Linguistic Genocide

How different would the world be without the everyday use of the english language? Or Chinese? Or even Spanish? Around the world, there are almost 8,000 languages. What if you lived in a country where the language you spoke was not a right - but a privilege? A form of genocide that is not commonly known or noticed is linguistic genocide. Linguistic genocide is defined as a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety(definitionoflinguisticgenocide). This means that the language eventually 'dies', or is forced to extinction for any sort of reason and is no longer spoken fluently.

In an article about the top ten modern cases of Linguistic Genocide, the ten included: Mandarin (among Chinese Singaporeans), Hawaiian, Ryukyuan languages, Korean, Russian, The British Isles (Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic, Scots, and Irish), minority languages in France, Chinese in Indonesia, regional languages in Spain (Basque, Catalan and Galician), and Kurdish. Of these ten genocides I plan to highlight the top two in this blogpost: Mandarin, and Hawaiian.

Because most of Southern China speaks Non-Mandarin Chinese languages, the government of China launched a campaign to promote and support the use if Mandarin in Southern China an other non-Mandarin speaking parts of China. In 1979, this campaign was titled the "Speak Mandarin Campaign", and helped to do just that. The campaign bans the use of non-Mandarin languages in local and foreign media, in hopes that Mandarin would be spoken more. Though the campaign has worked and Mandarin has increasingly been spoken, is it not linguistic genocide to "kill off" non-Mandarin Chinese languages?


In Hawaii, English has been more widely spoken as a result of war and the sole fact that it is a state of the United States whose dominant language is obviously English. In the 1820's the Hawaiian language was influenced by the missionaries causing many Hawaiians to learn and speak English. In 1893, the Provisional Government supported the use of English even more, and banned the Native Hawaiian language in public schools, resulting in today's statistics of 2,000 native Hawaiian speakers.

Although it seems wrong that any language is initially decreasingly used or extinct, after doing this research I have personally concluded that it is just as wrong to demote a language. Who ever said that there can only be one dominant language?





Sources :
http://listverse.com/2010/02/26/10-modern-cases-of-linguistic-genocide/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_genocide