When Borders Overlap: Spanish and Moroccan in Melilla

by Camila Martinica

Camila Martinica is a senior in Global Studies at The University of Illinois. Camila’s future plans include applying to graduate school. She wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in spring 2019.

Have you ever been walking down by a beach and noticed the different ways that people communicate with each other? How one group of people can be talking in “American” English while the others speak in “British” English? Or have you noticed how you pick up bits and pieces of a language that you thought you knew, for example Spanish, but in reality what you start hearing is a mixture of two languages and people are just switching from one language, or “code,” to another within the same sentence? This is a phenomenon known as code-switching and I think it makes you feel like you’re in a different world, right?

So, now let me ask you to imagine this:

You’re in North Africa, walking on the Southern coast of the Mediterranean.

You’re at the beach and overhear a Moroccan female in her early 20s say “hua man araf igual que venga o no” which would translate in English to “he, who knows, maybe he comes or he does not come.” This Moroccan female managed to switch from Moroccan Arabic (in bold) to Spanish and was perfectly able to convey her message with the person she was talking to. This is what a linguist named Isabel A. Knoerrich Aldabo observed in her time studying the intricacies of linguistics in Melilla.

At this point, you’re probably searching your mind thinking about whether or not you’ve heard about Melilla or if you could even place it on a map. So, where in the world is it?

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spain_CIA_map.png

If you zoom in on a world map to the Mediterranean Sea, you’ll notice that at one point on that map Spain and Morocco are very close to each other. Traveling between Tangier, Morocco to Tarifa, Spain is just a short 30-minute ferry ride and quick stamp of your passport away. If you take a closer look at Eastern Morocco, it has two small peninsulas. Those two peninsulas are Ceuta and Melilla. They are both autonomous cities of Spain, geographically within the borders of Morocco, Africa. 

In order to understand how this came to be, there’s a rich and complicated history between Spain and Morocco, as well as between their respective languages: Spanish and Arabic. One linguist, Bryan Kirschen from UCLA argues that the influence of Arabic on Spanish dates back to 711 until around 1492. He also informs us that this era is known as the Spanish Reconquista. Shortly after, in 1497, Melilla was conquered by the duke of Medina Sidonia under Isabel I of Castile. What followed was an ongoing fight against the Spanish by the Imazighen people (who, in my opinion, are incorrectly referred to as “Berbers”: https://intercontinentalcry.org/free-people-the-imazighen-of-north-africa/) and the rulers of Morocco to regain control of Melilla and reintroduce it to Morocco. In the late 19th century, Spain stirred trouble over the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, which is seen as one of the tensions that led to the Spanish-Moroccan War. From 1912 to 1956, Morocco was under a French and Spanish Protectorate that was established under the Treaty of Fez. In 1956, Morocco gained Independence. By this point, the enclaves had been integrated into the Spanish state and were considered “plazas de soberania.” In 1986, Spain joined the European Union and included Ceuta and Melilla. However, the European Union customs regulations are not the same for the enclaves than for the EU mainland (https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/calculation-customs-duties/rules-origin/general-aspects-preferential-origin/arrangements-list/ceuta-melilla_en).

As you now know, Melilla is a mélange of different cultures and histories. So, it is reasonable to conclude that language in this autonomous city is just as rich as its history. Melilla is essentially trilingual. The three languages spoken are Castilian, Tarifit and Moroccan Arabic. Tarifit is the Imazighen, or “Berber” language of the Rifian mountains in Morocco (https://www.britannica.com/place/Rif-mountains-Morocco). I think that Melilla is in a special realm when it comes to languages. For people living in Melilla “bilingualism and multilingualism does not mean that all the inhabitants of the enclaves speak two or three languages; it applies almost exclusively to the Moroccan community whose members are exposed to Castilian, which has prestige, since it is the official language of Ceuta and Melilla” (Aldabo, 2011).

So, when it comes to languages, Castilian Spanish is first as it is the official language. Then comes Tamazight, the Berber language, which is not recognized as a co-official language.

I think it’s very hard to wrap my head around how this truly looks on a day-to-day basis, so now imagine this:

You’re in North Africa, walking on the Southern coast of the Mediterranean in an autonomous city of Spain known as Melilla.

You walk into a café farther away from the coast and more towards the west of Melilla, where you start to see Imazighen and Arab influences. At this cafe you can get an authentic Tajine, a traditional Moroccan dish, and talk to a waiter who has Moroccan parents and identifies as Moroccan, but who is a Spanish citizen. The waiter speaks fluent Spanish to you in this formal setting and can tell you all about what it’s like to live under the “four freedoms” of the European Union single-market.

But, this waiter can also speak fluent Moroccan Arabic and when he turns around to place your order, he immediately switches from talking to you, a tourist, in Spanish to a mix between Tamazight and Spanish (think: “hua man arafigual que venga o no” as I mentioned before).

If we think about it, this scenario is extremely peculiar. The logical way it would’ve played out is that the waiter would’ve just kept talking in Spanish and this code-switch for his co-workers would not have been necessary. However, it is very likely that the change came naturally for the waiter. It is what they grew up around. Perhaps they didn’t know a specific word for something you asked for in Spanish but knew it in Tamazight.

On the other hand, this is not usually the case for Spaniards in Melilla. This is in part due to the fact that the Spanish population of Melilla mostly has little to no knowledge of Moroccan Arabic or Tarifit. I believe this is due to the fact that Moroccan Arabic is recently reaching standardization and for centuries has only been passed down orally. This is the intricacy of language in Melilla.

You won’t find many signs in Melilla recognizing the existence of Tamazight or Moroccan Arabic but their presence is strong. Today, the enclaves are in a constant battle of who “claims” them. Whether it is a Moroccan royal visiting Melilla to instigate trouble or Spain ignoring the insults from the Moroccan government of their Prime Minister visiting Ceuta, the tension between cultures is at its peak in Melilla, and I believe that is most evident in their use of languages.

References:

Aldabo, Isabel A.Knoerrich. “When Spain Meets Morocco: Discourses, Language Choices and Linguistic Policy in Ceuta and Melilla.” Dialectologia et Geolinguistica: Journal of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, vol. 19, 2011, pp. 103–118. (www.library.illinois.edu/proxy/go.php?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2012901005&site=eds-live&scope=site)

Ceuta, Melilla profile. (2018, December 14). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14114627

Kirschen, B. (2014). The (Not-So) Distant Relation between Spanish and Arabic. Voices, 2(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w47k24s

When Borders Overlap: Spanish and Moroccan in Melilla

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Lilts, Brogues, and Llanfairpwll: The ‘Englishes’ of the British Isles

by Bryan Lu

Bryan Lu was a senior in Computer Science when he wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in spring 2019.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When someone asks you to talk with a British accent, what do you sound like? Chances are, you are trying to imitate the sound of BBC News broadcasters or 19th century Victorian era nobility. You might even throw in some cliché phrases like, “Jolly good show, old chap!” or “pip pip, cheerio!” While these phrases certainly are very stereotypically English, the British Isles contain much more diversity in accents and dialects of the English language than most people would realize. Just take a look at this list, for example. There are quite a few varieties within England itself, including one known as Received Pronunciation (or RP), which is the accent you were most likely trying to mimic earlier. Furthermore, there are the kinds of English spoken in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, all of which have their own quirks and regional variations. These three specific varieties of English are often forgotten or confused for each other, so this linguistic tour of the British Isles will try to give those minority varieties more of the spotlight.

Giant’s Causeway, Ireland. 

Source: Tony Bowden, Flickr Creative Commons

First up is Irish English, or Hiberno-English. There has been a long history of contact between the English and Irish languages in Ireland, as the first English-speaking settlers traveled to the island in the 12th century. So, it makes sense that Irish English is heavily influenced by features of Irish Gaelic. For example, one of the defining features of Irish English is the use of “t” or “d” sounds instead of “th.” In this way, “thin” becomes “tin,” and “breathe” becomes something like “breed.” This pronunciation came about because Irish has no equivalent to the English “th” sounds, causing Irish speakers to approximate them with “t” and “d.” However, it must be noted that most people from Northern Ireland do not use this pronunciation. Another feature borrowed from Irish is the large range in pitch in general speech. On the stressed syllables of words, the voice of some Irish English speakers becomes lower in pitch. This is the reason why Irish English is sometimes described as sing-songy or lyrical. This pattern of intonation is especially characteristic of people from County Cork in the south of Ireland (like Roy Keane, a former Manchester United midfielder). Other famous people who speak a kind of Irish English include actress Saoirse Ronan (more modern Dublin accent), Conor McGregor (older Dublin accent), and Liam Neeson (Northern Irish accent).

Robert Burns, Scots language poet
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Next, we move on to Scottish English. The English used in Scotland can be described as a continuum, with Broad/Lowland Scots on one end and Standard Scottish English (SSE) on the other (Scobbie, Gordeeva, & Matthews, 2006). The case of Scotland is particularly interesting, as there are two different languages that have affected the English spoken there: Scots and Scottish Gaelic. One aspect of this is the unique vocabulary that the languages have brought to Scotland. Words like wee ‘small’ and bairn ‘child’ and the suffixes -nae ‘-not’ and -ie (like in laddie) all come from the Scots language, which was also the original language of the poem/song Auld Lang Syne. While Scots words are mostly restricted to within Scotland, many loanwords from Scottish Gaelic are used in all types of English. These include words like clan, slogan, and of course, whisky. There are also a number of pronunciations that are characteristic of Scottish English. One is that there is no distinction between the vowel in “put” and the vowel in “boot.” Instead, it is pronounced a bit like the sound halfway between the vowels in “bit” and “boot” (this is known as a close central rounded vowel). Other features include the use of a glottal stop (the catch in your throat when you say uh-oh) in place of “t” in the middle and end of words and the guttural “ch,” as in Loch Ness. To make this sound, say the letter “k”, but instead of releasing the air quickly, exhale with your tongue in the same position (like in the letters “f” and “s”). If you want to hear some Scottish English, take a listen to James McAvoy in this video for an extremely over-the-top accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4zupuXPjos. For more subdued versions, you could watch some videos of Andy Murray or Karen Gillan.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Finally, we travel to Wales, in the southwest part of Great Britain. This variety, in my opinion, is more similar to RP than Scottish or Irish English, but there still are noticeable differences. One feature that Welsh English takes specifically from the Welsh language is that unstressed vowels at the ends of words tend to sound more like the vowel in “bed.” Multisyllabic Welsh words do not have schwas (neutral vowels, as in “the” or “above”), so this has carried over to Welsh English. Furthermore, Welsh English has more contrast with vowel length than most other varieties of English. In this context, vowel length simply means the amount of time the vowel is spoken for. For example, the words “cat” (using a vowel like “ahh”) and “cart” sound the same, except that the vowel in “cart” takes a bit more time to say. The longer vowel length of Welsh English is especially prominent in words that end in a long “e” sound, like “happy” or “city.” In those words, the vowel of the final syllable is drawn out longer than in other accents. This video of the actor Luke Evans presents a good example of a Welsh accent (plus Welsh slang!), and some other people you could listen to are Catherine Zeta-Jones or Tom Jones (when he isn’t singing).

There are many, many other accents of the British Isles to explore, and there could be a lot more said about Irish, Scottish, and Welsh English varieties of English. From Scouse and Geordie in the north of England, to Cockney and Cornish in the south, and even subvarieties of Scottish and Irish English, there is an impressive amount of diversity in a relatively compact geographical area. If you would like to hear more examples of accents, this website has sound clips of accents arranged by location on an interactive map. Also, for a more general look at accents, Wired’s YouTube series Technique Critic has some interesting videos breaking down a number of accents used by actors in movies. Happy listening!

References

Scobbie, James M, Gordeeva, Olga B, Matthews, Benjamin. “Acquisition of Scottish English phonology: an overview.” QMU Speech Science Research Centre Working Papers, WP-7, 2006.

Hickey, Raymond. “The Phonology of Irish English.” Handbook of Varieties of English, Volume 1: Phonology, edited by Bernd Kortman, Mouton De Gruyter, 2004, pp. 68–97.

Núñez Busto, Maite. “Welsh English: A ‘Mystery’ for the Kingdom.” Universidad del País Vasco, Departamento De Filología Inglesa y Alemana, 2016, pp. 1–35.

Lilts, Brogues, and Llanfairpwll: The ‘Englishes’ of the British Isles

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Diglossia: What It Is and How It Happens to Communities

by Michael Bailey

Michael Bailey is a junior in Political Science at The University of Illinois. Michael’s future plans include graduating, in the Fall of 2020. Michael wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

The concept of diglossia has existed since the beginning of language itself. There have been multiple instances of diglossia throughout the world. It can happen anywhere. The term was first coined in 1959 by sociolinguist Charles Ferguson. Even though his paper was written in 1959, a majority of his findings concerning diglossia still ring true. This blog will focus on further defining diglossia, and how it develops in various language communities.

In order to first define diglossia, we must first define bilingualism, as the two terms refer to different concepts entirely. Bilingualism is an individual experience and is concerned with fluently speaking two languages. Diglossia is a community experience, and it forms when two language varieties (dialects) coexist in society together. These language varieties have two different forms: high (represented by H) and low (represented by L). These distinctions must be made since: “there is a very divergent, highly codified, superposed variety … is learned by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but not … ordinary conversations” (Ferguson 336). Essentially speakers must know how and when the use of each dialect is appropriate.

High dialects are typically used in formal education, news broadcast, political speech, sermons and more. Low dialects are typically used, in conversations between family and friends, political cartoons, and folk literature (Ferguson 329). This idea of high and low is pervasive in society, meaning that someone might read or watch content in high but talk about it in low. This is especially evident on the island of Cyprus. In the formal education system, Cyprians might watch a video in Standard Greek but discuss the contents of the video in Greek Cypriot. What is equally interesting about diglossia is that some dialects are not mutually intelligible. A great example of this concerns Arabic. In his paper, Ferguson states that Christian Arabs will speak a different type of dialect amongst themselves. 

However, when part of a mixed group, the Christian Arabs will switch their dialect to Muslim Arabic in order to be understood (Ferguson 325). This example helps illustrate a lack of mutual intelligibility that results from diglossia. Furthermore, diglossia is not just confined to dialects. Since diglossia concerns community interaction, other languages might take the role of high and low in a society. Consider the Maltese as an example. According to a 2018 article published by Nationalia, 79% of the Malta population speak Maltese at home and 18% of the population speaks Standard English at home. Maltese also dominates the workspace in terms of language usage. Half speak Maltese while English tops off at 38%. Interestingly enough, a majority of the population uses English for reading newspapers, books and posting on social media (Nationalia).

Now that we have defined diglossia, it is important to illustrate how it develops in the first place. According to Ferguson, diglossia develops in nine categories: function, prestige, literary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and phonology. Diglossia is set apart by how it functions concerning usage. In certain situations, only the high version might be acceptable. There is such an emphasis placed on function, that if someone uses high or low inappropriately, they are “subject to ridicule” (Ferguson 329). This nature helps enforce the norms created by diglossia. Prestige concerns the idea that the high dialect (usually) contains more societal value than the low dialect. Ferguson makes a claim that this idea of prestige can be seen in Haiti in regard to French and Creole. However, in “Diglossia Revisited” Dejean argues that French cannot be considered the prestige language. This is because a majority of the country’s Creole-speaking population is monolingual. The French speakers (the affluent) tend to keep to themselves even though most are bilingual (Dejean 193). Moving onto literary heritage, most literary works are written in high. Interestingly, this is seen in Malta with the Maltese preferring to read in English over their spoken language. Since English has become a global language, it is safe to infer that English is becoming the high language in Malta, while Maltese is transitioning into being a lower language. Next is Acquisition, which concerns formal education. Ferguson states that adults will speak in the low dialect to their children because it is informal. Children might hear what high sounds like, but they will most likely learn high dialect upon entering school (Ferguson 331). It could be argued that similar instances of this occur in America. English might not be a child’s first language especially if the parents are immigrants. However, through schooling, a child begins to learn English, thereby becoming bilingual.

Standardization concerns standardizing the high through the use of corpus planning (orthography, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary). Another characteristic of diglossia is certain rules concerning grammar. High dialects and low dialects have differences in sentence structure and certain elements are exclusive to high dialect. These differences are radical and exist amongst every diglossic community. Essentially the grammar of low dialects is simple compared to high dialects. Lexicon is also an important distinction between low and high dialects. According to Ferguson, a majority of the language between the two dialects is shared; however, low dialects lack some vocabulary present in high dialects (Ferguson 332-3). Overall the difference in grammar and in lexicon plays a major role in mutual intelligibility between the two dialects. This is seen in Swiss German. In Swiss German (specifically around the Bavaria area) a popular way to say hello is grüß gott. This differs from the traditional guten tag which is a staple throughout German. If a new German speaker went to Bavaria, they might have trouble understanding Swiss German, since the difference in grammar and lexicon will severely impact the mutual intelligibility of the two languages. Stabilization of language norms is evident in nations with diglossia. Language stabilization lasts for an extremely long time. In order to quell rebellions, high dialects might borrow vocab from low dialects to appease those who speak them. This idea of stabilization was intended to be implemented in Cyprus. The government created a language called Cypriot which was intended for Turkish speakers and Greek speakers to understand each other. This language lasted for a while before it simply split into Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot. Finally, phonology between high and low dialects vary drastically as well. The low dialect often has a more basic system while the high dialect has a more complex subsystem of sounds (Ferguson 335).

It is important to note that like language, diglossia is a community experience. Diglossia is defined by numerous factors most notably concerning high and low dialects. Diglossia develops in communities through the changing use of function, prestige, literary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and phonology.

Work Cited

Dejean, Yves. “Diglossia Revisited: French and Creole in Haiti.” Word, vol. 34, no. 3, 1983, pp. 189–213., doi:10.1080/00437956.1983.11435744.

Ferguson, Charles. “Diglossia.” Word, 1959, doi:10.1080/00437956.1959.11659702.

Vincentz, Frank. “New Survey Reveals Diglossia in Maltese Society.” Nationalia, 15 May 2018, www.nationalia.info/brief/11099/new-survey-reveals-diglossia-in-maltese-society.

 

Diglossia: What It Is and How It Happens to Communities

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La importancia lingüística de las lenguas regionales del Cáucaso

by Emily Sardarov

Emily Sardarov wrote this blog post as a senior in Linguistics in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

Se puede caminar por las calles de Majachkalá, Rusia por lo menos cinco minutos y escuchar una variedad de idiomas diferentes que hablan los lugareños. Mejor aún, haga un viaje a un selo más pequeño, o pueblo, como Tagerkent, y sin duda se encontrará con alguien que nació en Rusia pero que no habla nada de la lengua materna. Eso es porque quizás el idioma del estado no sea su lengua materna. Como las ciudades de Majachkalá y Tagerkent están ubicadas en Daguestán, una república del sur de Rusia que es conocida mundialmente por su diversidad étnica, aún mas por la diversidad lingüística (Britannica, 2015), no es una situación tan descabellada después de todo.

Históricamente, Daguestán, que significa "tierra de montañas" en muchas de sus lenguas regionales, estaba poblado por pueblos étnicos que estaban separados por el terreno físico. Había largos períodos de aislamiento que permitieron que el desarrollo de estos idiomas no tenía ningunas interferencias por unos años. El conflicto y la colonización, sin embargo, eran inevitables, y con el tiempo, muchos reinos conquistaron estas tierras y dejaron sus huellas en los idiomas. La evidencia se encuentra en el léxico: los idiomas de Daguestán contienen muchas palabras de origen árabe, turco y persa.

Hoy en día, Daguestán forma parte de un área geográfica más grande, conocida como el Cáucaso, que se extiende desde el Mar Negro hasta el Mar Caspio, a través de Rusia, Armenia, Azerbaiyán y Georgia, según el mapa de regiones etnolingüísticas de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia de los Estados Unidos (C.I.A., 1995). Hay una gran cantidad de idiomas que son indígenas al Cáucaso, y están divididos en tres ramas: la familia caucásica del noreste, la familia caucásica del noroeste y las lenguas kartvelianas. La familia caucásica noreste se refiere a una familia de idiomas que incluye checheno, avar, lezgiano, y más. En adición, los idiomas como adyghe, abjaz, ubykh y kabardiano constituyen la rama de la familia caucásica del noroeste. Por último, la familia de idiomas kartvelianos está formada por el svan, el zan, y otras lenguas que son genéticamente relacionadas.

Aparte de estas tres familias que son nativas a la tierra, las lenguas indoeuropeas, semíticas, mongoles y turcas – como el ruso, el griego, el árabe, el azerbaiyano y el kalmyk también son utilizadas por una gran cantidad de personas. Durante el siglo XIX, por ejemplo, el "mejor árabe literario" se encontró en la región del Gran Cáucaso (Owens, 2000). Sin embargo, dado que el número de hablantes para la mayoría de las lenguas caucásicas raramente supera los doscientos mil, la extinción es definitivamente un desafío realístico para estas comunidades. Por ejemplo, la familia de idiomas del noreste tiene menos de cuatro millones de hablantes. No es una idea extraña, entonces, que el Cáucaso sea un sitio común donde hay un grupo de idiomas en peligro de extinción (Nichols, 1998). La UNESCO enumera muchas de las lenguas caucásicas como "en riesgo" (Moseley, 2010) y los últimos años sugieren más hegemonía rusa en el futuro. A pesar de todo esto, los idiomas de Caucasia muestran características únicas que continúan impulsando a más lingüistas a estudiarlos y grabarlos.

Una de las características de los idiomas caucásicos que los hace destacar es su gran número de consonantes. Por ejemplo, la lengua avar tiene cuarenta y cinco consonantes distintas y el lezgiano tiene cincuenta y cuatro (Haspelmath, 1993). Sin embargo, esto no es nada extraordinario de los idiomas caucásicos, especialmente en el noreste.

De hecho, investigaciones recientes revelan que algunas lenguas contienen más de setenta consonantes distintas (Hewitt, 2004). Esto se puede ver por la presencia de las consonantes eyectivas. Ellas son sonidos que se producen cuando el flujo de aire sale de la boca. A veces la gente se describe que los sonidos suenan como si estuvieran siendo "escupidos" por la boca, pero en realidad, la gran cantidad de presión que resulta de la corriente de aire que fluye hacia afuera crea una explosión de aire dramática y da la sensación de "escupir".

Además de tener muchos consonantes eyectivas, los idiomas caucásicos del noreste son notables para sus sistemas de casos. Un lenguaje que tiene casos, como el acusativo, el nominativo, el ablativo, y más, usa diferentes afijos para cambiar el papel de la palabra. En términos simples, si quiere indicar posesión, usaría el caso genitivo. Un objeto directo requiere el caso acusativo, etcétera.

Muchos idiomas tienen sistemas de casos – esa no es la parte rara. Las lenguas caucásicas del noreste simplemente superan a las otras con la gran cantidad de casos que poseen. El idioma tsez, por ejemplo, ¡tiene al menos sesenta y cuatro casos! La mayoría de los otros idiomas mundiales que son conocidos por sus sistemas de casos, como el húngaro y el ruso, solo tienen dieciocho y seis casos gramaticales, respectivamente.

Las lenguas caucásicas del noroeste, por otro lado, no son tan intensas, en cierto sentido, porque no tienen una enorme cantidad de consonantes o casos. De hecho, esta familia se compara bastante bien con las otras familias de idiomas que son muy conocidas. Además, las lenguas kartvelianas, parte de la última rama, son aún más diferentes de las otras dos familias. El georgiano, por ejemplo, tiene su propio alfabeto, mientras que las lenguas del noreste y el noroeste utilizan el alfabeto cirílico. Los idiomas kartvelianos también tienen más hablantes, algo que los hace más importante al nivel nacional.

Más recientemente, el Cáucaso está enfrentando algunos desafíos con el proceso de revitalización de las lenguas minoritarias. Las nuevas generaciones se adhieren al idioma del estado, ya que ofrece más oportunidades en las carreras y mejora la calidad de la vida en general. El inglés incluso participa en la disminución de las lenguas caucásicas que tienen hablantes nativos más jóvenes debido al hecho de que está muy difundido hoy en día. Por lo tanto, los jóvenes creen que el inglés es esencial para aprender.

Como cualquier cosa puede suceder en el futuro, es importante para el Cáucaso promover sus idiomas minoritarios y encontrar formas de integrarlos en más aspectos de la vida, no solo en los hogares. Podría ser difícil, porque existe una variedad tan grande de idiomas en un área relativamente pequeña; sin embargo, cuanto más se usan el ruso y otros idiomas del mundo entre la gente, más tiempo llevará convencerlos para que continuamos hablando su lengua materna.

La importancia lingüística de las lenguas regionales del Cáucaso

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Лингвистическая значимость региональных языков Кавказа

by Emily Sardarov

Emily Sardarov wrote this blog post as a senior in Linguistics in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

Вы можете прогуляться по улицам Махачкалы в течение пяти минут и услышать, как местные жители говорят на разных языках. А еще лучше - отправляйтесь в село, например Тагеркент, и вы столкнетесь с кем-то, кто родился в России, но не говорит на родном языке. Это из-за то, что, возможно, государственный язык не является его / её родным языком. Поскольку оба города - Махачкала и Тагеркент - расположены в Дагестане, известной во всем мире своим этническим и лингвистическим разнообразием (Британика, 2015), в конце концов, это не такая ненормальная ситуация.

Исторически, Дагестан, которое означает «земля гор» на многих региональных языках, был населён этническими народами, которые были разделены физически. Были длительные периоды изоляции, позволяющие языкам развиваться годами без помех. Конфликт и колонизация, однако, были неизбежны, и со временем многие королевства завоевали эти земли и оставили свои следы на языках. Доказательства лежат в лексиконе - дагестанские языки содержат много слов арабского, турецкого и персидского происхождения.

В последнее времена Дагестан составляет часть более обширного географического района – Кавказ – который простирается от Черного до Каспийского моря через Россию, Армению, Азербайджан и Грузию (ЦРУ, 1995). Существует множество языков, которые являются коренными для Кавказа, и они разделены на три части: нахско-дагестанские языки, абхазо-адыгские языки, и картвельские языки. Нахско-дагестанский относится к семейству языков, включающему чеченский, аварский, лезгинский, так далее. Между тем адыгейский, абхазский, убыхский и кабардинский, составляют абхазо-адыгскую семью. В конце концов, картвельская семья состоит из сванских, грузинских, и других генетически родственных языков.

Кроме того, многие люди используют индоевропейские, семитские, монгольские и тюркские языки, например русский, греческий, арабский, азербайджанский и калмыцкий. В девятнадцатом веке в регионе Великого Кавказа говорили на «лучшем литературном арабском» (Owens, 2000). Однако, поскольку число носителей большинства кавказских языков едва превышает пару сотен тысяч, вымирание, безусловно, является проблемой для этих сообществ. Например, нахско-дагестанская семья насчитывает менее четырех миллионов человек. Поэтому неудивительно, что Кавказ является общим местом для групп исчезающих языков. ЮНЕСКО перечисляет многие из кавказских языков как «подверженные риску» (Moseley, 2010), и последние годы предполагают усиление гегемонии русских в будущем. Несмотря на все это, языки Кавказа демонстрируют уникальные особенности, которые продолжают побуждать лингвистов изучать их и записывать их.

Одной из особенностей кавказских языков, которые выделяют их, это ихни количество согласных. Например, у аварского языка сорок пять различных согласных, а у лезгинского пятьдесят четыре (Haspelmath, 1993). Это не редко для любого из нахско-дагестанских языков.

Фактически, недавние исследования показывают, что некоторые языки содержат свыше семидесяти различных согласных (Hewitt, 2004). Это связано с наличием абруптивых. Абруптивы — это согласные, которые образуются, когда изо рта выходит поток воздуха. Абруптивые согласные часто описываются как звучащие, как будто они «выплевывают» изо рта, потому что давление воздуха, возникающее из-за потока воздуха, направленного наружу, создает резкий выброс воздуха. Отсюда и ощущение «плевания».

В дополнение к множеству абруптивых, нахско-дагестанские языки отличаются обширной системой падежей. Язык, у котором есть падежи, такие как винительный, номинативный, аблативный, и так далее, использует разные аффиксы для изменения роли слова. С точки зрения непрофессионала, если вы хотите указать владение, вы бы использовали родительный падеж. Прямой объект требует винительного падежа и так далее.

У многих языков есть падежные системы — это не редкость. Нахско-дагестанские языки просто подавляют других языков с огромным количеством падежа, которыми у них есть. Например, у цезского языка есть как минимум шестьдесят четыре падеж! Большинство других мировых языков, которые известны своими системами падежей, например венгерский и русский, имеют только восемнадцать и шесть грамматических падежей.

Абхазо-адыгская семья, с другой стороны, не такая интенсивная, в каком-то смысле, поскольку в ее языках нет слишком много согласных или падежей. Фактически, эта семья сравнивается довольно равномерно с основными языковыми семьями мира. Кроме того, картвельские языки, еще более отличаются от обоих семейств. Например, в грузинском языке есть свой собственный алфавит, а в нахско-дагестанском и абхазо-адыгском языках используется кириллический алфавит. Картвельские языки также имеют больше носителей, что делает их более лучшими на национальном уровне.

В последнее время Кавказ борется с усилиями по оживлению языка. Новые поколения придерживаются разговора на государственном языке, поскольку это открывает больше возможностей для карьерного роста и улучшает общее качество жизни. Английский язык даже участвует в сокращении кавказских языков с более молодыми носителями языка из-за того, что он настолько широко распространен, как «lingua franca». Таким образом, молодежь считает необходимым изучение английского языка.

Поскольку в конечном итоге все может произойти, для Кавказа важно продвигать языки своих меньшинств и находить способы интегрировать их в большее число аспектов жизни, а не только в частный сектор. Это может быть трудным делом, поскольку в относительно небольшой области существует такое огромное разнообразие языков, однако, чем дольше русский и другие основные языки мира используются среди людей, тем больше времени потребуется, чтобы убедить их продолжать говорить на своем родном языке.

Лингвистическая значимость региональных языков Кавказа

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The Linguistic Importance of Regional Languages of the Caucasus

by Emily Sardarov

Emily Sardarov wrote this blog post as a senior in Linguistics in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

You can walk about the streets of Makhachkala, Russia for five minutes tops and hear a handful of different languages being spoken by the locals. Better yet, take a trip to a smaller selo, or village, like Tagerkent, and you will without a doubt run into somebody who was born in Russia but doesn’t speak a lick of the mother tongue. That’s because perhaps the state language is not their mother tongue. Since both the cities of Makhachkala and Tagerkent are located in Dagestan, a southern Russian republic that is known worldwide for its ethnic, ergo, linguistic diversity (Britannica, 2015), it’s not such a far-fetched situation after all. 

https://www.mapsofworld.com/where-is/makhachkala.html

Historically, Dagestan, meaning “land of mountains” in many of its regional languages, was populated by ethnic peoples who were separated by physical terrain. Consequently, there were long periods of isolation, allowing for the languages to develop for years without interference. Conflict and colonization, however, was inevitable, and as time passed, many kingdoms conquered these lands and left their traces behind in the languages. The evidence lies in the lexicon – Dagestani languages contain many words from Arabic, Turkish, and Persian origins.

Nowadays, Dagestan makes up part of a larger geographical area, referred to as the Caucasus, that spans from the Black to the Caspian Sea across Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (C.I.A., 1995). There is a plethora of languages that are indigenous to the Caucasus, and they are split into three branches: Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian. Northeast Caucasian refers to a family of languages that includes Chechen, Avar, Lezgian, etc. Meanwhile, languages such as Adyghe, Abkhaz, Ubykh, and Kabardian constitute the Northwest Caucasian branch, and the Kartvelian language family is comprised of Svan, Georgian, Zan, and other genetically related languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartvelian_languages#/media/File:Kartvelian_languages.svg

Aside from these three families that are native to the land, Indo-European, Semitic, Mongolian and Turkic languages (i.e., Russian, Greek, Arabic, Azerbaijani, and Kalmyk) are also used by a decent amount of people. However, since the number of speakers for a majority of the Caucasian languages barely exceeds a couple hundred thousand, extinction is definitely a concern for these communities. For example, the Northeast Caucasian language family has a combined number of less than four million speakers. It is no surprise then, that the Caucasus is a common site for language hotspots (Nichols, 1998), or locations where there is a cluster of endangered languages. UNESCO lists many of the Caucasian languages as “at-risk” (Moseley, 2010) and recent years suggest more Russian hegemony in the future. Despite all of this, the languages of Caucasia demonstrate unique features that continue to drive more linguists to study and record them.

One of the features of Caucasian languages that makes them stand out is their sheer number of consonants. For example, Avar has forty-five distinct consonants and Lezgian has fifty-four (Haspelmath, 1993). This is not uncommon with any of the Northeast Caucasian languages.

In fact, recent research reveals that some languages contain upwards of seventy distinct consonants (Hewitt, 2004). This is in part due to the presence of ejectives, or consonants that are produced when airflow is coming out of the mouth. The sounds are often described as sounding like they are being ‘spit out’, but in reality, the high amount of air pressure that results from the airstream flowing outwards creates a dramatic burst of air, hence the ‘spitting’ feel.

In addition to having many ejectives, the Northeast Caucasian languages are notable for their extensive case systems. A language that has cases, such as the accusative, nominative, ablative, etc. uses different affixes to change the role of the word. In layman’s terms, if you want to indicate possession you would use the genitive case. A direct object requires the accusative case, and so forth.

Many languages have case systems – that is not the rare part. The Northeast Caucasian languages simply blow others out of the water with the sheer amount of cases they possess. Tsez, for instance, has at least sixty-four cases! Most other world languages that are known for their case systems, like Hungarian and Russian, only have eighteen and six grammatical cases, respectively.

The Northwest Caucasian branch, on the other hand, isn’t as intense as its languages don’t have an enormous number of consonants or cases. In fact, this family compares pretty evenly with major world language families. Furthermore, The Kartvelian languages, which make up the last branch, are even more different from the other two families. Georgian, for example, has its proper alphabet, while the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages utilize the Cyrillic alphabet. Kartvelian languages also have more speakers, making them more prioritized on a national level.

More recently, the Caucasus has been struggling with revitalization efforts. Newer generations stick to speaking the state language, as it offers more opportunities in career paths and improves the general quality of life. English is even participating in the decrease of younger native speakers of Caucasian languages due to the fact that it is the current lingua franca and, consequently, so widespread. Therefore, the youth finds English essential to learn.

As anything can happen in the long run, it’s important for the Caucasus to promote its minority languages and find ways to integrate them in more aspects of life, rather than just the private sectors. It could be a difficult thing to do since there is just such a vast variety of languages in a relatively small area, however, the longer Russian and other major world languages are being used among the people, the longer it will take to convince them to continue speaking their mother tongue.

References:

Britannica, T. E. (2015, September 11). Dagestan. Retrieved April 18, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/place/Dagestan-republic-Russia.

Central Intelligence Agency. (1995). Ethnolinguistic Groups in the Caucasus Region. Retrieved from https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/commonwealth/ethnocaucasus.jpg.

Owens, Jonathan (2000). Arabic As a Minority Language. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 89–101. ISBN 9783110165784.

Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Online version: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas

Haspelmath, M. (1993). A grammar of Lezgian. (Mouton grammar library; 9). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. – ISBN 3-11-013735-6, p. 2

Hewitt, George (2004). Introduction to the Study of the Languages of the Caucasus. Munich: Lincom Europaq. p. 49.

Nichols, Johanna. 1998. An overview of languages of the Caucasus. http://popgen.well.ox.ac.uk/eurasia/htdocs/nichols/nichols.html

The Linguistic Importance of Regional Languages of the Caucasus

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Spanish, Catalan, or Both? Language Uses and Identities in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, Spain

by Karol Funez

Karol Funez is a senior in Political Science and Global Studies at The University of Illinois. Karol is planning to work in sales after graduation and is interested in Law, she hopes to attend law school in the near future. She wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' course, in spring 2019. 

One of the best-known and highest ranked soccer teams in the world; known for having soccer players such as Lionel Messi; is the Football Club Barcelona (FC Barcelona). My family follows Spain’s soccer league very closely and, naturally, are huge fans of FC Barcelona. Usually, both, before and after soccer matches, the soccer players will have either press conferences or interviews. As a Spanish speaker myself, I would notice when soccer players would switch from Spanish to a language that sounded like Spanish but was not. I later learned that this language is called Catalan. Catalan is a Romance language that developed two thousand years ago and remains prevalent in Spain despite different efforts to supersede it.

The official state language of Spain is Castilian, but the 1978 Constitution also grants co-officiality to minority languages in autonomous communities (Ros, Ignacio Cano, & Huici, 1987). Catalan is one of the minority languages spoken in Spain, and it is the official language in the autonomous communities of Catalonia (Huguet & Llurda, 2001). Today, there are over 6 million people who speak Catalan (Ros, et al., 1987). They reside mostly, in Catalonia’s four provinces: Barcelona (the capital), Tarragona, Girona, and Lleida.

During Francisco Franco’s rule, there was a high level of Diglossia between the Castilian and Catalan languages. Diglossia refers to a situation when two languages are spoken under different circumstances. Castilian was the language of, “education, administration, and legislation, while the use of other languages was restricted to informal contexts like family” (Ros, et al., 1987). Catalan suffered greatly during this time, but the restoration of democracy in 1977 allowed Catalan to slowly move from being used in informal contexts to more formal contexts. In addition, during this time, Catalonia gained political autonomy.

This political autonomy allowed Catalonia to start normalizing the language at an institutional level, such as in administration and mass media (Ros, et al., 1987). This normalization allowed Catalan to survive and grow to its levels of sociolinguistic vitality today. Most citizens of the Catalonia community identify themselves as Catalans and believe that using and conserving Catalan is essential for their identity. However, Castilian remains the national language of Spain, therefore Catalans are forced to use both languages.

According to Ros, Ignacio Cano, & Huici (1987), “Castilian holds the dominant position [in Spain], followed by Catalan,” though Catalan has a strong vitality. For example, Catalan speakers have a stronger linguistic competence than those of other communities such as Basque or Valencian, in that Catalans use their language more often whether it is written or orally (Ros, et al., 1987). Catalans not only use their language more, but Catalan is the second most used language in Spain following Castilian (Ros, et al., 1987). It has also been found that Catalan speaker’s attitudes towards Castilian or Catalan is, “consistent, preferring Catalan to Castilian” (Ros, et al., 1987). This data suggests that Catalans’ language is very important to their social identity and it emphasizes how established Catalan is in social contexts.

To further understand the language preference of people in the communities of Catalonia, Huguet & Llurda (2001), investigated the attitudes of school children towards Catalan and Spanish by studying two autonomous communities in Spain: Catalonia and Aragon. Catalonia, as we know, is bilingual, and, people speak Spanish and Catalan. Aragon is mostly monolingual, but two geographic areas in Aragon are considered bilingual (Huguet & Llurda, 2001). The study in these two communities consisted of a "questionnaire on the attitudes of school children… to detect any attitudinal differences towards Catalan and Spanish” (Huguet & Llurda, 2001). The results found, “an overall dominance of favorable attitudes towards both languages” (Huguet & Llurda, 2001). This study shows how school children in the two Catalan/Spanish bilingual communities have favorable attitudes when using either Castilian or Catalan. 

The survival of Catalan even after the 1939-1975 dictatorship is surprising, especially after the immigration of immigrants from other parts of Spain and most recently the immigration of Latin Americans to the Catalonia region. Immigrants from other parts of Spain prefer Castilian but are forced to learn Catalan (Trench-Parera & Newman 2009). Furthermore, immigrants from Latin American countries identify more and prefer their Latino roots over Spanish or Catalan. Between the extremes of Linguistic Cosmopolitanism, “support for bilingualism and preference for linguistic crossing,” and Linguistic Parochialism that is, “supportive of monolingualism”, both immigrant groups "show attitudes that are at least partially cosmopolitan" (idem). This demonstrates how Catalan has a strong social vitality, as it shows that even immigrants had to become accustomed to the use of the language.

Museu d’ Historia de Catalunya, in Barcelona, Spain. March, 3^rd, 2018.

Despite the fact that Catalan went through a period of diglossia during Franco’s 1939-1975 dictatorship, Catalan has persevered against all odds. Catalan remains a strong factor of social identity for Catalonia. With the efforts from the Catalan government to normalize Catalan after democracy was reestablished, Catalan was able to remain prestigious. Today, Catalan is used so much in administration and mass media. Even my family from Chicago, that are across the world and unaware of Catalonia, get to hear Catalan through interviews conducted and anthem when they watch a FC Barcelona’s soccer match.

References

Àngel Huguet & Enric Llurda (2001) Language Attitudes of School Children in two Catalan/Spanish Bilingual Communities, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 4:4, 267-282, DOI: 10.1080/13670050108667732

Mireia Trenchs-Parera & Michael Newman (2009) Diversity of language ideologies in  Spanish-speaking youth of different origins in Catalonia, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 30:6, 509-524, DOI: 10.1080/01434630903147914

Ros, M., Ignacio Cano, J., & Huici, C. (1987). Language and Intergroup Perception in Spain. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 6(3–4), 243 259. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X8763007

 

Spanish, Catalan, or Both? Language Uses and Identities in the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, Spain

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Δύο Γλώσσες μιας Διχασμένης Χώρας: Η Γλωσσολογική Διαφορετικότητα στην Κύπρο

by Dorothea Christophorou

Dorothea Christophorou is a senior in Political Science and communication at The University of Illinois. Dorothea’s future plans include working in Chicago with non-governmental organizations. Dorothea wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

Βρισκόμενη στα ανατολικά της Μεσογείου, η Κύπρος έχει μια μοναδική γεωπολιτική θέση και είναι ανάμεσα στο σταυροδρόμι τριών ηπείρων (Ευρώπη, Αφρική, Ασία). Ένα μικρό νησί που έγινε ανεξάρτητη χώρα το 1960, υπήρξε σημείο συνάντησης πολλών πολιτισμών και Κουλτούρων και έχει μια μακρά και πολυτάραχη ιστορία.

Μέσα από τους αιώνες της ιστορίας της, η Κύπρος κατακτήθηκε από τους Φοίνικες, τους Ασσύριους, τους Πέρσες, τους Άραβες, τους Βενετούς, τους Ρωμαίους, τους Έλληνες, τους Οθωμανούς και τους Βρετανούς από τα πρώτα χρόνια της ύπαρξης της. Οι κατακτητές άφησαν στοιχεία από την ιστορία τους, την αρχιτεκτονική, τον πολιτισμό και τη γλώσσα στο νησί και κάποιες από αυτές τις επιρροές οποίες παραμένουν μέχρι σήμερα αποτυπωμένες. Απο όλους τους κατακτητές της, την μεγαλύτερη επιρροή άφησαν οι Έλληνες, οι Οθωμανοί και οι Άγγλοι, διαμορφώνοντας το νησί. Όταν η Κύπρος απέκτησε την ανεξαρτησία της από τους Βρετανούς το 1960, ο πληθυσμός (572.000), αποτελούσε 77% Ελληνοκύπριους, 18% Τουρκοκύπριους και 5% Μαρωνίτες, Αρμένιους, Βρετανούς κλπ. Η Ελλάδα και η Τουρκία είχαν καθιερωμένο καθεστώς ως οι «μητρικές χώρες» σε σχέση με τις αντίστοιχες κυπριακές κοινότητες. Το σύνταγμα του νησιού γράφει ότι τα Ελληνικά και τα Τούρκικα είναι οι επίσημες γλώσσες του νησιού, ενώ η αγγλική γλώσσα χρησιμοποιείται από την πλειονότητα των κατοίκων ως η "τρίτη" γλώσσα. Επιπλέον, η μικρή Αρμένικη κοινότητα διατήρησε τη δική της γλώσσα (αρμένικα), ενώ παράλληλα χρησιμοποίησε την ελληνική γλώσσα για να επικοινωνήσει με τον ελληνόφωνο πληθυσμό. Είναι ενδιαφέρον να σημειώσουμε ότι τόσο η ελληνοκυπριακή όσο και η τουρκοκυπριακή κοινότητα μιλούσαν (και εξακολουθούν να μιλούν) μια μοναδική διάλεκτο των αντίστοιχων γλωσσών τους. Παρόλο που η γραπτή Ελληνική γλώσσα είναι πανομοιότυπη τόσο για τους Κύπριους όσο και για τους Έλληνες, (και το ίδιο συμβαίνει και με την τουρκική γλώσσα για τους Τουρκοκύπριους και τους ομογενείς Τούρκους), οι διάλεκτοι των δύο κοινωνιών προσθέτουν ένα άλλο μοναδικό στοιχείο στο γλωσσικό πλούτο της Κύπρου.

Μεταξύ του 1960-1974 οι δύο κύριες κοινότητες (Ελληνοκυπριακή πλειοψηφία και Τουρκοκυπριακή μειονότητα) συνυπήρχαν ειρηνικά, αν και είχαν και περιόδους έντονων και βίαιων συγκρούσεων. Παρά την ύπαρξη δύο διαφορετικών κύριων γλωσσών που μιλούσαν αποκλειστικά μέσα στις αντίστοιχες κοινότητες, υπήρχαν κοινές λέξεις. Αυτό βοήθησε με την επικοινωνία στο νησί, ιδιαίτερα στα μικρά χωριά και στις πόλεις, όπου οι δύο κοινότητες συγκατοικούσαν. Οι παλαιότερες γενιές μπορούσαν επικοινωνήσουν, παρά τις διαφορές τους και προσπαθούσαν να επικοινωνήσουν μεταξύ τους χρησιμοποιώντας η μια πλευρά τη γλώσσα της άλλης. Για παράδειγμα, η λέξη "τσάντα" στην ελληνική γλώσσα είναι παρόμοια με την τουρκική λέξη "canta" που προφέρεται με τον ίδιο τρόπο. Αυτό επέτρεψε τη λειτουργικότητα της γλώσσας ως ένα σημείο και ήταν ένας τρόπος που διευκόλυνε την αίσθηση της κοινής ταυτότητας μεταξύ των Ελληνοκυπρίων και των Τουρκοκυπρίων, παρά τις διαφορές που είχαν μεταξύ τους. 

Μετά το 1974, οι νέες πολιτικές πραγματικότητες που επικρατούσαν στο νησί προκάλεσαν μόνιμη αλλαγή στο δημογραφικό και εθνικό χαρακτηριστικά της Κύπρου, συμπεριλαμβανομένης της γλωσσικής αλληλεπίδρασης μεταξύ των δύο κοινοτήτων. Οι Τουρκοκύπριοι που κατοικούσαν στο νότιο κομμάτι του νησιού (τώρα υπό έλεγχο) μετακόμισαν στο βόρειο κομμάτι του νησιού που ελέγχεται από την Τουρκία. Οι Ελληνοκύπριοι κάτοικοι έφυγαν από τα νότια μέρη τους κατά τη διάρκεια της εισβολής για να σώσουν τη ζωή τους. Το αποτέλεσμα ήταν μια χώρα χωρισμένη και δύο κοινότητες που παρέμειναν από τότε. 

Η Λευκωσία, η πρωτεύουσα της Κύπρου, είναι μια διαιρεμένη πόλη που χωρίζει τις δύο κοινότητες με ένα φυσικό σύνορο, γνωστό ως η πράσινη γραμμή. 

Με τα νέα δεδομένα, η διγλωσσία που υπήρχε στο νησί εξαφανίστηκε, με την εφαρμογή μονογλωσσικών πρωτοβουλιών από την ελληνοκυπριακή κυβέρνηση. Χωρίς την αναγνώριση της τουρκοκρατούμενης βόρειας πλευράς του νησιού, από τη διεθνή κοινότητα, η Κυπριακή κυβέρνηση έχει προχωρήσει με την εφαρμογή πολιτικών που επικεντρώνονται στην Ελληνοκυπριακή γλώσσα και σχεδόν καμία που επικεντρώνεται στη τουρκοκυπριακή γλώσσα. Παρόλο που πολλά κυβερνητικά έγγραφα είναι διαθέσιμα στα τουρκοκυπριακά μέχρι σήμερα, είναι ασυνήθιστο για όσους ζουν στη νότια πλευρά να τα ζητήσουν.

Οι γλωσσικές πρωτοβουλίες στην Κύπρο έχουν απομείνει σε μη κυβερνητικές οργανώσεις και στις προσπάθειες ορισμένων ακτιβιστών στο νησί να προωθήσουν κάποια από την επικοινωνία που υπήρχε στο νησί πριν από τον πόλεμο του 1974. Το 2003, ένα από τα δύο σχολεία δευτεροβάθμιας εκπαίδευσης στη Λευκωσία, το Αγγλικό Σχολείο, άρχισε να δέχεται Τουρκοκύπριους μαθητές όπως έκανε πριν από χρόνια. Το Υπουργείο Παιδείας και Πολιτισμού στην Κύπρο έχει αρχίσει να αναγνωρίζει ότι η γλωσσική πολυμορφία και η μάθηση των γλωσσών είναι απαραίτητη. Τα Εκπαιδευτικά Κέντρα σε όλη τη χώρα είναι ανοικτά τόσο για τους Τουρκοκύπριους όσο και για τους Ελληνοκυπρίους για να μάθουν τη γλώσσα και τον πολιτισμό, την κοινότητα και την κοινωνία (Υπουργείο Παιδείας και Πολιτισμού).

Δύο Γλώσσες μιας Διχασμένης Χώρας: Η Γλωσσολογική Διαφορετικότητα στην Κύπρο

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Two Languages in a Divided Country: The Linguistic Diversity of Cyprus

by Dorothea Christophorou

Dorothea Christophorou is a senior in Political Science and communication at The University of Illinois. Dorothea’s future plans include working in Chicago with non-governmental organizations. Dorothea wrote this blog post in 418 'Language and Minorities in Europe' in spring 2019.

Situated in the far eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, the island of Cyprus has a unique geopolitical position at the crossroads of three continents (Europe, Africa, Asia) and at the meeting point of great civilizations. A small island which became an independent country only in 1960, it has had a long and turbulent history.

Throughout its history, Cyprus has been conquered by Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Arabs, the Venetians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Ottoman Turks and the British. They all left their historical, architectural, cultural and linguistic influences on the island, some of which remain to this day. Among all its conquerors, the Greeks, the Ottoman Turks and the British have left their mark the most, impacting and shaping the island’s demographics. When Cyprus gained its independence from the British in 1960, it had a population of 572,000 people, consisting of 77% Greek Cypriots, 18% Turkish Cypriots and 5% Maronites, Armenians, Latins, British and others. Both Greece and Turkey had a long-established status as the “mother countries” in relation to their respective Cypriot communities, and Great Britain was Cyprus’ last conqueror. Consequently, the constitution stipulated that Greek and Turkish were the official languages of the island, while the English language was widely used and spoken as a “third” language. Furthermore, the small Armenian community maintained its own language (Armenian), while also using the Greek language to communicate with the Greek-speaking population. It is interesting to note that both the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot communities spoke (and still speak) a unique dialect of their respective languages. Even though the written Greek language is identical for the Cypriots and mainland Greece Greeks alike (the same holds true for the Turkish language for the Turkish Cypriots and the mainland Turks), the spoken varieties can be characterized as different dialects that add some unique elements to Cyprus’ linguistic wealth.

Between 1960-1974 the two main communities coexisted peacefully, overall, despite periods of intense and violent bi-communal conflicts. Regardless of the existence of two distinct main languages (Greek and Turkish) spoken exclusively within their respective communities, they also shared common pronunciation patterns and words. These commonalities aided in the communication on the island, particularly in small villages and towns, where both communities co-habited. Older generations found ways to interact and exchange words, despite their differences, and tried to communicate in each other’s languages. For example, the word “bag” in Greek is “τσάντα”, while in Turkish it is “canta” pronounced the same way. This allowed for language functionality and provided a way to facilitate a sense of commonality between Greek and Turkish Cypriots despite their differences.

After 1974, the new political realities prevailing on the island caused a permanent change in the demographic and ethnic characteristics of Cyprus, including the language interaction between the two communities. The Turkish Cypriots who used to reside in the south part of the island (now the Greek-Cypriot government-controlled area) moved to the Turkish-controlled northern part of the island. The Greek Cypriot residents of the invaded part of Cyprus fled to the south part during the invasion to save their lives. The result was a country divided and two communities isolated from each other. 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Cy-map.png

Nicosia, the capital (pictured above), is now a divided city separating the two communities. This division has had several effects. The multilingualism that existed on the island disappeared, with monolingual language policies being implemented by the Greek-Cypriot government. With no political recognition from the international community given to the Turkish-occupied north side of the island, the Cyprus government has now proceeded to implement policies that focus on Greek-Cypriot and almost none that focus on the Turkish-Cypriot. Even though many government documents are available in Turkish-Cypriot to this day, it is uncommon for anyone living in the south to request them. 

Source: Flickr Creative Commons 

The language initiatives in Cyprus have been mostly left to non-governmental organizations and to some activists who attempt to foster some of the communication that used to exist on the island before the war. In 2003, one of the dual secondary schools in Nicosia, the English School, began re-admitting Turkish-Cypriot students. In the mid-2000s, the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus began recognizing the necessity of language diversity and inclusion. Training Centers all over the country are now open to Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots alike to learn about the language and culture, community and society (Ministry of Education and Culture). The fact that more policies have been implemented shows that the language policies in Cyprus have begun to shift. Albeit slow, these changes might lead to some increased mutual feelings on the island amongst the two communities that harbor 45 years’ worth of painful (?) separation.

Works Cited

Xenia Hadjioannou, Stavroula Tsiplakou & with a contribution by Matthias Kappler (2011) Language policy and language planning in Cyprus, Current Issues in Language Planning, 12:4, 503-569, DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2011.629113

Ministry of Education and Culture, A guide to education in Cyprus

Two Languages in a Divided Country: The Linguistic Diversity of Cyprus

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In the Shadows of French: Guadeloupian Creole between ‘Liberté’ and Oppression

by Nair Banks

Nair Banks is a senior in Political Science, French, and Gender and Women’s Studies at The University of Illinois. Nair’s future plans include moving to Washington, D.C. to work as a paralegal and studying for the LSAT. Nair wrote this blog post in the 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ course in spring 2019.

On International Francophonie Day, March 20th, 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron advocated for the promotion of the French language in Africa. One year ago, he had similar goals, expressing to francophone Africans: "If we go about it right, France will be the first language in Africa and maybe even the world in the coming decades!" As it turns out, this declaration comes across as shockingly ignorant: in what sense would Africans “go about it right”, if they wanted to promote the former colonizer’s language? Not only does Macron’s proclamation echoes French colonial discourse about some sort of a civilizing mission implemented in Africa through French culture, it is shockingly ignorant of the linguistic diversity and continued oppression of local languages, including large vehicular languages, in Africa. France’s prioritization of their language and culture over native languages and cultures is best exemplified by the case of Guadeloupian Creole. 

Guadeloupe Islands

Located in the French West Indies, the 12 islands of Guadeloupe have 448,874 inhabitants. It is an overseas territory of France, consisting of two main islands named Basseterre and Grand-Terre. The three smaller surrounding islands, Marie-Galante, La Désirade, and the Îles des Saintes or ‘Islands of the Saints’ are also dependencies of Guadeloupe. Considered an integral part of the French Republic, Guadeloupe is also represented in the European Union and the Eurozone. In 1635, Louis XIV led France to claim Guadeloupe as one of their slave colonies. In this century, Guadeloupe, just like other French plantation colonies, required many laboring populations. African slaves and European indentured workers were imported to the islands of Guadeloupe to work as the lowest classes. Consequently, the intermingling between Colonial French men and the multitude of African languages spoken by the slaves led to the development of Guadeloupian creole.

In 1946, the French government deemed the islands of Guadeloupe a ‘département d’outre-mer’ or overseas department. Since then, France has remained sovereign over the region and French has remained the sole official language.

Saint-Rose beach

Many other countries have adopted colonial islands into their official territories; one well-known example is the United States and the territory of Puerto Rico. However, the institutionalization of the French language in Guadeloupe has been largely incoherent. Although French linguistic influences have been present in the region since the 15th century, standardized French, as spoken in Paris, has never been the first language of the people living there. Nowadays, of course, many centuries after the French conquest and administrative takeover, almost all Guadeloupians are bilingual. However, they all acquire their creole native language before French. Guadeloupian Creole is a variant of Antillean Creole, spread across the archipelago of Guadeloupe and the island of Saint-Martin. In spite of its 430,000 native speakers, Guadeloupian French remains an unofficial language. It has no official recognition as its own language or even a co-official dialect status.

Guadeloupian Creole is recognized by the French state as a “créole à base lexicale française” or creole-based on the French lexical system (Cerquiglini, 1999). It is currently categorized as a ‘Lesser Antillean Creole’, alongside Martinican, Santois, Guyanese, Haitian, Dominican, and St Lucian. However, the reality is that these Creoles are languages in their own right. Although all ‘Lesser Antillean Creoles’ share a common French lexical origin, these languages have diverged grammatically and lexically over time after being scattered across many islands. Now they have become less mutually intelligible. In Guadeloupian Creole, the French lexicon operates superficially while the grammar of the language functions differently from French; with syntax clearly demonstrating Creole roots.

Currently, in Guadeloupe, there is diglossia between French that enjoys ‘High’ status in all its administrative functions, and Creole that remains a spoken ‘Low’ language with no status. As the ‘High’ language, bilinguals use French in formal settings such as school or work. Guadeloupian Creole, deemed the low dialect, is reserved for the home, everyday conversations and rural villages. Internalization of this mentality can be most clearly seen in educational environments. Today, students and teachers alike are anxious about the use of their native language, Guadeloupian Creole, in academic settings (Jeannot-Fourcaud, 2013).

Over generations, French hegemonic cultural and linguistic ideologies have been reproduced in the Guadeloupian society and education. This has resulted in the separation of languages by social spheres. The dominance of the French language in Guadeloupe was not accomplished by accident, but through thoughtful language and acquisition planning. French governmental actions have been the cause of how Guadeloupians see Creole through a French lens: to both the French and some Guadeloupians, Guadeloupian Creole continues to be looked at and feel marginalized as a ‘lesser, broken’ language living in the shadows of French.

To sum up, in Guadeloupe, French is not the ‘langue de liberté’. It is more like a language that has been imported, adopted, and cultivated by the French and the locals, but it also pretends to be the only one to matter. When one realizes that French is the language used by the colonists to assimilate African slavery for 200 years (1635-1848), its dominance is inexplicable. Forced to learn French in school, speak French in academic and business settings, and claim French as the sole official language, Guadeloupians’ cultural lives is still dictated by the hegemony of that centralized French state that brought plantation economy to the island. Guadeloupian society still adheres to exclusively French linguistic, educational and legal frameworks, even though Guadeloupian French citizens live very different lives than their counterparts in France.

While French citizens enjoy on average 38,476.66 USD per capita, Guadeloupian secondary citizens average only $7,900 USD per capita (Trading Economics, 2017). Similarly, unemployment in France is roughly 9% whereas, the unemployment rate in Guadeloupe has peaked at 50% for several decades (Crowell, 2018). The economic disparity between France and Guadeloupe demonstrates not only the secondary treatment of Guadeloupian French citizens, but a racialized treatment entangled in unresolved colonial sentiments. In 2019, France still cannot properly acknowledge their historical role in the cultural and linguistic oppression of Guadeloupian citizens. In 2019, it can still be said that the fate of Guadeloupian Creole seems to symbolize the neglect of an entire local society that makes it very hard not to see Guadeloupians modern-day slaves of a distant Metropole.

Works Cited

Jeannot-Fourcaud, Béatrice. “Language Emancipation and Attitudes towards Languages in ...” Sociolinguistic Studies, Research Gate, Dec. 2013, www.researchgate.net/publication/276914325_Language_emancipation_and_attitudes_towards_languages_in_the_case_of_Guadeloupe.

Bonan, Caterina. “The Core Grammar of Guadeloupian Creole. A Descriptive and Comparative Approach.” Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Research Gate, June 2013, www.researchgate.net/publication/321372396_The_Core_Grammar_of_Guadeloupian_Creole_A_Descriptive_and_Comparative_Approach.

Crowell, Maddy. “The Island Where France's Colonial Legacy Lives On.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 21 Apr. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/france-macron-guadeloupe-slavery-colonialism/557996/.

“France GDP per Capita PPP.” Trading Economics, 2019, tradingeconomics.com/france/gdp-per-capita-ppp.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Guadeloupe_Places_of_interest_map-fr.svg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Plage.Guadeloupe.jpg

Iskrova, Iskra. “French in the Caribbean: Characterising Guadeloupian French.” Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland, University of Aberdeen, 2010, www.abdn.ac.uk/pfrlsu/documents/Iskrova, French in the Caribbean.pdf

In the Shadows of French: Guadeloupian Creole between ‘Liberté’ and Oppression

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Not-Quite-European? The Struggle with Russia’s European-ness

by Megan Carpenter

Megan Carpenter is a Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies M.A. student at The University of Illinois. Her research interests are Soviet history and post-Soviet Russian politics. When she graduates, she hopes to work for the federal government. She wrote this blog post in FR418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in spring 2019. 

For centuries, Russian writers, politicians, philosophers, and rulers have struggled with the question of Russia’s European-ness. Is Russia European? Should western culture be allowed to influence Russians and Russian culture? Given the current political climate, the issue of Russia versus the West is an incredibly relevant topic that has a long, complicated story, and is arguably at the center of Russian history. The extent and limitations of European influences are readily apparent in the history of the Russian language.

Figure 1 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/attachments/images/large/europe-political.jpg?1547145650

Russia did not start out “European.” Situated between the edge of Europe and Central Asia, Russian culture is a truly fascinating, unpredictable product of the convergence of many different histories. Many people already know, and will remember with a hint of anxiety, that Russian has a different alphabet (it really isn’t scary! I promise!). It’s called the Cyrillic alphabet, after the Greek Saint Cyril, who created it in the 9th century for the Slavic languages.(1) The alphabet provided by Saint Cyril began a centuries-long process of changing and standardizing the Russian alphabet to suit the evolving needs of its people. Although seemingly strange for the history of what is now a major world power, from 1230 to around 1550, Russia was occupied by the Mongols from the east, and was thus cut off from the major cultural developments of the Renaissance in the west.(2) What emerged after the occupation was a distrustful, relatively uneducated Russian elite whose language bore the mark of the Mongols’ long occupation.(3)

Figure 2: Early Cyrillic Alphabet   Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet

It was this elite and the Russian culture they represented that Tsar Peter the Great, who had spent much of his youth among Europeans, set out to dramatically reform during his reign from 1682 to 1725. He despised Moscow, Russia’s capital, for what he saw as its “backwardness”- its people were unrefined, uneducated, and suspicious of foreigners.(4) His policies to counteract this ranged from weird to dramatically altering the course of Russian history. When he wasn’t busy building his dream European city (St. Petersburg) in the middle of a swamp technically owned by their Swedish enemies, he ordered male members of the aristocracy to shave their beards.(5) He also introduced changes to the Cyrillic alphabet, collectively called the “civil script,” which consisted of replacing and discarding old characters in favor of something that more closely resembled the Latin alphabet (The Russian Cyrillic alphabet was once again revised in January 1918, with the removal of several “redundant” letters).(6)

Figure 3: Modern Russian Cyrillic   Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/00Russian_Alphabet_3.svg/1149px-00Russian_Alphabet_3.svg.png

Unfortunately for the Russian language, this was about all the attention Peter the Great paid to it over the course of his rule. His European vision of Russia meant the aristocracy was to learn French and other foreign languages.(7) By the 1800s, Russian nobles struggled to speak Russian, and Russian literature and vocabulary were severely lacking.(8) Many words were (and still are) borrowed from French, such as muzei/musée (museum), café, and etazh/étage (building floor). The written Russian that did exist was not standardized and based on “archaic Church Slavonic,” meaning it did not reflect the way average Russians expressed themselves.(9) It was in this context that the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin came to the rescue of his native language’s literature. He dedicated himself not just to writing in Russian, but also to developing new words that better reflected spoken Russian.(10) For his contributions, he is revered to this day, and has been described as the father of Russian literature.(11) What followed over the course of the nineteenth century was tension between the continuation of this European influence and its rejection by authors such as Pushkin and Tolstoy, as well as the development of Russian literature with writers such as Dostoevsky and Chekhov.(12)

Figure 2 Alexander Pushkin  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Alexander_Pushkin_(Orest_Kiprensky,_1827).PNG

This tension continued all the way until the Russian Revolution, when Russian’s fortunes changed. The Bolsheviks inherited a vast empire in which dozens of languages besides Russian were spoken. In the early 1920s, under Lenin, Soviet language policy was that no language should be treated as superior to the others, and that countries of the Soviet Union had the right to use and teach their native language.(13) In 1938, however, under Stalin, Russian was made a mandatory subject throughout the Soviet Union.(14) More importantly, following World War II, Russian gained traction as the result of migration and the concentration of administrative power in Moscow.(15) Over the course of the 20th century, unofficial government policy and political trends made Russian by far the dominant language of the Soviet Union. Even decades after its collapse, citizens of the former Soviet Union still typically learn Russian, a significant shift from being rejected by what should have been its native speakers.

Linguistic and language policy developments in Russia are just some of the numerous manifestations of Russia’s struggle over its identity. For various reasons, not all of them moral, Russian is now spoken in countries through Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Russian did not always, however, occupy such a predominant position. In the 1800s, pursuit of a “European” Russia resulted in the Russian language’s neglect for over a century. Writers such as Pushkin and Tolstoy took up the cause of reviving the Russian language, shaping it and, by extension, Russian culture into something future generations could be proud of.

Works Cited

1. Figes, Orlando, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York, New York: Picador, 2002.

2. Iliev, Ivan, “Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet.” International Journal of Russian Studies, no. 2 (2013): 221-285.

3. Kirkwood, Michael, “Glasnost’, ‘the National Question’ and Soviet Language Policy.” Soviet Studies, vol. 43 no. 1 (1991): 61-81.

4. Berdy, Michael A., “The Soviet Language Revolution.” The Moscow Times, November 10, 2017. Accessed April 17, 2019. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/11/10/the-soviet-language-revolution-a59541

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[1] Ivan Iliev, “Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet,” (International Journal of Russian Studies, no. 2, 2013), 222.

[2] Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, (New York, New York: Picador, 2002), 16-17.

[3] Ibid 370.

[4] Ibid 12.

[5] Ibid 4, 43.

[6] Ivan Iliev, “Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet,” 236.

Michael A. Berdy, “The Soviet Language Revolution,” The Moscow Times, November 10, 2017, accessed April 17, 2019, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/11/10/the-soviet-language-revolution-a59541

[7] Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, 43.

[8] Ibid 55. 

[9] Ibid 50.

[10] Ibid 83.

[11] Ibid 482.

[12] Ibid 51. 

[13] Michael, Kirkwood, “Glasnost’, ‘the National Question’ and Soviet Language Policy,” (Soviet Studies, vol. 43 no.1, 1991), 61.

[14] Ibid 64.

[15] Ibid.

Not-Quite-European? The Struggle with Russia’s European-ness

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