Language in the world: properties and powers
Claims about human groups
In rebutting the belief that linguistic diversity is not worth preserving, because '[i]t is, in short, a total myth that the sharing of a single language brings peace, whichever language it might be', Crystal (2002: 27-8) ironically seems to us to undermine one of his own arguments. From our perspective, no language has the power to 'bring' peace, social cohesion or cultural integration. Neither the strategy of creating a single language, nor of supporting endangered ones, is likely by itself to have a significant effect on social inequalities. It is a property of language that it is available to be mobilized by people who have a varied range of social interests (cf. Holborow 1999). These include people who want to portray the links between language and identity, language and culture, or language and nation in particular ways - but, once again, it is people who describe the world in this way, and not language which determines these links. Nettle and Romaine claim that 'a way of life disappears with the death of a language', but the claim that language is synonymous with way-of-life weakens, or even ruptures, the interplay between culture and agency by conflating the two.
Furthermore, because linguistic conformity indicates very little about social conformity, those who would seek to make a nation culturally homogeneous by seeking to impose linguistic homogeneity are unlikely to be successful. When speakers use any given language variety, they do not automatically and unequivocally proclaim their normative commitment to one particular set of cultural values or propositions. Indeed, speakers can play with and exploit the varieties in their repertoire, as several empirical studies have demonstrated (e.g. Rampton 1995b). Alternatively, linguistic conformity may be a favored strategy for concealing and even advancing social dissidence. For example, you can choose to learn English in order to stand a greater chance of succeeding in your ambition to carry out acts of 'terrorism' against the English or American state.
A further source of disquiet is the congruence between the discourse of linguistic rights and that deployed by more conventional advocates of nationalism. As Blommaert (2001c: 137) observes, '... a program of ethnolinguistic pluralism is based on exactly the same ideology as the one it claims to combat' (see also Ashcroft 2001). This is manifest in a tendency in the linguistic rights discourse to reify the nation, where 'nation' is linked with ethnicity and notions of shared history - what has been identified as 'ethnonationalism' (Connor 1994). Vuolab (2000: 13), for example, asserts that 'The mother tongue is a chain that binds us to our own history. ... Our personal duty is to transfer the mother tongue to the next generation.' A presupposition here is that there is an identifiable, homogeneous entity called the mother tongue, and that there is a single history to which 'we' are 'bound' by language itself.
Myhill (1999: 34) has drawn attention to one significant problem with tying language to 'identity' in this way. The belief that there is some 'inherent emotional and spiritual connection between a person and his/her native language' may conflict with 'the ideology of language and territory'. For example, if English is in the blood of its native speakers, the 'identity' argument would give them the right to take it with them into any supposedly non-English territory; conversely, according to the 'territory' argument, if a threatened minority language is associated with geographical region, its use would necessarily be restricted to this small area. Both such logical extensions of the arguments would presumably be unappealing to champions of language rights. Fraser Gupta (1997), among others, has also raised some objections to such claims:
Does everyone have a mother tongue that they can identify with? People who are ethnically mixed, people whose ancestors have undergone language shift, and those who are bilingual from infancy often have a very weak sense of identification with a 'mother tongue'.
What this observation points to, in our terms, is a recognition of the salience of the psychobiographical domain, and of the interplay between this and the structured social relations which lead to changing linguistic contexts. Critics also have reservations about the retrospection involved in appealing to culture as unchanging, 'fossilized' [ibid.], 'a museum piece' (Chew 1999), 'nineteenth-century Romanticism' (Malik 2000).
