#language policy

« Notre nation a été constituée par l’État et par la langue », a estimé Emmanuel Macron, devant les Académiciens. « Elle a été la fabrique d’une Nation qui, sinon, s’échappait entre ses langues vernaculaires, ses patois, ses différentes langues régionales qui, pour nombre d’entre elles, existent encore mais qui étaient un instrument, au fond, de division de la Nation. À travers votre rôle, votre travail, notre langue, c’est bien l’unité du pays et la création de la Nation qui était à l’œuvre. »

Translation: Our nation was built by the State and by the language. It was fabricated by a Nation that, otherwise, would have been lost under its vernacular languages, its patois, its regional languages that, for many of them, still exist but were an instrument, at their core, of the division of the Nation. Through your role, your work, our language is truly a means of the unity of a country and the creation of a Nation.

Lingthusiasm Episode 67: What it means for a language to be official

The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in public places. Choosing between languages is both very personal but it’s not only personal -- it’s also a reflection of the way that the societies we live in constrain our choices.  

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about language policy and how organizations and nation-states make language decisions that affect people’s everyday lives. We also talk about the excellent recent lingcomm book Memory Speaks by Julie Sedivy, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (currently ongoing!), and many ways of unpacking the classic quote about a language being a dialect with an army and a navy.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we’re getting enthusiastic about word games and puzzles with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular! We talk about patron questions, including lots of Wordle content: what Ben and Nicole learned from interviewing the creator of Wordle, our favourite Wordle variants such as IPA Wordle and Semantle, and comparing our Wordle solving strategies with a demo game on air. Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 60+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can play and discuss word games and puzzles with other language nerds! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Wikipedia entry for Rosetta Stone

Wikipedia entry for Demotic

Wikipedia entry for Ptolemy V

Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017

Australia’s first trilingual statute

Memory Speaks - On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy

Stan Carey’s review of Memory Speaks

Wikipedia entry for the Bengali Language Movement

Wikipedia entry for International Mother Language Day

Official International Mother Language Day website

United Nations Decade of Indigenous Languages

International Decade of Indigenous Languages Twitter account

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Samuel Tremblay, better known by his stage name Samian, says he was shocked when a discussion with an organizer from a prominent Quebec song festival turned to how much of his proposed August show would be in French.

The Anishinabeg rapper and actor from Pikogan, Que. performs in French and Anishinaabemowin — one of many Algonquin dialects spoken in First Nations in Quebec, Ontario and other parts of Canada and the U.S.

He says the Festival international de la chanson de Granby (FICG)  wanted assurances that no more than 20 per cent of the show would be performed in his Indigenous tongue.

"I find it very insulting," Samian told Radio-Canada.

"For me the show comes as it is. My last album is entirely in Algonquin … you can take it or leave it — and they left it."

Samian shared his frustration on social media over the weekend, saying booking agents need to "do their homework."

He said it's hard to reconcile his recent experience with some of the progress that's been made over the course of his 15-year career — including Quebec's move to officially recognize and help protect Indigenous languages last June and a similar move by the United Nations.

"I understand we want to have francophone festivals and I understand the fight of the French language against English," he said, "but Indigenous languages aren't threatening. Indigenous languages are threatened."

The Granby festival declined an interview request from CBC but issued a statement saying it had invited Samian to perform knowing he had songs in French as well as in his first language and its team is "sincerely sorry about the turn of events."

"We told his representative we were open to him performing songs in his two languages, accounting for the fact the primary mission of the festival is to promote francophone songwriting," reads the statement.

The festival said it hopes talks with Samian and his agent can continue so he can still put on a show.

Samian says he feels it's disrespectful to impose linguistic requirements on Indigenous artists and says the subject never came up when he was invited to perform at other French festivals like the Francos de Montréal.

"I can't start calculating the percentage of French and Indigenous language in my show," he said. "It felt like I was talking to politicians."

Hi, aros. I wanted to share a short summary of a research proposal I drafted for one of my courses.

Unfortunately, with my current time taken up by AUREA, data analyses for other arospec and a-spec surveys, and my thesis (which is not on queer things at all), I am not sure when this kind of research could get done.

However, that’s where you come in. I would be happy to send along some sources and literature review (i.e., my whole research proposal document) if someone, or a group of someones, is interested in carrying out some or all of this research. I’d also be happy to help guide the research or give advice. Reach out to me if this sounds like something you’d be interested in doing, now or later, or leave comments or asks about your thoughts on this. If you reblog this, please reblog it without clicking “Keep Reading” so that the post is accessible for length. Apologies for people on mobile for the lengthy ID.

[Image description under the cut.]