Language And Ethnicity Research Paper

The criterion of self-sufficiency in biological reproduction sets the lower limit of the size of an ethnic group. The upper limit is set by the criterion of alterity. As ethnic groups define themselves and are defined in contradistinction to other such groups, an ethnic group can never comprise all of humankind. Ethnic groups tend to be medium-to large-scale human aggregates, typically ranging from thousands to millions. Many ethnic groups, including those which do not have a ‘nation-state’ to their name, exceed many independent states in the size of their populations. ‘ethnic group’ and ‘nation’ form a pair of concepts, the first stressing cultural aspect, the second political ones. ‘nation’ includes the additional element of statehood in one or the other form. One can say that an ethnic group plus a state in which it predominates or a claim to such separate statehood is a nation. The fact that political rights like self-determination are attributed to nations in the political and juridicial discourse does not help to define which ethnic group qualifies as a nation and which one does not. Any ethnic group can claim to be a nation and become one through such a claim. The only difference between a mere ethnic group and a nation without state is that the latter claims political sovereignty and the former does not necessarily do so. This distinction may not be very helpful in solving practical political issues, but social science does not provide a more helpful one.

Ethnicity is a cultural construct and its construction materials are cultural as well. There are other cultural constructs which are partly based on biological givens, like gender on biological sex, but in all cases in which ethnicity claims to be based on biological facts like discontinuities in the distributions of genes (race), such claims can be shown to be without a biological basis. Genes may cluster in different ways, but they never mark ethnic boundaries. Ethnic groups are never based on race, but very frequently on beliefs about race. Another element ethnic groups tend to attribute to themselves, often counterfactually, is a venerable age, and therefore ethnicity can in some ways be said to be a pseudobiological category: ethnic groups view themselves as natural and stable in time like biological species. Other parts of culture, in addition to beliefs about race, which play a part in the construction of ethnic groups, include the reference to real or imagined historical events, peculiarities of customs, and the like. No two ethnic groups have a set of criteria which is alike, but typically ethnic discourses make reference to a plurality of such criteria. If only one such criterion is stressed, like religious affiliation, one would not speak of an ethnic group, but, rather, of a religious one.

For our present topic it is of special importance that language tends to be (but by no means always is) high up in the catalog of cultural criteria used to mark the boundaries between ethnic groups. This makes the question of the relationship between language and ethnicity appear tautological in some cases. Where language is used as the primary marker of an ethnic boundary (Barth 1969), ethnic and linguistic units tend to be congruent. In post-World War I Europe, the language census has in numerous cases simply replaced the declaration of political will of local communities in effecting boundary corrections between nation-states (Dench 1986). On the other hand, through the school system and the exclusive use of the majority language for administration, national languages or languages which enjoy a special status in certain areas, have been imposed on linguistic minorities (Gellner 1981). Congruence between linguistic communities and ethnic units/nations has thus been promoted on the interstate level by adjusting political boundaries to language distribution areas and on the intrastate level by extending a language policy to the boundaries. In spite of the fact that these processes have been at work for some time, still only a small fraction of the world’s nations are linguistically homogeneous (Ra’anan 1989).

While in some cases ethnic and linguistic units are coterminous, at the other extreme we find ethnic units, well defined by other criteria, which have nothing to do with language. The Garre of north eastern Africa conceive of themselves as one ethnic group because of their common genealogy and clan organization, their shared pastoral nomadic culture, and their desire, not always fulfilled, to keep peace with each other. The Garre are divided in four linguistic clusters which cross-cut other criteria of differentiation like clanship. Some of them speak an Oromo dialect close to the one of the Boran, while some speak Af Rahanweyn, yet others Af Garreh Kofar. The latter two are closely related Somali-like languages but are kept clearly apart by their speakers. There are also Garre who speak Somali proper. Oromo is a different language well beyond comprehension. It belongs to the same lowland branch of the east Cushitic languages as the Somali-type languages, but internal differentiation within this branch is high. The fact that the Garre are also divided between three nation-states (Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia) has nothing to do with this linguistic differentiation, since speakers of all four languages are found among the Garre of all three states. The only language which is spoken exclusively by Garre appears to be Af Garreh Kofar, but to the outside observer it is difficult to distinguish that language from Af Rahanweyn which is spoken by hundreds of thousands of non-Garre, namely Somali of the Rahanweyn clan-cluster. It does happen that Garre who do not share one of these Cushitic languages are obliged to converse with each other in languages from totally different language families, like Swahili (Bantu) or English (Germanic) which they have acquired at school, an institution frequented by only a minority of them for mostly short periods.

If there are enough other elements (political, economic, cultural) on which a feeling of ethnic belonging and commonality is based, such an ethnic unit can tolerate a high degree of linguistic diversity. If these other foundations are absent, no amount of linguistic homogeneity can prevent disruption. Even within a language formerly perceived as one, now three different languages can be distinguished if the political will so dictates. This is exemplified by the split of the Serbo-Croatian language into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian.

The close association between a nation and its national language is a fairly recent development of political ideology even in Europe, and more so in other parts of the world to which this idea has been exported. Originally the term mother tongue (Muttersprache) referred to the language learned from the mother or wet nurse as distinct from the language of the male sphere, of officialdom and scholarship, i.e., Latin (Ahlzweig 1994). Through romanticism and the evolving linguistic nationalism this term later acquired political overtones. The modern national states of Europe have, in their formative period, taken little account of the map of language distribution. Personalities claimed in retrospect as forerunners of German, Russian, or other nationalisms, in their real lives often preferred to speak French. The ethnicization of the state, its culturalization and its evolving association with a particular language was a gradual process in the development of modern Europe. Linguistic obstacles were sometimes artificially raised between nations. As their national standard the Norwegians have chosen from among their many dialects the one most different from Danish.

Not only languages but also language families have been politicized by identifying them with groups of people who were often ascribed racial characteristics, as a result of which they were either accorded privileges, or denied such privileges and even such basic rights as freedom and the right to live. Nowadays nobody outside the lunatic fringes would use the term Semite, to the extent that it is still used at all, in any other sense than speaker of a Semitic language. But there are other such terms of Biblical derivation like Cushites and Hamites which still continue in political careers which were unforeseen by the late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European historical linguists who applied them to clusters of languages they found to derive from shared ancestral forms. One can hear Oromo nationalists in Ethiopia arguing for the inclusion of minority groups and their territories into Oromia on the grounds that, although they are not Oromo, they are also Cushites. Ideologies about the repulsion of Hamitic intruders are at the root of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, although the Tutsi, in fact, speak the same Bantu language as their Hutu murderers, and historical theories that they ever spoke a different language are questionable to say the least. Ironically, too, the term Hamitic is no longer used by linguists. This may serve as a recent example that linguistic classifications, once they cross the boundaries of the academic sphere, can develop a dynamic of their own and that such a dynamic can be quite a murderous one.

Linguistic nationalism often appeals to romantic notions about the relationship between a particular language and other aspects of the culture of its speakers. The language we speak is believed to influence our thinking in a subtle way, giving language a much deeper cultural implication than that of a mere boundary marker between different cultural/ethnic units. Such ideas, which go back to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), cannot be explained away by pointing to the ways in which they are instrumentalized by nationalists. In Herder’s view, a language is the ‘collective treasure’ of a nation and, since each language shapes the perspective on the world in a different way, the intellectual wealth of mankind consists in the diversity of its languages, i.e., in the number of such treasures (Schlesinger 1991, p. 12f ). Or, in the words of a modern Herderian: ‘It is ethnic and linguistic diversity that makes life worth living. It is creativity and beauty based upon ethnic and linguistic diversity which makes man human’ (Fishman 1989, p. 15). Very differentiated assumptions about the interrelationship between language and thought have also been put forward by Humboldt (1988), while a more simplistic view, basically a linguistic determinism, was proposed much later by Whorf (1962). Whorfians have also claimed the earlier Sapir as one of their persuasion and speak of a Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. A fuller analysis of the interrelationship of language and thought or language and cognition would go beyond the scope of an article on language and ethnicity (for a summary see Schlesinger 1991).

The above-mentioned possibilities, that an ethnic group is completely coterminous and identified with the community of speakers of a certain language, and the opposite case, of a total lack of such a congruence and the absence of any association between an ethic group and the language(s) spoken by it, are two extremes of a range of variation. Between these extremes we find language and ethnicity interacting in a great number of ways. To examine how language relates to ethnicity, and which languages ethnic identifications persist in which functions in a plurilingual and culturally heterogeneous setting, i.e., to study the ecology of languages, the following variables need to be taken into account: demographic variables, like the sizes of language communities and their growth rates, and their compact or dispersed form of settlement including the forms of mixture with speakers of other languages; political and juridical variables, like the status of a language and the institutions in which it is used, and the presence or absence of ethnic stratification of the labor market with which language status often correlates; ethno-cultural variables, like the association of a language with a group’s history or religion, and the potential of a language in terms of range of vocabulary and tradition of writing; interactional variables like communicational mobility and degree of multilingualism of speakers, specialization of the functions of speech varieties in diglossic and polyglossic settings, and routines of interactions between ethnic groups/speech communities; variations on topic, to explore the influence of different topics on the choice of a language; predominant/exclusive use of a language in the public/private sphere, and the linguistic distance between the languages in contact (Haarmann 1986, pp. 11ff ). This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Some of these variables are illustrated. In contact situations, languages may undergo functional differentiation. The original language in bilingual communities may become restricted to sacral functions. Ethnicity and language choice should not be studied in isolation from other dimensions of social identity like gender and age. Minority people may revert in their old age to the language of their childhood, while their professional lives have been dominated by languages of wider currency (Dow 1991). The past interaction between languages, their differences in potential and prestige in different semantic domains, and the relationships between the speakers of those languages and the cultural values attached to their ethnic identities, are reflected by loanwords. Contrary to the widespread assumption that loanwords are typical for specialized concepts, these often extend far into the basic vocabulary and may designate parts of the body or kinship terms (Haarmann 1986, pp. 186ff, Schlee 1994). In intensive language contact situations, borrowing is not restricted to the lexicon and there may be light or heavy structural borrowing (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, pp. 74f ).

Written language and writing systems show a stronger tendency to be maintained as sacred, and/or symbols of ethnic identity, than does spoken language. Aramaic-speaking Christians became speakers of Arabic, which they also used for writing and in which they produced a considerable literature, but for a long time they continued to use their earlier Syriac alphabet because they identified the Arabic alphabet with the Qur’aan and Islam. The mirror case is provided by Muslims in the post-reconquista Spain who wrote Spanish in Arabic characters. Jews throughout Europe for centuries wrote the respective majority languages of the countries in which they lived, with a sprinkling of Hebrew words, in Hebrew characters. Where the new alphabet, like the Arabic alphabet in non-Arabic countries converted to Islam, is associated with holy texts, the opposite may occur. Many different languages have been written in the Arabic script, and other writing systems, some of them ancient, have fallen into disuse (Lewis 1998).

Also linguistic variation within the performance of one speaker in the same speech act can highlight aspects of language and ethnicity. A narrator may switch in a story back and forth between languages and/or more or less standardized creolized varieties of these languages to depict characters to whom different ethnic and other social identities are attributed. Also, in presenting themselves, polyglot people, or people who master more than one register of a language, can play with options of identification rather than being tied to one form of speech and the ethnicity, or more generally the identity, it connotes (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985).

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