Multilingualism as a market
Prestige, the Francophonie and the economy of "useful" languages
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
At its Barcelona meeting in 2002 the European Council set a goal that has been repeated in every educational document of the Union since: every citizen should speak their mother tongue plus two other languages. It sounds generous, until we ask which two. In practice these two are almost always English and one of a few large European languages. The multilingualism Europe encourages is the multilingualism of prestigious languages.
Bourdieu called this a "linguistic market": a place where every way of speaking has a value, and where that value is set not by the language itself but by the power of those who speak it. De Swaan (2001) showed that the world's languages form a hierarchical system, with one "hypercentral" language at the top, a few "supercentral" languages below it, and thousands of peripheral languages whose speakers must learn another language to rise, while no one at the top ever learns theirs to reach them.
The Francophonie, which has had its own institution since 1970, is usually presented as the voice of linguistic diversity against the dominance of English. Yet from Dakar to Kinshasa, French is still the language of school, court and university, while most people speak Wolof, Lingala or dozens of other languages at home and in the market. For these people, defending French against English is not a defence of diversity; it is the defence of one colonial language against another. Heller and Duchêne (2012) have shown that in late capitalism language is both a commodity and a mark of identity, and that these two roles are often in tension.
I come from Belgium, a country whose language dispute has more than once brought the state close to collapse, and I know that language policy cannot be reduced to the formula "learn a useful language". The real question is how a knowledge infrastructure can separate the value of a text from the prestige of its language. If a text in Wolof is as findable, citable and lasting as a text in French, the linguistic market loses at least one of its levers.
Questions for discussion
- Could the goal of "mother tongue plus two" be rewritten so that it also counts peripheral languages?
- What is the relation of the Francophonie in Africa to linguistic diversity: does it sustain it or stand in its way?
- How can a knowledge infrastructure separate the prestige of a language from the value of the text written in it?
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Polity Press.
De Swaan, Abram. 2001. Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heller, Monica, and Alexandre Duchêne, eds. 2012. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. New York: Routledge.
Barcelona European Council, 15 and 16 March 2002. Presidency Conclusions.