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French Regions Have Their Voice

 

About 50,000 campaigners for French regional language rights have called on UNESCO to grant them “cultural asylum” and accused the French state of systematic linguistic discrimination amid growing concern for the future of indigenous languages such as Breton and Occitan.

Protesters gathered in Quimper, Toulouse, the Pays Basque, in Alsace, in Catalonia, as well as outside the UN cultural organization’s Paris headquarters last month carrying banners that said: “French state is killing our languages.”

They included representatives from an alliance of groups also representing Basque, Catalan, Alsatian, and Corsican speakers as well as the indigenous languages of France’s overseas territories.

Alexis Quentin, the secretary general of EBLUL France, a Europe-wide network of language campaigners, said a delegation meeting UNESCO officials had been “well received”.

“They insisted that they need UNESCO to acknowledge that French regional languages are in a poor situation because France does not respect international conventions and treaties,” Quentin told the Al Jazeera news network. “We want UNESCO to officially ask the government to pay attention to the protests in this country.”

France is a signatory to several UNESCO treaties protecting diversity of languages, including the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which calls on members to safeguard linguistic heritage and promote multilingualism.

However, it has yet to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, which is considered the main legislation promoting the rights of less-commonly-used language speakers across Europe. Ratification of the charter is required for all new members of the European Union.

The protest was timed to coincide with the first anniversary of French President Francois Hollande’s inauguration to highlight his failure to make good on a campaign promise to ratify the regional languages charter. In a statement, Colette Capdevielle, a member of the National Assembly for Hollande’s Socialist Party in the Basque region of southern France, said the policy had been dropped because of the negative opinion of the Council of State, the country’s highest judicial body, which ruled in 1999 that ratification of the charter would “violate the constitutional principles of the indivisibility of the Republic.”

The status of French as the country’s only official language is enshrined in article two of the French constitution which states: “The language of the Republic shall be French.”

There are about five million people in France who are fluent in one of the country’s regional languages use of which was once forbidden.

UNESCO’S atlas of endangered languages lists 26 under threat in France, including Breton, once the world’s most widely used Celtic language with about one million speakers just a century ago, and Occitan, a group of related dialects that were once the predominant language across southern France.

Since coming to power, Hollande’s government has reiterated its recognition of the need for fresh measures to protect and promote France’s regional languages. Vincent Peillon, the country’s education minister, said that the government remained in favor of ratifying the European charter, but acknowledged that it faced legal difficulties.

Aurelie Filippetti, the French culture minister, also created an advisory committee on languages in March, and said that ratification of the charter was only one step among those required to encourage linguistic pluralism.

“We need to break once and for all with the idea that learning a language involves unlearning another,” said Filippetti. “And reconnect with the idea that it is a plurality of languages, alongside French, that can give our country its true face, a nation open to the world, confident in its rich heritage, making its history key in adapting to the challenges of the future.”

Meanwhile, on the French island of Corsica, the local Assembly adopted the proposed statute for equality of status and revitalization of the Corsican language by 36 votes for, 11 abstentions, and no votes against. The regulation does not have an immediate legal effect as it still has to be approved by the French National Assembly. T his may prove to be the catalyst that creates co-official status and a legal basis for revitalization for French regional languages.

 

Arabizi Sparks Fears for Arabic’s Future

At a conference in Dubai last month, fears were raised that the trend among young Arabs to speak either a foreign language or a hybrid popularly known as “Arabizi”, heavily populated with foreign words, may jeopardize the future of Arabic.

According to Dr Muna Al Saheli, one of the participants at the Second International Conference on Arabic Language, “We do not have pride in our language, which is the vocal expression of our identity, because the colonist was successful in making us think it is inferior,”

Fouad Bu Ali, adviser to the Moroccan minister of information, agreed, “Language, especially one like Arabic, is not just a tool for communication. It represents the moral, religious and historical values of a culture. It is the channel through which we disseminate our culture, a link to our rich historical heritage and the catalyst for our renaissance as Arabs and Muslims.”

Dr Al Saheli, a professor of literature at Benghazi University in Libya, feels that Arabs are suffering from an “inferiority complex”, as a result of years of colonialism and dictatorships but she also believes that some of the blame lies with outdated, boring, and monotonous teaching methods.

Another problem is Fus’ha, or formal standardized Arabic. Mostly used in written form, such as official and religious documents, Fus’ha is at odds with the widely diverging colloquial spoken varieties of Arabic, used in everyday conversations.

So while the colloquial version was the native language, formal Arabic was taught in schools. Because colloquial Arabic could be incomprehensible to speakers from different parts of the region, educated Arabs mostly used the formal version to communicate with each other.

But, says Dr Al Saheli, many Arab education systems taught formal Arabic to children, forgetting that they did not speak it and barely understood it.

“We need to not only revamp the curriculums but also introduce interactive classes where the four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing – are incorporated,” she says. “Only then will we produce a generation that has a good grasp of standard Fus’ha Arabic.”

According to Dr Adnan Eidan, another threat comes form universities choosing to teach in other languages. “When Arabs were leaders in scholarship, the language grew and absorbed words from Greece, Persia and other cultures,” he says. “However, our post-colonial situation, where we lived under dictators who stifled and clamped down on any kind of creativity and placed so many restrictions and red lines on our basic freedoms, has arrested the development of the Arab people and, naturally, the language.”

Samia Bibars, plenipotentiary minister at the Arab League, disagrees that Arabic is in danger of extinction, preferring to concentrate on the many challenges that needed to be addressed.

The sad state of Arabic is a reflection of the current state of affairs in the Arab world, which includes stagnation, regression and fragmentation, she explains.

While Arabs worried about their language, delegates from China, Nigeria, and Bulgaria came to the conference to seek support for their Arabic learning programs and partnerships with Arab educational institutions.

 

Two More Confucius Institutes in Pakistan

Chinese Rooster Year of 2017 illustration

The Chinese Ministry of Education has approved setting up of two more Confucius institutes in Pakistan, according Pakistan’s Ambassador to the country, Masood Khan.

Writing in Pakistan’s Daily Times, Khan remarked on the cultural ties between the nations prior to new Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s  visit to Pakistan on his first visit abroad, “which demonstrates the significance China attaches to its relations with us.”

“People-to-people contact remains crucial in strengthening ties between the two countries. In China, Pakistan Study Centres are housed in four prestigious Chinese universities — Peking, Tsinghua, Sichuan, and Fudan. I believe it would be a good idea to establish Pakistan-China centres in key Pakistani universities as well. In Pakistan we are encouraging the trend of learning the Chinese language and culture in Pakistani schools and colleges. This would produce a new generation of Pakistanis equipped with the skills to deal with the rising dragon more productively. To understand each other’s culture better, we are also making efforts to show our TV dramas in our respective countries. We plan to intensify interaction between media personnel, think tanks, and academic institutes. The presence of over 8,000 Pakistani students in China and establishment of academic linkages between our key universities is another shining aspect of our growing collaboration,” wrote the Ambassador.

 

French in Canada

The minister responsible for Bill 14 says “mutual anxiety” about language in the francophone and anglophone communities is making her job a tough one.

During an emotional day featuring sometimes inflammatory presentations and with one French-language activist, Mario Beaulieu, revealing he has received death threats, Diane De Courcy said the debate over her bill has taken on an acrimonious tone.

“I have heard it all,” De Courcy, minister responsible for the Charter of the French Language, told reporters. “I even heard someone say we wanted to partition Quebec and create apartheid between anglophones and francophones.

“I admit I have seen a very, very acrimonious tone, very acrimonious tone, in social media and, in certain cases, written media.

“There are abuses of language. It’s not desirable but I think the truth is in the middle. If there is one thing we share with the English-speaking community and all of us, it is our mutual anxiety on questions of language.

“So this requires a lot of tact, balance and profound understanding.”

But getting to the middle is proving to be a challenge. Into a fourth week of hearings into the bill by a National Assembly committee, the “middle,” was certainly not the message from Jean-Paul Perreault, president of the Outaouais-based language lobby group Impératif français.

He started the day by — among other themes — urging Quebec to abolish the concept of anglophone hospitals.

“In our view, there’s no place for anglophone hospitals in Quebec,” Perreault said at a news conference. “They should all be francophone hospitals and the front-line services should be offered in the form of a translation service.”

He said in his view, the rules of the charter should be extended to all public health and education institutions — including CEGEPs and universities, plus all Crown corporations.

He said this is only logical “if we accept the principle that all persons who choose to live in Quebec must speak French or learn it.”

“I think what we need are hospitals,” Perreault responded later at the committee under questioning from the Coalition Avenir Québec MNA on the committee, Nathalie Roy, who said she could not disagree more with Perreault.

“Defining hospitals on a linguistic basis is to practise a form of discrimination.”

De Courcy immediately quashed the idea, lumping it into the pile of extreme ideas tossed into the mix almost daily now.

But her day was not over.

Two other groups, Beaulieu’s Movement Québec français and the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN), took turns saying Bill 14 does not go far enough.

Despite statements from business lobbies that workplace language rules are fine as they are, the CSN said the proportion of employees working mainly in French in Montreal has dropped from 85 per cent to 80 per cent between 1989 and 2010.

The number of firms working only in French only has dropped 6.5 percentage points between 1997 and 2010, they told the committee.

In yet another warning about creeping bilingualism, CSN president Jacques Létourneau told the committee three out of four available jobs in Montreal require English.

Letourneau told the committee about a newly arrived Italian immigrant who learned French when she arrived because she was told she would need it to work as a waitress in a café in Petite-Patrie.

He said the woman told him: “Nobody told me I would also have to work in English.”

And CSN vice-president Michel Forget dismissed Liberal arguments that the incentive approach is best in the workplace.

He said the voluntary route has been tried for a number of years. Given the chance to do nothing, firms will, he said.

Beaulieu also quoted dire statistics, telling the committee that short of a shakeup, in 20 years the francophone population of Quebec will be down to 40 per cent.

Overall in Quebec, the percentage of francophones is now below 80 per cent.

“If we don’t act now, by the time the problem shows up in the City of Quebec, it will be too late,” Beaulieu said.

And earlier, Beaulieu — a familiar face in Quebec’s linguistic battles — revealed he received death threats after a January interview about language on a Montreal English-language radio station.

“It was very explicit — ‘You should be shot, all of you,’ ” Beaulieu said, switching briefly into English while explaining the incident to reporters.

Beaulieu said he turned over the threats to police but blamed some English-language media for the problem because he said he has been described as “xenophobic, anglophobe and racist.”

“I am not anglophobic,” Beaulieu said. “I have anglophones in my family. I want to assure the future of French.”

The day ended with an appearance by a group named the Office Québécoise de la langue anglaise, which presented a harshly-worded brief calling on Quebec to make English an official language, scrap Bill 14, give parents freedom of choice for schools and lower the threshold for bilingual cities.

Accompanied by about 20 supporters, group spokesperson Hugo Shebbeare accused the government of wanting to legitimize discrimination based on language and “get rid of anglophones.”

He said a legal divide is being placed between Quebecers by “opportunistic politicians, inebriated nationalists and separatist militants who think we are foreigners here.”

“This is an angry presentation, an angry brief,” a Liberal MNA on the committee, Geoffrey Kelley, remarked to the committee as it wrapped for the day.

He said language is always a “question of balance,” and asked the group if it had any concrete suggestions about that.

Three Languages for Catalan University Grads

The Generalitat of Catalonia announced in April that it would require future university students to have knowledge of a third language to earn a degree. While this new regulation will allow students to choose the language of study, English is highly encouraged.

“We want to guarantee that none of our students have problems with English when they leave the university,” explained the minister of the economy, Andreu Mas-Colell.

Students can prove their proficiency in a third language either by taking language courses and taking a university exam, or by testing out of the requirement. For English, the First Certificate would suffice.

The Catalan government reports that capacities for English have been less than satisfactory, and places the blame on little instruction at the elementary and secondary levels.

A similar initiative failed in 2008. However, if it is implemented this time, demand for language training will increase and private language schools will benefit greatly.

 

Castilian Spanish Rules in Catalan Classrooms

A Catalan court has ruled that if a family in Catalonia wants more hours of instruction in Castilian Spanish, the school must comply. However, the ruling goes on to do more than make differentiated instruction mandatory. According to the court, the entire class will have to be instructed in Spanish upon the request of one student. The ruling comes as a blow to Spain’s autonomous Catalan region, which uses Catalan as the language of instruction in schools.

This most recent ruling comes after a string of court decisions that left the issue of the language of instruction in Catalonia a legal grey area. The ruling of the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Catalonia (TJSC) clarifies that the student’s right to receive instruction in Castilian Spanish “would not be satisfied with private attention given in Castilian Spanish, but rather with a transformation of the system.”

Catalan education minister, Irene Rigau, understands the ruling as a global attack on Catalan and stated that the ruling would not be applied in the classroom: “We guarantee the right of every family to ask for individual attention at elementary and primary schools. But that right cannot affect the rights of other families,” she said.

Meanwhile, the court argued that, “It is known that the fundamental right to education […] does not guarantee the right to choose to receive instruction exclusively in only one of the official languages.” The TJSC pointed out that Catalonia is the only bilingual region of Spain that offers instruction predominantly in one language. In the Basque country, families can choose between three different models each with a different ratio of instruction in two languages.

The school district in Catalonia reported that only seventeen families requested instruction in Castilian Spanish. Spokesman Josep Maria Cervello remarked, “the ruling won’t even be applied.”

The ripple effect of this ruling has gone beyond the realm of education into Spanish national politics. In January 2013, Language Magazine reported on the FC Barcelona soccer stars who publicly defended the use of Catalan in schools. Some critics suspect that this most recent ruling was a reaction against raising tension over the issue of Catalan secession from the rest of Spain.

The TJSC’s ruling is also a contentious issue in the Spanish congress. The Catalan independentist party, Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña, or the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), demanded that all delegates, whether Catalan or not, speak Catalan during congressional sessions in “logical parallelism and fair correspondence” with the TJSC’s ruling. ERC complained that if one delegate requests the use of Catalan in the government, then all must comply.

The ERC’s request follows an incident in which Catalan congressman Joan Tardá was expelled from a session for addressing the congress in Catalan. Tardá remarked on his party’s request for Catalan in congressional sessions, “It may seem pointless, but it’s pointless here and in Catalonia.”

All Spanish Equal

The head of Spain’s Real Academia de la Lengua (Royal Spanish Academy, or RAE) said last month that Latin American variations of Spanish in “do not endanger” the language, which is spoken equally well on both sides of the Atlantic.

Prior to giving a speech in the former capital of the Spanish Empire, Toledo. entitled “The Royal Academy and its Future,” Jose Manuel Blecua commented to the Spanish international news agency, Efe, that although some people see “a danger” in the variations of Spanish spoken across the Spanish-speaking world, “ there is no place where it is spoken better than in any other.”

“It can be (the same) in Bogota, or Mexico City as in Valladolid, Madrid or Barcelona, because there is no variation that is more pure than another,” insisted Blecua. He continued to say that such thinking began to be debunked with the publication of the “New Grammar of the Spanish Language,” the first grammar compendium reflecting all the varieties of Spanish.

When asked about the most important projects currently underway at the RAE, Blecua emphasized the celebration in 2013 of the third centennial of its creation and the publication in 2014 of the new edition of the authoritative “Dictionary of the Spanish Language,” on which work has been progressing since 2001.

Soccer Giants Defend Catalan

After Spain’s education minister stated that he was drafting a proposal to make the teaching of Castilian Spanish obligatory in schools throughout the country, the world-famous FC Barcelona soccer team has defended the use of the Catalan language and how it is being taught in the region.
“Our language, like our team, is an element of integration which permits us to identify with our country (Catalonia),” said an FC Barcelona spokesperson. It “energetically asserts its right to use the Catalan language and the model of language immersion that has been in force in Catalonia over the last 34 years.”
Currently, there are separate Spanish classes in Catalonia’s state schools, but they are not obligatory.
The statement comes in response to separatist demonstrations in Catalonia, where many believe the region will do better if it breaks away from Spain and becomes an independent nation within the European Union.
That idea was put to the test in Catalonia’s regional parliamentary elections on Nov 25 in which the central issue was whether to hold a referendum on separating from Spain. Pro-referendum voters obtained a majority of seats in the legislature.
The proposed referendum has caused tensions with the central government which argues that Spain’s regions cannot hold individual referendums because that would be unconstitutional.
The dispute grew more heated when Spain’s Minister for Education, Culture, and Sport, Jose Ignacio Wert, said he was drafting a proposal that would ensure that Castilian was taught in schools throughout the country.
Catalonia’s regional education chief, Irene Rigau, stormed out of a meeting in Madrid saying his proposal was unacceptable.
Barcelona soccer team Captain Carles Puyol has now tweeted hashtag keywords critical of Wert. The Barcelona football team, whose motto is “more than a club,” is seen as a bastion of Catalan identity dating back to Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and the subsequent military dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.

Spanish Center for Harvard

Spain’s Instituto Cervantes is creating a Spanish-language center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the goal of which is to be the international point of reference for analyzing the progress of the Spanish language in the U.S.
The largest banking group in the Eurozone, Spain’s Grupo Santander, will contribute 1 million euros ($1.3 million) to the center over the next four years.
Cervantes’ director, Victor Garcia de la Concha, said these are crucial years for the consolidation of Spanish as the second language for international communication, which means that even greater efforts must be made.
Garcia de la Concha and Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, are scheduled to sign the accord on Friday.
The center will be headed by Francisco Moreno, professor at Spain’s University of Alcala and ex-director of the Cervantes Institutes in Sao Paulo and Chicago.
It will also act as a venue to promote cultural initiatives, conferences, and lectures, as well as showcase Cervantes Prize winners and Latino writers living in the U.S.

New Bill to Support Language Teaching at School

LAUTENBERG, HOLT INTRODUCE BILL TO SUPPORT INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12) have introduced, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the “Foreign Language Education Partnership Program Act.” The legislation would create a new U.S. Department of Education initiative to support revolutionary classroom programs that provide carefully sequenced foreign language classes from kindergarten through high school.

“We need to give our young people the best opportunities to master foreign languages to help them thrive in this global economy. By fostering innovative programs for our students, this legislation will help close the foreign language gap among American students,” Lautenberg said. “I hope my Senate colleagues will help make our nation more secure and prosperous by joining this effort to make foreign language education a national priority.”

“Because of poor foreign language education, American companies today lose international contracts, our scientists miss important opportunities for collaboration, and clues critical to our national security go untranslated,” Holt said. “We need to improve dramatically how our children learn languages by establishing a foundation at the earliest ages and building on it through high school, college, and beyond.”

According to studies funded by the Department of Education, only 30 percent of American high school students are enrolled in foreign language classes, and only 25 percent of American elementary schools even offer foreign languages. To address these problems, the bill would create a new K-12/higher education foreign language education partnership program. It would provide up to $50 million in annual funding for model programs of sequenced foreign language instruction from K-12, with the goal of graduating high school students with an advanced level of proficiency. Any foreign language is eligible, but the Secretary of Education may establish priorities on languages critical to national needs.

Information on successful programs and practices would be widely disseminated, with a goal of encouraging school systems nationwide to adopt similar approaches.

The bill introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Holt will be referred to the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, of which Holt is a member. The House bill is cosponsored by Reps. Jim McDermott (WA-7), Jared Polis (CO-2), John Tierney (MA-6), Jan Schakowsky (IL-9), James McGovern (MA-2), and David Price (NC-4).

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