Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes © 2023 the Authors Published version Laihonen, Petteri; Heltai, János Imre Laihonen, P., & Heltai, J. I. (2023). Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes. In J. I. Heltai, & E. Tarsoly (Eds.), Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities : Speaking Romani at School (pp. 15-24). De Gruyter Mouton. Contributions to the Sociology of Language (CSL), 121. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110769609-002 2023 Part I: Romani and translanguaging: Theoretical considerations Petteri Laihonen, János Imre Heltai 2 Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes One third of the world’s Roma population live in the Carpathian basin in close proximity to speakers of Hungarian among other ethnicities (Szuhay 2011: 620). The foundations of the educational language policies of our fieldwork sites in Hungary and in Slovakia were laid down in the Kingdom of Hungary (as part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) in the 19th century, when public education was established in most parts of Europe. The Kingdom of Hungary was multilingual and education was fundamentally multilingual, too, often with different functions for different languages: Latin was the language of law, monestic culture and education, and latin and/or german was used in administration, German was also the dominant language of urban bourgeoisie and trade, while local languages were limited to (e.g. Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak) everyday interactions, typical of vernacular languages elsewhere in Europe. In the process of 19th century nation building, a single common language was developed for each nation state through language reforms and standardisation, which meant formal and official unification (Kamusella 2012). This idealised variety was conceptualised as the basis for the nation’s existence and served as a justification for the desired independence of states. In this process, the language of “one’s own”or “mother tongue”gradually became a distinguishing factor between people in the modern era, alongside origin, status, and religion. This idea was effectively spread among the masses in the context of censuses in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy (cf. Anderson 1991; Gal 2011: 42). Towards the end of the 19th century, as language became more and more viewed as a distinguishing characteristic uniting as well as dividing the masses, monolingual ideologies of education became dominant in the parts of the Monarchy ruled by Hungary. Gal (2011: 33) describes the monolingual ideologies of the 19th century as intellectual views according to which: “monolingualism is the natural condition of ordinary people; learning a second language supposedly endangers the first one cognitively.”Politically, multilingualism was seen as raising the dangerous “possibility that speakers had loyalties to more than one state.”(Gal 2011: 33; cf. also Stergar and Scheer 2018). Such views arrived to the Kingdom of Hungary from Western Europe, where monolingualism was established as part of “civilisation”and “modernisation”(Gal 2011: 33), where linguistic minorities generally remained on the margins of public education, and at the same time, previous multilingual practices disappeared over time. A public and equal school Open Access. © 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110769609-002 system gradually spread in Europe in the 19th century at the same time as the notion of a national language became accepted as the unifying and distinguishing factor for people. 2.1 Language standardisation, monolingualism and education in Europe The concepts of majority and minority are linked to a critical interpretation of language policy, in which language policy refers to a language-based division of power and resources between different groups. The majority is roughly at the top of the hierarchy, the minorities at the bottom. In particular, the choice of language of instruction is at the heart of language education policy (cf. Tollefson 2013). As an important European example of a multilingual region, in the Hungarian Kingdom, the language of education was unified towards the 20th century with emphasis on Hungarian medium education and on basic education in the languages of the recognised nationalities (e.g. Romanians, Slovaks, Germans etc.), which included the teaching of “patriotic”subjects (e.g. History and Geography) inHungarian(cf.e.g.Berecz2013).InthepeacetreatyclosingtheFirstWorld War, Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and more than two million Hungarian speakers ended up as minority language speakers in the surrounding countries, which reciprocated the same language policies towards Hungarians. Post First World War Hungary still contained relatively large groups of minority language speakers including over half a million German speakers and numerous Romani speakers, however, as Szarka notably constitutes (2011: 85) “no official cognizance was taken of the [. . .] Gypsy languages”in 1920s Hungary. Today, minority languages may be taught in minority language revitalisation and maintenance projects, when so required by minority groups, but they rarely serve as the (official) language of instruction, which is most often associated with majority-only collective language education policy rights (cf. eg. Extra and Gorter 2008: 31–32). The ideologies of monolingualism still prevail in European language education policy. Those deviating from the norm represented by the imagined majority –white, middle-class European citizens, speakers of official and national languages –are in a weaker position in many ways. Piller (2016) cites such vulnerable areas as fundamental rights, education, security, and gender equality. In addition, mental well-being, employment status, social status and living standards are often endangered, especially in situations where linguistic difference is combined with, for example, a different skin color (Piller 2016). 18 Petteri Laihonen, János Imre Heltai The standardisation of languages has been seen as a prerequisite for the emergence of larger, “imagined communities”(Anderson 1991). Unification has meant reducing intra-linguistic variation. The elimination of variation can be linked to the ideology of enlightenment and modernisation, which emphasises the practicality of a common language: advanced ideas and technological developments can be rapidly disseminated among big crowds living in large areas. The purity of language, in turn, is related to the national idea: clear “boundaries”between languages also draw boundaries between groups of speakers. Separating and valuing languages is always ultimately about valuing speakers. In Europe’s multilingual and intra-linguistically diverse reality, language ideological processes have separated people, while linguistic standardisation processes have favored certain groups of speakers. The place for linguistic unification and the cherishing of separation and purity has been primarily the school. Recently, however, alternative developments have been seen, with a particular emphasis on pedagogies based on interlingualism and heteroglossia, such as translanguaging, which highlights the lowering or eliminating of language boundaries in multilinguals’speech (cf. Blackledge and Creese 2014). At the same time, the idea of the “mixed use”oflanguagesasan avoidablephenomenonstilllivesoninEuropeaneducationatlarge.Spolsky (2021: 200), summarises the present language educational thinking containing, on the one hand a “recent growing sentiment for allowing diversity in the classroom, celebrated by the new term translanguaging”,and,ontheotherhand,amainstream tendency, where “policy makers [. . .] and teachers generally prefer certainty, holding a belief that there is a correct and desirable version of named languages.” 2.2 Multilingual speakers and non-territorial, non-standard languages in education In Europe, people tend to talk about ethnic and linguistic belonging in terms of separable groups. This way of thinking, determined by ideologies rising parallel to the emergence of European nation states in past centuries, is labelled by Brubaker as groupism (2002, 2004). Under this approach, most people speak for example Hungarian in Hungary and Slovak in Slovakia. At the same time, there are also ethnic minority groups who speak, alongside the national language, a language „of their own”, mostly standardised languages, spoken as official languages elsewhere: for example, in Hungary a part of the population is ethnic Slovak, Romanian, and German; what is more, ethnic Hungarians live in Slovakia in large numbers. Members 2 Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes 19 of these ethnic and linguistic minorities are mostly regarded as bilingual, but we can find relatively easily monolingual speakers of a minority language (for example Hungarians in Slovakia with no or little knowledge of Slovak). Members of these groups often perceive language(s) as well-defined, homogenous entities, clearly separable from each other, having a pure and idealistic realisation (a standard variety), which is an important part of their identity, to be guarded and cherished in its “clean”or “pure”form, “sheltered”from the influence of other languages. This way of perceiving linguistic practices has a long and strong historical tradition; people consider language mixing or any kind of influence of another language on their own language as dangerous and harmful (Li 2018: 14). Under these circumstances, bilingualism is often assumed as the side by side coexistence of two languages in speakers’mind and social life. This kind of bilingualism is called double monolingualism, parallel monolingualism (Heller 2006 [1999]: 34) or separate bilingualism (Creese and Blackledge 2010), expressing the idea that people have two monolingual selves and social lives. This is a general concept about bilingualism in European thinking, influential also in 20th century linguistic approaches. In today’sEurope,“official state languages”(Extra and Gorter 2008; on the use of terms cf. Spolsky 2021) have the highest recognition, and the most financial resources allocated to them as official languages of European countries, the European Union and other international organisations. Extra and Gorter in their typology of “regional minority languages”in Europe, group languages in five categories. The final, fifth group of languages they mention, is “non-territorial languages”; this group includes “Romani and Yiddish”as “most prominent”languages (Extra and Gorter 2008: 28). This group gets little mention later in Extra and Gorter’sotherwise detailed description of language status and educational policies in Europe. The label “non-territorial language”indicates that the Roma are on the margins of European language-based national movements (cf. e.g. May 2012), which are underpinned by the same ideological commitments as the creation of contemporary nation states in Europe, and which create an ideological link between territory and language. Language rights (in education) are usually granted to minority groups which identify with, and are recognised speakers of, “territorial languages with a historical base”(Piller 2016: 35) such as the Sámi in the Arctic or the Basque in the Basque country, an autonomous region in Spain. Especially the latter indicates that language rights are often coupled with political representation and power in the given regions. Therefore, Romani is not only a blind spot for European education (in which sign languages are an even less recognised category) because of European standard-based, monolingual traditions, but Romani is at odds even with the more recent approach which seeks to promote plurilingualism. The political approach of plurilingualism promoted by the Council of Europe (1992) is, thus, unable 20 Petteri Laihonen, János Imre Heltai to accommodate Romani within its framework, and to provide (linguistic) rights for Romani speakers (cf. Vallejo and Dooly 2020). In addition to having a territorial base, a language often needs standardisation in order to be recognised and granted a status in society and education. Tamburelli and Tosco (2021: 7) observe that the existence of a prescriptive, literary variety is too often interpreted as “the only viable dimension along which “languages”can be defined”. Standardisation of a language has been an important part of constructing imagined communities (Anderson 1991) in Europe which are the basis of most current nation states, which then typically invest further in the standardisation process of official state languages (national languages). It is a typical idea, that for a language to be used in school it has to have a widely accepted standardised variety, which will then constitute the language of school (target language or language of instruction). In most cases, according to Spolsky (2021: 41), the school mandates “[the] use of the standard language even though students (and often teachers) normally speak a stigmatised vernacular variety”. In this manner, following the European ideology of spreading (Gal 2011), cherishing and developing the national standard languages through schooling, in most education systems there is a normative language of education, a variety or register, which is different from the home language or local variety. Through such language education, the (standardised) unity of the nation is achieved, which is deemed economically advantageous as well (Spolsky 2021). 2.3 Conclusion: The responsibility of language education and sociolinguistics Romani speakers are multilingual all over Europe. As a result of its monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1997), European education serves multilingual populations poorly (cf. e.g. Piller 2016; Gorter and Cenoz 2017). Elite multilingualism, consisting of speaking several European prestige languages (similar to that Rosa and Flores [2017] termed as white languages) is often celebrated, whereas “the other”linguistic diversity “is associated with a range of social ills, and is seen as something to be contained, possibly even something to be fearful of”(Piller 2016: 2). Research in applied linguistics has not been successful in addressing the challenge of multilingualism and growing language diversity in education either. For instance, the main focus of second language acquisition (SLA) studies has been the acquisition of English (Cenoz and Gorter 2019: 130). This has been aggravated by the fact that, in most countries globally, the so-called “second”or “foreign”language education has 2 Non-standardised ways of speaking and language-policy regimes 21 been limited to English without any consideration to the languages that learners might speak or might wish to learn. The challenge of linguistic inequality Romani speakers face lies in the intersection of unfavourable and exclusive language-education policy trends regarding language diversity, in the conceptual frameworks and ideas about language in education, and in European mainstream pedagogies which are based on monolingual norms of communication (Pennycook 2018; Cenoz and Gorter 2019; Piller 2016; Ortega 2019). Despite all this, according to May (2012: 44) “Roma across Europe continue to reproduce their ethnicity [including language] even when it reduces their chances of attaining prosperity and political power”. Accordingly, our responsibility as sociolinguists, applied linguists, and educationalists consists of seeking alternatives to improve the inclusion of Romani speakers in education. References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Berecz, Ágoston. 2013. 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