I ran across this article:
Language policies should accommodate diversity, protect minority rights and defuse tensions
Its headline sums up the essence of the problem. You can't promote diversity, increase minority rights AND defuse tensions. Obsession with diversity and minority increases tensions in the society, because when you create privileges for the minorities, the majority feels oppressed while the minority feels they still haven't enough.
"Diversity" is one of the sacred mantras of our time used demagogically to justify a variety of discriminatory measures, as well as for racist guilt-casting. (Yes, in case you didn't know, hating white people is racist too.) When you stop to think about it, it shouldn't be too hard to realise that diversity is not a desirable goal per se. Or is someone seriously suggesting that the ideal case would be if every human being on Earth spoke a language of his own incomprehensible to every other human being?
What people who preach diversity actually mean is they are opposed to the wilful destruction of diversity. That is a noble and laudable goal. It is horribly wrong when the governments strive to the forceful assimilation of the subdued ethnic groups in the country (like France) or even deny their very existence (like Greece). But neither would it be a good idea if, for instance, every country in the world declared their local accent of English a separate language, and, say, the government of Japan obliged their teachers to teach their students to speak English with the Japanese accent rather with the pronunciation used in the USA. Or if every county of Norway established their own standard of writing and pronouncing Norwegian. That would add to diversity all right, but it wouldn't obviously serve any useful purpose.
If the above wasn't plain enough, imagine these two scenarios:
A. The Breton-speaking areas of France would get bilingual administration, bilingual schools (naturally with French pupils studying Breton in the amount equal to the Breton pupils studying French) etc, and similarly in the Basque, Catalan, Italian, German-speaking areas;
B. The inhabitants of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté would be forced to switch from French to Turkish, the inhabitants of Centre-Val de Loire to Arabic, and the inhabitants of Pays de la Loire to Chinese.
Both plans would increase the linguistic diversity of France, but it's obvious that the second plan would constitute outrageous abuse on a part of the people of France whereas the first plan would end outrageous abuse.
All the rhetoric about diversity is off the point. What we need is not more or less diversity. What we need is a cessation of policies directed at the destruction of ethnic groups. It must be understood by everyone that when, say, in a predominantly Basque-speaking region, Basque is prohibited as a language of instruction and children whose native language is Basque have to go to schools where the language of instruction is French, then this is, firstly, genocide against the Basque ethnic group, and, secondly, blatant violation of equal treatment, because the French Republic is dividing its citizens into two castes – 1) the ones who may handle their day-by-day affairs in a language they can effortlessly understand, 2) the ones who have to attend to their day-by-day affairs in a foreign language. The «égalité» in the motto of the French Republic is a rotten lie – in reality, a significant part of the French citizens have to study a foreign language before they can use the rights which they are supposed to have according to the constitution. How many native French speakers can speak a foreign language on the level of understanding schoolbooks and official documents? How then can the French have the nerve to demand such a knowledge of French from their Breton, Basque and Italian citizens? As long as the French Republic is cynically negating the equality of all citizens, it has no right to even call itself a democracy. (Of course, France is only one among many such countries.)
The policy of forced language switch as practiced by France, Greece, Russia and many other countries is monstrously evil for two reasons.
1. It's genocide.
There is no objective standard by which the French people are more valuable than the Breton people or vice versa, of the Russian people more valuable than the Bashkir people or vice versa. Therefore, there can be no moral justification for the rule according to which the French and the Russians are free to retain their native language while the Bretons and Bashkirs are compelled to diminish the use of their native languages and switch to French and Russian, respectively. When a country whose government is controlled by the ruling ethnic group puts, with various political and administrative measures, pressure on the subdued ethnic groups to switch from their own language to the country's ruling language, then this will over time cause the members of the subdued ethnic group to give up their ethnic identity altogether, eventually causing the ethnic group to become extinct. Government policy directed at causing an ethnic group to first decrease in number and eventually cease to exist is obviously genocide even if it doesn't involve any physical violence. An ethnic group is destroyed no matter if its members are killed or merely forced to give up their ethnic identity. The only difference is that one happens quickly, the other slowly. The result is the same.
Therefore: depriving an ethnic group of the opportunity of school education and administration in its native language, not because it's economically unfeasible due to the ethnic group's very small size, but because the government strives for the assimilation of all ethnic minorities in the country, is genocide. It should be prohibited by international law like the other forms of genocide.
2. It's unequal treatment and therefore incompatible with democracy.
As I just explained, and as I have laid out in greater detail in my article Why language is more important than other things, it's simply a blatant lie and monstrous hypocrisy to suggest that all the citizens of, say, Germany, have equal rights when in reality the citizens of German ethnicity can go to school in their native language whereas the citizens of Turkish or Danish ethnicity have to go to school in a foreign language.
Of course, equal treatment is not an absolute rule to be achieved at whatever the cost. Should I become a citizen of Malaysia, I have of course no right to demand that the government provide my children with an Estonian-language school. But if the Turkish minority of Bulgaria has enough children to fill many schools, qualified teachers proficient in Turkish and it would be easy to acquire Turkish-language textbooks, then there can be no justification for forcing Turkish teachers to teach Turkish children in the Bulgarian language.
Obsession with minorities
Instead of realizing that the language problem is a problem of equal treatment and human dignity, language enthusiasts have jumped onto the diversity bandwagon. "Hey, ethnic groups are also minorities who need privileges! So give us our piece of the pie!" Unfortunately, their version of minority protection comes with the usual guilt-mongering and selectiveness. Each language activist chooses one ethnic group and makes it the centrepiece of his world. Sometimes they get together and advocate unitedly for the assortment of their pet "minorities", without any logical system. Oftentimes they spend their energy on protecting tiny languages which are no longer viable anyway, or even work to revive a language that is already dead, such as Cornish (undoubtedly now spoken with a heavy English accent that sounds nothing like the real Cornish sounded, but at least it's incredibly cool and makes you feel special speaking a language no one can understand) while ignoring the needs of ethnic groups whose languages are actually used for interpersonal communication today, in spite of all the oppression.
When you stop to think about it, you ought to realise that is irrelevant who is in the majority and who is in the minority. Or are you suggesting that should your measures to promote a minority language prove so successful that it becomes the majority, then all your rhetorics will make an about-turn and the oppressed minority of yesterday will become the evil majority of tomorrow, and the evil oppressor of yesterday will become the new endangered minority?
On top of all the above, the use of the word "minority" is an insult. No one says that the Germans are an ethnic minority in Europe. No, the Germans are a majority in their homeland, Germany. Similarly, the Basques are not a national minority in Spain and France. They are a majority in their homeland, the Basque Country.
To declare, for instance, the Bretons some kind of a European hill tribe whose unique language and culture must be preserved is profoundly racist and demeaning. The Bretons and the French are exactly the same kind of human beings, only the formers' native language is Breton and the latters' is French. Therefore the idea that the French nation should remain the ruler while the Breton nation should enjoy special protection as if it were some kind of a rare bird species is simply unjustifiable.
What the oppressed ethnic groups need is not more taxpayer money for activist organizations, not the establishment of a huge open-air language museum in the historically Sorb-speaking area, not the revival of the Cornish or Manx language. What oppressed ethnic groups need is the cessation of linguistic genocide in Bretagne, Corsica, Southern Macedonia, Mari El, Udmurtia and many other regions in Europe. Instead of all those "oh my goodness look what a cute little language those 20 people speak in those two mountain villages" projects, we need a mechanism for forcing governments to stop destroying big ethnic groups that still have a chance of surviving.
Many would object that ethnocentrism would bring about calls for redrawing state borders and potentially new wars – after all, there is no sensible reason why, say, Corsica should belong to France or the Beregszász (Berehove) area to Ukraine.
My reply is: on the contrary! It's the "one country, one language" attitude that perpetuates unsolvable territorial conflicts and encourages linguistic genocide to deny foothold to the irredentists. I say that granting minority language speakers equal rights with the ruling ethnic group is the only way to do away with border disputes. It's obviously impossible to divide the mixed Romanian-Hungarian area between a Romanian-only state and a Hungarian-only state in any even remotely just and reasonable manner. But when all mixed localities were officially bilingual, it would no longer matter where is Romania and where is Hungary. The only noticeable difference would be that Romanian text is written above the Hungarian text in one town and the other way around in another.
With true equality between the ethnic groups instead of minoritist hatemongering, it will no longer matter if this or that village belongs to Hungary or to Slovakia, to France or to Italy, to Greece or to Bulgaria. Age-old border disputes would become meaningless and true interethnic reconciliation would become possible for the first time in history.
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