1
International Journal on Multicultural Societies, Vol. 4, No. 2
ISSN 1564-4901 © UNESCO, 2002


The Impact of Language Policy on Endangered Languages

by
Suzanne Romaine
Merton College, University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 4JD
UNITED KINGDOM

Abstract

Evaluation of the potential and actual impact of language policy on endangered languages is
complicated by lack of straightforward causal connections between types of policy and language
maintenance and shift, as well as by confusion of policy and planning. Language policy is not an
autonomous factor and what appears to be ostensibly the “same” policy may lead to different
outcomes, depending on the situation in which it operates. Weak linkages between policy and
planning render many policies ineffective. Conventions and treaties adopted by international
organisations and agencies recommending the use of minority languages in education usually lack
power to reinforce them. Furthermore, policies have negligible impact on home use, which is
essential for continued natural transmission of endangered languages. Although survival cannot
depend on legislation as its main support, legal provisions may allow speakers of endangered
languages to claim some public space for their languages and cultures.

0. Introduction

0.1. Fewer than 4 per cent of the world’s languages have any kind of official status in the
countries where they are spoken. The fact that most languages are unwritten, not recognised
officially, restricted to local community and home functions, and spoken by very small groups of
people reflects the balance of power in the global linguistic market place. Campaigns for official
status and other forms of legislation supporting minority languages often figure prominently in

---

2
language revitalisation efforts, despite the generally negative advice offered by experts on their
efficacy. As Fishman (1997, 194) has pointed out, endangered languages become such because they
lack informal intergenerational transmission and informal daily life support, not because they are not
being taught in schools or lack official status. Nevertheless, because official policies banning or
restricting the use of certain languages have been seen as agents of assimilation, if not also by some
such as Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) as tantamount to acts of genocide, it is no wonder that hopes of
reversing language shift have so regularly been pinned on them. Skutnabb-Kangas (2000, 312), for
example, maintains that “unsupported coexistence mostly ... leads to minority languages dying”.

0.2.
Nevertheless, we have here a good example of unwarranted and simplistic conclusions being
drawn about causal relationships between language and policy, if not outright confusion of policy
and planning. As Benton (1999, 23) so aptly puts it, “there is a difference between permission to
speak, and actually speaking”. Basque speakers in Spain’s Basque Autonomous Community (BAC)
have been hesitant to use their language in relations with the administration not because they are not
allowed to, but because they have difficulty in doing so. A long history of dealing with officialdom
in Spanish and lack of education in Basque leaves most ordinary people unfamiliar with the newly
coined terminology used in this domain (Gardner 1999).

0.3.
Likewise, McCarty and Watahomigie (1998, 321) observe that “in practice, language rights
have not guaranteed language maintenance, which ultimately depends on the home language choices
of native speakers. Such decisions are notoriously difficult for extra-familial institutions to control,
even when those institutions are community controlled”. Nettle and Romaine (2000, 39–40) warn in
a similar vein that “conferring status on the language of a group relatively lacking in power doesn’t
necessarily ensure the reproduction of a language unless other measures are in place to ensure
intergenerational transmission at home. ... conferring power on the people would be much more
likely to do the trick”.

0.4.
Looking to schools and declarations of official status to assist endangered languages is much
like looking for one’s lost keys under the lamp-post because that is where the most light appears to
shine rather than because that is where they have been lost. Just as it is easier to see under the lamp-

---

3
post, it is far easier to establish schools and declare a language official than to get families to speak
a threatened language to their children. Yet only the latter will guarantee transmission. This points to
the negligible impact of official language policies on home use. Strubell (2001, 268) notes that “the
way people bring up their families – including the language they choose – is not for the authorities to
decide”. In any case, these acts fall short of what is required in practical terms if the language is to
survive in spoken everyday use.

0.5. Many language-policy statements are reactive ad hoc declarations lacking a planning
element. The Native American Languages Act (NALA) of 1990 is one of the most explicit
statements on language ever issued by the United States Congress, yet it is a classic example of a
policy with no planning dimension. Among other things, NALA states that “the United States has
the responsibility to act together with Native Americans to ensure the survival of these unique
cultures and languages” and “to preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native
Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages”. As Schiffman (1996, 246)
observes, now that the languages are practically extinct and pose no threat to anyone, we can grant
them special status. Those who think that NALA is a pro-active policy rather than a
recommendation lacking means of enforcement just because it is written and carries the grand name
of “act” deceive themselves. However, this does not mean that policy is totally useless. As Lucas
(2000) points out in a quite different context (that of assessing the legal status of Hawaiian), the
1978 state constitutional amendments declaring Hawaiian and English as the state’s official
languages may provide language advocates with the tools to compel the state to take various
measures to support Hawaiian, but they must be tested in court. No state courts have yet interpreted
the legal implications of these provisions.

0.6.
In this article I examine some of the obstacles faced in evaluating language policies and
some examples of weak linkages between policy and planning which render ineffective most
policies aimed at assisting endangered languages.

---

4
1. Evaluating Policies and the Fallacy of Autonomy

1.1.
The ideal way to evaluate language policies in a systematic fashion would be to control all
the independent variables but one, and examine the consequences. Needless to say, in practice,
things are otherwise. Evaluation of the efficacy of policies is made difficult, if not impossible, by the
existence of almost as many variables as there are polities and policies as well as the lack of
congruence between the sociolinguistic condition of the group in question and the language policy
(see Schiffman 1996, 26). A plethora of interlocking factors make it difficult to discern any direct
relationship. Bourhis (2001, 114), for example, says that “cause and effect relationships are difficult
to establish when evaluating the impact of language policies on language behaviour and language
shift”.

1.2.
At first glance, a number of typologies of language policies appear to offer some guidance
through the entangled thicket (see e.g. Cobarrubias 1983, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), but upon closer
examination we are forced to conclude that language policy is not an autonomous factor. As
Conversi (1997, 1) puts it in a different context, “no country’s politics exists independently of its
culture”. What is ostensibly the “same” policy may lead to different outcomes, depending on the
situation in which it operates. Strubell’s (1999, 27–8) comparison of the status of Catalan in
Catalonia and Valencia is an insightful case in point. He concludes that “the same degree of
devolution granted to Catalans and Valencians ... has not led to the same increase – or rather
recovery – in the use of the (same) language” (1999, 26).

1.3.
Carrington (1997, 88) furthermore notes how change of status can be used as a political
instrument to neutralise those pressing for recognition of their language by reducing the rallying
power of their cause. Amery (2000, 231) suggests that Australia’s adoption of a “softer approach to
language and culture by the federal government may be a trade-off for their hardline stance on land
matters – a partial compromise which directs some additional resources to those areas which do not
pose a direct threat to the economic interests of the rich and powerful”. After years of suppressing
the indigenous languages of New Caledonia, France provided financial support to encourage their
use in education. This was clearly part of an attempt to promote peace with militant Kanaks who

---

5
have long struggled against French control, and to mitigate anti-French sentiment in advance of a
referendum on independence.

1.4.
Elevation in status of a previously unrecognised or unsupported minority language or efforts
to extend its use to new domains may also trigger backlash from speakers of the dominant language,
as in Spain where Spanish nationalists have protested against legislation in Catalonia requiring
knowledge of Catalan for certain jobs. In the Basque Autonomous Community, similar efforts to
“normalise” the use of Basque in education and government through legal measures prompted
battles over the rights of individuals. The 1982 Basic Law for Normalising Basque Language Use
made the right to use Basque an individual rather than a territorial right. The declaration of
officiality, however, was challenged by the Spanish Constitutional Court, which declared that it
could not affect bodies of the Spanish Government operating in the BAC. More recently in
December 2000, the Navarre Government passed an Autonomous Decree regulating the use of
Basque in public administrative bodies. One result is that knowledge of Basque has ceased to be a
requirement for many public-service positions. The government has justified the decree as a
corrective measure in face of discrimination suffered by Spanish speakers. Meanwhile, bilingual
road signs, advertisements and other public notices are being replaced with Spanish monolingual
ones (Peña 2001, 9). Yet another example comes from Peru, where Quechua was made co-official
with Spanish in 1975, with provision made for Quechua to be taught at all levels from 1976, and
from 1977 for it to be used in court actions involving Quechua speakers. Again, resistance from the
Spanish-speaking majority made implementation difficult, and it has fallen far short of its ambitions.

1.5.
Magga and Skutnabb-Kangas (2001, 26) underline similar difficulties in implementing the
provisions of the Saami Language Act passed in 1992 in Norway, which designated certain areas as
Saami administrative districts. Many of the municipalities outside these districts withdrew services
in Saami, claiming that the law did not require them. Even in traditional Saami areas, where there
may be one Norwegian speaker in a class, it is assumed that all teaching must be done in Norwegian.
When teachers have used Saami in such contexts, allegations of discrimination against Norwegians
ensued. Magga and Skutnabb-Kangas attribute such actions to a culture clash between the Saami
community’s collective right to develop their language and the right of individual Norwegian

---

6
speakers. The choice to use Saami is thus politicised and restricted territorially.

1.6.
Fishman (1991, 84) writes of the damage, both locally and beyond, done by previously
disadvantaged language activists who become “cultural imperialists” themselves within their newly
dominated networks. When Quebec francophones adopted various legislative measures designed to
protect French, in particular a requirement for newcomers to learn it and direct financial incentives
to increase the birth rate, anglophones felt threatened. Bill 101 mobilised anglophones to mount
legal challenges and to boycott Montreal stores with French monolingual signs; by 1988 the
Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the legal requirement for French-only signs contravened both the
Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec’s linguistic laws also stirred up
much negative feeling among anglophones outside the province as well as outside Canada. Bourhis
(2001, 133) observes how the English Only movement in the US regularly uses controversial
features of Quebec language laws to justify its campaigns against minority language maintenance.
Nevertheless, he sees democratically adopted language laws as necessary tools allowing modern
states to harmonise class and ethnic conflicts (see also Kymlicka 1995, 2000).

1.7.
In proposing such measures, Quebec’s francophones sought no more than to guarantee for
themselves similar “rights” to control their own reproduction that anglophone Canadians have felt
unnecessary to state as policy because they were implicit in practice anyway. Quebec anglophones,
in particular, benefited from the provision of a state-financed English-medium education system
ranging from pre-kindergarten through university, to an extent rarely granted a linguistic minority
elsewhere (except perhaps to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland). What amounted to an
affirmative action plan for Quebec anglophones passes unnoticed because it is regarded as “normal”.
In this way, all nations unavoidably promote and support the languages sanctioned for use in
education, at the same time as they marginalise other languages denied the same public space.

1.8.
This reminds us not to overlook the fact that policy is implicit even if no specific mention is
made of language. Probably most majority languages dominate in many domains where they have
only de facto and no legal status. As Fishman (2001a, 454) comments, “even the much vaunted ‘no
language policy’ of many democracies is, in reality, an anti-minority-languages policy, because it

---

7
delegitimizes such languages by studiously ignoring them, and thereby, not allowing them to be
placed on the agenda of supportable general values”. Proponents of what is sometimes called
“benign neglect” ignore the fact that minorities experience disadvantage that majority members do
not face.

1.9. Advocates of minority languages have repeatedly stressed that demographically weak
languages need firm pro-active policies in order to survive and thrive (see e.g. Strubell 1999,
Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Yet the legal approach to reconciling status differences in languages with
equality in a world where majority rights are implicit, and minority rights are seen as “special” and
in need of justification, is fraught with difficulty. Magga and Skutnabb-Kangas (2001, 31)
emphasise that “equality is misunderstood if it leads to an equal division of time and resources
between a minority and a majority language”. As Hickey (2001, 466–7) has observed in connection
with Irish immersion pre-schools, “equal treatment of different children does not necessarily mean
the same treatment is given to each child”. Thus, there is an important distinction between legislating
equal use of languages and guaranteeing equitable treatment of their speakers, a point to which I
return below in my discussion of South Africa’s post-apartheid language policy.

1.10. In assessing the impact of Quebec’s protective legislation, Bourhis (2001, 115) says that the
1996 census suggests increasing intergenerational shift towards French since 1971, although the
change can be largely attributed to allophones (i.e. those whose native language is neither French or
English) adopting French as their home language. In addition, unfavourable reaction to Bill 101 led
to anglophone out-migration.

1.11. Schiffman (1996) says that we cannot assess the chances of success of policies without
reference to culture, belief systems, and attitudes about language. The idea that linguistic rights need
protection has never been part of American culture, and so they have not been seen as central to
American courts unless allied with more fundamental rights such as educational equity, etc.
(Schiffman 1996, 216, 246). Elsewhere, however, even international courts have opined that there is
no basic human right to education in one’s own language. UNESCO’s (1953, 6) much-cited axiom
“that the best medium for teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil ...” did not lead to any

---

8
widespread adoption and development of vernacular languages as media of education. In most
parts of the world schooling is still virtually synonymous with learning a second language.

1.12. Although a basic right to education cannot function equitably unless the child understands
the language of instruction, this is of little use to groups whose nationalities and languages do not
“officially” exist (as is the case with the Kurds and Kurdish in Turkey) or to groups whose language
has been so eroded by shift that their children do not speak it. A case in point is that of Hawaiian,
where the Board of Education’s official position is that Hawaiian immersion schools constitute a
programme of choice and not of right within the public school system. Hence it has refused to
recognise an affirmative duty to provide adequate funding for Hawaiian-medium schools for
children desiring education through the medium of Hawaiian.


2. Weak Linkages

2.1.
Although Fishman (2001a, 478) admits that conclusive evidence is lacking at both the state
and international level to evaluate the efficacy of policies, he believes that “there is no reason to be
overly optimistic in either case, because a lack of priorities and linkages seems to characterise the
entire legalistic approach”. He does, however, advocate monitoring certain “litigious climates”
surrounding languages such as Maori and Frisian in order to gauge the likelihood and the
circumstances needed for legislation, and various other legal measures to be able to make a practical
difference in language revitalisation efforts. Even if such actions do make a difference, Fishman
warns that they must still be distinguished from the possible effects of the conventions and treaties
adopted by international agencies and organisations lacking the power to enforce their resolutions.

2.2. A good example of weak linkages is the European Charter for Regional or Minority
Languages, created to provide a legal instrument for the protection of languages. Although it
specifies no list of actual languages, the languages concerned must belong to the European cultural
tradition (which excludes “migrant” languages), have a territorial base, and be separate languages
identifiable as such. The terms of reference are deliberately vague in order to leave open to each

---

9
member state how to define cultural heritage and territory. Thus, each state is free to name the
languages which it accepts as being within the scope of the charter (see the issue of MOST Journal
on Multicultural Societies on “Lesser Used Languages and the Law in Europe” 2001a; and Ó
Riagáin 1998, 2001, for information in the status of languages in the European Union and a
summary of legislation relating to minority languages). The UK, for example, which ratified the
treaty in March 2001, does not include Manx and Cornish. The effectiveness of any initiatives on the
supranational level can always be undermined by individual states unless there is some way of
guaranteeing the implementation of language-related measures on a supranational level. The only
institutions with authority to regulate language policies exist within the political bodies of individual
states, and the European Union has generally avoided taking any action that would interfere with
national laws or policies concerning linguistic minorities, or for that matter with laws concerning its
national languages. Moreover, the charter does not grant rights to speakers or minority language
groups, but to languages.

2.3.
Despite the fact that Greece is signatory to many international covenants and treaties on
human rights, as well as a member of the European Union, it voted against the European Charter for
Regional or Minority Languages in 1992. In July 1995 Sotiris Bletsas, a member of the minority
Aroumanian (Vlach) community, was arrested after he distributed publications of the European
Bureau for Lesser Used Languages which mentioned the existence of the Aroumanian language and
four other minority languages in Greece (Arvanitika, Macedonian, Turkish and Pomak). The police
obliged him to make a statement saying that he was Greek. As a result of charges brought by Mr
Haitidis, a right-wing Member of Parliament of the New Democracy party, Bletsas was convicted
under Article 191 of the Greek Penal Code which states that dissemination of false information
could create fear and unrest among Greek citizens and damage the country’s international relations.
The European Court of Human Rights had already ruled that this article was in violation of the
European Convention on Human Rights, but an Athens court gave Bletsas a 15-month sentence
(suspended) and a fine. After several postponements of his appeal, much international pressure, and
concern expressed to the Greek Government by the EU Commissioner for education and culture,
among many others, Bletsas was finally acquitted in December 2001 by unanimous decision of the
Athens Three-Member Appeal Court (see http://www.eurolang.net for coverage of this case).

---

10
Meanwhile, Turkey, an aspiring member of the European Union, still maintains that it has no
minorities.

2.4.
Most European nation-states still apply one set of rules to the national language and another
to minority languages within their boundaries, and often in addition apply differing standards to
indigenous and non-indigenous minorities (see Romaine 1998). Similarly, New Zealand has
progressed in its treatment of Maori language issues, while it has lagged behind in recognition of the
rights of migrant Pacific-islander communities.

2.5.
Differing practices within different regions of the same country, and with respect to different
minority groups, add a further dimension to the vexed problems of evaluation and implementation.
The effects of policy proposed at the national level can be complex, depending on political
structures. In Australia, for example, the 1990 National Language Policy did not really challenge the
dominance of white anglophone society after centuries of assimilation and restrictive immigration
practices (see Romaine 1991, 1994). Fishman (2001a, 479) offers a more recent, but equally
pessimistic assessment, and Lo Bianco and Rhydwen (2001, 417) say that community language
maintenance has been relegated to a subordinate status with insufficient resources to sustain the few
token acclamations remaining in the policy.

2.6.
Clyne (2001, 386) points out how individual states subsequently developed vastly different
policies, and chose different priority languages. Lo Bianco and Rhydwen (2001, 404) explain how
the “second languages policy” of the Northern Territory Government’s Department of Education
serves only as a recommendation to schools and does not cover the specific needs of Aboriginal
communities. Neither do its Social and Cultural Education guidelines cover the kinds of programmes
that Aboriginal people want to implement. The lack of strong policy support has meant that
Aboriginal language and culture programmes have not achieved a secure place in the schools. In
1998 the Northern Territory abandoned public funding for indigenous bilingual education, which
had originally been established by the Commonwealth Government when education in the Northern
Territory was under its jurisdiction.

---

Document Outline

• Abstract
• 0. Introduction
• 1. Evaluating Policies and the Fallacy of Autonomy
• 2. Weak Linkages
• 3. Timing: Too Little Too Late?
• 4. Factors other than Legal Status
• 5. Conclusion: The Proof is in the Pudding
• References
• About the Author

---