Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2008

Since the late 1990s the question of whether to ratify the status of Swedish as the “principal” language of Sweden by means of a language law has been subject to considerable public dispute. Drawing on Blommaert’s concept of a “language ideological debate,” we explore how and why this particular debate seemingly ground to a halt without achieving any kind of tangible closure. In order to do so, we introduce Habermas’s notion of “legitimation crisis” and describe how such crises are, according to Habermas, typically underpinned by one or more “rationality deficits,” i.e. discursive paradoxes that emerge in a given historical, cultural, social and economic context. We then propose that the concept of “legitimation crisis” not only may help to explain why some language ideological debates sometimes reach a stalemate at a specific historical moment as in the Swedish case, but also constitutes a theoretical framework that could be productively incorporated into the study of language politics more generally.

Langue issue de la colonisation, le français s’est imposé depuis un siècle et a fini par occuper une position de domination par rapport au kirundi et aux autres langues en présence au Burundi. Après avoir supplanté le kirundi comme langue du droit, il demeure de facto langue de l’administration et bien d’autres domaines clés concernant la vie d’un Burundi pourtant monolingue lato sensu, et malgré la restriction, voire l’abandon de son statut officiel intervenu depuis les constitutions de 1993 et de 2005. Par souci de respect des lois nationales et des instruments juridiques internationaux, mais aussi dans la foulée de l’universalisation des droits de l’homme, une certaine revendication du droit à la langue maternelle semble émerger, se fondant sur le rôle prépondérant joué par cette dernière dans un réel et durable développement. Cette préoccupation ne va pas sans soulever une évidente contradiction interne aux visées d’une francophonie soucieuse de s’assurer, en principe, du respect à l’égard des langues locales d’Afrique ou d’ailleurs érigées en partenaires, mais que, en pratique, la situation réelle au quotidien, due en l’occurrence à la diglossie kirundi-français pour le cas du Burundi, minimise par le poids culturel et l’aura du français, toujours perçu comme vestige colonial. Il s’ensuit une sorte d’hybridation à la fois linguistique et sociétale, comme une dimension importante dans la reconfiguration du Burundi post-colonial, et que la gestion du multilinguisme, voire de ses implications politiques, doit dorénavant prendre en compte.

For the past hundred years Esperanto has found adepts in China and Japan. Outside Europe and the Americas, nowhere has Esperanto spread as much as it has in East Asia. The Chinese and Japanese were drawn to it through their desire to learn from the west; they hoped to use Esperanto as a bridge between east and west or they found in it a link to anarchism and communism. Often the Esperantists used their language for campaign purposes, for example in the battle against the Japanese invasion of China beginning in the 1930s (“For the liberation of China through Esperanto”) or for the popularization of pacifism in postwar Japan. As in the west, many Esperantists in China and Japan based their connection with Esperanto on the idea of the harmony of all humankind. The movement progressed thanks primarily to those who avoided too much missionary zeal and preferred to recruit on the basis of Esperanto as a neutral device. Given the lack of opportunity to use the language in practical ways, for more than half of the past hundred years the Esperantists of East Asia tended to emphasize Esperanto as an idea; but the economic prosperity of Japan and the opening of China, by allowing greater contact with the outside world, have given Esperanto the opportunity to demonstrate more strongly its usefulness as an easily learned means of communication, also for direct contact between Chinese and Japanese.