Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 35, Issue 2, 2011

The paper reports the findings of a survey study which examined attitudes towards a range of language policies for the Arabic language in Israel. Arabic is an official language in Israel as a result of a Mandatory Order (1922) which dictates comprehensive Hebrew-Arabic bilingual conduct by state authorities. In practice, Arabic’s public position in Israel is marginal, and Hebrew is the dominant language in Israeli public spheres. Arabic speakers, a national indigenous minority, and Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, form the two largest language-minority groups in Israel. The study explored attitudes concerning (1) the use of Arabic in three public domains (government services, public television, and teaching of Arabic in Jewish schools), (2) a Hebrew-Arabic bilingual model, and (3) a multilingual model addressing language minorities in Israel in general. Respondents were 466 university and college students, Jews and Arabs, divided into five subgroups along linguistic, ethnic and religious lines. The main findings indicated (1) a clear hierarchy of language policy domains among all five subgroups, with ‘government services’ being the most favored domain; (2) a tendency among Jewish respondents to favor a multilingual policy over a Hebrew-Arabic bilingual one; and (3) a language minority element (non-native Hebrew speakers), overshadowed by the ethnic-religious (Jewish-Arab) element.

Political debate concerning the recognition of regional and minority languages has been the subject of much study in recent years. However, with the focus on separatist and/or nationalist forces, the centre-left has often been overlooked in such studies. In both Asturias in Spain and the Veneto in Italy, centre-left parties have taken a particularly ambivalent approach towards language revival policies, and the ideologies behind this approach merit further study. Drawing particularly on Bourdieu’s work, the author will consider how linguistic hierarchies and linguistic capital are reflected in centre-left discourse and actions concerning the respective local languages. This will shed light on the ambiguous role of the centre-left concerning language policy, and provide further insight into the compatibility of liberal and progressive politics with language revival policies.

In minority language contexts, the aim of language policy and planning initiatives is frequently to enhance their survival prospects by increasing individuals’ knowledge and use of such languages in a variety of social contexts. The success of such policies depends on a variety of factors. These include the ability of policy to encourage maintenance of the language amongst existing speakers (the so-called ‘native’ speakers of the language) and its revival amongst individuals in the community who no longer speak it and who have become ‘native’ speakers of another language, typically, the dominant language. However, the task of policy makers and language planners is often made more difficult by sociolinguistic, socio-economic, socio-geographical and ideological differences between ‘native’ speakers and ‘non-native’ newcomers to the language. Rather than forming a unified speech community, ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speakers of the minority language very often see themselves as being socially and linguistically incompatible. The purpose of this article is to examine the native-non-native dichotomy in two minority language contexts: Irish in the Republic of Ireland and Galician in the Autonomous Community of Galicia.

The Holocaust had a profound effect on the Esperanto movement. Many of the leading members of the Esperanto language community perished, and some survived. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in those who died and those who lived. Among the dead were most of the family of L. L. Zamenhof, author of Esperanto. Among the survivors was the father of the financier George Soros, Tivadar Soros, whose memoir of survival in Nazi-occupied Budapest, written originally in Esperanto and published in 1965, was published in English translation in the year 2000. An important player in the effort to protect the Jews of Budapest was the Esperantist Valdemar Langlet, of Sweden, whose memoir of his experiences was adapted and published, first in Swedish, then in Esperanto, by Nina Langlet, his widow. In 2003, Zofia Banet-Fornalowa published a memorial volume for six Esperantist victims of the Holocaust. Among other relatively recent Holocaust-related books in Esperanto are a translation of Imre Kértesz’s novel Fateless and a biography of Tilla Durieux.