[1]Intercultural communication or parallel cultures?
The Swiss example with special regard to the Rhaeto-Romance situation
Ingmar Söhrman
Dept of Romance Languages, Göteborg University[1]
Abstract
Politically correct terminology often fails to describe actual reality. Switzerland is commonly held up as an example of accomplished multiculturalism and multilingualism. Although appealing, this image is also fairly erroneous as the German majority and French “dominant” minority seem to live separate lives. Likewise, Italian and Rhaeto-Romance are generally marginalized and rarely either spoken or understood by the French- and German-speaking Swiss – creating the so-called “2 and ½-lingualism”.
This article does not pretend either to “prove” or “reject” Switzerland as a good example to follow. The domestic intricacies of each and every country demand home-grown solutions, and those solutions may or may not incorporate outside experience and practice. The intention is to discuss the difference between political will (and prejudice) and pragmatic arrangements in an attempt to identify what promotes multilingualism (and multiculturalism) in some places and what leads to coexisting languages and cultures that follow separate and parallel paths in others. The central hypothesis is that while a country may be multilingual politically, having embedded this intention in law and having organized the local community according to these laws in order to facilitate the usage and utility of the different cultures and linguistic varieties, this political arrangement may have little reflection in more complicated practice, with linguistic and cultural populations choosing to follow parallel and separate paths instead. The central issue is whether intercultural communication actually does exist, to what extent it exists, and what promotes it in a world that is turning its back on other national cultures and languages.
Keywords:
Sociolinguistics, multilingualism, parallel languages, multiculturalism, geolinguistics, Rhaeto-Romance, Switzerland
Politically correct terminology often fails to describe actual reality. Switzerland, for instance, is commonly held up as an example of accomplished multiculturalism and multilingualism. Although appealing, this image is also fairly erroneous as the German majority and French “dominant” minority seem to live separate lives. The French-speaking Swiss especially have difficulty in understanding Swiss German, which, until recently, was and is not taught at their schools or elsewhere. However, there have been courses on Swiss TV introducing at least the Zurich variety of German. Likewise, Italian and Rhaeto-Romance[2] are generally marginalized and rarely either spoken or understood by the French- and German-speaking Swiss – creating the so-called “2 and ½-lingualism”.[3]
The French-speaking region tends to look toward France, and these close contacts have led to a “takeover” of standard French while the Franco-Provençal varieties spoken in most of the valleys of West Switzerland only two generations ago are now disappearing.[4] Although there are Swiss mass-media using French the impact of French culture is strong. The Italian Swiss also focus on the mother country of their tongue as they live in the canton Ticino and in the southern parts of the Grisons in the southeast of Switzerland, and their language is no longer particularly different from that spoken on the other side of the border in northern Italy.
The German case is somewhat different for two reasons. First of all its speakers constitute the vast majority of the country’s population, and secondly, they have a long tradition of being self-sufficient in their Swiss-German culture using their Alemannic dialects[5] that are difficult for Germans and other speakers of High (and Low) German to understand. They proudly focus on their own homeland and do not look upon Germany as a cultural resource as do the French and Italian Swiss in regard to their cultural and linguistic “support” countries. The Romansh Swiss lack both this cultural back-up and the strength of German, and therein lies part of the problem.
Multilingualism and multiculturalism
Switzerland is a reasonably small country with certain geophysical complications due to its mountainous character. A very decentralized state, it also has one of the world’s highest living standards. It has four official languages, even if there are some special limitations to the usage of Romansh which has been a “partly official language” (lingua ufficiala parziala) only since 1996. When the communist regimes fell en masse in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s the new governments there had to deal with their own multilingual situations in a more democratic and humane manner and could no longer use force to compel order among divergent ethnic and linguistic aspirations and pretensions. Switzerland (along with Spain[6]) was often employed as a good example of how to turn possibly explosive multiculturalism (cf. ex-Yugoslavia as the worst case scenario) into a forward-looking pluralistic welfare state. But was (or is) Switzerland truly the country of multiculturalism and bi- or trilingualism that could provide such an example for emulation?
In this article I do not pretend either to “prove” or “reject” Switzerland as a good example to follow. The domestic intricacies of each and every country demand home-grown solutions, and those solutions may or may not incorporate outside experience and practice. I do intend to discuss the difference between political will (and prejudice) and pragmatic arrangements in an attempt to identify what promotes multilingualism (and multiculturalism) in some places and what leads to coexisting languages and cultures that follow separate and parallel paths in others. My central hypothesis is that while a country may be multilingual politically, having embedded this intention in law and having organized the local community according to these laws in order to facilitate the usage and utility of the different cultures and linguistic varieties, this political arrangement may have little reflection in more complicated practice, with linguistic and cultural populations choosing to follow parallel and separate paths instead. Although not a very risky hypothesis – examples for it abound in the contemporary world – it still deserves more attention and discussion for it raises the question of whether such inefficiencies in fulfilling political good intentions are to be accepted as unavoidable or whether the search to find another way to remedy these difficulties could (and should) be pursued.
The idea of multiculturalism is quite complex. The concept indicates the coexistence of various cultures. I do not intend to go into what culture means, but let us just use the notion for the sharing of basic values, traditions, artifacts and behavior. Culture is often linked to a certain language and religion.
Before going deeper into the Swiss example some conceptual matters must be clarified. Every linguistic variety enjoys some degree of cultural and politicalprestige, and the relative degree of prestige is what in reality decides whether a particular variety is considered a language or merely a dialect. It has to be borne in mind that the qualification language is almost entirely political rather than linguistic. Of course, in the final analysis it is a decision that has to be taken by the speakers themselves more or less consciously, and this decision will be dependent on the socio-cultural context. Prestige consists of official recognition such as its use as a teaching language, its use in mass media and in contacts with authorities, as well as its use in writing and as a literary expression.[7] Swiss German varieties are hardly intelligible for a German, but they are still one language and the written German language is fairly unified, whether it is written in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria. English and Spanish are surprisingly unified for languages spoken across such vast territories, and the same holds true for Russian. Norwegian and Swedish are considered two different languages and have established different literary traditions and official usages although from an entirely linguistic standpoint they originally could have easily and with good reason been considered one language, and they still have more resemblances between them than certain of their dialects have with the standard varieties.
Political divisions that promote separate developments provide another major complication. Because it is written with the same characters Chinese is a unified language, although now the Min[8] variety of Chinese, spoken on Taiwan and the close mainland regions, is gaining its own prestige and status as a language in Taiwan because it has become the national variety of the country (regardless of the complex legal situation of Taiwan).
Religion is also an important factor. The Arabic-speaking world is full of very different linguistic traditions, but they are held together by the classical Arabic that keeps the varieties linked. Maltese constitutes the significant exception which, because it is spoken by Catholics, has received the status of a language all its own.[9] The same applies for the Romansh that is spoken mostly by Calvinists in the southeast and by Catholics in the northwest of Grisons. This religious division contributed for many centuries to the unwillingness of one Romansh-speaking group to understand other Romansh varieties.[10] The same is partly true for the Võru-Estonians who speak a different variety of Estonian and are mainly Orthodox.[11] The usage and the relativity of the notions of language and dialect is worth bearing in mind since they are so often employed to defend or denigrate particular linguistic varieties even though the vagueness of the line between them by no means justifies the insistence with which they are argued.
Majority and Minority
Likewise, the apparently obvious concepts of minority and majority languages are far more controversial and unclear than one might think. First of all, both concepts are relative. Majority normally refers to the most spoken language in the country and the one that has official recognition. The minority can still be in the majority in one or more regions or “just” the majority in certain towns or villages, but the minority language might also be in a minority situation everywhere, which in itself indicates a poor survival perspective for that language. Also important for the survival of the minority language is whether it is spoken in the local capital or spoken by a leading group in the region or town. This is the case in Catalonia, where half of the population speaks Catalan and half Spanish. Still, the predominant bourgeoisie uses Catalan and has always done so. Here, Catalan is promoted to a degree that seems to have lowered the Spanish competence of the younger generation, causing upset in at least some influential circles in Spain.
When a majority feels threatened in some way the issue becomes more critical, provoking exaggerated nationalistic statements on both sides. In the Swiss case, the minority languages are by no means a threat to the two largest languages (German and French.) On the contrary, Romansh is the only Swiss language that is spoken only in Switzerland, lending it an emblematic status if only on a superficial level. I have personally been accused of “stealing” the language just because I was learning it. Interestingly enough, such accusations were made by a non-Romansh Swiss, never by Romansh-speakers who consistently expressed their satisfaction that foreigners were interested in their language. This encouragement was often expressed with an aside that it would be even better if the German (and French) speaking Swiss would make such an effort. The favourable regard of Romansh as part of the Swiss identity by no means implies that the German-speaking majority is tempted to learn the language, not even in Grisons. Only 1/5 of Grisons’ population actually speaks Romansh.
In countries and regions with two official languages both are sometimes taught at school as in Quebec, Catalonia, and (formerly) in Finland (Finnish-Swedish). The obligatory exam in both languages has now been revoked in Finland and the vast Finnish-speaking majority will no longer have to learn Swedish. Likewise, with the obligation removed the regional Swedish-speaking majority on the Åland Islands have much less incentive to learn Finish. The outcome of this recent legal change is still to be seen since the decision was taken only in May 2004.
Bilingualism
This leads us to the concept of bilingualism, which is harder to define than one might think. One could, as is usually the case, view it as a phenomenon that occurs on the individual level. This is often the situation when it comes to describing immigrants or speakers of a minority language and children with parents who have different first languages (mother tongues), but bilingualism is also used metaphorically and on a territorial level indicating something completely different, with the coexistence of two languages in one region often and incorrectly interpreted as a sign of individual bilingualism.
At the level of the individual the fundamental question arises as to when a person can be considered bilingual. Traditionally, when someone manages two languages at a more or less equal level and has learnt both before the age of 12-13 then /s/he is considered bilingual. However, linguists such as Einar Haugen extend this concept to include also advanced language learning later in life such that many Scandinavians could be regarded as bilingual (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish - English). Others restrict the concept to only those persons who have in fact learnt two languages before reaching adolescence. There are, of course, many levels of individual command of two or more languages learnt at different ages than are found in these two more “extreme” standpoints. For the following discussion, however, it is very important to distinguish these two kinds of bilingualism since one does not imply the existence of the other. T. Skutnabb-Kangas argues that four criteria establish whether a person is bilingual or not[12]:
1)origin – if the person has grown up with two languages from the beginning;
2)competence – if the person is equally competent in the two languages /s/he is bilingual but since this is rarely the case and the languages are used in different situations it is harder to prove;
3) function – if the person is capable of using both languages in most situations in society;
4)attitude – how one regards oneself and if others regard the person as bilingual. Bilingualism is thus both a quantitative and a qualitative concept, used for very different purposes and often without defining which criterion or criteria are being employed.
On a territorial level, the mere existence of two languages within one territory tends to give the presumption that the population is bilingual, which is not at all the case. First of all, in most cases only the speakers of what is the minority language (and one of the languages is almost always considered a minority language in relation to the official language of the country or region, although these can be different as in Catalonia or in Slovakia until its independence.) aregenerallybilingual.A more or less total bilingualism in the long run often leads to the loss of the minority language given that its usage is always more restricted.[13] On the other hand, Romansh stands a good chance of surviving according to Fishman’s eight-degree scale where 8 is the bottom and 1 indicates the survivor. Romansh ends up between 2 and 3 and, with its new official status, also enters one criterion at 1.[14]
Another assumption that is often made in these cases is that the minority language is composed of only one variety, and there is often an official demand to unify the local varieties of a minority language or to allow them to disappear on their own.[15] This was basically the case in the creation of the unified Romansh-Rumantsch Grischun.[16] This amalgamated version of Romansh was supposed to be used for administrative purposes only, and was to be taught alongside one of the local varieties (Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter and Vallader). An immediate consequence of this unified language was that information in Romansh increased some 20 times in a few years and, since Romansh was promoted to a ‘partly official language’ in 1996 its official usage continues to increase. Is this a general development? Possibly. However, Sardinia represents a fairly similar and neighboring case where there is no real willingness to give up the more local linguistic usages in order to maintain the language space as a whole by trying to unite the so-called dialects.[17] In contrast, in northern Italy the Ladin varieties have recently established a unified standard – Ladin Dolomitan.[18]
There are, for different reasons, very different ideas concerning which variety of the minority language is really authentic and therefore which variety is to be taught in school. We have discussed the Romansh situation in Switzerland. Swiss-German also has many varieties in the spoken versions of the language, while the written language is more or less High German. French-speaking Swiss complain that they are taught to speak High German but they do not understand their co-nationals speaking the Swiss varieties. Therefore, they see little point in studying German if such study does not enable them to understand their compatriots. In Alsace there is a German-speaking regional minority but their variety is substantially different from High German and, of course, the question arises as to whether the children should be taught High German or the local variety of Alsatian at school. One possibility being discussed is to have two kinds of bilingualism: French-German at a school level and French-Alsatian on the home level. Is this a good thing or does it mean the destruction of Alsatian and the introduction of just another foreign language (German)? What will be the outcome of the new standardized languages like Rumantsch Grischun, and Ladin Dolomitan or Euskara Batua (unified Basque)?[19] Will they be entirely accepted and used (and then in what situations)? Does the introduction of these varieties lead to the disappearance of the more traditional varieties? There is a big difference between official and actual recognition of a language, and both are needed if the language is to continue being used as a spoken variety.