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Individual Bilingualism and Collective Bilingualism: Difference between revisions
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Individual Bilingualism and Collective Bilingualism (view source)
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In fact, officially plurilingual societies correspond to States where we find a juxtaposition of unilingual territories of marked by the superiority of one language over the other(s). Such is the case of Switzerland and Belgium, just to mention two frequently evoked examples. | In fact, officially plurilingual societies correspond to States where we find a juxtaposition of unilingual territories of marked by the superiority of one language over the other(s). Such is the case of Switzerland and Belgium, just to mention two frequently evoked examples. | ||
There are however societies that we could call "bilingualized", in which an aboriginal population of important parts of it are being imposed the generalized contact with, the knowledge and the use of a foreign language, which lead them to a certain degree of bilingualism or polyglossia. Such situations are generally attributable to varied forms of colonialism, or at least domination. I will leave to conclusion to Albert Memmi, who describes the consequences this situation: | |||
"Equipped with his sole language, the colonized is a stranger in his own country. | |||
In a colonial context, bilingualism is necessary. It is the condition of any communication, any culture, and any progress. | |||
[...] The command of two languages is not only that of two tools, it is the participation to two psychic and cultural realms. Now here the two symbolized universes, carried by the two languages, are in conflict: they are those of the colonizer and the colonized. | |||
Moreover, the mother tongue of the colonized, that which nourishes his sensations, his passions and his dreams, that in which he liberates his tenderness and his amazement, finally that which conceals the greatest affective charge, that one precisely is not valued. In the linguistic conflict which inhabits the colonized, his mother tongue is humiliated, crushed. And this contempt, objectively founded, he ends up making it his own. Of himself, he begins to push away this crippled language, to hide it to the eyes of strangers, to appear at ease only in the language of the colonizer. In short, colonial bilingualism is not a diglossia, where coexist a popular idiom and a language of purists both belonging to the same affective universe, nor simply the richness of the polyglot, who benefits of an additional instrument, one relatively neutral: it is a linguistic drama." (1) | |||
This drama, we have been living it day by day for a long time inside Quebec. Whatever we do, and beyond local and provisional arrangements that we may conclude, this drama is that of a society. It is global and its remedy could only be global as well. | |||
== Author's Note == | |||
1. Albert Memmi, ''Portrait du colonisé'', Montréal, Édition de l'Étincelle, 1972, p. 103 | |||