According to a story published by
Le Point on 11/12/2008, Radio France Internationale is losing out in most countries to other global players such as Deutsche Welle, BBC and Voice of America:
Rien ne va plus à RFI ! La station publique a de plus en plus de mal à faire entendre sa voix, en dépit des 465 journalistes assurant une mission d'information partout dans le monde en vingt langues. Le budget est en déficit "dont plus de la moitié concerne la masse salariale", soulignait, mardi 2 décembre, Alain de Pouzilhac, son pdg, interrogé par la commission des affaires culturelles du Sénat. Sans que le terme soit évoqué, la réforme entreprise semble mener directement vers un plan social.
En tout cas, dans un premier temps, certains services vont être restreints. C'est ainsi que, sur vingt langues, six (l'allemand, l'albanais, le polonais, le serbo-croate, le turc et le laotien) sont appelées à disparaître le 31 janvier 2009, faute d'une audience suffisante. Le service russe sera, quant à lui, maintenu uniquement sur Internet. Alain de Pouzilhac souligne qu'en Europe le taux d'audience de RFI est compris "entre 0 et 1 %".
Christine Ockrent, directrice générale de RFI, assume la restriction du service de RFI en Europe et propose de concentrer les forces de la station sur l'Afrique, où la station jouit "d'une expertise reconnue" et d'une couverture globale grâce à trois langues (anglais, français et portugais). Cette stratégie de repli en Europe suscite de vives réactions. Une pétition circule contre l'arrêt de la diffusion de RFI au pays de Poutine. Parmi les signataires, l'ancien dissident soviétique Vladimir Bukovsky et le phi losophe André Glucksmann protestent contre l'abandon de l'une des dernières sources d'information défendant les valeurs de la démocratie. Les auteurs de la pétition soulignent qu'Internet est loin d'être la panacée, car Moscou bloque les moteurs de recherche. RFI sur le Net diffuserait donc dans le vide...
Donner une "image positive" de l'Afrique
Bernard Kouchner, le compa gnon de Mme Ockrent, n'est plus décisionnaire depuis que RFI a été rattachée à un holding dépendant de Matignon, et donc de François Fillon. Mais que faire ? Les faiblesses se sont multipliées tant le Quai d'Orsay (autrefois chargé de RFI) a laissé, au fil des années, pourrir la situation. Qu'on en juge : même en Afrique francophone, le marché le plus puissant de RFI, la station peine à exister face aux radios locales de la BBC. Son taux d'audience, jadis de 30 %, a reculé pour ne plus peser que 20 %, selon les chiffres avancés par Alain de Pouzilhac. Pour endiguer ce recul, Christine Ockrent propose "d'élargir le champ des sujets traités à de nouveaux domaines" donnant une "image plus positive de sociétés africaines en pleine transformation". Et la directrice générale de donner deux exemples : "la place de la femme" et "le rôle du microcrédit".
Le plan de redéploiement de la station bute cependant sur un problème financier. Les crédits publics de l'audiovisuel extérieur (298 millions en 2009) devraient baisser de 30 millions d'euros d'ici à 2011... "Incompatible avec les objectifs de la réforme [lancée par Sarkozy en juillet 2007]", prévient le sénateur centriste Joseph Kergueris, auteur du rapport sur le sujet. Mais où trouver les sous quand les caisses sont vides ?
Link to the story
7 comments:
On n'est jamais trahi que par les siens
Hopefully the French government will abolish Radio France, I hope mine abolishes Voice of America.
The Fragmentation of Spanish into Multitudes of Mutually Unintelligible Dialects.
Language policy in Spanish-speaking Latin America deals with challenges to the status of Spanish as the official language, a status inherited from the colonial administration of the New World. These challenges come from several sources: THE ASSERTION OF THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS GROUPS, THE ‘DANGER’ OF FRAGMENTATION OF SPANISH INTO A MULTITUDE OF LOCAL DIALECTS, THE GROWING PRESTIGE OF ENGLISH AND INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES, AND ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF BRAZIL, CONTACT WITH PORTUGUESE.
In the initial phase of colonization, the Catholic Monarchs and later Charles V required all of their new subjects to learn Spanish, just as their predecessors had imposed the learning of Castilian on the conquered Arab territories in order to bind them more closely together in the nation governed by Castile. However, it soon became clear that the linguistic diversity of the New World was too great to allow for the immediate implantation of Spanish, and some allowance had to be made for the usage of indigenous languages in teaching and evangelization. In 1570 Phillip II reluctantly authorized a policy of bilingualism in which instruction could be imparted in ‘the’ language of each Viceroyalty: Nahautl and in New Spain and Quechua in Peru, with the consequent extension of these two languages into territories where they were not spoken natively. Even this measure was not enough, however, and in 1596 Phillip II recognized the existent multilingualism: Spanish for administration and access to the elite, and a local indigenous language for evangelization and daily communication in indigenous communities. This policy lead to a separation of colonial society into a minority of Spanish/creole Spanish-speakers governing an indigenous majority speaking one of many indigenous languages. The separation became so great that it all but halted the Hispanization of rural areas and created local indigenous elites with considerable autonomy from the central adminstration. A reassertion of central authority commenced in 1770 when Carlos III declared Spanish to be the only language of the Empire and ordered the administrative, judicial and ecclesiastic authorities to extinguish all others. After Independence, the new nations and their successors maintained the offical status of Spanish as a means of strengthening national unity and pursuing modernization through education. This tendency was reinforced at the turn of the century through the 1940’s with notions of Social Darwinism, in which the vigorous hybrid groups of Latin America would eventually overcome the ‘weaker’ indigenous groups. It is only since World War II that this policy has suffered any substantial change.
Several processes converged in the post-War period to shake the linguistic status quo. One is the growth of industrialization, which requires an educated workforce and thus lends urgency to effective education. Another is agrarian reform, which raises the social status of the farmer while increasing his need for vocational training. These two processes create a growing pressure to learn the language of technology and mechanization, Spanish. As a counterpoint to this pressure, there was an understanding among policy makers of the failure of the pre-War incorporationist policies to acheive their goal of Hispanization. The confluence of these tendencies was a shift towards the usage of indigenous languages in primary schools to ease the transition to Spanish. Moreover, the dynamic of questioning the entire model of development grew, a dynamic that was reinforced by the emergence of indigenous activists educated in the new national schools. These contradictions came to a head during the labor and peasant movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, where calls for the preservation of indigenous languages served as a vehicle for the preservation of entire indigenous societies. The subsequent official response to these movements had diverse outcomes throughout Latin America. In Mexico, the new indigenous consciousness continued to grow unabated, as it did among the Bolivian Aymara and Ecuadorian Quechua, and to a lesser extent among the other Quechua speakers of Bolivia and Peru. Elsewhere, many organizations were driven into marginality or outright armed resistence, with the paradoxical result that often the only officially-tolerated supporters of indigenous languages were foreigners: scholars pursuing linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, linguists trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for the translation and dissemination of Christian texts, or members of other non-governmental organizations engaged in aid or relief work.
Only recently have indigenous defensors of indigenous languages found any standing on the national stage. This new tolerance has been said to reflect the neo-liberal reforms required as conditions for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the early 1990’s, with the threat of Communist takeover having receeded. There are now a multitude of protective measures that go from bilingual primary education (Honduras), to constitutional protection (Colombia), to the establishment of indigenous languages as co-official with Spanish (Guatemala).
With respect to the status of Spanish among native speakers, Independence lead to the creation of national educational institutions and a desire to reform Spanish orthography so as to facilitate its learning by American speakers, as well as to foster a literary tradition independent of Spain. Such reforms come to little in the face of the turbulence created by Independence, but a second round of standardization began as part of the modernization process initiated around 1870. Increasing immigration to Latin America and the strengthening of trends towards democratization lead to the fear among the intellectual elite that the linguistic unity of Latin America would collapse into a cacophomy of local variants, much as the Latin of the Roman Empire fragmented into the variety of Romance languages.
The final threat to the official status of Spanish is the growing contact with other European languages: with English throughout Latin America, and with Portuguese along the southern border of Brazil. Contact with English arises through migration to the United States for economic or political reasons or sojourns for business or education. This contact is particularily acute in the case of Puerto Rico, where its adminstrative dependency on the United States has led to an extensive diffusion of English, as well as the threatened imposition of English as the official language should Puerto Rico ever gain statehood. This threat has sparked intellectual debates that echo the Spanish-vs.-indigenous-language debates heard on the mainland: language is an expression of identity, perhaps the fundmental expression of identity, and it should not be given up lightly.
Selected references
Angel Rama (1996) The Lettered City. Duke University Press.
[spelling reform after independence, p. 43ff; foundation of Spanish American Academies, Cuervo, Caro & Bello p. 59ff]
Julio Ramos (1989) Desenceuntros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Tierra Firme, México.
[Ch. II sobre Bello]
Julio Ramos (1996) Paradojas de la letra. Ediciones eXcultura, Caracas, Miami, Quito.
[Ch. 1 sobre Bello]
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/Pubs/LALangPol.html
===================================
The priority of the language spoken and written on the mainland on Latin America. was the central thesis of this writing, the "barbaric nature of the Native American languages" prevented, in his view, they have to exert any influence on the Spanish of America. The enforcement of the Academy would do the rest. This was trying to counter the forecast made by Andres Bello in the preface to his Grammar of 1847, feared that the profusion of regional varieties that "clouds and flooded much of what is written in America, and altering the structure of language, tends to turn it into a multitude of dialects irregular graduates barbarians "for the design, linguistic and political inextricably only unit of the tongue" cult "would ensure the unity of the Hispanic world. By contrast, the Colombian philologist Rufino Jose Cuervo, which supported the diagnosis of Bello of the possible fragmentation of FRAGMENTATION IN A VARIETY OF MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE LANGUAGES, warned against the use of written language to measure the unit of language, considering it a veil that covers the local. "
Translated from Spanish: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castellano_neutral
===================================
The "SPANISH" LANGUAGE: Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries
The section on modern colloquial Spanish, especially that spoken on television, is discouraging. It is often difficult to understand, even for people from other Spanish-speaking countries. The film makes light of this, but it is a pathetic decline from the beautiful Spanish promoted by the Spanish Academy. Even some Latin American students at Stanford use a slang unknown to me and often to other Latin Americans. Some WAISers defend the variants as the expression of a people, but they seem to have a romantic longing for the good old times when the inhabitants of one valley could not understand those of the next. John Wonder complains about this, and about the machine-gun like speech of young people. Indeed, in the Bogota I first knew, the "Athens of America," the intellectual elite spoke a very beautiful Spanish. Now SCOLA rebroadcasts news programs from Cali. The young women announcers on the program rattle off Spanish is high-pitched voices without the intonation indicating comprehension. The decline of Spanish in Colombia is a tragedy, admittedly insignificant in comparison with the major tragedy of life there.
Ronald Hilton - 4/15/01
http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Language/language_mexandothers41501.html
===================================
Is Spanish in danger?
It seems that not everyone understands very well in Spain, a source of misunderstanding for their common language. Receipt stupor scanned the letter that a college Creixell (Tarragona) submitted by parents to allow their children to attend two hours a week for Arabic language classes. Further to the issue, the letter written in Catalan, Arabic, Spanish is obvious that the co-official languages in Catalonia, and thus forced to use by the administration. In short, it puts a higher position in Arabic into Spanish, in an effort to remove him from social life, where a majority in Catalonia. WITH THIS AND OTHER ACTIONS, WE ATTEMPT TO "CIVIL DEATH" IN A LANGUAGE AND CULTURE VITAL TO BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD, DEPRIVING STUDENTS OF KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH THROUGH MARGINALIZE NOT BEHIND THE CATALAN (WHICH TURN MARGINALIZES OFFICIALLY ANDALUSIA ANDALUSIA MAJORCAN AND VALENCIAN), AND WHERE APPROPRIATE, GALICIAN AND BASQUE, BUT BEHIND ENGLISH, FRENCH AND NOW ARABIC.
JUSTIFY THE FACT THAT SUPPLY MARKETS IN BARCELONA HAVE COME TO PLACE BILINGUAL SIGNS IN CATALAN AND URDU (OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF PAKISTAN), BUT NOT A SINGLE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT IN SPANISH, IS TO JUSTIFY A PATHOLOGICAL HATRED, RIDICULE AND SICKLY WITH SEVERAL CRETINS OFFICIAL CAR AND SEVERAL "PANIAGUADOS" COLUMN SUBSIDIZED MEDIA. We must not forget that subsidies for "experiments" in Arabic, Urdu and anything within swahilli, are paid with money of all, to produce illiterate or managed well in Spanish or Catalan or appropriate local language.
Spanish
http://www.diariodeamerica.com/front_nota_detalle.php?id_noticia=4673
The Fragmentation of Spanish into Multitudes of Mutually Unintelligible Dialects.
Language policy in Spanish-speaking Latin America deals with challenges to the status of Spanish as the official language, a status inherited from the colonial administration of the New World. These challenges come from several sources: THE ASSERTION OF THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS GROUPS, THE ‘DANGER’ OF FRAGMENTATION OF SPANISH INTO A MULTITUDE OF LOCAL DIALECTS, THE GROWING PRESTIGE OF ENGLISH AND INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES, AND ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF BRAZIL, CONTACT WITH PORTUGUESE.
In the initial phase of colonization, the Catholic Monarchs and later Charles V required all of their new subjects to learn Spanish, just as their predecessors had imposed the learning of Castilian on the conquered Arab territories in order to bind them more closely together in the nation governed by Castile. However, it soon became clear that the linguistic diversity of the New World was too great to allow for the immediate implantation of Spanish, and some allowance had to be made for the usage of indigenous languages in teaching and evangelization. In 1570 Phillip II reluctantly authorized a policy of bilingualism in which instruction could be imparted in ‘the’ language of each Viceroyalty: Nahautl and in New Spain and Quechua in Peru, with the consequent extension of these two languages into territories where they were not spoken natively. Even this measure was not enough, however, and in 1596 Phillip II recognized the existent multilingualism: Spanish for administration and access to the elite, and a local indigenous language for evangelization and daily communication in indigenous communities. This policy lead to a separation of colonial society into a minority of Spanish/creole Spanish-speakers governing an indigenous majority speaking one of many indigenous languages. The separation became so great that it all but halted the Hispanization of rural areas and created local indigenous elites with considerable autonomy from the central adminstration. A reassertion of central authority commenced in 1770 when Carlos III declared Spanish to be the only language of the Empire and ordered the administrative, judicial and ecclesiastic authorities to extinguish all others. After Independence, the new nations and their successors maintained the offical status of Spanish as a means of strengthening national unity and pursuing modernization through education. This tendency was reinforced at the turn of the century through the 1940’s with notions of Social Darwinism, in which the vigorous hybrid groups of Latin America would eventually overcome the ‘weaker’ indigenous groups. It is only since World War II that this policy has suffered any substantial change.
Several processes converged in the post-War period to shake the linguistic status quo. One is the growth of industrialization, which requires an educated workforce and thus lends urgency to effective education. Another is agrarian reform, which raises the social status of the farmer while increasing his need for vocational training. These two processes create a growing pressure to learn the language of technology and mechanization, Spanish. As a counterpoint to this pressure, there was an understanding among policy makers of the failure of the pre-War incorporationist policies to acheive their goal of Hispanization. The confluence of these tendencies was a shift towards the usage of indigenous languages in primary schools to ease the transition to Spanish. Moreover, the dynamic of questioning the entire model of development grew, a dynamic that was reinforced by the emergence of indigenous activists educated in the new national schools. These contradictions came to a head during the labor and peasant movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, where calls for the preservation of indigenous languages served as a vehicle for the preservation of entire indigenous societies. The subsequent official response to these movements had diverse outcomes throughout Latin America. In Mexico, the new indigenous consciousness continued to grow unabated, as it did among the Bolivian Aymara and Ecuadorian Quechua, and to a lesser extent among the other Quechua speakers of Bolivia and Peru. Elsewhere, many organizations were driven into marginality or outright armed resistence, with the paradoxical result that often the only officially-tolerated supporters of indigenous languages were foreigners: scholars pursuing linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, linguists trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for the translation and dissemination of Christian texts, or members of other non-governmental organizations engaged in aid or relief work.
Only recently have indigenous defensors of indigenous languages found any standing on the national stage. This new tolerance has been said to reflect the neo-liberal reforms required as conditions for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the early 1990’s, with the threat of Communist takeover having receeded. There are now a multitude of protective measures that go from bilingual primary education (Honduras), to constitutional protection (Colombia), to the establishment of indigenous languages as co-official with Spanish (Guatemala).
With respect to the status of Spanish among native speakers, Independence lead to the creation of national educational institutions and a desire to reform Spanish orthography so as to facilitate its learning by American speakers, as well as to foster a literary tradition independent of Spain. Such reforms come to little in the face of the turbulence created by Independence, but a second round of standardization began as part of the modernization process initiated around 1870. Increasing immigration to Latin America and the strengthening of trends towards democratization lead to the fear among the intellectual elite that the linguistic unity of Latin America would collapse into a cacophomy of local variants, much as the Latin of the Roman Empire fragmented into the variety of Romance languages.
The final threat to the official status of Spanish is the growing contact with other European languages: with English throughout Latin America, and with Portuguese along the southern border of Brazil. Contact with English arises through migration to the United States for economic or political reasons or sojourns for business or education. This contact is particularily acute in the case of Puerto Rico, where its adminstrative dependency on the United States has led to an extensive diffusion of English, as well as the threatened imposition of English as the official language should Puerto Rico ever gain statehood. This threat has sparked intellectual debates that echo the Spanish-vs.-indigenous-language debates heard on the mainland: language is an expression of identity, perhaps the fundmental expression of identity, and it should not be given up lightly.
Selected references
Angel Rama (1996) The Lettered City. Duke University Press.
[spelling reform after independence, p. 43ff; foundation of Spanish American Academies, Cuervo, Caro & Bello p. 59ff]
Julio Ramos (1989) Desenceuntros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Tierra Firme, México.
[Ch. II sobre Bello]
Julio Ramos (1996) Paradojas de la letra. Ediciones eXcultura, Caracas, Miami, Quito.
[Ch. 1 sobre Bello]
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/Pubs/LALangPol.html
===================================
The priority of the language spoken and written on the mainland on Latin America. was the central thesis of this writing, the "barbaric nature of the Native American languages" prevented, in his view, they have to exert any influence on the Spanish of America. The enforcement of the Academy would do the rest. This was trying to counter the forecast made by Andres Bello in the preface to his Grammar of 1847, feared that the profusion of regional varieties that "clouds and flooded much of what is written in America, and altering the structure of language, tends to turn it into a multitude of dialects irregular graduates barbarians "for the design, linguistic and political inextricably only unit of the tongue" cult "would ensure the unity of the Hispanic world. By contrast, the Colombian philologist Rufino Jose Cuervo, which supported the diagnosis of Bello of the possible fragmentation of FRAGMENTATION IN A VARIETY OF MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE LANGUAGES, warned against the use of written language to measure the unit of language, considering it a veil that covers the local. "
Translated from Spanish: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castellano_neutral
===================================
The "SPANISH" LANGUAGE: Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries
The section on modern colloquial Spanish, especially that spoken on television, is discouraging. It is often difficult to understand, even for people from other Spanish-speaking countries. The film makes light of this, but it is a pathetic decline from the beautiful Spanish promoted by the Spanish Academy. Even some Latin American students at Stanford use a slang unknown to me and often to other Latin Americans. Some WAISers defend the variants as the expression of a people, but they seem to have a romantic longing for the good old times when the inhabitants of one valley could not understand those of the next. John Wonder complains about this, and about the machine-gun like speech of young people. Indeed, in the Bogota I first knew, the "Athens of America," the intellectual elite spoke a very beautiful Spanish. Now SCOLA rebroadcasts news programs from Cali. The young women announcers on the program rattle off Spanish is high-pitched voices without the intonation indicating comprehension. The decline of Spanish in Colombia is a tragedy, admittedly insignificant in comparison with the major tragedy of life there.
Ronald Hilton - 4/15/01
http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Language/language_mexandothers41501.html
===================================
Is Spanish in danger?
It seems that not everyone understands very well in Spain, a source of misunderstanding for their common language. Receipt stupor scanned the letter that a college Creixell (Tarragona) submitted by parents to allow their children to attend two hours a week for Arabic language classes. Further to the issue, the letter written in Catalan, Arabic, Spanish is obvious that the co-official languages in Catalonia, and thus forced to use by the administration. In short, it puts a higher position in Arabic into Spanish, in an effort to remove him from social life, where a majority in Catalonia. WITH THIS AND OTHER ACTIONS, WE ATTEMPT TO "CIVIL DEATH" IN A LANGUAGE AND CULTURE VITAL TO BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD, DEPRIVING STUDENTS OF KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH THROUGH MARGINALIZE NOT BEHIND THE CATALAN (WHICH TURN MARGINALIZES OFFICIALLY ANDALUSIA ANDALUSIA MAJORCAN AND VALENCIAN), AND WHERE APPROPRIATE, GALICIAN AND BASQUE, BUT BEHIND ENGLISH, FRENCH AND NOW ARABIC.
JUSTIFY THE FACT THAT SUPPLY MARKETS IN BARCELONA HAVE COME TO PLACE BILINGUAL SIGNS IN CATALAN AND URDU (OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF PAKISTAN), BUT NOT A SINGLE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT IN SPANISH, IS TO JUSTIFY A PATHOLOGICAL HATRED, RIDICULE AND SICKLY WITH SEVERAL CRETINS OFFICIAL CAR AND SEVERAL "PANIAGUADOS" COLUMN SUBSIDIZED MEDIA. We must not forget that subsidies for "experiments" in Arabic, Urdu and anything within swahilli, are paid with money of all, to produce illiterate or managed well in Spanish or Catalan or appropriate local language.
Spanish
http://www.diariodeamerica.com/front_nota_detalle.php?id_noticia=4673
The Fragmentation of Spanish into Multitudes of Mutually Unintelligible Dialects.
Language policy in Spanish-speaking Latin America deals with challenges to the status of Spanish as the official language, a status inherited from the colonial administration of the New World. These challenges come from several sources: THE ASSERTION OF THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS GROUPS, THE ‘DANGER’ OF FRAGMENTATION OF SPANISH INTO A MULTITUDE OF LOCAL DIALECTS, THE GROWING PRESTIGE OF ENGLISH AND INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES, AND ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF BRAZIL, CONTACT WITH PORTUGUESE.
In the initial phase of colonization, the Catholic Monarchs and later Charles V required all of their new subjects to learn Spanish, just as their predecessors had imposed the learning of Castilian on the conquered Arab territories in order to bind them more closely together in the nation governed by Castile. However, it soon became clear that the linguistic diversity of the New World was too great to allow for the immediate implantation of Spanish, and some allowance had to be made for the usage of indigenous languages in teaching and evangelization. In 1570 Phillip II reluctantly authorized a policy of bilingualism in which instruction could be imparted in ‘the’ language of each Viceroyalty: Nahautl and in New Spain and Quechua in Peru, with the consequent extension of these two languages into territories where they were not spoken natively. Even this measure was not enough, however, and in 1596 Phillip II recognized the existent multilingualism: Spanish for administration and access to the elite, and a local indigenous language for evangelization and daily communication in indigenous communities. This policy lead to a separation of colonial society into a minority of Spanish/creole Spanish-speakers governing an indigenous majority speaking one of many indigenous languages. The separation became so great that it all but halted the Hispanization of rural areas and created local indigenous elites with considerable autonomy from the central adminstration. A reassertion of central authority commenced in 1770 when Carlos III declared Spanish to be the only language of the Empire and ordered the administrative, judicial and ecclesiastic authorities to extinguish all others. After Independence, the new nations and their successors maintained the offical status of Spanish as a means of strengthening national unity and pursuing modernization through education. This tendency was reinforced at the turn of the century through the 1940’s with notions of Social Darwinism, in which the vigorous hybrid groups of Latin America would eventually overcome the ‘weaker’ indigenous groups. It is only since World War II that this policy has suffered any substantial change.
Several processes converged in the post-War period to shake the linguistic status quo. One is the growth of industrialization, which requires an educated workforce and thus lends urgency to effective education. Another is agrarian reform, which raises the social status of the farmer while increasing his need for vocational training. These two processes create a growing pressure to learn the language of technology and mechanization, Spanish. As a counterpoint to this pressure, there was an understanding among policy makers of the failure of the pre-War incorporationist policies to acheive their goal of Hispanization. The confluence of these tendencies was a shift towards the usage of indigenous languages in primary schools to ease the transition to Spanish. Moreover, the dynamic of questioning the entire model of development grew, a dynamic that was reinforced by the emergence of indigenous activists educated in the new national schools. These contradictions came to a head during the labor and peasant movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, where calls for the preservation of indigenous languages served as a vehicle for the preservation of entire indigenous societies. The subsequent official response to these movements had diverse outcomes throughout Latin America. In Mexico, the new indigenous consciousness continued to grow unabated, as it did among the Bolivian Aymara and Ecuadorian Quechua, and to a lesser extent among the other Quechua speakers of Bolivia and Peru. Elsewhere, many organizations were driven into marginality or outright armed resistence, with the paradoxical result that often the only officially-tolerated supporters of indigenous languages were foreigners: scholars pursuing linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, linguists trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for the translation and dissemination of Christian texts, or members of other non-governmental organizations engaged in aid or relief work.
Only recently have indigenous defensors of indigenous languages found any standing on the national stage. This new tolerance has been said to reflect the neo-liberal reforms required as conditions for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the early 1990’s, with the threat of Communist takeover having receeded. There are now a multitude of protective measures that go from bilingual primary education (Honduras), to constitutional protection (Colombia), to the establishment of indigenous languages as co-official with Spanish (Guatemala).
With respect to the status of Spanish among native speakers, Independence lead to the creation of national educational institutions and a desire to reform Spanish orthography so as to facilitate its learning by American speakers, as well as to foster a literary tradition independent of Spain. Such reforms come to little in the face of the turbulence created by Independence, but a second round of standardization began as part of the modernization process initiated around 1870. Increasing immigration to Latin America and the strengthening of trends towards democratization lead to the fear among the intellectual elite that the linguistic unity of Latin America would collapse into a cacophomy of local variants, much as the Latin of the Roman Empire fragmented into the variety of Romance languages.
The final threat to the official status of Spanish is the growing contact with other European languages: with English throughout Latin America, and with Portuguese along the southern border of Brazil. Contact with English arises through migration to the United States for economic or political reasons or sojourns for business or education. This contact is particularily acute in the case of Puerto Rico, where its adminstrative dependency on the United States has led to an extensive diffusion of English, as well as the threatened imposition of English as the official language should Puerto Rico ever gain statehood. This threat has sparked intellectual debates that echo the Spanish-vs.-indigenous-language debates heard on the mainland: language is an expression of identity, perhaps the fundmental expression of identity, and it should not be given up lightly.
Selected references
Angel Rama (1996) The Lettered City. Duke University Press.
[spelling reform after independence, p. 43ff; foundation of Spanish American Academies, Cuervo, Caro & Bello p. 59ff]
Julio Ramos (1989) Desenceuntros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Tierra Firme, México.
[Ch. II sobre Bello]
Julio Ramos (1996) Paradojas de la letra. Ediciones eXcultura, Caracas, Miami, Quito.
[Ch. 1 sobre Bello]
http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/Pubs/LALangPol.html
===================================
The priority of the language spoken and written on the mainland on Latin America. was the central thesis of this writing, the "barbaric nature of the Native American languages" prevented, in his view, they have to exert any influence on the Spanish of America. The enforcement of the Academy would do the rest. This was trying to counter the forecast made by Andres Bello in the preface to his Grammar of 1847, feared that the profusion of regional varieties that "clouds and flooded much of what is written in America, and altering the structure of language, tends to turn it into a multitude of dialects irregular graduates barbarians "for the design, linguistic and political inextricably only unit of the tongue" cult "would ensure the unity of the Hispanic world. By contrast, the Colombian philologist Rufino Jose Cuervo, which supported the diagnosis of Bello of the possible fragmentation of FRAGMENTATION IN A VARIETY OF MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE LANGUAGES, warned against the use of written language to measure the unit of language, considering it a veil that covers the local. "
Translated from Spanish: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castellano_neutral
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The "SPANISH" LANGUAGE: Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries
The section on modern colloquial Spanish, especially that spoken on television, is discouraging. It is often difficult to understand, even for people from other Spanish-speaking countries. The film makes light of this, but it is a pathetic decline from the beautiful Spanish promoted by the Spanish Academy. Even some Latin American students at Stanford use a slang unknown to me and often to other Latin Americans. Some WAISers defend the variants as the expression of a people, but they seem to have a romantic longing for the good old times when the inhabitants of one valley could not understand those of the next. John Wonder complains about this, and about the machine-gun like speech of young people. Indeed, in the Bogota I first knew, the "Athens of America," the intellectual elite spoke a very beautiful Spanish. Now SCOLA rebroadcasts news programs from Cali. The young women announcers on the program rattle off Spanish is high-pitched voices without the intonation indicating comprehension. The decline of Spanish in Colombia is a tragedy, admittedly insignificant in comparison with the major tragedy of life there.
Ronald Hilton - 4/15/01
http://www.stanford.edu/group/wais/Language/language_mexandothers41501.html
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Is Spanish in danger?
It seems that not everyone understands very well in Spain, a source of misunderstanding for their common language. Receipt stupor scanned the letter that a college Creixell (Tarragona) submitted by parents to allow their children to attend two hours a week for Arabic language classes. Further to the issue, the letter written in Catalan, Arabic, Spanish is obvious that the co-official languages in Catalonia, and thus forced to use by the administration. In short, it puts a higher position in Arabic into Spanish, in an effort to remove him from social life, where a majority in Catalonia. WITH THIS AND OTHER ACTIONS, WE ATTEMPT TO "CIVIL DEATH" IN A LANGUAGE AND CULTURE VITAL TO BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD, DEPRIVING STUDENTS OF KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH THROUGH MARGINALIZE NOT BEHIND THE CATALAN (WHICH TURN MARGINALIZES OFFICIALLY ANDALUSIA ANDALUSIA MAJORCAN AND VALENCIAN), AND WHERE APPROPRIATE, GALICIAN AND BASQUE, BUT BEHIND ENGLISH, FRENCH AND NOW ARABIC.
JUSTIFY THE FACT THAT SUPPLY MARKETS IN BARCELONA HAVE COME TO PLACE BILINGUAL SIGNS IN CATALAN AND URDU (OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF PAKISTAN), BUT NOT A SINGLE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT IN SPANISH, IS TO JUSTIFY A PATHOLOGICAL HATRED, RIDICULE AND SICKLY WITH SEVERAL CRETINS OFFICIAL CAR AND SEVERAL "PANIAGUADOS" COLUMN SUBSIDIZED MEDIA. We must not forget that subsidies for "experiments" in Arabic, Urdu and anything within swahilli, are paid with money of all, to produce illiterate or managed well in Spanish or Catalan or appropriate local language.
Spanish
http://www.diariodeamerica.com/front_nota_detalle.php?id_noticia=4673
You cannot escape the reality that Spanish will become either a Macro-Language just like Chinese or Neo-Spanishes.
Examples of differences in Spanish in this words:
1. Españoles/Ehpañoleh/Ezpañolez/Españoles/Eshpañolesh/Ethpañoleth/Ezhpañolezh/Epañole
2. durce for dulce
3. puelta for puerta
4. to'o for todo (I heard this from Colombians whose Spanish is considered the purest in Hispanic America)
5. agents for agentes
You can hear these and other corrupted words not just from illiterates but also from educated hispanics who insist on using them as a sign of national identity. Result is an new evolved language.
This reminds of Afrikaan corruption of Dutch words:
1. skouer for schouder (shoulder)
2. nes for nest
3. saal for zadel (sadel)
4. nag for nacht (night)
5. 'n Bietjie for Een beetje (Een beetje)
Sorry, but the birth of Afrikaans started on corrupting the words which evolved into a distinct languages. Spanish variants are on the same path towards new languages.
In 2050, Spanish language is a SHATTERED GLASS or BROKEN MIRROR.
All they can say to the original language is "Adios y no hasta la vista!"
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