Re: bilingualism

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

At 10:05 02/11/97 -0500, Andrew Sieber wrote:
>John Hodges wrote:
>> I also considered the politics of Esperanto, the goal of a "universal
second
>> language", ideally sponsored by all the world's governments. One major
>> source of resistance I saw was the fear that the second language would
usurp
>> the first, as it would be spoken more widely and would therefore be more
>> useful; I thought perhaps this fear could be overcome if the sponsoring
>> governments made it AGAINST policy/law to teach it or speak it to anyone
>> under the age of (12, 14, 16, choose.) It would then NOT be a "language of
>> the home", it would be a language you learned in your first year of
"Foreign
>> language" study in the schools. Children could/would learn any other
>> langage(s) in the home, but Esperanto would thus be prevented from ever
>> being anyone's first language.
>RANT-ON
>If my government ever has the arrogance to try to prevent me from
>teaching any particular language to my child, I can guarantee that there
>will be SEVERE consequences.
>There are some people who are more in favor than other people of
>governmental intervention in social issues, and indeed there are some
>truly radical interventionists (who just happen to have gained
>significant power in the United States over the past few decades) who
>want governmental control of which organizations you financially
>support, which "poor" people you give money to, how you invest for your
>retirement, what you may eat, what you may drink, smoke, inhale, inject,
>marry or have sexual intercourse with, but I have NEVER heard of someone
>advocating that the government take responsibility for deciding which
>language a child is allowed to learn.  This reeks of the concept of
>"Newspeak" in the book _1984_.
>RANT-OFF
>
>I normally don't introduce any political ideology into my postings to
>non-political mailing lists, but I simply must object to John's idea.
>
>--Andrew
>absieber@eos.ncsu.edu
>

Governments are always trying to mess around with language - just take a
look at the Balkans.  See my essay "Who is a Native Speaker?"
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309/native.html> for some examples.


Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>