Bilingualism and Multilingualism

The core sense of "civil" society is generally understood as the societal interaction, organization, and activity that takes place outside of government or the state. From this standpoint, the role of language diversity in civil society has varied across time and settings. Factors such as whether a group of people or a society is primarily rural or urban, sedentary or migratory, will often influence language diversity and individual bilingualism. The social and political relations between groups often determine how it is perceived, treated, or utilized within the society as a resource, problem, or even as a part of the civil and human rights of individuals or groups.

For example, Sue Wright describes the elite in Europe for much of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as "multicultural and multilingual" because of their need to interact and collaborate with each other despite the different native languages in the region. Acquiring other languages was seen as an expected and normal activity for these mobile elites. Most of the population, however, were sedentary farmers, serfs, or peasants, living in small, monolingual villages and having no contact with or need to learn other languages. They spoke a variety of one of the language "continua" of Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, or Baltic. The dominant Christian Church operated across kingdoms and "nations" with a common language of wider communication—Latin. In general, villagers attempted to accommodate "others" who did not speak the village language, who were often travelers or soldiers, but otherwise people understood each other from one village to the next, even if their vernaculars were slightly different.

According to Eduardo Ruiz Vietez, three activities caused changes in this situation: the consolidation of national kingdoms, the reformation of the church, and the development of the printing press. The consolidation of kingdoms into more fixed territories meant that the royals governed a multilingual population at the same time that the vernacular language of the capital was promoted as a standard. The first grammar of such a vernacular was presented to the king and queen of Castille, Spain, in 1492, as an instrument of nation building along with the sword and the Bible. The Reformation promoted the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, establishing a need for literacy and standardization of the text in various languages. Wright describes the emerging relationship between language and the printing press: "Printers adopted standardised languages with enthusiasm. Print capitalism profited from the standardisation of national languages, because the process delivered bigger markets than the splintered linguistic landscape of the dialect continua" (p. 2).

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, nation was understood in civic terms and in ethnic or cultural terms. Within the civic, fixed territorial states, nation-building pressure was placed on disparate groups. Within the ethnic states, the boundaries were fixed around the single group, with other ethnolinguistic groups often pushed out. Single-language standardization and its association with the state developed a single concept of the nation as a single, unified cultural body, even while in reality, many of these nations contained regional, historically rooted, language minorities (such as the Catalans or Basques), and even migratory or nomadic language groups (such as the Romani) that continue into the early twenty-first century.

For another pattern of language diversity and civil society, one can turn to the Mexican Aztec Empire during the fifteenth century. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Aztec Empire was organized into a tributary system, where the Nahuatl language was used in the metropole and throughout the empire. In the subjugated areas of the empire, bilingual administrators, such as "tax" collectors and local governors, were the brokers in local towns and villages and would mediate the tributes and administrative interactions with the central government. Beyond these interactions, the need for Nahuatl was minimal among the local populations, who continued to use their local languages. The language of the empire was highly valued and its value provided an incentive for individual bilingualism among the population, although individual bilingualism was not widespread.

The situation changed after contact with the Spanish and, later, other Europeans. With the imposition of the Spanish colonial structures, Spanish became the "instrument" of empire building, not just nation building. It became the prestige language and was imposed through the process of evangelization and conversion. The libraries of the Aztec Empire were Table 2. Countries by number of languages, 2000

burned and destroyed by the Spanish. Religious leaders, colonial administrators, and indigenous elites, who learned each other's languages, became bilingual and brokered the creation of revised local histories and knowledge. Over time, Spanish was promoted as a single substitute for the indigenous languages, increasing its number of speakers, even while many indigenous languages survive into the early twenty-first century.

In these and other ways, communication in language-diverse settings has been promoted through bilingual brokers. Travelers, soldiers, missionaries, and immigrants often learned new languages to facilitate these communications. Certainly in language contact situations individual bilinguals in the various languages played key roles in the civic interactions between peoples. If the language situation was more complex, involving three languages, a pidgin as "common" language often arose to broker communication between groups.

In the twentieth century, the development of popular schooling in multilingual situations often was organized with bilingual or multilingual instruction. Early primary grades were often taught in the native language of the community, with the regional and/or the national languages added as the student matured. The integration of countries into regional economic, political, and civil societies, such as the European Union, has put social pressures on groups to maintain their national languages at the same time they are to learn other regional languages and some languages for wider communication, such as English. This results in the promotion of at least a trilingualism among the population.

The transnational movement of people (as immigrants, refugees, and international workers) has also created the need for learning the host country's language(s), and for addressing the language needs of their children in schools. When there are substantial numbers of speakers of these (immigrant) languages concentrated in one place over a sufficient time to establish local organizations and institutions, such as local ethnic economy or independent community mother-tongue schools, then there are other local accommodations that often follow, with and without the support of the host society and the dominant language majority.