Bilingualism and Multilingualism

The success of language policies and planning by governments is not uniform across time and place. Neither is success measured in the same ways. Any such evaluation of language policies would need to take into account the goal, its justification, and the means to achieve it.

L. F. Bosnahan reviewed four cases of language imposition, of which three were successful in seeding and developing the imposed common language of empire—Latin during the Roman Empire, Greek during the Greek Empire, Arabic during the rise of Islam, and Turkish during the Ottoman Empire. The first three cases were successful in having the imposed language become the exclusive or principal speech of the population, replacing the preexisting vernaculars. Bosnahan cites four features he believes made this success possible, if not determinative, where all four cases shared the first two features and were differentiated by the third and fourth: (1) each language was imposed by military authority, resulting in a political unity that increased commercial, political, economic, and/or cultural contact among different sections of the united area; (2) once imposed, it was maintained for at least several centuries by similar authority, allowing the adoption and then transmission of the language across several generations and the spread across the population; (3) the area of language imposition was already multilingual, making the imposed language one for wider communication; and (4) knowledge of the imposed language conferred material advantages and benefits widely recognized among the population, including employment, citizenship and its attendant rights and privileges, acquisition or grants of land, and trade opportunities. Bosnahan identifies another characteristic to which he does not attribute a share of the language imposition but which seems, nonetheless, important: a group that acquires the imposed language more quickly or readily than the rest of the subjugated population becomes an elite or intelligentsia that functions in the first stages of the military invasion and pacification as the interpreters and minor officials of the new authority, and subsequently as the medium through which the new language is transmitted to the subjugated general population.

One can look to other goals or situations, such as group coexistence, democratic pluralism, national integration, or the amelioration of group conflict. Each might require a different type and method of assessment. Some of these might be guided by principles of language diversity that have been borne out by research: (1) language conflict is usually related to other conflicts; (2) individual bilingualism in language contact situations is generally a normal result; (3) language conflict most often arises when one group attempts to impose its language on another; and (4) no two languages will be used by the same group of speakers for all of the same functions at the same time.

Whether there are 6,800 languages in the world, or 3,000, or less than 1,000, globalization is making the globe an ever smaller village. Communication will continue to be humanity's most important task. Addressing language diversity by encouraging individual multilingualism seems to be a continuing, viable strategy for success.