At
the start of the twentieth century it was considered popular wisdom
that all nations should be entitled to a state of their own, in which
government was conducted in the nation's own language. A hundred
years and some of history's most heinous wars later, the ideology of
the nation-state has lost a lot of its appeal and so has the doctrine
of monolingualism. Scholars and politicians alike are starting to
realise that there are actually very few monolingual states (Spolsky
2004:61); that the traditional distinction between languages and
dialects is often based on power relations rather than solid
linguistics (Barfield 1997); that it is often unclear which ethnic
group has the most legitimate claim to a particular territory and
thus which language 'ought' to be the official one in that area (De
Schutter 2008:111). However, despite these new insights the
nation-state ideology is still thriving and countries are still
implementing new legislation to ensure the dominant status of their
language.
The
first part of this essay will consist of a brief discussion of the
befenits and disadvantages of the monolingual state, which
demonstrates that it is based on an ideology and it is not
necessarily the best solution. In the second part, a historical
institutionalist theory is used to shed light on why states
nevertheless keep pursuing the linguistic territoriality principle.
The prevalence of nationalism and the connected monolingualism is
explained as the result of an increasing returns process.
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