The Mother Tongue (6 page)

The situation is so hair-triggered that when a French-speaking group of villages in Flanders known as the Fourons elected a French-speaking mayor who refused to conduct his duties in Dutch, the national government was brought down twice and the matter clouded Belgian politics for a decade.

Even more bitter has been the situation in French-speaking Canada. In 1976, the separatist Parti Québécois, under the leadership of René Lévesque, introduced a law known as Bill 101, which banned languages other than French on commercial signs, restricted the number of admissions to English schools (and required the children of immigrants to be schooled in French even if both parents spoke English), and made French the language of the workplace for any company employing more than fifty people. The laws were enforced by a committee with the ominous name of Commission de Surveillance de la Langue Française. Fines of up to $760 were imposed by 400 “language police.” All of this was a trifle harsh on the 800,000 Quebec citizens who spoke English, and a source of considerable resentment, as when “Merry Christmas” greetings were ordered to be taken down and 15,000 Dunkin' Donuts bags were seized. In December 1988, the supreme court of Canada ruled that parts of Bill 101 were illegal. According to the court, Quebec could order that French be the primary language of commerce, but not the only one. As an immediate response, 15,000 francophones marched in protest through the streets of Montreal and many stores that had bilingual signs were vandalized, often by having the letters FLQ (for Front de Libération de Québec) spray-painted across their windows. One was firebombed.

But even a thousand miles from Quebec linguistic ill feeling sometimes surfaces. Because Canada is officially bilingual, a national law states that all regions of the country must provide services in both French and English, but this has caused sometimes bitter resentment in non-French-speaking areas such as Manitoba, where there are actually more native speakers of German and Ukrainian than of French. French Canadians are a shrinking proportion of the country, falling from 29 percent of the total population in 1961 to 24 percent today and forecast to fall to 20 percent by early in the next century.

People can feel incredibly strongly about these matters. As of February 1989, the Basque separatist organization ETA (short for Euskadi to Azkatasuna, “Basque Nation and Liberty”) had committed 672 murders in the name of linguistic and cultural independence. Even if we are repelled by the violence it is easy to understand the feelings of resentment that arise among linguistic minorities. Under Franco, you could be arrested and imprisoned just for speaking Basque in public. Catalan, a language midway between Spanish and French, spoken by 250,000 people principally in Catalonia but also as far afield as Roussillon in France, was likewise long banned in Spain. In France, for decades letters addressed in Breton were returned with the message
Addresse en Breton interdite
(“Address in Breton forbidden”). Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.

Suppression is still going on. In the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Azerbaijanis and other linguistic minorities rioted, and sometimes lost their lives, for the right to have newspapers and schoolbooks in their own language. In Romania there exists a group of people called Szeklers who speak what is said to be the purest and most beautiful form of Hungarian. But for thirty years, until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian government systematically eradicated its culture, closing down schools, forcing the renowned Hungarian-language Bolyai University to merge with a lesser-known Romanian one, even bulldozing whole villages, all in the name of linguistic conformity.

On the whole, however, governments these days take a more enlightened view to their minority languages. Nowhere perhaps has this reversal of attitudes been more pronounced than in Wales. Once practically banned, the Welsh language is now officially protected by the government. It is a language of rich but daunting beauty. Try getting your tongue around this sentence, from a parking lot in Gwynedd, the most determinedly Welsh-speaking of Wales's eight counties: “A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg?” It translates roughly as “Did you remember to pay?” and, yes, it is about as unpronounceable as it looks. In fact, more so because Welsh pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings—at least when viewed from an English-speaking perspective. The town of Dolgellau, for instance, is pronounced “doll-geth-lee,” while Llandudno is “klan-did-no.” And those are the easy ones. There are also scores of places that bring tears to the eyes of outsiders: Llwchmynydd, Bwlchtocyn, Dwygyfylch, Cwmystwyth, Pontrhydfendigaid, and Cnwch Coch.

Given such awesome phonics it is perhaps little wonder that Prince Charles had endless difficulties mastering the language before his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969. In this he is not alone. Almost 80 percent of all Welsh people do not speak Welsh. Although the country is officially bilingual and all public signs are in Welsh as well as English, the Welsh language is spoken hardly at all in the south, around the main industrial cities of Swansea, Cardiff, and Newport, and elsewhere it tends to exist only in pockets in the more remote inland areas.

That it has survived at all is a tribute to the character of the Welsh people. Until well into this century Welsh was all but illegal. It was forbidden in schools, in the courts, and at many places of work. Children who forgot themselves and shouted it on the playground were often forced to undergo humiliating punishments. Now all that has changed. Since the 1960s the British government has allowed Welsh to become an official language, has permitted its use in schools in predominantly Welsh-speaking areas, allowed people to give court evidence in Welsh, and set up a Welsh television station. Welsh, according to
The Economist,
is now “the most subsidised minority language in the world.” Discussing the advent of S4C, the Welsh-language television station, it observed: “Never mind that it costs £43 million a year to broadcast to the 20 percent of the population of Wales who speak Welsh, who in turn make up only 1 percent of the population of Britain.”

All of this was secured for the Welsh people only after a long campaign of vandalism, in which road signs were painted over, television masts torn down, and weekend cottages owned by English people set alight. More than a hundred people were imprisoned during the campaign. Today, although still very much a minority tongue, Welsh is more robust than many other small European languages—certainly in much better health than the Breton language of France, its closest relation. (Breton and Welsh are so close that speakers from the two regions can converse, though they have lived apart for 1,500 years.) Its numbers are falling, but it is still spoken by half a million people.

The position is somewhat less buoyant for the Gaelic of Ireland. There too the government has been a generous defender of the language, but with less visible success. Ireland is not even officially an English-speaking country. Yet 94 percent of her citizens speak only English and just 1 percent use Gaelic as their preferred language. Ireland is the only member of the Common Market that does not insist on having its own language used in community business, largely because it would be pointless. The dearth of Gaelic speakers does convey certain advantages to those who have mastery of the tongue.
The Spectator
magazine noted in 1986 how Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien would respond to an awkward question in the Dáil, or lower house of parliament, by emitting a mellifluous flurry of Gaelic, which most of the members of his audience could but admire if not even faintly understand.

The Irish-speaking area of Ireland, called the Gaeltacht, has been inexorably shrinking for a long time. Even before the potato famine of 1845 drove hundreds of thousands of people from the land, only about a quarter of the population spoke Gaelic. Today Gaelic clings to a few scattered outposts, mostly along the rocky and underpopulated west coast. This has long been one of the most depressed, if fabulously scenic, areas of Europe. The government has tried to shore up the perennially faltering economy by bringing in tourists and industry, but this has put an inevitable strain on the local culture. In the 1970s the population of Donegal, the main Irish-speaking area, increased by a fifth, but the incomers were almost entirely English speakers who not only cannot speak Gaelic but have little desire to learn a language that is both difficult and so clearly doomed.

All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate. It seems not to matter greatly whether governments suppress them brutally or support them lavishly. Despite all the encouragement and subsidization given to Gaelic in Ireland, it is spoken by twice as many people in Scotland, where there has been negligible government assistance. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic is one of the few minority languages in the world to be growing. Gaelic was introduced to Scotland by invaders from Ireland thirteen centuries ago and long held sway in the more remote islands and glens along the western side of the country. From 80,000 speakers in 1960 the number has now crept up to a little over 90,000 today. Even so, Gaelic speakers account for just 2.5 percent of the Scottish population.

But almost everywhere else the process is one of slow, steady, and all too often terminal decline. The last speaker of Cornish as a mother tongue died 200 years ago, and though constant efforts are made to revive the language, no more than fifty or sixty people can speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation. It survives only in two or three dialect words, most notably
emmets
(“ants”), the word locals use to describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous landscape each summer. A similar fate befell Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man, whose last native speakers died in the 1960s.

The Gaelic of Ireland may well be the next to go. In 1983, Bord na Gaelige, the government body charged with preserving the language, wrote: “There is very little hope indeed that Irish will survive as a community language in the Gaeltacht beyond the end of the century”—an uncharacteristically downbeat, if sadly realistic, assessment.

We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Synge, Behan, and Ireland's other literary masters had written in what is inescapably a fringe language. Their works would be as little known to us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

4.

The First Thousand Years

I
n the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the “veather ist cold” or inquire of the time by asking, “What ist de clock?” According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago.” [Quoted in
The Independent,
July 6, 1987.] This shouldn't entirely surprise us. This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become its most prominent language.

Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to English. These are the 300,000 Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of them can, according to the linguistic historian Charlton Laird, still read the medieval epic
Beowulf
“almost at sight.” They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Frisian for boat is
boat
(as compared to the Dutch and German
boot
), rain is
rein
(German and Dutch
regen
), and goose is
goes
(Dutch and German
gans
).

In about
A
.
D
. 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, these two groups of people and two other related groups from the same corner of northern Europe, the Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later. The broad
a
of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrims were from the old Anglian strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the pronounced
r
of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering consequence of the Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. In any case, once in Britain, the tribes variously merged and subdivided until they had established seven small kingdoms and dominated most of the island, except for Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, which remained Celtic strongholds.

That is about as much as we know—and much of that is supposition. We don't know exactly when or where the invasion began or how many people were involved. We don't know why the invaders gave up secure homes to chance their luck in hostile territory. Above all, we are not sure how well—or even if—the conquering tribes could understand each other. What is known is that although the Saxons continued to flourish on the continent, the Angles and Jutes are heard of there no more. They simply disappeared. Although the Saxons were the dominant group, the new nation gradually came to be known as England and its language as English, after the rather more obscure Angles. Again, no one knows quite why this should be.