The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

Finns and Estonians can freely understand each other. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians often insist that their languages are quite distinct and yet, as Mario Pei puts it, there are greater differences between Italian dialects such as Sicilian and Piedmontese than there are between any of the three main Scandinavian languages. Romanian and Moldavian, spoken in the Soviet Union, are essentially the same language with different names. So are Serbian and Croatian, the only real difference being that Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian uses Western characters.
    In many countries people use one language for some activities and a second language for others. In Luxembourg, the inhabitants use French at school, German for reading newspapers, and Luxemburgish, a local Germanic dialect, at home. In Paraguay, people conduct business in Spanish, but tell their jokes in Guarani, the native Indian tongue. In Greece, for a long time children were schooled only in Katharevousa, a formal language so archaic that it was (and indeed still is) no longer spoken anywhere in the country. The language for common discourse was Dhimotiki, yet perversely this everyday language was long held in such low esteem that when the Old Testament was published in Dhimotiki for the first time in 1903, riots broke out all over the country [Peter Trudgill, Socio-linguistics, page 115+].
    In countries where two or more languages coexist, confusion often arises. In Belgium, many towns have two quite separate names, one recognized by French speakers, one by Dutch speakers, so that the French Tournai is the Dutch Doornik, while the Dutch Luik is the French Liège. The French Mons is the Dutch Bergen, the Dutch Kortrijk is the French Courtrai, and the city that to all French-speaking people (and indeed most English-speaking people) is known as Bruges (and pronounced “broozsh”) is to the locals called Brugge and pronounced “broo-guh.” Although Brussels is officially bilingual, it is in fact a French-speaking island in a Flemish lake.
    Language is often an emotive issue in Belgium and has brought down many governments. Part of the problem is that there has been a reversal in the relative fortunes of the two main language groups. Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium, was long the economic powerhouse of the country, but with the decline of traditional heavy industries such as steel and coal, the economic base has moved north to the more populous, but previously backward, region of Flanders. During the period of the Walloon ascendancy, the Dutch dialect, Flemish, or Vlaams, was forbidden to be spoken in parliament, courts, and even in schools. This naturally caused lingering resentment among the Dutch-speaking majority.
    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