The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.