Powerless languages

How do you judge if a language is a powerless, weak or minority language? Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory had to demarcate languages into weak and strong. According to him, a language / literature could be weak if it was in the process of being established or if its position within a larger literary /linguistic framework was not central. For instance, many Indian tribal languages which are yet to get a script or got one recently, can be considered to be in this position. They are yet to produce confident literature in the written script and are so peripheral to mainstream Indian literature that they are practically invisible. Languages like these can be thought of as minority languages which find it difficult to survive the onslaught of more powerful languages in the globalized world.

However, as Cronin points out, the minority position is not permanent. “The concept of minority is the expression of a relation not of an essence. A language may be displaced from the public sphere and thus increasingly marginalized from use in various areas of life because of invasion, conquest or subjection by a more powerful group” (“Minority”, 170). Changing equations of power and prestige affect the position of a language also. The position of French in the world is an example. Till very recently, French was considered to be the language of the educated and the aristocratic – Tolstoy’s aristocrats in War and Peace speak French, not Russian. The growth and establishment of the British Empire ousted French, and English came to be the lingua franca of the commercial and political world. The position of English in the world today should not be attributed to the inherent superiority of the language, but to the power exercised by the Anglo-American world. If this equation changes, then English can be relegated to the status of a minority language, even without any change in the geographical territory where it is spoken as a first language.

Another feature of a minority language is that it is a language that is translated into, rather than translated from. Cronin quotes Albert Branchadell’s definition of the term ‘less translated-language’: “all those languages that are less often the source of translation in the international exchange of linguistic goods, regardless of the number of people using these languages” (“Minority”, 170). The problem with these languages is that they tend to translate more, which might eventually rid them of their individuality.