Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies
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Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853599637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 04/12/2007 |
| Series: | Multilingual Matters , #138 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Studying Minority Language Media
MIKE CORMACK
What is a minority language? The question is a more complex one than might at first be thought. Various related terms have been used to describe such languages – regional, lesser-used, non-state, subordinated, non-hegemonic. 'Indigenous' has also been used to cover a related but slightly different area. In this book 'minority language' is the preferred term. All the other terms have particular disadvantages. (For other discussions of this issue, see Grin, 2003: 20; Hourigan, 2003: 2). Despite its institutionalisation in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 'regional' is less than satisfactory since it makes no reference to what the problem for minority languages is – that they are dominated by a surrounding majority language. As François Grin notes, 'referring to a "region" stresses a geographical association, yet defuses a cultural, possibly more essentialist one' (Grin, 2003: 20) and is thus, in effect, a way of deflecting the argument away from linguistic rights. It is also unsatisfactory in that in many minority language communities, there are speakers – and indeed communities of speakers – of the language who live outside the traditional territories. Using 'regional' in relation to media, for example, might lead to media provision in specific areas, but not necessarily in cities containing speakers of the language who have moved away from the traditional areas. It clearly also does not apply to non-territorial languages such as Yiddish and Romany (as Grin notes) and the various varieties of sign language (as will be clear from Ladd's Chapter 13 in this book). Sometimes it has been a preferred term to avoid what are seen by some as the negative connotations of 'minority'.
'Lesser-used' makes no reference to the context of the language. Danish, an officially recognised language of the EU, has fewer speakers (6 million) than Catalan (10 million), but the former is the official language of a fully-fledged state, whereas the latter is not. The term has been institutionalised in the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL), but François Grin has argued that 'lesser-used' was adopted as a political compromise, 'chiefly in order to avoid the term "minority", which would have not been to the liking of member states that recognise no minorities, autochthonous or otherwise, among their citizens' (Grin, 2003: 20). Even EBLUL's own website uses other terms when it refers to the remit of its Member State Committees as representing 'the interests of the various regional or minority communities within their state'.
Sometimes 'non-state languages' has been preferred. This is closer to the mark, but still fails to be explicit about what the problem actually is – that the language in question is dominated by a much larger language community. It can also lead to confusion. Languages that are official in one state might be a minority language in another (such as Russian in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, or Arabic in France). As with 'regional' and 'lesser-used', it is a term largely used to avoid reference to minority communities. 'Subordinated' (as used by Grillo in opposition to 'dominant' languages, see Grillo, 1989) and 'non-hegemonic' are closer to indicating the problem, but here again the precise nature of the relationship between the minority community and the majority one is not made clear. Only the term 'minority' makes explicit what these languages have in common – that they are dominated politically and economically by numerically larger communities within a particular state. It is this that puts Catalan in the same category as Scottish Gaelic (with 58,000 speakers). The political element is made explicit by Monica Heller when she writes: 'The concept of a linguistic minority only makes sense today within an ideological framework of nationalism in which language is central to the construction of the nation' (Heller, 1999: 7). She goes on to note that 'linguistic minorities are created by nationalisms which exclude them' (Heller, 1999: 7). In other words, the concept of a linguistic minority is essentially a political one. If a language group with a small number of speakers was given the same linguistic rights as a large language group, then its status as a minority would be unimportant, and it is the nationalism (whether explicit or not) of the larger group that denies these rights. It is the majority group that makes a 'problem' of the minority. This relates to the notion of 'minoritisation' as the process – political and ideological – by which one community is constructed by another as a minority.
Sometimes, of course, many of these languages are grouped under the heading of 'endangered' languages. Here, however, the element of subjective assessment is very apparent. While few would argue that languages with fewer than 100,000 speakers are endangered, it is a much more controversial term when applied to larger communities, and, of course, some – taking a long-term view of the dominance of English – would see many majority, official, state languages as ultimately endangered.
Another term that has been used in this context is 'indigenous'. As noted below, Donald Browne used this as the central category in his book Electronic Media and Indigenous Peoples. He defended his use of the term pragmatically while noting its difficulties, and suggested a working definition: 'For my purposes, those who can establish that they have been in the area for the longest time, and continue to live there, would be the indigenous peoples of that area' (Browne, 1996: 4). This may make sense when looking at former colonial territories, such as Australia, Africa and the American continent, but in the European context, such a term is highly problematic. English, Spanish, French and Norwegian are just as indigenous as Irish, Basque, Breton and Sami. It makes little sense to get into arguments about which language was around before others in any particular area.
The Emergence of Minority Language Media Studies
The history of the media developments that have led to the emergence of this area of study are well covered by Browne's Chapter 7 in this book. Alongside these changes in the media has been a gradual increase in the official recognition and institutionalisation of minority languages. In the European context, 1982 saw the establishment by the European parliament of the EBLUL. Its website describes it as 'an independent democratically governed Non-Governmental Organisation working for languages and linguistic diversity'. In 1987 Mercator was established by the European Commission as a forum for the exchange of information and cooperation in relation to minority languages. Of its three parts, one is specifically devoted to media, and since 1995 has been publishing the Mercator Media Forum with the aim 'to promote discussion and the flow of information between those who work in the territorially-based non-state languages of the European Union in the field of media' (Thomas, 1995: 3). In 1996 the European Centre for Minority Issues was established. Such bodies have given invaluable support to minority language initiatives in Europe and have made sure that the question of minority languages remains firmly on the political agenda.
Alongside these, there is the recognition given by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992. This has tried to build minority languages into the structure of the 'New Europe'. The development of this Charter (and its full text) is given in Grin, 2003. Most relevant for the media is Article 11 (Grin, 2003: 214–215). There a comprehensive list of media provision is recommended. A minimum standard is established of at least one radio station, one television channel and one newspaper in the relevant language, with governments asked to either 'ensure' or 'facilitate' their setting up. However an escape clause is added, allowing a lower standard of just 'adequate provision' of programmes and the publication of newspaper articles, rather than a whole newspaper in the language. Not surprisingly for such a document, there is no attempt to define just exactly what all this means. If a newspaper is issued weekly is this adequate? Is there a minimum number of hours a day required to constitute a television channel? (For further discussion of these standards of provision, see Cormack, 2005: 112–113, and for discussion of the more general issue of media provision, see Moring's Chapter 2 in this book.) The Charter then goes on to protect cross-border broadcasting, important since many linguistic minorities have been split by state boundaries (this is most obvious in the cases of Basque and Catalan, both crossing the border between Spain and France). (For further discussion of the Charter, see Guyot's Chapter 3 in this book.) In 1996 the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (sometimes known as the Barcelona Declaration) reinforced this argument, deriving norms for media provision from the assertion of linguistic rights. More recently, the 2003 Conference on the Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media resulted in a set of Guidelines on the Use of Minority Languages in the Broadcast Media, which gives much more detailed consideration to this issue (the Guidelines, along with other papers from the conference, were published in 2005 in Mercator Media Forum 8, in an issue devoted to the Conference).
Another impetus to the study of minority languages has been the steadily growing body of academic writing in this area, marked most clearly by the publication of Joshua Fishman's Reversing Language Shift in 1991 and his follow-up of a decade later, Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? (the latter being a collection of essays by various writers but including important opening and closing essays by Fishman himself). His influential account of the 'Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale' (GIDS) as a means of measuring the degree of language shift, put the emphasis for language maintenance firmly on the lived experience in the local community (Fishman, 1991: 87–109; Fishman, 2001: 451–483). Fishman's work has stimulated much other writing in what has become a significant academic growth area, and this leads towards the more specific territory of this book – minority language media studies (despite Fishman's own scepticism about the media's role in language maintenance). Several publications during the 1990s established the groundwork for this, alongside a steadily increasing number of studies of media in specific minority language communities.
Although there had been earlier writings dealing with specific languages, the first major step towards developing the study of minority language media was taken with the publication in 1992 of the collection Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective (Riggins, 1992). Despite the fact that the title did not mention them, minority languages featured throughout this book, with essays ranging from media in Greenlandic to Aboriginal broadcasting in Australia, from Basque radio in France to Spanish language media in New York. Again and again in these essays, language emerges as a crucial factor in minority community media. However, perhaps the most significant contributions were the two generalising essays by the editor, Stephen H. Riggins, at the start ('The Media Imperative: Ethnic Minority Survival in the Age of Mass Communication') and at the end ('The Promise and Limits of Ethnic Minority Media'). In these he laid out some principles that began to identify the ground on which the study of minority language media could be built, even though this was not the declared aim of the book.
In the introduction he describes what he terms 'the media imperative': 'What better strategy could there be for ensuring minority survival than the development by minorities of their own media conveying their own point of view in their own language?' (Riggins, 1992: 3). But against this he notes that 'ethnic minority media may also unintentionally encourage the assimilation of their audiences to mainstream values', thus revealing the 'dual role' of ethnic media (Riggins, 1992: 4). He also describes five models of state support for ethnic minority media, which make clear the variety of reasons that a state may have for supporting a minority (and are useful to bear in mind when reading the historical account given in Browne's Chapter 7 in this book): the integrationist model (media designed to integrate the minority into the majority culture), the economic model (assimilating the minority by economic pressure), the divisive model (setting different minorities against each other), the pre-emptive model (preempting more radical media from within the minority community itself), and the proselytism model (assimilating the minority into the majority's values). These are important as a first attempt at a descriptive categorisation of minority media and work as well for minority languages as they do for other types of minority. They also show an awareness of the dangers of state support that European writers would do well to take to heart.
From Riggins' comments generally, five points can be extracted that indicate key elements in any study of minority language media, but that, at the same time, indicate key problems.
(1) The media imperative – This is the need that minorities have to express their own values and culture in the media.
(2) The limits of media power – 'It appears that the long-term effect of ethnic minority media is neither total assimilation nor total cultural preservation but some moderate degree of preservation that represents a compromise between these two extremes' (Riggins, 1992: 276). Importantly, he goes on to note that 'the actual impact of the media on ethnic minority survival remains problematic' (Riggins, 1992: 277).
(3) The political context – 'The crucial importance of the political context of ethnic minority media is evident in all the case studies presented here' (Riggins, 1992: 276). This point has been argued elsewhere for minority languages in general (May, 2001) and minority language media in particular (Cormack, 1998), and is noted in several of the chapters in this book, notably Chapter 3 by Guyot.
(4) Minority empowerment – This stresses differences, and, of course, while acknowledgement of difference may be what the minority community seeks, it may also be profoundly unsettling for the majority community, upsetting the myth of the homogeneous nature of the nation-state (this is most apparent in France, although it is also evident in reactions to developments in the 20th century in Spain and in the UK).
(5) Minority control of the media for the benefit of the community – Riggins notes that 'it is essential for minorities to have full control over the financing and administration of their own media' (Riggins, 1992: 285) and that 'minority media should be designed in response to the informational needs and preferences of the community' (Riggins, 1992: 286). These might seem very obvious points but they indicate an essential problem – if finance is coming from the majority community (inevitable given the cost of television in particular), how is overall power and control to be disentangled from this, while appropriate accountability is retained?
From all of this it will be clear that Riggins takes an unashamedly pragmatic view of minority media. He is not so much concerned with theoretical issues as with the practicalities of media production. In taking this approach, he is not alone. Minority language media studies are energised by two sources – on the one hand the practicalities of how the media can be used to support languages under threat, and on the other hand, the rather more academic view of minority language media as an intriguing example of the media's role in society. It is probably fair to say that the former is the underlying concern of most of those involved in minority language media studies, but the latter provides the link with more mainstream media studies.
(Continues…)
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