Education problems

Communities migrating to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's school children. About 5 million South Asians residing in the UK speak dozens of different languages, and it is difficult to determine how many people speak each language alongside English. The majority of Black Britons speak English, as their ancestors in the West Indies and (to a lesser extent) Nigeria generally also spoke English as a first language, hence there are not large numbers of African or minor Caribbean language speakers. With more than 300,000 French-born people in the UK, plus the general popularity of the language, French is understood by 23% of the country's population. Also, Spanish is one of the fastest-growing languages spoken in London and other parts of the UK owing to the 400,000 -1 million-strong Latin American and Spanish population.

Multilingualism on any scale, though, brings with it problems for individuals and groups of individuals, especially those who are members of linguistic minorities. Unlike the members of the majority-language group, they have to acquire proficiency in at least two languages before they can function as full members of the national community. Perhaps the biggest problem they have to face is educational. In other cases the problem will not, perhaps, be too severe, because the two languages involved may not be particularly different Or it may be that the educational policy of the country concerned is reasonably sophisticated linguistically, and the children learn to read and write in and are taught through the medium of their native language in the initial stages of their schooling, with the majority language being introduced later on. This approach has been adopted in many parts of Wales and other places. In other cases the minority child may be faced with very considerable difficulty. It occurs where the two languages involved are not closely related and also, more importantly, where the educational policy of a particular nation-state is to discourage, or simply to ignore or not to encourage, minority languages. In some extreme cases the minority language may be forbidden or disapproved of in school, and children punished or actively discouraged from using it there. That was formerly true both of Welsh in Wales and Gaelic in Scotland - at one time a law was in force that actually made the speaking of Gaelic illegal.

Almost the same approach was for many years an official policy in the United States. Today a considerable provision is made for some minority groups, notably Spanish-speakers and Native American Indians, to be educated in their own language, and certain other steps have also been taken: public notices in New York City, for example, are posted in Spanish as well as English, to cater for the large Puerto Rican community now living there. However, even the larger, more rural linguistic minorities such as those consisting of speakers of French (in the north-east and in Louisiana) and Pennsylvania Dutch (a form of German) are rapidly declining in size. In 1970, the ten largest linguistic minorities in the US were as follows: Spanish – 7.9 million; German – 6.2; Italian – 4.0; French 2.6; Polish 2.3; Yidish – 1.5; Norwegain – 0.6; Swedish – 0.6; Slovak 0.5; Hungarian – 0.5. All in all, about 34 million Americans currently have a mother-tongue other than English.

The position of other European minority languages in education varies considerably. Those languages, like German, which are innately connected with the majority of speakers have a clear practical advantage over languages like Gaelic and Sami (Lapp) for which there is a scarcity of teaching materials and reading matter. Where the language is a defining characteristic of the minority ethnic group wanting independence, particularly where other (for example physical) characteristics are not significant (as in the case of Welsh), linguistic factors are likely to play an important role in any separatist movement they might undertake. This is partly in response to practical problems, such as education, but mainly a result of the fact that language acts as an important symbol of group consciousness and solidarity. The extent to which this is true is revealed in the part played by linguistic groupings in the development of new independent nations in Europe after the breakdown of the older, multilingual empires.

A rapid increase in the number of independent European nation-states in the past hundred years or so has therefore been paralleled by a rapid growth in the number of autonomous, national and official languages. During the nineteenth century the number rose from sixteen to thirty, and since that time has risen to over fifty. It is interesting to plot some of the stages of this development, particularly since the movement has not been entirely in one direction. During the Middle Ages, for example, some languages - like Provencal and Arabic - ceased to function (the latter in Europe alone) as standardised official languages, while others - like English and Norwegian - became submerged, only to reappear later.

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