Another post? Yes. I have to rant about something – and ranting, as everyone who knows me will tell you, is what I do best. I’m the David Mitchell of the internet. Anyway, I feel a bit silly complaining about this to an audience mainly fromIreland, since the Irish language has been decimated there for similar reasons, but I won’t go into that since I’m not really competent to comment seeing as how I don’t live there.
So, the title may confuse you. You probably have never heard of the ECRML. It is the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. That explains it all, right? But seriously, the ECRML is there to do exactly what it sounds like: Protect regional and minority languages. It has a major flaw of concept though: The languages that need protecting aren’t decided by some independent EU committee or anything. They are decided by the countries themselves. Anyone see a flaw in this? Yep, exactly. The government of the country can deny linguistic groups the benefits they deserve on a whim.
So why do I make such a fuss about this? Because I am part of one of those linguistic minorities. The Ripuarian language, Ripuarian Franconian, Rhenish language or whatever term for it most strikes your fancy, was taught to me by late grandmother. It currently has only 900’000 estimated speakers, though that is a euphemistic estimate that includes people who speak German with a few Ripuarian loan words and can thus hardly be described as Ripuarian speakers. If we subtract, say, 300’000 such people from that figure, we end up with 600’000. As if that isn’t bad enough, a vast majority of those people are above the age of 60 years. In 20 years time, the language will probably have about 100’000 speakers left who, considering the breadth of dialects of Ripuarian and the large area throughout which it is spoken, will probably just stop speaking it in favour of German, or German mixed with Ripuarian slang.
You’ve probably guessed why I’m so annoyed at the ECRML now: The ECRML does not include Ripuarian. We have a moribund language, with self-proclaimed linguists (probably more accurately described as arrogant prescriptivists) trying to “save” it (in reality doing more harm than good), and yet the German government says “Nope. We don’t care. It’s not a language, it’s a dialect.” The issue with that is that there is no definition for a “dialect”. People can just call things dialects in order to denigrate them. The most reasonable way to distinguish between a dialect and a language – I find – is to look at mutual intelligibility, or, to put it simply, how well speakers of language A can understand language B.
In those terms, it’s been determined that Bahasa Indonesia is not a dialect of Malayalam, Dutch isn’t a dialect of German, Portuguese isn’t a dialect of Spanish and Czech isn’t a dialect of Polish. These language pairs all have relatively high rates of mutual intelligibility. I – and most others who have familiarised themselves with it – would judge that Ripuarian and German are no more mutually intelligible than Dutch and German. Yes, there are commonalities, as there are in all languages of one family, but they are linguistically distinct languages – you could not, as a German speaker, speak without major problems to people who only speak Ripuarian. On the other hand, Low German, which is recognised by the ECRML, is quite understandable to speakers of German (aka High German).
So what is my point? My point is that the ECRML is a joke. My point is that prescriptivist “linguists” (who, sadly, form the majority of linguists in Germany) deem Ripuarian dialectal, vernacular, or even “common” (yep, that’s not classist at all), and I’m bloody sick of it. I speak this language, it is what my ancestors spoke – hell, it’s what Charlemagne spoke, the man who unified Germany– and I think that some half-arsed attempt at language saving to shut up the activists just simply isn’t good enough. Academics look down on the language, the apathetic, frustratingly unsentimental people who live here look down on it and if the EU is going to do something to stop languages from dying, I’ve got one for them right bloody here.
I’m sorry, I know I care too much about language, and if I bored you, sorry, or if I made you laugh…good for you. I needed a good rant, and I hope there’s at least some of you who understand how tragic it is when something as defining and wonderful as a language is nearly dead, and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it.
Frederic Bayer, German Correspondent – 17/06/2012
revolutionpending 