There are, of course, other models of languages coexisting, with varying levels of amity. The Flemish-French divide in Belgium has not exploded in tumult but has nevertheless left the country in a state of institutional paralysis. French thrives in Quebec, supported by some extremely assertive language legislation, but the threats of secession in the province are a persistent nuisance. And in India, whose constitution recognizes twenty-two languages, the ill-starred attempt in the nineteen-sixties to make Hindi the sole language of the union foundered in the face of violent resistance from speakers of southern languages such as Tamil, leaving the country with a “three-language formula” governing its school system.
The Indian case speaks to both the possibility of a genuinely multilingual society and its risks. Linguistic diversity is not a good acquired at no expense to the societies that have chosen it (or been forced to choose it) over homogeneity. Indian multilingualism, no less than French or Italian homogeneity, is a ledger with its own column of costs—communal tensions, constant incomprehension—to be weighed against its undoubted benefits.
If India has managed to avoid a single national language, there has been a considerable amount of linguistic consolidation within language groups: what’s called Hindi is really a bureaucratic attempt to unify a quite disparate group of languages and dialects spoken across the north. Tamil itself is no less a political construction, with public discourse and education carried out in a self-consciously archaic form of the language only half-intelligible to many speakers of its multifarious vernaculars. (My own first language, notionally a dialect of Tamil, takes a good deal of its vocabulary from Malayalam; my attempts to speak the standard forms of both languages nearly always occasion laughter.)
Not even those linguistic underdogs Kurdish and Ukrainian are exceptions to this pattern. In Syria and Turkey, the standard form of Kurdish is Kurmanji, written in Latin script; in Iran and Iraq, the standard form of Kurdish is Sorani, written in an Arabic-based script. Both standardizations have tended to push aside smaller, related tongues such as Gorani, which had been a literary language in its own right, and Zazaki, whose classification as a variant of Kurdish or as a separate northwest-Iranian language remains contested. Ukrainian, meanwhile, was built on the prestige of the Poltava-Kyiv tongue of the Middle Dnipro region; Rusyn, which enjoys protected minority-language status in Slovakia and Poland, is treated within Ukraine as a mere dialect. Kichwa trails a similar history. Spoken today by hundreds of thousands, it descends from the Quechuan language carried north by Inca imperial expansion. In southern Ecuador, the Cañari were conquered by Quechuan speakers, and their own language went extinct. We can condemn the perpetrators of linguicide without assuming that their victims must themselves be blameless innocents. It’s graveyards all the way down.
What would a preservationist victory actually look like? It may look like contemporary Wales. Some six decades ago, the writer and politician Saunders Lewis was predicting that the Welsh language would be dead by the year 2000. Instead, it is now an official language of Wales, taught throughout the public-school system, broadcast on its own television channel, used in courts, in the national assembly, on road signs, and in public documents as a matter of routine. It is spoken, to a greater or lesser degree of fluency and often mixed with bits of English, by around a sixth of the population of Wales. The Welsh government hopes to see the number who speak it almost double, so that the language will have a million speakers by 2050.
