Language And Nationalism

Ed Miliband would, under a future Labour government, make it a stipulation that every Briton would have to speak English. He also would appear to want to stipulate that anyone who goes to live in Britain would have to speak English and that, to have a job which requires interaction with the public, staff would need to demonstrate proficiency in the English language. 

This may all seem like a sop to the right-wing, but it doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, especially where public-sector jobs are concerned. If you wish to create something of unified national identity, then language is as good a symbol as any for ensuring it.

Such language stipulation is not solely an issue for British politicians to have to consider. It is one, you may have noticed, that also taxes the minds of Spanish politicians. The Catalan-Castellano great bore aside, there have been thoughts about insisting that immigrants to Spain speak Spanish (as opposed to Catalan, though maybe they think differently on the matter in Catalan-speaking areas). The current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, once said that he would make it a stipulation, much as Miliband appears to want to where English is concerned.

Rajoy was coming from the issue from a non-EU angle (and, one suspects, a non-EU angle that nevertheless placed certain EU nationals, the likes of the British, the Germans and the French, in a different category to, for example, Bulgarians). There has never been any enactment as such, but, and regardless of where an immigrant comes from, an inability to speak the language will be an obstacle. This much is inevitable. In Spain, in Britain, wherever you care to mention.

Requiring immigrants to speak the native-tongue takes on the not always healthy glow of nationalism and the somewhat specious concept of citizenship, whether a formal application for citizenship is made or not. Speaking the language (Spanish) demonstrates a willingness to be a good citizen. Or in theory, it does. But what is meant by this? For politicians, it means the same as embracing culture, given that language and culture are indivisible, but this is highly questionable; immigrants retain their old cultures, to greater or lesser degrees, even when able to speak a new language perfectly well, and indeed Miliband is not suggesting that immigrants should abandon the cultures of their birth, which is very noble of him.

By the same token, not being able to speak the new language does not automatically mean that someone is a bad citizen. There are plenty of British people in Mallorca who speak Spanish hardly at all or not very well but who are perfectly decent citizens (or rather members of local society).

A demand that language should be acquired also takes no notice of practicality. Again, in theory, it is possible for anyone of more or less any age to learn a new language, but any language teacher or linguistics expert will tell you that language acquisition becomes harder the older the person is. It isn't just age and linguistic conditioning that are drawbacks to learning, there are also linguistic rules. For the Briton in Mallorca (or Spain), one who has never really understood English grammar, coming to terms with what appears a far more rule-based language is a mammoth task. There is only so much language that can be acquired through conversation. It needs real teaching in order to explain why, for example, Spanish has two overtly past tenses, why the present perfect doesn't necessarily observe the same rules as in English or why the subjunctives are as they are. Put any of this grammatical stuff in front of your average English-speaker, and he or she wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about.

Language is one of the great bastions of nationalism. This much is evident in the Catalan argument, among those both for and against. It isn't unreasonable to expect or at least hope that immigrants can acquire proficiency. Not unreasonable but not easy. And the logic of this is that, because it isn't easy, the proficiency won't be attained, and so the immigrant should be shown the door. Hence, language becomes an arbiter of entitlement and an enforcement. It also becomes a mark of having obtained a state of those two cultural impostors, assimilation and integration; impostors because neither can be adequately or satisfactorily defined.

Purely personally, I believe that language should be acquired to at least a reasonable level, which means to a far higher level than being able to order "dos cervezas". I suspect that there will be those resident in Mallorca, British with negligible language ability, nodding in agreement with Miliband. They would be the ones, therefore, who have not only not acquired much Spanish (or maybe they have), they would also be the ones who are still firmly rooted in Britain. Language? Culture? So long as they are someone else's problem.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.