Linguistic Varieties and Multilingual Nations
Over half the world’s population is bilingual and many people are multilingual. They acquire a number of languages because they need them for different purpose in their everyday interactions. Kalala’s experience in Zaire, describe at the beginning of chapter 2, illustrated this. One language was his ethnic or tribal language, another was the language of his education, another served as a useful language of wider communication in particular contexts, such as the market-place, or with outsiders or tourist. In this chapter I will examine the labels and the criteria sociolinguistic use to distinguish between different varieties or codes in multilingual communities.
Example :
Mr. Patel is spice merchant who live in Bombay. When he gets up he talks to his wife and children in Kathiawari, their dialect of Gujerati. Every morning he goes to the local market where he uses Marathi to buy his vegetables, At the railway station he buys his ticket in to Bombay city using Hindustani, the working person’s lingua franca, He reads his Gujerati newspaper on the train, and when he gets to work he uses Kacchi, the language of the spice trade, all day. He knows enough English to enjoy an English cricket commentary on the radio, but he would find an English film difficult to follow. However, since the spice business is flourishing, his children go to an English-medium school, so he expect them to be more proficient in English than he is.
The fact that India is one of the most multilingual nations in the world is reflected in Mr Patel’s linguistic as the repertoire, just as the linguistic heterogeneity of Zaire was reflected in Kalala’s repertoire, With a population of over 700 million, Indians use hundreds of different languages- the exact number depends on what counts as distinct language, what is rather a dialect of another language. With this kind of linguistic diversity it is easy to understand the problems facing the country use the same language for internal administration and for official communications with other nations? Which language or language should be used by the government and the court? In order to assess the relative claim of different languages it is necessary to look at their status and the functions which they serve.
Sociolinguists have developed a number of ways of categorizing languages, according to their status and social functions. The distinction between a vernacular language and a standard language is a useful place to start.
Vernacular Language
The term vernacular generally refers to a language which has not been standardized and which doesn’t have official status. There are hundreds of vernacular languages, such as Buang in Papua. In a multilingual speech community , the many different ethnic or tribal languages used by different groups are referred as vernacular languages. Vernacular are usually the first language learned by people in multilingual communities, and they are often used for a relatively narrow range of informal functions.
The most basic refers to the fact that a vernacular is an uncodified or unstandardized variety. The seconds refer to the way it is acquired in the home as a first variety. The third is the fact that it is used for relatively circumscribed function.
Some have extended the term to refer any language which is not the official language of a country. An influential 1951 Unesco report, for instance, defined a vernacular language as the first language of a group socially or politically dominated by a group with a different language. So in countries such as the United States where English is the language of the dominant group, a language like Spanish is referred to as a chicano’s child vernacular. But Spanish would not be regarded as a vernacular language in spain, Uruguay, or chile where it is an official language.
The vernacular is the variety used for the communication in the home and with close friends. It is the language of solidarity between people from the same ethnic group. By extension the term has been used to refer in a monolingual community to the most informal and colloquial variety of language which may also have a standardized variety.
Finally the term vernacular is sometimes used to indicate that a language is used for everyday interaction, without implying that it is appropriate only in informal domains. Hebrew, for example, was a language of ritual and religion with no native speaker. It was no one’s parental tongue and was certainly and was certainly not considered a vernacular language. From being a language of ritual, Hebrew became a language of everyday communication-vernacular language.
Standard Language
Standard language is generally one which is written, and which has undergone some degree of regularization or codification (for example, in a grammar and a dictionary); it is recognized as a prestigious variety or code by a community. It is a very general definition, because it is exclude most of world’s four or five thousand languages. Only a minority of the world’s languages is written, and an even smaller minority is standardized in the sense of codified and accepted by the community as a suitable for formal function.
Standard language emerged ‘naturally’ in the fifteenth century from a variety of regional English dialect, largely because it is used by the Court and the influential merchants of London which is an economically powerful merchant class.
Codification is usually achieved through grammars and dictionaries which record, and sometimes prescribe, the standard forms of the language. And the dictionary writers generally take the usage of educated and socially prestigious members of community as their criterion.
The development of Standard English illustrates the three essential criteria which characterize a standard:
a. An influential or prestigious variety
b. Codified and stabilised
c. It serveH function
Standard language developed in similar way in many other European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, generally based on the dialect of political, economic and social centre of the country. For example, in Italy, Romania, there was a variety of dialect of the vernacular languages (which all derived from varieties of colloquial Latin) which served the L function of their communities, alongside classical Latin, the H function.
Standard dialect generally provides a very useful means of communications across areas of the dialect diversity. Standard English has served as a useful variety for communication between areas of dialect diversity, not only within Britain but also in countries where the British have had a colonial influence. But the degree of variation at least in the written standart variaties has not been great. And though countries like Australian and New Zealand make their own standard Englishes.
LINGUA FRANCA
A lingua franca is defined as a language which is used to habitually by people whose mother tongue are different on order to facilitate the communication between. A variety of other terms can be found which describe much the same phenomenon. Although English is not the language with the largest number of native or 'first' language speakers, it has become a lingua franca. A lingua franca can be defined as a language widely adopted for communication between two speakers whose native languages are different from each other's and where one or both speakers are using it as a 'second' languageThat is to say that a lingua franca refer to a trade language, a contact language, an international language (Wardaugh, 55-56).
A lingua franca is needed in many areas of the world populated by people speaking divergent languages. In such areas, where groups desire social or commercial communication one language is often used by common agreement.
The lingua franca may be spoken in the various ways. They are not only spoken differently in different place., but individual speakers varied widely in their ability to use the languages. English serves today as a lingua franca in many parts of the world: for some speakers it is a native language, for other second language, for still other foreign language. In the past time,Bahasa Melayu was used as a lingua franca in Indonesia archipelago. Banjarese language may be used as a lingua franca by its nonnative speakers in South Kalimantan; it may be used by wong jowo (Javanese People) when communicating with oreng madure (Madurese People) in one of the market in Banjarmasin, south Kalimantan.
Many people living in the European Union, for example, frequently operate in English as well as their own languages (where these are different), and the economic and cultural influence of the United States has led to increased English use in many areas of the globe. Like Latin in Europe in the Middle Ages, English seems to be one of the main languages of international communication, and even people who are not speakers of English often know words such as bank, chocolate, computer, hamburger, hospital, hot dog, hotel, piano, radio, restaurant, taxi, telephone, television, university and walktnan. Many of these words have themselves been borrowed by English from other languages of course {e.g. chocolate, hamburger, taxi, etc.), and speakers of Romance languages are likely to have a number of words in common with English. But there are many 'false friends' too, where similar sounding words actually mean something quite different, for example, Italian eventualmente (- in case) contrasts with English eventually (- in the end).
In the 1960s, a Catholic nun, Sister Dominic, was sent to Rome for meeting between nuns from different countries. She can’t speak Italian but good in French and English. One day, she lost her purse. A priest come to her and asked about the chronological to her. He come from Brazil and speaks Spanish and Portuguese. How did he explain the chronology to the police officer? He used Latin to communicate to Sister Dominic. At that time Latin was the still language of church service. Then, the priest translated into local Italian dialect about the chronology.
Pidgin
A pidgin is a language with no native speakers: it is no one’s first language but it is contact language. That is, it is the product of a multilingual situation in which those wish to communicate must find or improvise a simple code to enable them to do so.
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, A pidgin is a language with a reduced range of structure and use, with NO native speakers. It grows up among people who do not share a common language but who want to communicate with each other.
According to the Wikipedia, A pidgin or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
For example:
• Bahasa Melayu had been regarded as a pidgin, namely, a variety of language with no native speakers in Indonesian archipelago.
• West African Pidgin English is used extensively between several ethnic groups along the West African coast."
(David Crystal, English As a Global Language. Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Creole
A Creole is when a pidgin language is adopted by a community as its native tongue and children learn it as first language.
According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, a Creole is “a pidgin which has become the mother tongue of a community,” and therefore has native speakers.
Creole also means that a language that begins as a pidgin and eventually becomes a first language of a speech community through being learned by children.
For example:
Bahasa Melayu was adopted as Bahasa Persatuan (unifying language) called Bahasa Indonesia. After being adopted as Indonesian community, it has been learnt by Indonesian people as native language. At present, there are native speakers of the language.
