Introduction: different worlds --- same issues? Cases of language emancipation in Norway and France

Abstract

The present issue has its main focus on the sociolinguistics of historical minority languages in Norway and France, completed by the more general perspective of Nordic and French overseas territories. From a theoretical point of view, the papers in this issue investigate sociolinguistic processes by which the societal situation of a language or dialect is improved in some way. The point of departure in this respect is the concept of language emancipation as defined and discussed in the first article of this issue by Anna-Riitta Lindgren.The topic of language emancipation has recently been discussed in the special issue entitled The many faces of language emancipation, number 209 of Inter- national Journal of the Sociology of Language (2011), edited by Leena Huss and John Shaun Nolan. The present volume of Sociolinguistic Studies continues to deal with this concept, this time focusing on two countries, Norway and France, reaching from the Arctic areas of northernmost Norway to Paris and to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean Sea. However, the aim of this volume is not to give a complete report from these countries, taking into account all sociolinguistic changes that can be called emancipatory. This volume presents a few varying cases from both countries.French has long been an international lingua franca placed high in international language hierarchies. Historically, it has also been one of the aims of French language policies to maintain and strengthen the high status of French internationally (Johansson, 2005). Norwegians usually view their country as a so- called small country, as in the name of a popular song, 'Mitt lille land' ('My little country'), that became especially popular in the aftermath of the Utoya terror attack in the summer of 2011. Whether we consider something 'small' or 'large' is of course dependent on the point of comparison. From a minority perspective, Norwegians and Norwegian society may not be small at all, but rather big, in contrast to minorities, which appear very small in comparison.France and Norway are known to be two very different European states as far as their language policies are concerned. In France, there is a longer history of centrally directed language policies than in any Nordic country, especially since the Revolution of 1789-1799 (Johansson, 2005; Ammon, 2010). Language policies in Norway have been considered especially democratic because of the fact that linguistic variation in Norway has been tolerated and respected more than in the other Nordic countries or most other European countries - in this respect, Norway could, in Europe, be compared with Switzerland (Bull, 2009). Switzerland, however, has a much longer tradition of recognising multilingualism on an official level; this did not happen in Norway until the 1990s when Sami achieved the status of an official language (Bull, this volume).The building of nation states in the nineteenth century has been crucial for many minorities in Europe. There were two types of nationalism, called French or 'civic' and German or 'ethnic', and it is the German type that was typical for Norway as well as for the other Nordic countries. The French concept of the nation state is based on a common political will rather than on ethnic commonality, whereas German nationalism is based on a concept of a nation state formed from a single ethnic group. However, according to Ulrich Ammon, both civic and ethnic states have resulted in the same type of policy towards linguistic diversity: 'It is, however, typical of both the ethnic and the civic states that a single language or variety gains prevalence as the general tool of communication and symbol of the whole nation and the other languages or dialects become excluded from the prestigious domains (...)' (Ammon, 2010:211).In Norway, there were about a hundred years of nationalistic assimilation policy from around the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century (Eriksen and Niemi, 1981). …