(Bloomberg Opinion) — The late linguist Max Weinreich put it best. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” he said almost a century ago. The distinction, in other words, has less to do with linguistics and more with politics. This explains many conflicts past and present, including a controversy now raging in the Balkans.
This week Bulgaria, a member of the European Union, vetoed the start of formal accession negotiations to let its neighbor North Macedonia join the bloc. One of Sofia’s stated reasons is that Skopje refuses to acknowledge certain historical “truths,” including the view that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian and thus doesn’t deserve the formal status of an “EU language.”
That’s hard to swallow for the North Macedonians, who’ve already made other painful concessions to become an EU candidate. In 2018, they even changed their name to please Greece — which has a region also called Macedonia — by adding “North” to distinguish their small Slavic country.
Well, you might shrug, that’s why the Balkans gave us “Balkanization.” The region is a hodgepodge of tongues and ethnicities once tenuously held together by the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians. Ever since those empires declined and nationalism rose, the locals have been reviving, editing or inventing narratives about their languages, identities and histories for the purposes of nation-building.
But there’s nothing particularly Balkan about redefining languages as dialects and vice versa. Nations new and old, rising and falling, have been at it almost everywhere. In the jargon of social sciences, sometimes it suits the people in power to be “splitters,” emphasizing differences more than similarities. Other times, they’d rather be “lumpers,” declaring even quite different tongues to be just parts of one mother language.
These days, for example, it may be moot whether Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are bona fide languages or just forms of Scandinavian. (A humorous distinction I once heard is that Danish basically sounds like Norwegian spoken underwater.) But during the modern era, the three Nordic nations, once united in the Kalmar Union, wanted to form separate identities. So they became linguistic splitters.
The obverse case is that of Chinese, for example. If you disregard the common written characters, spoken “dialects” such as Cantonese or Hakka are all but incomprehensible to speakers of Mandarin or Sichuanese. To many linguists, this really makes them “languages.” But don’t mention that to a nationalistic lumper in Beijing. The ideology of China, from the Middle Kingdom’s dynasties to today’s Communist Party, is that its many diverse tongues are all forms of Chinese. And as Weinreich would note, China doesn’t just have a navy, but the biggest one in the world.
It’s not at all ordained that we must bicker about our tongues. Whenever politics and questions of identity become relaxed, controversies about dialects and languages tend to become irrelevant. Take Dutch, Frisian and Platt. They’re extremely similar, yet the Dutch are in the Netherlands, speakers of Platt are in Germany and the Frisians straddle the border — and all appear entirely unfussed.
Meanwhile German, or rather the “high” dialect that’s evolved as the standard since Martin Luther’s time, is shared by Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein, and is also considered an official language in Switzerland, Belgium and other countries. Some have navies, some don’t. And yet nobody is arguing about whether, say, Luxembourgish is a language or a dialect of German.
A similar linguistic truce once reigned in the former Yugoslavia, of which North Macedonia was a part. Bowing to political realities, Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes, Bosnians and Montenegrins agreed that they spoke the same South Slavic language, called Serbo-Croatian. Then the country dissolved and some of its groups went to war against one another. Now they insist they’re speaking separate tongues.
In a sense, language is similar to race. Scientifically, both concepts mean nothing concrete and evolve over time. And yet both have explosive political potential. The tragedy is that all too often they divide people for no good reason. So in the spirit of European integration and harmony — that’s the point of the EU after all — here’s a modest proposal to Sofia and Skopje: Please drop the quarreling and keep talking. After all, you understand each other.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He’s the author of “Hannibal and Me.”
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the NDP is caving to political pressure from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when it comes to their stance on the consumer carbon price.
Trudeau says he believes Jagmeet Singh and the NDP care about the environment, but it’s “increasingly obvious” that they have “no idea” what to do about climate change.
On Thursday, Singh said the NDP is working on a plan that wouldn’t put the burden of fighting climate change on the backs of workers, but wouldn’t say if that plan would include a consumer carbon price.
Singh’s noncommittal position comes as the NDP tries to frame itself as a credible alternative to the Conservatives in the next federal election.
Poilievre responded to that by releasing a video, pointing out that the NDP has voted time and again in favour of the Liberals’ carbon price.
British Columbia Premier David Eby also changed his tune on Thursday, promising that a re-elected NDP government would scrap the long-standing carbon tax and shift the burden to “big polluters,” if the federal government dropped its requirements.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
Simon Jolin-Barrette, minister responsible for consumer protection, has tabled a bill to force merchants to calculate tips based on the price before tax.
That means on a restaurant bill of $100, suggested tips would be calculated based on $100, not on $114.98 after provincial and federal sales taxes are added.
The bill would also increase the rebate offered to consumers when the price of an item at the cash register is higher than the shelf price, to $15 from $10.
And it would force grocery stores offering a discounted price for several items to clearly list the unit price as well.
Businesses would also have to indicate whether taxes will be added to the price of food products.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Quebec legislature member Youri Chassin has announced he’s leaving the Coalition Avenir Québec government to sit as an Independent.
He announced the decision shortly after writing an open letter criticizing Premier François Legault’s government for abandoning its principles of smaller government.
In the letter published in Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, Chassin accused the party of falling back on what he called the old formula of throwing money at problems instead of looking to do things differently.
Chassin says public services are more fragile than ever, despite rising spending that pushed the province to a record $11-billion deficit projected in the last budget.
He is the second CAQ member to leave the party in a little more than one week, after economy and energy minister Pierre Fitzgibbon announced Sept. 4 he would leave because he lost motivation to do his job.
Chassin says he has no intention of joining another party and will instead sit as an Independent until the end of his term.
He has represented the Saint-Jérôme riding since the CAQ rose to power in 2018, but has not served in cabinet.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
