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Review of “Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language” by Stephen May
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Many discussions of ethnicity begin with the struggle to define ‘it’. While I am certainly interested in defining (or delimiting) ethnicity, I am even more interested in what the definitional struggle in this day and age reveals, namely, that the social sciences as a whole still lack an intellectual tradition in connection with this topic. Social scientists and social theorists have neither reconstructed nor developed with respect to ethnicity (nor, indeed, with respect to language and ethnicity) either a sociology of the phenomenon per se or a sociology of knowledge concerning it, much less a synchronic view of the link between the two, in any major part of the world of social life and social thought. Thus, here we are, in the late twentieth century, with God only knows how few or how many seconds remaining to the entire human tragi-comedy on this planet, still fumbling along in the domain of ethnicity, as if it had just recently appeared and as if three millenia of pan-Mediterranean and European thought and experience in connection with it (to take only that corner of mankind with which most of us are most familiar) could be overlooked. Obviously that is not our attitude toward other societal forms and processes such as the family, urbanization, religion, technology, etc. For all of these we manifestly delight in the intellectual traditions surrounding them. I must conclude that our intellectual discomfort and superficiality with respect to ethnicity and our selective ignorance in this connection are themselves ethnicity-related phenomena, at least in part, phenomena which merit consideration if we are ultimately to understand several of the dimensions of this topic that we are still waiting to be revealed.
Whereas the biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, could say that the mind of the Creator showed ‘an inordinate fondness for beetles’, a social scientist might say that it showed an inordinate fondness for languages.1 There may have been 10,000–15,000 languages in prehistoric times, although today there are commonly said to be 6,000 or 6,500 and the number is decreasing fast. Linguists’ interest in language for its own sake leads them to deplore this decline and recommend preserving the most minor remaining languages. Moreover some governments support national languages, at times by discriminating explicitly against others. It will be urged here that these Protectionist efforts are undesirable. The likely benefits of the world adopting a lingua franca outweigh the likely costs.
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