question_answer 8)

'When a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison.' Can you think of examples in history where a conquered people had their language taken away from them or had a language imposed on them?  

Answer:

 During colonization, colonizers usually imposed their language on the colonized people, forbidding natives to speak their mother tongue. In some cases, colonial regimes systematically prohibited native languages. Many writers educated under colonization recount how students were demoted, humiliated, or even beaten for speaking their native language in colonial schools. (a) The Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons) over the course of six centuries, conquered the native Brythonic people of what is now England and south east Scotland and imposed their culture and language upon them. (b) When Puerto Rico became a possession of the United States, as a consequence of the Spanish-American War, its population was then almost entirely of Spanish and mixed Afro-Caribbean Spanish descent. Thus, they retained the Spanish language bequeathed to them as the mother tongue while the Americans imposed English as the co-official language. (c) Written with the Latin alphabet, Estonian is the language of the Estonian people and the official language of the country. The oldest known examples of written Estonian originate in 13th century chronicles. During the Soviet era, Russian was imposed upon Estonians as the language to be used for official purpose. (d) The conquests of territories by Napoleon led to an imposition of French language on the people of the conquered areas as the official language in all the territory. As the influence of French (and in the Channel Islands, English) spread among sectors of provincial populations, cultural movements arose to study and standardize the vernacular languages. (e) A language imposed 500 years ago on the indigenous people of Brazil by their conquerors has made a comeback in recent years. (f) As a literary language, Venetian was overshadowed by the Tuscan 'dialect' and by the French languages. After the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes; and when Italy was unified, in the 19th century, the Tuscan language was imposed as the national language of Italy. Since that time Venetian, deprived of any official status, has steadily lost ground to Italian. At present, virtually all its speakers are bilingual and use Venetian only in an informal context.