Dear All,
You may find this interesting - another language casualty:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2247922,00.html
Abley writes brilliantly on this topic - see Spoken Here.
I particularly like the analogy of cultural destruction/bombing the Louvre, which echoes Castelao's
likening of the potential death of Galician to the destruction of the PĆ³rtico da Gloria. I also like
his references to minority language speakers needing to be bullish about their heritage, and the way
that this can feed back into linguistic militantism:
"How best to avoid that fate? For a minority language to flourish, its speakers need a sort of
bullheaded confidence. Such stubborn self-belief emerges from a sense of cultural power and feeds
back into it. The classic example is the astonishing rebirth of Hebrew a century ago in what would
become Israel. In our own time the Basques and the Catalans, the Welsh and the Maoris display a
similar faith."
Best wishes
Craig Patterson
Cardiff
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