Is Linguistic Democracy Possible? English and Chinese at the Heart of the Subject

Zoubida Sebane (zsebane@yahoo.fr) and Mimouna Zitouni (zitouni_mouna@hotmail.fr)
Additional contact information
Zoubida Sebane: University of Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Oran 2
Mimouna Zitouni: University of Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Oran 2

No 14, Proceedings of the 8th International RAIS Conference, March 26-27, 2018 from Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract: Does linguistic democracy exist or is it only a lull? Linguists and politicians believe that it has never existed, not even in countries where political democracy is a tribute to preserve. They rather believe there are only dominating and dominated languages.The dominating languages are explained by the number of people who speak a language. Presently, the US and China are respectively illustrative examples of dominance and dominating languages in the world. English ranks first in the top ten world’s most important languages and Chinese is gaining supremacy over many other languages. The dominating languages are hegemonic that means their use covers indoor and offshore territories. The dominated languages therefore are considered second-class languages, they are disregarded. This linguistic attitude has always prevailed in the world. The transfer of a dominant language to other people is considered to be a demonstration of power, traditionally, military power but also, in the modern world, economic power, and aspects of the dominant culture are usually transferred implicitly. The power of a country explains the extension of its language. English, Spanish and Portuguese are the dominant languages of the Americas. In Africa, the languages of some of the colonizing powers like Great Britain, France and Portugal are more firmly entrenched than ever, as English is in several Asian countries. This study will concentrate on highlighting issues related to linguistic dominance which could help to clarify whether the winning of independence can lead to language recovery or not.

Keywords: Language; dominating; dominated; power; hegemony (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6 pages
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of the 8th International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences, March 26-27, 2018, pages 158-164

Downloads: (external link)
http://rais.education/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/014March.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smo:tpaper:014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Proceedings of the 8th International RAIS Conference, March 26-27, 2018 from Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eduard David (rais.education@email.com).