| Language and the State: Israel and Ireland |
Sue Wright
Institute for the Study of Language and Society, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK |
| A betting man in 1900 might have hesitated before wagering much on the probability that there would existby the mid-centurythe independent nation state of Israel, with Hebrew as its language for public life, or the independent nation state of ire, with Irish as an official language. Both projects would have seemed immensely unlikely in the context of the power of the British and Ottoman empires. It is against this background of the achievement of an ambitious political goal that the question of language revitalization in the two situations has to be studied. |
| The organising principles of nationalism are complex and much disputed.1 There is profound disagreement over the relative weight of the various factors at work. However, it is perhaps defensible to claim, that belief in common ancestry, possession of common traditions and history (actual or invented), residence on a common territory, participation in a common belief system and communication through a common language have each played a significant role in the formation of nations, and that these elements interact with each other in different ways to produce the specificity of the various nationalisms. In the two cases, Ireland and Israel, that we considered in this series of CILS seminars, and which are recorded here in this issue of the journal, there appear to be certain superficial similarities in the inspiration for the national movements. For powerful majorities in both Ireland and Palestine, the wish to be with members of their own religious group and to be governed by a state organised according to the principles of their own religion were powerful motivating forces. |
| Language was not, at first, a defining characteristic in either case. In the Israeli context, the new Jewish settlers in Palestine were multilingual immigrants from four continents living side by side with the autochthonous population, mainly Arabic speaking. No single language was the obvious choice as lingua franca for the settlers, although Yiddish was the language of the culturally dominant group, and Hebrew had sometimes been used as a lingua franca between Jews from different linguistic backgrounds (Glinert, 1991). However, as soon as the movement had the goal of establishing a Jewish nation state in Palestine, a means of communication within the group became a prime requirement. A common language is an essential in any exercise in group formation: there must be a 'community of communication' where a polity aims to represent a nation, and claims legitimacy through that representation. Clearly the idea of 'Israel' would need a medium both to realise the dream and then to cement the reality. Professor Spolsky's paper recounts how Hebrew came to be that medium. |
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