Language secessionism


Language secessionism is an attitude supporting the separation of a language variety from the language to which it has hitherto been considered to belong, in order to make this variety considered as a distinct language. This phenomenon was first analyzed by Catalan sociolinguistics but it can be ascertained in other parts of the world.

In Catalan and Occitan

Common characteristics

In the Occitano-Catalan language area, language secessionism is a quite recent phenomenon that has developed only since the 1970s. Language secessionism affects both Occitan and Catalan languages with the following common features:
In Catalan, there are three cases:
There are three cases in Occitan:
The national language of Pakistan and official languages in many parts of India, the Delhi dialect has become the basis of Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu. Grammatically, Hindi and Urdu are the same language, Hindustani, but they differ in their literary and academic vocabulary. Hindi tends to adopt Sanskrit words and purges literary words borrowed from Persian, while Urdu does the opposite. In essence, apart from their scripts, the lexicon is what distinguishes Urdu and Hindi. There are additional Indo-Aryan languages that are counted as Hindi but are not the same as Hindustani. They are considered Hindi languages but may not be close to the Delhi dialect.

In Romanian

The official standard language of Moldova is identical to Romanian. However, its official name in that country is "Moldovan" and Vasile Stati, a local linguist and politician, has asserted his opinion that Moldovan is a separate language in his book Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary.
During the Soviet era, the USSR authorities officially recognized and promoted Moldovans and Moldovan as a distinct ethnicity and language. A Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the Moldovan SSR to reinforce this claim. Since 1989 the official language switched to the Latin script and underwent the same language reforms as Romanian, but has retained its name, Moldovan.
Nowadays, the Cyrillic alphabet remains in official use only on the territories controlled by the breakaway authorities of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, where it is named "Moldovan", as opposed to the Latin script version used elsewhere, which the local authorities call "Romanian".

In Serbo-Croatian

has a strong structural unity, according to the vast majority of linguists who specialize in Slavic languages. However, the language is spoken by populations that have strong, different, national consciousnesses: Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs.
Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Serbo-Croatian has lost its unitary codification and its official unitary status. It is now divided into four official languages which follow separate codifications: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian.
The common Serbo-Croatian still exists in a linguistic point of view. It is a pluricentric language being cultivated through four voluntarily diverging normative varieties, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian, which are sometimes considered Ausbau languages. However, Ausbau languages must have different dialect basis, whereas standardized Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian have the same dialect basis.
On the contrary, the Serbo-Croatian kind of language secessionism is now a strongly consensual and institutional majority phenomenon. Still, this does not make it legitimate to say that such secessionism has led to "Ausbau languages" in the cases of Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian, because such diversion has not taken place:

In Galician-Portuguese

The Portuguese kingdom, a former southern county split from the Kingdom of Galicia and fief of the Kingdom of Leon, was created by Afonso I of Portugal in 1126 and expanded towards the Islamic south, like its neighbouring kingdoms. That part of Galicia, named Portugal, became independent while the northern part of the country remained under the Kingdom of León during the 12th century and early 13th century. Northern Galicia would later be ruled by the Kingdom of Castile, which would become the core and ethnic base for the future Spain; but the culture was the same on both sides of the political border. Galician-Portuguese culture attained great prestige during the Low Middle Ages. In the late 15th century, Castilian domination became harder, banishing their language in all official uses, including the church.
Galician-Portuguese survived diglossically for the following centuries among the peasant population, but it experienced a strong Spanish influence and had a different evolution. Meanwhile, the same language remained fully official in Portugal and was carried across the world by Portuguese explorers, soldiers and colonists.
During the 19th century a revival movement arose. This movement defended the Galician language, and created a provisional norm, with a Castilian orthography and many loanwords. When autonomy was granted, a norm and orthography for a Galician language was created. This norm is taught and used in schools and universities of Galicia. But most writers did not support the traditional Galician forms; some of them based in Spanish orthography even if they recognized the essential linguistic unity, saying that the priority was achieving political autonomy and being read by the population. Other writers wrote with a Portuguese-like orthography.
Reintegrationists claim that the official norm was imposed by the Spanish government, with the covert intent of severing Galician from Portuguese. But this idea is rejected by the Real Academia Galega, which supports the official norm.
Reintegrationist and Lusist groups are protesting against this so-called language secessionism, which they call Castrapism or Isolationism. Unlike in the case of Valencian Blaverism, isolationism has no impact in the scientific community of linguists, and it is supported for a small number of them but still has clear political support.
Galician-Portuguese linguistic unity until the 16th century seems to be consensus, as does both Galician and European Portuguese being closer to each other and to the more conservative Portuguese variants of Brazil and Africa in the 18th century than in the 19th century, and also closer in the 19th century than in the 20th century and now. In this period, while Galician for the most part lost vowel reduction, velarization of and nasal vowels, and some speech registers of it adhered to yeísmo, all making it phonologically closer to Spanish. For example, European Portuguese had splits that created two new vowel phonemes, one of them usually an allophone only in the case of vowel reduction and the other phonetically absent in any other variant. Some dialects had a merger of three of its oral diphthongs and another three of its nasal vowels, and together with Brazilian Portuguese absorbed more than 5000 loanwords from French as well as 1500 from English.
It seems that the debate for a greater integration among Portuguese-speaking countries had the result of a single writing standard, often shunned by some segments of Portuguese media and population but long waited and cheered by Brazilians despite occasional criticism to some aspects and that changed the spelling of between 0.5% and 1% of the words in both former varieties, with minor respect to major dialect phonological differences. The other debate, whether Galician should use the same standard of Portuguese, a standard with minor differences, a re-approximation of both through another Lusophone spelling agreement that would give particular regional differences such as that of Galician as well as major diverging dialects of Portuguese more room, or the present standard based on the Spanish orthography, still did not cast official attention of government authorities in any of the involved countries, even if Lusophone support is expected to be strong in any of the first three cases.
A point often held by minorities among both Reintegrationists/Lusists and Lusophonists is that Portuguese should have a more conservative and uniform international speech standard that at the same time respected minor phonological differences between its variants that would further strength Lusophone integration, but this is not especially welcomed by any party in Europe, much because as the adoption of the 1990 OA in 2009–2012 proved, the Portuguese are often very of the adoption of things seen as giving preference, even if minor, to Brazil.

In Tagalog

Republic Act No. 7104, approved on August 14, 1991, created the Commission on the Filipino Language, reporting directly to the President and tasked to undertake, coordinate and promote researches for the development, propagation and preservation of Filipino and other Philippine languages. On May 13, 1992, the commission issued Resolution 92-1, specifying that Filipino is the
Though the Commission on the Filipino Language recognizes that a lot of the vocabulary of Filipino is based on Tagalog, the latest definition given to the national language tries to evade the use of the term Tagalog.
According to some Filipinologists, the main reason that Filipino is distinct from Tagalog is that in Filipino, there is a presence of vocabulary coming from other Philippine languages, such as Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Ilocano. They also maintain that the term Tagalog is the language of the Katagalugan or the Tagalog Region and puristic in a sense. It lacks certain phonemes like /f/ and /v/, which makes it incapable of producing some indigenous proper nouns Ifugao and Ivatan. Curiously, proponents of language secessionism are unable to account for the glaring absence of long vowel, phonemic in Tausug, in Filipino phonology or for the absence of a schwa. Arguments for secessionism generally ignore the fact that the various languages of the Philippines have divergent phonologies.

In Chinese

Mandarin versus other dialects

Among Chinese speakers, Yue Chinese, Hokkien and other varieties of Chinese are often referred to as dialects, instead of languages, despite the fact that those varieties are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, spoken by the majority of Chinese. However, the languages are reportedly significantly more mutually intelligible in written form as all varieties continue to use the same set of Hanzi ; i.e. Yue and Mandarin differ primarily in tonal differences and different pronunciations of various sounds which would be largely negated in writing.

In Hokkien

In the Hokkien topolect , which is widely used in Fujian, Taiwan, and in the Chinese diaspora, it is debated that whether Taiwanese dialect should be separated from the Hokkien language as the Taiwanese language, although people from Fujian and Taiwan can communicate with each other despite some differences in vocabulary. Such debates may be associated with politics of Taiwan.
In Taiwan, there is a common perception that Hokkien preserves more archaic features from Classical Chinese than Mandarin, thus allowing poetry from the Tang dynasty to rhyme better. Amongst Hokkien nationalists in Taiwan, this perception is sometimes elevated into stronger claims about the identity of Hokkien and Mandarin. One common name for Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan, especially among elderly speakers, is, derived from a folk etymological reading of Hok-ló, Ho̍h-ló, or Hô-ló. The character reading is interpreted to be a reference to the Yellow River Map and the Lo Shu Square and taken as evidence that the ancestors of Hokkien-speaking people came from the Central Plain, and in preserving their identity over the centuries, Hokkien speakers have also better preserved their language. Some fringe scholars claim that modern Hokkien is a faithfully preserved archaic variety of Chinese once used in the imperial courts dating back as early as the Shang dynasty. Another claim based on folk etymology is that the word is based on the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese phrase. This is taken as evidence that Mandarin has been corrupted by foreign influence from Manchu, Mongolian, etc and is thus not fit to be the official language of a Chinese-speaking country. This is in contrast to more mainstream views that Taiwanese Hokkien, as a variety of Southern Min, is a descendant of Proto-Min, a language that split from late Old Chinese, and Mandarin descended from Middle Chinese, and that it is not meaningful to say that one modern language is older than another.