Introduction

As Japan comes to assert itself in the multicultural international world, linguistically distinct communities in Japan are demanding and achieving recognition of their language rights. New found language freedoms increasingly require new language policies along the road to multilingualism. So as not to repeat the mistakes of others faced with similar problems, we in Japan might look to various multilingual experiences around the world for guidance. Even when the experiments cannot be exactly replicated elsewhere, the success of such programs may encourage policy-makers, as well as the people of the various language communities of Japan, to work toward the goal of fostering a multilingual, multicultural Japan.

The world is a treasure of multilingual diversity, and we cannot hope to represent such diversity in the space of this short article. Instead, we will present four aspects of multilingualism in Belize, Guatemala, Italy, and Finland, which have particular relevance to situations here in Japan. Learning from these international precedents, Japan may cherish its Ainu and Ryûkyû heritage languages, its dialectal diversity, and its burgeoning foreign language communities. Cosmopolitanism is quickly replacing xenophobia throughout Japan, and one must be optimistic that the earlier fear and intolerance of minority languages will eventually be supplanted by multilingual sophistication.

The myth of confusion

Sometimes, the claim is made that multilingualism contributes to inefficiency and confusion and that, conversely, having a single language eliminates the need for translation and the terrible duplication of work that this entails. From a certain abstract logical view, this may be true; however, the facts are that the world is unlikely to become monolingual any time soon, and a goal of monolingualism is of questionable merit. The facts of the world's multilingualism are clear: over 4,000 languages are used daily in the 175 member states of the United Nations. A pragmatic thinker realizes that multilingual people are less likely to need translations. Moreover, when we leave our armchair and look at reality, we see again and again that multilingualism results in neither inefficiency nor confusion. Switzerland, with three proclaimed official languages and an additional proclaimed national language, is often cited as a model of efficiency. Furthermore, a community need not be wealthy and industrialized to support multilingualism. Let us consider the example of Belize.

Central American polyglots

Belize, a country where I have conducted research, has a population roughly the size of Iceland's but can boast at least ten large mother-tongue populations. The sign at the wharf welcoming visitors to Punta Gorda, the government seat for the southernmost administrative district, lists seven languages commonly spoken in that city alone. Commerce is conducted in whatever language is understood by the merchant and the customer, and often the two parties can speak two different languages because each understands both. Within the municipal government hall of Punta Gorda, I have witnessed the use of four languages: English, Q'eqchi', Belizean Creole (which is a variant of Western Caribean Creole English), and Spanish. In fact, the mayor himself participated actively in conversations involving all of four languages. Although Belize lacks the economic resources necessary for a corps of government translators, there prevails a coöperative spirit which enables the people of Punta Gorda to both respect the rights and meet the needs of its various language groups. Also in Belize City, the nation's capital, where I was able to observe various government ministries at work, multilingualism is seen to enhance the efficiency and pleasantness of interpersonal transactions.

To answer another fear, we need only look to the United States for evidence that multilingualism will not condemn a community to economic impotence. More than ten percent of the U.S. population speaks a native language other than English; in the three wealthiest states, California, New York, and Texas, more than one fourth of the population speaks a native language other than English. In addition to Apache, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Choctaw, Cree, Eskimo, Sioux, Muskogee, Navaho, Ojibwa, Zuni, and other American languages, the U.S. is home to speakers of Arabic, Amharic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Plautdietsch, Romani, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tamil, Urdu, Vietnamese, and other Old World languages. Besides the U.S., we find multilingual populations in the other G-Seven countries as well. Canada is even more multilingual than the United States.

The Maya, Guatemala's heritage people

Guatemala is a country which owes much of its international reputation to an indigenous group which is not in the mainstream of the modern market economy. The Maya are not only a source of national pride, but they rank with coffee as Guatemala's most distinguishing feature internationally.

Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica and the subjugation of the Maya progressed rapidly in the sixteenth century. Fortunately, the petitions of Fra Bartolomeo de las Casas and others prevented the outright enslavement of the Maya. Nevertheless, in areas under effective Spanish control, the Maya often became serfs, bound to the land and obliged to provide seasonal labor. On exception, as in the Verapaz area of Guatemala, the Maya lands were placed under the protection of the Spanish sovereign as reservation lands, and here the Maya enjoyed an independent position. Such royal protection of the Maya in the Vera Paz was lost when Guatemala, as part of the Central American confederation, proclaimed its independence from Spain in 1821. For some time, the Central American Republic and later the Republic of Guatemala continued to respect Mayan independence in the Vera Paz, and they even abolished the practice of tribute payment for native people generally; nevertheless, pressure from non-Mayan commercial and private interests eventually led to the seizure of Mayan lands and the exaction of Mayan labor.

Despite the numerical superiority of the Maya, the hispanic population was well entrenched and often powerful enough to thwart treaties and other guarantees of Maya rights and freedoms. Even as late as 1880, previous treaties were abrogated in order to develop coffee plantations in the Alta Verapaz and to force the Maya living there into plantation labor (King1974: 30). In justification, it was argued that forced labor was necessary because wages alone could not attract the Maya to pick and process coffee; because the Maya were reluctant, in the words of one official, "to participate in the national economy".

The Ainu, part of Japan's heritage

The Ainu, though small in number compared to the Maya, are an important element in Japanese culture. When we think of Hokkaido, the history of Ezo and our Ainu heritage spring quickly to mind. Ainu representatives are known to have visited T'ang China in the year 659 (Komai 1964). Long before it became famous internationally for Honda and Sony, Japan was known as the home of the Ainu. We may compare, for example, popular photo essays on Japan in National Geographic (McDowell and Ward 1974; Hilgerand Miyazawa 1967), which featured the Ainu long before industrial technology. In fact, the Japanese archipelago's reputation as a leading center of world technology can be traced to much earlier times, for Japan's early Jomon people are among the world's first to develop pottery. A few researchers claim, controversially, that the Ainu are the modern descendants of these Jomon potters (Brace et al. 1989). Since the earliest days of Jomon and Yayoi cultures, Japanese history and prehistory is replete with Ainu elements. Though at odds with popular tradition, Ainu ancestors are even speculated to have been warriors in Yoritomo Minamoto's 1180 army, contributing to the subsequent flowering of the samurai class (Brace et al. 1989: 107-108).

As with the Maya in Guatemala, reversals of policy vis-à-vis indigenous people's rights are recorded for Japan as well. Japanese expansion and Ainu retreat in Honshu was followed by a period of stabilty during which the territorial integrity of the Hokkaido Ainu was respected. Even after the Matsumae clan established itself on the Woshima peninsula at the southwestern tip of Hokkaido, the common Japanese were forbidden to reside outside this Japanese settlement area, i.e., within Ainu territory proper. For the next two hundred years, "the Ainu continued to retain their independence" (Watanabe 1964: 85), and eighteenth century reports convey the sense of Ezo as a foreign land (DeChicchis 1995). In 1799, however,the Tokugawa Shogunate asserted its sovereignty over Hokkaido. Over the years, the Matsumae developed the "basho" system, which came to treat the Ainu as serfs, confined to their home districts and obliged to provide periodic labor for Japanese business. Eventually, in 1868, under the new Meiji government, the Japanese government confiscated all Ainu territory.

In Guatemala, Spanish is the language of government, and it is also the language used in the cities when conducting most commercial cash transactions. As in Japan, English is an auxiliary language used in multinational commercial and scientific discourse. Neither of these languages is a mother tongue for half of the people of Guatemala, most of whom speak one of several Mayan languages. Since 1986, the Guatemalan Ministry of Education has been experimenting with the use of four Mayan languages as media of instruction, namely, K'iche', Kaqchiqel, Mam, and Q'eqchi'. Results to date have been so encouraging that four additional Mayan languages are now being taught and the coverage of the program will be increased from 400 to 1300 schools over the next four years. Students in the bilingual programs become literate faster, they attend school more regularly, and they have an easier time learning Spanish. Most importantly, these students are less likely to feel alienated from their school and other government institutions; their self esteem is enhanced, and they are able to work with their hispanic countrymen for the betterment of their world.

Financially, Japan does not lack resources to meet the needs of its Ainu citizenry, a population much smaller than the indigenous population which economically poor Guatemala's hispanic government must accommodate. So, what can be done? Japan should, first, confirm the Ainu right to native language instruction in school; second, fund bilingual education where requested by the local community; and third, assist the current Ainu language revival by supporting cultural festivals and language-learning centers in order to help arrest feelings of alienation among the Ainu. Pending Ainu rights litigation now suggests that alienating this well educated and organized indigenous group may incur greater costs than coöperating in the preservation of this important linguistic heritage.

Italian "koku-go" (national language)

Japan's national language, or koku-go, is a recent development; so too is the national language of Italy. For centuries, the Italian peninsula, like the Japanese archipelago, was a patchwork of socially isolated communities. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a compromise between Tuscan and Roman dialects, with some concessions to Piemontese, Emigliano, and other dialects, had become the common language used by newspapers and by authors with a national audience. During the years of fascism, this new national standard was effectively propagated through schools and broadcast over the radio.

Like Japan, the Italian nation-state did not finally emerge from its long feudal history until the nineteenth century. During its centuries of feudal organization, the popes enjoyed varying degrees of power at different times and in different parts of the Italian peninsula, similar to the situation of the emperors and shoguns of the Japanese archipelago. Throughout this period of Italian history, local government had the greatest, most immediate,and near exclusive impact on the lives of ordinary people. Local customs and lifestyles were stable and regional and local language varieties developedand flourished. Even during periods of instability, displaced people tended to cluster in linguistically homogeneous colonies (Migliorini 1960: 78,155, passim), rather than dispersing throughout the Italian peninsula, and this was also true of Japan's internal displacements and immigrations. Moreover, in both Italy and Japan, the linguistic diversity of the regions and local areas was sufficient to distinguish special classes of people who cultivated practical linguistic talents, most notably the troubadours in Italy and the samurai in Japan. The troubadours, famous as poets and musicians, were often polyglots as well. The samurai were practiced, not only in the martial and leisure arts, but also in the translation of Japanese languages and dialects.

From the birth of early Italian, as represented in certain legal documents known as the placiti cassinesi at the end of the tenth century, until the search for a national standard during the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, Italian dialects and sociolects have been shaped by diverse historical and foreign influences. The vernacular models attested for Italy throughout this long period contain more than traces of pan mediterranean and transalpine influence (Migliorini 1960). Literate Italians typically knew Latin, French, and Provençal; and non-Romance languages too. The documentary record of Italy attests developmental stages from Latin to modern standard Italian; moreover, it is unclear what the status of the writing (qua Latin or Italian) was in the mind of the author at the time of composition. In Japan, a similar question concerns the man'yôgana, which is the Chinese character script of the eighth century Japanese anthology called the Man'yôshû. It is sometimes debated whether the language represented by this script is Old Korean or Japanese (Lee 1989 is especially controversial; see also Tak 1991), and the authors of the poems may actually have known both. Similarly, we do not detect a conscious distinction between Latin and Old Italian in the writing of Italians before the placiti cassinesi.

From 1861 to 1870, at the same time as the Meiji Restoration, modern Italy was created. The new state encompassed five great dialect regions, each with a developed literature and a good historical and commercial claim to national predominance. For half a century, Italian letterati and illuminati shaped a new language of national scope, relying heavily on both literary and journalistic publications to disseminate the new standards. Although these experts often disagreed, a consensual norm had stabilized by the beginning of the Fascist era.

Not everyone was happy with the new national standard, and in the more liberal era following World War Two there were a number of attempts to institutionalize certain dialects as media of instruction in certain regions, Typically, these have been the dialects which differ extensively from the national norm, but even Romans have argued at times in favor of Romanesco. Still, when pushed to a vote, Italians have nearly always and universally affirmed their preference for the national standard as the language of the schools. Twentieth-century interurban migration, spurred by industrial and commercial needs, underscored the utility of a pan-peninsular lingua franca. Like the Japanese, Italians embraced the modern Italian language as an important feature of their national identity; a feature which is perhaps, as in Japan, rivaled only by cuisine.

Local dialects continue to be used extensively in homes, town markets, and local political discussions. Unlike Japan, there was no movement to discredit the regional dialects; there was no attempt to replace regional with national usage. Standard Italian is regarded as a language of inter-regional, and even international, communication, while the regionally particular varieties are reserved for sincere, homey, and down-to-earth talk. Similar functions have been noted for the regional dialects of Japan (e.g., Miller1977: 75). To be sure, the promotion of koku-go has had an affect on Japan's dialectal varieties, but these dialects continue to be used, increasingly being heard on radio and television too. As Japan develops its language policies, the liberalism of the Italian experience may serve as a model for the tolerance of dialectal diversity.

Special island varieties

Two regional speech varieties found in Italy figured little in the shaping of standard Italian. Both Sardinian and Sicilian, despite clear linguistic affinities, were considered to be too foreign. These languages often fail the test of mutual comprehensibility with peninsular speech, and the physical separation of Sardinia and Sicily reinforces the linguistic differences. Even today, Sardinian and Sicilian are often said to be distinct lingue,while regional varieties of the peninsula are typically termed dialetti.

Japan's Ryûkyû language is normally unintelligible to the speaker of Tokyo Japanese, even though the languages are genetically related (Shibatani 1990: 191). Like Sardinia and Sicily, Okinawa has its own distinguished history, but it was incorporated into Japan's prefectural system in 1879 when King Shô Tai was brought to Tokyo as a prisoner of the Meiji court (Mason and Caiger 1972: 221). The Ryûkyû Islands remain home to several dialects which fail tests of mutual intelligibility. Nearly one million people speak "Ryûkyûan languages" such as Amami-Oshima, Kikai, Kunigami, Miyako, Okinawan, Yaeyama, Yonaguni, and Yoron (Grimes 1988: 540). My own research on Yaeyama varieties suggests that Ryûkyû language attrition is more advanced in parts of Yaeyama than it is on Okinawa, which has a much larger, culturally richer population. Yet even when Japanese is spoken, Yaeyama variants are observed which function as sociolinguistic badges of island solidarity in the general manner described by Labov (1972). The entire area is an instructive example of language variety worthy of continued research.

Suomi: good neighbor policy

On the other side of Eurasia from Japan, another modern people dedicated to world peace owe their early cultural advancement to a foreign people. The Finns can be grateful to the Swedes. Swedish-speaking clerics began the colonization of western Finland in the twelfth century. Southern Finland became a territory of the Swedish crown in 1323, and Sweden became the source of advanced technology and culture thereafter.

For centuries, Swedish was the official language of Finland, which was part of the Swedish monarchy until its cession to Russia by treaty in 1809. A Czarist bureaucracy governed Finland from 1809 to 1863. Even though this bureaucracy was comprised primarily of Finns, the official language of the Russian grand duchy continued to be Swedish. Official recognition of Finnish came by Czarist decree in 1863, whence Finnish could be used in courts of law Later, in 1902, Finnish was placed on a parr with Swedish as an equally official language. Finland's declaration of independence at the end of 1917 was followed by civil war; the resulting 1919 constitution declared both Finnish and Swedish as the national languages. The great majority of Finland's inhabitants spoke Finnish, and there was widespread resentment of the economically elite Swedish-speaking population near Helsinki. These factors contributed to an erosion of Swedish usage. Eventually, in 1947 and in 1961, language legislation was enacted which recognizes and protects certain linguistic rights of the Swedish-speaking minority. Today, Finland has two declared national languages. In fact, the popular name of the country, Suomi Finland, is a bilingual amalgam of its common Finnish and Swedish names, a semantic redundancy like Sahara Desert.

Since only six percent of Finland's population is native Swedish speaking, one may wonder whether official status for Swedish is justified. Historically, Swedish-speaking people have lived in southwestern Finland from early times, predating their administrative unification with Tavastia, Karelia, and other areas of Fennic habitation. More recently, in the enlightened era following World War One, the Åland Islands, populated by native Swedish-speakers, were granted limited autonomy under Finish sovereignty. In Åland, Finland permits a certain amount of discrimination against Finnish speakers which would not be tolerated on the continent.

Kyushu, the western most of the four main islands of Japan, was home to Korean artisans and craftsmen since Yayoi times. (The consequences of Korean influence in the history of Japanese is discussed in Maher 1991.) Today, over half a million Korean speakers live in Japan, predominating in certain areas of Osaka, for example. Unlike the Finnish case, the sanctioning of a foreign language haven for this large Korean minority, a legacy of the profits Japan enjoyed from its imperial history, seems to have never been considered. Descendants of these Japanese Koreans, who have been denied Japanese citizenship, have been denied access to Korean language education, and now many of them can not speak Korean. Finland's Åland is also reminiscent of Japan's Ogasawara, formerly known as the Bonin Islands and also as Arzobispo, which were remote uninhabited islands until 1830 when two U.S. citizens, together with a Genovese, an Englishman, a Dansker, and some twenty-five Hawaiians, established the first known settlement (Cholmindeley 1915). In 1853, U.S. envoy Commodore Perry recognized these settlers as the legitimate government of the Bonin Islands. Even so, Japan declared its sovereignty and began colonization of the islands in 1862. During World War Two, nearly 7000 inhabitants were evacuated to the Japanese main island of Honshu, and only 135 Bonin Islanders were permitted to return to their home in 1946, then under U.S. administration. Two decades later, the English-speaking community was flourishing when Japan resumed control of Ogasawara (Sampson 1968); however, no attempt has been made to protect this linguistic heritage, and English usage on Ogasawara has since declined dramatically. In the case of Korean spoken on Honshu, and in the case of English spoken in Ogasawara, Japan has systematically pursued policies which encourage the eradication of these minority language communities. On the other hand, Finland recognizes the legitimacy of the linguistic legacy of its small Swedish minority. To their credit, the Finns do not force the Swedish speakers to speak Finnish any more than they force Finnish speakers to speak Swedish.

In Finland, many have questioned the wisdom of publishing all government documents in two languages and of requiring all children to study both languages in school. For a small country, the added expense of these and other bilingual programs is significant. Although the importance of Swedish as a learnèd language with an important literature was clear in earlier times, the twentieth century has witnessed the rise of English and Russian as languages of greater international and regional utility. Nevertheless, Swedish provides an important cultural link with the Nordic countries, with which Finland is in close economic coöperation. Moreover, the Fennic majority, by learning Swedish in a reinforcing bilingual environment, acquire a springboard into the other Indo-European languages spoken throughout Europe. English and German are learned easily, and French and Italian become less foreign than they might be to the unprepared Fenno-Ugric ear. The great investment in bilingual education and foreign language training continues to yield great profits in both economic and cultural terms.

History cannot be changed, and Finland's language policy represents an effort to nurture the multilingual situation which history bequeathed. Japan contains similar foreign-language-speaking populations, the Koreans being one of the better known groups. Koreans in Japan continue to demand that the Japanese government treat them equitably, but discrimination continues. In formulating and defending its policies, the Japanese government betrays a short-term memory of history, for Japan owes a great debt to Koreans. When the Europeans arrived in the 16th century, they found the Japanese to be, in terms of material culture, quite advanced. The elements of cultural advancement in religion, science, and arts were unmistakably Chinese, and sometimes Indian, in origin; the couriers of new insights and new technologies had been the Japanese's western cousins, the people of the Korean Peninsula.

In addition to the Koreans, other foreign language communities exist in Japan, notably the Ryûkyû speakers, and the Chinese speakers. More recent arrivals include English, Hindi, Tamil, and Farsi speakers. Japan might look to Finland as a reminder that different language communities can co exist in mutual respect.

A cognitive treasure

There are over four thousand languages currently spoken in the world, and some people wonder whether or not we would be better off without most of them. Occasionally, certain shallow thinkers speculate that it might be possible to have all of the world's people speaking the same language; but a monolingual world would be a sad situation. What would become of all the knowledge in books written in other languages? What would happen to the knowledge now preserved in the folk tales and songs and jokes and proverbs of the world's languages? Imagine if English were adopted as the national language (i.e., the koku-go) of Japan, and of every other country in the world as well. Image that, as a result, Japanese were no longer to be spoken. Could we preserve Japanese knowledge by translating everything into English? Can any two translators agree on the proper translation of Genji Monogatori or of Heike Monogatori? Of course not. The idea of such a translation, and hence of a single world language, is absurd. A language is more than a vehicle for information transfer. A language represents a human perspective on reality; a cosmology.

Different languages represent the world differently because human experiences have been different at different times and in different places. Languages are our windows into reality, and to know only one language is to see the world through only one window. The Cholan subgroup of the Mayan language family contains the closest modern varieties of the language written by the ancient Maya. Nearly three centuries have passed since the ancient script could be read by anyone, and now the spoken languages are in danger of extinction. Mexico's Chontal speakers, all of whom are bilingual in Spanish, have forgotten a number of concepts of historical cultural importance; and the Chorti speakers of of Guatemala and Honduras are also forgetting their language in favor of Spanish (Fought 1985). In the face of disuse and attrition, it is fortunate that linguists have compiled technical descriptions of these languages, yet it is indeed unfortunate that many of these Cholan people can no longer understand the language of their ancestors. Will Japan forget the languages of its ancestors? Ainu and Ryûkyû provide windows into human linguistic prehistory, and these windows look out on the prehistory of Japanese language and culture as well.

A language is a cognitive treasure, well suited for framing our thoughts and planning our lives. Our language can serve as a bridge to the thoughts of our ancestors, and it can link us to others who share our linguistic ancestors. Languages, like gemstones, come in many different sizes, hues, lusters, and clarity; and the more we have, the richer we are.

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