The greatest cultural and linguistic discrimination in history: the languages spoken in Europe and America
European nations can officially speak their own languages, Native American nations are discriminated against and have been seen (and forced to speak imposed exotic languages)
Part 1
Linguistic differentiation in Europe and the political recognition of local languages
In Europe, this evolution throughout history led to the formation of several hundred different languages or local dialects.
The expansion of some states (Greek-Macedonian and Roman Empires) in the so-called classical era (5th century BC to 6th century AD) and Greek-Byzantine gave rise to linguistic homogenization due to the imposition of certain strong languages on weaker ones.
In particular, Latin (in Western Europe and the western half of the Mediterranean Sea) and Greek (in the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea) expanded. In both cases the languages were imposed as written and bureaucratic-use languages, but the vernacular languages maintained their main features and mainly nourished the vocabulary of the dominant language).
From the fall of the Roman Empire of the West, in the fifth century, linguistic differentiation intensified. Thus, after several centuries of transformation, several languages influenced by Latin were generated in the former provinces. The Galician-Portuguese language, Spanish, Catalan, Asturian, Leonese and others were developed in the Iberian Peninsula. In the Italian peninsula and neighboring islands, the Tuscan language, Piedmontese, Lombard, Veneto, Sardinian, Corsican, Calabrian, Sicilian, etc. evolved. In the ancient transalpine galias, the Latinized local languages (in their vocabulary, although not necessarily in their grammar) derived in the Provencal, Occitan, French, Romansh, Walloon and other languages. In Dacia the Romanian emerged. In North Africa, several Afro-Romance languages were extinguished in the early medieval period and in the British Isles the British Romance language (extinguished in the early Middle Ages). In the Greco-speaking region the local differentiation was minor due to the longer duration of the Greco-Byzantine domination and the Ottoman invasion in Anatolia that imposed the Turkish languages replacing Greek in the main centers of the former Byzantine Empire.
In the European regions that did not experience Roman or Greco-Byzantine domination, families with different ethno-linguistic roots were developed (German-Scandinavian, Slavic, Finnish, Magyar, Albanian, Celtic and Vas-congada languages, among others).
At the beginning of the 20th century, about 150 different languages were spoken in Europe, including numerous dialect varieties. Among them there were about 60 languages with sufficient demographic volume and local predominance to transcend politically and culturally.
In fact, 41 languages became dominant official languages (national languages) in their respective states. The process of defense and officialization of national languages proved complex and it was necessary to resist the cultural and political domination of dominant (sometimes occupying) states. Some languages survived but did not become dominant official languages in the state in which they are found (eg Basque, Catalan, Breton, Welsh, Corsican, Sardinian, Sami, Tatar, Chechen).
Many of these states emerged as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This is the case of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Moldovan, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Armenian, Georgian and Azeri. Something similar happened as a result of the break-up of Yugoslavia that resulted in the establishment of independent states with their own national languages (Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Albanian languages of Kosovo, etc. ).
A different historic case is the evolution of languages in Russia. Both in European and Asian Russia there are a large number of local languages that continue to be spoken together with Russian. They will be considered in a different article (see Part 3).
In any case, after this long evolutionary history, the resulting ethno-linguistic geography in Europe is one of the most diverse in the world (see Tables 1 and 2).
The multiple historical episodes that marked European political evolution led to the formation of numerous national states that, in most cases, managed to preserve their own languages.
Because of this, many local languages, now recognized as national languages, have social prestige and state support, in particular educational and economic.
(follows in Part 2)
Author: Danilo Antón
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