Everywhere in the world the
right to speak one's mother language is violenced. 'When people think of
violence to human rights they think of torture or rape, but also the forbidding
of speaking one's mother language is a form of oppression. This is often
denied. And also the Netherlands is guilty of this form of oppression'.
Dorfman, professor at the Duke University in the United States, has been in The Hague for the last few days to be present as a judge at the first hearing on the violence of the right to have one's own language. The hearing was organised by the People's Communication Charter, the Institute for Social Studies en the Organisation of Local Broadcasting Companys. Five languages were discussed: the language of the Kurdish people, the creole, the berber's, the Spanish-speaking people of California and the SIGN LANGUAGE OF THE DEAF (my capital's).
Dorfman conciously points to the Netherlands. He wants to express that the violence of the right of having an own language is not a "far-from-my-bed-show". 'The Dutch government withholds the Morrocon youth which grows up here, the right of education in their mother language. This is mostly from unexperience. These Moroccon people are mostly berbers, but you teach them in Arab, because this is the official language of Morocco.'
The denying of the particular language is one of the important causes of the problems with the Moroccon youth, as Dorfman states. 'Imagine thousands of Dutch young people moving to China and having education there in Chinese and German. What would this young people do? Revolt, of course.'
Dorfman sees this happening in California too. Lately there has been installed a rule that children no longer receive a bilingual education at school. Most of them are Spanish-speaking and have to be soaked totally in the English language at school. The idea is that this improves results in their carreers.
'I think this to be a dangerous development. It implements that their own language is thougth to be inferior. It's my opinion that such a rule arises from fear. Fear to lose one's identity'.
According to Dorfman the American people injure themselves with this acting. 'In a hundred years there will be spoken Spanish and English in Latin America. In the U.S.A. they only will be speaking English by then. This has been happening through the ages with al empires; the Roman, the Greeks, and so forth.'
According to the end-statement which Dorfman and his four colleague-judges deposed, every day someone in the world stops with speaking his or her's mother language. Of the thousands of languages in the whole world 90 percent is treated with dying out.
'Compared to a hundred years ago we are now more alert to the existence of the many difference languages. But because of the globalising this number of languages increases rapidly.
Dorfman states that with the disappearing of these languages also a lot of knowledge on the history of the earth disappears. 'The Dutch language has knowledge about the water, in the Amazone-area the words include knowledge of the rainforests. When you destroy this languages, you destroy a lot of wisdom.' <
From "Volkskrant" 5-4-99
Translation: Corrie Tijsseling