Plurilingualism and Universalism

When we created the European Observatory for Plurilingualism in 2005, we had no idea that the issue of languages and plurilingualism could be at the heart of a political and philosophical debate absolutely fundamental for the present and future.

Our initial questioning was provoked by a very rapid phenomenon which marked our European linguistic space. On the one hand, it was the fact that within a few years English had established itself as the almost sole language of use within the European institutions and, on the other hand, the spectacular acceleration of the penetration of the French language by Anglicisms.

And these two questions were all the more intense as none of the founders of the OEP, who were fine linguists or had a good linguistic culture, were hostile to the English language or had any kind of defensive or purist position with regard to the French language.

Moreover, our natural critical position forbade us to give in to all the commonplaces surrounding the institutional and linguistic domination of English (easy, modern, efficient language, etc.).

The patient and methodical work of the British in the European Commission to reduce the share of French and German and to impose English as the only effective working language was crowned with success because of the accession in 2005 of 10 new members stemming from the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. There was absolutely nothing obvious about this development. It was of course contrary to the European Treaty, which advocates linguistic and cultural diversity, and to the Union's language regulation, Regulation No. 1 of October 6 1958 which lists the official languages and states in Article 4 that "Regulations and other texts of general impact be drawn up in the official languages", not only "published", but "written".

As regards the massive adoption of English terms in all the European languages, and particularly Italian, German and French, although there are no serious statistical studies on this subject, this movement corresponds roughly to the period of triumphant globalisation and the ideological domination of neoliberalism. It is unrelated to the affirmation of English as the first international language, far ahead of French, Spanish and Arabic.

The concept of plurilingualism

Faced with this pressure towards monolingualism, a concept was needed. This concept was borrowed from the work of the Council of Europe: it was "plurilingualism".¹

Plurilingualism differs from multilingualism in the fact that it assumes that the speaker speaks more than one language, at least two, at varying degrees of proficiency. The use of the term "multilingualism", with which it is often confused, is rather reserved for the collective level, where one can see, for example, in a same society people of different languages but each person being monolingual.

This is the first difference, but there is another fundamental difference, namely that the plurilingual speaker, precisely because of his or her plurilingualism, has a particular sensitivity to language. Whereas the monolingual person cannot communicate with a person of a different language without resorting to translation, the plurilingual individual is to some extent his or her own translator or interpreter. Once language ceases to be a tool for the most basic things in life, and one approaches the relationship to the world and to the other, language takes on its full dimension and plurilingualism loses its aspect of mental performance and becomes a source of personal and collective enrichment and emancipation.

The age-old role of translation

We know that the evolution of Humanity, the "arrow of time", marked by the seal of irreversibility, is not a continuous line towards progress, but is instead characterised by stagnation and frightening regressions. However, the entire history of humanity is to be found in languages, and consequently all languages carry within them a part of the universal.

And in this universalisation of languages, we always find translation. Whether we are in a multilingual or multilingual context, we will always find the strength of translation. For a multilingual society, translation is the only way to open up to the outside world.

We must assess the crucial importance of translation in the history of Humanity.

Thus, between 750 and 1000 AD, under the Abbasid dynasty that founded Baghdad, a major policy of translating the works of Greek antiquity was organised, works which, as real spoils of war, could pass from Byzantine libraries to the new Arab "Houses of Wisdom", centres of both teaching and conversion from one language to another² . For these massive translations, which lasted for more than two centuries, the services of Christian, Jewish and Arab translators were required.

The intellectual effervescence spreads to Spain where the Arabs capture Cordoba in 711. Cordoba quickly rivalled Baghdad, becoming a great intellectual and cultural capital for three centuries. "It is important to bear in mind that in the 10th century, the Cordoba library contained no less than 400,000 volumes, including the precious works of Greek writers and scholars, which could only be found there. A number of Hindu and Persian works were also unearthed, and through the Arabic language, knowledges which Europe did not know or had lost were passed on. It is not an exaggeration to consider Cordoba as a place of memory and transmission between East and West³.

With the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, and the beginning of the Catholic Reconquista, the Christians "took over one of these four or five major centres of Islamic culture. It was then the turn of Westerners to come into contact with Greek thought through Arabic translations. Many travelled to Spain to translate manuscripts from all over Europe: from England, like Daniel of Morley, from Italy, like Gerard of Cremona, and from central Europe, like Hermann of Carinthia. The economic boom in the West and its urbanisation gave rise to a new interest in philosophical and scientific problems, an interest that would lead to the great syntheses of the 13th century, that of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas⁴.

What must be added to this all-too-brief shortcut is that the capitalization by Arab scholars from the 8th to the 10th century allowed the legacy of ancient Greece to spread well beyond Europe, to the East and to Africa. In a recent interview on RFI, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne⁵ mentioned that his grandfather's library contained works in Arabic which analysed and discussed Aristotle's philosophy and that it was this reading, among other things, which determined his vocation as a philosopher.

Thus, the primordial importance of translation in the cultural and political history of Humanity will never be over emphasised.

Getting out of the language tool

And the added value of plurilingualism is the understanding through personal experience of the diversity of languages, of the perception of the world and of the other. And to go further, we know that in some way everyone has their own language, or their own variety of language within one or more more global languages. And this awareness alone fundamentally alters the relationship with the other.

To say that each language carries a part of the universal is not without consequence. It challenges the very notion of the universal. It is even downright revolutionary. Let us explain.

As we have pointed out many times, as long as linguistics insists on considering language as a mere tool, reinforcing a doxa which has been fixed for centuries, a single language will continue to be seen as a manifestation of universality, and linguistic diversity will always be suspected of slowing down progress. In fact, Aristotle's injunction to give a single meaning to each word is applied to language in general, a requirement which is understandable in the fields of technology and the so-called exact sciences, but which, when applied to natural languages, reflects a total ignorance of the essence of language.

The renewed interest in regional and endangered languages of course raises some questions. However, it was not until the 1980s that a few linguists and didactologists began to concern themselves with the links between languages and cultures, reviving a linguistic tradition illustrated in particular by Wilhelm von Humboldt, after an eclipse of over a century. The question remains, however, to know whether the separation between language and culture was merely a disciplinary separation or whether the separation was really possible.

For example, as early as 1969, José Mailhot, inspired by Levi-Strauss, concluded that it was necessary to consider the two notions 'globally' and not broken down 'into levels', simply because, as Louis Porcher stated in L'acte de langage, language and culture are inseparable, i.e. one cannot understand language, except in an approximate way or for extremely simple things, if one has not assimilated a little of the culture it implies.

So the single language is pure fantasy, but this does not mean that bridges between languages cannot exist. Cultures interact with each other, except in cases of absolute isolation, thanks in particular to translation through linguistic exchanges and at the level of individuals when they are plurilingual.

And if these exchanges are possible, it is because in each language there is a part of the universal, and this point deserves to be discussed.

What is meant by 'universal'?

Louis Porcher⁶ used the Hegelian concept of universal-singular to explain the didactic process by which the learner who learns one or more languages compares them with his or her mother tongue, or another language, and builds up a metalanguage for himself/herself.

 

"The comparison between languages - cultures inherent in the approach is fundamentally intercultural in nature because languages and cultures are truly in contact. Indirectly, it is a question of bringing to light the 'singular universals' of each language.

"A universal-singular is indeed a phenomenon which is present everywhere, i.e. that of which everyone has at least lived experience of, but which each society or (perhaps, more likely) each culture feels and deals with differently." (Groux and Porcher, 2002, p. 74).

The concept of universal-singular, originally defined by Hegel, expresses the link between the universal and the particular: the particular finds its place in the universal and vice versa. As far as languages are concerned, there are many universals: the expression of negation, feelings, time, etc., but with societal specificities. Moreover, according to L. Porcher, entry through the universal-singular has the advantage of reconciling "the source-culture (that of the learner) and the target-culture by giving them something in common" (Porcher, 1994, p. 5). (Porcher, 1994, p. 11).

What seems to us particularly important for our purpose is that singular universals are in no way reducible to one another, as if they constituted a kind of lowest common denominator, which would be completely reductive and would lead us back to the dreaded fantasy of the single language.

The fact that they are not reducible to each other means that they allow access to the new language, the latter becoming intelligible, while preserving its richness and specificity. This conception of the universal is inclusive and not exclusive.

In this respect, it should be pointed out that Liebniz⁷ had already grasped such a problematics through the notion of monad and "point of view".

The monad is the elementary unit of life, capable of apperception, perception, conscience and memory, and is constitutive of all living being. If the vocabulary is dated, one is nevertheless surprised by the modernity of the proposal. All monads are different and have as an internal property the capacity to evolve. Every living being is a construction of monads. As such, these elementary units are universal and infinite in number and diversity. Universality and diversity are therefore consubstantial and inseparable. The notion of monad is associated with that of "point of view". Each monad is a point of view on the universe, but none can reach the universe in its totality. Only God is able to do this because He is the Universe. These notions of vital source and point of view will be found in particular in Nietzsche and Bergson and among the linguists, more particularly in Humboldt (languages are 'visions of the world', synonymous with 'point of view') and in Saussure.

This is to say that reducing European universalism⁸ to colonial thinking is both legitimate, but at the same time a serious and simplistic deviation.

When we speak of diversity, we must not only think of cultural and linguistic diversities, which are, according to Vico, above all the expression of the diversity of historical experiences, but we must also think of the diversity of means of expression.

For example, consider the origins of art and writing⁹ . The first forms of writing used images in the form of pictograms. And the parietal arts show that even before the discovery of writing, people expressed themselves through objects, images and symbols, i.e. through hieroglyphs. This is what Giambattista Vico develops in The New Science¹⁰ .

Towards a truly universal

And when Léopold Sedar Senghor explains that art is one approach to reality, just as scientific knowledge is another, he is in fact part of this filiation. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne explains¹¹ , a link can be established with the development of Nietzsche, who in 1886 returned to his early work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he explored the relationship between art and truth in the following terms: "To examine science in the light of art, but art in the light of life"¹² . According to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the Senghorian enterprise of making African art an African knowledge, an African intelligence of reality, is in a way a similar audacity, and he finds its justification in Bergson. But let us immediately specify that Senghor's approach is in no way a matter of differentialism or identitarianism, but an affirmation of Africa's contribution to universal civilisation.

Thus, through plurilingualism, we turn our backs on the idea that the universal could amount to what is common to all cultures, an option that lays itself to all kinds of reductionist drifts, with everyone having their own conception of what is common. As François Jullien suggests¹³ , it is the reciprocal intelligibility of cultures which must found the basis of universality, with the individual pursuing his or her destiny within and between cultures.

All this is said very quickly, too quickly, but it sets the scene for the 6^es European Conference on Plurilingualism in Cadiz, to be divided into four basic areas: political, educational, economic, social and cultural.

 

https://assises.observatoireplurilinguisme.eu/