Call for 'civic disobedience' to save minority languages

 "The Slovak language law is a carbon copy of a Latvian language law that appeared in 1995, but this was dropped under pressure from the EU. Now Slovakia is in the EU [language protection] doesn't seem to matter any more, so we have double standards," said Tatjana Zdanoka MEP (PCTVL, Latvia), a member of the European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.

"Either Europe is a Europe of cultures, or Europe will die," she added.

"Part of the problem is the terms used to describe languages by the EU itself," said Bill Bowring, a professor at Birkbeck College at the University of London, claiming that the bloc's use of terms like 'main', 'most widespread', 'less widespread', 'less widely used', 'minority' and 'less taught' makes clear that despite the formal equality of the EU's 23 official languages, "it is clear that there is a hierarchy of languages in Europe".

Referring to the Council of Europe's Convention on Regional and Minority languages, which only 16 of the 27 EU member states have ratified, Bowring said "if the EU is serious about protecting language rights, then there must be serious moves to make sure that all its members have ratified this charter".

"The EU picture is extremely unsatisfactory. There is contradiction and confusion, and some member states are in violation of a charter that they have signed," he added.

Referring to Estonia and Latvia, both of which have Russian-speaking minorities, Vadim Poleshchuk, a legal analyst at the Legal Information Centre for Human Rights in Estonia, said "the language issue is the most controversial issue of contemporary politics" in both countries.

Poleshchuk, who said there were suspicions that Russian language campaigns are being run by the Russian secret service, said "the Estonian and Latvian authorities don't like it when their language policies are criticised by outsiders".

Maria Pilar García Negro, a professor at the University of A Coruña in Galicia, said a language is an abstract notion and cannot be defined by number of speakers or the country in which it is spoken.

"Talking about a state language automatically creates sub-categories of languages," she warned, declaring: "Either languages are given to you by a government body, or they are claimed by their speakers as a human right. I prefer the second option".

Speaking in her native Galician, García Negro said "some people think Galician can be saved if you try to impose regular doses of it. But a language needs to be part of the air that we breathe as human beings".

"Galician needs to be set free, for economic as well as social reasons. Its unbridled use should be promoted. Normalising Galician would not be to the detriment of anyone," she said, insisting that "we need to move away from repression, regulation and redundancy and abandon the 'freedom with restrictions on use' model".

"The Slovak language law flies in the face of all the EU is trying to achieve," said the secretary-general of a Belgian NGO dealing with human rights in Central Europe. "A member state pursuing a law against the language of another member state, an official language of the EU and 10% of its own population, [runs against] European principles and has no precedent in Europe," he added.