Minority languages

Politics

Minority languages may be marginalised within nations for a number of reasons. These include having a relatively small number of speakers, a decline in the number of speakers, and popular belief that these speakers are uncultured, or primitive, or the minority language is a dialect of the dominant language. Support for minority languages is sometimes viewed as supporting separatism, for example, the ongoing revival of the Celtic languages in the British Isles and France (Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton). The dominant culture may consider use of immigrant minority languages to be a threat to unity, indicating that such communities are not integrating into the larger culture. Both of these perceived threats are based on the notion of the exclusion of the majority language speakers. Often this is added to by political systems by not providing support (such as education and policing) in these languages.