Linguistic Discrimination - Other Examples

Other Examples

• The Coptic language. At the turn of the 8th century, Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan decreed that Arabic replace Koine Greek and Coptic as the sole administrative language. Literary Coptic gradually declined such that within a few hundred years, and suffered violent persecutions especially under the Mamluks, leading to its virtual extinction by the 17th century.
• Language policy of the British Empire in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Cromwell's conquest, the long English colonisation and Great Irish Famine made Irish a minority language by the end of 19th century. It had not official status until the establishment of Republic of Ireland. In Wales speaking of the Welsh language in schools was prohibited. Scottish Gaelic also had not official status until the end of 20th century. Scots was not considered "a suitable medium of education or culture".
• Basque: Public usage of Basque was prohibited in Spain under Franco, 1939 to 1965. Galician and Catalan have similar histories.
• Kurdish: Kurdish remains banned in Syria Until August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media
• Vergonha is the term used for the effect of various policies of the French government on its citizens whose mother tongue was one of so-called patois. In 1539 with Article 111 of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, French (the language of Ile-de-France) became the only official language in the country. Use of the languages of southern France (langues d'oc) as well as Breton in education and administration was prohibited. The French government has not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
• Germanisation: Prussian discrimination of Western Slavs in 19th century, such as the removal of the Polish language from secondary (1874) and primary (1886) schools, the use of corporal punishment leading to such events as Września school strike of 1901.
• Russification: 19th century policies on the territories seized due to partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, such as banning the Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian languages in public places (1864), later (1880s) Polish was banned in schools and offices of Congress Poland. Under the Russian Empire there were some attempts in 1899-1917 to make Russian the only official language of Finland. In the Soviet Union, following the phase of Korenizatsiya ("indigenization") and before Perestroika (late 1930s to late 1980s), Russian was termed as "the language of friendship of nations", to the disadvantage of other languages of the Soviet Union
• Suppression of Korean during Japanese rule in Korea, 1910 to 1945.
• Quebec's language policies have been frequently noted as linguistic discrimination against the province's Anglophone population (see Legal dispute over Quebec's language policy).
• Anti-Chinese legislation in Indonesia
• Anti-Hungarian Slovak language law
• Dutch in Belgium afters its independence in 1830. French was for a long time the only official language and the sole language of education, administration, law and justice despite Dutch being the language of the majority of the population. This led to a massive language shift in Brussels, the capital. Discrimination slowly diminished over the decades and formally ended in the 1960s when the Dutch version of the constitution became equal to the French version.