Language rows between Slovakia and Hungary: Hovorte po slovensky!
The Economist:
Language laws may protect minority rights or infringe them. Slovakia’s new law, which comes into force on September 1st, is under fire for its harshness. It imposes fines of up to €5,000 ($7,000) on those who break rules promoting the use of Slovak in public. Hungarian-speakers, who number around a tenth of the population, mainly in the south of the country, see that as a direct attack on their right to speak their mother-tongue. So do politicians in neighbouring Hungary. A long-running dispute between two of Europe’s most prickly neighbours is turning nasty.
Slovakia’s left-leaning populist government has been needling Hungary since it took power in 2006. It sidelined plans for a joint Hungarian-Slovak history textbook last year and has publicly endorsed the Benes Decrees, which expelled most Germans and many Hungarians from the then Czechoslovakia after 1945, as a punishment for their supposedly Nazi sympathies. The new law tightens rules about speaking Slovak in dealings with public officials: not just police officers or teachers, but also, say, doctors. Exceptions apply to monoglots, or in districts where the minority makes up a fifth or more of the population. Hungarian-language schools must conduct their administration in Slovak. The new law also lays down detailed instructions for the way in which memorials and plaques may be inscribed.
In brief, around ten percent of the population of Slovakia is Hungarian-speaking, beyond which there are Ukrainian, Roma and other minorities. For all practical purposes, the new law eliminates all the minority languages from the public sphere. Yet even here there is a further discrimination - the small Czech minority is exempt from its restrictions.
The Law, recently passed by parliament, is highly detailed and penetrates deep into the everyday lives of the linguistic minorities. It seeks to regulate any and all meetings, gatherings, associations and other forms of communication by insisting on the parallel use of the “state language”, Slovak, whenever and wherever members if the minority get together in public, and “public” is very broadly defined. Thus, if a group of Hungarian-speakers establish a literary circle, say, their proceedings would have to have a parallel Slovak translation, whether anyone actually needed this or not.
Minority-language schools are obliged to run their administration and documentation in Slovak and the same applies to the health service. The armed forces, the police and the fire service are to be monolingually Slovak. This last, by way of example, creates interesting scenarios - thus in a Hungarian-speaking area, the firemen are very likely to be all Hungarian-speakers, but when putting out a fire, they must speak Slovak to each other and also, of course, to the owner of the house where the fire is.
The weirdest of all is that all public inscriptions must be in the state language; this may be accompanied by other languages and, although the Law is vague on this, it looks as if it is to be applied retroactively. The implication is that gravestones must all be recarved, unless they are already in Slovak.
Really? If this is correct, it’s thoroughly fucked up. As a lover of languages, it’s always sad to see someone campaigning for the death of a language (even if it’s just in one area); as a lover of human rights, it’s always sad to see ethnic discrimination.
It was only a few decades ago that the Norwegian state ceased its despotic assimilation policy of sending off our Sami population to boarding schools where they were punished harshly for using their own native language. This kind of thing is thoroughly despicable on so many levels (so despicable, in fact, that I’m leaving in the redundancy).
