Shipbuilding yard of the Dutch East India Company. In 1541, further legislation is passed banning the use of Irish in the areas of Ireland then under English rule.ġ567: King Philip II of Spain makes the use of the Arabic language illegal.ġ570: King Phillip II of Spain declares Nahuatl the official language of the colonies of New Spain, in order to facilitate communication between natives and Spanish colonists.ġ633: Philip IV of Spain decrees that Roma people do not exist, effectively banning the Romani language and traditional culture. The book is deemed “the companion of the Empire.” About his work, Nebrija notes in a letter to Isabella I, Queen of Castile: “After Your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues, with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and among them our language with this work of mine, they will be able to learn it, as we now learn Latin from the Latin Grammar.”ġ535: The Laws in Wales Act decrees that English is to be the only language used in Welsh courts and that Welsh speakers are barred from holding public office.ġ536–1814: Danish gradually comes to dominate many sectors of Norwegian life, as an influx of Danish adminstrators there use their own language instead of Norwegian.ġ537: The Statute of Ireland – An Act for the English Order Habit and Language prohibits the use of the Irish language in the Irish Parliament. The Article makes it illegal for English colonists in Ireland to speak the Irish language and for the native Irish to speak their language when interacting with them.ġ380: Under Olaf II of Denmark, Norwegian and Danish are used in education and administration in the Faroe Islands.ġ482: The Valencia Bible, the first bible in the Catalan language, is burned.ġ492: Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio de Nebrija is the first grammar book dealing with the Spanish language and the first grammar book of a modern European language to be published. This timeline is an incomplete account of language politics in many parts of the world, starting roughly from the beginning of nation-states.ġ367: The first English law in colonized Ireland that specifically banned the use of the Irish language is enacted as Article III of the Statute of Kilkenny. Linguists calculate that at the current speed, almost half of the world’s 7,151 languages will disappear before the end of this century. Such destructive policies towards languages and dialects seem to originate in Europe and are then spread globally during colonization, although one must keep in mind that the sheer volume of documentation centered on European history at the expense of all other civilizations often tends to produce an optical distortion. It is mainly with the emergence of nation-states that some languages became designated as official while many others were discouraged, suppressed, or banned altogether. 1 Some thrived and others waned, yet there are no examples of systematic attempts (that we could find) to prohibit or extinguish a language during antiquity. Throughout most of written history, since the invention of writing by the Sumerian civilization, languages coexisted in relative harmony even when their speakers didn’t.
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