Using a lingua franca does not erode the speakers’ own cultural identity

Evidence

For Gramsci’s discussion of the “language question”, see Int. pp. 21 -25 , etc. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church fought against the use of the vernacular and for the preservation of Latin as the “universal” language, since this was a key element in its own intellectual hegemony. Dante, for example, felt compelled to defend his use of (Florentine) Italian in the Divine Comedy. Gramsci describes the emergence of Florentine dialect as a “noble vernacular”. “The flowering of the Communes developed the vernaculars, and the intellectual hegemony of Florence produced a united vernacular, a noble vernacular… . The fall of the Communes and the advent of the Princely regime, the creation of a governing caste detached from the people, crystallised this vernacular in the same way as literary Latin had become crystallised. Italian was once again a written and not a spoken language, a language of scholars rather than a language of the nation” The language question was simplified at one level in the nineteenth century, when literary Italian finally defeated Latin as the language of learning, and when it was adopted as the language of the new Italian national state. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2086 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Speech accommodation, or language switching, refers to the sometimes subtle and unspoken negotiation by which a language is selected for communication between bilinguals from two ethnolinguistic groups. Often, the selection of the language of one’s ingroup, and the corresponding rejection of the language of the outgroup, represents a unique linguistic form of ingroup bias (e.g., Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1973). For example, in the Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking) west coast of Ireland where speaking in Gaelic was a criminal offense for generations, a sign common in many inns and taverns reads, “Irish spoken. English understood.” Hogg, D’Agata, and Abrams (1989) documented that Italian immigrants to Australia responded negatively to fellow Italian immigrants who engaged in an “ethnolinguistic betrayal” by speaking the dominant (English) language of the host receiving nation. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1292 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Relation-thinking opposes monolingual totality through multilingual speech; Proficiency in the rival language becomes the shield that cancels ethnic stigma — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 113; Creole language variation prevents identity from reifying into essence — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 349 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Language choice serves intellectual hegemony, not mere communication #complicates (0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2086
• Choosing which language to speak is a silent act of group allegiance #complicates (0.80) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1292
• Choosing which language to speak between bilinguals is itself a form of ingroup bias #complicates (0.76)
• Language changes through class culture acquisition and hegemonic national languages #complicates (0.73)
• Fragmenting dominant slogans linguistically lets colonized subjects remap their own identity #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2505