Helen DeWitt links to this interesting exercpt from a book by Tomasz Kamusella about the politics of language in central Europe. The basic idea is that we’re all too used to thinking that a country should have a single language, and the exceptions (for example, Canada, Belgium, old-time Austria Hungary) seem weird to us. For example, it’s always seen as a big joke in the U.S. that some people in Canada insist on speaking French. China shouldn’t be a joke but, hey, they all speak “Chinese,” right? And India doesn’t really count because they’re all supposed to speak English. Anyway, India’s not just a country, it’s most of a subcontinent, so that’s different. And African countries have “tribes” so that doesn’t really count either. And, sure, they speak 23 languages in Guatemala, but the official language is Spanish, so that’s fine, right? Back when Russia was the U.S.S.R., I certainly had no idea that they spoke Ukranian and all those other languages there. And of course lots of people in the U.S. get upset that people insist on speaking Spanish here.

Kamusella writes,

Although the Western European pedigree of politics of language is at present conveniently forgotten, the phenomenon of language politicization is said to be now most visible in Central Europe. It is so because after World War I, the formerly multilingual Western European powers of France and the United Kingdom with the support of the United States chose to delegitimize the existence of Austria-Hungary on the account of its multilingualism and multiethnicity. By the same token, the victorious powers legitimized various ethnonational (formerly, often marginal) movements, which defined their postulated nations in terms of language. The national principle steeped in the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity allowed these movements to carve up Central Europe into a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states. What followed with vengeance was forced ethnolinguistic homogenization pursued to assimilate ‘non-national elements’ within a nation-state. . . .

The declaration of more than one language per person was not permitted, which by default excluded the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism from official scrutiny. The logic of this exclusion stemmed from the conviction that a person can belong to one nation only. By the same token, declarations of variously named dialects, already construed as ‘belonging to’ a national language, were noted as declarations of this national language. . . .

And then some statistics:

Nowadays, in comparison to the majority of extant polities worldwide, most of the nation-states of Central Europe are unnaturally homogenous in their ethnolinguistic composition. Non-Polish-speakers constitute less than 1 percent Poland’s population, non-Magyar-speakers amount to 2 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants, non-Czech-speakers are less than 3 percent in the Czech Republic’s populace, non-Romanian-speakers constitute less than 11 percent of Romania’s inhabitants, and non-Slovak-speakers amount to less than 15 percent of Slovakia’s populace. . . .

I like to say I speak 1 3/4 languages. I wish I could speak more. But, until reading this, I’d always thought of monolingual countries as a default rather than a construct. Interesting stuff.