Cover Letter

Phase 3 has been a challenging but also exciting phase for me. Firstly, it was challenging because this was the first research paper I ever wrote in my entire academic career. I didn’t really know what to expect or what the structure of the paper was going to be like. However, through the student examples you have given me and the numerous times I have had my paper peer-reviewed during English class, I have slowly begun to understand how to write my research paper. Secondly, this phase was exciting for me because I got to choose my own research topic and I chose one that was really dear to me: Language and National Unity. Because I was interested in the topic, finding sources for my research paper didn’t feel like a task to me and I was easily able to find many sources to support my claim.

 One concept that really helped me in this phase was the concept of rhetorical situations because the rhetorical precis that I had to submit for some of my sources as homework, really helped me understand my sources better, which in turn helped me write better analyses of them in my research paper. One course outcome that I was able to accomplish in this phase was course outcome three as I was able to “develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing” through the multiple sessions of peer review I had. The peer review sessions were especially important this time because along with getting advice on my paper, I was able to be inspired by other people’s research papers as well as able to implement some of those strategies in my own research paper. Another course outcome that I accomplished in this phase was course outcome six as I located “research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet.” This course outcome was bound to be accomplished in this phase as researching sources was an essential part of the major assignment for this phase and I truly enjoyed doing so. 

One difficulty I would say I had in this phase was choosing my research paper topic and choosing its scope or how specific it would be. Even though I knew that I wanted to write about how language contributes to national unity, I kind of struggled with figuring out if I should focus on multiple countries or just one specific country. I ended up choosing multiple countries at the end because I realized that that would guarantee me finding the most sources on my topic and could help me with the page length as well. Overall, I would say I enjoyed this phase a lot, even though it was a lot of work and research, I finally got to experience writing a research paper and I know that such experience will only help me as I move forward in my college career as I believe I have to write more research papers in the near future.

Language and National Unity

For the majority of human history, nation-building has been an essential element of human prosperity. Throughout history, people have built a nation on the basis of many things such as ethnicity, religion, and culture. However, none of them were as important as the entity that tied all those things together, their language and scripture. Language is the most crucial aspect of every culture since it enables individuals to interact in a familiar tone and understand each other. This understanding promotes feelings of trustworthiness and ease, which creates a strong level of unity and pride. Therefore, language was the one thing that defined entire groups of people. Names such as French, Spanish, and English refer to the groups of people by the language they speak. For many people and nations, their language is a matter of utmost pride, they are ready to suffer for it, they are ready to fight for it, and they are ready to die for it.

However, as much as language unites people, different languages within a country can spark vile discrimination often against ethnic minorities, which leads them to be marginalized, and even genocided. Some examples of this are the Kurdish people and the Yazidis. It leads many marginalized groups to not put their nation first and even want to secede and create their own state, therefore, hindering national unity. Even though language has undoubtedly brought nations apart in the past, on a broad scale, language brings people of the same culture and ethnicity together and even though a lot of groups have been discriminated against for their language and culture, they found strength and unity in their language to fight for their own independent nation. Thus, while many factors must align for a nation’s people to unite, I will argue that language is the most crucial because it governs how nations communicate, allowing their government to function effectively and uniting them through culture and identity.

Language is the one aspect of nation-building that is crucial for the nation to function efficiently. In the article “The Role of Language in Nation-Building within the European Union,” professor Alexander Caviedes stresses that it is “The survival of a nation and the success of its drive towards nation-state status are predicated upon the existence of a language that its people can speak, and more importantly, read and write” (Caviedes 250). The assertion that Caviedes is making here is that the presence of a common language in a nation contributes to the nation’s stability, provided that all individuals are able to comprehend it and communicate effectively with it. Furthermore, Caviedes goes on to state that “identification is taught and developed through the presence of a common language”(Caviedes 251). This further promotes the idea that language serves the utmost importance when it comes to uniting a nation as it gives the people of the nation an identity to identify under. The people of a nation can feel pride in their mother tongue, as they all speak it and it is associated with their culture. This is especially true for nations with languages that not many others speak. Facing the threat of existence, can cause them to feel even more feelings of patriotism for their nation as they are the only nation to speak such languages as Finnish in Finland and Icelandic in Iceland. 

Language has enabled a lot of marginalized people to gain control and prominence in their countries. Let’s take a brief look at the Eurasian country of Kazakhstan. Post-Soviet Kazakhstan was a multi-language, multi-ethnicity state that could barely function as a nation for Kazakhs. According to the journal article “The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan,” Edward Schatz, who is an associate professor of Political Science, refers to Kazakh society as a primarily “bi-ethnic” society (Schatz 489). Post-Soviet Kazakh society could barely be called Kazakh as the Kazakh ethnic group was actually a minority in their own titular state, comprising only 39.7 % of the entire population. Much of Kazakhstan’s political leaders were culturally and linguistically Russian, so Kazakh people had limited representation in their own government. Furthermore, the Kazakh language was dying among its own people. Since the Russian language was being promoted for professional careers during the Soviet era, the Kazakh youth were more well-versed in Russian than Kazakh. To combat the Russian language domination in Kazakhstan, the Kazakh government “after rancorous debates and heightened interethnic tensions in the early part of the decade, a compromise was forged in 1996. Kazakh was to be the ‘state’ language, while Russian was an ‘official language on a par with Kazak (Schatz, 493). After Kazakh became the state language, Kazakh became a more prominent language in Kazakhstan, and the ethnic Kazakhs were able to become more represented in their own government and workforce as certain positions that previously weren’t available to Kazakhs due to their lack of Russian proficiency became accessible to them. Along with becoming a state language, Kazakh-medium schools went on the rise, and Russian-medium schools saw a decline. Such language-based changes in the nation caused ethnic Russians to migrate out of Kazakhstan and ethnic Kazakhs from diaspora communities in Mongolia, Afghanistan, Turkey, and China to migrate into Kazakhstan. This increased the overall unity in Kazakhstan as ethnic Kazakhs became the majority and they were able to identify more with their own language within their own country. 

This idea is more prevalent not just in Kazakhstan, but all over the world. For example, even in Malaysia, another Asian country, a common language is prioritized by the government. According to the research paper presented to the 18th annual ASEAN conference, “Conceptualization of Nationalism Through Language and Symbols” professors Maya Khemlani David and Wendy Yee Mei Tien note that after Malaysian independence, “several policies, such as the ‘National Education Policy’ and the ‘National Language Policy’, were enacted to promote a common curriculum across the different types of schools so as to foster national unity and national identity. Bahasa Malay…became the national language and the medium of instruction in national schools” (David and Tien 1). This is very important as it shows that nations prioritize their national language because they know it promotes feelings of unity. They want all the youth of their nation to grow up and learn in their native language so that they can feel pride in it and collectively feel pride for their nation. What’s more, is that people in Malaysia will not face any unfair disadvantages in the job market due to them all knowing one language. Companies cannot discriminate based on language as everyone speaks the same one, which will create equity in Malaysian society and will lead to the success of the nation. 

On top of that, language can help people fight oppressive regimes as well. If we take a look at the country of Bangladesh. Before 1971, Bangladesh was an entity known as East Pakistan, in which the people spoke mainly Bengali, but was ruled by the Urdu-speaking government in West Pakistan. In an article by Aljazeera, author Anam Zakaria states that “The refusal to accept Bengali as a state language of Pakistan in the early years after Partition, economic disparity between the two parts, the hegemony of the West Pakistani ruling elite over Pakistan, martial laws, and a demeaning attitude towards Bengali culture and the Bengali population soured relations” between Bengali people and the Pakistani government (Zakaria 2). The oppression faced by the Bengali people because of their language and identity sparked a revolutionary mindset within them. At first many Bengali college professors and students staged protests against the West Pakistani government to make Bengali an official language. When the protests resulted in nothing more than brutal beatings and killings by the Pakistani military, Bangladesh declared itself an independent nation with the official language as Bangla. They then fought a nine-month war that they eventually won, to commemorate the Bengali people’s willingness to fight for the recognition of their language, the United Nations declared February 21 as International Mother Language Day. Bangladesh was only able to become an independent state because all the citizens of the country regardless of religion and politics unified under the Bengali language and fought for their identity. 

Even though historically language has been used to fight oppression by oppressed groups, language has also been used to oppress groups of people as well. One prominent example of this is Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In the 1940s, the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, decided to pursue a policy of aggressive territorial expansion for the supposed need for “lebensraum (living space)” for the German people. He pursued an Ethno-state for “Aryans” and violently discriminated against and killed minorities. The group most significant was the Jewish people who came under Hitler’s rule., Hitler, who was the main perpetrator of the Holocaust, a treacherous genocide of over 6 million Jewish people, took Jewish people from their homes and sent them over to cruel concentration camps to die. This genocide couldn’t be facilitated without the use of language. According to Tom Hale, a senior journalist from IFL Science, “researchers from the graduate school of business…collected 140 pieces of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, including posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and political speech transcripts.” They then used “cutting-edge psycholinguistic tools that can dig deeper into the intentions behind the words.” What they found was that “Jewish people were portrayed as inhuman but also depicted as possessing a high level of agency, as if they were a masterminding threat to the German people” (Hale 2). The use of German to persuade the Germans that Jewish people were “less than human” is one of the distinguished ways in history that language was used to unite a group of people to brew hatred for an oppressed group. The use of German in anti-Semitic propaganda invoked nationalistic and racist emotions among many Germans and allowed Hitler to justify his actions without causing much outrage among the German civilian population. Even though Hitler’s use of language to justify his crimes was effective at the start, a lot of Germans began seeing through the propaganda, and after Hitler’s regime was toppled, Germans united against anti-Semitism banning all forms of anti-Semitic propaganda and symbols. Germans have once again united under one language, this time against hatred and violence.

Some people may claim however that language has nothing to do with national unity. They may point to examples of multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic countries such as the one shown in Figure 1. The country shown in Figure 1 is India, and the figure shows all the different languages Indian nationals speak in different regions of the country. A total of 121 different languages are spoken across India and although they might be unified in belief, Indians are largely unable to communicate with each other when they travel to other regions. Due to none of them understanding each other’s language, they feel the need to communicate in a tongue that is not native to either of them, and this is where conflicts of interest arrive. Furthermore, India’s diverse languages are the cause for a lot of discrimination inside the country as not everyone understands each other, and many may get frustrated if others can’t communicate with them properly. In a University of Toledo Honors Thesis, researcher Jason Baldridge noted that an individual can face issues “when one uses the wrong language in some places,” and he recommends that “one should not speak Hindi in South India” (Baldridge 13). These language disagreements not only affected small day-to-day interactions amongst Indians but also affected monolingual young people of the country as many of them were afraid that “students from Hindi areas” gained an unfair edge in the job market “particularly in government services” (Baldridge 15). A nation that has such imbalances in its system cannot function properly, as the people who fall on the wrong side of language discrimination will instinctively have a natural resentment towards the country and system. Therefore, multilingual countries such as India can never be as unified as other monolingual countries because the government and systems in a country cannot function unified without one language to tie them all together.

Ultimately, language is the most essential component that is required for national unity. This is due to the fact that it determines how people communicate with one another, which in turn enables their government to work efficiently and brings them together through their shared culture and identity. From time to time, we have witnessed how the use of a single language throughout a nation has facilitated the consolidation of a nation’s identity and the improvement of its operational efficiency. We as humans inherently need a common language to thrive as it helps us maintain culture and pride in our respective nations. As we progress deeper into the process of globalization, we must ask ourselves if the distinctive languages spoken in each nation will continue to serve a purpose or whether everyone will eventually speak the same global language.

Figure 1, Language Distribution in India, pie chart created by revisitingindia.com

Works Cited

Baldridge, Jason. “Reconciling Linguistic Diversity: The History and the Future of Language Policy in India.” Upenn.edu, Aug. 1996, www.ling.upenn.edu/~jason2/papers/natlang.htm. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Caviedes, Alexander. “The Role of Language in Nation-Building within the European Union.” Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 27, no. 3/4, 2003, pp. 249–268, www.jstor.org/stable/29790689. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

David, Maya, and Wendy Tien. Conceptualization of Nationalism through Language and Symbols. 15 Apr. 2008. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/162012064.pdf. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Hale, Tom. “How the Nazis Used Language to Pave the Way for the Holocaust.” IFLScience, IFLScience, 9 Nov. 2022, www.iflscience.com/how-the-nazis-used-language-to-pave-the-way-for-the-holocaust-66129. 

Schatz, Edward. “The Politics of Multiple Identities: Lineage and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan.” Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, 2000, pp. 489–506, www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/153810.pdf. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.

Zakaria, Anam. “Remembering the War of 1971 in East Pakistan.” Www.aljazeera.com, 16 Dec. 2019, www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/12/16/remembering-the-war-of-1971-in-east-pakistan.