What Is a Language Community?

Abstract

Theories of nationalism, democracy, regional assertiveness, and civil war have relied on vague and unspecified notions of linguistic heterogeneity, based upon estimates of the mother tongues of a population. Under conditions of mother-tongue diversity, the criterion for a language community that requires structural proximity of languages is equally problematical, and here linguistics gives us little theoretical guidance or empirical data. Another criterion of language diversity measures the probability that two random people in a country will share a language. Empirical problems (on getting standards of knowing a language) and theoretical ones (concerning whether the ability to communicate is sufficient for an indicator of cultural homogeneity) beset these measures. In light of these problems, the paper specifies several new measures that might be used for coding a language community. Data collected from six post-Soviet republics illustrate the potential usefulness of these measures. thnic heterogeneity is often portrayed as a powerful source of democratic instability, regional assertiveness, and civil war. In his classic essay on primordial conflict, Geertz (1973) sees it as a source of chronic tension in the postcolonial states after World War II. Dahl (1971) sees it as a serious constraint to the success of democracy. Rabushka and Shepsle (1972) model ethnic heterogeneity such that it leads in equilibrium to the breakdown of democratic regimes. Connor (1994) equates ethnic heterogeneity with higher probability for civil war. But not all studies link heterogeneity with unhappy outcomes. Lijphart (1977) for one showed the possibility for democracy (of the nonmajoritarian sort) under conditions of cultural pluralism. The debate on the influence of ethnic heterogeneity on political outcomes has remained vibrant for nearly forty years. Yet, a major problem in testing such claims is lack of consensus on how to measure either the degree of ethnic heterogeneity within a polity or the degree of difference between any two ethnic groups in that polity. It may seem obvious that the Hirschman-Herfindahl concentration index used for political parties would be ideal for an index of ethnic dispersion-and thus all you need to know is the percentage of each ethnic group of an entire population. However, members of ethnic groups are not out there to be counted as are votes for political parties. In fact, the clear identification of ethnic groups as entities is often the result of their mobilization due to political instability and regional conflicts of interest. But if ethnic mobilization becomes the criterion for ethnic groupness, there is a problem, as the value of the independent variable becomes dependent on the value of the dependent variable. The methodological task is to develop valid indicators of ethnic heterogeneity that are independent of our observations on the dependent variables whose values are being explained. One way out of this problem is to use language as a proxy for ethnicity. The percentage of the population whose historic language is Welsh, or Catalan, or Luo therefore substitutes for a more subjective accounting of the percentage of Welsh, Catalans, or Luos in Britain, Spain, or Kenya. Use of language data in this way allows us both to measure the degree of group