Language is the identity and prejudice of a country or people who speak that particular language. Nelson Mandela had once commented that “if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” And this is true once own language is the heart and soul of the body. Language gives the prejudice and freedom to live within that state.
The Russia- Ukraine war other than that of arms and ammunition has turned into a war of language and dialects. The war has even affected language dialectics. Ukrainian are probably unaware that there is long-standing controversy regarding the particular form of speech. One side views Russians and Ukrainians as “one people”, and the opposite side does not. The former claims that Ukraine is just a dialect of Russia, while the latter argues that it is a separate language.
There are many other countries that face the same linguistic controversy in their country. And due to this, there are many conflicts within the country. Here are some of the countries which have linguistic conflicts in their countries as well.
The Czech Republic and Slovakia
Even though the split of Czechoslovakia into different countries has a political reason but one of the small contributing factors to their split was the language. The Czechs were resented by the Slovaks. The Czechoslovakia government tried to balance the use of the languages to foster unity but Slovaks resented them due to the perceived dominance of national culture. The government tried to make them both equally used even though Czech had twice as many speakers as the Slovaks. But the dominance prevailed and the countries got split.
Malay and Indonesia
The Malay language belongs to the western Austronesian group of languages. A variety of Malay is an official language in four southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Indonesia serves as a means of communication for administration and political integration and as a mark of national identity in these two countries. Malay/Indonesia is considered either a single language or else two very closely related languages. Despite marked differences between the two varieties in lexicon, pronunciation, grammatical choices, and features of discourse organization.
Serbian and Croatian
Officially, the language Serbo-Croatia once united Yugoslavia, which has now ceased to exist. It has now four names: Bosnian, Serbia, Croatian, and Montenegrin. And the language under the four countries forms a tongue called the “polycentric” language, similar to English, German, and Arabic. They argue that while different dialect exists these are variations of the same language since everyone who speaks it understands it. The authors consider the insistence on the usage of the four variants to be “ repressive, unnecessary and harmful”.
