Discriminació vs. Segregació

Resum

This paper presents an index for measuring how language discrimination affects the use of a language in a bilingual society. The index compares the proportion of conversations in each language to the proportion of members in each linguistic group. Using some calculations for discrimination assuming the imposition of the majority language, and total and equal communication among the members of society, a counterintuitive result is obtained— that discrimination increases with the number and pro- portion of members of the discriminating group. A general formula is presented to facilitate the calculations for communities with different numbers and proportions of people from the different language groups. Other calculations with incomplete communication reinforce the conclusion that discriminatory language rules encourage members of the discriminated group to limit their linguistic interaction to members of their own group (segregation), and to small conversation groups (privatization). Some references to Hispanic bilingualism in certain states in the United States, and to the Russians in the Baltic republics illustrate the validity of these formal conclusions concerning «the fear of the minority » when there is a large majority. The final section presents a formal model for short-term language balance, in which the levels of communication and language discrimination are inversely proportional.