Are there confirmed cases where a country changed its language without being conquered?

Question

I thought about this question and wondered: Are there any known cases where a country switched to a different language other than because of being conquered? If some country ever did this I would be very interested in how exactly they implemented it.

What I could come up with:

• Mongols that conquered China and to some extent Germanic tribes that conquered Rome took over the language of the country they conquered. But they simply assimilated with the native population, they didn't bring the new language back to their home country.
• Danish used to be the language of the Norwegian upper-class. However, it was when Norway was in a union with Denmark, so essentially they were the same country. And Danish was the official language of that country while Norwegian wasn't (not that any of the Norwegian dialects was ever accepted to be the Norwegian language).
• Hebrew in the modern Israel is essentially an artificial language. However, it was created to have a common language where previously was none, the Jews who came to Israel spoke many different languages. So it's not like the whole country switched from one language to another. Of course, many other countries went through a similar (even though less radical process), e.g. the modern German (High German) is only one of the many dialects that existed in Germany (and some still exist).

So Japan considered having the whole country switch to English. Did any country actually do something like this?

Answer 1

Scotland has gradually changed to using English without being conquered by England. Now I shall temper that a little in that there have been English speaking people living in Scotland just as long as there have in England. The Anglo-Saxons settled south east Scotland as well as north east England. However, English didn't become the majority language for hundreds of years after that.

Scotland had several native languages such as Scots Gaelic, Pictish, a Brythonic language similar to Welsh, and also some Norse or Norn speakers. The Angles brought in Old English. Magnus Magnusson's book "Scotland, The Story of a Nation" has a map of this distribution on page 35.

Old English changed to Middle English and then split to become Scots and Modern English. By the late middle ages just three languages remained. Gaelic, Scots and a small minority English speakers. (Map of Languages in Scotland circa 1400)

After the Union of Crowns and latter Union of Parliaments, Modern English started to increase in use and Scots and Gaelic withered. However, the Union wasn't an invasion. Scotland was never conquered by the English. In fact the opposite. The Scottish king inherited the English crown.

Today almost nobody uses Scots. Instead they use Scottish English with a few hits of Scots. There is a small group of Gaelic speakers but no where near the number of just 200 years ago. Wikipedia gives numbers of 297,823 speakers (18.5% of total population) in 1800 and just 58,652 (1.2%) today. Thus I would argue that Scotland has changed it's language without being conquered.

Mongolia would be a contender for a second answer. Mongolia split from China during the early 20th Century. At that time they used a mix of Mongolian and Chinese (Mandarin) and a little Tibetan. They had there own Mongolian script for writing. However, today if you travel to Mongolia, you will see little use of the Mongolian script. It was replaced with Russian Cyrillic script. The strong influence of of the Soviet Union, which bordered Mongolia, brought about a change in the written language of the area. However, although the Soviet Union had a strong influence, Mongolia always remained a separate nation state and was never conquered by the USSR. Today Mongolian script is usually only seen in Inner Mongolia, within China. Outer Mongolia changed.

Taiwan would also make a third answer. This one maybe politically contentious depending on how you view the status of Taiwan. However, before 1949, Mandarin Chinese was a minority language on Taiwan. When the Republic of China government relocated to Taiwan in 1949, a large number of refugees from the Mainland settled there. Today Mandarin Chinese is the majority language. So officially, the language changed without invasion.

Some Taiwanese will not agree with my assessment as they consider Taiwan to have always been independent from China, assigned to Chinese control, and occupied after WWII. However that is a minority opinion. Others will disagree with me on the opposite argument that Taiwan is not an independent country and thus as part of China, doesn't count.

Singapore will be my fourth contender as an answer. The official languages are Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. The Last two, Malay and Tamil, are the native languages of the area. English came in via conquest and colonial rule. However, Chinese is now the largest language in use (49.9% of total population) but Singapore has never been conquered by the Chinese. Rather a large influx of Chinese immigrants has changed the cultural balance of the country.

Answer 2

The Roman Empire, at it start under emperors Julius Caesar (44 BC) and Augustus (27 BC) had Latin as its main language, and the one spoken by its elites and leaders. At the end of it, with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, the prevailing language of the elites was Greek. The main change came under emperor Heraclius (610 to 641), whose reforms upon taking the throne included the introduction of Greek as the official language.

Answer 3

How about the Holy Roman Empire?

Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany etc) changed the language of the Empire to German in 1781 (Patent of Toleration), from Latin, and sometimes from local languages.

Here is the thing: there is some inherent, anachronistic assumption in the question about the language of a country. Before the XXth century, without public education, without media or even general literacy people spoke whatever they wanted. The language of a country was formalized only in things like the language of administrative offices, military command and such. 99% of the population didn't need to speak these at more than an elementary level (if at all).

Answer 4

Of course, it happened many times when the country was conquered, later got its freedom and returned to the previous language, that it used before that last conquest. Sometimes the language even started to change before the real freedom came, as in Czech lands in 19th century, when they started to learn they own almost dead language.

The question is formulated obviously by a person, who lives in the mono-language culture. There are others, too. In the older Europe people very often used many languages - one at home, other in the village, third in the town, two more - with traders. For example, in Dagestan even now there are villages, where 2 languages are used that are no used in any other place. Of course, they also know 2-3 wider known Dagestan languages and Russian, too. How do you count these people?

And the picture in all old Europe was as that one. There were very many languages in France, in Germany, really in any country. They were no dialects, they were really very different.

Answer 5

Many countries have changed their official languages.

South Africa had two official languages (Afrikaans and English) before 1994 and now has 11.

Bolivia used to have only one official language (Spanish), but now it has 37 (yes, 37).

Rwanda went from having French and Kinyarwanda as its official languages to having English and Kinyarwanda, and now has English, French and Kinyarwanda.

In the U.S., Louisiana went from being French-speaking when it gained statehood to becoming bilingual and then in the 1920s actually banned French altogether, before trying to restore it in recent years.

You can find lots of other examples if you look around.

Answer 6

In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenian gradually became the main official language replacing Lithuanian. After the country became a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ruthenian was superseded by Polish.

Answer 7

Ancient Aramaic was adopted as a "lingua franca" by most of the Mesopotamian states in the eleventh century. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, an Akkadian speaking culture, managed to conquer the Aramaean cities, a major center of trade, early on, which included internal exile for the Aramaean elite throughout the Assyrian empire. The meant the ruling class and clerical class Assyrians were likely to also speak Aramaic, making it easier for inter-city trade within and without the empire.

It's almost analogous to the Roman elite adopting Greek after the conquest of Greece, except commoners and nearby trade partners also adopted the conquered tongue as well, while the conquering Assyrians retained their own language as their primary tongue for a while. (And this would get weird when the Chaldeans took over, and energetically re-established Akkadian as the language of the empire.)

Answer 8

Turkey, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, introduced a series of language reforms via the public education system that seriously impacted comprehension of older documents. The changes included massive vocabulary changes as well as a switch from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet. Since the taxonomy of languages is always up for debate, it can be reasonably argued that a change to the Turkish language at this magnitude constitutes a shift to a new language, even if that new language is also called Turkish.

This change differs from the more gradual changes that typified transitions between classical, medieval, and modern languages (e.g. Latin to French, Middle English to Modern English, Old Norse to Danish, etc.) because it was quick, deliberate, and official. This was not a slow social process of changes filtering out through towns and villages and across social classes over decades or centuries, it happened via government decrees and official public school curriculum updates.

Answer 9

Although there were many languages spoken throughout the Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire), its court and administration language switched from Latin to Greek over time.

Answer 10

All of the countries under Roman rule gradually migrated away from common Latin into their own distinctive languages. One example is French, which is a modification and combination of Gaulish and vulgar Latin. England reverted to English as the official tongue of the court sometime in the 13th century after 300 years of French.

Answer 11

Indonesian

When Indonesia got independant from The Netherlands after WWII, they adopted Indonesian, a variation of Malay, as the official language of their newfounded state.

In 1945, when Indonesia declared its independence, Indonesian was formally declared the national language, despite being the native language of only about 5% of the population.

This choice met several purposes:

• Getting rid of Dutch, the language of the colonisator.
• Unifying the country with a common language.
• Promoting equality of citizens, by adopting a language without class distinctions, hence not Javanese, the most widly spoken language in Indonesia at that time.

With thousands of islands and hundreds of different languages, the newly independent country of Indonesia had to find a national language that could realistically be spoken by the majority of the population and that would not divide the nation by favouring one ethnic group, namely the Javanese, over the others.

Indeed, already three decades beforehand, the Youth Pledge defined Indonesian as bahasa persatuan, the language of unity.

Nowadays, more than 200 millions Indonesians speak Indonesian, even if

Most Indonesians, aside from speaking the national language, are fluent in at least one of the more than 700 indigenous local languages.

Answer 12

The Norman's adopted French as their language even though they were the ones who conquered.

Answer 13

One can consider the opposite case: switching the language when the country gains its independence. The new langauge certainly exists, but not all inhabitants of the country may master it, and it may lack written forms or significant representation in the culture and politics. One can consider former Soviet republics as examples, and probably Ireland.

Remark on Hebrew: It is incorrect to say that Hebrew is "an artificial language" (see Constructed language) and it was created from "none": Biblical Hebrew existed as a liturgical language, known to practicing Jews all over the world. The pronunciation was also relatively standard, since being codified by Masoretes. However it has undergone many innovations, such as:

• developing vocabulary adapted modern realities (basic words like pen, pencil, monthly, etc.)
• reconstructing some grammatical forms on the basis of of the parallel forms in the related languages (such as Arabic)
• some grammatical changes due to being used by the speakers of Indo-European languages: notably switching to subject-verb-object word order, and transformation of perfect/imperfect tenses to represent past/future tense and active participle to represent the present tense.

Answer 14

There are of course many language reforms being performed from time to time, as partially listed in other answers. I won't mention language change that happened after the country stopped being "conquered" and as a result of being "free", and focus only on majority languages (there are way too many minority languages being made official in some partial function). However, there are indeed some (recent) examples when there was really a change in language (as in "a language is a sociolinguistic construct, not a mere linguistic one"):

• Montenegro officially changed its language from Serbocroatian to Montenegrin on 22 October 2007, but the language remained "the same" until some standardization changes in 2009/2010, which made it slightly different from standard Serbian.
• Bosnia and Hercegovina (or better, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) slowly (since the 1990s) introduced standard Bosnian language as one of the official languages
• borderline example is Moldova, where the language has been (since the independence from the USSR) called on and off Romanian and Moldovan, depending on then current political situation (without any changes to the language itself)
• Singapore's Chinese population changed its languages from Cantonese to Mandarin around the 1980s; this was quite voluntary, because Mandarin gave much better economic opportunities. (Before anyone comments, Cantonese and Mandarin are two different, mutually unitelligible languages)
• China switched its written official language from Wényánwén to Pǔtōnghuà (these languages are considerably different) slowly from the beginning of the 20th century until after the communist revolution. The situation with the official standard spoken language has been considerably more complicated, but by the end of 20th century, Pǔtōnghuà has firmly become the spoken standard.
• Malta replaced Italian with Maltese as one (the second being English) of the official languages in 1934 (it was however a part of the British Empire, but this still a nice example)
• Kingdom of Hungary was still using Latin as its official language until 1836, then switched to Hungarian (it can be argued that it has been "conquered" during all the time, but this did not influence its language choice)
• USSR adopted Russian as the official union language in 1990 (it was "only" a language of the Russian Federation, one of the union republics until then).

Answer 15

I believe Alaska would also count. I can't imagine there were many (if any) English speakers living there before it was sold to the United States in 1867.

Answer 16

The Union of South Africa established in 1910 had English and Dutch as official languages. This was changed in 1925, where Afrikaans was added as a form of Dutch. In 1986, all mention of Dutch was scrapped, so it was Afrikaans only. In 1994, nine native languages were added.

Answer 17

100 years ago, France had many different local languages, such as Breton, a Celtic language. WP says that as late as 1950, there were about a million native Breton speakers. Today the language is for all practical purposes extinct.

Answer 18

One fairly typical scenario for this is the conquest of a foreign country, followeed by the assimilation of the new elite into the conquered population. A good example are the Manchu in China who assimilated so well that their language had becomme extinct at the end of the (Manchu) Qing dynasty. Other examples would be the Mongols in Iran, Russia and Central Asia, or the Bulgars in the Balkans