a profoundly political act and speaks in the name of the people, even if it
can scarcely be claimed that he is a committed writer or a popular author.
The term ‘minority’ is borrowed – obviously deliberately – from the field of
politics and full of irony: the major dialect, the standard language, is, in fact,
only spoken by a tiny minority of speakers. This is as true of standard English,
language of imperialism, as of German in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And,
in truth, this ironic situation also concerns the field of politics, where speeches
about respecting the majority often conceal policies defending minority or
élite interests. But the real interest of the concept is that this ontological
metaphor does not refer so much to a result as to a process: this is why, ideally,
we should prefer the coinage ‘becoming-minoritarian’ to ‘minority’. For the
function of linguistic minorities – this is the form taken by class struggle in
language – is to render the standard language minoritarian. By this is to be
understood a dual process: the minor dialects subvert the major language,
they disquiet it, destabilise it, put it in a state of continuous variation;
correlatively, however, by subverting it they make it live, they cause the
linguistic formation to continue to develop, to be the site of tensions and
contradictions that render it active in the historical and linguistic conjuncture.
In germ, here we have a theory of the specific effectivity of the family of
language games commonly called literature. The concept is interesting for
a second reason. It makes it possible to stress the diversity of linguistic
phenomena and thereby challenge the unicity of language understood as a
system. A linguistic formation is a rather chaotic set of dialects (e.g. the forms
of English spoken in Scotland or Australia), even of languages in the process
of being formed (what are called the ‘New Englishes’ – the English of Singapore,
Nigeria, etc.), of social or generational dialects (the English of inner-city
Glasgow, which is not only Scottish but proletarian; or what is called ‘Estuary
English’, a dialect born on the banks of the Thames and dear to today’s British
adolescents), of jargons and registers (by which is understood the language
of occupations and professions), of argots and other secret languages, of
individual and group styles, of speech genres and other language games (the
English of the media is a good example). It is this unstable, continually varying
set, with each component having its own rhythm and temporality, which by
(inevitable) abstraction and (far from innocent) fetishisation is called ‘English’.
Why is the fetishisation not innocent? Because it makes it possible to pass
off, by synecdoche, one of the dialects – ‘standard English’ – for the whole
of the linguistic formation, which has important consequences (e.g. when it
212 • Conclusion