Schizophrenia or cleverness? Why do people in Ireland embrace English, while in the Philippines, Spanish is met with fear?
The language ombudsman's statements claiming that bilingualism is "linguistic schizophrenia" showcase the ultimate defeat of linguistics in its battle against politics and ideology.
The assertion of "linguistic schizophrenia" is highly controversial, especially considering that modern linguistics and semantics have convincingly demonstrated that any form of bilingualism is an undeniable advantage, particularly in terms of cognitive development.
Switching from one language register to another complicates the neural organization in the brain structures responsible for speech apparatus.
It directly influences the development of thought.
That is why Ireland, despite its complex historical relationship with Britain, has retained the use of the English language, while Irish Gaelic occupies approximately 20% of the country's linguistic landscape.
India maintained English following a long colonial period.
The leader of the Celtic revival and the greatest Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, a Nobel laureate in literature, wrote in English.
Taras Shevchenko wrote his diaries and even poetry in Russian.
And there are many such examples.
Additionally, it was in Ukraine that the great linguist Alexander Potebnya was born, in whose honor our academic Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine is named.
One of Potebnya's key works is "Thought and Language."
Potebnya stated that language is primarily a means of understanding oneself. It is a way to express internal thought in the form of semantic constructions externally.
That is why language develops exclusively as a process derived from internal thought, not the other way around.
In this context, language development can occur either as a linguistic revolution (as happened in Israel, but there it was triggered by linguistic polyphony among repatriates) or as an evolutionary, gradual process.
As seen in the Philippines, where the local Tagalog gradually displaced Spanish, even though there is still an academy of the Spanish language and a literary award named after Cervantes.
However, the development of language cannot be a primary process in relation to thought, meaning the language in which a person "thinks and forms their thoughts."
At the same time, linguistics can be part of politics and ideology. But then what does schizophrenia have to do with it, especially "linguistic" schizophrenia?
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