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Power and dominance in intercultural communication 405

etc. The reason why I could do so is, I believe, quite evident: Even if these
players had behaved genuinely altruistically, they would still have been prone
to act on the basis of a knowledge the ethnocentricity of which they were not
aware of.

3.3. Linguistic expansion (Sprachausbau) under postcolonial duress
santa Maria nijéit – chu
fuck neg.
(virgo intacta in Shuara; from Kummer 1985: 127)

Nowhere perhaps are power and dominance in intercultural communication felt
more strongly about than in the area of – to put it neutrally – language mainten-
ance. “Languages differ in their linguistic devices and purposes. Beyond this
they differ in the forms of representation and practices, i.e. in the cultural appar-
atus, tied to them.” (Redder and Rehbein 1987: 19). This complex interrelation
is the basis for nation building via aggressive language policy (e.g. Hill 2002;
Mikula 2002), maintenance of minority languages (e.g. Aklif 1999; Clyne 2004;
Hatoss 2004) and issues of language planning and “ecology” (e.g. Gundara
1999; Mühlhäusler 2000; Liddicoat and Muller 2002b). As can be seen from
most of these studies, linguists and policy makers alike make frequent use of the
concept of identity – which is unfortunate, as this concept is as much of an ex-
planandum as the culture concept. For if one just takes “identity” in a minimal-
ist sense, say, “that which holds out against another”, the concept can be applied
to the major part of the material world as well as to mental entities such as
thoughts in the sense of Frege (1967). Also the ecological metaphor tends to
lose its descriptive merits very quickly when it is used to re-introduce, after the
Darwinist speculations of the 19th century, biological notions to societal and
linguistic processes (Finke 1996).
I therefore believe that an understanding of these issues is facilitated by try-
ing to look at the purposes that generate them:
Nation building usually occurs amongst societies that are very similar. Its
purpose is territorial and is best achieved by making political and linguistic
borders coincide in people’s minds (Auer 2004). Dragosavljevic ˇ (2002) illus-
trates how aggressive language policy instrumentalizes the tiny differences be-
tween Ijekavian and Ekavian to ultimately create different countries within
former Yugoslavia.
The issue of language maintenance frequently arises in postcolonial so-
cieties that comprise – very different – indigenous societies. Tradition and com-
munication in these societies are mostly oral. If they lose their languages,
they do not lose “identity”, they lose their cultural apparatus. They lose society
as such. “If people don’t have their land and language, they will be lost. They