ABSTRACT
The relation of language to politics can be made either from the point of view of the individual or from that of the language. * In this chapter I take the second approach and reify language as one would reify religion, social class, or nation in order to answer the question: What are the successful survival strategies of a minority language that has increasingly close contacts with more powerful languages. I shall make frequent but non-exclusive reference to the Canadian case, Canada being a rich laboratory for the study of both cooperation and conflict among official languages, aboriginal languages, and the large number of languages brought into the country by a high level of immigration. All these languages are affected by what I have called the Law of Babel. 1
