Germanic words, later-learned loanwords, copied from Latin or French may "sound more cultured" to a native English-speaker. Following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire over much of present-day Germany and Central Europe, the German language and its dialects became the preferred language of many Central-European nobility. With varying success, German spread across much of Central and Eastern Europe as a language of trade and status. This ended with World War II (See also Germanization.). French has also expanded. Languages such as Occitan, Breton, Basque, Catalan and Corsican have been slighted in France. This process, known as Francization, often causes resistance amongst the subject peoples, leading to demands for independence. Examples of this can still be found in Breton nationalism and in the Flanders' Flemish Movement in Belgium). In Italy there is a situation similar to the French one, with Italian that has expanded at the expense of languages such as Sardinian, Sicilian, Ladin, Venetian and Friulan, while languages such as German (in South Tyrol) or French (in Aosta Valley), historically persecuted, are now co-official in those regions (See also Italianization). Portuguese and Spanish colonization made these languages prevalent in South America and in parts of Africa and Asia (the Philippines, Macau, and for a short time Formosa). In Spain, Spanish spread and was imposed over other languages, becoming the only official language of the state from the 18th to the 20th century. It was labelled "the companion of the Empire" by Antonio de Nebrija (1492) in the introduction to his Gramática de la lengua castellana. Russian linguistic imperialism can be seen in Belarus both in the former dispute over the name of the country (Belarus vs Belorussia) and in the common spelling of the name of their president. The English transcription of his name is the Russian form, Alexander Lukashenko, instead of the Belarusian form, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. In post-independence India, there were attempts to make Hindi as the sole official language which was vehemently opposed by various provinces, particularly by the state of Tamil Nadu. In Karnataka, linguistic imperialism manifests as pushes to impose Kannada almost everywhere. Criticism Many scholars have participated in lively discussions of Phillipson's claims. Alan Davies, for instance, envisions the ghost of Phillipson haunting the Department of Applied Linguistics in Edinburgh: For Davies, two cultures inhabit linguistic imperialism: one, a culture of guilt ("colonies should never have happened"); the other, that of romantic despair ("we