[ref. ALI workshop on Language Shift & Maintenance in the Asia Pacific Region,
Latrobe University, 9 July 1994; convenors: Patrick McConvell and Margaret
Florey].
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I jotted down the notes which follow after the workshop to clarify my own ideas.
They are impressionistic, and coming from an instinctive contrarian may well
please nobody. The purpose is merely to help crystalize some social issues
which often remain unspoken.
The Latrobe workshop was a venue for the presentation of information and views
which ranged from the factual to the ideological, from the local to the
universal. Some speakers assumed a communality of purpose and values which was
belied by the skepticism of others. There was an intermixing of professional
ambitions, private beliefs and the cultural concerns of absent communities
which made it impossible to draw many coherent conclusions. However, the
meeting did succeed in forcing those present to reexamine their own positions.
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Linguists' arguments for language maintenance are often ideological. It is an
ideology which tends to rationalize the linguists' own interests as a surrogate
for the interests of language speakers in affected communities. Both interests
may actually coincide, but often enough they do not.
If a debate amongst linguists on language maintenance is to be honest and
practical, it has to begin by identifying the values and self-interest of
linguists (which are as legitimate as any others in their own domain). Next,
and separately the interests of various social groupings, political entities,
institutions and finally affected speakers themselves need to be addressed.
1. Linguists: Let us start with the obvious. Linguists like languages, the more
the better. This is a matter of romance, fascination and intellectual
challenge. We don't hear much about the romance, but to encounter a coven of
descriptive linguists and their acolytes is (for the iconoclastic observer)
much the same as stumbling upon a clique of American artists in Paris,
twenty-something bond traders on Wall Street, New York, or petrol-head drag
racers in the western suburbs of Sydney. What all these groupies have in common
is a belief that they are doing something very sexy, something that has a
special cachet. Each milieu has a style, an in-group language, peer pressure
for a unifying set of values, and a network of mutual support which gives
members a sense of the rightness of their cause.
There is nothing wrong with linguists having a sense of community like
petrol-heads and bond traders. The world is made up of such intersecting
communities, and without them we could have no commitment to vocation or
research. Problems do arise however when academics project their own particular
vocational romance into a universal condition for all humanity. When it comes
to language preservation, the linguist's ideology expressed as an assumed value
for everyone else is both naive and self-defeating.
2. Ken Hale told us that the number of languages in the world has been dropping
for at least half a millennium. Apparently this is at a rate which is inverse
proportion to the tide of intercultural exchange from mass migrations, trade,
industrial growth, education, and communication revolutions.
For linguists, the loss of languages seems an unparalleled tragedy. The
extraordinary intricacy, flexibility and functional power of a human language
is the very pinnacle of achievement in our species. Each language is unique,
and the historical vehicle for whole eras of regional culture. Surely such a
thing is worth preserving. Yet every act of preservation does carry an
opportunity cost.
3. The human upheavals of the past 500 years have been generally catastrophic
for other life-forms on the planet. The sheer numbers in human populations mean
increasingly that the rest of nature is corralled as either an agricultural
factory or a theme park for one species.
Further, the human species itself differentiates into the users and the used,
where "ethnic" groups, by coercion or choice, become vaudeville entertainment
in "service industries", and the unreflective content of cultures (including
language) is massaged by spin doctors to soothe the sensibilities of tour bus
groups. Actually, for large numbers of people in post-industrial societies,
general ethnic domains have similar properties to language domains: we slip in
and out of these shells according to personal, institutional or commercial
demand.
If a human plague threatens animal species and decimates the biodiversity of
plant forms, it is perhaps not surprising that scientists, aware individuals
and finally governmental institutions feel that they have step in and try to
save the planet which nourishes us all.
Nor is it surprising if linguists react with alarm to the apparent
homogenization of natural language into fewer and fewer systems, which also
borrow heavily from each other. There is an immediate temptation to equate the
process with a general loss of biodiversity. Is this sensible? When the gene
pool for a plant type is reduced from hundreds of varieties to only several,
then disease strikes, we must anticipate human disaster. The Irish potato
famine of the 19th Century was a potent example. When a hundred languages
disappear, to be replaced by, say, English, Indonesian or Tok Pisin, should we
anticipate a terminal decline in cultural variety or human inventiveness? What
is the evidence?
4. As an artifact, no language is replaceable. We might think of a language
synchronically as the sum of (mostly subconscious) knowledge that a speech
community holds about a set of protocols for mutual communication, and their
skill in deploying those protocols. The product of exercising such protocols
can be partially preserved in books, or on audio tape, or in oral myths, but
valuable as such items are, they are not the language itself. Whenever a
synchronic sample of the protocols of a language is extracted, it will differ
slightly from all other samples taken before and after it. That is, the
totality of protocols which constitute a language evolves constantly, and is
indeterminate within a range which defines the phenomenon itself. In this we
can compare a language to a cyclone, which is unpredictable within the range of
cyclone-like phenomena, or an economic cycle which is unpredictable within the
normal limits of all economic cycles.
5. As a communicative tool, any language is replaceable. It is at least arguable
that the phenomenological cycle which defines a particular language is only a
subset of the cycle which defines natural languages in general, and can be
substituted by any member of the larger set. Moreover, new subsets of language
will emerge and evolve if the need arises. Linguists might gnash their teeth,
and traditionalists regret a popular inability to read the Dead Sea Scrolls in
the original, but each new generation of children will get on with shaping the
world as they find it.
6. Most people are not full-time philosophers. They are concerned to feed and
breed and maximize their comfort zones. Having achieved a level of comfort they
may turn to designer clothes or meditation classes or cultivating some
linguistic cleverness to secure their sense of being special. More likely on
this planet, having been denied a level of comfort apparently available to
others, they may identify some language as a barrier or a pathway to the
millennium. They may promote a minority tongue or dialect as an act of defiant
solidarity, or pursue a language of wider community to increase their life
opportunities. The fact that a majority of people on earth are multilingual is
good evidence that compromise is usually made in both directions. The fact that
the overall number of languages has been declining dramatically is strong
evidence that people ultimately find it more effective and comfortable to talk
one or two languages than three or four, and that their choices will !
ultimately be less and less parochial.
7. Linguists are often called upon to support the preservation or maintenance of
minority and threatened languages. In general they are eager to help. In some
cases they may incite a group of speakers to preserve a language that would
otherwise have passed away unmourned. There is not much point in saying what
linguists should or should not do in such circumstances. Each situation has its
own merits. In any case, being human and having self-selected for an interest
in languages, most linguists will continue to follow their heart's desire.
8. The effects of language maintenance programs can be extremely positive for
threatened cultural groups. Psychologists often talk about the power of
self-visualization: the ability of successful individuals to achieve difficult
ends by projecting themselves mentally into a state where those ends are
already achieved, and then actualizing the vision. The penniless immigrant who
asks for his first bank loan, already seeing himself as a captain of industry,
is apt to become just that. There is an important sense in which whole cultures
are also driven by a kind of collective visualization. It may be a religious
vision, or it may be a vision which says "I am Australian (or Japanese or
German) and this is where Australians are going...". Such visualization
underpins an individual's behaviour, his ambition, his health, even his
posture.
All over the world small aboriginal groups (in particular) have had their
cultural vision shattered, and physical disintegration has rapidly followed. It
is in this context that I feel (and this is a personal view) that language
maintenance, or even language resurrection can be extremely potent medicine.
Here I align language with all the other cultural artifacts that may be used
for self-definition, used as a tool for the revisualization that can help to
give a people back their humanity and hope. I would defend it in this situation
in the same way as a religious belief that I might reject privately, or a way
of building houses which might seem ridiculously inefficient but would for the
maker be a home and not merely a building. If the children of newly confident
communities went on to buy project homes, opt for agnosticism or extend their
linguistic comfort zones by shifting to a major metropolitan language, I would
not count it a cultural catastrophe. They would have achi!
eved a psychological condition where choices were no longer coercive.
9. Can language revival have damaging effects? Yes, I believe so, where cultural
preference becomes a vehicle for linguistic nationalism. The long suppression
of minority languages in the old Soviet Union has led to an explosive reaction
of xenophobic intolerance in the disintegrated empire. Empires, for all their
bureaucratic insensitivity, do convey major benefits for general communication
and the flowering of creative achievement. The collapse of the Roman empire led
to the European dark ages, not an instant renaissance. The military and
cultural colonization of the Indonesian archipelago by Javanese is burying
hundreds of languages and island cultures, often in a most brutal way. An
intermittent visitor to Indonesia over the past quarter century does not have
an impression of most island people sinking into a bottomless morass of
despair. They might not like the cultural imperialism, but there is an
accelerating dynamism about the place, and a new mobility for large numbers
of people that the majority would not substitute for an earlier way of life.
Some might welcome the teaching of local language as a locus of communal
identity, but they would not wish to see the movement go feral and become a
force for secession. This is a matter for fine political judgement, where the
linguist's voice is only one amongst many.
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