Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity 9781350195400, 9781350195417, 9781350195448, 9781350195431

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Prologue
1 Language origins and language diversity
2 Interpreting language diversity
3 The emergence and measurement of multilingualism
4 Dialects and other language varieties
5 Multilingual abilities
6 The consequences of Babel: Lingua francas and translation
7 Keeping languages pure
8 Languages and identities
9 Language decline and revival: Basic factors
10 Language decline and revival: Advocacy and activism
11 Language planning and the ecology of language
12 Postmodern perspectives
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Multilingualism

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY World Englishes: A Critical Analysis by Mario Saraceni Multilingualism in Public Spaces, edited by Robert Blackwood and Deirdre A. Dunlevy Linguanomics by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Other books by John Edwards The Irish Language Linguistic Minorities, Policies and Pluralism Language, Society and Identity Language and Disadvantage Multilingualism Un mundo de lenguas Language and Identity Language Diversity in the Classroom Minority Languages and Group Identity Language in Canada Challenges in the Social Life of Language Sociolinguistics

Multilingualism Understanding linguistic diversity Second Edition

JOHN EDWARDS

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2012 This edition published 2023 Copyright © John Edwards, 2023 John Edwards has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image © Cosmo Condina / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9540-0 PB: 978-1-3501-9541-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9543-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-9542-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­À la mémoire de Suzanne Aline Marie DeLarichelière

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­Contents List of figures  viii List of tables  ix

Prologue  1 1 2 3 4 5 6

Language origins and language diversity  9 Interpreting language diversity  31 The emergence and measurement of multilingualism  43 Dialects and other language varieties  61 Multilingual abilities  75 The consequences of Babel: Lingua francas and translation  93 7 Keeping languages pure  109 8 Languages and identities  123 9 Language decline and revival: Basic factors  137 10 Language decline and revival: Advocacy and activism  149 11 Language planning and the ecology of language  165 12 Postmodern perspectives  183 Epilogue  197 Notes  200 References  220 Index  248

List of figures  1.1 The Tower of Babel by Anton Joseph von Prenner (1683–1761)  10  1.2 Adam names the animals in the Garden of Eden  15  1.3 Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones (1746–1794)  25  1.4 The global distribution of the major language families  26  1.5 The central branches of the Indo-European family tree  27  2.1 Dorothy (Dolly) Pentreath of Mousehole (1692–1777)  32  3.1 Taking the census (volkstelling) with the Theunisz family of caravan dwellers, Amsterdam, 1925  51  3.2 Multilingual plaque at the entrance to the European Parliament, Brussels  59  4.1 Cockney rhyming slang on an ATM in Hackney  73  5.1 Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890)  87  5.2 The Mortlake mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton  88  7.1 Dr Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language (6th edition, 1785)  116  7.2 Sir James Murray (1837–1915)  118  7.3 Noah Webster (1758–1843)  120 10.1 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) working on his dictionary of Hebrew (c. 1915)  151

List of tables 1.1 The ten most widely spoken languages  28 3.1 Pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York and Reading  57

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Prologue

I­ ntroductory note This is a second edition of a book (in English) that had earlier seen the light of day, in rather different form, in Catalan and Spanish editions. Even though it is now presented in a much revised and enlarged version, it can still only touch upon many important topics that are covered more thoroughly elsewhere. It does, however, provide an overview of multilingualism that is reasonably complete, if abbreviated, and it is meant for all those who find discussions of language and languages both interesting and informative. It may also prove useful for students, either by itself or in conjunction with other linguistic resources. I present here a picture of global linguistic diversity, with some of its important ramifications and consequences, but I also try to show that many of the most compelling aspects of this diversity are not linguistic in any narrow or self-contained sense; rather, they have to do with the symbolic and identity-marking features of language. If languages were only instruments of communication, there would still be a great deal to say in a world that contains several thousand of them: why there are so many, how different they are from one another, how they present reality in different ways to their speakers, and so on. It would also be useful, particularly for speakers of ‘big’ languages, to discuss in some detail the multilingual capacities that characterize the majority of the world’s population, the normality of multilingualism, and the statistically minor category

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of monolingualism. There is a great deal more to say, however, when we realize that languages are totems as well as tools. For then we enter the highly charged psychological and social domains of group attachments, the most powerful and the most historically interesting categories here being ethnic and national affiliations. Even a cursory glance at the table of contents of this book will reveal the attempts to comment upon the intertwining of language and group identity.1 Many languages are mentioned in the book, but many more are not. One cannot deal with all settings and all varieties, of course, and for this reason I have tried wherever possible to make points and to highlight situations that have clearly generalizable features. (I  invite readers to pause now and again, to consider how a description or assessment of a particular language setting might or might not find echoes in other circumstances, in other communities.) Since social-scientific work generally reveals a lack of historical and crossdisciplinary awareness, the topics and developments discussed here are given some suitable contextualization, wherever feasible. I have also been attentive to the most significant and coherent treatments in the relevant scholarship. Whether one remains with the Englishlanguage academic literature or ventures further afield, there is much less serious work to be found on non-European contexts, despite the obvious richness of multilingualism in Africa, Asia and South America. Nonetheless, I have been able to make some mention of this richness in the book. Given the current global linguistic picture, a great deal of the discussion has to do with interactions between ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ languages. More specifically – and as most readers will know – these involve contact (and often conflict) between English and other varieties. I should say something here, then, about the unique status of English in the world, and some of its important ramifications.2

English in the world Since so many modern multilingual scenes take place on a stage for which English provides the general backdrop, I thought it useful to set out a few contextual details in this short section. And, since so much

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attention has been given to resisting the global pervasiveness of English, and to improving the fortunes of ‘small’ languages, it is also useful to bear in mind – from the outset – Abram de Swaan’s simple observation: ‘the more languages, the more English’. The implication is that increases in linguistic diversity may actually strengthen the need for a cross-cultural lingua franca. Something to bear in mind for all opponents of linguistic ‘imperialism’.3 In 1578, John Florio published First Fruites, a book that provided ‘familiar speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden sayings’ to teach Italian to English gentlemen. In Florio’s time (c.1550–1625), French, Italian and Spanish were the powerful ‘international’ varieties, widely studied in Tudor and Stuart England. Italian challenged the supremacy of French in both the cultural and the commercial worlds, and many prominent Elizabethans learned it. Indeed, the queen herself was a student, along with luminaries like Edmund Spenser and the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesly – a literary patron to Florio and, more famously, to Shakespeare. Few people in the sixteenth century would have predicted global status for English, a language with 4 or 5 million speakers, and well back in the linguistic sweepstakes. One of Florio’s set conversation pieces makes the point that, once across the Channel, English loses most of its usefulness. The first speaker notes that English is a language that ‘wyl do you good in England, but passe Douer, it is woorth nothing’. Then, in reply to a question about the state of the language itself, he adds: ‘Certis if you wyl beleeue me, it doth not like me at al, because it is a language confused, bepeesed with many tongues: it taketh many words of the latine, & mo from the French, & mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch.’ A mixed and bastardized variety, of only insular value.4 I mention Florio’s work here as a salutary general example of the changing fortunes of language and, in the case of what is now the major global lingua franca – often described as an agent of cultural and linguistic imperialism – a reminder that English has not always been a linguistic power-house. The reasons for its growth are familiar enough to require no special attention here; all languages owe their fortunes to the status of their speakers and, even when Florio was writing his manual, the seeds of English global dominance were being planted and nurtured. The language did not follow the usual course, however.

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Historical precedent would have suggested that the decline of British power meant the waning of English, but the language received a renewed lease of life as America took centre stage. More unusually still, there may be a third act to the drama, since English has now so thoroughly penetrated the non-anglophone world. Rising economies everywhere are already well used to English, and to its lingua-franca value, both within and between countries. One hesitates to predict that even the dramatic surge in Chinese power and influence will lead to the widespread replacement of English by Mandarin. While there is now a considerable literature examining the allegedly baleful effects of English linguistic imperialism, there are also voices from beyond the traditional ‘anglosphere’ that not only accept the place of English, but also see it as a medium that has grown far from its original roots and is no longer ‘owned’ by its original speakers. In 1996, Sridath Ramphal, the Guyanese Secretary-General of the British Commonwealth, wrote that English had become a world language, not a language of imperialism. More recent comments along the same lines have come from Farzad Sharifian, an Iranian linguist who claimed English as an international language; from Sung-Yul Park, writing about the ‘local construction of a global language’ in Korea; and from the Japanese sociolinguist Nobuyuki Honna, who sees English as ‘a multicultural language’. Suresh Canagarajah has noted that the use of English as a lingua franca in non-native contexts may facilitate a desirable unity of action in movements for national liberation, for instance. Fuller arguments have been made by Philippe van Parijs, who sees the desirable lingua-franca status of English arising ‘from no hidden conspiracy . . . but [as] the spontaneous outcome of a huge set of decentralised decisions, mainly by non-anglophones, about which language to learn and which language to use’.5

Multiculturalism, nationalism and language Readers may wonder why I merely touch on multiculturalism and nationalism in this very brief section. Large literatures exist for each of them and, within that extensive coverage much mention is

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made of their relationships with language. That is one reason why I do not delve more deeply into them here. The more important reason is that the principal ways in which matters of ethnicity, nationalism and culture intertwine with language are made quite clear throughout this book, and this is particularly evident in those many places where I discuss contacts between bigger and smaller languages and communities. Here, then, I wish only to emphasize the point I made at the beginning of the book about the powerful symbolic value that languages possess, which so often comes to the fore when ethnic and national contacts become especially salient or problematic, and whose contribution to the marking of group borders is considerable. I shall return to language-as-symbol in several of the later chapters here. The mundane instrumental aspects of language provide, in themselves, rich material for study and analysis, and contribute a major pillar to individual and group identity. Most speakers of big languages do not reflect on this contribution very often, simply because it is an unremarkable ‘given’. Indeed, the daily language of many such speakers is also the language of their culture; there is thus a continuity between the past, with its literary and historical associations, and the present. You read poetry in the same language you use to buy apples. What is of immediate instrumental value also carries symbolic freight, and the language-and-identity linkages are clear, if not always uppermost in the mind. They often become very central, however, when linguistic instrumentality is waning or has, indeed, been lost. It is hardly surprising, then, that symbolic aspects of an ancestral language may help to sustain a sense of ‘groupness’ when that language is on an instrumental decline. Not only that: the powerful cultural associations of a language no longer widely spoken may provide a base for vernacular revival – or so linguistic nationalists hope and believe. The upshot here is that much of the subject matter of this book – language and languages in all their forms – deals either explicitly or implicitly with the relationship between language and cultural identity. And this means that, if there were sufficient time and space, it would make a great deal of sense to discuss multiculturalism together with multilingualism. Instead, I can only remind the reader that multiculturalism often implies multilingualism. Indeed, if we accept that languages that have come to possess only

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symbolic value for a cultural community might still be discussed under the heading of ‘multilingualism’, then we could replace that ‘often’ with something close to ‘always’. In most countries – particularly, of course, those immigrantreceiving countries of the new world – multiculturalism has long had de facto status. Canada was the first to give it de jure status, however, to make multiculturalism official. The idea of a ‘mosaic’ of indigenous and immigrant populations was introduced by a journalist in 1922. Four years later, a worker for the YWCA in Canada used the word in the title of her book – she went on to become the secretary of the organization’s ‘Council of Friendship’, set up to assist the integration of newcomers to the country. ‘Mosaic’ then appeared in the title of a 1938 book which compared the Canadian arrangement to that of the American ‘melting pot’, and which can be seen as introducing the concept of multiculturalism – although not the word, which began to emerge during the 1960s. The findings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (established in 1963) led to the Official Languages Act (1969) and the adoption of a federal policy of multiculturalism followed in 1971, later enshrined in an Act of 1988.6 Officially supported multiculturalism is a rare bird. A recent summary of multicultural policy in twenty-one democratic countries shows that only Canada and Australia enshrine such a policy in legislative terms. Since Canada is officially bilingual, and given the sometimes fraught relationship between its francophone and anglophone populations, the multicultural policy exists within a bilingual framework. The French were particularly opposed to endorsing any ‘ethnic’ language, for fear that that would act against the maintenance of French. At the same time, some of those immigrant groups for whom multicultural accommodations were made have regretted (to put it mildly) that their languages were not included under the federal cultural umbrella. A succinct account of the basic objection here – of the difficulty of reconciling official linguistic dualism with ethnocultural pluralism – was provided by a Ukrainian scholar, who described the federal policy as one of ‘political pragmatism’ which: pleased no one . . . The failure to provide multiculturalism with a linguistic base especially displeased the Ukrainians; the loosening of the ties between language and culture angered the

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francophones who disliked any suggestion that the status of their culture was on a par with that of other ethnic groups. The summary study found that, besides the country-wide policies of Canada and Australia, some states do make partial or regionally based multicultural accommodations for immigrant communities. Every reader will be aware, of course, that a heady mixture of concerns about the non-integration of immigrants and refugees, Islamophobia, right-wing activism, racism and political populism has meant that, over the past decade, many European leaders have declared their multicultural efforts to be failures.7 Nationalism is a second important topic in which languages play a central role, but – as with multiculturalism – I have not broken it out for separate examination. Again, however, the matter of language-asnational-marker is implicit throughout the text. In fact, if we realize that the ethnic affiliations that define and fuel multicultural dynamics are nationalisms writ small, if we understand that the demands for cultural recognition and respect are essentially the same at both levels (leaving aside nationalist demands for accreditations as independent states, of course), then the two topics I bring up in this section are reflections of one another.8

Notes and references I have included a great many references and endnotes, although the flow of the text does not require that they be consulted. I may have rather over-egged the pudding here, but I thought it valuable to provide the fullest documentation for readers who may be concerned to follow up on some parts of the discussion. I apologize for the large number of references to my own work – if nothing else, readers will gather that virtually all of the topics treated in this book have been matters of great interest to me over a long time.

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­1 Language origins and language diversity

Introductory note Readers may think it odd that I have devoted the next two sections to biblical and, more generally, ‘spiritual’ aspects of language – especially since I go on to give only cursory attention to modern views of language origins. My reasoning here is twofold. First, the story of the Tower of Babel and its ramifications is intrinsically interesting, particularly as it leads us towards the odd phenomenon of glossolalia. Second, the debates about the language of Eden are also fascinating in themselves (and not without some humorous and/or bizarre asides), besides telling us something of both religious and secular arguments involving language. The specifics of most of these are now mainly of historical interest, but desires to associate one’s group with a particular language are still very much with us. Arguments claiming that one language is above others in terms of ‘purity’, or greater internal logic, or aesthetic superiority, also have modern representations. While various aspects of these matters are taken up in this book, I can anticipate a little by repeating that the central and unifying feature of them all is the relationship between language and group identity.

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Spiritual language I: Babel and Babble1 ­In the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, the divine punishment for human temerity was the confusion of languages. Of course, many scholars have long felt that linguistic diversity does not reflect a punishment at all but, rather, comprises a vital component of a larger and entirely desirable human diversity. Einar Haugen, for example, thought that it was hard to see Babel as a ‘curse’ and later, in a paean to bilingualism and diversity, he wrote about the ‘blessings’ of Babel. A possible interpretation of Babel suggests, in fact, that neither punishment nor blessing is the best characterization; instead, God’s action can be seen as a judgement and a reminder (none too subtle, of course) of the divine injunction to disperse and multiply. Among others, Marianne Moyaert has pointed out that it was not the supposed arrogance of the tower builders – seeking to climb too close to heaven – that disturbed the divine mind, but rather their cultural and linguistic continuity: ‘one people and one language’ intending to

FIGURE 1.1   The Tower of Babel by Anton Joseph von Prenner (1683–1761), after the 1563 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569), ­Metropolitan Museum of Art (Public Domain).

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‘stay together at one place’. In this view, God intervenes to restore the diversity previously ordained. Incidentally, as with stories of great floods, dramatic language dispersals are described in the mythologies of many cultures. George Steiner thus writes that ‘no civilization but has its version of Babel, its mythology of the primal scattering of languages’ or, as he put it elsewhere, a ‘remembrance of a primal severance, of a brutal weaning’. One of the most comprehensive treatments is Arno Borst’s Der Turmbau von Babel, a work in six volumes.2 In biblical terms, the linguistic confusion at Babel was remedied, albeit only in a spiritual context, by the miracle that occurred at the first Pentecost – a word meaning ‘fiftieth’, thus marking a holiday celebrated seven weeks, or fifty days, after the Jewish Passover. We read in Acts that, at this first celebration after Christ’s martyrdom, the apostles were suffused with the holy spirit and ‘began to speak with other tongues’. Those who listened were amazed, ‘because that every man heard them speak in his own language . . . how hear we every man in our own tongue?’ But Peter and the apostles said that this new mutual intelligibility was partial fulfilment of a prophecy, one that foresaw the ‘pouring out’ of God’s holy spirit. The result is a double miracle, inasmuch as the speakers were in receipt of divine inspiration, and the listeners required some heavenly interpretation service to make sense of what would otherwise be gibberish. In some interpretations, the passage in Acts suggests xenoglossia, the ability to speak in a language one does not know, but which is nevertheless an existing variety. Those listening to the apostles were members of more than a dozen groups – from Parthians and Medes to Cretans and Arabians – and they were astonished to find that they understood the speakers (all of them ‘Galilæans’). Were the apostles actually speaking in the many languages of their listeners, then? Or were the latter able to understand what was said – however it was said – in their own tongue? Is the miracle in the speaking or in the hearing? A third possibility is that the ‘other tongues’ produced by the holy spirit were indeed a type of glossolalic speech – no real language at all – in which case the miracle was indeed a double one. The word glossolalia derives from a Greek compound uniting ‘language’ with ‘speech’ and was coined by Frederic Farrar in his life of St Paul. He referred to ‘soliloquies of ecstatic spiritual emotion’,

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but also suggested caution in both practice and interpretation. Here he drew inferences from the apostle’s own admonitions, as found in I Corinthians, where Paul says that prophecy is preferable to speaking in tongues – indeed, if such speech is not based in revelation or divine prediction, if it does not flow from the holy spirit, then it is a false quantity. There is, Farrar wrote, a possible ‘rivalry of unmeaning sounds among the glossolalists’, and of a ‘manifestation at first both sacred and impressive, but liable to easy simulation and grave abuse’. This ‘gift of tongues’ appears throughout Christian history, but Farrar and others – both within and without the church – have described its hysterical symptoms, which often lead to ‘disorderly and deplorable’ consequences.3 In the contemporary western world, glossolalia is found most often in some of the smaller branches of modern Pentecostalism, but it also occurs in larger charismatic and evangelistic settings. The redoubtable Billy Graham gave it his imprimatur in the 1970s, as did the Southern Baptist Convention in 2015. Glossolalia has also been important in the Mormon tradition. While Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, cautioned that there is nothing ‘more easily imitated by the devil than the gift of tongues’, he nevertheless acknowledged its usefulness in missionary work.4 Glossolalia is perceived as one of the revelations of the holy spirit. In fact, five such manifestations are mentioned in Mark, the other four being the ability to heal the sick, to cast out devils, to handle venomous snakes and to drink deadly poison. Some or all of these divine gifts can be found in current Christian sects. The Appalachian ‘Signs Followers’ exhibit all five, with a notice in its West Virginian church pointing out (in uncorrected copy here) that: The Paster and Congregation are not Responsible for anyone that handles the Serpent’s and get’s bit. If you get bit the Church will stand by you and pray with you. And the same goes with drinking the poision.5 Glossolalists themselves obviously believe that speaking in tongues is a sign of divine and desirable possession, but more disinterested assessments reveal psychological and neurological underpinnings. From a linguistic point of view, it is clear that, while glossolalic ‘words’

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are ‘semantically empty and lacking in grammatical patterning . . . they do have phonological patterns, and these are derived from the speaker’s native language and from any other language(s) s/he has heard.’ With affective or emotional force, but without rational meaning, historical and contemporary manifestations of speaking in tongues clearly do not have the semantic characteristics that appeared at Pentecost. Modern glossolalists may assume that the infusion of the holy spirit produces ‘real’ language, but they do not expect either transmission or reception of logically or grammatically understandable information.6

Spiritual language II: From the Garden of Eden If linguistic diversity first occurred because of some celestial intervention, some deliberate confusion, what came before? What was the original language? There are one or two quite well-known experimental investigations – perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not – based on the assumption that, if left uninfluenced, children would somehow come out with that first variety. Herodotus reports that the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik arranged for two babies to be nurtured without hearing any language: at the age of two, the infants apparently said becos, a Phrygian word meaning bread. Early in the thirteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor attempted a similar experiment, but without success, for it was found that ‘the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments’. Later on, James IV of Scotland put two infants with a dumb woman, and ‘some say they spoke good Hebrew’. The assumptions underpinning these regal enquiries went unsupported, of course, not least by the naturally occurring ‘experiments’ provided throughout history by ‘wolf-children’ and ‘bear-children’. None of these feral youngsters have been able to speak, and most efforts to teach them language have been failures. Victor, the ‘wild boy of Aveyron’, discovered in 1799 aged about eleven, is the best known case here.7 Dubious empiricism aside, the question of the primal human language has always been important, in both religious and secular

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settings. In terms of the great monotheisms of the classic world, it has generally taken the form of enquiry into the language of Eden. This was once important (although hardly evidentiary, of course) and the early speculations, while quite without linguistic or historical merit, remain of some psychological and social interest. This is simply because they are a manifestation of the place that language has always had in our sense of who we are. And what, after all, could be more important than being able to show that your language was, in fact, the very first one (or, at least, a lineal descendant of that ‘Adamic’ variety)? The implications for group and individual identity, for relations with other people, and for communication, are considerable. Any ‘winner’ here could claim both linguistic and cultural superiority. The search for the divine language, then, is the earliest example of something that has a continuing resonance in discussions of multilingual contact and conflict. These commonly involve languages of greater or lesser social force, languages with which speakers have very close affiliations, languages about which strong opinions are held. ­Genesis tells us that after God had made all the birds and beasts, he ‘brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.’ Or, as John Milton has the first man say, in Paradise Lost: I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu’d My sudden apprehension . . . Once, then, there was an original and ideal language and, unlike all languages since, there was a mystical but perfect correspondence between words and the things that they named. Many believed that that blissful language of Eden, the divinely inspired lingua humana, was necessarily a perfect medium – but to identify it and to make a case for some relationship with an existing human language proved rather more difficult. In fact, more than three centuries before Milton, in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s Adam says that his language was long extinct before the time of Babel, which rather complicates the matter. Earlier, however, Dante had held (in De vulgari eloquentia) that the language of Eden was Hebrew, and that this remained the common language until the great confusion of tongues.8

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FIGURE 1.2   Adam names the animals in the Garden of Eden, Truro ­Cathedral © Wellcome Images (CC BY 4.0).

From about the second century BCE, Jewish literature gave pride of place to Hebrew: this was the medium of revelation, the language in which God spoke to Adam, the language used by all creatures until the fall, and all people until Babel. Hebrew had the support of most of the Christian community, too. Virtually all of the Greek, Latin and (later) Byzantine patriarchs supported its primary status, as did most of the Arabic-speaking Christian theologians. Among other things, this support was itself a buttress of the Christian claim to be the ‘new Israel’. Simply put, ‘until the sixteenth century, most Western thinkers assumed that [the] first language was Hebrew.’9 Still, Hebrew did not have it all its own way. Theodoret of Antioch and Gregory of Nyssa, for example, both prominent religious figures of the fourth century, were dubious. Theodoret plumped for Syriac, and argued that since God gave Hebrew to Moses – that Hebrew had only come into being at the time of the exodus from Egypt – it could hardly be the language of creation. Aramaic, a variety widely spoken throughout the middle east generally, and within the Jewish community specifically, was also a continuing rival for top honours. Its

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primacy was proclaimed by the Syriac church fathers – unsurprisingly, as Syriac is essentially an Aramaic dialect.10 Even if Hebrew were the Adamic language, many felt that its modern varieties must surely have lost the essential ‘character’ that allowed that first perfect fit between words and things. In the seventeenth century, John Wilkins made that argument, pointing out that so-called ‘deficiencies’ in the contemporary Hebrew indicated that it was not ‘the same which was con-created with our first Parents, and spoken by Adam in Paradise’. At about the same time, Thomas Hobbes (in his Leviathan) wrote that, whatever Adam’s speech capacities may have been, all of his linguistic invention was ‘lost at the tower of Babel, when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.’ Strengthening these reasonable cautions is the fact that no specific claim is made in the Old Testament for Hebrew as the Edenic language. So, Wilkins, Hobbes, Athanasius Kircher, and many other prominent philosophers of the early Enlightenment argued that no attempt to rediscover the lingua humana could possibly succeed. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico was pouring scorn on the wasted discussions about the primal variety, pointing to ‘opinions so uncertain, inept, frivolous, pretentious or ridiculous, and so numerous, that we need not relate them.’ And yet . . . even the great Gottfried Leibniz was not above engaging in linguistic speculation, supporting a ‘Celto-Scythian’ hypothesis that would embrace German. He approved the sentiment expressed by a correspondent: ‘there is nothing in our Saxon language that is random or confused . . . not one word which naturally and properly denotes any vice or moral defect; which is a proof that our language was founded at the time of those first men and is the very ancient tongue they spoke.’ Not surprising, then, that the nineteenth-century philologist, Max Müller, deeply regretted how much such conjectures had retarded the progress of linguistic science.11 While support for Hebrew generally rested upon quite specific religious conjectures, many other languages were suggested as the original, often because of more secular political and nationalistic developments and aspiration. Contenders here included the Celtic varieties, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Basque, Hungarian, Breton, German and Chinese.The lack of any meaningful comparative linguistics,

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linked with the decline of Latin and the rising importance of national vernaculars, allowed speculations that now seem ludicrous. Some Persian scholars – perhaps not entirely seriously – felt that Adam and Eve spoke their language, that the snake spoke Arabic, and that the angel Gabriel spoke Turkish. We may assume that other assertions were intentionally silly. One seventeenth-century writer argued that God spoke Spanish to Adam, the Devil spoke Italian, and Adam and Eve subsequently apologized to God in French. A satirist of the time wrote that God spoke Swedish and Adam Danish, and that Eve was seduced by a French-speaking snake.12

Language origins in current perspective Linguistic speculations that hoped to link, however tenuously, the language of Eden with some existing human variety can be safely put aside. Current religious accounts, to the extent that they find the question relevant at all, generally accept – with the sixteenth-century mystic, John Dee – that Adam and Eve no doubt spoke in tongues and/or in some now-forever-lost ‘angelic’ or ‘celestial’ variety. If we turn from the spiritual to the scientific, however, we find that returning to origins, in terms of any specific language or group of languages, remains a fraught journey. Perhaps there was, in fact, one original language from which all others evolved (the principle of monogenesis), but it is equally possible that several emerged more or less simultaneously, in different places (polygenesis). And, in either case, just how did language arise? These waters are deep enough that, in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris forbade any further discussions on language origins, on the grounds that all would be fruitless.13 In 1922, the great Danish linguist and anglicist Otto Jespersen outlined several common hypotheses, in which language was seen to arise from emotional exclamations, or rhythmical grunts, or songs. Onomatopoeia was another suggestion: the first words were representations of sounds in nature. Two immediate problems present themselves, of course. The first is that most objects in the world do not make characteristic noises – something of a limitation, to be sure. Also annoying is the fact that animals (for example) make

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different sounds in different parts of the world. In English, roosters go ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ and dogs go ‘woof’, but in Romanian they say ‘cucurigu’ and ‘ham’. There are cross-cultural similarities, of course. Cats everywhere say (more or less) ‘miaow’, and a lot of dog speech varies only at the level of dialect: in German and Icelandic, they say ‘wuff’ and ‘voff’, respectively. Only relatively recently have questions about language origins been given renewed attention. Virtually all modern ideas are embedded in an evolutionary picture in which the development of speech had survival value. Perhaps this development was made possible by some internal predisposition of the evolved brain, some innate ‘readiness’ to learn language, or perhaps the contribution of the environmental context – obviously necessary, in any event, to give predisposition a specific linguistic form – has greater explanatory value. Perhaps language first arose as a refinement of rather primitive noises, perhaps it translated and expanded gesture into sound. A very recent theory, one that is of some particular relevance to group solidarity, holds that the utility of language was originally linked to social bonding. Gossip, the banal exchange of social experiences, is seen as a sort of human ‘mutual grooming’. Perhaps the most proficient speakers might have improved their survival chances by being more informed and more manipulative. Like all theories, this one is controversial, but the universality of gossip – which accounts for about 70 per cent of everyday talk – is indisputable. Origin theories, and the evolved complexity of human language in comparison with any other animal communication system, are of great significance, but we need not attend further to them here. Suffice it to say that, although we are still in the realm of speculation, it is an increasingly informed speculation, and the nature, underpinnings and assumptions of current hypotheses are quite different from those of the church patriarchs and the pre-scientific natural philosophers.14

Comparing languages ­ herever and whenever human language first arose, and whatever W form (or forms) it initially took, the scholarly community is virtually as one in the assertion that all known varieties are of considerable

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complexity. There are no ‘primitive’ languages, none is more ‘logical’ than any other, no ‘exotic language’ full of sounds unfamiliar to the western ear should be thought to signal any inherent neuro-cognitive variation between the inhabitants of Amazonia and those of Arizona. I shall return later on to linguistic claims of ‘better’ or ‘worse’, but I can anticipate a little by presenting some simple differences between languages, differences that nobody (I think) could reasonably put in any sort of value hierarchy. Consider variations in word order, for example. In English the subject (S) of a sentence generally comes first, then the verb (V), then the object (O): ‘the boy eats the apple.’ Other languages have an SOV arrangement – ‘çocuk elmayı yedi’ (Turkish) – or a VSO one – ‘ithean an buachaill an t-úll’ (Irish). VOS languages are found in families as far from one another as the Austronesian and the Mayan. The final two permutations are much rarer. The Warao language of north-eastern South America is an OSV variety (and Yoda, the Jedi Master of Star Wars, is of course an OSV speaker: ‘apple, the boy eats’). Hixkaryana, a Brazilian language, has an OVS arrangement. In virtually all languages, however, the typical or the dominant wordorder variation is usually not the only one to be found. Latin is an interesting and instructive case here. It is basically an SOV language, so ‘puer malum comedit’ – but, in fact, each of the six possible arrangements of these three words is possible. This is because word endings change according to their role in the sentence (subject or object, for instance). The classicists Andrew Devine and Laurence Stephens put it succinctly when noting that, in general, ‘Latin word order is grammatically free but pragmatically fixed, while English word order is pragmatically free but grammatically fixed.’ Free, yes, but not random. While ‘puer malum comedit’ might be taken as a more or less neutral statement of fact – the boy eats the apple – ‘malum puer comedit’ puts the emphasis on ‘malum’. Thus, it is the apple that the boy is eating, rather than some other fruit. ‘Malum’ might also be emphasized in speaking, just as English stress patterns indicate variations in meaning. As well, and generally less likely in English, speakers of Latin seem also to have had marked personal preferences: we are told that, where Caesar always wrote castra ponit (pitch camp), Livy more often wrote ponit castra.15

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Adjectival placement also varies across languages, such that ‘the blue car’ in English is ‘el carro azul ’ in Spanish. In all languages, however, exceptions are generally easy to find. There is that famous empty chair at Arthur’s Round Table, the Siege Perilous. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has the jester, Touchstone, tell a nobleman about ‘the quip modest’, the ‘reproof valiant’ and ‘the reply churlish’: these are three of the levels in the jester’s description of a ‘lie seven times removed’. In one of her scathing theatrical reviews, Dorothy Parker wrote that ‘The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.’ Major-General Stanley, in The Pirates of Penzance, is very well acquainted with ‘matters mathematical’. Such usages are not all comedic. Consider rather formal phrases like ‘I thee wed’ or ‘Until death us do part’ or ‘Professor Emeritus’, or more ordinary ones like ‘Off the Nova Scotian coast lie the Ironbound Islands’, or all those of the ‘“I wasn’t there,” said Harry variety’, so common in novels. Sometimes the latter usages are simply a way of avoiding endless usages of ‘Harry said’ over and over, but there may also be poetic requirements: “‘I am half sick of shadows,” the Lady of Shalott said’ doesn’t have quite the resonance of “‘I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott.’ Common or uncommon, virtually all such variants in English word order are immediately intelligible and unambiguous.16 There are other sorts of cross-language differences, sometimes very striking ones, and in many instances particular variations have been seized upon to make one sort of case or another. Language A has no words for numbers higher than ten. Speakers of language B have a colour lexicon that makes no distinction between green and blue. The vocabulary of language C reveals its speakers’ belief that stones have a vital life force. Would we be right to assume that the first group is mathematically illiterate, that the optical rods and cones of the second are deficient, and that the animists are mired in darkage ignorance? Possibly – although further study might reveal that the complex kinship vocabulary of the first group shows a refinement and nuance far exceeding that found in any ‘developed’ language, that the desert-dwelling members of the second community have separate words for dozens of subtle shades of brown – rivalled in western societies only by the usage of paint manufacturers and interior decorators – and that those benighted speakers of

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language C have a system of tenses that puts even classical Greek verbal complexity to shame. The point here is a simple one: languages develop according to the needs and beliefs of their speakers. There are no ‘primitive’ forms but, equally, there are few languages that are ‘over-developed’. Why have a higher-order number system if there is no necessity to go beyond something like ‘one, two, three, many’? Why bother with many shades of green and blue when you live in the Sahara? And what, in a pre-scientific society that, like all societies, finds it necessary to understand its surroundings and abhors an explanatory vacuum, could be more reasonable than to explain the mysteries of nature in essentially spiritual terms when no other explanations are available? A final point here: we can be certain (because we have any amount of evidence) that if the living conditions of members of groups A, B and C change, their languages will change, too, in accordance with altered circumstances. Those desert-dwellers will soon fine-tune their blue-green spectrum once they’ve struck oil and moved to the south of England. Words themselves are only indicators. The real meaning of scholarly assertions about linguistic adequacy is that language keeps pace with conceptual advancement, which in turn determines the very needs of which speakers can even be aware. While there must obviously be a finite lag between new ideas and new terms, this lag varies inversely with the general importance of the idea. How long did it take for ‘astronaut’ to enter common usage? And, even while it was waiting to make its entrance, there had long been other descriptive terms to fill the void (‘spaceman’). Description, albeit rough, is always possible.17 Languages are best seen as different systems reflecting different varieties of the human condition. Although they may be unequal in complexity at given points, this does not imply that some have greater overall expressive power. To put it another way, we could say that not all varieties have the same capabilities: different social, geographical and other circumstances determine what elements will be needed and, therefore, developed. All are, however, potentially functionally equivalent. Languages differ in lexical, grammatical, phonological and other ways, but questions of overall linguistic ‘goodness’ are simply wrong-headed.

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Different languages interpret and codify the world in different ways, and a moment’s reflection will surely lead to the conclusion that the great variation in physical and social environments, over time and space, would make any other arrangement nonsensical. To repeat, however, no language has been found which is inadequate for the current needs of its users. To the surprise of some, acceptance of this idea has quite a long history. In the sixteenth century, for instance, Joachim du Bellay pointed out that ‘all languages are of a like value . . . to each man his language can competently communicate every doctrine’, and he went on to reject the idea that ‘diverse tongues are fitted to signify diverse conceptions.’ Historically, this may have been a minority view, but it is now the received scholarly wisdom. The famous linguist, Edward Sapir, thus observed in 1921 that: the lowliest South African Bushman speaks in the forms of a rich symbolic system that is in essence perfectly comparable to the speech of the cultivated Frenchman . . . When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam. Sapir’s phrasing here is no longer quite comme il faut, perhaps  – and there is more head-hunting now in corporate jungles than in those of Assam – but his words are endorsed by all linguists. That this endorsement is not shared by everyone outside the academic cloisters is one of the many reasons why a broader and deeper general awareness of language and languages is always to be encouraged.18

Languages and language families How many languages are there in the world? Which are the most widespread, and which ones have the greatest number of speakers? It turns out that these are not easy questions to answer. In the early twentieth century, the Académie française identified some 2,800 different languages, and German scholars argued for about 3,000. A British estimate, however, suggested that there were 1,500

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languages in the world. Contemporary scholars suggest a much higher figure: perhaps 4,500 languages. This is variability of a large order, and it reflects a lack of sufficient linguistic knowledge, name variations, and – as we shall see – considerable inconsistency in differentiating languages from dialects. The world may be much smaller now than once it was, but there are still areas that remain little known. In parts of Africa, South America and Oceania, for example, the linguistic jigsaw still lacks some pieces, while having others that don’t seem to fit. Take New Guinea, for example. It is the second largest island in the world (after Greenland), almost a continent in itself, although geologically Australian. The history of human habitation is exceptionally long, between 50,000 and 60,000 years. It is home to many ecosystems, from mountains to savannahs to rain forests; consequently, the range of biodiversity is immense. There is an equal breadth of human cultural and linguistic diversity. Among a population of about 10 million, there are some 1,000 language communities. The size of the island, its challenging terrain, and its complicated and often troubled history – foreign intrusions from the Dutch, Germans, British, Australians and Japanese are factors here – have all contributed to make our knowledge far from precise. In some areas, indeed, we are faced with Rumsfeldian ‘known unknowns’: we are aware that there remain dozens of communities still designated as ‘uncontacted tribal groups’, particularly in the western half of the island (which is part of Indonesia). It is worth saying a bit more about this extraordinary island, I think, since it provides such an interesting comparison with language contexts elsewhere. Consider, first, that ‘Near Oceania’ (i.e., New Guinea and some surrounding islands) has a diversity of peoples and languages ‘unmatched by any other region of comparable size in the world . . . with around 1100 languages, or about 20 per cent of the world’s total.’ But there is more to the linguistic picture than even these striking facts reveal. Andrew Pawley writes that ‘the nonAustronesian languages of the New Guinea area fall into no fewer than 23 families that are not demonstrably related, plus nine or ten isolates.’ By contrast, he adds, the languages of Europe at the start of the fifteenth century ‘fell into just three unrelated families (Indo-European, Uralic and Semitic) and one isolate, Basque’, which

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means that the nineteen families of New Guinea alone reflect a diversity six times greater than that of pre-Columbian Europe.19 As noted, languages are arranged in families of related varieties, about which our knowledge is relatively recent. In February 1786, Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones presented a paper to the Asiatick Society of Bengal, in which the British scholar and jurist noted the obvious relationships among Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. He argued that the similarities were so pronounced that ‘no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists.’ Jones proposed the existence of an ‘Indo-European’ family, which would include Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German and Celtic languages. The basic idea had been current for some time, and the term ‘Indo-European’ had been introduced a generation earlier, but now the insistence on a source variety linking geographically widespread languages was clearly stated. An historical approach to language classification, with its evolutionary tenor, became less novel in the century of Darwin’s Origin of Species; so, as with the earlier linguistic analogues to herbals and bestiaries, language families were now viewed as products and reflections of evolutionary development.20 Given the difficulties of accurate linguistic determination – touched upon above, and to be more fully considered a bit later – we can understand that accuracy in placing languages into families, and even in estimating the number of such families, is also difficult. The idea of the language family is further complicated when we bear in mind the ‘tree’ metaphors that imply one original-language ‘trunk’ (or possibly a small number of such trunks: recall the note, above, about monogenesis and polygenesis); perhaps all languages are really relatives within one great ‘super-family’. If we move upward and onward from an original trunk, however, it is easy to see that there is a very great deal of room for later classification: what one set of scholars might reasonably see as a family of closely linked branches, another might consider to be a number of separate families, or perhaps sub-families. The large Indo-European family, for instance – all members of which may descend from an original ‘ProtoIndo-European’ trunk – has a number of sub-families, among the

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FIGURE 1.3   Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones (1746–1794), National Library of Wales (Public Domain).

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FIGURE 1.4   The global distribution of the major language families. From Multilingualism, by John Edwards © Penguin, 1994. Reproduced with ­permission of Penguin Books Ltd. most important of which are the Germanic, Celtic, Hellenic and Italic subdivisions. Estimates of the number of contemporary language families, then, range widely: perhaps as few as 100, perhaps as many as 300. Figure 1.4 shows something of the global distribution of language families, and Figure 1.5 presents an abbreviated picture of the Indo-European family of languages. The greatest number of speakers (more than 40 per cent of the world’s population of some 8 billion people) is found among the 450 Indo-European languages. The Niger-Congo and Austronesian families have fewer speakers (although, together, they still account for about 13 per cent of that 8 billion), but are by far the largest in terms of linguistic diversity: the former comprises about 1,500 languages, the latter about 1,300. Table 1.1 shows the ten most widely spoken languages, among an estimated total of 7,200.21 There are ancient languages known only because of references in classical literature: Cappadocian, Bithynian, Pontic and others. It is obviously very difficult to construct accurate classifications for such varieties. And there are modern ‘language isolates’ that seem not to fit in families as we currently understand them. The languages of the Salish and Kootenay peoples of British Columbia, and the now-

FIGURE 1.5   The central branches of the Indo-European family tree. From Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction by John Edwards © Oxford University Press, 2013. Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear.

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TABLE 1.1   The ten most widely spoken languages Spoken as a first language

Spoken as a second or subsequent language

Total speakers (millions)

English

370

980

1,350

Mandarin

920

200

1,120

Hindi

340

260

  600*

Spanish

470

70

540

Standard Arabic

275

----

Bengali

230

40

270

French

80

190

270

Russian

155

105

260

Portuguese

230

25

255

45

155

Standard Malay

  420**

 200***

*830 with Urdu / **includes speakers of the many regional varieties; modern Standard Arabic is a formal variety virtually never learned as a first language / ***290 with vernacular varieties of Malay

extinct  language of the Beothuk community in Newfoundland, are examples here. The members of the group were ruthlessly slaughtered by Europeans, with the assistance of Indian mercenaries from the mainland, and the last speaker died of disease in St John’s in 1829. It is ironic that this community should have been the one to prompt the generic term ‘Red Indian’: when John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) first encountered them in the late fifteenth century, he observed and reported their custom of rubbing themselves with red ochre. Modern Basque is also an isolate, thought to be a relic of preIndo-European Europe. The Basques are genetically different from their neighbours, and biological classification provides data that supplement language-family assessments and speculations. If the speakers of Basque were already living in their mountains before

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those great immigrant waves from the east arrived, what could be more reasonable than to expect that they would be both linguistically and biologically different from their European neighbours? Similar triangulations between linguistic and genetic scholarship have reinforced classifications of cultural communities in other parts of the world, too.22

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­2 Interpreting language diversity

Introductory note We must expand a little upon the lack of knowledge that makes counting and categorizing languages so difficult. In many parts of the world, language surveys are nonexistent, or incomplete, or dated. Even in ‘developed’ societies, language-census information is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes this means that languages are ‘missed’ altogether, and sometimes the level of ‘capture’ becomes confused. The Canadian census of 1951 reported 14,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic, a figure which dropped to 7,500 a decade later – but then, in 1971, re-emerged as 21,400. Did Gaelic fade away, only to return half again stronger than it was twenty years earlier? The answer is no. For that 1971 count, all Celtic languages other than Welsh were lumped in with the Gaelic figures. (I shall return to census and other forms of language assessment in the next chapter.)

Dead or alive Insufficient linguistic knowledge often falls into several quite specific categories. For instance, if we do not always have accurate basic information, it follows that we cannot be sure if a language continues to be spoken. Languages are vulnerable to social, political and

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FIGURE 2.1   Dorothy (Dolly) Pentreath of Mousehole (1692–1777), 1781 engraving by unknown artist, after Robert Scaddan (Public Domain).

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economic changes affecting their users. These factors take their greatest toll, of course, among small or endangered languages and these, in turn, are often the ones we knew least about to begin with. Sometimes, however, we have information about the last speakers of a language. Dolly Pentreath, reputedly the last speaker of Cornish, died in 1777. Ned Maddrell was the last native speaker of Manx when he died in 1974. In 1985, researchers found that 82-year-old Tevfik Esenc was the last speaker of Oubykh (a language of the Caucasus). A recent and very typical case is that of Marie Smith Jones, who died in January 2008 at the age of eighty-nine. She grew up on the Copper River delta in Alaska, and was the last person fluent in Eyak, a North American language related to the larger Athapaskan family. Her death, and that of her language, was noted in the media around the world, with the BBC and the (American) National Public Radio network providing audio commentaries, and The Economist an excellent written one. All seemed to be galvanized by this event – the first indigenous Alaskan language to become extinct in recent times – although the death of vernacular varieties is hardly uncommon. Michael Krauss, who worked closely with Mrs Smith Jones, and who interested himself in endangered languages generally, suggested that, on average, a language is ‘lost’ every fortnight. Eyak once flourished in southern Alaska, but rapidly lost ground in the twentieth century, coming to be spoken only in Eyak itself, a village now part of the town of Cordova. A commonly reported pattern in settings of language decline involves a big language (like English) gradually ousting a smaller one (like Eyak). In many instances, however, this pattern is too simplistic. When Angela Sidney died, in 1991 (also aged eighty-nine), she was considered to have been the last fluent speaker of Tagish; however, before Tagish had really begun to shrink under pressure from English, it had already been threatened, largely through trade and inter-marriage, by Tlingit. That same Tlingit also pressured Eyak, as did Alutiiq and other varieties spoken in and around the Copper River country. And now Tlingit, too, is severely endangered, with only about 150 speakers, all of them bilingual (with English). When Smith Jones was born, in 1918, there were perhaps fifty speakers left and, as a teenager, she began to encounter a few anthropologists and folklorists, eager to capture something of what was

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obviously a dying language. At school, Eyak was either discouraged or forbidden, and it had no place in the fish cannery where Smith Jones worked. She herself was apparently unconcerned about Eyak, married outside her community, and found that her children had no interest in the language. It was only later in life that she became something of a language activist, having finally realized the precarious state of her mother tongue. Dismissive of most white outsiders who came to interview her, Smith Jones began to work with Krauss, helping him to produce an Eyak grammar and dictionary.1 There are important generalizable features that we can extract from the Eyak ‘case’. Indeed, it is worth mentioning at this point that, while all language settings are unique, the uniqueness of each does not stem from the presence of elements that are found nowhere else in the world. On the contrary, there are many recurring aspects of language-contact situations. In fact, anyone who has ever attempted to compare and contrast across linguistic and cultural communities, or who has cited different examples to make a general point, has in effect argued that some features are constant or at least similar enough across contexts to suggest useful generalization. In other words, the uniqueness of each ‘case’ arises from specific weightings and arrangements of familiar features: a kaleidoscopic assortment of possibilities that are constructed from a finite set of features. Here are some of the important descriptions that we find, over and over again, in our studies of the social life of language. The first and most obvious is that languages are in dynamic relationships with one another; very often, these relationships are asymmetrical in terms of power and status. A language can falter, then, when in the shadow of stronger neighbours. In today’s world, it is clear that this influence need not be geographically local: English, for instance, makes its presence felt from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Indeed, the power of the really big languages – of lingua francas like Greek, Arabic and Latin – has never been restricted to purely local neighbourhoods. An important corollary is that overweening linguistic neighbours need not always be large-language communities; they can be quite small local languages and dialects, very likely to encounter their own contact difficulties with larger varieties. Consider the Tagish-TlingitEnglish nexus I touched upon above, or the complexities of influence among African languages in contact.

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A second generalizable point is that schools and other formal institutions often discourage the use of indigenous languages. This sometimes arise from prejudice or ignorance, but it usually involves at least some sense of what is considered the best for the children. However misguided and unfair we might think this to be, it has been a very common phenomenon around the world, and one in which parents have often acquiesced. Again, many may see this as a regrettable occurrence, perhaps reflecting deep social inequities, lack of choice, and so on. Nonetheless, even if schools promote a small language, and even if parents are brought to realize that stable bilingualism might represent a workable combination of large and small varieties, the fact that the latter increasingly find little applicability in the wider world also works against their preservation. More generally, we find that bilingualism in the declining language and its powerful linguistic neighbour is often only a temporary phenomenon, to be ultimately replaced with dominant-language monolingualism. Third, interest in and concern for declining languages often arrive very late in the day, both personally and socially. When young, Marie Smith Jones was not prompted to any action on behalf of her language. Languages in decline typically have a predominance of middle-aged or elderly speakers, and there is a lack of transmission to the younger generation. It is common to hear language revivalists express the wish that efforts had been put in train earlier. If only we had acted sooner to maintain Manx or Cornish. If only those immigrant languages of the new world had been encouraged and not subjected to anglicizing pressure. If only more scholars had been activists and advocates, and less like Matthew Arnold, whose historical and antiquarian interests in Celtic literature co-existed with a desire for the disappearance of spoken vernaculars and for the cultural assimilation of their speakers. If only we had more linguists like Michael Krauss, and fewer who seem to prefer their languages safely dead, like Dickens’s Miss Blimber: She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.2

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Revivalists may bewail the fact that intervention in language decline is often a matter of ‘too little, too late’, but we have ample evidence from all sorts of human arenas that things often have to grow to perilous proportions before substantial movement is galvanized. Hindsight is a great thing here, as elsewhere. In fact, even ascertaining the point of actual language death is not always easy and, obviously, the difficulty increases as we go back further in time. The existence of some ancient varieties is confirmed only through classical reference: Cappadocian, already mentioned, once thrived in what is now central Turkey, but we know next to nothing about it. There are also undeciphered varieties. We have thousands of examples of Etruscan texts, but the brevity of many inscriptions (most are funerary) and the ‘isolate’ nature of the language (there are only two other languages in the family, Lemnian and Rhaetic, and neither is well attested) mean that our understanding of Etruscan is very incomplete. Still, the language of the Etruscans – sometimes referred to as Tusci by the Romans who came after them: hence the modern ‘Tuscany’ – seems not quite so dead as Cappadocian. But consider the possibility of further archaeological discoveries at the famous Kerkenes excavations, east of Ankara, discoveries that might very well lead to increased knowledge of Cappadocian. Is it possible that a dead language could then be brought back to some sort of life? As for those ‘dead’ languages that students sometimes moan about – Latin and Attic Greek – well, they don’t seem very dead at all in this company. There appear to be degrees of linguistic mortality. In any event, we probably shouldn’t think of Latin as a dead language at all. The Vatican still makes pronouncements in that language, and dictionaries published under its auspices remain remarkably up to date. In a new dictionary of Latin, or Latinate, words, one will discover escarorium lavator (washing machine), exterioris pagine puella (cover girl) and serpentinus cursus (football dribbling). Providing the only service to rival that of the Vatican, Radio Finland began to broadcast a Latin news bulletin in 1989. Tuomo Pekkanen presented a ‘lean and economical’ Latin, free of circumlocutions: while ‘television’ could be described as a machina ad vim electricam trasmittendam ita instructa ut sine intervallo imagines ac voces e longinquo indicet, Pekkanen suggested televistrum (a Greek-Latin hybrid). Another Finnish professor, Jukka Ammondt, has presented

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Elvis songs in Latin; these have included Nunc hic aut numquam (‘It’s now or never’), Ne saevias (‘Don’t be cruel’) and Glaudi calcei (‘Blue suede shoes’). This is just language play, to be sure, but it makes an important point: languages, whatever their age and condition, can be adapted to new requirements.3 It is perhaps an irony that representatives of the larger cultures that have brought about the demise of local languages are generally the ones to (finally) pay some consistent attention to them. Among other things, this accounts for the love-hate relationship that typically exists between members of indigenous communities and the ‘outsiders’, however committed they may be, who come to study and record their languages and cultures. Relatedly, we often find that active desires to stem the decline of threatened languages are very much a minority interest; indeed, revivalists are often non-group members who have become apologists for language maintenance. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, of course, and there are often very good reasons why ‘ordinary’ group members are unwilling or unable to take on active roles in linguistic and cultural defence. Still, when thinking about future linguistic fortunes, it is clear that there are important differences between leaders and followers – just as there are, more broadly speaking, important differences between native speakers and those who study and learn the language on a more self-conscious or voluntary basis. (Discussions of language revival are found in Chapters 9 and 10.) There are now interesting discussions in the literature about the concept of the ‘native speaker’, a term that is not without its problems. Some have argued that ‘nativeness’ might be acquired, and that the idea of some natal precedence is unfair. In some settings, for example, it is seen as the traditional language of one’s ethnic group, whether or not it is the individual’s first language – and that variety need not be the one used by parents, either. One may be a ‘native speaker’ of more than one language, or the unnuanced use of the term may not be sufficient where several varieties of a language have an important and continuing existence (Indian English, Jamaican English, and so on). Virtually all scholars now reject the once-current opinion that the only ‘real’ native speakers were those in the original anglophone world of Britain and its former colonies (to cite a familiar linguistic example).4

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When we think about the health of languages, we immediately realize that contact and possible change – not stasis – form the typical historical pattern. In this regard, the linguistic practices and choices made by ‘ordinary’ speakers are largely motivated by practical necessity, whether this comes from within or is a consequence of external pressures. Language decline (or growth, of course) can therefore be understood properly only as a symptom of group interaction, only as a consequence of frictions or inequalities at the points where communities meet. The logical conclusion – but one that often seems to be missed, ignored or denied in the literature of language maintenance and revival – is that efforts directed towards language preservation alone are unlikely to have a great deal of substantial or durable success. Much more radical intervention in the broad social fabric would seem necessary, many more changes would seem to be called for. Such revolutionary action is rare (and no doubt should be), but in communities in which language is an integral part of social evolution (that is to say, in all communities), surely a thoroughgoing reweaving of the societal fabric is the necessary underpinning of longstanding linguistic maintenance or alteration. And this is exactly the nub of the matter, because, in the vast majority of instances in which some language realignments are sought, the beneficiaries don’t want to give up most of the other aspects of social life with which they have become familiar. It is doubtful, on both practical and theoretical grounds, whether such selectivity is feasible; see also Chapter 9. To end on a slightly sunnier note here, we should bear in mind that while language shift has been and continues to be the norm for many small language communities – and historically, of course, for many larger ones, too – a case can be made that cultural integrity can be maintained despite language shift. This is a much larger topic than can be dealt with here, but scholars have argued that it is the maintenance of a sense of community boundaries that is required for the continuity of a sense of unique ‘groupness’. The cultural ‘stuff’ that is found within the borders, however, and which sustains them, is mutable. In fact, the single most important prop of groupness is a continuing psychological awareness of membership, typically based upon conceptions (whether accurate or not) of shared ancestry. It is thus interesting to consider that the strongest of all cultural buttresses is the most intangible.5

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We can now track the status of languages more accurately than ever before, and it is fair to say that there is greater interest nowadays in preserving linguistic diversity. Heightened attention, however, does not ensure prolonged life. There are some seventy aboriginal languages in Canada, in twelve families. The latest census (2016) shows that about 1.7  million people identify themselves as aboriginal; this is about 4.5 per cent of the total population. Of these, 265,000 (about 16 per cent) reported that they were sufficiently competent to conduct a conversation in an indigenous variety. This is down from 29 per cent in 1996 – although the actual numbers have risen with the growth of the population. Since having an aboriginal language as the mother tongue is declining, the increase is largely due to second-language learning. These figures are enough to show the parlous state of these ‘first languages’ of Canada; in fact, none could be termed in vigorous health. Only three have more than 15,000 speakers: Cree (100,000), Inuktitut (36,000) and Ojibwe (32,000). Many have fewer than 1,000 speakers, some have a hundred or so, and some only a few dozen. Han, spoken in the Yukon, has perhaps fifteen speakers. In the Pacific North-West, Sechelt has half that number. Munsee, a language found in Southern Ontario, has only half again – that is, three or four elderly speakers.6

The problem of names If grappling with issues of decline and death is one important manifestation of lack of linguistic knowledge, then the ‘naming problem’ is another. This difficulty arises because a language is often given different designations. The Oubykh language whose last speaker was Tevfik Esenc, for example, is also called Ubykh or Ubyx. Multiple names are particularly likely to occur for remote and small varieties, but even better-known languages may have several. As well, the different names for the same variety are not always similar:  a connection among Oubykh, Ubykh and Ubyx might be guessed, but that language has also been called Pekhi. A few other examples will illustrate these points: in Turkey, Circassian is also Adygey and Cherkes; Atruahi, Jawaperi and Waimiri are names for the same

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Brazilian language; in North America, Gwichin, Loucheux, Tukudh and Kutchin refer to the same aboriginal variety. Multiple names arise for a number of reasons. Different writing systems and conventions will complicate matters, of course: just a small variation (as between Ubykh and Oubykh) may lead to problems of indexing and categorization. The names of different sub-groups, tribes or clans may all become attached to a language held in common. Different groups of ‘foreigners’ – whether adjacent language communities, explorers or invaders, or scholars of different nationalities – may have their own names for the same people and language. The ‘naming’ problem can prove very difficult, even for countries with considerable census expertise and penetration. As a commentator on the Indian context has put it, ‘caste names, names of clans, names of professions, names of religious sects, names of speech or language not currently in use, names of villages, regions or provinces, names of animals and birds, and a host of other names may be offered as the name of the language of the individual being counted under the census.’ (This is to say nothing, of course, of the great possibilities for confusion between languages and dialects; see Chapter 4.) And he goes on to add that ‘only the so-called educated persons, living in their own world of knowledge, wisdom and cynicism, think that every individual in India knows the name of the language he or she speaks.’ While we are told that increased attempts are being made to ‘rationalize’ the names of the mother tongues recorded in the census, there also remain ‘some complacency, and an unwillingness to recognize the possibility of the diversity of responses.’ The upshot is that in the famous 1961 Indian census, there were 1,652 mother tongues reported – but just over 400 languages.7 Group names can be remarkably informative. Some are very easy to understand, with some translating simply as ‘the people’. Geographical variants like ‘people-of-the-river’ or ‘the-mountaindwellers’ sort are common. Self-descriptions also often suggest that those outside the group are qualitatively different: many communities style themselves with some synonym or equivalent of the pronoun ‘we’. This seems innocuous enough, and not unreasonable, perhaps, when groups live in relative isolation from others, when inter-group contact is rare or fleeting. However, it is a little disturbing to realize that

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‘we’ or ‘us’ or ‘the people’ – or the many variants thereof – sometimes carries the implication that those beyond the group boundaries are not fully or adequately human. Such names are found in many parts of the world, among groups as widely separated as (for example) the Bantu, Berber, Blackfoot, Chuchi, Inuit, Iroquois, Kaluli, Kannaka, Navajo, Maya, Nez Percé, Roma, Salish, Sámi, Tsimshian and Washoe communities. Many of those who self-identify as ‘the people’ extend their selectivity to what they speak, too: ‘the real language’ is what the Tsimshian (and many others) speak. Ayapaneco, the Mexican language mentioned in note 1 is called Nuumte Oote (the ‘true voice’) by its speakers. Further interesting refinements also occur. Sometimes ‘the people’ becomes something like ‘the best people’, or ‘the first people’ (Chippewa and Ojibwe) or, simply, ‘the human beings’ (Cherokee). While terms like ‘Blackfoot’ and ‘Nez Percé’ should not, perhaps, be interpreted as anything more than rough external appellations, some of the Dakota (‘the friends’) became known as Sioux (‘snakes’), an abbreviation of a term bestowed upon them by enemies. Many Inuit consider the earlier term ‘Eskimo’ to be a derogatory reference to them as eaters of raw meat. While the Welsh call themselves Cymry (meaning something like ‘fellow countrymen’), the English name for them derives from the Anglo-Saxon w(e)alh, via the Germanic Wälsche (‘stranger’, ‘foreigner’ or even ‘barbarian’). The Khoekhoe (meaning ‘men of men’) of southern Africa were called ‘Hottentots’ (stutterers) by the Dutch. The San (a major group of which call themselves !Kung  – ‘the people’) were called Bushmen (Bosjesmannen in Dutch, or Boesmans in Afrikaans). The name San itself (meaning forager) was coined by the Khoekhoe as a somewhat derogatory term for those who owned no cattle. In seventeenthcentury Muscovy, foreigners were called nemtsy (‘mutes’), a Russian labelling now restricted to Germans. A particularly egregious example is found among the Asmat of Irian Jaya: while they are ‘the human beings’, they classify everyone else as manowe: ‘edible ones’. Such ethnic naming conventions are also found, of course, in religiously based groups. Some interpretations within Islam divide the world into those within the sacred ‘house’ (Dar al-Islam) and those without, and the Christian bible labels some groups as idolatrous and evil, with unfortunate consequences for the Amalekites and the Midianites.

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The names of individuals are not strictly relevant here, but it is clear that they, too, can be particularly revealing. Faith, Felicity, Patience and Joy are modern reminders of Puritan practices in which godly virtues were made into names. Contemporary first names like Courage, Goodwill, Blessed, Lordwin, Goodluck and Withus remain popular in parts of Africa, legacies of colonialism and proselytism. Rolihlahla Mandela recounts how, on his first day at school, the teacher (Miss Mdingane) told him that his new name would be Nelson. In a lighter vein, we find the coinage charactonym (or characternym), which refers to names that reflect a personal characteristic: Mistress Quickly, Mr Bumble. Sometimes we find the terms aptonyms (or aptronyms, euonyms), designating names that fit their bearers rather nicely: Sarah Blizzard presents the weather for BBC, and Jules Angst is a psychiatrist who studies anxiety. And there are inaptronyms, too: Rob Banks (an English policeman), Peter Bowler (a batsman) and my favourite, a name that I have treasured for years: Jaime Sin, a dignitary of the church who became Cardinal Sin.8

­3 The emergence and measurement of multilingualism

The rise of multilingualism It is clear that multilingualism has always been a widespread global phenomenon. The religion and culture of Judaism provide an excellent historical case in point. Arthur Koestler described the descendants of the biblical tribes as representing ‘the classic example of linguistic adaptability’ and demonstrating how group identity can outlive communicative language shift: first they spoke Hebrew; in the Babylonian exile, Chaldean; at the time of Jesus, Aramaic; in Alexandria, Greek; in Spain, Arabic, but later Ladino – a Spanish-Hebrew mixture written in Hebrew characters, the Sephardi equivalent of Yiddish; and so it goes on. They preserved their religious identity, but changed languages at their convenience.1 ‘At their convenience’ seems a little glib, since people do not alter their linguistic habits lightly or without very good cause, but Koestler’s example shows that language shift need not destroy a communal sense of historical and cultural continuity. The rise of multilingualism and its ramifications are not difficult to understand. Immigrants to a new country obviously bring languages

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into contact, a common experience in all the new-world ‘receiving’ societies. Territorial expansion is another type of migration, with similar results. It is not always necessary for large numbers of people to physically move; their language may come into contact with others through military, political and economic pressures requiring only a handful of soldiers, merchants and bureaucrats. Many colonial rulers have had to rely upon trusted intermediaries: the ‘collaborating elite’. At the time of independence in 1947, the Indian population was about 350 million; there were fewer than 1,000 colonial adminstrators, and about 70,000 soldiers, most of them on the North-West Frontier. In the Madras Presidency, a southern region with some 50  million people, there were 60 British policemen. Now, in a population of 1.4  billion, it is estimated that about 125  million speak English (in addition to at least one other variety).2 (‘Until the British came, the entire territory of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari did not come under a single hegemony.’ The language that they brought created ‘a common platform and evoked . . . [an] inherent feeling of Indianness.’ Following independence, however, divisive ‘centrifugal forces’ began to re-assert themselves, leading Jawaharlal Nehru to say that political integration was insufficient in such a vast and varied country without an accompanying ‘emotional integration’. These are excerpts from the introductory remarks in a 1962 report from the ‘Committee on Emotional Integration’ – surely the warmest title ever to grace an official body – in which recommendations were made for the educational promotion of country-wide unity across all borders of language, religion, region and caste.)3 Political union among different linguistic groups will also lead to multilingualism. Switzerland, with its German, French, Italian and Romansch, is an example; Belgium is a country of French and Flemish speakers; Canada has English and French ‘charter’ groups (overlaid, as it were, on about seventy indigenous language communities; see Chapter 2). We also find quite involuntary amalgamations: there are many examples of colonial boundary-marking and country-creation in Africa and Asia. Predictably enough, these formations are fraught with danger, and with hindsight we can see that imperialist politics left many delayed-action devices – some of them linguistic – buried in local fields. In general, while borders may respect pre-existing

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linguistic divisions and may conform to long-established community distinctions, they very often do not. Multilingualism is also commonly observed in border areas; see the language continua mentioned in the next chapter. These are the most obvious reasons for the growth of multilingual competence. They are not, of course, the only ones: cultural and educational motivations will also expand linguistic repertoires, for example, even if there is no desire or possibility to use the new ability in ordinary conversational ways. Through the examples cited here, and perhaps even including those where purely scholarly factors are at work, there nevertheless runs a thread of necessity. A moral which could be drawn is that multilingualism is largely a practical affair, that few people become or remain multilingual on a whim – but also that, in almost all instances, an individual’s abilities in his or her two, three or four languages will not be equally developed. On the contrary, we might predict that they will extend just as far as circumstances demand.

Scholarly attention to multilingualism Even though the world has generally been full of bilinguals and multilinguals, those who spoke only one language were seen as the most appropriate for concentrated study in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is strange to think now that monolingualism was somehow the ‘natural linguistic arrangement’ and that multilingualism was often seen as an aberrant over-extension. Even the famous Otto Jespersen – proficient himself in several languages – felt that learning a second language might lessen the potential for learning other things. His opinion is not unrelated to a familiar concern – one that still exists (see my remarks about language-immersion programmes, in Chapter  5). It is that there is some finite limit to repertoire expansion. At its simplest, it suggests that what you gain on the swings of one language you lose on the roundabouts of the other. All that we know of intellectual structures and functions, and all the evidence concerning learning in general, however, suggest that we need not worry about exceeding our limits. Early in his partnership with Watson, Sherlock Holmes explained his

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ignorance of many things by saying that the brain was like an attic, that one should fill it wisely according to one’s needs, and that ‘it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.’ But while there may be limits, Holmes grievously underestimated them; he could easily have remedied his ignorance of literature and astronomy without displacing his knowledge of poisons or the many varieties of cigarette ash.4 The flood of people into North America in the early twentieth century highlighted longstanding prejudices and stereotypes, while also reinforcing the idea that there was something undesirable about multilingualism – and, more specifically, about immigrants who spoke little or no English. Heavily biased tests and interviews indicated a relationship between the many languages they brought with them and ‘feeble-mindedness’. Not surprisingly, this handicap was found to be more prevalent among southern and eastern Europeans than in those from the north and west. The opinions of the Ivy League professors Carl Brigham and Clifford Kirkpatrick reflected those of many others. Brigham argued that ‘the representatives of the Alpine and Mediterranean races in our immigration are intellectually inferior to the representatives of the Nordic race’, and Kirkpatrick added that innate deficiencies meant that no amount of ‘Americanization’ could turn immigrants into ‘intelligent American citizens capable of appropriating and advancing a complex culture.’5 The general climate – and not only in America – was one in which the mental capabilities of both immigrants and some indigenous inhabitants even suggested eugenic intervention: compulsory  sterilization for those ‘feeble-minded’, for example. There were critics who pointed to the hypocrisies and prejudices, the pseudo-science and the racism at work here; a notable example was Louis Marshall, one of the founders of the American Jewish Committee. But the popular tide was running fast against the critics, with fears of being ‘overrun’ easily stoked. The scholars who designed the flawed literacy tests and who wore such large linguistic blinkers were far from stupid, of course. They were restricted, however, not only by the limitations of the research capacities of the day, but also by the prevailing state of knowledge about ‘racial’ and ethnic-group differences, by the monolingual bias already discussed, and by a profound belief in northern European superiority in virtually all areas of life.

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There is an irony in all this. After the demise of Latin as their lingua franca, scholars still needed knowledge of at least one language other than their own. When the mathematician Henri Poincaré lectured in Göttingen in 1929, he spoke in French. In that same year, Sigmund Freud spoke in German at Clark University in Massachusetts. In both cases, most of the audience were able to understand; after all, ‘languages had been built into their scientific training.’ In the middle of the eighteenth century the working language of the Berlin Academy changed from Latin . . . to French. It would be another sixty years before French was replaced by German. At the end of the nineteenth century, French, English and German were about equal as the languages of science. As late as 1920, however, there were markedly more German-language publications than those in English (French had fallen dramatically into third place), and German ‘enjoyed unequalled prestige as the language of education and learning’ in the United States, where the ability to read it was ‘indispensable to many disciplines’. There are two basic messages here. The first is that the fortunes of languages can change quite markedly. The second – and most salient at this point – is that most of those English-speaking scholars who were rounding on the languages of those huddled masses were bilingual or better themselves.6 Crude and inaccurate scholarly assessments of languages and the competence of their speakers could not last, of course, and studies of bilingualism began to appear in the early years of the twentieth century. Jules Ronjat described his son’s acquisition of French from him and German from his mother; Milivoïe Pavlovich discussed a child’s very early experiences with Serbian and German; Werner Leopold published a four-volume description of the acquisition of English and German by his daughter. With Leopold speaking German to the child, and his wife speaking English, this is an early detailed account of the ‘one-parent-one-language’ procedure often followed by those wishing to raise children bilingually. No negative effects of early bilingualism were reported in these classic narratives, following which empirical work suggested that there was no marked correlation between bilingualism and cognitive skills. This usefully undercut the earlier and unwarranted negative views – and would, itself, soon give way to assessments showing a positive connection, in fact, between multiple fluencies and cognitive functioning.7

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­Bilingualism and intelligence A much-cited 1962 study compared ten-year-old bilingual and monolingual children in Montreal, and found that the former did better on both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests: they exhibited ‘mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, and a more diversified set of mental abilities.’ The authors were obliged to note, however, the knotty problem of causal direction: ‘it is not possible to state from the present study whether the more intelligent child became bilingual or whether bilingualism aided his [sic] intellectual development.’ Further work supporting positive linkages between bilingualism and intelligence soon followed – but so did cautionary notes. Apart from the ‘directional’ problem, other factors interfered with unequivocal conclusions. How might different levels of bilingual proficiency affect results? Could simple measures of socioeconomic status fully and accurately equate home backgrounds? And so on.8 Some of the most recent research bearing upon bilingualism and intelligence has suggested a positive relationship between expanded linguistic repertoires and important aspects of cognitive functioning. Much of the relevant work has been conducted with children whose bilingualism involves English (often with French as the other language). This is largely because the pioneering work in the area was conducted in Toronto by Ellen Bialystok and her associates. Nonetheless, studies have been performed with a number of language pairs – the varieties here include Basque, Catalan, Dutch, Frisian, Gaelic, Irish, Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish), Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh. Bilingual children have been reported as being better than monolinguals in terms of problem-solving, reasoning, planning and general cognitive flexibility, with their larger ‘cognitive reserves’ responsible for the improvements. While children have been the focus of most of the work, it has also been suggested that greater language competence may ameliorate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease. Scholars have again pointed to limitations and uncertainties, as well as to areas in which the performance of bilinguals is not better than that of their monolingual counterparts. Still, many researchers in the area have come to accept that adding languages improves cognitive abilities.9

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Other investigations have argued that expanded language repertoires are only ‘inconsistently correlated with superior executive function’ and that all speakers have non-linguistic ways to improve such function. Perhaps, indeed, it is the effort involved in managing more than one language that provides any advantages multilingualism may have over monolongualism. It is also important to realize that ‘there has not been a true experiment in which individuals are randomized to bilingualism or not’ and that studies that follow the same informants over time are vanishingly rare. Then, too, there are two major experimental biases, neither of them infrequent in social science. There is, first, a ‘confirmation bias’, by which evidence supporting one’s position is more actively sought, and more likely to be recalled, assessed and worked into emerging theory than is disconfirming information. Second, there are ‘publication biases’: on the one hand, journal editors are often more favourably disposed towards studies that provide significant, and significantly positive, results; on the other, researchers sometimes shelve disconfirming or ambiguous findings.10 Whether it supports or questions the ‘bilingual advantage’, the research bearing on the matter is workshop-based. Most of the participants form a rather special subset of the population: they live in ‘developed’ societies, they are literate and educated, they are relatively well-off, and their abilities, either present or nascent, tend to stand out. While most people around the world are bilingual or better, there seems not to be any great evidence linking these expanded fluencies with greater basic knowledge or insight. As social-scientific scholars have found with many other topics, it is hard to bring the complexities of real life into testing sites. No research firmly negates the possibility of a bilingual or multilingual advantage, of course, but criticisms of the criticisms – that is, rebuttals of the findings that challenge some unalloyed bilingual advantage – are not completely fair. Arguing that ‘the considerable literature that reports group differences between monolingual and bilingual participants is greatly more informative than the attempted replications that fail to find significance’ is simply an expected opinion, and is not well-supported if one looks over all the relevant research. Again, an ‘advantage’ proponent writes that ‘unless all conditions have been accounted for and all other explanations have

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been exhausted, it is misleading to call into question the reliability of the phenomena themselves.’ That is simply not sound logic.11 Well before the latest iterations in research, I suggested that simple equations linking bilingualism or multilingualism with mental advantage were doubtful. Whether or not bilingualism entails cognitive benefits, however, the development of expanded language competence(s) is a good and useful thing, and without any intrinsic negative consequences. This statement is surely as uncontroversial as is the assertion that the devoted study of great literature or music can increase psychological sensitivities.12

Assessing multilingualism by census Most societies regularly assess the type and extent of multilingualism within their borders in order to better serve cultural and other needs, to identify the size and composition of specific groups for specific purposes, to gauge the depth and variety of available language skills within national and regional borders, to fine-tune present and future immigration policies, to measure the results of language maintenance or revivalist policies, and so on. This information is most commonly collected by census, and modern techniques for collating and categorizing vast amounts of information – and then displaying the data in many different ways, for many different purposes and constituencies – have made census material more important and more useful than ever before. Nonetheless, census data can still be limited in both detail and application, and in some cases downright misleading. An initial difficulty arises in the phrasing of questions. Should we ask respondents to tell us their mother tongue? If so, how do we know that all informants will interpret ‘mother tongue’ in the same way? And what of those who have been raised from birth with more than one parental tongue, or of those who have forgotten or never use their maternal variety? Further confusion arises when questions, definitions and instructions for respondents alter over time. Canadian censuses up to 1941 defined mother tongue as the language first learned and still spoken. From 1941 to 1976 it was the language first spoken and still understood and,

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in 1981, respondents were asked about the language first learned and still understood. Mother tongue has had other descriptions, too: in some national censuses it has been defined as the language spoken in the person’s home when he or she was a child; in this case, a ‘mother tongue’ might never have been actually learned by the informant. Some of the distinctions – perhaps that between ‘first spoken’ and ‘first learned’ – may seem unimportant, but anyone who has had anything to do with the development and interpretation of questionnaire data will be alive to the smallest nuance. The general point is simply that any change in wording can alter responses in important but usually unmeasurable ways. (Collection techniques vary too, of course: enumerators may be used or, more common now, census information may be self-reported.)

FIGURE 3.1   Taking the census (volkstelling) with the Theunisz family of caravan dwellers, Amsterdam, 1925 (Public Domain).

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Rather than asking about mother tongue, it might be better to ask more direct questions, such as ‘What is the first language you spoke?’ But, as with the apparently more fraught enquiries about the language learned at the maternal knee, this may not provide us with the information we would most like to have. If we want to know about languages currently spoken, for instance, asking about mother tongues or ‘first’ languages will clearly not always serve. In at least some instances, then, we might simply ask people about the language they now speak most often. This sort of enquiry also raises difficulties. How, for instance, will it be answered by those who regularly and frequently speak two or more varieties? Many official assessments permit only one response, and offer informants little or no room for explanation or qualification. There are inherent problems with the whole questionnaire/interview approach, especially when it exists in tightly structured or ‘closed’ format. On the other hand, enquiries that permit more ‘open-ended’ responding – that allow respondents to elaborate on their multilingual abilities, for instance – may lead to further difficulties in accurately assessing what respondents have understood questions to mean and, therefore, in the accurate recording of information. In the 1986 Canadian census, one question was ‘Can you speak English or French well enough to conduct a conversation?’ This is obviously open to a huge degree of interpretation by the informants. Another asked ‘What language do you yourself speak at home now (if more than one language, which language do you speak most often)?’ Again, problems.13 One of the reasons mentioned above for asking about language on censuses is to gauge the effects of formal policies. As with mothertongue enquiries and those more explicitly focusing upon respondents’ current language competence, however, more pointed questions also have attendant problems. In Ireland, where competence in the Irish language declined dramatically in the nineteenth century, 25 per cent of the population reported themselves as Irish speakers in 1861, and this actually rose to 28 per cent in 1971, the highest percentage in a century. In the latest census (2016), the figure stood at 41 per cent. To see these figures as constituting a substantial upswing in the fortunes of the language would, however, be quite inaccurate. While most of the 1861 informants were fluent in Irish, this is now true for only about 3 per cent of the population. Recent percentages

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refer in the main to those who have acquired a very thin wash of Irish competence at school. More detailed census findings bear this out: the reporting of Irish-speaking ability declines with age, with the highest numbers found among secondary school pupils. As for actual usage, only about one-quarter of those who claim Irish-speaking ability say they use the language with any regularity, and threequarters of those are school children. At one time there was considerable under-reporting of Gaelic competence in Nova Scotia, due largely to the desire to deny possession of a stigmatized variety and to avoid the attentions of ‘impertinent, inquisitive and romantic’ outsiders. In Ireland, too, it is quite probable that the nineteenth-century enumerations suffered from conscious under-claiming of language ability. Equally, however, we might expect that in modern Ireland, where Irish is constitutionally enshrined as the national language, and where everyone has had that ‘thin wash’ of school Irish, over-claiming would be more likely. Distortions and inaccuracies due to social and political perceptions are common enough, after all, when people are asked about sensitive matters (not just linguistic ones).14 On a related matter, we find that census questions sometimes ask about ethnic background instead of (or as a complement to) language information per se. In some cases, too, people have been asked about their ethnicity in one census, and about their language in another. Alterations here are interesting in themselves, driven as they are by changing social and political postures, atmospheres and sensitivities. Nonetheless, they severely hamper the accurate plotting of information over time. In the American census of 1980, a possible response to a question about ethnic origins was ‘Spanish-Hispanic’, a label that could be seen to serve as a unification for all the varied groups who speak Spanish – or who are reputed to, or who would like to, or who want increased funding for Spanish-language education, and so on. ‘Ethnic’ questions can have an elasticity even greater than that which bedevils the interpretation of language enquiries. An implication of all these actual and potential confusions is that, when accurate language data are needed, specialized surveys usually must be conducted. These may build upon census information and, in some countries, it is possible to have customized tabulations prepared by central statistical authorities. (Sometimes not, however: in Belgium,

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no language-related questions appeared in censuses after 1947 because of the possible political, ethnic and social ramifications in that linguistically riven state.) Usually, though, special field work is required. The scholarly literature is full of tightly focused studies of particular groups, regions, languages and social settings. In short, census investigations cannot ask about language matters with sufficient scope and breadth to illuminate the details that language planners and policy-makers often require for accurate assessment and action. Serious enquiries about language may begin by looking at census information, but they must inevitably go further.

Assessing multilingualism: Ethnographic approaches If we broaden our multilingual scope for a minute, to encompass vernacular usage within and across dialects, we can see that an obvious way to increase our knowledge and to supplement (or replace entirely in some instances) both census data and more focused but still macrolevel surveys is to narrow the focus and make more intensive studies at local levels. This can supply the real-life context that questionnaires – and even interviews – typically cannot take into account. Most relevant here is ethnography, a method used in social or cultural anthropology for studying the habits and customs of groups within their own setting, or from the point of view of the group members. It was endorsed by Bronisław Malinowski – a Polish anthropologist whose career was spent at the London School of Economics – in his seminal work on modern ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Malinowski wrote that communication is ‘only intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation, if I may be permitted to coin an expression.’ Understanding must then ‘burst the bonds of mere linguistics.’ The essence of the ethnographic method is participant-observation; how else, indeed, is the researcher to gain the sociocultural specifics that are needed? Inherent in this approach is a holistic posture, and an emphasis upon qualitative data rather than on the quantitative findings that characterize a substantial part of survey work.15

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One of the more contemporary arguments for a specifically linguistic element in ethnography – one that echoes Malinowski’s words – is found under the heading of ‘the ethnography of speaking’, a modern iteration of which is the topic known as ‘linguistic ethnography’. This has been presented ‘in the contexts of late modernity and globalisation.’ My general comments on postmodernism and its ramifications appear in Chapter  12, and further criticism is not my primary concern at this point. Rather I want to refer to Clifford Geertz’s comments about the ‘anthropological irony’ and the ‘moral asymmetry’ that are often evident when researcher meets ‘native’ in participant-observer settings. As ‘a member, however marginal, of the world’s more privileged classes’, the anthropologist is not really a group member, but the illusory membership is what allows insights to be made, and permits ‘thick’ description (as opposed to ‘thin’ accounts of behaviour). It is not difficult to see that fieldwork at an intimate level, meant to produce ‘thick’ description, may lead to some dubious interactions between scholars and their informants, especially where covert observations (for instance) are made.16

­Assessing multilingualism: Deception and the observer’s paradox The aim in most investigations of linguistic (and other) behaviour is to observe how people act ‘naturally’ – that is, when they are not being observed. For some enquiries, deception is seen to be necessary. In Stanley Milgram’s famous studies of obedience in the 1960s, for instance, participants were led to believe that they were giving electric shocks to learners who made mistakes; the experiments would have been valueless if the subjects knew of the deception. Not all social psychological deceptions are quite as dramatic, of course, but they are still common. Most psychological associations now publish codes of ethics, and these typically say that deception must be justified by the work’s significance, cannot be used where physical or emotional distress might arise, and must be followed by

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full disclosure. Of course, all the researchers who use deceptive techniques believe that their work is significant, and they now must typically submit their experimental design to an ethics-review panel. Whether all the participants would agree to the deception were they to be made aware of it is, of course, another matter. While researchers fully debrief their informants once the exercise is over, two points immediately suggest themselves. First, how is one to gauge distress caused during the experiment, or discomfort once the deception has been revealed. Just as the judge’s admonition to the jury to ‘ignore that last remark’ cannot really be followed, so participants in research cannot forget what they did, or said, or wrote. Being told that you didn’t really administer shocks to another person does not erase the fact that that was exactly what you thought you were doing. You cannot rewind life’s video or, as Omar Khayyám put it in the twelfth century: ‘the moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’17 In language studies, too, investigators must now reconcile their desire to avoid the ‘observer’s paradox’ – whereby examination changes what is being examined – with ethical considerations. One can of course simply observe people speaking to one another, either in general or in particular settings, but researchers are often interested in specific linguistic features. In one clever and now well-known example, William Labov wished to observe the use (or not) of the postvocalic /r/. Speakers who exhibit ‘rhoticity’ pronounce the /r/ when it follows a vowel (as in cart or flower), while ‘non-rhotic’ speakers do not – although they too sound the /r/ when there is a following vowel (either in one word, as in horrid or in a sequence such as flower opening). Staff members in New York department stores at the top, middle and lower end of the market (Saks, Macy’s and Klein’s, respectively) were asked where specific goods were to be found. In every case, it had been predetermined that the items in question were on the fourth floor. The respondents typically replied to the question twice – initially in a casual fashion and then, prompted by the questioner who apparently didn’t quite catch their answer, more emphatically – so there were at least four opportunities for Labov to hear whether

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or not the post-vocalic /r/ was pronounced. It was most frequently present in Saks, less frequent in Macy’s and least frequent of all in Klein’s. Since rhoticity is a feature of more prestigious accents  in New York English, the suggestion is that the staff members in higher-status shops were adopting the pronunciation of their customers. In this and related studies, Labov was able to show that patterns of pronunciation (and syntax) were regularly correlated with socioeconomic status. Later work by others has confirmed the continuation of such patterns. Readers will know that, while pronouncing your /r/ may be a feature of higher-status speech in some settings, it isn’t always so elsewhere. In fact, at about the time that Labov was conducting his ‘listening’ studies in New York City, Peter Trudgill was enquiring about the social connotations of /r/-pronunciation in Reading, England. Some findings are presented in Table  3.1. These neat columns of figures gloss over generational and age variations, as well as differences that may exist between the speech of workingclass women and men; the former are often more ‘polite’ than the latter, and hence may be less ‘rhotic’. Nonetheless, the broad comparisons remain accurate. More generally, we have here a clear demonstration that what is prestigious in one dialect may not be in another.18

TABLE 3.1   Pronunciation

of postvocalic /r/ in New York and

­Reading Percentages of postvocalic /r/ pronunciation New York

Reading

Upper-middle-class speakers

32

0

Lower-middle-class speakers

20

28

Upper-working-class speakers

12

44

Lower-working-class speakers

10

49

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Linguistic landscape The ‘linguistic landscape’ refers to the appearance of different languages or language varieties on public signage, in advertisements, and so on. Planning – to which I turn more fully in Chapter  11 – is obviously at work here. The information on official signs, notices, warnings and the like must often be able to reach members of different language communities. A very recent recognition of this has led to a bill approved by the House Homeland Security Committee, which would require multilingual signs, instructions and websites at American airports; the bill is soon to be presented to Congress. Shopkeepers sensitive to the linguistic capabilities and preferences of their potential customers will advertise accordingly. In some cases, planning does more than cater to immediate requirements or to mixed competences: it may reflect purposeful linguistic policy. The Québec language law on French and English signage is a good example: legislation broadly mandates that, while languages other than French may appear on signs, French must be visibly predominant. Increasing attention is now given to seeing the linguistic landscape as a sort of real-life classroom whose examples can illustrate more traditional approaches to language learning and the sociology of language in general.19 The idea of studying the landscape of signs was introduced to language scholars in 1997, with particular attention paid to the degree to which it reflected the group ‘vitality’ of ethnic-minority communities. It has an obvious relevance for multilingual contexts generally, of course, and can provide an immediate public window into language practices and regulations. Where choices exist among dialects or orthographies, the landscape of signs can reflect hierarchical levels of power and prestige. Attention paid to the same areas (geographical and otherwise) over time can reveal changes in such levels. One or two articles have even looked at grave-stone inscriptions in contexts in which within-group language shifts have occurred, or where territories have come under different linguistic jurisdictions. I hope to see informative linkages between made between current linguistic-landscape approaches and toponymy (the study of

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FIGURE 3.2  Multilingual plaque at the entrance to the European P ­ arliament, Brussels © Gildemax – www.commons.wikimedia.org (CC BY-SA 2.5). place names) and onomastics (personal names). For example, the severities inflicted on the Mi’kmaq people by Edward Cornwallis, who oversaw the establishment of Halifax in 1749, have led to calls for his name to be removed from streets, buildings, towns and ships. We have seen similar pressures in the United States (with reference

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to Confederate soldiers, and to slave-holders among the early leaders of the country); in Britain, where representations and representatives of colonial-era racism are increasingly subject to public scrutiny and action; and in many other countries. Interest in the linguistic landscape has grown briskly, as evidenced by several edited collections, a recent monograph of note, and several thematic issues of language journals. A journal devoted to the subject appeared in 2015. As well, studies of the ‘virtual’ landscape can now be found. It is obvious that the potential range of enquiry is very broad indeed.20 I close here by mentioning an essentially literary perspective that does not usually figure in the sociolinguistic literature on landscape, an approach to the language of the actual physical landscape. Notable here are the works of Robert Macfarlane, who has been described as the ‘linguist of landscape’, and Dominick Tyler. The former’s Landmarks is a beautifully written account of place-words in the natural world: landscape, nature, weather. The latter’s Uncommon Ground covers similar ground (literally), and provides striking illustrative photographs.21

­4 Dialects and other language varieties

What are dialects? Dialects are varieties of the same language. As such, they are mutually intelligible, where languages are not: French speakers cannot understand Finnish speakers, but Texans can understand Londoners. Everyone realizes, though, that mutual intelligibility among dialects is often more theoretical than real; everyone has heard dialects of their own language that are almost impossible to understand. Mutual intelligibility falters at other levels, too. Consider a dialect continuum, for instance, along which lie varieties A, B, C and D. Speakers of dialect A can easily understand B, can just follow C, but cannot comprehend D. Are A and D different languages, then, even though C and D speakers understand one another, even though a chain of intelligibility exists from A through to D? Such continua are in fact quite common: dialects of German and Dutch form such a chain, as do varieties of Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Polish and Russian, or Romance dialects of Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese. Social and political factors are also at play here. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers may have considerable difficulty understanding one another but they are considered to speak dialects of Chinese, not only because they use the same written form, but also because of the overarching state of which they are members. On the other hand, Norwegian and Danish speakers can understand each other

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well, but the demands of national and political identity require that they have ‘different’ languages. There are other examples, too, of the dominance of political concerns over purely linguistic ones, concerns that dictate that Hindi and Urdu, Flemish and Dutch, Serbian and Croatian, are to be seen as separate languages. The last pair provides us with a particularly powerful, if repellent, example of the influence of identity politics upon language. And, more pointedly than the other examples, it reminds us that political decisions are made by those who have the power to do so. Or, as Max Weinreich said, ‘a language is a dialect that has an army and navy.’ Once upon a time, there was a language called SerboCroatian, a common variety among not just Serbs and Croats, but also Bosnians and Montenegrins. Although there were regional and dialectal variants, and a number of contentious historical, orthographical and grammatical points, Serbo-Croatian has been a widely accepted medium since the mid-nineteenth century. Towards the end of the twentieth, hoewever, the language began to feel political pressures; sentiment in some Croatian quarters, for instance, held that it was too ‘Serbianized’ a medium. Now, in a postYugoslavian era, we find that Serbo-Croatian no longer has an official existence: it has been replaced by Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. What has actually happened, linguistically? In Serbia, very little. In Bosnia, moves to emphasize Arabic-Turkish features have been made, but basic grammar and lexicon have been little affected. In Croatia, however, symbolic declarations have been accompanied by ‘a campaign to actually make the language as different from Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian) as possible, and as quickly as possible.’ Active moves currently being made to drive instrumental wedges, to try and make two languages where once one existed. These surely highlight the political importance of linguistic group markers. It is disappointing to realize that, as part of the realpolitik of language planning, scholars are at this moment setting up barriers to communication under the flag of group solidarity.1 Dialects vary in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation (accent). Everyone knows that people from different regions have different accents, and most are aware that their words may differ, too. In some English dialects, speakers brew their tea; others let it mash, or sit, or steep or stew. All who like a robust cuppa, however, will have scalded

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(warmed) the pot before putting in the tea, and will then wait until the tea is ‘strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ (I prescind here, of course, from the noisome habit of dipping a tea-bag into the cup, and refer only to the civilized use of a china pot – preferably with loose tea.). Few would deny that such lexical variants are anything other than simply different. Few, then, would assert that car bonnets are better than hoods, that boot makes more sense than trunk, and that tube is more appropriate than subway. Simple translation between British and American usage does not exhaust the complexity, of course. Like the Americans, the British have trunks, but not on their cars; their cars have hoods, which are not their bonnets; and Americans without cars can travel on the subway, something that the English can only walk through.

Evaluating dialects: Attitudes Many people are rather less tolerant when it comes to grammatical variation among dialects – when, for instance, they hear someone say, ‘I done it yesterday,’ or ‘I ain’t never goin’ there again,’ or ‘I ax Billy can he play tomorrow.’ It is largely on grammatical and syntactical grounds that value judgements are made, judgements that elevate some varieties and disparage others. Such evaluations are of long historical standing, often made at an informal public level – as evidenced by the strong opinions that many people have about ‘poor’ language, sometimes expressed in complaints in the media – but also expressed and reinforced in the work of academicians and lexicographers. Further evidence of the perceived need for accurate ‘standards’, to be held inviolate, is found in the perennially popular usage guides, which date at least to the dawn of the modern era. Most of these were and continue to be directed internally, advising readers against ‘incorrect’ grammar and vocabulary, horrific provincialisms, slang, inappropriate or unnecessary foreign borrowings, and so on.2 The idea of different degrees of accuracy, appropriateness  and desirability across dialects underpins descriptive terms like ‘standard’, ‘nonstandard’ and ‘substandard’. Thus, a standard variety is the ‘correct’ one, reflected in formal usage in the media, among those who are well-educated and high-status members of society

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(for England, think ‘BBC English’ or the ‘Queen’s English’) and, most notably, in the written language. A dialect achieves standard status because of the  social power of those society members whose imprimatur has the greatest weight. Its position rests upon the fortunes of its speakers and supporters, and their prominence typically reflects historical vicissitudes. If York instead of London had become the centre for the royal court, and the cynosure of importance and influence, then BBC newsreaders would sound different today, and school teachers would long have promoted another form of ‘correct’ English in England. Regular speakers of the standard – which, in its most formal clothing, is a supra-regional dialect – are a minority among the larger population. The power of standard dialects is therefore an interesting illustration of the fact that relatively small groups may have considerable influence or, to put it another way, that numerical superiority by itself is rarely sufficient when it comes to social and political dominance. Dialects other than the one that has become primus inter pares are by definition nonstandard, and these comprise all the less formal vernaculars. It is regrettable that, in common parlance, ‘nonstandard’ does have a somewhat unfavourable shading, of course, but – as we shall see – it is not (or ought not to be) a pejorative term. Enlightened usage of the term is not helped, however, when we read in authoritative dictionaries that it is, in part, defined as a form deviating from the normal, and considered incorrect by educated people. It is similarly unhelpful to read that a dialect is ‘one of the subordinate forms or varieties of a language’ – this, in the second (and current) edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. (The full third edition, by the way, is not scheduled to be completed until 2034.) So, in some instances and in the eyes of many people, it is not surprising that nonstandard forms are considered to lack logical structure or fluency, to be inaccurate and inconsistent departures from ‘correct’ usage: to be, in a word, ‘substandard’. Many nonstandard-dialect speakers themselves think of their variety in this way.3 Given the different social positions of standard and nonstandard dialects, it isn’t surprising that perceptions of their speakers may differ. Many studies have shown that standard-dialect speakers are typically rated as more intelligent, industrious and ambitious than their nonstandard-speaking counterparts. The latter, however, may be

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seen as friendlier and more helpful (think ‘salt of the earth’). Further, rural nonstandard dialects are often viewed as more pleasant than urban ones: bucolic charms versus satanic mills. But what about substandard dialects? It defies common sense to think that any regularly used medium would last very long were it riddled with inaccuracies and ambiguities. A ‘primitive’ or haphazard dialect is inconceivable. Any system of communication relies upon adherence to agreed rules, and to accept that the only appropriate yardsticks of correctness are community norms is to accept that – barring fatigue, lack of attention and other impermanent factors – speakers of all dialects speak ‘correctly’. Problems arise, as already implied here, because not all communities and dialects have equal social clout, because the linguistic standards of those in power become dominant, and because social dominance (in language as elsewhere) allows difference to be translated into deficiency. Hence, the belief in a ‘substandard’ dialect tells us more about those applying the labels than it does about those whose language is being described. It reveals, quite simply, the flawed belief that there is a correct ‘standard’ from which all others deviate, a variety which is inherently superior. From at least the time of the Roman scholar Quintilian (c.100 CE), the idea that the best dialect was that of the socially powerful, often of the most scholarly among them, was self-evident. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the French grammarian Claude Vaugelas agreed: standards are to be sought among la plus saine partie de la cour (the most wholesome people at Court) and they, in turn, are guided by la plus saine partie des auteurs du temps, the most wholesome authors. Sustaining his definitions with quotations from the best authors was a prominent feature in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755. He was not the first lexicographer to follow Quintilian’s precept but the enduring prominence of his work, generally acclaimed as the first great English dictionary, has often led people to think so.4 Apart from the longstanding and continuing opinion that, because of superior internal logic (i.e., grammar and syntax) and greater levels of accuracy and precision, some dialects are better than others, arguments have also been made on aesthetic grounds. When George Puttenham wrote in The Arte of English Poesie that the best English

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was that spoken in the home counties, his was hardly a lone voice. Three and half centuries later, the Oxford philologist Henry Wyld argued that ‘if it were possible to compare systematically every vowel sound in RS with the corresponding sound in a number of provincial and other dialects . . . I believe no unbiased listener would hesitate in preferring RS as the most pleasing and sonorous form.’ What Wyld calls ‘RS’ (Received Standard English) is now more commonly referred to as ‘RP’ (Received Pronunciation), and there are many who continue to find it the most pleasant to the ear.5

Evaluating dialects: Evidence I have implied that making value judgements about dialects is a dubious enterprise, and I have touched upon the three possible bases of such judgements: logical (grammatical), aesthetic and social. What modern evidence is there, however, that bears directly upon strongly held and longstanding opinions and beliefs? In work beginning in the late 1960s, William Labov demonstrated that, while different dialects may have slightly different grammatical ‘gears and axles’, none is intrinsically better than another. He paid closest attention to urban African American English (AAE), an excellent ‘test case’ since it had for so long been disparaged by white society, and since its speakers were victims of prejudice that went well beyond language alone. If it could be shown that AAE was not some debased variety, this would go some way towards establishing linguistic integrity for all nonstandard forms. Its rules need not be exactly the same as those of other dialects, but regularly observed rules there must be. Needless to say, Labov and his associates found such rules. Here are two well-known examples. In contexts in which Standard English allows the contraction of verbs, the rules of AAE allow deletion. So, just as ‘they are going’ can acceptably become ‘they’re going’ in the former, so it can become ‘they going’ in the latter. (It is worth pointing out, by the way, that such deletion is hardly unknown outside the bounds of AAE: at least some readers will have had a policeman say to them, ‘that your car?’) A second example involves the double negative. An acceptable practice in AAE is found in sentences like ‘he don’t know nothing.’ Two negative markers, however, are the norm

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in many languages; in Spanish and French, for example, we find no sabe nada and il ne sait rien. In English, too, the usage was once common, and even triple negatives can be found. In the prologue to his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says of the friar that ‘ther nas [was not] no man nowher so vertuous.’ (He is being ironic here, by the way: the next line explains that the friar was the ‘beste beggere in his hous’.) In more modern times, teachers have admonished their pupils not to use double negatives in English, on the grounds that two negatives cancel each other and thus produce an affirmative sentence. It is obvious that doubling (or tripling) negative markers can simply be a form of emphasis.6 What, then, of Wyld’s point? If it is true that all dialects have an internal logic, with grammatical and syntactical rules that limit ambiguity and ambivalence, might it yet be the case that some simply sound better than others? Could there be an aesthetic dominance? Wyld’s little thought experiment would of course be entirely inadequate to answer the question, since his listeners would be unable to separate the sounds they heard (standard versus ‘provincial’ utterances, say) from the social stereotypes that would immediately come into their minds. Their ratings of aesthetic appeal would thus be contaminated. Investigations undertaken in the 1970s by Howard Giles and his colleagues solved this problem by removing the interference of social knowledge. In one study, British students who knew no Greek were asked to evaluate the aesthetic qualities of the Athenian and Cretan dialects; in another, Welsh adults listened to speakers of three French dialects in Québec. Within the Greek and Québec speech communities themselves, there are clear-cut opinions about the greater beauty of the language of the capital (Athens), and that of the more educated francophones, respectively. But the listeners here, lacking the within-community social awareness – for whom, then, the presentations were only sounds without meaning – made no consistent evaluations. (In the Greek study there was, in fact, a slight tendency for the Cretan dialect, considered rustic, rough and less attractive by Greeks themselves, to be assessed as more mellifluous than the Athenian.) The implication is that, if the social stereotypes associated with dialects are (experimentally) eliminated, leaving only speech itself, aesthetic judgements favouring high-status standards do not

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necessarily occur. An English theatre audience that hears a woman dressed as a duchess speak with a Cockney accent will note an incongruity and probably find it funny. Someone in the audience who knew English but who was not aware of the different social connotations possessed by different dialects might well miss the comic effect. The norms are ‘imposed’ by those in the know, and the stereotypes that link beauty, or harshness, or comedy to particular sets of sounds are unavailable to others. None of this rules out purely individual preferences, of course; I may think Florentine Italian sounds the most attractive, you may believe that Inverness Gaelic is unrivalled, but we have to agree to differ on a matter of subjectivity. Still, we must always remember that in the real world some preferences have important social consequences and that ‘only before God and the linguist are all languages equal. Everyone knows that you can go further with some languages than you can with others.’ It is also worth pointing out here that, just as the use of English can be a valuable unifying tool among those who are not native speakers of the language, so standard dialects may level the linguistic playing field within a language, especially for children and especially where reading and writing are concerned. In these areas, a good case can clearly be made for some agreed-upon uniformity and, while it may be objected that this favours standard-dialect speakers, we should remember that all speakers of all variants require formal learning to move from speech to print. Research suggests that the effort involved here is not appreciably greater for those who speak nonstandard forms.7 An interesting twist on linguistic evaluation has to do with the so-called ‘covert prestige’ attached to working-class and broadly non-prestigious dialects by speakers of more standard varieties. I mentioned above that nonstandard-language speakers are perceived to have a ‘salt-of-the-earth’ quality, and this is certainly allied to the directness and, indeed, tough-mindedness upon which covert prestige rests. Since we know that ‘polite’ speech and adherence to standard norms are more characteristic of women than of men (once social class is taken into account), covert prestige is clearly something more likely to be found in males. I was given a fine example of its force some years ago, in the office of a middle-aged,

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upper-middle-class male American university professor. As the head of his department, he was being pressed by two or three colleagues (also male) on a current academic matter. He was clearly unable or unwilling to go along with their request. After a few minutes of polite and ‘educated’ give-and-take, my friend turned to the others, smiled broadly and exclaimed, ‘Listen boys, you know they ain’t no way I can do it.’ His departmental colleagues immediately ceded the point. Falling into this nonstandard pattern was a signal of directness and firmness, of an egalitarian informality . . . of the truth. The essence here lies in the perceived contrast between nononsense usage, on the one hand, and inflated, evasive or overly nuanced (academic) language, on the other: straight shooting versus humbug.8 A final note here. The important debates about the status of dialects like AAE, the controversies over bilingualism and multilingualism in education and elsewhere, and the many preferences and prejudices that have always attended different varieties, all rest of course upon the acceptance that ‘named’ languages or dialects are in fact real. Arguments and interpretations would hardly make sense if the existence of definable language communities were denied, or if multilingualism was a chimera. Subaltern groups in particular would be affected because language – their language – is generally a central aspect of a social identity they wish to retain or recover in the face of colonial and/or contemporary pressures. Yet a central argument made by adherents of postmodernism and deconstructivism is that the reality of languages is a myth. This bizarre and troublesome claim will be examined in Chapter 12.

Official languages and dialects With as many as 7,000 languages in some 200 countries, internal linguistic heterogeneity is obviously the norm. Unsurprisingly, then, only some languages will achieve legal, national or official status at state and/or regional levels. In states where two or more varieties have such standing, one language is usually predominant, or has regional limitations, or carries with it disproportionate amounts of

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social, economic and political power. Switzerland, for example, with its recognition of German, French, Italian and Romansch, shows clear linguistic dominance for one variety at the canton level and the four languages are not, in any event, anything like equal in crosscommunity utility. Singapore also has four official languages (English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay) but the latter two are much less important than the former pair. Ireland recognizes both Irish and English as national varieties, but the first has only symbolic significance in the general life of the country. Und so weiter. Linguistic heterogeneity at the societal level need not correlate with expanded personal capabilities. In India, Hindi is the first official language, English is co-official, and the government also recognizes twenty-two other ‘scheduled’ languages as official (refraining, however, from specifying a single pan-Indian national variety). And beyond this lies a much richer linguistic landscape: more than 400 languages, categorized into the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric and Tibeto-Burman families. Like India, Nigeria is linguistically very rich – richer, perhaps, when one considers that its 500 languages are distributed among a population that, at about 155  million, is only about one-eighth the size of India’s. Unlike India, however, Nigeria’s sole official language is English. Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba are also acknowledged nationally, and half a dozen other languages have regional recognition. Regardless of numbers of languages, whether ‘official’ or otherwise, it is easy to predict both widespread multilingualism and widespread monolingualism in these sorts of settings. Some speakers may spend their entire lives within essentially monolingual enclaves. Others may range rather more widely, and broaden their linguistic repertoires to the degrees necessitated by repetitive and routine encounters. And still others may develop deep and substantial fluencies in several languages. As always, circumstances will alter cases. The generality is this: multilingual competence is clearly necessary in many settings, but the fact that these settings vary in terms of speakers, topics and requirements implies that linguistic capabilities are not equally developed. In fact, given the complexities here, and the social exigencies attaching to various types of interaction, it would not be very sensible to ‘overdevelop’ language fluencies; see also Chapter 3.

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Style, register, jargon, slang, argot, cant ­ ll speakers know that choices are often made within their overall A language repertoire. As suggested by the example of ‘covert prestige’ that I gave above, this can occur at the level of dialect. Those who have moved from their nonstandard-speaking birthplace to a setting where a more standard form of their language is common may shift from one dialect to another, either temporarily or permanently. If the former, then speakers may revert to their original dialect when returning home, for instance (either physically or emotionally). More permanent change is not unusual; common examples here are found among immigrants who, when young, move from a region to another, one in which their maternal language is spoken with a different dialect. Other variations in the linguistic repertoire are also available within a dialect. Style is often used to refer to distinctive manners of speaking or writing, either at a group or an individual level; this sense of the word can be traced to the early fourteenth century. Styles change over time, for example: the style in which Dickens and other nineteenth-century authors wrote is not the style of novelists today. Individuals also have idiosyncratic styles – it would be difficult to confuse a passage by Hemingway with one by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some personal styles reflect, above all, particular positions on a continuum of formality: May I request the gentleman who has, not once but repeatedly, interrupted my observations by his interjections, to extend to me that large measure of courtesy which, were I in his place and he in mine, I should most unhesitatingly extend to him. This is a reply made by William Gladstone to a heckler, who was reportedly sobered by the shock of this eloquence.9 A more common term to refer to variations in formality, especially where these occur within a single speaker’s repertoire, is register. Its first recorded usage in the sense of a range of possibilities was in 1811, when it referred to ‘the compass of a singing voice’, which transfers quite nicely to the scope of linguistic formality, too. A very readable account of such scope was provided by Martin Joos in his

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book, The Five Clocks, so titled because he argued for five distinct registers of English usage: frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate. His work has long been superseded by technical studies, but it remains an enjoyable and informative introduction. Frozen language is that found most commonly in print, while intimate usage occurs between speakers who know each other well, and for whom a lot of information can be taken for granted. Midway between the two extremes comes the consultative register, where back and forth transfer of information is necessary, and the import of the other two points on the continuum is easy to understand. Common registers typically include but go beyond degrees of formality alone. They are reflected in the particular usages of certain disciplines and professions: medical and legal registers come immediately to mind, as do the various registers required in the sciences. Here, vocabularies and even grammars may vary. Register is not necesarily different from jargon, since this latter term can also be applied to specialized vocabularies, but it generally has a rather pejorative connotation. Your doctor will not mind you mentioning medical register but will probably bristle if you talk about physicians’ jargon. Signifying gibberish – or the meaningless twittering of birds, in its original sense – from about 1340, jargon did come to refer to the language of a particular group about three centuries later, but it remained an unfavourable designation and was viewed as barbarous or debased speech. Jargon may act as a marker of a particular group identity and this, some would say, also ties it to register; after all, legal and medical language can serve in this way, too.10 Slang is informal and nonstandard usage and, once again, can serve as a group boundary marker. It usually exists within a particular register – so we have the slang of doctors and lawyers, but also of soldiers and sailors, cricketers and rugby players, thieves and actors – not forgetting the rhyming slang of London cockneys. From the mideighteenth century, slang was viewed (obviously too narrowly) as the colloquial language of ‘low’ and uneducated people, often of members of disreputable groups. Argot denotes the secret slang of the underworld, and is a nineteenth-century coinage of French origin. It is similar to the English cant, which in this equivalent sense appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century; it also referred to the secret language of sects, gypsies, provincials, beggars and

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thieves. Very soon, however, cant also took on the meaning of affected language thought to be fashionable. In this way, the term came to more closely reflect its origin in chant (from the Latin cantare), with its connotations of mindless repetition, and so on to hypocrisy and empty morality. It was in this latest sense that Samuel Johnson made his famous remark to Boswell: ‘My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, “Sir, I am your most humble servant.” You are not his most humble servant.’11

FIGURE 4.1   Cockney rhyming slang on an ATM in Hackney © Cory Doctorow – Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.5).

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Learning a mother tongue This is not a book about first-language learning, but a word or two about it is not inappropriate, particularly since it often stands in such marked contrast to the learning of second and subsequent varieties. Beginning in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky argued that the largely informal way in which infants acquire a mother tongue cannot be accounted for solely on the basis of post-natal experience. Human beings must then be genetically prepared or ‘pre-wired’ to learn such a complicated system as language – and, since it would be silly to think that children born in France have a different sort of evolutionary wiring than their counterparts in Finland, all brains must be equally ‘ready’ in all the many language communities of the world. This, in turn, implies that at some fundamental level all languages may be cut from the same cloth: hence Chomsky’s suggestion of a ‘universal grammar’. Such an important theory links linguistics with philosophy, psychology and epistemology. It is not without its critics, some of whom argue that there is no need to postulate an evolutionary development applicable solely to language learning. Whatever may be the rough-hewing genetic contribution to first-language acquisition, it is obvious that the environment shapes its ends – with the structure of words (morphology) or phrases (syntax), with meaning (semantics), with sound (phonology) and with lexicon (vocabulary).1 It is also interesting to consider a category of individuals (rather larger than many might imagine) in which a single ‘first language’ is not easily determined. Most bilingual and multilingual individuals

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begin, of course, with one particular mother tongue, but some plural capacities develop so early and so deeply that a primary allegiance is hard to discover; see also Chapter  3. There are generally two ways to consider the situations of those whose bilingualism (or multilingualism) begins at the parental knees. The writer and critic George Steiner has claimed early, continuing and more or less equal competence in German, French and English: perhaps a perfect trilingual. He reasonably suggests that such ‘primary’ multilingualism may have social and psychological implications quite different from those associated with sequential language acquisition. We have little information on this, but we can be sure that there are subtleties here that go far beyond simple additive relationships.2

Beyond the mother tongue3 The general literature on second-language learning has become very large, and there is no need here to delve into the theories and practices of the teaching and learning of languages. Given the thrust of this book, I touch only upon the social aspects of language learning. Setting variation in basic aptitude aside, it is necessity – real or perceived, welcomed or otherwise – that provides the greatest incentive to learn. It has great influence, then, on other important factors, notably levels of motivation and attitudinal dispositions. For immigrants, for minority-language speakers, and for those who are driven by a desire to more satisfactorily cross cultural borders, expanding the language repertoire is usually an obvious requirement. It need not, however, reflect inherent preference. As it was for immigrants to America, so it became increasingly clear to most of the indigenous Irish population that learning English was a virtual necessity. (Indeed, for immigrants to refuse linguistic change would seem to make the decision to emigrate less than worthwhile.) But this surely reflected a grudging recognition of circumstance rather than any inherent preference. Where necessity is evident, any formal lessons will be substantially reinforced by relevant social situations beyond the school gates. Conversely, social reality can create a demand for formal instruction. Where necessity is not a factor – as, in the classroom, it so often is

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not – then the task of the instructor is considerably more difficult. One need not be a Solomon to see that there are more difficulties teaching German in Nevada than in Nijmegen, which is only a dozen kilometres from the border. While the Dutch teachers probably need to spend little time justifying German lessons to their pupils (I leave aside, of course, age-old and universal problems of sustaining children’s interest in classroom subjects tout court), those in Las Vegas have a more difficult row to hoe.4 People have always expanded their initial language repertoire as real-life circumstances have demanded, and generally without formal instruction. Indeed, the practice is so widespread as to make monolingualism very much a minority global phenomenon. So, when putting together programmes of formal educational instruction, efforts have been made in recent times to try and capture some of the elements of a practice so common beyond the school gates. A great range of approaches – from ‘language laboratories’ that prioritize conversational skills over grammatical precision, to field trips, to immersion programmes, to study terms abroad – can be seen as emanating from this impulse. It seems so obvious now, and yet we recall that for a long time school-children in many jurisdictions had little or no exposure to the real ‘social life’ of the languages they were taught. For most of them language learning was just another subject, and deadening emphases upon grammar and writing skills made it largely a passive, receptive matter. There is, as well, a strong sense of artificiality where pupils are set to acquire a language which is not one that can be put to any foreseeable use, and which may not even be the maternal variety of their teachers. Formal instruction is then neither an extension of the way first languages are acquired, in which communication is stressed, and where grammatical refinements come afterwards, nor a representation of normal, interactive conversation. Language learning at school will always either benefit from perceived necessity or suffer for the lack of it. Of course, even in the former case, and even in the most enlightened, engaging and tech-savvy environments, schools can never be more than restricted microcosms of wider society. Classrooms can never become streets. They can, however, be brought a bit closer to the wider world. An innovation is the immersion classroom, in which children learn more or less entirely through the medium of a second language. This is unlike

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what we might call ‘submersion’, in which immigrant or minority-group children have to do as best they can in an environment where little or no accommodation is made for their lack of understanding. Canadian aboriginal children who had to learn English in residential schools, for example, were victims of educational submersion. Immersion, by comparison, is aimed at children who speak the ‘mainstream’ language and who wish (or whose parents wish) to achieve fuller, richer and more native-like competence in a new language. Canadian anglophone children in French immersion classrooms constitute a typical example. Immersion is meant to lead to ‘additive’ bilingualism, whereas submersion – whether intentionally or not – often means language replacement, a new monolingualism. Quite apart from the obvious linguistic hardships that accompany insensitive educational policies, it is easy to see that – with the close relationship between language and culture – they can also do real and lasting damage to traditional and longstanding community bonds. No such damage is likely to accrue to immersion experiences where, in addition, the positive attitudes of the participants (who have, after all, usually chosen this approach to language learning) and the generally enthusiastic attentions of the teachers contribute greatly to what are usually quite successful outcomes. The most common reservation that accompanies choices, incidentally, is the fear that development in the first language may be hindered by immersion in a second. Research shows that, while there may be some slight delays along the way, as it were, the fear is essentially groundless. While generally admitted to be much superior to traditional grammar-based approaches to language learning at school, immersion programmes are not without their flaws. Graduates rarely achieve native-like fluency, and the use that they make of their language skills is often less than hoped for – even in settings, like Montreal, where anglophones have ample opportunity to initiate and maintain conversations in French. Nonetheless, when I had the chance to talk to parents’ groups about whether or not to place their children in immersion programmes, my remarks were overwhelmingly encouraging. An antipodean example of immersion learning is the kōhanga reo (‘language nest’) initiative for the Māori language in New Zealand, which began in 1982. This has a wider intent than some

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immersion education programmes, in that the broad aim is the revival and maintenance of a threatened variety. It makes a great deal of sense, then, that a central feature of the programme is the participation of elders in the children’s language learning. As with indigenous languages elsewhere, Māori is spoken by only a small minority of people: while 15 per cent of the New Zealand population (about 5.1 million) claim aboriginal ancestry, only 3 per cent can converse in the language. The language-nest idea has now spread to other countries, including Canada (where the varieties involved include Mohawk and Salishan) and the United States (Hawai’ian and Ojibwe). Evidence of the interrelationships of many such programmes around the world is the recent announcement of collaboration between the kōhanga reo programme and Welsh revitalization efforts.5 A final note here concerns ‘language brokering’. This term most often refers to the process by which children in immigrant families translate from the dominant language in which they are being schooled to their home language, for the benefit of parents and other family members who not be proficient in the ‘mainstream’ variety. A moment’s thought, however, will suggest that language brokering goes beyond children. Translation is a task that nurses and other health workers with bilingual (or better) language skills will routinely be asked to do – but, in addition, there is real ‘brokering’ involved when they put the technical language of the doctor into the vernacular of the patient. This is interpreting, then, but – unlike the largely impersonal efforts of the accredited interpreter – the nurse has an ongoing and affective relationship with patients. An interesting personal description of language brokering – but also language loss – is described by Jenny Liao. She grew up in New York, and regularly translated English into Cantonese for her parents. As she matured, left home for university, and then took a job in California, her Cantonese gradually deteriorated. At first, she retained enough to chat with her parents on the phone, but the increasing loss of competence led to this self-evaluation: ‘Cantonese no longer feels natural . . . my parents and I have no heart-to-heart conversations, no mutual understanding, on top of cultural and generational gaps to reckon with.’ Many people lose their mother tongue – but for how many does this mean loss of connection with family members?6

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­Two languages at once Different languages often intertwine via ‘code-switching’, in which individuals change languages within conversations, often within sentences. Here is an excerpt from a conversation between a shopper and a shop clerk in Texas: the question asked by the former is ‘donde está el thin-sliced bread?’ and the answer is ‘está aisle three, sobre el second shelf, en el wrapper rojo.’ And here is the title of a wellcited article: ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: toward a typology of code-switching.’7 Code-switching now has a large literature to itself, and one or two general points can be extracted here. While interference between languages may make its presence felt in code-switching, particularly where the norms of one language are incorrectly applied to another, the more neutral transference is generally a better description. Language ‘switches’ are typically non-random. Speakers will often switch for emphasis, or because they feel that the mot juste is found more readily in one of their languages than in another. Switches may also reflect assessments of changes in topic or content, or of the linguistic skills or preferences of interlocutors. In some ears, code-switching is heard unfavourably as, indeed, are any language mixtures: terms like Spanglish, Denglish, Franglais, Tex-Mex and Japlish are generally used pejoratively. Even bilingual speakers themselves have reported feeling embarrassed at their ‘impure’ utterances, a sad commentary on how easy it is to internalize ignorant and prejudicial attitudes. The truth of the matter, after all, is that unlike monolinguals – who can ‘switch’ between or among dialects, styles and registers, but who must do so within the confines of a single language – multilinguals have an even wider repertoire to draw upon, and it is hard to see that this is anything but useful.8 Some other examples of cross-language influence are quite common, too. If a Brussels francophone uses the Dutch vogelpik for a game of darts, rather than the standard French fléchettes, this is an example of lexical transfer. Further, vogelpik in this context constitutes a loanword since it is regularly used in unchanged form. It might, however, be given a French pronunciation, which indicates another type of change: an attempt to bring the foreign element

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into the maternal fold. Sometimes loan words become very widely used and, if we go far enough, we reach the level of permanent inter-language borrowing. English, for instance, has taken in words from neighbouring languages: soufflé and déjà vu from French, zeitgeist, blitzkrieg or even schadenfreude from (German), macho and guerrilla (Spanish) and a great many others. Borrowings from languages further afield are also not uncommon: English took samovar and apparatchik from Russian, amok and kris from Malay, alcohol and algebra from Arabic. Some borrowings – like gumbo and banjo from Bantu languages, or bungalow, dinghy and pyjamas (or pajamas, if you prefer), which come to us from India – reflect colonial contact and imperialist occupation. Spellings may vary when words are borrowed, often because they are transliterations from other alphabets: thus, pyjamas and pajamas represent two different renderings of the sound of the Hindi/Urdu original, पैजामा (roughly, paijaamaa). Another variety of lexical transfer occurs when loan translation occurs. An example is English skyscraper, which becomes wolkenkrabber (in Dutch), wolkenkratzer (German), gratte-ciel (French) and rascacielos (Spanish). Such words are called calques, (literally, ‘copies’). When a word in language A is more fully embraced by language B, we have a morphological tranfer: the Dutch kluts (dollop) becomes, in Brussels French, une clouche, and heilbot (halibut) becomes un elbot. Syntactic transfer occurs in such examples as ‘Tu prends ton plus haut chiffre’ (‘You take your highest figure’), said by a native Dutch speaker, who makes her adjectives precede the noun, as they would in Dutch (‘Je neemt je hoogste cijfer’) but not as they would in French. Phonological transfer is very common, of course, and is the most difficult area in which to avoid interference (think of fluent second-language speakers with ‘horrible’ accents). Prosodic transfer – subtle differences in stress and intonation between languages, such that one’s dominant variety influences the other – may also be difficult to avoid. As just noted, borrowings may be on a ‘nonce’ basis or they become permanently embedded in the receiving language: the latter typically grows from the former and presumably reflects stronger and more widespread need. However, a further subdivision has been suggested for established borrowings; some are indeed necessary – words filling lexical gaps in the other language, for example – but

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some seem gratuitous, since an equivalent item already exists. It is easier, perhaps, to justify das Web-Design or der Cursor than der Trend, or der Team, or der Cash-Flow, but ‘justify’ is not really appropriate, since it implies a strict rationality in linguistic choice. The latter can often reflect a desire to participate in a larger linguistic usage pool, particularly where the words come from a powerful or prestigious source. Clearer reflections of perceived status can be found in the speech of those who use foreign words in their conversations, where more domestic equivalents exist. Clearer still is the presumed prestige that can come from employing terms that are not meant to be understood. Shops in many countries often find it easier to sell their products if they are labelled in English. No English competence is implied or required in either seller or buyer; simple recognition and cachet do the trick. I have on my desk packets of Japanese sweets labelled ‘Meltykiss Chocolate’ and ‘Men’s Pocky Chocolate’, and a fizzy drink called ‘Pocari Sweat’. To focus on the oddity of usage here is to miss the point – which is that any such oddity is meaningless. Very few of the purchasers of these sweets will decipher these English words, and they will neither know nor care that ‘meltykiss’, ‘pocky’ chocolate and ‘pocari sweat’ might not be popular treats in London or New York.9

Not learning languages Multilingualism is both a simple description of global linguistic diversity and a representation of the individual and group abilities that have developed because of that very diversity. These abilities are common and, in most instances, normal and quite unremarkable. It is both a fact and a frequent lament, however, that speakers of ‘large’ languages lag well behind others in foreign-language competence. A reasonable generalization is that such competence is inversely proportional to the ‘bigness’ of the mother tongue: contemporary anglophone populations are among the very poorest of language learners. Language teaching in English-speaking countries is more difficult and less attractive than in Europe. Do we observe here

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some genetic anglophone linguistic deficiency? Are the British and the Americans right when they say, ‘I’m just no good at foreign languages’? Are they right to envy those clever Africans, Europeans and Asians who slide effortlessly from one mode to another? The answers here obviously involve environmental conditions, not genetic ones – anglophones were once regular language learners – but I present these silly notions because they constitute in some quarters a type of self-fulfilling prophecy that adds to the difficulty of language learning. I use the word ‘adds’ here because the real difficulties, the important contextual conditions, the soil in which such prophecies flourish, have to do with power and dominance. In Florio’s time, as I noted in the Prologue, English was not dominant in Europe and, consequently, anglophones needed to expand their language repertoires. By the nineteenth century, however, burgeoning English political and commercial influence contributed to a decline in bilingual ability. Lytton Strachey wrote of a ‘relapse from the cosmopolitan suavity of eighteenth-century culture’ and a growth of English dominance marked by the ‘Napoleonic wars, the industrial revolution, the romantic revival [and] the Victorian spirit.’ Here are one or two amusing examples. In 1814 the Duke of Wellington’s aide-decamp disputed the ownership of an umbrella by telling the mayor of Bordeaux, ‘c’est moine’ (‘it’s a monk’), when he should have said ‘c’est à moi’ (‘it’s mine’). When travelling in France in the 1840s, Edward Strachey was asked for a tip by the coachman: he refused, saying ‘Vous avez drivé devilish slow.’ Sir John French – commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1914 – referred to a footman as a ‘piedhomme’. And fans of Patrick O’Brian’s series of historical novels will remember Jack Aubrey’s graceful reply to French officers, ‘Domestique, monsieur’, thinking that he was saying the equivalent of the formal English ‘your servant, sir’.10 Contemporary anglophone linguistic laments often involve some crocodile tears or, at least, are rather hollow: they represent the superficial regrets of those who lack competence, but who need not, after all, really bother to acquire it. The world is increasingly being made safe for anglophones, and readers may like to consider whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, an inevitable thing, a reversible thing, and so on.

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­Individual attitudes and abilities Since official language status is often restricted via legislated policy, and since, as we have seen, prestige varies across varieties, it is clear that at both group and individual levels, attitudes towards language(s) are important. At socially élite levels, multilingualism has always been encouraged and has in itself been a marker of high status. In the middle ages, those European scholars, diplomats and aristocrats who spoke languages other than their mother tongue enjoyed a level of education and privilege light years removed from the lives of the masses. Not to have known Latin or Greek or French in addition to one’s vernacular would have been unthinkable – although often unthinkable, perhaps, in the same way that it would have been unthinkable not to have had servants. While the use of French in the royal courts of Europe reflected the dominant cross-cultural language of the time, it was also an obvious reflection of linguistic status. In Sobieski’s Polish court, in Catherine’s St Petersburg, in Frederick’s Berlin, and in many other royal quarters from the seventeenth century onwards, French was the language of aristocratic prestige. Visiting the court of Frederick II in 1750, Voltaire wrote to a friend that it was just like being in France: ‘on ne parle que notre langue. L’allemand est pour les soldats et pour les chevaux; il n’est nécessaire que pour la route.’ (They all speak French here; German is for soldiers and horses, and you only need it when travelling.)11 Charles V, the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, is supposed to have neatly distributed his various language fluencies: he spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to horses. In the seventeenth century, Richard Carew described Italian as ‘pleasant’, French ‘delicate’, Spanish ‘majestic’ and Dutch ‘harsh but virile’: none could compare, however, to the excellence of English. And, in the eighteenth century, Antoine Rivarol said that ‘ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français’ and he went on to nominate English, Italian, Greek and Latin as less precise. Beyond these preferences and practices, the general historical consensus has been that the more languages one speaks, the better. Roger Bacon, the Doctor Mirabilis of the thirteenth century, correlated multilingualism with wisdom. Charles V (again) pointed out that quot linguas calles, tot

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homines vales: one is worth as many people as languages known. This sentiment can be found in proverbial expressions around the world, in fact. Still, there have always been dissenting opinions. John Milton argued that knowledge of several languages was not, in itself, a marker of expanded wisdom or insight, and Samuel Butler was rather more pointed: ‘the more languages a man can speak, his talent has but sprung the greater leak.’12 It is not only the assessments and abilities of prominent people that underpin multilingualism in the world, of course; a great many (probably most) people know more than one language or dialect. In Europe, for instance, the latest data (as reported in 2019) indicate that two-thirds of working-age adults know more than one language: 36 per cent are bilingual, 21 per cent have two additional languages, and 8 per cent know three or more. Although figures are harder to come by for the rest of the world, it seems safe to assume that these European percentages are not anomalous.13

Polyglossia and personality These figures reveal a great deal about social exigencies and pressures, of course, but they also suggest that learning languages is unremarkable, and does not require more than average aptitude; see also Chapter 3. In this section, however, I discuss language abilities that are remarkable and, to most of us, fascinating. Polyglossia is often defined as the existence of several varieties in a particular region, but there have always been polyglossic individuals (polyglots). When James Murray applied for a post at the British Library in 1866, he wrote that: I possess a general acquaintance with the languages and literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes . . . with several [languages] I have a more intimate acquaintance, as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin and in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch I am tolerably familiar with Dutch . . . Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies

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have been much closer . . . I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic [sic], having obtained a useful knowledge of Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform and Sanscrit [sic] branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the O.T. . . . to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician [sic].14 Murray, familiar to those who have read Simon Winchester’s account of him, was twenty-nine when he sent this letter. (He didn’t get the position, incidentally – a fortunate failure, perhaps, from the lexicographic point of view, since, in 1879, he began work on the Oxford English Dictionary.) I don’t mean to detract at all from Murray’s linguistic breadth when I point out that it was uneven, and that as a dictionary-maker he had little or no need for oral fluencies. His chief requirements were a reading knowledge of several languages and a wide acquaintance with the lexicons and grammars of many more. Murray’s language talents have been matched, and exceeded, by many others over the course of history. John Bowring was said to have been able to speak about one hundred languages: he was a translator, anthologist, literary executor of Jeremy Bentham, statesman – and governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859. The famous Victorian traveller and explorer, Richard Francis Burton, was competent in two dozen languages. As an Arabist, he translated The Perfumed Garden and Arabian Nights, and his love of the Middle East is exemplified in his mausoleum, a model in stone and marble of an Arab tent, decorated within by camel bells and other appropriate artefacts. Justin McCarthy, the Irish author and statesman, wrote a memorial sonnet for Burton’s headstone, describing the scholartraveller as a ‘singer of the East who loved so well the deathless wonders of the Arabian Nights.’ One of the best-studied individuals is Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a Vatican librarian in the early to mid-nineteenth century, who is said to have spoken about fifty languages with some degree of fluency. He took every opportunity to talk with native speakers, and one famous visitor, the Hungarian politician Ferenc Pulszky, was delighted to report that the cardinal spoke to him in Hungarian – and with a heavy Debrecen accent (learned from an earlier visitor,

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FIGURE 5.1  Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) © ­Wellcome Images (CC BY 4.0). an Hungarian hussar). Mezzofanti encouraged Pulszky to learn languages, pointing out that only the first two dozen present any difficulty; the rest come very easily. The cardinal himself devoted a great deal of time to learning languages, sometimes in ways that most would find extremely tedious. As with Murray, as with all polyglots, there is considerable variation in estimates of his linguistic scope and depth – which, in turn, raises interesting questions about just what it means to ‘know’ a language.15

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FIGURE 5.2   The Mortlake mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton © Svarochek 2011 – www.commons.wikimedia.org (CC BY-SA 3.0). A polyglot to whom I have recently given some close attention is Solomon Caesar Malan, a Victorian clergyman, scholar and artist. By the time he went up to Oxford in 1833, he had fluent French, German, Spanish and Italian. He asked if he might write some of his papers in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin or Greek – rather than in English. (His request was denied.) He was also ‘well advanced’ in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic and other oriental varieties. As a professor in Calcutta, he added Chinese, Japanese and other languages. His library included books in more than seventy languages, and he prepared a collection of psalms and prayers in more than eighty languages and scripts: these ranged from the biblical varieties, to Asian, European and even two Pacific languages (Fijian and Māori). In an 1872 letter to his wife, he wrote: ‘This is life! Talking thirteen languages a day.’ 16 Malan was clearly an exceptional example of multilingual talent, and some of his psychological characteristics were probably related to his linguistic skills in important ways (as I shall suggest, below).

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Here, we may note that, while a formidable scholar whose talents ranged beyond remarkable linguistic abilities, Malan was also an accomplished carpenter, musician, artist, naturalist and biblical exegete. The very extent of his activities implies breadth without depth, and Owen Chadwick, the noted religious historian, was one among several commentators who referred to a dispersal of talent, and a mind lacking in critical sense. Deficiencies in this vital capacity do indeed undercut novel endeavour, and energetic application and a powerful work ethic are insufficient remedies; similar assessments have been made of Mezzofanti. While Malan certainly had varying degrees of competence in an enviable number of languages, the major application of his talents was an almost archival one: many translations, carefully categorized and arranged. I think that we find in his work the fruits of a type of intelligent activity that is, at heart, neither creative nor original. (This need not detract from the potential usefulness of Malan’s work, of course. Scholar-archivists assemble, collate and sometimes interpret material that will be grist for the mills of others. Even wealthy ‘bibliomaniacs’ like Cotton, Harley, Huntington, Morgan and Folger – who rarely read the books they collected – usually come to serve scholarship.)17 The idea that prodigious talent in one part of a person’s life may be unmatched in others is hardly new or surprising. Sometimes, indeed, those other parts are not found at what we might see as average or normal levels: they may be severely underdeveloped. To many, the fact that ‘an individual can be simultaneously gifted and retarded continues to be a source of bafflement.’ The ‘idiot savant’ – an unpleasant term now typically replaced simply by ‘savant’ or, in some instances, by ‘autistic savant’ – is someone who has ‘an island of startling ability in a sea of disability: people like “Rainman” made famous by Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic savant in the film of that name.’ One assessment of the essential features of the ‘savant syndrome’ highlights neurological anomalies, inherited and/ or acquired aptitudes, and powerful and reinforced motivation, and we might reasonably add excellence in memory and systematization to the list. There is some agreement that the achievements of many, perhaps most, savants are in fact based upon ‘an essentially normal mental-processing capacity allied to unusually intense and long-lasting attention, concentration and involvement in particular interests.’ This

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takes nothing away from their extraordinarily rare abilities but it does suggest that we are not faced with supernatural qualities.18 Autism (literally ‘self-ism’) is a developmental disorder thought largely to be of genetic origin. Although much remains to be learned about its causes, its typical symptoms include a lack of competence or comfort in social interaction and communication and, conversely, a security found in routine and repetitive activity. While a large number of autistic individuals are unable to live independently, many have quite special talents. About one in ten have what seem extraordinary abilities: the calendrical or ‘lightning’ calculators, for instance, who can tell you what day Christmas fell on in the year 1264, or who can multiply two twelve-digit numbers in a few seconds. More have at least some notable skills in music or mathematics. Beyond remarkable memory, other common autistic traits include task repetition and practice (often obsessive), generally in the service of creating systems and patterns. Monologic communication, especially when scripted, means that making formal presentations – including, most interestingly, discussing one’s own autism – on familiar subjects, in familiar settings, is possible for some. Nonetheless, autistic individuals – even those referred to as ‘high-functioning – often have frustrating and anxious social lives, in which they cannot understand the actions and words of others, and where they fail to understand jokes, banter and metaphor. Imitation can reduce stress here – a process not unlike the social ‘modelling’, the learning by observation, that is so useful for all of us.19 The single descriptor ‘autism’ has now generally given way to the term ‘autism spectrum disorder’. This is important (and relevant here) because it highlights a more nuanced approach and, in fact, suggests that the traits of autistic individuals are very often ones that, in less dominant form, are found in a great many (probably most) people. Autism researchers like Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith have argued that very few of us would be at zero on any plausible scale of autism. Frith describes herself as obsessive in her work, sometimes socially awkward, and so on. In general, ‘autisticlike’ traits, including compulsiveness, perfectionism, systematicity, eccentricity and energetic devotion to specific tasks, are widely detectable, particularly among scholars and others of above-average intelligence, success in whose work often rests upon at least some

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of these qualities. Tendencies to systematize might particularly help to explain why ‘scientists score higher than nonscientists on a test that measures autistic traits.’20 The existence of an autistic spectrum allows us to link the savant with those individuals whose extraordinary abilities apparently coexist with an absence of any marked or clinically significant non-social tendencies. When asked to ‘make 4 divided by 47 into a decimal’, the twentieth-century mathematician Alexander Aitken began to respond after four seconds, gave another digit every three-quarters of a second, and in a minute or two had provided the decimal to forty-six places, noting that this long sequence then repeats. The suggestion is that remarkable feats like this can be ‘the outcome of an essentially normal mental-processing capacity allied to unusually intense and long-lasting attention, concentration and involvement in particular interests.’21 I can return now to polyglossia, with this summary of its underpinnings which, while it prompts many further questions, does not seem implausible: a capacity for sustained study, a ‘superior ability to switch among languages’, an excellent memory; and some advantageous neurological underpinnings. While ‘super-linguists’ may seem to have ‘leapfrogged the banality of method’, they tend in fact to rely upon quite ordinary – not to say tedious, or dull – practices. They have the capacity, however, to ‘make the banality more productive. Their minds enjoy the banality.’22 One contemporary ‘case’ is that of Christopher Taylor, a Yorkshireman born in 1962. He is quite fluent in French, Spanish, Greek, German and Dutch, and has some command of Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Danish, Norwegian, Welsh and Hindi. These talents coexist with a very low measured IQ, and Taylor suffers from a number of particular disabilities. He is uncomfortable in social situations, and most at ease in contexts in which his behaviour is restricted and repetitive. He suffers from apraxia – a neurological condition whose most general characteristic is an incapacity to do things that the individual wants to do, and is not physically prevented from doing: Taylor can’t remember the way to his local pub, for example. Another example is Daniel Tammet (born in 1979), a ‘highfunctioning’ autistic savant, a member of a very small group (perhaps  100 world-wide) of so-called ‘prodigious savants’. He has

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been the subject of television documentaries, and is a published author. His articulate capacity for self-description makes him a particularly valuable subject for scientific study. Tammet knows ten languages and, in a famous demonstration, he learned Icelandic in a week, becoming sufficiently fluent to be interviewed on television in Reykjavik. He also has synaesthesia, the condition in which sensations may be mixed. Some synaesthetes ‘smell’ colours or sounds, and Tammet ‘sees’ numbers – thousands and thousands of individual numbers – as having particular shapes, colours, textures and other attributes. While ‘333’ is an attractive number, ‘289’ is ugly and ‘25’ is energetic. On ‘Pi Day’ in 2004, Tammet recited π (pi, the irrational but constant number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) to more than 22,000 places. His synaesthesia helps with his language learning, too: ‘the Finnish word tuli is orange to me.’23

­6 The consequences of Babel: Lingua francas and translation

The lingua franca A multilingual world means that language divides exist. We have a number of ways to bridge them beyond individual abilities that, however broad, are obviously very limited in the larger scheme of things. The two most common spans are translation and lingua francas. The latter fall into three categories. First, there are existing languages that have achieved some position of power, either regionally or globally: these big varieties are sometimes referred to as ‘languages of wider communication’. Second, there are restricted or limited forms of existing languages, whose diminished scope makes them easier to master, and which are sufficient for simple communicative purposes: pidgin varieties are the prime examples here (although they are, or can become, quite complex forms themselves). Less common is the use of constructed or ‘artificial’ languages that are intended, again, to be easy to learn, and which present themselves as universal auxiliaries that do not threaten mother tongues.1 Although there must have been earlier examples, the ‘original’ lingua franca (that is to say, the ‘language of the Franks’) was a medium for trade and commerce, dating from the time of the Crusaders’ struggles in the eastern Mediterranean. It was probably a pidgin (see

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below) composed of Provençal – common along the Riviera, from Marseille to Genoa – and Italian, with the latter being the dominant element. The word ‘Frank’ suggests eastern influence, inasmuch as it is related to feringhi, an Arabic word denoting any European (or, sometimes, any Christian). Lingua franca was undoubtedly used by the people of the Levant, in a rough-and-ready fashion, to mean any European variety in circumstances in which further specificity was not needed. But it referred, above all, to the mixture that Arabs (and others) heard the ‘Franks’ of different mother tongues using amongst themselves, and this was basically a Provençal-Italian mix, although there were probably other linguistic contributors, too. Early uses of the term typically refer to a ‘mixed language’ or ‘jargon’; from this it became generalized to signify any ‘contact’ language. In the seventeenth century, the poet Dryden thus observed that a lingua franca was a compound language of ‘all tongues’; his is apparently the first recorded use of the term in English. By the end of the nineteenth, the term had expanded to include instances where a single language provided the necessary bridging (e.g. Urdu in India; Swahili in East Africa) but the earlier idea of some mixture of varieties was also retained.2

Languages of wider communication Almost everyone knows that there have always existed important and prestigious languages that served as bridges among national groups and language communities. Many still seem not to know, however, that these languages achieved their power and status because of the social and political dominance of their users, and not because of any intrinsic linguistic qualities. The popular, enduring – and mistaken  – argument has been that some language varieties are inherently better than others, either on ‘logical’ (which means ‘grammatical’) or on aesthetic grounds; see the discussion in Chapter 4. The strength of lingua francas arises from the fact that their original users possess important commodities – wealth, imperial dominance, cultural superiority, scientific and technical knowledge – that others see as desirable or necessary for their own aspirations. The aphorism

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that ‘all roads lead to Rome’ has always had linguistic and cultural meaning, too. I have already pointed out that Greek and Latin were classical lingua francas. By the fourth century BCE, Greek had spread throughout the Near and Middle East. The Romans, more ardent imperialists, ensured that Latin had a still greater sway. Indeed, even after the emergence of the romance varieties that it spawned, Latin remained as an instrument of religion and scholarship, weakening only with the rise of secularism, mercantilism and the ‘new science’ of the seventeenth century. After Latin, several other European languages took their turn in the (western) sun: French and Italian are particularly notable here. Today, of course, English is the most important global variety and thus has the greatest status as a world lingua franca.3

Pidgins and creoles The second major type of lingua franca is that of a restricted or simplified language mixture; indeed, as noted above, the very term lingua franca first had this connotation exclusively. Such a mixture is referred to as a pidgin, a word whose etymology is unclear. The nineteenth-century surgeon and traveller Julius Berncastle reported that the Chinese pronounced ‘business’ as ‘bigeon’, which then became ‘pigeon’. Another possibility is that pidgin derives from pigeon (a bird that can carry simple messages; perhaps there is also some sense here of the bird-like and rather superficial repetitions associated with trade communication). Whatever the derivation, pidgin refers to a mixture of languages that is no one’s maternal variety, a rather spartan medium.4 There are many pidgins in use, most involving a European colonial language. Their restricted vocabulary and grammar allow simple communication and, since this is their purpose, the very existence of pidgins does suggest some linguistic creativity. Pidgins may have considerable longevity: if the communities in contact (trading settlements and indigenous populations, for example) drift apart, then a pidgin may be less necessary. In settings where prolonged contact exists, one group may learn the other’s language, of course,

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but a pidgin may become general. In the linguistically diverse Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin (‘talk pidgin’, New Guinea Pidgin) is officially recognized and is the most important ‘native’ variety, spoken by several million people on a regular basis. Here are the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Tok Pisin: Papa bilong mipela Yu stap long heven. Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi. Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam. Solomon Islands pijin is a related variety. Here is a warning posted on the fence outside the Honiara airport: No go insaed fens eria. Faen for brekem rul hem $5,000 or 3 manis peresin. Tagio tumas. (The last two words mean ‘thank you too [very] much’ – the rest of the message is clear.) Closely related to pidgins are koinēs. These also involve mixing and linguistic simplification but, unlike pidgins, are derived from varieties that are either mutually intelligible or, at least, similar. ‘Koinē’ simply means ‘common language’ (in Greek, κοινή) and, like all lingua francas, it does not replace existing varieties: it is not to be confused, then, with more phoenix-like forms. ‘Koinēization’ is a more gradual process than ‘pidginization’, requiring sustained contact and, indeed, integration. The term was first applied to the type of Greek that became an eastern Mediterranean lingua franca; this was essentially Attic Greek with intertwined elements from other dialects. New Zealand English and Québec French (for example) arose as koinēs. In some cases – but by no means all – a pidgin may evolve into a creole. This happens when a pidgin becomes a mother tongue, when children born in pidgin-speaking communities begin to develop (or ‘creolize’) their linguistic inheritance. The developing language becomes richer, more expressive and more linguistically complete than the parent variety. Nobody’s mother tongue becomes somebody’s mother tongue. As Peter Trudgill has put it, the

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simplifications and reductions that characterize pidgins are ‘repaired by expansion’; they are ‘perfectly normal languages – only their history is somewhat unusual.’ Creole itself is generally thought to derive from the Portuguese crioulo, via the French créole. It meant a person of European descent who was born and reared in a colonial setting. The meaning gradually shifted to include Africans born in the (non-African) colonies and, further, to encompass the social and linguistic practices of such creole persons.5 A national language of Sierra Leone is Krio (creole), an indigenized variety whose ancestor developed in Jamaica. It is the maternal variety of perhaps 10 per cent of the population, and is understood by almost everyone in the country (i.e. by about 6 million people). ‘A bin tek di buk go na skul’ (‘I took the book to school’) and ‘I don was di klos’ (‘He has washed the clothes’) are examples. In combination with other languages, Krio now spawns pidgin varieties itself, thus giving us a glimpse of the ever-evolving and dynamic state of language development. I should add here that the traditional pidgin-to-creole developmental sequence has not gone unchallenged. Indeed, the weight of contemporary assessment suggests that pidgins often arise later than creoles, in complementary geographical distribution but along different developmental continua. The former can be understood as exoteric – languages for communication across speech-community borders – while the latter are neogenic, representing the rise of new identities when groups merge. A colonial example is found in the adoption of European languages as vernaculars by Africans, but where appropriation involved restructuring.6

Constructed languages ‘Artificial’ or constructed languages – supporters now view the former designation disapprovingly – are the third type of lingua franca. The example most readers will know is Esperanto, presented to the world by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887. For many, both within and without academia, the whole idea of constructed languages immediately suggests a sort of linguistic lunatic fringe or, at best, profoundly misguided enthusiasm. Nonetheless, the interest in constructed

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languages might reasonably be considered as an outgrowth of that early and pervasive quest for the first human language, the language of Eden, that I discussed in Chapter 1.7 The next part of the story of a ‘perfect’ (or, at least, better) language takes us to the projects for a ‘universal’ or ‘philosophical’ language whose logic would facilitate the search for knowledge and its classification. Not surprisingly, then, the same age that saw the dawn of the ‘new science’ in Europe also saw great activity on the part of the ‘language projectors’. Indeed, most of the early members of the Royal Society (founded in 1660), as well as continental luminaries like Comenius, Descartes and Leibniz, were at least passively interested in the idea of a ‘philosophical’ medium. While ‘philosophical’ language projects came to naught, interest remained in the idea of a neutral medium that, while logical and regular, would privilege no one particular group of speakers. Powerful ‘natural’ languages cannot serve here (at least, not in the eyes of the language makers) for they are tinged, as it were, by history and (usually) imperialism. Thus the way has been seen as theoretically clear for a constructed language to fill a yawning and bothersome gap. Since the seventeenth century, there have been hundreds of constructedlanguage schemes and, although the rhetoric surrounding them has often been quite grandiose, they have all swung on two pivots: an easily accessible and practical instrumentality, on the one hand, and a naïve but laudable desire to facilitate global harmony, on the other. Thus Zamenhof felt that Esperanto would provide more than a second language to supplement, but not supplant, mother tongues. He hoped and believed that it could also contribute greatly to some ‘trans-national identity’, an apt goal for one who observed that ‘if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent.’ To dilute the former while resisting the latter must have seemed a pressing need when Zamenhof said this – in 1914.8 Zamenhof’s Esperanto, while not the last word in constructed languages, is certainly the most successful. There may be as many as 2 million Esperanto speakers worldwide, but the fact that official estimates give that as a possible upper limit, and 100,000 as a lower, suggests the dubious state of statistics here. There are also some native speakers, children whose parents have brought them up with Esperanto as a first language; again, estimates vary widely, from

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perhaps as many as 2,000 to perhaps as few as 200. The core of Esperanto is its famous sixteen-rule grammar, and its guiding force is simplicity and regularity: all nouns end in o, the definite article la serves for all cases, numbers and sexes, verb forms are the same regardless of person or number, the stress is always on the penultimate syllable, and so forth.9 Foremost among constructed languages though it is, Esperanto has never captured a sufficient amount of general attention to become the functioning worldwide auxiliary its proponents wish. One rough distinction seems to be between those who, while not wholly unsympathetic to the idea of constructed languages, nevertheless perceive fatal practical flaws, and those who see Esperantists (and other constructed-language apologists) more or less as cranks and faddists. It is not unfair to say that all constructed languages have suffered from suspicions of naïve idealism, lack of intellectual rigour and even presumption (how can you invent a language?). At a pragmatic level, the apparently reasonable desire to have everyone learn the same link language founders on a logical reef. Since the speech community within which Esperanto (say) could be used is very restricted and its members widely scattered, it is hard to recruit substantial numbers of new learners. But how will a meaningful community ever arise unless recruitment happens? Motivating people to take the plunge has always been the central difficulty dogging proponents of constructed languages. This is particularly so in societies in which powerful languages already hold sway, and still more so when these other languages are, like English, contenders for global lingua-franca status. While a few scholars have interested themselves in constructed languages, these interests have rarely translated into research. The little formal study that does exist has been largely of the opinion-poll variety, and has not generally shown much rigour in either sampling or analysis. Apart from language study per se, the important connections between language and identity should also prompt investigation of the psychology, the politics and the sociology of constructed-language activism. Socio-religious investigation suggests itself, too, for there has frequently been a quasi-religious element to such activism: Zamenhof revealed this in his later years, for instance, and adherents of one constructed language have sometimes rejected adherents of

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another as heretics from the true cause, sometimes quite vitriolically. George Orwell once wrote that ‘for sheer dirtiness of fighting, the feud between the inventors of various of the international languages would take a lot of beating.’10

Translation, ownership and secrecy The second broad approach to bridging language gaps is that of translation. While translation is of obvious practical use, it has sometimes been seen to have unfavourable social and psychological consequences. Since these are not always well understood, it is appropriate to begin with a brief examination of some of them. The translator is one whose linguistic competence gives entry to (at least) two language communities and, as George Steiner has pointed out, ‘there is in every act of translation – and specially where it succeeds – a touch of treason. Hoarded dreams, patents of life are being taken across the frontier.’ The old Italian proverb is blunter: traduttori, traditori. And what are these dreams, these patents of life, if not the cultural heart of the community? Concealment and privacy, as many scholars have pointed out, are as much a feature of language as is communication: Karl Popper, for instance, wrote that ‘what is most characteristic of the human language is the possibility of story telling.’ This is but a recent expression of a very old idea, all examples of which refer to that aspect of language that Steiner called ‘enclosure and willed opaqueness’.11 The idea, indeed, often assumes deep religious significance. The Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Vedas, the Christian Bible, the Holy Qu’ran and the Hadith, the Torah and the Talmud, and many other religious works are all sacred in and of themselves, to varying degrees. Some, for instance, are not to be translated at all, while particular versions of others (the King James Bible, for example) have achieved iconic status. The idea of the holiness of ‘the word’, of a linkage between words and things, of divine creation, even of the creator itself, predates both the Christian era and the Greek Golden Age. Some time during the twenty-fifth Egyptian dynasty (i.e., between about 750 and 650 BCE), an already existing theological discussion was inscribed on a stone, now in the British Museum. In this ‘Memphite Theology’, we read

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that the god Ptah, having first thought the world, then created it by saying the name of all its elements. Thus, in the Egyptian mythology, as in later ones, names and things coincided, the former perfectly capturing the essence of the latter. In the Christian tradition, as we have seen (in Chapter  1), there is the mystical association of the ‘word’ – logos, the Greek λόγος, with its many related meanings of word, thought, essential principle, reason and logic – with the allpervasive and divine spirit. We read this at the opening of St John’s gospel in the most forthright way: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It follows that any tampering with the Word is of the utmost gravity. Indeed, there are clear demonstrations – in Judaism and Christianity, to give but two examples – that translation is blasphemy. He who has ‘been in Christ’ must not (or, perhaps, cannot) repeat the arcana verba in mortal words (II Corinthians XII: 4). And Jewish writings from the first century record the belief that the translation of the holy law into Greek led to three days of darkness. There are groups who believe that the name of God is never to be uttered, others who reserve this honour for the priestly caste, and still others who argue that no language at all is adequate for religious purposes.

Translation in practice In a letter of 1796, Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote: all translation seems to me simply an attempt to solve an impossible task. Every translator is doomed to be done in by one of two stumbling blocks: he will either stay too close to the original, at the cost of taste and the language of his nation, or he will adhere too closely to the characteristics peculiar to his nation, at the cost of the original. The medium between the two is not only difficult, but downright impossible.’ These two difficulties do indeed anchor the ends of the translation continuum, but most scholars – even in Humboldt’s day – have felt that ‘impossible’ is putting things rather too strongly.12

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Omitting the dubious aspects of translation and its ramifications, we can turn to more mundane matters. Translation is simply a fact of multilingual life, but it is not, however, a simple or technical one. Apart from almost useless word-for-word exercises, every act of translation involves interpretation and judgement. For this reason, it has sometimes been supposed that ‘true’ translation is impossible. However, although a perfect version which captures every nuance and allusion is rather unlikely – and becomes more so as the material to be translated becomes less prosaic – we have nonetheless translated, for practical purposes, throughout history. To turn again to George Steiner: ‘to dismiss the validity of translation because it is not always possible and never perfect is absurd . . . the defence of translation has the immense advantage of abundant, vulgar fact.’ 13 To understand translation as interpretation also links, incidentally, cross-language exercises with communications within the same language. That is, even the simplest of conversations between two speakers of the same language involves interpretation, and is analogous to ‘reading between the lines’ in written language. And it is in the written language of the past that the case becomes clearest: even the work of Charles Dickens now begins to look a bit alien to many, and the works of Chaucer are regularly presented in what amount to bilingual editions. It is through a constant process of translation that we continue to possess our own literature and, indeed, our own culture. From the time of Cicero’s admonition not simply to translate verbum pro verbo, we have been faced with the practical problems of the translation exercise. Dryden’s observation when translating Virgil into English (in 1697) is illustrative here. ‘I thought fit,’ he wrote, ‘to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation . . . I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ This most basic of concerns has not faded away over the last two centuries; in fact, it remains the most immediately pressing for the day-to-day enterprise of the translator. Émile Rieu (an editor of Zola’s books in English translation) referred to what he called the ‘law of equivalent effect’. When translating L’Assommoir, Leonard Tancock kept Rieu’s admonition firmly in mind; the book, he noted,

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‘is for Paris what a rich novel of Cockney life would be for London . . . the nicknames Bec-Salé, Bibi-la-Grillade, Mes Bottes, Gueule d’or . . . have as authentic a ring as, say, Nobby Clark or Ally Sloper or for that matter Fanny Adams might have to a Londoner.’ Problems here can be formidable. ‘The translation of slang and swearing in general,’ Tancock continued, ‘is self-defeating in that the more exactly it hits off the tone of the original in the slang of the moment . . . the less durable it is likely to be.’ Indeed, his suggestions of English nicknames to match those of Zola’s rather make the point. The only solution is retranslation. Thus, new versions of the classics have always been seen as vital to their continued popular existence.14 I find it interesting that the greatest threats to accurate translation appear at opposite ends of the literary continuum. On the one hand, rough and slang-laden speech poses the sorts of difficulties Tancock discusses; on the other, poetic or philosophical productions also lay traps in their use of metaphor, allusion or dense, abstract reasoning. Taken all in all, the difficulties faced by translators have remained remarkably stable, from Cicero’s day to our own. Does a literal version or a more literary one come first? Should translations aim largely to recreate the linguistic world of the original, or should they try and bring things up to date? How much freedom should the translator exercise? These are some of the fundamental concerns of all translation exercises. Most readers may be inclined to side with Cicero and Rieu, but they should also be aware that Vladimir Nabokov once argued that anything but the ‘clumsiest literalism’ is fraudulent in the translation of poetry. What can he have meant? It is of course obvious that some words, and some works, are easier to translate than others. Poetry, as I say, is more difficult than prose. And, within prose, Agatha Christie is probably easier than James Joyce. However, even an author as apparently prosaic as the creator of Hercule Poirot can create difficulties for the translator. Josef Škvorecký writes that, in Czech translation, Christie’s clever Belgian detective is made to sound more like the other characters than he is in Christie’s original, where his English is considerably ‘Frenchified’. (David Suchet’s television interpretation of Poirot is very accurate in this regard.) The result, Škvorecký tells us, is that Poirot makes Czech readers think of a Sudeten German. More interesting still are the efforts to translate Christie into French, to render Poirot’s Frenchified

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English into French itself. In the original, Christie has Poirot say: ‘Stamboul, it is a city I have never visited. It would be a pity to pass through comme ça [he snaps his fingers]. Nothing presses – I shall remain there as a tourist for a few days.’ In Louis Postif’s translation, this is rendered as ‘ne connaissant pas Stamboul, je ne voudrai pas y passer sans m’arrêter. Rien ne me presse. Je visiterai la ville en touriste.’ Not quite the même chose, is it?15 In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev told some western diplomats that ‘we will bury you’ – which led to several of them walking out of the room. This was the English version of Khrushchev’s Russian phrase, as given by Viktor Sukhodrev, an interpreter considered as one of the best. His rendering was not an error in a literal sense, but he should have given the words as ‘we will outlast you’, something probably closer to Khrushchev’s meaning at that moment. This is a famous example of how difficult it can be to find the appropriate spot on the literal-to-idiomatic spectrum. Outright mistakes do occur, of course. When a UN delegate said ‘l’Afrique n’érige plus des autels aux dieux (Africa no longer builds altars for the gods), it was translated, on the basis of a mishearing, as ‘ . . . des hôtels odieux’ (odious hotels). In America, Khrushchev was told that he was ‘barking up the wrong tree,’ but this was translated into Russian as ‘baying like a hound.’ One of my favourite errors occurred in an American war film, subtitled in French. One of the soldiers peers into the distance, and another asks, ‘Tanks?’ The subtitle reads ‘merci’. Inattention or ignorance can also cause problems. ‘Body by Fisher,’ describing a General Motors product, emerged as ‘Corpse by Fisher’ in Flemish. And, when GM presented its Chevrolet Nova, apparently no one considered that ‘no va’ in Spanish means ‘it doesn’t go.’ ‘Come alive with Pepsi’ almost appeared in the Chinese version of Reader’s Digest as ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.’16 Computer-aided translation draws upon digital resources to assist the translator. These include elements familiar to us all, like spell and grammar checkers and online reference tools of various sorts, but there are also specialized databases to help with the translation of idioms (for example). Machine translation, on the other hand, is meant to do most of the work. Again, there are familiar websites that we can use to translate words and phrases from one language

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to another – and the number of possible language pairs is increasing all the time. Even the most casual users will have noticed, however, that electronic word-for-word translations are often limited in scope and can sometimes be quite bewildering. Captioning may be done before filmed material is shown, with time for errors and infelicities to be dealt with. This doesn’t ensure accuracy in all cases, of course. In a recorded commentary, an archaeologist twice says the phrase ‘ancient world’ and, while the caption at the bottom of the screen is correct the first time, the second reads ‘the engine world’. Problems are more likely to arise, of course, when broadcasts are being captioned as they are broadcast. In one instance, the name of the Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov appeared as ‘so gay lover of’. A television weather reporter warned viewers about the likelihood of ‘rain along the Nazi ghosts’ (the North Sea coast, that is). Problems also affect the users of Internet translation services. If you request a Latin translation of ‘apple’ you may well get ‘malum’, for instance. Now, if you enter ‘malum’ and ask for its English translation, you may get ‘evil’. Or, if you enter ‘pomum’ you will probably get English ‘apple’. Further investigation is required to sort out what’s going on here. Problems are obviously multiplied as one moves from words to phrases, especially where renderings of informal or idiomatic terms can only rarely adhere to the ‘law of equivalent effect’ noted earlier. Idiom, style and vocabulary can differ significantly among localized parts of an overarching language community. This means that translations from a foreign language may not be entirely appropriate for all such parts. A very recent comment on the English translation of an Italian novel set in 1970s Rome pointed out that British readers would be taken aback by its ‘intense Americanization’ and, in some cases, find ‘impediments to immediate comprehension.’ A more general comment added that the ‘pervasive use of American vocabulary . . . suggests the wrong society, the wrong period, the wrong mood.’ Sometimes these within-language impediments are more obvious. In Chapter 4, I mentioned bonnets and hoods, boots and trunks, and so on – and here is another and perhaps more significant difference. To table an agenda item in America means to postpone consideration, usually sine die; in Britain it signifies the opposite, to present for discussion right away. At the Geneva Disarmament Talks in 1962,

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the American and British contingents apparently spent some time arguing before discovering that they both wanted to discuss a British motion immediately.17

V ­ oice appropriation Privacy, the construction of fictionalized myths, legends and stories – to say nothing of outright dissimulation – are at once important and threatened by translation and translators. A modern expression of these age-old concerns for the protection of identity, and for the potential erosion of that protection by translation, is the alleged ‘appropriation’ of native stories by outsiders. In many cultures, particularly those with powerful and rich oral traditions, stories belong to the group or, indeed, to some designated story-teller or caste of story-tellers. Consider the role of the European bards, the shamans of North America, or the griots of West Africa: living libraries, charged with the preservation and transmission of the most central and important group narratives. The phenomenon of ‘voice appropriation’ arises from two related resentments felt by many communities. The first, as we have seen in Chapter 2, is that the very names by which they are most widely known are not of their own choosing. The second is that important myths and legends have often been told by outsiders. This cultural theft is generally seen as a continuation of colonialism. ‘Insiders’ have always disliked and feared intrusion into the heart of their society, of course: think what it means to have large and powerful neighbours give you the name by which the wider world will know you, tell your stories, reveal your secrets. It is only recently, however, that this resentment has been acknowledged and accepted by ‘outsiders’, a reflection of shifts of attitude on the one hand and of greater self-assertiveness on the other. That is, the political clout of small speech communities, and the (apparently) greater willingness of larger ones to listen, support and respond, has never been as evident as it is today. Of course, there remains much ‘mainstream’ hypocrisy, empty posturing and repellent lip-service, but there has been substantive change, too, at least in western liberal democracies. To cite the title of an important collection published some twenty years ago, the ‘indigenous voice’

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has never been so united and forceful in its repudiation of what might be seen as a type of ‘linguistic imperialism’.18 There are examples here from around the globe. Studies of the fortunes of Scottish Gaelic, for example, have shown that the voices of ‘in-group’ members have not been sufficiently heard. A common explanation is that ‘ordinary’ people have been unable or unwilling to record their own perspectives on important events, but this does not come to grips with the overwhelming English historiographical bias. There are Gaelic commentaries available, but they have been largely ignored by historians. The generality here is surely as a corollary of the familiar dictum that history is written by the winners (assuming, we might add, that the winners are not illiterate). An important implication recalls the often pejorative naming practices that I discussed earlier: if outsiders who have been traditionally considered as inferior or alien have come to achieve obvious social and political dominance, what does this suggest to the ‘insiders’ about the validity of their traditional descriptions, about their self-esteem, about the tenuous nature of their cultural continuity?19 Nonetheless, I think that we have to be careful when discussing ‘appropriation’ because, no matter how much one may sympathize with individuals and cultures who have been badly treated by more powerful societies, the matter is by no means clear-cut. In works of fiction, for instance, ‘appropriation’ of one sort or another is paramount. A logical extension of the appropriation argument might lead to the conclusion that no one could ever write about anything beyond one’s own immediate experience; only ‘insiders’ could write about their lives and cultures. Consider, too, that an embargo along these lines, one that would prevent majority-group outsiders from writing about the lives of those in small or culturally threatened groups, would logically also prevent minority-group members from commenting upon the ‘mainstream’. Furthermore: are women never to write about men, Blacks never about whites, Germans never about Spaniards? This is clearly nonsensical, an imposition that would have stifled an overwhelmingly huge proportion of the world’s literature, and of the knowledge we have of one another as human beings. At the same time, it is not difficult to understand the grievances that arise when the narrative boundaries that are crossed separate groups of significantly different socioeconomic clout. Sauce for the

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goose may, logically, be sauce for the gander, but the inequalities that exist between those birds in real life surely mean that some special attention might reasonably be given to the less powerful ones. Dostoevsky famously said that we could judge the state of a civilization by seeing how it runs its prisons, and many others have enlarged the point: the way society treats its most needy or vulnerable citizens is a measure of its humanity. And we can surely expand things further still, and say that there must also be a correlation between that humanity and cross-cultural sensitivity. This is why the more thoughtful commentaries on ‘voice appropriation’ have not stated matters in a simplistic either-or fashion but, rather, have argued about the degree of cross-border commentary that might be reasonable, and the circumstances and contexts in which it ought or ought not to occur.20

­7 Keeping languages pure

Purism and prescriptivism A world of languages, as I have implied throughout this book, is also a world of identities, and many linguistic attitudes and actions are therefore reflections of underlying psychological and social matters having to do, above all, with ethnic and national memberships and allegiances. Once a strong relationship has been established between a particular language and a particular group affiliation, the ‘protection’ of the language often becomes paramount. This typically takes the form of purist and prescriptivist impulses and actions to keep a language undefiled by unwanted linguistic intrusions; these are typically part and parcel of prescriptivist regulations about what is linguistically ‘correct’ or not. All such activities ostensibly deal with language per se, but they are essentially in the service of identity protection. In a theoretical treatment of linguistic purism, George Thomas made some general points that we can use here to anchor our discussion. He noted, first, that attempts at purism and prescriptivism are universal characteristics of standardized (and standardizing) languages; second, that the forms these attempts take are often remarkably similar across contexts; third, that while prescriptivist actions are typically directed at unwanted external influences, internal prescriptivism (selecting among dialects, for instance) is also common; fourth, that most such activity is concerned with vocabulary items, although grammatical regulation is often an important component of internal prescriptivism. Language practices and planning exist in a circular relationship with

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the desires that motivate them: if our cultural impulses have linguistic consequences, then these, in turn, will influence our thoughts on social identity and social categorization.1 The clearest examples of language protection are found in the existence and the works of academies. The most well-known of these is the Académie française, established in 1635. Here, Cardinal Richelieu’s forty ‘immortals’ were given virtually absolute power to prescribe in literary and linguistic matters. As we shall see, the efforts of the French academy and other similar institutions have not always been very successful, either in their grammatical and lexicographical productions or, more specifically, in their attempts to intervene in the dynamics of language use. But this does not detract from their importance as manifestations of will and intent, nor does it vitiate their symbolic role. In fact, while lack of success here may tell us quite a lot about the power of language to resist institutionalized direction, the very establishment of language academies and councils  – and their continued existence in spite of poor track records – tells us even more about the importance of language as a marker of group identity. Formal pronouncements on language matters continue to mark linguistic and nationalistic anxieties and these, whatever the logic of the matter, persist in the popular imagination. We may be sure that, when Maurice Druon – a former Minister of Culture and the secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française – called for language watchdogs to guard against poor French on television, a great many people nodded in agreement.2 The letters pages of newspapers everywhere regularly print feverish responses to linguistic barbarisms and bastardizations, there have always been influential columnists who write about usage and abusage, and books about the decline of the language and what ought to be done to stem it are both frequent and popular. There has never been a shortage of ‘amateur do-gooding missionaries’ in this perennially interesting area, as Sir Randolph Quirk once observed. All such evangelical zeal can be easily derided, and, furthermore, there is often a dark side arising from prejudice and ignorance. Some of the criticism, however, is more reasoned, particularly that which deals with deliberate or ignorant misuse of existing words, propaganda, jargon and unnecessary neologism. Here we often find literary critics  – not linguists, perhaps, but not rank amateurs

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either – adding their voices to the debate. One thinks immediately, I suppose, of Orwell’s famous essays on the status of English and the politics of language, but there are many other thoughtful treatments here. Running through all such efforts, whether careful or ill-conceived, is a concern for language, and it is not always an ignoble one.3 In modern times, prescriptivism has not been very popular among linguists, who have typically held it to be neither desirable nor feasible to attempt to intervene in the social life of language. A deliberate renunciation of prescriptivism, of course, is more like atheism than agnosticism: a conscious non-belief is, after all, a belief itself, and scholarly stances against language intervention represent a sort of ‘reverse purism’. It has been suggested that, in their rush away from prescriptivism, linguists may have abdicated a useful role as arbiters, and may have left much of the field open to those less well-informed. Dwight Bolinger was one of the few contemporary linguists willing to participate in debates about the ‘public life’ of language: he rightly criticized the obvious crank elements, but he also understood the desire for standards, the popular frustration with perceived ‘decay’ and ‘incorrectness’, the onslaught of jargon. In my view, there remains a need for much more illumination of that persistent no-man’s-land between academic linguistics and public language.4 Prescriptivist attitudes towards language have always been with us, and complaints about decline and decay, about foreign infiltration, and about the inadequacy of certain varieties are as perennial as misgivings about the younger generation. Within the scholarly community, there is a long tradition of studying language attitudes, supplemented more recently by a revived interest in ‘folk linguistics’, in popular understandings of language, its use and its users; see also Chapter  4. This sort of attention has traditionally coincided with arguments against prescriptivist intervention, on the grounds already noted. Historically, of course, matters were rather different in intellectual and policy circles: decisions have been required when national languages arose and became elements in group identity, when some print standardization was found necessary, when popular literacy grew. Interventions here did not simply emerge from the minds of some nationalist élite aiming to forge or strengthen group solidarity.

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The tension between a prescriptivism arising from narrow and often unfair conceptions of social inclusion and exclusion, and desires and needs for at least some standardization remains important today. Any attention to the work of ‘language planners’ immediately reveals prescriptivist stances; see Chapter 11. Any desire to intervene on behalf of beleaguered varieties (for example), a desire that has become attractive to many, both within and without the academy, involves a willingness to engage in prescriptivist exercises. This can create an interesting conundrum, to be sure, for those whose liberal impulses generally embrace both a concern for the small, the ‘authentic’ and the ‘threatened’ and a dislike of ‘interfering’ in other cultures. As I noted at the beginning, a strong connection between nationalism and language leads very naturally to desires to ‘protect’ and perhaps ‘purify’ that language. Of course, the notion of keeping a language free from foreign taint reveals a profound misunderstanding of the unfettered dynamics of all natural languages, but it also reveals a great deal about psychological and social perceptions. It is simply a fact of social life that, as Quirk observed, ‘protagonists of national languages tend to involve themselves with questions of linguistic purity.’ By the fifteenth century, with the power and scope of Latin waning, the fortunes of major European languages waxing, and the development of printing, the need for linguistic regularization was quite well established. There were identity functions to be served, too, even if they were initially more focussed upon the unification of the literate than upon a broader nationalistic ‘groupness’. These developments helped to provide a base for the nationalist impulses that were soon to come.5

Academies The beginning of institutionalized purism came with the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence in 1582. It was, however, the Académie française (founded half a century later) that set the pattern for many of the similarly inclined bodies that were to follow in Europe and beyond. Its major aim was to reinforce its conceptions of linguistic clarity, simplicity and good taste, to encourage all that was

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‘noble, polished and reasonable’. Most academicians were initially drawn from the church, the nobility or the top echelons of the army, the bodies that would naturally have been considered the inheritors of the best French and the obvious arbiters of good linguistic taste. From the beginning, professional linguists have rarely been members. Since the notion of language purity is a fiction anyway, perhaps there is no pressing requirement for ‘experts’. Intelligent, educated individuals from the professions, the literary world and politics are all reasonable people to have as members, falling as they do between linguists and philologists, on the one hand, and the man or woman in the street – whose beliefs comprise that ‘folk’ linguistics mentioned above – on the other. However, since dictionary-making and the production of grammars do require specialist skills, it will come as no surprise to learn that the academy’s first effort here (in 1694) was the inferior piece of work that might be expected from an amateur, if socially prominent, collective. In modern times, the Académie française has become best known for its attempts to keep French free of foreign borrowings and to create where necessary French terms for the products and processes of science and technology. It has thus acquired a modernizing function to supplement the original purifying objective. The special aim of keeping English influence at bay began in the nineteenth century and has strengthened since then. Purification plus gate-keeping: these are obvious undertakings on behalf of the maintenance of group boundaries and identity. Similar in intent to the French academy, and much influenced by it, was the Real Academia Española, founded in 1713 by the Bourbon king Philip V. Its royal motto – Limpia, fija y da esplendor – emphasizes again the desire for linguistic purification. A dictionary was produced in 1730, and a grammar in 1771. Much of the importance of the academy rests upon the way in which it spread its influence to the Spanish New World, spawning a large number of associated bodies in the nineteenth century. Their common brief has been to work for the unity of Spanish and to enshrine historically based standards. It is important to understand that these are not merely the aspirations of language dilettantes or popular commentators; rather, they reflect the views of Spanish linguists. There is (perhaps) an interesting difference in national atttitudes between these hispanic professionals

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and their counterparts in the English-speaking world, where national academies have not been generally supported (see below). Academies charged with maintaining linguistic standards exist far beyond the Romance area and, in countries lacking a formal academy, councils and other prescriptive bodies typically exist. As William Mackey correctly pointed out, ‘there is hardly any country in the world that does not have some sort of public or private language planning body.’ Besides the academies that have long existed for big languages, there are now regulatory bodies for Basque and Breton, for Cornish and Cherokee, for Greenlandic and Guaraní, for Māori and Manx. It could be argued, I suppose, that such institutions are particularly relevant for small or threatened varieties in need of some linguistic standardization.6 Conspicuous by its absence is an English-language academy; neither England nor America established one, and this anglophone anomaly extends to all the relevant overseas countries as well – with the exception of the English Academy of Southern Africa, established in 1961, and the ‘academy’ of the Queen’s English Society (see below); both, however, are non-governmental organizations. Randolph Quirk (once more) suggested that there must exist some AngloSaxon aversion to ‘linguistic engineering’, or a lack of interest in formal activities to maintain linguistic standards. Others agree, arguing further that this is a luxury available only to those whose language has become so globally dominant. But the point of view is an historically limited one – which is why I put ‘perhaps’ in brackets when touching upon hispanic linguists a paragraph ago – for there have always been proponents of an English academy. Richard Verstegan argued for the protection and encouragement of the language in 1605 and, in 1664, the Royal Society established a committee to ‘improve’ English: the members included such luminaries as Dryden, Evelyn and Waller. This might have become the cornerstone of a language academy, but the broad scientific aims of the Royal Society tended to isolate those who were more narrowly concerned with language, and their base of operations soon diminished. (One can reasonably argue, of course, that if there had been a greater degree of interest in English prescriptivism, the initial efforts would not have faded. Dryden and his colleagues must not have been that interested, after all.) A little later, Daniel Defoe proposed that England should follow the example of the Académie

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française and establish a body to encourage ‘polite’ usage, to maintain ‘propriety’, and to purge the unfortunate and irregular additions that ‘ignorance and affectation have introduced.’ Jonathan Swift, too, argued for an English academy to counter the ‘infusion of enthusiastic jargon’ that had come to infect the language. None of these schemes and proposals received sufficient or sustained support.7 It must not be thought, by the way, that interest in an English academy has disappeared completely. In 2010, the Economist reported that the Queen’s English Society (established in 1972) had just created a new English Academy in order to combat the current ‘anything goes’ attitude. The website of the Society itself provides more information about its academy, acknowledges a prescriptivist intent – here, it makes the reasonable point that the organization would have no purpose if it were wholly ‘descriptive’ – but denies a policing or governing role. It notes that ‘the fact, nevertheless, remains that there are people who speak [English] and write it in a clear and elegant way and others who are imprecise and unclear.’ The website adds that ‘anyone who knows the rules and can use English correctly is entitled to “play” with the language . . . [but] there is all the difference between such a person saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and a person who says that believing it to be correct English.’ These citations illustrate very well the contemporary face of prescriptivism: a reluctance to be branded authoritative which is nevertheless coupled with strong views about ‘correctness’.8

Dictionaries9 Not all countries and other political entities have academies or councils that are fully or partially concerned with language matters. A great many, however, have dictionaries for their languages which, in some cases, have come to be accepted linguistic authorities. Thus, for the English-speaking world, the need for some language standardization, for some arbiter of ‘correct’ vocabulary and usage, has given rise to important and lasting lexicographical efforts. In both Britain and the United States, the production of dictionaries by individuals took the place of the institutional prescriptivist approach commonly found elsewhere. From the middle of the seventeenth

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century, English lexicographers knew all about the work of the French and Italian academies. Samuel Johnson, who published his famous dictionary in 1755 – often seen, not least by himself, as the English equivalent of the committee efforts of the continental academies – acknowledged them quite specifically. His sense of the functions and force of lexicography altered somewhat over time. In his Plan of a Dictionary (1747), he implied both the possibility and the desirability of some degree of prescriptivism. In the preface to the great work itself, however, he criticized the lexicographer who imagines ‘that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity and affectation.’ Elsewhere in that same preface, Johnson expressed the hope that the ‘spirit of English liberty’ would hamper or ruin any academy that might be established. Nonetheless, he continued to feel that a dictionary resting upon the English of prominent authors might stabilize the language and check its ‘degeneration’. Perhaps the clearest statement of Johnson’s ambivalence is found in a single sentence: ‘the pen must at length comply with the tongue; illiterate

FIGURE 7.1   Dr Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary of the English ­Language (6th edition, 1785), Internet Archive (Public Domain).

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writers will . . . rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety.’ Usage will have its way, even though lexicographers might wish that a little restraint, a little more ‘propriety’, might be possible.10 Johnson’s ambivalence represents very well a more general English posture: while the idea of some élite body imposing their will on the language may have been distasteful, the need for some guidelines was perfectly obvious in an era when spelling and usage were fluid, and when language was seen as a potential servant in the cause of identity. This tension between a prescriptivism arising from narrow and often unfair conceptions of social inclusion and exclusion, and desires and needs for at least some standardization is, I believe, a permanent one, and it is not restricted to anglophone settings. In fact, a more or less permanent ambivalence or tension is highly desirable. On the one hand, the steadily growing scholarly belief in the ‘naturalness’ of descriptivism is legitimately erected on the foundations of ‘ordinary’ usage. Usus est magister optimus may be logically unprovable, but it has the considerable weight of history behind it, not least exemplified by language change and evolution. On the other, linguistic choices continue to be necessary, and any route followed means another road not taken. There is, then, an ongoing need for what we might style a ‘modified’ prescriptivism, for minimalist intervention. Reliance on a single individual, a single lexicographer, to produce an authoritative work continued in England after Johnson’s great effort. James Murray’s work on the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, and sections were published from 1884. It was only completed (in twelve volumes) in 1928; a thirteenth, supplementary volume appearing in 1933, and four further supplements brought things up to 1986. A full second edition appeared in 1989 and it, too, has had several published supplements. All these versions essentially added to the original, but a third edition is being revised throughout. This was put in train in the 1990s and some entries now appear online; updates are made quarterly. In its complete state, however, the thirdedition OED is not expected until about 2035. If this edition were to be published in paper copy – which would depend upon sufficient demand – it is estimated that it would run to forty volumes.

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FIGURE 7.2   Sir James Murray (1837–1915), The Strand Magazine, JulyDecember [volume 50], 1915 (Public Domain). When the United States became independent in 1776, it inherited English linguistic tendencies. In considering language policy, then, it had no academy to consult directly and the Spanish and French models lacked appeal because of their association with ‘crowned heads and royal courts’. As in England, some important people did

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favour the idea of an academy, and the most prominent of these was John Adams. He believed that an American academy would restrain the ‘natural tendency’ that languages had to ‘degenerate’. He also believed that, since England had no academy, there was an opportunity here for the United States to put its official stamp on linguistic purity and preservation. But Adams, often suspected of monarchist sympathies, had no success in moving Congress. So the result was, once again, recourse to a one-man academy, a lexicographer. The American Johnson was, of course, Noah Webster – who, while acknowledging the need for some uniformities, shared both Johnson’s pragmatic perspective on linguistic change, and his modesty about the work of dictionary makers.11 Webster had more overtly political interests than did Johnson. He felt the need to contribute to the linguistic independence of the United States, a need that culminated in his American Dictionary of the English Language. He thought that England and the United States would gradually become linguistically separate, and that entirely different languages would be the eventual result. He was not at all opposed to such a trend, for it reinforced his nationalistic feelings: he wanted ‘American’ to diverge from English. In publications earlier than his great dictionary, Webster had urged spelling changes, and these were to signal the chief differences between American and British English (differences that persist today: color rather than colour; center instead of centre). His view was one that I have implied here already: ‘a national language is a bond of national union.’ Still, enamoured as he was of a new ‘people’s language’, Webster did not shirk from the removal of ‘improprieties and vulgarisms . . . and . . . those odious distinctions of provincial dialects.’ Old ideas die hard, even in new countries.12 I mentioned above that language academies and councils may seem particularly necessary for small-language communities, and a similar argument may be made for dictionaries. Beyond their immediate utility in providing authoritative reference material, they both have substantial symbolic value. In the Solomon Islands archipelago, for instance, the preparation of a dictionary of Lavukalevese was seen as tangible proof of linguistic validity, particularly since the islanders were aware that neighbouring speech communities already had a dictionary. The value of such a professionally produced dictionary had

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FIGURE 7.3   Noah Webster (1758–1843), portrait by James Herring, 1833. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Gift of William A. Ellis) (Public Domain). ‘less to do with its content, and more to do with its very existence.’ Size is important, too: ‘the most frequent response to the dictionary . . . was disappointment that it was not as big as people were expecting.’ The inclusion of novel or ‘difficult’ words was particularly welcomed, since access to them was restricted to the more educated members of the community. The general status created by the interest and the work of outside experts co-exists, then, with more specific in-group

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status hierarchies. Some might imagine that these reactions reflect a lack of sophistication – and in one obvious way that must be true. But the fieldworker’s observation that ‘written materials have an emblematic function far beyond their intrinsic content’ is entirely in line with my arguments in this book about the powerful relationship between language and group identity, something that applies to all of us.13

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­8 Languages and identities

Identity: A general note The essence of identity is similarity: things that are identical are the same, and the word stems from the Latin idem. The actual derivation of the word identity may have come from identidem (= idem et idem). This most basic sense is exactly what underpins the notion of identity as it applies to personality. Dictionaries routinely note that identity signifies ‘sameness at all times or in all circumstances’, the fact that a person is oneself and not someone else. It means a continuity, then, that constitutes an unbroken thread running through the long and varied tapestry of life. That thread has considerable strength when you consider the very real changes that take place in the tapestry. As George Orwell observed in his discussion of the cultural continuity of the English, of the links between the Englands of 1840 and 1940: ‘What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.’1 It is important to realize that individuality is not composed of psychological components not to be found in anyone else. That would be a strange social world, indeed. Rather, the uniqueness of the individual comes about through the particular combination or weighting of building blocks drawn from a common human store. To accept this is to accept that no rigid distinction can in fact be made between personality and social identity. ‘No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine,’ as John Donne wrote in the seventeenth century. Contemporary

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social scientists put it rather differently, of course, but their various investigations reproduce and amplify Donne’s observation. Our personal characteristics derive from our socialization within the group (or, rather, the several groups) to which we belong; one’s particular social context defines that part of the larger human pool of potential from which a personal identity can be constructed. Thus, individual identities will be both components and reflections of particular social (or cultural) ones, and the latter will always be, to some extent at least, stereotypic in nature because of their necessary generality across the individual components.2 The most cursory attention reveals that the course of human history and its implications for every individual are by and large fuelled by perceptions of groups. And it turns out that ‘groupness’ is remarkably easy to establish. Beginning in the 1970s, the social psychologist Henri Tajfel, with his students and colleagues, investigated the formation and maintenance of what they called ‘minimal groups’. They divided people into groups on the basis of trivial or unimportant criteria (e.g. expressing a preference for one of two painters, neither of whom had been heard of before), and showed how subsequent behaviour (‘in-group’ favouritism, for example, and/or disdain for the ‘out-group’) is affected by this. These demonstrations are certainly intriguing (and worrying), but we might think them of little significance outside the laboratory. We would be wrong, however, since there are countless real-life examples of people forming themselves into groups – either physically or ideologically – on weak, illusory or malignant bases. ‘Ever-Trumpers’, for example, continue to hold certain social and political beliefs in the face of great counter-evidence. Conspiracy ‘theories’ are commonly maintained in illogical and unrealistic ways. (There are, of course, reasons why people continue to hold false or exaggerated opinions, why beliefs are maintained in the face of new or verified information, why evidence that clearly disconfirms opinions is disregarded or denied, and so on. There is a large literature on these and related matters, which are discussed in any good social psychology textbook.)3 When we think of the logical extension of ‘identity’ from the person to the group, the thread that links us – or that we believe links us – to a particular heritage is also strong. The ‘belief’ here can come to be a symbolic quality over time. What are we to understand about Americans who say that they are Irish (for instance), and who may give themselves a hyphenated description (Irish-American), but

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whose forebears have, for centuries, been born in the United States? Apart from reminding us that perception is all-important, and that a symbolic quantity can have real force, the connection with Orwell’s observation is that the cultural ‘stuff’ that defines a particular group over many years can alter a great deal. As Fredrik Barth pointed out in his much-cited work, it is the continuation of a perceived boundary that permits the preservation of a group identity over time. Specific ‘markers’ of identity may come and go, but so long as there exist some affiliative features – objective, subjective or some combination of the two – the frontiers of ‘groupness’ can be maintained.4 When I published a book called Language, Society and Identity thirty-five years ago, the final word in the title was not a particularly common one in the social-scientific literature. There had, of course, existed all sorts of studies of ethnic and national affiliation – largely from political and historical perspectives – but it is only in the last few decades that studies of identity have really come into their own. By the early years of this century, Zygmunt Bauman was observing that identity is now ‘the most commonly played game in town’, and the sub-title of his book (Seeking Safety in an Insecure World) nicely captures the perennial underpinnings of identity. Others, too, were pointing to a ‘veritable explosion’ of interest in identity, and a discussion by Richard Jenkins throws further light on the topic: ‘identity’ became one of the unifying themes of social science during the 1990s, and shows no signs of going away. Everybody has something to say: anthropologists, geographers, historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists. In fact, Jenkins’s list is too abbreviated, since identity is also a topic in the arts and humanities; see also Chapter 12.5

Identity: Instrumental and symbolic language The relationship between language and identity is a thread running throughout this book; it may be implicit in some parts, but it is always detectable in the social fabric and – to switch metaphors – never far

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from the surface of the discussion. That being so, I only mean in this section to touch upon the difference between the instrumental and the symbolic facets of language. Where language-and-identity relationships are concerned, ethnic and national allegiances are typically the most politically and socially salient, particularly where cultural and linguistic contact occurs and certainly, therefore, of prime importance in studies of multilingualism. Where a language has daily functions across all contexts, where it has ongoing instrumental value, its role as a ‘marker’ of group identity is obvious and, indeed, seldom remarked upon. But, as implied earlier, languages no longer spoken (among immigrant populations, for example) may continue to have considerable symbolic significance for the group. Few of the current descendants of those first Italians, Germans and Irish to arrive in the United States speak their ancestral languages, nor is there any broad interest in learning them. The phenomenon also extends to indigenous groups, where large-scale language shift occurs. Thus, in an extensive study undertaken in Ireland in 1975, continuingly potent sentimental attachments to Irish were revealed, but these were not accompanied by much language use, nor by any widespread desire to actively promote Irish, nor yet by optimism about its future. It may be thought, then, that a language that has come to possess only symbolic status is a rather weak entity. It may, however, link importantly with other features of cultural life, and may have a role to play in continuing or rejuvenated interest in the group’s history and literature. It might even prove a platform for some degree of vernacular revival.6

Identity: Language and religion Religion has always been a central feature of both individual and group identity, and its relationship to language is often revealing. An apposite opening example is that of Hebrew in Israel. From the end of the nineteenth century in Palestine, and on to the establishment of the state of Israel, it became clear that a lingua franca was needed for the Jews who came – and were to come – from many different language communities. This need was able to draw upon the existing

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langue intime, Hebrew, which of course had quintessentially religious connotations. There are two strands to the particularity of the Israeli Hebrew ‘case’. First, during the long period when the language almost ceased to exist as a daily vernacular, religion provided a sheltering home for it. Second, the development and maintenance of a state built upon a specific religious base brought that sheltered language back into wide mundane use.7 There are other modern instances of the close connections among language, religion and identity that are as interesting, if not always as dramatic, as those involving Hebrew. If, for instance, religion is a central pillar in the culture of a group whose language is at risk, it makes sense to exploit its strength and to suggest that spirituality is uniquely expressible through the threatened tongue. In Ireland, the ancestral language was seen as ‘the casket which encloses the highest and purest religion’ – it was the ‘instrument and expression of a purely Catholic culture.’ At the same time, English could be condemned as the expression of a materialistic and godless way of life. The Catholic and Irish-language heritage of the remaining Irishspeaking areas constituted an important barrier against the corrupting influences of the anglophone world.8 So, just as it had been reviled as the language of ‘popery’, proscribed under the Tudors, used to facilitate religious conversion, and then indirectly proscribed again, the religious associations of the Irish language were drawn upon by nineteenth-century revivalists. That the strength of Catholicism, unwavering until the most recent times in Ireland, could be used to halt, shore up and perhaps even reverse the decline of Irish seems a logical move. Indeed, if it had proved possible to convince the Catholic Irish that there was a necessary and indissoluble link between their faith and the Irish language, the fortunes of the latter might have shown a dramatic improvement. On the other hand, it is arguable that religious strength may have acted against language-revival efforts. As the most broadly potent component of Irish identity, the continuity of Catholicism may have diluted the urge to protect the linguistic component. With a powerful neighbouring island whose language increasingly seems the key to social and economic advance, a weakening local language may not seem so vital a pillar of ‘groupness’ if another stalwart support remains secure.

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Lest we imagine that these linkages are of the past, consider this: a contemporary Presbyterian minister in Scotland has suggested that, whatever may have once been the case, God is now quite clearly ill-disposed towards Gaelic. Since there are no Gaelic-speaking candidates for the ministry, the reverend gentleman has argued that ‘since the Lord is not sending out Gaelic-speaking labourers to toil in His harvest, I must draw the conclusion that it is not His will that Gaelic survive as a language.’9 There may be few Gaelic-speaking labourers at work today in the fields of the Lord, but missionary activity has continued. It has always been closely entwined with linguistic matters, and there is not the slightest doubt that a great deal of extremely useful linguistic work has been accomplished by missionaries. As Max Müller pointed out, missionaries often felt it part of their duty to ‘collect lists of words, and draw up grammars wherever they came in contact with a new race.’ There is an obvious tension, of course: however beneficent their motives may be, missionaries are engaged in cultural intervention. Indigenous languages are learned, recorded and often used as evangelical tools to expedite conversions. They may have a real and scholarly interest in local cultures and languages, but missionaries are generally opposed to local religions. Why else would their missions exist? And if religions are discouraged or replaced, what may this bode for the community language?10 Attending to local languages for religious or allegedly moral purposes has a long history. In a book of 1688, Johann Amos Komenský – Comenius, the great Czech educator – said ‘let some of our own people, through intercourse with the barbarians, learn their languages,’ adding that if large numbers of children were brought away to be educated and instructed in ‘our language and the harmonies of things,’ they would return as apostles to their own people. In today’s world we are only too well aware that many indigenous children – in Australia and North America, for example – were routinely removed from their homes and placed in residential schools. The ostensible reason was always to better educate them in the ways of modernity and, therefore, to improve their prospects. More subtly, however, the aim was often to interrupt older cultures, religions and languages that were seen, at best, as passively primitive and, at worst, as actively opposed to the requirements of ‘mainstream’ life. Only now are

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the longstanding patterns of neglect and abuse being subjected to systematic ‘truth-and-reconciliation’ enquiries.11 In Canada, the first conversion to Christianity occurred in 1610, after which a permanent base was established with the arrival of the Récollets and, especially, the Jesuits in the early years of the century. These French priests learned aboriginal histories, cultures and languages, and they wrote dictionaries and grammars. From the earliest days in the new world, they sent back to France reports and documents of all kinds, the most famous of which are now known as the Jesuit Relations. The saving of souls through conversion has always been the paramount purpose of missionaries, of course, and so all these activities were in the service of the spread of Roman Catholicism and, increasingly, of combatting the inroads of Protestantism. The Séminaire des missions étrangères was founded in Paris in 1663 expressly for overseas proselytism, and in 1735 it sent Pierre-Antoine-Simon Maillard to work with the Mi’kmaq in Acadie, the French colony in what is now the Canadian Maritimes. In a lengthy manuscript, Maillard provided evidence that, while missionaries have always profited by learning local languages, and may often have worked for the learning of their languages by native populations, they haven’t always encouraged literacy. He pointed out that literacy meant access to secular and political material that might promote anti-French sentiment. He felt that the Indians would abuse their knowledge of reading and writing because of an uncontrollable curiosity that would lead them into error and, worse still, they would persuade themselves that they knew more than those who were teaching them. From the aboriginal point of view, literacy became indissolubly linked with religion, and suspicions of proselytism kept some from wishing to become alphabétisé. For others, becoming literate meant acknowledging ‘their participation in the larger colonial world.’ It is worth pointing out, incidentally, that there were precontact systems of visual communication in North America: paintings and carvings, but also petroglyphs and hieroglyphs. Such systems were either ignored or disparaged by the newcomers.12 Not all religions have operated in quite the same way. It is clear that Catholic missionaries wished to keep scriptural interpretation and dissemination very much in their own hands. The stance here is intimately connected with what, in many contexts over many years,

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has been a control that was temporal as well as spiritual. Given the nature of Protestantism from its inception, it is unsurprising that Methodist and Anglican missionaries had a different perspective. They supported a more broadly based education and literacy skills that would enable their congregants to read the Bible for themselves. These denominational differences proved to be of long standing. To stay with Canada for a moment, we find that Catholics remained more fluent and stronger in terms of Gaelic language maintenance in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. The ceilidh, dancing, story-telling and other cultural practices have also endured longer among them than among their Protestant neighbours. To be sure, language retention in both communities benefited from the geographical isolation and poverty of Cape Breton Island, but Catholic culture – here as elsewhere – was and remains more tightly knit and all-embracing. In terms of Gaelic literacy, however, the Protestant population (and particularly the Presbyterians) was far ahead. A series of studies in the late 1970s found an average Gaelic literacy rate of 52 per cent among Protestants, compared to 17 per cent among Catholics, historically discouraged from personal scriptural reading.13 Where temporal influence has waned, by the way, one often finds religious accommodations to prevailing language trends. Displaying a calculated pragmatism, the Catholic clergy in Ireland increasingly turned to English once the British had established Maynooth College – essentially a seminary – for them, in 1795. At the same time, the Irish language continued to be used by Protestant proselytizing groups. The assessment of the hierarchy was quite logical from the point of view of a church concerned with la longue durée, and, consequently, well practised in adapting to profane exigencies. The church altered course again with the nationalism of pre-independence Ireland, and the official position given to Irish. The fact that the Celtic revival was so often linked with anti-English, anti-materialist and, indeed, antimodern tendencies eased the new accommodation, which was further facilitated by legislators who were ‘incapable of conceiving of an Irish educational process free from ecclesiastical supervision.’ The course of the Irish language has hardly been smooth since independence, however, and so the dominant language in which the church must work has remained English. A current lecturer at Maynooth University (as it now is) has written that the church has

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always preferred working in the dominant language and adds that, in fact, ecclesiastical postings to the Gaeltacht are ‘punishment posts, Siberias for the disobedient, or hard stations to teach newly-ordained priests the virtue of humility before they pass on to lusher pastures.’14 As I implied above, evangelists have sometimes found it necessary to teach as well as to learn languages. Early Jesuit missionaries, for instance, found that a diversity of tongues frustrated their activities: even where an indigenous lingua franca existed, ‘its primitive vocabulary was quite inadequate for explaining the mysteria fidei.’ Teaching languages to native groups assisted secular initiatives, too. Sixteenth-century merchant-adventurers in the Americas told Charles V that linguistic confusion interfered with the discovery and exploitation of gold, silver and other valuable resources. And in the preface to his seventeenth-century universal-language scheme, the Ars Signorum, George Dalgarno pointed out its value for ‘civilizing barbarous Nations, Propagating the Gospel, and encreasing Traffique and Commerce.’ Thus did spiritual impulses often complement less heavenly aims.15

Identity: Language and gender When Europeans first came into contact with the Carib Indians of the new world, a seventeenth-century commentator reported that both men and women had expressions ‘peculiar to themselves’. Each understood the other, but different activities and interests, accompanied and reinforced by social and religious taboos, had given rise to differences in actual usage. The early explorers ought not to have been particularly amazed; after all, different language choices made by men and women have always existed. Most are ‘gender-preferential’ rather than ‘gender-exclusive’, of course: there are clearly words that women are more likely to use than are men (and vice versa) but it is hard to imagine words or phrases that are exclusive to one or the other today.16 Most of the regular differences that have been studied are familiar to all of us. The use of ‘bad’ language is generally felt to characterize one gender more than the other, although most readers will agree that women swear more often nowadays, at least in western societies.

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Occupational and educational levels are relevant, of course, but so is age: the four-letter words I regularly hear used by female undergraduates in the college corridors are not nearly so frequent in the mouths of their women instructors, even when the latter are relaxing after work, even when (so I am reliably informed) they are in same-sex venues. Studies have also shown that, even in a more linguistically permissive age, there remain some words (fewer than before, no doubt) that women tend not to use. There is swearing and swearing. Women still tend to be more ‘polite’ than men, and are generally more conservative in their usage. Circumstances almost always alter cases, however, and the frequency, form and function of polite usage are matters for enquiry in either gender. Besides, although we generally accept that it is a desirable social lubricant that can make people feel safer and more comfortable, politeness is often associated with subordination and deference. This, in turn, may reinforce its feminine connotations. Still, when we consider the regularity with which we hear empty requests (‘Have a nice day!’), or have people tell us who they are, for obviously venal reasons (‘Hi! I’m Jason, and I’ll be your waiter this evening’), or are inappropriately reassured (‘Hey! No problem’) – and when all such noxious utterances cross all social divides – it seems like the currency of politeness has become cheapened for both men and women. The power of social convention and pressure is obviously at work when we think of gender differences in speech. We could be blunter here, and think more specifically about social dominance and subordination. If women are expected to be more ‘polite’ than men, and if their use of profanity and obscenity is more severely sanctioned, then we might conclude that their linguistic behaviour has limits placed upon it. It is an irony, of course, that the forms this limiting takes are often velvet-lined: isn’t it good to be polite and to avoid swearing? The fact remains, however, that if women are on some sort of linguistic pedestal in these regards, they have been placed there, and pedestals offer little room for movement. (I  am of course prescinding here from the many ways – linguistic and otherwise – in which traditional constraints on women’s lives are not at all velvety.) A subordinate social role can imply insecurity, uncertainty and lack of confidence. It is exactly these phenomena that were elucidated

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by Robin Lakoff in her now-famous studies of women’s language. Although there were problems of method and analysis with her work, and the implicit acceptance of a ‘male-as-norm’ perspective was quickly commented on, Lakoff’s attempts to at least begin a classification of recurring gender differences in speech have been widely and favourably recognized. Among other things, she highlighted women’s disproportionate use of so-called ‘empty’ adjectives (gorgeous, fabulous), precision in colour terms (taupe, magenta, cerise), and over- or under-statement, because both can suggest nervousness, timidity and a desire to mollify or to avoid unpleasantness. These and other linguistic habits contribute to gender differences in communication. Men dominate conversations, men interrupt more, and women provide more conversational feedback, making more encouraging and facilitating remarks during exchanges. This, at least, has been the received wisdom.17 Some caveats should be borne in mind, however. The speech characteristics traditionally associated more with women are not, after all, exclusively theirs, the familiar features do not always signify the same thing, and a dominant-subordinate dichotomy is clearly an insufficiently nuanced perspective. Consider ‘tag questions’, one of the most widely discussed features of women’s speech. Must they always imply uncertainty, do they always invite the listener to make a correction or at least expand upon a dubious utterance? Some do (‘It’s a wonderful painting, isn’t it?’), but others are better understood as ‘facilitative’, giving the listener a comfortable conversational entry (‘You’ve just changed jobs, haven’t you?’), and others still may work to soften a criticism (‘That was a bit silly, wasn’t it?’). Readers will immediately see that these usages are frequently employed by both men and women. Tags can also be confrontational (‘I just told you, didn’t I?’), in which case readers would be right to believe that men are the more frequent users. More fine-grained analyses of gender differences in speech reveal that ‘women’s’ features – greater female politeness, more use of standard variants and so on – may all say more about genuine facilitative and supportive desires than they do about insecurity and lack of confidence. One writer succinctly remarked that men typically ask themselves if they have won in conversational exchanges, while women ponder whether or not they have been sufficiently helpful.

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This is a little too neat, but a broader point is that men and women may use language for different social purposes, having been socialized in different ways from earliest childhood. Even silence can differentiate: if a man is silent, this may be taken as a sign of care and wisdom, of authority and potency; if a woman is silent, she may be viewed as weak or uncertain. There is an irony here, inasmuch as women in many cultures have had silence imposed upon them in one way or another.18 Gossip, both noun and verb, has historically had gendered connotations. Thus, the OED described the former as ‘a person, mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, especially one who delights in idle talk.’ While the idea of trivial chat, of unsubstantiated rumour and of meddling and malicious banter has remained, the specific association with women has largely disappeared in modern dictionaries. A recent study of an indigenous group in Brazil, however, reported that women’s speech was seen as ‘gossipy and unreliable’, and readers will know that this is very far from the only contemporary community in which such a description still obtains. There also remain gendered assessments of gossip, with one study finding that almost 70 per cent of the female respondents felt that gossip was restricted to women. (The study found that men were split evenly on the question, but the author suggests that, in the context of her work, they were likely giving what they thought to be politically correct, or ‘socially desirable’ answers.) Virtually all modern research reveals that gossip among women has favourable as well as less desirable features. There is a focus on personal relationships, experiences and problems, in a generally supportive atmosphere in which ‘networking’ is key. Conversation about relationships may also, however, become the aggressive ‘weapon of choice’ among women, and a way of engaging rivals – particularly romantic rivals – in ‘competitive reputation manipulation’.19 Men gossip, too, of course, but here the stereotype involves the exchange of factual information, and the discussion of weighty matters. (Male) descriptions of such conversations among men, and  – as women subjected to ‘mansplaining’ know very well – between men and women, often avoid the word ‘gossip’ altogether. Who imagines, however, that men are unwilling or incapable of spending time in meaningless banter, or refrain from vacuous and

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often profane talk about personal achievements, hobbies, sports, cars and, indeed, women? There is a large popular literature on miscommunication between men and women and, while some books build upon all-too-real social conventions and stereotypes, there is also a great deal of exaggeration for humorous effect. Deborah Cameron has suggested that, when ways of curbing misunderstanding are discussed, the books often turn into self-help guides aimed at women, part of the much larger genre that could be styled ‘you and your relationship’ or, indeed, ‘how to deal with your man.’ Other ‘advice’ has told women to speak more like men if they want to be taken seriously or to do well in the corporate world. At best, then, we see recommendations for adaptation and tolerance, rather than reasons for either behaviour or stereotypes. Cameron reminds us that gender variations are frequently underpinned by power variations: when a husband asks his wife if there is any ketchup, the real message is ‘(please) bring me some’; if a daughter asks her mother the same thing, she is more likely to be told that the jar is in the cupboard.20 Besides gender differences in language use, there is also the matter of sexist language. Leaving aside truly violent or repulsive usage – which, especially if we were to consider image as well as language, is actually increasing, thanks to the ever more ubiquitous visual media – our culture continues to provide frequent instances of crude, trivializing, stereotyped or offensive language. Given all this, should we try and change society, secure in the knowledge that language change will follow? Should we make attempts at language reform, as a way of speeding the happy day? Is language only a symptom, or could it also be a contributor? Efforts should obviously continue along all fronts. At the level of language change, it is clear that some egregious usages have disappeared, and some new and more appropriate terms have arisen, often quite quickly: consider the rise of the term ‘Ms’, for example. (One should really speak of its reestablishment; examples of its use in the modern sense date to the early 1900s, and much earlier usages – not always with favourable connotations – go back for centuries.) Otto Jespersen stood at the head of a long line of later authors, both male and female, when he included his Language a chapter on women – but none on men. The gender-and-language literature

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used to deal almost exclusively with women, and much of it still does. There are sociological reasons for this. Just as it can be more instructive to study Spanish rather than English language policies in the United States, just as it may be more appropriate to consider the social situation of Blacks rather than whites, so a stronger focus on women’s language may be more revealing. Still, despite recent advances in both information and social sensitivity, we must take care to avoid treating the speech of one gender (need I say which?) as the norm from which that of the other differs or deviates. Why say women are more polite than men, or swear less, or are more conversationally facilitative, or hedge their linguistic bets? Why not ask, rather, why men are ruder, more confrontational and more unreasonably assertive? The title of a relevant article was ‘Not Gender Difference, but the Difference Gender Makes’ and this apt phrase is relevant to all investigations in the area.21

­9 Language decline and revival: Basic factors

Introductory note Interactions among languages can have many consequences, some at fine-grained linguistic levels, others along the broader social dimensions that are my concern in this book. Much of the attention here has focused on the various ways in which contact leads to conflict. Indeed, some have argued that there is no language contact without conflict. This seems too blunt to me, since many languages rub up against one another without undesirable encounters. When we consider, however, that most of the relevant work in the area concerns itself primarily with contact between languages of unequal power, conflict becomes more readily understandable. The single greatest focus, then, has to do with minority languages, both indigenous and immigrant.

Minority languages Minority languages can be distinguished simply by numerical size, but the more important aspects are those having to do with subordinate status or influence. Welsh and Gaelic are examples of indigenousminority communities, but so are Zula and Xhosa. I mention these South African varieties because they better illustrate the fact that

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numerical superiority need not lead to social or political dominance. Taken together, they are the first languages of about 40 per cent of the population, and although their speakers greatly outnumber those of Afrikaans (15 per cent) and English (10 per cent), they have historically had only ‘minority’ status. The fact that, in the post-apartheid republic, they have achieved legislated recognition illustrates another fact: speakers whose languages come to have official status may find that this does not necessarily lead to either increased use or substantially heightened influence. Irish, to cite another familiar example, is still overshadowed by English, even though it has its own country and is enshrined as both national and official.1 Paying particular attention to the relationships between ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ language communities makes sense for at least two reasons. The more general one is simply that matters of language and group identity may only rarely arise in larger or more ‘mainstream’ groups. Speakers of English in predominantly anglophone countries may go for a very long time indeed without thinking about them. More specifically, contacts between (and among) larger and smaller groups can throw into greater relief cultural and linguistic conflicts which illuminate important attitudes and beliefs. This is not to say, of course, that interesting cultural dynamics are not illuminated when two or more larger groups come into contact, nor that opinions about language and culture are absent within those larger groups. It is, as I say, a matter of producing a starker or more visible set of interactions. Although I must gloss over many details that complicate my simple references here to minority languages, I can mention one or two. Some groups have retained an ancestral heartland (the Welsh, for example), others have not (the Roma), and still others remain close to one: the French in the northeastern United States and the Spanish in the southwest are just a step away from their heartlands; indeed, the effect of their migration has often been simply to expand the homeland so that it transcends political boundaries. Some groups exist as minorities within minorities (the Ossetians within Soviet Georgia, or the Cree within francophone Québec – viewing the latter as a Canadian minority, but clearly not a provincial one). Distinctions between immigrant and indigenous minorities can be very important, insofar as some language (and other) rights possessed by the latter may be denied to the former – and yet the distinctions are not

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always clear. Some of the Tamils in Sri Lanka came to the island a thousand years ago, while others moved there in the mid-nineteenth century:  are some indigenous and others not? Have some of the immigrant groups that populated the countries of the new world now achieved indigenous status? How will we regard the apparently permanent gastarbeiter groups in Europe five hundred years hence? Are the Welsh and Bretons truly indigenous in the lands they now live in: were they not historical interlopers in some earlier age? Perhaps the European-origin population of North America will always be seen as an immigrant one in the eyes of aboriginal groups, but were not the latter, in their turn, migrants via ‘Beringia’?

Language accommodations In many instances of language contact between varieties that are unequal in important ways, some bilingual accommodation seems the obvious avenue: one language for home and hearth, another for the world outside one’s door. In many settings, however, bilingualism is often an unstable and impermanent way-station on the road to a new monolingualism. There is, of course, diglossia, that more enduring state of bilingual or bi-dialectal coexistence. The complementarity here – whether of the classic sort, in which ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the same language co-exist, or in the broader sense that allows different languages to be the players – is stable almost by definition. But even stability is relative: nothing lasts forever, and diglossic arrangements need be no exception. Bigger languages may continue to chip away at smaller ones until language shift occurs. It is very often the case that the dynamics of urbanization, modernization and mobility place languages at risk, and a decline in the existence and attractions of traditional lifestyles inexorably entails a decline in languages associated with them. In these circumstances, language shift is frequently inevitable and bilingualism often a phenomenon that cannot be maintained beyond the second or third generation.2 Despite the fact that some scholars write rather breathlessly about language ‘loss’, as if there were some period during which groups had no language at all, despite the fact that ‘globalization’ has become the longest four-letter word for many people, and despite

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the imbalance of heat and light in discussions of the social life of language, we should try to remember that change rather than stasis is the historical norm. Environments alter, people move, needs and demands evolve, and such factors have a large influence upon language. When considering accusations that certain societies, or groups, or institutions can be singled out as villains in the story of some language or another, we should keep some generalities in mind. Desires for social and economic mobility and advancement, and for the delights of modernity (however dubious) are, with some few notable exceptions, global phenomena. Globalization and its linguistic ramifications are welcomed by many who see in them upward mobility: physical, social, psychological. All of this is very serious for small languages whose appeal to their once-and-future speakers may come more and more to rest upon abstract pillars of cultural continuity and tradition. The old English proverb has it that ‘fine words butter no parsnips’: equally, fine cultural appeals must often wait until those to whom they are so frequently addressed have satisfied rather more immediate requirements, have secured their butter and their neeps. To put it another way: attention to more intangible matters tends to increase as collars go from blue to white. One Navajo mother said that if she had to choose between living a mile from water and speaking Navajo, or having indoor plumbing and speaking English, she would choose the latter. We may wish of course that families were not faced with such dilemmas – that Diné bizaad could be spoken in a hooghan outfitted with all mod cons – but this is not always possible.3

Language decline, maintenance and revival4 Given the critical remarks I have to make about some academic interventions on behalf of threatened languages, and about the perils of trying to combine scholarship with advocacy, I think it is as well to start by nailing my personal colours to the mast. I agree with Dr Johnson, who – though not always favourably disposed towards the Scots – was moved during his tour of the Hebrides to

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tell Boswell: ‘I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.’ (I would not place quite such a singular emphasis on language, however.) And I fully understand all the many nationalist sentiments that are paraphrases of admonitions such as ‘a people without a language of its own is only half a nation’ (Thomas Davis), or ‘has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers?’ (Johann Herder), or ‘language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation’ (Wilhelm von Humboldt).5 A point that bears much repeating is that language decline and shift are typically symptoms of contact between groups of unequal political and economic power. They are effects of a larger cause. Just as one does not cure measles by covering up the spots, so one cannot maintain a language by dealing with language alone. To switch metaphors and perspectives: large-scale social changes meant to float all boats would certainly float linguistic ones, but such alterations are generally not desired. Even the most fervent linguistic and cultural nationalists are unlikely to want such wholesale flooding. The hopes are narrower, revealing a wish for a linguistic rejuvenation coincident with the uninterrupted continuation of other desirable aspects of current social life. Many of the latter reflect the benefits afforded by participation in (or next to) the large community whose incursions have brought about language decline in the first place. You see the problem? Osborn Bergin, a famous Irish philologist, once noted bluntly that ‘no language has ever been revived, and no language ever will be revived.’ A generation later, however, Uriel Weinreich wrote that ‘many “obsolescent” languages have received new leases on life.’ A lot obviously depends upon one’s assessments of language revival and, indeed, of language death. Furthermore, attempts to maintain and revive flagging languages may have beneficial consequences, even if they are ultimately and broadly judged as failures: school programmes may at least provide for pupils that ‘thin linguistic wash’ that I mentioned in Chapter 3, a minimal competence that can serve as a base for further and fuller study of the language itself and thence to the literature in which it is written. Thus, bringing about a popular return to a largely lost vernacular need not be the only criterion. This is especially so when we see that the spoken language has often been considered as only one element – and not necessarily the most pivotal one – in a broader literary revival.6

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Notwithstanding the difficulties, efforts have often been made to arrest the decline of languages and, in a work that was among the very first to consider a number of these in one collection, Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas mac a’Ghobhainn described twenty revival attempts, ranging from the Albanian to the Ukrainian. With the exception of Hebrew, Indonesian and Korean, the languages dealt with were all European, with most of the efforts concentrated in the nineteenth century. In England, however, struggles to maintain English in the face of Norman French began as early as the thirteenth century – rather ironic since many of the modern maintenance-andrevival movements contend against the encroachments of English.7 The maintenance, rejuvenation or outright revival of a language in decline is often a parlous enterprise because, by the time action is seen to be needed, the precipitating social pressures have often assumed formidable proportions. One consequence of this is that differences between ‘maintenance’ and ‘revival’ are often not nearly so pronounced as the terms themselves would imply. Besides, while ‘revival’ can certainly mean resuscitation, it can also, both logically and etymologically, refer to renewal, to reinvigoration, to the arresting of decline: to maintenance, in other words. Many types of restorative activity, then, can legitimately be placed under one heading: matters commonly involve degrees of difficulty rather than theoretical difference. There are also degrees of success. As I noted above, must revitalization efforts always imply vernacular maintenance or restoration? Could a language preserved in written form, but spoken by few (or none) on a regular basis, be considered ‘maintained’? The answer to this latter question is yes: first, because the preservation of texts is important in itself; second, because such preservation could, at least theoretically, be a basis for future ‘re-vernacularization’. Nonetheless, language maintenance is generally aimed at the continuity of some ordinary spoken medium. This, in turn, highlights the importance of uninterrupted domestic language transmission from one generation to the next. If this family transmission is sustained, then language maintenance is at some level assured; if the passing of the linguistic torch from parents to children falters or ends, however, the language becomes very vulnerable. Learning languages at the maternal knee has always been of the greatest importance in these matters. This is another way of saying that the home is probably the

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most important of all language domains – a point repeatedly, and correctly, stressed in the literature. Less often emphasized, however, is the logical ramification that, for the continuation of this domestic language setting, there must generally exist extra-domestic contexts within which the language is necessary or, at least, of considerable importance. Languages may most effortlessly be learned by small children at home, in that most private and intimate of settings, but long-term prospects will still be dim if their usefulness disappears at the front gate. Beyond that gate, we should remember that not all domains are of equal weight or value as pillars of language continuity. While it is difficult to be categorical here, it is possible to identify – for a given variety, at a given time, in a given context – what one might call domains of necessity. These domains are related to the most pivotal aspects of people’s lives, and obvious examples include the home, the immediate community, the school and the workplace. On the other hand, domains in which participation is voluntary, or sporadic, or idiosyncratic, are not likely to be so important for broad language maintenance. The twice-a-week Welsh lesson may be intensely interesting, the teachers may be excellent, the materials and methods may be the newest and the finest, and the pupils may be strongly committed – but it is still a rather self-conscious world away from buying your groceries, routinely talking to your workmates, or having an after-dinner drink in the language. In summary, the maintenance of a language is on a surer footing if it, and it alone, is required in domains of central and continuing salience. The fortunes of languages are tightly bound up with those of their speakers, which means that efforts directed towards the preservation and maintenance of threatened varieties are unlikely to have much enduring success when they are more or less isolated from those social currents I mentioned above. It is only when thoroughgoing alterations in the social fabric have been made – evolution or revolution – that we might expect to find significant and enduring linguistic change (among much else, of course). However, such widespread upheavals are rarely wanted by language and cultural revivalists. As I said in Chapter  2, in the great majority of settings, the beneficiaries don’t want to give up most of the other desirable aspects of social life with which they have become familiar.

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So it is doubtful, on both practical and theoretical grounds, whether the highly selective interventions desired by revivalists can hope to accomplish very much. It seems odd to think that serious scholars could actually believe that such picking-and-choosing were possible, but the academic literature testifies to the breadth of the mistaken idea that language intervention can be meaningfully conducted in some free-standing way. Some years ago, I referred to ‘the paradox of the Gaeltacht’: when nothing official was done, the erosion of these Irish-speaking areas continued, but conscious intervention has not stemmed the decline in native speakers. Others have also pointed out that ‘languages will certainly die unless we do something . . . they may also die even if we do something.’ The paradox is resolved, of course, when we understand that it describes a language that is in severe decline.8 Formal interventions, formal efforts at language planning on behalf of beleaguered languages, and formal edicts from legislators can often do very little to stem the urbanization and modernization I mentioned above, and which so often place languages in danger in the first place. (I am referring here, of course, to liberal-democratic contexts: dictatorial regimes have much greater powers of imposition, linguistic and otherwise.) Standardization and modernization are always theoretically possible, even for the ‘smallest’ of languages, but they are not always practicable, nor do they necessarily change in any substantial way the status-based balance of dominance among competing forms. Small varieties that have developed to nationallanguage levels (Somali in Africa, and Guaraní in South America, for example) still remain less broadly useful than English and Spanish, respectively. In fact, their usefulness drops off quite dramatically as soon as one leaves their heartlands. Although complicated in itself, and although made even more difficult by being only one thread in a broader and more all-inclusive social fabric, language maintenance per se can be quite easily problematized: how can a language be supported; how can decline and discontinuity be halted? There are two major and inter-related factors involved here, one tangible and one more subjective. The first I have already mentioned. It is the continuing existence of important domains within which the use of the language is necessary. These domains depend, of course, upon social, political and economic

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forces, both within and without the particular language community. Although the details will clearly vary from case to case, issues of  general relevance include linguistic practicality, communicative efficiency, social mobility and economic advancement. These four constitute the greatest advantages associated with large languages, and the greatest disincentives for the maintenance of small ones. In many cases of language contact between varieties that are unequal in important ways, some bilingual or diglossic accommodations are often sought but, as already suggested, such arrangements may prove unstable and impermanent, and often give way to a new monolingualism (in the stronger language). Isolation and lack of mobility – not generally thought desirable – are often prerequisites for language maintenance. In Europe, Peter Mühlhäusler tells us, lack of mobility reinforced linguistic ecological stability. On the other hand, we know that migrations from the old to the new world have generally exacted linguistic and cultural tolls. Is stasis the price of ethnolinguistic continuity? It might well be so. The scholar-activist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas summarized Jared Diamond’s discussion of factors inimical to diversity: movement in unfamiliar environments, advances on new frontiers, acquisition of new technology, increasing political centralization. What can we make, I wonder, of a position that sees these primarily as ‘negative factors’? It is unsurprising that some contemporary ecological postures have difficulty endorsing literacy, and champion localized and oral cultures; see also Chapter  11. Of course, if people are willing to remain in an isolated condition, the possibilities for longterm bilingualism are more propitious. Indeed, isolation has not only stabilized bilingualism, it has very often accounted for the endurance of monolingualism in the original variety. Forty years ago, Joshua Fishman wrote that: stable bilingualism and biculturism cannot be maintained on the basis of open and unlimited interaction between minorities and majorities. Open economic access and unrestricted intergroup interaction may be fine for various practical and philosophical purposes. Indeed, they strike most of us as highly desirable legal and social principles; but they are destructive of minority ethnolinguistic continuity.

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­his seems to capture the situation quite well. Here is an T avowed  supporter of minority languages, of stable bilingualism, of ‘ethnolinguistic continuity’, suggesting that the price of stability is higher than most have evidently been willing to pay. Curious, to say the least, that open access and interaction are seen as ‘fine’ – these are the sorts of things that people struggle and migrate for, not simply ‘highly desirable’ principles.9 When we think of the isolation which can protect small languages – hardly a ‘splendid isolation’, of course, given the social and economic mobility often welcomed wherever it becomes possible – we think of a heartland, a traditional geographic setting whose traditional and symbolic value remains long after out-migration. When we think of urbanization, on the other hand, we usually have in mind large centres in which small languages are essentially submerged and diluted. As Charles Dunn pointed out, small languages are often ‘preserved in the country and forgotten in the town’; he was referring specifically to Gaelic in Nova Scotia, but his remark is widely generalizable. Where they occur, however, urban concentration of small languages can obviously be of great significance. The Basques and the Catalans have the important centres of Bilbao and Barcelona, and, less familiar, perhaps, the Faroese have Tórshavn, the Sardinians have Cagliari, and the Corsicans have Ajaccio. None of the Celtic languages, however, have a concentrated, modern urban area. Stornoway, the ‘gateway’ to the Western Isles is not a Gaelic-speaking town, and has not been since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Even if it were, its population today is only about 6,000. Although an obvious advantage where the fortunes of small languages are concerned, we see that their urban centres can sometimes attract ‘outsiders’ whose presence may prove disadvantageous. The very importance of Bilbao and Barcelona, for instance, attracts speakers from the rest of Spain.10

Revival through education This brief section is needed because revivalists have generally seen the school as the main vehicle for maintaining and encouraging languages and identities thought to be at risk. This is understandable,

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given the powerful and enduring presence of the school in the lives of children, but it is naive. If, for example, schools had indeed functioned to reinforce the presence of a particular language at a particular time, as was the case of English-language schools in Ireland, it is illogical to think that, in greatly altered social circumstances, the process could be reversed. It is also worth pointing to the frequent political hypocrisy in small-language settings, whereby the onus for language resuscitation is essentially placed on the shoulders of teachers. Since teachers are usually overburdened in any event, and since they are typically being asked to produce results that are strongly countered by the social currents prevailing beyond the school gates, it is little wonder that they become handy scapegoats for predictable failures. In circumstances perhaps less dramatic, but certainly still of great importance, we also see that the programmes of French immersion education for anglophone children in Canada – while quite successful in creating good second-language fluency – have not had the desired side-effect of reducing the social divide between the two large Canadian linguistic communities in any significant way. Similarly, the vicissitudes of bilingual education in the United States have meant limited outcomes in terms of social change. In these and other settings, even those most enthusiastically engaged in programmes of language revival now acknowledge that relying upon schools as the main agents of change is wrong-headed.11

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­10 Language decline and revival: Advocacy and activism

Language revival and collective will More than a century ago, Ernest Renan observed that ‘une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel’ in which the single most important factor is ‘la volonté’ – that is to say, a nation is a soul, a spiritual essence which rests centrally upon the group will. More specifically, where language maintenance and revival efforts are concerned, the importance of this will and its ramifications can hardly be denied.1 The objection is sometimes made that, since language decline is often a reflection of relative social inequality, it is unrealistic to expect that threatened cultures and sub-cultures can exercise much power or actualize their desires. Desmond Fennell has written that ‘the lack of a will to stop shrinking is an intrinsic characteristic of a shrinking language minority.’ In general terms, this is true, but there are some subtleties here worth mentioning, some nuances that a broad-brush perspective may not capture. In studies of the decline of the Celtic languages, for instance, scholars have charted the familiar territory of linguistic retreat in the face of the advance of English. But they have also pointed out that acquiescence in at least some facets of language shift (notably in educational

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settings) coincided with strong resistance to other manifestations of ‘mainstream’ pressure. The Highland Scots who were apparently willing enough for their children to be educated through English were at the same time quite capable of violent protest over landmanagement matters and the provision of non-Gaelic-speaking priests. Why do people go to the barricades in the face of some changes while acquiescing in others? There is simple inertia, of course, an inherent problem wherever passivity is to be galvanized into action. There are clear reasons for this, most of them having to do with a lack of sufficient awareness coupled with the economic and pragmatic imperatives of daily life; these touch everyone, of course, but rather more centrally for those who are of subordinate or disadvantaged status.2 It is also possible for populations to have been ‘taken in’ by mainstream groups, so that they no longer know or trust their own linguistic and cultural instincts. Drawing upon earlier work showing how negative, authoritarian and prejudiced evaluations of stigmatized social and religious groups were sometimes replicated within these groups themselves, social-psychological researchers in Montreal described a ‘minority-group reaction’ by which small linguistic communities may come to believe that their language is indeed deficient vis-à-vis that of the larger surrounding population.3 I cited Mackey’s observation that ‘only before God and the linguist are all languages equal’ in Chapter 4, and the obvious awareness of this is central to matters of motivation and will. Along with other less well-documented cases, the Celtic varieties often came to have unfavourable connotations. Early nineteenth-century Irish became more and more linked with ‘penury, drudgery and backwardness’. Self-perceptions of Gaelic in Nova Scotia were described in almost exactly the same words by another commentator: the language implied ‘toil, hardship and scarcity’, while English was a medium of ‘refinement and culture’. From the time of the earliest emigrations, settlers in the new world ‘carried with them the idea that education was coincident with a knowledge of English.’ It goes without saying that I am making no judgement here about the accuracy or, indeed, the desirability of such attitudes. I only wish to point out that perceptions of languages and, therefore, the desires and actions that rest upon them are based upon comparative

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assessments and that,  as resistance in other quarters indicates, there is some evidence for a reasoned discrimination here, even in subject populations.4 If will is a quantity that can be galvanized in some circumstances, how important is it? After enduring long years of sociopolitical and religious paternalism, the francophone population in Québec experienced a révolution tranquille, transformed and modernized itself, and assumed the provincial mastery that its inherent strength had always promised. An important corollary of the transformation was linguistic engineering on behalf of a French language considered to be at risk. Thus, Bernard Spolsky writes of francophones beginning to become ‘conscious of English

FIGURE 10.1   Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) working on his ­dictionary of Hebrew (c. 1915), photographer unknown (Public Domain).

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dominance’; he uses terms like ‘commitment’ and ‘ideological support’, states bluntly that ‘language policy is about choice’ and emphasizes the importance of the ‘perception’ of sociolinguistic situations. These usages are not all (or always) synonymous with will, but they all suggest how important convictions, attitudes and perceptions are in matters of language maintenance and revival. We could also recall here the far-reaching effects of Eliezer BenYehuda’s creation, in the 1880s, of the first Hebrew-speaking home in what was to become Israel. His son, born in 1882, was the first maternally Hebrew-speaking child in the modern era. To be able to extrapolate, then, from the family to the community would be of the greatest importance in the life of ‘threatened’ varieties. Fishman observed that the success of the re-vernacularization of Hebrew rested upon ‘the rare and largely fortuitous co-occurrence of language-and-nationality ideology, disciplined collective will, and sufficient social dislocation.’ In similar vein, in a discussion efforts on behalf of Frisian, he wrote that ‘the basic problem seems to be in activating this [passive] goodwill.’5 The invocation of the concept of ‘will’ is surely also accurate when we consider the actions of those strongly committed to the protection of at-risk languages. Language nationalists, activists and enthusiasts are typically few in number but fiercely committed to their linguistic cause. Consider the Cornish and Manx revivalists, or those native anglophones who move to the Gaeltachtaí of Ireland and Scotland, or those who carry the banners for Gaelic in Cape Breton Island, and so on; there are many apposite cases here. The other side of this coin – and the one that often gives the activities of revivalists their poignancy – must obviously be the will of those who choose not to move to minority-speaking enclaves, nor to bring up their children in some threatened medium, nor to otherwise encourage it. It might be thought that this second category is not particularly interesting or illuminating, representing merely passivity, non-exercise of will, or a decision to not make a decision, to drift along in the current of some mainstream. In fact, however, there are contexts in which conscious decisions unfavourable to minority languages, on the part of potentially important players, are equally illustrative of the power of active will.

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Commitment to a first language in a second one One consequence of colonialism is that the élites in newly independent countries have typically been educated abroad; their training is usually undertaken in the language of the former colonizers and they often continue to value that language more highly than indigenous varieties. When it comes, then, to encouraging local vernaculars and their development, or opting for the mediums of education, the mindset of those in power is (or so it is alleged) often stuck in a linguistic rut. The operation of their will stifles local languages, even perhaps their own mother tongues. Given the great divides that may exist between the rulers and the ruled, the implication is that a change in that mindset, a recalibration of that will, could have profound consequences for those large numbers who are linguistically and educationally excluded from the corridors of power, whose languages remain widely used but unfairly reined in. It is, of course, of the greatest significance that the exercisers of will in these circumstances are indigenous individuals themselves: they may be the élite, socioeconomically far removed from the vast majority of their compatriots, but they are unquestionably of the place. They are not callous outsiders whose language policies, however reprehensible, are understandable in the traditional colonial context. Rather, they are people of whom more might have been expected. Indeed, they are people who often have fulfilled the expectations of them in other matters of social and political life. The poignancy of all this has been eloquently discussed in a number of essays by the distinguished Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. His decision to write in Gĩkũyũ and not in English is an important part of the backdrop to his many impassioned pleas for the linguistic and cultural ‘decolonizing’ of the African mind, and to his indictment of those in power whose minds apparently remained colonized. In one essay, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o cited an observation by another famous writer, Chinua Achebe: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like dreadful betrayal and produces a

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guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it. Achebe surely speaks here for many ‘third-world’ intellectuals, but his position is morally untenable in the eyes of Ngũgĩ – who bluntly notes that ‘African literature can only be written in African languages.’ (He does not accept the argument, by the way, that European varieties have become African languages through adoption.) He is particularly concerned with literary and dramatic ‘decolonization’, but he has certainly commented upon politics as well. He writes about the President of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, who admitted that French had been forced upon him but who yet remained ‘lyrical in his subservience’ to the language; and about Hastings Banda, who created an élite English-language academy in Malawi, staffed by teachers from Britain, and expressly designed to encourage able students to be sent to universities in England and America.6 Achebe, Wole Soyinka the Nobel laureate, Tanure Ojaide, and other prominent African writers have argued, however, for a ‘new English’, a contextualized and localized variant that can reflect the African experience. Similarly, Ojaide says that his English is neither British nor American.7 While that may be so, the basic dilemma is obvious: a choice between supporting and encouraging one’s own small variety, and attempting to give one’s work the widest possible readership. It is not a dilemma unique to ex-colonial writers. Those living under what Michael Hechter famously called ‘internal colonialism’ (he focused on the ‘Celtic fringe’) are also familiar with the problem. In his 1920 poem, “I Was Born in Rhymney”, Idris Davies writes: ‘I lost my native language / For the one the Saxon spake / By going to school by order / For education’s sake.’ Readers will easily bring to mind the names of many other writers who are like Davies in this respect. Finally, the dilemma is not unique to small languages. Many writers and scholars whose maternal varieties are ‘world’ languages must still consider whether it would be best to publish in English. Acommodation is sometimes reached by publishing in more than one language (as do some of my Québécois colleagues, for example).8

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Activism and advocacy Assuming social and political freedom of movement, it is the actions of speakers themselves that have the most significant consequences for the fate of small or threatened languages. (I realize, of course, that sometimes the actions to be taken are something of the Hobson’schoice sort.) I have already implied that there are obvious practical reasons why the masses (particularly in subaltern societies) find it difficult to involve themselves in vigorous maintenance work. The corollary is that active efforts on behalf of flagging languages are typically made by a relatively small number of people who must try to animate what is often a broadly based, sympathetic but rather inert feeling for the language. Activists are often intellectuals, but – as David Moran wrote of the Irish revival effort – ‘without scholars it . . . cannot succeed; with scholars as leaders it is bound to fail.’ This may be a little narrow, but it is certainly the case that revival efforts are typically characterized by a small core of activists nervously glancing over their shoulders to see how many of their presumed beneficiaries are following them.9 Activists are obviously committed to a particular cause; they are not neutral observers. This suggests that those in the socialscientific academy who attempt to combine scholarship with advocacy are on difficult ground: their commitment and their training as disinterested researchers may well clash. This is particularly salient in the linguistic community, most of whose members have for a long time felt that their task is descriptive and analytic, not prescriptive (notwithstanding the necessary choices imposed upon academicians and lexicographers). The fortunes of language are seen to be bound up with broad social and historical dynamics, and formal intervention as neither desirable nor feasible. Nonetheless, motivated by the plight of small languages, especially at a time when the English ogre stalks the earth, some contemporary scholars have not shied away from engagement in what might be called the ‘public life’ of language. Joshua Fishman, to name one prominent sociologist of language, made no secret of his commitment to the preservation of at-risk languages, and devoted considerable attention to ‘reversing language shift’, an undertaking that he described as a sacred quest.

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Furthermore, the concerns of many like-minded intellectuals coincide with a ‘small-is-beautiful’ posture and a dislike of contemporary social currents. So, just as Douglas Hyde, the famous Irish revivalist and statesman, equated anglicization with a hated modernity, so Fishman saw language revival as part of a battle against the banal commercialization of modernity and the disregard of the ‘moral and spiritual’ dimensions of life.10 Such sentiments illustrate a common thread in the writings of language activists: they wish to take radical steps on behalf of conservative impulses. The implication seems to be that, once linguistic and cultural wrongs have been rectified, once the depredations of large and powerful neighbours have been halted, there will be a return to some ‘smaller’ and purer time. Of course, like all nationalists, language activists are loath to admit any yearning for past glories. Indeed, one of the pillars of nationalism is the selective mining of history in the construction and preservation of group identity. Here is Renan again: the question he posed was ‘what is a nation?’ and his partial answer was that ‘l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses’ (i.e. while nationalists share many things, they also conveniently forget others).11 It is clear that this is a very contentious area. What some would see as inappropriate and unscholarly intervention, others would consider absolutely necessary. Any combination of scholarship and advocacy is fraught with potential danger, but one might reasonably argue that one of the ‘facts’ to be presented to groups and policymakers is the very commitment of at least some in the academic constituency. Groups whose languages are at risk might profit from the knowledge that the issues so central to them are also seen as important by outsiders, and that the problems they are facing are not unique. We should remember, however, that – whether fervently pro-maintenance in tenor or more ‘detached’ – the actions of linguists are likely to pale beside the realities of social and political pressures. As Abram de Swaan observed, small-language problems can only be resolved by the speakers: ‘it is not up to others to preach or admonish; the only helpful response is to clarify the dynamics of the dilemma.’ Such realities should at least suggest a sense of perspective – but for those who side with the Fishmans of academia, or some of

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those who engage in language planning, or the postmodernist desconstructivists, the lure of advocacy is compelling.12 In a famous scholarly exchange in the pages of the journal Language in 1992, Michael Krauss argued for intervention to stem what he called the ‘catastrophic destruction’ of many of the world’s languages. Peter Ladefoged responded by endorsing the traditional disinterested approach that tends not to go beyond data collection and analysis. Another participant was Nancy Dorian, who reminded us that even ‘laying out the facts’ can hardly be divorced from social and political positions. True enough but, as I have noted both implicitly and explicitly in this book, some things are more ideologically freighted than others.13 The issue was revisited in 2018, in a set of articles discussing the view that ‘a scientist who becomes aware of a widespread idea or social practice with important consequences that is invalidated by his own data is obligated to bring this error to the attention of the widest possible audience.’ This is known as the ‘principle of error correction’, as formulated earlier by William Labov on the basis of his work on African American English; see Chapter 4. It seems unobjectionable, it accords with the disinterested stance recommended by Ladefoged, and the only advocacy involved is one of facts, not of values. Mary Bucholtz, one of the contributors to this set of papers, argued however for something more: sociolinguistics, she wrote, must move from a ‘liberal perspective of benevolent scientific objectivity to a more politically engaged stance.’ She joined Mark Lewis in suggesting that it is naïve to think that social change responds to the provision of scholarly knowledge. And indeed, despite the work of Labov and others in refuting misguided notions of ‘verbal deprivation’ and ‘substandard’ dialects, it is clear that strong social prejudices have not disappeared. Lewis went further: stressing logical argument is actually counterproductive because it directs attention away from the social and political dimensions of racism and classism that sustain linguistic prejudices. Walt Wolfram agreed: ‘one of the most prominent myths about social life is that giving people facts and analyses about their social situation motivates change.’ He also pointed out, however, that those stating the facts about dialect validity were not unaware of the ‘racism, classism and hegemony that drive language inequality.’14

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Labov’s response to all those commenting on the principle of error correction acknowledged that presenting linguistic facts does not always go very far in combatting inaccurate perceptions – indeed, he reminded us of the resistance to African American English from within the Black community itself. In a final summary note, Lewis repeated his contention that reliance on the principle shows a misplaced emphasis on evidence and rationality, and endorsed Bucholtz’s argument for more political engagement with ‘political movements that resist the same injustices that our research seeks to understand.’ Three things occur to me about this important exchange of views. First, I obviously think it unwise for Bucholtz and Lewis to suggest a value-based advocacy; Labov’s note about within-community resistance to academic information is a word to the wise about one of the many social pitfalls awaiting the scholar-advocate. Second, just because scholars cannot change everything doesn’t mean that they should refrain from doing what they can, and criticizing their work in and of itself is like criticizing a painting for not being a sculpture. Third, when it comes to combatting social attitudes and stereotypes, it is as well to remember the old adage that you cannot reason someone out of something into which they were never reasoned.15

Bilingualism and the ‘new speaker’ It may be useful to preface my remarks on the ‘new speaker’ by touching upon some salient aspects of bilingualism in general; these also apply to competence in more than two languages. All of them reveal the complexity of bilingualism and multilingualism, revealing how many-faceted both can be. First, consider degrees of bilingual competence. It is impossible to say just when a level has been reached at which it makes sense to label someone as bilingual. Few would accept that (for an English speaker) knowing a few terms like c’est la vie or gracias or guten Tag is sufficient. Few would deny that an individual who is, by any test, completely fluent in two languages is bilingual. (Such a person is often called a ‘balanced bilingual’ – but it is easy to see that one could have ‘balance’ at other than the highest ability levels.) Where along this continuum does the label become applicable, however? In fact, there is more than one relevant

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dimension here: we must take into account variations in the four common language skills – listening, reading, writing and speaking – within which further divisions are possible: speaking skills may vary along the lines of vocabulary, grammar and accent, for instance. (It would not be inappropriate to add sign language as a fifth skill which may exist in more than one variety in one individual.) We also have to bear in mind distinctions between receptive (passive) and productive (active) bilingualism: I may understand a second language much better than I can speak it. Also: is bilingualism an additive or a subtractive quantity? Where both languages have continuing social value, then we see a repertoire expansion; where one language is dominant and the other waning, there is a subtractive or replacement dynamic at work. Levels and types of desire to learn a second (or subsequent) language also contribute to degrees of bilingual achievement. A distinction has been drawn between integrative and instrumental motivation: the former refers to language learning as part of a broader wish to know more about, to interact with, and perhaps ultimately to immerse oneself in, another culture; the latter means learning for purely utilitarian purposes. A moment’s thought, however, reveals yet further complexities: a wellfleshed instrumental attitude must include at least some integrative motivation, and one can also imagine a development of the former into the latter.16 A distinction can also be drawn between primary and secondary bilingualism, between a dual competence acquired naturally, through contextual demands (often around the family hearth), and one in which systematic and formal instruction has occurred. (These are not watertight compartments: one might pick up a good conversational grasp of a language in a relatively informal way, and then feel the need later to add some grammatical skills, for reading and writing.) As a contemporary example, compare those English-Gaelic bilinguals, in the west of Ireland or in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, whose fluencies result from growing up in a particular location, with those who, in Dublin, Glasgow or Edinburgh, have more self-consciously set themselves to beome bilingual. Consider then the ways in which lumping these two groups together, under a single ‘bilingual’ rubric might, for example, give a rather inaccurate picture of the state of health of Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

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Encouraging secondary bilingual competence is central to contemporary efforts at language revitalization or revival, where it is hoped that the marked and continuing decline of primary (or ‘native’) bilinguals may be offset by those now commonly called ‘new speakers’. While these individuals are of course secondary bilinguals, the term refers more specifically to those language learners who have an active commitment to stemming the decline of their second language, and for whom it has important symbolic and traditional meanings. Some scholars add fluency and regularity to the engagement that characterizes new speakers, but the first of these, at least, perhaps need not be a feature; in this connection, one sometimes sees the term ‘potential new speaker’. Instrumental usage is important, but often less so than the desire to become an integral part of a language community with which one would like to more closely identify. (I found a striking example among new speakers of Gaelic in Nova Scotia some years ago: the intention of actually speaking the language was virtually never given as a reason for learning it.) Most ‘new speakers’ could be placed under the older rubric of ‘heritage-language’ learners, although the terms are not exactly synonymous. Both groups of learners are usually studying the language of their own ethnic community, but new speakers may well come from others. Indeed, many at the forefront of languagerevival efforts and, therefore, most supportive of new-speaker activities have no original ethnic affinity with the language group in question. Thus, for example, Irish revival efforts were initially led by ‘upper-middle-class individuals, for many of whom Irish was an acquired talent rather than a maternal one.’ Similarly, in the Gaelic revival efforts in Nova Scotia, we see ‘the presence of small groups of enthusiasts who see their role as galvanising a moribund linguistic situation.’17 New speakers are not native speakers, and this may mean tensions. An attitudinal hierarchy that puts the latter at the top of the heap is often accepted on all sides. The former then occupy a ‘peripheral position in traditional minority language communities . . . [there] may even be palpable schisms between native and new speaker cohorts.’ Even more pointed is the comment that ‘new speakers of minority languages are frequently vilified and their practices indexed as

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illegitimate, inauthentic, and lacking authority.’ Relatedly, it has been pointed out that, while inhabitants of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) feel that Irish supports a local-identity role, new speakers may view it in a national and quite ideological fashion. Furthermore, any additional weight behind standard Irish may be seen as marginalizing the local variants. Some of the most recent work suggests that, while new-speaker Irish is indeed seen as more standard (and ‘synthetic’) – because of formal acquisition that is based on the several published guides to standardization – the traditional dialects (of Ulster, Connacht and Munster) retain their prestige and ‘authoritativeness’; see also the next chapter for some discussion of the potential problems of dialectal standardization.18 At the same time, new speakers’ enthusiasm reflects and contributes to a revitalized sense of optimism for what is often a language in decline, and their presence helps in defining or re-defining the language landscape. The fact that their grammar and usage patterns often differ from those of primary bilinguals is an example here and, although alterations may not always sit happily with traditional practices, we may view some as innovations achieving some permanence. The Gaelic of new speakers in Glasgow, for instance, is not ‘an ephemeral social phenomenon’ and ‘Glasgow Gaelic’ is a burgeoning variety.19

Minority languages and the internet Beginning by citing Bismarck’s famous 1898 comment – that the decisive factor in world history was that North America spoke English – Geoffrey Nunberg, writing in 2000, pointed out that many felt that the internet would only strengthen the importance and the prevalence of English around the world. It would become ‘just one more route along which English will march.’ He also cited general views that saw the web as the ‘ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,’ and the specific (and typically understated) lament of Jacques Chirac, then the French president, was that the dominance of English on the internet was a ‘major risk for humanity.’ Nunberg’s own opinions were quite prescient: he likened the impact of internet communication to that of printing centuries before, and suggested that it might actually strengthen the position of national and regional

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languages. More generally, he argued that ‘it’s a mistake to assume that any gains English makes . . . will have to come at the expense of other languages . . . the diffusion of information is not a zero-sum game.’20 Even with the increased participation of many different language communities, English remained the main language in cyberspace for some time. Its presence had, however, decreased to about 40 per cent by 2010, and most of its users were non-native speakers by that time. Between 2000 and 2020, the presence of English rose by about 650 per cent, but it was outstripped by the burgeoning of many others, including Russian, Malay, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish – and the growth of Arabic was estimated at about 8,000 per cent. The place of production of content in a particular language may complicate analyses here: in 2007, for example, Britain and Germany produced more French-language content than did all the African francophone countries, and all but 3 per cent of African content came from South Africa.21 The possibility of increasing the exposure and scope of ‘small’ or threatened languages by adding the resources of cyberspace to those of radio and television was almost immediately seized upon. An example was the Bród [Pride] Campaign to revitalize Irish, in which social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were employed in an effort to have people commit to use the language. It was motivated by the fact that ‘although we spend 14 years of our lives learning Irish very few of us actually speak it’, borne out by census figures showing a great gap between reported competence and actual use. Another report has noted that social media can provide an effective, economical and easily implementable way to foster language revitalization among the young; the language here is Balinese. And a third recent article illustrates the use of social media to promote ethnonational identity among Kurdish women in Iran. I have selected these three to show something of the geographical scope of current exercises and, as well, to show that – besides focusing on language alone – the reinforcement and promotion of fragile identities are also a common element in social-media exercises. Responding to early fears that the internet could threaten national identities, especially those of smaller communities, Thomas Hylland Eriksen has argued that, in fact, ‘nations thrive in cyberspace’ and that the internet

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has assisted in maintaining the integrity of dispersed or diasporic collectivities (as in the Kurdistan context, just mentioned).22 META (the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance) is a programme of the European Commission in which thirty-four countries participate. It has produced many white papers, each of which is titled The X Language in the Digital Age – where ‘X’ stands for any one of thirty languages (including small varieties such as Basque, Croatian, Welsh and Galician). It is interesting to read, in the Catalan edition, an almost word-for-word repetition of Nunberg’s assertion (above) about the impact of the internet: ‘la revolució digital és comparable a la invenció de la impremta de Gutenberg.’23 Internet studies focusing on language are now very frequent indeed, and specific attention to multilingualism can be found in several recent books. Some interesting consideration is being given to ‘word play’ on the internet, to the rise of now-common acronyms and, more generally, to cyberspace developments that are affecting languages themselves. As well, of course, internet resources are now frequently used in the classroom.24

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­11 Language planning and the ecology of language

An introductory note Language planning has become an accepted sub-discipline within the sociology of language, but it is salutary to bear in mind that informal planning has always occurred. It could be said, for instance, that immigrants moving to a country where their maternal language is not widely used engage in some ‘planning’, as do involuntary diasporic populations. The old phrase cuius regio, eius religio, meaning that the religion of the ruler had to be the religion of the subjects, has a linguistic equivalent: cuius regio, eius lingua. Of course, in many settings, and especially in multi-ethnic empires (those of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, for instance), the languages of the people were of little concern to the kings and emperors. What has sometimes been touted as imperial protection of minority communities is better understood as a tolerance resting on pragmatism. Harmonious relationships between administrators and these communities, and across minority populations themselves, ought not to be overestimated, however, and – where there was a threat of cultural diversity becoming politically assertive – limits to harmony soon became evident. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, such threats became more prominent as the nineteenth century progressed. Enlightened policies of tolerance thus encouraged nationalistic ideas

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to flourish, especially among non-Muslim populations, of course – a development that could hardly be welcomed by the Porte. The power and pervasiveness of today’s ‘big’ languages also figure in ‘unintended’ language planning: the secondary consequences of colonial impositions are a case in point. Some policies, however, involve language from the beginning, but ignore or fail to realize the knock-on effects. English was introduced on Samoan television in the 1960s and, in both Western and American Samoa, it seemed that the  programming had contributed to aspirations for increased literacy. It was a more or less isolated intervention, however, without provision being made for possible consequences. This is but an example of what are quite common one-off linguistic interventions, especially in education, where individual and unconnected research programmes can come and go in the classroom. Not only do such activities fail to achieve anything of lasting value, they can also lead to the inevitable consequences of raised expectations that are very likely to be dashed.1 In some societies, choices among different languages or dialects may be necessary in order to select those that will receive some legal imprimatur in education and officialdom. Orthographies and alphabets may have to be developed (or invented), lexicons may need to be modernized, and so on. The standardization of the emerging national languages of Europe became important, for example, particularly as the cross-cultural use of Latin was waning. The last major English philosophical work to be published in Latin was Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (in 1623), and the last important scientific work was Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687).2 The shift to vernacular languages was also expedited by rising levels of literacy and by innovations in printing technology, both of which suggested the need for regularities. Johannes Gutenberg’s German printing press was in existence by 1440 and, within a decade, was ready to create its first book, the famous bible. William Caxton, the first English printer, lived in what is now Belgium from 1450 to 1476, and in the 1470s he produced the first two books printed in English – The Recuyell (Collection) of the Histories of Troye, and The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Once back in England, he printed Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other books ‘mostly in English and rarely in fashionable French or revered Latin.’

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Very soon, however, Caxton was confronted with printing choices that had to be made among English words and dialects. Without dictionaries or other guides to help him, he had to do his own linguistic ‘fixing’ of standards, and in the prologue to his Boke of Eneydos, his 1490 translation of a French version of Virgil’s Aeneid, he reflected upon the difficulties created by the fact that the ‘comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from another.’ He tells a story of a merchant who, while travelling in Kent, ‘axyed after eggys’ but the woman he was talking to ‘answerde that she coude speke no frenshe.’ The merchant was annoyed because, of course, he wasn’t speaking in French. He then asked for ‘eyren’ a term which the ‘good wyf’ understood. Caxton writes: ‘what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, “egges” or “eyren”?’ He adds that it is hard to ‘playse euery man by cause of dyuersite and chaunge of langage’ but, since his book is not for a ‘rude vplondyssh [unsophisticated] man’ to read, he has given it in terms that gentlemen will be most familiar with. Many of the choices made by Caxton remain in today’s English.3 The choices among dialects that faced Caxton have not disappeared. Whenever standardization is underway, official imprimaturs are for selected forms only. As I noted in the previous chapter, the twentieth-century regularization of Irish led to accusations that the classroom variety was an ‘artificial standardized amalgam of dialects.’ The criticisms arose largely because no one of the three main Irish dialects had achieved greater social dominance or prestige than the other two. Standardization is of course a validation – one often wanted by language activists – but it can also be a limitation on the claims for the legitimation of all forms of linguistic diversity made by minority communities. It is quite possible, then, that speakers of nonstandardized dialects may feel doubly stigmatized: all forms of their language remain low in prestige, and their particular form suffers in comparison with its standardized cousin. Quite apart from the possibility of favouritism in standardization efforts, it is easy to see that aiming for some sort of inter-dialectal ‘neutrality’ runs the risk of pleasing no one. The difficulties here are magnified in oral cultures in which literacy is rare or absent. The Quechua Academy has had to deal with several important dialects of this Andean language, and has faced criticisms of selectivity coupled with purism.4

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Academic language planning ­ hen developments demand attention and choice, it is entirely W reasonable that, despite their general scholarly reluctance to prescribe, despite their sense that language change is a constant and natural process, and despite their view that broad usage is the ultimate criterion of ‘correctness’, linguists and other scholars would bring their skills to bear. Some have argued, indeed, that this is a duty, if for no other reason than that it can forestall other, less disinterested action; recall my reference to Dwight Bolinger in Chapter 7. Beyond the traditional roles that scholars have played as academicians and lexicographers, ‘language planning’ has become formalized within the sociology of language and applied linguistics; it is now an area with its own journals, books and conferences. It is a very broad area indeed, encompassing many topics: all facets of language-in-education can be considered under this rubric, as can language contact, conflict, survival, maintenance, spread, shift and revival.5 The main features of language planning as an academic exercise were first outlined by Einar Haugen half a century ago, in a model having four aspects: norm selection, norm codification, functional implementation and functional elaboration. Selection and implementation (often called ‘status planning’) are extra-linguistic features, social in nature. Codification and elaboration (‘corpus planning’), on the other hand, deal directly with language itself. The operation of language planning along these lines is theoretically quite straightforward. A linguistic issue arises, such that a choice has to be made between or among varieties. Following this, standardization can provide a written form, or regularize grammar, orthography and lexicon. Implementation involves spreading the variety through official pronouncements, education, the media, and so on. Various evaluation procedures are often employed at this stage to monitor the degree of acceptance of the chosen form. Finally, elaboration means keeping the language viable in a changing world; obvious necessities here include lexical modernization and expansion. A somewhat later development pays closer attention to language-planning applications.6 In practice, however, language planning is far from straightforward. To begin with, the divisons drawn by Haugen and later expanded

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upon by others are neater on the page than they are in the field. As well, the purely linguistic aspects (codification and elaboration) of planning are less broadly important than the social ones (selection and implementation). In this sense, language planners essentially engage in technical activities, after important decisions have been taken by others. Matters of codification and elaboration certainly require a great deal of skill, but language planners are not prime movers. In fact, in some ears at least, language planning has an altogether too grandiose ring about it. While those involved usually realize that their work does not occur in isolation, they seem not always to appreciate the radical difference in magnitude between their contributions and those of the real planners: politicians and administrators. The language planner has been likened to the ‘management scientist’ who rarely makes real decisions but is, rather, employed to organize and analyze data. The actual policy-makers, those with the requisite political clout, may then balance this work with other important information. In the world of language planning, this other information usually encompasses far more than language alone. As in other areas of public life, ‘experts’ are called as needed, and their recommendations are either implemented or gather dust according to how well they support or justify desired positions.7 I am reminded here of what Elie Kedourie wrote about the rationalization of language borders: It is absurd to think that professors of linguistics and collectors of folklore can do the work of statesmen and soldiers. What does happen is that academic enquiries are used by conflicting interests to bolster up their claims, and their results prevail only to the extent that somebody has the power to make them prevail.8 Language planning, especially selection and implementation, is a heavily value-laden exercise. Any relatively disinterested theorizing becomes compromised in practice, and language planning is often concerned with applications in highly controversial settings: the maintenance or revival of ‘small’ or endangered languages, the establishment of a lingua franca, the navigation of acceptable channels among large areas of linguistic diversity, and so on. Planning is inevitably coloured by ideological imperatives and what appears

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as progress to some may be persecution to others. If not from the beginning, then certainly at the point of application, language planning is subservient to the demands of non-academic interests with social and political agendas that may owe little or nothing to linguistics, history or, indeed, cultural equity. None of this means that professional linguistic assistance is trivial, and one certainly hopes that relevant expertise is drawn upon before important decisions are taken. To succeed, of course, language planning does not solely depend upon the backing of the powerful; it also requires acceptance from those whose linguistic habits are to be affected. Even the most dictatorial policies may result in social upheavals if they are repressive and/or unpopular enough. More benign policies, on the other hand, may languish due to misreading of the social context. In at least some settings, then, there is a natural check on the implementation of ‘top-down’ planning that fails to engage the sympathies of its intended recipients; see also the following section. Unfortunately, this may come too late to avoid distress or social disturbance, especially where the actions of policymakers are unfeeling, inadequate or otherwise deficient. Although language planning has now ‘come of age’, in the sense that it has established itself as a category within the larger sociologyof-language literature, we remain largely in a pre-theoretical phase: the area awaits its Linnaeus. This does not vitiate the value of accurate data, of course, and it is the desire to provide practical and comparative information that has led several researchers to look for cross-contextual generalities. But when dealing with official responses to multilingual realities, it is salutary to remember that much of what appears in the literature under the heading of ‘language planning’ will never leave the academic cloisters. In their useful overview, Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf suggested that ‘language planners’ are caught somewhere between linguistic description and prescriptivism. On the one hand, they are now largely drawn from the scholarly ranks, and this implies (or ought to imply) a disinterested and dispassionate stance. On the other, their work ‘contains a kernel of prescriptivism by definition’. In fact, there is often much more than a kernel here. These authors go on to make the case that language planning is descriptive in its data-gathering mode but, beyond that, becomes prescriptive. This, I think, is already

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an admission of the heavy prescriptive weighting overall, since the activities that come after fact-finding (recommendations for action, selection of policies, implementation, review, and so on) consume much the greatest amounts of time and energy. Even the initial survey work, however – even the assembling of the necessary data – is initiated for reasons that are rarely dispassionate or apolitical. Language planning as a field is in fact so broad as to encompass virtually all aspects of the social life of language: any application of any combination of linguistic and sociological matters can be placed under the planning rubric. This is a useful reflection of reality, chaotic in tooth and claw, but it does pose serious difficulties for any tight definitions, for any meaningful or substantive theoretical statements. Furthermore, much of the wide and traditional language-planning perspective has now been translated and shrunk into the ‘ecology of language’, to which I shall turn in the next section. Kaplan and Baldauf capture this translation very well in a diagrammatic representation of ‘forces at work in a linguistic eco-system,’ which shows how the concerns expressed by official, educational and other agencies can easily be seen as facets of an ecological model. This comes at the beginning of their section entitled ‘Towards a model for language planning’, but the many details presented, as well as one or two further diagrams, only go to show the sprawling nature of any such ‘model’.9 It is also the case that basic terminology is not entirely settled. One of the foremost researchers in the field, Bernard Spolsky, has made an argument for ‘management’ rather than ‘planning’; the former, he believes, better describes the most common work of formal institutions, agencies and academies. A recent journal issue has been devoted to language management, and coverage increasingly goes beyond anglophone settings.10

Macro-level language planning It may be useful to mention several examples of the ‘top-down’ policy that I alluded to in the previous section. English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay are official languages in Singapore. The last three are designated as the ‘mother tongues’ of the Chinese, Malay and

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Indian communities, respectively. Even though Indians in Singapore may speak Malayalam or Gujerati (for example), the policy selects Tamil as ‘their’ language. Similarly, although relatively few Chinese are Mandarin mother-tongue speakers (Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese are the major variants), that variety is ‘theirs’. Chinese students study English and Mandarin, while those from the other ethnic groups study their ‘own’ variety and English. In order to encourage ‘correct’ speech, there are regular language campaigns for all four official varieties, but those for Mandarin and English are particularly important: the former because the Chinese constitute three-quarters of the population of the city-state (almost 6  million), and the latter because of its global dominance. The ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign, instituted in 1979, encourages the Chinese population to adopt that variety, and its ‘Speak Good English’ counterpart began in 1999. Neither is above criticism. The first is seen as working against the retention of non-Mandarin Chinese variants. The second discourages the local English variety (‘Singlish’), and promotes British standard English. Not only does this disparage Singlish – which, like many other localized Englishes around the world, is widely used in informal settings, and continues to develop as a creole – it also perpetuates the linguistically untenable idea that Singlish is ‘corrupt, broken and ungrammatical’ (as the prime minister at the time of the 1999 initiative asserted). In China, the Han people constitute about 95 per cent of the population, and the communist state has encouraged Putonghua (essentially the Beijing variety of Mandarin, which means ‘Han language’) since its establishment in 1949. It has held annual promotional campaigns since 1998. Official news releases report that about 80 per cent of the population now speaks Putonghua, but this falls to about 60 per cent in rural and ‘ethnic’ areas. The most recent announcements reveal the intent of pushing the general figure to 85 per cent in 2025, and to have virtually everyone under the Mandarin umbrella by 2035. As with Mandarin promotion in Singapore, this suggests difficulties for non-Han Chinese variants, including Cantonese (with 60 million speakers) and Hokkien (30 million). There are greater and no doubt deliberate threats to ‘ethnic’ languages like Tibetan, Mongolian and Uighur, as contemporary news reports tell us.

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A final example is that of Taiwan. For the half-century up to 1945, Japanese was the official language of the island. The Kuomintang government which replaced it came to strongly promote Mandarin and discourage other Chinese ‘dialects’. In both cases the authoritarian hand was a heavy one. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, those other ‘dialects’ were first tolerated and then cultivated. The cumulative effect is that – with 70 per cent of the population being native speakers of Hokkien (Taiwanese), and only about 25 per cent Mandarin – some 80 per cent of the overall population (some 24 million) speak both varieties.11

Ecology of language: Origins The ecological perspective is one of the most important of the recent stances on languages and identities. As a term and a focus of study, ecology is a mid-nineteenth-century coinage of Ernst Haeckel and, as its Greek root (οίκος = home) implies, the emphasis is upon the holistic study of environments within which lives are lived and intertwined. Haeckel was concerned with the Darwinian struggle for existence within the ‘web’ of life. This includes both the beneficial and inimical interrelationships among plants, animals and, indeed, inorganic surroundings: ‘the totality of relations of organisms with the external world’, as Haeckel put it. Ecology is about adaptations whose necessity arises from inevitable linkages.12 Implicit in the earliest conceptions of the ‘economy of nature’ is the scientific study of the conditions constituting environments and, from this perspective, ecological awareness (broadly speaking) is very old. It can be traced, for instance, at least to Aristotelian concepts of ‘design in nature’ and the idea that the world is essentially ordered, which underpins contemporary secular science. In a predictable extension of a concept that initially focussed upon plants and animals, an ecological anthropology folded culture into the mix, reminding us of the reciprocity between what is given and what is constructed. In all the literatures that bear upon the social life of language, incidentally, it seems clear that the important and enduring scholarly insights have always been ecologically minded. Historically speaking, most have appeared avant la lettre, perhaps, but it is hard to think of any notable

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contribution to any of the arts, humanities – and social sciences – that has not paid due attention to context and to the ‘web’ of human life. The first specific reference to the ecology of language was apparently made in 1967, but the term is particularly associated with the work of Einar Haugen – whom we have already met in this chapter – five years later. His intent was to emphasize the linkages between languages and their environments, with particular regard to status and function, and he produced a list of contextualizing questions dealing with the users of the language, its domains, varieties, written traditions and family relationships, the degree and type of support it enjoys, and so on. In themselves, these questions are neutral in tone. In a book forthrightly called Blessings of Babel, however, Haugen referred to a ‘problem of social ecology: keeping alive the variety and fascination of our country, diverting the trend toward steamrollering everything and everyone into a single, flat uniformity.’ The dislike of a monotonic landscape is clear, although Haugen’s remark is not entirely transparent. He probably did not mean to imply that ‘social ecology’ was essentially devoted to the promotion of diversity, but rather that any such promotion would fall within its remit.13

Ecology of language: Contemporary shortcomings In any event, the emerging idea of language ecology had a breadth of vision meant to embrace all linkages among languages and their environments, and to counter any tendencies to think about language in isolated or stand-alone fashion. This breadth remains in the most thoughtful accounts, but it is not unfair to say that, today, the scope of most of what is written under the ecology rubric has narrowed. With some exceptions, the literature has come to concern itself chiefly with issues surrounding endangered languages and the maintenance of linguistic diversity, which is seen as an unalloyed good, to be defended wherever it seems to falter. While a truly ecological perspective would take into account all sorts of relationships and outcomes, from ruddy linguistic health all the way to extinction, the modern variant now

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argues for a kinder, gentler nexus. As one researcher recently noted, ‘functioning ecologies are nowadays characterized by predominantly mutually beneficial links and only to a small degree by competitive relationships.’ This seems an unwarranted limitation since, like all others, linguistic environments are often harsh or indifferent. Big and small languages, for instance, often have a less than pacific relationship, one that recalls to mind Woody Allen’s reworking of a passage from Isaiah: ‘the lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.’14 The new ecological thrust is driven, above all, by the desire to preserve linguistic diversity in a world where more and more languages are seen to be at risk, and where matters of maintenance and revival are central. It has obviously achieved its current prominence because of the strength and scope of big languages, most notably English. It is, therefore, a field in which we find many scholar-advocates, whose essential argument involves both action and stasis. That is, intervention is needed on behalf of beleaguered varieties that have been unfairly denied their place in the sun by larger and often bullying neighbours, but, once some linguistic wrongs have been righted and once some appropriate redress has been made, a just, moral and self-perpetuating balance will prevail. I can only touch upon some of the contentious assertions that are found in the writings of some scholars of language ecology. One finds criticism of literacy and education, for instance, on the grounds that they often undercut the preservation of linguistic diversity. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that literacy promotion actually works against the vitality of small languages, and one scholar wrote that ‘literacy may not either be necessary or desirable and may impact negatively on the linguistic ecology.’ Written varieties push oral ones aside, writing is accorded more prestige than speech, and so on. A related suggestion is that formal education is not always the ally of enduring diversity and bilingualism, for it often has intrusive qualities, championing literacy over orality, and imposing foreign (i.e. western) values and methods upon small cultures. It is not difficult to sympathize with laments about supposedly intrusive ‘foreign’ education paradigms but, since all education worthy of the name is multicultural in nature, the argument is self-defeating. Formal education necessarily involves broadening the horizons, going beyond what is purely local and

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‘traditional’. In an unequal world whose disparities create risks for languages, education will perforce become yet another evidence of those disparities.15 In Chapter  7, I discussed the several ways in which dictionaries for small languages are important. In contrast to the sceptical views of literacy noted in the previous paragraph, fieldworkers in the South Pacific have argued that its arrival helps to encourage language maintenance and combat endangerment. Terry Crowley in particular rails against ‘any attempt to discourage vernacular literacy [or] to turn back the clock to a romantic but no longer existent past,’ since this may well weaken indigenous languages. He adds that perverse and misguided ideas about maintaining some ordre naturel is ‘dangerously close to being based on an assumption that there is only one unchanging way of being Melanesian . . . [this is] a position of extreme naïveté which would be rejected outright by any informed anthropologist.’ He is also critical of the argument put forward by Peter Mühlhäusler (one that, as we shall see later, is held by many postmodernists) that ‘the very view that languages can be counted and named may be part of the disease that has affected the linguistic ecology of the Pacific’ and that the production of dictionaries is a colonial act leading to complete language shift.16 Many of the current ecological models quickly identify the forces working against language diversity: unrestrained free-market capitalism, unfettered industrialization, galloping globalization. It is not uncommon to find disparagement of the scientific culture and concern for the ‘privileging’ of its knowledge over ‘folk wisdom’. (The concern here is not unlike contemporary expressions of disdain for ‘experts’ and the accompanying surges in populism.) There is a special regard for small cultures and local knowledge, and it takes two forms. There is a simple, straightforward and, indeed, perfectly reasonable desire for the survival of such cultures and systems. But there is also the argument that they are in some ways superior to larger or broader societies and values. This view is often expressed in somewhat muted fashion, although the mask sometimes slips: ‘without romanticizing or idealizing the indigenous cultures, it is clear that they are superior to the mass culture because their members retain the capability of living in at least relative harmony with the natural environment.’ Another version of this sentiment, familiar in

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the North American context, is that ‘Indians have traditionally treated the inanimate and animate world with awe and concern in ways that do not indiscriminately damage the natural environment.’ Or consider this dedicatory line in a recent anthology: ‘to the world’s indigenous and traditional peoples, who hold the key to the inextricable link between [sic] language, knowledge and the environment.’ And what should we make of the claim that ‘the universal is a fraud, a mask for the self-interest of the dominating over the dominated’, or of the defence of those people who ‘have not capitulated to the massive blandishments of western materialism, who experience life and nature in deeply poetic and collectively meaningful ways’.17 Two points immediately occur. The first is to consider what level of artistic sensitivity figures in the lives of those many illiterate millions whose fragile existence depends upon a few pennies a day. The second is a reminder that those academic commentators who write about the poetry and harmony of small and subaltern societies virtually never move to them. Would it be inaccurate to suggest that at least some scholar-advocacy for small languages, under the banner of ecology, arises from a sense of guilt? Perhaps some of the guilt – if guilt there be – represents a developed-world reflex when confronted with social situations so much less attractive than one’s own. This might be seen as a reasonable response, especially since the privileged positions of the few have historically rested upon the less appealing positions of the many. Isn’t it rather disingenuous not to acknowledge such motivations, however, and aren’t they more likely to persist because of their cathartic value than because of any useful consequences for the intended beneficiaries? I am surely not the only one to have noticed how many of the discussions emanate from outside the communities concerned, how many of those arguing for the maintenance of threatened varieties do so from the most secure of personal linguistic bases (sometimes, indeed, finding expression in prestigious accents and dialects). Orwell, as usual, had something apposite to say in this connection: ‘nationalists of the most extreme and romantic kind tend not to belong to the nation they idealize.’18 Do the oppressed, as Bertrand Russell once discussed in a famous essay, hold the moral high ground because of oppression itself? Can we agree with Orwell when he writes that ‘this business about the moral superiority of the poor is one of the deadliest forms of escapism

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the ruling class have evolved’? Alleged moral considerations, of course, are what underpin much of the modern ecological thrust, much of which rests upon three pillars. First, it is unfair that big languages continue to overshadow small ones. Second, declining languages mean the loss of the accumulated knowledge that they carry. Third, there is an aesthetic and cultural dimension of diversity, the weakening of which would impoverish us all. This last point is, I think, unexceptionable, for what enlightened person would not rail against that ‘flat uniformity’ that Haugen mentioned? The first – the unfairness – also reflects preferences underpinned by a moral sense. Preferences standing alone have rarely, however, been sustainable. Is there more to say, though, about the third point, about the argument that language loss means loss of accumulated experience?19 It is of course true that language decline or death means a palpable and regrettable loss, providing that we accept that the language itself is what is lost. The suggestion of some essential linkage between a particular language and the knowledge that it contains is, however, less immediately obvious. One researcher no doubt spoke for many when he asked ‘how many urban dwellers . . . know the names for the many different varieties of edible plants?’ This misses the important point that ‘western’ societies typically allocate expertise: the experts are, in essence, our translators or interpreters. It doesn’t matter at all that I don’t know the names of all the types of tomatoes; what is important is that there are always some people who do. And, given the cumulative nature of science, specialists steadily expand their knowledge bases; when necessity requires it, they are well placed to analyse traditional or indigenous truths. It is missing the point again to argue that scientific and industrial ‘terminological planning . . . ignores ecologically sounder innovations.’ Lack of ‘soundness’ in scientific realms or, even more immediately, in commercial and economic ones is the surest and quickest impetus for change.20 Literate worlds – those of the Greeks and the Romans, for example  – have left us written accounts of all kinds, and so may ease concerns about the loss of knowledge. Perhaps weightier demonstrations of language-loss-as-knowledge-loss might refer, then, to small languages with only oral traditions. If, for the sake of argument, we were to accept that, when they go, they take particular cultural insights with them, wouldn’t this be a rationale for the

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promotion of literacy? But what, then, of that suspicion of literacy and educational progress already mentioned? What of the argument that ‘literacy may not either be necessary or desirable’? What of the overwhelming evidence, both historical and contemporary, that virtually all societies prize literacy once it becomes a possibility? The fact that the moral positions I’ve just touched upon can so easily be tethered to matters of preference and, therefore, may lack much compelling force is the reason that the final moral argument – that relating to ‘language rights’ – is now so heavily underlined. Ecologically minded language bodies often have a charter or a statement of intent concerning rights. Thus, the TESOL organization (The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) passed a resolution in 2001 asserting that ‘all groups of peoples have the right to maintain their native language . . . a right to retain and use [it].’ They then added that ‘the governments and the people of all countries have a special obligation to affirm, respect and support the retention, enhancement and use of indigenous and immigrant heritage languages.’ Right away we see the flaw in the thesis: it is one thing (and certainly a possible thing) to legislate for people’s rights to use a particular language. In most countries, indeed, you are free to use whatever language you like. Legislating the right to be understood, however, is rather trickier. Relatedly, we find that official and quasi-official resolutions and charters are often outlined in a manner so general as to be virtually useless, or are not linked to binding obligations or responsibilities to act.21 There are deeper issues, too. Language rights are usually meant to have an effect at the group level; indeed, their existence is generally motivated by the plight of small groups whose languages and cultures are at risk. This may sit uneasily with traditional liberal-democratic principles that enshrine rights in individuals, not collectivities. This is not the place for fuller discussion, but it should be noted that wider matters of pluralist accommodation in societies that are both democratic and heterogeneous, where language rights are obviously a subset of concern, are now of the greatest importance. They have become part of the province of political philosophy, for instance, which implies a very welcome breadth of approach, a search for cross-society generalities, an escape from narrower and intellectually unsatisfying perspectives. The discussions here, whatever their

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specifics, and however their strengths and weaknesses may be perceived in different quarters, all suggest that any isolated statement or claim of language rights is simplistic and unprofitable.22 There are even more basic issues with which the framers of language-rights manifestos rarely engage: do such rights even exist and, if they do, what sorts of things are they? Perhaps there are no rights in this area; perhaps there are only cultural claims. Rights to language seem not to be of the same order as, say, those that proclaim freedom from slavery. While legal rights imply moral ones, the reverse does not necessarily hold (although what is merely desirable today may of course become lawfully codified tomorrow). The difficulty for moral claims is to effect this transition, and it is disingenuous to imply that claims are sufficient to somehow give language ‘rights’ the same strength of footing as those rights underpinned by criminal or civil codes. And there is, above all else perhaps, the powerful practical matter that I touched on earlier: while it is possible to legislate rights of language expression, it is rather more difficult to legislate rights to be understood; typically, this has occurred only in very limited domains (in selected dealings with civil services, for example), not in the vast unofficial ones where languages really rise or fall. And if your language is not understood by people with whom you must deal, its usefulness is rather restricted.23 Overall, the ‘new’ ecology of language is not so much a refinement of scientific methodology in the face of new understandings and new challenges as it is a sociopolitical ideology. It is interesting that an ecology that, by its nature, ought to be multi-faceted, inclusive and, above all, aware of nuanced perspectives, should often see things in rather simplistic ways. My critical remarks here are not directed at ecology per se, of course, for who could gainsay its essential elements? But I think that the underlying ideology of the new ecology of language is insufficiently examined and, in fact, builds in various assumptions as if they were unremarkable, and beyond enlightened debate. While some of its underpinnings may be appropriate in some cases, there can be little doubt that a wholesale acceptance of them would be both unwise and counterproductive. The narrow focus of most modern writing on linguistic ecology is upon an environmentalism that makes a specific case for the maintenance of diversity. This is not problematic in itself, of course,

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and it is clearly not an illegitimate stance (although it is not always a sturdy one), but it is surely reasonable to have some misgivings about an area that describes itself in very broad terms while, at the same, marshalls its forces along quite specific lines. My central criticism is that language maintenance and revival are always difficult endeavours, that past efforts have often foundered on the shoals of romantic and unrealistic enthusiasm, and that approaching the topic from a position of aesthetic and moral commitment, while understandable and in some circumstances even laudable, is neither in the best traditions of disinterested scholarship nor likely to realize long-term success. To see some of the current language-ecology research as largely undergirded by considerations of preference, justice and morality – hardly undesirable quantities, of course, but not fitting seamlessly into social-scientific frameworks – is not only to criticize its rather more grandiose assertions, it is also to suggest that the old difficulties in maintaining endangered languages have not, after all, been lessened through new insights. These difficulties, after all, have been heightened and exacerbated in modern times, as more and more languages and language domains fall under the shadow of English. How might endangered languages best be supported? One would certainly be more indulgent towards the formal shortcomings of the ‘new’ ecology if its assumptions and its programmes actually seemed to make a difference on the ground. In fact, however, these shortcomings only serve to highlight problems that have been quite well understood for some time. Most of them can be summarized by observing that, unless one is interested only in some archival embalming, the maintenance of languages involves much more than language alone. To put it another way: the conditions under which a variety begins to suffer typically involve a stronger linguistic neighbour and, hence, language endangerment is symptomatic of deeper matters, a particular sort of fall-out from a larger collision. Acknowledgement of this simple and indisputable statement of affairs must surely suggest the scope of the difficulties commonly encountered.

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­1 2 Postmodern perspectives

Introductory note Some readers may find this chapter rather surplus to requirements, but it contains what I think are useful cautionary notes about ideas and terms in current – and quite widespread – use. Consequently, even general readers may come across them, particularly if they are at all familiar with postmodernism and its ramifications. At the outset, I should remind all readers that I am fully aware that no positions are value-free. Since even the hardest of hard sciences cannot quite escape subjectivity in choices made and theories offered, it is clear that arguments about human behaviour and society are always open to interpretation (or should be). My discussion here should be read with that caveat in mind – but I would also ask readers to remember that not all postures are equally ideologically charged, and that those social analyses that depart most markedly from reallife experiences and assumptions should expect to be particularly closely assessed. I also think it worth pointing out that, while it is the special obligation of the scholar to probe for clarity and nuance in a world of blunt assessment, this ought not provide carte blanche for unnecessary neologism or insubstantial theory. Where these are found amendments will certainly follow – or they should, at least in scientific or social-scientific disciplines – but they may be damaging while they last, and their existence may retard genuine advance. The illusion of progress is worse than stasis.1

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Discourse analysis ­ iscourse analysis implies a close and/or ethnographic study of D language, written or spoken. Two of the early studies in this connection showed that the cultural norms of American Indians (specifically, the Apache of Arizona, and the Sahaptin of Oregon) were sufficiently different from those of their white neighbours that reservation children often fell foul of their teachers. The most salient difficulty was a reluctance to speak in class. Teachers were traditionally likely to categorize their Indian pupils as shy and unresponsive: as in many situations of cultures-in-contact, this sometimes led to assessments of linguistic and cognitive deficiency. Later studies have looked at language use in classrooms more generally, and these reveal interesting relationships among pupils’ verbal participation, gender and speech community.2 The work of Dell Hymes and his associates gave a specific linguistic focus to the enterprise: hence, the ‘ethnography of communication’ (see also Chapter  3). Opposed to the reductionist and narrowly experimental tendencies in much social-scientific work, some classic studies were produced. The approach soon began to produce its own difficulties, however, particularly in its examination of increasingly narrower slices of reality. Holism, an emphasis upon so-called ‘lived experience’ and a concern for procedural breadth and depth have tended to give way to a new reductionism in what is now sometimes termed ‘linguistic ethnography’. This has been described as a ‘site of encounter’ among various research approaches, where ‘the contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed’. These are hardly novel observations.3 Since communication is a pivotal feature of human life, however, claims have been made that discourse analysis should be at the centre of the whole social psychological enterprise. The area would then emerge from its laboratory-orientated sterility and its constrictive paradigms, its study of attitudes (especially using questionnaires) being a notable case in point. There is little doubt, indeed, that much of contemporary social psychology is indeed a wasteland where the inappropriate emulation of the methods and mathematics of the ‘hard sciences’ means that any meaningful insights into human behaviour

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are lost in a swamp of abstractions, jargon and numerical averages. Nonetheless, discourse analysis typically has less to say than some of the ‘classic’ work in language attitudes and stereotypes, at least in terms of practical and generalizable information of interest to teachers and others. Some of its most fervent advocates admit that discourse studies do not always reveal much that is new, and the level of detail in which they often revel is usually unlikely to lead to helpful educational actions and amendments.4 So, while discursive and ethnographic analyses can be of great use – as suggested by some of the work I touched upon above – it would be unwise to abandon complementary approaches. As in other fields, eclecticism of perspective and methodological triangulation are likely to prove the most enlightening. Thus it is heartening to find that, improved from its origins and often incorporating discursive elements, the careful study of language beliefs and attitudes has not been entirely jettisoned. Several collections, for instance, have now shown the utility of bringing linguistic and psychological information under one roof.5 A final note here: if you look up ‘folk linguistics’ on Wikipedia, you will read that it deals with ‘uninformed speculation’ about language, and that it is ‘often motivated by ideology and nationalism.’ If you then look up ‘perceptual dialectology’ you will find a more neutral paragraph or two: the term is said to describe how ‘nonlinguists perceive variation in language . . . [and] how they socially evaluate it.’ The entry adds that perceptual dialectology is ‘considered a subset of folk linguistics.’ Both entries are correct, in fact, and the study of the beliefs and attitudes of ‘ordinary’ people – which often takes the form of discursive enquiry – is clearly of interest and, indeed, may have much more relevance when it comes to the application of academic findings to the ‘real world’. So, while the term ‘perceptual dialectology’ may have a whiff of jargon about it, its approach to language study is very welcome. Its complementary value when findings are coordinated with those of more traditional approaches is heightened when we discover that those ‘uninformed’ speculations are not disorganized or random or simplistic, and that they typically reveal considerable consistency across individuals and settings. Of course, since much of the more formal and laboratory-based

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investigation of language attitudes must also draw upon ‘uninformed speculations’ of the research participants, we ought not be surprised at congruences here.6

­‘Critical’ discourse analysis In some of the literature, ideological underpinnings become particularly evident. These are generally signalled by the use of the word ‘critical’, a word that has been co-opted: as an adjective before terms like ‘linguistics’, ‘studies’, ‘pedagogy’ and ‘discourse analysis’, it carries quite particular ideological baggage. Scholar-advocacy here is driven by a desire to illuminate and redress social inequality, a desire that closely considers ‘political discourse, media, advertisement, ideology, racism [and] institutional discourse.’ Not, of course, a neutral or disinterested undertaking, it was from the first ‘perceived by many as liberating, because it was upfront about its own, explicitly left-wing, political commitment.’ Indeed, in its ‘critical’ clothing, the exercise is described by an adherent as ‘discourse analysis with attitude’.7 Here are two salutary reactions to critical discourse analysis, from senior and respected scholars: The proponents of [critical discourse analysis] can be regarded as activists in that they are critical, but as discourse analysts they are academics . . . it seems reasonable to be critical of their work, as discourse analysis, where it appears not to conform to the conventions of rationality, logical consistency, empirical substantiation and so on. and Any intellectual framework that requires a particular political commitment . . . has no place in the secular academic context. It is an ideology masquerading as a scholarly method.8 The idea that there might be objective truth, unattainable as this may be in any complete or final way, is speedily and rather happily

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jettisoned in favour of a dynamic and often indeterminate subjectivity. What were once the academic games of French intellectuals – whose personal lives, despite all their vaunted interest in ‘de-centring’ and ‘deconstruction’, typically reveal a rather considerable centring on themselves – have taken on a bizarre totemic status in several related academic fields. Meant to overturn a sterile empiricism largely practised by and for members of the hegemonic ‘mainstream’, discourse analysis and its offshoots have increasingly become introverted and isolated enterprises. Like a game of chess (but more elaborate, in that there are infinite possibilities for re-definition and realignment of the rules), they are fascinating to their players, but largely divorced from social reality.9

Postmodernism and its discontents ‘Critical’ discourse analysis is part of the postmodern (‘deconstructivist’) thrust, so the latter requires a little attention here. As a philosophical stance, postmodernism finds expression across many areas of life and is subject to many interpretations, but at its heart is a scepticism that extends to questioning the existence of objective truth. Its ‘critical scholars’ therefore tend to reject science and its long history of evidence-backed achievement. Postmodernism rails against ‘the assumptions of modernity, the so-called Enlightenment, the hegemony of Western thought.’ One writer has seen monolingualism as a vehicle for the Enlightenment and for mass literacy, which we might imagine rather stands in its favour, but he then adds that it has also been the vehicle for the capitalist market economy and colonialism. In fact, he concludes, monolingualism ‘is without question a political, economic and ideological force, created by the privileged to shore up their power.’ The mixture of elements mentioned here suggests to me that singling out monolingualism as the villain of the piece is putting the linguistic cart before the social or political horse.10 Built upon certain political foundations, postmodern perspectives are of course ‘social’, but they can hardly be styled ‘social-scientific’. The fact that many postmodern scholars do in fact engage in sociological and social psychological enquiry, however, means that

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they are open to the sorts of criticism that might not apply were they to essentially concern themselves with the literary dissection or ‘deconstruction’ of texts that characterized the early work in the late 1960s. Roaming in social-scientific territory without accepting established benchmarks means that there are no firm starting points for postmodern enquiry itself. In this sense it is quite unlike the cumulative scientific approach, where – as Newton famously said – we constantly stand on the shoulders of giants. Where are the giants to be found in postmodernism? Celebrities and stars of the day, at whose feet acolytes gather, are the best that can be expected when rigorous standards do not exist. The ‘critical’ approach associated with postmodernism is particularly concerned with redressing social inequities and giving voice to subaltern groups. There is an unavoidable double standard at work here. Making specific reference to the ideology of the human-rights movement, Kenneth Minogue observed that there is an oscillation ‘between a denial of objectivity as merely a cloak of power and privilege, on the one hand, and an insistence on moral and legal objectivity of rights on the other.’ This seems to me to be a well-aimed arrow. When ‘critical social research’ views all reality as a social construction, situations cannot be merely described as they ‘really’ are since this would imply an ‘objective “commonsense” reality where none exists.’ And yet, proponents of an unfettered social constructionism decide for themselves that some things – language rights, for instance, or, more generally, their proposed societal rearrangements – apparently possess an undeniable objective reality.11 The postmodern effort has now gone well beyond its literary beginnings, and deconstructivism now claims that ‘named languages’ do not exist: ‘a postmodern (or postcolonial) approach to language policy . . . suggests that we no longer need to maintain the pernicious myth that languages exist.’ (Note that the nonexistence of named varieties would eviscerate the arguments for the validity of nonstandard dialects – most of whose speakers are in those subordinate groups supposed to be of particular concern for ‘critical’ scholars; see Chapter 4.) Further, there are the twin claims that ‘the concept of language used by linguists was invented by European theorists,’ and that it has become a tool in the continued

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global dominance of western and majoritarian societies. Linguistic communities cannot therefore exist, either, multilingualism must necessarily be an illusion, and any attempts at linguistic planning are flawed at base.12 Those who argue that languages do not exist as ‘separable and enumerable categories’ grudgingly accept that, in some unenlightened quarters, the old idea of a language still remains: ‘we are obliged to take account of what people believe about their languages . . . even where we believe these “languages” to be inventions.’ We read that the mistaken idea of separate languages helps to maintain social injustice, and to control variety and difference by excluding ‘mixed language practices, creoles and other ways of using languages in multilingual networks.’ Only by ‘disinventing’ languages as we now know them can social inequities be alleviated. These ideas reflect an unscientific and ideological narrowness. Of course we should pay much closer attention to social inequality, and to the part that language practices may play in it. Of course we should understand that patterns of linguistic dominance and subordination are reprehensible and destructive. There is no doubt that certain linguistic ‘constructs’ have had undesirable consequences, but so might any reworking, any attempt at ‘disinvention’ followed by some ideologically approved ‘reinvention’. Ultimately, any act of communication can be either elevated or condemned: this has to do with power, whatever the means by which it is expressed.13 For all ordinary intents and purposes, there are separate languages, and there are distinct varieties within them. It is true that languages are social constructions – ‘inventions’, if you like – and they lack sharp boundaries. But this is nothing new. Just as no two sets of experiences and learning environments are exactly alike, so no two individual linguistic systems are precisely the same. Each of us has a ‘personal dialect’ (an ‘idiolect’) that reflects variations in grammar, lexicon, semantic and pragmatic usage, style, and so on. (It may be of more marked individuality, of course, if the speaker knows more than one language or dialect.) These internalized arrangements do not map exactly onto any other individual system and, indeed, it follows that dialects are commonly accepted generalizations which emerge from individual usage. Strictly speaking, but only strictly speaking, speech communities are idealizations. The overlaps, as

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it were, between idiolects and dialects are obviously broad and significant enough to enable communication. This means that, apart from utility in all normal usage, it makes sense to give a name to language varieties.

Translanguaging The elemental reconsiderations of postmodernism have given rise to many neologisms. ‘Translanguaging’ and ‘translingualism’, ‘polylanguaging’ and ‘polylingual languaging’ – these unwieldy coinages are meant to reflect the new ‘critical’ understanding of language in the world. Their use is almost invariably both unnecessary and ugly, as this example shows: ‘we use language to achieve our purposes, we are languagers, and we perform languaging.’ We are also reminded that ‘the ability to language [sic] . . . is the most important signifying role of human beings – that which gives life meaning.’ The title of a recent article begins with the words ‘relanguaging language’ and the sub-title of a book extends the unpleasantness: ‘Indonesians knowledging at home and abroad.’ It is ironic that, apart from everything else, scholars of language should have such tin ears.14 I can’t deal with all of these new terms, of course – but there really is no reason to. While they are not all synonymous, they all pay homage to the idea that longstanding ideas about the separate identity of languages must be radically altered. Most of them reflect, as well, the idea that ‘code-switching’ (see also Chapter  5) is not an appropriate term to characterize movement within one’s linguistic repertoire. New words were allegedly needed and ‘translanguaging’ is now among the most frequent. At its first appearance (in 1996), this word meant receiving information ‘through the medium of one language [my italics]’ and then expressing that knowledge through another, but it now seems to cover any and all types of cross-language switching, stylistic variation, and so on. ‘Translanguaging’ is now to be understood, not simply as movement between two separate varieties, but as signifying the appropriate selection – according to context and circumstance – from within a unitary pool of linguistic elements.15

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Terms like ‘translanguaging’ reflect no advances in scholarship and, at best, give us ham-fisted reminders of Bakhtin’s well-known discussions of ‘heteroglossia’ (about which he began to write in the 1930s): descriptive of the ways in which named languages (or dialects) are social constructions made up of many elements (idiolects, styles, registers and so on) that coalesce over time and context. He writes, then, about the non-neutrality of language, about a polyphonic world, about language in the service of the social order, and so on. None of this, incidentally, was new when Bakhtin wrote about it: any good study of the translation of fiction, for instance, will reveal the historically longstanding awareness of vocal multiplicities, their sources, their intertwinings and, consequently, the problems of interpretation that they present. These problems are evidences of the very ‘translinguality’ that is now being discussed as if were a new conceit.16 Since ‘translanguaging’ was first used in an educational context, a word or two about language(s) at school may not be amiss here. Teachers have long had to engage with multilingualism in the classroom, with pupils who arrive with different language skills. A very recent summary and guide covers most of the important ground here; it is mainly aimed at teachers who teach English (or, by extension, any other language) as a subject or, more generally, for those who use English as the medium of instruction. It is based on the simple observations that students cannot learn what they cannot understand, and that it is wise to build upon the language resources they bring from home. Presenting information about the prevalence of multilingualism in the communities around the school, and in wider regional and global contexts, is seen as an important psychological thrust, particularly for those children whose languages or dialects are not always well regarded. The benefits of knowing more than one’s own mother tongue are to be stressed, as is some awareness of the advantages and potential pitfalls of translation.17 The preparation of teachers for language diversity in their classrooms is not always adequate, especially in those settings where children arrive at school with a variety of languages and dialects. This is not solely an urban phenomenon; even schools in areas whose populations were historically both local and stable are now more and more confronted with children from many different backgrounds.

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The geographical spread of Spanish speakers throughout the United States, far beyond the initial settlement areas of Florida and the southwest, is one example. Another is the wide distribution and mobility of immigrants and refugees in Europe. Even if there were no great likelihood of teachers encountering social or linguistic diversity in their classrooms (increasingly implausible as this would seem), however, I think that a good case could still be made for giving much more attention to such diversity. All good education is multicultural, after all, and so any heightening of teachers’ cross-cultural and crosssubcultural sensitivities must be a good thing. It is important to point out that expanded sensibilities are not particularly difficult to produce and encourage. To take one example: the evidence that African American English dialects are just as valid as any other English variants, that they are just as rule-governed, that their patterns of pronunciation and emphasis are just as regular, that they serve the cognitive needs of their speakers just as well as any other form of speech does – all this and more can be presented to, and understood by, anyone who has an open mind. My own experience with teachers over many years confirms that this is so. The suggestion that teachers might in any regular way be resistant to new linguistic insights has been firmly rejected in recent investigations. While teachers will hardly need to be reminded that these insights remain unknown or, worse, rejected by many outside the educational precincts, this should not deter them from doing what can be done in the classroom. Minority-language children and those with low-status dialects have very real social burdens to bear. It is a further tragedy that their linguistic and cognitive skills should be misunderstood or denigrated.18 One scholar pedantically described translanguaging as signalling ‘an arrangement that normalizes bilingualism without diglossic functional separation.’ This emphasis on a single internal linguistic source, rather than two (for bilinguals) or more, is central to the translanguaging thesis. The likelihood that individuals draw upon a unitary language pool is not particularly contentious, however. Indeed, many linguists do not find it implausible that there is only one human language, and that what we regard as different varieties might be viewed by some clever intergalactic visitor as different embroideries on a single pattern. On the other hand, assuming that no idiolects

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are exactly the same logically means that there are more than 7 billion separate language systems. For present purposes, neither extreme need detain us for very long. It seems clear that separately nameable language varieties could exist just as easily within a single linguistic pool as they could in different compartments. A reasonable suggestion is that neither a tightly compartmentalized (sometimes called a ‘dual-competence’) model, which postmodernists criticize and which is indeed rather unlikely, nor some fully ‘unitary’ model in which no linguistic naming makes sense, will ultimately prove most satisfactory.19 All ‘named’ languages are illusions for translanguaging scholars, but seen to be particuluarly noxious are their standard (read middleclass) forms, especially where social classes come into contact  – most notably, perhaps, in the ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘minoritized’ classroom. It is certainly true that, for a very long time, a great deal of social and linguistic misinformation has inaccurately (and therefore unfairly) stigmatized children who speak a nonstandard dialect of the ‘mainstream’ language, or another variety altogether. In this sense, what I imagine must be the educational aspirations of postmodernism are commendable, even though there is no evidence that translanguaging theorists have made any novel contributions. It is, rather, the continuing research on the internal validity of all dialects that has made the most clear-cut and successful attacks on what are now (at least in enlightened quarters) discredited deficit models and bizarre conceptions of cultural and linguistic ‘deprivation’; see Chapter 4.

Superdiversity Some scholars now believe that ‘diversity’ is a word no longer sufficient to cover the current scope of social and linguistic heterogeneity. They suggest that we need a new one for a world of ‘transnationalism’, a world in which ‘assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary.’ We are also seen to need enquiry that ‘takes account of plurality of affiliation, the coexistence of cohesion and separateness, and the fact that people cohere to [sic]

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different social worlds and communities simultaneously’. In the same vein, we are told that linguistic identities can be multifaceted: ‘what exactly is wrong with linguistic complementarity?’ What indeed – but what informed opinion ever denied that identities and the ways of expressing them can be many and varied?20 ‘Superdiversity’ is a term coined or popularized by Steven Vertovec, and is meant to better capture some new realities of languages-inthe-world, with particular reference to the dominated and subaltern varieties that, as I mentioned above, are of such concern in postmodern ideology. These newly developing linguistic realities are said to arise from massive and often chaotic migration patterns which bring more and more languages into contact. The world has always experienced large-scale migrations and language contact of all kinds, and one could realistically speak of varying levels of diversity in different circumstances, but to think that a new word is needed is to reveal a lack of historical awareness. Not only is it obvious that a meaningful and unique definition of superdiversity would be almost impossible, but the relevant data show that we are faced with an unnecessary neologism.21 While the number of international migrants almost doubled between 1960 and 2000, the percentage vis-à-vis the global population has actually dropped. Of greater importance, perhaps, is the fact that the number of ‘emigration’ countries increased from 124 to 148, while their ‘immigration’ counterparts decreased, from 102 to 78. That is, people are moving from more countries to fewer destinations. In fact, half of all migrants now live in only ten ‘receiving’ countries: four are in Europe (Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain); Canada, Australia and the United States comprise another group; and the remaining three are Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The diversity here is completely explicable. In Europe we see both refugee populations and a continuation of the post-war gastarbeiter movement fuelled by domestic requirements; these also account for the more recent emigration to the rich parts of the Arab world. The ‘new-world’ anglosphere is a composition of immigrants, and emigration to Russia is largely from the former Soviet republics. Just as translanguaging is essentially code-switching writ large, so superdiversity is simply diversity on a larger scale. The basic phenomena, however, require no new terminology.22

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­A concluding word Why are we now faced with such a plethora of language-related neologisms, and what accounts for the traction they have gained in the absence of any compelling need? It is clear that there are everincreasing scholarly demands to come up with new and improved theoretical positions, and to stake particular claims to particular insights. These demands are more pronounced in sociology (say) than in physics, precisely because much of the ground has been so well ploughed, from so many perspectives, over such a long time. In addition, while expertise in nuclear physics is admitted by all to be a specialist enterprise, requiring its own particular language, the same cannot be said for enquiries into the human condition. The intricacies go well beyond what can be treated here, but much apposite discussion may be found in the work of Michael Billig, who has pointed out that ‘modern academics . . . must be able to keep writing and publishing even when they have nothing to say.’23 Think for a moment about the chapter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which describes the ‘caucus race’ organized by the Dodo. Everybody was declared a winner, and therefore ‘all must have prizes.’ More prosaically, Gerd Gigerenzer has noted that while many theories in psychology (read also other social sciences) are either tautological or repetitious, they persist because they are a bit like toothbrushes: we all want our own. He might have added that, just as toothbrushes are very inexpensive, so the current proliferation has inevitably cheapened the currency of theory construction. So, if one combines some salient features – inattention to historical and often quite relevant context, disciplinary insecurity, lack of interest in, and/or awareness of, work in adjacent areas, a publish-or-perish environment, settings in which propensity for theory-building appears to vary inversely with intellectual depth – the current malaise, the postmodern caucus race, becomes more understandable.24 I’ll end here with two familiar quotations. The first comes from Hamlet, in which Gertrude admonishes that tedious wind-bag, Polonius, by asking for ‘more matter, with less art.’ The second is George Orwell’s pointed observation about ideological delusions: ‘one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe [them]: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’25

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y treatment in this book of what could be termed the ‘social life of languages’ is, at some sub-surface level (not a very deep one, however), not really about language at all. Or, rather, it is about language as a particular window into the human condition, language as a perspective from which to consider social interaction, language as a marker of individual and group definition. The unique approach afforded by studying language rests upon two important facts. The first of these is simply that language is ubiquitous: there has never been a human group without language (well, not for a very long time anyway) and every language is adequate for the immediate needs of its speakers. A corollary here is that language is eminently mutable: as circumstances and requirements alter, so language will adapt and develop. The second important fact is that language is almost always more than a instrumental or communicative medium. Stripped-down technical vocabularies, pidgin varieties and constructed languages are the obvious exceptions here, exceptions arising from quite specific and essentially prosaic needs. But, as I have noted, even these spartan communication devices will, if circumstances are propitious, begin to add further layers of meaning and nuance. Technical lexicons can merge into common parlance and, themselves, take on metaphorical meanings far beyond their restricted origins. (Computer terminology provides a good case in point, with terms like download and interface. I recently read, too, of the use of hardware and software to refer to the brain and its thought contents, respectively. And a computer colleague informed me that dull people can be described

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as having ROM, read-only memory that is incapable of taking in new information.) Pidgin varieties can become creolized as they migrate towards the status of ‘natural’ languages. And constructed forms like Esperanto begin to show regional variation; as well, with the development of original written material, particularly poetry, they too take on more and more nuanced and non-instrumental aspects. The single most important message that I have tried to convey in this book, then, is that all discussions of the social life of language are ultimately discussions about group identity. The very diversity of languages is a testament to the desire to maintain particular and unique windows on the world. Purely instrumental mediums would, over the long haul of history, have shown much greater tendencies to converge than natural languages have done, and visitors to Earth from outer space might find it odd that a species so adept in many other ways seems so backward in taking the obvious steps to facilitate wider and easier global communication. The discussion of translation also showed the imperatives of ‘groupness’ intertwining with the clear necessities of cross-border communication: or, to put it another way, how the symbolic aspects of language coexist with more mundane and instrumental ones. The interesting phenomenon of ‘voice appropriation’ is a particularly poignant example of the importance of language as it bears the weight of social narrative and group myth. If the symbolic value of language is important, then it is entirely understandable that societies finding themselves in states of transition – most centrally when these have been forced upon them by external pressures, but even where transition is generally welcomed or self-initiated – will be particularly sensitive to questions of language maintenance and shift. And more than that: in many settings, it is to be expected that groups will act to keep their languages ‘pure’, that they will fight to preserve varieties seen to be threatened by powerful linguistic neighbours, and that possibilities for formal intervention on behalf of flagging varieties will be considered more and more closely. My aim here has been to present succinctly some of the important constituents of the dynamics of language-in-society settings, some of the factors that must be attended to in any meaningful discussion of linguistic contact and conflict. Important here are the demonstrations

Epilogue

199

that all dialects have an internal ‘logical’ (are rule-governed, in other words), but that not all have equal social status. Similarly, ‘big’ languages have greater prestige and power than ‘small’ ones, and the dynamics of contact fuel language decline and attempts at revival. The book opens with a description of arguments for the divine provenance of some language or another. They can now be seen as both delusional and understandable in their historical context. Also misguided, but surely less defensible, are the postmodern conceits I discuss in the final chapter. I have also tried here to provide a treatment that will be of interest to a wide variety of people. Is there anyone, in fact, who isn’t interested in the social life of language at some level or other? Finally, I hope I’ve suggested – implicitly throughout much of the book, rather more explicitly in one or two places – that we need clearer and more dispassionate perspectives. In areas that often generate more heat than light, in contexts in which the role of the scholar becomes mixed with that of the advocate, in settings where virtually everyone has strong opinions – in such circumstances, this need is surely magnified.

Notes Prologue 1 Readers will realize that the nature of the overall theme means that many topics could be discussed under more than one heading, in more than one section. I have tried to place material where I think it fits best, and the index will be useful where topics are mentioned at different places in the book. 2 When discussing languages and language groups, I have not continued to put words like ‘small’, ‘big’ and ‘large’ in the inverted commas that they really require – this is simply to avoid tedious over-use. The terms refer to the relative scope and dominance of languages, regardless of speaker numbers. And, of course, no value judgement is intended. 3 De Swaan (2004: 574); see also Riley (2015). For fuller discussion of de Swaan’s arguments (and those of Philippe van Parijs), as well as criticisms of them, see Edwards (2011). 4 Florio’s words are given by Yates (1934: 32); see also Florio (1578). 5 For Ramphal’s remarks, see Crystal (2003); see also Sharifian (2009), Park (2009), Honna (2008), Canagarajah (1999a and 1999b) and Van Parijs (2004: 124). For discussions of English linguistic imperialism, of English as a ‘killer language’ and of linguistic ‘genocide’, see Phillipson (1992) and Skutnabb-Kangas (2000). De Swaan’s (2004) brief but accurate comment on simplistic and emotionally charged views of English in the world today is recommended. Fuller details can be found in Edwards (2011). 6 See Hayward (1922), Foster (1926) and Gibbon (1938). 7 The summary is provided by Wallace et al. (2021). The Canadian francophone reticence about multiculturalism is understandable. French is dominant in Québec, but its 7 million speakers form only about 20 per cent of the overall Canadian population. Furthermore, only one province (New Brunswick) is officially bilingual, with francophones comprising one-third of its population (of some 780,000). In none of the other provinces and territories is the francophone presence greater than 5 per cent. For more information about Canadian multiculturalism and

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its ramifications, see Edwards (1995a) and, for more general discussions, see Edwards (1995b) and Rattansi (2011). For the cited objection to the Canadian policy, see Lupul (1982: 100). 8 A reasonably comprehensive discussion of ethnicity, nationalism and language will be found in Edwards (2009); see also Grosby (2005). There is, of course, a very large literature on nationalism and all its ramifications.

1: Language origins and language diversity 1 Babel is most often – and, I would say, most accurately – pronounced with a long ‘a’, and so does not sound like the English word babble. The latter derives most immediately – but not exclusively – from Low German. It is not difficult, of course, to understand that, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: ‘no direct connexion with Babel can be traced; though association with that may have affected the senses.’ God’s actual injunction (in Genesis 11:7) was: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ (Or, ‘venite igitur, descendamus, et confundamus ibi linguam eorum, ut non audiat unusquisque vocem proximi sui’ – my italics highlight the central action.) 2 Haugen (1987, 1983); Moyaert (2009: 225); Steiner (1992: 57 and 1998: 90); Borst (1957-1963). 3 Farrar (1879: 52 [in volume I] and 81 [in volume II]). Glossolalia and ‘ecstatic language’ are not unique to Christianity. 4 Smith is cited in Copeland (1991: 23, 26). ­5 Pond (2017: 14). Healing and glossolalia are frequently connected in the practices of shamans (from the Tungus šaman), sangomas (from the Bantu isángoma) and other divine doctors. 6 On the neurological underpinnings, see Lynn et al. (2011); for the linguistic view, see Thomason (1984: 349). Samarin’s monograph (1972) remains important. 7 See Edwards (1995b) for fuller information on these and related matters. 8 Milton’s poem was completed in 1663, and first published four years later. Dante’s great work was completed by 1320, but only published in 1472. His work on the vernacular was first published in Italian translation (in 1529), with the Latin original appearing later (in 1577). 9 Katz (1981: 132).

202

Notes

10

See Olender (1989).

11

Wilkins (1668: 5 and 11); Hobbes (1651 [1973]: 13); Vico (1725 [1948]: 430); Müller (1862). For the Leibniz citation in the original German, see Leibniz (1717: 239 and 245) – here I draw upon a commentary by Walker (1972: 303).

12 See Edwards (2021a) for more about these speculations. 13 See Casaubon (1659) for the first publication of Dee’s holograph manuscript. 14 For the ‘gossip theory’, see Dunbar (1996). See also my discussion of language and gender in Chapter 8. 15 See Devine and Stephens (2006: 23). The fact that their book on Latin word order runs to 650 pages is an indication of the complexities; see also Mahoney (2010). Pinkster (1991) analysed about 570 of Caesar’s sentences; he found that, while most (63 per cent) were in SOV order, all of the other five arrangements were represented, too – in proportions ranging from 1 to 21 per cent. 16 The Siege Perilous is a major theme in The Holy Grail (1869), one of the books in Tennyson’s poem cycle, Idylls of the King. Touchstone’s speech is in Act V, Scene IV, 71–85. Dorothy Parker’s brief review (1931: 36) is generally given as ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – omitting, that is, the words ‘for me’. To my ear, this slight misquotation is an improvement on the original. Okrent (2021) provides further examples of noun-adjective order, including the title ‘Surgeon General’ which, unlike the other examples I have given here, does not mean the same thing when put in more usual order: ‘general surgeon’. ­17 ‘Astronaut’ was a rather obvious coinage, on the model of ‘aeronaut’, which emerged in the 1780s with the first balloonists. 18 Du Bellay (1549 [1939]: 46–7); Sapir (1921: 19 and 222). 19 See Pawley (2005: 1) for these figures, and the collection of which he is a co-editor (Pawley et al., 2005) for a broad and comprehensive treatment of Papuan languages and cultures. 20 For Jones’s famous observation, see Franklin (1995: 359); for fuller accounts of the orientalist’s linguistic (and other) work, see the biography by Cannon (1990), who styles Jones the ‘father of modern linguistics’. This is going a bit too far, and the interested reader will want also to look at Franklin’s (2011) more recent treatment.

Notes

203

21 The Ethnologue – now in its 24th edition – is the single most comprehensive guide to world languages and language families. First published in 1951, it has appeared annually since 2013 and is produced by SIL International, an evangelical organization. See Eberhard et al. (2021). 22 One of the classic works linking genetics and linguistics is by Cavalli-Sforza (1996).

2: Interpreting language diversity 1 For information about Marie Smith Jones and Eyak, see Kolbert (2005) and Pemberton (2008); for the work produced with her help (a type-script volume running to about 3,500 pages), see Krauss (1970). Angela Sidney also compiled a type-script book (140 pages) of Tagish place-names; see Sidney (1980). In an interesting twist, it was reported that the last two fluent speakers of Ayapaneco were refusing to talk to one another, even though they live just 500 metres apart in Tabasco; see Tuckman (2011). Three years later, however, a reconciliation was announced – prompted by a concern for the perilous state of the language; see Donnelley, 2014). 2 See Arnold (1867). Miss Blimber appears in Chapter 11 of Dombey and Son (Dickens, 1846). 3 See Mariucci (1986-1991) for the five-volume Latinitatis nova et vetera. The Finnish radio news in Latin (Nuntii Latini) was a fiveminute weekly bulletin that ran between 1989 and 2019. Among other things, each episode provided translations of new Latin terms into Finnish, English and German. ­4 See Dewaele (2017) for a comment on the ‘native speaker’ label, and Lee (2020) for discussion of Englishes in the digital media. Slavkov et al. (2021) have just produced an excellent collection examining the ‘changing face’ of the native speaker. 5 For the classic discussion of group boundaries vis-à-vis the cultural content enclosed within them, see Barth (1969) and, for a recent overview, Eriksen (2015); see also Chapter 9. 6 Statistics Canada (2017). 7 Mallikarjun (2001). 8 See Mandela (1994).

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Notes

3: The emergence and measurement of multilingualism 1

Koestler’s description of Jewish linguistic variation is taken from a rather controversial book (1980). As with Judaism over the centuries, Koestler’s own adventurous life was studded with many languages: his original Hungarian (thus his birth name, Kösztler Artúr) plus domestic German, to which were later added fluency in French and English, and working competence in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew.

2

Overy (2021). During the time of the Raj (Crown Rule) – from the Mutiny of 1857 to independence – there were never more than 4,000 civil servants; most were British, but by no means all. Not surprisingly, the Mutiny (or Revolt) has also been called the War of Independence.

3

Committee on Emotional Integration (1962: iv and 3).

4

See Gōncz (2021: 1) and Ellis (2006), who refers to monolingualism as the ‘unmarked case’ (the ‘normal’, basic or usual). A familiar gender example occurs where ‘male’ is the unmarked and, one might say, the default case; thus, until recent times it was common for ‘he’ to be written where we would now write ‘he or she’ (or use some other construction so as to be more accurate).See also Jespersen (1922), Aronin and Singleton (2019) and, for fuller discussion of bilingualism, Edwards (2010a and 2021b).Sherlock Holmes’s remark was made at his initial appearance, in A Study in Scarlet, first published in 1887; the citation here is from Conan Doyle (1966: 12).

5

Brigham (1923: 194), Kirkpatrick (1926: 2).

­6

Gordin (2017: 13) and McLelland (2017: 49). Gordin’s monograph on the languages of science is recommended; see also Edwards (2022a) for more details on languages across the scholarly world.

7

Ronjat (1913), Pavlovich (1920), Leopold (1939–1949).

8

Peal and Lambert (1962: 20). More details about levels and types of bilingualism will be found when I turn to ‘new speakers’ in Chapter 10.

9

See Bialystok et al. (2014) and Woumans et al. (2015) for references to dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. For discussions of the supposed correlations between bilingualism and intelligence, see Bialystok (2009), Moreno et al. (2010) and Kroll and Bialystok (2013).

10

Valian (2015: 3); Zahodne and Manly (2015: 45).

11

Kroll and Bialystok (2013: 502–3).

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12 Edwards (1995b). For general overviews of the bilingualism-andintelligence, see Edwards (2019a and 2021b). 13 Not all census information is gathered via questionnaires, for instance – door-to-door interviews continue to be used in some settings. The reporter is still following a script, of course, but there is room for queries to be answered and guidance given. This may raise another problem, however, one of consistency both across and within individual interviewers. 14 Foster (1988: 111). 15 Malinowski (1922). The word argonauts was first used in English in 1834; see also Malinowski (1923[1948]: 239). In 1967, he published a diary, which revealed him to have at least one foot of clay, with little sympathy or fellow-feeling for those he studied: a considerable ethnographer but not a pleasant man. The diary was reviewed by Geertz (1967) who later acknowledged that the diary was a ‘backstage masterpiece’ (1988). 16 See Hymes (1962) on the ethnography of speaking, and Tusting and Maybin (2007) on linguistic ethnography. See also Edwards (2009: 17), Geertz (1968: 149) and, for the initial reference to ‘thick’ description, Ryle (1949). Edwards (1994a) provides some further detail on the pitfalls of fieldwork. 17 See Milgram (1963 and 1974); and Verse 51 in Fitzgerald’s 1859 rendition of Omar Khayyám’s poem. 18 Labov (1966), Trudgill (1975) and, for a general discussion, Edwards (2009 and 2013). 19 See Martin (2021) for the American committee action. ­20 In their recent collection, Niedt and Seals (2021) focus on the landscape as classroom. For bringing landscape into classrooms, see Krompák et al. (2021). See Landry and Bourhis (1997) for the contemporary introduction of the term. As well as that presented by Niedt and Seals, two other collections – edited by Malinowski and Tufi (2021) and Blackwood and Dunlevy (2021) – are recommended as the most recent treatments. See also Gorter (2006), Pütz and Mundt (2018), Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael (2019), and the journal Linguistic Landscapes. For an interesting study on grave-stone inscriptions in Alsace, see Vajta (2018). For linguistic landscape in cyberspace, see Ivković and Lotherington (2009). 21 See Macfarlane (2015) and Tyler (2015). The ‘linguist of landscape’ designation is that of Leissle (2020).

206

Notes

4: Dialects and other language varieties 1

For Weinreich’s famous phrase – which he did not originate himself – see Edwards (2009). On Serbo-Croatian, see Greenberg (2004) and Bugarski (2001) – the citation is from his page 84.

2

See Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2018 and 2019) for comprehensive attention to guides to English usage.

3

See Edwards (1989, 2009 and 2018) for fuller discussion of dialect varieties and evaluations.

4

See Vaugelas (1647); see also Hall (1974) and Edwards (2012a).

5

Puttenham (1589) and Wyld (1934: 4). The latter acknowledged that useful comparisons would have to involve ‘speakers who possessed equal qualities of voice’ – an obvious requirement, and one with which all comparative speech studies must deal. In his famous essay on ‘U’ (Upper Class) and ‘non-U’ speech, Alan Ross (1980: 13) pointed out that Wyld was both a scholar and a gentleman, although in the latter capacity he was ‘perhaps a little old-fashioned’ in his opinions. Wyld felt that ‘no gentleman goes on a bus.’

6

Labov’s first important report on the logic of nonstandard English appeared in 1969; see also Labov (1976 and 1977). For comprehensive accounts of all the work on dialect evaluation, see Edwards, 1989 and 2010a).

7

Giles et al. (1974 and 1979); for the observation about language (in)equality, see Mackey (1978: 7). On standard as a levelling factor, and on other aspects of standard and nonstandard forms at school, see Edwards (1989).

8

See Edwards (2010a: 154) for the direct quotation, and Edwards (2009 and 2011) for general discussions of men’s and women’s speech.

9

See Russell (1950: 217). It has been suggested that the prime minister was consciously trying to overawe his critic but, in any event, Gladstone’s usage – like that of most educated Victorians – was considerably more formal than our own.

10

Excessive or unnecessary use of group registers has fuelled the various ‘Plain English’ efforts, as well as language-usage guides, notably the classics by Fowler (1926) and Gowers (1954); see also my remarks on language brokering, below.

11

Partridge is the name that comes immediately to mind when we think of lexicographers of slang; his most general (and famous) work first appeared in 1937, and was supplemented by more

Notes

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specialized slang dictionaries. He has been joined by many others over the years, and the compendium assembled by Lillo and Victor (2017) runs to almost 1,400 pages – and the ‘select’ bibliography of works it draws upon has more than 1,700 entries. Johnson’s remark can be found in any edition of Boswell’s Life, at 15 May 1783.

5: Multilingual abilities 1

See Cook and Newson (1996), Ambridge and Lieven (2012) and Pinker (1994) – and, for a well-worked critical account, Sampson (2005).

2

Steiner (1992).

3

It is a mark of the topic that several major publishers have issued ‘handbooks’ – all of them much too weighty to be held in the hand – and some have stretched as far as encyclopedias. See Doughty and Long (2003), Gass and Mackey (2012), Herschensohn and Young-Scholten (2013) and Robinson (2014). For an excellent new survey of aptitude in second-language learning, see Chalmers et al. (2021).

4

Pawlak et al. (2020) devote a short monograph to boredom in the language classroom.

5

See King (2001) for a discussion of kōhanga reo, and Nation-Cymru News Service (2021) for the collaborative intent. The most recent and most comprehensive coverage of immersion programmes of all types, embedded within a much wider treatment of bilingualism and education, is that of Baker and Wright (2021).

6

Liao (2021).

7

The Texan example is from Crystal (1992: 69); for the other, see Poplack (1980).

8

Giles and his colleagues developed a theory of speech accommodation that deals specifically with the preferences and intentions of interlocutors. We may wish to converge with our conversational partners in order to show approval or acceptance, submission or respect. Divergence is also possible, of course. There are several forms of linguistic accommodation – including speech rate, message content and, of course, accent – and they are often accompanied by paralinguistic aspects of body language. Accommodation need not always be behaviour of which we are conscious. See Robinson and Giles (2001) and Edwards (2009).

208

Notes

9

Orwell’s (1946) concern with pretentious diction and other maladies affecting English is still well worth reading.

10

For the references to the aide-de-camp and Sir John French, see Holmes (2007: 20 and 305). Lytton Strachey (1931) reports the franglais of his forebear; the citation is from his page 181.

11

See Waterman (1966: 138) for Voltaire’s remark, and Edwards (2022a) for a discussion of European lingua francas and languages of prestige in modern Europe. Voltaire may not have had to go beyond French when he was in the Prussian court, but he would certainly have agreed with Goethe, who – about a century later – wrote that ‘wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.’ I’ll leave this one untranslated; see Goethe (1833 [1907]: 18).

12 For these various opinions, see Edwards (1995b and 2011). 13 See European Commission (2019). 14 See Winchester (1998) and Murray (1977: 70). 15 For Mezzofanti, see Russell (1858) and Erard (2012), both of whom contextualize their treatment in broader remarks about polyglossia. Lomb (2013) provides an English account of the Hungarian’s visit, first reported in Pulszky (1880). Lomb herself was a formidable polyglot, translating and interpreting across sixteen languages; a very brief note about her is found in Krashen and Kiss (1996). For Burton, see Kennedy (2005). Edwards (2019a and 2022b) discusses polyglots, ‘hyper-polyglots’ and extraordinary language capabilities more generally. ­16 Malan (1897: 273). For this treatment of Malan, see Edwards (2022b). 17 Chadwick (1970). 18 The citations here are taken from Howe (1991: 65 and 162) and Smith (2005: 39). See also the general discussions provided by Treffert (1989) and Foer (2011). 19 For a general discussion, see Smith (1983). 20 For very succinct accounts, see Baron-Cohen (2008) and Frith (2014). The citation is from Erard (2012: 230). 21 Howe (1991: 154); see also Smith (1984). The mystery does not entirely disappear, of course: why do some individuals devote such prolonged and intense attention, for instance? Is it a compensation for lack of social skills (or perhaps merely interests), or do the latter lead to the former? 22 Erard (2012: 268–9).

Notes

209

23 For Taylor, see Smith and Tsimpli (1995) and Smith et al. (2011). See also Tammet (2007, 2017). ‘Pi Day’ is March 14th – 3/14, being the first three numbers of π (3.14159 . . . and so endlessly on).

6: The consequences of Babel: Lingua francas and translation 1

For the plural of lingua franca, I have used lingua francas – rather than lingue franche (Italian) or linguae francae (Latin). Both of these are used, but they seem a bit pretentious, since the singular form has been so completely adopted into English. Most dictionaries give ‘lingua francas’ their first or only imprimatur.

2

Dryden’s play, The Kind Keeper, was written in 1677, first performed the next year, and published in 1680.

3

For a recent overview of English as a lingua franca, see Jenkins et al. (2017).

4

Berncastle (1850).

5

See Trudgill (2000: 170).

6

The treatment of creole and pidgin language is a technical matter; two useful approaches to current debates are those by Mufwene (2020) and Croft (2021); see also Mufwene (2001).

7

See Zamenhof (1887).

8

See Lieberman (1979: 100) for Zamenhof’s comment about nationalism.

­9

Founded in 1908, there is an active international Esperanto association, and the language has considerable electronic presence, and is available in online language-learning and language-translation sites; see Chapter 10.

10

Orwell (1944a: 107–8).

11

Steiner (1992: 244) and Popper (1974: 1,112).

12 Wills (1982: 35) provides the citation. 13 Steiner (1992: 264). 14 De Optimo Genere Oratorum (‘On the Best Kind of Orators’) is a work from Marcus Tullius Cicero written in 46 BCE: see May and Wisse (2001). See also Dryden (1697: unpaginated preface). See also Tancock (1970: 16 and 18). Ally Sloper was a cartoon character in the late nineteenth century; ‘Nobby’ perhaps hangs

210

Notes on a bit, along with others of that sort: ‘Dusty Miller’ and ‘Chalkie White’, as well as ‘Lofty’ for a short person, ‘Tiny’ for a big one, and so on. Fanny Adams lingers most, in the phrase ‘sweet Fanny Adams’ or ‘sweet F.A.’ – although there was in fact a real little girl of that name, whose initials have now been co-opted for a meaning more profane than the use of her name was in the nineteenth century: a fascinating little story here. For Nabokov, and other opinons about translation, see Edwards (1995b).

15 Škvorecký (1985). 16 See Lurie (1981) and Enright (1992). 17 Lucas (2021: 6). 18 See Moody (1988) on the ‘indigenous voice’. 19 See Kennedy (1999) on Gaelic voices. 20 A thoughtful review by Lenard and Balint (2020) points out that cultural ‘engagement’ – which may lead some to make a leap to ‘appropriation’ – is problematic only when it involves culture misrepresentation or cultural offence. This narrowing is welcome, but may still be too restrictive. What is offensive, for example? And, given the fact that cultures are not monoliths, it may well be that what some insiders view as misrepresentation, others might see as setting straight an inaccurate record. Deep waters, these.

7: Keeping languages pure 1

Thomas (1991).

­2

Druon (2004).

3

Quirk (1982: 99); Orwell (1946).

4

Bolinger (1990).

5

Quirk (1982: 59); see also Chapter 11.

6

Mackey (1991: 55).

7

Quirk (1982: 68); Verstegan (1605); Defoe (1697); Swift (1712).

8

Queen’s English Society: https://queens-english-society.org/

9

See Dalby (1998) for a guide to more than 1,600 dictionaries in about 300 languages.

10

Johnson (1747 and 1755). The preface to his dictionary was unpaginated; the citations I give here are from paragraphs 84, 88 and 90.

Notes 11

211

See Heath (1977) on Adams; see also Drake (1977).

12 Webster (1828); the citation is from an earlier publication (Webster, 1783: 7). 13 See Terrill (2002: 214–16), the title of whose article is an interesting question: ‘Why make books for people who don’t read?’

8: Languages and identities 1

Orwell (1941: 64).

2

Donne (1624: Meditation XVII).

3

See Tajfel (1978 and 1981), and Brown (2020) for a good overview of the ‘minimal-group’ work.

4

Barth (1969).

5

See Edwards (1985). Other earlier work includes that of Gumperz (1982) and LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985). Joseph (2004) also makes a notable contribution. The citations are from Bauman (2001: 16) and Jenkins (2004: 8); see also Block (2006) and, for fuller discussion of the language-and-identity relationship, Edwards (2009).

6

For the Irish study, see Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research (1975).

7

For general works dealing with the language-and-religion relationship, see the early work by Samarin (1976), as well as Omoniyi (2010) and Omoniyi and Fishman (2006). The recent collection by Pandharipande et al. (2020) pays particular attention to religion as a factor in understanding language maintenance and language shift. For much of this section, I draw upon Edwards (2013).

8

See Fullerton (1916: 6).

9

Meek (2000: 44).

10

Müller (1862: 135). Contemporary missionaries belonging to the Summer Institute of Linguistics – based in Texas, and the somewhat more secular face of its partner, Wycliffe Bible Translators – have made possible the publication and regular updates of Ethnologue, a comprehensive catalogue of all the world’s languages. See also Zwartjes and Hovdhaugen (2004).

11

Comenius (1688[1938]: 226–7).

12 See Mealing (1997) for an introduction to the Jesuit Relations. See Maillard (1863), Edwards (2005) and Wyss (2000) for fuller details

212

Notes about missionaries, aboriginal populations and literacy in Canada. The citation is from Wyss, page 5.

13 See Edwards (2010b) for details of the Nova Scotian studies. 14 The first citation is from Titley (1983: 119), the second from Ó Ciosáin (1991: 13–14). 15 On the mysteries of the faith, see Knox (1990: 127). The citation from Dalgarno’s (1661: A5) book comes from a prefatory letter lauding his work – it is, in fact, a letter from Charles II, printed here over the name of William Morice, the king’s Secretary of State. 16 See Trudgill (2000: 65) for the Carib reference. For fuller discussion of the language-and-gender relationship, see Edwards (2009). Much more thorough and up-to-date assessments include those provided by Coates (2016), Kiesling (2019), Sauntson (2020), and Angouri and Baxter (2021). 17 Lakoff (1975). Bucholtz (2004) provides an updated version of Lakoff’s work, together with commentaries from several authors. 18 Leet-Pellegrini (1980). 19 For the Brazilian study, see Ball (2018: 15) and, for the gendered assessments of gossip, Guendouzi (2001). See Reynolds et al. (2018) and McAndrew (2017), who echoes the arguments of Dunbar (1996) about the evolutionary advantages of gossip as ‘social grooming’; see also Chapter 1. 20 Cameron (2012). 21 Jespersen (1922) and Cameron (1992).

9: Language decline and revival: Basic factors 1

Nelde (1987 and 2002) is one who has argued for contact leading to conflict. For general notes on minority languages, see Edwards (2010b).

2

Although diglossia is simply the Greek version of bilingualism, it has the more specialized application noted here.

3

See Spolsky (1989) for the Navajo example.

4

There is a huge literature on ‘small’ and endangered languages. Besides the works of my own that I’ve referred to, the collections edited by Grenoble and Whaley (1998), Flores Farfán and Ramallo

Notes

213

(2010) and Austin and Sallabank (2014) are recommended, as is the monograph by Sallabank (2013). There is, too, the inevitable handbook (Rehg and Campbell, 2018) – in this instance, quite a good one (see Edwards, 2019b). 5

For references for these and other such phrases, see Edwards (1985: 129).

6

For Bergin’s assertion, see Ó hAilín (1969: 91); see also Weinreich (1974: 108). On unsuccessful revival efforts, see Dorian (1987) – whose argument was anticipated almost a century earlier by Trench (1907).

7

Ellis and Mac a’Ghobhainn (1971). Their work does not, of course, go into the detail that studies of individual contexts can provide; it is an overview and, in some places, quite dated.

8

Edwards (1985). See also Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (1998: 78) and Edwards (2012b).

9

Mühlhäusler (2000), Skutnabb-Kangas (2002), Diamond (1992) and Fishman (1980: 171).

10

Dunn (1953: 140); see also Greene (1981).

11

Edwards (1985, 2007b and 2012b).

10: Language decline and revival: Advocacy and activism 1

Renan (1882 [1947]: 899).

2

See Fennell (1981: 38) and Edwards (2016) for further general discussion.

­3

Edwards (2009). The situation of francophones in Québec is not the same as that of African Americans, of course (see Vallières, 1968, however), but the ‘minority-group reaction’ is a variety of what DuBois (1903) called ‘double consciousness’; see also Gilroy (1993). Circumstances may also exist in which a common mother tongue is disdained in favour of a foreign variety. Ramos (1961) described how customers in the Philippines received more prompt and polite service in shops when speaking either English or Spanish – even though both they and the clerks were native Tagalog speakers. Parents were often unhappy with their children being taught in Tagalog, too, after the language was made the educational medium in 1940.

214

Notes

4

See Durkacz (1983) for an excellent monograph on the decline of the Celtic languages in general. The citations are from Mackey (1978: 7), Ó Danachair (1969: 120), Dunn (1953: 134) and Campbell (1936: 130).

5

The citations are from Spolsky (2004: 196, 205, 217 and 219) and Fishman (1991: 291 and 180).

6

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986: 6, 19 and 27)

7

See Ndimele (2016), particularly the chapter by Okuyade; see also Irele (2001).

8

Hechter (1975) and Davies (1945). For some discussion of the travails of scholars who write in a language other than their ‘own’, see Hyland (2016a and 2016b), Politzer-Ahles et al. (2016), Flowerdew (2019) and Brereton and Cousins (2022).

9

Moran (1900: 268).

10

Fishman (1991); Hyde (1894).

11

Renan (1882 [1947]: 882).

12 De Swaan (2004: 579). Further discussion of the role of the linguist is found in Edwards (1994b) and Bugarski et al. (2004). Even Dorian (1993: 577), a scholar with great sympathy for small languages, has pointed out that ‘it’s unlikely that linguists can ever persuade a group either to give up or not to give up’ their language. 13 See Krauss (1992), Ladefoged (1992) and Dorian (1993). 14 The citations are from Labov (1982: 172), Bucholtz (2018: 352) and Wolfram (2018: 375–6). See also Lewis (2018a), Snell (2018) and Mallinson and Hudley (2018). 15 Labov (2018) and Lewis (2018b: 384). See also Edwards (2010a) for fuller discussions of the famous debates about African American English and ‘Ebonics’ that attracted so much attention – both popular and scholarly – in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, refer to the brief mention of teacher training, in Chapter 12. The observation that ‘reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired’ is found in Swift (1721: 27). A more recent variant is attributed to Sydney Smith, the nineteenth-century literary cleric: ‘never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.’ 16 Fuller discussion of the definition(s) of bilingualism, its many aspects, its relationship to identity, and so on, may be found in Edwards (2010a).

Notes

215

17 Edwards (1991). See also Newton (2005), who reports that hopes of being torch-bearers for a renewed Gaelic presence in North America were the chief inspirations of his informants. See also Soler and Darquennes (2019) for an important collection of papers about new speakers. On revival leadership, see Edwards (2010b: 108 and 160) and, more generally, Edwards (1995b). 18 Ó Murchadha et al. (2018: 11 and 9), Ó Murchadha and Flynn (2018) and Ó Murchadha and Kavanagh (2022); see also Coughlan (2021). For a discussion of the ‘native speaker’ label – now not uncontroversial – see Chapter 2. 19 Nance (2018: 225). Good general discussions of ‘new speakers’ include a special journal issue edited by Soler and Darquennes (2019), as well as works by Jaffe (2015), Flynn (2020) and Dunmore (2021). Collections that reflect the expanding scope of research on ‘new speakers’ are those of Smith-Christmas et al. (2018) and Walsh and O’Rourke (2018). Together they provide coverage of Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Galician, Basque, Breton, Manx, Francoprovençal and Giernesiei – the last being a variety spoken on Guernsay, known also as Guernésiais. 20 Nunberg (2000: 41 and 43). 21 See Pimienta et al. (2009) and, especially, the excellent recent overview provided by Kelly-Holmes (2019). 22 A general overview is that of Gruffydd Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed (2012). For the campaign for Irish, see Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson (2017); the quotation is from page 241. For the Balinese reference, see Stern (2017). For the Kurdistan article, see Aghapouri and Ahmadi (2021). For broader discussions of nationalism in cyberspace, see Eriksen (2007: the citation is found on page 1) and Saunders (2010). Language Documentation and Conservation is an online journal that regularly publishes articles about social-media and Internet initiatives concerning language revitalization; for a recent example dealing with ‘virtual Frisian’, see Belmar and Heyen (2021). Griffiths (2019) discusses Duolingo, a language-learning website. Catering largely for English speakers, it provides courses in 40 languages – all the big ones, ones, but also Irish, Hawaiian, Esperanto, High Valyrian and Klingon (the last two are fictional varieties created for the Game of Thrones television series, and the Star Trek films, respectively). 23 The META series of publications is under the general editorship of Georg Rehm and Hans Uszkoreit; for the Catalan paper, see Moreno et al. (2012) – the citation is from page 39.

216

Notes

24 Crystal (2006) and McCulloch (2020) write about the Internet affecting language and, more generally, communication patterns. Crystal’s book (its first edition was in 2001) and Danet and Herring (2007) provide comprehensive treatments. See also Jamie Lee (2020) and, especially, Carmen Lee (2016).

11: Language planning and the ecology of language 1

See Baldauf (1982 and 1993/1994) and Chua (2018) on unintended language planning.

2

See Roelli (2021) for an excellent account of the fortunes of Latin, particularly as the language of scholarship.

3

Developments with movable type – the essence of Gutenberg’s invention – had taken place in China a century or two earlier. See Bolton (1992: 200) for the citation about Caxton and the choice of English. Trevelyan (1949: 78–9) provides the story of the merchant.

4

Breatnach (1964: 20); see also Carnie (1996) and O’Byrne (2007: 315) who went further, claiming that ‘the first official language of Ireland today is certainly an invented language.’ See the useful collection by Lane et al. (2018), in which the contributions by Costa et al. and Gal provide some important generalizations. CoronelMolina (2008) discusses the activities of the Quechua academy; see also Zavala (2018).

5

The single most comprehensive overview of language planning remains that of Kaplan and Baldauf (1997). Two journals have the term in their title – Current Issues in Language Planning and Language Problems and Language Planning – and many others regularly publish articles on the topic.

6

Haugen (1966); see also Nahir (1977).

7

See Cobarrubias (1983a, 1983b).

­8

Kedourie (1960: 125). The powerful players need not always be captains and kings, of course. Power is relative, and scholarly linguists or anthropologists have often been in a position to influence or, indeed, dominate the beneficiaries of their interventions.

9

Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 302, 311).

10

Spolsky (2009 and 2021) and Nekvapil (2007). For the journal issue devoted to management, see Nekvapil and Sherman (2015). See also Kimura and Fairbrother (2020).

Notes 11

217

On Taiwan, see Klöter’s (2004) excellent overview.

12 Hayward (1995: 26) is the source for the Haeckel citation. 13 For the ‘first mention’ of language ecology, see Voegelin et al. (1967); see also Haugen (1972) and (1987: 11) for his citation. 14 The note about ‘functioning ecologies’ is from Mühlhäusler (2000: 308). See also Allen (1974: 19). This paragraph is taken from Edwards (2013), where other remarks on ecology may be found; see also Edwards (2008). 15 The citation is from Liddicoat (2004: 3). Slaughter (1985) and Messineo and Wright (1989) have made similar points. For a somewhat more balanced view, see Matiki (2006). 16 Crowley (2000: 368 and 377); see also Crowley (1999 and 2004) and Mühlhäusler (1996: 5). 17 Salminen (1998: 62), Maffi (2001), Fishman (1982b: 8) and Chawla (2001: 118). See also Polzenhagen and Dirven (2004: 22), who discuss the ‘pronounced anti-globalisation, anti-Western and antiCartesian’ stance of the ‘romantic’ ecology-of-language model. 18 Orwell (1944b: 208) 19 Russell (1950) and Orwell (1944b: 230). 20 Mühlhäusler (2000: 339). 21 See Edwards (2002 and 2020b) for comprehensive discussions of language rights.. 22 There are many good treatments of language rights as group rights, of reconciling attention at the level of the group with traditional liberal principles. Some of the more interesting include Kymlicka (1995), May (2001), de Varennes (1996), Wee (2011) – and the excellent collection edited by Kymlicka and Patten (2004). 23 Kukathas (1992) on rights versus claims.

12: Postmodern perspectives 1

The history of science reveals many instances in which amendments were delayed for very long time, of course: Ptolemaic astronomy lasted for well over a millennium. The much weaker foundations of social science mean that theories can come and go with quite incredible speed: see Edwards (2020a and in press-a).

2

For the American Indian studies, see Basso (1970) and Philips (1970 and 1983). See also Julé (2004) on classroom investigations.

218

Notes

3

Gumperz and Hymes (1964), Heath (1983) and Cazden (2001). See Tusting and Maybin on linguistic ethnography, and Rampton (2007: 585) for the citation.

4

Arguments for a desirable ‘discursive turn’ have been made by Potter and Wetherell (1987), Antaki (1988), Harré and Gillett (1994) and Harré and Stearns (1995). See Edwards (2020a) for some relevant criticisms of contemporary social psychology.

5

See Giles and Coupland (1989) for cautionary notes, Garrett et al. (2003) and Kristiansen et al. (2005); see also Ladegaard (2000).

6

Much of the impetus behind the contemporary study of perceptual dialectology has come from Dennis Preston and his associates; see Preston (1993 and 1999) and Long and Preston (2002).

7

The first two citations are from Blommaert (2005: 21 and 6), the last from Van Dijk (2001: 96). The use of the word ‘critical’ is an unfortunate arrogation of an adjective that describes all disinterested investigators.

8

The first citation is from Widdowson (2004: 173), the second from Joseph (2006: 130).

9

For fuller discussion of critical discourse analysis, see the fourvolume collections edited by Toolan (2002) and Wodak (2012). For more of my own description and criticism, see Edwards (2010a and 2013).

10

The citations are from Pennycook (2006: 62) and Blackledge (2019: 434); see also Pennycook (2004). On the implied criticism of literacy, see my discussion in Chapter 11.

11

See Minogue (2001: 27); the other citation is from May (2001: xiii).

12 The citations are from Pennycook (2006: 67 and 2004: 2). 13 The citations here are from Makoni and Pennycook (2007: 2), Creese and Blackledge (2010: 554) and García (2007: xiii). ­14 The citations here are from (Jørgensen, 2010: 152) and Creese and Blackledge (2010: 570). The titles are those of Krause (2021) and Goebel (2015). 15 Williams (1996: 64); see also the discussions by Lewis et al. (2012a and 2012b). 16 Bakhtin (1981 and 1986). 17 See Heugh et al. (2019) for this book, one likely to be of much greater relevance to those working at the coalface than are most of the current academic obscurities. 18 See Edwards (2010a), as well as Mallinson and Hudley (2018) and Snell (2018). Refer also to the discussions of dialect evaluation and ‘error correction’ in Chapters 4 and 10.

Notes

219

19 The citation is from García (2007: xiii). Chomsky can stand as an example of ‘many linguists’ here; see also Anderson (2012). 20 Creese and Blackledge (2010: 551 and 568) and May (2005: 337). 21 Vertovec (2007). 22 Czaika and de Haas (2014). 23 See Billig (2013: 26 and 2019); see also Moosa (2018) and Pavlenko (2019). 24 For Alice, see Lewis Carroll, of course; the book was first published in 1865 and remains easily available in many editions and many languages. At last count, there have been almost 200 translations (more than 30 in Japanese alone). Besides appearing in all the European varieties, Alice has also been published in Swahili (Elisi katika nchi ya ajabu), in Latin (Alicia in terra mirabili) and in Esperanto (Alicio in Mirlando). Appearing in the third chapter, the ‘caucus race’ is one of the several terms given to us by Carroll: it means an energetic but useless circular race.

See also Gigerenzer (2010).

25 Queen Gertrude’s remark is found in Act 2, Scene 2, line 95. See also Orwell (1945: 178).

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Index Although there is some overlap, this index generally omits entries for material that is easily found via chapter titles. Topics that are also referred to outside their chapter–title coverage are noted below: for example, Chapters 9 and 10 deal with language revival, but this listing shows the other pages (35–8, 126–7, 130, 213 n.6, n.7, 215 n.17) on which revival is mentioned. This index also has entries for subjects found under sub– headings (which are not given on the table-of-contents page). Académie française 22, 110–15 academies 47, 112–19, 154, 167, 216 n.4 Achebe, Chinua 153–4 Adam 14–17 Adams, Fanny 103, 209 n.14 African American English (AAE) 66, 69, 157–8, 192, 214 n.15 Alice in Wonderland 195, 219 n.24 Allen, Woody 175 alphabet 81, 129, 166 Appalachian ‘Signs Followers’ 12 argot 71–3 attitudes 63–9, 78–80, 84–5, 186. See also prescriptivism, purism autism spectrum disorder 89–91 autistic savant 89–91 Babel. See Tower of Babel Barth, Fredrik 125, 203 n.5 BBC English 64 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 151–2 Beothuks (‘Red Indians’) 28 Bible 4, 10–17, 100–1, 130, 166, 211 n.10

bilingualism 35, 47–50, 139–46, 158–61, 204 n.8, n.9, 205 n.12, 214 n.16. See also ‘new speakers’ Blimber, Miss 35, 203 n.2 Bolinger, Dwight 111, 168 Boswell, James 73, 141, 206 n.11 Burton, Richard Francis 86–8 Caesar, Julius 19, 202 n.15 calque 81 ­cant 71–3 Caxton, William 166–7, 216 n.3 census 31, 39–40, 50–4, 162, 205 n.13 Chaucer, Geoffrey 67, 102, 166 Chomsky, Noam 75, 219 n.19 Christie, Agatha 103–4 Cicero 102–3, 209 n.14 Confusion of Tongues. See Tower of Babel creole 93–7, 172, 189, 209 n.6 Dante Alighieri 14, 201 n.8 Davis, Thomas 141 deception. See Milgram, observer’s paradox Dee, John 17, 202 n.13

249

Index de Swaan, Abram 3, 156, 200 n.3 dialect continuum 61 Dickens, Charles 35, 71, 102, 203 n.2 dictionaries 115–21 diglossia 139, 145, 192, 212 n.2 discourse analysis 184–7, 218 n.4, n.7, n.9 Donne, John 123–4 Dorian, Nancy 157, 214 n.12 double consciousness 213 n.1 Dryden, John 94, 102, 114, 209 n.2 Duolingo 215 n.22 Eden 9, 13–17, 98 Education. See schools endangered languages 31–9, 127, 139, 146–56, 169, 174–81, 212 n.4. See also language, ‘dead or alive’ English 2–4 Esenc, Tevfik 33, 39 Esperanto 52–5, 86, 97–9, 209 n.9, 215 n.22, 219 n.24. See also language, constructed ethnography 54–5, 184–5, 205 n.15, n.16, 218 n.3 Farrar, Frederic 11–12, 201 n.3 feral children 13 Fishman, Joshua 145, 152–6 Florio, John 3, 83, 200 n.4 folk linguistics 111–13, 185 Gaeltacht 131, 144, 152, 161 gastarbeiter 139, 194 gender 131–6, 204 n.4, 206 n.8, 212 n.16 globalization 55, 139–40, 176, 217 n.17 glossolalia 12, 201 n.3, n.5, n.6 gossip 18, 202 n.14, 212 n.19 ­Gutenberg, Johannes 163, 166, 216 n.1

Hebrew 13–16, 43, 86–8, 126–7, 142, 151–2, 204 n.1 heteroglossia 191 Holmes, Sherlock 45–6, 204 n.4 identity 197–9 ‘idiot savant ’ 89 idiolect 189–92 immersion programmes 45, 77–9, 207 n.5 immigrants 6–7, 43, 46, 78–9, 138–9, 165, 179, 194 imperialism 3, 4, 44, 98, 107, 200 n.5, 204 n.2 Indo-European 23–8 instrumental learning 5, 125–6, 159–60, 197–8 integrative learning. See instrumental learning intelligence 48–50, 204 n.9, 205 n.12 internet 105, 161–3, 215 n.21, n.22, 216 n.24 jargon 71–3 Johnson, Samuel 65, 73, 116–19, 140, 206 n.11, 210 n.10 Jones, William 24–5, 202 n.20 Joos, Martin 71–2 Khayyám, Omar 56, 205 n.17 Koestler, Arthur 43, 204 n.1 kōhanga reo 78–9, 207 n.5 Krauss, Michael 33–5, 157 Labov, William 56–7, 66–7, 157–8, 206 n.6 language accommodation 139–40, 207 n.8 activism 155–61 advocacy 155–61 artificial (see constructed) borrowing 80–2 brokering 79 code-switching 80–2, 190, 194

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constructed 93, 97–100, 215 n.22 (see also Esperanto) ‘dead or alive’ 31–39 (see also endangered languages) domains 143–4, 174, 180–1 families 22–9, 39, 203 n.21 interference 80–1 isolates 23, 26–8, 36 koinēs 96 learning 39, 45, 58, 68, 75–92, 129, 142, 159–62, 207 n.3 mutual intelligibility 11, 61–2, 96 nonstandard (see standard) origins 17–18 origins (religious) 10–17 ­‘primitive’ 21, 65, 128, 131 revival 35–8, 126–7, 130, 213 n.6, n.7, 215 n.17 standard 63–72, 80, 109–17, 144, 157, 161, 166–8, 188, 193, 206 n.6, n.7 standardization 109–17, 144, 161, 166–8 substandard (see standard) symbolism 1, 5, 6, 70, 110, 119, 125–6, 146, 160, 197–9, 211 n.13 transference 80–2 ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ 206 n.5 ‘language nest’. See kōhanga reo ‘languaging’ 190–4. See also ‘translanguaging’ Latin 17–19, 24, 36–7, 47, 84–8, 95, 105, 112, 123, 166, 203 n.3, 216 n.2, 219 n.24 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 16, 98, 202 n.11 Lexicon 20, 62, 166–8, 197 lingua franca 3–4, 34, 47, 93–9, 126, 131, 169, 209 n.1 lingua humana 14–16 linguistic landscape 58–60, 70, 161, 174, 205 n.20, n.21

Index literacy 129–30, 166–7, 175–9, 211 n.12 loan translation 81 loanwords 80–1 Maddrell, Ned 33 Malan, Solomon Caesar 88–9 Malinowski, Bronisław 54–5, 205 n.15 Māori 78–9, 88, 114 Mezzofanti, Giuseppe 86–9, 208 n.15 Milgram, Stanley 55–6. See also deception minority language 137–9, 149–61, 212 n.1 minority-group reaction 150, 213 n.3 missionaries 12, 128–31, 211 n.10, n.12 monogenesis 17, 24 monolingualism 35, 45, 70, 139, 145, 187, 204 n.4 mother tongue 75–9 multiculturalism 4–7, 192, 200 n.7 Murray, James 85–7, 117–18 names 39–42, 58–9 nationalism 4–7, 98, 112, 130, 149, 156, 185, 201 n.8, 215 n.22 ‘native speaker’ 37, 203 n.4, 215, n.18 New Guinea 23–4 ‘new speakers’ 158–61, 215 n.19 Newton, Isaac 166, 188 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 153–4 observer’s paradox 55–7, 144 ­official language/dialect 6, 69–70, 84, 96, 130, 138, 171–3, 200 n.7, 216 n.4 one-parent-one-language principle 47

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Index onomastics. See names onomatopoeia 17 orthography 58, 62, 166–8 Orwell, George 100, 111, 123–5, 177–8, 195, 208 n.9 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 64, 86, 117, 134, 201 n.1 Pentecost 11–13 Pentreath, Dolly 32–3 perceptual dialectology 185, 218 n.6 ‘Pi Day’ 92, 209 n.23 pidgin 93–7, 198, 209 n.6 ‘Plain English’ 206 n.10 Poincaré, Henri 47 Poirot, Hercule 103–4 polygenesis 17, 24 polyglossia 85–92, 208 n.15 prescriptivism 109–21 principle of error correction 157–8 ‘prodigious savants’ 91–2 purism 109–121 Queen’s English Society 114–15, 210 n.8 Quirk, Randolph 110, 112–14 Ramphal, Sridath 4, 200 n.5 register 71–3 religion 43–4, 126–31, 165, 204 n.1, 211 n.7, n.10. See also spirituality residential schools 78, 128 Rieu, Émile 102–3 rights 138, 179–80, 188, 217 n.21, n.22, n.23 Royal Society 98, 114 savants 89–92 schools 34–5, 47, 53, 76–9, 128, 141, 153, 175–6, 191–3, 206 n.7, 217 n.2

Shakespeare, William 3, 20 Sidney, Angela 33, 203 n.1 slang 71–3, 206 n.11 Smith Jones, Marie 33–5, 203 n.1 spirituality 10–17. See also religion statues and monuments. See linguistic landscape Steiner, George 11, 76, 100–2 style 71–3, 80, 105, 189–91 submersion. See immersion programmes superdiversity 193–4 Swift, Jonathan 115, 214n15 ­synaesthesia 92 Tancock, Leonard 102–3, 209 n.14 Tennyson, Alfred 202 n.16 toponyms. See names Tower of Babel 9–10, 16, 201 n.1 ‘translanguaging’ 190–4. See also ‘languaging’ translation 81, 100–6 translation errors 104–6 transnationalism 193 van Parijs, Philippe 4, 200 n.3 Vatican 36, 86 voice appropriation 106–8, 198, 210 n.20 Voltaire 84, 208 n.11 Webster, Noah 119–20, 211 n.12 Weinreich, Max 62, 206 n.1 will-power 149–58 word order 19 Wyld, Henry 66–7, 206 n.5 xenoglossia 11 Zamenhof, Ludwig 97–9, 209 n.8 Zola, Émile 102–3

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