Linguistic diversity, sustainable development, and the future of the past

Suzanne RomaineMerton College, University of Oxford

Barcelona is in danger of becoming a more provincial city than it should be, isolated in a linguistic fog.

Ian Buruma 2001. Road to Babel.

New York Review of Books. May 31. p. 23.

Fog in Channel, Continent cut off?

Responses to threats to linguistic diversity

Do nothing

Document endangered languages

Engage in revitalization activities

It is unfortunately true that very few people (including most of their own speakers) care about the impending demise of small languages.

Joshua Fishman 1995. On the limits of

ethnolinguistic democracy. p. 60.

What if half the world's languages are on the verge of extinction? Let them die in peace.

Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect. November.

Normalizing change

Every day, English, Spanish, Russian and French, along with almost all other living languages are being altered by speakers to suit changing times…. Language evolution is taking place every day; why interfere with it?

David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways. New York Times. May 27:F3.

The reason why languages dieis “not because they are suppressed, but because native speakers yearn for a better life. Speaking a language such as English, French or Spanish, and discarding traditional habits, can open up new worlds and is often a ticket to modernity.”

Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect. November.

the study of languages is a scientific enterprise, the effort to preserve them is not. It is a political question.

David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways. New York Times. May 27:F3.

tribalism is seen as a threat to the development of the nation, and it would not be acting responsibly to do anything which might seem, at least superficially, to aid in its preservation.

Peter Ladefoged 1992. Another View of Endangered Languages. Language, Vol. 68 (4): 809-811.

the elucidation of language in all its complexity is an enthralling scientific enterprise. But ‘saving endangered languages’ is not a part of it.

David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways. New York Times. May 27:F3.

CIPL is fully aware that as an apolitical organisation it is unable to reverse … gradual decline of many languages, because this process is largely determined by social and political factors beyond our influence. …we have to make an effort at least to record languages, … do fieldwork, … write grammars, … dictionaries, and to preserve and make accessible their oral and written literature.

R. H. Robins & R. Uhlenbeck eds. 1991.

Endangered languages. Oxford: Berg. xiii.

Whilst the link between documentation and revitalisation is appreciated (and desirable), the prime focus of the funding is documentation. Applicants are encouraged to structure the documentation in ways which assist the local communities to perceive and foster language and also increase the potential for ELDP funds to be combined with revitalisation funds from other sources.

Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. SOAS.

linguistic salvage work that consists solely of recording for posterity certain structural features of a threatened small language is inevitably a political act, just as any other act touching that language would be…. Fieldwork, however antiseptic it may try to be, inevitably has political overtones.

Nancy Dorian 1993. A Response to Ladefoged's Other View of Endangered Languages. Language 69(3): 575-579.

Preservation [...] is what we do to berries in jam jars and salmon in cans. [...] Books and recordings can preserve languages, but only people and communities can keep them alive.

Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer,

Tlingit [Alaska] oral historians

If the information and political will are present, Ubykh can be revived 500 years from now. Hebrew, after all, was brought back from ancient texts into daily use after 2,000 years.

David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways. New York Times. May 27:F3.

The future of the pastOne of the great ironies of the information age is that while the late twentieth century will undoubtedly have recorded more data than any other period in history, it will also almost certainly have lost more information than any previous era.

Alexander Stille 2003. The future of the past. How the information age threatens to destroy our cultural heritage. New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Indigenous peoples and biolinguistic diversity

The greatest linguistic diversity is found in some of the ecosystems richest in biodiversity inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4% of the world's population, but speak at least 60% of its 6,000 or more languages.

Nettle & Romaine 2001. The Last Survivors. Cultural Survival Quarterly 25(2):44.

Language loss and biodiversity

linguistic and biological diversity have common locations, common causes, and face common threats.

Nettle & Romaine 2000. Vanishing Voices. The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford University Press.

Preserving linguistic diversity through sustainable development

the needs to preserve languages and the need for development in the world's peripheral societies are not opposing ones, but complimentary aspects of the same problem.

freedom of choice is both a principal means and end of development. Good development involves local community involvement, control and accountability.

Languages need communities

[A language] can only exist where there is a community to speak and transmit it. A community of people can exist only where there is a viable environment for them to live in, and a means of making a living. Where communities cannot thrive, their languages are in danger. When languages lose their speakers, they die.

Nettle & Romaine 2000. Vanishing Voices. p. 5.

Inuit of Nunavut

are a dwindling group on the edge of the world. Their suicide rate is horrendous. But they do still speak their language. Another expression of their identity is shooting rare Bowhead whales with .50 caliber hunting rifles. The point here is not to be facetious. The hunts are not just for the meat. They are defended on cultural grounds: shooting whales is deemed essential for the preservation of identity. This, surely, is not what the ecolinguists have in mind.

Ian Buruma 2001. Road to Babel.

Commercial whaling

Inuit children at residential school, Roman Catholic mission, Cape Dorset, NWT 1951

much … in common with reactionary, backward-looking visions [that] seek to preserve the unpreservable, and all are possessed of an impossibly nostalgic view of what constitutes a culture or a 'way of life'… it is modernity itself of which Nettle and Romaine disapprove. They want the peoples of the Third World, and minority groups in the West, to follow 'local ways of life' and pursue 'traditional knowledge' rather than receive a 'Western education'. This is tantamount to saying that such people should live a marginal life, excluded from the modern mainstream to which the rest of us belong. There is nothing noble or authentic about local ways of life; they are often simply degrading and backbreaking.

Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect.