Words and Worlds

BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISMSeries Editors: Professor Colin Baker, University of Wales, Bangor, Wales, Great Britain and Professor NancyH. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Recent Books in the Series Language Minority Students in the Mainstream Classroom (2nd edn)

Angela L. Carrasquillo and Vivian Rodríguez World English: A Study of its Development

Janina Brutt-Griffler Power, Prestige and Bilingualism: International Perspectives on Elite Bilingual Education

Anne-Marie de Mejía Identity and the English Language Learner

Elaine Mellen Day Language and Literacy Teaching for Indigenous Education: A Bilingual Approach

Norbert Francis and Jon Reyhner The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality

Alan Davies Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies

Robert Bayley and Sandra R. Schecter (eds) Language Rights and the Law in the United States: Finding our Voices

Sandra Del Valle Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research, and Practice inMultilingual Settings

Nancy H. Hornberger (ed.) Languages in America: A Pluralist View (2nd edn)

Susan J. Dicker Trilingualism in Family, School and Community

Charlotte Hoffmann and Jehannes Ytsma (eds) Multilingual Classroom Ecologies

Angela Creese and Peter Martin (eds) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts

Aneta Pavlenko and Adrian Blackledge (eds) Beyond the Beginnings: Literacy Interventions for Upper Elementary English Language Learners

Angela Carrasquillo, Stephen B. Kucer and Ruth Abrams Bilingualism and Language Pedagogy

Janina Brutt-Griffler and Manka Varghese (eds) Language Learning and Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Approach

Margaret R. Hawkins (ed.) The English Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice

Vaidehi Ramanathan Bilingual Education in South America

Anne-Marie de Mejía (ed.) Teacher Collaboration and Talk in Multilingual Classrooms

Angela Creese

For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall,Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, Englandhttp://www.multilingual-matters.com

BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 52 Series Editors: Colin Baker and Nancy H. Hornberger

Words and WorldsWorld Languages Review

Fèlix Martí, Paul Ortega, Itziar Idiazabal,Andoni Barreña, Patxi Juaristi, Carme Junyent,Belen Uranga and Estibaliz Amorrortu

UNESCO ETXEA

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto

The authors wish to express their deepest gratitude to the Basque Government,who, in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding signed with UNESCOon 23 July 1997, has financed the World Languages project from its beginnings to thepublication of the present volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Words and Worlds: World Languages Revie/Fèlix Martí … [et al.].Bilingual Education and Bilingualism: 52Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Sociolinguistics. 2. Language and languages. 3. Linguistics.I. Marti, F. (Felix) II. Series.P40.W647 2005303.44-dc22 2005004086

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1–85359–827–5 (hbk)ISBN 1–85359–828–3 (electronic)

Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH.USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

Copyright © 2005 UNESCO ETXEA.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any meanswithout permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby.Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.

Contents

List of Maps ...........................................................................................................................vi

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................vii

Prologue ..................................................................................................................................x

Introduction ............................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1. Linguistic Communities...................................................................................10

Chapter 2. The Linguistic Heritage....................................................................................46

Chapter 3. The Official Status of Languages ....................................................................92

Chapter 4. The Use of Languages in Public Administration ........................................119

Chapter 5. Language and Writing....................................................................................131

Chapter 6. Language and Education ...............................................................................150

Chapter 7. Languages and the Media..............................................................................175

Chapter 8. Language and Religion ..................................................................................189

Chapter 9. Transmission and Intergenerational Use of Language ..............................200

Chapter 10. Linguistic Attitudes ......................................................................................214

Chapter 11. The Threats to Languages ............................................................................225

Chapter 12. The Future of Languages .............................................................................249

References ...........................................................................................................................269

Web References...................................................................................................................281

Appendix 1: Survey Questionnaire .................................................................................284

Appendix 2: Index of Contributors .................................................................................289

Appendix 3: List of Informants ........................................................................................291

Appendix 4: Index of Languages, Families and Varieties ............................................301

Subject Index.......................................................................................................................315

v

List of Maps

Map 1. Genetic Groupings of the Languages of the World

Map 2. Languages in the Caucasus Region

Map 3. Native American Languages in California

Map 4. Sami Language. Language, Territory, and Official Status

Map 5. Languages of South Africa

Map 6. Great Diversity but only Occasional Use in Administration

Map 7. Standardisation in Senegal

Map 8. Languages of Central America (Partial)

Map 9. The Media and Languages Spoken in Tanzania

Map 10. Tamazight Language Areas

Map 11. Attitudes and Indian Languages in Canada

Map 12. Languages of Colombia

Map 13. Language Diversity in China

The maps can all be found between pages 248 and 249.

vi

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this Review would not have been possible without the collabo-ration, contributions, help and advice of a large number of people, institutions andorganisations all over the world. In this respect, the World Languages Review can beconsidered a collective work, indebted to all the contributors listed below. We wouldtherefore like to express our profound gratitude to all those who have disinterestedlysupported this project (we apologise for any possible oversight or inaccuracy the listmay include):

• To the members of the former Board of Directors: José Antonio Ardanza, former President of the Government of the Basque Country;Vigdis Finnbogadottir, Goodwill Ambassador to UNESCO for Languages,Chairperson of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge andTechnology, former President of the Republic of Iceland; Enric Masllorens,Chairman of the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia; Joseph Poth, former Director of theDivision of Languages of UNESCO.

• To the members of the former Scientific Committee: Miquel Siguán (Chairman), University of Barcelona, Barcelona; E. Annnamalai,Central Institute of Indian Languages, (CIIL), Mysore, India; Denis Cunningham,International Federation of Teachers of Living Languages, (IFTLL), Victoria,Australia; E. Nolue Emenanjo, Nigerian National Institute for Languages, Aba,Nigeria; Irina Khaleeva, Moscow State Linguistics University, Moscow, Russia;Luis Enrique López, PROEIB Andes, Cochabamba, Bolivia; Mohamed Miled,Tunis Language Institute, Tunis; Juan Carlos Moreno, Autonomous University ofMadrid, Madrid, Spain; Philippe N’Tahombaye, University of Burundi,Bujumbura, Burundi; Irmela Neu, Fachhochschule, Munich, Germany; RaymondRenard, UNESCO Chair in Linguistic Planning and Didactics of Languages,University of Mons-Hainaut, Belgium; Ignace Sanwidi, Councillor for Educationand the Culture of Peace, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Jean-Jacques VanVlasselaer, University of Carleton, Ottawa, Canada.

vii

• To the experts of recognised prestige who have contributed to the text of the Review: Anvita Abbi, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Xavier Albó, Peasant Research andPromotion Centre; Isaac Pianko Ashaninka and Joaquim Mana Kaxinawa, AcreIndigenous Teachers Association; Ayo Bamgbose, University of Ibadan; WynfordBellin, Cardiff University; Jean-Paul Bronckart, University of Geneva; BernardComrie, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Nancy C. Dorian,Bryn Mawr College; Francis Favereau, University of Rennes 2; Joshua Fishman,Jeshiva University; Barbara F. Grimes (Ed.) Ethnologue; Josiane Hamers, Universityof Laval; Sun Hongkai and Huang Xing, Minority Languages Academic Society ofChina; Joseba Intxausti; Irina Khaleeva, Moscow State Linguistics University;Omkar N. Koul and Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Central Institute for IndianLanguages; Multamia R.M.T. Lauder, University of Indonesia; Chura ManiBandhu, University of Nepal; Grant D. McConnell, University of Laval; BartomeuMelià, “Antonio Guasch” Centre for Paraguayan Studies; Juan Carlos Moreno,Autonomous University of Madrid; Raymond Renard, University of Mons-Hainaut; Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, University of Oxford; Miquel Siguan,University of Barcelona; Miquel Strubell, Open University of Catalonia; AlexeyYeschenko, Pyatigorsk North-Caucasian Centre for Sociolinguistic Studies.

• We would especially like to thank Professor Peter Mühlhäusler and Professor MorenoCabrera for their extensive contributions to Chapters One and Two respectively.

• To each and every one of the informants who filled in the more than one thousandquestionnaires on their languages or the languages they knew. To all of them wesend our warmest thanks for their commitment and for their valuable first-handcontribution (see Appendix 3 for the list of informants).

• To the people and institutions with whom a special partnership was established: Stephen Wurm (†)Clinton Robinson, Ray Gordon, and Barbara Grimes, Joe Grimes and Paul Lewis(Summer Institute of Linguistics, SIL)David DalbyTove Skutnabb-Kangas

• To the Spanish Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO.

• To the National Commissions for Cooperation with UNESCO all over the world.

• To the UNESCO Advisory Committee on Linguistic Pluralism and MultilingualEducation.

• To the UNESCO Centre of Catalonia and the Linguapax Institute.

viii Acknowledgements

• To the University of the Basque Country – Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.

• To Olalla Juaristi, research assistant, UNESCO Etxea.

• A special mention for the direct collaborators of the Technical Committee duringthese years: Maitena Etxebarria, member of the Technical Committee for this reportduring the years 1998–2000, for her dedication during this period; Izaskun Azueta,Mikel Mendizabal, Marta Pardo, Begoña Arbulu, Maider Huarte, MargaretaAlmgren, Xabier Monasterio, José Luis Villacorta, Ane Ortega, Esti Izagirre andOlga Andueza as support staff; finally, UNESCO Etxea – UNESCO Centre of theBasque Country, their work team and their Board of Governors, chaired by JonArrieta and Ruper Ormaza during all these years, and Mikel Mancisidor, Directorof UNESCO Etxea.

Acknowledgements ix

Prologue

The value of language diversity

Languages are humanity’s most valuable cultural heritage. They are fundamental tounderstanding. Each language provides a system of concepts which helps us tointerpret reality. The complexity of reality is easier to understand thanks to thediversity of languages. Progress in understanding is due, amongst other things, to thegrowing linguistic diversity that has characterised the human species. Languages arealso fundamental in the generation and transmission of values. Each languageexpresses a differentiated ethical sensibility. Each language provides us with symbolsand metaphors to deal with the mysterious and the sacred. Furthermore, languagesare not closed or exclusive universes. All of them express the rationality of the humanspecies, as well as its common fears and hopes. Linguistic diversity is the mostobvious manifestation of cultural diversity. In a world characterised by growingprocesses of globalisation, it seems necessary to assert the value of cultural diversityas a guarantee of more democratic and more creative coexistence. Culturaluniformity would mean a decline, to the extent that we would lose our ability to givespecialised answers to specific challenges. The report “Our Creative Diversity”,published by UNESCO in 1995, pointed out what orientations were necessary topreserve diversity without renouncing positive aspects of globalisation. In the field ofcultural and linguistic diversity we often coincide with the criteria of the defenders ofdiversity of living species in the natural environment. In both cases it is said that thereis a need to protect the heritage. The reason is not exclusively ethical. Both the defenceof biological diversity and the defence of cultural and linguistic diversity arenecessary conditions for the well-being of humans, for the balances that protect lifeand for the life quality we aspire to develop.

The defence of languages and cultures is part of a larger project which aspires to amore rational, fairer and freer organisation of humanity. We have entered thetwenty-first century without giving sufficient answers to very serious globalproblems. These could be grouped under seven headings. First of all, the failure inthe system of distribution of the planet’s wealth, which leads to poverty and extremehardship, so objectively described by the successive reports on human developmentby the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Secondly, unsustainableproduction and consumption systems, which increasingly deteriorate the planet’s

x

ecological balance, as studies by the Worldwatch Institute, amongst others, haveshown. Thirdly, the non-fulfilment of international conventions in matters of humanrights, as denounced by the annual reports of Amnesty International and othergovernmental and non-governmental human rights organisations, as well as thepersistence of undemocratic governments. Fourth, the weakness of the UnitedNations and of international tribunals as a result of the inertia of the system of statesovereignties and the excessive weight carried by some states. Fifth, the practice ofvery unbalanced cultural relations to the extent that the technologically dominantculture aggressively imposes its myths and its values on other cultures. Sixth, themarginalisation of many peoples and minorities whose aspiration to various formsof cultural or political self-determination is not sufficiently recognised by centralistand uniformist political traditions. Seventh, the use of enormous scientific and tech-nological resources for security and defence systems which have little bearing on theobjectives of human security and peace.

These challenges also define our responsibilities. We want to build a world withfair economic structures, with a sustainable model of development, with effectiveprotection of human rights, with a United Nations that can exercise governance ofglobality, with harmonious coexistence between cultures and religions, with recog-nition of all peoples and with peace guaranteed by human security.

Globalisation, socio-economic development and protection oflanguage

The protection of the linguistic heritage forms part of the construction of a moreorderly, more balanced and more advanced world. There is a very clear relationshipbetween language policies, economic, cultural and social development, the perfectionof democratic systems, stability and peace. In the past, some very mistaken principlesregarding linguistic questions gained prestige which fortunately now are no longerdefended. It was thought that languages could be ranked according to a hierarchy andthat it was therefore a good thing to replace the use of inferior languages with that ofthe higher languages essential for science or for abstract speculation. Today we knowthat all languages are equal in dignity and in communication and thinking capacityand that the hierarchy among languages is based on prejudices characteristic ofcultural colonialism. It was also believed that linguistic uniformity of the populationwas desirable in the governance of states, in the same way as there was opposition toother aspects of pluralism such as religion or ethics. Today we attach prestige topolicies that can manage complex societies. Pluralism is perceived as an asset. Ethnic,religious or linguistic cleansing belongs to mistaken, primitive political philosophies.

In recent years, studies by sociolinguists have drawn attention to the speed of thechanges affecting linguistic communities. Languages are living realities and therehave always been relations between linguistic communities that have contributed totheir development. Relations of power, wars, migrations and technological changeshave had an important influence in the life of languages. All languages, with the

Prologue xi

passage of time, have evolved. Linguistic contacts have been something verycommon. Many languages have suffered irreversible processes of minorisation or ofrepression and have died. Others have changed through the evolution of thelinguistic community itself and have given rise to new languages. Scientists oflanguage warn us of the conventional nature of our concept of language or oflanguages. In reality what we find are linguistic practices which become diversifiedover the human geography but that do not permit the establishment of clear borders.Political borders are often presented as linguistic borders, but in the majority of casesthere is no real break to be seen in the linguistic practices of areas separated byborders. Furthermore, while in some territories only one language is used, in otherterritories it is normal for various different linguistic communities to coexist in someform and for multilingualism to be a generalised and socially well consideredpractice. What is new in our time is the pace affecting linguistic contacts, the growingcomplexity of all societies from the point of view of their linguistic diversity and thegeneralised risk of linguistic take-overs as a result of certain aspects of globalisation.

Goals of the Review

This Review sets out to present the universal sociolinguistic situation. The Reviewdescribes the linguistic diversity which currently characterises the human speciesand the trends indicating the risks of losing a considerable part of this diversity. TheReview is not intended as a linguistic atlas. Many researchers have prepared mapslocating the linguistic communities and illustrating linguistic contacts. Neither is itintended to provide an official list of the world’s languages or an encyclopaedia clas-sifying each and every one of them. Many works have already been published in thisfield without having reached general agreement as to either the number of languagesthat exist or even a form of reckoning that distinguishes properly between languages,dialects and pidgins. The Review sets out to present significant data on linguisticdiversity and its speeding evolution. The authors of the Review have sought outopinions on linguistic uses and their evolution from individuals, groups and institu-tions concerned with the trends they observe as members of specific linguisticcommunities or as researchers. The Review is intended as an appeal to the responsi-bility of everyone to protect linguistic diversity. In this respect, the Review aims tocontribute to the rise of a linguistic ethic, that is to a set of attitudes in favour of theprotection of the linguistic heritage. Finally, the most important objective of theReview is to establish a set of guidelines with a view to the future. Many actors play apart in the life of linguistic communities: governments, popular movements,teachers, media, religious leaders, non-governmental organisations, research centresand of course self-organised linguistic communities themselves. The Review putsforward guidelines of language policy for all these actors. In the realisation that eachspecific situation has novel aspects, the Review merely recommends language policymeasures on the basis of a typification of situations which would have to be adaptedand completed locally. In many cases the objective of the Review will have been

xii Prologue

achieved if it avoids mistakes that have been very common in public interventions inmatters of language policy. For this reason some authors are sceptical about theappropriateness of promoting language policies. The Review, with its recommenda-tions, tries to allow for modest, sensible language policy measures that favour theweakest or most endangered linguistic communities.

History of the Review

In preparing the Review a fairly complex methodology was established. The Director-General of UNESCO Federico Mayor Zaragoza at a seminar of experts held in Bilbao(Spain) in 1996, proposed the drafting of a review on the world’s languages. Thegovernment of the Basque Country (Spain) provided the funds for the first review inthe framework of the Memorandum of Understanding signed on 23 July 1997.Coordination of the project was entrusted to UNESCO Etxea (UNESCO Centre of theBasque Country). A board of directors was set up for the project, along with a scientificcommittee and a technical committee, which worked at a good pace during the years1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. We decided to launch a survey to get direct infor-mation from the linguistic communities themselves and from a variety of informers.More than one thousand replies were received, which once analysed allowed confir-mation or modification of the research hypotheses used to draft the surveys. At thesame time, continental meetings served to get a better understanding of the linguisticproblems of each continent and request the collaboration of experts for the differentparts of the Review. The Linguapax university network coordinated by the UNESCOChair at the University of Mons (Belgium) collaborated in the different stages of theproject. The scientific committee, chaired by Dr Miquel Siguan, met regularly anddiscussed the successive draftings of the review with the members of the board ofdirectors and the technical committee. The final result is the one offered in this text.

About language diversity and social peace

Linguistic issues have a very fundamental effect on human identities at an individualand a collective level, and it is not easy to deal with linguistic pluralism calmly,rationally and objectively. In some states there are conflicts which have linguisticcomponents. For this reason reflection on the past and future of linguistic communitiescan be seen as over-politicised or destabilising. The Review does not set out to disguisethe political implications of the management of linguistic diversity by states and by theinternational community, but it stresses the pacifying nature of a management oflinguistic pluralism which takes into account the principles of democracy and justice.The Review is offered in the framework of the Linguapax spirit that inspired UNESCOlinguistic activities during many years in the conviction that language policies whichrespect diversity and promote linguistic communication also favour peace. Linguisticsecurity – that is the perception by linguistic communities that they are not going tosuffer deliberate aggressions – is one of the conditions for peace. Multilingualeducation is another of the conditions for peace. Self-enclosed communities that are

Prologue xiii

unable to understand other communities living around them can give rise to preju-dices, fear and intolerance. Peace is built with the enjoyment of rights that affirm one’sown linguistic identity and by promoting relations of understanding and sympathytowards other linguistic communities. These judicious principles constitute theLinguapax philosophy. The Review is inspired in these principles and it is hoped it willcontribute to the solution of conflicts with a linguistic dimension.

This Review is the result of a work done by an independent group of experts. Theauthors have worked in excellent collaboration with the Languages Division, until itwas suppressed in 1999, as well as with many permanent delegations of the UNESCOmember states, but the Review is the responsibility of the technical committee, thescientific committee and the board of directors. Its mistakes and its limitations mustbe attributed to its authors, and as figures in many publications, the opinions andjudgements expressed cannot be considered official opinions or judgements ofUNESCO. The editors offer this text with the intention of contributing to a much-needed international debate on measures to protect the linguistic heritage. Amongstsociolinguists this debate already exists, but it would be good if this Review served toenlarge it. It is indispensable that we find out the points of view of linguistic commu-nities, of state and intra-state governments, of international organisations, of NGOs,of teachers, of experts in the new communication technologies, of cultural promotersin the cities and of everyone interested in the life of languages.

Contributions and limits of the Review

The Review is intended to be of use to all citizens, in the same way as reports on theother great challenges affecting our societies are directed at all the citizens. TheReview aspires to go beyond ignorance and the prejudices which negatively affect thelife of linguistic communities. At the same time, the Review is not intended merely topresent the situation of languages in danger of extinction. It wants to contribute toorganising the relations between all languages according to new criteria, that is therelations between local, national, state, regional and international languages. Alllanguages must think about their future and their mutual articulation. In this respectthe group of experts proposes a text whose interest is universal. In the context ofspeeding globalisation, all languages must imagine and find their place in theuniverse of languages, that is in the set of all human languages. The possible modelsfor international linguistic coexistence must be the subject of debate, and ultimatelyof individual and collective decisions. The Review can help to establish hypothesesfree of private interests of a political, economic or ideological type.

All those who have contributed to the preparation of this Review are conscious ofthe limits of the text they are offering to the public opinion. They deem it to be a firstglobal diagnosis with a series of recommendations the application of which shall besubject to adaptations to each concrete situation. They believe that the Review canorientate a wide international debate and that the observations made by the readerswill help draft future reports about the world languages.

xiv Prologue

Reading notes

Apart from being able to read the Review from the first to the last chapter, the mono-graphic character of the book allows the reader to read each one independently. Thereader can make more rapid progress, for example, following the recommendationsthat one can find at the end of each chapter. Another interesting itinerary would be tofollow all the testimonies of the informants that are marked in italics throughout thetext and that is maybe the more original and authentic contribution of the Review. Agraphic view of world language diversity can be obtained from the thirteen maps ofthirteen different geographical areas that are included in a separate section accordingto the interest that a particular area has as an example of the phenomena analysed ineach chapter, together with the tables and graphics. The various monographic texts,in boxes, of the specialists that have collaborated in the Review, offer a varied andcontrasted way of understanding many of the more highlighted aspects of the situ-ation of the languages of the world. The reader can also consult the different indexes,the extent list of collaborators and informants, the questionnaire used, the list of thelanguages quoted in the Review or the subject index always depending on thereader’s interest.

Prologue xv

Introduction

How can we describe the sociolinguistic situation of the languages of the world in away that lets us assess the situation of each language and at the same time putforward recommendations or patterns of action to help preserve the linguistic andcultural heritage of humanity?

Before a challenge of this scale, the technical committee felt it was essential to turn– amongst other sources – to the speakers of the languages themselves, to ask themembers of the linguistic communities directly for their view of the situation theirlanguage is in and collect first-hand the opinions of the protagonists themselves. Webelieve that the survival of a language basically depends on what its speakers, itscommunity, wants to and can do with their language.

To obtain this information, the technical committee prepared a questionnairespecially for this Review and distributed it to an extensive network of informantsduring the five years of work. The questionnaires have been returned by thoseinformants who wanted to collaborate in this project and to whom we are deeplygrateful (see the respective Appendixes)

The data received via the questionnaire are a basic reference providing the review’smost original information. However, to respond to the review’s objectives of explanationand understanding, we have also had access to other sources. There are many researchand documentation centres on languages that are carrying out systematic work on thecircumstances surrounding languages in different parts of the world. Catalogues, reper-tories, atlases and various works of a linguistic type have been of great use to us andhave provided invaluable references (see the respective Appendixes).

We have turned to many authors and to members of many institutions with arecord in the fight against the loss of linguistic diversity for their collaborationthrough specific contributions. These contributions have enormously enlarged ourperspective and undoubtedly done a lot to enrich this Review.

In involving the largest possible number of specialists and/or cultural agentscommitted to the defence of linguistic diversity and wealth, the meetings held indifferent parts of the world have also been very useful. In the course of events duringthe four years spent preparing the Review, it has been possible to meet many peoplewhose academic speciality, awareness or experience in work on the preservation oflinguistic diversity has made them collaborators in the project. We would like to pick

1

out the international seminars held in Bolivia (Cochabamba, March 1999), the RussianFederation (Elista, May 1999), Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou, June 1999), India(Mysore, March 2000) and Australia (Melbourne, April, 2001), which made it possibleto significantly enlarge the group of collaborators and informants, as well as helpingthe Review to accurately reflect the linguistic situation in different parts of the world.It is essential that we report the different views of what languages are, of howlanguages in contact in certain areas relate to one another, of the uses that bringprestige to languages in each context, of how diversity, complementarity or relationsof domination or dependence of languages are experienced in each area. Experts ineach region, as well as the enlightened members of each community, have a lot to sayand offer with a view to greater understanding of linguistic diversity in the world,avoiding the dangers threatening it and feeding the hope that it can be developed.And our aim has been to reflect this in our Review.

Contents of the Review

The Review consists of twelve chapters of different types. The first two are principallybased on contributions by experts not on the technical committee and do nottherefore refer to data obtained from the questionnaire. Their contributions, like thoseby the rest of the collaborators, complement and balance the contents of the Review.The nine chapters that follow sum up the quantitative and qualitative contributionsgathered by the specific empirical research this Review is based on. As we shall see,these chapters cover the most significant sociolinguistic aspects in an account of thesituation of the languages of the world. The last chapter of the Review makes up theprospective section. It answers one of the basic objects of this review: to put forwardaction plans for languages to the different agents involved.

In the course of the different chapters, contributions by various specialists areincluded in a different format. Similarly, the maps included have been drawn up on thebasis of the information obtained from different sources, to illustrate some of the mostsignificant areas from the point of view of linguistic diversity. These additions are of avaried nature and the feelings they reflect do not necessarily coincide. They complementthe views of the technical team and substantially enrich the contents of the review.

The contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds: recognised linguists,sociolinguists who have dedicated all their reflection and life to the cause of thesurvival of linguistic diversity, politicians responsible for linguistic affairs in theircountries, activists belonging to indigenous communities who tell of their own expe-riences, teachers, journalists, writers, etc., all united behind the cause of linguisticsurvival, even though the forms and strategies adopted may be different.

As we have already said, the voices of the voluntary informants play a central part inthis document. There are abundant accounts taken from the questionnaire andincluded amongst the chapters. We feel that this Review must also be a meeting pointand a place for exchanging initiatives. In it appear similar experiences in places farapart and differing experiences in neighbouring communities, even in cases of groups

2 Words and Worlds

with similar social characteristics. We feel that a mutual knowledge of these experienceswill be enriching for everyone and will encourage new relations of exchange.

We have dedicated Chapter One to clearing up terminologies and to understandingthe concept of linguistic community. This is the object of the work of ProfessorMühlhaüsler. We believe his particular knowledge of one of the geographical regionswith the greatest linguistic wealth, the Pacific and Australia, makes a basic contri-bution to understanding the data supplied by the informants and to guiding thepolicies of preservation and furtherance that should be promoted. We feel his reflec-tions on the concept of language, a concept which tends to be heavily biased byWestern experience and which can cause so much confusion when it comes to under-standing and especially intervening in other experiences, are particularly relevant.The members of the technical committee consider that his view of linguistic ecologyallows a suitable description of very diverse linguistic situations which will bereflected through the data gathered from the questionnaires.

Chapter Two, called “The Linguistic Heritage”, offers a general overview of theplanet’s linguistic diversity and includes an extensive contribution on the subjectfrom a classical typological standpoint by the collaborating lecturer and member ofthe scientific committee, Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera. The technical committee felt itwas important to include this contribution in the Review because it provides ageneral overview of the planet’s linguistic diversity analysed by number of speakers,linguistic families and geographical areas, constituting an essential academicreference in a review such as ours. In addition, it was felt important to include thiscontribution because it is not just a sterile academic description but points out thedangers threatening diversity. It also provides a personal view of the reasons why thediversity of languages is endangered.

Chapter Three deals with the analysis of the status of languages. In particular, itcovers the legal or official status to be seen on the global linguistic scene. In this chapterwe would like to point out the contribution by Professor Annamalai, who takes a noveland realistic approach to linguistic policy aimed at dealing with multilingual relationsgrounded on rigorous theories. This proposal not only has implications for tradi-tionally multilingual societies like India, this specialist’s country of origin, but also hasimplications of relevance for most parts of the planet. Multilingual relations are alsoarising in Western countries; his proposals are especially interesting as an alternativeto the monolingual model imposed by Western tradition and the many problems itposes in approaching a reality which is multilingual and multicultural.

Following this, chapter four analyses the use of language in administration.Administration is the area which in certain linguistic situations best reflects the legalstatus of the language. Writing, education, the media and religion are the spheres ofuse analysed in the following chapters: Chapters Five, Six, Seven and Eight. Theenormous disparity in sociolinguistic situations and the different ways they are seendo not allow simplifications. It is important to understand that these are alwaysdynamic processes and that there is never just one factor to explain the reality of alanguage. Multifactorial analyses are what allow greater realism in dealing with the

Introduction 3

information provided in the accounts gathered. Chapter Nine analyses the trendsobserved in the intergenerational transmission and use of languages. Chapter Tenstudies linguistic attitudes and Chapter Eleven sums up the dangers and threats theinformants observe in the languages and communities mentioned. These threesections provide the most disturbing information contained in the review. In fact,intergenerational transmission as observed in the sample under study is in analarming situation. Almost 50% of languages are no longer habitually transmitted.Intergenerational use of languages as reviewed by the informants seems to have dete-riorated even more, since only 30% of the languages studied are used among theyounger generations of their communities. In the remaining cases, communicationbetween young people is established in a different language, generally the dominantone. The title of Chapter Eleven, “The Dangers and Threats Facing Languages”, is notvery optimistic either. However, as can be seen in the plentiful accounts reproduced,more and more linguistic communities are becoming aware of the dangers threat-ening their languages and therefore their cultures and their very communities, andare beginning to rebel against the trend towards linguistic substitution which only afew had noticed until now.

Finally, Chapter Twelve looks to the future. It points out the need to establish newlinguistic models based on the acknowledgement and celebration of cultural andlinguistic diversity. Other highlighted topics are the importance of universalisedmultilingual education that should not be limited to the learning of a few large circu-lation languages, the need for progress in the field of linguistic rights, the access ofsmall and medium sized linguistic communities to the new information technologiesor enhancing the value of the own language as an element of the economic devel-opment of communities. This chapter also puts forward some proposals to betterstudy the linguistic contact and the rapid evolution of diversity, especially caused byincreasing population movements and migrations. It recommends the creation ofnew research centres in sociolinguistics and suggests specific responsibilities forUNESCO and for the states. The chapter ends by connecting languages with peaceand welcoming the new languages that will appear during the 21st century.

The questionnaire

In the course of forty questions, most of them open, we have gathered the character-istics of languages and of their linguistic communities, regarding their denomination,uses, representations, attitudes and the linguistic expectations shown by the speakersof different languages. The questionnaire was drawn up according to criteria nowclassical in sociolinguistics, such as Haugen’s (1972), mentioned by Mühlhaüsler inthis same review (see Appendix 1).

In spite of some difficulties, the questionnaire has had a relevant virtue; it hasallowed the informants great freedom in their answers. This fact is especially worthnoting as it has become a very valuable aspect in the review. The informants havesupplied the facts they felt were most relevant, regardless of whether or not they were

4 Words and Worlds

required of them. Obviously this very aspect could reduce the credibility of theresults, just as it is obvious that the diversity of the informants (organisations,linguists, members of the community, etc.) could have the same effect. However, sincethese two facts (differences in the perception of the relevance of the information anddifferences in the involvement of the informants) were detected at the beginning, thetechnical committee has chosen, first of all, to pay greater attention to the qualitativeinformation and, secondly, to include, as well as the objective data, the informants’representations of the reality.

Subjection to objective data often involves a distortion of reality, especiallyinasmuch as it is altered by non-objective elements (feelings, desires, opinions, etc.).In the case of this World Languages Review, it is obvious that emotional or professionalinvolvement impregnates the objective elements and we have therefore felt thatrepresentations of reality should also form part of the review. After all, not a fewlinguistic normalisation projects have failed because they did not take into accountthe wishes, ideologies, feelings, etc. of those affected.

Reading the questionnaires, we have been struck by the informants’ urge tocommunicate and by the hope this Review has evidently stirred up in many commu-nities, and we believe that rather than acting as depositories, our duty is to makethese voices reach the largest possible number of people and organisations.

The language sample

The research this Review is based on is still in progress and has been receiving ques-tionnaires uninterruptedly since 1998. We have received more than 1000 question-naires, and although they sometimes refer to the same language, the total number oflanguages to which we had access is more than 800. The quantitative analysis,however, has been carried out using a sample of 525 languages. This sample corre-sponds to the languages received as of July 2001, the deadline established forbeginning the statistical analysis. The statistical treatment made use of the analysisprocedures offered in the SPSS program (Statistical Package for Social Sciences).Different samples were taken: from 100 languages, 400 languages and 525 languages.We have been able to observe that, regardless of the number of languages or question-naires processed, the main figures, as well as the general trends, remain constant.

The range of situations of the languages for which we have received informationprovides an outlook as disturbing as it is suggestive. The sample contains languageswith large numbers of speakers and used for a large number of purposes and languageswhich are now down to their last speakers, expanding languages and disappearinglanguages, languages that are official in some states and that are disappearing in others,usually marginalised by the authorities-in short, a wide range of situations.

The technical committee has in no case wanted to demonstrate a common denomi-nator in these situations, so much as, on the contrary, to reflect all their disparity and withit the many strategies that intervene in the dynamics of languages, since by comparingand contrasting, ideas can arise that contribute to the preservation of linguistic diversity.

Introduction 5

Although the sample we have worked with is clearly limited (approximately 10%of all the world’s languages), the results clearly show what other specialists havealready stated: one of the underlying causes of the acceleration in the trend towardsworld linguistic uniformity is the increasing inequality between languages and, ofcourse, their speakers, such that the growth of some languages involves a reductionin the number of speakers of many others and/or their disappearance. This processhas harmful consequences in that it drags other communities after it by destroyingtheir traditional web of communications, as we shall see later.

The sample reveals trends in the sociolinguistic behaviour of linguistic commu-nities and makes it possible to plan actions aimed at restoring or preserving thelinguistic balance. However, the Review does not present detailed figures for each ofthe languages making up the sample. It is not a catalogue in which to look for specific,singularised information.

Details of the language

The authors of the Review are convinced that standardising the names of languagesor glottonyms is an urgent task, especially in an increasingly interconnected world.The enormous task of documentation carried out in this respect by the Ethnologuestrikes us as a basic and indispensable contribution for this process of normalisation,which should facilitate the identification of languages and correct terms that areunsuitable for a variety of reasons (pejorative or inaccurate terms, unnecessaryheteroglottonyms, etc.).

The request for information in this respect is intended to propose suitable names,giving preference to the use of the autoglottonym or name the speakers themselvesgive their language. In other words, in those cases in which there is no traditionaldesignation and whenever the term is pejorative, we advocate the use of the autoglot-tonym to identify the language.

The authors of the Review do not want to overlook those cases in which there isno glottonym and in which creating one could contradict the cosmovision of thepeople concerned. After all, the concept of languages is a construct alien to manycultures. In these cases, and for want of further discussion of this issue in thesphere of linguistics, we propose the use of the auto-ethnonym or name of theethnic group the speakers belong to and, failing this, some historical orgeographical term allowing its identification. Obviously, this proposal still acceptsthe notion of language as an entity with fixed limits, but we do not believe there isany alternative that can be proposed without prior discussion in depth. Wetherefore wish merely to draw attention to this issue and propose it as a subject forfuture reflection.

In connection with the question of glottonyms, linguistic variation, and with itlinguistic filiation, inevitably arises. The inference is clearly that the attribution of alanguage to a specific group or family basically depends on the informants’ theo-retical option in the case of professional linguists and in other cases on their

6 Words and Worlds

perception and/or intention. The same language can be seen either as a variety ofanother language or else as an independent language or as a language group.

Even when linguistics has given priority to the criterion of intelligibility in deter-mining linguistic borders, the fact is that the nature of languages as a continuum, therelations established between communities, the reciprocity or otherwise of intelligi-bility and, in short, the actual wish to understand, clearly interfere with this criterion.At the same time, the notion of languages as discreet entities usually overlooks theirhistorical development apart from their “official” history, which sets out to give afragmented view of communities, as though their historical background had nothingto do with the surrounding communities.

All of this raises questions that go far beyond technical aspects of linguistic filiationand pose another challenge: how to designate the set of intelligible varieties weconsider “languages”. It is obvious that using a single term distorts the perception ofvariety and contributes to uniformity, but it is also true that the use of various termsfavours fragmentation and this can be fatal for the preservation of linguistic diversity.The authors of this Review believe that this is another of the theoretical aspects which,on account of their importance in the life of communities, deserve to be treated indepth over and above technical aspects.

The informants

We have tried, often successfully, to obtain first-hand information, that is, to ensurethat the information came from informants who were members of the respectivelinguistic communities or were closely connected to them. Thus more than half of theinformants, approximately 60%, say they belong to that linguistic community.Identification with the community, furthermore, is backed up with reasons of ethnicand/or linguistic membership. Almost 40% say they are not members of thecommunity. These are researchers or people who, in one way or another, are workingfor the community in question. Some researchers, though, identify themselves asmembers of the community precisely because of their work or because they havelearned the language.

I belong to the community by descent and blood ties. I also speak (the language) fluently.(Maori, New Zealand)

I consider myself a member (of the community) because I am part of that culture and myparents brought me up in the belief that I am a native like them, I was born in thatcommunity. (Yine, Peru)

I am a speaker and writer, but I am not a native or a native speaker. I am not a gypsy but Iknow the four dialects of the Romany language that are spoken in Romania by the Roms(Gypsies). (Romany, Romania)

The significant proportion of informants who say they belong to the linguisticcommunity for which they are supplying information strikes us as a decisive factor.

Introduction 7

We know that this adds subjectivity to the information but, in view of the circum-stances, it is obvious that no-one knows the linguistic reality like the memberinvolved. Since the aim is to create awareness and help to reverse the trend towardsuniformity, we believe that this connivance with his or her linguistic reality, far fromdetracting from the review’s validity, enriches it.

This element of will must be taken into account in analysing the results, since theReview includes details of languages whose speakers are already aware of the need torevitalise it or of its value for the community in general, and, in the case of thespecialists (language informants), the very fact that the languages have research andresearchers itself singles them out from the majority of the world’s languages.

Appendix 2 and Appendix 3 contain a list of all the people and institutions whohave contributed to this Review so far. We would like to take this opportunity toexpress once again our profound gratitude to all of them.

The contributions

We have tried to include contributions by experts representing a variety ofgeographical, sociopolitical and cultural contexts, coming from different scientific,social and cultural backgrounds and belonging to a range of academic, political orsociocultural institutions. Although they all show a positive awareness as regardspreservation of the linguistic heritage, one can find opinions that may differ amongstthemselves or from the approach taken by the technical committee. We feel this is areflection of the reality which need not be hidden in working for the common cause ofthe defence of linguistic diversity.

In spite of all the efforts, however, we realise that we have not managed to contactall the recognised specialists on the subject. What we can say is that the requests forparticipation have had a widespread general acceptance for which we areprofoundly grateful.

The contributions by the collaborators are included in the text in a different format.The content and form, of course, is the responsibility of the author signing them. Themembers of the technical committee are responsible for their placement. We aregrateful for their generosity in sharing their experience and knowledge in favour ofthe common cause which involves us all: the preservation of linguistic diversity.

With a view to the next Review

We believe the usefulness of the project also lies in its nature as a reference forsuccessive editions and it allows to enlarge the data base. It is a point of departurewhich raises many elements for reflection, offers a wide range of initiatives for thepreservation of languages which are being developed in a wide range of communitiesand hopes to take advantage of and publicise the talent and creativity of manycommunities in the preservation of their linguistic heritage.

At the same time, the prospective side of the review feeds on the multiple effectiveactions in different parts of the world, actions that have rarely served as a model for

8 Words and Worlds

other communities, on account of the obstacles to information and to its dissemi-nation. We have tried to palliate these obstacles by listening closely to their proposalswith the explicit object of acting as a mouthpiece for all those who, having madevaluable contributions to the preservation, revival and recovery of their languages,have been generous enough to share their experiences with us.

The pages that follow are an initial approach to the enormous wealth of infor-mation gathered in the course of preparing this Review. Other readings, other inter-pretations, will help spread it farther and better, as established and growingcommunications networks, especially through computers, gather and disseminatethis splendid documentation.

For the time being, in response to all the information received, we are presentingthis Review with the intention of:

• Generating pride, self-esteem and prestige in the speakers and promoters of theworld’s languages, so that they will continue to work in favour of their heritagewithout looking down on or weakening languages with which they share speakersand their communicative space.

• Providing models for action, raising awareness and promotion that have beenpositive in their respective communities so that they can provide an incentive anda stimulus in other situations and one to continue in those where they have alreadybeen tried successfully.

• Denouncing threats and warning of the dangerous situations languages are facing,so as to rouse awareness in the authorities and the general population in favour ofthe preservation and development of the linguistic heritage.

• Attracting the support of those who have the responsibility and the power toreverse the trend towards linguistic uniformity.

The Technical Committee:

Fèlix Martí, Paul Ortega, Itziar Idiazabal, Andoni Barreña, Patxi Juaristi, CarmeJunyent, Belen Uranga and Estibaliz Amorrortu

Introduction 9

Chapter 1

Linguistic Communities

This Review is concerned with languages, language communities or speech commu-nities along with language ecologies. The reader will find that the terminology used isnot new, though we would like to underline the fact that the traditional definitions ofsome terms and ideas are not adequate to describe the real situation of languages in theworld. Thus, we wish to make clear that languages are neither abstract entities nor inde-pendent systems as the Western Linguistics tradition has portrayed them to be.Languages are rather historical products related to each other that the communities usefor several purposes: to communicate, to represent their world and to generate thoughts.

The attempts to formalize certain aspects of a language, such as the grammar of alanguage, do not tackle the real nature of a language, that is, its social aspect.Languages are social and identifying realities, they are thoughts and valuesprovoking realities and the strict framework of a grammar or a classical dictionarycannot handle such aspects of the language. A great variety of parameters is neededin order to define a language as an ecological system.

The technical committee considered it necessary to devote a chapter to clarify theterminology used in the field. Professor Mühlhäusler (University of Adelaide,Australia), who studies linguistic realities very different from the Western ones and isan expert on languages from Australia and the Pacific area, has been invited to writethis chapter for the Review.

As Professor Mühlhäusler points out, the chapter presents many of the terms thathave been used to describe sociolinguistic realities that are different from thelanguages and patterns of language use around the globe. The chapter also presentsthe set of parameters that will be used to define the language ecologies. The question-naire designed to collect the data in the review is also based on this parameterframework that was originally presented by Haugen (1972). The chapter and thewhole review describe the different situations of languages and language ecologies,not with great thoroughness but indicating which aspects of the relations amongdifferent linguistic groups are the healthiest or the most pathologic for the purpose oflinguistic diversity.

We believe that the clarifications of the terminology as well as the description of thedifferent language ecologies are an accurate reflection of the descriptive andprescriptive aims of the review.

10

1. Introduction

This chapter will be concerned with a number of issues that are fundamental to thetask of understanding the vast diversity of languages and patterns of language usearound the globe. It is hoped that the understanding gained can contribute to theurgent task of maintaining linguistic and cultural diversity. The problem which gaverise to the UNESCO review of the state of the world’s languages is that linguistic andcultural diversity, which until the advent of the modern industrial age was a self-regulating and self-sustaining system, is no longer self-sustaining and like otherphenomena such as climate or biological diversity, requires management. Left to itsown devices, linguistic and cultural diversity is likely to rapidly decline, giving wayto monolingualism and monoculturalism. A major challenge to scholars working inthis area is the widespread perception that we are witnessing a natural process ofcompetition between less fit and more fit ways of communication, the end of whichonly a few competitors will survive. There is a very strong intellectual tradition inWestern thinking about language that this is also a desirable process, that thereplacement of a very large number of languages and ways of communication by afew modern standardised languages will lead to greater economic efficiencies, adecrease in human conflicts and greater human well-being. Linguistic diversity inpopular perception is a reflection of the curse of Babel.

The idea that linguistic diversity is an asset or even a treasure is widespread intraditional societies that cherish multilingual skills, though the wish to preserve one’sown small language is growing stronger among many ethnic groups in modernindustrialised societies as well. The revival of minority languages in Spain, France orBritain are recent examples of this. Fishman (1991), one of the principal theoreticianson language revival, has strongly emphasised the rationality of this wish and we cannow witness a reframing of the question, ‘How can we achieve greater efficienciesthrough the reduction and streamlining of diversity?’ to a new question, ‘How canlinguistic diversity be employed in solving social, environmental and technologicalproblems?’ This reframing goes hand in hand with the emergence of a new paradigm,the ecological paradigm in many areas of enquiry, including linguistics (Fill &Mühlhäusler (eds) 2001/Mühlhäusler 2002).

The ecological paradigm has a number of characteristics, including the following:

• considerations not just of system internal factors but wider environmental ones;• awareness of the dangers of monoculturalism and loss of diversity;• awareness of the limitations of both natural and human resources; • long-term vision; and• awareness of those factors that sustain the health of ecologies.

A fundamental principle of management is that one can only manage what one knows.Two related principles are one can only manage what one can talk about and one can onlymanage what one cares for. This paper aims at summarising existing knowledge on the

Linguistic Communities 11

issue of speech communities and to draw attention to the important issue of talking aboutthe phenomenon. It is argued that existing knowledge is patchy and that unreflected useof words such as ‘language,’ ‘tribe’ or ‘community’ make management very difficult andwhether political and economic leaders care about languages remains to be seen.

An appreciation of linguistic diversity alone, it is argued, is not enough. It presup-poses an understanding of the nature of this diversity. The complexity of the issues,the limitations of time and space and the urgency of action make it necessary to resortto shortcuts, simplification and abstractions and, above all, focussing on a smallerselection of parameters that are desirable in a parameter-rich ecological approach.

2. Methodological considerations

In what follows I propose to adopt the classical ‘scientific’ method of proceeding froma research question to observation, classification and eventual theory formation. Putdifferently, I shall try to develop a tool or theory which can be used to reverse the trendtowards language loss. Given the novelty of the problem, I shall concentrate heavily onthe pre-theoretical stages of observation and classification. I shall be guided by thesuggestion of the editors of this volume and carry out my observation and classifi-cation from the perspective of the community of users of a language or languages.

I shall further be guided by Haugen (1972) who in his seminal paper ‘The Ecologyof Language’ has suggested a list of questions to be asked.

For any given ‘language1’, then, we should want to have answers to the followingecological questions:

• What is its classification in relation to other languages? This answer would begiven by historical and descriptive linguists.

• Who are its users? This is a question of linguistic demography, locating its userswith respect to locale, class, religion or any other relevant grouping.

• What are its domains of use? This is a question of sociolinguistics, discoveringwhether its use is unrestricted or limited in specific ways.

• What concurrent languages are employed by its users? We may call this a problemof dialinguistics, to identify the degree of bilingualism present and the degree ofoverlap among the languages.

• What internal varieties does the language show? This is the task of a dialectologythat will recognize not only regional, but also social and contactual dialects.

• What is the nature of its written traditions? This is the province of philology, thestudy of written texts and their relationship to speech.

• To what degree has its written form been standardised, i.e. unified and codified?This is the province of prescriptive linguistics, the traditional grammarians andlexicographers.

12 Words and Worlds

1The notion of ‘given language’ is highly problematic and will be discussed in greater detail below.

• What kind of institutional support has it won, either in government, education, orprivate organisations, either to regulate its form or propagate it? We may call thisstudy glotto-politics.

• What are the attitudes of its users towards the language, in terms of intimacy andstatus, leading to personal identification? We may call this field of ethnolinguistics.

• Finally we may wish to sum up its status in a typology of ecological classification,which will tell us something about where the language stands and where it isgoing in comparison with the other languages of the world.

3. Language communities, speech communities, language ecologies:some terminological issues

A major problem in doing this is a terminological one. The received wisdom amongboth academics and lay persons in Western societies is that the notion of language andthe associated notion of language community is a relatively unproblematic one, thatlanguages are somehow ‘given’ and can be objectively described, classified andanalysed. However, on closer inspection, it emerges that there is no such thing as acultural neutral definition of a language and that Haugen’s notion of a ‘given’language cannot be easily applied. Rather we are dealing with quite diversephenomena which from time to time have been labelled ‘language,’ mainly by profes-sional linguists or by language policy makers. The experience of most writers on thematter of European national languages has strongly influenced their views of whatlanguages are. However, even an inspection of European national languages demon-strates considerable heterogeneity. The historical forces which have brought into beingstandard French differ greatly from those involved in the development of standardItalian, Norwegian, Bosnian or Modern Greek, one of the differences being the extentof deliberate human planning by speakers or outsiders. Haugen’s characterisation ofthe Scandinavian languages as ‘cultural artefacts’ (1972) can be extended to a widerange of other languages. Languages thus can be seen as the outcome of a unique mixof cultural and historical forces. The diversity of human ways of speaking is not anatural process of speciation and the practice of using the label ‘natural language’ is anexample of the typical process of myth creation: the confusion of history with nature.

That languages are the outcome of a vast number of historical processes acting onan as yet ill defined natural human language ability increases rather than decreasesthe importance of diversity. The maintenance of languages as memories of culturalexperience and adaptation to specific conditions would seem far more important thanthe maintenance of relatively superficial varieties of the universal theme ‘language’.

In this connection we need to examine how linguists have regarded the relationshipbetween languages and the world. In Western linguistics one can distinguish four views.

(1) Independency hypothesis (Chomsky, cognitive linguistics). Language is forcognition – it exists in a social and environmental vacuum.

(2) Language is constructed by the world (Marr).

Linguistic Communities 13

(3) The world is constructed by language (structuralism and post structuralism).(4) Language is interconnected with the world – it both constructs and is constructed

by it (ecolinguistics).

The ecological view would appear to be the most complex, but at the same time themost realistic as it caters for the fact that languages combine independence from theworld with dependency on the world as well as their ability to shape the worldthrough a range of ecological interdependencies. The problem with finding a satis-factory definition of language is encountered again when defining the notion ofcommunity (see below).

4. Types of languages

The following is an attempt to identify some of the principal parameters that can beemployed in characterising different social types of languages. Individual languagescan be conceived as a kind of matrix of parameters including:

4.1 Bounded versus continuous

Before the emergence of nation states and colonisation, language boundaries did notexist in many parts of the world. Instead, there were dialectal or language chainsspoken over wide areas. There was for instance a Germanic dialect chain locatedbetween the north of Scandinavia and the south of Italy. Adjacent varieties weremutually intelligible with intelligibility declining with increasing geographicaldistance. Thus speakers of varieties on both sides of the present border between theNetherlands and Germany could intercommunicate freely, whilst the same speakersexperienced difficulties understanding varieties spoken a few hundred kilometresfurther south or north. Intelligibility on such a chain resulted from close structuraland lexical similarities of adjacent varieties but also from institutionalised conven-tions for endo and exolexicons. This terminological distinction means that speakersactively use a particular lexical item (say British English ‘tap’ or ‘bucket’) whilstpassively recognising other speech varieties (American English ‘faucet’ and ‘pail’).Table 1 shows how in the ‘Western Desert’ language of Central Australia a single endolexeme was accompanied by up to eight exolexemes which eased understanding overa wide area (Table 1, based on Hansen 1984). The // indicates the boundary betweenendo (to the left) and exolexicon (to the right) in a number of desert communities.

The word listed first is the preferred or most frequently used synonym within thatcommunity. All words listed before the double slash // are primary synonyms usedin the community. Words listed after the double slash // are secondary synonyms –known but not used.

Other well known language chains have been documented for West Africa and inmany parts of the Pacific, including the New Guinea Highlands (Wurm and Laycock1962), Micronesia (Bender 1971) and Vanuatu (Tryon 1979) we find long chains ofinterrelated dialects and languages with no clear internal boundaries. As regards

14 Words and Worlds

Ling

uistic

Co

mm

un

ities

15

Table 1: Words used to translate English ‘small’ in different communities of Western Desert Language

COMMUNITIES WORDS

Ernabella tjukutjuku tjimpatjimpa kulunyra// tjap wiima

Giles kulupa kulunypa tjukutjuku tjapu wiima// tjulyitjulyi tjulyi,nyamanypa

Warburton Ranges kulupa kulunypa tjukutjuku// tjulyitjulyi

Papunya tjukutjuku wiima// nyamanypa tjaputjapu tjulitjuli yamanypa

Balgo Hills lampan (pa) tjuku wiima nyamany (pa) tjapu tjulitjuli tjumpili

Christmas Creek lampan (pa) tjuku tjukutjuku tjukunya nyamanpa ngini// tjulitjuli,wiima,tjumpili, nyuyi

Fitzroy Crossing tjuku lampan tjukutjuku tjutamata nyuyi tjulitjuli tjapu, wiima,nyamanypa,tjumpili

La Grange tjukku tjukutjuku tjapu tjulitjuli tjapuwata tjulyi nyamanypa//,wiima, lampan,warrku,tjumpili

Jigalong tjuku tjukutjuku tjulitjuli tjapuwata// nyamanypa kulunypa

Wiluna tjuku tjukutjuku tjapu tjulitjuli warrku tjapuwata// tjumpili,nyamanypa,wiima

Micronesia, a group of very closely related languages are spoken all the way fromTruk in the east to Tobi in the west. As observed by Bender (1971) ‘there are some indi-cations that it is possible to establish a chain of dialectal connections from one end tothe other with all contiguous dialects being mutually intelligible.’

Language boundaries, one might argue, are not so much a linguistic given, but acreation of linguists, administrators and missionaries. Over time, Western andWesternised thinking has become so habituated to the concept of language boundarythat it has become to be regarded as a natural fact.

The popular perception is reinforced by the large number of language maps andatlases and indeed the entire subdiscipline of dialectology which is predicated on thenotion that it is possible to establish locations and boundaries. Dialectologists, forinstance, seek to define a dialect2 as being surrounded by bundled isoglosses. This turnedout not to be the case, even when the objects of mapping were carefully abstractedlanguages rather than patterns of speaking (for further discussion see Bailey 1996).

It is possible of course to map the political boundaries within which a particularlanguage has official status, for instance, the parts of Belgium where German is offi-cially spoken but this hardly gives an indication where languages are actually used.

Political boundaries, the development of national standard languages and changesin speakers’ mobility has greatly affected the viability of language chains, or at leastseverely curtailed their geographical range. Language chains are among the mostendangered linguistic phenomena.

4.2 Focussed versus unfocussed languages

Whereas it is widely assumed that a standard grammatical code is a precondition forsuccessful intercommunication, there are a number of documented cases wherespeakers communicated quite successfully without sharing a grammatical code. LePage and Tabouret-Keller’s study of Belizian Creole (1985) documents an astonishingdiversity of grammatical and lexical practices among Creole speakers in ColonialBritish Honduras, shared norms emerged only through ‘an act of identity’ followingthe establishment of an independent state Belize where the inhabitants of the newnation began to emulate the linguistic habits of their political leaders, a process calledfocussing. The extent to which languages are focussed depends on the presence andrecognition of linguistic role models.

One might wish to argue that the absence of clear role models is a contributing factorin the structural disintegration of many traditional languages. Charpentier (2001) for

16 Words and Worlds

2The definition of dialect is primarily a sociopolitical one – “a dialect is a language without anarmy and navy” is a common pronouncement of sociolinguists. Being labelled a dialect orpatois (a Romance form of speech in French-speaking countries) can contribute to endan-germent of a way of speaking. There is far less concern for the disappearance of dialects thanfor the disappearance of languages and there are fewer funds for dialects than for minoritylanguages. A dialect, apart from lacking military hardware, thus has come to mean a languagelacking official recognition and funding.

instance, brought attention to the fact that demographic and social changes in Vanuatuhave greatly diminished the number and authority of older speakers who in the pastprovided role models, an outcome of the absence of older speakers are less focussedyoung people’s varieties such as Young People’s Dyirbal described by Schmidt (1985).

4.3 Intergenerationally continuous languages

Language transmission is often conceived as a process where children acquire or gethanded down the language of their parents. As Hockett (1950) has shown, trans-mission can take many forms as can continuity over time. Hockett suggests acontinuum situation ranging from those where children living in isolated hamletswith adults caretakers to creolization where children construct a new languagetogether with other children. Intergenerational continuity is often reinforced by socialinstitutions, including schools, literacy or language training by elders. The continuityof the Torres Strait language Miriam Mer, for instance, was enforced by languagemonitoring (Cromwell 1980). In this language ‘mis-speech is virtually never allowedto pass uncorrected. And the corrections of vocabulary, or of tense, or of grammar,may be rendered by anyone present who notices the error’ (Cromwell 1980). Thatsuch corrections differ from European schoolteachers’ correcting their pupils’grammar, however, is evident from the remainder of this quotation.

In noticing the error he is making an implicit claim to a more able command of thelanguage, and in noticing and correcting it he makes his claims explicit. But insuch acts of correction it is important to note that what is being corrected is theway of speaking. That is, the corrective utterance embodies the sense that thespeaker who erred DID NOT SAY WHAT HE MEANT.

Case studies of changing sociocultural practices leading to weakening of languagetransmission can be found in Maffi (ed. 2001). As traditional institutions (languagemonitors, initiation ceremonies) sustaining intergenerational transmission arebecoming less important and as children attend modern schools or missions and areremoved from traditional society, intergenerational transmission is becoming prob-lematic. This is particularly evident in the case of difficult, esoteric languages whichstructural complexity could only be maintained through complex long-term methods.

Intergenerational continuity is threatened by deliberate acts of language planningas well. The modernisation of Turkish in the 1920s, for instance, included thereplacement of the traditional Arabic script by Roman script and the phasing out ofwords of Arabic origin and led to a situation where young Turks could no longeraccess older written documents or indeed speak with members of the older gener-ation (Gallagher 1971). Similar modernization of languages (not always deliberate)can be witnessed around the world.

Language shift is the most radical form of intergenerational discontinuity. It isparticularly widespread among migrant communities. Neither discouragement norpositive language maintenance policies have prevented second and third generationchildren of the numerous migrant groups in USA or Australia from giving up their

Linguistic Communities 17

ancestral languages and to assimilate with the mainstream English-speechcommunity (see Fishman 1991).

Internal migration and in particular urban migration has a similar effect. The speakersof many smaller languages that have migrated to capital cities such as Honiara (SolomonIslands), Bangui (Central African Republic) or Harare (Zimbabwe) increasingly shift tonon-traditional languages such as Solomon Pijin, Sango or Town Bemba respectively.

4.4 Esoteric versus exoteric languages

An important distinction developed in Thurston’s writings (e.g. 1982, 1987) is thatbetween exoteric and esoteric languages, the former being freely available for intergroupcommunication, whilst the latter are restricted to a well-defined group who oftencontribute to its exclusiveness by making it difficult for outsiders to learn. To sustain anesoteric language requires considerable social effort, as it involves formal teaching, moni-toring and correcting. The case of the Papuan language Anêm, and its relationship withsurrounding Austronesian languages reported by Thurston (1982), is a good illustration.

In the past, languages like Japanese and Chinese were esoteric in the sense that itwas prohibited to teach them to outsiders. Limited access to the language by outsidersis one of the criteria for esotericity and numerous small languages continue to be keptaway from outsiders. As long as there is a viable community of speakers for an esotericlanguage, this does not affect its survival. However, with out-migration, out-marriageand similar social processes the number of speakers of small esoteric languages candecline to the point where language is no longer viable and threatened with extinctionas is happening to the Pitkern-Norfolk language (see Mühlhäusler forthcoming).

The limited economic usefulness of an esoteric language combined with the effort ittakes to learn them can be a cause for language shift. Exoteric language by contrast,because of their accessibility, usefulness in wider communication and relative lack ofstructural complexity have a greater survival chance. World languages such asEnglish and Spanish are modern examples of exoteric languages but exotericlanguages were also found in earlier days and in traditional context. Malay for longtime has been an exoteric language, as has Arabic or Wolof. Formerly esotericlanguages have become exoteric languages with the consequence of deliberate inter-vention by European missionaries and Governments, Guarani in Paraguay, Kâte andYabêm in Papua New Guinea or Tetúm in East Timor being examples. Closely relatedto the notion of exoteric language is that of lingua franca.

The historical origin of this term is a medieval Mediterranean trade language(Arends 1998) used as the language of intercommunication between Crusaders andthe people of the Middle East, the language of the sugar plantation of Cyprus and thelanguage of the trade centres of the area.

A lingua franca in a wider sense is typically used as a second language by speakersof many other languages over a wide area. Because of its function as an auxiliarylanguage it tends to be structurally and lexically less complex than the natively spokenlanguage it derives from (e.g. English as a foreign language or Odgen’s Basic English(1968) when compared with English) but remains mutually intelligible with it.

18 Words and Worlds

Structured complexity and mutual intelligibility are of course gradientphenomena. There are, for instance, a number of varieties of Swahili in East Africaranging from vernacular Swahili in coastal Tanzania to highly reduced and restrictedPidgin varieties spoken in Katanga and the interior of the continent. English, as alingua franca of Singapore, again comprises of a continuum of varieties.

4.5 Pidgins

Pidgin languages come into being when speakers of different languages need tocommunicate about a restricted range of topics and when neither party wishesand/or is allowed to become fully competent in the other party’s native language.

The classical pidgin context is that of plantations, set up in the colonial era whichemployed slaves or labourers from numerous language backgrounds, who, in orderto communicate among themselves and with their plantations owners and overseers,had to develop a common language. Pidgin languages by definition are secondlanguages, structurally and functionally restricted and not mutually intelligible withthe language from which they derive most of their lexicon. The various PidginEnglishes of the Pacific (Queensland, New Guinea, Vanuatu etc.) are not intelligible tospeakers of ‘standard’ English. They have developed their own communicativenorms which draw on universal principles of language simplification, borrowingfrom a range of languages and diffusion of Pidgin conventions around the globe. Theobserved absence of shared grammar has prompted Silverstein to state (1971) that theequation of ‘linguistic community’ with ‘people with the same grammar’ seems to betoo strong here. The complexity of a Pidgin is closely related to the communicativefunctions it fulfils and they are sustained not by native speakers transmitting themfrom parent to children but by the continuation of the conditions that brought theminto being. The military Pidgin English of Vietnam and Korea disappeared with thesocial context in which they were developed and Vietnamese Pidgin French (Tay Boi)ceased to be used once the French colonisers left Vietnam. Pidgin Portuguese, oncespoken almost universally in South East Asian trade, disappeared when Englishtraders became dominant.

The survival of colonial Pidgin languages depends on their users putting them tonew uses. Pidgin English in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu have become the prin-cipal languages of intercommunication of modern independent states and have beenrecognised as official languages. Increasingly this principle appears to apply to manynon-Pidgins as well.

In specific circumstances Pidgins can become primary or native languages, aprocess called Creolization. Compared with Pidgins, Creoles are spoken as nativelanguages, are compatible in terms of structural and lexical complexity with other fulllanguages. Contexts in which creolization occurs include plantations where childrenelaborated the only useful means of intercommunication, their parents’ brokenPidgin, in orphanages of remote locations (such as Tayo in New Caledonia orUnserdeutsch in Papua New Guinea) or most recently under the impact of rapidurbanisation in countries such as Papua New Guinea or the Solomons.

Linguistic Communities 19

In as much as human history is full of catastrophic events (invasions, slavery,displacement) there are probably a very large number of languages with a Creoleancestry and the number of known Creoles (as listed in Holm 1988) of about 100, is avery conservative estimate. Because Creoles are often perceived to be inferiorversions of a lexically related more prestigious language e.g. Seychellois or HaitianCreole vis à vis French, they are susceptible to language shift or gradual merger (so-called post-Creole continuum) with their lexifier language.

4.6 Koines

This term derives from the variety of Greek spoken by settlers from different areas inthe Greek colonies of the Mediterranean (best known as the language of the ModernTestament). The term has since been extended to many similar situations wheredialect mixing occurs in new settlements, for instance the German settlers of EasternEurope or Namibia, or in the non-traditional Aboriginal settlements of Australia(Mühlhäusler and Amery 1996). In discussing this term, Siegel (1985) draws attentionto the following points:

A Koine is the result of mixing between language subsystems that are eithermutually intelligible or share the same superimposed standard language.

Koineization, unlike pidginization, is typically a slow and gradual process.

The social correlate of Koine development is sustained intensive contacts andgradual assimilation of social groups.

Thus, although some of the linguistic consequences of koineization can be similar tothose identified in Pidgin development (for example, simplification of inflectionalmorphology), Koines do not involve the drastic reduction characteristic of earlypidgin development. There is some overlap with the notion of lingua franca. Incontrast to the latter Koines are spoken as native and/or primary languages.

The development of Koines goes hand in hand with social displacement and socialreconstruction and an increase in urbanisation and social change in the 21st century islikely to lead to the development of further Koines. Their long-term viability howeveris not secure.

4.7 Ausbau and modern languages

In times of rapid social technological development languages tend to lag behind andare not capable of adapting quickly to new requirements. In such a situation they caneither be abandoned or marginalised or made to meet the new requirements by delib-erate human interference. The term Ausbau, coined by the German linguist Kloss(1967), refers to the general process of extension. Typical examples are provided bylanguages chosen by Christian Missionaries as media of conversion. Missionaryextension typically consists of adding Christian terminology and words used ineducation and life on a mission station (e.g. relating to food, hygiene etc). The smallMelanesian language Mota, for instance, was extended by a number of professional

20 Words and Worlds

linguists belonging to the Melanesian Mission (such as Codrington and Palmer, 1896)and elevated the state of the language of missionization and education.

Modern languages are a special case of Ausbau. The modernisation process isdesigned to make them intertranslatable with modern European nation languages.Indonesian, for example has undergone an extension process of modernisation (over400,000 new words have been added since 1947) as have Swahili, Pilipino and Afrikaans.

Whilst in principle all languages can be modernised, in practice it has been a veryselective process. Because of the cost of language planning, modernisation isgoverned by considerations of economy of scale. Only Indonesian and a few largeprovincial languages in Indonesia underwent modernisation, all the other 400+languages of the archipelago remained largely unaffected and unmodernised. Oncemodernised, a language tends to have considerable economic advantages andspeakers on non-modernised languages can find it desirable either to adopt them as asecond language or switch to them.

Extension which does not involve dependency on European language models isbeing attempted in a number of instances, where indigenous languages have gainedgreater political status. A well known case is that of Maori (Harlow 1993).

4.8 Abstand languages

This term meaning ‘distance language’ again was coined by Kloss (1967). It impliesdeliberate human interference, not so much with the aim of making the languagecope with the modern world but in order to distinguish it from another relatedlanguage with which speakers do not wish to identify. Switsertütsch for instance, wasdeveloped as a reaction against the German spoken in Hitler Germany, Norwegian asa reaction against the language of the Danish colonisers, Bosnian as a reaction againstSerbia, but Hindi and Urdu became different languages because of the different reli-gious affiliations of Hindustani speakers.

The wish not to speak the language of a group one does not identify with is a verystrong one and there is a sizeable body of literature (e.g. Laycock 1975) documenting‘naïve language planning’ of the absolute type in traditional society. Where 90% ofIndigenous Australians no longer speak an indigenous language, and whilst most ofthem can speak standard Australian English, Aborigines nevertheless havedeveloped a number of Aboriginal Englishes such as Koori English of the East Coastor Nunga English of South Australia, to signal their distance from mainstream whitesociety. An extreme case of Abstand language are secret languages or cants, such asShelta (developed by Irish travellers), and varieties of English such as Backslang andperhaps Rastfarian English.

4.9 Artificial and planned languages

Whilst languages such as English are referred to as ‘natural’ languages andcontrasted with artificial languages (eg. Esperanto) the distinction is not an absoluteone. Deliberate human involvement in lexicon and grammar are documented invirtually all languages (Laycock & Mühlhäusler 1990) and in most national languages

Linguistic Communities 21

(see below) the extent of human agency can be very considerable. The documentationof what Laycock has labelled ‘naïve language planning’ is very patchy. The mainraisons d’être in traditional societies includes, taboo, secret or initiation ceremonies,purposes or language play (ludlings). Like Pidgins they are brought into existence byspecial social circumstances and disappear once external conditions change. Franklin(1992) for instance has documented the disappearance of the Pandanus gatheringvariety of Kewa Papua New Guinea, and Hale (1992) has analysed the disappearingDamin register of the indigenous Australian Lardil language.

There is great urgency to document and analyse similar special languages aroundthe world.

Entirely planned languages were developed mainly in Europe following theEnlightenment. The objective of their creators being to have a language capable ofexpressing enlightened philosophical or scientific ideas, to have a single language forworldwide communication either in addition to or as a replacement of existinglanguages.

Structurally, artificial languages are either of the a priori type, created from scratchon the basis of philosophical principles of classification or naming (Libert 2000), or aposteriori languages, simplified and enhanced versions of an existing language orlanguages. The best known example of this latter category is Esperanto. In the recentpast the idea of developing a single artificial language for the European Union hasbeen revived.

A general problem with artificial world languages is the underlying assumptionthat a single language can cope equally well with all aspects of the world, that it couldin principle be replacive of other languages.

4.10 Sign and other non-verbal languages

Speech typically is accompanied by gestures which in most societies are mainlyimprovised in context. In some special conditions highly codified gesture systems candevelop(substitute languages), however. The sign languages of deaf communities arean example, next to the better documented sign varieties of large modern languagessuch as English German or French, there probably have been many others that goundocumented and may disappear. Washabaugh (1986) has demonstrated, with theexample of the sign Creole of the small Caribbean Island of San Andres, the relevanceof such languages to both linguistic theory and to an understanding of humancommunication. Kendon (1988) offers the most comprehensive account of signlanguage in a particular linguistic ecology, that of indigenous Australia. Most of themwere semantically highly sophisticated sign languages used as languages for specialdomains or functions and as languages of intergroup communication. Sign languageas full substitute of verbal speech once were widely used. Few of them are properlyrecorded and most of the remaining ones appear to be endangered.

Other non-verbal forms of communication such as whistle languages, drum orslitgong languages share their fate and observationally adequate accounts areurgently needed.

22 Words and Worlds

4.11 Independent versus connected languages

In the Western view, languages are seen as objects that are clearly separate from thesocial and natural environment they are spoken in. As such they can be transportedand they can be acquired by new groups of speakers. By contrast, many traditionallanguages are regarded by their speakers as being inseparably linked with land,customs, belief systems and family relations. The link to the land of some Australianindigenous languages is such that one has to speak a different language when movingto a different part of the territory (Sutton 1991). Correct use of some languages is onlypossible for members of the language community, for instance in pronoun choice orwhen using kinship terms, both of which can require a knowledge of how speakers,persons spoken about and persons spoken to, are related to one another, a practicewhich can only be upheld in small tightly-knit communities. With migration andchanging patterns of land use the connections that languages have with their envi-ronment are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. It has been argued, forinstance, that the large scale loss of Australian indigenous languages was precipitatedby the removal of most groups from their traditional habitat.

4.12 Endemic versus exotic languages

The widespread view that languages are independent entities, accounts for thescarcity of these labels in sociolinguistic literature. There are now findings howeverwhich suggest the coincidence of tribal and language boundaries and local naturalecologies (Tindale 1974) and a recent study by Nettle 1998, 1999 summarised inGlausiusz (1997) suggests a direct correlation between language size and rainfall.Geographically spread-out languages are encountered typically in dry areas whilstsmall languages predominantly occur in high-rainfall areas. The unstoppable spreadof English (a high-rainfall language) over the entire globe under this view suggestsproblems for discourses about management of resources in desert areas.

Mühlhäusler (1996) argues that the hypothesis of adaptation can be tested mostconveniently with evidence from recently occupied ‘desert’ islands such as Pitkern,Palmerston Creole or Mauritian Creole. As languages get transported around theglobe, the fit between them and the environment in which they are spoken, ofnecessity, weakens. As linguistic adaptation to a new environment takes severalhundred years (e.g. the development of complex plant classification in Maori after thearrival of Eastern Polynesian with a much less complex system in New Zealand), thismisfit is likely to be a prolonged one and may turn out to be an important task forlanguage planners.

Detailed studies of how languages are adapted to and help preserve the biologicaldiversity in their area of currency are given by the contributors to Maffi (ed. 2001). Inher introduction Maffi observes (following Harmon 1996) that biological megadi-versity closely correlates with linguistic diversity. The conclusion most contributorsto Maffi’s volume arrive at that the loss of large numbers of endemic languages willresult in the loss of biodiversity.

Linguistic Communities 23

4.13 National languages

The concept of nation and nation state is only a few hundred years old and hasbecome worldwide applicable only in the wake of decolonisation and modernisationfrom the middle of the 20th century. Nation states, as Wollock (2001) points out,initially took pride in their linguistic diversity.

The idea that political units and states should be inhabited by a culturally andlinguistically homogenous population is an idea that developed during the FrenchRevolution. Before this event speakers of many languages (Occitan, Catalan, Flemish,Alamanic, Basque and French) were spoken in France and the concept of a Frenchcommunity was defined by shared laws, shared religion and a common ruler.

The ideal of a single monolingual French nation took more than 200 years to becomerealised. French as a national language today is the dominant medium of all publicdiscourse but other languages still continue to be used by minority groups in otherdomains. The creation of monolingual nation states first occurred in other Europeanstates such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy – though there are no nation statesin which other languages are not also spoken and a number of modern nation statessuch as Belgium, Switzerland and Finland continue to be officially multilingual.

The idea of a single national language has been converted into policy in manyformer European colonies – in most instances national language means the most priv-ileged and most modernised language rather than the only language. However, thetrend toward dominant monolingualism established first in France can also bewitnessed elsewhere: Modern China, Malaysia, Indonesia as well as former coloniallanguages such as Russian, English, Spanish and Portuguese have acquired a largenumber of native speakers (or monolingual) of the chosen national language.

4.14 Tribal languages

This term is used as synonymous with ‘indigenous language’ and ‘vernacular’ i.e.unwritten, unstandardised forms of speech spoken by single communities in smallpolitical units such as extended families, tribes or villages. The vast majority of theworlds’ languages falls into this group. More than a third of the world’s languages arespoken by fewer than 1,000 people and in some regions (e.g. Melanesia) the averagenumber of speakers is even less.

The number of tribal languages has decreased dramatically since the Europeanconquest of the world and estimates such as these by Lizarraldi (2001) for SouthAmerica underline this. Of the 1,200 tribal languages spoken there in 1492 only 600remained in 1940 and the number has since shrunk to about 400.

4.15 Some generalisations

The main aim of this section has been to show the variety of phenomena bearing thelabel language. Languages, I have tried to show, differ in their political status, abilityto be used in modern technological environments, range of functions and domainsand last, but not least, in having recognised boundaries and domains and a name.

24 Words and Worlds

In whatever sense human languages are equal, they are certainly not equal inregard to their visibility. There is a clear danger that the best described, mapped andlabelled languages have a better chance of being maintained. Ironically, this oftenmeans that languages that have been described or otherwise standardised or objec-tified by Europeans are the ones whose survival chances are greatest and thatgenuinely different ways of speaking are highly endangered. There is a clear paral-lelism with the so-called charismatic species in wildlife protection: whereas manymillions of dollars are spent on koala research in Australia, very little money has beenmade available to document and maintain Australia’s weevil population. Butarguably, the survival of a diversity of near invisible weevil species is ecologicallymore important than that of the koala.

Many ways of speaking which, on structural and/or functional grounds could wellhave been recognised as languages in actual fact are not – because of political circum-stances, lack of folk sentiment, or lack of Abstand and Ausbau. In Europe, thisincludes languages such has Alsatian, Asturian, Bavarian, Corsican, Flemish,Francique, Istro-Romanian, Yutish, Karelian, Low Saxon, Tsakonian and many others.In some instances, the ways of speaking have been labelled ‘dialect’ or ‘patois’, inother instances there is little metalinguistic awareness of their existence.

What I shall do in the following section is explore how different ways of speaking areemployed side-by-side by groups of people. Just as the term language applies to a rangeof phenomena, so do the terms language community, speech community, multilingualcommunity etc. Again, the multitude of combinations must be seen as functionalresponses to particular communicative requirements, not dysfunctional oddities.

I shall employ Haugen’s (1972) and other ecological parameters to identify anumber of types of possible languages or language ecologies. The term ‘languageecology’ is used as a cover term for a range of phenomena, some of which in the pasthave been labelled language communities or speech communities. The maindifference between an ecological and closed sociolinguistic approach is that theecological approach places greater emphasis on the environmental support systemsand pays greater attention to the adaptability of different language ecologies.

It would seem useful first to say a few words about the concept of speech commu-nities used in sociolinguistics.

Linguistic Communities 25

The Indian tribes are scheduled as per Article 342 of the Constitution by thePresident and the Parliament. They do not form a neat homogenous social-cultural category. The concept of tribe in India is thus an administrative,judicial, and political. The scheduled tribes constitute 623 varied communities.Languages spoken by these scheduled communities are considered ‘tribal

THE MEANING OF TRIBAL LANGUAGES IN INDIA

26 Words and Worlds

languages’. There is no linguistic definition of tribal language/s. It is the triballanguages that contribute to the vast and rich linguistic diversity of India. Thetribal languages belong to five distinct language groups pertaining to distinctfive language families represented in India such as Andamanese, Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Tibeto-Burman. Though tribal languagesare spoken all over the country, languages belonging to a particular family tendto be concentrated in a defined geographical area. Thus Northeast by Tibeto-Burman, East-Center by Austro-Asiatic (Munda and Mon-Khmer), WesternIndia by Indo-Aryan, Southern India by Dravidian, and Andaman Islands byAndamanese languages are represented.

As these languages are not scheduled languages, ethnolinguistic minoritystatus induces a negative attitude toward language loyalty. Anxiety to be asso-ciated with the superior masses discourages people to declare their traditionallanguages as mother tongues. In reality the tribals speak and use their tradi-tional languages in the home domain but refuse to acknowledge this. This isespecially true of many of the urban Munda and the Dravidian tribes. The‘claimed mother tongues’ that are reported in various census reports at best,are foster mother tongues.

Despite the reported language shift most of our rural tribals (barringAndamanese) do not really fit in the moulds of ‘terminal speakers’ or ‘semi-speakers’. Instead, some of them may be considered ‘healthy speakers’. Those inthe rural Northeast and in rural Jharkhand may be considered the thrivingspeakers. The two forces, retention and shift, coexist within the same languagegroup, e.g. while the urban tribals of the Munda family and those of theDravidian family are seen as easy to shift, rural tribes of the same languagefamilies prefer to maintain their indigenous languages. Tribals belonging to theMunda group are known to be the original inhabitants of India.

Bilingualism among tribals is 50% more than the national average bilingualism.Most of the Northeastern and Central urban Tribals are bilinguals in Hindi

which they use for inter-tribal communication, or in other lingua franca origi-nating out of the mixture of two or three languages of the region such as Sadariamong Munda speakers and Nagamese, Nefamese, Chakesang (theselanguages are contact languages created out of the convergence of two or threelanguages. Thus Nagamese is convergence of Naga and Assamese, whileChakesang is constituted of drawing structures of three languages distinctlanguages) as well as in English among the educated Tibeto-Burman speakers.The conflict between the mother tongue and the other tongue is greater, deeperand more terse in Central India than that which exists in the Northeast.

Anvita AbbiJawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

5. The notion of language community and speech community

The problems encountered in defining language are again found when it comes todefining speech and language communities. As the etymology of the term‘community’ suggests, its members have something in common but what it is thatmembers of a speech community have in common and how many properties have tobe shared for a community to come into existence is far from clear.

Linguists such as Gumperz (1972) and Fishman (1971) have argued that “A speechcommunity is one, all of whose members share at least a single speech variety and thenorms for its appropriate use” (Fishman 1971). Other linguists by contrast de-emphasise the notion of uniformity of language and put in their place shared evalu-ation of patterns of language use (e.g. Labov 1972). By the first criterion there wouldseem to be a single community of all of those who can speak English or French as thefirst or second (and possibly foreign language), by the second criteria, because the socialevaluation of different varieties of English varies greatly, one is dealing with a largenumber of communities. Labov (1972) notes that the assumptions of dialectologists areproblematic because of the presence of variation within speech communities. Extremeforms of variation are found in some Post-creole communities and in Kupwar-typesettings. The Indian village of Kupwar (described by Gumperz and Wilson 1971) islocated in Sangli District Maharashtra, approximately seven miles north of the Mysoreborder. It has a population of 3,000 and four languages. Village lands are controlledlargely by two land-owning and cultivating groups, Kannada-speaking Jains, who formthe majority, and Urdu-speaking Moslems. There are furthermore, large contingents ofKannada-speaking Lingayats – largely craftsmen, Marathi-speaking untouchables andother landless labourers, as well as some Telugu-speaking rope-makers.

In spite of the differences in language use, Kupwar can be defined as a communityin Labov’s sense because the evaluation of language use is shared by all members ofthis village though not by outsiders.

What leads to shared norms is constant interaction. Milroy’s (1980: 20) use of anetwork model provides further insights. She distinguishes two types, as in Diagrams1 and 2 where the individual whose network is being studied is shown by a star, andother people in the network by dots. Contact between individuals is shown by a line.The two networks are said to be of high density and low density respectively.

Milroy then observes “it is possible for one network to be described as more or lessdense than another, rather than in absolute terms as open or closed. Additionally, Blomand Gumperz comment that the contents of the network ties which bind members ofthe elite to ‘local team’ people is ‘largely impersonal, focussing around single tasks.” Incontrast, most local team people ‘live, marry and earn their livelihood among others oftheir own kind’ (p. 433). Thus, not only are local team networks dense, but each indi-vidual is likely to be linked to others in more than one capacity – as a co-employee, akinsman and a friend, for example. This kind of network tie may be said to bemultiplex, or many stranded, and to contrast with the uniplex ties of the elite who tendto associate with the local people in a single capacity only.

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Traditional lifestyles strongly correlate with closed multiplex networks and suchnetworks provide a home for a multitude of small endemic languages. Urbanisation,social and geographical mobility and information technology, by contrast promoteopen networks which call for larger, even international languages: one can witness acorresponding process of the shrinkage of closed networks (they are becomingrestricted to communication with in-families, tribes and other highly-knit socialstructures), and a steady growth in the importance of open networks. In as much asthe village has been the typical locus for closed network communication, the notion ofa global village seems absurd. Kreckel (1980) comments on the ‘undesirable effects ofheterodynamic [=open network] communication for presupposed commonknowledge may easily have no common basis at all.’

Given the problem of pinning down what a speech community is, it would atfirst sight seem desirable to start with clearly bounded units such as states,provinces and urban communities and ask: what languages and what relation-ships between languages are encountered within such units. This, in fact, is whatmany sociolinguists have opted to do (a process referred to as the dialectologicalapproach) when describing phenomena such as diglossia (see below). However,

28 Words and Worlds

X

Diagram 1. High-density personal network structure: X is the focal point of the network

X

Diagram 2. Low-density personal network structure: X is the focal point of the network

applying labels such as speech community, Laycock (1979) has pointed out, canbring with it other problems:

Extensive multilingualism has important consequences for theories of languagecontact and language classification. One major effect is the erasure or blurring oflinguistic boundaries. We can distinguish three types of linguistic areas withdefinable boundaries:

(1) a communication area, which is the area in which a speaker or community canstill manage to communicate, by the use of any languages known;

(2) a lectal or language currency area, which is the area in which a single language iseffective for communication purposes,

(3) a language area, which is the area in which a particular language can be said to benative – that is, it is the first learnt and/or the primary language.

Linguistic maps usually feature type 3, which is the hardest to define satisfactorily, andwhich is coterminous with types 1 and 2 unless multilingualism is present. However, itis precisely the boundaries of 3 that are made fuzzy, or are erased by, multilingualism.

A way of defining community that does not rely on pre-established boundariesmight be to examine the key metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) that differentgroups of people live by. Those dominant in mainstream Anglo culture (time ismoney, argument is war) are not shared by members of many other cultures. TheAustralian and British metaphor of politics as a game of cricket (to be playedaccording to rules on a level playing field) is foreign to most of the ‘foreign’ politiciansthat British politicians are dealing with and the lack of shared metaphors could be oneof the reasons for the lack of mutual understanding.

That the notion that speaking the same language needs to correlate with othersocial categories is questioned by writers such as Rigsby and Sutton (n.d.) who arguethat speech community is not a primary social term but a secondary construct. Theirown data, gathered during many years of fieldwork in Northern Queensland suggestthat ‘residence groups, task groups (such as ritual participants) and regional politicalgroupings are formed largely independent of linguistic affiliation’ (p. 35). The notionthat one language equals one culture and the derived view that the loss of, say, 100languages implies the loss of 100 cultural and philosophical systems thus would seemhighly questionable.

The non-agreement between language and culture can be illustrated in the so-called developed world by the existence of pluricentric standard languages withseveral standard varieties (see Clyne 1985). Examples of these include Arabic,Chinese, Dutch, English, French and Spanish, all of which have official status in anumber of nation states with different political and cultural agendas. Belonging to thesame speech community does not exclude hostility or almost total non-cooperation,as can be seen from the examples of Korean in North and South Korea, Mandarin inMainland China and Taiwan or German in former East and West Germany. The caseof Moldavian and Galician illustrate that there can be considerable disagreement

Linguistic Communities 29

among speakers as to whether they are speaking a language with its own norms or avariety of Romanian or Portuguese and in the case of Valencian vis à vis Catalan thishas led to considerable social conflict.

In view of the difficulties with the definition of communities, the notion oflanguage ecology would seem preferable, particularly as it supplements informationabout the use of different languages as information about the wider ecological factors(including discourses) that sustain such practices.

One has to remind oneself of the etymological roots of the term ‘ecology,’ i.e. Greekoikos, ‘house’ or ‘home.’ Haugen, whose ecolinguistic questions were quoted at thebeginning of this paper, very much looked at the linguistic practices of the inhabitantsof communities bounded by sociopolitical boundaries and this approach would seemappropriate only for nation states and similar modern entities. The question of therelationships within a house, what relationships between its inhabitants make it ahome and a sociolinguistic characterisation of its inhabitants are important. However,Haugen uses the notion of ecology as a heuristic metaphor without suggesting thatlanguage can itself be an ecological phenomenon.

In discussing the notion of endemic language I have suggested that languages canalso be seen as ecologically adapted to particular natural environments and thissuggestion can be extended to the hypothesis that particular language ecologies inturn are adapted to particular natural conditions, that, for instance the seeminglyexcessive multilingualism in some parts of the world is a response to the need forvarious types of cooperation needed for survival and management in a particularenvironment. Healthy ecologies are characterised by the presence of a large numberof mutually beneficial interrelationships and a relatively small proportion of compet-itive and/or parasitic ones. They are also defined by functional diversity.

In the past, healthy language ecologies were the norm but over the last fewhundred years or so, there has been a marked shift to unbalanced and unhealthyecologies, characterised by an increase of internal competition and a reduction ofdiversity and, in the domain of language, a dramatic loss of the connections betweenlanguages, speakers and their natural habitat.

What defines language ecologies remains to be explored, and the sections thatfollow have to be read against the background of an important ecological principle.What keeps one ecology healthy and stable may destroy another one. The supportsystem for different language ecologies can be very different and must be determinedcase by case.

An overview of writings on the psychology and sociology of language ecologies isgiven by Fill (1993). The parameters determining ecological processes in languageand society listed by Fill include:

• status and intimacy,• similarity and difference of language in contact, • number of competing languages, • cultural, religious and economic factors,

30 Words and Worlds

• frequency of intermarriage, • functional distribution,• degree of codification, • external interventions.

In my view there are a number of additional parameters that need to be considered:

• whether languages are endemic or exotic to an ecology,• the degree of esotericity (closed in-group language),• the degree of vitality of the languages in an ecology,• whether languages are ‘packaged’ with or disconnected from the ecology, • continuity (e.g. dialect or chains) or discontinuity (abrupt boundaries), • named or unnamed i.e. degree of recognition by speakers and outsiders),• types of solutions for intergroup communication with outside groups (bilin-

gualism, lingua francas, Pidgins).

6. Some aspects of ecological support systems

In what follows I shall consider some of the external factors that impinge on thenature of language ecologies, factors such as territory, speaker numbers, etc.

6.1 Language and territory

The 6,000+ languages spoken around the world are not evenly distributed. Neither isthere a simple formula for the relationship between language and topological spacenor is there one for language and speaker numbers. In some parts of the world a rela-tively small number of languages is spoken by a large number of people (Europe andNorth America today), in others many languages are spoken by a few people each. InPapua New Guinea 800+ languages are said to be used by about 4 million speakers,far fewer speakers than in the past, whereas in New Zealand, a country of a compa-rable size only one language, Maori, was spoken at the time the first Europeancolonisers arrived.

The reasons for these differences have been traditionally given as temporal factors.Linguistic diversification takes time (e.g. 1,000 years time period is conventionallyused as a rough guide for one language to become two). Thus, the difference betweenPNG with 40,000+ years of human habitation and New Zealand with only about 1200years is adduced as a reason for the difference in language numbers. Similarly, thelarge number of dialects of British English contrasts with a very small number ofdialects in North American English and an even smaller one in Australian and NewZealand English.

Next to time, contact with other languages is given as a reason, as new languagescan develop out of language contact in a relatively short time, only a few decades inthe case of Pidgins and Creoles, for instance. Both factors together would account forthe fact that there are a large number of different languages in Arnhem Land,

Linguistic Communities 31

Northern Australia, the first part settled by human beings and the one closest toSouth East Asia with whose inhabitants there have been several periods of contact. Bycontrast human habitation of the Southern parts of Australia is far more recent andcontacts with outside groups were rare or non-existent.

Time and contact alone are insufficient to explain all aspects of linguistic diversity.Laycock (1982) adds deliberate human choice as a further motive. Speaking about thesituation in Melanesia he argues:

In view of all the above, it is possible to formulate a hypothesis about Melanesianlinguistic diversity. Migration into the small independent, or semi-independent,communities, with, often, the same or very similar languages. Isolation andnormal linguistic change played their part in the splitting of these communitiesunhampered by pressures towards convergence. The process was accelerated bycontact between communities of quite different linguistic backgrounds, bywarfare (and subsequent dispersal of communities), by cross-cutting migrations,and by technical innovation. Once the process of diversification was well underway, diversity had advantages as well as disadvantages, in clearly distinguishingfriend, acquaintance, trading-partner, and foe; and with this consciousness camean attitude, I believe, that the community was further divided. In other words, Isuggest that Melanesian linguistic diversity is not merely the by-product of acci-dents of history and geography, but is in large measure a partly consciousreaction, on the part of the Melanesians themselves, to their environment andsocial conditions.

Ecolinguistics, as discussed under the heading of ‘Endemic Languages’, has addedexternal environmental reasons. The size of a language coincides with the size of theecological borders in which it is spoken. Highly diversified complex ecological condi-tions such as in rainforest areas coincide with high linguistic diversity. The linguisti-cally most complex areas are Melanesia, the Amazon and West Africa. The number oflanguages spoken in desert areas and the Arctic, on the other hand, are relatively small.Areas with high linguistic diversity are also areas with a high degree of multilin-gualism, with as many as 4+ languages spoken in traditional Melanesia and up to adozen in tropical Northern Australia. Linguistic diversity is often linked togeographical isolation but this turns out not to be a very reliable parameter. Islands, forinstance, have traditionally been associated with isolation but as the many contrib-utors to the Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia and theAmericas (Wurm, Mühlhäusler & Tryon 1996) have demonstrated, contacts betweenmost of the islands of the Pacific was relatively intense and the only genuinely isolatedislands of the area were Easter Island and possibly Hawaii. Rivers also isolate popula-tions but, on the contrary, provide access and contact. The isolated languages of distantmountain villages are mainly a discursive category rather than a linguistic fact. Thelargest languages in Papua New Guinea, for instance, are located in the rugged terrainof the New Guinea highlands. Genetic research (e.g. Terrell 1986) confirms that humangroups rarely remain isolated over extended periods of time.

32 Words and Worlds

There is, however, an interesting relationship between some factors of the physicalterrain and language continuity. Languages located in areas subject to natural disasterssuch as drought, floodwaves, volcanic eruptions etc. are more vulnerable to change andextinction than other languages. Thurston (1982) has illustrated this for the languagesspoken on the dangerous coastline of Eastern New Britain, and the unreliability of watersupply in parts of the Pacific has in the past lead to the extinction of populations andtheir languages on many islands. Medical disasters such as epidemics can also disruptlinguistic continuity. Stross (1975) has shown how speakers of Tzeltal in Yukatan areaffected by frequent epidemics which lead to the decline of individual dialects and therise of others, promoting frequent changes in the direction of language development.

Introduced diseases and their roles in changes in language ecologies remain to befully documented. Australian Indigenous languages, as a response to smallpox andinfluenza, often became non-viable as their speaker numbers declined, or as speakersfled to different parts of the continent where they mixed with other groups. Hottentotand several Melanesian languages experienced a similar decline and the spread ofAIDS and other pandemics throughout the developing world is likely seriously toaffect the viability of many smaller languages.

6.2 Speaker distribution

This concept relates on the one hand to the degree of contacts between members of alanguage community and, on the other, the density of such contacts.

Contact between languages involves physical proximity as a necessary but not asufficient reason for mutual influence. Contact together with time tends to promotesimilarity between languages no matter what their original history was. It tends tolead to the development of Sprachbunds where languages from several familiesdisplay common traits not found in members of the same families spoken outside.The already mentioned Kupwar situation can be called a mini-Sprachbund. Thelanguages of the Balkan again have become structurally and semantically similarover time with Romanian in spite of its romance origins, being more similar withsurrounding languages such as Greek or Bulgarian than Latin or Spanish.

Linguistic Communities 33

Languages in contact, whether it is bilingualism or multilingualism are anintegral part of human behaviour. Situations of languages in contact have alwaysoutnumbered monolingual situations, but they will constantly increase with glob-alisation and increasing population movements due to migration and greatersocial mobility, with the universal spread of education and the need for all humansocieties to have access to modern information technology. By “languages incontact” we mean the use of two or more distinct linguistic codes in interpersonal

BILINGUALISM, MULTILINGUALISM AND MIND DEVELOPMENT

34 Words and Worlds

and inter-group relations as well as the psychological state of an individual whouses more than one language. The distinction between bilingualism and multilin-gualism refers to the number of languages involved in the contact situation:multilingualism generally refers to any situation involving two or morelanguages, whereas bilingualism refers to a contact between only two languages.

A more important distinction is however made between societal and indi-vidual bi- or multilingualism. The concepts of bilingualism and multilingualismrefer to the state of a linguistic community in which at least two languages are incontact with the result that more than one linguistic code can be used in thesame interaction and that a number of individuals master more than onelanguage; it includes the concept of bilinguality or individual bilingualism. Inthe present discussion, we will use the term bilinguality to refer to bilingual andmultilingual individuals, as so far there is no evidence that bilinguals and multi-linguals show different behaviour patterns.

Definitions of bilingualismAt first sight the concept of individual bilingualism seems easy to define. In thelayman’s view a bilingual person is somebody who either speaks two languages asnative speakers or has an almost native-like command of a second language inaddition to the command of his mother tongue. According to Webster’s dictionary,a bilingual is defined as “having or using two languages especially as spoken withthe fluency characteristic of a native speaker” and bilingualism as “the constantoral use of two languages”. However, scholars in bilingualism do not agree on asingle definition. Bloomfield (1935) defines bilingualism as “the native-like controlof two languages”. In contradistinction to this definition of “perfect bilinguals”,Macnamara (1967) suggests that a bilingual is anyone who possesses a minimalcompetence in one of the four language skills, listening, reading, speaking andwriting in a language different from its mother tongue. Between these twoextremes there is a large array of definitions; Titone (1972), for example, definesbilingualism as the individual’s capacity to speak a second language following itsconcepts and structures rather than paraphrasing the mother tongue.

These definitions, ranging from a native-like competence in two languages toa minimum proficiency in a second language, raise a number of theoretical andmethodological questions. First, they lack precision: they do not specify what ismeant by native-like competence, nor by minimal proficiency, nor by followingthe concepts and structures of a language. Second, they refer to a singledimension, i.e. proficiency in both languages. According to Hamers & Blanc(1983), however, bilingualism and bilinguality are multi-dimensional concepts.

Bilinguality can be described using the following dimensions: according tocompetence in both languages a distinction can be made between balanced(competence in L

A = competence in L

B ) and dominant (competence in L

A > or

Linguistic Communities 35

< than competence in LB

) bilinguals ; according to cognitive organisationbetween compound (language labels in L

Aand L

Bcorrespond to one single

concept) and coordinate (each language label corresponds to a different concept)bilinguals. In terms of age of acquisition a distinction is made between simulta-neous (the two languages are acquired during the language acquisition period;L

Aand L

Bare both the child’s mother tongues) and consecutive (L

2is acquired

after the child has developed a competence in L1) bilinguality. In consecutive

bilinguality a further distinction is made between childhood (L2 before 10–11),

adolescent (L2between 11 and 17 years) and adulthood (L

2after the age of 17) bilin-

guality. According to the presence or the absence of a community of L2 speakers,

a distinction is made between endogenous (both speech communities are present)and exogenous (only one speech communities is present) bilinguality. Accordingto the relative status of the languages a distinction is made between additive(both language are highly valorised; bilingual development will enhancecognitive development) and subtractive (L

1is devalorised, leading to cognitive

disadvantages). Bilinguals can also be described in terms of their cultural identity:bilinguality can be described as bicultural, monocultural or deculturated(ambiguous membership and anomic identity).

Bilinguistic developmentEarly biographies on bilingual children (Ronjat 1913; Leopold, 1939–1949)already pointed to a harmonious development of the bilingual child and indi-cated that his linguistic development is comparable to that of a monolingualchild. More recent studies however permit us to be more precise in their compar-isons and point out that the bilingual child does not only compare favourablywith his monolingual counterpart but displays also some specific behaviours. Atthe preverbal stage, it seems that infants as young as four months, raised in amultilingual environment, discriminate better between familiar and non-familiar phonemes and intonation patterns than their monolingual counterparts.

There is a general agreement that the bilingual child produces his first word atthe same time as a monolingual infant and that at the holophrastic stage he useswords from his two languages. The receptive vocabulary of monolingual andbilingual children is comparable; bilingual children produce less vocabulary ineach language, but if the lexical items in the two languages are taken togetherproduction is comparable; bilingual children do not have translation equiva-lents for all their lexicon but monolingual and bilingual children’s conceptualvocabularies have similar sizes.

How do grammatical structures evolve in bilinguistic development? From theavailable data it appears that certain aspects of linguistic development follow amonolingual pattern closely while others do not. Some studies (Swain 1972)mention developmental delay, others (Meisel 1990) give some evidence for a

36 Words and Worlds

more precocious development of bilingual children, while still others (Padilla &Liebman 1975) conclude that the acquisition of the two languages follows amonolingual pattern.

Mixing is mentioned in all biographies and studies on bilinguistic development.The majority of mixings are lexical in nature, with nouns as the most frequentlysubstituted words. Mixing may also occur at other levels (est-ce que you sleephere?). Infant and adult mixing follow different patterns and there is also aconsensus that syntactic categories do not appear at random in mixed elements.

Although probably all bilingual children mix codes, this mixing occurs with alow frequency (from 2% to 6.5%), tending to decrease with age. What role mixingplays in bilinguistic acquisition is still little known, but its less frequent use as thechild grows older may be a manifestation of his improved capacity to keep histwo languages separate. Not all mixing must be attributed to a lack of compe-tence; mixed utterance might express the intended meaning more adequately.

Translation is also an integral part of bilinguistic development. Besides usingtranslation spontaneously, the bilingual child requests translation equivalentsin the other language. The onset of awareness of two systems is evidencedaround the second birthday: two-year old children will assign words to eachparent’s repertoire and request translations for them. This is considered as proofthat language awareness develops at an early age.

The relation between language and mindSeveral researchers have suggested that language and mind are closely inter-mingled. In 1956, Whorf suggested that language moulds thought, andalthough this hypothesis in its extreme form is no longer accepted, mostscholars do agree that language and thought are not completely independentfrom each other. Childhood bilinguality does not develop in isolation fromother developmental aspects but interacts with them. Whether one considersthat language plays an important role in the development of thought orwhether both are seen as developing independently from each other willinfluence the extent to which bilinguality is considered as a relevant factor forthe development of cognitive processes. At the present time most childpsychologists recognise the role played by language in cognitive devel-opment. But what happens when children are socialised into multilingualmodes of communication?

Empirical research on the cognitive consequences of bilingual developmentcan be divided in two periods. The early studies, mainly psychometric ones,conducted before the 1960, reported mainly negative results: bilingual childrensuffered from academic retardation, from a linguistic handicap, had a lower IQand were socially maladjusted as compared with monolingual children.Bilinguality was viewed as the cause of an inferior intelligence.

Linguistic Communities 37

From the sixties onwards studies demonstrating positive effects by faroutnumber research which still mentions negative effects. An important turningpoint came in 1962 with the publication of the Peal & Lambert study: comparingthe academic achievement of bilingual and monolingual children, the authorscame to the conclusion that bilingual children showed a higher level ofcognitive development which they attributed to a more developed cognitiveflexibility. Among others, the following advantages have been mentioned in thestudies conducted after 1962: a greater ability in reconstructing perceptual situ-ations, superior results on verbal and non-verbal intelligence; a greater sensi-tivity to semantic relations between words; higher scores on concept-formationtasks and rule-discovery tasks; a better performance with traditional psycho-metric school tests; a greater originality in creative thinking. Bilinguals are alsobetter in verbal-transformation and symbol-substitution; in correction ofungrammatical sentences; in problem-solving tasks. They outperform monolin-guals in metalinguistic tasks. (For a review, see Hamers & Blanc, 2000.)

However, a small number of studies still report poor academic achievementof bilingual children. When this occurs, it almost always refers to minoritychildren, schooled in the majority language and having their own mothertongue devalorised. Attempting to explain the positive and negative effects ofbilingual development, Lambert (1974) suggests distinguishing betweenadditive and subtractive bilinguality. In its additive form the child adds asecond language as a communicative and cognitive tool to its linguistic reper-toire; in its subtractive form the little valorised mother tongue is replaced by themore prestigious second language. In the first case the child might benefit froma bilingual situation whereas in the second case the child’s cognitive devel-opment is likely to be delayed. In their model of bilingual development, Hamers& Blanc (1982) suggest that social and individual valorisation of both languagesplay a crucial role for the bilingual’s child cognitive development. Educationcan provide the necessary context for additive bilinguality by insisting onmother tongue education for minority children.

Several authors have suggested that a bilingual child would develop a deeperlevel of processing which would lead to a greater cognitive flexibility and amore developed metalinguistic awareness. In Vygotsky’s (1962) view, beingable to express the same thought in different languages will enable ‘the child tosee his language as one particular system among many, to view its phenomenaunder more general categories, and this leads to awareness of his linguisticoperations’. This early awareness further generalises to other areas of conceptlearning and thinking.

During the last decades the development of bilinguality has been analysed inrelation to the development of linguistic awareness. Bilingual children may havea greater cognitive control in information processing than do monolingual

7. Types of language ecologies

7.1 Balanced multilingualism

Multilingualism is often portrayed as a consequence of speakers having to communicatewith outgroups, but this is only part of the story. As Kendon (1988), who like Laycock(above) emphasises the rationality of multilingualism, has observed for Australia:

People may speak several different languages, not so much because they need todo so to make themselves understood in different places, but because theirlanguages serve as a means of expressing multiple social identities that they canlay claim to through their network of kin relationships.

Choosing different languages can be equated with choosing different registers orstyles in a monolingual speech community. Whether different communicative func-tions and domains are talked about in one or more than one language differs fromgroup to group. The fact remains that successful communication requires a repertoireof many speech varieties or languages.

Balanced multilingualism is predicated, on the one hand, on a stable ecological linkbetween speakers of different languages and, on the other hand, or the absence ofsudden changes in established patterns of social and spatial mobility. It is manifested,in instances such as Melanesia or tropical Australia, with egalitarian modes of coexis-tence but hierarchical structures, such as that of Kupwar (see above). Other examplesof traditional multilingualism have been discussed for the Asia Pacific Region byWurm, Mühlhäusler and Laycock (1996) and in Wurm (ed. 1979).

I shall begin by looking at areas of extensive multilingualism such as Papua NewGuinea (Laycock 1979), the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland (Sutton 1991) orBrazil (Aikenvald 1999, Sorensen 1967). Communication between the speakers ofmultiple small languages is achieved by a number of means all of which seek the dualpurpose of enabling intercommunication whilst maintaining the maximum diversityof local vernacular. The maintenance of language numbers of small local vernacularsis required both to preserve ethnocultural identity and to ensure a fit betweenlanguages and local environmental conditions.

38 Words and Worlds

children; this provides them with the necessary foundation for metalinguisticability, a necessary tool in cognitive development. Because experiencing with twolanguages enhances the awareness of the analysis and control components oflanguage processing, different processing systems develop to serve two linguisticsystems from the ones that operate with one language. These advantages areavailable to all children provided with an adequate bilingual education program.

Josiane F. HamersLaval University, Canada

A large number of small group of speakers (fewer than 1,000) also ensures that (a)relatively unauthoritarian structures can be maintained within a languagecommunity and (b) no community can readily achieve power over anothercommunity: diversity reduces the scope for competition and strengthens linksbetween speakers of small vernaculars. Speakers of small or very small languages arerarely monolingual as they depend on their well-being and functional links withother groups for trade, out marriages and joint action.

The solutions to this requirement vary from ecology to ecology: an obvious but rela-tively ‘costly’ solution is multilingualism or the less costly dual-lingualism (passivemultilingualism) where each party speaks their own language but understands theirinterlocuter’s language. The greatest degree of multilingualism is encountered in partsof Australia (e.g. Cape York Peninsula, Sutton 1991) where speakers have at theirdisposal a repertoire of up to a dozen languages; a knowledge of 3–4 languages such asin parts of Papua New Guinea is more common, but because multilingualism usuallydoes not imply full competence in all languages it is impossible to be precise.

The varying extent of communicative requirements when dealing with outgroupsis the reason for bilinguals employing a vernacular and one or more special inter-group Pidgins. A particularly sophisticated solution is a layered language ecology(Mühlhäusler 1999) where local vernaculars are employed mainly to express localidentity and discuss local knowledge, intergroup Pidgins (often with a 50/50 mixedlexicon and a common core grammar) are employed mainly for transactions betweenvillages, and regional lingua francas are employed mainly for signalling regionalidentity and exchanging regionally important information. Examples of such layeredecologies have been documented for Native (Indian) Americans in the southernUnited States by Drechsel (1997). Similar layering is developing in the EuropeanUnion where many inhabitants are competent in international English, their NationalStandard Language, plus a local vernacular.

Stable hierarchical communities often employ a diglossic pattern, where there arespecialised functions for High (socially superordinate) and Low (socially subordinate)forms of speech. In the strictest sense, these varieties should be historically and lexicallyrelated such as French versus Haitian Creole or Classical Arabic and Egyptian ColloquialArabic (Ferguson 1959). In a wider sense the complementary functional distribution oftwo languages, e.g. Spanish and Guarani in Paraguay, has also been labelled diglossia(for more details see Romaine 1989). In using labels such as stable or balanced, I do notwish to suggest that traditional societies are static. Rather, the rate of change in manytraditional language ecologies is such that they can adapt to those changes thatinevitably occur. What endangers them is that technological and social changes that arenow occurring have put their adaptive potential under severe strain.

7.2 Mixed endemic–exotic ecologies

Migrations, invasions and colonisation are the main factors that bring endemiclanguages into contact with exotic ones, with a range of linguistic outcomes such asthe large scale extinction of Indo European languages in Central Asia, following the

Linguistic Communities 39

Mongol invasion, pidginization, creolization and intensive mixing between local‘Papuan’ and ‘Austronesian’ languages in Melanesian or the specialisation of the twolanguage types in a new linguistic ecology as in the case of Carib and South Americanlanguages in the form of gender differentiation (Trudgill 1983).

What such processes may have done to linguistic ecologies in the past remainsunknown. It is certain, however, that even without major contacts, the number oflanguages that became extinct in pre-colonial times was of a very large scale. Walsh(1997), working with figures used by O’Grady (1979), argues that over the last 15,000years a minimum of 4,000 and perhaps as many as several hundred thousandlanguages have become extinct in Australia.

European colonisation, and the technological and social changes that happened inthis wake have created massive changes in the linguistic ecologies, in particular:

(1) the establishment of a small number of powerful exotic languages (English,Spanish, Portuguese, French) in most parts of the world,

(2) the emergence of a small number of large natural languages (e.g. Indonesian,Hindi, Swahili) modelled on European National languages,

(3) widespread diglossia, transitional multilingualism and partial Ausbau ofselected local languages.

An important study of the new mixed endemic-exotic communities is that by Myers-Scotton (1993) for Africa. She documents the change from a relatively stable to ahighly dynamic multilingualism in which introduced European languages play apivotal role. In the past, multilingualism was found primarily among people whowere mobile in a geographic sense (p. 30ff) or amongst speakers of a small languagesurrounded by a larger one. Today, mobility in a socio-economic sense is the primereason. Adding a metropolitan language to one’s repertoire can lead to competition,functional reproduction of non-metropolitan languages and language shift. Whilst anumber of studies of new types of diglossia or triglossia are available it is not easy togeneralise, as the reasons for using languages in certain domains and functions arecontingent on complex sociohistorical processes (Fishman 1965). A classic study of atraditional language ecology to which exotic languages have been added is that bySankoff (1972) where she discusses code switching among the Buang of PNG in the1970s many of whom spoke a church lingua franca, Yabem, and still more spoke TokPisin. Speakers’ choices are summarised in Diagram 3.

More recently Sankoff has discussed some of the changing patterns of codeswitching among the Buang under the impact of English education and migration tourban centres. An important feature of the latter article is the demonstration that codeswitching behaviour can differ considerably among the individuals within a givengroup or society and that the mastery of a multitude of subcodes and codes may be ‘inpart a result of deliberate development of rhetorical skills by aspirants to leadership.’A situation (Mühlhäusler 1996) far more complex than among the rural Buang is foundin Fiji (Schütz 1985) where a number of varieties of Fijian are spoken side-by-side with

40 Words and Worlds

two exotic languages, English and Fiji Hindi. The degrees of stability achieved inParaguay (Rubin 1968) for Spanish and Guarani would seem to be relatively rare andcompetition or even dualling (Myers, Scotton 1993) are common in the 20th century.

In 1971 White concluded:

Fiji shares with many other new nations the problems of creating a sense of socio-cultural unity in a territorial area which at the moment has little else but geo-politicalunity. It is characteristic of emerging nations that the forces of nationalism andnationism co-exist, and it is common for an ethnically based diglossia to potentiallybe divisive, but the possibilities of division are reduced by two factors disclosed inthe current survey: (i) the practice of vernacular bilingualism, and (ii) the use ofEnglish as a mediating or stand-by language in intergroup interaction. English, it isclear, has the potentiality of becoming an instrument both of nationism and of nation-alism, but it will probably have to serve as an artefact of geo-political unity before itcan contribute to the evolution of socio-cultural unity in the emergent nation of Fiji.

Thirty years later the situation remains problematic and attempts to create a stablesociety with a stable multilingual ecology continue.

7.3 Competitive language ecologies

The reader needs to be reminded of the ecological principle that healthy linguisticecologies are characterised by a large proportion of functional interrelationships

Linguistic Communities 41

decision to speak

speaking to non-Buangspeaking to Buang

formal situation

religious written oralbusiness:

government:

community

affairs

traditional

e.g. yam

distribution

missionary

teacher

pastor

Yabem or

Bukawa

speaker

Buang

speaker

other

YABEM

NM

BUANG

YABEM

NM

NM

YABEM

BUANG NMBUANG

NM

BUANG YABEM YABEM BUANG

NM

YABEM

NM

special

circumstances

e.g. joking

normal

circumstances

informal situation stranger non-stranger

Diagram 3. Language choice among the Buang in Papua New Guinea

(mutually beneficial) between languages and a relatively small proportion of compet-itive ones. The view that people’s linguistic choices are rational ones, regulated by arational market forces ignores, as Tollefson (1991) has shown, the fact that thelanguage market is far from free but rather is dominated by the monopolism of a fewprivileged (sometimes referred to as killer) languages.

Competition can take a number of shapes. The most extreme one is the killing offof speakers of minority languages (as happened with many Australian andAmerindian people), resettlement, forced assimilation (which is an ongoing processin many countries), legislation or deliberate status planning and discriminationagainst smaller languages. In the majority of instances one is dealing with a gradualloss of ecological factors that are needed to maintain structural linguistic diversity.Ironically, languages can be rendered uncompetitive by the very acts that weremeant to strengthen them. Standardisation, promotion of literacy and schoolprogrammes, as has been argued in Mühlhäusler (1996), can in some instances accel-erate the decline of languages and eventual language shift. The two principalreasons, in other words, for language competition are the introduction of powerfulregional or national official languages into areas where many small languages arespoken and the migration of speakers of small languages. How these two factors canlead to the extinction of many minority languages in India has been illustrated byPandharipande (1992). The external conditions which have made smaller locallanguages unacceptable according to this writer are:

(a) mechanisation of professions such as fishing, farming, tanning of leather etc. israpidly replacing human labour by machines, thus leaving the traditional skillsof these communities useless to a great extent,

(b) deforestation and urbanisation of the villages have made it mandatory for the tribalsto interact with the dominant/majority group for commercial trade or jobs, and

(c) the education policy of state governments to promote education among thesecommunities through the medium of regional/state languages has acceleratedthe speed of learning of the dominant regional language among these commu-nities. These communities view the regional language as a tool for upward socio-economic mobility in the society.

In as much as these changes were brought to the communities from the outside, thechoice of shifting to other languages is far from free. It is necessary not just for socialmobility, but in many instances, physical survival.

Migration again can be both a choice driven by the wish to improve one’s life or it canalso be beyond people’s control brought about by war, persecution and forced reset-tlement. Migrant languages not only are far from the cultural and physical supportsystem that once sustained them and surrounded by numerically and functionallymore powerful languages; as Fishman (1991) has shown, there are few instances inwhich migrant languages have survived for more than three generations but thissurvival was typically accompanied by a shrinkage in the domains and functions in

42 Words and Worlds

which these languages are used. First language adaptation is a matter of centuries, theoutcome of competition is often a matter of years only. Whatever short-term economicbenefits it may bring, the long term consequences are far from beneficial. One of theproblems of language shift is that it can lead to a loss of cultural identity. There is astrong but not necessary link between language and people’s identity, the wish tospeak the same language typically being driven by the wish to belong to a communityof like people (Fishman 1991). The loss of a language can be a matter of grief for acommunity and can have negative side-effects on its members. When there is a stronglink between language and identity, a number of adjustments can occur. In the case ofthe indigenous languages of Australia, 90% of Australian Aborigines no longer speak atraditional language. However, traditional patterns of language use have been main-tained in various Aboriginal Englishes (Eades 1982), for example South AustralianNunga English, South East Queensland English, and the concept of languageownership can persist even where a language is no longer spoken. New Englishes inAustralia are not necessarily languages of identity, rather a typical pattern in tradi-tional language whether spoken or not is the focus of identity. Aboriginal English is thelanguage of non-identity with the white majority and standard English a language ofcommunication within the wider community.

7.4 Artificial language ecologies

One can argue that diversity is natural and streamlining is artificial and further thatmost contemporary language ecologies are located at the artificial end of acontinuum, with examples of instances where exotic world languages were elevatedto national languages being particularly artificial. Thus, just as national languagescan be labelled ‘cultural’, language ecologies can also be artificial to a substantialdegree. Singapore provides an example of how repeated acts of planning and policymaking can create a different ecology.

In Singapore, the suppression of small ethnic languages as well as that of non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese has been much more deliberate. Goh (1980) reportedon the language situation in Singapore as follows:

Singapore society is ethnically heterogeneous, with about 76% Chinese, 15%Malay, 7% Indians, and 2% from other ethnic origins. Its language situation is stillmore diversified since each of the three major ethnic groups speaks manylanguage varieties. A census report identifies more than 33 specific mother-tongue groups, 20 of which have more than 0.1% of the population as nativespeakers. Four major languages are designated as official languages: Malay,English, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil. Hokkien, while a major language, is notan official language. In addition, there are three minor languages: Teochew,Cantonese and Hainanese. (Goh 1980, quoted in Kuo 1980)

This policy of egalitarian multilingualism has since given way to a policy ofEnglish/Mandarin bilingualism and deliberate official attempts to get rid of Chinesevarieties other than Mandarin.

Linguistic Communities 43

The European Union, whereas far more tolerant of minority languages, never-theless has over the years introduced many policies that have remarkably changed itsoriginal linguistic ecology and, with a number of new members about to join, moreradical solutions (e.g. creating a supernational artificial language, such as Eurolinguaor using Esperanto) are being considered.

Thus far, artificial language ecologies have been of the streamlining type, i.e. theobjective has been to reduce the number of languages spoken. There is no reason whyone could not also plan for highly diverse language ecologies in which a maximumnumber of languages could be sustained. Given the extent of which traditionallanguage ecologies have been disrupted, this would seem a logical task for futurelanguage planners. However, management of complex diversity presupposes a greatdeal more knowledge than is available to most language planners at present. The ideawas briefly mooted in the context of planning a multi-ethnic, multi-function polis inSouth Australia but with the demise of the physical project the plans for cultural andlinguistic diversity have also been shelved.

An interesting project is that of Romansch Grishun (see contributors to Lüdi 1994)which combines streamlining with planning for diversity. In essence, five very smallRomansch languages were merged with into a single standard variety (RomanschGrishun) which is recognised as Switzerland’s fourth official language and which isused side-by-side with the other three official languages in parts of the country. Theconcept of merging closely related small languages into a single larger more compet-itive language is also being tried for Sami and other languages (Wurm 1994). What thelong-term chances of this approach might be remains to be seen.

My remarks on types of language ecologies and speech communities should not beregarded as either complete or as a statement of linguistic fact. It is a pre-theoretical,exploratory attempt to classify a very large number of phenomena, each of themunique, and may require a major revision after more becomes known about thenumerous ways in which human beings establish their linguistic identities, definethemselves vis à vis others and cooperate or compete with one another.

8. Conclusions

Whilst linguists, and to a certain extent sociolinguists, have tended to arrive at gener-alisations I have in this paper taken the opposite approach. My point is that it is notpossible to make sweeping generalisations as to what languages, speech commu-nities and language ecologies are. Rather, humanity has over a very long time arrivedat a large number of different solutions to the management of human affairs and toadapting to environmental conditions.

A grammar in its widest sense accounts for the fact that the whole is more that thesum of the parts. Sentences, for instance, mean more than what their individual wordscumulatively mean. Speech communities or ecologies too are grammaticalphenomena in the sense that the whole community is more than the sum of its parts.What matters are the syntagmatic relations or functional links between the parts. At

44 Words and Worlds

this point only relatively few studies and a small metalinguistic vocabulary exists (e.g.diglossia, balanced multilingualism) to describe the grammar of entities comprised ofdifferent languages. To understand why so many individual languages are disap-pearing requires an understanding of the ecological conditions that sustain complexlanguage ecologies.

Language is inescapably linked to the world and affects the well-being of thosewho inhabit it. Language users want more than to communicate information, theywant to maintain social bonds, have a feeling of belonging and identity, to includeand exclude outsiders to varying degrees and to manage their environment. In viewof the numerous problems of overpopulation, genocide, war, displacement andpsychological disturbances in the 21st century, it would seem essential to gain agreater understanding of healthy as well as pathological aspects of different linguisticgroups and their interactions. An initial step is to adopt an interlinguistic andecological perspective in documenting the world’s language communities.

Linguistic Communities 45

Chapter 2

The Linguistic Heritage

A un populu Enchainmittitilu a catina a people

spugghiatillu strip it bare,attupatici a vucca, cover its mouth,

é ancora libiru. it is still free.

Livatici u travagghiu Deprive it of its worku passaportu of its passport

a tavula unni mancia of the table where it eatsu lettu unni dormi of the bed where it sleeps

é ancora riccu. and it is still rich.

Un populu, A peoplediventa poviru e servu, is poor and enslavedquannu ci arrobbanu a when it is robbed of the

lingua languageaddudata di patri: inherited from its parents: é persu pi sempri. it is lost for ever.

IGNAZIO BUTTITTA, Lingua e Dialettu, (Sicilian poet)

How many languages are spoken in the world? This is a question we have all asked atone time or another. It is also a question that linguists are often asked and which wehave had to answer on numerous occasions. But the answer linguists give to this typeof question is usually unsatisfactory, as we can only venture an approximate figure.

The fact is that for various reasons it is not easy to give a straightforward answer to thiselementary question. One of the reasons it is difficult to answer is that some parts of ourplanet have not yet been described linguistically and that even today, from time to time,news reaches us of the discovery of new ethnic groups and languages. This happens, forexample, in the islands of Indonesia, in regions of Papua New Guinea and in tropical

46

regions of South America. In 1998, for example, the Vahuadate and Aukedate ethnic groupsin Indonesia were “discovered” from the point of view of Western culture.

Another reason why it is difficult to answer is related to the names of languages.Languages, in general, tend to be given more than one name, depending on the neigh-bouring peoples the speakers have dealings with and the name the speakers them-selves give their own language. This multiplicity of denominations complicates thejob of identifying the language concealed behind different names. The problem issuch that the Ethnologue (Grimes 2000), for example, speaks of 6,809 languages and41,806 names for them and their variants.

But the real problem making it difficult to answer is over who should decide whena variety is a language or a dialect, or, in other words, what concept of language weare working with. As has been pointed out already by Mühlhäusler, until recently theconcept of European national languages has been decisive in this issue.

Until very recently, Luxemburgian was considered a dialect or variety of German.Today, though, Luxemburgian, along with German and French, is one of the officiallanguages in Luxemburg. Who should decide if a variety is an independent languageor a dialect of another language? This is a crucial issue, since the concept of languagevaries according to the period, the place, the culture and the society. After all, who canstop a community with political and economic power that is firmly determined todefend the rank of language for its speech?

Such a variety of criteria is used that Grimes (2000), for example, mentions sevendifferent Germanic languages spoken in Germany, while for many these are no morethan varieties of German. The same sort of thing happens with other very widespreadlanguages in the world, such as Arabic, English or Chinese.

But this question also affects numerous less widespread languages. Who, forexample, should decide whether Achi is a variety of the Maya language K’iche’, as theAcademy of Maya Languages in Guatemala proclaims, or an independent Mayalanguage, as many of its speakers claim? Who should decide whether the different vari-eties of Tamazight, Sami or Quechua form a single language or a group of languages?

Mutual understanding as one of the characteristics for defining the autonomy oflanguages is not a valid criterion or at least does not work infallibly. Otherwise, why areDanish, Swedish and Norwegian considered three separate languages if they have noproblem understanding each other? Who decides whether or not the Croatian speakerunderstands the Serbian speaker, the Catalan speaker understands the Spanish speakeror the Urdu speaker understands the Hindi speaker? Furthermore, mutual under-standing is not always symmetrical and depends to a large extent on people’s attitudes.

But, returning to the original question regarding the number of languages in exis-tence, most linguists today (Crystal 2000, Nettle 1999, Comrie, Matthews & Polinsky1996, Wurm 2001, Grenoble & Whaley 1998, Hagège 2000) give global figuresbetween 5,000 and 6,000 languages, which we shall also use. If we start with thepremise that some 6,000 languages are spoken in the world, their distribution bycontinent is approximately as follows: 1,900 in Africa (32%), 900 in America (15%),1,900 in Asia (32%), 200 in Europe (3%) and 1,100 in the Pacific (18%) (see Diagram 4).

The Linguistic Heritage 47

But languages are not uniformly distributed over the different continents either. Ifwe look at linguistic diversity by territories or states, we see that in 22 states there aremore than 100 languages spoken, or, in other words, that in those 22 states almost 90%of the languages of the world are spoken (Table 2).

Table 2. Number of languages per state

State Gunnemark (1991) Krauss (1992) Grimes (2000)

Papua New Guinea 750 850 823

Indonesia 300 670 726

India 350 380 387

Nigeria 400 410 505

Cameroon 200 270 279

Mexico – 240 288

Australia 150 250 235

Brazil 150 210 192

Zaire / Congo 200 220–200 218

China – 160–100 201

United States 150 160–100 176

Philippines 100 160–100 169

48 Words and Worlds

Africa 1900

Asia 1900

Pacific 1100

Europe 200

32%

32%

18%

15%3%

America 900

Diagram 4. Distribution of languages by continentBased on Krauss 1992 and Grimes 2000

If we classify languages according to the number of speakers they have, we see that afew languages, about 80, have more than ten million speakers each – that is, that 1.3%of languages account for about three quarters of the world population. On the otherhand, 81.8% of languages do not exceed 100,000 speakers and 55.5% do not exceed10,000, though on this question the sources differ considerably (Table 3).

The Linguistic Heritage 49

Table 2. Continued

State Gunnemark (1991) Krauss (1992) Grimes (2000)

Burma 100 160–100 107

Nepal – 160–100 120

Russia 100 160–100 100

Malaysia 120 160–100 139

Sudan 100 160–100 134

Tanzania 100 160–100 135

Ethiopia – 160–100 82

Chad – 160–100 132

Vanuatu 100 160–100 109

Central African Republic – 160–100 68

Based on Krauss 1992, Grimes 2000, Gunnemark 1991

Table 3. Languages and number of speakers

Number of speakers Number oflanguages

Percentage oftotal numberof languages

Ascendantaccumulatedpercentage

Descendingaccumulatedpercentage

More than 100 million 8 0.1 0.1 100

10 – 99.9 million 72 1.2 1.3 99.9

1 – 9.9 million 239 3.9 5.2 98.7

100,000 – 999,999 795 13.0 18.2 94.8

10,000 – 99,999 1,605 26.3 44.5 81.8

1,000 – 9,999 1,782 29.2 73.7 55.5

100 – 999 1,075 17.6 91.3 26.3

10 – 99 302 4.9 96.2 8.7

1 – 9 181 3.0 99.2 3.8

1 51 0.8 100 0.8

Based on Crystal 2000

50 Words and Worlds

Nigeria, with a population of about 100 million, has a little over 400 languages,most of which belong to two large families: Niger-Congo (whose largest sub-family is Benue-Congo), and Afro-Asiatic (whose largest sub-family is Chadic).These two sub-families between them account for most of the country’slanguages. In fact, Hausa, one of the country’s three major languages, is Chadic,while the other two, Yoruba and Igbo, are Benue-Congo. Another interestingthing about these sub-families is that Chadic is found mainly in the northern,and northeastern areas, while Benue-Congo spreads across the southern andcentral parts of the country. The third family, Nilo-Saharan, is representedmainly by Kanuri in the northeastern tip of the country. In addition to languages

THE LANGUAGES OF NIGERIA

Although the number of speakers is often considered decisive for the preservationand future of languages, we would like at this point to stress the relative nature ofthis question.

At first sight it seems to be the case, as Nettle (1999), for example, points out, thatbelow a certain number of speakers a language can have problems surviving. Thisauthor indicates the figure of 10,000 speakers as a crucial threshold. But this issue hasa lot to do with the type of society and culture.

The Linguistic Heritage 51

that are indigenous to the country, English is the official language, Nigerian(English-based) Pidgin is an informal medium, and Arabic is used mainly inconnection with Islam.

It should be clear from the foregoing that Nigeria is typically multilingualwith all the challenges that characterise multilingualism. The fact that there are400 languages to 100 million people does not imply that each language isspoken by ¼ million persons. The three major languages account for about 55million native speakers, while another 10 million speak one or more of them asan additional language. If a language is not regarded as major, it does not meanit is minor. In practically every State, there is a main language which can bepromoted and there are hundreds of smaller languages at the local level.

Ideally, all Nigerian languages should find a role at the national, State or locallevel. The ideal is however often different from reality. In spite of policiespurporting to enhance the status and role of Nigerian languages, implemen-tation is generally ineffective. The result is that Nigerian languages areconstantly being bombarded by the dominance of English as the language ofgovernment and administration, education at almost all levels, most of themedia, science and technology and most creative writing. In recent years, inter-national attention has been focused on endangered languages and the need tosafeguard them. This effort must not be limited to smaller languages alone butshould rightly extend to the dominance of English and the deprivation arisingfrom lack of use of Nigerian languages in prestigious domains. A majorconstraint in this regard is the lack of political will by policy-makers and unfa-vorable attitudes to indigenous languages engendered by the colonial expe-rience. If Nigerian languages and cultures are to survive, basic education mustbe given in a child’s language and efforts must be made to take measures toenhance the value and status of indigenous languages. As long as being profi-cient in Nigerian languages is not seen as conferring any special rewards oradvantages, so long will their use and preservation be hampered.

Ayo BamgboseIbadan University, Nigeria

Languages with less than 10,000 or even 1,000 speakers can form highly viablecommunities in which the only language used for all internal purposes is their own.We find situations of this type, for example, in the communities using the Gumawanalanguage in Papua New Guinea, which has 367 speakers according to the 1996census, Nambikwara in Brazil, with almost 1,000 speakers of which 95% are mono-lingual, Ka’apor in Brazil, with less than 500 speakers of which 90% are monolingual,Onobasulu in Papua New Guinea, with some 500 speakers, or Secoya in Ecuador,with a similar number of speakers. Similar situations have been described onnumerous occasions and in a variety of places, such as the Caucasian languageHinukh in Dagestan (Kibrik 1991) or the Baiso language of Ethiopia (Hagège 2000).

The community’s cohesion and its wish to maintain its language and culture candecide their future and so it has been for centuries, as in the case of Baiso in Ethiopia,mentioned above, which for more than a millennium has resisted competition frommore widespread languages around it. In other words, as well as the number ofspeakers, the vitality shown by the language is fundamental.

On the other hand, there are languages with more than 10,000 speakers in situa-tions of extreme danger. This is the case, for example, of Breton in France. Accordingto figures by Broudic (1999), although Breton has more than 250,000 speakers, due tothe percentage of speakers in the total population (Diagram 5) and their distributionby generation (Diagram 6), the situation seems highly delicate.

Global figures for Breton for 1997 (Diagram 6) seem to indicate a rapid reduction inthe number of speakers in the coming years, although at the end of the nineteenthcentury it had almost one and a half million speakers.

The number of speakers of a language therefore seems to be a relative aspect. However,a decrease in the number of speakers is an important indicator, as all the experts agree.

It is a known fact, for example, that in many parts of the planet aboriginallanguages are seeing an alarming decrease in numbers of speakers in a trend thatleads to extinction. By way of example, let us look at the extremely disturbing figuresfor the percentage of speakers of aboriginal languages in Canada and Australia(Diagrams 7 and 8) based on recent censuses.

52 Words and Worlds

57%

9%

Good knowledge11%

23%

Fairly good knowledge

A few words

Nothing

Diagram 5. Knowledge of Breton in 1997Based on Broudic 1999

The Linguistic Heritage 53

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

74+ years 60–74 years 40–59 years 20–39 years 15–19 years

Diagram 6. Percentage of speakers of Breton by age group in 1997Based on Broudic 1999

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 1996

Diagram 7. Evolution of the percentage of the indigenous population speaking anaboriginal language in CanadaBased on Norris 1998

There now follows the contribution by Professor Moreno Cabrera (AutonomousUniversity of Madrid) on linguistic diversity (pp. 54–90). The subjects presented are,first of all, linguistic diversity on the individual, genetic and structural or typologicalplanes, secondly, the location of linguistic diversity in the different parts of the worldwith particular reference to endangered languages, thirdly, the loss of linguisticheritage and the need to understand the equality and dignity of all human languagesand cultures, and finally, the alarming consequences of the internationalisation ofEnglish, which the author calls Anglo-Saxon linguistic imperialism.

Linguistic diversity in the twenty-first century

Defending our languages and their diversity, particularly against the dominationof a single language is more than defending our cultures. It is defending our life.(Hagège 2000)

We shall now take a look at the planet’s linguistic diversity and we shall see that thislinguistic diversity is in very serious danger. The rate at which the languages andcultures of the less favoured communities are disappearing is increasing steadily andthe numerous warnings that have been issued do not seem to have been able to halt thephenomenon in any significant way. It is impossible to discuss the planet’s presentlinguistic diversity without referring to this circumstance. For this reason, in the lastsection of this contribution the causes for this dramatic situation are analysed briefly

54 Words and Worlds

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

1986

20.4 2014

1991 1996

Diagram 8. Evolution of the percentage of the indigenous population speaking anaboriginal language in AustraliaBased on McConvell and Thieberger 2001

and it is argued that the acceleration in the loss of the world’s linguistic wealth has a lotto do with the steady internationalisation of English, which is not based on a sponta-neous or natural phenomenon but on certain monolingual models of acculturation thatare becoming more and more widespread over the length and breadth of the planet.

Linguistic diversity

In this section we shall establish the theoretical bases of linguistic diversity so as tomake empirical considerations on this aspect in subsequent sections.

We can distinguish three types of linguistic diversity (Nettle 1999): individual,genetic and typological.

• Individual diversity refers to the number of languages spoken in the world; it istherefore determined by counting the number of languages spoken in each area ofthe planet.

• Genetic diversity is determined by the number of linguistic families that exist intoday’s world. Here, therefore, we count the number of genetically relatedlanguage groups, called families, that there are in the world.

• Structural diversity refers to the degree of variability in the grammatical structuresof the world’s languages. We shall examine these three types of diversity in thefollowing sections.

We shall examine these three approaches to the concept of linguistic diversity in turn,since all three have important aspects for evaluating and understanding it.

Individual diversity

As has been pointed out above, it is quite difficult to count the number of languagesspoken in the world, as the criteria applied in different parts of the world are not thesame. In countries where one or more standard languages have been officially adoptedby the state, that language is usually counted as a single individual, even though thereare varieties that differ to a greater or lesser degree. For example, English, German,Chinese and Russian are all counted as four single languages in most accounts, whenit is well known that these languages include a large number of different linguisticvarieties that are far from identical to one another. Nevertheless, this situation onlyoccurs in certain parts of the world. There are places in the world that have no officialstandard languages, but a set of more or less similar linguistic varieties which are veryoften counted as separate languages, even though they resemble one another morethan some of the varieties included in the languages mentioned above.

Calculations of individual linguistic diversity on a world level are thereforebiased, as they reduce linguistic diversity in the industrialised societies andincrease linguistic diversity in the other societies. This creates the false impressionthat the so-called backward societies of the third world show a great linguisticdiversity and that that diversity is one of the factors contributing to their so-called

The Linguistic Heritage 55

backwardness, stagnation or isolation. As we shall see in chapter four, these areracist ideas, despite attempts to back them up with seemingly objective facts andfigures. The fact is that in Western industrialised societies linguistic variety issimilar to that in third world countries, but this variety is disguised and hidden bythe existence of standard languages. It is well known that in that part of Europegoing from Vienna to Amsterdam there is a chain of Germanic varieties which arelocally mutually intelligible and which are disguised behind generic terms likeGerman or Dutch. There is no doubt that the countries making up this part ofEurope (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium) areamongst the most advanced, civilised and developed in the world. The same sort ofthing goes for France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. No correlation can therefore beestablished between a high level of linguistic diversity and social, political oreconomic underdevelopment, isolation or stagnation. In addition, in many Westernsocieties, as a result of immigration, there is a very appreciable number of speakersof non-European languages which should be counted as European languages ofnon-European origin. Something similar can be said of the United States andCanada. According to Grimes (1996), for example, in Great Britain there are thoughtto be at least 140,000 speakers of Gujarati, an Indo-Arian language from India; inFrance, there are more than 600,000 speakers of Algerian Arabic, more than 500,000speakers of Kabyle, a language of the Algerian Berber family, and more than 200,000speakers of Tunisian Arabic.

In the thirteenth edition of the catalogue of languages Ethnologue (Grimes 1996), atotal of 6,703 languages are listed. However, this figure is biased by the considerationswe have just made. Even so, the increase as a result of splitting up languages likeGerman or Italian could be compensated by the reduction in the number as a result ofmerging many varieties of indigenous languages which are given as separatelanguages. For example, the Ethnologue lists more than thirty-five Quechualanguages, which could be reduced to just one or two if we used criteria like thoseapplied, for example, in Europe, even though there is no official unified Quechuaadopted as a standard language.

The problem is much more difficult in the case of areas like Papua New Guinea,where most of the indigenous languages (871, according to this catalogue) areknown only poorly or not at all, so that in many cases their degree of similaritycannot be assessed.

Even so, a figure of around 6,000 could be taken as the approximate number oflanguages spoken in the world today.

Where languages do show considerable variation is in the number of speakers.The imbalances on a world level are very big and to some extent reflect otherimbalances in the world economic and political structure. The following table(Table 4) is sufficiently illustrative.

56 Words and Worlds

Although the number of speakers is only one of the factors influencing the preser-vation and survival of a language, the fact is that the smaller this number is the moreweight this factor carries in the risk situation facing a particular language.

If we take the figure of 10,000 speakers (Nettle 1999) as the threshold below whichthe factor of the number of speakers can be considered decisive for the survival of alanguage, then of the approximately 6,000 languages in the world 59.4% oflanguages have fewer than 10,000 speakers, which amounts to 3,564 languages. Inother words, in the course of the twenty-first century, in view of their endangeredsituation, it is very possible that half of the languages spoken today could disappear.Amongst them, 30.1% – that is, 1,806 languages – have less than 1,000 speakers. It ispossible that most, if not all, of these languages are doomed to extinction in aquestion of decades.

If we take into account languages with fewer than 100,000 speakers, which Nettlehimself (1999) defines as languages whose future is seriously endangered thiscentury, then we get 83.8% of 6,000 languages, which means rather more than 5,000languages. On this basis, only about 1,000 languages can be considered stronglanguages from the demographic point of view.

The simple fact that there are almost 3,500 – or, perhaps more realistically, 5,000– languages in danger (almost 2,000 of them very seriously), along with thecultures for which they are a vehicle, is a cultural catastrophe of a truly over-whelming magnitude. As Nettle says, “Most of our human heritage is disap-pearing before our eyes” (1999).

Table 4. Percentages of languages with less speakers than the figure indicated

Continent <150 <1,000 <10,000 <100,000 <1,000,000

Africa 1.7 7.5 32.6 72.5 94.2

Asia 5.5 21.4 52.8 81 93.8

Europe 1.9 9.9 30.2 46.9 71.6

North America 22.6 41.6 77.8 96.3 100

Central America 6.1 12.1 36.4 89.4 100

South America 27.8 51.8 76.5 89.1 94.1

Pacific / Australia 22.9 60.4 92.8 99.5 100

World 11.5 30.1 59.4 83.8 95.2

Source: Nettle 1999

The Linguistic Heritage 57

We may wonder what the cause of this situation is. There are undoubtedly multiplecauses of a historical, economic, political and cultural nature which ought to bestudied at length. What we can say is that at the heart of this situation and of its steadyacceleration at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-firstcan be found, amongst other things, an efficient policy of discrimination, marginali-sation and assimilation that has been and is still being applied on a global scale, as Ishall explain later.

Genetic diversity

Since the beginning of historical-comparative linguistics in the nineteenth century ithas been known that many languages can be classified into larger units calledlinguistic families, which contain all those languages that have arisen as a result ofthe process of differentiation of a particular ancestral language, known as the parentlanguage. One historically recent case is the Romance family, which includeslanguages like Spanish, French, Italian, Romansh, Sardinian, Catalan, Galician,Friulan, Ladino, Occitan, whose parent language is vulgar Latin. Although nowritten testimonies of them have survived, the Germanic languages – German,Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, for example – and the Slavic languages –Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, for example – are alsoeach descended from their own parent languages and therefore form two distinctlinguistic families. Outside Europe we find a similar situation. The more than 1,000Austronesian languages, which cover most of the Pacific Islands, Indonesia,Malaysia and the Philippines, seem to be descended from an ancestral language forwhich there is no written evidence, which is known as Proto-Austronesian and couldbe about 6,000 years old. Similarly, the Bantu languages of Central and SouthernAfrica arose from an ancestral language called Proto-Bantu which must have beenlocated somewhere in today’s Cameroon and whose speakers expanded towards theequatorial forests of the Congo about 5,000 years ago.

Several linguistic families have in turn been shown to be genetically related. Forexample, the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families (along with other families andlanguages) are demonstrably related to one another and it is therefore postulated thatthey are descended from one ancestral language usually called Indo-European. A setof related families, taking a term from biology, is called a phylum. So we have theIndo-European phylum, to which languages like Sardinian, Dutch, Greek, Armenian,Belarusan, Breton and Lithuanian belong, languages which at first sight have nothingto do with one another. Similarly, the Bantu, Iyoide, Atlantic, Mande and Kordofanianlinguistic families of western and central Sub-Saharian Africa seem to be geneticallyrelated and an ancestral language called Proto-Niger-Congo has also been postulatedwith an age of about 15,000 years.

Unfortunately, it has not always been possible to determine how the variouslinguistic families discovered in the world are linked genetically, although there areproposals – some riskier or bolder than others – which at all events should be seen as

58 Words and Worlds

speculations for research rather than reliable results. The American continentprovides an illustrative case. The approximately 900 languages of America can begrouped in the following linguistic families:

Linguistic families of America

Although not all these linguistic families are felt to have been convincingly demon-strated, since some are based solely on a few clues which do not necessarily provetheir genetic relation (Campbell 1997), we can nevertheless say that the 900languages belong to just fourteen linguistic families. One author, Joseph Greenberg,a pioneer in the classification of the linguistic families of Africa, has proposed amacro-phylum called Amerindian (Greenberg 1987), which would contain all thefamilies listed except Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené in a single phylum. In that way,America would have just three native language groups, although, as I say, thisproposal is considered too uncertain.

All together, and with the exception of a few dozen languages that are consideredgenetic isolates – that is, lone remnants of possible extinct families or phyla – we cansay that 90% of human languages belong to one of the following phyla or families.(see also Map 1.)

The Linguistic Heritage 59

Na-Dené (North America, 41 languages)

Eskimo Aleut (North America, 9 languages)

Hokan (North America, 43 languages)

Penutian (North America, 92 languages)

Almosan (North America, 62 languages)

Keres (North America, 35 languages)

Oto-Manguean (Central America, 19 languages)

Uto-Aztecan (Central America, 33 languages)

Tanoan (Central America, 8 languages)

Ge-Pano-Carib (Central and South America, 193 languages)

Tucanoan (South America, 59 languages)

Equatorial (South America, 209 languages)

Chibchan-Páez (Central and South America, 71 languages)

Andean (South America, 30 languages)

Genetic groupings of the languages of the world

Therefore, the immense majority of the world’s languages can be classified in these 33phyla or linguistic families (counting the families gathered under the Amerindianmacrophylum individually).

60 Words and Worlds

Afro-Asiatic (includes the Semitic family)

Niger-Congo (includes the Bantu family)

Khoisan (includes Bushman and Hottentot)

Nilo-Saharan

Altaic (includes the Turkic family)

Uralic (includes Finnish and Hungarian)

Chukchi-Kamchatkan (includes Chukchi and Itelmen)

Languages of America (a least twelve phyla or linguistic families)

Eskimo-Aleut (includes Inuktitut, Yupiit and Aleut)

Na-Dené (includes the Attabascan family with the Apache languages)

Australian (includes the Pama-Nyungan family of South Australia)

Mon-Cambodian (includes Cambodian and Vietnamese)

Munda (India)

Daic (includes Tai)

Austronesian (includes the Malayo-Polynesian family)

Miao-Yao

Sino-Tibetan (includes the Sinic family)

Andamanese (Andaman Islands)

Papuan (includes the trans-Guinean phylum, which covers most of New Guinea)

Indo-European (includes the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic and Celtic families)

Southern Caucasian (includes Georgian)

Northern Caucasian (includes Chechen)

Isolated languages: Japanese, Korean, Basque

Typological diversity

Typological diversity refers to the diversity of grammatical features to be found in theworld’s languages.

First, all the languages of the world have an identical general structure: there areelementary significant units (words) and all those words consist of one or moresyllables and these syllables, in turn, consist of a concatenation of distinct units ofspeech, without meaning, called phonemes. Any utterance in any human languagecan be analysed in this way. For example the West Greenland Inuktitut (Manning1996) word neqitorpunga, “I ate meat”, is broken up as follows: neqi-tor-pu-nga,where neqi means “meat”, tor means “to eat”, pu is the morpheme for the indicativemood and nga denotes the first person singular. In turn, each of these elementsconsists of one or more syllables (ne-qi). Each of these syllables consists of severalphonemes – for example, tor is obtained by the concatenation of three phonemes:/t/, /o/ and /r/.

Expressions in all known human languages can be analysed in this way, showingthe deep fundamental affinity between all of them.

Within the sphere of phonetics, variability is not very great, since the human speechorgans limit the possibilities for the production of sounds. Vowels such as [a] or [i] arevery common in languages, the consonants [t] and [k] or [m] and [n] are amongst themost common. There are more complex sounds that are less widespread in the world’slanguages. For example, the pharyngealised voiced nasal velar, the affricativevoiceless retroflex, the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative lateral, or the voiced pharyn-gealised dento-alveolar vibrant have been found in very few languages. All thesesounds arise through the combination of simpler articulatory gestures that are muchmore frequent in human languages.

As regards the syllable, it seems that the immense majority of humanity’slanguages contain syllables of the CV type (a consonant followed by a vowel, as in ka),although the CCV (kra), VC (ak), CVC (kak) and CCVCC (krans) types occur withvarying frequency in a wide range of languages. Several languages also have diph-thongs such as ya or ay.

In the sphere of words we find that languages are unequally distributed betweenanalytic procedures, in which each word tends to be associated with a simplemeaning, and the synthetic model, in which a word is associated with a complexmeaning composed of simple meanings. For example, the Inuktitut word neqitor-punga shows a high degree of synthesis as it includes four significant elements. In theEnglish translation of this expression “I ate meat” we have three words with a simplermeaning: “I”, the first person singular pronoun, “ate”, the past of the verb “to eat”,and “meat”. What in Inuktitut is expressed through just one word requires threewords in English. In this respect, therefore, Inuktitut is more synthetic than Englishand English is more analytical than Inuktitut. In spite of this superficial difference, thecorrespondence between the two languages is perfect:

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The only difference is that what Inuktitut can do in the morphology English has to doit in the syntax. However, the English “I” is not as autonomous a word as “meat” andcould in some ways be said to act more like a prefix than a separate word (in fact, it isdifficult to find contexts in which “I” appears alone in a sentence).

In syntax we also find a fairly restricted diversity, since syntactic mechanisms canonly be expressed by the following means: word order, function markers and into-nation. Normally, the last procedure is present along with one of the other two.

For example, to distinguish the object from the subject of an action, Spanish canresort to the use of a preposition to mark the object: Juan vio a María (“Juan sawMaría”), where Juan denotes the subject and a María denotes the object. In Basque theopposite occurs: Jonek María ikusi zuen, where the ending –(e)k in Jonek indicates theagent function. Furthermore, the auxiliary verb zuen indicates a subject and an objectin the third person, so that the function of the participants is also marked in theauxiliary verb form. In English, the order of the words is what indicates the function:“John saw Mary” as opposed to “Mary saw John”. Languages in this aspect use one ofthese procedures or a combination of them, so that diversity is limited.

In vocabulary, languages have some elements in common and elements specific toeach one. There is a basic vocabulary that denotes common elements of nature and ofthe human being itself and which appear in all languages. The known languages havewords for “sun”, “water”, “moon”, “star”, “head”, “leg”, “eye” or “tongue” andwords denoting basic actions such as “eat”, “urinate”, “copulate”, “walk”, “run”,“sleep”, etc. These words from the basic vocabulary are the ones commonly used todetermine the genetic relation between two or more languages.

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Correspondence of the Inuktitut neqitorpunga with the English “I ate meat”

English I ate meat

Inuktitut –nga –torpu– neqi–

The Ethnologue: Languages of the World began in 1951 as a catalogue of thelanguages of the world, and has been published in successive editions eversince by SIL International. It includes information about language names,alternate names, a unique three-letter identification code for each language,speaker population date and source, size of the ethnic group, number ofsecond language speakers, location, names of different countries where the

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ETHNOLOGUE TO THE REVIVAL OF WORLD LANGUAGES

The Linguistic Heritage 63

language is spoken, names of dialects and their alternate names, languagefamily it belongs to, closeness of dialects, the second language used byspeakers, and other information.

Information has come from field linguists under SIL International, otherlinguists, other scholars, linguistic publications and reports, and other indi-viduals and organisations.

The latest edition, the 14th, was published in the year 2000. It is printed as twovolumes with a total of 1,584 pages. It has information on 6,809 livinglanguages, as well as some extinct languages, and some languages used assecond languages only. It includes language maps of many countries, alanguage family index, and a language name index that includes 41,806language, dialect, and alternate names.

The number of languages listed has grown with most editions, as infor-mation about additional languages and corrections become available. Since1990 the Ethnologue has been on the Internet, increasing feedback and questionsfrom users.

Since 1974 the Ethnologue has included growing information about creolelanguages, often thought by some people to be dialects or corrupted varieties ofthe languages on which they are based. Creole languages are the mothertongues of a group of people, but pidgin languages are used only for contactpurposes among speakers of other languages. The 2000 edition includes 82creole languages and 17 pidgin languages.

Since 1984 or earlier the Ethnologue has included growing informationabout nonstandard and regional languages that have no official status, andare often considered to be dialects of better known languages, although theirspeakers cannot understand the better-known language of which they arethought to be dialects.

Since 1988 Deaf sign languages have been included in the Ethnologue. It mayprovide a more complete listing than is available elsewhere. The 2000 editionincludes 114 of them.

The 2000 edition of the Ethnologue includes information on 8 mixedlanguages, of growing interest to linguists. Earlier information was provided onsome of these, including Gypsy languages and Jewish languages. In the 2000edition 15 Gypsy languages and 27 Jewish languages are listed. Linguists haveused the Ethnologue as one of their sources to provide information on endan-gered languages in the world. It is hoped and planned that its accuracy andusefulness will continue.

Barbara F. GrimesEthnologue Ed.

The location of linguistic diversity

According to Grimes (1996), out of a total of 6,703 languages, 1,000 – that is, 15% – areof American origin; 2,011 – that is, 30% – are of African origin; 225 – that is, just 3% –are of European origin; 2,175 – that is, 32% – are of Asian origin; and 1,302 – that is,19% – are of Pacific origin. That means that 97% of the planet’s linguistic wealth hasits origin outside of Europe.

What most draws one’s attention about the linguistic situation of the twenty-firstcentury are the monstrous inequalities that exist between the world’s languages.Most of them are spoken by very few people and a few are enormously widespread.

In America there are two clearly predominant languages: English in the North andSpanish in the South, with a considerable presence of Portuguese (Brazil) and French(Canada, United States and the Caribbean Islands).

In Africa, Arabic in the north, English in the west, centre and south, French in thewest and centre and Portuguese are the colonial languages that dominate in manydecisive political spheres. Native African languages, like Wolof, Hausa, Yoruba,Swahili and a few others are also widespread and influential.

In Europe, each state has its dominant language or languages, though English,German and French occupy important spheres, either because of the number of coun-tries in which these languages are official (the case of German and to a lesser extent ofFrench and English) or because of their economic, political and cultural influence(English and French).

In Northern and Central Asia, Russian still occupies an important place as an inter-national language, in spite of the disappearance of the USSR. On the Indian subcon-tinent there is appreciable linguistic variation with an important demographic basis,but English, a colonial inheritance, still plays a decisive role in many spheres. In EastAsia, Chinese occupies an important position because of demographic and politicalfactors and its cultural influence, along with Japanese as a language associated with acountry with great economic power and cultural prestige. French still enjoys a certaininfluence in Indochina, as a remnant of its colonial inheritance.

In the Pacific, we have Indonesian as a language associated with power centres andFrench and especially English and French as the dominant languages in many areas(Australia, New Zealand and several Pacific Islands).

Beneath this apparent linguistic homogeneity is a much more complex reality inwhich we find most of the languages of the world, an enormous cultural heritagewhich in many cases is gradually languishing and disappearing while the centres ofcultural, political and economic power do not feel sufficiently involved or concerned.

Let us briefly examine the linguistic situation of the world, paying particularattention to this endangered cultural heritage of Humanity. We shall start ouroverview with the linguistic phyla and families and we shall take our figures fromGrimes (1996), which gathers the results of a wide range of studies of this issue.

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North America

We have already given figures for the Eskimo-Aleut family in the previous section.Most of the indigenous languages of North America (Canada and USA) are in a verybad situation. For example, the Salish family of British Columbia (south-westCanada) consists of many languages with fewer than 100 speakers and a few witharound 500. Of the Na-Dené phylum (Canada and USA), at least 27 languages havefewer than 1,000 speakers. Navajo, the indigenous language with the largest numberof speakers, belongs to this phylum. Fishman (1991) reports that in the largestindigenous population in the United States, the Navajo, only half (about 100,000)speak Navajo. A more recent study has raised the alarm:

As for Navajo, which is one of the healthier American indigenous languages andcultures by most measures, Diné language and ways of life are deeply endan-gered. The shift from Navajo to English…is taking place with extraordinaryspeed. (Lee and McLaughlin 2001)

Of some 25 languages in the Algonquin phylum (Canada and USA), there are 15 withfewer than 5,000 speakers. Of the 13 remaining languages in the Sioux family (USA),12 have fewer than 10,000 speakers, nine have fewer than 1,000 and seven have fewerthan 100. The Iroquoian family is no better off: of the six languages in this family, fivehave fewer than 5,000 speakers, most of them fewer than 1,000. The four remaininglanguages of the Caddo family (USA) have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Of the 28languages of the Penutian phylum (USA), there are at least 18 with fewer than 100speakers, so that the chances for survival for most of these languages are slim.

The situation of the indigenous languages of North America, then, is absolutelydesperate. It is almost certain that all of them will disappear during the present century.

Central America

Most of the languages making up the various families of the Hokan phylum are alreadyextinct or have fewer – in many cases far fewer – than 500 speakers. For example, of theSalinan-Serian family, only speakers of Seri in Mexico remain (about 700), the other twolanguages in this family, Chumashan and Salinan (California) are already extinct.

In the Chibchan family (Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica,Colombia, Ecuador), 70% of the languages have fewer than 5,000 speakers, most ofthem fewer than 1,000.

All of the languages of the Amuzgoan, Chiapanec-Manguean and Chinantecanfamilies (Mexico) have fewer than 10,000 speakers, most fewer than 5,000. Most of thelanguages of the Popolocan family of Mexico have fewer than 5,000 speakers. Otherlanguage families of Mexico, such as Mixtecan, Mayan, Aztecan and Zapotecan, havea much higher number of speakers. In Mexico, then, we find a degree of preservationof indigenous languages which is totally unknown in the rest of North America,which does not mean that these indigenous American languages are entirely freefrom danger, in view of their low status of recognition and association induced from

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above and very often assumed from below with poverty and ignorance. The generalsituation is characterised as follows:

Language policy in Mexico can be summarised as a tendency to unify the countrylinguistically and make native languages disappear. The policy is based on the rela-tions established by the indigenous groups with Spanish-speaking sectors which inturn are based on economic relations and social discrimination transmitted by themedia, religion and primarily by the educational system. Since 1964 there issupposedly bilingual and bicultural education. It has amounted to making thecommunicative barrier between teachers and students less abrupt, but it isn’t a realsystem of bilingual education and it certainly is not bicultural: the teaching mate-rials are inadequate, the teachers are not qualified and above all their attitude isnegative. What they do is use the native language to teach Spanish. (Lastra 2001)

South America

The languages of the Ge and Pano families (Brazil) do not exceed 1,000 speakers in mostcases. Most of the languages of the Cariban family (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia) havefewer than 5,000 speakers. The Mataco-Guaicuru family (Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia,Paraguay) consists of languages which also have fewer than 1,000 speakers. TheHuitotoan family (Peru, Colombia) is also seriously threatened, as most of its languageshave fewer than 1,000 speakers. The Arawakan family (Brazil, Colombia, Peru,Venezuela) has 90% of its languages below the 5,000-speaker mark. Ninety-threepercent of the Tupian languages (Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay) have fewer than 5,000speakers. Paraguayan Guarani alone stands out with some 4.5 million speakers. Morethan half the languages of the Tucanoan family (Brazil, Colombia, Peru) have fewer than1,000 speakers. The Yanomami family (Brazil, Venezuela) is made up of five languages,four of which have fewer than 10,000 speakers. The Páez-Barbacoan family (Colombia,Ecuador) has several languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. Of the Andean family,excepting Quechua, the rest are on the verge of extinction. The Zaparo family (Peru,Ecuador) is made up of a series of languages having fewer than 200 speakers. Of theAlakaluf family (Chile), only one language, Kaweskar, remains, with about twentyspeakers. Of the Araucanian family (Chile), only two languages remain, one of which,Mapuche, still has more than 400,000 speakers. But some families are already extinct orare on the verge of extinction, like Cahuapanan (Peru) or Chon (Argentina). But even alanguage with millions of speakers, like Quechua, mentioned above, can be consideredendangered. This is how two researchers see the present situation:

While the position of Quechua varies greatly from one community and region tothe next, there are substantial sociolinguistic data which indicate that Quechua isindeed a declining and threatened language. In Peru, for example, figures fromthe official census reveal that Quechua monolingualism is steadily giving way totemporary, subtractive bilingualism in one generation, followed by Spanishmonolingualism in the next. (Hornberger and King 2001)

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As we can see, the survival of most of the indigenous languages of America isextremely precarious, even in the case of many languages with a large number ofspeakers. There is only one country in America where an indigenous language clearlydominates, though only in the rural world (Paraguay).

Africa

In North Africa the Berber family, while containing languages with an appreciablenumber of speakers, is cornered and constantly threatened by the predominanceof Arabic.

The Biu-Mandara family, of the Chadic phylum (Nigeria, Cameroon), consists of 48languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. Of the Omotic languages of Ethiopia, 42%have fewer than 10,000 speakers.

Of the 94 languages of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, 75 have fewer than 10,000 speakers.In the Khoisan family (Namibia, Angola, Botswana), there are just over 30

languages, of which more than 20 have fewer or far fewer than 5,000 speakers.The large Niger-Congo phylum, which includes the large Bantu family, is the

richest and most widespread of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (it covers western,central and southern sub-Saharan Africa), but that does not mean that there are notdozens of languages in this phylum in serious danger of disappearing under thepressure from other more widespread languages, both African and European. Of therather more than 640 Bantu or Bantoid languages, more than 200 have fewer than10,000 speakers. We could mention the Bantu languages of the H and C areas. In the Harea (Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Angola), there are some 19 languages ofwhich at least 12 can be considered endangered. In the C area (Democratic Republicof Congo, Congo, Central African Republic), there are rather more than 70 Bantulanguages of which about 35 seem to have fewer than 5,000 speakers.

The situation of the Adamawa families is especially worrying, with 61% oflanguages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. The languages of the Kordofanian family(Sudan) do not seem to be in a very hopeful situation, either. It comprises some 31languages, of which 20 have fewer than 10,000 speakers and 13 fewer than 5,000.

Most of the native languages of Africa are under pressure from two directions:from the large native languages of Africa-Swahili, Kikuyu, Bambara, Fulani,Amharic, Tigriña, Lingala, Luba Congo, Lugando, Lugbara, Ebe, Wolof, Yoruba,Hausa and Igbo:

These major languages are like big fish that deliberately go out to swallow up thesmaller languages. Their functional dominance in the national scheme of thingsdictates, willy nilly, that anyone who desires any meaningful participation innational life must learn to use at least one of them. (Adegbija 2001)

and from the European languages inherited from the colonial period:

The very presence of European languages and the disproportional prestige asso-ciated with them overtly and covertly by virtue of the dynamic roles that they have

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played in national life since colonial times is a major threat to African languageswhich, functionally, become insignificant by comparison. (Adegbija 2001)

68 Words and Worlds

With its nearly 2000 languages, Africa is the continent of multilingualism. Thisexplains why many states have granted a European language the status ofexclusive or not exclusive official language. French enjoys this status in abouttwenty of them, essentially in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also widespread in theArabic-speaking Maghreb. Many states in the anglicised or Portuguese-speaking areas have chosen it as a second foreign language in their concern foreconomic trade with their neighbours.

Yet the 27 African member States of the institutional Francophonie cannot beconsidered as ‘French-speaking’. All sociolinguistic surveys stress the greatdiversity in intercommunication situations that characterise those countries, thevitality of their own languages and the gap between the de jure status and realityin the field.

The dissemination and vernacularisation of French in Africa are linked toschooling and urbanisation processes. The excessively low schooling rates –hardly 30% in the South of Sahara – and totally inadequate and exclusiveeducation systems cannot satisfy the enormous need for integration and devel-opment of a fast growing school-age population. So the French that is spreadingis a street-French. One can therefore wonder whether its appropriation byAfricans will convert it into a language very different from that spoken in theformer metropolis. Regional varieties of French have already appeared, such asCameroonese, Congolese, Ivorian, Senegalese, and so forth.

The massive appropriation of an exogenous language always entailslinguistic changes that constitute an endogenous norm. As opposed to theimported – or official – norm, that of the popular French corresponds toinformal, home exchanges that are more social and therefore more convivial.They are evidence of a feeling of linguistic security, of freedom of complexes,which allows French to really participate in the African identity, to integratewell into the environment. It is not without reason that linguists speak of “Afro-French speaking Africa” (Kazadi) or of “French as African language” (Dumont).The acknowledgement of the different “national” French alone can legitimatethe “plural francophony”.

On the other hand, the media – mostly the audiovisual ones – probablycontribute to maintaining a certain intercomprehension which is necessary forofficial, scientific, administrative or economic functions and carries hopes ofsocial promotion…

THE FUTURE OF FRENCH IN AFRICA

Europe

Europe is the home of some of the most widespread languages in the world today(English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian). The existence of independent politicalstates in association with a particular language has meant that many Europeanlanguages, even those with few speakers, enjoy a favourable situation. However, thisdoes not mean that all the languages of Europe are in good health. Many Europeanlanguages are at this moment in a precarious or serious situation. Perhaps the mostobvious example is Romany. The Gypsies have their own language, Romany (a memberof the Indo-Aryan linguistic family), which, following the fate of this people, is cornered,scattered, despised, fragmented and on the verge of total assimilation and extinction.Hagège reports (2000) that many speakers of Romany have disappeared throughvarious attempted genocides. Other authors are just as forthright on this subject:

With regard to Gypsies, policies have always been a negation of the people, theirculture, their language, in different ways. (Liégeois 1992)

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But the major problem is obviously the relationship between French and thenational languages. An initial schooling in the environmental language condi-tions the harmonious development of any child and any community in respectof their sound identity.

Shouldn’t we ascribe part of the lack of participation of the majority of so-called French-speaking Africans in their own development, their difficultyachieving democracy and academic failure to the cultural uprooting they areconfronted with?

Reconciling tradition and modernity through adequate language planning,this is the path to follow to allow French to play an irreplaceable role as a feder-ative element. An effective strategy of functional multilingualism would makeFrench a second language of access to modernity.

This approach requires interlinguistic articulation of languages based on anintercultural contract of partnership excluding the very notion of dominant anddominated language, relying on the respect for “partner languages” and open toendogenous norms. In this perspective, French is certainly not intended as asubstitute for environmental languages but rather for the “hexagonal” French,which will confine itself to the fields of sciences and international relations.

Believing that Africans could do without an international language of accessto modernity is as utopian as imagining they could renounce their ownlanguages in their social relations.

Raymond RenardUniversity of Mons-Hainaut, Belgium

There are a large number of Gypsies in Hungary, the ex-Yugoslav republic ofMacedonia and Romania and they can be found in smaller numbers in other countriesin Western and Eastern Europe. However, Romany is a language with no recognitionor support of any sort in Europe. Romany is perhaps one of the European languageswhose outlook is most uncertain and inevitably tied to the marginalisation and assim-ilation of the Gypsy people.

In the Caucasus, the richest part of Eastern Europe, linguistically speaking, ofthe 34 North-western and North-eastern Caucasian languages, 15 have fewer than5,000 speakers. (See Map 2.)

There are many languages which in spite of having an appreciable number ofspeakers, do not seem to have a very clear future unless decisive action is taken intheir favour. Amongst these languages is Welsh in Wales, Breton in Brittany, IrishGaelic and Scottish Gaelic. Frisian, Sami, Casubian, Romansh, Franco-Provençal andOccitan are also in a precarious situation. Fishman (1991) denounces the massiveerosion of Frisian and its replacement by Dutch, the dominant language in a largepart of the Frisian area and especially in the urban nuclei. Fishman points out that inthe town of Heerenveen, located in the south of the Frisian area, 95% of the popu-lation spoke Frisian in the 1950s while today the proportion has dropped to 71%, andin the new districts of the town only 42% of the population speaks Frisian and only25% of the children of mixed marriages learn Frisian.

An even more precarious situation is the one facing languages like Bable,Aragonese Fabla, Ladino and Vepsian, which are European languages in seriousdanger of disappearing.

It is especially worth mentioning linguistic communities in European states with adifferent official language. Denmark, for example, has a community of 20,000Germans, almost 40,000 Faroese and 50,000 Greenlanders; in France there are morethan one million Alsatians and more than 60,000 Corsicans; in Hungary there aremore than 200,000 Germans and in Italy more than 300,000; in Norway there are morethan 12,000 Finns, in Romania there are more than 1.5 million Hungarians and half amillion more in Slovakia. Hagège (2000) reports that the Hungarian spoken in the eastof Austria faces an extremely serious threat of extinction. In Oberwart, less than 12kilometres from the border with Hungary, there are about 2,000 people who havegiven up Hungarian in favour of the German of Burgenland. Even the Europeanstates themselves do not always guarantee, protect and promote the linguistic rightsof these communities to speak languages as European as the official languages of thestates they belong to.

To all this must be added the languages of the immigrants, which receive littlerecognition, prestige, understanding or protection in a part of the world which seesitself as one of the most advanced.

70 Words and Worlds

The Linguistic Heritage 71

The term “North Caucasus”, as a concept of physical geography, is used todesignate the area comprising the north Caucasus and the north slope of theGreat Caucasus. In Russia, this name has also been applied to the political andadministrative unit that included the provinces of Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodarand Stavropol and the Republics of Adygeya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, North Osetia-Alania, Ingushetia, Chechenya, Dagestan andKalmykia. After the reform of the administrative division of the RussianFederation implemented in 2000 by President Vladimir Putin, which consistedof the implementation of seven Federal Districts in the country, governed byPresidential Delegates, this region has had its surface area increased with theincorporation of the neighbouring provinces of Astrakhan and Volgograd, atotal of 626,000 square kilometres with more than 19,000,000 inhabitants.

If the Russian Federation is a “nation of nations”, then the Northern Caucasusis the part of the country with the largest number of peoples and ethnic groups,speaking almost 50 languages belonging to a wide range of linguistic families.The Slavonic language family is represented here by Russian, which as well asbeing the mother tongue of the Russians living in this area and forming themajority of the population is spoken as the country’s official language by theremaining ethnic groups in this District. Two languages belong to the Iranianfamily: Osettic (whose autoglottonym is Irón Avzag), the official language (astatus it shares with Russian) of the Republic of North Osettia-Alania, and Tat,spoken by members of the Tat ethnic group, barely numbering 30,000 peopleliving in small communities scattered over Dagestan and other republics andprovinces of the Northern Caucasus without forming a compact territory.Karachay-Balkar (Karachai-Malkar Tif), Kumyk (Kumuk Tif) and Nogai (NogaiTif) belong to the Kipchak group of the Turkic language family. All theselanguages, like Osettic, belong in the category of the so-called “titularlanguages”, or languages of peoples who have given their name to a republic asa political and administrative unit of the Federation: Karachay-Balkar, spokenby more than 300,000 people, is the official language of the Republics ofKabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, Nogai is another officiallanguage of Karachay-Cherkessia and Kumyk is one of the official languages ofthe Republic of Dagestan. Kalmyk (Jalm Keli), titular language of the Republicof Kalmykia, is the only language in the Northern Caucasus representing theMongolian family of languages.

Under the name of Caucasian languages are included a set of almost 40languages, linguistic modalities and/or dialects. The area covered by theselanguages is made up of the Caucasus and part of Turkey. There are also small

NORTHERN CAUCASIAN LANGUAGES

72 Words and Worlds

communities of speakers of Caucasian languages in Syria, Iran, Jordan andother countries of the Middle East. The total number of speakers of theselanguages exceeds 7,000,000 people. According to the most widespread classifi-cation, the Caucasian languages are usually divided into three groups: Abkhaz-Adyghian, Kartvelian and Nakho-Dagestanian. Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz(Chano) and Svan belong to the Kartvelian language group, which has about3,800,000 speakers spread over an area embracing the Republic of Georgia andbordering areas of Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey.

The Abkhazo-Adyghian group (North-West Caucasian languages) is madeup of the following languages: Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Kabardian-Cherkessian and Ubikh. Speakers of Abaza (about 350,000 speakers) lackpolitical and administrative identity and live scattered over various republicsand provinces of the Northern Caucasus. Adyghe, spoken by some 220,000people, is the titular and official language of the Republic of Adygeya, while theKabardian form of Kabardian-Cherkessian, which has some 400,000 speakers, istitular and official in the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria and the Cherkessianform (more than 50,000 speakers) is titular and official in the Republic ofKarachay-Cherkessia. Abkhaz and Ubikh, like the Kartvelian languages, are, instrictly geographical terms, located outside the Northern Caucasus andtherefore the Federal District of the South of the Russian Federation: the first isthe official language of Abkhazia, which is a political and administrative unit ofthe Republic of Georgia, and the second is spoken by a small community madeup of descendants of the North-Caucasian Ubikh who emigrated to Turkey onaccount of the Caucasian war in the nineteenth century.

The Nakho group is made up of three languages: Chechen (Nojchiin Mettan),the official language of the Republic of Chechenya, spoken by some 700,000people, Ingush (Galgai Mot), the official language of the Republic of Ingushetia,spoken by more than 200,000 speakers, and Bats, a language spoken by acommunity of almost 3,000 people who live in Georgia.

Amongst Caucasian languages, the most numerous group (consisting ofsome 25 languages and linguistic forms with 1,5000,000 speakers) and the mostdifficult to classify is Dagestanian, the group of highland Caucasian languagesspoken by numerous ethnic groups who inhabit the Republic of Dagestan. Themost widespread criterion tends to single out two main subgroups amongst theDagestanian languages: Avar-Ando-Tsezo (which contains the followinglanguages presented by their autoglottonym: Avar Matsi, Kvannab Mitsi,Ashvali Mits, Bagvali, Buijali Mitsi, Chamalaldub Mitsi, Guibdili Mitsi, KikirliMitsi, Bezhkalas Mits, Guinuzas Mets, Jvarshi, Tseios Mits) and Lezguian(containing languages whose glottonyms are: Lezgui Chal, Tabasaran Chal,Agul Chal, Rutul, Tsajo, Arshatten Chat and Undino spoken by a small ethnic

Asia

In the area of Siberia, of the twelve languages belonging to the Tungus family (Altaicphylum), nine have fewer than 10,000 speakers. We have already seen how theChukchi-Kamchatkan of the far northeast of Siberia is also in obvious danger. In arecent field study on Chukchi, Dunn reaches the following conclusion:

Chukchi is thus a highly endangered language. While at the time of writing thereremain lots of native speakers, transmission of the language to the young hasbeen disrupted, and political and economic support for language maintenance isvery low. (Dunn 1999)

Of the Yeniseian family, the only surviving language, Ket, has fewer than 1,000 speakers.Of the 81 languages comprising the Iranian family, there are at least 52 with fewer

than 10,000 speakers.

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group in Azerbaijan and Georgia). The classification omits Lak (Lakku Maz)and Dargva (Dargan Mez, with its varieties Jaidako and Urbuko), which arecharacterised by a certain “oneness”.

It is worth singling out the demographic potential of four Dagestan languages(Avar, with more than 600,000 speakers, Dargva, with almost 370,000, Lezguian,with more than 200,000, and Lak, with more than 100,000), contrasting with mostof the languages of this group, which have between 1,000 and 15,000 speakers.

Following the Russian Parliament’s approval in October 1991 of the “Law ofLanguages of the Russian Federation”, the Republics of the NorthernCaucasus passed the respective laws or decrees establishing the “stateship” oftheir titular languages (in Russian, the concept of “state language” isconsidered the highest element in the tripartite terminological system “statelanguage – official language – titular language”). As a result of this legislativeaction, today we can speak of 14 Northern Caucasian languages that havebeen proclaimed state languages: Avar, Adyghe, Chechen, Dargva, Ingush,Kabardian-Cherkessian, Kalmyk, Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Lak, Lezgian,Nogay, Osettic and Tabassaran. As we can see, there are more state languagesthan there are Republics, and this is because some Republics are plurilingual,as in the case of Dagestan, which has seven state languages, the Republic ofKabardino-Balkaria, which has two state languages, and the Republic ofKarachay-Cherkessia, which has three. To all these languages must be addedRussian, which is still the state or official language in all the Republics of theNorthern Caucasus.

Alexey YeschenkoUniversity of Pyatigorsk, Russian Federation

In the numerous group of languages of the Indo-Aryan family of northern India,we find a fairly small proportion of languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers.Almost 50% of the Nuristani, West and Sinhala-Maldivian groups have fewer than10,000 speakers. In the Dravidian family of southern India we find languages withmillions of speakers (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil), but there are also many withfewer than 10,000, more or less 56% of them.

The Mon-Cambodian family comprises some 150 languages of which more than100 have fewer than 10,000 speakers. The Munda family in Italy is in a similar situ-ation, since half of them also have fewer than 10,000 speakers.

The same sort of thing goes for the Daic family, which includes Tai, the nationallanguage of Thailand; approximately half the languages in this family have fewerthan 10,000 speakers.

The Bodic family, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan phylum and located mainly inNepal, comprises some 130 languages of which rather more than 80% have fewerthan 10,000 speakers. Of the rather more than fifty languages in the Burmese-Lolofamily, about 20 have fewer than 10,000 speakers. The Karen, Nunguisa and Chianfamilies (Myanmar, Thailand and China) also have approximately 50% of theirlanguages below the 10,000-speaker mark.

This is a brief and far from complete overview of the linguistic situation of this partof the world.

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An ethnic-territorial autonomy is a form of ethnocultural existence in theRussian Federation, surviving in the post-Soviet space. In Russia, this takes theform of intra-state entities where the bulk of non-Russian peoples live in acompact pattern.

As a federative state, today’s Russia is made up of 89 subjects, whose nation-state entities include 21 republics, 1 autonomous region and 10 autonomousdistricts. RF’s non-Russian population amounts roughly to 28 million people, ofwhom only 18 million live in “their own” republics. According to census data, atotal of 180 ethnic groups live in RF territory.

From the viewpoint of international law, all of these, barring the Russianpeople, may be described as national minorities. However, the content of someconcepts used in international documents is not applicable to Russia in all cases.

Thus, for instance, about 100 Russian ethnic groups developed into “ethnoses”precisely in the Russian territory, i.e., they are capable of forming a state.

Other groups of peoples in today’s Russia have their “parent ethnoses” beyondthe RF confines. These are more recent ethnic entities, representing peoples livingin the CIS, the Baltic countries, Finland, Poland, Greece, Germany, Korea and so on.

LANGUAGES IN RUSSIA AND CIS COUNTRIES

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In addition, in Russia’s territory there live ethnoses which have no state oftheir own anywhere, such as Gypsies, Assyrians, Karaims and others.

In Russia, there also exists a group of aboriginal peoples (63), indigenousethnic entities whose number ranges from several dozens to several hundredsand whose languages must become the subject of linguo-ecology study. In otherwords, development and preservation of languages of small indigenouspeoples, over 30 of whom live in the North, must become a priority task both forscience and the state.

The year 1996 saw the adoption of the Law “On national-cultural autonomy.”The law provides the basis for the genuine national-cultural self-determinationof RF citizens who regards themselves as belonging to certain kindred commu-nities, and for measures to develop national languages, education and culture.Thus, according to recent data provided by the Ministry of Justice, there are 94national-cultural autonomies registered in Russia.

Language and cultural processes in the RF are determined by combinations ofthree basic factors, namely, polyethnicity of population, the predominant(Russian) nationality, and the existing structure of the national-territorialentities.

Micro-censusing of population helps identify an important trend in languagedevelopment processes of contemporary Russia’s peoples, which is a growingbilingualism and a corresponding slow down of the pace of assimilation.Russia’s schools at present provide training in 38 languages. In close to ninethousand schools 75 national languages are taught as an official subject.

In a multinational and federative state, which Russia is, constitutional regu-lation of ethnic processes includes not only regulation of the rights of the indi-vidual but also of the use of national languages in official relations.

The integrity of the state and the unity of the system of state governmentrequire the use of a single vehicle of official training at the federative level.

Russian is the official state language in the entire RF territory (RFConstitution, Part 1, Article 68). It is the language of the ethnic majority ofRussia, i.e. 83% of population.

At the same time, however, the RF Constitution (part 3, Article 68) guaranteesall the peoples of Russia “the right to preserve their mother tongue and to createconditions for its study and development.”

Under the CIS Charter, the Russian language is also the official language inthe relations between CIS countries in post-Soviet territory.

Irina KhaleevaMoscow State Linguistic University, Russian Federation

The Pacific

In the Austronesian phylum, which dominates Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippinesand the Pacific Islands and which comprises more than 1,200 languages, we findmore than 800 with fewer than 10,000 speakers. This does not mean that these 800languages are in immediate danger of extinction, but the fact that the drive ofEnglish, the official languages and the vehicle languages of the area (including theCreole languages and the sabirs) means that their future is in no way assured. Oneillustrative example is the New Hebrides archipelago forming the territory of thestate of Vanuatu.

Vanuatu is the country with the world’s highest linguistic density, since it has some150,000 inhabitants and has rather more than 100 languages, all of them belonging tothe Austronesian family, comprising almost 10% of the entire phylum (Tryon 1999).This gives a proportion of one language for every 1,500 inhabitants. According toTryon (1999), none of these 100 languages is taught in the schools and although noneof them seem to be in danger of immediate disappearance, we must bear in mind thatapproximately half of these languages have fewer than 300 speakers. By Tryon’s esti-mates (1999), the greatest threat to these languages comes from the national languageof Vanuatu, a Creole language based on English and called Bislama. Children inVanuatu tend to use this language when they communicate with one another ratherthan the languages education takes place in, English and French. Furthermore, theexample set by parents who speak to their children in Bislama instead of their locallanguage is catching on. Nevertheless, Tryon notes that the fact that the inhabitants ofVanuatu take pride in their languages and their culture works in favour of the preser-vation of these languages. According to this author, these feelings can for the timebeing guarantee the survival of these languages.

The linguistic variety of the Island of New Guinea is also absolutely amazing. InPapua New Guinea there are more than 800 languages and in Irian Jaya, the westernpart of New Guinea, which belongs to Indonesia, there are more than 250 languages.The phylum with most languages on the island of New Guinea is Papuan, whichcontains numerous linguistic families. Most of these languages have fewer than10,000 speakers, many of them fewer than 5,000. For example, of the 105 languages ofthe Sepik-Ramu family, located in the north of Papua New Guinea, there are rathermore than ninety with fewer than 5,000 speakers. The Madang-Adelbert family has102 languages, 100 of which are spoken by fewer than 5,000 people. This is the generalpattern in the rest of the families of Papuan languages.

Australia, with some 230 indigenous languages, presents a desolate picture ofsuffering and destruction. The linguists’ opinion leaves no room for doubt:

Australian aboriginal languages are dying at a rate of one or more per year.Although there may have been more than 250 languages before European contact,some linguists predict that if nothing is done, almost all Aboriginal languages willbe dead by the time this book is published. (Nettle & Romaine 2000)

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The conclusions of a study on the recoverability of these indigenous Australianlanguages leaves no room for doubt either:

Despite occasional instances of revival efforts that attain short-term, unexpectedand spiritually uplifting gains for communities of speakers of traditionallanguages the pattern of attrition and extinction appears inexorable. (Lo Biancoand Rhydwen 2001)

We should not be in the least surprised at this dramatic situation. According toFishman (1991), the first 150 years after the British occupation of Australia havebeen characterised by a shameful history of destruction of Aborigine peoplesthrough expropriation of their land, destruction of their holy places and inhumanand demeaning treatment. The results of this genocide are quantifiable: from apopulation of more than 250,000 people, in less than a century and a half they werereduced to 80,000 people. The consequences for linguistic diversity have beendevastating: of at least 300 languages spoken at the time of contact with the British,only about 50 languages remain that have an appreciable number of speakers, ofwhich only two or three seem to have any chance of surviving in the twenty-firstcentury (Fishman 1991).

The figures to be found in the Ethnologue amply confirm these opinions. Of morethan 200 Australian indigenous languages, only 53 have more than 100 speakers,there are nine with more than 1,000 speakers and none reaches the figure of4,000 speakers.

Compared with this, the situation in Aotearoa (New Zealand) as regards Maori, theindigenous language of the island, is far more hopeful, in view of this people’sstruggle to preserve their language and culture. This struggle crystallises in the TeKohanga Reo movement (Home of the Language) for the revival of Maori, whose firstcentre opened in April 1982, and moves by the Kura Kaupapa Maori (Schools ofMaori Philosophy) (May 2001), whose first centre opened in 1985. The results of theintroduction of these two Maori educational movements are very important:

There is still much to be accomplished in the arenas of language and educationin Aotearoa/New Zealand – of that there is no doubt – while the wider politicalstruggle for group-differentiated rights for Maori continues. However, in theareas of language and education, Te Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Maorirepresent, for the first time since 1840, a genuine educational alternative thatmeets the terms outlined in the Treaty of Waitangi of ‘guaranteed [and active]protection’ of Maori language and culture. The aims of Kohanga Reo and KuraKaupapa are also consistent with the developments of international law andother national arenas…Moreover, they are contributing to Aotearoa/NewZealand’s slow move towards a genuinely bilingual and bicultural society.(May 2001)

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78 Words and Worlds

There is no such thing as a culture neutral definition of a language. The Westernconcept of language, including that of professional linguists, has been shapedby the experience of European nation-state languages. English, Hiri Motu andTok Pisin are referred to as national languages of Papua New Guinea byyounger members of post independence society, and the view that there are 800plus indigenous languages has found its way into the education system. Theseare recent developments and traditional ways of conceiving ways of speakinghave been quite different.

In many instances the traditional criteria used to distinguish betweendifferent ways of speaking are at odds with professional linguistic criteria, suchas intelligibility or shared core lexicon. Linguists have talked about the lack ofclear linguistic boundaries in terms of dialect and language chains but never-theless drawn arbitrary boundaries and labelled languages. Structural criteriaare unreliable indicators of traditional language boundaries, as these reflectfactors such as wanting to be members of a group, sharing social obligations orhaving a common enemy.

A very large proportion of what modern linguists have labelled ‘language’have no traditional name – most names featured in existing lists of languagenames were given by expatriate linguists, administrators and missionaries.

There seems to be no clear distinction between language in an abstract senseand concrete talk, nor a boundary between language and other cultural forms ofcommunication. In many instances, the ability to understand and use languageis extended to spirits and animals.

There is a perceived direct link between verbal utterances and what they referto. The belief that there can be dangerous words has promoted taboo words andsecret speech forms.

Where groups of speakers from time to time agree on identifying with aparticular language what is understood by the term ‘language’ may differgreatly from situation to situation.

The notion that one can identify, count or classify the languages of PapuaNew Guinea is a recent idea, one which made no sense in precolonial PapuaNew Guinea. A perusal of the last hundred years of writings on the linguisticscene in Papua New Guinea presents a very confusing picture.

There are few attempts to explore indigenous views on what a languagemight be.

There are constant changes in both naming practices and drawing boundariesbetween languages: each list of Papua New Guinea language names has adifferent number of languages and distinct differences in name.

THE LANGUAGE CONCEPT IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

The Linguistic hecatomb

Gure herriak ez dauka kondairarik Our country does not have a history.Pobrea da. Ez dauka It is poor. It does not have anything but pirata koxkor pare bat, A couple of little pirates, langile sofritu batzuk, Some suffering workers,muga zentzungabe asko, Many senseless bordersmila zorigaizto And thousands of misfortunes.besterik. Ez da gutxi It’s not that little.Euri gortina batek ixten du A rain curtain closes gure kalendarioa. our calendar.Ez da bilatu kondaira unibertsalen No empire of our own is to be foundliburu handietan gure inperiorik. in the big books of Universal History.

(Joxe Azurmendi, Manifestu atzeratua, 1968)

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The notion that there are either 700, 800, 846 or whatever languages in PapuaNew Guinea is devoid of precise meaning, as the entities counted are notreadily comparable.

Whilst the indigenous concept of language and communication remain unex-plored, a new generation of Papua New Guineans is being educated tosubscribe to a Western concept of language.

A major problem which has arisen from the projection of Western metalin-guistics views on a linguistically very different language ecology, is that it isdifficult to diagnose changes – the fact that languages disappear from a list doesnot say much about language decline. For instance, the current Ethnologue lists asingle language Pinai with eight dialects (among them Wapi and Hagahai) with atotal of 600 speakers. Nekitel (1998), Professor of Linguistics at the University ofPapua New Guinea, lists three languages, Pinai 1500 speakers, Wapi 1200speakers and Hagahai 300 speakers. It is difficult to see how such confusing infor-mation can be the basis for any action concerning language policy and planning.

What has kept the languages of Papua New Guinea viable is not names,boundaries or numbers but the fact that Papua New Guinea has highly struc-tured multilingual language ecologies inhabited by typically unnamed anduncounted lingua francas, Pidgins, vernaculars, sign and drum languages etc.To conceptualise these ecologies would seem a precondition for carrying outlinguistic diagnosis and linguistic rescue work.

Peter MühlhäuslerUniversity of Adelaide, Australia

As we have seen previously, it is clear that at this moment the world is going througha gradual reduction of the linguistic and cultural wealth treasured over many thou-sands of years. Linguists have begun to realise the scope of the problem after manydecades in which only a few specialists had worried about it. The alarm has beenraised and there are monographs devoted to letting the world in general know of thiscritical situation. Books aimed at the general public, like those by Nettle and Romaine(2000) and Crystal (2000), are illustrative examples of this trend. See Map 3 for adescription of the situation of the languages of California.

It is absolutely vital to realise, in order to understand this situation, that the expla-nation for the death of languages is connected with the result of a certain type of policyof assimilation and oppression which powerful communities exert on small commu-nities that are at a disadvantage and which since colonial times have begun to have aneffect on a global scale. This sort of oppressive policy is not exclusive to the colonialperiod when slavery existed, but still exists today in other more modern forms, whichexplains the accelerating pace at which languages and cultures are becoming extinct.

Cultural genocide in the world today

The explanation sometimes given for this situation is that the small languages that aredisappearing are those of communities representing residual stages in the devel-opment of Humanity, who must be assimilated and indoctrinated in order to haveaccess to the economic and cultural forms of civilised and advanced Humanity, whichgoes with economic, social and political progress. Furthermore, these smalllanguages and cultures have nothing to contribute to the cultural wealth of Humanityunless they quickly assimilate the languages and cultures associated with the centresof political and economic power within whose area they fall. Therefore, the disap-pearance of so many languages and cultures is no more than a collateral occurrence,regrettable but inevitable, in view of Humanity’s progress towards the sort of societythat is considered more advanced. They are remnants from earlier periods which it isfelt must be put behind us as soon as possible. These communities are invited toadopt the linguistic, cultural, political and economic patterns which are considered aguarantee of social, political and economic success and progress.

In face of this, it has to be said that the disappearance and minorisation of manylanguages and cultures and the spread of English as an international language in mostspheres of decision-making is no more than the result of a conscious, predeterminedpolicy of cultural genocide and imperialism, carried out by the great world powers andthe smaller powers subordinated to them, who have no qualms about using psycho-logical or physical violence for the sake of destroying linguistic and cultural diversityand to bring about the imposition of a handful of languages in the decision-makingspheres of economic, political and social organisation. To sum up, the present situation ofsevere regression in linguistic and cultural diversity is the result of imperialist practicesagainst many small communities on our planet and the coercive imposition of certainlanguages and cultures by the hegemonic Western societies, whose actions are not basedon the principle of respect for the linguistic and cultural rights of small communities.

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Many examples could be given of this oppressive imperialist policy. The followingare a just a small cross-section, denounced by the Non Governmental OrganisationSurvival International, which are taking place at this moment:

• The linguistic discrimination and oppression the Tibetans are subjected to by theChinese government.

• The linguistic and cultural genocide to which the Turkish government is trying tosubject the Kurds.

• The maltreatment by the government of Botswana of the Bushmen, still today seenas savage and primitive hunters, marginalised and trampled by the government.

• The constant attacks by the government of Brazil on the territorial and culturalintegrity of the Yanomami and other native peoples of the territory of this country.

• The continuously unfulfilled promises of recognition of the territorial integrity ofthe Wichi by the government of Salta (Argentina).

• The marginalisation and systematic invasion of the Naskapi Indians (Innu) by theCanadian government.

• The marginalisation of the culture and language of the Berber people in the coun-tries of North Africa and the null or scarce official recognition of Berber in Moroccoand Algeria.

• The marginalisation, scorn and continuing persistent attempts at the cultural andlinguistic genocide of the Gypsies in many of the countries of Europe.

• The continued oppression of the Khanti (west Siberia) by the oil companies sincethe sixties, which have endangered or totally prevented their traditional means ofsubsistence.

As this Non Governmental Organisation proclaims, “There are some 300 millionindigenous people all over the world, organised in viable contemporary societieswith complex lifestyles and progressive ways of thinking. They are not remnantsfrom a past age.”

Indigenous peoples are part of the present and not just part of the past. All commu-nities, as historical communities, have ties with the past. The large Western commu-nities are also a product of the past.

Modernisation and the age of globalisation are leading to the disappearance ofmany languages and cultures because a series of deliberate and sustained policies arebeing implemented that are directed at eliminating them, either through assimilationor through physical violence (destruction of these communities’ habitat andresources) or social and psychological violence (destruction of their self-esteem andof the valuation of their language and culture). This is how it was described in a recentstudy of today’s hunter-gatherer communities:

For most indigenous minorities, the transition to modernisation is a synonym ofimpoverishment, racism, violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide andsocial disintegration. In fact, the tendency to consume toxic substances can be

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symptomatic of an unconscious desire of self-destruction, and a mute protestagainst the collapse of the old values. For Pygmy, San, Negrito, Inuit and othereconomically marginal groups, ways of life have already changed or will soondo so, with modifications of the environment, such as game depletion andcompetition from other types of economies. (Froment 2001)

Ever since the colonial period, sometimes openly and sometimes covertly, the largeWestern political and economic powers have applied an absolutely scandalous policyof cultural genocide.

There is no natural process of progress that leads inevitably to marginalisationfollowed by the disappearance of the greater part of the planet’s small local languagesand cultures, so much as a policy directed at those ends which has had unques-tionable success during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There are a series of suppositions which, though not explicitly acknowledged,shape this policy of cultural marginalisation and destruction.

First, the racism which, in spite of all the formal declarations against it, still exists inevery corner of the world. The concepts of primitive society or savage, backward ortribal community are clearly racist. The communities these pejorative labels areapplied to are made up of people with exactly the same abilities and the same needsas people in Western societies, neither more nor less. There is no backwardness, eitherphysical or mental, that can be considered characteristic of these communities. Itmust be stated that any idea of this sort is declaredly racist.

These prejudices give rise to the belief that these savage communities need to beeducated according to Western models. This presupposes another racist idea, namelythat these communities are ignorant and backward and are therefore incapable bythemselves of assimilating contacts with others in their own way, following their ownbehaviour patterns, their own culture and their own language. Here it is the industri-alised Western societies who are ignorant, as they know nothing or almost nothingabout the language, culture and customs of these communities and simply assumethat they are primitive and inferior and must therefore be assimilated as soon aspossible to Western models and must be guided and controlled by them to ensuretheir survival, showing a paternalism based on the racist and discriminatory idea thatthese communities are not of legal age or are primitive.

From the general racism which predominates today in the modern world, and whichdemonstrates its radically conservative and retrograde nature, is derived linguistic racismor linguicism – the term used by Phillipson (1992) to refer to discrimination on the basis oflinguistic differences – according to which some languages are more developed or moresuitable for modern life than others. Languages are classified as modern languages ofcommunication and indigenous languages serving only to express a people’s identity butnot having any communicative or cultural value. As Phillipson has remarked:

The labels currently used in political and academic discourse to describe Englishare almost invariably positive ascriptions. By implication other languages lackthese properties or are inferior.

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In this way, descriptions such as international or global language, auxiliarylanguage, link language, neutral language, encounter language, language ofculture or language of science, applied to English, French and Spanish, have astheir complement the characterisation of other languages as local languages,tribal languages, regional languages, local or tribal dialects or speeches, exclusionlanguages, nationalist languages, uncultured languages, languages of poverty,languages of non-communication, languages of superstition, etc. These implica-tions manifest linguistic racism or linguicism, because all the languages of theworld are languages of communication, of culture, of understanding, ofknowledge and of excellence. If some languages are more advantageous or morewidespread than others, this is due to circumstances outside them, such as thesocial, political or economic conditioning that makes some communities appearmore highly favoured than others in one or more spheres.

The identification of culture with written culture is another of the racist ideas domi-nating many areas of today’s Western world. It is felt that written culture and liter-ature, which are typical of the dominant powers in the Western and Oriental worlds,are superior to cultures with an oral tradition, which are typical of smaller commu-nities, who do not make use of writing.

But it is quite clear that oral cultures and literatures are much richer and morevaried than written cultures. First of all, let me say that all communities have oralculture and literature, even those considered more advanced. What is more,written culture and literature arise from oral culture and literature and hardly everthe other way round. Therefore, written culture and literature arise from a transpo-sition of oral culture and literature to a written medium. Indeed, any language thatis written has previously been spoken and, what is more important, is in mostcases still spoken today. It is not true that literature arises with writing. Literaturehas arisen in and from orality in all cases, including those of the major Westernsocieties. Anyone who says that there is no oral literature in Western societies iswrong. Written literature and culture have not supplanted oral literature andculture in any of the Western societies. In those societies in which there is a writtenpress, there are also oral means of diffusion, which always have larger audiencesand more influence.

In all spheres of industrialised societies, orality is used as an essential element:from work interviews to court hearings, from political meetings to scientificcongresses, from primary education to further education, from café gossip to parlia-mentary debates. Writing has not managed to supplant orality in the industrialisedcountries. In fact, amongst the most representative inventions of these post-modernsocieties are radio, television and the mobile telephone, which have given a newdimension to orality. We have no right to despise languages and cultures with anexclusively oral tradition, because orality is also fundamental in our advancedindustrialised societies. To think otherwise is to lapse once again into cultural andlinguistic racism.

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On equality and dignity in all human languages and cultures

Human languages are diverse by nature. Each community tends to develop its ownway of speaking that identifies it as a community and distinguishes it from othercommunities. This is even possible in several communities that speak what is iden-tified as the same language. It is a perfectly documented fact that languages developdistinctive idiosyncratic forms that identify a specific linguistic community. TheEnglish of Seattle is not the same as the English of Houston, the Spanish of Oviedo isnot the same as that of Seville, the German of Hamburg is not exactly the same as theGerman of Munich. The standard languages adopted by today’s national states aremore or less artificial conventions adopted in the basic institutions of these states.This is the case of standard English or Englishes, standard German, standard Spanishor Spanishes and many other languages. These standard languages, furthermore, arenot entirely neutral, but are based on a certain variety associated with some centrewith social, political or economic prestige. For example, standard French is based onthe Francian variety, standard Peninsular Spanish is based on the Castilian variety,standard Italian is based on the Tuscan variety.

There is therefore no standard language that is entirely and politically neutral:

Ethnicity and nationalism…inhabit the very structures of the civic societies inwhich we live. In effect, both the political and administrative structure of the stateand its civil society are ethnicised. This is achieved principally via the artificialestablishment of a ‘common’ civic language and culture. This supposedlycommon language and culture in fact represents and is reflective of the particularcultural and linguistic habitus of the dominant ethnie, or Staatsvolk. It is a majori-tarian particularism masquerading as universalism. (May 2001)

Standard language is based on a conventional concoction of the basic varietiesresulting in a more or less prefabricated language which, when spoken in thedifferent linguistic communities, takes on special distinguishing features. This is sobecause real linguistic activity works through variation and differentiation, which areat the root of two essential elements of languages: their constant adaptation to socialdynamics and their use as an indicator of identity. These two examples are what allowlanguages to persist over time and survive the multitude of social upheavals acommunity is inexorably exposed to. They also make it possible for language to be asign of cohesion and identification for communities. A specific way of speakingconstitutes a sign of intragroup cohesion and a sign of intergroup identification.

Just as the human being is equipped to deal with linguistic diversity, sinceaccording to what I am saying languages themselves keep adapting dynamically tosocial changes, they are also equally capable of understanding related linguisticvarieties from other linguistic communities. In none of these aspects do standardlanguages occupy a significant place. Standard languages do not provide anyfurther essential range in the cohesive and communicative aspects that are notpresent in the varieties.

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The process of standardisation of a language or groups of linguistic varieties doesnot introduce elements that fundamentally modify the quality of that language andmake it superior to the varieties. The value of a standard language is the value givento it by the community that adopts it freely or by obligation. It is not, however, anintrinsically superior language but, at most, the outline for a language, an unfinishedlanguage which needs to be constantly remade and recreated through whatever use ismade of it, as happens with non-standard languages. All of this means that thosecommunities that do not have a standard language of their own (most of the world’scommunities), which is a Western phenomenon associated with a specific type ofpolitico-social organisation, are communities as perfect or imperfect linguisticallyspeaking as those that do have a standard language. The differences arise from thestructure according to a particular model, but the languages of the former commu-nities have exactly the same cohesive, communicative and identificative possibilitiesas these. Linguistic communities without a standard language must not therefore belooked on as inferior, backward or less evolved in comparison with those with astandard language. These communities, like any human community, have one ormore developed languages and a literary tradition that is transmitted orally. Oraltransmission of a language is also characteristic of Western societies, where writtenlanguage is acquired once the language spoken has been acquired orally. We cannottherefore look down on a language for not being standardised or written.

English as the natural language of globalisation

English is far from being a neutral language that can be associated with a progressiveinternationalisation of Humanity. English, whether we like it or not, is associatedwith a certain specific type of culture, as worthy and valuable as any other, of course,but never superior.

Language and culture are closely connected by three aspects (Fishman 1991): theindicial, the symbolic and the constituent. English is the language of Shakespeare andSpanish is the language of Cervantes, classical Arabic is the language of the Koran. Itis something that cannot be avoided in any way; when we use a certain languagethere is an indicial reference, deliberate or not, to certain cultural referents andpatterns. In its symbolic aspect, language works as a symbol of a certain culture;English is a symbol of Anglo-Saxon culture and Spanish is a symbol of Hispanicculture. We cannot strip English or Spanish of this symbolic aspect, in the same wayas it is very difficult to eliminate the connotations of a swear word. As regards theconstituent aspect, language forms a constituent part of a certain culture. English is aconstituent part of Anglo-Saxon, for example. It is very difficult to imagine the associ-ation of the Anglo-Saxon culture with Chinese or Russian. It is very difficult toexpress oneself in English and set oneself outside Anglo-Saxon culture or the Anglo-Saxon colonial sphere.

The neutral image of English (and of other languages) is used for imperialistpurposes, as explicitly stated by Phillipson:

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Claiming that English is neutral (a tool, an instrument) involves a disconnectionbetween what English is (‘culture’) from its structural basis (from what it has anddoes). It disconnects the means from ends or purposes, from what English is beingused for. The type of reasoning we are dealing with here is part of the national-ization process whereby the unequal power relations between English and otherlanguages are explained and legitimated. It fits into the familiar linguicist patternof the dominant language creating an exalted image of itself, other languagesbeing devaluated, and the relationship between the two rationalized in favour ofthe dominant language. This applies to each type of argument, whetherpersuasion, bargaining, or threats are used, all of which serve to reproduceEnglish linguistic hegemony. (Phillipson 1992)

From Anglo-Saxon imperialist standpoints it is preached that international Englishmakes us more cosmopolitan and makes us feel like citizens of the world, free fromsentimental and exclusive nationalisms.

Some linguists have realised that the spread of English is resulting in the domi-nation and even disappearance of other languages and cultures:

American English cannot be a real international language, i.e. a neutral instrumentfor everyone to communicate everywhere. It is the vehicle of a culture that may wellswallow up all the others and convert them in negotiable products. (Hagège 2000)

This French linguist draws a direct connection between the lightning spread ofEnglish and the speeding up of massive language extinction on a world level:

All factors of language death, whether political, economical or social, can act tothe detriment of any language except English, and in favour of the latter. Thestrength and rapidity characterising the current dissemination of Englishworldwide are by far surpassing those that in the past allowed other languages –such as Latin two thousand years ago – to lead a great number of languages tototal extinction. (Hagège 2000)

Other students of the relations between languages and nations take the same approach:

Globalisation has clearly played an important part in the rise of English as thecurrent world language… But this is not the whole story, since the current ascen-dancy of English also clearly has longer historical antecedents. Indeed, the rise ofEnglish to be the pre-eminent international language has had much to do with therole of Great Britain the dominant colonial power over the last three centuries…Theincreasing sociopolitical and socioeconomic dominance of the USA, and its pre-eminent position in cutting-edge media and telecommunication, has ensured thatEnglish remains at the forefront of the world’s languages. (May 2001)

The spread of English is far from being a natural or spontaneous phenomenon. Thereare institutions funded by Great Britain and the United States whose object is to makeEnglish an international language. Phillipson (1992) mentions the British Council and

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the United States Information Agency as agents of Anglo-Saxon linguistic imperi-alism whose object is the recognition of Anglo-American cultural values. This, ofcourse, may be legitimate, but in no way does it make English a culturally neutrallanguage, as it is sometimes said.

The teaching of English, monolingualism and cultural assimilation

Phillipson (1992) shows how the basic premises of the teaching of English as a foreignlanguage, as laid down at the Commonwealth Congress on teaching English as asecond language, which took place in Makerer (Uganda) in 1961 (Phillipson 1992),have been decisive in creating or favouring the necessary conditions for increasingthe hegemony of English, especially in areas outside Europe. These premises,according to Phillipson (1992), are as follows:

• Monolingualism in the teaching of English. English should normally be taughtexclusively in English, without resort to another auxiliary language.

• Ideally the English teacher should be a native speaker. The native speaker and,even more important, the way he or she speaks English, are considered the basicmodel for the teaching of this language.

• English should be taught as early as possible. The younger the learner of English,the better the results obtained.

• The more English is taught, the better. Teaching of English should embrace thelargest possible number of spheres.

• The quality of the results of English teaching is inversely proportional to the use ofother languages. The more other languages different from English are used, theless successful its teaching will be.

This is not the place for an examination of the efficacy of these points of viewmentioned by Phillipson for the teaching of a second language, but let us look at theideological aspects concealed behind these postulates and their relation with a mono-lingualist ideology that sees cases of bilingualism or plurilingualism as no more thanstages in the transition to monolingualism in the dominant language.

The idea that only English and no other language should be used when teachingEnglish is clearly aimed at linguistic substitution rather than at the coexistence oflanguages. This is even more obvious bearing in mind the third supposition, thatEnglish teaching should be introduced as soon as possible. This allows for the possi-bility that English could eventually replace the student’s native language. The ideathat the use of other languages can have harmful effects on the teaching of English,the fifth supposition, once again shows that this proposal is based on a monolingualideology. The first, third and fifth suppositions, therefore, regardless of whether ornot they are considered effective or suitable in the teaching of a foreign language, aresigns of a clearly monolingual mentality tending towards the replacement of ourvarious languages by one single language.

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The second and fourth suppositions reveal another of the basic pillars of linguisticimperialism: induced assimilation and acculturation.

First, to say that the best teachers must be native speakers implies two concealedideas: the English of native speakers (British or United States) is the best and mostcorrect English and, secondly, by suggesting this type of teacher as a model, someoneis being proposed who has normally been educated according to an Anglo-Saxoneducational model which thereby becomes a universal model for all parts of theworld (educational imperialism).

Considering native English as correct English and the remaining forms of Englishspeech as incorrect or defective has the following consequence: since the number ofpeople who learn a foreign language and get to speak it like a native is very low,there is an extremely high number of speakers of English who speak it badly orincorrectly, with the discrimination that this involves. The worldwide spread ofEnglish is creating a kind of cultural proletariat characterised by its incorrect,defective use of English, which brands them as second-class cultural citizenscompared with the natives, who are first-class. To reach a level in one’s use ofEnglish close to that of the natives it is often necessary to spend a long time inten-sively involved in Anglo-Saxon teaching institutions, which ensures they are assim-ilated in depth, as speaking English correctly means neither more nor less thanspeaking according to the canons of the British or United States educated norm.Only those prepared to undergo all this will be able to shake off the cultural under-valuation involved in using English incorrectly.

The fourth supposition lies at the root of one of the basic postulates of the teachingof English: it is not enough just to learn to understand English, one must also learn touse it actively, to speak it fluently. Linguistic imperialism considers that just learningto understand a language is imperfect and faulty learning. Someone who says theyunderstand English but can’t speak it is not normally valued as highly as someonewho says they can do both. It is obvious that the passive teaching of languagesfavours plurilingualism, since it is much easier to learn to understand severallanguages competently than it is to learn to speak them competently.

It is well known that learning to use a language actively involves much greatereffort and dedication than learning it simply for passive use, that is, for under-standing. This clearly favours monolingualism: the time spent learning to speak onelanguage is time taken away from the passive learning of others.

Furthermore, the predominance of passive language learning does not favourspeakers of the dominant language, as they have to make an effort to understand thelanguage of the dominated, if they really want to understand them. But people whospeak a dominant language, such as English, are rarely prepared to make this effort.

Therefore, the model of monolingual and assimilatory imposition, which to a largeextent is the model used in the teaching of English (and of other European languageslike French and Spanish), not only facilitates the spread of the language and createsthe conditions for it to replace other languages, it also creates a large number ofsecond-class citizens who use English (or French or Spanish) not entirely correctly, at

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the same time as it means that native speakers of English (or French or Spanish) donot need to make any effort to understand, let alone to speak, the language of others.

With a model of this sort it is difficult to be optimistic regarding the future oflinguistic diversity on our planet.

Conclusion

We have seen the immense linguistic and cultural wealth our planet still treasures, butwe have also seen the trends on a world level, left over from the colonial period,towards the implantation of a model based on monoculturalism and monolingualism.This model places no value on the mutual understanding of languages and cultures asthe basis for the cementing of harmonious relations between the peoples of the world,but considers that there are modern cultures and languages and backward culturesand languages and that the backward communities must assimilate this model as soonas possible and that it does not in the least matter if their cultural and linguistic idio-syncracies are partly or totally lost in the process of assimilation.

The policy of imposing ideas, cultures or languages has often been the origin ofconflicts between the world’s communities and peoples and will continue to be so.Western models of economic, political or social organisation demand that the agentsintervening in them adopt a very limited number of languages, normally those of thedominant layers of society, and therefore force many of those agents to abandon theirown language in favour of one that is strange to them and in which they will probablyfeel less sure of themselves than native users of that language. On this sort of basis,mutual understanding between the world’s communities becomes submission andcultural and political dominance. In this way it will never be possible to build a worldin peace and harmony.

As Froment points out in referring to the future of hunter-gatherer communities,this can only take place on the basis of respect for all facets of the life of smallcommunities and their way of assimilating the changes brought about by relationswith other communities:

In the end, the biological consequences of modernity for hunter-gatherergroups will be dictated by the evolution of social prejudice against them, theiraccess to school, affluence and health facilities, the acknowledgement of tradi-tional rights to land, as well as their own choices in the matter of development.(Froment 2001)

Although at this moment English is the imperialist language par excellence, theproblem does not lie in English as such, since it is as respectable as a language as anyother, so much as in the monolingual assimilation models linguistic imperialism isbased on.

This does not imply that if English were to vanish (a highly improbablehypothesis in the present world), other languages would live in equality.Dominant languages in multilingual communities and in a multilingual world

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are dominant because their speakers have the power to secure advantages fortheir own group, among them linguistic advantages. Thus linguicism serves tomaintain the dominant position of French in a substantial number of countrieswhich are linked to France in an imperialist structure in much the same way asEnglish linguistic imperialism operates. (Phillipson 1992)

Linguistic diversity, like cultural diversity, is something that enriches Humanity andwhich we ought to care for between us all. What is needed is a radical change inmentality. If we really want to understand each other we ought to take an interest inunderstanding each other’s language and culture, but the effort needed to do this willonly be made on the basis of mutual respect. If we think that the other person’sculture and language are inferior to our own – that is, if we take a racist attitude – weshall never make the effort needed to understand the other person, who is as humanas we are.

The monolingual attitude being imposed on a global level is intrinsically counter topeace and harmony and furthermore is lacking in legitimacy:

I have argued that this assertion of continued monolingualism has no real orlegitimated basis – certainly, at least, not under the auspices of individual rights –since the opportunity and right to continue to speak the dominant language is inno way threatened by minority-language recognition. (May 2001)

Nothing can change if we are not prepared to change this mentality and, far moreserious, if we are not even aware of it. Since it seems difficult to change the mentalityof those who are already educated, then perhaps education for tolerance, the valu-ation of other cultural and linguistic communities and mutual understanding, andagainst racism, is the only basis on which we might, in the future, build a truly fairerand more human world.

Recommendations on linguistic heritage

In view of the imminent danger of loss of our linguistic diversity, we recommend

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• Spreading the idea amongst international bodies and the general public thatlinguistic and cultural diversity is a heritage that must be preserved as activelyas possible.

• Publicly proclaiming and defending that endangered languages, like alllanguages, contain enormous wealth and interest for humanity, and drawingattention to the falsity and the danger of placing languages in a hierarchy.

• Transmitting and popularising the feeling that all languages and culturesform part of the common heritage of humanity and that as such they mustnot only be preserved but developed and encouraged.

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• Spreading, especially amongst speakers of widespread languages, theimportance of preserving and furthering the less widespread languages,especially those around them, and making speakers of the less widespreadlanguages aware of their role in this task.

• Spreading the idea that multilingualism does not refer only to theknowledge and use of the more widespread languages. The study of lesswidespread languages, especially those surrounding each community,should be encouraged and helped.

• Spreading the importance of respecting and protecting the rights of speakersof all languages to use them and cultivate them.

• Declaring each and every language the heritage of humanity.

Chapter 3

The Official Status of Languages

1. Each culture has a dignity and value which must be respected and preserved.2. Every people has the right and the duty to develop its culture. 3. In their richvariety and diversity, and in the reciprocal influences they exert on one another,all cultures form part of the common heritage belonging to all mankind.

(UNESCO 1966, Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural Co-operation).

In this chapter we shall look at the official status of the languages of the world and also atthe impact that official recognition of a language by a state has for the development of thatlanguage. Since it is the official languages of each state that, as a result of being used in allsocial spheres, show the greatest vitality, those linguistic communities whose languagedoes not share the same official status should demand this status for their own language,or if not this status, then at least the practical consequences arising from being official.

The chapter is structured as follows: first of all, different state policies regardingrecognition of their official languages are analysed; secondly, we shall look at languagesthat have achieved official status and those that have not; next, we shall single out someof the current legislation aimed at the protection of linguistic heritage through policiesof official recognition, and finally, Professor Annamalai will put forward a newapproach to linguistic policy based on the recognition of plurilingualism.

The state and the official language

The majority of the linguistic policies of states today have been based on, at least inrecent centuries, promoting what they call their “national” languages. This encour-agement of “national” languages has in most cases had a twofold application.Internally, the language or variety considered “national” has had prestige conferredon it and been promoted over the other languages and varieties within the stateborders. The consequences of this policy have, amongst other things, been to margin-alise the other varieties and languages, lower their prestige, endanger them and evencause their disappearance. Only in a handful of occasions or historical moments havestates acted to preserve their linguistic diversity.

Externally, many powers have considered their “national” language a loyal partnerin their imperial and colonial actions and have exported it beyond its original limits.

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In the new territories, it has in turn become the language behind the disappearance ormarginalisation of other languages and cultures.

European nationalism in recent centuries has integrated the concepts of a commonlanguage, nation and state (Lastra 1992) and has created the opinion that a modernstate, if it is to be modern and promote itself as such, must be endowed with a singlelanguage common to all its citizens.

The development of the European concept of the nation state together with colonialexpansion has encouraged a specific concept of state based on the idea of a “national”language sustained and reinforced by a common administrative and educationalsystem and has spread it all over the world.

The creation of new states in the course of the twentieth century and the moderni-sation of others has on numerous occasions involved the mimetic adoption of thismodel, very often to the extreme of even declaring the language of the Europeancolonisers the official language.

In this way, languages of basically European origin, such as English, Spanish,French or Portuguese, are today official languages in most of America and Africa andin large areas of Asia and the Pacific, and have a clear advantage in their competitionwith the local languages. English is the official or co-official language in more than 70states according to Crystal (1997), French in 30, Spanish in 20, Arabic in 20 andPortuguese in 6.

McArthur (1998) mentions 232 territories spread over the planet in which one of thefour languages mentioned (English, Spanish, French or Portuguese) is official, co-official or carries a lot of weight. According to this author, only the remaining 52 terri-tories are free of this European linguistic preponderance. The situation is especiallynotorious in Africa, where out of 56 countries, according to UNESCO (1997), 45 havea language of European origin as their official or co-official language and nine haveArabic (Bolekia 2001).

This policy of linguistic homogenisation is based on the prejudice of consideringthat the use of just one language or of a common language facilitates the cohesion andprogress of the state, overlooking the fact that in many situations the language of theformer coloniser has not united and does not unite different linguistic communities.

Whatever the case, with this worldwide consolidation of the idea of a nationallanguage, in some states the languages of the European colonisers has in practicemanaged to replace the local languages and the “national” language adopted hasbeen the colonial language. This has happened, for example, in Australia, NewZealand, Argentina and Brazil. In these states, the local languages have only justsurvived and their speakers can only use them alongside the official languages in abilingual situation.

In other states, which have also opted for the language of the colonisers as theofficial language and a vehicle for Westernisation, linguistic wealth has been betterpreserved, perhaps because the demographic pressure of the colonisation itself wasless. This is the case of Cameroon (English and French), Gabon (French), Gambia(English), Chad (French and Arabic) and Guatemala (Spanish), for example.

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In other cases, especially when colonisation has been more recent or less intense,the modern state has preserved the language of the colonisers as one of its officiallanguages, while also promoting one of its local languages to the same rank. This isthe situation, for example, in Kenya (English and Swahili), Pakistan (English andUrdu) and Vanuatu (English, French and Bislama). There are even situations wherecolonisation has meant the conversion of a traditionally monolingual society to bilin-gualism or multilingualism, as in Samoa (English and Samoan), Tonga (English andTongan) and Rwanda (French, English and Rwanda), which as well as their ownlanguages have declared those of their former European colonisers as official.

States that have copied the European model of a “national” language, promoting justone of their local languages to this rank are also found. This has taken place in certainstates in the process of modernisation, such as Turkey (Turkish), Nepal (Nepali),Tanzania (Swahili), Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani) and Thailand (Thai). This policy has ledthem to the promotion and development of the language declared “national” overand above their other languages. In some cases, the language chosen for this purposeis the one most closely tied to local economic power or with the best chance of beingpromoted as an interstate language, and not the most widespread language. This isthe case in Bahasa in Indonesia and Tagalog in the Philippines, languages which areofficially known as Indonesian and Filipino.

However, there are also states that have adopted positions more in consonancewith the preservation and promotion of their linguistic heritage, raising several oftheir languages to the level of official languages. South Africa, for example, has since1996 recognised 11 languages as official (Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Xhosa,Sotho, Tswana, Swati, Tsonga, Venda and Zulu); India has two official languages overthe whole of its territory (English and Hindi) and 17 more co-official languages indifferent regions (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Kashmiri,Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil,Telugu and Urdu), and Eritrea has recognised eight official languages (Afar, Arabic,Blean, Hadareb, Kunama, Saho, Tigre and Tigriña).

Most states, therefore, have adopted explicit linguistic policies, juridicallyfavouring the internal and external development of the language considered by their

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Article 3 of the Constitution of Vanuatu, 1980

1. The national language of the Republic of Vanuatu is Bislama. The officiallanguages are Bislama, English and French. The principal languages ofeducation are English and French.

2. The Republic of Vanuatu shall protect the different local languages whichare part of the national heritage, and may declare one of them as anational language.

rulers to be the common and official language of the country. On many occasions, thestate even takes on the work of preserving and maintaining the “purity” of thelanguage adopted as official, as well as its protection and diffusion beyond itsborders. This political practice leads to the preponderance and development of thelanguages proclaimed official, which states generally use as the only medium ofcommunication in all public spheres, to the exclusion of all other languages.

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In Indonesia today, apart from Indonesian, there are hundreds of languages.One estimate puts the number of regional languages at 715. These languages aredistributed throughout the entire archipelago of Indonesia and have aconfusing number of names. The language map in Indonesia is kaleidoscopic.

In 1928, while Indonesia was still under Dutch colonial rule, a group of youngnationalists expressed their yearning for national unity and independence in adeclaration which is now known as the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda). Withsome considerable foresight, they included in the declaration their intention topromote Indonesian as the language of national unity.

Their dream of Indonesian being the national language became a reality. Indonesian is now spoken as a first language by a growing number of people andthere is no denying that it is taking root in the nation, but its spread is not even,geographically or socially. Not all Indonesians are able to speak it, and many do notspeak it in the home. The presence of the regional languages is still very much felt.

The number of people who claim to understand Indonesian has grown signif-icantly during the last three decades. However, a large number of these peoplestill do not necessarily use the language on a daily basis at home. They continueto use one or other of the country’s regional languages as their language of dailycommunication. In 1970, only 40% of the population claimed that they under-stood Indonesian. In 1980, it had grown markedly to 60% and in 1990, the figurehad risen moderately to 67%. Projections for the year 2000 put the figure at 72%.

According to the 1980 census, there were 17,505,000 people who could under-stand Indonesian and who also used it on a daily basis in their home. By 1990, therewere 27,055,000, an increase of about ten million people. However, there were179,194,223 people in 1990 and therefore Indonesian speakers represented onlyapproximately 6.62% of the population. The number of people in 2000 was esti-mated at 32.000.000 million people. This means that, while the language iscertainly gaining ground, its eventual adoption as everyone’s first language isindeed a long-term project. It has, however, spread more rapidly in some placesthan others. If we compare the growth during the ten years between 1980 and 1990in a number of provinces beyond the island of Java, the growth is quite remarkable.

LANGUAGE TREASURES IN INDONESIA

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Most Indonesians are able to use more than one language with Indonesian andthe regional languages being used side by side. However, for the majority ofpeople, one of the regional languages – rather than Indonesian – will be their firstlanguage. So the regional languages have an important place still in the life of thepeople. The regional languages are still used as a means of education in theirown locales. The use of the regional languages in education is provided for in thecountry’s law. In Statute 4 of 1950 it says that ‘teachers may use the regionallanguages as a medium of instruction up to the third year of primary school.’

There is a close link between the regional languages and a person’s ethnicgroup. Regional languages are the mother tongue or first language of manypeople and are used for informal, personal communication in the home amongfamily members, or in the immediate environment with people who are fromthe same ethnic group. The regional languages are also used in a limited way forformal or public activities such as marriage ceremonies.

A Rich HeritageFor someone interested in the relationship between language and culture, thevocabulary of a language can mirror the way the people in that speechcommunity conceive their world, the way they structure knowledge aboutsociety and their place in it. Because language reflects culture and also representscognitive structures, each regional language is a valuable resource for researchnot only into the diverse nature of each of the unique cultures it expresses, butalso into important theoretical issues about the nature of linguistic and cognitiveuniversals – the way human beings cognitively process reality. These importantissues need to be tested by field data from languages other than English or thosein the Indo-European group before such theories can win wide acceptance.

Certainly, the decision to promote Indonesian which has come to some extentat the expense of the regional languages can be justified in terms of theimportant role Indonesian is playing in national unity, development, and theprovision of educational opportunity.

Yet surely it need not cost the extinction of this rich heritage which is animportant source of knowledge for questions ranging from the relation betweenlanguage, culture and knowledge to the search for linguistic universals, thestructure of human knowledge and human evolution.

Informed policies are necessary which will aim to promote a happy coexis-tence between Indonesian and the regional languages and will help to slowtheir demise. We cannot stop language change. Nor can we necessarily preventthe natural processes that lead to the extinction of languages. But we canperhaps support the work of those who wish to combat social beliefs andpolitical policies that are actively undermining the world’s linguistic diversityby the promotion of monolingual policies.

State, language and territory

Both in states that have existed for centuries and in more or less modern post-colonialstates, situations are found in which the same linguistic community inhabits terri-tories belonging to more than one state. In Europe, for example, one well-known situ-ation is that of Sami, whose speakers are to be found in land belonging to Norway,Sweden, Finland and the Russian Federation, of Basque, in France and Spain, ofFrisian, in Germany and Holland, of Catalan, in Spain, France and Italy, of Occitan, inFrance, Italy and Spain, etc.

This lack of consideration for the integrity of local ethnic groups or linguisticcommunities in drawing the limits or borders of modern states can also be found inother parts of the world. Thus the territory of the Zaparo linguistic community isdivided between Ecuador and Peru, the Maya languages Ch’orti’, Mopan,Q’anjob’al and Popti’ between several Central-American states, Garifuna betweenGuatemala, Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua, Osettic between the RussianFederation and Georgia, Kirgiz between Kirgiztan and China and countlessexamples in Africa.

It is a well-known fact that colonial borders, at least in many areas, were fixedtotally arbitrarily, with no respect for common cultural or linguistic traditions. To agreat extent, this is what has caused the present divisions between states and not afew of today’s armed conflicts.

Alongside this fact it is important to mention the shifting of borders that takes placein some parts of the world. By this we mean areas which change fairly easily from onestate to another or are a cause of dispute between states.

From the point of view of linguistic policy, management aimed at promoting andpreserving the linguistic heritage, it is important to stress this aspect since due to thelimited resources available it is essential that efforts be coordinated.

It is also important that forces and bodies from outside the affected communitiesavoid having a negative influence on these processes by preventing supra-statecoordination or creating false linguistic and cultural divisions that do not existwithin the communities.

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Recent efforts which frame the arguments for preservation within the contextof a social and political agenda are signs that the threat of extinction for manylanguages is seen by many respected linguists as all too real. The least thatresearchers can do is to record for posterity something of the uniqueness ofthose people’s lives, thoughts and culture. Perhaps we can also support effortsat increasing awareness among policy makers of what is being lost.

Multamia RMT LauderUniversity of Indonesia, Indonesia

Official status and languages

How many of the world’s languages are official in some state or other?This question can be answered with an initial approximation, such as the one by

Krauss (1992), who notes that only some 250 languages are recognised as official orco-official languages in states or in autonomous regions of a state.

Though not referring strictly to states, UNESCO (1998) puts the figure of differentstates or regions of our planet at 224. Languages with official or co-official status inany state or region of a state comprise less than 5% of the world’s total.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that more and more states are tending torecognise all or several of their languages as official or at least to give them co-officialstatus in the area where they are spoken. Although there are large differences from onestate to another, we can say that following the pioneer policies of Switzerland and Ireland,who since the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth haverecognised as their official languages French, German, Italian and Romansh, in the case ofthe former, and English and Irish Gaelic, in the case of the latter, other states are seeking toraise all or several of the languages of their territory to official or co-official status.

Sri Lanka, for example, recognised Sinhala and Tamil as official languages in 1978.Luxembourg declared its three languages – French, German and Luxemburgian –official over the whole of its territory in the eighties. Belgium has French, German andDutch as official languages. South Africa, as mentioned above, has recognised 11 of itslanguages as official. Paraguay has made Spanish and Guarani official. Eritrea hasestablished eight languages as official: Afar, Arabic, Blean, Hadareb, Kunama, Saho,Tigre and Tigriña. Nigeria has declared nine languages official or national: Edo, Efik,Adamawa Fulfulde, Hausa, Idoma, Igbo, Yerwa Kanuri, Yoruba and English.

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Constitution of Switzerland 1874, Art. 116

1. German, French, Italian and Romansh are the national languages ofSwitzerland.

2. German, French and Italian are declared to be official languages of theConfederation.

Constitution of Sri Lanka, 1978

1. The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. 2. Tamil shall also be an official language. 3. English shall be the link language.

Other states, instead of making all their languages official state languages, grant all orseveral of them co-official status in their territory alongside the state language orgeneralised official language. This is the case in Spain, with Basque, Catalan andGalician, in Denmark, with Faroese and Greenlandic (Inuktitut), in the RussianFederation, with many of its languages, such as Chukchi in Chukchia, Chuvash inChuvashia, Dolgan in Taymyria, Nentsi in Nenetsia and Taymyria, Osetic in NorthOssetia, Udmurtian in Udmurtia and Yakuto in Yakut and in China with some of thelanguages spoken in its territory, such as Tibetan, Jingpo, Derung, Dai, Salar, Zhuang,Zaiwa, etc.

In other states, local languages, not always recognised as official or co-official, arepromoted through their use in the administration and in the educational system. Thishappens, for example, in Ghana, where Akuapim Twi, Asante Twi, Dagaari, Dagbani,English, Eve, Fante, Ga, Kasem and Nzema are used in teaching (Grimes 2000), inIndia, where according to the Sixth Educational Survey in 1998, 35 languages are usedin the educational system, though at different levels (Pattanyak, in this Review), andin Papua New Guinea, with some 30 languages in the educational system (Wurm, inthis Review).

Although it is true that most states affected by linguistic diversity have for a longtime, contrasting with what have been the main lines of their traditional policy,proclaimed the dignity of the local languages and the need to preserve them andencourage them in public life, it is no less true that these proclamations very oftentend to be simple declarations of good intentions which are not reflected in thelinguistic practice of the authorities (Siguán 2001).

But casting an eye over all of the languages of the world, it is important to rememberthat 95% of them lack official or co-official state recognition.

Official recognition by the state, as Hagège (2000) points out, involves theinscription of a language in the state’s constitution and is an increasingly indispen-sable measure for ensuring the preservation and promotion of languages.

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Constitution of Vietnam, 1980, Art. 5

…All the nationalities have the right to use their spoken languages and scripts,and to preserve and promote their fine customs, habits, traditions, and cultures.

Constitution of Ecuador, 1979, Art. 1

…Castilian is the official language. Quechua, Shuar and the other ancestrallanguages are official for the indigenous peoples, in the terms laid down bythe law.

When a language is made official, the prestige this measure gives rise to in the atti-tudes of the speakers towards their language is remarkable. Linguistic communitiessee their efforts to preserve their language reinforced and the measure allows the useof resources not previously available. Being able to endow themselves with officialresources to promote their language adds to the prestige of its speakers and in themeans available to them in their daily struggle for the promotion and preservation oftheir language.

From official status to marginalisation by way of tolerance

The speakers of minority languages generally tend to identify two different types ofaction by states and public institutions.

On the one hand, there are speakers or linguistic communities who feel that theirlanguages are tolerated by the authorities. This tolerance can, in some cases, be accom-panied by real, specific measures that promote the development and preservation ofthe language, as happens, for example, in the case of Welsh (United Kingdom).

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By 2001 the Census showed that there were 582,400 Welsh speakers making up21 per cent of the population of Wales. This represented stabilisation since theCensus of 1981. The highest percentages (41%) were in the numbers of youngerWelsh speakers (five to fifteen years old).

The language is represented on television (30 hours a week) and radio (120hours a week). An Education Reform Act of 1988 stipulated that all children instate schools should be taught Welsh. Most five to fourteen year olds were sobeing by 1993. Then, since 1999, all pupils from five to sixteen learn Welsh eitheras a first or second language.

The ‘Welsh Language Act’ of 1993 was intended to give Welsh and Englishequal legal status in Wales. It does not give Welsh speakers individual rights.Public bodies, but not private companies, must draw up plans for providingservices in Welsh.

The legislation gave responsibility for receiving and assessing such plans to‘Bwrdd Yr Iaith Gymraeg/The Welsh Language Board’. The Board also becameresponsible for promoting the language. It administers state aid to two annual‘Eisteddfodau’ or competitive festivals which have become large scale events.

Intergenerational transmission is a problem. Just over 90% of families whereboth parents speak Welsh transmit the language. But where just one parentspeaks Welsh the language is spoken at home only 50% of the time.

A movement for pre-school education (‘Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin’) has beenimportant for developing Welsh medium nursery education since 1970. A

THE LANGUAGE REVIVAL OF WELSH

On the other hand, though, there are occasions when the state can declare alllanguages official, as in the case of Mozambique, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador.However, only very rarely does it take real measures towards protecting them.

Constitutions like Colombia’s (1991) proclaim, for example, that “the state recog-nises and protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian Nation”(article 7) and that “the languages and dialects of the ethnic groups are also officialin their territories.” “The teaching in communities with their own linguistic tradi-tions will be bilingual” (article 10). The informant for the Awa Pit community,however, points out that their language “is theoretically official in their territory,but this has not yet been put into practice.” The same sort of thing seems to happenin Ecuador, where article 1 of the constitution states that “the State respects andencourages the development of all the languages of the Ecuatorians. Castilian is theofficial language. Quechua, Shuar and the other ancestral languages are used offi-cially by the indigenous peoples in the terms laid down by the law.” The informantfor Waorani, in turn, points out that his language “is also co-official in theirterritory, but (only) in theory.” The informant for Zaparo in Ecuador also coincideswith this feeling and points out that the language is “co-official in its area, but (only)on a theoretical level.”

The linguistic communities do not express disagreement with this generic procla-mation of official status; what they want is to be able to take advantage of the meansthat real official status implies.

When the state does not go beyond formal declarations, disappointment is aninevitable consequence. The informant for the Achuar language of Peru, for example,

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movement known as ‘Urdd Gobaith Cymru/The League Of Welsh Youth’ isimportant for linking Welsh speaking children and adolescents.

Such movements receive state aid through the Welsh Language Board. TheBoard’s strategy includes supporting ‘Mentrau Iaith’ or language ventureswhich work within communities to revitalise the language as a communitylanguage.The Government of Wales Act 1998 set up the National Assembly forWales, giving a weak form of devolved government to Wales. (The Assemblycannot initiate legislation.) The Welsh language is used in Assemblyproceedings, and simultaneous translation is provided. Changes in the legiti-mation and promotion of the language create dilemmas for campaigninggroups such as ‘Cymdeithas Yr Iaith Gymraeg/The Welsh Language Society’.New kinds of mobilisation other than historic civil disobediance campaignswould be needed to build on the current situation.

Wynford BellinCardiff University, United Kingdom

clearly demonstrates the inefficacy of mere general recognition: “In fact it has noofficial status of any sort as far as the use of this language in the public administrationand other bodies is concerned”.

It is worth adding that this disappointment seems to extend to a number of coun-tries, to judge from the accounts gathered. With regard to Article 4 of the Constitutionof Mexico (1992), which says that “The Mexican nation has a pluricultural compo-sition originally based on its indigenous peoples. The Law will protect and promotethe development of their languages, cultures, habits, customs, resources and specificforms of social organisation”, the informant for Otomi points out that this is “fair butbelated recognition for the indigenous languages”, but that “there’s many a slip twixtthe cup and the lip”.

Generally in these situations of tolerated languages the members of thelinguistic communities involved have only their own resources to work with infavour of their languages, and can only count on tolerance on the part of the publicinstitutions. These languages are only used within the linguistic communities andrarely get to be used in dealings with the administration. Even when they are usedin the educational system, it is generally at the elementary levels and with theobject of integrating the community’s members into the dominant national culturemore quickly.

In addition, those linguistic communities wanting to preserve and cultivate theirlanguages and cultures are often faced with hostile attitudes from their fellowcitizens, as the informant for Aymara in Peru points out: “Formally it is co-official andin practice tolerated, but there is also a negative attitude on the part of the dominantsector of white Creole society”.

The survival and development of a language is not ensured by giving it an officialstatus or by tolerating its use. However, it is always positive to claim for the right of alanguage to become official. If there are speakers and linguistic communities who feelthat their states forget, marginalised or try to do away with their languages, theproblem is even worse. Amongst these cases we find situations like the ones in Turkeyor Botswana, where the use of non-official languages is explicitly forbidden in somepublic spheres.

At other times, although the prohibitions are not explicit, the spokespeople for thelinguistic communities understand that the government would like to see the non-official languages disappear. In this respect they blame the state and the governmentfor the situation of their languages, which are close to extinction.

This is the case of the informant for Munduruku in Brazil, who says, “I understandthe Brazilian government’s great desire is that they stop using Munduruku and speakonly Portuguese. The sooner the better.” The perception of the informant for Breton inFrance also goes this way: “France denies the existence of linguistic minorities on itsterritory. The notion of community other than ‘the French national community’ isbanished from the French legislation that only recognises citizens ‘equal in rights’ andconsiders the affirmation of specific community rights as discriminatory and contraryto the principle of ‘republican equality’.”

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From the origins of Brittany until well into the 20th century, Breton was thelanguage spoken by a great majority of the population of its area, Lower Brittany.Besides, the use of Breton reached its highest level (more than a million speakersout of one and a half million inhabitants) on the eve of the First World War.

But Breton parallelly suffered a complete exclusion from the education system setup at that time (from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century),while French was declared the only teaching language, particularly in primaryschool, despite many claims, movements of protest, petitions and draft laws.

It was only by the middle of the century that the change of language imposeditself and the practice of Breton much declined from then on. After dropping toless than half-a-million, the number of Breton speakers is now estimated toroughly 250,000, and “passive Breton users” – who understand Breton but don’tspeak it – are roughly estimated to 360 000, according to recent figures.

On the other hand, for the past two decades there seems to be a strong desire forthe preservation of Breton and its increased access to teaching and media amongat least three-quarters of the concerned population (Lower Brittany). The rateeven came very close to 90% in the latest opinion polls on this issue (1997, 1999).

Admittedly, a change occurred since the Breton language was given a certainplace through the Deixonne law in the fifties, which allowed its introduction insecondary school. Breton was taught as a second modern language during theseventies, then as an optional subject and finally bilingual streams were set upduring the last two decades, especially after the creation of the Diwan asso-ciative schools in 1977. By the end of 200, these schools were the subject ofministry proposals for their admission under public status with a view to ensuretheir development.

Currently, the three bilingual education streams (immersion-type associativestream, parity-type streams of public and Catholic private schools) enrol around7,000 pupils (approximately one-third each). To this we must add around 12,000pupils who receive Breton teaching (as optional or so), which means a total ofless than 20,000 pupils out of more than half-a-million enrolled children in thedistrict of Rennes (not counting the district of Nantes).

The European Charter for Minority Languages signed by the Frenchgovernment in 1999 (i.e. 39 articles), should contribute to improve this situationand legitimate the Breton language, in the field of education as well as in thefield of media and for its officialisation at different levels. This is why the ratifi-cation of this Charter seems important to us.

Francis FavereauUniversity of Rennes II, France

BRETON AND THE EUROPEAN CHARTER FOR MINORITY LANGUAGES

Legislation for the protection of the linguistic heritage

Some states make an effort to protect their linguistic heritage. In this respect, it is worthmentioning New Zealand’s new linguistic attitude toward Maori, Switzerland’stowards Romansh, Finland’s towards Swedish, the United Kingdom’s towards Welsh,Paraguay’s towards Guarani, Canada’s towards the indigenous languages, especiallyin the North-West territories, Eritrea’s towards its languages, etc.

It is not the intention of this Review to draw up an exhaustive list of favourablepolicies implemented by states with a view to the preservation of the linguisticheritage, but we shall point out a few examples.

One example of positive legislative implementation is that affecting the Samilanguage. This language, distributed over the states of Norway, Sweden, Finland andthe north east of the Russian Federation (see Map 4), has seen important progress inits legal status over recent decades, though not in all the states where it is spoken.

Until the Second World War, the linguistic policies of these European states asregards Sami were highly assimilationist, trying to impose their respective “national”languages on Sami speakers and thereby condemning the language to extinction.After the Second World War, Norway, Sweden and Finland all recognised the particu-larities of their minorities and began to legislate to guarantee the rights of the Samipeople and its culture.

However, the recognition of linguistic rights in these countries’ constitution did notcome about in Norway until 1988. “It is incumbent upon the government authoritiesto take the necessary steps to enable the Sami population to safeguard and developtheir language, culture and social life”. In 1996, it was the government of Finland thatadded a special clause to its constitution “Given their status as an indigenous people,and pursuant to the law, the Sami shall be accorded cultural autonomy in their home-lands on matters relating to their language and culture”. Sweden’s constitutionmakes no specific reference to the Sami language, although it mentions the linguisticrights of the minorities (Magga 1998).

Today, these measures have made it possible for the Sami community to use theirlanguage in the educational system and in various spheres in which it was banneduntil now.

Whatever the case, and as happens with numerous languages, the fact that itextends over different state territories calls for supra-state co-ordination to take careof the interests of this people’s culture and language.

Canada is another state in which legislation and administrative practice aremaking progress towards the preservation of linguistic heritage. Since 1970 theofficial state languages are English and French, but the Canadian Constitutional Actalso establishes that “The existing rights of Aboriginal Peoples are hereby recog-nized and confirmed.”

This declaration has allowed several juridical and administrative instances tointerpret that the aboriginal peoples have the right to learn and use their languages intheir dealings with the administration.

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However, political practice in Canada as regards its local languages has not materi-alised in laws or received financial backing until very recently, when in 1988 theprovince of Northwest Territories declared its six aboriginal languages (Chipewyan,Cree, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Inuktitut and Slavey) co-official in its territory along withEnglish and French (Ignace 1998).

As a result of this recognition, these languages receive funding for their real implemen-tation as languages used in the administration and in education and have acted as a pointof reference for the other Canadian provinces and their native linguistic communities.

There are now projects for the teaching and use of Canadian aboriginal languagesin various provinces. As examples we could mention those of the Cree and Inuskitutcommunities in James Bay and North Quebec or that of the Mohawk community ofKahnawake, Quebec, where since 1980 a programme of linguistic immersion in thislanguage has been in progress following the model used for French in Quebec. ThisMohawk teaching model has given excellent results as regards the learning and use ofthe language and is today one of the mirrors in which the other aboriginal linguisticcommunities see themselves (Hoover 1992, Ignace 1998).

Although aboriginal linguistic communities do not always seem to get the supportthey wish for and need, the explicit wishes of the aborigines and more sensitive legis-lation have opened a window of hope in Canada as regards the preservation of thelinguistic heritage. This has happened in a part of the world where the threat facinglanguages is enormous (Krauss 1992).

Another language that has seen a certain revival in recent years is Maori. It has beensaid of Maori that it is a language that has risen from its deathbed. After centuries ofmarginalisation the Maori language was declared official in New Zealand in 1987.Aborigines and defenders of the language had been fighting since the sixties for itsinclusion in the educational system and its use in public life. In about 1980 the firstlinguistic immersion educational programmes in Maori began to be applied and,thanks to the determination of its defenders and to legal and financial support fromthe New Zealand administration, Maori has gained in prestige and raised its level ofuse (Ministry of Maori Development 1998).

Initiatives in favour of the preservation of linguistic heritage

In the European Union (EU), also, initiatives have been developed over the last fewyears designed to promote linguistic diversity. Today, thirteen languages have officialstatus in at least one of its fifteen states: German, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, French,Irish Gaelic, Greek, English, Italian, Luxemburgian, Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish.

Continuing in the tradition of its member states, the EU has based its linguisticrules on the principle of the equality of languages in its states, though excluding IrishGaelic and Luxemburgian from the rank of official working languages of the EU.

In 1958, when it was established that the official languages were to be the officiallanguages of its member states, what is known as the principle of non-discriminationwas also underlined. This principle states, amongst other things, that citizens cannotbe discriminated on the grounds of language.

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European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages

Strasbourg 1992

Preamble

The member States of the Council of Europe signatory hereto,

Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is to achieve a greater unitybetween its members, particularly for the purpose of safeguarding and real-ising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage;

Considering that the protection of the historical regional or minoritylanguages of Europe, some of which are in danger of eventual extinction,contributes to the maintenance and development of Europe’s cultural wealthand traditions;

Considering that the right to use a regional or minority language in privateand public life is an inalienable right conforming to the principles embodied inthe United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, andaccording to the spirit of the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection ofHuman Rights and Fundamental Freedoms;

Having regard to the work carried out within the CSCE and in particular tothe Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the document of the Copenhagen Meetingof 1990;

Stressing the value of interculturalism and multilingualism and consid-ering that the protection and encouragement of regional or minoritylanguages should not be to the detriment of the official languages and theneed to learn them;

Realising that the protection and promotion of regional or minoritylanguages in the different countries and regions of Europe represent animportant contribution to the building of a Europe based on the principles ofdemocracy and cultural diversity within the framework of national sovereigntyand territorial integrity;

Taking into consideration the specific conditions and historical traditions inthe different regions of the European States,

Have agreed as follows: Euopean Charter for Regional or MinorityLanguages (Committee of Ministers of the European Union 1992). Availablefrom; <http: //conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/treaties/HTML/148.htm>[Accessed 30 October 2004]

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The most serious move in this respect was the approval in 1992 by the Committeeof Ministers of the EU of what is known as the European Charter of Regional orMinority Languages, which was submitted to member states for their signature andpractical recognition. This Charter lays down the obligations of states in the attemptto preserve the linguistic rights of its minorities and of citizens who do not speak theofficial language. To facilitate the signature by states of this charter, only general obli-gations are mentioned, without making any reference to specific languages. As aresult, the document is purely symbolic.

Even so, the Charter demands minimum measures in teaching, in the media, incultural facilities, in public and administrative life, recognition of the plurilingualreality and a firm will to preserve and promote it. For all these reasons it can beconsidered an important step forward, so long, of course, that its recommendationsare respected and carried out. For this it will be necessary for all the EU member statesto sign the Charter and comply with its contents.

In addition, the Council of Europe has expressly invited all the European states togive their support to this charter. At the end of 2001, 27 states had signed the Charterand 14 of them had ratified it: Germany, Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Slovenia, Spain,Finland, Holland, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Norway, United Kingdom, Sweden andSwitzerland. Amongst the signers who had not yet ratified it were: Armenia, Cyprus,Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta,Rumania, Russia and Ukraine. On the other hand, 16 states in the Council of Europe –Albania, Andorra, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Greece, Ireland,Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Poland, Portugal, San Marino and Turkey – had not yetsigned the Charter.

Another EU organisation that works to preserve the European linguistic heritage isthe EBLUL (European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages). This institution estimatesthat 40 million citizens of the EU speak a language other than those considered officialin the EU and advocates full recognition of their linguistic rights.

One of the EBLUL’s most recent initiatives, for example, is its proposed resolutionfor the promotion of Occitan as an official language at the Winter Olympics to be heldin Turin in 2006.

In Africa, too, in recent decades there have been a series of conferences andmeetings of state representatives to outline and plan several aspects of linguisticpolicy. In Harare in 1997, at the Intergovernmental Conference of Ministers onLanguage Policies in Africa, organised by UNESCO with the collaboration of theOAU (Organisation of African Unity) and the ACCT (Francophone Agency) and thefinancial support of the Republic of Zimbabwe, at which government experts from 51states took part, a clear wish was expressed to design a future in which linguisticwealth would be favoured and protected through government action.

At this conference a proposed action plan was also drafted, which pursued theimplementation of real measures by government authorities with a view to thepromotion of languages in the spheres of education, administration, culture, media,communication, economy, etc.

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Along the same lines, the Asmara proclamation, in 2000, underlines the need tofurther African languages and literature in the face of the tendency to maintaincolonial languages as vehicles for communication in Africa.

See Map 5 showing language diversity in South Africa.

The universal declaration of linguistic rights

The Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, signed in June 1996 in Barcelona, is animportant reference for the preservation and promotion of languages.

At the World Conference on Linguistic Rights organised by the PEN ClubInternational Commission for Translations and Linguistic Rights and the EscarréInternational Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations, with the moral and technicalsupport of UNESCO, non-governmental participants from almost 100 countriesapproved a declaration on linguistic rights for the preservation of languages whichwould serve as a guideline for the different state and international bodies.

As it is pointed out in the preliminaries, this declaration sets out to “correctlinguistic imbalances so as to ensure respect and full development of all languages

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PETITION TO THE EUROPEAN INSTITUTIONS (EBLUL 2001)

On the occasion of the European Year of Languages 2001 (EYL), you have anopportunity to express your support in favour of Europe’s regional orminority languages, by signing this petition. In this way you will contributeto supporting the demands of the forty or so minority linguistic communitiesof Europe.

Our languages, an essential part of the European cultural heritage, shouldbenefit from a legal framework and from the necessary subsidies to protect andsafeguard them.

In the absence of adequate financial aid, one part of the European linguisticheritage is condemned to disappear.

Help EBLUL to give a voice to the more than 40 million European citizenswho speak a regional or minority language so that they can feel themselvesequal with all other European citizens.

Your stance will contribute to the better preparation of a pluriannualprogramme concerning regional or minority languages and will influenceEuropean institutions to take appropriate measures.

EBLUL is an International Association functioning under the Belgian and theIrish law. It is an independent organisation co-operating with the EuropeanCommission and for questions concerning the European Charter for Regionalor Minority Languages, with the Council of Europe. EBLUL is in Special consul-tative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN, the UNESCO andthe Council of Europe.

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INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCE OF MINISTERS ON LANGUAGEPOLICY IN AFRICA, HARARE 1997

HARARE DECLARATION

2. GUIDELINES FOR POLICY FORMULATIONa. All African language Policies should be those that enhance the chances

of attaining the vision of Africa portrayed above.b. Each country should produce a clear Language Policy Document,

within which every language spoken in the country can find its place.c. Guidelines for policy formulation should be sanctioned by legislative

action.d. Every country’s policy framework should be flexible enough to allow each

community to use its language side-by-side with other languages whileintegrating with the wider society, within an empowering language policythat caters for communication at local, regional and international levels.

e. A language policy-formulating and monitoring institution/bodyshould be established in each country.

AGAINTS ALL ODDS: AFRICAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES INTOTHE 21ST CENTURY

Asmara 2000

African languages must take on the duty, the responsibility, and the challengeof speaking for the continent.

The vitality and equality of African languages must be recognized as a basisfor the future empowerment of African peoples.

The diversity of African languages reflects the rich cultural heritage of Africaand must be used as an instrument of African unity.

Dialogue among African languages is essential: African languages must usethe instrument of translation to advance communication among all people,including the disabled.

All African children have the unalienable right to attend school and learn intheir mother tongues. Every effort should be made to develop Africanlanguages at all levels of education.

Promoting research on African languages is vital for their development,while the advancement of African research and documentation will be bestserved by the use of African languages.

and establish the principles for fair and equitable planetary linguistic peace as a prin-cipal factor of social coexistence.”

Amongst the basic ideas that guided the drafting of this Universal Declaration ofLinguistic Rights is the principle of the equality of all peoples and all languages. Theinitial concept is that neither the internal characteristics of languages nor theparticular economic, social, religious or cultural features of the people who speakthem justify any kind of discrimination.

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The effective and rapid development of science and technology in Africadepends on the use of African languages and modern technology must be usedfor the development of African languages.

Democracy is essential for the equal development of African languages andAfrican languages are vital for the development of democracy based onequality and social justice.

African languages, like all languages, contain gender bias. The role ofAfrican languages in development must overcome this gender bias andachieve gender equality.

African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds andfor the African Renaissance.

UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF LINGUISTIC RIGHTS

Article 3

1. This Declaration considers the following to be inalienable personal rightswhich may be exercised in any situation: the right to be recognized as a member of a language community; the right to the use of one’s own language both in private and in public; the right to the use of one’s own name; the right to interrelate and associate with other members of one’s languagecommunity of origin; the right to maintain and develop one’s own culture;and all the other rights related to language which are recognized in theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 16 December 1966and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ofthe same date.

2. This Declaration considers that the collective rights of language groups,may include the following, in addition to the rights attributed to the

In the absence of the nevertheless indispensable international legislation in linguisticmatters, this declaration, with its universal vocation, could at least provide a point ofreference for the international community. As a result, states and other responsiblebodies will be able to take coherent action and reverse the trend to uniformity whichruns counter to linguistic and cultural plurality.

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members of language groups in the foregoing paragraph, and in accordancewith the conditions laid down in article 2.2: the right for their own language and culture to be taught; the right of access to cultural services; the right to an equitable presence of their language and culture in thecommunications media; the right to receive attention in their own language from governmentbodies and in socioeconomic relations.

3. The aforementioned rights of persons and language groups must in no wayhinder the interrelation of such persons or groups with the host languagecommunity or their integration into that community. Nor must they restrictthe rights of the host community or its members to the full public use of thecommunity’s own language throughout its territorial space.

Language is an entity of double abstraction. It is an abstraction at one levelof the speech of individuals (known as idiolects) and of the speech of commu-nities of individuals bound by geographic, social, economic and gender divi-sions (known as dialects). This abstraction has been the object of linguisticdescription for centuries and the cornerstone of modern linguistics initiatedby Saussure (who called this abstraction langue). Language is an abstraction,at another level, of the function of relationship with other languages that arebound in a multilingual network. When multilingualism is taken as the norm,the functional (or ecological) relationship between languages in a multi-lingual network (or linguistic ecology) defines the nature of each language inthe network.

This second abstraction of language has not found a place even in sociolin-guistics, which treats multilingualism as a cluster of autonomous languages.The languages are not autonomous, as their formal autonomy is constrained bythe multilingual context in which they are situated. The linguistic competence of

NEW APPROACH TO LANGUAGE POLICY

112 Words and Worlds

a multilingual speaker correlates with the function of the language defined bythe domain of its use and thus it is a variable. A multilingual speaker need nothave the same competence of the language he uses in the courtroom in anotherlanguage he uses in courtship. When he mixes two languages to realise hiscommunicative and social goals, the codes cease to be autonomous.

The postulate that the languages are autonomous of their functional multi-lingual context underlies the current practice of language policy. Hence stan-dardisation of language becomes a primary focus of language policy and isconsidered to be a prerequisite for the function planned for the language.Standardisation draws boundaries around languages, which process militatesagainst language dependency operating in a multilingual network. The bound-aries are violated by speakers in their natural linguistic behaviour, as they dotypically in informal contexts and in code mixing. They can be enforced onlythrough penalties sanctioned by the policy of denying social status and mobilityfor breaking them. Language policy is traditionally concerned with the formand function of a language and not with the form and function of a multilingualnetwork. That is, the concern is not of the functional inter-relationship betweenlanguages at the level of the individual, the community and the nation. Thefunctional inter-relationship at best may be an outcome of the implementationof the policy in a multilingual context, whose focus is the individual languages.

Language policy in the post-colonial world has traditionally been concernedwith making a nation out of a former colony. The policy postulates that thecitizens of the country will have loyalty to and pride in the nation, and thus willmake it viable, through the acceptance of one of the native languages as thesymbol of the new nation and as the instrument of governance. It also postulatesthat the nation is one communication zone and one language must have currencythroughout the nation for communication. The policy then is about the selectionof the national, official and link language or languages of the country. It isconsidered ideal if all three are the same language. In order to make all citizensacquire the national, official and link language(s), choice of language ineducation becomes an integral part of the policy. With the emphasis on nationformation, the home language of the people in education does not get its dueplace in the policy formulation. The fact that for most ordinary people the zone ofcommunication in which they live their daily lives is local gets scant attention.The needs of the individuals and communities are subordinated to the needs ofthe nation and when there is any conflict between the needs, the nation’s needstake precedence. The policy is not about legitimising the needs of the individualsand communities who constitute the nation but is about fulfilling the needs ofthe nation by its constituents co-opting them. Language policy, in other words, isan expression of the concerns of the State to maintain itself.

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Given the centrality of the interests of the State in the goals of languagepolicy, policy making and implementation becomes the prerogative of thegovernment. The government is not neutral ideologically and so is not aneutral arbiter when the interests of the different segments of the society comeinto conflict. Its policy is shaped by the ideology of the ruling class and by theinterests of this class and so the policy becomes an instrument of this class toretain its power. A consequence of this connection in making policy is that itsimplementation draws more on the legal sanction of the policy by the Statethan on the will of the people. The State has to enact laws for the acceptance ofthe policy by the people and adherence to it; there are social sanctions for non-compliance like denial of educational and economic opportunities. Whenpeople protest against one or other aspect of the policy, it is suppressed usingthe power of the State. There are other consequences as well. Policy implemen-tation depends on bureaucratic will rather than on the demands of the people;it becomes a governmental programme rather than a popular programme.There may be disjunction between the policy pronounced by the governmentand the actual practice of the people.

These features of policy making and implementation reflect the fact that theruling class generally is drawn from the linguistic majority and consequentlythe interests of the linguistic minorities are not incorporated in the policy. Thesefeatures, however, are found with regard to the linguistic majority also when aglobally dominant language is involved. In many developing countries, theirformal colonial language is eschewed in the policy but embraced by the people.The case of English is the paradigm example of this. This results from the factthat policies in other spheres like economics are contrary to the goals oflanguage policy. The economic policy may promote capital intensive, high techindustries and integration with the global market, which are perceived by theruling class to be beneficial. This kind of economy enhances the value of theglobal language for knowledge accumulation and dissemination and soincreases the demand for it by the people in spite of the language policypromoting a native language. Public policy and private choice of languagediverge even for the linguistic majority in a nation.

Such divergence is a manifestation of the relation of dominance betweenlanguages in which one or some languages abrogate the functions of all publicdomains that give power. Promotion of the relation of dominance is inherent inthe traditional language policy and thus emerges one or some dominantlanguages out of the multitude of languages. It is inherent in the policy becausethe policy is to aid national governance and a centralised governing structure ismade easy by the dominant language, which is made good use of by the bureau-cracy to assert its authority. The dominance of a language forces or induces a

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language behaviour in the speakers of other languages that leads to thedisplacement of their languages. The dominant language enters into privatedomains of language use also – home is the ultimate private domain – under-mining the fabric of functional distribution of languages. Many languages cometo be regarded as redundant, and so a burden, when one language assumes allfunctions. This perception leads to transmission of only the dominant languageto the following generation and consequently the disappearance of otherlanguages. The emergence of a dominant language at the global level threatensthe dominance, if not the survival, of the dominant language(s) at the nationallevel so assiduously developed by the language policy. The global dominantlanguage weakens the allegiance of the national elite to their nation by facili-tating the global alliance of the elite across nations. This shift in the allegiance ofthe ruling elite weakens the will of the national government to make a languagepolicy that will curtail the power of the global dominant language. Nationalgovernments that are traditionally the agents of language policy yield theiragency to the market (or to another powerful nation) to allow the emergence ofa dominant language of not their making in their countries.

The agency of the government to make language policy in its interest is chal-lenged by another global development. It is the assertion of language rights bypeople who want the freedom to make language choice that does not discrim-inate them from access to opportunities. The government is forced to take intoaccount in language policy the language rights that are exercised by the peoplefor materialising their interests and to accommodate them without compro-mising the interests of the State.

The circumscribed role of the government in making language policy pressedby the global dominant language on one hand and by the assertion of the rightsof the speakers of marginalised languages on the other calls for a new approachto language policy. The failure of policy as revealed by its dislocation frompractice and by the need to use the force of law to implement it, as mentionedabove, lends further support for a new approach.

When the language is taken to be the second abstraction mentioned in thebeginning, it would follow that all languages, however small, will come underthe purview of policy in terms of their relationship with each other.Standardisation for literate functions would become a manifestation of just oneof the relationships. Dominance would not be the all-pervasive relation in themultilingual network. Language policy will be concerned with maintaining afunctional balance between languages. Functions have different values andtherefore the policy must ensure that they do not discriminate. The equalitybetween languages emanates from the equality of persons in the sense thatpersons do not become unequal by the languages they speak. People are not

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discriminated against and denied opportunities because of their language. Sothe fundamental concern of the language policy must be to ensure this equality.It means that no language is a liability to its speaker. A corollary of this principleof equal treatment of languages for equal opportunities to their speakers is thatspeakers of more than one language will be better endowed among the equals.In other words, many languages add to one’s asset by enhancing their function-ality, as the addition of literacy over orality in a language does.

When the focus of the language policy is multilingual functionality and thedevelopment of individual languages in the sense of equipping them to performtheir function is a derivative of it, the problem of language disappearancecaused by language dominance and inequality will be minimised.

This shift in focus does not mean that a multilingual network is static. Itcontinuously evolves in tune with the societal changes and the multilingualfunctionality of speakers is constantly redefined. The goal of language policythen is not to make languages reach their set end points but to keep the multi-lingual functionality viable and vital all the time and to prevent it from self-terminating by disallowing emergence of dominant and unequal relationshipbetween languages.

Such a language policy calls for a shift in the domain of the policy. Its domainis not limited to the nation but extends to the community and the individualbecause language functions are not limited to the nation. Communities and indi-viduals have functions for languages, some of which may replicate the functionsthe State has for those languages, and some other functions may complementthem. All the functions together make up the multilingual functionality of theindividual, the community and the nation. An individual and a community donot have a mother tongue in the functional sense (other than using one languagefor ethnic identity for socio-political purposes) but have a language repertoire,which is not merely a collection of languages but a set of languages with definedfunctions. The languages in the repertoire have distributed functions and, correl-atively, distributed competence. The repertoire may have just one language (ifwe ignore the dialect varieties with defined functions), which means all func-tions are carried out by one language. But the repertoire is open to include morelanguages and so is not necessarily static. The language policy must make use ofthis openness to encourage the individuals and communities to enrich the reper-toire. As with the nation, the multilingual network in the individuals andcommunities is not static, but is changing in response to societal changes.Protecting the viability and vitality of the individual and communal multilingualfunctionality must be a goal of language policy. The policy of multilingual func-tionality at the level of the individual, the community and the nation mustsynchronise to realise this goal.

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Some advantages follow the above shift in the domain of the policy. Thecultural needs of rootedness and distinctiveness of individuals and commu-nities get equal weight with the political needs of unity and solidarity ofnations. These needs do not exclude each other. Unlike traditional languagepolicy, the linguistic functionality of the individual and the community is notleft to be the default function or, at best, to be the residue of the national policy.All three domains get equal attention in the policy. All linguistic communities,big and small, get a place in the policy, not just the majority community. Crossborder communities could have common functionality at their level on towhich the national level functionality is super-imposed. The negative featuresof the traditional language policy mentioned earlier will not manifest itselfbecause the individual, the community and the nation are not moving indifferent directions.

The domain shift brings with it a structural change in the agency of policymaking. The government has been the exclusive agent to make policy. The newglobal and ethnic forces constraining the freedom of the government to makepolicy for the nation have already been mentioned. In the new approach, thegovernment is one of the three agents along with the individual and thecommunity. The individual is free to make his or her decision (i.e. policy) oflanguage use and so does the community. The constraint is that the policiesmade by the three agents are in concert. For the three agents of language policyto function in relative freedom the control mechanism in the polity must bedecentralised. A good candidate for decentralised control is the school system.The community has control over the school and decides language choice ineducation accommodating individual and national preferences.

The role of the government in the overall language policy is neither centralnor independent. In addition to making that part of the policy that safeguardsnational interests, it assumes other responsibilities like facilitating thecommunity and the individual to make decisions on language use, synchro-nising the decisions made at the three levels and balancing the language rightsof the individual, the community and the State.

There is another aspect to the decentralised language policy making.Decisions about policy must be well informed. Otherwise they may not be inthe interest of their makers themselves. Individuals and communitieswithout power may accept the negative perception of their language as defi-cient and useless inculcated by others in power and this may bias theirdecision about the use of their language. They may further be enticed by therewards of the language of the powerful and mesmerised into believing thatthe rewards are automatic when that language becomes dominant in theirlanguage repertoire edging out others. This calls for programmes for creating

The Official Status of Languages 117

awareness in individuals and communities about the value of differentlanguages, about existence of structural barriers other than acquisition of thedominant language that block access to power, wealth and status, about thevacuousness of the belief that use as the medium of education (immersion) isthe best way to learn effectively the language of power, etc. Creation of suchawareness must be the responsibility of the media, non-governmental organ-isations and other institutions of the civil society. Any decision made by indi-viduals and communities after exposure to such information may be said tobe well informed. The language policy must accommodate such decisions.

Language policy is not made for the sake of language alone. It has a largersocial purpose as well. It is to build a just and equal society without discrimi-nation by the attributes of one’s birth. A language policy that does not allow thelanguage to be used for discrimination and that does not push people intogiving up their language to avoid denial of opportunities in the pursuit of theirinterests makes a contribution to building such a society. This must be theunderlying principle for any new approach to language policy.

E. AnnamalaiCentral Institute of Indian Languages, India

Recommendations on the official status of languages

Leaders, legislators and administrators in societies in general should do everythingpossible to:

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• Legislate on linguistic matters on the basis of respect for the wish of indi-viduals to use their own language in public and in private, and according tothe principle of the right to maintain and develop one’s own language.

• Structure societies on the basis of respect for the wish of linguistic commu-nities to use their own language in education, in the administration of publicservices, in the sphere of justice and, in general, in all spheres of public andprivate activity.

• Explicitly recognise, in the constitution or in the supreme judicial ordinance,the co-official status at state level of all the languages of the territory, or atleast the official status of each language in its area (autonomy, province,federation, canton, city, etc.).

• Provide real and effective administrative and financial support on the part ofthe authorities for putting into effect educational and language-use projectsin the public sphere and the administration.

• Establish and further a body to control these measures in each linguisticcommunity, administered by the community itself.

• In those cases in which a community is divided over various states, promotethe community’s own supra-state body for the coordination of the differentlinguistic and cultural programmes.

• Publicise and spread existing positive practices and models, to which end wehereby appeal to linguists and members of all the planet’s social and scien-tific communities to increase their efforts in this direction, either throughorganised encounters or through academic and social diffusion.

• Exchange experiences and coordinate the efforts by states, state organisa-tions, supra-state organisations or popular initiatives working in this field.

• Establish an international body of an informative type both to denounce viola-tions of linguistic rights and to mediate in the solution of any problems arising.

Chapter 4

The Use of Languages in PublicAdministration

Why is it important for a language to have access to public administration?The use of a given language by governmental institutions always brings prestige to

it because it is associated with the power wielded by the political and administrativestructures. Administrative uses, and especially in writing, have furthermoredeveloped specific registers and styles in languages which have access to them.Consequently, it is logical that any linguistic community should want to be able to useits language when dealing with administrative bodies.

Given the political structure of states, many languages have not been able toexercise any administrative role. This non-use, of course, does not imply any intrinsicshortcoming in the language that cannot be overcome with use. It is important toemphasise, furthermore, that forms of use can be very varied, from informal oral useto the most specialised written use. It is also important to bear in mind that accordingto the characteristics of the administrative organisation, depending, for example, onwhether it is run by members of the community or outsiders, the possibilities forusing the language can be considerably increased or decreased.

In the information gathered, it can be seen that use of a language in public servicesdepends directly on its official status. But this is not a sufficient guarantee. There canalso be examples of communities in which, in spite of lacking the desired legal statusfor their language, it is at least tolerated and members of the community can use it forsome administrative purposes.

In this chapter we shall analyse the relation between the official status of alanguage and its use in administration, with special attention to whether or not theuse reported is written or oral.

Language, official status and public administration

According to the information gathered, 7% of the sample languages are official or co-official state languages in their territory or, at least, part of it.

119

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As regards language use in dealings with public administration, 13% of informantssay that their language can be used both orally and in writing with relativenormality; 5% consider that it is limited to oral use but with incipient written use,and 23% that its use is exclusively oral. The remaining languages (59%) are notused at all.

An initial comparison of the figures might appear surprising, as one would expectthat at least 26% of the sample languages – that is, the ones with official or co-officialstatus – would be used normally in public services. However, the figures reveal thatonly between 13% and 18% of languages are used in writing and there is anobservable gradation from normalised to incipient use.

Although the sample under study represents approximately 10% of the languagesin the world, the figures and trends reflected in Table 5 are fairly representative of thegeneral situation of languages. We shall now analyse each of the observed trends onthe basis of the figures gathered.

Table 5. Official status of languages and use in governmental institutions

Degree of official status Official orco-official

statelanguages

Co-officiallanguages

in theirterritory or

part of it

Languageswithoutofficial

recognition

Total

Language use in administration

Oral and written use 6 % 6 % 1 % 13 %

Oral with incipient written use 1 % 2 % 2 % 5 %

Exclusively oral use –– 7 % 16 % 23 %

Neither oral nor written –– 4 % 55 % 59 %

Total 7 % 19 % 74 % 100 %

Despite its low population density in pre-industrial times, Siberia (including theRussian Far East) is home to substantial linguistic diversity. Apart from recentlyintroduced languages like Russian, the following families are represented:Uralic (western Siberia), Turkic (southern Siberia, also Yakut (Saha) in easternSiberia), Tungusic (central and eastern Siberia), Mongolic (southern Siberia), aswell as the so-called Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic) languages: Yeniseian (central

THE LANGUAGES OF SIBERIA

Languages used orally and in writing in public administration

The languages used orally and in writing in public administration are of three types: Official or co-official state languages. The presence of these languages is extended

to all levels of public administration. In this situation we find, for example, Spanish,Russian, Chinese, French, Arabic, Japanese, Polish, Icelandic, Korean, Swedish andItalian. These languages make up 6% of the total.

Languages that are official in their territory or part of it. These are languages thathave a real presence in public administration orally and in writing. In this situationwe find, for example, Catalan (Spain), Faroese (Denmark), Mongol (China),

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Siberia), Yukaghir (north-eastern Siberia), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (north-eastern Siberia), and Nivkh (Gilyak, eastern Siberia). In addition, varieties ofEskimo are or were spoken at the eastern tip of Siberia.

Some of the smaller languages were endangered even before Russian enteredthe area, and there are well attested cases of shift from one Siberian language toanother, e.g. Dolgan is an aberrant variety of Yakut with a Tungusic substrate. Inthe Soviet period, encouragement was given, e.g. through the development of awritten form and at least limited use in education and the media, to some of theindigenous languages, though the smallest ones, such as Yukaghir and theYeniseian language Ket, received little or no such support. The more extensivelanguages, in particular the Turkic and Mongolic languages of the southernfringe and Yakut, have survived well, are currently spoken by the near-totalityof the corresponding ethnic groups, and are even in some cases, e.g. Tuvan,enjoying a substantial revival through expanded use in the post-Soviet period.Some of the smaller languages, however, had already died out by the end of thenineteenth century, e.g. the Uralic language Mator and the Yeniseian languageKott, while the last speaker of the Uralic language Kamassian died in 1989.

The Soviet policy – paralleling similar policies in North America – of removingchildren to Russian-speaking residential schools led to language loss amongchildren, so that even for languages that did find some use in education likeChukchi, it is increasingly hard to find younger speakers with a full command ofthe language. The post-Soviet period has admittedly provided new opportunities,e.g. writing systems have been developed for some languages that previouslywere not used as written languages, such as Ket. But the market economy and theexploitation of Siberia’s natural resources have not in general been kind to thesmaller languages, and the prospects for their survival as active means of commu-nication are bleak. Documentation of these languages is an urgent task.

Bernard ComrieMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Malabar (India) and Tibetan (China). These languages make up another 6% of thetotal of languages.

Languages without official recognition. There are languages that in spite of lackingofficial or co-official status are nevertheless used in public administration. Thesemake up 1% of the sample languages, as reported by, for example, the informant forAcholi in Uganda:

It is used in administration, since most people do not express themselves well inEnglish in official documents, and especially in the sphere of the rural commu-nities, Acholi is used a lot in writing. (Acholi, Uganda)

Languages with normalised oral use and incipient written use in publicadministration

Five percent of the sample languages show normal oral and some sporadic writtenuse in public administration. Some (1% of the total) are languages which in spite ofbeing official or co-official state languages are used very little in writing. This is thesituation of, for example, Guarani in Paraguay, Urdu in Pakistan, Belarusian inBelarus and Maltese in Malta. The accounts of the informants on Urdu and Malteseare revealing in this respect:

Maltese is the national language, and co-official with English according to theConstitution. It is the language of the Parliament and the Law Courts. It is spokengenerally in all administrative levels, but most of the writing is carried out in English.(Maltese, Malta)

Urdu is the national language. Yes, it is used in offices in verbal form, very rarely inwritten as mostly the written language is English. (Urdu, Pakistan)

Others (2% of the total) are languages that while co-official in their territory or part ofit are barely used in writing in public administration. Some examples of these are Igbo(Nigeria), Ndebele (Zimbabwe) and Dai (China).

The Igbo language has an official status. It is one of the three major languagesalongside Hausa and Yoruba taught in the school system – primary, secondary andtertiary levels. It is used to some extent, mostly in the spoken form. Official documentsin the country are usually written in English. There are, however, a few instanceswhere these documents may be translated into the three major languages: Hausa, Igboand Yoruba. (Igbo, Nigeria)

In the Xishuangbanna and Dehong Dai Autonomous Prefectures, Dai is an officiallanguage and has the same status as Chinese. Dai is used in administration along withChinese. At the prefectural and county levels, Chinese is used more; at the township andvillage levels, Dai is used more. In terms of writing, Chinese is mostly used. Dai writingis only used for certain important documents or when there is a necessity to inform thoseliving in townships or villages. (Dai, China)

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Finally, there is another group of languages (2% of the total) which while notofficial or co-official are also used in public administration, though their writtenuse is very limited.

Languages with oral and without written use in public administration

Twenty-three percent of the sample languages are used in administration only orally.This group includes languages that are co-official in at least part of their territory,such as Kabardian (Russian Federation), Wolof (Senegal) and Dongxiang (China).These languages make up 7% of the sample. The remaining 16% of the total are notofficially recognised.

From the accounts of the informants themselves one can deduce that the oral use ofa language in administration is not a direct consequence of a policy of promoting thislanguage by the administrative authorities. In fact, it responds to the spontaneousconduct of citizens who use the language on recognising a member of their owncommunity in an administrative post. These languages can hardly be consideredfavoured or protected by the authorities. The accounts of the informants forTamazight, Karachay and Salar have plenty to say on this aspect:

Only Niger and Mali have recognised the co-official status of Tamazight although theydo not ensure its use in schools. In Algeria, the official status of this language has notbeen recognised in spite of the constant campaigns by the Kabyle from spring 1980 untilthe popular outbreak following the murder of Lunes Matub in July 1998. Officially it isnot used in administration, although in Berber-speaking areas it depends on whether ornot the civil servants are Berbers and always unofficially. In this case, it is always usedorally. (Tamazight, Algeria)

Formally this language has state status in the territory of the Republic. This language isused in dealings with the administration only in cases when the civil servant isKarachay. In this case, older people use their mother tongue but only orally. (Karachay,Russian Federation)

Salar is one of the official languages in Salar autonomous areas. In government affairswithin the Salar autonomous counties, Chinese is usually used. However, among Salarpeople themselves, they may occasionally use spoken Salar. (Salar, China)

Whatever the case, this oral use of the language or this possibility of using it in publicadministration is a positive aspect for the vitality of the language and reflects at leasta certain tolerance on the part of administrative structures.

Languages not used orally or in writing in public administration

Fifty-nine percent of the remaining languages in the sample are not used in dealingswith governmental institutions. This situation sometimes includes languages whichhave co-official status in their territory, as in the case of Nogai (Russian Federation) orAymara (Peru). (See Map 6.) But basically the languages in this group are those with

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no explicit recognition, which is the case of Uitoto (Colombia), Cabecar (Costa Rica)and Fongbe (Benin).

Formally they are co-official and in practice tolerated or even rejected by the dominantsector of white Creole society. In the public and private administration the Aymaralanguage is not used, either orally or in writing. (Aymara, Peru)

According to the new political Constitution of 1991, ‘The state recognises and protects theethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian Nation’ (Article 7). ‘The languages anddialects of the ethnic groups are also official in their territories. The teaching in commu-nities with linguistic traditions of their own will be bilingual’ (Article 10). Even so, thelanguage is not used at all by the administration.” (Uitoto, Colombia)

In 1987 this language – and 5 others – was raised to the rank of national languages thatmust be promoted as a priority in Benin. Fon is not in use by the administration.However we must point out a movement of hope since at the level of the Beninianparliament, some deputies can only understand their own national languages. Thesedeputies are starting to claim that the parliamentary sessions should also take place inFon. (Fongbe, Benin”)

This large group has given rise to accounts from informants in which it can be seenthat they are not aware of any tolerance of their languages by public adminis-tration. Contrary to their wishes, the speakers come up against obstacles imposedby the administrative authorities that hinder the use of the language bygovernment services.

The language is not official yet. To this day, Portuguese is the only official language of theislands. There are however efforts being made to endow Kriolu with a joint-official status.In terms of acceptance of the language, a survey I conducted on the islands in the summerof 1997 showed that the overwhelming majority of the people interviewed not onlyaccepted the language but also favoured its officialisation by the side of Portuguese(Capeverdean Creole, Cape Verde)

Bantawa is not allowed to use in administration (Bantawa, Nepal)

France denies the existence of linguistic minorities on its territory. The notion ofcommunity other than the French national community is banished from the French legis-lation that only recognises citizens equal in rights and considers the affirmation of specificcommunity rights as discriminatory and contrary to the principle of republican equality.Article 2 of the French Constitution, as modified in 1992, states that the language of theRepublic is French. The written use of Breton is banished from public administration. Itsoral use is anecdotal or confidential. (Breton, France)

These figures are surprising, because a careful reading of them could suggest, forexample, that in many situations recognition of official or co-official status for alanguage in its territory or part of it is more symbolic than real. We need only note thatwhile 19% of the languages in the sample are co-official in their territory, only 6% of

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The Use of Languages in Public Administration 125

them can possibly be used in writing normally in dealings with the administrationand 2% only show incipient use (see Table 5, column 2).

From all this we can conclude that only 13% of the languages in the sampleshow real normalised use in public administration, regardless of their officialstatus. Of course, we must not forget the 5% which are said to show incipientwritten use. Any achievement, any presence of the language in a medium such asthe administration, must always be defended and backed up if we want topreserve linguistic diversity.

However, in the face of these facts, we must make an urgent appeal to the adminis-trative and public authorities for practical measures to encourage the use of all theirlanguages in public institutions.

In analysing the use of languages in government services, it can be seen that inmany situations the recognition of official or co-official status for a language seemsmore symbolic than real. We need only note that while 19% of languages in thesample are official or co-official, less than a third (6% of the total) show any degree ofnormal written use in dealings with governmental institutions. Furthermore, there isa symbolic 2% of the total of languages that only use writing in public servicessporadically (see Table 5, column 2).

This does not mean that oral use is not important. In fact, the informants them-selves mention that insofar as citizens have access to administrative or to governmentbodies, they use their own language, sometimes because they express themselvesbetter than in the official or administration language, and at others because they wantto exercise their right to use it. These, of course, are acts that show a considerableawareness or linguistic vitality that very often has nothing to do with the officialstatus of the language.

Although contact situations between languages have traditionally beenconsidered a problem for administrators, it is urgent that administrative bodiesshould look on multilingual situations as normal and they must be managed as suchby the administration as well. Just as in education the simultaneous use of more thanone language need not be an obstacle to communication if one can appreciate thevalue of diversity.

In any case, every effort made for languages to figure more prominently in politicaland administrative bodies will always be positive both for the prestige and for thedevelopment of new linguistic forms in each language. Because of all this, it isimportant that we appeal to the administrative and public authorities so that theytake every measure available to them and protect this fundamental right with imagi-native measures, taking advantage of the innovations to be found in technology andalways bearing in mind that the basic object of the administration is to ensure thegreatest well-being for its citizens.

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Censuses with linguistic data have been with us for a long time. Certainly a fewcountries have had language questions in their censuses for the better part of the20th century (eg. Canada, India, Soviet Union) but even fewer in the 19thcentury (eg. Canada, India, Belgium). Other countries have been late arrivals onthe scene and have only shown an official interest in such data in recent years(e.g. Spain, USA) and others have gathered language data in the past but havenot done so in recent times (e.g. Belgium).

To broaden the scope of what has been called linguistic data above, we couldinclude in this discussion not just language data per se, but also data on ethnic ornational groups as well. In doing so, we would ipso facto add many more countriesto our list of those gathering ‘linguistic’ type data or what would be better termedethno-linguistic type data. As language here defined is spoken by people, andpeople are themselves regrouped by longstanding ancestral and cultural relation-ships, data on these quite intact human groups can often shed some light on theirlinguistic affiliations (ibid. Kloss and McConnell, volume 1, Introduction).Obviously, broad ethno-linguistic links exist, but these need not be on a uniquelyone-to-one basis, as an ethnic group can easily be found to speak more than onelanguage on the one hand, and on the other, one language can often be spoken byseveral ethnic groups. This state of affairs has come about through a longhistorical process of diffraction and assimilation of languages. Here horizonal(geographical) space, involving also geographical barriers to communication, isparamount in the diffraction process. On the other hand, assimilation results inthe loss of a language by a group, so that a language initially spoken by one groupis lost and another language takes its place. Hence, the language spoken first byone group is later spoken by two or more. Here vertical (social) space is para-mount, in that a number of languages may come to be used in a social space,resulting in the spread of some and the contraction of other languages.

When we try to make these less than neat associations between closelyinterknit groups and their languages, it is usually presumed that we arespeaking of the first language learned in childhood and still spoken, which is usuallyreferred to as the mother tongue. Between the mother tongue and the ethnicgroup then, there is some kind of intimate consociational relationship (anecological community with a common mother tongue), which in many caseslasts from generation to generation, and which allows one not only to link, butalmost to identify, the one in terms of the other. This is not nearly so much thecase for other-than-mother-tongue languages (second, third, forth, etc.languages), which have a much more tenuous relationship with the ethnicgroup and which are usually determined by conditions of social proximity

THE WHY AND THE WHEREFORE OF CENSUSES WITH LINGUISTIC DATA

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either in horizonal or in vertical space. Nowadays, both types of space havefurther expanded into a third dimension of cyberspace, so that real physicalproximity or lack of it is no longer a sine qua non of second language learningand language maintenance, spread and loss. Due to the overall ‘shrinkage’ ofphysical space, the diffraction process appears to be slowing down, giving riseto a lower ‘birth rate’ for languages on the one hand, and on the other, theincreasing virtual proximity would appear to be resulting in a speeding up ofthe assimilation process, both in terms of social and ‘long distance’ cyber space.

THE WHEREFORE OF LINGUISTIC DATAAt this point we should perhaps ask ourselves the following question: ‘Whybother gathering linguistic or ethnolinguistic data?’ and at the same time, usethis discussion to discuss some of the difficulties and pitfalls involved in thisdata gathering process.

One would have thought that given the central and dependent role oflanguage in our daily lives, together with the inescapable fact of universalethnic grouping (the latter having in turn a direct link to nationalism and therise of the nation state in modern times), that data on linguistic and ethno-national groups would be plentiful, accurate to a fault and universally recog-nised and promoted. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is the exactopposite. Data is sparce, sporadic in its manifestation, lacks consistency overtime, is geographically not very widespread and methodologically is largely notuniform. Although such data is considered basic by many, it is often so stratigicor sensitive in many countries as to warrant suppression at the worst, or manip-ulation at the best. So, although ethno-linguistic data should due to its nature beof central interest to most countries and in high demand for research and in thescientific media for many different reasons, the reality is that when it is notsimply ignored, such data is limited in scope and controlled in its diffusion bygovernments in control of their census offices and research institutes.

Data on an ethnographic and geolinguistic patterning of the world and itspeoples would seem to be a natural result of a democratisation of the politicalregimes of the world and could without too much difficulty be related to basichuman rights, at least in the form of a right to detailed information on the subject.Graphically, it could also lead to a further scientific development of maps on thesubject and to still other scientific developments in GIS mapping (Dalby 1998;McConnell 1999), so that ethnolinguistic data could be better classified, thereby‘obtaining sets of empirical data at each level of abstraction’ (see above). At thesame time this data could be linked to other types of social data, so that changesin language use (including language death) could be monitored better, explainedand predicted through an ecological approach, using data not only from thesocial sciences but from the biological sciences as well (Parker 1997).

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Apart from the usual standard type of data relating to: (i) mother tongue, i.e.‘the first language learned and still spoken’, (ii) second or other languages spoken(able to keep up a conversation in the language), there are sometimes questionsabout whether languages are read or written. There are also, but only very occa-sionally, questions on speaking a language in a particular contextual situation,which constitutes a very useful dimension, e.g. ‘Language most often spoken inthe home?’, as in more recent Canadian censuses. The most recent census inCanada, i.e. that of 2001, will still add further questions of this nature, namely,‘The language most often spoken at work?, The second most used language atwork? and ’The second most used language at home?’. This type of question isimportant, as it relates directly to the functional or utilitarian aspect of languageand not just to general language skills, which are largely assumed in the func-tional context. Second, it includes in the functional aspect one of frequency ordominance. Language function is a whole different area of study not centred onthe individual speaker and his/her language skills, but on dominant or coor-dinate language usage in a specific ‘social’ territory. This type of data has onlybeen superficially covered in language censuses, but when it has been used thereor elsewhere, has given rise to challenging comparisons and promising analyses.Very little data of this nature has come out of the conventional census, probablybecause such data raises sensitive questions of language role and utility/function-ality, that can lead to further embarrassing questions on language communityrights, to language spread, maintenance and loss, and to language domination.However, sociolinguistic research on language communities has generated a largeamount of data over the past 40 years, although much of it is based on case studiesthat give neither a wide coverage or a strong comparative basis. One such studythat has these qualities and which covers several hundred languages spoken onseveral continents is: The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree andModes of Use (Kloss and McConnell 1978, 1989, 1989; McConnell et al. 1995, 1998,2000). Here the data that has been gathered is based on the same questionnaire(with limited local adaptions) with information on 8 social domains (govern-ments, schools, mass media, industries, etc.) and in each of these domains on anumber of levels. This has allowed us to create a functional portrait that is bothdescriptive and quantifiable.

THE POTENTIAL FOR LINGUISTIC DATA IN CENSUSIf it were not for the political impediments and objections raised against thecollection of linguistic data in censuses, this type of data could go a long way tosolidifying language and linguistic community rights and to adding to the mainoutlines of an ethnographic and geolinguistic patterning of the world’slanguages and peoples. This framework, once established, would also allow usto study in a more serious vein the internal interaction of this patterning

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(language and community contact) against the backdrop of other types of socialand economic interaction in order to better evaluate more seriously the effect ofthe one on the other. It is only then that any serious kind of prognosis orprediction can be undertaken. Unfortunately both linguists and sociolinguistsin the recent turn of century events could not resist the temptation to predict thedemise of most of the languages of the world (Hagège, Crystal, Krauss, etc.).However, it is certain that basic linguistic and sociolinguistic portraits of most ofthe languages of the world that are required for this framework are simplyeither not available, are out of date or are incomplete.

So in spite of the pitfalls in language census data, some of which arementioned above, the census still has a role to play in gathering data of thisnature worldwide. And this role can and undoubtedly will become ever moreimportant, once this data is not just at the service of individual nation states, butat the service of worldwide institutions, the aim of which is to foster the dissem-ination of important and useful and even critical ethnolinguistic data on thepeoples and languages of the world.

Grant D. McConnellLaval University, Canada

Recommendations on the use of languages in public administration

Having noted the importance and the practical transcendence for linguistic commu-nities of the use of their language in relations with public services:

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• The administrative authorities and public services, both those dependent onthe state and those that are regional and local, should watch over thefulfilment of the right to use local languages in citizens’ dealings with theadministration.

• The administrative authorities must ensure that members of linguisticcommunities have the chance to address oral and written requests to theadministrative services in their own language and to receive a reply in thesame language.

• In public administration, citizens should be provided with the relevantapplication forms in the local language or at least in a bilingual or multi-lingual edition. The same must happen with the basic documents suppliedby the administration, such as identity cards, passports, driving licenses,citizens’ certificates, etc.

• The public administration should also ensure that members of local commu-nities can use names and other signs of identity in their own language andthat place names and toponyms are indicated in the local language(s).

• The public administration should in particular ensure that basic facilitiessuch as the administration of justice and the health service attend to citizensin their own language.

• The authorities should see to it that their employees are able to use thelanguage of the area where they are working.

• The authorities should take population censuses that include linguistic data,with the object of revealing citizens’ real linguistic situation and subsequentlybeing able to provide services attending properly to their linguistic rights.

Chapter 5

Language and Writing

Can a language subsist without writing in the twenty-first century? Why is so muchimportance attached to writing? What is the real situation of most languages asregards writing? What does it mean to standardise a language? Does writing meanwritten literary tradition? How much space/time will be left for reading/writingwith the generalisation of telephony and of computer and audiovisual media?

When a linguistic community has no system of writing and has no dealings withso-called modern civilisation, its language nevertheless fulfils all the functions ofcommunication and thought for the community and can therefore subsist withoutdanger. This situation, however, is increasingly rare. For the sake of modernity andthe power of social liberation attributed to written culture, literacy campaigns arenow widespread in all states. As Pattanayak points out (1991), UNESCO put a literacyprogramme into operation in 1975 which it was hoped would reach the whole of theworld’s population by 2000. However, this author believes that there are still about800 million people today who are illiterate. Also, it is not known if the newly literateare literate in their own language or, which is almost the same thing, how manypeople have been made literate in their own language and who they are.

Although it is known that many languages have no written codification or writtenuse, in the figures obtained in the study, more than 80% of the informants for thelanguages sampled said that their language was a written one. What is more, it seemsthat the development of writing, along with schools, is a prime objective for thesurvival of the language in question.

Except for fully official or co-official state languages, most languages show only thebeginnings of written use, generally limited to the sphere of religion and to schools. Itis with regard to writing that we see how the interpretation of the concept of standardlanguage varies. As for literary tradition, we shall see that the oral wealth that existsin all languages rarely has a written version. In this section on the written use oflanguages, we shall try to answer the questions above, mainly on the basis of theevidence gathered.

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132 Words and Worlds

You have come to the village of the Ena Wene Nawé, an Arawak people of theJuruena river, Mato Grosso, Brazil. In 1974 they had their first visitors from the“others”. At the beginning of 1978 I am in their midst and I am writing my notesin a notebook on my knees. The natives watch the movement of my wrist andthe birth of the signs lining up from left to right with curiosity. One day Kawair°asks me if my companion will be back soon; another day, I am asked if thewoman we left dying in the village has died yet. Writing, they think, can predict,prophesy, bring the distance near and leap across time.

One day I take a book with me containing mythical stories of the Paresi, anotherArawak people with long contact with “civilisation” and once visited by ClaudeLévi-Strauss. I have been with the Ena Wene Nawé for some years now, and I havenever before read aloud what I write in Portuguese. What sense could they makeof that bla-bla-bla of mine? But for whatever reason, today I decide to read aloud.When I pronounce words in a similar dialect, they immediately understand. Andthen one of them, realising that I do not know enough of the language to give sucha long account so well, snatches the book from me intrigued…and listens to it.There is no doubt I saw the voice, the voice was inside the book.

Going from orality to writing is not an impersonal act. Someone has to specif-ically transmit the voice to the hands and from the hands to a sign, written,drawn, lined up vertically or horizontally, and transmitted back to the eyes.While there is a taste of language that is relished, savoured, is moistened withsaliva or dries in the throat, there is also writing that is touched, though it wouldtake an almost superhuman sense of touch to make out the relief in writingunless it were cuneiform or glyptic or some other form of graffito. But essen-tially, writing makes it possible to see words and to hear what we see, since whatwe hear is endowed with visibility. In orality and writing all the senses that arestrengthened and enhanced on the basis of utterances intervene. Today weknow that no word can be uttered that cannot be at once time and space. Butwhat is really universal is the language of the mouth, which we call oral andwhich no human society can do without.

The experience by which I happened to assist at the birth of reading in avillage filled me with wonder and fear. It all began as a game, but then I began towonder how it would end. How often they took my notebook from my handsand filled the lines from left to right with drawings – graphemes – that weredifferent but fairly repetitive – that is, discrete units of an almost closed series offigures, an attempt at a kind of alphabet. An attempt to imitate? Probably.

In what were to become early pages of writing there was not as yet, it seemed,any intention of mastery, as Claude Lévi-Strauss thought he had discovered

ORALITY AND WRITING: AND THERE WERE LETTERS

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when that Nambikwara Indian, precisely in the same area where I was nowwith the Ena Wene Nadw, appropriated writing, trying to make use of thosescribblings as an instrument of power. Before my eyes, though, was a barelygratuitous act and – why not? – an amusement. This has been the commonparadigm of the history of writing in the peoples who have adopted it. Notalways, but it presents a way in which writing can emerge and be acceptedwhich would perhaps not be very traumatic for those peoples and languageswho adopt it.

Death in books?The Yanomami refer to letters with the word kanasi, which means “vestige,corpse, remains, sign or hint”. In fact, writing can be all these things: the corpseof a dead body, the waste remains of empty words, but also the vestige of amemory, the hint of future life, a sign of battle.

According to accounts of people’s first encounters with letters and books, thesituation created is not a very hopeful one.

Pedro Mártir de Anglería and Francisco López de Gomara speak of the rever-ential fear of the natives before these newcomers who “made paper speak”.

Written paper, understandably, seemed almost as fearful and as terrible as thefirearms that wounded and killed from a distance, since it brought and issuedwords of life and death over even greater distances. Written paper was theinstrument of great powers that came from far away, through voices that werenever heard but that were “seen” in the picture on the paper.

According to one account from 1614, at the time when the Jesuits in Paraguaywere carrying out their “Reducciones”, the Guarani distrusted these men whospent so much time reading their breviaries. The Jesuit writes, “Throughout theParaná they spread [the idea] that we were spies and false priests and that webrought death in our books”. The Jesuit chronicle also reports that one Guaraniyouth, on seeing “the priest was praying for the book in his hands, conceivedthat the tupa kuatia, as they called books or paper, revealed his betrayal; becausethey have conceived that, when they see that we communicate through letters,these speak to us and reveal that which is secret and foretell the future”.

The notebooks and field diaries of ethnographers who have had experiencesof first contact with indigenous societies record similar reactions. The neolo-gisms created by the natives themselves to express the novelty of written paperare revealing. The Guarani called letters kuatia, a name with which they alsorefer to the drawings and paintings with which they adorn themselves: avaikuatia for “the man written with paintings”. The Guarani-Chiriguano calledpaper tupa pire, “divine skin” or “skin that casts spells” (shamanistic).

The truth is that writing and literacy have become an unavoidable task ofglobalisation. In fact, there may be no greater globalisation today than writing,

The value of writing

Many values have been attributed to written language. The study of the history ofwriting, and especially of classical Greek culture, has led authors like Olson to say(1991) that it is written language that has given rise to ordered and logical thought. Ithas also been said that it is thanks to writing that humanity has been able to developdemocratic political systems. This same researcher (Olson 1994), however, mentionsother authors who argue that Greek culture, the Homeric texts or the writings of Platohimself, are based on oral records. He even accepts that no direct causal links can beestablished between written culture and cultural development.

In the same way, assertions about the influence of writing on cognitive devel-opment are also questionable. It might be said that thanks to writing obvious metalin-guistic skills are developed. The development of grammar, of syllogistic reasoning, ofmost linguistic analysis, are all unlikely without writing. However, differentiatingbetween simple and complex thought on the basis of the possession or otherwise of awritten culture has no scientific foundation (Goody & Watt 1968).

It also seems obvious that writing as a system of annotation, memorisation andrecording is more efficient than the oral system and it is hard to imagine a state orpolitical system of any scope without a written system of administration. But, asGough says (1968), writing is no guarantee of democracy, since dictatorial or fascistsystems have also developed with the help of writing. In the same way, we cannot saythat cultures without writing are less logical. In fact, according to Lloyd (1990),knowledge has developed more through oral dialectical discussion than through theanalysis of written texts.

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though in such a range of forms that those of us who are of one language areilliterate before another.

Only the market is perhaps more globalised than writing itself, but themarket economy could hardly become widespread except through a system ofletters and numbers.

The debate over the death throes – the struggle and approaching death – ofthe voice in the face of writing had a lofty exponent as far back as Plato himself.Must we continue to mistrust writing? Is it still in most cases an instrument ofdomination? And even worse, the death of words?

But would it not still be possible to play with letters, like voices seen andpainted? Writing is a visible support for the voice and not necessarily its rival,although at present its dominant fixation is sought.

Bartomeu Melià“Antonio Guasch” Centre for Paraguayan Studies, Paraguay

Similarly, no-one is in any doubt that the prestige of written language is associatedwith the social, religious and political history of most communities. As Landaburupoints out (1998), it is the possessors of technology (scribes, priests, officials, jurists,etc.) who have overvalued the use of writing, taking advantage of the position ofpower this use gave them. It is therefore logical that the mastery of writing is alsoconsidered an important asset to social liberation.

Although the values attributed to writing can be questioned, we nevertheless knowthat society – and this includes all the informants in our research – considers writtenlanguage essential for a language to subsist and to acquire the prestige necessary to bepassed on. It is therefore not the object of this review to dismiss or detract from writing.It is, however, important to stress that writing does not constitute a necessary conditionfor a language to be considered an invaluable asset of the cultural heritage of humanity.

The written use of languages

The figures in Table 6 provide important information for assessing the state oflanguages as regards written use. If we only looked at the answer to “is the languagewritten or not?”, we would be reduced to the information provided in the first line ofthe table, which tells us that more than 80% of the languages analysed are used inwriting. However, because of the extreme differences to be found in the act of writing,we also need to look into the information that has been obtained on standardisationand on written literary traditions. Of course, we need to go back over what isconsidered standard language and on the possible misinterpretations of the questionon written language. Suffice it to say, for the time being, that only a third of alllanguages, those that claim to have a standard language and a standard literature,show a relatively normalised use of writing.

Writing is a factor to which informants attach great importance. Generally it bringsprestige to the language, especially when there is an ancient written tradition to fallback on, as shown by informants of Sindhi, Breton and Tibetan.

The Literary tradition is as ancient as the language itself (10,000 years). Poetry: Shah-jo-Risaco, Sachal-jo-Risalo. Texts: Mirza Kaleech Beg Allama I. Kazi and others.(Sindhi, India)

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Table 6. Written use, standardisation and written literature

Languages not used in writing 19%

Languages used in writing, with standardisation and written literature 27%

Languages used in writing but without standardisation or written literature 54%

TOTAL 100%

The Breton literary tradition is very ancient. Originally oral (bardic tradition), it appearsin writing in the twelfth century. This inspired the Matière de Bretagne by Chrestien deTroyes. Since the creation of the Gwalarn literary movement in 1925, novels, short novels,poetry and plays have not ceased to appear. (Breton, France)

There is an abundant collection of traditional folk literature in the Tibetan language. Thisincludes mainly folk songs, myths, legends, stories, narrative poems, long songs andheroic epics. The Story of King Geser is a Tibetan heroic epic which consists of over 100sections and which has over 50 different versions. Tibetan operas consisting of over 10different plays and several Tibetan ballads are also very popular throughout Tibetanregions. (Tibetan, Tibet)

In many cases, writing has begun recently – in the last century – as in the case ofZhuang, Jingpo and many other Chinese languages, or many African languages likeSomali or Bamanankan. Very often, and this would be the case of the examples given,the beginning of writing coincides with colonisation and even, sometimes, seems tohave been induced by it. This does not lessen the value attached to its presence and use.

It has a phonetic script based on the Latin alphabet which was created in 1957. Among theZhuang people another form of writing based on Chinese characters is used for nativepoems and plays, but the shapes of the characters vary between regions. It has a richcorpus of literature. Most of them have been transmitted orally down through the genera-tions. Since the creation of the Zhuang writing system, these traditional works have grad-ually been published. (Zhuang, China)

There has been a written system since 1972; there are poems, songs, dances, stories.(Somali, Somalia)

The Jingpo writing system, which was based on the Latin alphabet, was created in 1899.(Jingpo, China)

The known use dates from 1930 through Kaarta’s Bamanankan (writing called ‘masaba’).(Bamanankan, Mali)

A separate mention is needed for the writing systems adopted by differentlinguistic communities. The processes some languages have been through in theadoption of different codifications (alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic, etc.) constituteinteresting aspects of the cultural experience undergone by the respective commu-nities. These circumstances, however, are in many cases the reflection of the partic-ularly troublesome historical situations that so many communities have sufferedand still suffer.

Examples of this type are the writing in the Abaza language of the RussianFederation, which according to our informant, was until 1938 based on the Latinalphabet and after this date on the Cyrillic alphabet; that of the Malay language ofMalaysia, which has two written forms, Latin and Arabic; that of Kirgiz, which in Chinahas writing based on Arabic signs and in Kyrgyzstan on Cyrillic; Meitei, in India, which

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is written in the Assamese/Bengali system and in its original specific alphabet;Rajhastani, which is based on the Devanagari system, etc.

It seems that these circumstances do nothing for the prestige and vitality oflanguages. If the process of writing is seen as something enriching, a resort thatspeakers of a language endow themselves with to gain access to other uses that arenot possible from oral use, it seems important to have the most economic andeffective writing models. In other words, those codes are needed that best serve thecircumstances in store for the linguistic community now and in the future. Linguisticplanners and the respective officials should bear this very much in mind.

Another aspect that is emphasised over and over again amongst the informants isthe influence of religions as initiators of written use. Illustrative examples are thosecases of American languages such as Guarani, Otomi and Wayuu, or the Africanlanguage Nyoro and the Asian Lai.

Since the arrival of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century until our day, the Guaranilanguage has had an alphabet and it has been used since the implementation of thebilingual situation in 1993. (Guarani, Paraguay)

From the sixteenth century the Franciscans and Augustines adapted the Latin alphabetfor writing Otomi. Today there is a ‘rebirth’ of written Otomi. The Secretariat for PublicEducation is publishing text books for primary education for children who speak Otomi.(Otomi, Mexico)

There was no written form until 1907, but the American Missionary Mr. Carsoninvented a written form in 1907. (Lai, Bangladesh)

The Runyoro have known written use for only 120 years, since the arrival of the Africanmissionaries. Until then, they only knew spoken tradition. (Nyoro, Uganda)

Only the publications of the Church (are written): Bible, New Testament, school Bible,missal, prayer book, hymn book, catechism, dictionary, grammar, ABC Chisena…There isa booklet of poems and another of legends made by pupils. (Wayuu, Venezuela)

Written experience is often limited to the translation of the Bible, or parts of it, veryoften by missionaries or linguists from outside the community. The adoption ofwriting in the language of the community is not usually quick or widespread, but itcan constitute a productive process. What has happened in the history of writing ofmost European languages, and particularly in the Germanic languages, seems still tobe repeated. Religious writings and in particular translations of the Bible give rise towriting in many other languages. The most recent experience is that of the SummerInstitute of Linguistics (SIL) as chiefly responsible for this powerful boost to writingin native languages through the Bible.

This language exists in a written form since 1973, when literacy and Bible TranslationProgrammes were introduced in Maridi to develop southern languages, but prior to thatsome works existed in comparative vocabularies only. (Viri, Sudan)

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The Summer Institute of Linguistics prepared literacy reading-books in this language butthey were used very little. The Central Bank of Guayaquil has produced publications onmythology which are hardly used either by speakers. At present the Confederation ofIndigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) is publishing material which is beingused in the bilingual schools. (Colorado, Ecuador)

The development of writing in each language will nevertheless depend on the ideo-logical, economic and institutional resources the community itself can manage.

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Modern linguistics, thanks to descriptive studies of numerous indigenouslanguages made during the twentieth century, has been able to determine thatthere is no such thing as a primitive language supposedly less developed thanthe languages of Western civilisation. It is commonly believed that a languagethat is not written, that has neither grammar nor dictionary, is less grammati-cally developed than those languages that have grammatical descriptions anddictionaries, and that until writing is introduced, allowing the composition ofworks of this sort and a written literary tradition, a language cannot develop itsgrammatical potential. These beliefs are radically false. Writing and writtenliterary tradition have no influence at all on the grammatical structure oflanguages. Having writing has no real effect on the grammar of any language.There is a preconception that writing fixes or codifies language. All humanlanguages are codes structured according to precise rules and subject to aconstant state of change, also according to identifiable rules. Languages thatare written do not in any way stop changing, just like purely oral languages;hence the differences to be seen, for example, between spoken and writtenEnglish or French.

Furthermore, communities that have no knowledge of writing have rich andvaried oral literary traditions that exploit and develop the possibilities offeredby their languages, which are the same as those found in, for example, classicallanguages like Greek or Latin, the basis of one of the most admired written liter-atures in Western cultures.

Many people refuse to accept that the language of a small tribal communitycan have a linguistic medium of expression as useful, ductile and powerful asthat enjoyed by Spaniards, Russians or Germans. Nevertheless, linguists whohave described the languages of lost tribes, such as Hixkariana (Brazil, 400speakers; see D.C. Derbyshire 1979) or Haruai (Papua New Guinea, 1,000speakers; see Comrie, 1998) reveal languages whose grammatical developmentand capacities are similar to those of Western languages.

ON THE EQUALITY OF LANGUAGES

See Map 7 for information on language diversity and standardisation in Senegal.

Languages not used in writing

Although the number of languages in the world without writing is very large, of thesample analysed, only 19% are languages whose informants say they have no writing.

Of course, the absence of writing does not involve any linguistic shortcoming forthe language or for the culture it transmits. Evidence for this are the abundantaccounts reflecting the literary wealth which unwritten languages also possess andtransmit from generation to generation orally, so long as the language remains alive.The following accounts of three Chinese languages are a good example of this fact. Itis also important to point out that according to these same accounts, only Guiqiongseems to be transmitted at all normally. The other two, De’ang and Namuyi, are inimmediate danger of extinction.

As there has been no written form of De’ang historically, its traditional literature has beentransmitted through the generations in oral form. A few literary works have been recordedusing Dai in religious writings. These include ‘The Story of the Flood’, ‘The BathingGoddess’ and ‘Lament on the Lusheng’. (De’ang, China)

The elders or religious practitioners in the local areas can remember a wealth of oral liter-ature. This includes historical stories, stories about the origin of man, songs and fables.Apart from their superstitious content, they have a certain literary value. However, therehave not yet been opportunities to record them. (Guiqiong, China)

Some elderly people and religious practitioners can relate historical stories, fables, andother forms of oral literature, which can be traced back to antiquity and which have beenpassed down orally through the generations. They have not all been recorded. Theyinclude some curses used by their religious practitioners as well as some other religiousterms. Despite the superstitious elements of some of the stories, they are still valuable

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The fact that all known languages are equal as regards their degree ofcomplexity and potential does not mean that they are the same. Each languageachieves that degree in its own way; no two languages are the same in thisaspect, each one has its own grammatical personality within the common arenathat defines human languages. Every single one of the languages of the world isan original and efficient contribution to the rigorous demands of expression andcommunication amongst human beings and communities.

Juan Carlos MorenoAutonomous University of Madrid, Spain

because they contain much philosophical knowledge and provide us with insight abouthow the ancients viewed the world. (Namuyi, China)

Languages used in writing

In the sample analysed, more than 80% of the languages studied are said to have awritten code. This is a good thing if we bear in mind that writing, in principle,helps to give languages prestige and vitality. However, to say that a language isused in writing can mean a lot of things, from the existence of an alphabet barelyused for anything more than to translate bits of the Bible or transcribe some workof folklore, to situations of normalised use of writing which is socially indispen-sable for belonging to the group. The in-between situations, of course, varywidely. In order to provide rather more accurate information taking into accountthe figures gathered, we shall analyse whether the languages in the sample, aswell as having a written code, are standardised and whether they have a writtenliterary tradition.

Languages used in writing, with standardisation and a literary tradition

Of the languages analysed, 27% have a standard variety and furthermore a writtenliterary tradition.

Of course, each of these concepts – whether a language is used in writing or not,whether it is standardised and whether it has literary tradition – can be understooddifferently and the fact that the answers to the three questions are affirmative does notguarantee that the written language is habitually or normally used.

According to the details given by the informants themselves, written use in manycases arises basically through the production of material for study, literacy teachingor religious instruction. It does not necessarily reflect widespread use either inspheres of normal social use (administration, education, the press, trade, etc.) or bythe majority of the members of the community (level of literacy in the language inquestion). The following examples illustrate this situation:

There is written use of the language: some of the documents that exist are religious hymns,fragments of biblical translation, literacy spelling books, reading books for classes inconvergent education, handbooks for reading and writing and various literacy docu-ments. There are publications by Catholic missionaries and isolated researchers. TheDNAFLA (Direction Nationale de l’Alphabétisation Fonctionnelle et de la LinguistiqueAppliquée) has produced a lot of teaching material for literacy and post-literacy classesand classes in convergent education. (Dogon, Mali)

There is a lot of material written recently in the language by the Kaxinawa teachers for usein schools about native history, geography and science. It has been published by theComissão Pró-Índio do Acre since 1987. (Kaxinawa, Brazil)

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Written forms include a phonetic script based on the Latin alphabet, as well as the newLatin Lisu script created after 1949. There is a wealth of literature which includes‘Genesis’, ‘The Shepherd’s Song’ and the ‘White-Haired Bird’, as well as the Bible andChristian hymns of praise. (Lisu, China)

Of course, widespread languages that are official state languages and that have anextensive literature in production today satisfy all three conditions.

This group also includes languages that are currently undergoing recession or havehad a flourishing literature in the past but have lost that condition for one reason oranother. In this group, there are also languages whose written use is just beginningand has not yet extended to all the community of speakers.

Writing processes, like any other linguistic activity, are dynamic by nature.Situations can change due to a number of circumstances. Informants seemed toconsider it a good thing to be able to write a language and to do so as often aspossible and for as many uses as possible. The survey also reflects the difficultyinvolved in this practice when the language is in decline. Bearing in mind the prideand satisfaction which arises from possessing written texts, especially forminorised languages, it is important to emphasise and appreciate the effort madeby these communities.

Languages used in writing but lacking standardisation or writtenliterary tradition

Fifty-four percent of languages are used in writing even though they lack standardis-ation and a written literature. The account for Qiang, a Chinese language, shows thatwriting does exist. However, it is also evident that this is not a language in whichwriting is a common practice.

There is oral folklore. Since the creation of the Qiang writing system, a volume of tradi-tional literary works has been collated (with a total of over one million words) and isawaiting publication. (Qiang, China)

In fact, at least half the languages that are said to be written are in a precarious situ-ation. Although they are said to have a standard variety, this is frequently the onlyvariety or dialect to have been codified, as in the case of Aukan, Babole or Dobel,whose accounts follow.

There is a standard form of the language as it is used in speech by Aukaners. Furthermore,the SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) has developed a standard orthography and hasdocumented the linguistic patterns of the language. (Aukan, Surinam)

No conscious attempt to impose standardisation, but the Dzeke variety is the only varietywritten. (Babole, Congo)

In the written form, printed materials all use the SIL approved ‘working orthography’,individuals often spell according to how they think it should be in personal letters.(Dobel, Indonesia)

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Similarly, we have been able to confirm that in spite of having a written code, manylanguages hardly have any written work and that neither writing (nor reading), atleast in their own language(s), is as yet a normal practice in that linguistic community.

Similarly, it is known for a fact that our figures also confirm the existence oflanguages which have a written literary tradition and which nevertheless have notaccepted a standard variety for all the written practice of the linguistic community asa whole. These account for approximately 20% of this group. The example of Uma, anIndonesian language, illustrates this situation.

If you mean standard orthography used in all literature, yes, there is standardisation. Allliterature that has been produced is in the Kantewu (Central) dialect, and the establishedorthography has been used. But if you mean is there a standard dialect or standardwritten form used by all dialects, no. Other dialects accept Kantewu dialect better thanthey would any other dialect, but many people would still prefer to read their own dialect.(Uma, Indonesia)

On standard language

The concept of a standard language is a Western notion usually associated with thewritten language, as it is through writing that the corresponding rules are normallyestablished and fixed. It is nevertheless important to remember, as Moreno Cabrerasays in this same work, that “the process of standardisation of a language or groups oflinguistic varieties does not introduce any new elements that would fundamentallymodify the quality of that language and make it superior to the varieties”. It is alsotrue, however, that the adoption of certain formal regularities, be they lexical,morphological, orthographical, etc., can bring stability and thereby increase thechances of identification and cohesion the language gives the group. The standard,however, insofar as it is usually built from forms used by the elite (see Bronckart inthis same text), also raises problems for its adoption by the community as a whole.

Whatever conception our informants have, almost half the languages in this sample arestandardised, according to the information they have provided. On the other hand, theother half are not, although 10% say they are being standardised at the present moment.

As we pointed out above, the concept of standard language is not unequivocal. Forexample, for a large number of informants a language need not necessarily be usedhabitually in writing to be considered standardised. In fact, 20% of the languages thatclaim to have a standard language are hardly used in writing, but are languages of afundamentally oral tradition. The standard, in these cases, is associated with the oraluse, and is a variety which receives general acceptance within the community.

The following list sums up the reasons given in the survey to support how thestandard language came about:

• The standard is based on one of the dialects although it is influenced by others. Thecase of Waffa or Yele, in Papua New Guinea, corresponds to this criterion since onevariety of the language is said to have been accepted as standard.

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• Standardisation is taken for granted, as the language is not considered to havevarieties. There is no need for writing. Languages in serious risk of extinction,such as Tchamba, in Togo, or Itzaj, in Guatemala, are the ones that give rise tothese appreciations.

• The existing literary language is implicitly accepted as the standard form of therespective language.

An orthography based on scientific principles has been introduced and used in theavailable books. Outside of this literature there is little standardisation. (Yakan,Philippines)

The standard as such does not exist, but literary Ossetic fulfils the role of the nationalnorm. (Ossetic, Georgia)

• The use of the written language – that is, the production of written material – isalso seen as proof in itself of the existence of the written standard. But there are alsothose who feel the opposite. It is not enough to write a language for it to have astandard form.

• The teaching of the language in schools and the prestige of the language are alsooften given as reasons supporting the existence of a standard variety.

The Tepehuan of the south-east is considered the prestige dialect, since it is spoken overa wide area. (Tepehuan, Mexico)

• There is an orthographic, grammatical and/or lexical proposal that has been prom-ulgated by some official institution or organisation, sometimes with the support ofrules or laws.

The question of standardisation pertains to the individual dialects. Most of the dialectsare now standardised in the sense that there are dictionaries and (small) grammars formost of them. It is, however, as yet unclear whether all members of the linguisticcommunity accept the standardised forms of Frisian. (Frisian, Germany)

An association of Mandyak has determined that Bok should be used as the standard; itis the most widespread dialect. (Mandyak, Senegal)

• Translation of texts confirms and reinforces the existence of a standard variety andat the same time gives a feeling of unity within the language.

Concerning standardisation, if you mean ‘Is there an official body that determines howthe language will be written’, then the answer is ‘no’. If you mean ‘Is there a body ofpublished literature in a single dialect that has a standardising effect’, the answer isyes. (Yele, Papua New Guinea)

• It is felt that there must be various simultaneous uses (literature, media, education)to confirm the existence of a standard language.

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Halbi spoken in and around Jagadalpur is considered a standard one. All India Radiobroadcasts programmes in Halbi. The only local newspaper of Bastar DandakaranyaSamachai publishes News in Halbi in Nagarisaint. Hence, this standard variety isrecognised. Hence, Halbi spoken in the central part of Bastar is considered thestandard one. (Halbi, India)

• And although sporadic, there is no shortage of associations between the conceptsof standard language and artificial language. In the same way, there are those whospeak of changes in acceptance of the standard.

During the 1950s, the vernacular form used in Jinhua town in Jianchuan Country wasconsidered to be the standard form. However, over the past few years, it has beenreplaced by the vernacular used in Xizhou Town in Dali City. (Bai, China)

However, most accounts considered that having a standard variety is good forprestige and especially for allowing the use of language in writing. The disparity ofopinions confirms the range of circumstances that can affect the creation and devel-opment of a standard variety. It is also very important to point out that, as the infor-mation shows, the standard variety is not essential either for written use or forliterary production and even less so for the survival of a language. The informersseemed to be clear that it is their use, both orally and in writing, that ensures thesurvival and development of languages.

In the same way, it cannot be said either that the existence of a standard varietynecessarily ensures written literary production. A wide range of situations can arisein the development of languages and their written varieties, be these consideredstandard or not. Within the group selected, the languages with a standard that never-theless lack a literary tradition account for 35%.

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Linguistic norms can be defined as codified products of social judgementsconcerning the particular human activity called language.

Language has two obvious characteristics: it is extremely diversified and itevolves with the passing of time. Diversity is first of all external: language isrealised through multiple natural languages, which differ from one another intheir phonology (types of sound units exploited to produce meaning), in theirlexicon and their morphosyntactic rules. Diversity is also internal: within eachlanguage there are coexisting varieties linked to regional, socio-economic,personal differences, etc. As to change, it affects the whole dimension ofnatural languages, even if evidence of it requires long periods of time. Thisvariability of languages is due to the fact that the significance of their consti-tutive units, or signs, is permanently renegociated through use and these signs

THE STATUS OF LINGUISTIC NORMS

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organise themselves in paradigms of terms competing to express the samereality. It is also due to the fact that these signs get organised in commu-nicative forms, i.e. oral or written texts, the function of which is to comment ondiverse and changing human activities, and the structure of which partiallydepends on the very characteristics of those activities. But this variability isalso dynamic: each natural language (and each variety) constitutes a systemable to transform itself to express any item of knowledge and any process ofthought. In this sense, languages constitute systems of expression whosepotentialities are strictly equivalent whether they have a writing system or not.

Social judgements concern one or another aspect of this functioning oflanguage and produce four different kinds of norms.

• Functional norms are related to the conditions of use of a particular natural language;they indicate the choice of signs and of texts that, regardless of any intrinsicvalue judgement, seem more accurate or more suitable in a determined situ-ation of communication, to express content or comment on an activity.

• Cultural norms are related to the presumed quality of language productions, andtherefore largely depend on aesthetic judgement. They can translate into acomparison of languages, leading us to consider that some of them could be morecomplete or more logical or “nicer” than others, and also leading us to considerthat the best languages could be those that both possess a writing system andhave been the subject of technical descriptions. Cultural norms generally givemore importance to the characteristics of written forms compared to oral formsand, within written forms, they favour a subgroup of a literary nature.

• Theoretical norms result from the steps made towards language knowledge inphilosophy or in linguistics. In philosophy, an important thread claims thatthe structures of languages are but the direct translation either of a logic ofthe world or of a logic of thought, both of universal status. In this perspectivediversity and change are disturbing phenomena and hence they remainunder-analysed and de facto undervalued. In linguistics, many works ofempirical analysis of languages have been carried out but none of the modelsbuilt on these bases could pretend to give a full and homogenous vision oftheir characteristics. Yet researchers often tend to consider that the onlyexisting language properties are those they manage to describe, which againentails a depreciation of some varieties, particularly oral ones.

• Political norms are linked to centralisation and education measures under-taken by the States. Relying on the concept of State unity and citizen equalityprevailing from the end of the 18th century, they translate into the definitionof a standard language that would be a kind of common language elaboratedfrom multiple varieties in use, and that would serve at the same time as the

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official State language, as the teaching language and as the “mother”language to be taught. But historical analyses show that these standardlanguages always build upon a privileged variety, that of the elites close topower, and that they reject most of the characteristics of the other varieties inuse inside a specific community.

In as far as all human activities are subject to social evaluations, the production oflinguistic norms is in itself an ineluctable process and it would be illusory topretend to interrupt or suppress it. But there is a risk of confusing these judgements,whose grounds are often questionable, with the very reality of languages andtheir functioning. On the other hand, these normative judgements are everyone’sresponsibility, and it is therefore legitimate and necessary to discuss and controlthem, and particularly to try to differentiate between those norms that are usefulfor the development of languages and their users, and those hindering them.

From this point of view, and on the basis of the data collected in this Review, itis convenient to question and fight against the judgements that issue fromsimplistic “preconceived ideas” or from “interested” enterprises (cultural,philosophical, scientific or political ones). This drives us to assert that alllanguages (and their varieties), whatever the magnitude of their disseminationand use, have a potential linguistic resource that is equal in rights, and that theyare the witnesses of the multiple ways humans have to elaborate theirknowledge of the world and regulate their social interactions, and in this sensethey constitute a major aspect of human heritage. This also drives us not to over-estimate the role played by writing systems. The creation and development of thesesystems do entail deep changes in the social structures and in the cognitive func-tioning of individuals. But every language has the capacity to survive, to enrichand to play its part as a social mediator independently from the existence ofwritings that only reflect part of their properties and are only recent technicalconstructions. This finally drives us to encourage a switch in the all too frequentrelationship existing between theoretical elaborations and the effective charac-teristics of language functioning; languages should not be masked or rejected inthe name of philosophical prejudices or because of insufficient descriptions orscientific analyses. On the contrary, such positions and procedures must bepermanently corrected, according to the progress of our knowledge of the prop-erties and operating conditions of all human languages.

On the other hand, there is no point in questioning the usefulness of what wecall functional norms. As far as it fits in with varied and complex social inter-action processes, the production of signs and texts in all languages is submittedto conditions of use that all speakers must learn and master so that they canfully assume their part as members of a community. Therefore it is necessary to

Written literary tradition

It is worth repeating that that there is no natural living language that does not have aliterary tradition, and the fact that this may be oral does not mean that it is of aninferior category to written literature.

In the survey, though, the question refers to written literature. This question wasnot always properly understood, since many of the informants thought it referredonly to literary tradition. This fact led many informants to insist, quite rightly, thatregardless of the greater or lesser written tradition, the languages they wereinforming on had a rich literary tradition.

Even so, 39% of the sample languages appear as languages with a written literarytradition. In many cases, of course, there is reference to religious texts, to educationalmaterial for initial literacy or for primary education, and to the publication of collec-tions of literature from the oral tradition, either historical, cultural or folkloric. Thesecharacteristics of the written production are what justify the undoubtedly positivenumbers as regards the experience of written literature.

Amongst the languages mentioned as having religious literature are Ashaninca(Peru), Kabiye (Togo), Kaqchikel (Guatemala), Karay (Russia), Lango (Uganda),Migaama (Chad), Naasioi (Papua New Guinea), Ndau (Mozambique), Sakapulteko(Guatemala), Tiv (Cameroon), Burushaski (Pakistan), Triqui, (Mexico), etc. Thenthere are literatures with a basically oral tradition, which have recently begun to becollected and published. Finally, we might mention more ancient literatures as inthe case of languages like Friulan (Italy), Ladino (Israel), Otomi (Mexico),Poqomchi’ (Guatemala), Rajasthani (India), etc., each of which has a differenthistory and experience.

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have indications concerning the communicative relevance and appropriatenessof the different units and structures proposed by the same language system.

Finally, although the language standardisation process seems inevitable, dueto the conditions of functioning and reproduction of modern societies (througheducation), it is convenient not to convert standard languages into instruments of afight against diversity and change, i.e. against the effective modalities of languagefunctioning for the majority. To ensure their democratic role standard languagesmust consider the effective practices that are open to change and diversity, inother words they must permanently aim at creating a balance between thegeneral need for intercomprehension and the diverse and rich linguistic solu-tions used by human subgroups to achieve it.

Jean-Paul BronckartUniversity of Geneva, Switzerland

The literary tradition is still very new and poor, consisting mainly of poetry (religious),folklore and public education. (Burushaski, Pakistan)

Although there are religious and educational texts, we cannot speak of the existence of aliterary tradition. (Triqui, Mexico)

However, it is important to properly understand, and the accounts are a good illus-tration of this, that however incipient and precarious the writing experience is, it isalways considered a factor of prestige for the language. Similarly, no one – at least inour results – decries the possibilities this condition offers for development, thoughthe obvious shortcomings can, very often, lead to discouragement and frustration.

Also, it is essential to insist on the fact that, whether or not a language has a writtenform, there is no linguistic reason for looking down on it. On the contrary, in contrastto the written forms of most languages, which are recent productions, all languageshave millenarian oral literary traditions which are the repositories for their particularinterpretations of the world and which make most valuable contributions to thecultural heritage of humanity.

The language has a rich literary tradition. Firstly, there are many folk songs and fairytales. Folk songs are sung during weddings as well as funerals. Secondly, the Lingaopeople have their own unique brand of Lin opera and puppetry. Some classic Chineseoperas have also been adapted for the Lingao language. (Lingao, China)

As there was no written form historically, its traditional literature has been transmitteddown through the generations in oral form. There is an abundant collection of differentkinds of oral literature, including legends, stories, fables, proverbs, historical poems, andfolk songs. There are historical poems concerning the creation of the world and the originof man. (Va, China)

There is no written tradition in this language, there is only an oral tradition. There aresome stories and legends of the payas, but they are all written in Spanish, with a fewnames of animals, plants and people in Pech. The most important are Gods, heroes andmen in the Pech mythical universe (1991) by Lázaro Flores and Wendy Griffin. There areno stories written in Pech, not even bilingual. (Pech, Honduras).

Map 8 shows language diversity in Mexico and Central America.

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Recommendations on language and writing

In view of the importance informants give to the possibility of using their language inwriting, we recommend:

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• Furthering written use, as it confers prestige on languages and increasestheir chances of being transmitted and recovered. This measure cannot beimplemented without the agreement of the linguistic community affected.

• Taking the utmost care so that the use of the written form of a language isseen as an enrichment rather than a threat for the linguistic community.

• Allowing the functional aspect pursued by writing to integrate the existingcultural tradition, especially in the case of languages whose situation iscritical. A linguistic community’s written tradition, whatever it is, is animportant part of its cultural heritage.

• That the authorities should support people, groups or community institu-tions who take care of the furtherance of the written use of minoritylanguages, in such a way that the greater the degree of minorisation of thelanguage or the threat to it, the greater the assistance from the authorities.

• That changes in the systems of writing a community’s language(s) should beavoided, as the interests of the linguistic community and the defence of itslinguistic heritage must prevail over the political and administrative interestin favour of uniformity on the part of the states these communities belong to.

• That the scientific community should involve itself in a coordinated job withthe linguistic communities in questions relating to standardisation,primarily when the communities request their assistance.

• That linguistic communities should be provided with suitable technologicalmeans and training in their use when required, to help and allow written useof the language.

• That bearing in mind the fact that telephony and computers have madespelling rules (orthography) more flexible, the spread of these resources inless widespread languages with less written practice can provide a goodchance of increasing the use of these languages.

• That it should not be forgotten that the fundamental use of any language isoral and that the survival of a language depends on its transmission andhabitual use.

Chapter 6

Language and Education

Are the languages taught in schools more important than the ones that are not taught?How can a language be taught if the teachers do not know it or are not trained to teachit and there is no teaching material in that language? Can children learn two or threelanguages without harming their academic training? Why spend money on teachinga minority language if it is hardly used for communicating and all the new thinking isdone in another language? What does it mean to maintain one’s own language andwhat does learning a new language do for one?

In attempting to describe the situation of languages in the world, it seems essentialto approach the educational situation. Nevertheless, education adds nothing intrinsicto a language. All languages have developed and been transmitted during the courseof history independently of the teaching institutions that may have grown up aroundthem. The dominant languages are the ones that were able to take advantage of schoolsearlier and more effectively as a way of furthering their use and development. But theefficiency of the dominant educational policies has also, in most cases, increasedlinguistic uniformity, the loss of languages and cultures, and forced the abandonmentof identities forged over thousands of years. These losses and the uprooting and socialmarginalisation resulting from them are factors that have been underestimated orsilenced to the greater glory of policies of national unity aimed at maximum linguisticand cultural uniformity in the nation-state and its colonies or satellites.

What is more, this educational policy has created a monolingual school model,widespread in many parts of Europe and the whole of the Western world, which hasposed enormous contradictions in bilingual or plurilingual communities, as well as

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“All persons should therefore be able to express themselves and to create and dissem-inate their work in the language of their choice, and particularly in their mother tongue;all persons should be entitled to quality education and training that fully respect theircultural identity.” (Article 5 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on CulturalDiversity of 2 November 2001)

for all the stateless languages or those with few speakers. School and prestigiouseducation have been associated with the dominant language, which in many cases isnone other than English.

Nevertheless, in the twentieth century, there have also been linguistic policies thathave promoted diversity, educational policies that have included teaching of and invarious languages and whose chief objective has been to encourage bilingualism orplurilingualism. Furthermore, the growth of the educational sciences, and of educa-tional linguistics in particular, shows that bilingual and plurilingual education notonly benefit the individual and social development of schoolchildren but also theeducational system itself.

In this respect, it is worth remembering some of the guidelines of the action plan for theimplementation of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2 November2001), to which Member States are committed. We have singled out objectives 5 and 6:

–“To safeguard humanity’s linguistic heritage and support expression, creationand diffusion in the greatest possible number of languages”:

–“To further linguistic diversity – respecting the mother tongue – at all levels ofeducation, wherever possible, and stimulate the learning of several languages fromthe earliest age.”

This chapter presents the difficult situation facing many of the world’s languages,and which according to the accounts gathered is partly due to the lack of access to theeducational system or to their inadequate treatment by it. It also reports on the possi-bilities the educational system could offer for reappraising, recovering and devel-oping languages. Of particular interest are the presentations of the models developedin different parts of the world and the significant testimonies gathered throughinformants on teaching initiatives being undertaken in favour of their languages. Thechapter ends with recommendations of interest to the various political and culturalagents responsible for furthering education and linguistic and cultural diversity.

Languages without access to the educational system

Most of the world’s languages are not present in the school system so that this cannotcontribute to their transmission and development. Thirty-three percent of informantsstated that the languages they were reporting on were not present in schools (seeTable 7). And no one seems satisfied with this situation. What is more, it must beemphasised that any move in favour of teaching languages is a good thing in that it atleast generates positive attitudes of prestige for them.

Some of the informants mentioned the speakers’ experiences with initiatives forteaching the language, its literary tradition, etc., even when taking place outsideschool hours.

Our language is not taught in formal education and there is no written material. Schoolteachers from the indigenous communities give pupils homework on words from the

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Nahuatl language who go where there are speakers who teach them orally and in writing.(Nahuatl, Mexico)

Children learn songs and phrases in community activities/cultural centre. (Cupeño, USA)

Others go even further and as well as reporting on informal experiments in furtheringtheir teaching and use, clearly express their wish that the language be introduced intothe formal educational system.

This language is not used in education. But we have been demanding education in the mothertongue. Some informal application in education has brought better results. (Chepang, Nepal)

In some cases they even report real prohibition, always against the express wish of thecommunity.

The Mon community has an Education Committee in order to teach Mon language intheir community. But in the state run schools, it is not allowed even as a subject of study.(Mon, Burma)

There are also plenty of accounts of situations in which although the law allows theuse of the language, in practice it is not included at school.

Teachers are permitted to use the language for explanations to students in the lowergrades of elementary education. But the medium of instruction is Pilipino or English andmany teachers do not speak the language. (Some) teachers who are native speakers wouldlike to use the language at least in first grade and/or as a subject of study in otherelementary grades. Materials are available. But the provincial supervisory structure of theschool system has not been very encouraging – to say the least. (Yakan, Philippines)

The language is supposed to be used as a medium for bilingual education as well as a subjectin elementary education. However, for various reasons this remains on paper. (Kuvi, India)

Other accounts speak of languages which were once present in the educationalsystem but are no longer so.

Bilingual schools were begun about 20 years ago; but I think it is all in Portuguese now,both the R.C. Mission school and the school in Sai Cinza, begun by a Baptist missionary(now retired). (Munduruku, Brazil)

It was used for some months when a vernacular pre-school was going on. But the schoolfell apart when the teachers were discouraged by not being paid from the community. Butthe use of the language in education might resume when the time is ripe for doing so.(Meramera, Papua New Guinea)

Finally, let us hear from those informants who indicate that although their language isnot today present in the educational system they hope it will be in the future.

Teachers are being trained to use Mapudungun as a vehicle for teaching as well as asubject for learning. (Mapudungun, Chile)

The new educational policy plans its introduction at the primary level. (Comorian, Comoros)

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Possibly in the future, at the community school in the language area it will be used as thelanguage for education for preparatory and grades 1 and 2. (Yale, Papua New Guinea)

The Education Department wants to teach the first three years of schooling in the Naraklanguage. (Narak, Papua New Guinea)

The accounts gathered are only a small sample of the many linguistic communitiesthere are that have no access to education. When the population goes to school buttheir own language is not present, it is difficult to imagine what benefit these childrencan obtain from these schools. The negation of identity involved in a situation of thissort is unimaginable for the majority of the citizens belonging to communities with adominant language. These citizens have grown up thinking that education can onlybe transmitted in certain languages or that it is best if it is done only in the dominantlanguage. In many cases, this is also the opinion deliberately instilled into citizensbelonging to communities with minorised languages that are not reflected in theeducational system. The arguments are extremely twisted: some people consider thatthis avoids problems of communication; we could also mention the argument that thesocial development resulting from learning the dominant language is best for bothcommunities, of whatever language; others say that there are not enough resourcesfor every language to be taught at school.

The right to an education in one’s mother tongue constitutes a fundamental rightrecognised by UNESCO since 1953. Nevertheless, most linguistic communitiescannot exercise it.

This principle, however, still plays a decisive role in the educational policy to bedeveloped for all the world’s linguistic communities and especially the smallest. Itsimplementation would allow the development of languages not only by increasingtheir use as such, but also because, in general, it gives rise to positive attitudestowards them.

Indeed, although all languages are equal from a linguistic point of view, their prestigeand the attitudes surrounding them suffer badly if they are not taught at school.

They call it a ‘dialect’ and look down on it as a language and as a means of expression.Nowadays, school teachers have forbidden the children from using Chipaya.(Chipaya, Bolivia)

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The tension between the unitary features of the Union and equally strongregulatory powers of the States is also reflected in the education scenario ofthe country.

Bringing education into the concurrent list of the constitution and handingover primary education to the Panchayats are two such examples. The latter was

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possible by the 73rd and 74th Amendments of the Constitution in 1992, whichfor the first time, recognised local Governments.

Culture, language and education are social capital for development.Whether one looks at education as enrolment or retention, as availability ofteachers or textbooks, adequacy of infrastructure or of instructional aids, itwould demonstrate the quality and quantity of a society’s engagement withitself and with others.

The contradictions in perception about rural and urban schools are as follows:education ruins the rural children, it spoils the urban; provides more infor-mation and less skills; considers working with hands inferior to working withmachines; and the present day education results in alienation, anomie andculture perception blindspots. The distinction is between ‘being’ and‘appearing’. Language is at the root of these contradictions.

About 3000 mother tongues approximating to 200 and 700 languages in Indiaas against 35 languages at Primary stage, 28 languages at Upper Primary stage,25 languages at Secondary stage, 20 languages at Senior Secondary stage, usedas medium of education in schools (All India 6th Education Survey, 1998,NCERT) demonstrate that as one climbs higher in the education ladder, thegreater is the demand for fewer languages. At the University level, the mediumis English or the dominant regional language.

The emphasis on English is due to the colonial mind-set developed during200 years of British rule. Colonialism came to India with the traders searchingfor markets. It claimed to civilise the uncivilised. It remained to develop theunder developed, to protect their environment and empower the weakersections and finally to globalise them. Globalisation is not only a search forglobal market, but also a search for marketable talents. Language and educationremain instruments for continuation of the colonial process in India and thethird world.

Developing a knowledge/learning society in a plural world necessitatesinterdisciplinary, interactive communication between subjects and medialanguages. Linking memory with thinking abilities will link indigenousknowledge systems with the modern. Languages would continue to play acritical and crucial role. Multiple languages must develop twin focuses, cooper-ative, intercultural education at home and competitive marketable educationfor the world outside.

Dr. D. P. PattanayakFormer Director, Central Institute of Indian Languages, India

Languages that are used in teaching

It is true that most languages have survived without schools; a language is no less alanguage just because it is not taught at school. We also know that schools by them-selves cannot save a language. Schools are not even the best place to learn a language.Annamalai (1995), referring to India, points out that learning languages, like certainother subjects, probably happens out of school more than inside.

Nevertheless, if schools are where communities transmit and develop their culture,it seems logical that they should also transmit their language. But schools do notalways respond to the needs of the community. As a result, the school is not alwayspopular as an institution. There are indigenous communities in Colombia, forexample, which reject school and the language used there, since they consider that theeducation it offers is not in keeping with their cultural characteristics. In these cases,the indigenous peoples demand their own ethno-educational models which do notnecessarily coincide with the more widespread model of school (Landaburu, 1998).

From the information gathered it can be seen that most communities consider theuse of their language at school to be important. In fact, the first initiatives of linguisticpolicy undertaken by these communities tend to be aimed at the educational field.Thus, in the sample studied, 67% acknowledge that their language is present to someextent in the teaching system, though as we shall see later on, its presence is rarely asnoticeable as it should be.

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I believe that education, the job of schools and of teachers in indigenouslanguages is to convey the idea that we must preserve, study and enlarge ourlanguage ourselves. Only through our language will we manage to extend ourown knowledge.

If I am an Ashaninka, my people are Ashaninka, all my pupils are Ashaninkaand all of them speak Ashaninka, why should I work in Portuguese? It makesno sense for me to work in Portuguese in the classroom because if I did I wouldbe missing the contents, the little details that the language brings with it. Iwould be removing power from our language, our speech, because I would beworking in another language. If I work in the Ashaninka language, withAshaninka pupils, I am offering them the chance of extending our ownknowledge and understanding it better and at the same time of strengtheningour language.

Some Portuguese phrases have no meaning or translation in our languagebecause ours is a different world. For example, when I work in the Ashaninkalanguage on some event from the non-indigenous society, for example, it hasno explanation in our language because we have other references, our world is

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a different one. Our language is very important, because we see it as a part ofus. Because there is no point in having indigenous schools and working inanother language.

Our people need people who will act as a bridge to the dominant society,because without them we cannot defend our territory. To work it is important tohave an understanding of the surroundings, that is why we need these people.But there is no need for everyone to act as a bridge. For that, Brazil and othercountries have diplomats who make contact, negotiate, etc. And here theopposite happens, everyone has to know Portuguese. Even parents expecteveryone to learn Portuguese, they see Portuguese as the alternative by whichto break with dependence.

But I see it the other way round, because if you learn Portuguese you end updepending on the other society, not on yours. You will depend on the othersociety because you are already in another language. That is why we work likethis. There have to be people who are bridges, but not everybody. The schoolworks with six or seven people in training to be able to make that contact.

In our school it is quite clear. We discuss with the community so that they stopworrying so much about Portuguese. Wanting to know someone else’slanguage gets you nowhere; it’s enough to have a knowledge of the world andof the way of life of the society around you.

What we need is to understand the values of our knowledge and to valuewhat is ours. I believe that that is the importance of language, giving it thechance to grow more and not disappear. Because the more you study anotherlanguage, the more you think it is richer than yours and that’s not so. Languagedepends on the cultural and scientific development of the people using it. Thereare indigenous teachers who say that the indigenous language is very poor, butwhy do they say that? It’s because they have lived with Portuguese for manyyears and no longer value their mother tongue, because they have lost the totalbalance of their language.

In the school I always speak in this way: the point of reference to work withthe language, science and culture begins with the teacher. To be able to workwith our language and strengthen it, and identify the problems, I have to startwith the pupils. After seeing the situation of the pupils I have to continue withthe elders. To resolve the problems of the young people, the elder must be apoint of reference for the indigenous language necessary for working in theclassroom. The space in which the elders educate the young people is the mostimportant educational space for strengthening their own language, culture andknowledge, because the way the elders teach is fundamental.

In our community we work over this question a lot, because the elders are themost important people for working with the question of the language. The way

Table 7 classifies and sums up the answers received regarding the use of languages inteaching. The list is not necessarily in hierarchical order. At any rate, the authors ofthis Review cannot establish it. We are merely trying to reflect the situation from theaccounts we have received. We are also presenting some examples of these accounts.

As can be seen in Table 7, the languages used in education present a wide variety ofsituations and their distribution also varies. As well as those languages said to bepresent in teaching without details of their level of usage (1%), it is worth pointingout, first, that the languages in group 2 are used as secondary languages, as a tran-sition to the acquisition of the language promoted by the school. The informantsexpress themselves clearly. This use is aimed at a quick and successful introduction of

Table 7: Languages in teaching grouped according to their use

Group 1 Present in teaching (without specifying) 1%

Group 2 Exclusively oral use (as an instrument for the teaching given inanother language)

7%

Group 3 Teaching as a specific subject (L2) 8%

Group 4 Present only in pre-school and early years 26%

Group 5 Extensively present in primary education and part of secondary(with difficulties)

13%

Group 6 Present throughout the system, though not throughout thepopulation (sometimes the system is bilingual)

12%

Group 7 Languages not used in teaching 33%

Total 100%

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they have of speaking, the time they have for explaining; they have another paceof teaching, everything is planned in the heads of the elders, that is our world.Many pupils bring those formulas into the classroom. This form of wisdom ofthe elders is the point of reference for a school in tune with nature; it is thecontribution by traditional knowledge making itself present through theindigenous language.

Isaac Pianko AshaninkaAcre Organisation of Indigenous Teachers, Brazil

young people to the other language, which is the one “used” for teaching. Neither theinformants nor the schools seemed to value oral use in itself as a way of developingtheir own language.

Only in grades 1 and 2 of primary schools as a supplementary educational tool in trans-lating text. (Pumi, China)

In the past it was used as the language of instruction in primary schools. With the recentpromotion of Mandarin Chinese, Cun is only used as a supplementary tool in beginners’or elementary classes. (Cun, China)

In the language classes it is used orally to explain the content of the class being given.(Adyghe, Russia)

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Indigenous education has various forms. Perhaps the young child’s firsteducation is the one he or she receives in the home. All the experience passed onby the father or mother is education. After that, education is also participation infestivals, in rituals the community has always held. Children are also there, notas though it were a school for learning in, but as an event that comes along forthe children to learn from. That is what we know as traditional education andthe indigenous language always forms part of it.

Recently there has been talk of differentiated school education, ofindigenous school education. Another type of knowledge that indigenouspeoples are acquiring is related to the knowledge of writing and reading.Previously, children learned orally, now they are learning from writing. Atschool they learn to read and write, enquiries are being made amongst theteachers so that pupils have that knowledge and so that this knowledge istaught in the schools. This is an incentive for children to start to think aboutnew investigations with the elders. It is called school education when theknowledge is learned from writing.

It is very positive work. I have heard my pupils who have more contact withwhites say that that they did not know or had never thought that our people hadsuch and such a story. Because for them our past did not exist. But with thiswork we are doing through the enquiries by some of the teachers the pupilseventually realise that we also have our own stories. The whites have stories ofancestors but so have we. One important moment in our past is the conquest ofthe land. The conquest of education, health and the environment will also in thefuture be our past.

EDUCATION IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THEIR REVIVAL

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Education in the indigenous language is a good thing because we must writedown everything making up our knowledge as we decide. This strengthenschildren’s knowledge and at the same time we are strengthening our culture. Asin any language, although speakers of Kaxinawa may have difficulty writing,they understand the content from the context. The indigenous language is anincentive for learning from paper too.

I believe that in the revival and maintenance of languages the teacher is thedriver who pushes that language in the classroom, with the participation of theelders. The Kaxinawa people have a division of knowledge, a division of maleand female teaching. These roles are what make the pupils learn what it is to bea father or a mother. For example, in speaking about arts and crafts there is nosingle word in Portuguese that can be identified with this word in Kaxinawa, orin music there is no translation that can explain what it means in Portuguese,only the indigenous language can transmit that knowledge. I believe the experi-ences during these years have been very positive.

Many indigenous peoples had many contacts and probably in those contactsthey lost their languages and stopped speaking them, and the children took tospeaking in Portuguese. In the eighties and nineties, work was done to increaseour cultural knowledge and we made a place for ourselves in the federal consti-tution, so that each indigenous people could teach its language and culture andorganise itself. Today we are seeing that many people who were not aware oftheir culture are beginning to investigate, to prepare teaching material, and thiswill help the pupils who have problems with the language. There was a timewhen parents were ashamed to use the indigenous language to speak to theirchildren and grandchildren and our language almost disappeared. We see thatthe Kaxinawa people living close to the city still have this lack of faith in theirown language and culture.

This entire process has been a very good experience for me. Perhaps the firstwas when I lived amongst the whites under the pressure of not being able tospeak my mother tongue. Happily, my father and mother had the courage to goon speaking in our language and it was the first language I mastered. Then Iwent on to write the language. To write our language we had to decide on a signsystem, write our alphabet, and in the last few years we have been producingteaching material.

The first material published was a literacy book: some sentences, words,letters. That was very good for learning to write our language. Then we did ajoint work from which emerged Shenipabu Miyui, which contains 12 writtenstories. The material was well prepared and today it is a reference whenspeaking of old stories of the Kaxinawa people. Other material was alsoproduced, a post-literacy reading and writing book, a book of geography and

Group 3 includes those languages taught as a subject carrying more or less weight inthe syllabus or curriculum. These amount to 8%. This is a traditional approach tolearning second or foreign languages.

However, there are differences within this group that should be pointed out.Although in most cases they are given very limited oral use restricted to the basicgrades, in some cases, as the accounts show, it seems to be a first step towards makingthe language an instrument of teaching.

It is hardly used as an instrument of teaching, only as a subject in some syllabuses like inthe schools under the management of the Directorate General for Bilingual andIntercultural Education. (Chuj, Guatemala)

Teaching medium and subject of study in elementary school, i.e. Classes preparatory andvernacular components in higher grades are being planned. (Boazi, Papua New Guinea)

Attempts are being made to try and have the language used as the subject of study inprimary school teaching and later it is hoped it will take on the role of an instrumentallanguage. (Kokama, Peru)

Group 4 includes those languages that are used as a teaching medium, though only atpre-school level and during the first years of primary education. This group, whichaccounts for more than a quarter of the languages in the sample (26%), itself includesmany different situations. In general, these are languages recently introduced intoteaching. Very often the introduction has been thanks to popular initiative and is notsupported by the authorities.

These valuable initiatives, however, rarely embrace the whole of the populationspeaking the language in question, as they often tend to be restricted to certainareas or communities. The reports also show the various difficulties they have toface to get their language implemented with full rights in the world of teaching.The lack of involvement by the authorities, government obstacles, even new

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one of music, to show the Kaxinawa people that Portuguese is not the onlylanguage that can be written. The indigenous language can also be recorded.

Recently I wrote 12 stories like the ones in Shenipabu Miyui. Some are anearlier version of the published ones. And that is very important because closecontact with the Portuguese language had altered the stories.

Today we think that this language is not finished, that we are going to keep itgoing. If it did not disappear when it was oral, now that it has been recorded itwill be even more difficult.

Joaquim Mana KaxinawaAcre Organisation of Indigenous Teachers, Brazil

prohibitions, the shortage of teacher sources, teaching materials and funds ingeneral, the inexperience and lack of schooling tradition which most of theseinitiatives come up against should all be taken very much into account. Theinformants’ accounts speak for themselves.

Miskito has not been used as an oral or written language at school, as it was forbidden byeducational legislation. In isolated towns and villages not supervised by the Ministry,some Miskito teachers gave one hour a week of Miskito by means of old people’s stories, butthis was an exception. Since the establishment of the bilingual/intercultural education inthe Honduran Mosquitia (CEBIMH), and MOPAWI (the primary non-governmentalorganization operating in La Mosquitia) published the first learning-to-read book, YabalRaya, the first one to fix the system of writing and the phonemes of Miskito quasi-officially,and a pilot project for bilingual education began in 12 schools in La Mosquitia (Lara, 1998:80). From 1975 to 1980, the Department of Literature of the UNAH (UniversidadNacional Autonoma de Honduras) offered three learning levels of the Miskito languagegiven by the native teacher Natan Pravia, but unfortunately they were later discontinued.(Miskito, Honduras)

This language is not used orally and is not written, either in intermediate education or atuniversity. Since 1994 it has begun very timidly to be taught at the two schools attendedby the Tolupan of the Montaña de La Flor, as L1, with the Tol reading and writing booksproposed by the SIL and accepted by PRONEEAH. Its has only been relatively successful,there are still no pupils at these schools who write texts in Tol at all fluently, they barelywrite words and phrases or very short sentences. The great failure of PRONEEAH in LaMontaña de La Flor is that no teacher, of the twelve there are in the region, speaks Tolupanand what is more surprising than anything is that none of the speakers have been trainedfor this. (Tol, Honduras)

There is now some teaching of S. Tiwa at all levels, in programs developed in the 1990s.All is a level of ‘language revival’, since there is growing concern about losing their nativetongue. (Tiwa, USA)

The languages gathered in group 5 (13%) can be considered to have a more estab-lished educational practice; they can generally cater for the whole of primaryeducation, they have teaching materials and a certain tradition. Nevertheless, theaccounts gathered still reveal problems that seem to be due to the lack of involvementon the part of the authorities. These are all languages that do not enjoy official or co-official status, something which generally leads to discrimination and asymmetrywith regard to the other language or languages whose space it shares or that competewith it in a certain usage, in this case in teaching.

The following accounts illustrate some of the circumstances we have just mentioned.

As a vehicle as an object – specially since 1977, when the association of Breton schoolswas created (2000 pupils in1998) – both in the public and Catholic schools, this teachinghas been progressing since 1982 under the effects of continued pressure from parents

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associations and Breton language teachers associations. Around 13,000 children areinitiated into the language as a subject. Around 4,700 children are taught in Breton atleast partially. (Breton, France)

The Tamazight language was not used in teaching in any North-African countryuntil 1996–1997 in Algeria. In this country it is taught at the end of basic educationand in secondary education. In Morocco, in spite of King Hassan II’s promise tointroduce it in primary teaching in his speech of 20/8/1994, nothing has yet been putinto practice. In higher education, Tamazight is only the object of research.(Tamazight, Morocco)

Before civil war Somali was the medium of instruction up to secondary level. HigherEducation was in Italian and English. Now most secondary schools have switched toEnglish medium. Quite a number of lower and upper primary schools have Arabic orEnglish medium. However in all educational institutions there is a lot of spoken use ofSomali. (Somali, Somalia)

Group 6 includes those languages used throughout the educational system. In somecases they may not all reach all sectors of the population. There are also cases which inspite of legislation in their favour, as the languages enjoy official or semi-officialstatus allowing their use in the educational system, this legislation is not fullyenforced and the demands of the population are not properly attended to. However,this group includes languages which are generally felt to be in a proper or normalsituation for proper development of a language at school. These account for 12% ofthe sample.

Whereas we have seen that 7% of the languages in our sample are official and 19%are co-official in their area (see Chapter four), the figure mentioned before (12%) indi-cates that co-officiality does not ensure proper treatment of the language in the schoolsystem either.

In basic and intermediate education the use of the language tends to be like the social char-acteristics of the area in question, with a clear tendency to use Castilian, even amongchildren whose initial language is Galician. At university the number of students speakingGalician drops considerably. According to the law, the predominant mother tongue must beused in infant education, while taking care to teach the other one; in the rest of non-university teaching the possibility is established of teaching 50% of subjects in Galician. Itis important to say that the law is not being kept in these two cases. (Galician, Spain)

Welsh is both a subject and a medium in schools at all levels but precise practice variesdepending on the local authority. (Welsh, Great Britain)

Both Russian and Belarusan are compulsory in the secondary school system. Actually,40% of the children are taught on the basis of Belarusan and 60% on the basis of Russian.In the higher education system, especially in technical universities, it is practically impos-sible to be trained in Belarusan. The number of hours devoted to the study of Belarusan inuniversities diminishes year after year. (Belarusan, Belarus)

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According to Table 7, the figures in our sample seem fairly hopeful since they revealthat the sum of languages with some sort of use in teaching reaches 67%. However,the real scope of this activity is substantially less. At the very least, certain clarifica-tions are needed. Without going outside the sample, we can say that generalised useof the language throughout the educational system does not seem to occur in morethan 12% of cases. And as we have seen, most minorised languages do not fall intothis group.

This initial analysis reveals the presence and/or treatment of different languages inthe educational system. It has been barely possible to observe the schooling condi-tions of the language communities. Do they receive an education suited to theirneeds? Do the members of the community become bilingual speakers or is their bilin-gualism or pluringualism reinforced?

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At the end of the twentieth century the globe retains a rich linguistic heritage ofan estimated 6000 languages. Not as rich as some earlier periods in history, thecurrent wealth of languages world-wide is threatened – seriously threatened – ifprojected language loss eventuates. In his recent text, Language Death, DavidCrystal estimates rationally and conservatively that up to 90% of theselanguages could disappear during the next hundred years.

This would be catastrophic as I believe that the loss of even one language istragic. Whatever reasonable steps that could be taken, should be taken to arrestthis anticipated deterioration of the linguistic wealth currently enjoyed acrossthe globe. The solutions are many and must be put in place immediately. Globalawareness-raising of the issue at all relevant levels – governmental, political,family community, education, culture, NGO associations, electronic and digitalmedia, to identify but a few – must be undertaken without delay to mobilise aglobal conscience to protect and retain the world’s languages.

In this context, education has a major role to play. Where educational policyand practice are satisfactory to excellent, education becomes an effective vehicleto further the cause of languages. Where these essentials of society are less thanadequate, the necessary upgrading should be accompanied by the irrevocablemessage that languages are critical to global society, operations and culture, andmust be nurtured, defended and maintained.

As a result the promotion and teaching of languages in the educational field –whether at the primary, secondary, tertiary or adult level – should be a priority.The identity of languages taught would be a local concern, but one wouldexpect adequate coverage of the first language of the majority of learners,

THE TEACHING OF MINORITY LANGUAGES AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Plurilingual education: a challenge for everyone

As the Delors report on Education for the Twenty-First Century (UNESCO, 1996) soclearly shows, it is important to prepare the younger generations so that they can takeadvantage of the possibilities today’s information society has to offer. There is agrowing demand for knowledge of languages used in international relations. Buteducation will have failed if on account of this it ignores, rejects or causes people to

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languages of international significance and languages particular to a certainlocation, region or country. Any of these language categories could find them-selves defined alternatively as minority languages within a certain area but themajority of languages used globally – Crystal points out that 4% of the world’spopulation speak 96% of the languages used – are what we would considercollectively as minority languages.

Many of these will be learned at home, at school or elsewhere as a firstlanguage, but let us not forget the important perspective of their being accom-modated as a second language in education within all sectors (i.e.government, religious, independent) and across all levels. Australia – with itsdeclining wealth of indigenous languages and co-existing surge in the numberof languages brought to the continent by more recently arrived groups –provides an excellent model of a multicultural society, strongly underpinnedby rich multilingualism.

In school, it is not only those students of certain ethnic groups who are offeredthe language(s) of their community. Schools make choices to teach languages,often the languages of minority groups significant to an area, and expect allstudents enrolled to undertake the study of these languages across a range ofyear levels. The self-esteem of the speakers of these languages (as an L1)elevates predictably and considerably; those learning the language as an L2develop a healthy perspective of another culture, another element of theircommunity by learning the language of some of their classmates. An acceptanceof difference and a discovery of the touchstones of humanity – similar across allcultures – often lead to a growing respect for others. Complementing thelanguage curricula of mainstream schools is the Victorian School of Languages,which teaches 40 languages – however defined but among them a significantnumber of minority languages often as an L2 – to 14,000 students of a multitudeof backgrounds. Such a model epitomises what is possible in the policy anddesire to promote mutual respect, harmony and peace in a multilingual andmulticultural society, a microcosm of our global community.

Denis CunninghamInternational Federation of Professors of Living Languages, Australia

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abandon the languages and cultures that have shaped the identity and integrity ofpeople and communities.

As stated in the Resolution approved by the United Nations General Assembly of9 November 2001, teaching the language, history and socio-political philosophy ofdifferent civilisations is one of the Action Programmes. Similarly, the UNESCOUniversal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, as we have seen, places special emphasison pluringualism as a way of making cultural diversity accessible to everyone. In thisrespect, also, UNESCO’s Programme and Budget Plan for 2002–2003 specificallyconsiders “support to networks of experts and research institutions for counsellingMember States and UNESCO on important issues to do with education in humanrights, linguistic pluralism and multilingualism in education”.

Many people live with bilingualism and pluringualism quite naturally. In India, inthe Amazon, in Central Europe, in the Caucasus, people have traditionally beenfamiliar with several local languages so as to coexist in a plurilingual and pluricul-tural environment. Sixty-four percent of the communities consulted in our researchsaid that most of their members were bilingual and in 10% of cases most of themembers of these communities were plurilingual. In other words, most of themembers of the different linguistic communities are not monolingual. These commu-nities could be the best prepared to face the need for the plurilingual proficiencytoday’s world increasingly demands of its inhabitants.

These communities show that coexistence and communication between groupswith several languages is possible and that plurilingualism does not lead to a lack ofcommunication or to a loss of cohesion within the group, the community or the State.

India is a good example in which to observe rules of behaviour that seem strange tothe eyes of Westerners and that can provide answers to some apparent contradictions.It is possible to have a multiple identity without any risk to personal integrity. Theease with which codes are alternated or even mixed, the freedom and lack of purismin being able use several languages at different levels of proficiency and for differentobjects and purposes (Annamalai, 2001) could be a realistic way of dealing with rela-tions between people ever more remote and diverse without renouncing linguisticdiversity. Any form of relations between different codes is more interesting, demo-cratic and natural in the history of humanity than the uniformity we seem to behaving forced upon us.

Education must therefore face another challenge. The mother tongue is not enough.Knowledge of at least one other language must be ensured, and in many cases it willbe necessary to confront plurilingual education.

When the object is bilingual or plurilingual proficiency, we need to take whatplurilingual communities have traditionally done as our model. New languages arelearnt like new instruments, as new skills for new purposes. In these circumstances,learning a new language does not involve the gradual loss of the mother tongue(Annamalai, 2001).

It is also important to stress that languages are basically instruments for oralcommunication. When it comes to education, however, written forms are given

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priority. School is associated with the literacy of its speakers, the system of writing,the existence of a written literature and text books written for schools. These demandsare an added obstacle to increasing the role of the school in the survival of languages.Without detracting from or abandoning writing, why not encourage greater oral useof languages at school? Why not place greater value on what really has most commu-nication value and is linguistically more fundamental – that is, oral use?

Knowing that languages are fundamentally used orally, that to encourage this usewe hardly need the most sophisticated resources of language (writing, written liter-ature, books, spelling rules, etc.) and that the new technologies allow an infinitenumber of oral uses with a great power of attraction (telephony, radio, television),why are schools subordinated to the written form of languages?

Written language must not be surrendered or even underestimated. But the factthat a language is only just beginning to be used in writing does not justify a poor orlimited use of that language at school.

During the course of the second half of the twentieth century, various bilingual andplurilingual educational programmes and models were developed in different partsof the world.

Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and for large part of the twentieth,pedagogical theorists and educational politicians were decidedly opposed tobilingual teaching. This was partly because the educational renewal propoundedcontinuity between family and school experiences and therefore defended themother tongue as the medium of education. The chief reason, though, was theinfluence of what has been called linguistic nationalism, which established a closerelation between language, culture and nationality and the importance of languageas a factor in the development of identity, whereas early bilingualism threatened todivide it. After the Second World War, the globalisation process has multiplied situ-ations of contact between languages and the early need to know foreign languagesand all this has worked in favour of bilingual education. Among the variousexamples of successful bilingual education the best-known was the St. LambertExperiment with children whose family language was English and who weretaught in French. The success was so complete that the opposite opinion began tobecome widespread, that bilingual education is in itself a good thing. And this isequally false. Bilingual education takes many forms, can have very varied objec-tives and can only succeed inasmuch as it has the right means for the desired ends.

In certain situations where languages are in contact, as happens in the city ofBrussels with French and Dutch, two school systems are set up according to thelanguage of origin of the pupils. In this case we cannot speak of bilingual

ON BILINGUAL EDUCATION. OBJECTIVES AND APPROACHES

Language and Education 167

The literature for the descriptions of educational models for bilingual proficiency ofschoolchildren is increasingly abundant (Baker 1993, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000,McLaughlin 1984, Cummins 1995, López 1996). Not all so-called bilingual systems,however, have the object of training bilingual individuals. Skutnabb-Kangas (2000)describes up to 10 types of supposedly bilingual education systems. Only five of them,the so-called strong models, can guarantee proficiency in more than one language. Weshall single out two of them: the maintenance model and the immersion model.

The maintenance educational model for minority languages involves schooling inthe mother tongue through bilingual teachers at the same time as the majority

education. In other cases, as often happens in the United States with the populationof immigrant origin, pupils speaking the lesser language are offered the chance touse it at school, either until they master the main language, in this case English, orelse as a way of preserving their language. In other cases, and this happens todayin those parts of Spain that have their own language, the object of bilingualeducation is that all students should master both languages whatever their familylanguage. This can take place through a single model of school or with more thanone model from which parents can choose. Obviously, in all these cases the objectof bilingual education is to increase social cohesion while respecting the rights ofspeakers of different languages. Equally obviously, a system of this sort can onlysucceed insofar as it is supported by democratically expressed social consensus.

In truly plurilingual countries such as Luxembourg, bilingual, or in this casetrilingual teaching cannot be considered an educational option so much as astrict necessity. And the success of the results shows how easily pupils can learnin more than one language when the conditions are right.

A different situation from these is when the object of bilingual education is theacquisition of foreign languages. Modern education has generalised the use ofcommunicative methods in the teaching of foreign languages, but after a certainlimit, which is soon reached, the most effective way of making progress in theforeign language is through its use as the teaching medium. There are plenty ofexamples today of schools that above a certain level offer some teaching in aforeign language, such as, for example, English.

But the presence of a foreign language in the educational system can haveother objectives as well as ensuring its mastery. In schools for civil servants inthe European Community, where pupils come from a wide range of linguisticand national backgrounds, familiarity with other languages is intended toincrease their open-mindedness and strengthen their European conscience.

Miquel SiguanUniversity of Barcelona, Spain

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language is also learnt as a second language. These programmes are therefore farsuperior to the traditional submersion models, which school in the dominantlanguage without taking into account the pupils’ own language. In this type ofteaching, teachers are generally unfamiliar with the schoolchildren’s mother tongueand in most cases it involves the loss and discredit of the minority language. As far asthe maintenance model is concerned, it is important to stress the important experi-ments in bilingual education being developed throughout Latin America with theBilingual Intercultural Education programmes. Maintenance models, for example,are the bilingual multicultural education programmes being developed in Bolivia forQuechua or Aymara (Hornberger & López 1998). The experiment now beingdeveloped by the Brazilian Comisión Pro Indio do Acre de Amazonía is anotherexample of a highly suitable treatment of local languages in educational activitiesthrough the training of indigenous teachers themselves (Lindenberg-Monte 1998).

In Latin America there are endless experiments in education being developed infavour of the local languages. Their contributions constitute a real revolution ineducation and are cause for hope, both for their maintenance of the languages and theprestige they give them and in the educational innovations, teacher training, comple-mentary oral and written use, and approach to interculturalism that they encourage.

The immersion educational module uses a language other than the mother tongue asthe medium of instruction. The programmes are always approved by the parents,teachers are bilingual and are familiar with the child’s language. In general, theseimmersion programmes allow a second language to be learnt far more efficiently thantraditional programmes for L2 teaching. They have been particularly effective in theteaching of minorised second languages such as Maori in New Zealand (Benton 1996,Skutnabb-Kangas), Basque in the Basque Country (Spain and France, Sierra et al.),Catalan in Catalonia (Spain, Artigal), Mohawk in Canada (Hoover 1992), Breton in France(Gwegen 1999) and Welsh in Great Britain. They are also used in situations in whichlanguages are a contextual minority, such as French in Canada (Lambert 1974, Genesee1987) or Aosta, Italy (Floris 1988), Finnish in Sweden (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), etc.

Thanks to the immersion model applied to minorised languages it is possible toextend learning of these languages beyond the community itself and, especially,recover them amongst members who have lost them. They further bilingualism, inte-gration and social peace, and therefore the maintenance of minorised languagesotherwise condemned to disappear.

Papua New Guinea has about 820 local languages, with 16 extinct and 77threatened. Only 3 languages have over 100,000 speakers, 10 over 50,000, 70over 10,000, 330 over 1000, 360 between 100 and 1000, and about 80 under 100.

POSSIBILITIES OF THE REVIVAL OF LANGUAGES IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Language and Education 169

Education as an agent of linguistic recovery

What is gained by learning a new language? What does it mean to recover thelanguage of our ancestors? What can education contribute?

Many languages are learned as second or third languages. The social relationsestablished through intergroup coexistence, migratory movements or a variety ofeducational policies mean that a large part of the population becomes bilingual or

Not only small languages are threatened, but also some larger ones. Speakersare very proud of their languages, cling them as symbols of their ethnic identity,though 90 per cent know the national language Tok Pisin as the secondlanguage, which until recently had little influence on the maintenance of locallanguages. Bi- and multilingualism is very widespread. The last 20 years haveseen a sharp increase in marriages between partners speaking differentlanguages because of greater population mobility. The family language becameTok Pisin then. Electronic media use Tok Pisin, English and a few majorlanguages. Elementary education uses only about 30 major languages. Youngspeakers increasingly regard small minority languages as unimportant andprefer Tok Pisin. This has lead to endangerment and extinction of the former.Academics and politicians try to stop this through media propaganda, withlittle effect as yet. Descendants try to revive some recently extinct languagesusing studies of them by linguists. The introduction of oral elementaryeducation an hour every day to linguistically separated groups of pupils ofdifferent mother tongues in their own languages in a polylingual class as asupplement to the main education with literacy in a major language, is a possi-bility for raising the respect of children speakers for their own languages and forreviving and preserving their failing languages. It would also correspond toUNESCO’s view that every child ought to get some basic education in itsmother tongue. Another important means of revitalising and maintainingthreatened languages has been found to be their study by outside and locallinguists and the production of language materials in them which is greatlywelcomed by their speakers. UNESCO has supported this activity from1992–1998 through grants awarded to applications received by the InternationalCouncil for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies – ICPHS (UNESCO), but thisfunding has been discontinued which lowers the chances of language mainte-nance, revival and survival, unless other organisations giving grants for suchlinguistic work step in, which may be likely seeing the present great interna-tional interest in the study and maintenance of threatened minority languages.

Stephen WurmThe Australian National University, Australia

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plurilingual in the course of their life. Social life, work, commerce, science and politicsall have considerable influence on the learning of regional, state or internationallanguages. It is important to stress that any language learning process constitutes anasset to training and culture which is increasingly valued and necessary. Learninganother language brings direct access to another culture, substantially increases thecapacity for understanding cultural heritage and improves communication power.Advances in educational linguistics, audiovisual and computer technologies andaccess to the media allow substantially faster and more efficient language teaching.

Although all these experiments take place basically in the case of second languageswhich in their context act as dominant languages, nevertheless there are also cases inwhich thanks to specific educational programmes languages which may be in aminority situation can be learned as L2 or L3. The fact that members who have losttheir language or that members of other communities learn a minorised language isalso a source of prestige for this language. Of course, if this option is to play a decisiverole in the recovery of a language, it must be of a social nature, and school is one of themeans used to this end. This is the purpose of education in any language recoveryprogramme, and its influence will be positive, and sometimes decisive, so long as thecommunity integrates the educational initiative in a more general and completerecovery plan. In these cases, the identity value attributed to a language, and thepossibility for social integration learning it allows, is decisive for the success of theinitiative. The examples of Hebrew, Maori, Basque, Welsh and Catalan (Fishman1991) and the initiatives reported for Triqui, Kaxinawa, Mapudungun, Sami, etc.show that, though difficult, it is not impossible to revive a language and thateducation can be an important tool for achieving this object.

The Basque community (Euskaldunak) and its language (Basque – Euskara)have had a remarkable experience in the Basque Country (Euskal Herria) overthe last 40 years in teaching the language to adults and, at the same time, inacquiring literacy in their own language.

This linguistic community is currently (1996) estimated to have 12,000 mono-lingual Basque speakers, 534,000 bilingual (Basque-Spanish/Basque-French)speakers and 352,900 passive bilingual speakers. At the same time, Basque wasthe mother tongue of 31.6% of the inhabitants of the Continental BasqueCountry, 24.2% of the Basque Autonomous Community and 10.1% of Navarre.

Thus the levels of familiarity and use of the language vary considerablyaccording to the geographical area of the country and the sociolinguistic level ofthe population. Furthermore, in general, the need, opportunity and/or wish to

WHY LEARN THE LANGUAGE? WHY BE LITERATE? THE BASQUE EXPERIENCE, 1960–2000

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acquire the language on the part of adults and/or the convenience of doing soand becoming literate in Basque also varies widely in the three areas of theBasque linguistic community. Learning the language and literacy must thereforebe seen in this varied and sometimes contradictory setting. As we shall see, inrecent decades the acquisition of language and literacy has played an importantpart in this community.

In general, we might say that the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) iswhere the best organised plans for positive promotion have been set up, boththrough private social initiatives and through the Administration’s officialpublic initiatives, but conditions for this between 1940 and 1975 were especiallydifficult. Neither before nor during those decades could teaching of thelanguage to adults or Basque literacy for speakers use the general schoolsystem, the cultural institutions or the media. Only a stubborn effort by thecommunity managed to open a breach in the status imposed.

Various socio-cultural factors came together to reactivate the social foundationsof the language. Amongst them were a few worthy individual initiatives (fifties),the teaching in the Seminars of the Catholic Church, which included courses inBasque (fifties), the creation of the Basque Schools and their social milieu(Ikastolak), the introduction of spoken and written journalism (sixties), themassive secularisation of already literate Catholic seminarists (who became newagents of literacy: 1968…), the spread of the children’s literacy press (1959, 1966)and the offer of radio programmes promoting the language (1966), amongst others.

To all this can be added, in the sixties, as basic factors, the economic devel-opment of areas with a high proportion of Basque speakers (with a twofoldrural/industrial domestic economy) and the growing discredit of the Francoregime’s educational and cultural policy. Thus possession and mastery of thelanguage emerged more and more as a liberating factor and an instrument for amore harmonious future for the country. Political resistance and culturalcreativity came together in a single movement.

In this context, there was a proliferation of modest local initiatives for Basqueliteracy and language learning (at first, Gau-Eskolak: extracurricular eveningclasses), also helped by a wide range of social movements and after 1966gathered under the protection of the Euskaltzaindia (Basque LanguageAcademy). In 1975, a broad network of euskaltegiak (Basque language andliteracy centres) came together as a general coordinating association (AEK) andbegan operations alongside other professional centres of the same nature. At theend of the seventies, annual enrolment at these centres reached about 30,000 (ofwhich 91% were for Basque language and 9% Basque literacy).

In response to the growing importance of this phenomenon in society, in thefollowing decade (the eighties) the authorities (in this case, the Basque

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Government of the BAC) took on themselves the institutional coverage ofBasque language and literacy (HABE: Basque Adult language and LiteracyInstitute, 1983). At the same time, the declaration of the language as (co) officialin the Basque Autonomous Community and the Autonomous Community ofNavarre (1979, 1982) and the projects for its normalisation have also generatedincreased demand for Basque teaching, doubtless also as a result of the socialprestige arising from the legality of the language and its new professional oroccupational utility (access to posts in the Administration).

Along with the schools mentioned above, several complementary actionsshould also be mentioned, in both the private and public sectors. First of all,there are the Barnetegiak (boarding schools) and, in another field, the publi-cation of magazines for pupils (Habe, Aizu) and teachers (Hizpide, Ele), as wellas classroom teaching materials. Proficiency and refresher courses for teachershave not been overlooked either (1992–1997). Two methodological criteria haveguided this teaching activity: careful progress in the study of language struc-tures and special attention to the communicative component in learning(Perales 2000). The experience gathered in the preceding years has made itpossible to design a “Basic Syllabus for the Teaching of Basque to Adults”(Decree of 24/01/2000).

At the same time as Basque language and literacy acquisition has beenendowed with technical and organisational resources, it has also sought publicsupport for the process, to which end social/leisure events have been created,such as Korrika, a people’s march across the Basque Country (every two yearssince 1980) or Aek-Eguna, a festive occasion for schools and for anyone inter-ested in the recovery of the language.

What point has currently been reached in language and literacy acquisition inthe Basque Country? The size and nature of the student population is suggestedin the following figures. In 1995, there were 1,135 registered students in theContinental Basque Country, while in Navarre the annual number of studentscan be estimated at 3,500 people and in schools in the BAC there were 42,064(1997–1998). It is estimated that between 3,500 and 4,000 people pass the topgrade in Basque language every year (BAC). To all this must now be added anew form of action, that of technical literacy teaching, which aims to prepareprofessionals and the public in general in the use of the language in thespecialised sphere of their professional or occupational life.

The future transmission of the language to adults will be particularly condi-tioned by other initiatives as important or more so: by the general educationalsystem (increasingly Basque-speaking by families’ choice), by the perhaps moredifficult process of bilingualisation of civil servants, by the influence of themedia (overwhelmingly dominated by French and Spanish) and more generally

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Recommendations on language and education

State, regional and local authorities, especially educational and cultural adminis-trators, must bear in mind he following points:

by the fact that greater knowledge of the language also has a positive effect forthe real use of the language.

After almost forty years of private efforts by society (1960–1980) and by socialinstitutions – private and public (1980–2000) – two objectives can be seen tohave stimulated the linguistic community in this field: that of recovering the lostlanguage and that of achieving full social normalisation of this minoritylanguage. The awareness of and esteem for the cultural and identifying value ofthe language have been decisive in the process of learning, as well as that ofliteracy. This was evident in the seventies and recent surveys have confirmed itonce more (Perales 2000). The will of society and of the political institutions hascollaborated in both senses with noteworthy effect, especially in the BAC.

Joseba IntxaustiBasque Country, Spain

• Multilingualism is the skill best suited to safeguarding cultural diversity andconfronting the dangers of globalisation. The priority educational aim for thenew millennium must be approached in terms of language proficiency.

• Multilingualism must be an aspiration and a demand for everybody, not justfor the speakers of minority languages. Knowledge of the language of one’sown community is not enough, but neither is knowing only the language ofthe state.

• Minority linguistic communities must have institutional assistance andadvice to create and develop their educational system, but they must beallowed to define their own objectives according to their linguistic andcultural needs.

• The fact of not having a written language must not prevent the use of alanguage at school. Furthering formal and informal oral uses must be aneducational priority in languages with and without writing, especially whenthe presence of a language in society is limited.

• The educational models that can contribute most to preserving linguisticdiversity and thereby the identity and integrity of all linguistic commu-nities are those that have successfully trained multilingual or at leastbilingual individuals.

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At the time this World Review is going to press, the position paper ‘Education in aMultilingual World’ has been published by UNESCO (2003). The ideas expressed inthis document are in line with the recommendations of this chapter.

• In the case of immigrants arriving in the territory of linguistic communitieswhich speak a language different to their own, the use of immersion teachingmethods is recommended to speed up the process of learning the languageof the host community. This immersion must be made compatible with thepreservation of the language of their place of origin.

• The monolingual school model is a threat to linguistic diversity; multilin-gualism must be a priority objective also for speakers of dominant languages,and schools can offer this service through immersion programmes. The prin-ciple of educating children in the family language still applies, but especiallyso when it is a small one. It is also important to remember that legislating forthis is not enough; the community must be given the human and financialresources needed to achieve this end as soon as possible.

• Schools cannot guarantee either the recovery or the preservation of alanguage, but it will be difficult to save a language if it is not included in theeducational system of the affected community.

• Biodiversity is an asset acknowledged by everyone. It is important also toacknowledge linguistic diversity as humanity’s most valuable cultural asset.This acknowledgement would reinforce language teaching and conferprestige on any move in favour of preserving linguistic diversity.

• The ability to use several languages is an asset of immediate utility, whetherfully or only partly exercised. For commercial exchanges it is useful to knowa few oral expressions; for social and political relations oral use is a priority,and in technology an ability to read in certain languages can also be suffi-cient. In other words, knowledge of languages, as well as being worthwhilein itself and intellectually enriching, is always useful. Schools shouldtherefore teach people to enjoy and make use of each level of learningachieved in the languages they teach.

Chapter 7

Languages and the Media

The use of a language in the media has a fundamental effect, both from the internalpoint of view of the language itself, and from the external point of view of the statusof the language.

On an internal level, the media are responsible for the development of specific oral andwritten genres, as well as the corresponding discursive, grammatical and lexical forms.

Oral and written forms in the media can have so much influence that the linguisticvarieties they use are the fundamental points on which many of today’s standardlanguages are based. So-called British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) English is theclassic and most paradigmatic example of this.

From the point of view of status, the media also contribute decisively to the prestigeand vitality of languages and can do so negatively or positively. Absence from themedia, incorrect, derogatory or disparaging use, would be the most negativeextremes of endless ways of damaging a language in the media.

On the other hand, the presence and correct (suitable) treatment of languages in themedia is today a fundamental way for them to develop a formal and public discourse.In other times, it was religious and festive rituals that provided the necessary commu-nicative contexts for developing this type of prestige.

Subsequently, using the language in the media not only fulfils its specific object ofallowing communication between members of a linguistic community, but alsoincreases the prestige of the language between people inside and outside thecommunity. In this Review, Xavier Albó puts it as follows: “…if speakers of a discrim-inated language find it is used in favourable contexts in the social media, their self-esteem grows and even the dominant elite can come to accept its presence”.

All of this shows how very important it is for languages to have access to the mediaand therefore how important it is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity in themedia. Those languages present in the media acquire greater prestige in their owncommunity of speakers and outside it and are better situated to face up to thetendency towards linguistic and cultural uniformity and ensure their survival.

In this chapter we shall start with the controversy there is over the consequences thatthe growth of the media is going to have for the future of languages. The second sectionanalyses the way in which languages can be present in the media. The third sectioncovers the factors that enable or restrict the presence of languages in the media. The

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fourth section analyses the importance of developing media in each of the languages ofthe community. Finally, a series of recommendations to the authorities, the linguisticcommunities themselves and to institutions, on the subject of the media is presented.

Media, globalisation and languages

The media have grown in a way that was previously unimaginable. While large areasof the world, especially the less industrialised, do not yet have widespread access tomuch of the information and communications technology, there are fewer and fewerpeople who are not in contact with some network of written, oral, audiovisual orcybernetic transmission.

There is much controversy today over the consequences the growth in the mediacould have on the future of languages. For some, the digitalisation, fusion, deregu-lation and globalisation that is taking place in the world of telecommunications isproducing a tendency to uniformity that threatens linguistic and cultural plurality. Inother words, the development and the growth of digital technology are increasing thecapacity for obtaining, processing and storing information. This digitalisation processhas at the same time allowed the technological standardisation behind the fusion ofmedia corporations with the large technological companies, giving rise to a singletelecommunications industry which is usually in the hands of the dominant culturesand which in many cases is taking on the appearance of an oligopoly. These twotrends, in turn, are closely linked to the tendency to deregulation that can be seen inthe world of the media. In other words, at the same time as they are being privatised,the large information and telecommunications operators are acquiring more powerand influence over society, to the detriment of public operators. These three trends, inturn, are closely linked to the globalisation process taking place in the world. Thisprocess is favouring the growth and strengthening of the cultural industries, largelyNorth American, which are creating a culturally and linguistically uniform worldthrough the spread of English and of products fashioned according to the Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural pattern (Hamelink 1994).

Opposite to this view, placing the emphasis on the trends to uniformity, there areauthors who analyse the influence of the media and who hold an optimistic outlookas regards the future of languages. These authors point out that, while accepting thereal threats facing linguistic diversity, many linguistic communities endure and havecome to have a certain presence in the communications media and, in some cases,have developed communications media in their own language. Despite more thantwo centuries of production by the cultural industries, and despite the aggressivestrategies of the powerful communications groups, independent forms of enter-tainment and media are still succeeding in the world (Miège 2000).

What presence do languages have in the communications media?

In the questionnaire used for the review, a question about the presence of thelanguages of the community in the media was introduced. Specifically it was asked if

the language is used in press, radio or television. It is important to remember that thequestions were open, so we have been able to gather some information about theiruse in Internet.

More than half (53%) of the languages analysed in the research carried out arepresent in some kind of media – that is, they are used as a medium of expression in themedia – although there are enormous differences in the means at their disposal and inthe frequency with which they broadcast. As regards their presence in the media,languages can be classified in three main groups:

First of all, languages that are usually present in all the media (radio, television,press and even the Internet). In this group are the more widespread languages of theworld, such as English, Arabic and Spanish, and most official state languages. Inother words, the languages of the dominant cultures that in many cases use the mediaas an instrument of linguistic and cultural dominance.

The second group contains those languages that have gained access to the mediabut do not have either the media presence or the political and economic power of thelanguages in the first group. Furthermore, the languages in this group do not form ahomogeneous group as there is a gradation to be seen in them going from languageshabitually used in all the media to languages used from time to time and only in somelocal media.

European languages such as Latvian, Catalan and Icelandic are found in thissubgroup. These are languages which lack the power and the extension of thelanguages in the first group but which have media productions and are habituallypresent in the press, on radio and television and, in most cases, also on the Internet.Some are even official state languages.

This group contains also languages that are habitually present in some media,both oral and written, but that are not used in all the media or else are only sporad-ically present. Examples can be found in an Amerindian language like Aymara,habitually present on the radio and occasionally on local television but absentfrom the press, and the Gikuyu language of Kenya, which has a press and radiobut no television.

Besides this, those languages whose presence in the media is reduced almostexclusively to local radio can be found, though this presence can vary from beingdaily, weekly or monthly to being only sporadic. This subgroup includes, forexample, the Maya language Achi, which is used by two radio stations in the regionfor one hour a day; Mon, in Burma, which has a radio programme of half an hourevery week, and Kom, in Cameroon, which is used in five programmes a weeklasting half an hour on the station in the provincial capital. Amongst languagessporadically used in the media we can include Lakota, spoken in the United Statesand Canada, and Meriam, in Australia. Both languages are used sporadically on thetribal radio stations of each community.

We present below some examples of the languages that the informants sent us,without generalised presence in mass media.

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Languages used to some degree in the media

In the Autonomous Prefecture Hani is used in broadcasting, films, and on television.Hani newspapers are also published locally. (Hani, China)

There are Jingpo broadcasts and newspapers in Yunnan Province, and in the Dehong Daiand Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture. The Dehong Autonomous Prefecture also showsfilms which have been translated into Jingpo language. (Jingpo, China)

There is a television channel in Galician, a radio station and a newspaper. There are alsosome programmes that are broadcast in Galician on other television channels and radiostations (though very few), as well as some articles in Galician in the press which is almostall in Castilian. (Galician, Spain)

It is used on radio and television but not in newspapers yet. (Ibibio, Nigeria)

Dogon is used in the media: radio, press, television. (Dogon, Mali)

The language is used in local radio broadcasting. Approximately one hour per day.(Burushaski, Pakistan)

There are Maonan broadcasts in Maonan towns only. Chinese is used in all other forms ofmedia. (Maonan, China)

There is an Ainu language radio course on the air once a week. (Ainu, Japan)

There is at least one radio station that broadcasts in Otomi, of the Patrimonio Indígena delValle del Mezqutal in Ixmiqilpan, Hgo. There is no real press in Otomi, or televisionprogrammes. (Otomi, Mexico)

It is used on the radio and exceptionally on television. (Serere, Senegal)

The third and last group is made up of languages which have no presence in themedia, such as Guiqiong, in China, Tayo, in New Caledonia, and Yeyi, in Botswanaand many others.

As has been said before, almost half the languages from the sample studied (47%)have no access to any communication media. In other words, they are languageswhich in most cases have been marginalised by the dominant cultures and which onmany occasions have been denied access to the media. In this respect, it should bepointed out that, on many occasions, the dominant cultures and languages haveprevented development of the media in these languages and have used the influenceof the media to achieve linguistic and cultural uniformity of the territory around thelanguage proclaimed official or national.

Some languages which informants said that are not used in the media are thefollowing ones:

Achang, Achuar, Aiwo, Akoye, Alsatian, Amahuaca, Athpare, Awa pit, Awajun,Babole, Badyara, Baheng, Baima, Balanta, Baniwa, Bao’an, Bargam, Bariai,

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Baruga, Basari, Bengni-Bogar, Berbice, Bhumij, Bimin, Bisu, Blang, Boazi,Bolinao, Buang, Budik, Buhutu, Burum-Mindik, Bwaidoka, Cabecar, Cacaopera,Caquinte, Cayapa, Chaga, Chamling, Cheke Holo, Chepang, ChichimecoChilcotin, Chimila, Chinanteco, Chipaya, Chocho, Chrau, Kokama, Kofan,Colorado, Komba, Cun, Da‘a, Darang-Deng, De’ang, Derung, Dobel, Domaki,Dong, Edolo, Ergong, Ersu, Fuyug, Gelao, Geman-Deng, Giriama, Guambiano,Guiqiong, Gumawana, Gungu, Haruai, Hewa, Hezhen, Uitoto, Idakho, Idu,Ilianen Manobo, Imbongu, Iquito, Itzaj, Jalunka, Jarauara, Jinuo, Jiongnai, Jukun,Ka’apor, Kagayanen, Kaguru, Kaluli, Kamali, Kandozi, Karay, Kayapi, Kayapo,Kei, Koasati, Komo, Kuku-Yalanji, Kuuy, Kuvi, Kwakwala, Lakkia, Lamenu,Lembena, Lobala, Loogoli, Luang, Luwo, Macanese, Malay, Malecite, Malngin,Mambwe, Manchu, Mangbetu, Mazateco, Mbosi, Meramera, Mian, Migaama,Minaveha, Miwok, Mixe, Mocheno, Munduruku, Mussau-Emira, Muya,Nambikwara, Namuyi, Narak, Ndali, Ndogo, Ngardi, Ngbaka, Ngbandi,Ngonde, Ngoni, Nihali, Ninggirum, Numanggang, Nunga, Nusu, Ogiek,Oneida, Onge, Onobasulu, Orya, Pagibete, Paiute, Palenque, Pech, Popoluca,Poyanawa, Pumi, Ramoaaina, Rouruo, Sabaot, Saep, Salar, Sandawi, Sawai,Sentani, Shawnee, She, Shelta, Shixing, Shona, Blackfoot, Sipakapense, Siriono,Siroi, Songorong, Sukuma, Sumo-Tawahka, Tae’, Tanimuka, Tatar, Tau, Tayo,Tehid, Tehuelche, Teke, Tepehuan, Tifal, Timbe, Tiwa, Tol, Tsanglo, Tujia,Tutunacu, Tuwali, Uma, Uspanteko, Waama, Waffa, Wampis, Wanga, Waorani,Xavante, Yaaku, Yagua, Yakan, Yale, Yele, Yerava, Yukuna, EasternYugur, WesternYugur, Zauzou.

Factors allowing or restricting the presence of languages in the media

Although it is difficult to determine all the factors that play a part in the presence alanguage has in the media, everything seems to suggest that the legal status and thesupport or restrictions the dominant cultures allow or impose on the languages intheir orbit play a decisive part in their presence in the media.

In this respect, a close correlation can be seen between the use of a language in themedia and its official status – that is, languages that are official and co-official have agreater presence in the media than those that have no official status. To be precise,almost 90% of official languages and co-official languages are present to some extentin the media. It is important to point out, though, that lack of official status is not aninvincible obstacle to the presence of a language in the media. The example ofRomany is one of many examples we have been able to note.

There are two hours a week on Romanian television for the Roms. There are five maga-zines for the Roms with writing in Romania. There are also three radio programmes inRomany. (Romany, Romania)

Speakers’ linguistic awareness and the wish to develop media in their own languageis another decisive factor for the development of the media. There are many accounts

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from informants, even of languages with few speakers, saying that in recent yearsthey have been able to develop written and oral media.

Frisian is hardly used in the media. The situation is as follows: There are three minutesa week on the local public radio station. The radio station does not seem to be willing toincrease the broadcasting time. On one private radio station there are occasionallylonger programmes. There is no Frisian on television. In the local newspaper there isone page per month with articles in Frisian and Low German. In the Danishminority’s newspaper, Flensborg Avis, there are occasional articles in Frisian.(Frisian, Germany)

Nevertheless, all the linguistic communities analysed expressed a clear wish tomaintain, develop or create media of their own, though they also show difficultieswhich very often are difficult to overcome. Above all, the lack of financial support isone of the main obstacles to the development of the media. There are many linguisticcommunities which, although they have the awareness and the wish to developmedia of their own, do not do so because of a lack of financial resources.

There are radio and television broadcasts in Runyoro. There was a local newspaper,Enyunorí Yaítu, but it has stopped for lack of funds. Now there are only occasionalpublications and text books (a few), because most of them are written in English.(Nyoro, Uganda)

Map 9 shows the languages spoken in Tanzania.

The survival of languages through the development of their own media

The fact that the gloomiest forecasts on cultural identities and languages have notentirely come true and that many languages have achieved some kind of presence inthe media is no guarantee that these forecasts will not be fulfilled at some point inthe future. Many people have pointed out that the large communication corpora-tions, which basically broadcast in English, will increasingly foster culturaluniformity and lead to the disappearance of those languages whose position isweakest (May 2001).

The asymmetry and lack of proportion between a local radio using the language ofthe community in the face of the large television channels or the American filmcolossuses raises serious doubts as to the survival of the less widespread languagesand cultures.

Everything seems to suggest that to avoid linguistic and cultural uniformitylinguistic communities will have to develop communications media that use theirown language. In other words, in the face of the influence in favour of uniformityexerted by the large communications media, linguistic communities will have tocreate their own media or at least ensure their presence in the local media.

As has been pointed out above, the development of communication channelsdepends on a number of things, some of which are beyond the powers of the group or

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community of speakers. Written media obviously call for an alphabet and a system ofspelling; audiovisual media require technological and financial means that are notalways accessible to linguistic communities, though it should not be forgotten thatthey facilitate their use for unwritten or barely standardised languages or languageslacking the creation of graphic systems.

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The media are one of the most powerful instruments for standardising,changing or consolidating languages and cultural identities. Present in thelandscape and in the intimacy of every home, they shape values, attitudes andeven identities, like a fine rain that eventually penetrates the being’s everypore. At the same time, by their very nature, the mass media reflect the globalenvironmental pressure more insistently than other institutions – such asschool – and can pose a threat to the identity and language of subordinated ormarginated groups such as indigenous peoples, immigrant workers, refugeesand other excluded groups.

In Latin America, the indigenous languages entered the media late and veryincompletely. It was not until the fifties that the transistor radio made it possiblefor communication to overcome obstacles such as bad roads, lack of electricity,illiteracy or monolingualism and radio stations or programmes in the mainindigenous languages began to emerge, sometimes with ample audience partic-ipation, especially in countries with few languages spoken by many and withless state control of radio stations. On commercial television and in the dailypress, progress is practically nil, while the little that has been done in cinemaand video is very scattered.

The use of one language or another in the media, as well as easing orobstructing understanding, plays an important expressive role, especially inthose media that appeal to the feelings by means of sound and images. Ifcertain languages and cultures are ignored in them or only appear in thecontext of crime or with pejorative connotations, their marginalisation isincreased and their disappearance hastened. But if speakers of discriminatedlanguages find them used in the media in favourable contexts, their self-esteem grows and even the dominant elites can eventually come to accepttheir presence.

For any media to strengthen its positive role in favour of minority languages,the general setting and contextualisation of all its programmes must reflect theplural reality around it positively; its use of languages, images and content mustshow the country or the area in a positive light as an intercultural andplurilingual reality.

THE MEDIA IN THE SERVICE OF MINORITY LANGUAGES

Radio, according to the accounts gathered, seems to be the medium that has seenmost development, even in linguistic communities with more modest means. It isthe most readily accessible media form and therefore the most widespread. Thefigures are clear in this respect: 44% of the languages analysed are used on the radio;only 26% have access to the written press, and 23% of the languages have somepresence on television.

The reasons for the predominance of radio are easy to imagine. It is less demandingtechnically and economically than the other media, and in principle it has no need fora written use of the language. Also, it does not require the literacy of its audience(Anashin 2000). It is therefore foreseeable that linguistic communities and especiallythose with most awareness of their situation will continue to make widespread use ofradio. In this respect, radio is a medium to take very much into account in any imple-mentation of linguistic planning policy.

The proportion of languages with a television presence (23%) is half the numberwith radio presence (44%). The technical and economic demands for developing thenecessary technology mean that many communities, especially the smaller ones withfewer resources, have serious problems when it comes to gaining access to the tech-nology needed to develop this sort of media. However, there is no denying that tele-vision can play an important part in the survival of languages. Television could be ofgreat help for communities wanting to bring prestige to their language andencourage its use, or implement programmes for language teaching at a distance,especially amongst geographically dispersed linguistic communities. One interestingexperience in this respect were the Yukateko language classes given on the Mexicanchannel Azteca 13.

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In addition, all plurilingual countries should adopt the following measures:

• Train native speakers of the minority languages in the use of the differentmedia and ensure the existence of at least one regular broadcasting channelfor each linguistic area and community and in each branch of the media.

• Set up community radio stations in these languages and form radial chainsbetween the ones broadcasting in the same language.

• Further the preparation and compilation of records, cassettes, films andvideos in minority languages and their large-scale distribution in the chiefmedia and other distribution networks.

• Make systematic use of the different local languages in signs, public placesand events and on the Internet.

Xavier AlbóCentre for Peasant Research and Promotion (CIPCA), Bolivia

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The Internet, just like television, calls for infrastructures and technologies that arenot often within reach of all linguistic communities. With the increased use ofgraphic elements, the difficulties and the costs involved in image treatment arecreating added difficulties in its use. Increasingly sophisticated means are required,which very often are not available to linguistic communities. What is more,inequality in access to technologies in turn leads to greater social privileges for thoselinguistic communities with more power. Thus the socio-economic gap between therich communities, who can develop, promote and impose their language, and thepoorer communities, who have no alternative but to accept the cultural andlinguistic influence forced on them, gets wider. We must not forget that the masteryof these technologies gives real cultural and political power to the great worldpowers and the private interests behind them, particularly in relation to populationswho do not have proper education or are not in a position to classify, interpret or crit-icise the information they receive (Delors 1997).

In addition, everything seems to suggest that more than half of what there is on theInternet today is in English (Miège 2000). If we add to this the fact that the mainInternet browser software can only read the characters of the Latin alphabet (WorldCommunication Report 1997), it seems there is no other way but to accept the point ofview of certain authors who point to the Internet as one of the most important instru-ments of cultural uniformity (Virilio 1997).

However, we must not forget that the Internet is furthering previouslyunimagined remote communications networks and that it is one of the most activetechnologies that can allow the use of certain languages, especially when speakersare subject to increasing situations of mobility (migrations and job transfers).Furthermore, it gives communities or individuals speaking the same languagegreater opportunities for bringing pressure to bear or organising in favour of theirlanguage. The Internet makes it possible to debate, reach conclusions and organisewithout costly and unnecessary travel (Myers 1999). One obvious example is theUniversal Declaration of Linguistic Rights signed in 1996 in Barcelona, to whichwere added, with the help of the Internet, proposals from different centres andorganisations all over the world.

It must be remembered that, in so far as it allows interactivity, the Internet is a goodway of imparting distance teaching. It is likely that in future on-line study courses onthe subject of languages will be commoner and cheaper, thus foreseably contributingto their reinforcement and development as the World Communication andInformation Report notes (UNESCO 1999).

During the 31st session of the General Conference of UNESCO, November 2001,UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and the Main Lines of anAction Plan was adopted. In this action plan, the following objectives were estab-lished among others:

Another interesting reference is the document of Recommendation concerning thePromotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspaceadopted by the General Conference of the UNESCO during its 32nd session,October 2003, which undertakes an analysis of important themes such as the elabo-ration of plurilingual systems and contents, the facilitation of access to the web andits services, the development of information and knowledge in the public domainand the reaffirmation of the equitative equilibrium between private interests andpublic interests.

Each of the recommendations is vitally important. Here we present a small extract.

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MAIN LINES OF AN ACTION PLAN FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THEUNESCO UNIVERSAL DECLARATION ON CULTURAL DIVERSITY.November 2001(…)5. Safeguarding the linguistic heritage of humanity and giving support to

expression, creation and dissemination in the greatest possible numberof languages.

6. Encouraging linguistic diversity – while respecting the mother tongue – atall levels of education, wherever possible, and fostering the learning ofseveral languages from the earliest age.

(…)10. Promoting linguistic diversity in cyberspace and encouraging universal

access through the global network to all information in the public domain.(…)

RECOMMENDATIONS CONCERNING THE PROMOTION AND USE OFMULTILINGUALISM AND UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO CYBERSPACEAdopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientificand Cultural Organization during its 32nd session, October 2003.(…)5. UNESCO, in cooperation with other international organisations, should

establish a collaborative online observatory on existing policies, regula-tions, technical recommendations, and best practices relating to multilin-gualism and multilingual resources and applications, includinginnovations in language computerisation.

(…)8. In particular, Member States and international organisations should

establish mechanisms at the local, national, regional and international level

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to facilitate universal access to the Internet through affordable telecommu-nications and Internet costs with special consideration given to the needs ofpublic service and educational institutions, and of disadvantaged anddisabled population groups. New incentives in this area should bedesigned towards this end including public-private partnerships toencourage investment and the lowering of financial barriers to the use ofICT, such as taxes and customs duties on informatics equipment, softwareand services.

(…)10. Member States should encourage the development of information

strategies and models that facilitate community access and reach out to alllevels of society, including the setting up of community projects andfostering the emergence of local information and communication tech-nology leaders and mentors. Strategies should also support cooperation onICT among public service institutions, as a means of reducing the cost ofaccess to Internet services.

(…)14. Member States and international organisations should promote appropriate

partnerships in the management of domain names, including multilingualdomain names.

(…)16. Member States and international organisations should identify and

promote repositories of information and knowledge in the public domainand make them accessible by all, thus shaping learning environmentsconducive to creativity and audience development. To this end, adequatefunding should be provided for the preservation and digitisation of publicdomain information.

17. Member States and international organisations should encourage cooper-ative arrangements which respect both public and private interests in orderto ensure universal access to information in the public domain withoutgeographical, economic, social or cultural discrimination.

(…)19. Member States and international organisations should promote and facil-

itate ICT literacy, including popularising and building trust in ICT imple-mentation and use. The development of “human capital” for theinformation society, including an open, integrated and interculturaleducation combined with skills training in ICT, is of crucial importance.ICT training should not be limited to technical competence but should alsoinclude awareness of ethical principles and values.

Finally, the importance of the World Summit on the Information Society that tookplace in two parts should be stressed. During the first, in Geneva 2003, theDeclaration of Principles and the Plan of Action was adopted, to be reviewed in thesecond part, Tunis 2005. This Declaration affirms that:

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The General Conference recommends that Member States bring this recom-mendation to the attention of the authorities and services responsible for publicand private works on ICT policies, strategies and infrastructures, including useof multilingualism on the Internet, the development of networks and services,expansion of public domain information on the Internet and intellectualproperty rights issues

DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES. BUILDING THE INFORMATION SOCIETY:A GLOBAL CHALLENGE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

WORLD SUMMIT ON THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

12 December 2003

(…)

8) Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content52. Cultural diversity is the common heritage of humankind. The Information

Society should be founded on and stimulate respect for cultural identity,cultural and linguistic diversity, traditions and religions, and foster dialogueamong cultures and civilisations. The promotion, affirmation and preser-vation of diverse cultural identities and languages as reflected in relevantagreed United Nations documents, including UNESCO’s UniversalDeclaration on Cultural Diversity, will further enrich the Information Society.

53. The creation, dissemination and preservation of content in diverselanguages and formats must be accorded high priority in building aninclusive Information Society, paying particular attention to the diversity ofsupply of creative work and due recognition of the rights of authors andartists. It is essential to promote the production of and accessibility to allcontent – educational, scientific, cultural or recreational – in diverselanguages and formats. The development of local content suited todomestic or regional needs will encourage social and economic devel-opment and will stimulate participation of all stakeholders, includingpeople living in rural, remote and marginal areas.

Recommendations on language and the media

As proposed by the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policy for Developmentorganised by UNESCO and held in Stockholm (1998), it is necessary to recommend togovernment authorities that they promote cultural and linguistic diversity in the infor-mation society. Below we summarise some of the basic recommendations.

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54. The preservation of cultural heritage is a crucial component of identity andself–understanding of individuals that links a community to its past. TheInformation Society should harness and preserve cultural heritage for thefuture by all appropriate methods, including digitisation.

9) Media55. We reaffirm our commitment to the principles of freedom of the press and

freedom of information, as well as those of the independence, pluralismand diversity of media, which are essential to the Information Society.Freedom to seek, receive, impart and use information for the creation, accu-mulation and dissemination of knowledge are important to theInformation Society. We call for the responsible use and treatment of infor-mation by the media in accordance with the highest ethical and profes-sional standards. Traditional media in all their forms have an importantrole in the Information Society and ICTs should play a supportive role inthis regard. Diversity of media ownership should be encouraged, inconformity with national law, and taking into account relevant interna-tional conventions. We reaffirm the necessity of reducing internationalimbalances affecting the media, particularly as regards infrastructure, tech-nical resources and the development of human skills.

(…)

• To provide radio, written press, television and Internet services to linguisticcommunities in minority situations. The existence of one regular broad-casting channel for each linguistic area and community and in each type ofsocial communication media should be assured.

• To support initiatives arising in the linguistic communities themselves. Supportshould be given to those media that arise within the communities and that allowtheir members information and entertainment with their own view of reality.

• To create multilingual media, as well as media that provide access to andfurther the use of dialectical varieties, to allow a balanced development of all

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the languages and varieties in linguistic communities, so long, of course, asthe speakers themselves so desire.

• To promote equal use of languages amongst the new communication andinformation technologies, as far as possible making these technologies acces-sible to linguistic communities. In this respect, it should be remembered thatthe UNESCO universal declaration on cultural diversity, approved at thetwentieth plenary session on 2 November 2001, made an appeal to memberstates to promote linguistic diversity in cyberspace and promote free anduniversal access, via the world-wide web, to all information of public domain.

• To further the preparation, production and compilation of media material(records, cassettes, films, videos, etc.) in minority languages and its large-scale distribution in the chief media.

• To encourage the commitment of the public and private communicationmedia to matters relating to the promotion of local, regional and nationalcultures and languages and, especially, to endangered languages.

• In particular we appeal to the media and to journalists to value andencourage linguistic diversity, to confer prestige on the use of all languagesin all spheres and to fight against the linguistic prejudices that ridicule smalllanguages and lead humanity towards linguistic globalisation. We also askthem to give positive publicity to news from linguistic communities workingto preserve and develop their languages and cultures.

Chapter 8

Language and Religion

Religious factors can greatly influence language maintenance and shift. There areseveral reasons to consider this topic in a Review of the situation of the languages ofthe world. On one hand, religious experience (both religious beliefs and practices) isin most cases closely related to language; both language and religion are crucial in adefinition of the individual’s identity. On the other, the use of a certain language inreligious practices, apart from being very important for the individual believer, it alsogives additional prestige to the group of speakers and, as a consequence, to the givenlanguage. A language not used in the religious practice of their speakers gets rele-gated and marginalised, which can provoke negative attitudes among the speakersand correligionist non-speakers of the given language. Since religious institutionswield power in society, the language planning that they carry about can be deter-minant in the creation of linguistic stereotypes that perpetuate marginalisation ofcertain groups of speakers and their languages.

The power held by religious institutions and leaders is obvious in all three types oflanguage planning issues: the creation and spread of writing systems and other issuesrelating to standardisation of a language (corpus), the choice of one language overothers in the religious domain (status), and language-teaching (acquisition)conducted in church and missionary schools.

In this chapter we address the importance of religion in the sociolinguistic situationof the world, taking the following aspects into account: religious ideology in regard tolanguage planning, the role of religion on language choice in colonisation processes,some current scenarios where global religions are replacing local ones, and the effectof religion in language maintenance in immigrant communities. We also inform onthe written and oral use of the languages examined in this Review in the religiousdomain, and we give a series of recommendations directed to the preservation oflanguage diversity.

The influence of religious ideology

Religions have played a crucial role in the history and development of the world.Linguistic decisions taken influenced by religious beliefs, such as the use of a languageover another in religious practices or the spread of a certain writing system, have beenextremely influential in the future of many communities and even in the formation of

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modern civilisations. There is no doubt that the ideology inherent in the religion of alinguistic community affects greatly the status, corpus, and acquisition of a language.

Taken into account the language choice each makes, religions can be divided intotwo large groups. On one hand, some religions keep the use of the ancient language inwhich the revealed text was delivered by the divine force. On the other, anothergroup of religions use texts not revealed directly by God, but rather texts delivered bywise masters based on personal experience. The former are called Religions based onRevelation and the latter are named Religions of Wisdom. This way of looking at reli-gions and classifying them by their origin helps us understand the language choicesmade in many religions of the world.

Religions based on Revelation are the Religions of the Book (Islam, Judaism andChristianity), and others such as Hinduism. In this group we should make a furtherdistinction between the religions that take the Revelation as dictated directly by thedivinity – as in the case of Islam – and the ones that consider the received text as inspiredand, therefore, subject and allowed to be localised to the historical, psychological andcultural circumstances of the receiver – Judaism, Christianism and Hinduism.

All these religions have been and are often still associated tightly with the use ofcertain languages: The Qu’ran is considered a text descended (munzal) onMuhammad; it is the literal transcription of Alà’s words and should not, therefore, betranslated or interpreted – although there are examples that differ from this generalidea. Since this text is written in Classical Arabic, it can only be read or recited in thislanguage. Use of other languages is only allowed during the Friday sermon or in otherless formal situations. Map 10 shows the areas where Tamazight varieties are spoken.

Hinduism also prevents its sacred texts from being translated and these are read inanother classical language, Sanskrit, language of the ancient Vedas; Judaism has alsoused a classical language, Classical Hebrew, to pass on the revealed texts. All thesethree languages share the fact that they have not been transmitted naturally fromgeneration to generation, but have rather been kept incorrupt, away from anypossible language change, due, in fact, to their exclusive use in the religious domain.The case of Hebrew is worth mentioning as well, not only because of the impressiverecovery process that took place in Israel during the last century, but also, and what ismore impressive, for the fact that a classical language only used in the religiousdomain at the time spread its use to all situations, creating the whole range oflinguistic varieties needed in a normalised language.

Finally, there is no sacred language in Christian religions, although somelanguages, such as Latin and Greek, have been granted the highest status, despite thefact that they were not spoken by the Founders.

In fact, we can observe the major role played by religion in language choice and in thecreation and spread of writing systems when we examine, among others, languageplanning decisions through history in Europe. Between 867 (Council ofConstantinople) and 1054 Europe was divided in two clear cultural worlds. Thisdivision was related to religion and language (Hagège 1992: 133). In Western Europe,Christianity used Latin in all religious services by the 11th century, even in places where

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there had been no Latin tradition, such as Ireland or Germany; moreover, languages ofWestern Christianity not written before adopted the Latin alphabet. In the meantime,Eastern Europe started to translate religious texts to Gothic and the Orthodox Churchlater adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, which was based on Old Slavonic, the languagespoken by the monks who created it: Cirilus and Methodius. The two major writingsystems used in Europe today are, therefore, a direct consequence of the divide betweenWestern and Eastern Christianity after the Fall of the Roman Empire.

Another religion division among Christians in the 16th century also lets us seedifferences in language choice. The Protestant Reform brought the translation of theBible to High German, and later to other vernacular languages. In addition massiveliterarisation in vernacular languages allowed the spread of Protestantism, whichprovoked a reaction from the Catholic Church, which also felt forced to undertake theeducation of the elites and the literarisation of the general population, and started togive vernacular languages a status that they never had before, using them togetherwith Latin in religious texts (Baggioni 1997: 108). In fact, the standardisation of smallEuropean languages such as Basque or Gaelic began in this context, when they startedto be used in the written form of catechisms and doctrines. However, it was not untilthe Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Roman Catholic Church allowed theuse of vernacular languages in Catholic mass. Until then, mass was held in Latin.

Therefore, it is important to highlight the critical role that writing the sacred texts invernacular languages has, and the consequences that the choice of an orthographicsystem have in the future of many languages. In Western Christianity the Latin alphabetwas generalised, but this phenomenon has also been common in other religiouscontexts: for instance, languages written in other characters shifted to Arabic scriptbecause of religious reasons. Arabic alphabet was used to transcribe languages previ-ously not written down until the expansion of Islam, such as Turkish, Urdu, Malay,Swahili, although nowadays some of them (Swahili, Malay or Turkish) use the Latinalphabet (Calvet 2001: 171). The Hebrew system has also been used to codify languagessuch as Yiddish, Ladino and varieties of Arabic and Persian (Spolsky 2004: 49).

The relation between language and Religions of Wisdom is less close. Religions suchas Buddhism, Taoism, or Animism, and all their variants, have texts that gather thereflections of their wise masters; these texts do not constitute the revealed (by divineforce), but rather the experienced (by wise masters). The language used in thesecanonical texts is not the only key to interpretation, but rather it assists the believer tocreate a lifestyle that ultimately makes it possible to get to sense illumination orecstasy. Wisdom is not the start-point structured in a sacred language (as inRevelation cases), but rather an arrival-point.

The language has the instrumental value of allowing communication (Buddhism)or the value of invocation (Animism). Therefore, there is no close relationshipbetween a specific language and Wisdom religions or paths, these being more open tothe use of vernaculars. Buddhism has also encouraged translation from the originalSanskrit, Prakrit and Middle Aryan texts into Chinese or Tibetan, for instance. OurMon (Myanmar) informant confirms us that:

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Buddhism has a great influence on the Mon community, in terms of culture and liter-ature. (…) in the Mon community the religious service and ceremonies are completely inMon language. (Mon, Myanmar)

As other religions, Buddhism has also contributed to the spread of a writing system;as the religion spread through Asia, many communities adopted its writing system,Brahmi, or adaptations of it.

The Brahmi writing system is the base for most systems used in India, with theexception of the ones spread through Islam. The Devanagari script, a system derivedfrom original Brahmi, is currently used in India not only to transcribe ClassicalSanskrit, but also to write Hindi. Another form of Brahmi, the Gupta script, is used totranscribe the Tibetan language. In addition, the Brahmi system was adopted inChina and Japan when Buddhism spread there. The Chinese classical script wasspread with the expansion of Buddhism in Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Later, manysmall local languages used Chinese characters for transcription (Calvet 2001: 99).

Last but not least, Animist communities are the most likely to use their vernacularlanguage, to the point that some languages are only used by the certified person, shamanor another, as the language of invocation. Kallawaya, a language of Peru, for instance, isan almost secret and sacred language, not naturally transmitted in the community, butonly used by the Kallawaya when they practice traditional medicine (Girault 1989: 13).

Language shift as a consequence of colonisation: the effect of religion

Colonisation processes often bring together the imposition of the language, religion,culture and ways of living of the coloniser. Governors and political leaders frequentlyadded religion to the one language, one nation, one state, (one religion) idea spread byEuropean nationalism, and later taken to the colonies.

As Ferguson points out (1982: 102), several factors influence the spread of religionand language in the colonies: the number and proportion of colonists vis-à-vis thecolonised, the colonists’ attitude toward incorporation of the colonised populationinto their society, the role of religion in the local community, and the ideology of thecoming religion with regard to language.

The spread of language and culture and the spread of religion quite often go together,although not always: for example, French colonisation to Morocco and Algeria wasdeterminant in the spread of the language but not the religion of the colonisers, whereasthe Spaniards were quite successful in the spread of Catholicism in Philippines,although not so much in the spread of Spanish. The situations may be very varied.

A typical pattern of colonisation is that carried out by Europeans in Central andSouth America since the “discovery,” when the main objective was the spread ofreligion (Catholicism), even before the spread of the language. In fact, the first reli-gious missions used widespread indigeneous languages such as Nahuatl, Quichua,or Guarani, “powerful languages” at the time in comparison with smaller languages,and absolutely “powerless” languages today with regard to Spanish. The use in thereligious domain of these more important languages contributed to their spread, at

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least until the 18th century, when the prestige of these three lingua francas started todecrease and the use of Spanish in religious and administrative domains accelerated.(Ortiz Rescaniere 1992: 12. See also Cerrón Palomino 1987 and Meliá 1992).

The increased use of Spanish, not only in the religious domain but in all publicdomains, caused the substitution and loss of many American languages. The accul-turation feeling perceived by the communities as a consequence remains until today,as reported by many informants. The Mam testimony is only an example:

Christian religion has contributed to kind of acculturation that makes people drop theirreligion or their own spirituality and shift to the Catholic or Evangelical religion; on theother hand, due to religion, religious document have been currently translated; in addition,they sing and use the [Mam] language in ceremonies. (…) In the practice of Mayan spiri-tuality, the Mam language has always been the oral means of communication; however,Christianity started to use Spanish, both orally and in written form; Mam started to beused not long ago and it is reinforced with Spanish. (Mam, Guatemala)

As in the situations already mentioned, the spread of the new religion contributed tothe creation of writing systems for many languages that were not written at the time,and even the adoption of the Latin alphabet by languages that already had their ownsystem, such as Nahuatl, language that already had a different script in the Amoxtlicodex – books related to the religious and historic tradition of the old indigenousworld (Leon Portilla 1993: 20).

Another typical pattern is that carried out during the British colonisation of Asianand African territories: missionaries used vernacular languages, together with locallingua francas and English in education with the purpose of spreading the Christianreligion (Ferguson 1982: 102). This language policy obviously favoured the spread ofEnglish and local lingua francas, causing also a threat to small local languages.

Other patterns of colonisation, especially recent ones, gave up on the idea of spreadingthe religion of the colonisers. During the French colonisation in Africa in the 19thcentury, the French tried to colonise through the language, so that all the “civilised” oneswould be French speakers (Spolsky 2004: 71). In this case the role that the Frencheducation system played in the status of the European language in the colonies is crucial.

To finish, we must note that the spread of a religion or religious factors alone cannotbe held responsible for the marginalisation and even loss of hundreds of languages inthe former colonies. However, without underscoring the economical and social domi-nance that usually co-occurs with linguistic and cultural domination, we must stressthat the spread of religion in colonial settings often goes hand-in-hand with thespread of the language, culture and world view of the colonisers, who always want toimpose their ways over the colonised peoples’ ones.

Local versus global religions: some current situations

Although aware of the important consequences that religious ideology has inlanguage choice in religious practices, we must note that even religions that allow the

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translation of their holy texts and the use of vernaculars in religious practices are notalways consistent when applying this policy. Quite often, current religious ideologydoes not prevent them from using vernacular languages; however, according to someof our informants, religious practice is conducted in the language of the missionariesor religious leaders, producing language shift for the local community. The use of alanguage in the religious domain gives prestige to a language; similarly, it is commonto choose a prestigious language in the religious domain to the detriment of thosewith lower prestige. Consider the following testimony:

Since 1859–1860, the Pech have been Catholic, as they were converted by the SpanishJesuit Manuel de Jesús Subirana. The Pech communities are attended by Catholicpriests who use Spanish as the only ritual, official and communication language. Thechurch, along with schools, have historically been the institutions that have most perse-cuted the Pech language and have strengthened Spanish as the official and onlylanguage. (Pech, Honduras)

The members of the communities often report explicitly that they would rather usetheir vernacular language in religious rites and ceremonies:

Until the mid eighties, all the Reef Islanders were Anglican. Since that time, many joinedevangelical fellowships (e.g. Church of the Living Word). (…)The services are largelyconducted in English, a language most Reefs people do not understand. If a message ispreached, the preacher will use Aiwo or Pijin or both. All the written materials (Book ofCommon Prayer) are English exclusively, though the people have expressed a strongdesire to have this translated into Aiwo. (Aiwo, Salomon Islands)

In addition, it is important to highlight that in some situations language choice –whether to use the local language or impose a more prestigious one – seems to reflecta sort of competition among different religious organisations trying to gain adepts inthe same linguistic community:

Catholic Church promotes in a way the local language in all religious ceremonies. Thereare hymnbooks and missals in Achi and the New Testament has been translated.Protestants act differently: they reject the use of the local language and prohibit many ofthe Mayan traditions in the community. Protestants use the [Achi] language neither inwritten form nor orally. (…) In the Mayan religious practices the language is used 100%,but there are no written texts. (Achi, Guatemala)

Like the Achi informant, many others noted that, whereas religions not originatingfrom the region weaken local languages, practice of the native religion strengthensethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity (also Crystal 2000):

If it is a traditional ritual, the [Maninga] language is used exclusively. The cultural cere-monies are often influenced by Islam and the phrases and prayers are sometimes inArabic. (Maninga, Côte d’Ivoire)

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But sometimes it is often difficult to establish clear-cut differences between the new,global, religions and traditional ones. Several informants report cases of syncretismbetween the two.

In the western dialect area, the Muya people practise Lamaism, and have built manytemples there. In the eastern dialect region, only some of the Muya profess Lamaism, sothere are not many temples or professional Lamas. In addition, the Muya people stilladhere to animistic beliefs and often hold religious activities such as worshipping natureand sacrificing to spirits. (…) In Lama temples in the western dialect region, Tibetan isused in religious activities instead of Muya. In the eastern dialect area, Muya is used insuch activities, but is sometimes used together with Chinese and not Tibetan. Thus, Muyain the western dialect region tend to be much more fluent in Tibetan than those in theeastern dialect region. (Muya, China)

In addition, it seems that the tendency today is for many religious organisations to bemore tolerant towards local languages, as pointed by our Desano informant:

As for most indigenous groups, the traditional religion, often in syncretism with theCatholic religion, is bound to the everyday life of the indigenous people. Birth, death,sowing, harvesting etc. are reasons for religious celebrations in the community.Concerning other religions, Catholic missions acted as commissioned by the governmentof Colombia to “civilise” the indigenous people till 1974 and it was common to haveboarding schools where children were forbidden to use their language. Nowadays, theCatholic Church assists in the official education through administration contracts andthey are diminishing their offensive against indigenous traditions and the language.(Desano, Colombia)

However, it must not be forgotten that for many reporters the change that has takenplace in many religions is apparent; members of foreign religions have learnt thelanguage and produced texts written in the local language so as to promote a subse-quent transition to the dominant language. Quite a few people have pointed out thatthe use of the local language in religious acts, rites and practices always has the ultimateobject of continuing acculturation or leading them away from their own original beliefs,cultures and languages. Many of our reporters perceive that religious leaders have nointerest in supporting or strengthening local languages. In general, their goal would beto increase their membership and power in the community:

The Tolupan of La Montaña de la Flor have traditionally been Catholics, but thepresence of the Protestants of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) from 1950 to1980 has led most of the Tolupan of the Cipriano group to join this religion. Thelinguistic influence of the Protestant religion was quite considerable during its 36-yearpresence, as they did the first texts in Tol, studied the language and prepared thedictionary. They also began an educational programme for transition from the Tollanguage to Spanish. Curiously, the ILV [SIL] implemented a contradictory religionand language policy; on one hand, it studied the Tol language in depth and produced

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endless written texts, but on the other, it encouraged the transition to Spanish in itsreligious and educational programmes. (Tol, Honduras).

Accepting the fact that the main goal of religious organisations in the former coloniesis to gain adepts to their beliefs and religious communities, there seems to be a contra-diction in the language planning conducted by many. As noted by our Tol informant,among others, on one hand, there is great interest in documenting indigenouslanguages, especially in respect to their structure and lexicon. Very important effortshave been undertaken to codify writing systems for many languages. What looksnecessary corpus planning to reverse the minority status of “powerless” languages isoften perceived by the communities themselves as an effort to bring speakers to themainstream, so that they are assimilated by the more powerful linguistic and culturalgroup, and not as an effort directed toward the maintenance of indigenous languagesand cultures. Even more strongly, the work conducted by many proselytiser groups isoften perceived as a move towards linguistic, cultural, and religious uniformity forthe benefit of the economically, politically, and socially more powerful.

Religious practice as a trigger for language maintenance in immigrantcommunities

Current scenarios of large- or medium-scale migrations for socio-economic, politicalor religious reasons, and especially from less- to more-developed countries are inter-esting for the sociolinguist. According to Ferguson, this type of “voluntary”(quotation marks added) migration tends to be language-conservative; in otherwords, maintenance-oriented, “to the greatest extent for the language of the sacredtexts, next greatest for the language of public ritual and explanation of the texts, andalso for the mother-tongue language of ordinary conversation” (1982: 101).

The reason why “voluntary” migrations favour language maintenance in the reli-gious domain is that both language and religion are crucial in a definition of both theindividual and collective identity and immigrants quite often attempt to preservetheir identity as much as possible, at least during the first years after leaving theirhomeland. In addition, immigrant religious organisations also try to prevent theirimmigrant adepts from being assimilated religiously by other groups, which can onlybe achieved if the immigrants’ identity is preserved. It is well known that many immi-grant churches in the US, for instance, promote the teaching of the language of originof the community to the members who did not acquire it within the family.

This kind of situation is especially common these days right across the world. Anincreasing number of immigrant languages are in contact in socio-economically moredeveloped areas. Other than the family and close community environment, religiouspractice can contribute to the maintenance of many of these languages. It is hardlynecessary to say that aspects mentioned by Ferguson (1982: 101), such as the presenceor absence of coreligionists in the host community, the existence of shared linguafrancas, and the ideological stance of religion with regard to language will determinelanguage maintenance.

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Written and oral use of the languages of the world in religious practices

In the same way that all languages have their literature, most languages have alsodeveloped verbal forms, texts, either oral or written, and more or less ritualised, toexpress the sacred, supernatural or magic. It is not surprising, therefore, that most ofthe languages analysed in the World Languages Review should be used in religiouspractices. To be precise, more than 80% of the sample languages were reported to beused in religious ceremonies and rituals, at least orally.

In fact, religion is the social domain in which languages are most used. Indeed, inmany cases, the language survives only as a liturgical language. This is the situationin the African Fongbe community, whose essentially animist traditional religionsustains the language through worship, ceremonies and sacred songs. It is alsoimportant to note that traditional religions generally make exclusive use of thelanguage of the community, as in the case of the Akoye language of Papua NewGuinea. Other examples are that of Fon (Benin) and Guiqiong (China):

Fon speakers are mostly animists, a traditional religion that uses the language in itscults, ceremonies, sacred songs etc. (…) Fon is used in religious practices and cults, butonly orally. (Fon, Benin)

The Guiqiongs are animists and believe that there are spirits in heaven, earth, fire, moun-tains and water. When natural disasters strike, they will invite religious practitioners tosacrifice chickens, pigs and sheep in order to placate the spirits.(…) When their religiouspractitioners offer sacrifices, they use the native language, but some of the ancient reli-gious terms are not comprehensible to the general public. (Guiqiong, China)

Indigenous religions most generally have a exclussive oral tradition and, as pointedbefore, are the most common domain for language maintenance. Consider the Hayuand Mapudungun cases:

They have an indigenous religion.(…) It is spoken and sung in local ceremonies.(Hayu, Nepal)

Native religion practice revitalises Mapundungun and the Christian religion prevents itfrom use (…) The [Mapundungun] language is used in practices and religious cere-monies, it is used exclusively orally when Mapuche practices and religious ceremonies –in other words, the rites of the natives themselves – are carried out. (Mapudungun,Chile, Argentina)

Not surprisingly, the written use of languages in religious practices and rites dropsconsiderably with respect to their oral use: rather less than half of the languages areused in the writing of the religion. Even so, it must be pointed out that this figure forwritten use in religious practices is quite high in comparison with general written use,which in most cases does not exceed 30% of languages.

One of the reasons that might explain such a high proportion of written use oflanguages in religious practices is that, as mentioned before, the more widespread

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religions, the so-called “religions of the book”, are based on sacred texts in writtenform, whether they are maintained in the original language or, most often, translatedinto other languages. The written use of many languages is, in fact, restricted to thetranslation of sacred texts. As already mentioned, religions that encourage translationof the holy texts have played a central role in the use and, in some cases the devel-opment, of the written form of many of the world’s languages.

Although recognising the benefits that written use of a language in the domain ofreligion provide for the standardisation and even social prestige of manylanguages, we must stress that for a language to remain healthy and not in dangerof disappearance written use must be promoted also in other formal areas, espe-cially in the field of education, media and public administration, as claimed else-where in this Review.

Closing remarks

There is no doubt that religion plays a crucial role in sociolinguistic issues. On onehand, the fact that a language is used in the religious domain in itself grants thatlanguage a status and prestige not granted to languages not used in this setting. Wemust remind ourselves, though, that the fact that a language is not used in thereading of the sacred texts and in the rites and practices of the religion of thelinguistic community does not necessarily imply language loss. However, when reli-gious associations not only do not use the language of the community, but also wishto acculturate it or when the language different from the local one is more“powerful” or prestigious – often as a consequence of the social, economic or reli-gious status of the carriers of the new religion – the low or lack of use of the locallanguage in religious practices can, in fact, contribute, together with the otheraspects, to language substitution.

On the other hand, the importance of religion and religious associations incorpus planning must also be stressed. As discussed thorough this chapter, thestandardisation – codification of writing systems and other kinds of standardis-ation, for instance – of many oral languages was carried out for religious purposes.We must also point at the efforts conducted by many religious organisations in thefield of education in general, and especially, literarisation, despite very harmfulefforts to prohibit the use of some languages in religious schools, as reported bysome of our informants.

In sum, religious ideology alone cannot account for the different attitudes held andlinguistic measures implemented by religious organisations. Situations sharing acertain religion can be completely different with regards to tolerance for linguisticdiversity and promotion of minority languages.

Finally, when examining the current situation of languages and trying to predicttheir future, religious aspects cannot be taken in isolation; we should rather considereconomical, political, and social ones along with them, since the factors that mayaffect language shift or maintenance are various and interrelated.

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Recommendations on language and religion

While realising that using a language in the religious domain is not enough to ensureits vitality, the absence of a language from this domain can be a factor against itsdevelopment and survival. We, therefore, encourage religious leaders to:

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• Acknowledge that all religions can be expressed in any language, withoutprejudice to the exceptional value of the language of their founding texts.

• Respect native religions as elements of prestige and as vehicles for the use ofthe language of the community in the framework of the right to religiousfreedom. These traditions are often the ones that most respect local languages.

• Encourage the commitment of foreign religions to confer prestige on andfurther local languages. In other words, as well as showing a respectfulattitude to local languages, they should make an effort to use them in theirrites and ceremonies; religion can not be made an instrument of culturalcolonisation or of linguistic and cultural uniformity.

• Write, translate or adapt their texts to the languages of the communities inwhich they are present or into which they wish to introduce themselves,since in general linguistic communities do not reject the translation of sacredtexts and religious subject matter.

• Avoid the transmission of stereotypes and prejudices, marginalisation ofcertain cultural values and the creation of hierarchies amongst languagesand cultures, since all languages are suitable for religious use.

• Use, promote and confer prestige on native languages in educational centresattached to religious institutions.

• Prevent religion or its practice from being used as an instrument for discrimi-nating against linguistic communities. The ecclesiastical hierarchies of thedifferent religions must responsibly avoid divisions within the linguisticcommunity itself and confrontations between different linguistic communities.

Chapter 9

Transmission andIntergenerational Use of Language

Children learn the family language or languages in the course of socialisation. Allchildren, as human beings, acquire at least one language through their parents, theirfamily or their community.

Transmitting a language involves transferring knowledge and skills in using thatlanguage to those that lack them. The transmission of languages is influenced byvarious agents, such as the family, community, school, the sphere of work and themedia, whose importance varies according to the motivations people have forlearning the language. But the fact is that everyone learns to speak the language oftheir immediate environment, regardless of what other languages they may acquiresimultaneously or successively.

In this section, we shall focus on intergenerational transmission, a term whichrefers to the acquisition of a language in the family, informally and as part of theindividual’s socialisation process. Furthermore, it is generally admitted that thefamily language carries with it the group’s cultural identity, the symbology andthe collective memory. Through the language or languages acquired in the earliestcontacts established between the child and the immediate community, the inter-generational relations that shape the personal and cultural identity of individualsare reinforced.

In the settings in which a school system using a given language has been imple-mented, family or community transmission of that language can be reinforced.Other agents that influence the learning and use of language are those of the worldof administration, work and the media, but in this case they are consideredsecondary agents.

If it was felt essential to analyse this phenomenon in as much detail as possible, it isprecisely because it was seen that transmission of language, which in theory shouldbe a natural consequence of the linguistic circumstances, has suffered alarming alter-ations in large parts of the world. Specialists have reported extensively on thisproblem and our data also confirm the deterioration in natural patterns of language

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transmission. Erosion is said to happen when there are segments of the population ofcertain communities that do not teach the younger generations their own language.The erosion is absolute when there is a total break in the transmission. The chances ofa language of being replaced by another depend on the degree of alteration in thenatural method of transmission.

Indeed, a large number of researchers who have tried to understand the problemsinvolved in the unequal relations between languages have stressed that the alarmmust be raised immediately. There are an enormous number of situations in whichthe natural setting for children’s socialisation is breaking down and this is reflected,amongst other things, in the fact that parents are no longer passing on their languageto their children.

Krauss (1992), for example, analyses the position of languages in relation to theproportion of children who learn them, and if the trends are not corrected, he foreseesthat up to 90% of languages could disappear during this century. Wurm (1996, 2001)suggests that the scale of the threat of a language’s disappearing is closely related tothe proportion of children who speak it, and on this basis he proposes a classificationwhich basically indicates that if the language of a community is not widely learnt bythe children or by a large proportion of them (which should reach at least 30%) then itis in danger or at least potentially threatened.

The expression “in danger of disappearance” refers to a gradual process of declinewhich can lead to extinction after going through intermediate situations which areranked according to the level of deterioration from “languages in potential danger ofextinction” to “languages in serious danger”, “dying languages” and finally “extinctlanguages”. According to this author’s criterion, at least 50% of the world’slanguages – that is, more than 3,000 – are currently in danger of extinction, in seriousdanger or dying.

McConvell (2001) also proposes that the classification of the danger of extinctionof languages can be determined according to the population groups that speakthem. He proposes the following categories for discussion of types of language: (a)the language chiefly spoken by children; (b) the language understood by adults,though not necessarily transmitted to children, (c) languages spoken only by olderpeople, but understood by adults, while children no longer even understandthem. All of this suggests that the number of people making up the age groupswho know and use a language is a basic indicator of the danger of extinctionfacing the language.

Thus the basic objective of the proposals for revitalising languages in danger ofreplacement or extinction relies on ensuring their intergenerational transmission.One of the most representative theoretical writings on this issue is the onepresented by Fishman (1991), whose proposal for countering the trend towardslanguage shift centres on the need to ensure the means for preventing the break inintergenerational transmission, and in those cases where the shift has alreadytaken place, on influencing the factors that can help recover the natural trans-mission mechanism.

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Why is intergenerational transmission interrupted? Which reasons make parentsfeel that their language is not important enough to transmit to their children? Why isit said that every effort should be made to reinforce the nuclei of the earliest sociali-sation so that the language is transmitted naturally in spite of the external pressuresto abandon it that may be felt? Why is it said that intergenerational transmission is thecrucial point in the survival of languages?

The enormous range of situations in which languages come into contact does notallow generalisations or simple answers to these questions.

In this review facts are laid out that point in the same direction as the specialists.The causes the informants put forward for the deterioration and interruption of trans-mission as well as for its maintenance are also listed.

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The Euromosaic Report derives from a report commisioned by the Task ForceHuman Resources, Education, Training and Youth in 1993 (later DG XXII andnow the DG for Education and Culture) to investigate the current situation ofthe dozens of minority language groups within the European Union. Theexpression “minority language groups”, or communities, refers to territorially-defined linguistic groups other than those of the speakers of the dominant orofficial state languages in the member states.

Two previous studies had been commisioned in the 1980s. A new report wasurgently needed both because of the rapidly changing legal, institutional andsocial situation in a number of these communities, and because a methodologi-cally sound study would allow a comparative understanding of them. Theobjective of the chosen project was to relate the current situation of eachlanguage group to its potential for production and reproduction, and the diffi-culties encountered in doing so.

Various social and institutional aspects were considered, whereby a languagegroup produces and reproduces itself. Seven central concepts were focusedupon, and empirical measures were sought for them. The primary agencies ofthese processes were identified as the family, education and the community. Themotivating force involved the concept of language prestige and cultural repro-duction. The link between ability and use involved the concepts of institutional-isation and legitimisation.

The final version of the Euromosaic report, which was produced by theInstitut de Sociolingüística Catalana (Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona),Centre de Recherche sur le plurilinguisme (Brussels), and Research CentreWales (Bangor), highlights the shift in thinking about the value of diversity foreconomic deployment and European integration. It argues that language is a

EUROMOSAIC: THE PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION OF THEMINORITY LANGUAGE GROUPS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Language transmission

The figures analysed are representative of general trends. According to the informants inour research, only 53% of the languages analysed are widely and normally transmitted,thus confirming the hypothesis that there is a serious risk of language shift.

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Table 8. Intergenerational transmission of languages

Generalised transmission 53%

Partly interrupted transmission 23%

Practically interrupted transmission 8%

Totally interrupted transmission 12%

No answer 4%

Total 100%

central component of diversity; if diversity is the cornerstone of innovativedevelopment, attention must be given to sustaining the existing pool ofdiversity within the EU. The Report ends by focusing upon the need forproactive planning, which suffers from constraints on the deployment of budg-etary resources; and it calls for a Programme which can be the basis for suchforward planning and action.

The general Report was published in 1996 in several languages by theCommission. Nearly 50 individual uniformly structured reports were alsoprepared by the three Centres. These were added to several years later byreports on groups in Sweden, Finland and Austria. Each report was compiledusing the relevant bibliography and research, a language correspondent and anumber of key witnesses, following a complex procedure which allowed boththe language correspondents and the key witnesses to improve successivedrafts. The project also involved eighteen “language use surveys”.Abbreviated versions of the language group reports, containing valuableinformation on each language community and an analysis of its prospects forthe future, are available on the Internet (http://www.uoc.es/euromosaic/) inEnglish and French (and some in Catalan). The language use surveys are inEnglish only.

Miquel StrubellOpen University of Catalonia, Spain

In 23% of the communities analysed transmission exists but the influence of prestigelanguages is already perceptible, as transmission is only maintained in the moreimpermeable nuclei. The case of languages whose transmission is practically inter-rupted refers to languages whose change is imminent, since only in exceptional casesis the language transmitted within the family. This situation affects 8% of thelanguages analysed. Finally, the figures returned show that 12% are not transmitted atall, so that it is foreseeable that these languages will disappear along with the lastremaining speakers.

Indeed, the fact that in 43% (23%, 8% and 12%) of languages transmission has beenaltered is itself cause for serious concern. But it should also be pointed out that evengeneralised transmission of a language in the present generation does not necessarilyensure its survival, since transmission can be altered in the next generation – that is, ina very short period of time.

Of course, transmission is not interrupted simultaneously and completely in all thefamily nuclei of the community, except in exceptional cases or physical aggression.

In the cases of physical aggression, the change in the transmission trend tends to beradical, but in situations of extensive language contact the onset of shift is precededby the presence of the external language in spheres bordering on the family nucleus.In other words, the outsider language first of all occupies formal or official spheres,that of work relations, and gradually begins to be adopted in the private sphere of thefamily group. That is why it is said that the external influence for linguistic changetakes place chronologically and tends to progress from the external sphere towardsthe family sphere.

All of this suggests that if external pressures for the use of the prestige languageintensify – which is something quite likely in view of the trend to uniformity to beseen in the spheres of external use – the change will affect private relations, so that itcan be foreseen that many of the languages that at present are being transmittednormally could begin to be interrupted.

Intergenerational use of language

The first trend in language shift can be seen in the way the language is used in thefamily sphere. As we know, linguistic behaviour can reflect the attitude of speakersto the language. Even in those cases in which the language is transmitted, if there isa marked drop in the use of the language between the older and younger genera-tions a risk situation arises. If there is no change of attitude, transmission betweengenerations drops and the younger generation may not pass the language on totheir children.

Table 9 has been drawn up from information on the frequency with which thelanguage of the community is used as compared to the other language. In otherwords, the idea is to find out if the language in question is used with more, less or thesame frequency as another language.

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In a global analysis of the figures, always applying the necessary precautions to extrap-olation, we see that the use of the languages among the older generation is higher(approximately 65%) than the percentage of languages at present being transmitted(approximately 53%). The widespread use of the languages in these generationsassumes that they have received it naturally. This figure shows that in at least 10% oflanguages transmission has been interrupted in the space of a single generation.

The use of community languages shows a marked drop among the younger gener-ation to 36%. We can therefore see that in two generations the percentage of use hasdropped to half. In other words, there has been a marked acceleration in the tendencyto change observable in the first generation and widespread by the second.

This fact is particularly alarming because it shows the gap there is betweenknowledge and behaviour as regards one’s language. If at least 53% of languageshave been transmitted in the normal way, the level of use among the youngergeneration, 20% lower, suggests that the trend to substitution will increase in thenext generation.

Figures for the use of language among children (38%) are slightly higher than thoseof the group immediately preceding them – that is, young people (35%). This fact,which could in theory be a positive sign, does not seem to be a sign of recovery either,since the use of languages between adult generations and children, which inlanguage transmission situations seem to be the most favourable, shows a markeddecline. The figures confirm that adults speak their own language amongst them-selves (54%) more often than they do with children (42%), even if they have trans-mitted it. All of this suggests that this increase is more likely to be due to the fact thatchildren are less exposed to the majority language, as they have not yet had access tospheres with more influence from outside agents, which are principally school andthe surrounding social sphere.

Reasons for the interruption of transmission

The reasons for the interruption of language transmission go from subtle, more wide-spread prejudices to more explicit threats and prohibitions. Although the section onthe threats facing languages analyses these factors in greater detail, they are stressed

Transmission and Intergenerational Use of Language 205

Table 9. Intergenerational use of the language (%)

Old people Adults Young people Children

Old people 65

Adults 59 54

Young people 54 44 36

Children 49 42 35 38

here again because the informants associate them with the idea that the interruptionof intergenerational transmission is a cause of risk to the language and is one of theconsequences of the threats and risks facing the speakers of threatened languages.

Languages that are not transmitted naturally in the family are being replaced bylanguages of supposedly greater prestige. These languages can be a territory’s officiallanguage, the more widespread languages in prestigious social use or the languagesspoken by the more influential groups in the region.

The reasons for interruption most frequently mentioned are closely interrelatedand in general refer to: (1) Pressure from other cultures or languages, (2) Governmentpressure to acquire the official language or implementation of the educational systemin a language different from that of the community, (3) Demographic factorsinvolving displacements (migrations abroad or migrations from country to city) andthe effects of mixed marriages.

1. Pressure from other cultures or languages is mentioned by a large number ofreporters as a cause of interruption in language transmission.

A detailed analysis reveals that the influence of modernisation and urban devel-opment are considered the most influential causes. Urban development involves amove to a new lifestyle, considered more attractive and economically more prom-ising, which causes a change in lifestyle and in many cases a complete break withtraditional culture. This change shows up more strongly in the younger generations,since the expectations of entry into the professional and social world lead to theadoption of foreign habits:

This language was passed down from generation to generation in the closed feudal soci-eties of the past, leading to its preservation until now. However, over the past century,modern civilisation has gradually penetrated into these closed village communities, andthose of the younger generation of Jiongnai have left their homes to enter modern society.After the implementation of the reform policies and the opening of China’s doors to theoutside world, Jiongnai villages have been exposed to new objects, new concepts, andmodern technology as well as to new words. Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) is graduallyreplacing the previous southwestern dialect and is now being used in schools and publicmeetings. Thus, the Jiongnai language, with its small number of speakers and limited use,is gradually heading towards extinction. (Jiongnai, China)

When important changes take place in ways of life, immediate changes can takeplace in linguistic habits. The history of linguistic diversity clearly shows, forexample, that changes in the language-territory relationship are decisive in the life oflanguages, to the extent that the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle by nomadicpeoples often tends to involve language substitution, as in the case of the Gypsies ofRomania, the Fulani of northern Nigeria and the Maku of the Amazon jungle, tomention only a few.

2. Pressure to acquire the official language is mentioned explicitly in numerouscases (sometimes the pressure is attributed directly to the government) and appearsclosely linked to negative linguistic attitudes, which involve first a drop in use and

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subsequently the interruption of the transmission of the language itself. Aspectsmentioned include lack of appreciation for the language or lack of awareness, lack ofprestige in the language, shame, fear, etc.

Whenever there have been historical pressures for cultural discredit, there has evenbeen a negation of identity itself, so that parents decide to transmit the dominantlanguage with the object of avoiding discrimination on account of the language. Inthese cases, negation of the language is the first step to renouncing identity, as thelanguage is perceived as one of the elements preventing integration in the desiredsocial milieu. The feeling of discrimination and shame that has arisen in manycommunities in relation to language has meant that the speakers themselves try toassure their children a less painful future than their own.

Some years ago there were many families who denied their Maya identity… There arenumerous families who no longer transmit this language to their children because of thecultural discrimination there is in the country. People are valued if they speak Castilian,because this is the official language. If they only speak their language they are ignored,despised, marginalised. For this reason, many families are inclined towards Castilian asthe mother tongue for their children. (Achi, Guatemala)

Formerly the language was transmitted from parents to children. Today one often findsthat parents speak to their children in Spanish because they feel that this language’s domi-nance ensures their descendants will be accepted by the dominant society on an equalfooting. (Uitoto, Colombia)

Map 12 shows language diversity in Colombia.

(Transmission has been interrupted) for the last 10–20 years. Children never learn thelanguage, as it has no prestige and is linked to backwardness and to pre-Islamic rites.(Jukun, Nigeria)

One of the state’s areas of influence which is attributed most responsibility in linguisticattitudes is the sphere of education. Especially aggressive moves against unofficiallanguages have taken place in practically every part of the world. One example,amongst others, is the one from the reporter on the Mi’kmaw language of Canada:

Normally the language passes from one generation to the next. However, due to the insti-tutions who carry out cultural genocide and assimilation like the Indian boarding schools,the language is not being taught to future generations. (Mi’kmaw, Canada)

Implementing the school system in some language other than the local language hasgiven rise to the feeling that the language that is not used in schools is not suited tothis sphere of knowledge. This perception is related to the fact that schools are seen inconnection with the written use of language. Because of this, when it comes tolanguages with an oral tradition, the sense of a lack of modernisation is strengthened.

Inversely, the use of the language of the community in the school seems to offerhopes of avoiding the interruption of transmission and allowing recovery.

Transmission and Intergenerational Use of Language 207

The reply given by the reporter for Chilcotin, a language spoken in Canada, clearlysums up the part played by schools as a system of pressure for the abandonment ofthe language, in the case of the parents, as well as the part played by schools as anelement acting in favour of recovery, in the case of the children:

Although earlier educational pressures on today’s parents when they were at school led totheir language being abandoned, the children now often learn the language only in theChilcotin classes at school or with their grandparents. (Chilcotin, Canada)

We must remember that many places have opted for a bilingual or multilingualteaching system allowing use of the local language while learning others for specificintergroup or international relations purposes without losing their own language.

3. Migratory movements and mixed marriages are two of the demographic factorsindicated as causes for the interruption of language transmission.

Both the migratory movements outside the territory and the immigration ofspeakers of more powerful languages into a territory are factors that influence thedecision to transmit the own language or not. However, the factor most oftenmentioned as the cause for the interruption of transmission is the movement of therural population to urban areas. It is in the urban environment that the influence ofexternal factors for change is more marked. Direct dealings with administration, theinfluence on the value of the language of the labour market and commerce, the moreinfluential media and social relations, added to modernisation, make a decisivecombination for the attitude of speakers of less prestigious languages.

At the same time, bearing in mind that young people are more likely to make thissort of migration to the cities, the tendency to drop the habits of the community ismore marked. The following could be illustrative examples of these phenomena:

The transmission of this language from parents to children is obvious. Nevertheless, aconsiderable number of inhabitants – some 2000 who have settled in cities like Pucallpa,Yarinacocha – no longer do so, and replace it with Castilian. (Shipibo, Peru)

The language is transmitted from generation to generation, especially for the people fromthe rural areas. On the other hand, those who settle in urban centres replace it withSwahili or English. (Loogoli, Kenya)

Normally, yes [the language is transmitted], but in many cities there are now familieswho speak to their children in Maghrib Arabic in the belief that this will help in theirschooling. This process of forced Arabisation is replaced by Hispanicisation in the case offamilies of Berber origin in Melilla. (Tamazight, Morocco)

The language is still stable in the family for those who do not live in big cities or inter-marry with other ethnic groups. (Songorong, Chad)

Another very frequently mentioned cause is the phenomenon of mixed marriages.

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A large proportion does [transmit the language], but another proportion doesn’t, becausethey marry Spanish-speaking mestizos who because they don’t speak the Bora languagespeak mostly Castilian with their children. (Bora, Colombia)

The increase in marriages between Norfolk Islanders and foreigners is one of the reasonsfor the decline of the language. It is still considered bad manners to speak Norfolk when amember of the family or community only speaks English. (Norfolk, Norfolk Island)

Transmission and Intergenerational Use of Language 209

The Central Institute of Indian Languages (established by Govt. of India in 1969 atMysore) has studied and developed in different proportions, as of today eightytribal languages belonging to four language families plus the Andaman family oflanguages. Its intervention in the form of development of these languages hascontributed to the maintenance of some of the tribal languages in India.

The Institute has undertaken Linguistic description of the tribal and minoritylanguages in terms of their phonology, morphology and syntax; devised writingsystems for the hitherto unwritten languages; and standardised the existingwriting systems for the recently written languages.

Linguistic descriptions of the tribal languages are pedagogically oriented.Promotion of tribal languages in education especially at the primary schoollevel has been attempted. The objectives are two-fold: (a) providing educationto tribal children through their mother tongues, and (b) the maintenance orrevival of endangered languages. To fulfil these objectives trilingual dictionaries(tribal language – Hindi and English), and school primers adopting theBilingual Education Model have been prepared. The Institute has conductedExperimental Bilingual Education programmes in Soliga and Jenu Kuruba inKarnataka, Wagdi in Rajasthan and Dungar Varli and Davar Varli in the UnionTerritory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. The activities of CIIL and its participationin the Committees has helped in promoting the use of tribal languages inPrimary Education at the national level and it is reflected in National Policy ofEducation, 1986, section 4.6 (ii) which runs as follows “The sociocultural milieuof the scheduled tribes has its distinctive characteristics including, in manycases their own spoken languages. This underlies the need to develop thecurricula and devise instructural materials in tribal languages at the initialstages, with arrangement, for switching over to the regional language”.

Special attention has been paid to some of the languages spoken by (i)Negroid tribes viz. Onge (96 speakers), Andamanese (35 speakers) and Jarawa(estimated to be spoken by 200 speakers) and (ii) Mongloid tribes viz., the

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT/REVIVAL ACTIVITIES BY THE CENTRAL INSTITUTE OF INDIAN LANGUAGES

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Shompen language (Austro-Asiatic) estimated to be spoken by 200 people in theAndaman and Nicobar Islands. These languages are ‘endangered languages’because of the size of the population.

The Institute has prepared a grammar, an Onge-Hindi-English Pictorialglossary, an Onge-Hindi Bilingual education primer and a video film to learnthe Onge Orthography. To help the functionaries of Andaman Administration tocommunicate with the Onge tribe through their tribal mother tongue an Ongehandbook is under preparation.

In Andamanese (a) an Andamanese-Hindi Bilingual Primer and (b) anAndamanese-Hindi-English Pictorial Glossary have been prepared for schooleducation. The above instructional materials have been introduced in theschools in Strait Island, Andaman. Bilingual education primers in Onge andAndamanese languages attempt to give instructions to tribal children initially intheir respective mother tongues and later to switch over to Hindi.

A sociolinguistic study of the maintenance of Andamanese language has beenundertaken. The results of the study indicate that the active acquisition and useof the language of the parents/ancestors is less by the children of the next gener-ation due to peer group pressure but there is an increase in the use of theexisting passive knowledge of their mother tongue viz. Andamanese, due tonew acquisition, when the children become adults and participate in collectiveactivities like fishing, turtle hunting and cultural activities such as pubertyceremony. The schooling through Andamanese at the primary level is madepossible by the efforts made by the CIIL in collaboration with the UnionTerritory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This kind of new acquisition anduse of the mother tongue is due to the social network of the community. This isbecause both the utility value of Hindi and the identity value of Andamaneseare at work and cyclically there is a greater realisation of the need for identityand preservation as people grow older.

A handbook of Jarawa language has been published with a view to help thefunctionaries and researchers who have to interact and work with the Jarawa tribe.

A Shompen-Hindi-English Pictorial glossary has been published as a part ofteaching/learning material for the children and adults of the Shompen tribe.The Institute has also studied less known Dravidian tribal languages like Uralispoken in Tamilnadu.

In addition to the above the Institute in collaboration with AnnamalaiUniversity and Telugu University, Hyderabad has collected language data fordocumentation purposes in the following tribal languages: Kurichian(Dravidian) (Population: 15,700) spoken in Tamilnadu, Urali Kurumba(Dravidian) (Population: 4,370) spoken in Waynad, Kerala, Indi-Awe (Dravidian)and Parengi Gorum (Munda) both spoken in Koraput, Orissa.

Mixed marriages have a wide range of effects on the life of languages, although theimmense majority of reporters only mention their negative influences. Furthermore,there are indications that in societies that have traditionally been multilingual due tothe formation of couples belonging to different linguistic descents, in recent decades thetraditional strategy has been changed to one of the adoption of a dominant language, bethis the language of one of the spouses or the official or dominant language of theregion, which may not be the language of either of them. In the case of Western, basi-cally monolingual societies, mixed marriages can act in favour of diversity because eachspouse ensures transmission of their language to their descendants.

It is worth pointing out that of the causes mentioned only the last two, migrationand marriage, can be said to respond to communication strategies, while the restrespond to direct pressures or are attributable to negative linguistic attitudes usuallyas a result of these pressures.

A window for hope

It is worth mentioning in particular the important accounts provided by informantswho speak of new situations in certain languages which have made it possible toensure their transmission. There are languages that have achieved official status, asin the case of Kirgiz, or the new consideration gained by Timbe on producing awritten literature.

Since Kirgiz has also been spoken in Kyrgyzstan as an official language, it is transmittedfrom generation to generation. (Kirgiz, Kyrgyzstan)

In 1970 the language was considered inferior to either Kote or Pidgin. Many parents wereattempting to prevent their children from using it. By 1990 that had changed and sincethere was literature in the language many considered it better than Pidgin or Kote.(Timbe, Papua New Guinea)

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In collaboration with a non-governmental organisation known as ACCORDin Gudalur, Tamilnadu, primers at the pre primary level in the Dravidian triballanguages, viz. Paniya, Irula, Kattu Naika, Mullukurumba and Betta Kurumbaspoken in Gudalur, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu have been prepared. A Paniya PrimerPATTOLA for the pre primary class has been published and introduced in theschools run by the non-Governmental organisation viz. ACCORD. A TamilOrthography system with modifications has been adopted to write and readPaniya and the other languages. Thus the Institute has made pioneeringsuccessful efforts in reviving some of the endangered tribal languages of India.

Omkar N. KoulCentral Institute of Indian Languages, India

One hopeful fact that some informants provided was the value placed on grand-parents as transmitters of languages to their grandchildren to recover the trans-mission interrupted by parents with these children.

At present, Pech couples over 40 speak Pech at home but it seems that in youngercouples the grandparents are the only people who speak Pech to the children (Lara 1997).(Pech, Honduras)

Huambisa is transmitted by grandparents to parents, then to children and then to thegrandchildren. In some cases transmission relations arise from grandparents to grand-children. (Wampis, Peru)

Finally, it is important to mention some undoubtedly subjective accounts whichnevertheless have the added value of conveying the pleasure of speaking one’sown language.

Lingao will be passed down to future generations, because the local people like to use iteverywhere. The local people use it in markets, cadres use it in offices, teachers use it inschools, and children grow up speaking it. (Lingao, China)

Since the last century, all the researchers in La Mosquitia (Nicaragua) have pointed outtwo things as regards the Miskita language and its use: (1) That the Miskitos are verycommunicative with all ethnic groups and with foreigners and speak and teach theirlanguage to those wanting to learn it (Herranz, 1996: 436–437). (2) That Miskito women,even those married to Ladinos or other ethnic groups such as the Tawahka, always teachtheir children Miskito (Herranz 1996). (Miskito, Nicaragua)

At present, no other language is likely to completely replace it as the Derung people like touse their native language. (Derung, China)

Recommendations on intergenerational transmission and use oflanguage

Before the serious threat to the preservation of the universal linguistic heritage posedby the large-scale interruption in the transmission of family languages from parentsto children and by the alarming decline in the use of native languages in intergenera-tional relations, we must:

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• Emphasise the importance of language and culture for the individual’s senseof identity and self-esteem.

• Discourage language substitution, by pointing out the widely demonstratedability to harmoniously integrate the knowledge and use of more than onelanguage by one person or social group.

Transmission and Intergenerational Use of Language 213

• Protect and acknowledge the fundamental role of the family group inpreserving linguistic diversity. When the family is bilingual or multilingual,the transmission of all these languages should be encouraged, as the benefitsof bilingual or multilingual skills are fundamental in preserving personalidentity and integrity, as well as in furthering social integration.

• Confer prestige on all the languages in the area through its use in formal andinformal spheres and hold persistent campaigns to persuade adults to passon the language of the community to the younger generation.

• Explain to parents the psychological, cultural and economic advantages of amultilingual education that does not marginalise the mother tongue.

Chapter 10

Linguistic Attitudes

In speaking of linguistic attitudes, a reference is made to the favourable orunfavourable disposition people have towards languages, be these their own orforeign. Attitudes are formed by complex processes on the basis of the beliefs, repre-sentations and perceptions established around languages, all of them influenced by aparticular feeling of liking or rejection. In addition, attitudes make people more orless likely to adopt one linguistic behaviour or another. In other words, they lead to atendency either to use a language or to replace it, either completely or in certainspecific spheres or situations.

Beliefs about languages are usually linked to perceptions about the identity, char-acter, culture and history of its group of speakers, and are often based on historicallydisseminated prejudices which have a decisive influence on feelings, and subse-quently on behaviour. This is why it is important to take into account the sociolin-guistic and historical characteristics of each and every community to be able to getclose to a full understanding of these attitudes.

In addition, attitudes are not directly observable, and must be deduced fromopinions expressed in opinion polls, and by observing behaviour in specific situa-tions. The main thing is, perhaps, that attitudes, as well as helping to explain currentbehaviour, can help forecast future behaviour. This consideration suggests that themeasures taken to promote the use and prestige of languages can be effective throughthe positive attitudes they generate.

The attitude to a language – as regards using it or abandoning it, as well aslearning a new one – tends to show a twofold motivation: instrumental motivationand integrating motivation. The first reflects pragmatic objectives and is charac-terised by attempting, in theory, to respond to communication needs, and often alsoto motives of social recognition or economic promotion. The integrating character ofthe attitude, however, is of a social nature and is mainly reflected in the search forintegration and identification with the linguistic community. It goes without sayingthat in monolingual communities this integrating character is perceived naturallyand furthermore tends to be accompanied by feelings of liking for the language andthe community. However, in bilingual or multilingual situations, this integratingcharacter can be conflictive because it can give rise to identity tensions that are notalways easily resolved.

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One’s attitude to one’s own language involves one’s own personal identity linkedto the social group one belongs to. That is why it is especially interesting to identifythe reasons why some people’s attitudes lead them to use another language in situa-tions of multilingualism. Furthermore, it is interesting to find out what motivatessomeone to learn a new language, in what spheres it is used, and why it can replaceone’s own in spheres originally occupied by the latter, even to the extent of aban-doning it. In particular, we shall attempt to identify the reasons why people shownegative attitudes to their language.

One of the factors that researchers consider fundamental in shaping linguistic atti-tudes is whether or not the language has some sort of official status – that is, theofficial character of the language or the relative position of prestige it occupies withrespect to the official language and other languages in contact with it. In addition,other factors have to be added such as the preservation or loss of the community’scultural identity and the attitude shown by members of the linguistic communitieswith which they come in contact.

In addition, we have to take into account changes in the life of communities and inthe use of languages as a result of the process of urbanisation, migrations and theintroduction of mass media, along with pressure from the hope of social promotionexpressed in the need to use the majority languages.

In this chapter we shall be analysing the attitudes of speakers to their ownlanguages and the attitudes of speakers of other languages with which they come intocontact, in relation to the factors mentioned above. The comparative analysis of thedata will make it possible to classify them into two large groups, which though notclosed, will make it possible to speak of positive and negative attitudes to languages.

Positive linguistic attitudes

According to the figures gathered, the feelings that members of the community havetowards their own language are positive in the great majority of cases andfurthermore are almost always accompanied by feelings of identity, liking and pride.

In the case of speakers of official languages, as well as reflecting the natural rela-tionship between identity and language, the figures confirm the idea that an officiallanguage confers political, economic and social status on its speakers. When there is nocontact with other languages, the question may not even arise among speakers. Thosegroups whose first language is the official one see the use of their language in allspheres as something natural and, of course, have a positive attitude towards it. Butwhen the speakers of prestige languages have dealings with other languages, nuancesarise and an awareness of identity shows itself, giving rise to conscious attitudes ofpride for one’s language and of indifference (or scorn) for those of less prestige.

However, it is noticeable that the spread of transnational languages catering forprestige functions, such as those involved in the field of science, economics or inter-national culture, can compromise the behaviour of speakers of certain officiallanguages. Thus, pragmatic attitudes arise that turn to these transnational languages

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for reasons of social promotion. This is the case of widespread languages in theirareas of influence that are being adopted by speakers in many regions, very often tothe detriment of their own language. One example was provided by the informant forNorwegian, who said that “the attitude to the language presents no problems, as itsuse is taken for granted. However, the insecurity historically attached to everythingNorwegian can sometimes lead to an emphasis on the use of Norwegian, or, moreoften, to an irrational lack of self-esteem leading to an unnecessary and insecure useof English.”

The most widespread behaviour is the following: attitudes to the languages ofgreater prestige are positive and the tendency to learn these languages will depend onthe advantages their use involves. This is the case of some multilingual contexts,where identification with the influential group stands out. For example, in the case ofSena, declared a national language in Mozambique, it is reported that speakers use itas a means of communication, especially in cities where other languages are alsoused, and that the speakers themselves see it as a language respected by the othercommunities, precisely because of its status as a national language.

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There is a high correlation between the world’s biological andlinguistic/cultural megadiversity areas: where there are many biologicalspecies, there are often also many languages and cultures, and vice versa. Therelationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity is probably not onlycorrelational but also causal, reflecting “human-environment co-evolution”,including the assumption that cultural diversity (encoded in languages) mightenhance biodiversity or vice versa. People’s cultural knowledge, encoded in theworld’s languages, is a necessary prerequisite for sustainable maintenance ofnatural resources, including the most vulnerable and most biologically diverseenvironments in the world. Languages are also a necessary prerequisite forintergenerational transfer of that knowledge.

If we, as realistic prognoses claim, during the next 100 years murder 50–90%of the world’s linguistic diversity, we are also seriously undermining ourchances of life on earth. People need to get to know their environment wellenough to see that maintaining biodiversity is in their best interest. The timeneeded for this and for developing the knowledge of how to protect their envi-ronment and use it in a sustainable way is measured in centuries, not decades.Transferring this knowledge from one language to another (e.g. from a smallindigenous language to a larger dominant language) also takes generations. Iflanguages are being killed at today’s pace, these vital knowledges are lost.

TERRALINGUA AND LANGUAGE RIGHTS

One’s attitude to one’s own language depends on the pressures brought to bear on thelanguage to maintain it or abandon it. Whereas the great majority of opinion surveysfavour survival, it is obvious that historical pressures have given rise to behaviourinclined towards the replacement of people’s languages by others of greater prestigefor pragmatic reasons, in spite of people’s declared pride in their language. Theaccount of languages like Hani, in China, could illustrate this statement:

The Hani majority believes that the language is a symbol of their nationality which mustbe preserved. However, as there is a feeling that it is used in limited situations, they wouldlike to learn Chinese too. Furthermore, Hani is not necessary in school exams, so it wouldbe preferable to study Chinese or English. (Hani, China)

Another aspect worth stressing is the view people have of the attitude to theirlanguage on the part of speakers of other languages, which shows the importance ofthe relationship between linguistic status and attitude. By way of example, thereporter for Yoruba, a Nigerian language with national status and clearlyspreading, states that, “the members of the community are proud of their language,but even so, they realise that there are more advantages to using English than tousing Yoruba.” However, referring to other linguistic communities under itsinfluence, this same reporter says, “the attitude (of speakers towards the Yoruba) ispositive, particularly in the communities of the small Nigerian languages likeBaruba, Ebira, Ijaw and Urhobo.”

At the same time, the promotion of certain languages to the detriment of othersgives rise to many accounts of resentment. For example, whereas speakers ofPulaar express feelings of pride in their language, they say that “there is a certainill-feeling amongst other groups who see them as chauvinists”. A similar case isthat of the Viri language, reporting that “members of this community have a

Linguistic Attitudes 217

When speakers of small languages learn necessary dominant languages inaddition to their native languages, they become multilingual, and linguisticdiversity is supported. When dominant languages, like English, are learnedsubtractively, at the cost of the mother tongues, they become killer languages,and education is forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This isgenocide, according to the definition in the United Nation’s GenocideConvention, Article II (e).

The most vital linguistic human right for diversity maintenance, the right tomother tongue medium education, has totally insufficient protection in humanrights law.

Tove Skutnabb-KangasTerralingua (www.terralingua.org)

positive attitude to the promotion, development and use of the language, espe-cially since the language has spread to other languages”, adding that speakers ofother languages “have adopted it in public spheres, such as the fields of trade andcommerce, especially in residential areas.” All of this confirms the value of status inthe attitude to a language.

As regards languages with no official status, while expressing positive attitudestowards their own language, as in the case of Tumbuka, informants note that othercommunities have attitudes of “indifference, due to the fact that this language is notofficial in the administration at a national level”.

However, it is important to point out that linguistic attitudes to one’s own languageare not the same in all members of the community. One fact that stands out is thateven in those accounts expressing pride in one’s identity and an explicit wish for thesurvival of the language and culture of the group, there is deep concern over the lossof this awareness by the younger members of the communities. School, the media, thedominant culture and emigration to urban areas are seen as being the chief causes forthe attitude of indifference to or rejection of the local language by younger members.The accounts of the informants for Aymara, in Peru, or Sabaot, in Kenya, could serveto illustrate this situation:

Speakers of 40 years of age or more identify with their culture and communicate in thislanguage. Those between 20 and 35 use Aymara and Spanish with a tendency to culturalmixing. Those under 20, because of their nationalist, castilianising schooling, followurban behaviour patterns. (Aymara, Peru)

Most people like the language, especially those of middle age and above. But it is losingpopularity among educated young people. (Sabaot, Kenya)

Furthermore, accounts of differences between the attitudes of urban and rural popu-lations abound. One illustrative example could be the account by the informant forthe Achi language of Guatemala:

The attitude to the use and knowledge of the language among the majority in the urbanarea is negative, as they are under greater pressure to learn Castilian. This is the symbol ofdevelopment, of acceptance by the dominant class, of a source of employment. People inthe rural areas have a greater appreciation for the language; the children learn it frombirth; it’s the official language in the community. (Achi, Guatemala)

However, we want to stress that most of the accounts gathered express opinions infavour of maintaining and using the native language, even in spite of being at a disad-vantage with other languages or being subject to opinions that go from indifference tocontempt or prohibition:

Speakers of Chipaya take great pride in their language. They feel that it is the originallanguage of the world. And yet the members of other communities call it a dialect anddespise it as a language and a means of communication. Nowadays, the schoolteachershave forbidden the children to use Chipaya at school. (Chipaya, Bolivia)

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Furthermore, we have been able to see that in many communities in an advancedstate of language substitution a change is taking place in the attitude of membersof those communities, thanks to the reinforcement of cultural identity. Thisattitude shows itself in the growing tide of claims to the right to maintainlanguages and the growing demands for the use of languages, at least in the schoolsphere and in the local media. The informant for the Pech language in Hondurasexpresses this situation very well:

Until 1990, the attitude of the majority of the population was one of fear and strongreserves about speaking Pech outside the family setting or relationships of friendship withother speakers of the language. The presence of a Pech who didn’t speak the language or ofa Ladino was enough to stop them speaking it because they ‘felt ashamed’. Today, theFIPH (Federación Indígena Pech de Honduras) and the seven Pech teachers are encour-aging the oral use of Pech (and its written use at school). Now you can find Pech who takepride in speaking their language, especially the teachers and directors of the Federation,which offers a ray of hope. (Pech, Honduras)

This revival situation is taking place in many indigenous communities whereawareness of cultural identity is growing in the face of intense pressure fromcolonising languages. In Canada, for example, a study by the First Nations Assemblyin 1992 revealed the critical situation of their languages (see Map 11). However,figures issued by the Canadian Institute of Statistics show that 88% of those who usedto speak the language wanted to relearn it and that more than 75% of the natives whohad never spoken it were willing to learn.

Another example could be the situation amongst the indigenous peoples of Siberia,where the danger of extinction is extreme, not only for the languages but also for thecommunities themselves. These are languages and cultures which have deterioratedin a very short space of time. According to Filtchenko (2000), the impact of thediscovery of gas in the 1970s meant that in a very few years, as a result of massiveimmigration, the native demographic majority became a demographic minority, atthe same time as the traditional habitat suffered irreparable damage. As a result ofthese factors, the identity of the native peoples of Siberia has been endangered.Nevertheless, a revival of native awareness is taking place which expresses itself inthe importance a majority of the indigenous population attaches to the teaching of themother tongue at school through bilingual education, with the prime objective ofpreserving the language. They stress the need to make available the economicresources necessary for this, furthermore implementing the means whereby nativestudents can have a medium in the community in which to develop the language theylearn at school.

But the economic and social situation of many of the world’s indigenous peoples isextremely difficult. And very often, awareness of the loss of a language is considereda problem of little importance in the face of the social deterioration the community isimmersed in. The account by the reporter for the Bardi language of Australia, forexample, is moving in its frankness and is common to countless communities:

Linguistic Attitudes 219

[The situation of the language] doesn’t seem to matter to some; others (particularly a fewof the older people) want to pass the language on. My feeling is that until there is a ‘BardiCulture’ the language isn’t so important, but this point of view may not represent themajority point of view. I think the One Arm Point community is worried about drugs,alcohol and preventing suicide and unemployment and other social issues; the languagedoesn’t rank very high because there is a generation or two that don’t use it and becausethere are other concerns. (Bardi, Australia)

And nevertheless, the figures collected seem to suggest that when these conditionsimprove there is great interest in relaunching language learning along with rein-forcing native cultures.

The change in attitude referred to is also noticeable in some minority linguisticcommunities in Western Europe, where it has been possible to maintain culturalidentity, and linguistic policies are beginning to allow a certain flexibility, making itpossible to promote measures to revive languages, as in the case of Breton in France:

After four generations of shame and linguistic rejection and of an image marked by anegative Breton identity (linked to linguistic repression led by the schools of theRepublic), mentalities are changing. Today the dominant feeling is that a valuable asset isbeing lost and that there is an urgent need for action. According to a survey held in 1997,88% of people think the language must be preserved, 72% believe it has a future and 80%are in favour of its teaching. (Breton, France)

Negative attitudes

We have deliberately gone into the extremely worrying facts about people’s negativeattitudes towards their own language in some detail, as they indicate an almost irre-versible trend towards linguistic substitution.

The effect of traditional state policies and the progress of some expandinglanguages is endangering the survival of countless languages which are in a situationof lower prestige.

Because of this, it is not surprising that, along with expressions of affection for thelanguage, some of the accounts gathered by reporters speak of the shame they feelwhen using their language and of the fear of stigmatisation because of theirlanguage, a feeling which can even become scorn when the language has sufferedsevere loss of prestige.

Truly dramatic ideas were returned by the reporter on Kaqchikel, for example, whosaid that “after 500 years of rejection and extermination of the Kaqchikel language,today the majority of the members of the community rejects the preservation and useof the language”, or on Mam, of which it is said that “there is rejection of the languagedue to the lack of its implementation and use by the Administration, especially at theeducational level”, or of Pech, where “until 1990, the attitude of the majority of thepopulation was one of fear and great reserve in speaking outside the family setting orrelations of friendship with other speakers of the language”, or of Tol, whose

220 Words and Worlds

informant says that “all the work of researching the Tol of La Montaña de la Flor until1985 showed that the Tolupans of Yoro and La Flor felt shame when speaking Tol.”

The accounts of indigenous populations gathered in this Review show that nativelanguages have come under enormous pressure, and that although many communitiesare beginning to demand respect for their linguistic rights, many populations still shownegative feelings towards them. The lack of prestige towards the indigenous language isa feature we see repeated in most areas where minority indigenous populations coexistwith majority groups speaking the official language. We might remember that peoplecan even deny belonging to a linguistic community, as Abbi (2000) shows when he saysthat “the feeling of inferiority, the awareness of the low status of the mother tongue insociety, anxiety to be associated with the superior masses, all discourage people fromdeclaring the language used in the family setting their own. This is especially true inmany Munda and Dravidian tribes. Research has shown that even languages that havebeen declared lost are still used in the domestic sphere. The low prestige associated withthese languages has brought about this change in loyalty”.

And non-indigenous populations heighten this feeling through their attitude:

The members of the surrounding communities would like to bury this language or absorbit. (Lai, Bangladesh)

But this pressure is not exclusive to indigenous populations. In most of Europe, too,language communities in the minority have suffered the consequences of outrightassimilation policies on the part of states that have in many cases generated attitudesof indifference towards the minority language or its loss, or shame over the stigmainvolved in its use. There are some who feel the language should only be used in thefamily sphere, in the case of the informant on Friulan; who show indifference due tothe influence of schooling in French, like the reporter on Occitan; or who even expressscorn, as the informant for Corsican reports.

From what has been said above, we can deduce that establishing hierarchies in thestatus of languages generates attitudes of rejection towards one’s own language andtowards the languages of other communities. Similarly, the attitude to a languagedepends directly on the relation established with the group it represents. It is alsopossible that when groups with different mother tongues maintain balanced rela-tions, the tensions between the two different communities diminish. This is one of thebasic factors that have allowed language communities with small populations to keepup their cultural identity and their language today.

The hierarchical effect of languages is confirmed when we note the fact that all thedominant languages in the sample analysed for this Review are learned by otherpeople or adopted as second or third languages. The behaviour observed in thelearning of second and third languages also shows the influence of the hierarchiesestablished between languages. Thus dominant languages are learnt with greaterfrequency, but those of less prestige are only learned by certain people.

Societies that are traditionally multilingual show that the tendency to uniformity –one which is becoming extremely widespread in recent decades – does not take place

Linguistic Attitudes 221

in all societies and is not a natural one. The greater the multilingual tradition, the lessthe aggression between the different languages in contact.

The reported figures indicate that relations between communities of similar statusare less hostile than those established between majority and minorised languages.According to Abbi (2000) and Annamalai (2001), for example, relations among thedifferent languages in multilingual situations like India are linked to the nature ofmultilingualism itself in the area. This is characterised by its social acceptance, andpeople learn other languages in the course of socialisation, for communicative,economic, cultural and religious needs, since languages can have a functional distri-bution with respect to these functional uses.

Expressions of solidarity between communities show up time and again. This is anencouraging fact. It could be that if initiatives are begun in favour of respect fordifferent identities, the self-esteem of communities in a precarious situation mightrecover; experiences in similar situations might be shared and natural solidaritybetween groups of similar status might arise. All of this with the object of modifyingthe attitudes of dominant communities. Indeed, though no language can survivethrough the incorporation of speakers from other communities, the fact that itslanguage is learnt by people outside the group has very positive effects on the prideand consideration attributed to it. The learning of minorised languages by non-natives should be encouraged. Only in this way can balanced linguistic and culturalrelations be established in the face of the linguistic and cultural uniformity withwhich we are threatened.

222 Words and Worlds

Negative attitudes to pidgins and creoles are based primarily on perceivedlinguistic inadequacies or the economic and social limitations of pidgins andcreoles vis-a-vis their lexifier languages. Most speakers of pidgins and creoleswould be surprised to find that the study of pidgin and creole languages consti-tutes a legitimate academic discipline, and that linguists consider themlanguages in their own right rather than dialects or incorrect versions of otherlanguages. Superficial similarities lead non-experts to assume that pidgins andcreoles are inferior versions of the languages to which they are most closely affil-iated in vocabulary. Thus, Haitian Creole French speakers and Hawai’i CreoleEnglish speakers have been corrected and/or punished at school, and in somecases at home, for speaking what is widely believed to be ‘bad French’ or ‘badEnglish’, respectively.

Although they typically arise to serve a linguistically diverse population, theyhave limited currency outside these local settings when compared to their lexi-fiers. Most pidgins and creoles are unstandardised, unwritten, have no official

SOCIAL ATTITUDES CONCERNING PIDGINS AND CREOLES

Linguistic Attitudes 223

Attitudes and prejudices to be avoided

While it is true that linguistic attitudes are responsible for most behaviour relating tolanguage, it is no less true that behind most attitudes are prejudices that have nothingto do with the nature of languages. We believe it is necessary to unmask common-places and beliefs about languages that have no other basis than carefully and delib-erately promoted prejudices that establish hierarchies between languages as a priorstep to the replacement and disappearance of languages and cultures.

Let us remember some of the most widespread prejudices whose falsity it isessential to demonstrate as soon as possible:

recognition and have not been widely used in education. They often co-exist ina diglossic relationship with their lexifiers, where the pidgin/creole assumesthe L(ow) functions, i.e. is used at home and non-official domains, and thelexifier functions as H(igh).

Negative attitudes to pidgins and creoles, particularly at school, have had anumber of unfortunate social consequences. Research has demonstrated thefutility of constant correction of non-standard language use in the classroomwithout respect for the students’ home language. When teachers tell childrennot to speak pidgins and creoles because they represent a ‘lazy’ way to talk orbecause they are ‘broken’ English, French, etc., mixed emotions of shame andresistance are often the result. To deny the validity of any language is to deny thevalidity of the people who speak it.

Although it seems at first glance paradoxical that pidgins and creoles persistat all despite correction and negative public opinion, speakers do attach positivevalue to these languages as markers of solidarity and intimacy. As childrenapproach adolescence, the use of non-standard speech varieties often increases,indicating the effects of peer group allegiance, and resistance to mainstreamauthority structures which endorse the standard. One manifestation of this canbe seen in the extension of pidgins and creoles into domains generally reservedfor the lexifier language, in particular in literature and in school. A number ofcreoles such as Krio in Sierra Leone have vibrant literary traditions, and arebeing increasingly used in the classroom.

Suzanne RomaineMerton College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

224 Words and Worlds

• Languages are merely vehicles for communication; the fewer languagesthere are, the better the chances of communication; diversity is therefore anobstacle to understanding between human beings.

• The economic and technological underdevelopment seen in many commu-nities and social groups is largely due to their preservation of a language andculture that is not suited to social, economic or technological progress; thereare urban languages and rural languages, languages for modernity andlanguages for primitive, traditional or indigenous life.

• Some languages are only of use for affective family communication, butcannot be used as vehicles of formal education; there are languages that arenot suitable for use in schools, and far less in universities.

• The use in the family of a language that is not used at school is a handicapthat slows down children’s integration in the school system, has a directinfluence on learning difficulties and is the cause of school failure.

• Bilingualism is prejudicial to the all-round development of the individual;children do not acquire proper mastery of either of the two languages; a clearexample of the harmful consequences of bilingual education is that bilingualpeople do not master orthographic systems and make more and morespelling mistakes.

• Teaching children a minority language they do not know is an imposition, aswell as being unnatural; it is prejudicial because they have never heard it inthe family.

• Is a language that is not written and does not have a dictionary or grammar alanguage? Furthermore, why begin to write or teach a language that hasnever been written or taught? Why go against tradition?

• Some languages are not viable as it is impossible to agree on the correct formbecause it is spoken differently in different places. The standard, which may beof recent creation, is false, artificial and useless; false, because it does not reflectevery variety, especially yours; artificial, because it has no tradition and hasbeen invented by a handful of smart alecs who hope to make a living out of it;useless, because it has no future, as no-one will use it or understand it.

• Some languages are of no use when looking for interesting jobs or forrelating with the modern world; these are backward languages that merelyshut us away inside ourselves; they are not languages with a universal scope.

Chapter 11

The Threats to Languages

Languages evolve on the basis of sometimes imperceptible changes that take place indifferent ways. These changes can be caused by widely varying factors such asstrategies for adaptation to the social milieu, group identification or the influence ofexternal linguistic contacts. In addition, they can be induced through deliberatestrategies or can take place spontaneously.

If a moment comes in this evolution when the varieties are no longer perceived aspart of the same language and are considered different languages, we can say thatthese languages’ evolution has led to the disappearance of the original language.

We are speaking of well-known cases of languages for which there are plenty ofwritten accounts, such as the so-called classical languages, which are no longerconsidered living languages today. They have evolved into multiple languages, someof which are still alive, while others have become extinct. It is difficult to make evenan approximate calculation of the number of languages that have disappeared in thisway, since many of them have left no written evidence at all, but in any case thenumber far exceeds that of the languages still spoken. It is also important to point outthat the languages that are spoken in the world today are the product of evolutionand would not be recognised as the same languages if we were able to go back farenough in time. In other words, they have become totally differentiated from earlierlanguages. Rather than languages disappearing, in these cases we speak of languagetransformation (Hagège, 2000).

In this Review, however, the subject is the disappearance of languages in perhapsfar more dramatic terms. We want to put the emphasis on disappearance through

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Surely, just as the extinction of any animal species diminishes our world, so doesthe extinction of any language. Surely we linguists know, and the general publiccan sense, that any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely humancollective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism. Shouldwe mourn the loss of Eyak or Ubykh any less than the loss of the panda orCalifornian condor? (Krauss 1992)

extinction or replacement and try to identify the factors that have most influence onthe falling into disuse of a language. If we accept the metaphor of the death of alanguage, obviously these factors will be a direct threat to languages.

When one language is in contact with another which is expanding more powerfully,then it is subject to extinction depending on different factors such as history, politics,economics, culture and demography. It is therefore impossible to pick out a singledecisive cause that can be universally generalised, as each situation depends on itsown history and idiosyncrasies. It is easy to realise the enormous differences that existbetween languages in contact in stigmatised indigenous communities under pressurefrom powerful economies and between indigenous communities under pressure fromother indigenous groups or between communities with high historical and economicprestige under the influence of internationally dominant languages. Indeed, thecauses and effects vary enormously from one situation to another.

The last speakers

A language disappears when its last speakers stop speaking it without having passedit on to the younger generation. There are well known examples of these cases, suchas that of Marie Smith, the last speaker of Eyak, an Alaskan language mentioned byNettle & Romaine (2000), or the accounts gathered in our research of, for example, theMiwok language of the United States, whose only speaker is 94 years old, or that ofPopoluca, a language spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, whose youngest speaker is 74years old and has no following generation. What is more, in this case it is evenreported that “the older generation takes it for granted that the language is dying”.

Accounts of this sort are common. For example, Tol, in Honduras, is a languagewhich, like many other indigenous languages, is spoken exclusively by the old folk,“whose children have not learned it”; Macanese, on the island of Macao, “is onlyspoken by older people”; Palenque is a Creole language spoken in Colombia whoseinformant says it will “disappear within two or three generations because theyounger generation tends not to use it.”

The languages of the Australian Aborigines are also characterised by the very smallnumbers of speakers they have. The following account by a member of the Bardicommunity illustrates this situation:

The language is seriously threatened, as the last speakers are now reaching adult age(average life expectancy for the Aborigines in Australia is approximately 45 years, andmost speakers are already older than this). What’s more, the general feeling is thatspeaking this language does not provide access to jobs, so that the children have no longerlearned the language. (Bardi, Australia)

The gradual reduction in speakers also affects many unofficial languages in Europe.This is the case of Occitan, a language spoken in the south of France, whose disap-pearance is foreseen amongst other reasons due to the death of the speakers them-selves, who have not passed it on. The same happens with Aragonese (Spain): “this

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language is in danger due to the small number of speakers and the ageing of thepopulation, as well as the lack of official recognition and support.”

However, although the physical fact of the disappearance of the last speakersaffects individuals, the fact is that there have been direct causes that have led tothese speakers’ isolation. This is why the disappearance of the last speakers is notin itself considered the cause of death of a language, so much as the certification ofthis death.

The object of this section, therefore, is to determine the causes giving rise to thethreats facing languages. Analysis of specific situations confirms the idea that thereare many causes for the death of a language. Furthermore, the way the speakersthemselves perceive this question is significant and must be taken into account.

The information received has been analysed in detail, not only taking into accountthe factors referring strictly to the threats facing languages, but also with an eye tocauses referring to historical factors and the dangers facing the communities them-selves. In fact, many informants put forward the same arguments, both for thelanguages and for the communities, in trying to explain the dangers or threats theysee or suffer in their environment. We are convinced that in this way the informationpresented will be more complete.

Table 10 groups the causes of threats or dangers mentioned by the informants infive categories:

The Threats to Languages 227

Table 10. Causes of threats to languages

Causes (%)

POLITICAL FACTORS(Colonisation, linguistic policies, official status)

46

DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS(Reduced number of speakers, reduction and ageing of the population, mixed marriages, migrations for economic reasons orbecause of conflicts or deportations)

27

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FACTORS(Economic crises, economic exploitation, subordination, low socialprestige, acculturation)

16

PHYSICAL AGGRESSION(Natural disasters, epidemics, physical aggressions)

8

OTHERS 3

TOTAL 100

Political factors

A detailed description of the political causes that have affected languages would be atask beyond the scope of the present work. However, it should be remembered thatthe endangered situation of most of today’s languages is a direct consequence ofeconomic and social factors, for centuries governed mainly by political interests.

In all periods of history there has been displacement of populations as a result ofmilitary and political invasions, which has given rise to induced or directly imposedlinguistic changes.

The large movements associated with language shift, some of which have alreadybeen indicated by Fishman (1971), are as follows.

Vernacularisation of government, technical, educational and cultural activity inEurope. In other words, the establishment of the vernacular languages as a symbol ofstate unity during the construction of the European states. It can be said that thistendency towards one state/one language was accentuated after the FrenchRevolution and was the cause of the weakening of countless languages spoken inthese areas. Furthermore, this idea was subsequently widely accepted by states underconstruction during the post-colonial period.

The Anglicisation and Hispanicisation of the populations of North and South America,respectively. The colonisation of the American continent by European states broughtwith it, in addition to the extinction of languages through the physical extermination ofmany indigenous communities, the widespread Castilianisation of the region and laterthe Anglicisation and Frenchification of the regions of the north. The action of thecolonising states was different in each region and all sorts of particularities can be found.However, we can say that following the military domination of the population, apartfrom physical extermination the linguistic policy implemented was based on the impo-sition of the state language. There have of course been periods when states have not beenable to avoid using certain local languages with the object of achieving long-term goals,both economic and religious. This has even led to some local languages being spread bythe conquerors themselves. This is the case, for example, of Nahuatl and Quechua inCentral and South America respectively. We must not forget, however, that just liketoday, the spread of these indigenous languages led to the replacement of other locallanguages of less prestige. In North America, the process of conquest has been even moretroubled in demographic terms. The result is that the indigenous communities have beenrestricted to reserves, with hardly any chance of integration into the dominant society.

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When a language dies, the richness and fullness of human life suffers areduction. Languages are long in the making. They are repositories of humanhistory, carrying evidence of earlier environments and practices that a people

ABOUT THE DEATH OF LANGUAGES

The Threats to Languages 229

may no longer remember and of contacts between peoples who no longer liveanywhere near one another. The degree to which languages resemble each othercan reveal ancient separations or minglings of peoples. Languages bear witnessto the many ways in which human cognitive faculties have perceived the world,sorting and categorising human experience. Each language has unique lexicalcontent and unique ways of patterning that content grammatically.

Even languages that are considered well known – represented by wholelibraries of lore and literature, captured in extensive grammatical treatises – arenever fully plumbed. There is always more latitude for differences in the wayindividual speakers or groups of speakers put such a language into play thancan be recorded, and there is always scope for creative elaboration of linguisticresources beyond what happens to have been remembered or preserved. Littleknown languages – never treated in any studies, their poetic and traditional loreunfamiliar to anyone but their own speakers – are lost, when they die, tohumankind’s awareness of its own full range of expressive and elaborativeverbal capacities.

When a language dies, the community of people who once spoke it (if theyhave not all died as well) has lost the richest and most direct connection to theirancestral heritage. Not their identity, necessarily, since identity can be markedby other special features (distinctive clothing, music, foods, and the like). Lost tomemory and self-knowledge, rather, are such things as ability to perform thesacred songs and ancient chants whose rhythms and meanings are fullyexpressed only in the ancestral language; speech that embodies unique gram-matical and lexical categorisations reflecting distinctive cultural orientations;remembrance of the culturally specific names of places and figures important totheir history; deep familiarity with locally unique plants and their nutritionaland medicinal value. No language translates fully into another. Always thereare large or small expressive and conceptual losses when a people ceases tospeak its ancestral language and goes over to speaking another.

It can appear, sometimes, that a person chooses to abandon their ownlanguage for another. But choices are not always “free” choices, and under-lying such apparent choices are, in most cases, severe historic pressures:outside political control, economic subjugation, social discrimination. Whatis needed, fundamentally, is to alleviate the pressures. Around the worldtoday, peoples who recognise that their languages have almost slipped awayare making heroic efforts to save those languages, and with them theirrightful heritage.

Nancy C. DorianBryn Mawr College, United States of America

Other than this, the colonisation of Asian and Australian territories by the French andEnglish has also given varied results. By way of example, following withdrawal of theFrench from the region of Indochina, hardly any tradition of using the coloniallanguage remained, yet in Australia and other places the indigenous populations havebeen almost wiped out, so that the overturn in the demographic correlation preventsthe natural reproduction of their languages and seriously endangers their survival.

Within this section it is worth remembering the colonisation of the American andAfrican continents by other European states, such as Portugal and France, whichbroadly speaking followed the steps described above.

At the same time, it should be pointed out that direct action by states in economicmatters has also led to the rise of new languages. These are the languages arising incommunities of African slaves taken to America and of their descendants, who throughcontact amongst themselves and/or on the basis of European languages have producedmany Pidgin and Creole languages in large areas of the Caribbean and South America.

The adoption of English and French as internationally widespread elite languages,particularly in Asia and Africa should also be taken into account. This is a feature of post-colonial periods, when the majority local population has not had access to the languageof colonisation. The great majority of states have adopted the European language as theirofficial language. Although in many cases local languages have been made official, thefact is that the European languages are still used by the economic and prestige elites, asthey are used in administration and at school, wherever schools are generalised.

The forced Russification of populations under the control of the Soviet Union hasresulted in the deterioration and disappearance of many local languages. Similarly,displacement of Russian populations to republics that have recently acquiredpolitical autonomy also produces contacts between linguistic communities that aredemographically difficult to manage.

It should not be forgotten either that in many parts of Africa and Asia local languageshave been adopted for government, technical, educational and cultural activities. Inconsequence, the official languages of the colonial periods have been displaced.However, this does not prevent many other local languages being relegated.

230 Words and Worlds

The Linguasphere Observatory was created in 1983 as a transnational networkfor the study and promotion of multilingualism, developed since 1997 aroundits website www.linguasphere.org. The Observatory recognises the linguasphereas a dynamic continuum of spoken and written languages, developed andextended around the planet by humankind as its greatest and most collectivecreation, from the first palaeolithic speech-communities of hunter-gatherers to

ALTERNATIVES FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF LANGUAGES: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE LINGUASPHERE OBSERVATORY

The Threats to Languages 231

the electronic global society of today. This perspective on language is presentedin the Observatory’s 2-volume Linguasphere Register (David Dalby 2000), the firstcomprehensive classification of over 22,000 modern languages and dialects, andof over 71,000 linguistic and ethnic names. This new work of reference includesan introduction to the linguasphere and its classification, a bibliography, alexicon of new terms, statistical tables and a diagrammatic map.

Every living language deserves to be viewed and developed as an integral partof the linguasphere, as an active component in the dynamics of global communi-cation. Central to the working of the linguasphere are 12 megalanguages (theseare: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, German, Hindi-Urdu,Japanese, Malay-Indonesian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish; see Dalby 2000),each comprising over 100 million speakers. In contrast, more than one thousandendangered languages comprise less than 1000 speakers each, with infantlearners outnumbered by older speakers dying. Many of these fragile speech-communities – in the Americas, Eurasia, Africa and Australasia – were or still arehunter-gatherers, as were the earliest founders of the linguasphere. Between thetwo extremes are the majority of the world’s modern languages and dialects,whose future depends on global strategies of communication and education.

In today’s era of worldwide electronic communication, the maintenance ofhumankind’s diversity of expression requires the promotion of multilingualismin all speech-communities. The co-ordinated development of all living andevolving languages is more appropriate to an increasingly transnational societythan the protection of individual languages as isolated and static systems.

The Linguasphere Observatory has proposed the following four strategicpoints in the development of multilingual education in the 21st century, both inand out of school:

• access to two or more languages and cultures should be the right of each boyand each girl in every speech-community, including the language(s) of thatcommunity and at least one megalanguage;

• the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity should be presented to children asthe shared heritage of humankind: “each language belongs to all who learn it”;

• day-to-day life and culture in all speech-communities should be extensivelyvideo-recorded as a global educational project, and sub-titled in at least onemegalanguage;

• literary and dramatic creativity should be encouraged among the boys and girlsof every speech-community, together with skills of self-expression, translationand interpretation: “in the galaxy of languages, the voice of each person is a star”.

David DalbyLinguasphere Observatory, United Kingdom

In terms of the political causes generating a threat to languages, the first factor in theaction of states refers to the official status each one grants to the language spoken inits territory. Political factors manifest themselves from the expansions describedabove to those that materialise in the use of languages in all public services – that is, inthe administration itself, at school, in the health services and the media.

In other sections of this Review a more detailed study has been made of theseareas of use and their influence in the use of languages. Here, though, we want toprovide the information supplied by those affected with reference to actions of apolitical nature.

The lack of institutional support for a language can take many forms: from theexpress prohibition to use the language, which would be an extreme situation, to asubtler lack of support which can take the form, for example, of not complying withexisting legislation. The following is a list of the aspects mentioned by informants:absence of any form of official status or recognition of linguistic rights; express prohi-bition of using the language; absence of the language in the media, at school and inthe administration; and the absence of linguistic policies in favour of preserving thelinguistic heritage.

The lack of support in the sphere of education and even the express prohibition ofusing certain languages in schools is often mentioned in the informants’ observations.This is the case, for example, of the Yeyi language of Botswana, where according toour informant, “The government today prohibits the use of any language other thanEnglish or Tswana. The government banned the use of the languages that were taughtin schools before independence. Yeyi was banned and the people who developed itsspelling were imprisoned.”

The consequence of the absence of institutional support is that the languagebecomes excluded from public life. This exclusion also affects the media, a spherewhich is considered by some informants to be a source of danger for the language,either because the language itself is not present in them or because they are used tospread the dominant language.

Demographic factors

It seems obvious that languages with many speakers have more chances of survivingthan those with few speakers. In this respect, it is important to remember that 96% ofthe world’s population speaks only 4% of the world’s languages and that 55% oflanguages have fewer than 10,000 speakers. Furthermore, the eight most widespreadlanguages are spoken by more than 2,400 million people.

Nevertheless, the fact that a language has a large number of speakers is not enoughto ensure its survival. It is enough for some especially virulent action from outside tocome at some moment in history for the community to decide to adopt a newlanguage. Grinevald (1998) reports, for example, that Quechua, an indigenouslanguage spoken in the Andes Mountains by a population of from 8 to 12.5 millionpeople, “has no guarantee of survival in many areas, in spite of the projects under

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way for planning the corpus. There must be planning of the status to counter thepressure from Spanish in socio-economic incentives.”

The theory of ethno-linguistic vitality put forward in 1977 by Giles, Bourhis andTaylor proposes different variables of the language to be taken into account. Thefactors involved are related to the community’s economic, social and historical status,as well as the status of the language itself. It proposes taking into account demo-graphic variables referring to the distribution of speakers in the territory (the concen-tration and proportion of speakers of the language), absolute and relative numbers,mixed marriages and migrations (immigration and emigration). Finally, it proposestaking into account institutional support (or its absence) in official spheres (presenceof the language in the administrative services, schools, media) and unofficial spheres(areas of work, religion and culture).

Amongst the various external factors to be considered, here stress will be put on theanalysis of the demographic factors to be found in the societies with languages incontact. It is very significant that demographic factors, accounting for 27%, are thesecond group of factors most mentioned as a source of danger to the language.

Along with the absolute number of speakers of the language, their proportion withrespect to the total population occupying the region in which it is spoken also has adecisive influence. Indeed, if contact between languages with different economicstatuses comes about through demographic invasion, it will be much more difficultfor the members of the local community to maintain their language. Even when thelanguage enjoys official status, population figures could prevent this official statusfrom being effective. This is the case, for example, of Balkar, whose informant saysthat “the small percentage of Balkars in the republic (9.4%) does not allow full reali-sation of the language’s status as a state language”. However, if the contact occursexclusively amongst the elites, it is likely that the community will be able to maintainits own language, at least for a time.

But it is also true that small communities have managed to keep themselves safefrom economically and politically more aggressive cultures. These are languages thatare “viable but small”, in the words used by Kinkade (1991), which are spoken in“isolated communities or communities with a strong internal organisation, who areaware that their language is a distinctive feature that reinforces their identity”. We canoffer the account by the informant for Tanimuka, a language spoken in the Amazon bysome 600 people which seems to have great vitality, amongst other reasons thanks tothe fact that “there are strong settlements, though they are not big, which are quiteremote, in the forest. The danger lies in the fact that people are beginning to migrateand come down close to the white population of the Caquetá River.”

The effect of mixed marriages between linguistic communities of different socialstatus is also decisive. Though it may not be a direct or necessary consequence, it isextremely usual for the language that is transmitted to the new generation to be theone with the higher economic and social status, in detriment, of course, of the lessfavoured language. The example of Sorbian, a Slavonic language spoken in Germanyby about 50,000 people, could illustrate this: “Unfortunately, in many Sorbian-German

The Threats to Languages 233

marriages (and also in Sorbian-Sorbian marriages), the parents do not pass on theirmother tongue (Sorbian) to their children. Many parents think it is difficult for theirchildren to learn two languages from the start and they reject Sorbian because theythink German is the more important and useful language”. The factor that couldchange this tendency is the feeling of family or group identification, which could leadto its being passed on along with the more dominant language.

The drop in the birth rate and the aging of the population are further factors whoseeffect is alarming. These factors, along with the effects of mixed marriages mentionedabove amount to a total of 17% of the risk factors mentioned by our informants.

Migratory movements are another of the most influential demographic factors,whether caused by economic reasons or others. Although throughout history weknow of tragic forced displacements of whole populations (we need only rememberthe dark age of the slave trade between Africa and America), the nineteenth and espe-cially the twentieth centuries were characterised by the extreme cruelty and abun-dance of these displacements. The industrialisation of the nineteenth centuryproduced massive migration of whole populations to the main economic centres andthe twentieth century has witnessed mass migrations due partly to rapid urbandevelopment and partly to endless wars, armed conflicts, forced deportations anddisplacements for economic purposes, which have lead to the collapse of society inlarge parts of the world.

Indeed, the migration factor deserves a special mention, as it constantly arises asthe cause of the threat to languages. In fact, the phenomenon of migrations is a trans-verse issue, as they are caused for political and military reasons as well as foreconomic reasons. These migrations are mentioned as a chief cause of danger to thelanguage in 10% of the answers to the survey, although they do not necessarilyinvolve the loss of the language for the affected group. This can happen, though, andthis is why it is given special prominence in this chapter on risk factors and threats.

For example, it has been seen that the various migrations and displacements tocities are amongst the causes of the interruption of intergenerational transmissionusually pointed out by informants. In several cases these displacements are asso-ciated with a change in lifestyle. Although the behaviour of immigrant communitiesvaries according to their vitality, if the receiving community has a language of greaterprestige, the general trend seems to be towards the loss of the language in the thirdgeneration of immigrants.

Analysing the factors that lead populations to migrate is complicated. We needonly remember that the number of displacements as a result of armed conflicts,according to the Report for the year 2000 by UNHCR (United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees) was of 22.3 million people, of which 18.3% correspondto internal displacements and more than 52% to refugees. It is obvious that, apartfrom the human tragedy involved in such a situation, maintaining social and groupstructures will be very difficult and it is foreseeable that many will have their chancesof survival as linguistic communities seriously reduced.

234 Words and Worlds

The Threats to Languages 235

According to historical records, the many minority communities in Chinatoday were already living within the vast geographical territory of MainlandChina at least 3,000 years ago. However, due to contact and alliances betweenancient tribes and peoples, assimilation gradually occurred between thesenumerous languages to form smaller language groups. Only those minoritylanguages and cultures with fewer external contacts and which had formedfewer alliances with other tribes were able to preserve their languages morecompletely. Ever since China adopted a centralised system of government withthe Han as the main ethnic group, the sphere of influence of the Han Chinesepeople has continued to spread. The assimilation of many surrounding groupsled to a rapid increase in the Han population. Those groups which were notassimilated became the ethnic minorities of today, retaining their ownlanguages and cultures.

Viewed from both historical and present perspectives, the Han Chinese and the55 ethnic minorities of China are integral parts of the Chinese people. Thediversity and plurality of both the affiliations and typologies of their languagesand cultures are distinctive features of the ethnic minorities of China. Theirextensive representation in both human history and geographical territory fullyreflects man’s creativity, and represents an unalienable contribution to the richfabric of man’s linguistic and cultural heritage. The profound mysteries andcreative genius contained in the world’s languages and cultures cannot beadequately described by those in existence today, nor can they be comprehen-sively explained by current knowledge systems. With respect to Chinese minoritylanguages and cultures, many phonological, grammatical and lexical forms aswell as behavioural norms and value systems exist which are different from thoseof “more dominant” languages and cultures. These rich and diverse linguisticcategories and cultural forms tend to be prevalent in those non-material culturesbelonging to smaller ethnic groups which may be on the verge of extinction.

Due to a variety of reasons, the total numbers of minority languages andcultures, as well as their social functions, have decreased rapidly over the pastfew decades. This has led to some very evident negative effects: a gradualdecrease in human linguistic and cultural resources; a narrowing of the leben-sraum for such cultures; insurmountable conflicts and difficulties for thoseminority groups who have had to adapt to life in today’s global village; and aninevitable deterioration in the socio-cultural environment, the sustainabledevelopment of which depends on diversity.

Man needs to have a rational knowledge of himself, and must bear responsi-bility for his own history and future. Viewed from this perspective, the recording,

LANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN CHINA

236 Words and Worlds

preservation, and to a certain extent, revival of endangered languages constitutesan important task towards maintaining global diversity. This task is especiallyurgent for endangered languages which are fast approaching extinction andwhich do not have writing systems.

Over 100 different minority languages are spoken in China, including themany Austronesian languages of the Gaoshan people in Taiwan. The currentusage situation of the languages in China is as follows: 7 languages have 100 orfewer speakers; 15 have a hundred to a thousand speakers; 41 have one to tenthousand speakers; 34 have ten to a hundred thousand speakers; 17 have ahundred thousand to a million speakers; 10 have one to ten million speakers;while 2 languages are spoken by over 10 million people. Of the abovelanguages, those 20 or so minority languages with fewer than 1,000 speakers areon the verge of extinction.

The richness of a culture is contained within its language, which captures theessence of the traditional culture and experiences of its speakers. This is espe-cially so for unwritten languages or languages whose writing systems are rela-tively undeveloped. The knowledge and experiences of a community arecontained within their language, and depend on language for their transmissionfrom generation to generation. Therefore, the gradual disappearance of thelanguage of an ethnic community is an irreplaceable loss, and also represents aloss of our common human heritage. Linguistic and cultural diversity arenecessary for the richness and colour of our world.

From a purely linguistic perspective, the rich linguistic resources of China areextremely valuable for the development of linguistics in China. The richer thelinguistic resources, the greater is the potential for development. At present,many “small” language groups have still not been subjected to in-depth investi-gations. Although these languages have very few speakers, their academicvalue is high. Many have retained older features found in languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Altaic language phyla, the majority of which are found in China.Therefore, the recording and preservation of data from languages on the vergeof extinction are important and urgent tasks in the development of linguistics inChina, and are also fundamental to minority language research. The completionof these tasks can also promote the development of research in descriptivelinguistics, historical comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, and evenancient writing systems. This kind of research is also helpful in the in-depthstudy of historical relationships between different ethnic groups in China, inorder to improve our understanding of the complexity of our “diverse yetunited” country. This will enable better implementation of work among theminorities, and will also be extremely beneficial to the promotion and devel-opment of unity and progress among the different ethnic groups of China.

See Map 13 showing language diversity in China.

Economic and social causes

Researchers stress the importance of economic and social factors for people whospeak a language that is in contact with that of an economically and socially morepowerful community.

Amongst the economic causes can be included changes in economic systems,economic crises, poverty, economic subordination, indebtedness of the population,loss of land ownership, land shortage, the drop in living standards, economicexploitation of the local community and unemployment. In the framework of ourresearch, it is worth mentioning that 16% of answers regarding the causes of dangerare based on situations of this type. We come across striking ideas such as the one thatassociates certain ways of life with certain languages, so that some communities areforced to adopt a new language if they hope to become integrated into more advanta-geous situations. It is significant that terms like modernity, progress or economicdevelopment are associated with dominant languages and, on the other hand, certainlanguages and cultures are linked to terms such as “traditional”, “rural”, “ethnic” or“group”, which carry negative associations.

We could single out the example of Jaru, an Australian language spoken by about200 people, who have suffered the seizure of their land and massacres and who have

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Language is an important distinguishing feature of every ethnic group inChina, and every minority has a special affinity for their own language andwriting. The disappearance of “weak” languages has already aroused the concernof minority communities, who have appealed to the government for preservationand salvage of their languages. Investigation and research of “weak” languagescan therefore fulfil their expectations to a certain extent, and are also in accordancewith the language policies and programmes of the government.

The speakers of endangered languages are deeply dependent on their mothertongues for the continuous creation and re-creation of cultural symbols. Onlythrough their own languages can they discover a vigorous subjectivity,promoting social interaction, communication, and sustainable development.Through the identification and investigation of minority languages which arebased on a reliable foundations, the relevant departments concerned withethnic affairs, education, and culture can formulate developmental plans andimplementation strategies for different areas.

Sun Hongkai & Huang XingAcademic Society for the Minority Languages of China & Institute of

Nationality Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China

no chance of working without emigrating out of their territory, or of Sindhi, whosespeakers “are refused jobs and other opportunities because of their language”.

When a language is seen by its speakers as obsolete and of no use for socialimprovement, feelings of inferiority surface. Furthermore, if an economic eliteemerges within the community that imitates the outsiders’ behaviour, the need forchange is even more strongly felt. All of this leads a community to change its culturein favour of a foreign one that is more influential and more powerful. These arephenomena of acculturation.

Usually, these processes tend to go hand in hand with a decline in rural life, theabandonment of traditional activities and the adoption of new habits. As a result,there is a loss of prestige of the language that can lead directly to its death. In fact, it isnot just a loss of prestige for the language, but a loss of prestige for the wholecommunity and its culture, so that all the community’s local expressions will grad-ually be relegated to restricted spheres, and with them, particularly, the languageitself. All of this will influence the decision not to pass it on to their descendants. Theinterruption of transmission is a direct cause of the death of languages, but itself is theresult of two factors we are analysing in this section.

The process of acculturation tends to go through three stages:

(1) It begins with the political, economic or social pressure exerted by people whospeak the dominant language and can be either explicit and coercive or elseunderlie subtler pressures. Gradually it takes the form of hints of socio-culturalchanges which include modernisation, land development, modernisation of theeducational system, the influence of other cultures, the influence of religion, thelack of cultural autonomy, assimilation or loss of cultural identity, subordination,loss of prestige and social discrimination, marginalisation and social degra-dation, as well as degradation of traditional living conditions.

(2) The result is a period of bilingualism, which forms the second stage of theprocess. In principle, people acquire the new language without losing compe-tence in their original language. However, this bilingualism begins to decline asthe original language gives way in the more prestigious spheres of use, the onesthat suggest social or economic improvement. Unequal bilingualism develops,characterised by the gradual shift in the spheres in which language is used, untilit is totally assimilated. Accounts of these situations reflect over and over againthat speakers of minority languages constantly feel the pressure of the otherlanguage, first through the public spheres (school, media and governmentservices), and then in the private sphere of family relations.

The Yerava language, spoken in India, “is being replaced by more widespreadlanguages like Kodagu and Kannada. The community were once slaves and mostof them now work in forestry or in coffee plantations. It is under threat because itis not seen as suitable for work. It is a ‘language for the home, only used in thisdomain or field’”.

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(3) When identification with the new language becomes widespread in the youngergenerations and the original language is no longer necessary because it does notrespond to the new needs and can even be a cause of stigmatisation, the thirdstage of the process is complete. This sequence of events tends to be accompaniedby a feeling of shame over the use of their old language on the part both ofparents and children.

The informants frequently mentioned that a dangerous situation arises throughthe existence of bilingualism. In fact, the supposedly monolingual state modelspread by the colonial countries, as well as the generalisation of the monolingualschool as a quality educational model, have both struck deep. However, manycommunities are bilingual or plurilingual by cultural tradition, and if this featureis properly managed it can become a factor allowing the survival of languageswithout loss of communicating capacity on the part of the communities.

Physical aggression

It has been possible to confirm that in addition to the existence of situations ofextreme injustice affecting languages, these languages are also affected by theaggression to which the actual linguistic communities are subjected. The actualspeakers of the communities have mentioned physical aggressions as factors threat-ening their language in 8% of cases.

Physical causes are often responsible for the drastic disappearance of the speakersas a group. These are the most dramatic situations, on which all sorts of reflectionscan be made, as examples are available affecting just about every part of the world.They can be causes we could call natural, such as seismic movements, floods andprolonged drought. Examples of this are the collapse of Mount Barba-Bassari in Togo,which according to our informant wiped out a large part of the population of theBassar community, the great famine in Ireland in 1848, and the prolonged drought inseveral African countries during the twentieth century.

But as well as natural disasters, avoidable factors such as the destruction of thehabitat by economically more powerful foreign communities or companies, andothers, pose a serious threat. Understandably, the effects of these aggressions canhardly be classed as natural. We must remember that one of the most important causesof the drastic reduction in the indigenous population during the Spanish colonisationof America was death from epidemics of diseases which the colonisers introduced intoregions where they were unknown. We are also familiar with external aggressions ofthis type in Africa, such as the smallpox epidemic of 1713, which affected the Namacommunity in South Africa. Today, the effects of illnesses that can be easily eradicatedin the West, such as tuberculosis, or are at least relatively easy to control, such as AIDS,pose an unprecedented physical threat in several parts of Africa and Asia.

The physical integrity of communities is also affected by the impoverishment,social disintegration and marginalisation arising when these groups are forciblydisplaced due to economic causes such as migrations from the country to the city,

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deforestation, new forms of slavery through the hiring of cheap labour, prostitution,etc., or from political causes such as deportations and border conflicts.

Direct action and aggression against people have dramatically taken place inhistory and still take place today. Examples of important aggressions are thosementioned, for example, by Lastra (2000) in reference to the murder of natives in ElSalvador in 1932, where the death of 25,000 natives meant the disappearance of all thespeakers of Lenca and of Cacaopera and the almost complete extinction of Pipil.About this event, the informant on Cacaopera for our research adds that “as a resultof this massacre, most cultural values, including the language, were cast into oblivionin order to safeguard the natives’ lives”. There are many accounts of aggressions,such as those carried out by the rubber tapping companies in the Amazon, on whichthe informant for Uitot tells us that “the Uitotos, as well as other ethnic groups of theColombian Amazon region, suffered the atrocities perpetrated by logging companiesat the beginning of the twentieth century. Many died, others fled from their originalhomeland. One large group of Uitotos was taken to Peru as forced labour”.

In short, from the figures gathered we can estimate that a prime danger for thelanguages of communities today is based on physical aggression to people in at least8% of the communities analysed.

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There are over one hundred languages and dialects in Nepal. Ethnologue (Grimes,2000) lists 125 languages including one Nepali sign language). The PopulationCensus of Nepal 2001 reported 92 languages spoken in Nepal as mother tongues.In addition to these, some languages were lumped together as ‘unidentified’.These languages belong to four families such as Indo-European spoken by79.1%, Sino-Tibetan spoken by 18.4%, Austro-Asiatic by 0.2%, Dravidian by 0.1%and unidentified 2.2%. The UNESCO Language Survey Report for Nepal hascounted only 60 languages spoken in Nepal. Out of these 11 are Indo-Aryan, 46are Tibeto-Burman, 1 Dravidian, 1 Austro-Asiatic and 1 Kusunda (Toba, et al.,2002). According to the census of 2001 sixteen languages have more than 100,000speakers. These are Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Bajjika, Hindi,Urdu, and Rabamshi of the Indo-Aryan group of Indo-European family andTamang, Newari, Magar. Bantawa, Limbu, Gurung and Sherpa of the Tibeto-Burman family. In addition to these, there are other Indo-Aryan languages suchas Danuwar, Darai, Bote, Majhi, Kumale and Angika, which are spoken by asmall number of people in Nepal. Major languages of India like Hindi and Urduare used by educated elites in Nepal Terai. In everyday inter-personal communi-cation they use Nepali and other Indo-Aryan languages of their locality. Othermajor languages of India, such as Bengali, Marwadi, Punjabi, Oriya, Sindhi,

LANGUAGES OF NEPAL

The Threats to Languages 241

Hariyanwi, Magahi and Assamese are spoken by a small number of people inNepal. Some speakers of Sanskrit and English languages are also reported.

A large number of languages spoken in Nepal belong to Tibeto-Burmangroup of the Sino-Tibetan family. The languages such as Humli Tamang, Khan,Karmarong, Mugali, Dolpo, Rengpungmo, Tichurong, Lopa, Nar-Phu, Kag,Gyasundo, Sum or Sung, Nubri, Namsrung or Larke, Prok, Sama, KutangBhote, Kyorung, Hyolmo, Jirel, Kagate, Lhomi, Naba, Walung, Halung, Kachadand Lamtang are closer to Tibetan and are spoken by different small groups inthe Himalayan region (Bradley, 1997). Some of them are considered dialects ofTibetan. There are some emigrant speakers of Lhasa Tibetan who are alsobilingual in Nepali. Various languages of the central hill region fall under theTamang-Gurung-Thakali sub-group such as Thakali, Chantel, Managwa, Ghale,Kaike and Dura.

Other Tibeto-Burman languages of the southern slopes of the Himalayas aredivided into three sub-groups. (a) The West Himalayish languages such asByangsi, Chaudangsi, Darmiya, Jangali or Rawat and Rankas are spoken in thewestern border area of Nepal. Thami, and Bhramu of this sub-group are spokenin the west and east of the Kathmandu valley respectively. (b) The CentralHimalayish languages like Newar, Pahari, Chepang, Bhujel, Kham, Raute andRaji are spoken in the western and central hills of Nepal. (c) The EasternHimalayish languages are also known as Kiranti languages. They are again clas-sified into three sub-groups: Central Kiranti such as Bantawa, Puma, Chamling,Meohang, Sam, Kulung, Chukwa, Pohing, Nachhering, Dimali, Sangpang,Dungmali, Khesang, Waling; Eastern Kiranti such as Athapahare, Belhare,Chhiling, Chhulung, Chintang, Mugali, Pangduwali, Limbu, Yakkha; andWestern Kiranti such as Yamphe, Yamphu, Umbule, Jerung, Thulung, Limkhim,Bahing, Sunwar, Surel, Khaling, Dumi, Koi, Hayu and Tillung. Dhimal andMeche languages, spoken in the eastern Terai and Lepcha in the eastern hills arealso Tibeto-Burman languages. In addition to these, there are also small numberof people speaking various major Tibeto-Burman Languages of different neigh-bouring countries. Santhali, Munda and Khadiya are the languages of Mundagroup of the Austro-Asiatic family and Dhangar/Jhangar and Kisan are thelanguages of Dravidian family spoken in the eastern Terai. Nepali, Maithili,Newari, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Hindi and Rajbamshi languages with their writtentraditions use the Devanagari script for writing and publications. Tibetan,Limbu and Lepcha also have their own scripts. Arabic script is used to writeUrdu language. Various unwritten languages have adapted Devanagari scriptfor writing and publication.

Nepali is the official language used in administration, communication andeducation, and is spoken by 48.60% of the total population as their mother

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tongue and by others as their second language. Linguistic studies of some of thelanguages have been undertaken and the major languages are also used in radiobroadcasts and print media. Sanskrit and Tibetan occupy important positions aslanguages of the Hindu and Buddhist religions. Nepali Sign Language has beendeveloped recently for the use of deaf people, and is reported for the first time inthe national census of 2001 as well.

Some of the languages spoken by a small number of people are alreadyextinct and some other languages are on the verge of extinction. Many of themare not well described. A comparative study of Nepalese census figures for thelast five decades (1954–2001) show a gradual decrease in the number of speakersand many of the languages have already disappeared.

It has already been reported that some languages of Nepal are extinct ornearly extinct. Many of the languages spoken by less than 10,000 are threatenedor endangered. They are some Indo-Aryan languages like Kumal and Bote, andmany Tibeto-Burman languages like Khaling, Thakali, Chantel, Dumi, Jirel,Umbule, Yolmo, Nachiring, Dura, Meche, Pahari, Lapche, Bahing, Koyu, Raji,Hayu, Byangshi, Yamphu, Ghale, Chiling, Lohrung, Mewahang, Kaike, Raute,Baram, Tilung, Jerung, Dungmali, Linkhim, Koche, Sam, Kagate and Chintang.An unclassified language called Kusunda is also nearing extinction.

There are several reasons for language endangerment and extinction.Speakers of various languages have been using Nepali as a contact language formore than five hundred years. The space and domain of the use of Nepali havebeen constantly extending. As a language of basic literacy, education, adminis-tration and everyday communication, people of various linguistic backgroundshave been using Nepali as their second language and many of them have shiftedto Nepali. Similarly, many of the linguistic groups without written traditions oftheir own, have learnt to read and write the Nepali language. Opportunities forlivelihood, better jobs and social integration have motivated a shift to Nepali.Urbanisation, migration or change of habitat was another reason of languageloss. Speakers of various languages shifted to Nepali or other major languagesafter they migrated to new places with a new linguistic and cultural envi-ronment. The school children use the Nepali language as a medium ofeducation and socialisation in early childhood and children in some linguisticcommunities are not carrying the mother tongues of their parents. Lack ofawareness for language maintenance in some linguistic communities is anothercause of language loss.

Thus there are several factors for language endangerment and death.Language shift, growth of education in Nepali and English mediums, extensionof literacy in Nepali, wider contacts and constant use of Nepali and other majorlanguages in communication media, assimilation of small groups in dominant

In view of all this, it is surprising to find that an enormous number of languages arestill spoken in spite of centuries and even millennia of aggressive contact with otherlanguages. One might remember the conscious tenacity of communities like theindigenous North Americans, relegated to isolated reserves in the midst of the mostpowerful community in the world; the natives of the Amazon, faced by physical andcultural aggression on an inhuman scale; the Australian Aborigines, relegated to therank of second-class citizens; or communities that hold out against linguistic changein contact with expanding languages like English, French or Spanish, such as theCeltic languages (Breton, Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Cornish), spoken in regionsunder Anglophone or Francophone domination. The tenacity and persistence of thesecommunities in the face of outside aggression is admirable.

Nevertheless, as Crystal (2000) says, the present situation of danger is one withoutprecedent: “The world has never been so populated, globalisation processes havenever been so omnipresent and never before has English had so much influence”, sothat the need to take corrective measures on a large scale seems obvious.

The Threats to Languages 243

The public at large greatly underestimates the “value” of the little languagesscattered here, there and everywhere around the globe. How could theirextinction make much difference to their own speakers, the public asks, muchless to humanity as a whole? Those languages are so tiny and so ineffective in

WHAT DO YOU LOSE WHEN YOU LOSE YOUR LANGUAGE?

linguistic groups, migration and change of habitat, urbanisation, naturalcalamities and diseases have caused several languages to be put on the verge ofextinction and into an endangered situation.

ReferencesBradley, David (1997) “Tibeto-Burman Languages and Classification”, Pacific

Linguistics, pp. 1–72.Grimes, Barbara (2000) Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas, Texas: SIL.Toba, S. et al. (2002) UNESCO Language Survey Report: Nepal. Kathmandu:

UNESCO.Yadava, Yogendra (2003) “Language”, in Population Monograph of Nepal, Chapter

4, Kathmandu: Central Bureau of Statistics.

Chura Mani BandhuTribhuvan University, Nepal

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accessing the major material rewards of the modern world, that what possibledifference could it make to anyone whether they live or die? On the other hand,some language-oriented scholars and activists commit the opposite error andtry to substitute language determinism for language dismissal. The loss of eventhe tiniest language is considered a world-shattering cataclysm, not only for itserstwhile speech-community but for humanity at large, which will remain (theyclaim) forever devastated as a result of that loss. However, exaggeration is notnecessary to make the point: linguicide, like genocide is a major human tragedy.It is an evil that diminishes us all and that civilised and ethically sensitisedpeoples must struggle to overcome, whether it occurs in their vicinity or halfway around the world.

The indexical relationship between a language and its cultureIn order to answer the question posed in the title to these remarks, we must firstconsider how a language is related to culture. It is the business of cultures to be“different”. This self-declared “difference” is experienced by the members of aculture as uniqueness and as authenticity. Each language is indexically related(“calibrated”, if you like) to the specifically characteristic objects, values,concerns, kinship relations, interpersonal roles (rights and obligations) andenvironmental features (natural resources, flora and fauna) that its speakersrecognise and that make up their traditionally associated cultural distinc-tiveness. The seamless fit between a language and its associated daily culture,its unique and authentic world, is one of the characteristics of life that get lostwhen a culture loses its language. Its erstwhile speakers become a humanaggregate that is no longer quite sure exactly what terms to use. An entire popu-lation thrust into a second language is an insecure population for an entiregeneration or more. The “goodness of fit” that previously existed betweenthought, language and culture is gone and remains absent until the replacementlanguage and the modified culture have themselves co-existed and co-performed long enough and intimately enough in the bereft population to fittogether effortlessly and intergenerationally on their own.

So what do you lose when you (the collective “you”) lose your language?You lose the ease of navigational certainty in daily life, both personally andcollectively. Many customary and needed terms, phrases and speech events areno longer operational and many of those that remain feel somewhat strangeand inappropriate in their new settings and with a new language-context inwhich to be implemented. New words and phrases ultimately replace the oldones, but in doing so, the old speech events are no longer what they are. Theyare only approximations of their former selves, their exact meanings and evenconsensual understandings are uncertain and unshared. When “things fallapart”, twilight zones replace previous fine-grained certainties until new

The Threats to Languages 245

shared congruencies arise. Even then, the original home is never rebuilt orreoccupied. In a very fundamental sense, one never again returns to theoriginal home, with all of its historically meaningful, culturally familiar andsocietally distinctive contexts.

Language and culture are symbolically relatedLanguage is the major symbol system of the human species. As such, it is onlynatural that a given language should symbolise the particular speechcommunity with which it has long been intimately associated. We recognise init that the community’s very own intelligence, its humour, its propensity formusicality, its exactness and methodicalness, its originality, sobriety andhonesty, its distinctiveness and its self-recognition. In our own language wesee reflected our history, our major literary creations, our heroes and martyrs,our generations upon generation of mothers and fathers and assorted kinfolk(real or putative), the voices of the past and the promises of the future. Ourminds are culturally fashioned so as to discern attributes in our language ofeverything that it is theirs. And when we lose our language we lose an entireworld of seemingly automatic and immediate symbolic associations with thehistory and attainments of our own slice of humanity; in other words our ownself-concept becomes altered thereby. The turns of phrase that were part andparcel of the patrimony inherited from gifted kinfolk, historical events,triumphs of the mind, or ascents to God per se, exist no more, and it will takeuntold time for a successor language to develop new ones that are as rich insymbolic value for anywhere near as many members of the speechcommunity. The shared symbols associated with a language are the sharedsinews of community and of group identity. That is part of what you losewhen you lose your language.

To a very large extent the language is the cultureWe make a huge mistake when we assume that language and culture are asseparate as the two words are. Most of culture is so thoroughly interpenetratedby its traditionally associated language that the culture without that languagewould not be, could not be, “the same”. The body of law, the prayers and cere-monies, the songs, the proverbs, the folktales, the education, the greetings, theblessings, the curses, the jokes, the literature…all of these are in and through agiven language (and only in that language) for a given culture.

Of course all of these language-dependent desiderata can be translated,after a fashion, but a translated culture is not the same at all as the original. Itis like “kissing one’s beloved through a veil”: it does not have the same feel,the same aroma, the same reality. No culture has ever been fully or success-fully translated, because languages are not simply interchangeble parts. The

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continuity of group identity labels is a facade that masks huge underlyingdifferences in every aspect of daily life when the language traditionally asso-ciated with that label is lost and replaced by another language. Life goes on,but its ethos changes. Its access to its own roots is blocked. Its claim to naturalauthenticity is forfeited for generations to come, while overcoming a gener-ation gap preoccupies an entire collectivity. A new pattern of communica-tional ease, continuity in identity and cultural authenticity will ultimatelyarise, but things will never again be as they were before the rupture occurredor before “things fell apart”. That is what is lost when a culture loses itslanguage – it loses a great part of itself.

ConclusionsThroughout human history thousands of languages have been lost. Most ofthese languages hace died unmourned because they (their speakers and theircultures) were exterminated and there was no one left to mourn them. Manydied because they were so grievously dislocated by competitors, conquerors,missionaries and tourists. But “survival of the fittest” is, after all, a law of thejungle. Many small languages cannot remain in good health if left to their owndevices in today’s globalisation process. Yet their cultures have other and farmore humane virtues that do Wallmart or Coca Cola. Therefore, we must makethe world safe for the small languages too, by helping them and treasuringthem, for our own sake (if not for theirs). A world that is safe only for a few giantlanguages is not even a “zero-sum game” with some winners and some losers. Itis a “lose-game” (a game in which all players lose), because a culturallydenuded human environment is also an environment in which all other lifeforms become imperiled. That is why we all lose when “other people’slanguages” are lost. We must call a halt to linguicide, anywhere in the world,because it is really a form of suicide for us all. Some of the actual and some of thepotential beauty in our own lives is what we lose when a language is lostanywhere in the world. Knowing that, it is doubly cruel and senseless for us topermit such losses to go on. They need and deserve our sympathy, our under-standing and our help.

Joshua A. FishmanYeshiva University and Stanford University, USA

The Threats to Languages 247

The threats to languages: recommendations

Due to the many factors threatening the universal linguistic heritage, with a directeffect on the decline and death of many languages and cultures,

• It is recommended that an international programme be prepared that isdynamic and open to all linguistic communities and to the world civilsociety, with the collaboration of specialised Non GovernmentalOrganisations. The chief purpose of this programme, independently of anygovernment, political ideology, economic interest or religious creed, wouldbe to research, monitor and denounce situations posing a threat tolanguages. It could make specific regular reviews to alert world publicopinion and act as proxy before officials of the public and private institutionsinvolved. Furthermore, it could initiate specific actions to further the interna-tional prestige, use and knowledge of minority or endangered languages.

• Any kind of pressure on differentiated linguistic communities to abandontheir language or culture in favour of the exclusive use of the officiallanguage(s) must be avoided. In this respect, the authorities should facilitatethe use of the languages spoken in their territory in every sphere of socialactivity pertaining to them – that is, in relations with the administration, inteaching, in the media and in political life.

• It is important to plan for the use of all languages in their area in the socialspheres relevant to their administration, with the object of preserving themand developing them, so long, of course, as the wishes and the decisions ofthe linguistic communities involved are respected.

• Suitable measures must be urgently taken to prevent large-scale populationmovements that threaten the future of the language of the emigrants as wellas that of the locals in the target area. In those cases where these populationmovements are unavoidable or have already taken place, measures must betaken to preserve the languages and avoid their substitution.

• States with internationally established languages that plan to spread under-standing of them should be urged to respect the languages of those to whomthey intend to teach a new one. The large institutions that promote interna-tional development of English, French, Spanish or any other languageshould also finance the development of endangered languages and facil-itate world-wide study of all the languages spoken in their states, not justthe official language.

• In addition, it is essential to act immediately to try and preserve languagesthat have very few speakers, always, of course, in coordination with the localauthorities and the affected linguistic communities. An effort should bemade to gather all the documentation necessary and provide every possible

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means, always, of course, respecting the decisions of individuals, so that thelanguage is passed on by the last speakers to the younger generation in thecommunity or the area. In these situations it would also be necessary to poolall the efforts being made in different parts of the planet and get the affectedcommunities, scientists, universities and institutions involved in the issue toplan the recovery of these languages, backed by the financial and humanresources needed to carry this out.

• Furthermore, any discrimination of linguistic communities on political,social, economic, cultural, religious or any other grounds must be prevented.Special attention must be paid to the rejection of discrimination on the basisthat the language has not reached the right level of development, moderni-sation or codification, and,

• The proclamation and publication by all the governments of the world of acharter recognising linguistic rights, recognising that these form part ofhuman rights and defending their protection all over the planet. This shouldbe an international convention with financial and juridical resources to guar-antee its effective implementation.

Chapter 12

The Future of Languages

This chapter synthesises the main findings of the previous chapters and includessome thoughts concerning the future of the languages

1. Main findings and recommendations

1.1. Introduction

The original idea behind this Review was to get a better understanding of the situ-ation of the languages of the world and to try to provide guidelines for action for thepreservation of linguistic diversity. In this final section we shall be going back overthe alternatives proposed as regards the fundamental spheres for action in favour oflanguage use, such as education, writing and the media. At the same time, it includescertain reflections on public administration, non-governmental organisations andlinguists, agents considered to be the most influential in the process of preservinglinguistic diversity. Prior to that, we recapitulate certain general principles thatshould be considered before any language planning intervention. Broadly speaking,the global trend towards linguistic uniformity is confirmed and affects languageswith very few speakers as well as the languages of larger groups. However, onenotices an incipient reaction on the part of communities, especially in South Americabut also in other parts of the world. This takes multiple forms, from the attempt torecover and revitalise languages, to resistance to all sorts of pressure in the case ofcommunities whose language is still transmitted. For this reason, this Review cannotdetach itself from the genuine threat of death that languages face or ignore the effortsof communities to resist this threat. The information received shows many examplesof creativity in this struggle and its diffusion could be of great help to many commu-nities, both by drawing attention to them and by publicising models that could beapplied in other societies.

Even if universals cannot be drawn from the dynamics of languages, commonphenomena can be detected in the most diverse situations, such as the function ofbelonging and identity that language fulfils in most communities. And nevertheless,as a general principle, it is essential to understand the dynamics of languages as aglobal and multi-factorial phenomenon, so that actions aimed at revitalising them arenot limited to single areas, such as for example education, or exclusively to isolated

249

communities. On the contrary, from the general principle we deduce that preser-vation of linguistic diversity is a job for everybody, and not something affecting onlythose communities whose language is endangered.

Another observation of a general nature is that regardless of the specific circum-stances of each community, a negative linguistic attitude is a decisive factor inlanguage shift. For this reason, before taking specific steps towards recovery or revi-talisation, we need to provide the information necessary to allow a change of attitude,which must not, of course, be limited to language. In some cases, for example, we seethat a value which is in principle positive, like the link established through languagewith one’s ancestors and one’s cultural values, acts as a double-edged sword whenthese values are felt to be a limitation of people’s aims. In this sense, the association ofcertain languages with modernity, civilisation or progress can have devastatingeffects in communities subjected to socio-economic changes of all sorts, such astourism, migration or industrialisation.

Actions in favour of a language generally have positive effects on its development,but in many cases these actions are not enough or do not have the desired effects.This can be attributed in part to the restricted spheres in which intervention is taken,but especially to the effect of alienation as a result of certain actions that look onlanguage as an additional community feature rather than as something intrinsic tothem. For example, in some communities it has been detected that the fact that alanguage is protected leads members of the community to neglect their responsibil-ities. It has also been detected that many communities see intervention in favour of alanguage as an instrument aimed at obtaining certain ends. Perhaps the mostobvious example is that of the literacy campaigns carried out as a transition phase toacquisition of the official language.

The information obtained shows that the diversity of aims of the different planningagents often contributes to this ‘objectification’ of the language and therefore, as ageneral recommendation, it is important to stress the need to establish clear objec-tives, which must be those of the communities involved, who are, after all, the bearersof the language. Furthermore, planning must not look on language as an isolatedobject, but in relation to the history, the culture and, in short, the life of communitiesand their members.

One of the basic objectives of language planning must be to further cooperationand reciprocity, and to achieve this it is also necessary for those who no longer speakthe language and for members of other communities to take part, together with thelinguistic community itself. Language is a leading instrument of integration andidentification in communities of all sorts, to the extent that in many cases this is thechief motivation for acquiring a language. The fact that the preservation of alanguage is not something affecting only the communities involved suggests that itwould be a good idea to work in this direction to ensure equal distribution of respon-sibilities and full participation in the preservation of linguistic diversity, which is ajob for everyone. This is not incompatible with the fact that all the decisions or effortsthat go towards the recovery and revitalising of a language should come from the

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communities involved, or should at least have their approval, since they are the chiefagents of this work.

In addition to the general aspects, there is another question that should be empha-sised. The information analysed shows, openly or implicitly, a series of recurrentdichotomies, such as language/dialect, monolingual school/bilingual school, orallanguage/written language, rural/urban, traditional/modern, official/not official,minority/majority. These dichotomies, which in many cases add to the alienation ofthe speakers and contribute to the perpetuation of conflicts insofar as they are oftenmerely the reflection of the us/others confrontation, interrupt the continuous naturethat languages and communities tend to have and oversimplify situations which canonly be resolved if we take into account their complexity. For example, in some cases,rejection of the written form of a language or of its use in the media responds more toa fear of acculturation than of its actual use, while the often mentioned rejection byparents of the use of the local language in teaching responds to fear of marginalisationrather than to rejection of the language itself.

Throughout the Review, in the relevant chapters, alternatives to these dichotomieshave been suggested in the different spheres of intervention.

As regards global treatment of linguistic diversity, some fundamental general prin-ciples are listed here.

The Future of Languages 251

The trend to linguistic uniformity affects humanity as a whole and not just theindividuals and communities whose languages are disappearing.

The preservation of linguistic diversity is everyone’s responsibility.

The preservation of linguistic diversity calls for respect for all languages andtheir speakers.

The recovery and revitalisation of endangered languages is a process that takesin all aspects of the life of a community, including its relations with othercommunities, be these neighbouring or otherwise.

The recovery and revitalisation of endangered languages involves doing awaywith the hierarchisation of languages, especially in those spheres that are vitalfor communities.

The establishment of clear objectives and coordinated action are basic in anyprocess of recovery and revitalisation of endangered languages.

The recovery and revitalisation of languages cannot depend solely on actions inisolated spheres, such as education, for example.

1.2. Education

Education is a fundamental sphere of action for the recovery and revitalisation oflanguages, and something those communities concerned with recovering theirlanguages insist on. Schools, as well as being an instrument for spreading knowledgeand values, are the ideal medium for correcting negative linguistic attitudes andgiving the language its rightful value. As is mentioned in many of the cases analysed,the presence and use of a language in schools is a factor of prestige, and its absenceconsequently contributes to interrupting its intergenerational transmission.

The community must play a part in preparing the curriculum and in deciding theknowledge and values to be transmitted, especially because the use in teaching oflanguages in decline must not take place in isolation if these are to be recovered.

The first urgent measure is that no school should prohibit the spontaneous use ofthe students’ mother tongue. Even so, action in this area is neither exclusive nor suffi-cient, and it is therefore essential that teaching activities should be coordinated withother aspects of the life of the community. The necessary connection with other areasmust take place in the transmission of the community’s cultural heritage.Furthermore, this connection must take place at different levels. For one thing, whenthe use of the language is limited to primary education, its absence at higher levels, aswell as being a disadvantage to pupils who have studied in their own language,strengthens the notion that the language is not suitable for high functions. Foranother, use of a language in the school curriculum should be extended to all subjects,so that the study of history, mathematics, literature or any other subject can be linkedto the language and the community. The community must play a part in ensuring thatthe teaching syllabus is adapted to each context.

In addition to including the language in a suitable school syllabus, it is a good thing ifmaterials are created that allow acquisition as a second language of those languagesforming part of the community’s historical heritage, whether through bonds of neigh-bourhood or because they form part of the same state. Obviously, the preparation ofthese materials should also take into account as users those members of the communityto whom the language has not been transmitted and who wish to recover it.

One essential aspect of education is teacher training. In several cases, teachers’linguistic prejudices were mentioned. These prejudices are passed on to pupils.Teacher training must therefore include, in addition to knowledge of the language, apositive attitude towards it.

In some places, the development of bilingual teaching programmes has created adichotomy between bilingual schools and monolingual schools which is seen as adivisive factor in the community and in some cases is seen as a project aimed only atthe indigenous communities, thus strengthening the idea that monolingualism is aprivilege or something natural, while bilingualism requires special treatment.

However, nothing could be clearer than the obsolescence of monolingual schoolsand the need to encourage bilingual and multilingual educational models that cancater for the demands of training in different linguistic and cultural contexts. There

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is an urgent need to develop imaginative approaches aimed specifically at multi-lingual education for very small communities, for those that are traditionallybilingual or multilingual, or for areas of recent immigration, as well as for mono-lingual groups, whether or not their language is dominant, who also need to benefitfrom the communicative, cognitive and democratic advantages that come from amultilingual education.

Finally, returning to the initial subject, although schools are the main setting for theteaching and spread of languages, action in this field is not enough. The work ofschools needs to be related to other spheres and activities to allow the use of thelanguage in the wider world.

1.3. Writing

Writing has a great symbolic value which plays a large part in the prestige of thelanguage. One widespread linguistic prejudice is the tendency to only see aslanguages those that have developed a written form. This prejudice undoubtedly hasgreat influence on the linguistic attitudes of speakers and of members of othercommunities, whether neighbouring or not.

In general, writing is seen as an achievement by the majority of informants whentalking of languages whose writing has been developed recently, and as a desire or a

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The educational system must guarantee the use of languages as a basic right ofindividuals and communities.

The educational system must dignify and give prestige to languages, throughtheir use as well as by furthering positive attitudes towards all of them.

The educational system must give special support to those languages whichuntil now have been marginalised by it.

The educational system must always act in accordance with the linguisticcommunities, respecting their wishes, opinions and feelings.

The educational system must help those communities with few resources in thetraining and preparation of both the workforce and the material.

The educational system must train people in bilingualism or multilingualism,both in the case of communities with minority languages and in the case ofspeakers of widespread languages.

The chief priority of the educational system in the new millennium must beapproached in terms of language skills.

The monolingual school model is a threat to linguistic diversity.

need in those cases where it does not yet exist. Whatever the case, as we have alreadyseen in reference to other aspects, communities must play an important role indecision-making, and in this case the need for a language to have a written formshould come from them.

In those cases in which a written system must be created, it is essential to bear inmind the systems of surrounding languages, the cultural tradition and the geneticclassification of the language in question. In this respect, systems of writingcreated for languages in the same linguistic group can provide solutions andreflect the common origin of these languages. The cases of different systems ofwriting within a single language – alphabetic, orthographic, etc. – tend to favourdivision and fragmentation of languages and can be fatal in the case of languageswith few speakers. Therefore, any plans for creating a system of writing mustforesee these risks and consider the creation of written material in the language,material which can be taken from the oral tradition and that allows the creation ofa written literary tradition. The creation of a written system, therefore, as pointedout in other sections, must not be an isolated undertaking but one coordinatedwith other activities.

One way of avoiding the written/oral dichotomy, which attaches a higher value towriting, consists in valuing literary, ritual or religious oral literary traditions, as manyinformants have shown. Furthermore, nowadays, new audiovisual and computertechnologies, the media and more innovative educational models make it possible toincorporate oral usages into spheres of prestige which until very recently wererestricted to written forms.

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The written use of languages in general confers prestige on them and increasestheir chances of transmission and revitalisation.

Written use is only suitable if it is seen by the community as enriching and notas a threat or frustration.

Written use must integrate a linguistic community’s written and oral traditionand its cultural heritage.

The authorities should support the written use of all languages, especiallyminority languages or seriously endangered languages.

The authorities should provide communities with the right technical meansand economic resources to facilitate and allow the written use of the language.

The scientific community should work in coordination with the linguisticcommunities concerning questions regarding the creation of a written form orof standardisation, when these communities require their assistance.

1.4. The media

The role of the media in the preservation of linguistic diversity takes in at least twofundamental aspects: the presence and use of languages and the values the mediathemselves transmit.

Of all the media, radio is the most widespread and the most multilingual, mainlydue to its greater technical accessibility and diffusion and because it does not requirewritten language. Communities that have problems getting access to other mediahave shown that they can get access to radio broadcasting, so that the language hasmanaged to extend beyond the strictly family sphere. In this respect, as an urgentmeasure, encouragement should be given to radio broadcasts managed by thecommunities themselves with the object of increasing the scope of use of endangeredlanguages along with their prestige.

Television raises an aspect the Review does not want to overlook. The fact that largebroadcasting companies have a monopoly in this medium has the effect of mediatingthe information, so that minority communities can rarely take part in the image that istransmitted of them. At the same time, the chiefly metropolitan image of these broad-casts is having an alarming influence on communities with no direct access to thismedium, and is accelerating the process of acculturation of the societies that are leftout of them. In this respect, it is essential to alert the chief media so that an attempt ismade to avoid hierarchisation of cultures, for one, and for another, in those cases inwhich communities with minority languages have access to this medium, toexplicitly support them in spite of the impossibility of competing with the largebroadcasting companies.

In the case of the press, there is often a feeling in communities of ‘having missed theboat’. In other words, the tradition of the press in widespread languages preventsaccess on an equal footing to less favoured languages. However, in addition to theactual benefits that normalised diffusion in one’s language could bring, the spread ofa local-language press could be an effective method for providing reading material,which is essential if literacy campaigns are to have any continuation. At the sametime, just as the need for multilingual education has been emphasised, the creation ofmultilingual newspapers should be furthered, especially in settings where the simul-taneous presence of different languages could have an effect on the social acceptanceof each one of them.

Similarly, the Internet raises the need for the written use of languages. Its increasinguse aggravates the problem of the enormous differences in the use of languages andcould be an added factor in the death of languages. However, it also means thatcommunities can be at once agents and protagonists of the information they want todiffuse, with relatively accessible economic means. The feeling of having ‘missed theboat’, as mentioned above with reference to the press, could therefore be avoided inthe case of the Internet if facilities were provided for access to this technology.

As well as the essential democratisation of the media, it is important to point outthat one of the most urgent measures to be taken is the training of journalists to the

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extent that the values they transmit cannot be countered in other spheres. Theprofusion of linguistic and cultural prejudices, along with ignorance of linguisticdiversity and of the value of all languages, suggests that the training of journalistsshould include an understanding of this aspect of the life of communities and thenecessary information for overcoming the linguistic prejudices that perpetuatenegative linguistic attitudes. Until all peoples are able to explain their own history, weshould at least ensure that the intermediaries are, if not objective, at least even-handed and reliable.

1.5. Migrations and socioeconomic changes

The link between language and territory, which seems beyond doubt for the majorityof the world’s languages, is a recurrent topic in the Review. Profound reflection iscalled for, especially as regards proposing models for a changing society in whichalmost half the languages are not being passed on normally from one generation tothe next, where substitution processes are generally associated with social andeconomic changes related to urbanisation and so-called modernisation, and wheremigration is widespread.

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Each linguistic community should have at least one regular radio broadcastingstation. In the case of very small communities, it should at least be possible fortheir language to be present in the existing media.

It is also very important to develop the printed press, and the authorities shouldensure at least one regular printed medium. Support should be given to thosemedia arising in the communities themselves and allowing their membersinformation and entertainment with a viewpoint of their own.

The use of languages in the new communication and information technologies,and especially on the Internet, should be furthered.

The chief media should be open to the use of new languages and to combiningthe simultaneous use of different languages.

The chief media should respect, promote and confer prestige on linguisticdiversity.

The chief media should fight against the linguistic prejudices that ridicule theuse and promotion of less widespread languages and lead humanity towardslinguistic globalisation.

The chief media should give positive coverage to news about the revitalisationof languages.

Indeed, sudden changes in communities’ economic systems can have devastatingeffects on the dynamics of the languages of small communities. By way of example,unless it is managed in a way that is more in keeping with the specific characteristics ofthe territory, tourism is emerging as one of the greatest threats for the survival of manylanguages. While it is true that economic and social development can allow the devel-opment of linguistic policies, these need to be respectful of diversity. It is essential toavoid the association of minority languages with underdevelopment, poverty andmarginalisation. When communities have a positive attitude towards their ownlanguages, they can change their lifestyle without having to abandon their language.

Amongst the different types of migration, the move to urban areas is particularlyimportant, with large concentrations of population giving rise to numerous processesof language shift. As we have said, the dichotomy established between ‘rural’ and‘urban’ encourages numerous linguistic prejudices which feed substitution processes.Furthermore, it is obvious that these processes often result in marginalisation andghettoisation of the displaced population. Social agents intervening in these processesshould take into account the integrating factor of language in designing strategies forthe integration of displaced people and help both access to the language of the desti-nation community and preservation of the language of origin.

The public presence of the language of origin of the displaced, even if only symbol-ically, can further the perception of the society as multilingual and multicultural andsubsequently as welcoming to immigrants.

We need to remember that migratory movements resulting from wars and politicalconflicts can also have a negative effect on the life of languages, especially in the caseof small linguistic communities.

The attraction exerted by peoples who have managed to integrate differentlinguistic communities in peaceful coexistence benefiting from technologicalprogress and democratic organisation should be taken as a model of socioeconomicdevelopment for the preservation of linguistic and cultural development.

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The value of one’s own language and culture in terms of the individual’sidentity and self-esteem must be emphasised.

The ability of individuals to harmoniously integrate knowledge and use ofseveral languages must be emphasised.

All the territory’s languages must be given prestige through their use andthrough campaigns.

The use of various languages must be made possible in large cities wherepeople of different origins converge.

In communities that live in tourist areas, preservation of the native culture andlanguage needs to be especially encouraged.

1.6. Linguists

Linguists are members of the scientific community directly involved in the under-standing, preservation and furtherance of linguistic diversity.

Although in general it appears that the work of linguists tends to be appreciated bythe community and that knowledge of the language favours integration, in some ofthe cases analysed a certain reticence was detected as regards these professionals’activity, especially when their work was seen as an instrument of professional oracademic promotion rather than as a contribution to society. As a general principle, itis obvious that the linguist must be aware of the aims of the community and offerhis/her services for that end, and avoid using it as a means to his/her own profes-sional objectives.

The Review reveals the gap which tends to occur between linguists’ knowledgeand knowledge of the language. In many cases, the description of a language isdirected at the validation of theoretical aspects, rather than, for example, at makingwritten use or standardisation of the language possible. Even when the two aspectsare not incompatible, in many cases linguists overlook the practical aspects of theirwork or its applications in society, and this attitude can give rise to conflicts. Forexample, there are languages that have been studied from various theoretical view-points, but which nevertheless have no language-teaching method that can be used inschools. Awareness of the difference between linguistics, language knowledge andlanguage teaching is therefore important if linguists are to offer a useful service to thelinguistic community and not just to the scientific community.

The work of linguists cannot take place in isolation, either, and must, of course, takeinto account the surrounding culture. In societies without writing, linguists mustrealise that language is not just a formal or functional system, but that, among otheraspects of its culture, it contains the keys to an understanding of the history ofpeoples, their cosmovision and their relations with the surrounding communities.Research in these aspects, along with the recovery of name systems (toponyms,anthroponyms, etc.) must form part of their work, so that the recovery of thelanguage involves recovering the history and the culture of peoples.

At the same time, we must not forget the responsibility of linguists as regards theeducational side of their work. By publishing their knowledge, they can do a lot tohelp reappraise languages, eradicate prejudices and involve professionals and insti-tutions who could operate in the field of revitalisation. It is therefore essential toextend the presence of subjects relating to language loss and recovery, systemati-sation and exchange in academic centres, institutions, professorships and institutesconcerned with languages and linguistic communities.

1.7. Participation by non governmental institutions

The Review reveals that different organisations of varying types and objectives areacting on language communities and their dynamics, with different effects on theirlinguistic normalisation processes. Amongst these organisations can be found, for

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example, non governmental organisations, religious organisations and researchteams. While in some cases these institutions can be seen to act as perpetuators oflinguistic colonialism, in others, they have excelled as revitalising forces forlanguages and cultures. The general observation is that when the stage is left to thecommunities, their activities tend to be of great benefit to the recovery oflanguages and they fulfil a double role of incentive and support for the commu-nities’ projects. The enormous potential of these bodies, however, means that theiraction can be counterproductive in those cases in which this action is subordinatedto other aims, such as teaching language as an instrument of conversion to a givenfaith, or literacy as a stepping-stone to the dominant language. Sometimes theseobjectives are not explicit. Whatever the case, when the objectives have not beendrawn up by the communities and are therefore foreign to them, they have devas-tating effects on them.

In addition, the lack of coordination between different bodies within the samecommunity can lead to contradictory actions and, in the worst cases, open a dividebetween members of the community, between educational options, media uses, typesof writing, relations with other communities, etc. This divide can have the same effectas migration or deportation in the case of communities with few speakers whorequire a certain degree of cohesion.

This type of action affects all sorts of communities. For example, in so-calledmodern societies in Europe, discrimination against minority languages and theirspeakers is also common. This discrimination ranges from the exclusive use ofofficial or dominant languages in religious services, administration and NGOcampaigns or in language teaching to immigrants, to the reproduction of modelsfrom the dominant culture in preparing projects for language planning, promotionor recovery.

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Non governmental institutions involved in the recovery and revitalisation oflanguages must make their objectives clear.

The objectives of unofficial bodies involved in the recovery and revitalisation oflanguages must be shared by the communities.

The different bodies intervening in the life of communities must coordinatetheir activities.

Unofficial bodies involved in the recovery and revitalisation of languages mustsubordinate their activities to the life of the community, acting as both incentiveand support for the community’s projects.

It is necessary for international NGOs to promote large-scale action to promotelanguages and linguistic diversity.

1.8. The responsibility of the authorities

On the basis of the unquestionable fact that monolingual states are the exception, it isessential that their multilingual nature be acknowledged. Insofar as all individualsand all communities should be given equal treatment, it is the duty of the authoritiesto ensure respect and protection for all spoken languages, at least in their ownterritory. Acknowledgement of the multilingual nature of the state implies that theauthorities must ensure that all citizens take part on an equal footing, and this is notpossible if the state itself places languages in a hierarchy. At the same time, the inter-state reality of many languages must be acknowledged, thereby facilitating coordi-nation between organisations involved in the recovery and normalisation oflanguages whose speakers are located in different states, so that their actions andprojects embrace the entire territory of a language.

Since many normalisation processes show that normalisation is only possible withthe collaboration of a motivated community, state bodies should cooperate and collab-orate in the recovery activities that arise in the communities themselves, withoutforgetting that simply declaring a language official or even directing a project atpreservation over the heads of the community is not enough for the recovery of thelanguage. Public institutions can cooperate in a wide range of areas, from the recoveryof place names to drawing up syllabuses that include acquisition of the territory’sother languages as second languages, amongst many other things. But their basic rolemust be to ensure respect for the linguistic rights of all speakers and the recognition ofall the languages in the territory, so that no normalisation process is forced to takeplace ‘in spite of the authorities’.

Obviously, ensuring respect for everyone’s linguistic rights implies equaltreatment for all communities, since unequal treatment, as well as being aninjustice, could lead to confrontation between these communities. However, ‘equaltreatment’ must not be confused with ‘the same solutions for different situations’.In this respect, the members of the majority communities must take responsibilityfor designing strategies for the preservation of linguistic diversity. In the same waythat environmental conservation is an issue affecting the entire population, thepreservation of linguistic diversity is only possible with the collaboration of allinvolved, and for this it is essential to create the necessary mechanisms that allowreciprocity and cooperation. Inevitably, the first steps in this direction call forgeneral motivation, for which it is essential to provide the information and trainingthat will allow a change in linguistic attitudes. In this sphere, the role of the author-ities can be fundamental, providing the mechanisms to avoid the hierarchisation oflanguages, encouraging shared activities aimed at preserving linguistic diversityand ensuring equal treatment for all communities in keeping with their role in thisshared undertaking.

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2. The way forward

2.1. Celebrating cultural diversity

We are beginning the twenty-first century with a new and positive perception ofcultural diversity. Some authors have warned of the danger of conflictive culturalrelations and have announced wars between the main cultural traditions; but manyother voices are proclaiming the rise of peaceful coexistence between cultures. For thefirst time, on a global scale, we are in a position to accept the plurality of cultureswithout subjecting it to colonialist criteria. In the coming decades, understandingbetween cultures could grow and practices of mutual respect could spread, leading toa celebration of cultural diversity. If this future scenario is confirmed, linguisticdiversity, an important manifestation of cultural diversity, could be reinforced. Therapid disappearance of languages, which at present affects several dozen languagesevery year, could be reduced. Languages in danger of extinction are those belongingto cultures in extremely delicate situations. Language and culture are inseparable.Celebrating linguistic diversity involves celebrating cultural diversity.

A global future is conceivable in which all cultural and linguistic communities canlive in freedom. In the past, communities have all too often been subordinated topolitical and economic interests that failed to take into account their aspirations. In thecoming decades, all human communities must be acknowledged as the subject of theirrespective histories and integrated into political structures that endow them withadvanced criteria of democratic participation. We need progressive political structuresthat make room for all languages and cultures on sub-state, state, regional and globallevels. Constant advances in the democratic spirit mean we can realistically imaginehumanity evolving towards the elimination of cultural and linguistic discrimination.Measures can be taken today to ensure that, of the different possible futures, the onethat triumphs will be one that guarantees and celebrates linguistic diversity.

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The authorities must commit themselves to the preservation of linguistic diversity.

Multilingual states must acknowledge their nature as such and act accordingly.

It is the duty of the authorities to ensure equal treatment for all the linguisticcommunities residing in their territory.

The authorities must encourage trans-state linguistic policies, especially inthose cases in which linguistic communities occupy trans-border territories.

The authorities must cooperate in normalisation processes, but not impose them.

The authorities must facilitate and promote participation by all citizens in thepreservation of linguistic diversity.

2.2. Linguistic models for a global world

In the past, linguistic diversity was preserved by the isolation of linguistic commu-nities and therefore the low rate of linguistic contact. With a view to the future, it nolonger makes sense to choose isolation and contacts between speakers of differentlanguages will multiply in both the individual and the collective sphere. In this newsetting, what could happen is that the more vulnerable or even medium-sizedlinguistic communities will begin to die out because they will be displaced by otherlanguages with greater demographic, political, economic or technological strength.But it could also come about that new models for relations between all languages willbe established that do not lead to the death of the most fragile. Ecological modelsindicate that a form of linguistic coexistence is conceivable in which the languages incontact have different functions and which does not necessarily cause processes ofsubstitution. The real challenge consists in planning the relative functions of alllanguages – large, medium and small – in the global world.

Small and medium-sized linguistic communities must plan their future makingsimultaneous use of more widespread languages on the basis of their utility incommunication and in economic, social and cultural development. This multilin-gualism must be made perfectly compatible with the use of the community’s ownlanguage, the language which often determines personality or cultural identity, themyths and values that guide people’s lives. The stronger linguistic communities mustrealise that their demographic, political, economic or technological strength does notmake their language superior and that they must therefore open up to otherlanguages, especially those of their neighbours, and enrich themselves with otherepistemologies and other values. The main regional and universal languages must beredefined to be actively sympathetic to medium and small languages. A morepeaceful and more humane future can be built if mutual relations of sympathy areestablished between linguistic communities and between their speakers.Interlinguistic sympathy is one of the desirable futures for languages.

2.3. Generalisation of multilingual education

There is growing agreement about the importance of multilingual education. Insome continents with a rich linguistic diversity this is a tradition going back a longway. From birth, boys and girls hear the different languages in their family andsocial surroundings and quickly learn the linguistic codes as well as their commu-nicative function. The task facing us in the twenty-first century is to make multi-lingual education universal. Some linguistic communities that consider themselvessuperior because their language is associated with instances of political andcultural domination or breakthroughs in philosophical abstraction, science andtechnology, have not given multilingual education any consideration. In manycases, political powers have repressed minority languages in the conviction thatthey were encouraging access to a superior language. Today it is acknowledgedthat, even for speakers of the strongest languages, learning other languages is a

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priority cultural objective. In the coming decades, as well as eliminating illiteracy,we must eliminate monolingual education.

It would be desirable for plurilingual education to mean more than just an improvedknowledge of the more widespread languages or of those most often used in themedia. It is not enough, therefore, for bilingual syllabuses merely to introduce theteaching of a minority language alongside a major language or to provide speakers ofone major language with the knowledge of another major language. In the comingdecades there will be a need for generalised plurilingual education allowing a properknowledge of three or more languages: one minority language and two languages forcommunicating on a regional and universal level. The first would be the familylanguage, but importance should be given to learning the languages of the neigh-bouring communities. It is also important to distinguish between passive and activeknowledge, between oral and written language. Among languages of the samelinguistic group, a passive knowledge is achieved without much effort. The samehappens in learning oral language, which is faster than learning a written language.

2.4. Convention on linguistic rights

On the initiative of various governmental organisations, a series of proposals havebeen drawn up for the recognition of linguistic rights as part of human rights and fortheir international protection. The best known is the Universal Declaration ofLinguistic Rights promoted by the Pen Club International and the CIEMEN andagreed in 1996 by 61 NGOs and 41 Pen centres. UNESCO was asked to take care of thematter and draft a government declaration which could take the form of an interna-tional convention with the juridical mechanisms to ensure its effectiveness. The workis yet to be done. It would be desirable if in the next few years progress could be madein this process, because individual and collective linguistic rights, the same as humanrights, are being violated not only by political regimes that confuse unity and culturaland linguistic uniformity but also by the advance of globalisation in its imposition ofeconomic reasoning over cultural and social development. It would be desirable if therights and liberties many linguistic communities already enjoy could be globalisedunder the auspices of the United Nations system.

Migratory movements will probably increase in the coming decades. In all coun-tries, and especially in the large metropolises, people from different linguisticcommunities will be living together in unprecedented linguistic complexity.Managing linguistically complex societies will be a great challenge for the whole ofhumanity. Migrants could become involuntary agents of linguistic and culturaluniformity if criteria are not agreed for combining individual linguistic rights and thelinguistic rights of linguistic communities in their historical territory. Rules for theprotection of linguistic diversity must therefore be established taking these new chal-lenges into account. A universal declaration of linguistic rights in the form of an inter-national convention could be the frame of reference for the establishment ofintelligent linguistic policies. In addition, the international technical bodies set up by

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the convention could offer proposals or mediation that are difficult to find locallywhen conflicts arise. The instruments of the convention would make it possible toprevent conflicts or defuse them rapidly.

2.5. Languages and new communication technology

The spectacular advances in the new information and communication technologiespose unexpected challenges for linguistic diversity. On the one hand, one sees thecreation in this sector of gigantic commercial enterprises that use only the majorlanguages. On the other, medium-sized and small linguistic communities can use thenew technologies intelligently for their own needs and objectives. The presence of thesecommunities in cyberspace probably involves far fewer problems than those they facedin the fifteenth century in adapting to the spread of printing. Access to the Internet willbe open to all linguistic communities in the not-so-distant future, when electrical andtelephone services are universal and when voice use has the same technical possibilitiesas the use of written language. For some communication technologies, such as radioand television, orality is already much more important than writing.

To put the new technologies at the service of linguistic and cultural diversity, weneed to establish policies to guarantee this objective. In the coming decades theamount of information that is considered to be in the public domain will have to beincreased, whether it is information regulated by copyright or, especially, informationno longer subject to such limitations. Digitalisation of the knowledge and heritage ofall cultures must be supported. With these aims in mind, legislative measures need tobe introduced to guarantee free circulation of information on networks as well as on-line access to public heritage. The presence of small and medium-sized languages incyberspace will be one of the new responsibilities of local, substate, state, regional anduniversal authorities. The same responsibility must be shared by non-profit organisa-tions. Communication scientists, for their part, will probably achieve new tech-nologies for automatic translation, especially to prevent orality from being anobstacle to entering the cyberspace networks.

2.6. Languages as a factor of economic development

All languages can be associated with processes of economic, social and cultural devel-opment. No language has had a monopoly on economic progress in the history of thehuman species. Many languages have become a factor and a symbol of prosperity.Today, a handful of languages are used for universal scientific communication and forglobal economic activity. But we now know that economic development is a complexprocess in which many factors intervene that do not seem decisive on a global scale:people’s talent, social cohesion, participation procedures, moral values, patriotism,education and culture. A community with a language of its own can be a communitywith a high degree of self-esteem, in tune with its natural environment and withconceptual and linguistic instruments allowing competitive economic specialisationon a local, substate, state, regional and universal scale. Small, specialised communities

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can in the future achieve high levels of development. In addition, human developmentinvolves a transition from an economy-based model of development to forms ofsustainable development adapted to each environment. Languages provide episte-mologies and values that allow this adaptation.

Each linguistic community must find its place in the global economic world.People’s languages must, with a view to the future, be considered an added value alsofrom the point of view of development. Linguistic communities will of course beopen in the sense that their members will also be familiar with other languages, butthey will discover the pleasure of using their own language as the basis of theirspecific personality in a world increasingly looking for what is original and unre-peatable. It does not seem utopian to imagine that, in the same way that the touristtrade values landscapes or the physical cultural heritage for their originality anddifference, differentiated linguistic experiences will in future also be valued. It may bethat visitors to communities with languages of their own will ask for linguistic initi-ation so as to be able to enjoy the secrets of unfamiliar cultural universes. Linguisticcommunities will discover the economic value of their non-material linguisticheritage. Cultural tourism will include various forms of language learning.

2.7. Advanced linguistic sciences

Linguistic atlases are getting more and more complex. The use of languages in citiesand countries can no longer be understood on the basis of simple questions includedin population censuses. Linguistic contacts caused by displacements and migrationsare increasing in all countries. Linguistic practices in the professional spherefrequently differ from those in the family sphere. The languages used by citizens indifferent areas of their cultural life do not coincide either, because the cultural indus-tries use mainly the more widespread languages, which do not necessarily coincidewith the usual languages of traditional cultures. For all these reasons, sociolinguistswill have to develop efficient systems for monitoring language use over the whole ofthe universe of human geography. In the coming decades it would be desirable fornew sociolinguistic research centres in university networks and elsewhere to devotethe necessary efforts to describing linguistic diversity and its evolution. With a viewto the future, we need high-precision sociolinguistics.

The attention scientists have devoted to languages is very uneven. Some languageshave innumerable instruments: grammars, dictionaries, histories of literature andeditions of their representative works on paper or in digital format. Other languagesare poorly served as far as these scientific instruments are concerned although theyare not poor in terms of grammatical structures, vocabulary or literature. It would bedesirable if in the coming decades the activity of scientists of language were toconcentrate on the less studied languages so as to achieve a reasonable balancebetween all languages. Oral languages ought to be the object of particular attention,so that scientific activity can create suitable instruments of knowledge compatiblewith their particular traditions. Projects for cooperation in development for the

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coming years should take into account linguistic projects expressed by the linguisticcommunities themselves. The main aims of cooperation should be guided by thecreation of linguistic scientific competence among members of the linguistic commu-nities themselves.

2.8. Languages, the heritage of humanity

Studying all the world’s languages will provide data and perspectives for the designof useful strategic options for the future of each language. International continentalorganisations and UNESCO on a global level should have specific departments togive technical advice to linguistic communities in shaping their strategies and tothose political authorities that have responsibility for linguistic policy. Among thepossible measures for the promotion of all languages, an example to follow would bethe recognition as official languages of each state of all the historical regionallanguages spoken by its citizens. This recognition need not involve their use on anequal footing in administrative bodies and in public life. It would also be significant ifall those countries where they do not already exist set up technical departments tofurther the work of sociolinguistics in collaboration with research centres and toprovide linguistic communities with political, legal, economic and media instru-ments to safeguard their future.

The declaration by UNESCO of each and every language as the heritage ofhumanity would be a great stimulus to the recognition of the dignity of all languagesand an indication that each language belongs not just to the speakers of that languagebut to the human species as a whole. In keeping with this declaration, UNESCO couldperiodically convene global evaluations on the state of linguistic diversity in theworld with effective participation by representatives of large, medium and smalllinguistic communities. It would be also useful to publish regular reports onlinguistic diversity, summing up the findings from the latest sociolinguistic research,and regular studies of good practices on the subject of linguistic policy. For all thesetasks, UNESCO could, with a view to the future, establish new partnerships withuniversity networks of scientists in languages, specialist NGOs and UNESCO profes-sorships devoted to languages.

2.9. Languages for peace

The immense majority of human beings wish for a world at peace. Even those whouse violence believe they want peace. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century,the logic of force still engenders much violence that relativises the force of logic. Manypeople hope that the twenty-first century will see increasing faith in words, reasoningand dialogue and a reduction in violence. If this hope is to become a reality, humanitymust opt for free and open cultures of words. Languages are free when we remove theconditioning factors that are an obstacle to objective knowledge, critical sense andsense of humour, and the expression of desires and dreams. In today’s world, themedia industry, with its enormous power, often limits freedom of expression because

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it creates distorted virtual realities that are presented as objective and because itpopularises ideas, feelings and values alien to democratic consensus. In this sense,words in the public sphere very often contribute not to freedom but to domination.They are words that exert violence. Humanity has the right to free itself of manipu-lation by the media and of any words that exert violence. Many cultures express thewish to disarm words.

Languages are open when they do not try to monopolise knowledge. Eachlanguage is an interpretation of reality, but none of them has a complete or definitiveview of the various dimensions of reality. When one linguistic community or a groupwithin it considers that its knowledge, its writings, its representatives are superior tothose of other human communities, intolerance and violence arise. Languages mustnot have any strength other than that arising from their reasoning, from theirusefulness in relation to the challenges of the natural and social surroundings andfrom their capacity for exploring the wonderful through their poetic and symbolicregisters. This strength is not the strength that characterises conventional power. Witha view to the twenty-first century, there is a need for speakers without superioritycomplexes, and for linguistic practices that facilitate dialogue between their ownviewpoint and that of others within each linguistic community and between differentlinguistic communities. Languages, when they are used in a spirit of freedom andwith an open mind, are peace builders. During the twenty-first century, all languagesmust become languages for peace.

2.10. A welcome to new languages

The life of languages is a faithful expression of the life of human communities. The lifeof languages is affected by the evolution of the human species in space and time.Linguistic specialisation has allowed multiple adaptations of human communities totheir physical and cultural surroundings. Languages, with their marvellous capacityfor abstraction, have been the most decisive instruments for the advancement ofknowledge, agreement on ethical principles as a basis for coexistence and for imag-ining desirable futures. Each language can contribute to this common task. Manylanguages have disappeared because human communities were faced with new chal-lenges and needed new linguistic instruments. The languages spoken today are livinglanguages because there are human communities that need them to live – that is, tounderstand, to relate, to work, to speak of love, to ask questions and create beautifulexpressions, to remember and to make plans. The communities themselves areconstantly making languages evolve. During the twenty-first century, the power oflanguage could be returned to these communities, and in particular to those that havesuffered linguistic repression, through different forms of self-management. Withthese guidelines it would be possible to protect linguistic diversity without hinderingthe evolution of all living languages. Under normal circumstances, evolution shouldtake place in all widespread languages as well as in medium and small languages, sothat they can all adapt to new settings and new challenges. Taking part in the

The Future of Languages 267

linguistic creativity of one’s language is a pleasure. Perhaps we should remember thatwe speak our languages to enjoy them. Our spoken and written words are accessibleexperiences of life, creativity and joy. During the twenty-first century, multilin-gualism should become widespread for the sheer pleasure of it.

268 Words and Worlds

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Appendix 1

Survey QuestionnaireQuestionnaire number

Date of completion

Respondent’s details

Name: Surname:

Sex: Male Female

Institution belonged to:

Address:

Telephone: Fax: E-mail:

Glotonym or name of language on which you are providing data:

Autoglotonym (name given to the language by native speakers):

Heteroglotonym (name given by the non-native community to the language):

What language group does the language belong to?

Family: Group: Subgroup:

What type of language is it?

Creole Pidgin

1. Does this language have other varieties? If so, what are these?

2. Does the language exist in a written form?

3. Is there standardisation of the language?

284

4. Do you consider yourself a member of this linguistic community? If so, why?

5. Where is this language spoken? What are its geographical boundaries?

6. Have these geographical boundaries changed over the years? If so, how have they altered?

7. What is the physical terrain of this area like?

8. Are any other languages spoken within the same territory? If so, what are these?

9. Could you enclose a sketch or indicate the area in which this language is spoken? (if youwish, you can draw a sketch in the space on the next page)

10. What State(s) / country (ies) do/es the territory/ies where the language is spoken belong to?

11. What is the total number of inhabitants (whether or not they speak this language) of thisterritory?

12. How many of the inhabitants understand, speak, read or write this language?

Number

Understand

Speak

Read

Write

Use this space to draw a map or sketch of the territory where this language is spoken.

13. How many of the speakers are monolingual (use only this language)?

14. How many of the speakers are bilingual (use this and another language)? What otherlanguage(s) do they speak?

Survey Questionnaire 285

15 How many of the speakers are multilingual (speak this and more than one otherlanguage)? What other languages do they speak?

16. Are speakers of this language dispersed throughout the territory, or are they concentratedin specific population centres?

17. How has the number of speakers of this language evolved over time (increased, decreasedor remained stable)?

18. Is the language passed down from generation to generation? If not, why not? Whatlanguage is replacing it?

19. Could you indicate how often the members of each generation use the language with othergenerations (old people with old people, young people with old people, etc) in theirinformal contacts (in the street, at home, in leisure time,…)?

…speak the language with

The people The Elderly Adults Young people ChildrenMen Women Men Women Men Women Boys Girls

The elderly : Men Women

Adults: Men Women

Young people: Men Women

Children: Boys Girls

Specify the frequency: 5 = always in this language; 4 = more in this language than others; 3 = equally often in either language; 2 = more in other languages than in this one; 1 = always inother languages.

20. Do the speakers of other languages speak this language? In what circumstances?

21. Is there any historical, political or economic factor which has affected the situation of thislinguistic community?

286 Words and Worlds

22. Has any other factor directly influenced the growth or threatened the future of thelanguage (migration, temporary labour, deportations, wars…)?

23. Is the language currently threatened? If so, what is the cause?

24. Is the community which speaks this language in danger? If so, what is the cause?

25. Is there any internal migration (movement of the population within the territory)? Is thereany external migration (movement out of the territory to others)? If so, what is the cause?

26. What is the main economic activity of this community?

27. What is the influence of religion on this community?

28. Does the language have any official status (official, joint-official language, acceptance…)?

29. Is the language used in contact with the administration? Indicate whether its use in theadministration is in spoken and/or written form.

30. Is this language used in education (whether as the teaching medium or as a subject ofstudy)? Indicate whether there is spoken and/or written use of the language in elementaryand higher education.

31. Is this language used in the media (radio, newspapers and television…)?

32. Is the language used in religious services and ceremonies? Indicate whether there isspoken or written use of the language in religious services and ceremonies.

33. Is the language used in business and labour relations? Indicate whether the use is spokenand/or written.

34. Are there any other areas in which this language is used in its written form?

35. Is there any organisation or body responsible for linguistic policy and planning withrespect to this language? What kind of activities does this perform?

Survey Questionnaire 287

36. Is there any kind of cultural or linguistic organisation or body which promotes theknowledge and/or use of the language? What kind of activities does this perform?

37. Does he language have a literary tradition? If so, please give some information about thisliterary tradition.

38. What is the attitude of the majority of the members of this community towards theknowledge and use of this language?

39. What is the attitude of the majority of the members of the neighbouring communitiestowards the knowledge and use of the language?

40. PLEASE ADD ANY OTHER DETAILS REGARDING THE SITUATION OF THELANGUAGE WHICH YOU CONSIDER OF INTEREST. At the same time, we would begrateful if you could send us any statistics, reports, assignment or research which mighthelp us to understand the situation of this language. It would also be very helpful if youcould provide references of the sources consulted and the addresses of any individuals orbodies that may be able to offer further data about this language.

288 Words and Worlds

Appendix 2

Index of ContributorsTHE MEANING OF TRIBAL LANGUAGES IN INDIA 25

Anvita AbbiBILINGUALISM, MULTILINGUALISM AND MIND DEVELOPMENT 33

Josiane F. HamersTHE LANGUAGES OF NIGERIA 50

Ayo BamgboseTHE CONTRIBUTION OF THE ETHNOLOGUE TO THE REVIVAL OF WORLD LANGUAGES 62

Barbara F. GrimesTHE FUTURE OF FRENCH IN AFRICA 68

Raymond RenardNORTHERN CAUCASIAN LANGUAGES 71

Alexey YeschenkoLANGUAGES IN RUSSIA AND CIS COUNTRIES 74

Irina KhaleevaTHE LANGUAGE CONCEPT IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA 78

Peter MühlhäuslerLANGUAGE TREASURES IN INDONESIA 95

Multamia RMT LauderTHE LANGUAGE REVIVAL OF WELSH 100

Wynford BellinBRETON AND THE EUROPEAN CHARTER FOR MINORITY LANGUAGES 103

Francis FavereauNEW APPROACH TO LANGUAGE POLICY 111

E. AnnamalaiTHE LANGUAGES OF SIBERIA 120

Bernard ComrieTHE WHY AND THE WHEREFORE OF CENSUSES WITH LINGUISTIC DATA 126

Grant D. McConnellORALITY AND WRITING: AND THERE WERE LETTERS 132

Bartomeu MeliàON THE EQUALITY OF LANGUAGES 138

Juan Carlos MorenoTHE STATUS OF LINGUISTIC NORMS 144

Jean-Paul BronckartLANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN INDIA 153

P. PattanayakBILINGUAL INDIGENOUS EDUCATION 155

Isaac Pianko Ashaninka

289

EDUCATION IN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THEIR REVIVAL 158

Joaquim Mana KaxinawaTHE TEACHING OF MINORITY LANGUAGES AS A SECOND LANGUAGE 163

Denis CunninghamON BILINGUAL EDUCATION. OBJECTIVES AND APPROACHES 166

Miquel SiguanPOSSIBILITIES OF THE REVIVAL OF LANGUAGES IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA 168

Stephen WurmWHY LEARN THE LANGUAGE? WHY BE LITERATE? THE BASQUE EXPERIENCE, 1960–2000 170

Joseba IntxaustiTHE MEDIA IN THE SERVICE OF MINORITY LANGUAGES 181

Xavier AlbóEUROMOSAIC: THE PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION OF THE MINORITYLANGUAGE GROUPS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION 202

Miquel StrubellLANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT/REVIVAL ACTIVITIES BY THE CENTRALINSTITUTE OF INDIAN LANGUAGES 209

Omkar N. KoulTERRALINGUA AND LANGUAGE RIGHTS 216

Tove Skutnabb-KangasSOCIAL ATTITUDES CONCERNING PIDGINS AND CREOLES 222

Suzanne RomaineABOUT THE DEATH OF LANGUAGES 228

Nancy C. DorianALTERNATIVES FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF LANGUAGES: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE LINGUASPHERE OBSERVATORY 230

David DalbyLANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN CHINA 235

Sun Hongkai & Huang XingLANGUAGES OF NEPAL 240

Chura Mani BandhuWHAT DO YOU LOSE WHEN YOU LOSE YOUR LANGUAGE? 243

Joshua A. Fishman

290 Words and Worlds

Appendix 3

List of InformantsClifford Abbott, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Hilili Abdelaziz, Université SidiMohammed Ben Abdellah. Sapana Abuyi, Summer Institute of Linguistics. K.P. Acharya,Central Institute of Indian Languages. Marcel Acquaviva, Comité Français du Belmr / ScolaCorsa Bastia. Thomas Acton, University of Greenwich. Lawrence Olufemi Adewole,Obafemi Awolowo University. Larey Adreka, Direction de L’Alphabétisation de Togo.Zahid Agha. Amaia Agirre Pinedo, Eusko Jaurlaritza. Paulino Aguilera, MisionerosCombonianos. Husni Mahmoud Ahmad, Yarmouk University. Samuli Aikio, ResearchInstitute for the Languages of Finland. Chengshiliang Aixinjueluo, Central University forNationalities. Mariam Ajmatova, Kabardino-Balkarian State University. Ixch’umil AdelaAjquijay On, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Timur Ajriyev, IngushetiaState University. Aghamusa Akhundov, Nasimi Language Institute, Academy of Sciences.John Akhura Muhambi, Bible Society of Kenya. Omuka Fanuel Akolo, University ofNairobi. Kofi Akpakli, Directeur de la formation permanente, de l’action et de la recherchepédagogique de Togo (DIFOP). Afia Akrasi Twumasi. Olugboyega Alaba, University ofLagos. Mariëta Alberts, National Language Service South Africa. Catalina AlcantaraMalca, Federación de Rondas Femeninas del Norte del Perú. Mikhail Alexeyev, LinguisticsInstitute, Russian Academy of Sciences. Ileana Almeida, Fundación Pueblo Indio delEcuador. Ahmed Khattab Al-Omar, University of Tikrit. Miguel Angel Amaya Amaya,GUIDAKA (Comunidad de Indígenas Cacaoperas). Titus Adebisi Amoo, NigerianEducational Research and Development Council. Aït Mehouane Amssane. Jun An,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Gabriel Andres, Mouvement Autonomiste Alsacien-Lorrain. Dagmar Maria Anoca, Universitatea Bucuresti-Romania. Begum Jahan Ara,University of Dhaka. Jacques Arends, University of Amsterdam. Adjisardji Aritiba, ÉcoleNormale Superieure. Malcolm Armour, Summer Institute of Linguistics. John KobiaAtaya, Bible Society of Kenya. Kla’rik Attila, Ministry of National Education-Romania.Jeanne Austin, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Oladele Awobuluyi, University of Ilorin.A. Aziz Bin Deraman, Ministery of Education, Malaysia. Victoria Olubanwo Babalola,Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council. Tetouhaki Balouki, Associationpour la Sauvegarde des Langues et Cultures Africaines en Peril (ASLACAP). Ayo Bamgbose,University of Ibadan. Marlyse Baptista, University of Georgia. Verónica Barès, ConselhGenerau dera Val d’ Aran. Donald Barr, Summer Institute of Linguistics. EvaristeBarumwete, Université du Burundi. Janet Bateman, Summer Institute of Linguistics. AmyBauernschmidt, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Dimas Bautista Iturrizaga, Commoner ofNative Community of Tupe. Keith Beavon, Summer Institute of Linguistics-Cameroon.Eudocio Becerra, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. David Beck, University of Michigan.Jean Marc Becker, Associaton Wéi Laang Nach. Dietlinde Behrens, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Viacheslav Belousov, Intitute of the Russian Language. Héctor LeonardoBenito Pérez, Consejo Nacional de Educación Maya (CNEM). Rosario Bentolila, EGB 963.Boussad Berrichi, Journaliste à la radio et presse écrite. Christina M. Beuke-Muir,

291

University of Namibia. Revina Raphael Biltambo, University of Dar es Salaam. RuthBishop, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Piotr Bitkeiev, Kalmyk State university. ZaraBizheva, Kabardino-Balkarian State University. Boris Bizhoiev, Kabardino-BalkarianHumanities Research. Gilda Victoria Blanco Franzuá, Organización Negra Guatemalteca.Wenze Bo, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Joan Bomberger, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Marlytte Borman, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Freddy Boswell, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Ahmed Boukous, Université Mohammed V. Al Boush, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Claire Bowern, Harvard University. Robert Bradshaw, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Thomas Branks, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Tonnia Brennan,Magani Malu Kes. Miguel A. Bretos, Smithsonian Institution. Jaqueline Britto, AsociaciónInterétnica de Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana. Wella Brown, Kesva AnTaves Kernewek/ The Cornish Language Board. Dionicio V. Brown O’Neill, Secretaría de EducaciónDepartamental. John Brownie, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Bruce, Summer Instituteof Linguistics. Dionizio Bueno, Universidade de Sâo Paulo. Osmo T. Buller, UniversalEsperanto Association. Eugene Burnham, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Donald H.Burns, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Shirley Burtch, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Lazaro Bustince, Misioneros de África. James Butler, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Beatriz Cáceres Casaperalda, Federación de Mujeres Campesinas de Prov. Cailloma.Antoinette Camilleri, University of Malta. Carl R. Campbell, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Allan Campbell, Comunn na Gáidhlig. Aroldo Gamaliel CamposecoMontejo, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Ana María Cano González,Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (ALLA). Juan Pedro Carvajal Carvajal. Maribel ElinaCasanto Marinque, Organización CECONSEC. Charles Castellani, Comité Français duBelmr / Scola Corsa Bastia. Bernard Cathomas, Lia Rumantscha (LR). Raymundo CazTzub, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino,Universidad Pontificia Católica del Perú. Martín Chacach Cutzal, Universidad RafaelLandívar. Julia Chacon de Merino, Federación Campesina de Anta Fenca. MohammedChafik, Académie du Royaume du Maroc. Chaoke D. O., Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Ruth Chatfield, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Meregildo David ChayaxHuex, Comunidad Lingüística Uspatenko. Andy Chebanne, University of Bostwana.Moinaécha Cheikh Yahaya, Centre National de Documentation et de Recherche Scientifique,Comoros. Guoqing Chen, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zongzhen Chen, ChineseAcademy of Social Sciences. Donald Cheney, Summer Institute of Linguistics. BillChesley, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Mercy Chijioke, Nigerian Educational Researchand Development Council. Feodor Chirila, University of Bucharest. Angelina ChocMartínez, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Muhammad Hossam HaiderChowdhury, Independent University, Bangladesh. Duane Clouse, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Juan Idelfonzo Coj Ical, Comisión Nacional para la Oficialización de IdiomasIndígenas. Paolig Combot, Mouvement ar Falz. Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute forEvolutionary Anthropology. Russ Cooper, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Chris Corne,University of Auckland. Serafín M. Coronel Molina, University of Pennsylvania.Corporación de Resguardo Cultural Mata Nui a Hotu Matu’a o Kahu-Kahu o Hera.Graziella Corvalán, Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociológicos (CPES). Odilo Cougil Gil,Misioneros de África. Marcel Courthiade, Université de Paris. George Cowan, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Bill Cranmer, Namgis First Nation. Nigel Crawhall, NationalLanguage Service South Africa. Elettra Crocetti, Bureau Régional pour l’Ethnologie et laLinguistique. Marjorie Crofts, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Maria Josep CuencaOrdiñana, Universitat de València. Susana Cuevas Suárez, Dirección de Lingüística delINAH. Dashima Damdinova, Buriat State University. Dansk Sprognaevn (DanishLanguage Council). Nicholas Darryl, National Indian Brotherhood. Eifion GruffyddDavies, Welsh Language Board. Licio de Clara. Vivian Anne de Klerk, National Language

292 Words and Worlds

Service South Africa. Gerardo del Aguila Miveco, Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de laAmazonia Peruana. Béatrice Denis, Graduate student at City University of New York.R. Deprez, Unesco Platform UNESCO@Vlaanderen. Hubert Devonish, University of theWest Indies. Sorcha Nic Dhonncha, Ádarás na Gaeltachta. Diélimakan Diabaté, Ministèrede l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Amadou Dialo, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar.Soungalo Diarra, Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Karunasena DiasParanavitana, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. Salvatore Gennaro Dieni, Ismía Grecánikatu Jaló tu Vua. Hillebrand Dijkstra, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Kaba Diouara,Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Martin Diprose, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Direction de l’Alphabétisation et de l’Education de base du Senegal (DAEB).Hj. T. Fatimah Djajasudarma, Padjadjaran University. Dob, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Pascual Martín Domingo, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala.Daniel Domingo López, Consejo Nacional de Educación Maya (CNEM). Anne Dondorp,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ying Dong, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Nancy C.Dorian, Bryn Mawr College. Ina Druviete, University of Latvia. Ábngel Dueñas Arias,Academia Peruana de la Lengua Quechua (APLQP). Zara Duguzheva, Adyghe Compane.Cristofor Innokentiyevich Dutkin, Institute of Northern Minorities problems. P. DuttaBaruah, Central Institute of Indian Languages. Klara Dzhanibekova, Karachaievo-CherkessDept. of Moscow Open Social University. Elizabeth Eastman, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Karen H. Ebert, University of Zürich. Antón Eito Mateo, Consello da FablaAragonesa (CFA). Duxan Eli, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Jean Michel Eloy,Université de Picardie-Jules Verne. Nora C. England, Equipo de Investigación LingüísticaOxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’, OKMA. Natalia María Eraso Keller, Universidad de los Andes.Okon Essien, University of Calabar. Jesus Esteibarlanda, Sociedad de los Misioneros deÁfrica (Padres Blancos). Hortensia Estrada Ramírez, Instituto Caro y Cuervo. HortensiaEstrada Ramírez, Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Eduardo Daniel Faingold, University of Tulsa.Fenghe Fang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Cynthia Farr, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Saverio Favre, Bureau Régional pour l’Ethnologie et la Linguistique.Fédération Camerounaise des Clubs et Associations UNESCO. Benigno Fernandez Braña,MDGA (Mesa prá Defensa del Galego de Asturias e da Cultura). Ana Fernandez Garay,Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas. Phil Fields, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Rosalie Finlayson, National Language Service South Africa. AlexeyFlegontov, Association of Indigenous Peoples of Yakutia. Fidel Flores, AsociaciónCoordinadora de Comunidades Indígenas de El Salvador- ACCIES. Winona Flying Earth,Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. David Foris, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Francis Foster,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Rosalie Francis, Union of Nova Scotia Indians. KarlFranklin, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Donald Frantz, University of Lethbridge.Lisbeth Fritzell, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Roland Fumey, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. N. Louanna Furbee, University of Missouri. Zinaida Gabunia, Kabardino-Balkarian State University. Steve Gallagher, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Erqing Gao,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Luis Fernando Garcés Velásquez, UniversidadPolitécnica Salesiana. Xosé Lluis García Arias, Universidad de Oviedo. Donna Gardiner,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Yagfar Garipov, Institute of Language, Literature & Art ofthe Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan. Michel Gautier, UPCP-MÉTIVE. MassanviHonorine Gblem ép Podi, Société Internationale de Linguisitque. Florence Gerdel, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Marwan Ghasb, Al-Baath University. Salem Ghazali, InstitutSupérieur des langues de Tunis. Sarau Gheorghe, Universitatea Bucuresti-Romania. StanGibson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. John Mwaniki Gichangi, Kîembu-KîmbeereTranslation Project. Jordi Ginebra, Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Peter Gittlen, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. V. Gnana Sundaram, Central Institute of Indian Languages. DavidL. Gold, Association for the Study of Jewish Languages. María Stella González de Pérez,

List of Informants 293

Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Rita Gonzalez Delgado, Universitad de La Habana. DanielGonzalez García, Colla Unibersitaria por l’Aragonés. Durk Gorter, Fryske Akademy. JanGossner, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Kimmo Granqvist, Research Institute for theLanguages of Finland. Gianfranco Gribaudo, Unión de Asociaciones Piemonteses ante elMundo. Rhonda Griffiths, The Association of Norfolk Islanders. Andrew Grosh, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Manfred Gross, Lia Rumantscha (LR). Eva Grosser Lerner,Dirección de Lingüística del INAH. Abdoulaye Gueye, Universidad del País Vasco/ EuskalHerriko Unibertsitatea. Daniel Guillermo Agirre, Centro Colombiano de Estudios deLenguas Aborígenes (CCELA-UNIANDES). Nijayasarathi Gurindapall, Central Institute ofIndian Languages. Lakhan Gusain, Centre for Alternative Research and Development.Wilfrid Haacke, University of Namibia. Marleen Haboud Bumachar, Universidad Católica.Jerome Simooya Hachipola, University of Zambia. C. Joan Hainsworth, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Suleiman Haj-Mohammed, Damascus University. Lingadevaru Halemane,Central Institute of Indian Languages. Munawar Alam Halepota, Human RightsInternational Alliance. Amadou Hamady Diop, Centre de Linguistique Appliquée de Dakar,UCAD. Abdellah Hammouti, Université Mohammed I. Don Hankins. M. J. Hardman,University of Florida. Smolina Hariza, Serbska Kulturna informacija / SorbischeKulturinformation Berlin. Alec Harrison, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Lindsay Harry,Universal Esperanto Association. Ralph Harry, Universal Esperanto Association. DwightHartzler, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Yuting He, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.Paul Heineman, Summer Institute of Linguistic. Jim Henderson, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. David Henne, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Mark Hepner, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Victor Hernández Agüero, Comisión Nacional de Asuntos Indígenas(CONAI). Elvira Herrejón Mejía, Misioneras Combonianas. Hank Hershberger, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Ruth Hershberger, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ron Hesse,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Pirjo Hiidenmaa, The Research Instute for the Languages ofFinland. Margaret Hill, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Diane Hintz, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Kamel Hocine, Association Culturelle et Sportive NUMIDYA. HansHoddenbagh, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Alison Hoffmann, Victoria University ofWellington. Sam Hofman, Reformed Church in America. Richard Hohulin, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Paul Hoiland, Summer Institute of Linguistics. BarbaraHollenbach, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Arthur Holmer, Lund University. BruceHooley, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Bradley Hopkins, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Mary Hopkins, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Nancy H. Hornberger, University ofPennsylvania. Zhenhua Hu, Central University for Nationalities. Yong Huang, Universityof Foreign Economics and Trade of Beijing. Chenglong Huang, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Jock Hughes, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Rosendo Huisca Melinao,Universidad Católica de Temuco. Daniel Hunziker, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Conrad Hurd, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Christopher Hurst, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. David Hynum, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ana Ical de Cu, UniversidadRafael Landívar. Akanni Mamoud Igué, Université Nationale du Bénin. Clara Ikekeonwu,University of Nigeria. Petar Hr. Ilievski, Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts.Mohamed Iliyas, Jénonal Medical College. Nommensen Ingwer, Jandesinstitut Schlessing-Holstein für Praeis und Theorie an der Schule. Humanities Research Institute of theAcademy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). Investigación LingüísticaOxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’, OKMA. Zaual Ionov, Karachayevo-Cherkesia PedagogicalState University. Traore Issofah Issah, Direction de L’Alphabétisation de Togo. Pavle Ivic,Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Frances Jackson, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Roderick A. Jacobs, University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Jógvan í Lon Jacobsen,Fródskaparsetur Foroya. Marc Jacobson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jay Jenkins,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jiafa Ji, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Faïza Jibline,

294 Words and Worlds

Université Cadi Ayyad. Jitendra Jitendra, Nepal Chepang Association. Tony A. Johnson,Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. George Owen Jones, Mercator Media Centre. ElinJones, Mercator Media Centre. Sun Gi Jong, The Institution of Korean Language. BaldurJónsson, Icelandic Language Institute. Enrique Jordá, Compañía de Jesús. Victor Jose,National Secretariat of Torres Strait Islanders Organisations Ltd Jocelyne Joussemet, Centrede Documentació i d’Animació de la Cultura Catalana. Olga Marina Joya Sierra, InstitutoHondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). Ismail Junaidu, Nigerian EducationalResearch and Development Council. Junast, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. FarySilate Ka, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar. James Kakumasu, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Vidal Kamala-Cole, National Federation of UNESCO Clubs in Sierra Leone.Laré Kantchoa, Université du Bénin. Rawhia A. Kara, Sharjah Police Academy. YumavKarakaiev, Karachayevo-Cherkesia Pedagogical State University. Itao Michael Keem,Kaikor Catholic Mission. Donald Kenrick, Romany Institute. Lukian Kergoat, UniversitéRennes 2 – Haute Bretagne. Daniel Kernalegenn, Diwan Breizh. Amos Key, WoodlandCultural Education Centre. Kalu Ram Khambu Rai, Kirat Rai Language & Literary Council.Sejung Kim, The National Academy of the Korean Language. Kwanghae Kim, The NationalAcademy of Korean Language. Pascal James Kishindo, University of Malawi, ChancellorCollege. Timur Kocaoglu, Koc University. Mama Kouata, Ministère de l’ ÉducationNationale du Mali. Omkar Koul, Central Institute of Indian Languages. SilviaKouwenberg, University of the West Indies. Jarmila Kovarcik-Skalná, PEN (InternationalWriters Association). Jiri Kraus, Czech Language Institute. Georg Kremnitz, UniversitätWien. Pedro Juan Krisólogo B., Academia Venezolana de la Lengua Correspondiente de laReal Española. Menno Kroeker, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Gavril NikolayevichKurilov, Institute of Northern Minorities Problems. Lamont Laird, Eastewrn Shawnee Tribeof Oklahoma. Per Langgard, Ilisimatusarfik / University of Greenland. Robert Larsen,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Virginia Larson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. MildredL. Larson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Yolanda Lastra, Universidad Nacional Autónomade México. Juha Laulainen, University of Helsinki. Jean Le D–c, Université de BretagneOccidentale. André Le Mercier, Emgleo Breiz. Raúl Leal Gaiao, Universidade de Macau.Myles Leitch, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Yubing Li, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Jinfang Li, Central University for Nationalities. Keyu Li, Ethnic AffairsCommission of Huzhu Tuzu. Piran Li, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Min Liang,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Nietta Lindenberg Monte, Comissáo Pró Indio do Acre.Pauline Linton, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Baoyuan Liu, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Xiaochun Liu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Domingo Llanque Chana,Academia Peruana de la Lengua Aymara. Junstino Llanque Chana, University of Florida.Christine Lohmann, IPTS. Stale Loland, Norsk Sprakrad. Juventino López, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Ausencia López Cruz, Dirección de Lingüística del INAH.Longinos López Fernández, Misioneros Combonianos. Luz Mary López Franco,Universidad del Valle. Félix López Mamani, Ayllus de fhach’a Carangas. BelkacemLounes, Congrès Mondial Amazigh. Bernhard Louw, South African Academy of Science andArts. Larry Lovell, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Shaozun Lu, Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences. Velciov Luca-Francisc, Comunitatea Bratstvo a Bulgarilor din România.Eoghan Mac Aogáin, Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann (ITÉ). Scott MacGregor, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Donald J.M. Maciver, Haldane Education Centre. MunzhedziJames Mafela, National Language Service South Africa. Youssouf Billo Maiga, Ministère del’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Peter Nderi Maina, University of Nairobi. ManuelBernado Malchic Nicolás, Equipo de Investigación Lingüística Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’,OKMA. Refilwe Morongwa Malimabe, National Language Service South Africa. B.Mallikarjun, Central Institute of Indian Languages. Eusebia Mamani de Navarro,Organización Prov. Del Collao Dto. Ilave. Bertha Mamiro, University of Dar es Salaam.

List of Informants 295

Munir Mamman, Ahmadu Bello University. Deborah Maphoko Mampuru, NationalLanguage Service South Africa. Pierre-Loius Mangeard. Nathalie Marchal, Ministère de laCommunauté française-Service de la langue française. Mwamini Marco, University of Dar esSalaam. Nely Guadalupe Marcos Manrique, Organización Campa Ashaninka Feconaca.Nagy Marimela, Brukenthal School. Pedro Marin, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.Jeanne Marion-Landais, Comision Nacional Dominicana para la UNESCO. Ahmed Marouf,Université d’Oran. Michael Martens, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Maisa Martin,University of Jyväskylä. Gordon Martin, Summer Institute of Linguistics. William Martin,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Nyakundi M. Elijah Matagaro, University of Nairobi(CEES). Dyobyana Isaac Mathumba, National Language Service South Africa. EstherMatteson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Francis Kinyari Mbaaro, Bible Society of Kenya.J. Derrick McClure, Aberdeen University. Arthur Edwin McCullough, University of Ulster.John Martin McIntyre, Ulster Scots Language Society. Robert McKee, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Louise McKone, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Wilson McLeod, Universityof Edinburgh. Helena Medesi, The Executive Council of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.Nely Margot Mejia Paredes, FEDECMA. Nebon Maximino Méndez Bernardo, Academiade las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Chaoji Meng, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.Baceliza Miguel Dionicio, Federación de Comunidades Nativas Campa Ashaninka. AnneDagmar Biti Mikalsen, Saami Language Council. Mohamed Miled, Université de Tunis.Carlo Minnaja, “Esperanto” Radikala Asocio. Anna Nikolayevich Mireyeva, Institute ofNorthern Minorities problems. Gotart Mitri, Istitût Ladin-Furlan “Pre Checo Placerean”.Buyisiwe Phyllis Mngadi, National Language Service South Africa. Salum, R. Mnjagila,Ministry of Education and Culture. Romelia Mó Jsém, Equipo de Investigación LingüísticaOxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’, OKMA. Rosemary MH Moeketsi, National Language ServiceSouth Africa. María Cristina Mogellón Pérez, Asociación Interetnica de Desarrollo de laAmazonia Peruana. Handaine Mohamed, Université d’Eté d’Agadir. Yonta Moise,CABTAL. Claude Molinier, Institut d’Estudis Occitans. Luis Montaluisa, Confederaciónde Nacionalidades Indigenas del Ecuador (CONAIE). Henrique Monteagudo Romero,Arquivo de Planificación e Normalización Lingüística. Saqch’en Ruperto Montejo,Universidad Rafael Landívar. David Moomo, Nigeria Bible Translation Trust. JuanAntonio Morán Muss, Comisión Nacional para la Oficialización de Idiomas Indígenas.Bruno Moretti, Osservatorio Linguistico della Svizzera. David Morgan, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Chris E. Morganroth, Quileute Tribal School. Mabel Petronila Mori Clement,Asociación Interetnica de Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana. Nancy Morse, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Esteban Emilio Mosonyi, Universidad Central de Venezuela.Yuzhang Mu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Shihua Mu, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Violet Mucheni. Samuel M. Kimani Mugo, Mugoya Construction Co ClementMurba Wau Bilal, Université de Khartoum. Carolyn Murray, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Bill Murray, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jefwa George Mweri, Universityof Nairobi. N. Nadaraja Pillai, Central Institute of Indian Languages. HidayatullahNaeem, Pashto Academy. Francho Nagore Laín, Consello d’a Fabla Aragonesa (CFA).Naomi Nagy, University of New Hampshire. Ajit Kumar Naik, Jawaharlal NehruUniversity. V. Saratchandran Nair, Central Institute of Indian Languages. Poidi Napo,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Elivered Nasambu Mulongo, Bible Society of Kenya.Dmitri Mikhailovich Nasilov, Lomonosov State Univesity, Moscow. Montillier Natea,Centre Polynésien des Sciences Humaines “Te Anavaharau”. Gianni Nazzi, Clape CulturâlAquilee. Atwaya Saidi Nchimbi, Moi University. Peter Chuma Ndiema, University ofNairobi. Augustin Ngabiramé, Université National du Rwuanda. Meabh Ni Chatháin,Bord Na Gaeilge. Nkechiyere Nnadi, Nigerian Educational Research and DevelopmentCouncil. Inno Uzoma Nwadike, University of Nigeria. Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo,Kamanakao Cultural Association / University of Bostwana. Ruán Ó Bric, Údarás na

296 Words and Worlds

Gaeltachta. Michael O’ Keefe, Department of Canadian Heritage, Policy and Research,Official Languages Support Programmes. Howard Oates, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Rainer Oetzel, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Sabine Oetzel, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Charles Ogbulogo, University of Lagos. Chinyere Ohiri-Aniche, Universityof Lagos. Hideki Ohtsuba, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Claris Okonji, University ofNairobi. Joseph Ole Karia, Maasai of Kenya. Johnson M. Ndanareh Ole Kaunga,O.S.I.L.I.G.I. Secretariat. Soini Olkonen, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Clif Olson,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ronald Olson, Summer Institute of Linguistics. HarryOpikokew, MBC Radio. Galina Nikolaevna Orlova, Ministry of General and ProfessionalEducation of the Republic of Kalmykia. Carolyn Orr, Summer Institute of Linguistics. PeterOsore Muniafu, Oluluyia Bible Translation Project. Martha Lucía Osorno Posada,Universidad del Valle. Bertram Iwunwa Nkemgemedi Osuagwu, Alvan Ikoku College ofEducation. Jueya Ouyang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Haydee PadillaVillanueva, ADECAP. Michel Paillé, Conseil de la Langue Française du Québec. Ma LienaPalacios Rasal, LIGALLO de Fablans de l’Aragones. Christina Noel Pallangyo, Universityof Dar es Salaam. Chehgqian Pan, Central University for Nationalities. Robert A. Papen,Université du Québec à Montréal. James Park, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jim Parlier,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Luis Evangelino Patzi Vera, Confederación Sindical Unicade Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia. Valentin Pavlovski, Université linguistique deMinsk. Thomas Payne, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Sergey Pazov, Karachayevo-Cherkesia Pedagogical State University. Roy N. Pedersen, Highlands and Islands Enterprise.Louise Peltzer, Université de la Polynésie française. Lucio Peressi, Societât FilologjicheFurlane. Fernando Perez Prieto, Misioneros de Africa. Mona Perrin, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Jan Persons, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Gary Persons, Summer Instituteof Linguistics. P. Perumalsamy, Goverment of India – Language Division. GabrielePetersen de Piñeros, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Daryl Pfantz, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Kenneth Pheasant, Grand Traverse Band Tribal Council. Conrad Phelps,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Berengier Pierrette, Ciel d’Oc. Augusto Pinula Méndez,Comunidad Lingüística Uspanteko. Ilda Pizzinini, Union Generala di Ladins dla Dolomites(UGLD). Kathrin Pope, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Patricia M. Powell, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Leslie Pride, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Perry Priest, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Olga Profili, Commission Europénne. Mauricio Puig,Congregación Escuelas Pías. Edgar Armando Quiacain, Visión Guatemala. Ahmed RachidRaha, Fundación Mediterranea Montgomery Hart de Estudios Amazighs y Magrebíes. J.Randolph Radney, Canada Institute of Linguistics. Milorad Radovanovic, University ofNovi Sad. Krishna Kumar Rai, Kirat Rai Language & Literary Council. V.R. Rajasingh,Central Institute of Indian Languages. Jebra Ram Muchahary, Indian Confederation ofIndigenous and Tribal Peoples. N. Ramaswami, Central Institute of Indian Languages.Henri Ramirez, Universidade do Amazonas (Manaus/ Brazil). Alfredo Ramírez Celestino,Dirección de Lingüística del INAH. Mario Ramos Ramírez, Comunidad Lingüística Ch’orti’de la ALMG. R. Kailainathan Ratnamalar, University of Jaffna. Jorge Manuel RaymundoVelásquez, Universidad Rafael Landívar. Peter Rebigo, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Ioan Rebusapca, University of Bucharest. Joy Reddy, Central Institute of Indian Languages.JeDene Reeder, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Martine Renouprez, Universidad de Cadiz.Karin Rensberg Ripa, The Sami Parliament. John Rentz, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Anita Sophie Reutenauer. Mikael Reuter, The Research Institute for the Languages ofFinland. Ag Jbrahim Rhaly, Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. RudoRhuhwaya, UNESCO Harare. Heinz Richter-Rychtar, Universität Leipzig. David Riggs,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Antònia Rigo, ESADE – Escola Superior d’Administració iDirecció d’Empreses. Karen Risager, Universtity of Roskilde. Clifford Roberts, NationalFederation of UNESCO Clubs in Sierra Leone. Jean-Dominique Robin, Unvaniezh ar

List of Informants 297

Gelennerien Brezhoneg. José Carlos Rodríguez, Misioneros Combonianos. SimónRodríguez Hernández, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Telma RodríguezRodríguez, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Diego Rodríguez Toma,Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Haydee Rosales Alvarado, AsociaciónInteretnica de Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana. Haiim B. Rosén, Hebrew University ofJerusalem. Judith Rosenhouse, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Antonio BenicioRoss Montejo, Equipo de Investigación Lingüística Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’, OKMA.Melania Rukanda, Unesco Zimbabwe. Ingrid Runggaldier, Province Administration.James Rupp, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jim Rupp, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Liliana Ruxandoin, University of Bucharest. Fatima Sadiqui, Université Sidi MohammedBen Abdellah. Boniface Sagbohan, FIFA Médiation (Cabinet d’Etudes Socio-linguistiques).Omitade Saliman Salami, Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council. IsrapilSampíev. Juan Sánchez Arenas, Misioneros Combonianos. Francisco Javier SánchezGómez, PROIMMSE-IIA-UNAM. Eli Sánchez Rodríguez, Asociación Interetnica deDesarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana. Fausto Sandoval Cruz, Centro Cultural Driki. AldirSantos de Paula, Universidade Federal de Alagoas. Mahavir Saran Jain, Ministry of HumanResource Development. Leena Savolainen, Research Institute for the Languages of Finland.Will Sawers, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Junia Schauer, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Henri Scherb, Association Heimetsproch un Tradition (HT). AlvinSchoenhals, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Dietrich Scholze, Sorbisches Institut e. V.Bautzen. Petra Schroeder, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Martin Schroeder, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Marc Schwab, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Armin Schwegler,University of California. Sechenchogt, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Aliou NgonéSeck, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar-Fann. Margaret J. Secombe, University ofAdelaide. Osvaldo Segovia, Centro Educativo de Nivel Medio No 2. Frank Seifart, CentroColombiano de Estudios de Lenguas Aborígenes (CCELA-UNIANDES). Kilnesy EmmanuelSekwiha, University of Dar-es-Salaam. Charles Saina Sena, Ogiek Rural Integrated Projects.Gunter Senft, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Bjornar Seppola, Norsk KvenersForbund. Rekha Sharma, Central Institute of Indian Languages. Irina VitalievnaShenzova, State Institute for Pedagogical Sciences of Novokuznetsk. Caleb Shivachi,Maseno University. Wesley Shoemaker, Summer Institute of Linguistics. George Shultz,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Dag F. Simonsen, Norsk Sprakrad. Fridah Adava Simwa,University of Nairobi. María Juliana Sis Iboy, Equipo de Investigación Lingüística OxlajuujKeej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’, OKMA. William Sischo, Summer Institute of Linguistics. MadySissoko, Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Yome Bananibitcho Sizing, Directeurde la Formation permanente, de l’Action et de la Recherche pédagogique de Togo (DIFOP).Sarah Johanna Catharine Slabbert, National Language Service South Africa. A. Jean Smith,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Jerzy J. Smolicz, University of Adelaide. SiddharajSoorjibhai Solanki, Shri Arravalli Adivasi. Domingo Solís Marcos, Academia de lasLenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Neville Southwell, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Margarethe Sparing-Chavez, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ruth Spielmann, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Sunthorn Sripanngern, Mon Unity League. Jim Stahl, SummerInstitute of Linguistics. Roman Stefaniw, Summer Institute of Linguistics. RichardSteinbring, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Asher Stern, NIV – Center for ExpertiseProvision. Joel Stolte, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Anne Storch, Institut fürAfrikanische Sprachwissenschaften. Margarete Storck, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Mary Stringer, International Literacy Consultant with INTERLEC. Morris A. Stubblefield,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Suikhar, Chin National Froant. Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Kembo Sure, Moi University. Hongkai Sun, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Zamir Suyunou, Open State University of Moscow, Karachayevo-Cherkesia DeptKenneth Swift, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Mark Taber, Summer Institute of

298 Words and Worlds

Linguistics. Kaori Tahara, Ainu Association of Japan. Miloud Taïfi, Université SidiMohammed Ben Abdellah. Dalila Taisin Victoria, Federación Aguaruna (FAD). JarumTakazov, North Ossetia-Alania. State University Petrus Cornelius Taljaard, NationalLanguage Service South Africa. Elemo Tapim, Magani Malu Kes. Alejandro TeletovVelasquez, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Delfino Felipe Tema Bautista,Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Aldo Leopoldo Tévez, Alero QuichuaSantiagueño en Buenos Aires. David Thomas, Summer Institute of Linguistics. MarlinThompson, Yerington Paiute Tribe. Ruth Thomson, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, University of New South Wales. Purna Chandra Thoudam,Manipur University. Bertil Tikkanen, University of Helsinki. Mohand Tilmatine,Universidad de Cadiz. Peter James Hilary Titlestad, The English Academy of SouthernAfrica. Maria Elena Tobar Gutierrez, Universidad de los Andes. Band-Patrice Togo,Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Litip Tohti, Central University for Nationalities.Leo Toner, Istituto Culturale Mòcheno-Cimbro (ICMC). Modeen Tore, University ofHelsinki. Hilary Tovey, Dublin University. Douglas Towne, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Annette Trabold, Institut für Deutsche Sprache. Bory Traoré, Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale du Mali. Ed Travis, Summer Institute of Linguistics. E. Douglas Trick,Summer Institute of Linguistics. María Trillos Amaya, Universidad de Los Andes. TasakuTsunoda, University of Tokyo. Ma. C. Hilaria Tuki Pakarati, Corporación de ResguardoCultural Mata Nui a Hotu Matu’a o Kahu-Kahu o Hera. Afia Akrasi Twumasi. BobUebele, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Vijayendra Bhas V. Sarngadharan, InternationalSchool of Dravidian Linguistics. Ian Vail, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Rosa AidéVallejos Yopán, Asociación Interetnica de Desarrollo de la Amazonia Peruana. Freek Van deScheur, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Sjaak Van Kleef, Summer Institute of Linguistics.Feikje Van der Haak, Summer Institute of Linguistics. María Ofelia Vásquez, ComunidadLingüística Uspatenko. Domingo Vásquez Gómez, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas deGuatemala. Celia Vasquez Yui, Federación de Comunidades Nativas del Ucayli. ElíasVelásquez, Asociación Misionera Garífuna. Ruth Celia Velazco Castro, OrganizaciónIndígena Regional Atalaya- OIRA. Jaume Vernet, Universitat Rovira i Virgili. AntonioFlorencio Vicente Tosin, Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala. Sara DeliciaVillagra de Batoux, Comisión Nacional de Bilingüismo. Hessel Visser, Summer Institute ofLinguistics. Alan Vogel, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Paul Vollrath, Summer Instituteof Linguistics. Brad Voltmer, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Alastair Walker, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Piripi Walker, The Wellington Maori Language Board.Helga Walsemam, IPTS. Feng Wang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Said Warsame,UNESCO PEER. Christiane Weber, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Thomas Weber,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Samueul Weekes, National Federation of UNESCO Clubs inSierra Leone. Xuechun Wei, Information Property Minister. André Wengler, Ministère del’Education Nationale et de la Formation Professionnelle, Luxembourg SCRIPT. Anne West,Summer Institute of Linguistics. Ron Whisler, Summer Institute of Linguistics. HenryWhitney, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Daya Menike Wickramasinghe, University ofKelaniya. Geirr Wiggen, University of Oslo. Ratna Wijetunge, University of SoiGayewardenepura. Thomas Willett, Summer Institute of Linguistics. Elizabeth GraceWinkler, Indiana University. Birger Winsa, Stockholm University. Scott Wood Ronas,CEBIMH-MOPAWI. David Charles Wright Carr, Universidad del Valle de MEXICO.Hongwei Wu, Institute of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Huang Xing, Chinese Academyof Social Sciences. Shixuan Xu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Xijian Xu, ChineseAcademy of Social Sciences. Dewu Xuan, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. BalloYacouba, Ministère de l’ Éducation Nationale du Mali. Salisu Ahmed Yakasai, UsmanuDanfodio University. Yanli Yang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Jiangling Yang,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Juan de Dios Yapita, Instituto de Lengua y Cultura

List of Informants 299

Aymara (ILCA). Lahcen Yasri, Assotiation Socioéducative et Culturelle Assekka. DeshuYe, Jishou University. Yan Yuan, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Ore Yusuf,University of Ilorin. Mirfatych Zakiev, Institute of Language, Literature & Art of theAcademy of Sciences of Tatarstan. Daysi Zapata Fasabi, Organización Indígena RegionalAtalaya- OIRA. Roberto Zavala, Max Planck Institute für Psycholinguistik. Xiaoyu Zeng,Nankai University. Liubov Zhabelova, Research Institute of Humanities of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. Ronglan Zhang, Yunnan Minority Languages Commission. JunruZhang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Jichuan Zhang, Chinese Academy of SocialSciences. Aping Zhao, Institute on the Manchu Language. Nurgaisha Zheksem Bieva,Kazakh State University of World Languages and International Relations. Yiqing Zheng,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Jinwen Zhong, Central University for Nationalities.Guoyan Zhou, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Yaowen Zhou, Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences. Wenxu Zhu, Central Nationality University. Armand Zimmer, InstitutUniversitaire de Formation des Maitres (I. U. F. M.) de Lorraine. Mao Zongwu, ChineseAcademy of Social Sciences. Giandaniele Zoratto, Istit–t Ladin-Furlan “Pre ChecoPlacerean”. Carol Zylstra, Summer Institute of Linguistics.

300 Words and Worlds

!Xü *Abaza *, 72, 136, map 2Abkhaz, 72, map 2Abkhaz-Adyghian, 72Achagua *, map 12Achang *, 178, map 13Achi *, 47, 177, 194, 207, 218, map 8Acholi *, 122Achuar *, 101, 178, map 6Achumawi, map 3Adamawa, 67, 98Adamawa Fulfulde, 98Adyghe *, 72, 73, 158Afar, 94, 98Afrikaans *, 21, 94, map 5Afro-Asiatic, 50, 60, map 1Aghem *Aghul *, map 2Aguano, map 6Ahlon *, Ainu *, 178Aiwo *, 178, 194Ajachmen (Juaneño), map 3Akan *Akateko, map 8Akhwakh, map 2Akoose *Akoye *, 178, 197Akuapim Twi, 99Alakaluf, 66Algonquian (Algonquin), 65, map 11Algonquin *, 65Almosan, 59

Alsatian *, 25, 178Altaic, 60, 73, 236, map 1Alto Campa Amahuaca *, 178, map 6Amaiweri-Kisambaeri, map 6Amarakaeri, map 6Amerindian, 59, 60, 177, map 1Amharic, 67Amuesha, map 6Amuzgo * Amuzgoan, 65Ancash-Yaru (Quechua), map 6 Andaman, 209Andamanese *, 26, 60, 209, 210, map 1Andean, 59, 66Andi, map 2Andoa, map 6Andoke *, map 12, 6Anêm, 18Anong *, map 13Apache, 60Arabela, map 6Arabic *, 18, 29, 47, 51, 56, 64, 67, 68, 85, 93, 94,

98, 101, 136, 162, 177, 190, 191, 194, 231, 241Aragonese *, 70, 226Arahuaca, map 6Arasairi, map 6Araucanian, 66Arawakan (Arawak) 66, map 12Archi, map 2Armenian, 58, map 2Aru, map 6Asante Twi, 99

Appendix 4

Index of Languages, Familiesand Varieties1

301

1The information on the languages with an asterisk has been collected through a questionnaire

Ashaninca *, 147, map 6Assamese *, 26, 94, 137, 221Asturian *, 25Asu, map 9Athapahare (see Athpare), 178, 241Athapaskan, map 11Athpare (Athapahare) *, 178, 241Atsugewi, map 3Aukan *, 141Australian, 22, 23, 33, 42, 43, 60, 76, 77, 237,

map 1Austro-Asiatic, 26, 210, 240, 241Austronesian, 18, 40, 58, 60, 76, 236, map 1Avar *, 72, 73, map 2Awa Pit *, 178, map 12Awadhi, 240, 241Awajun *, 178, map 6Awakateko *, map 8Ayacucho-Cusco (Quechua), map 6Aymara *, 102, 123, 124, 168, 177, 218, map 6Azerbaijani *, 94, map 2Aztecan, 65Babanki * Babole *, 141, 178Backslang, 21Badyara *, 178Bafut *Bagri * Bagval, 72, map 2Bahasa, 94Baheng *, 178, map 13Bai *, 144, map 13Baima *, 178, map 13Baiso, 52Baka * Bakole * Bakpwe * Balanta *, 178Balkar *, 71, 73, 233, map 2Balong *Baltic, 60, 74Bamanankan *, 136Bandial, map 7Baniba, map 12Baniwa *, 178, map 12Bantawa *, 124, 240, 241Bantoid (Bantu), 58, 60, 67Bantu, 58, 60, 67Bao’an *, 178, map 13Bara *, map 12Barasana *, map 12Bardi *, 219, 220, 226

Bargam *, 178Bari *, map 12Bariai *, 178Baruba, 217Baruga *, 179Basari *, 179Basque *, 60, 62, 97, 99, 168, 170, 171, 172, 191,

map 1Batanga *Bati *Bats, 72, map 2Bavarian, 25Bay Islands Creole English *, map 2Bayot, map 7Beash *Befang *Belarusan *, 58, 162Belhare, 241Belize Creole English, map 8Bemba, 18, map 9Bena, map 9Bende, map 9Bengali *, 94, 137, 231, 240Bengni-Bogar *, 179, map 13Benue-Congo, 50Berber, 56, 67, 81, 123, 208 (Tamazight 47, 123,

162, 190, 208), map 10Berbice Creole Dutch *, 179Bezthi, map 2Bhili *Bhojpuri, 240, 241Bhramu, 241Bhujel, 241Bhumij *, 179Biao *, map 13Bimin *, 179Bislama, 76, 94Bisu *, 179, map 13Biu-Mandara, 67Blackfoot *, 179Blang *, 179, map 13Blean, 94, 98Bliss, map 7Boazi *, 160, 179Bodic, 74Boki *Bolinao *, 179Bondei, map 9Bora *, 209, map 12, map 6Boro *Bosnian, 13, 21Bote, 240, 242

302 Words and Worlds

Botlikh, map 2Botolan *Bozo *Breton *, 52, 53, 58, 70, 102, 103, 124, 135, 136,

161, 162, 168, 220, 243Brokpa *Buang *, 40, 41, 179Bubia *Budik *, 179Budukh, map 2Buduma *Buhutu *, 179Bukusu *Bulgarian, 33, 58Buluf, map 7Bungu, map 9Bunu *, map 13Buriato *Burmese-Lolo, 74Burum-Mindik *, 179Burunge, map 9Burushaski *, 147, 148, 178Bushman, 60Buyei *, map 13Bwaidoka *, 179Byangsi, 241Cabecar *, 124, 179Cacaotera, 179, 240, map 8Cacua, map 12Caddo, 65Cahto, map 3Cahuapanan, 66, map 6 Cahuilla, map 3Calabrian Greek *California Shoshoni (Panamint), map 3Campa del Alto, map 6Cañaris-Cajamarca (Quechua), map 6Canglo-Monba *, map 13Cantonese, 43Capanahua, map 6Capeverdean Creole *, 124Caquinte *, 179, map 6Carapana Cariban (Caribe), 66, map 12Cashibo, map 6Casubian, 70Catalan *, 24, 30, 47, 58, 97, 99, 121, 168, 170,

177, 203Caucasian, 52, 60, 70, 71, 72, map 1Cayapa *, 179Cayuga *Celtic, 60, 243

Chachapoyas-Lamas (Quechua), map 6Chadic, 50, 67Chaga *, 179Chamalal *, map 2Chamicuro, map 6Chamling *, 179, 241Chantel, 241, 242Chasi (Wasi), map 9Chatino *Chaudangsi, 241Chayahuita, map 6Chechen, 60, 72, 73, map 2Cheke Holo *, 179Chemehuevi, map 3Chepang *, 152, 179, 241Chewa *Chhiling, 241Chhulung, 241Chian, 74Chiapanec-Manguean, 65Chibchan (Chibcha), 65, map 12Chibchan-Páez, 59Chichimeco *, 179Chilcotin *, 179, 208Chilula, map 3Chimariko, map 3Chimila *, 179, map 12Chinantecan, 65Chinanteco *, 179Chinese (Mandarin) *, 18, 29, 43, 47, 55, 64,

85, 121, 122, 123,136, 139, 141, 148, 159,178, 191, 192, 195, 206, 217, 231, 235

Chinook *Chintang, 241, 242Chipaya *, 153, 179, 218Chipewyan, 105Chiwere *,Chocho *, 179Choco, map 12Ch’ol, map 8Cholon, map 6Chon, 66Chontal, map 8Ch’orti’ *, 97, map 8Chrau *, 179Chuj *, 160, map 8Chukchi, 60, 73, 99, 121Chukchi-Kamchatdan, 60, 73, map 1Chukwa, 241Chumash, map 3Chumashan, 65Cubas, 99

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 303

Cocopa, map 3Colorado *, 138, 179Comorian *, 152Cona-Monba *, map 13Coreguaje *Cornish *, 243Corsican *, 25, 241Costanoan, map 3Cree *, 105Croatian, 47, 58Cujareño, map 6Culina, map 6Cun *, 158, 179, map 13Cupeño, *, 152, map 3Czech *, 58, 107Da’a *, Dagaari, 99Dagbani, 99Dagestanian, 72, map 2Dai *, 99, 122, 139, 178, map 13Daic, 60, 74, map 1Dama *Damana *, map 12Damin, 22Danish *, 47, 58, 105, 180Danuwar, 240Darai, 240Darang-Deng *, 179, map 13Dargva, 73, map 2Darmiya, 241Datooga, map 9Daur *, map 13Davar Barril, 209De’ang *, 139, map 13Denya *Derung *, 99, 179, 212, map 13Desano *, 195, map 12Dhangar (Jhangar), 241Dido, map 2Diegueño (Kumeyaay, Ipai), map 3Digo, map 1Dii *, Dimali, 241Doayo *, Dobel *, 141, 179Doe, map 9Dogba *, Dogon *, 140, 178Dogrib, 105Dolían, 99, 121Dolpo, 241Domaki *, 179

Domari *Dong (Kam) *, 179, map 13Dongxiang *, 123, map 13Dravidian 26, 74, 210, 211, 221, 240, 241, map 1Duala *Dugwor *Dumbule *Dumi, 241, 242Dungar Varli, 209Dungmali, 241, 242Dura, 241, 242Dutch *, 29, 56, 58, 70, 95, 98, 105, 166Duupa *, Dyirbal, 17Ebira, 217Ediamat, map 7Edo *, 98Edolo *, 179Efik *, 98Ejagham *Elun, map 7Embera *, map 12Embu *English *, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27,

29, 31, 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 51, 54, 55, 61, 62,64, 65, 69, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105,113, 122, 138, 151, 152, 154, 162, 166, 167,169, 175, 176, 177, 180, 183, 193, 194, 203,208, 209, 210, 216, 217, 222, 223, 230, 231,232, 241, 242, 243, 247, map 5

Ergong *, 179, map 13Ersu *, 179, map 13Ese’ejja, map 6Esimbi *Eskimo-Aleut 59, 60, 65, map 1, map 11Esperanto *, 21, 22, 44Esselen, map 3Eve *, 99, 103Ewenki *, map 13Eyak, 225, 226Fante, 99Faroese *, 70, 99, 121Fe’fe’ *, Fiji Hindi, 41Finnish, 60, 105, 168Fipa, map 9Flemisch, 24, 25Fogny *, map 7Fogny-Kombo, map 7 Fongbe *, 124Francique, 25

304 Words and Worlds

Franco-Provençal *, 70French *, 13, 16, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29, 39, 40, 47, 58,

64, 68, 69, 76, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 98,102, 103, 104, 105, 121, 124, 138, 166, 193,203, 221, 222, 223, 228, 230, 231, 243, 247

Frisian *, 70, 97, 143, 180Friulan *, 58, 147, 221Fulani 67, 206Fuyug *, 179Ga *, 99Gabrielino (see Tongva), map 3Galician *, 29, 58, 99, 162, 178Ganda, map 9Garasia *, Gardangarurru *Garifuna *, 97, map 8Gelao *, 179, map 13Geman-Deng *, 179, map 13Georgian, 60, 72, map 2German *, 16, 21, 22, 29, 47, 55, 56, 58, 64, 70,

84, 98, 105, 180, 191, 231, 233, 234Ghale *, 241, 242Ghomala’ *Gikuyu *, 179Gilyak (see Nivkh), 121Gimbe *Gimme *Gin, *, map 13Giriama *, 179Giziga *Glavda *Godoberi, map 2Gogo, map 9Gondi *Gorowa, map 9Greek, 138, 190Greenlandic *, 98Grishun (Romansh), 44, 58, 70, 98, 104Guahibo, map 12Guambiano *, 179, map 12Guarani *, 18, 39, 41, 66, 98, 104, 122, 133, 137,

192Guarau *Guayabero *, map 12Guiqiong *, 139, 178, 179, 197Gujarati, 56, 94Gumawana *, 52, 179Gungu *, 179Gurung, 240, 241Gusii *Gusilay, map 7Gvoko *

Gweno, map 9Gyarong *, map 13Gyasundo, 241Gypsy, 7, 63Ha, map 9Hadareb, 94, 98Hadza (Hatsa), map 9Hagahai, 79Haida, map 11Hainanese, 43Haitian Creole, 20, 39, 222Halbi *, 144Halung, 241Hangaza, map 9Hani *, 178, 217, map 13Harakmbet, map 6Harauti *Haruai, *, 138, 179Hatsa (Hadza), map 9Hausa *, 50, 64, 67, 98, 122Haya *, map 9Haya, 197, 241, 242Hebrew *, 170, 190, 191Hehe, map 9Her, map 7Hewa *, 179Hezhen *, 179, map 13Hide *Hijuk *Himalayan Languages, 241Hindi *, 21, 26, 40, 41, 47, 94, 192, 209, 210,

231, 240, 241Hinukh 52, map 2Hiri Motu, 78Hitnu, map 12Hixkariana, 138Hokkien, 43Holoholo, map 9Hottentot, 33, 60Huachipaeri, map 6Huave, map 8Huichol, map 8Huihui *, map 13Huitoto (Uitoto), 66, 124, 179, 207, 240Humli Tamang, 241Hungarian *, 60, 70Hunzib, map 2Hupa, map 3Ibibio *, 178Ibo (see Igbo), 50, 67, 98, 122Icelandic *, 121, 177Idakho *, 179

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 305

Idoma, 98Idu *, 179, map 13Igbo *, 50, 67, 98, 122Ignaciano *IjawIjor *, 217Ika *, map 12Ikizu, map 9Ikoma, map 9Ilianen Manobo *, 179Imbongu *, 179Indonesian, 21, 40, 64, 94, 95, 96, 142, 231Indo-European languages 58, 60, 96, 240, map 1Inga *, map 12Ingush *, 72, 73, map 2Inuktitut, 60, 61, 62, 99, 105Ipai (see Diegueño), map 3Iquito *, 179, map 6Iraqw, map 9Irish Gaelic *, 70, 98, 105, 243Isanzu, map 9Isconahua, map 3Istro Romanian, 25Isu *Italian *, 13, 56, 58, 84, 98, 105, 121, 162Itzaj *, 141, 179, map 8Ivatan *Ixil *, map 8Jakalteko *, map 8Jalunka *, 179Jamaican, *Japanese *, 18, 60, 64, 121, 231, map 1Jaqaru *, map 6Jarauara *, 179Jarawa *, 209, 210Jaru *, 237Jasngali (Rawat), 241Jauja-Huanca (Quechua), map 6Jebero, map 6Jenu Kuruba, 209Jhangar (see Dhangar), 241Jibaro (see Shuar), 99, 101, map 6Jingpo *, 99, 136, 178, map 13Jino, map 13Jinuo *, 179Jiongnai *, 179, 206, map 13Jirel 241, 242Jita, map 9Jitnu *Juaneño (see Ajachmen), map 3Juhupde *Jukun *, 179, 207

Ka’apor *, 52Kabardian *, 72, 73, 123, map 2Kabiyari *Kabiye *, 147Kabwa, map 9Kada *Kag, 241Kagate, 241, 242Kagayanen *, 179Kagulu (see Kaguru), 179, map 9Kaguru (Kagulu) *, 179, map 9Kahe, 241, 242, map 9Kaike, Kajnas *Kakua *Kalanga *Kalmyk *, 71, 73, map 2Kaluli *, 179Kam (see Dong) Kamali *, 179Kamassian, 121Kami, map 9Kamsa *, map 12Kan Kandozi *, 179, map 6Kangjia *, map 13Kannada *, 27, 74, 94, 238Kanuri *, 50, 98Kaqchikel *, 147, 220, map 8Kara, map 9Karachay *, 71, 73, 233, map 2Karapana *, map 12Karata, map 2Karay *, 147, 179Karelian, 25Karijona *, map 12Karimojong *Kariña *Karmarong, 241Karon, map 7Karuk, map 3Kasa *, map 7Kasem, 99Kashmiri *, 94Kâte, 18Kawaiisu, map 3Kaweskar, 66Kawiyari, map 12Kaxinawa *, 140, 159, 160, 170, map 6Kayapi *, 179Kayapo *, 179Kazak *, map 13

306 Words and Worlds

Kei *, 179Kenyang *Kera *Kerewe (Kerebe), map 9Ket 73, 121Kewa, 22Khaidako, map 2Khaling, 241, 242Kham *Khesang, 241Khinalugh, map 2Khmer *Khoekhoegowap * Khoisan, 60, 67, map 1Khvarsh, map 2Khwendam *K’iche’ *, map 8Kikuyu, 67Kimbu, map 9Kinga, map 9Kirgiz *, 97, 136, 211, map 13Kirivila *Kisi, map 9Koasati *, 179Kobo * Kodagu, 238Kofan, *, 179, map 12Kogui *, map 12Koi *, 241Kokama *, 160, 179, map 6, map 12Kom *, 179Koma Ndera *Komba *, 179Komo *, 179Konja * Konkani, 94Konkow, map 3Konongo, map 9Konyagi * Koori, 21Korean *, 29, 60, 121, map 1, map 13Koreguaje *, map 12Korop * Koryak * Kosarek Yale * Kosorong *Kott, 121Krio *, 223Kryts, map 2Kubeo *, map 12Kuiba *, map 12Kuku-Yalanji *, 179

Kulung, 241Kumale, 240Kuman * Kumeyaay (see Dieguño), map 3Kumyk, 71, 73, map 2Kuna *, map 12Kunama, 94, 98Kupwar, 27, 33, 38Kurdish, map 2Kuria, map 9Kurripako *, map 12Kurti * Kusunda, 240, 242Kutang Bhote, 241Kutenai, map 11Kutep * Kutu, map 9Kuuy *, 179Kuvi *, 152, 179Kwaiquer *, (see Awa Pit)Kwakwala *, 179Kwatay *, map 7Kwaya, map 9Kwere, map 9Kyorung, 241Ladin *Ladino *, 58, 70, 147, 191, 219Lahu *, map 13Lai *, 137, 221Lak, 73, map 2Lakantun, map 8Lake (see Namsrung) Lakkia *, 179, map 13Lakota *, 177Lamba *Lambya, map 9Lamenu *, 179Lamnso’ * Langi (Rangi), map 9Lango *, 147Lardil, 22Laria * Larke (see Namsrug), 241Lassik, map 3Latin, 33, 58, 86, 136, 138, 141, 190, 191Latvian *, 177Laz, 72, map 2Lembena *, 179Lenca (Lenka), 240, map 8Leti *Lezgian *, 73, map 2Lfa’ *

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 307

Lhasa Tibetan, 241Lhomi, 241Li *, map 13Limbo, 240, 241Limbum * Limkhim, 241Lingala, 67Lingao *, 148, 212, map 13Lisu *, 141, map 13Lithuanian, 58Lobala *, 179Logooli *Lopa, 141Lotha * Low Saxon, 25Luang *, 179Luba Congo, 67Lugbara, 67Luiseño, map 3Lunda * Luo, map 9Luvale * Luwo *, 179Luxemburgian *, 47, 98, 105Maasai *, map 9Mabas * Macanese *, 179, 226Macedonian * Machame, map 6Machiguenga, map 6Machinga, map 6Mada *Madang-Adelbert, 76Magar, 240Mahl * Maidu, Northest, map 3Maithili, 240, 241Majhi, 240Makhuwa-Metto, map 9Makonde, map 9Maku, 206, map 12Makuna *, map 12Malay *, 18, 43, 136, 179, 191, 231Malayalam *, 74, 94Malayo-Polynesian, 60Maldivian, 74Malecite *, 179Malila, map 9Malngin *, 179Maltese *, 122Mam *, 193, 220, map 8Mamaara *

Mambay * Mambila * Mambwe *, 179Mambwe-Lungu, map 9Managalasi *Managua, 141Manchu *, 179, map 13Manda, map 9Mandarín (see Chinese) Mandinkan *Mandyak *, 143Mangbetu *, 179Maninga *, 149Manipuri, 94Mankon * Maonan *, 178, map 13Maori, *, 7, 21, 23, 31, 77, 104, 105, 168, 170Mapudungun *, 152, 170, 197Marathi, 27, 94Mataco-Guaicuru, 66Matal *Matengo, map 9Mator, 121Mattole, map 3Matumbi, map 9Mauritian Creole, 23Maviha, map 9Mayan, 65, 193, 194Mayoruna, map 6Mazateco *, 179Mbembe *, Mbo *Mboko * Mbong * Mbosi *, 179Mbugu, map 9Mbuko * Mbum, East * Mbunga, map 9Mbungwe, map 9Meänkieli * Meche, 141, 142Medumba * Meitei *, 136Meohang Eastern, 241Meohang Western, 241Meramera *, 152, 179Merey *Meriam *, 177Meru *Meta’ * Mian *, 169, map 13

308 Words and Worlds

Miao *, map 13Miao-Yao 60, map 1Mien * Migaama *, 147, 179Mi’kmaw *, 207Minaveha *, 179Mingrelian, 72, map 2Miraña *, map 12Miriam Mer, 17Miskito *, 161, 212, map 8Miwok *, 179, 226, map 3Miwok, Coast, map 3Miwok, Lake, map 3Mixe *, 179, map 8Mixteco *Mlokwo * M’lomp, North, map 7Moba *Mocheno *, 179Mochi (Mosi), map 9Mocho’, map 8Modo * Modoc, map 3Moghamo * Mohawk, 105, 168Mojave, map 3Moldavian, 29Mon *, 152, 177, 192, 194Mon-Cambodian (see Mon-Khmer), 26, 60, 74,

map 1Mongolian *, 71, map 13Mongolia, 120, 121Monguor *, map 13Mon-Khmer (see Mon-Cambodian), 26, 60, 74,

map 1Mono *, map 3Mopan *, 94, map 8Morunahua, map 6Mosi (Mochi), map 9Mota, 20Mpoto, map 9Magali, 241Muinane *, map 6, 12Mulam *, map 13Munda, 26, 60, 74, 210, 221, 241, map 1Mundang * Munduruku *, 101, 151, 179Mungaka *Munguk *Muniche, map 6Murui, map 6Mussau-Emira *, 179

Muya *, 179, 195, map 13Muyang * Mwanza, map 9Mwera, map 9N/u *Naasioi *, 147Naba, 241Nachhering, 241Na-Dené, 59, 60, 65Nahuatl *, 152, 192, 193, 228, map 6Nakho-Dagestanian, 72Nama *, 239Nambikwara *, 52, 133, 179Namsrung (Larke), 241Namuyi *, 139, 140, 179, map 13Napo-Pastaza-Tigre (Quechua), map 6Narak *, 153, 179Narang, map 7Naro *Nar-phu, 241Naxi *, map 13Ndali *, 179, map 9Ndamba, map 9Nda’nda’ * Ndau *, 197Ndebele *, 94, 122, map 5Ndemli *Ndendeule, map 9Ndengereko, map 9Ndogo *, 179Ndut *Nenets * Nentsi, 99Nepali, 94, 240, 242Newari, 240, 241Ngambay * Ngardi *, 179Ngas *Ngasa, map 9Ngbaka *, 179Ngbandi *, 179Nghwele, map 9Ngiemboon * Ngindo, map 9Ngoe * Ngonde (Nyakyusa) *, 179Ngoni *, 179Ngulu, map 9Ngurimi, map 9Ngwo *Niger-Congo, 50, 58, 60, 67, map 1Nigerian, 51, 217

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 309

Nigi *Nihali *, 179Nilamba, map 9Nilo-Saharan, 50, 60, 67, map 1Ninggirum *, 179Nisenan, map 3Nivhi *, Nivkh, 121Njikum *Njoyame * Nkwen *Nogai *, 71, 123, map 2Nomatsiguenga, map 6Nomlaki, map 3Non *Nongati, map 3Nonuya, map 12Norfolk (Pitkern) *, 18, 209Northern Central American Creole English,

map 8Norwegian, *, 13, 21, 47, 58, 216Nswase *N’tcham * Nubaca *Nubri, 241Nugunu * Nukak *, map 12Numand *Numanggang *, 179Nunga, 179Nunga English, 21, 43Nunguisa, 74Nuristani, 74Nusu *, 179, map 13Nyakyusa (Ngonde), 179, map 9Nyambo, map 9Nyamwezi, map 9Nyaturu, map 9Nyiha, map 9Nyindrou * Nyokon *Nyole *Nyoro *, 137, 180Nzema, 99Nzime * Occitan *, 24, 58, 70, 97, 107, 221, 226Odawa * Ogiek *, 179Okaina *, map 6, 12Omagua, map 6Omotic, 67Oneida *, 179

Onge *, 179, 209, 210Onobasulu *, 52, 179Orejon, map 6Oriya, 94, 240Orochi * Orokaiva * Oroko *Oromo * Oroqen *, map 13Orya *, 179Ossetic *, 143, map 2Oto-Manguean, 59Otomi *, 102, 137, 147, 178Páez *, map 12Páez-Barbacoan, 66Pagibete *, 179Pahari, 241, 242Paiute *, 179Paiute, Northern, map 3Paiute, Owens Valley, map 3Pajonal, map 6Palenque *, 179, 226, map 12Palmerston Creole, 23Pama-Nyungan, 60Pamun *Pa’na *Panamint (see California Shoshoni), map 3Panare *Pandanus, 22Pangduwali, 241Pangwa, map 9Pano, 66, map 6Papuan, 18, 40, 60, 76, map 1Parkwa * Parquenahua, map 6Pashto *Patwin, map 3Pavlikeana * Peba Yagua, map 6Pech *, 148, 179, 194, 212, 219, 220Pedi *, 94, map 5Peere *Pemon * Pennsylvania Dutch * Penutian, 59, 65Piapoco *, map 12Piaroa *, map 12Pichis, map 6Piemontese * Pilipino, 21, 152Pimbwe, map 9Pinai, 79

310 Words and Worlds

Pipil, 240Piratapuyo *, map 12Pisabo, map 6Pisamira *, map 12Pitkern (see Norfolk), 18, 209Plasla *Platt *Pogolo, map 9Pohing, 241Polish *, 58, 121Pomo, map 3Popolocan, 65Popoluca *, 179, 226, map 8Popti’, 97Poqomam *, map 8Poqomchi’ *, 147, map 8Portuguese, 24, 30, 40, 64, 68, 69, 93, 102, 105,

124, 132, 152, 155, 156, 159, 160, 231Poyanawa *, 179Prok, 241Proto-Austronesian, 58Proto-Bantu, 58Proto-Niger-Congo, 58Puinave *, map 12Pukirieri, map 6Pulaar *, 217Puma, 241Pumi *, 158, 179, map 13Punjabi, 94, 240Q’anjob’al *, 97, map 8Q’eqchi’ *, map 8Qiang *, 141, map 13Quechan (see Yuma), map 3Quechua *, 47, 56, 66, 99, 101, 168, 228, 232,

map 6, map 12Quichua *, 192Quileute *Rajasthani *, 147Raji, 241, 242Rama, map 8Ramoaaina *, 179Rangi (Langi), map 9Rankas, 241Rapa Nui *, Rastfarian, 21Raute, 241, 242Rawat (see Jasngali), 241Rengpungmo, 241Reo Tahiti *, Resigaro, map 6Reunion Creole * Rikpa’ *

Romance, 16, 33, 58, 60Romanian *, 25, 30, 33, 179Romansh (Grishun) *, 44, 58, 70, 98, 104,Rombo, map 9Rouruo *, 179, map 13Rromani * Rufiji, map 9Ruguru, map 9Rundi *, map 9Rungi, map 9Rungwa, map 9Rusnak *Russian, *, 24, 55, 58, 64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,

97, 99, 120, 121, 123, 162, 231, map 2, map 13Rusyn * Rutul, 72, map 2Rwa, map 9Rwanda *, 94, map 9Saafi-Saafi *, Sabaot *, 179, 218Saep *, 179Safwa, map 9Sagala, map 9Saha (see Yakut), 99, 120, 121Saho, 94, 98Sakapulteko *, 147Sakha *, Salar *, 99, 123, 179, map 13Saliba *, map 12Salinan, map 1Salinan-Serian, 65Salish/an 66, map 11Sama *, 241Samba Leeko * Sami *, 44, 47, 70, 97, 104, 170, map 4Samoan, 94San Andres, 22, map 12Sandawe *, map 9Sango, 18Sangpang, 241Sangu, map 9Sanskrit, 94, 190, 191, 192, 241, 242Santarrosino (Quechua), map 6Santhali (see Sattar), 241Sapiteri, map 6Sattar (see Santhali), 241Savara * Sawai *, 179Scots *, 243Scottish Gaelic *, 70Seediq *Segeju, map 9

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 311

Sena *, 216Sentani *, 179Sepik-Ramu, 76 Serbian *, 47, 58Serbocroatian *Serer *, Serrano, map 3Sesi Kham *Shambala, map 9Sharanahua, map 6Shasta, map 3Shawnee *, 179She *, 179, map 13Shelta *, 21, 179Sherpa, 240Shetebo, map 6Shipibo *, 208, map 6Shiwi’ma * Shixing *, 179, map 13Shompen, 210Shona *, 179Shor *Shuar (see Achuar), 99, 101, map 6Shubi, map 9Sikkimese * Sikuani *, map 12Sindhi *, 94, 135, 238, 240Sinhala *, 98Sinhala-Maldivian, 74Sinic, 60Sinkyone, map 3Sino-Tibetan, 60, 74, 236, 240, 241, map 1Siona, *, map 6, 12Siouan, map 11Sipakapense *, 179, map 8Siriano *, 179, map 12Siriono * Siroi *, 179Sizaki, map 9Slavey, 105Slavic, 58, 60Slovak *, 58Soliga, 209Solomon Pidgin, 18Somali *, 136, 162Songhay *Songorong *, 179, 208Soninke *Sorbian *, 233, 234Sotho *, 94, map 5Spanish *, 24, 29, 33, 39, 40, 41, 47, 58, 62, 64,

66, 69, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 93, 98, 105, 121,

148, 170, 172, 177, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196,207, 209, 218, 231, 233, 239, 243, 247

Sranan * Suahili (see Swahili), 19, 21, 40, 64, 67, 69, 191,

208Suba *, map 9Suga *Sui *, map 13Sukuma *, 179, map 9Sulawesi (see Indonesian)Sum (see Sung), 197, 198, 241Sumbwa, map 9Sumo-Tawahka *, 179, map 8Sunda * Sung (see Sum), 197, 198, 241Sunwar, 241Supralecto-Yauyos (Quechua), map 6Surel, 96Svan, 72, map 2Swahili *, 19, 21, 40, 64, 67, 69, 191, 208, map 9Swati *, 94, map 5Swedish *, 47, 58, 104, 105, 121Switsertütsch, 21Tabassaran, 73, map 2Tacana, map 6Tae’ *, 179Tagalog, 94Taiwano, map 12Tajik, *, map 13Talish, map 2Tamang, 240, 241Tamazight, *, (berber) 47, 56, 67, 81, 123, 162,

190, 208Tamil *, 43, 74, 94, 98, 211Tanimuka *, 179, 233, map 12Tanoan, 59Tarahumara * Tariano *, map 12Tat, 71, map 2Tatar *, 179, map 13Tatuyo *, map 12Tau *, 179Taushiro, map 6Tausug * Taveta, map 9Tayo *, 19, 178, 179Tchamba *, 143Tehid *, 179Tehuelche *, 179Teke *, 179Tektiteko, map 8Telugu *, 27, 94

312 Words and Worlds

Tem *Temi, map 9Teochew, 43Tepehuan *, 143, 179Terai, 240, 241Thai, 60, 74, 94Thakali, 241, 242Thami, 241Tharu, 240Thulung, 241Tibea *Tibetan *, 99, 122, 135, 136, 191, 192, 195, 236,

241, 242, map 13Tibeto-Burman, 26, 240, 241, 242, 243Tichurong, 241Tifal *, 179Tigre, 94, 98, 309Tigriña, 67, 94, 98Tikari * Tikuna *, map 6, 12Tillung Dhimal, 241Timbe *, 179, 211Tindi *, map 2Tinigua *, map 12Tipai, map 3Tiv *, 147Tiwa, *, 161, 179Tlingit, map 11Toba * Tofalar * Tojolab’al *, map 8Tok-Pisin * Tol *, 161, 179, 195, 196, 220, 221, 226, map 8Tolowa, map 3Tonga *, 94Tongan, 94Tongva (Gabrielino), map 3Tongwe, map 9Toposa * Toyoeri, map 6Trans-Guinean, 60Triqui *, 147, 148, 170Tsakhur, map 2Tsakonian, 25Tsimshian, map 11Tsonga *, 94, map 5Tswana *, 94, 232, map 5Tubatulabal, map 3Tucanoan, 59, 66Tujia *, 179, map 13Tukano *, (Tucano), map 6, 12Tuki *

Tumbuka *, 218Tunebo *, map 12Tunen * Tungus, 73Tungusic, 120, 121Tuotomb * Tupí Guaraní, map 6Tupian, 66Tupuri * Turkana * Turkic, 60, 71, 120, 121Turkish, 17, 81, 94, 191Tutunaku (Totonac) * Tuva (Tuvan) *, 121, map 13Tuwali *, 179Tuyuka *, map 12Tzeltal *, 33, map 8Tzotzil, map 8Tz’utujil *, map 8Ubikh, 72Ucayali, map 6Udi, map 2Udmurtian, 99Uitoto *, (Huitoto) 64, 124, 179, 207, 240, map 6,

map 12Ukrainian * Uma *, 142, 179Umbule, 241, 242Uminey * Unserdeutsch, 19Uralic, 60, 120, 121, map 1Urarina, map 6Urbuko, 73, map 2Urdu *, 21, 27, 47, 94, 122, 191, 231, 240, 241Urhobo, 217Uspanteko *, 179, map 8Uto-Aztecan, 59Uuhum *Uygur *, map 13Uzbek *, map 13Va *, 148, map 13Valencian, 30Venda *, 94, map 5Vepsian, 70Vidunda, map 9Vinza, map 9Viri *, 137, 217Vunjo, map 9Vute * Waama *, 179Waffa *, 142, 179Wagdi, 209

Index of Languages, Families and Varieties 313

Wailaki, map 3Waimaha * Wakashan, map 11Waling, 241Walser * Walung, 241Wampis *, 179, 212Wanano *, map 12Wanda, map 9Wandala * Wanga *, 179Wanji, map 9Wanyjirra *, Waorani *, 101, 179Wapi, 79Wappo, map 3Washo, map 3Wasi (Chasi), map 9Waunana *, map 12Wayuu *, 137, map 12Welsh *, 70, 100, 101, 104, 162, 168, 170, 243Whilkut, map 3Wichi *, 81Wintu, map 3Witoto (see Uitoto) Wiwa *Wiyot, map 3Woko * Wolof *, 18, 64, 67, 123Wuzlam *Xavante *, 179Xhosa *, 94, map 5Xibe *, map 13Xinka, map 8Yaaku *, 179Yabêm, 18Yagua *, 179, map 6, 12Yakan *, 143, 152, 179Yakkha, 241Yakut (Saba), 99, 120, 121Yale *, 153, 179Yaminahua, map 6Yamphe, 241Yamphu, 241, 242

Yana, map 3Yanghwang *, map 13Yanomami, 66, 81, 133Yao Map, 9Yaruro *, map 12Yasa *Yau * Yele *, 142, 143, 179Yemba * Yenische * Yeniseian, 73, 120, 121Yerava *, 179, 238Yerwa Kanuri, 98Yeyi *, 178, 232Yi *, map 13Yiddish *, 191Yine *, 7, map 6Yokuts, map 3Yoruba *, 50, 64, 67, 98, 122, 217Yugur, Eastern *, 179, map 13Yugur, Western *, 179, map 13Yujup-Maku map 12Yukaghir , 121Yukateko, 182, map 8Yuki, map 3Yuko *, map 12Yukuna *, 179, map 12Yuma (see Quechan), map 3Yurok, map 3Yuruti *, map 12Yutish, 25Zaiwa *, 99, map 13Zalamo, map 9Zanaki, map 9Zaparo, 66, 97, 101, map 6Zapotecan, 65Zapoteco *, map 8Zhuang *, 99, 136Zigula, map 9Zinza, map 9Zlgwa * Zo’e *Zoque, map 8Zulú*, map 5

314 Words and Worlds

Aboriginal– language, 53, 54– settlements, 20Abstand language, 21Academic Society for the Minority

Languages of China, 237Academic training, 150Academy of Maya Languages, 47Acculturation, 55, 88, 193, 195, 227, 238, 251,

255Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

(AIDS), 33, 239Action for Community Organisation,

Rehabilitation and Development(ACCORD), 211

Acre Organization of Indigenous Teachers,140, 157, 160, 168

Adigea, Adygeya, 71, 72Administration, 51, 99, 102, 104, 105, 107, 118,

119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129,130, 134, 140, 143, 172, 195, 198, 200, 208,210, 218, 220, 230, 232, 241, 242, 247, 259

Adolescent, 35, 101Adulthood, 35Africa, 40, 47, 48, 57, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 93, 97,

107, 108, 109, 110, 193, 230, 231, 239– Central and Southern, 18, 49, 58, 67– East 19– South 94, 98, 108, 239– Sub-Saharan 67, 68– West 14, 32African Renaissance, 110Agadir, map 10Aggression, xiii, 204, 222, 227, 239, 240Alaska, 226Albania, 107Alcoholism, 81Alfabetatze Euskalduntze Koordinakundea

(AEK), 171, 172

Algeria, 81, 123, 162, 192Algiers,Alienation, 150, 151, 154Alphabetic codification, 149, 254Amazon, 32, 165, 206, 233, 240, 243America, 47, 48, 59, 60, 64, 67, 93, 230, 234,

239– Central, 57, 59, 65, 97, 148– Latin, 168, 181– North, 31, 57, 59, 65, 121, 176, 228, 243– South, 24, 40, 47, 57, 59, 66, 192, 228, 230,

249Ancestral– heritage, 229– language, 18, 58, 99, 101, 229Andaman Islands, 26, 60Andes Mountains, 232Andorra, 107Anglicisation, 228Anglo-Saxon culture, 85Angola, 67Animism, 191Anomie, 154Aotearoa, 77Arabic script, 17, 191, 241Arabic signs, 136Arequipa,Argentina, 66, 81, 93, 197Armed conflict, 97, 234Armenia, 107Arnhem Land, 31Articulatory gesture, 61Artificial language, 21, 22, 43, 44, 144Asia, 32, 38, 47, 48, 57, 73, 93, 192, 230, 239– Central, 39, 64– East, 64– Northern, 64– South East, 32– Pacific Region, 38

Subject Index

315

Asmara, 108, 109Assimilation, 20, 42, 58, 69, 70, 75, 80, 81, 87,

88, 89, 126, 127, 207, 221, 235, 238, 242Astrakhan, 71Atlantic, 58Atlas, xii, 1, 16, 32, 265Attitude, xii, 4, 13, 26, 32, 47, 51, 66, 90, 100,

102, 104, 151, 153, 181, 189, 192, 198, 199,204, 206, 207, 208, 211, 214, 215, 216, 217,218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 250, 252, 253,256, 257, 258, 260

Audiovisual, 68, 131, 170, 176, 181, 254Augustines, 137Ausbau, 20, 21, 25, 40Australasia, 231Australia, 2, 3, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 32, 38, 39,

40, 43, 44, 48, 52, 54, 57, 60, 64, 76, 77, 93,164, 177, 219, 220, 226, 230

– Central, 14– Northern, 32– Tropical, 38– Tropical Northern, 32Austria, 56, 70, 107, 203Auto-ethnonym, 6Autoglottonym, 6, 71, 72Autonomous language, 111Autonomous University of Madrid, vii, viii,

54, 139Autonomy of language, 47Autonomy, 74, 75, 104, 111, 118, 230, 238Autonomous district, 74Autonomous region, 74, 98Auxiliary language, 18, 83, 87Auxiliary verb, 62Awareness, 1, 8, 9, 11, 25, 36, 37, 38, 97, 117,

125, 163, 173, 179, 180, 182, 185, 207, 215,218, 219, 221, 229, 242, 258

Azerbaijan, 72, 73, 94, 107

Babel, 11Balkan, 33Baltic, 60, 74Bangladesh, 137, 221Barcelona, 108, 167, 183, 202Basque Autonomous Community, Basque

Country, vii, viii, xiii, 168, 170, 171, 172,173

Belarus, 122Belgium, vii, viii, 16, 24, 56, 69, 98, 107, 126Belize, 16, 97Benin, 124, 197

Bible, 137, 140, 141, 191Bicultural, 35, 66, 77Bilbao, xiiiBilingual, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 66, 77, 93, 101,

103, 124, 130, 137, 138, 148, 150, 151, 152,155, 157, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168,169, 170, 173, 208, 209, 210, 213, 214, 219,224, 239, 241, 251, 252, 253, 263

– and bicultural, 35, 66, 77Bilingualism, 12, 26, 31, 33, 34, 41, 43, 66, 75,

87, 94, 151, 163, 165, 166, 168, 224, 238, 239,252, 253

Bilinguality, 34, 35, 36, 37Biodiversity, 23, 174, 216Biological diversity, biological megadiversity,

x, 11, 23Bolivia, vii, 2, 66, 153, 168, 182, 218Border, boundary, xii, 7, 14, 16, 27, 32, 70, 72,

78, 79, 92, 95, 97, 116, 204, 240, 241, 261Botswana, 67, 81, 102, 178, 232Brazil, 38, 48, 52, 64, 66, 81, 102, 132, 138, 140,

152, 156, 157, 160Britain, 11British Broadcasting Corporation BBC, 175British Columbia, 65British Council, 86British occupation, 77Brittany, 70, 103Bryn Mawr College, viii, 229Buddhism, 191, 192Bujumbura, viiBulgaria, 33, 58, 107Burgenland, 70Burkina Faso, vii, 2Burma, 49, 152, 177Burundi, viiBwrdd Yr Iaith Gymraeg, 100

California, 65, 80, 225Cameroon, 48, 58, 67, 68, 93, 147, 177Canada, 38, 52, 53, 56, 64, 65, 104, 105, 126,

128, 129, 168, 177, 207, 208, 219, 220Canadian Constitutional Act, 104Cape Verde, 124Cape York, 38, 39Caquetá River, 233Cardiff University, viii, 101Caribbean, 22, 64, 230Castilianisation, 228Catalonia viii, 168, 203Catechism, 137, 191

316 Words and Worlds

Catholic, 103, 140, 161, 171, 191, 192, 193, 194,195

Caucasian war, 72Caucasus, 70, 71, 72, 73, 165Census, 26, 43, 52, 66, 74, 75, 95, 100, 126, 127,

128, 129, 130, 240, 242, 265Central African Republic, 18, 49, 67Central Institute of Indian Languages CIIL,

vii, 209, 210Centre de Recherche sur le Plurilingüisme,

202Centre for Paraguayan Studies “Antonio

Guasch”, viii, 134Centre for Peasant Research and Promotion,

182Centro de Investigación y Promoción del

Campesinado CIPCA, 182Cervantes, 85Chistianity, Christianism, 190, 191, 193Cinema, 181Civil servants, 132, 167Classical language, 132, 167Code switching, 40Codification, 31, 131, 136, 198, 248Coexistence, x, xi, xii, xiv, 38, 87, 96, 110, 165,

169, 257, 261, 262, 267Cognitive, 13, 35, 36, 37, 38, 96, 134, 146, 229,

253Colombia, 65, 66, 101, 124, 155, 195, 207, 209,

226Colonial language, 24, 64, 93, 108, 113, 230Colonialism, xi, 154, 259Colonisation, colonization, 14, 24, 39, 40, 93,

94, 110, 136, 189, 192, 193, 199, 227, 228,230, 239,

Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre, 140Commonwealth, 87Communicative methods, 167Community– right, 102, 124, 128– school, 153, 164, 200Comoros, 152Comparative linguistics, 58, 236Competing languages, 30Computer technology ies, 170, 254Concurrent languages, 12Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of

Ecuador CONAIE, 138Congo, 48, 58, 67, 141Connected languages, 23Consciousness, 32

Constitution, 25, 75, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104,118, 122, 124, 153, 154, 159

Contact languages, 26, 242Continuous languages, continuum, 7, 17, 19,

20, 43, 230Convention for the Protection of Human

Rights and Fundamental Freedoms(Council of Europe), xi, 106

Co-official language, 93, 94, 98, 120, 179Co-official status, 98, 99, 118, 120, 122, 123,

124, 125Copenhagen, 106Costa Rica, 65, 124Council of Europe, 106, 107, 108Craftsmen, 27Creole, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 31, 39, 63, 76, 102,

124, 222, 223, 226, 230Croatia, 107Cultural– artefacts, 13– autonomy, 75, 104, 238– catastrophe, 57– diversity, x, 11, 80, 90, 101, 106, 124, 150,

151, 165, 173, 183, 184, 186, 188, 216, 231,236, 261, 264

– dominance, 177– experience, 13, 136– genocide, 80, 81, 82, 207– heritage, x, 1, 64, 108, 109, 136, 148, 149, 170,

187, 235, 252, 254, 265– identity, 35, 38, 43, 150, 186, 194, 208, 215,

218, 220, 221, 238, 262– marginalisation, 82– plurality, 111, 176– prestige, 64– referent, 85– right, 80, 110– uniformity, x, 158, 175, 178, 180, 183, 199,

222, 263Curriculum, 160, 252Cuzco, map 6Cymdeithas Yr Iaith Gymraeg, 100, 101Cyprus, 18, 107Cyrillic alphabet, 136, 191Czech Republic, 107Chad, 93, 146, 208Chechenya, 71, 72, map 2Chiclayo, map 6Childhood, 35, 36, 126, 242Chile, 66, 152, 197, map 6Chimbote, map 6

Subject Index 317

China, 24, 29, 48, 74, 97, 99, 121, 122, 123, 136,139, 140, 141, 144, 148, 158, 178, 192, 195,197, 206, 212, 217, 235, 236, 237

Chinese character, 136, 192Christian, 20, 141, 190, 193, 197Chukchia, 99Chuvashia, 99

Dagestan, 52, 71, 72, 73, map 2Dar es Salam, map 9Death of language, 86, 127, 163, 226, 227, 228,

238, 242, 247, 249, 255Decline of language, x, 18, 33, 42, 79, 103, 141,

201, 205, 209, 212, 238, 247, 252Decolonisation, 24, 110Deculturated, 35Deforestation, 42, 240Deixonne law, 103Democracy, xiii, 69, 106, 110, 134Democratic Republic of Congo, 67Demographic factor, 206, 208, 227, 232, 233, 234Denmark, 70, 99, 107, 121Descriptive linguists, 12Desert, 14, 15, 23, 32Devanagari script, 191, 241Dialect, 14, 16, 20, 25, 31, 47, 63, 78, 115, 132,

141, 142, 143, 153, 195, 206, 218, 251Dialectology, 12, 16Dialinguistics, 12Dictionary, 10, 34, 137, 138, 195, 224Diglossia, diglossic, 28, 39, 40, 41, 45, 223Dioudoulou, map 7Directorate, General for Bilingual and

Intercultural Education 160Disappearing languages 5Discrimination, discriminated, discriminatory,

42, 58, 66, 81, 82, 88, 105, 115, 124, 161, 175,181, 185, 207, 229, 238, 248, 259, 261

Disease, 33, 239, 243Displacement, 20, 45, 114, 206, 228, 230, 234,

265Diwan, 103Dodoma, map 9Domains, 12, 22, 24, 38, 40, 42, 51, 113, 114,

116, 128, 193, 223Dominant– culture, 177, 178, 179, 218, 259 – language, see also predominant language,

64, 70, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 113, 114, 117, 150,151, 153, 168, 170, 174, 195, 207, 211, 216,217, 221, 226, 232, 234, 235, 237, 238, 258

– monolingualism, 24– society, 156, 207, 228Drought, 33, 239Drug addiction, 81Drum language, 79Dry areas, 23Dual-lingualism, 39Durban, map 5

East London, map 5Easter Island, 32Ecolinguistics, 30, 32Ecological– balance, xi– community, 126– system, 10Ecology, 30, 31, 38, 43Economic– crises, 227, 237– exploitation, 227, 237– factor, 30– power, 47, 64, 80, 82, 94, 177– subjugation, 229Ecuador, 52, 65, 66, 97, 99, 101, 138, map 6,

map 11Education Reform Act, 100Education system, educational system, 66, 68,

78, 93, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 151, 152, 153,162, 163, 167, 172, 173, 174, 198, 206, 238,253

Educational– linguistics, 151, 170– policy, 150, 152, 153, 163– programme, 105, 166, 170, 190, 196Egypt 39, map 10Eisteddfodau, 100El Salvador, 240, map 8Electronic media, 169Elementary grade, 152Elista, 2Elite language, 230Emergente, 11, 14, 40, 114, 115, 185Emigration, see also migration, immigration,

xi, 4, 18, 23, 32, 33, 39, 40, 42, 56, 183, 196,206, 208, 211, 215, 218, 219, 227, 233, 234,239, 242, 243, 250, 253, 256, 257, 259, 265

Ena Wene Nawé, 132, 133Encounter language, 83Endangered– language, 51, 54, 63, 73, 90, 188, 209, 210,

231, 236, 237, 247, 251, 254, 255

318 Words and Worlds

– linguistic communities, xii, 3, 7, 19, 34, 84,97, 118, 119, 128, 131, 197, 142, 143, 149,170, 171, 173, 175, 190, 194, 198, 199, 214,221, 250, 254, 256, 258, 265, 267

Endemic language, 23, 28, 30, 32, 39Epidemia, 33, 227, 239Escarré Internacional Centre for Ethnic

Minorities and Nations, 108Esoteric language, 17, 18Estonia, 107, map 4Ethiopia, 49, 52, 67Ethnic identity, 115, 169Ethnicity, 75, 84Ethnocultural, 38, 74Ethno-educational model, 155Ethnolinguistic, ethno-linguistic, 13, 26, 126,

127, 129, 233Ethnoses, 127Europe– Central, 165– Eastern, 20, 70, 191– Western 190, 220European Bureau for Lesser Used

Languages, EBLUL 107, 108European Commission, 108European Charter of Regional or Minority

Languages, 103, 106, 107, 108European national languages, 13, 40, 47European nationalism, 93, 192European Union EU, 22, 39, 44, 105, 106, 202Euskal Herria, euskaldunak, 170Euskaltzaindia, 171Exclusion language, 83Exogenous language, 68Exolexicons, 14Exoteric language, 18Exotic language, 23, 40, 41Expanding language, 5, 220, 243Extinct language, 63, 169, 201Extinction language, 96, 201, 228

Fables, 136, 148Fairy tales, 148Family language, 166, 167, 169, 174, 208, 212,

263Famine, 239Fes, map 10Fieldwork, 29Fiji, 40, 41Finland, 24, 74, 97, 104, 107, 203, map 4FIPH, 219

First– grade, 152– language, 43, 95, 96, 126, 128, 159, 163, 164,

215First World War, 103Flood, 139Folk songs, 136, 148,Forbidden, 102, 153, 161, 195, 218Foreign language, 18, 27, 68, 87, 88, 167Formal educational system, formal teaching,

18, 152Former European colonies, 24Foster mother tongues, 26France, 11, 24, 52, 56, 70, 90, 97, 102, 103, 107,

124, 136, 162, 168, 220, 226, 230Franciscans, 137Francophone Agency ACCT, 107Francophonie, 68French Revolution, 24, 228Frenchification, 228Frisian (community, region, area), 70, 97, 143,

180Functional diversity, 30Further education, 83

Gabon, 93Gällivare, map 4Gambia, 93, map 7Generalitat de Catalunya, 202Genocida, 45, 69, 77, 80, 81, 82 207, 217, 244Geographical– isolation, 32– mobility, 28Georgia, 72, 73, 97, 107, 141, map 2Germany, 14, 21, 24, 29, 47, 56, 74, 97, 107,

121, 143, 180, 191, 233Ghana, 99Global– dominant language, 114– language, 83, 113– society, 163, 231– village, 235Globalisation, x, xi, xii, xiv, 33, 81, 85, 86, 133,

154, 166, 171, 176, 188, 243, 246, 256, 263Glottonym, 6Glotto-politics, 13Government of Wales Act, 101Gradual shift, 238Great Britain, 56, 86, 162, 168Great famine, 239Greece, 74

Subject Index 319

Guatemala, 47, 93, 97, 143, 147, 160, 193, 194,207, 218, map 8

Guayaquil, 138

Hamburg, 84Harare, 18, 107, 109Hawaii, 32Heerenveen, 70Helduen Alfabetatze Berreuskalduntzerako

Erakundea HABE, 172Helsinki, map 4Helsinki Final Act, 106Hetta, map 4High-rainfall, 23Hispanic Culture, 82Hispanicisation, 208, 228Hitler Germany, 21Holland, 56, 97, 107Home language, 112, 223Honduras, 16, 65, 97, 148, 161, 194, 196, 212,

219, 226, map 8Houston, 84Huancayo, map 6Huanuco, map 6Hudston Bay, map 11Human rights, xi, 106, 127, 165, 217, 248, 263Hungary, 70, 107Hymn book, 137

Iceland, vii, 107, 121, 177Idiolect, 111Idre, map 4Illiterate, 131, 134Immersion, 103, 105, 117, 167, 168, 174Immigration, see also migration, emigration,

xi, 4, 18, 23, 32, 33, 39, 40, 42, 56, 183, 196,206, 208, 211, 215, 218, 219, 227, 233, 234,239, 242, 243, 250, 253, 256, 257, 259, 265

Imperialist language, 89Impoverishment, 81, 239Independent language, 7, 47India, 3, 25, 26, 42, 48, 56, 60, 74, 99, 117, 122,

126, 135, 136, 144, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155,165, 192, 209, 211, 222, 238, 240

Indigenous– community, 2, 151, 155, 219, 226, 228– group, 66, 195, 226 – language, 21, 23, 24, 26, 33, 43, 51, 56, 65, 67,

76, 77, 78, 82, 102, 104, 121, 138, 155, 156,157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 181, 196, 216, 221,226, 228, 232

– minority, 81– people, 75, 81, 99, 101, 102, 104, 155, 158,

159, 181, 195, 219– population, 53, 54, 65, 219, 221, 230, 239Indigenous Teachers Association ACRE, 140,

157, 160, 168Indochina, 64, 230Indonesia, 21, 24, 46, 47, 48, 58, 67, 94, 95, 97,

141, 142Inequality, 115, 183Influenza, 33Information technology, 28, 33Ingushetia, 71, 72, map 2Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, 202Intercommunication, 16, 18, 19, 38, 68Interculturalism, 106, 168Intergenerational– continuity, 17– discontinuity, 17– transmission, 4, 17, 100, 200, 201, 202, 203,

206, 212, 234, 252– use, 4, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211,

213Intergovernmental Conference of Ministers

on Language Policies in Africa, 107Intermarriage, see also mixed marriage, 31Internal migration, see also migration,

emigration, immigration, 18International Commission for Translations

and Linguistic Rights, 108International Covenant on Civil and Political

Rights, 106, 110International language, 64, 69, 80, 86Internationalisation, 54, 55, 85Intolerance, xiv, 267Invasion, 40, 81, 233Iquitos, map 6Iran, 72Ireland, 98, 107, 191, 239Irian, Jaya 76Iringa, map 9Islam, 51, 190, 191, 192, 194Island of San Andres, 22, map 12Isolation, 32, 36, 56, 198, 227, 252, 258, 262Israel, 147, 190Italy, 14, 24, 56, 70, 74, 97, 107, 147, 168

James Bay, 105Japan, 178, 192Java, 95Jawaharlal Nehru University, viii, 26

320 Words and Worlds

Jesuits, 133, 137Jharkhand, 26Johannesburg, map 5Jordan, 72Judaism, 190

Kabardino-Balkaria, 71, 72, 73, map 2Kabrousse, map 7Kabyle, 56, 123Kahnawake, 105Kalemie, map 9Kalmykia, map 2Kautokeino, map 4Karachay, 71, 73, map 2Karachay-Cherkessia, 71, 72, 73, map 2Karasjok, map 4Kenya, 94, 177, 208, 218, map 9Kigoma, map 9Kinship terms, 23, 244Kirgiztan, 97Kiruna, map 4Koine, 20Koran, 85Korea, 19, 29, 74, 192Krasnodar, 71, map 2Kupwar, 27, 33, 38Kura Kaupapa Maori, 77

Lamaism, 195Language – choice, 41, 116, 119, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194– community, 10, 13, 15– continuity see also speech community, 33 – death, 86, 127, 163, 226, 227, 228, 238, 242,

247, 249, 255– decline, 79– development, 33, 75, 209– disappearance, languages disappearing,

115, 225– dominant, 115– ecology, 12, 25, 30, 30, 79– family, 63, 71– group, 7, 26, 55, 59, 72, 110, 111, 202, 203,

235, 236– in contact, see also contact languages, 2, 26,

33, 215, 222, 226, 233, 242, 262– in danger, xiv, 57, 201, 261– loyalty, 26– maintenance, 17, 73, 127, 169, 189, 196, 197,

244– names, 62, 78

– of communication, 43– of instruction, 158– planning, 17, 21, 22, 69, 189, 190, 196, 249,

250, 259– policy, xii, xiii, 13, 66, 79, 109, 111, 112, 113,

114, 115, 116, 117, 193, 195– recovery, 170– revival, 11, 109, 161– right, 114, 116, 216– shift, see also shift, 17, 18, 20, 26, 30, 40, 42,

43, 65, 97, 114, 115, 116, 121, 189, 191, 192,193, 194, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 228, 238,242, 250, 257,

– transmission, 17, 203, 205, 206, 208– use, 10, 11, 27, 43, 46, 52, 63, 114, 116, 118,

120, 127, 155, 160, 190, 191, 203, 221, 223,241, 249, 265

Languages in contact, see also contactlanguage, 26, 242

Last speaker, 5, 121, 226, 227, 248Latin alphabet, 136, 137, 141, 148, 191, 193Latvia, 107, 177, map 4Legends, 136, 137, 148Legislation, 42, 92, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 111,

124, 161, 162, 232Lesotho, map 5Lexicon, 14, 19, 21, 35, 39, 78, 144, 196, 231Liberia, Libya, map 11Lima, map 6Lingua franca, 18, 19, 20, 26, 31, 39, 40, 79,

193, 196Linguapax, viii, xiii, xivLinguasphere, 230, 231Linguicide, 244, 246Linguicism, 82, 83, 90Linguistic policy see also planning, vii, 3, 90,

97, 107, 155, 182, 228, 266, – comparative, 58, 236– contact, see also contact languages, xii, 4,

222, 262, 265, 266– density, 76– dominance, see also dominant language, 64– ecology, see also ecolinguistics, 3, 22, 30, 32,

40, 44, 111 – hegemony, 86– heritage, xi, xii, xiv, 3, 8, 9, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53,

54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75,77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97,104, 105, 107, 108, 149, 151, 163, 184, 232,247, 265

Subject Index 321

– homogenisation, 93– identity, see also language identity – immersion, 105– imperialism, 54, 87, 88, 89, 90– minority ies, 102, 113, 124– norms, 144, 146– normalisation, 5, 258– racism, 82, 83– right, see also language right, 4, 70, 104, 107,

108, 110, 118, 130, 180, 221, 232, 248, 260,263

– substitution, 4, 87, 206, 212, 220– uniformity, xi, 6, 9, 150, 249, 251, 263– universal, 96Link language, 83, 98, 111Literacy, 42, 115, 131, 133, 137, 138, 140, 147,

159, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 181, 182,185, 244, 250, 255, 259, 263

Lithuania, 107Living language, 231, 247Local language, 76, 130, 194, 195, 198, 207,

208, 218, 251, 255Lower Brittany, 103Lozovero, map 4Lunes Matub, 123Luxembourg, 56, 98, 107, 167Lycksele, map 4

Macao, 226Macedonia, 70, 107Maghrib, 208, map 10Maharashtra, 27Maintenance educational model, 176Makerer, 87Mala, map 4Malawi, map 9Malaysia, 24, 49, 58, 76, 136Mali, 123, 136, 140, 178, map 10Malta, 107, 122Marginalisation, xi, 58, 70, 81, 82, 93, 100,

105, 150, 181, 182, 193, 199, 238, 239, 251,257

Marie Smith, 226Marraquech, map 10Masaba, 136Massacre, 237, 240Mato Grosso, 132Mauritania, map 10Mbeya, map 9Media propaganda, 169Medical disasters, 33

Mediterranean, 18, 20, map 10Megalanguage, 231Melanesia, 32, 38Melbourne, 2Melilla, 208, map 10Mentrau Iaith, 101Merton College, viii, 223Metalinguistic, 37, 38, 45, 134– awareness, 25, 37– skills, 134Mexico, 48, 65, 66, 101, 137, 143, 147, 148, 152,

178, 226, map 8Middle East, 18, 72Migrant– communities, 17,– languages, 42Migration, see also emigration, immigration,

internal migration, xiv, 4, 18, 23, 32, 33, 39,40, 42, 56, 183, 196, 206, 208, 211, 215, 218,219, 227, 233, 234, 239, 242, 243, 250, 253,256, 257, 259, 265

Military domination, 228Minorisation, 80, 149Minorised languages, 141, 153, 163, 168, 222Minority language, viii, 11, 16, 42, 44, 90, 100,

103, 106, 107, 108, 149, 150, 163, 164, 167,168, 169, 181, 182, 188, 198, 202, 209, 221,224, 235, 236, 237, 238, 253, 254, 255, 257,259, 262, 263

Minority Languages Academic Society ofChina, viii

Missal, 137, 194Missionaries, 16, 18, 20, 78, 137, 140, 193, 194,

246Missions, 17, 192, 195Mixed – endemic-exotic communities, 39, 40– marriage, see also intermarriage, 31, 70, 206,

208, 211, 227, 233, 234Modern language, 20, 21, 22, 82, 103, 154,

231Modern Testament, see also New Testament,

20, 137, 194Modernisation, 17, 21, 24, 81, 93, 94, 206, 207,

208, 238, 248, 256Moldavia, 107Monolingual– assimilation, 89– attitude, 90– ideology, 87– mentality, 87

322 Words and Worlds

– model, 3– policy, 96– school, 150, 174, 239, 251, 252, 253Monolingualism, 11, 24, 66, 87, 88, 89, 90, 189,

252Montreal, map 11Morocco, map 10Morogoro, map 9Morphology, 20, 62, 209Moscow State Linguistics University, vii, viii,

75Mother tongue, 26, 34, 35, 37, 63, 71, 75, 96,

109, 115, 123, 126, 128, 150, 151, 152, 153,154, 156, 159, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169,170, 184, 196, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217, 219,221, 234, 237, 240, 242, 245

Mountain villages, 32Mozambique, 101, 147, 216, map 5Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin, 108Multicultural, see also pluricultural, 3, 164,

168, 257Multifactorial analyses, 3Multi-function polis, 44Multilingual– community, 25, 89– education, viii, xiii, 4, 213, 231, 252, 253, 255,

262– ecology, 41– modes of communication, 36– network, 111, 112, 114, 115– relations, 3Multilingualism, see also plurilingualism, 29,

30, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 51, 68, 69,87, 88, 91, 92, 106, 111, 151, 164, 165, 169,173, 174, 184, 186, 215, 222, 230, 231, 253,262, 268

Munich, vii, 84Murder of natives in El Salvador in 1932,

240Murmansk, map 4Mutual intelligibility, mutual understanding,

mutually intelligible, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 29,47, 56, 89, 90

Mwanza, map 9Myanmar, 74, 191, 192Mysore, vii, 2, 27, 209Myth, xi, 13, 132, 136, 138, 148, 262

Nagorno-Karabakh, map 2Nakho, 62Namibia, map 5

Narrative poems, 136National Assembly for Wales, 101National– language, 13, 21, 24, 28, 40, 43, 47, 69, 74, 75,

76, 78, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 104, 122, 124, 169,216

– minority, 74Nationalism, 41, 84, 86, 93, 127, 166, 192Nationalist language, 83Nationalisation, 86Native– language, 19, 66, 67, 112, 137, 199, 212, 217,

221– religions, 194, 197, 199Natively spoken language, 18Natural– and human resources, 11– calamities, 243– disaster, 33, 197, 227, 238– environments, x, 23, 30– language, 13, 21, 40, 82, 144, 145Negative attitude, 26, 102, 189, 215, 220, 222,

223Neighbouring communities, 2, 263Nenetsia, 99Nepal, 243Netherlands, 14, 24Neutral language, 83, 85, 87New Britain, 33New Caledonia, 19, 178New Guinea, 14, 18, 19, 22, 31, 32, 38, 39, 41,

46, 48, 52, 60, 66, 78, 79, 99, 138, 142, 143,147, 152, 153, 160, 168, 197, 211

New Guinea Highlands, 14, 32New Hebrides, 76New Testament, see also Modern Testament,

20, 137, 194New Zealand, 7, 23, 31, 64, 77, 93, 105, 168Newspaper, 144, 178, 180Nicaragua, 65, 97, 212, map 8Niger, 123, map 10Nigeria, vii, 48, 50, 51, 67, 98, 122, 178, 206,

207Non Governmental Organisation Survival

International, 81Normalised use– in the administration, 125– of writing, 135, 140North-West Territories, 104, map 11Norway, 70, 97, 104, 107, map 4Notozeto, map 4

Subject Index 323

Number– of languages, xii, 5, 11, 20, 31, 32, 34, 40, 44,

47, 48, 50, 55, 56, 63, 78, 86, 89, 126, 138,151, 164, 184, 225, 241, 243

– of speakers, 3, 6, 18, 24, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57,65, 67, 70, 72, 77, 88, 206, 227, 232, 233, 243

Nyassia, map 7

Oberwart, 70Official language, 19, 42, 43, 44, 47, 51, 68, 70,

71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101,105, 106, 107, 120, 122, 123, 124, 179, 205,206, 207, 211, 215, 218, 221, 226, 230, 241,247, 250, 266

Open University of Catalonia, viii, 203Oral– culture, 83– literature, 83, 148– literary tradition, 138, 148, 254– transmission, 85Orality, 83, 115, 132, 164Order of the words, 62Organisation of African Unity OAU, 107Original language, 198, 218, 225, 238, 239Oslo, map 4Ossettia, 99, map 2Ouagadougou, vii, 2Oussouye, map 7Oviedo, 84

Pakistan, 94, 122, 147, 148, 178Panama, 65Pandemics, 33Papua New Guinea (see New Guinea)Paraguay, 18, 39, 41, 66, 67, 98, 122, 133, 134,

137Paraná, 133Passive– language learning, 88– multilingualism, 39Patois, 16, 25Peasant Research and Promotion Centre, viiiPEN Club, 108, 263Persecution, 42Peru, 7, 66, 97, 101, 102, 123, 124, 147, 160,

192, 208, 212, 218, 240, map 12Philippines, 48, 58, 76, 94, 143, 152, 192Philology, 12Philosophical knowledge, philosophical

system, 29, 140Phonetic script, 136, 141

Phonetics, 61Phyla, phylum, 58, 59, 60, 64, 67, 73, 74, 76,

236Pyatigorsk, viii, 73, map 2Pidgin, xii, 19, 20, 22, 31, 39, 40, 51, 63, 79, 211,

222, 223, 230Piura, map 6Planned languages, 21, 22Planning, see also language planning (see

linguistic planning) 17, 21, 22, 69, 189, 190,196, 249, 250, 259

Plantations, 19, 238Pluralism, xi, xiii, 165, 187Pluricentric standard languages, 29Pluricultural, see also multicultural, 3, 164,

168, 257Plurilingualism, see also multilingualism, 29,

30, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 51, 68, 69,87, 88, 91, 92, 106, 111, 151, 162, 164, 165,169, 173, 174, 184, 186, 215, 222, 230, 231,253, 262, 268,

Poland, 74, 107Policies of preservation, 3Policy of discrimination, see also

marginalisation, assimilation, 58Political self-determination, xiPolitical units, 24Polyethnicity, 75Polylingual, see also multilingual, plurilingual,

73, 87, 88, 92, 107, 150, 151, 164, 165, 166,167, 170, 181, 182, 184, 239, 263

Ponoj, map 4Port Elizabeth, map 5Portugal, 107, 230Positive attitude, 151, 153, 214, 215, 218, 253,

257Post-colonial, see also colonial, 97, 112, 228Post-creole communities, 27Post-modern society ies, 83Predominant language, see also dominant

language, 64, 70, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 113, 114,117, 150, 151, 153, 168, 170, 174, 195, 207,211, 216, 217, 221, 226, 232, 234, 235, 237,238, 258

Prefabricated language, 84Prejudices, xi, xiv, 82, 146, 188, 199, 205, 214,

223, 252, 256, 257, 258Prescriptive linguistics, 12Press, 83Pretoria, 140, 171, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 187,

255, 256, map 5

324 Words and Worlds

Priest, 133Primary education, 83, 137, 147, 153, 157, 160,

161, 209, 252Primitive society, 82Private domain, 114Process of diversification, 32PROEIB Andes, viiProhibition, 152, 218, 232Promotion– of language, 99, 107, 108– of literacy, 42Protestant, 191, 194, 195Purism, 165Purity, 95Pyatigorsk North-Caucasian Centre for

Sociolinguistic Studies, viii, 73, 324

Quebec, 105Queensland, 19, 29, 38, 43

Racism, racist, 56, 81, 82, 83, 90Radio, 83, 100, 144, 166, 171, 177, 178, 179,

180, 181, 182, 187, 242, 255, 256, 264Rainfall, 23Receptive vocabulary, 35Regional language, 42, 63, 83, 95, 96, 154, 209,

266Religion, xi, 3, 12, 24, 66, 131, 137, 186, 189,

190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198,199, 233, 238, 242

Religious instruction– leaders, xii, 194, 195, 199– terms, 139, 197– writings, 137, 139Removing children, 121Rennes, viii, 103Repression, xii, 220, 267Resettlement, see also settlement, 42Revitalisation, see also vitality, 250, 251, 252,

254, 256, 258, 259Revival, 9, 11, 62, 77, 100, 105, 121, 158, 159,

161, 168, 169, 209, 219, 236Riga, map 4Rivers, 32Roman script, 17Romania, 7, 70, 179, 206Rope-makers, 27Röros, map 4Rural, 26, 40, 67, 122, 154, 171, 186, 208, 218,

224, 237, 238, 251, 257Russia, vii, 49, 71, 74, 75, 107, 147, 158

Russian Far East, 120Russian Federation, 2, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 97,

99, 104, 123, 136Russification, 230Rwanda, 94, map 9

Sabir, 76Sacred languages, 190, 191, 192Sahara, 67, 68Sahara, Western, map 10Salta, 81Salvador, 240, map 8Samoa, 94San Marino, 107San Salvador, map 8Sangli, 27Saussure, 111Scandinavia, 14, map 4Seattle, 84Second language, 18, 19, 21, 34, 37, 62, 63, 69,

87, 100, 127, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170, 242,244, 252, 260

Second World War, 104, 166Secondary education, 103, 122, 154, 157, 162,

163Secret languages, 21Seismic movement, 239Self-destruction, 82Self-enclosed communities, xiiiSelf-esteem, 9, 81, 164, 212, 216, 222, 257, 264Semi-official status, 162Semi-speakers, 26Senegal, 123, 139, 143, 178, map 7Separate language, 47, 55, 56Serbia, 21Serengeti National Park, map 9Settlement, 20, 42, 233Seville, 84Shakespeare, 85Shift, see also language shift, 17, 18, 20, 26, 30,

40, 42, 43, 65, 97, 114, 115, 116, 121, 189,191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204,228, 238, 242, 250, 257,

Siberia, 73, 81, 120, 121, 219Sign language, 22, 63, 240, 242SIL see also Summer Institute of Linguistics,

and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano ILV,viii, 62, 63, 137, 138, 141, 161, 195, 243

Sindian, map 7Singapore, 19, 43Single national language, 24

Subject Index 325

Size of a language, 32Slavery, slaves, 19, 20, 46, 80, 105, 230, 234,

238, 240Slitgong languages, 22Slovakia, 70, 107Slovenia, 107Small language, 11, 18, 23, 38, 39, 42, 44, 80,

169, 188, 217, 236, 246, 262, 267Smallpox, 33, 239Snasa, map 4Social– degradation, 238– discrimination, 66, 229– liberation, 131, 135– marginalisation, 150– mobility, 33, 42– prestige, 172, 198, 227Socioeconomic power, Sociolinguistics, 4, 12, 25, 111, 265, 266Sociopolitical power, Sodankylä, map 4Solomon Islands, Solomons, 18, 19Somalia, 136, 162Songelsk, map 4Songs, 136, 139, 148, 152, 197, 229, 245Sosnavka, map 4Soviet Union, 126, 230Spain, vii, xiii, 11, 56, 97, 99, 107, 121, 126, 139,

162, 167, 168, 173, 178, 203, 226Speakers distribution, 33Speech organ, 61Speech-community, see also language

community, 10, 12, 13, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,35, 38, 44, 96, 230, 231, 244, 245,

Sprachbunds, 33Sri Lanka, 98Staatsvolk, 84Stable hierarchical communities, 39Standard language, 16, 20, 29, 39, 55, 56, 84,

85, 131, 135, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147,175, 223

Standardisation, 42, 85, 112, 114, 135, 139, 140,141, 142, 143, 147, 149, 176, 189, 191, 198,254, 258

State language, 42, 73, 75, 78, 94, 97, 99, 104,119, 120, 121, 122, 131, 141, 146, 177, 202,228, 233

Status of– languages, 3, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105,

107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 221– planning, 42

Stavropol, 71, map 2Stigmatised indigenous community ies, 226Stockholm, 187, map 4Strasbourg, 106Structural disintegration, 16Structuralism, 14Submersion (educational model), 168Subordination, 227, 237, 238Substractive– bilingualism, 66– bilinguality, 37Sudan, 49, 67, 137Summer Institute of Linguistics SIL (see SIL)Sumpah Pemuda, 95Superstitions, 83Supplementary educational tool, 158Surinam, 141Survival, 1, 2, 18, 19, 25, 30, 42, 57, 65, 67, 77,

81, 82, 102, 114, 121, 131, 144, 149, 166, 169,175, 180, 182, 199, 202, 204, 217, 218, 220,230, 232, 234, 239, 146, 257

Sustainable development, 235, 237, 265Swaziland, map 5Sweden, 97, 104, 107, 168, 203, map 4Switzerland, 24, 44, 56, 98, 99, 104, 107, 147 Symbols, x, 37, 85, 107, 112, 124, 125, 169, 208,

217, 218, 228, 237, 245, 253, 256, 265, 267Syntagmatic relations, 44Syntax, 62, 209Synthetic model, 61Syria, 72System of annotation, 134

Taboo, 22, 78Tacna, map 6Taiwan, 29, 236Tallinn, map 4Tamanrasset, map 10Tarna, Tanganyka, map 9Tanger, map 10Tännäs, map 10Tanzania, 19, 49, 94, 180, map 9Tärna, map 4Taymyria, 90Te Kohanga Reo, 77Teaching institutions, 88, 150Technical innovation, 32Technological changes, xiTegucigalpa, map 8Telephony, 131, 149, 166

326 Words and Worlds

Temporal factors, 31Terminal speakers, see also last speakers, 26Terminological, terminology, 10, 13, 14, 20, 73Terralingua, 216, 217Texts, 12, 134, 135, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148,

161, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199Thailand, 74, 94The Australian National University,

Canberra, 169The League of Welsh Youth, 101The Universal Declaration of Linguistic

Rights, 108, 183, 263Third languages, 169, 221Thought, 10, 36, 37, 63, 97, 131, 132, 134, 145,

244, 249Threat, 68, 70, 76, 97, 105, 149, 164, 181, 193,

201, 212, 226, 232, 234, 238, 239, 247, 248,249, 253, 254

Threatened language, 66, 169, 206Tibet, 136Timbuctu, map 10Tizi-Uzu, map 10Tobi, 16Togo, 143, 147, 239Tolerated language, 102Tonga, 94Toronto, map 11Tradition, 3, 10, 11, 69, 83, 85, 105, 131, 135,

136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148,149, 151, 161, 191, 193, 197, 207, 222, 224,230, 239, 254, 255, 262

Traditional– folk literature, 136– grammarians, 12– multilingualism, 38– society, 17, 21Translation, 35, 36, 61, 101, 110, 137, 140, 143,

145, 155, 159, 191, 192, 194, 198, 199, 231,264

Transmission language, interruption oftransmission (see language transmission)73, 172, 207

Treaty of Waitangi, 77Tribal– community, 82, 138– language, 24, 25, 26, 83, 209, 210, 211Triglossia, 40Tripoli, map 10Tuberculosis, 239Tunisia, map 10Turin, 107

Turkey, 71, 72, 94, 102, 107, map 2Typological– diversity, 61– linguistics, 236Typology of ecological classification, 13

Udmurtia, 99Uganda, 87, 122, 137, 147, 180, map 9Ukraine, 107Unbalanced and unhealthy ecologies, 30Uncultured language, 83Unemployment, 220, 237Unequal bilingualism, 238UNESCO, vii, x, xiii, xiv, 11, 92, 93, 98, 107,

108, 131, 150, 151, 153, 161, 165, 169, 174,183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 240, 243, 263, 266

UNESCO Advisory Committee on LinguisticPluralism and Multilingual Education, viii

UNESCO Centre of Catalonia, viiiUNESCO Etxea UNESCO Centre of the

Basque Country ix, xiiiUnfocussed languages, 16Uniformity of language, 27United Kingdom, 100, 101, 104, 107, 224, 231United Nations High Commissioner for

Refugees UNHCR, 234United Nations International Covenant on

Civil and Political Rights, 106United States of America USA, 17, 65, 86, 126,

152, 161, 229, 246United States Information Agency, 87University– of Adelaide, viii, 10, 79– of Barcelona, vii, viii, 167– of Geneva, viii, 147– of Ibadan, viii– of Indonesia, viii, 97– of Laval, viii, 38, 129– of Mons-Hainaut, vii, viii, xiii, 69– of Nepal, vii– of Papua New Guinea, 79– of Pyatigorsk, 73– of Rennes 2, viii, 103– of the Basque Country, viiiUnofficial language, 207, 226Untouchables, 27Unwritten language, 139, 209, 236, 241Urban– communities, 28– migration, 18– schools, 154

Subject Index 327

Urbanisation, 19, 20, 28, 42, 68, 215, 242, 243,256

Urdd Gobaith Cymru, 101Utsjoki, map 4

Vancouver, map 11Vanuatu, 14, 17, 19, 49, 76, 94Variety language, 142Vatican Council II, 191Venezuela, 66, 137, map 12Veracruz, 226Verbal and non-verbal intelligence, 37Vernacular, 19, 24, 38, 39, 41, 79, 144, 152, 160,

191, 192, 193, 194, 228Vernacularisation, 68, 228Victoria, vii, map 9Vietnam, 19, 99, 192Vilhelmina, map 4Vitality see also revitalisation, 31, 52, 68, 92, 109,

115, 123, 125, 137, 140, 175, 199, 233, 234Violence (psychological or physical), 80, 81,

266, 267Vocabulary, 17, 35, 45, 62, 96, 222, 265Volgograd, 71Vuotso, map 4

Wales, 70, 100, 101, 202War, 29, 42, 45, 72, 103, 104, 162, 166Weak language, 237Weddings, 148Welsh Language Act, 100Welsh Language Board, 100, 101Welsh Language Society, 101Western– civilisation, 138

– concept of language, 78, 79– culture, 47, 138– industrialised societies, 56– model, 82, 89– political and economic power, 82Whistle languages, 22Widespread language, 47, 52, 67, 70, 91, 94,

141, 149, 177, 180, 206, 216, 232, 238, 253,255, 256, 262, 263, 265, 267

Writing system, 121, 136, 141, 146, 189, 190,191, 192, 193, 196, 198, 209, 236

Written– code, 140, 142– codification, 131– culture, 83, 131, 134– language, 85, 121, 122, 128, 134, 135, 139,

140, 142, 143, 161, 166, 173, 209, 230, 251,255, 263, 264

– literary tradition, 131, 135, 138, 140, 141,142, 147, 154

– literature, 83, 135, 138, 141, 147, 166, 211– media, 181

Xishuangbanna, 122

Young speakers, 169Youth Pledge, 95Yukatan, 33

Zaire, 48, map 9Zambia, map 9Zanzibar, map 9Zhuang writting system, 136Ziguinchor, map 7Zimbabwe, 107, 122, map 9

328 Words and Worlds

Map 1. Genetic Groupings of the Languages of the World

Map 2. Languages in the Caucasus RegionThe Caucasus is the richest area in Europe, linguistically speaking. Over fifty languages arespoken in the region, although only a few are official. This map depicts linguistic diversity inthe Caucasus and notes whether each language is official or not.Based on data provided by Alexey Yeschenko, University of Pyatigorsk (Russian Federation)

Map 3. Native American Languages in CaliforniaThe great linguistic diversity of California is reducing dramatically. This map shows NativeAmerican Languages in California and the number of speakers of each one. As you can see,most of them have already died or are in the process of totally disappearing.Source: Hinton, L. (1994)

Map 4. Sami Language. Language, Territory, and Official StatusFrequently, the same linguistic community inhabits territories belonging to more than onestate. In Europe, for instance, one well-known example is that of Sami, whose speakers are to befound in land belonging to Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Federation, but which isofficial only in the first three countries. This map shows the Sami-speaking areas.Source: Seurujärvi-Kari, Pedersen & Hirvonen (1997)

Map 5. Languages of South AfricaThe map includes the eleven languages of South Africa that are recognised officially. It is alsoimportant to point out that there are other first languages that are used by South Africans suchas Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, French, Tamil, Hindi, Telegu, Gujarati, Urdu,Chinese, Swahili, Shone and Arabic and two Bantu languages, siPhuthi and Makhuwa, thatare not recognised by the Constitution but that are both unique to South Africa.Based on data provided by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology of Pretoria (South Africa)

Map 6. Great Diversity but only Occasional Use in Administration Despite the great linguistic diversity in South American countries such as Peru, very few get tobe used in formal service encounters. Even languages declared official, Quechua and Aymara,for instance, are hardly used in public administration. This map of Peru shows the originalterritory of the several language varieties. Data provided by the Peruvian Indigenous Institute

Map 7. Standardisation in SenegalSenegal has great language diversity. Some languages, such as Balanta or Safen, haveundergone a certain process of standardisation; others, such as Basari or Badyara, have not.This map shows the languages used in the region of Ziguinchor.Based on data provided by the Directorate for Literacy and Basic Education, Senegal

Map 8. Languages of Central America (Partial)According to our respondent for Pech (Honduras), there is no written tradition in thislanguage, but only oral. This map shows the languages of Mexico and Central America.Sources: Wurm, Mühlhäusler & Tryon (1996), England (1994), Moseley & Asher (1994) and data providedby K’ulb’il Yol Twitz Paxil-Academy of Mayan Language and the Honduran Institute of Anthropology

Map 9. The Media and Languages Spoken in TanzaniaOver one hundred languages are spoken in Tanzania. Only a few have some presence in themedia. The use of Swahili as the language for high functions is widespread.Data taken from Grimes (2000)

Map 10. Tamazight Language AreasAccording to our Tamazight (North Africa) respondent, Islamism contributes to theArabisation of the Amazights. This map shows the Tamazight language areas.Based on data provided by the Mediterranean “Montgomery Hart” Foundation of Amazights andMagrebian Studies

Map 11. Attitudes and Indian Languages in CanadaAlthough a language may play an important role in the definition of both individual andcollective identity, severe language shift may occur in a community. According to therespondent for Algonquin, for instance, Algonquins often express their concern aboutlanguage loss and note that this language is an important part of their identity as a nation andas individuals. This map shows Indian languages in Canada grouped by families.Data provided by the Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (Minister of Supply and Services, Canada)

Map 12. Languages of ColombiaSocial pressure often prevents natural transmission of minority languages, as reported by ourrespondent for some languages spoken in Colombia.

Formerly the language was transmitted from parents to children. Today we often find that parentsspeak to their children in Spanish because they feel that this language’s dominance ensures thattheir descendants will be accepted by the dominant society on an equal footing. (Uitoto, Colombia).

This map shows languages spoken in Colombia.Based on data provided by the Colombian Center for the Study of Aboriginal Languages (CCELA)

Map 13. Language Diversity in ChinaMost minority communities in China today are at least three thousand years old. However,contact between different groups brought about assimilation, and only isolated communitieswere able to preserve their languages more completely (Hongkai and Xing, 2003: 243). This mapshows languages other than Chinese spoken in China classified by the number of speakers. Based on data provided by the Academic Society for the Minority Languages of China