s Conflict and Consensus about First Nations' Languages

Conflict and Consensus about First Nations' Languages

C̓imáuc̕a ("Place of the Snags"), Kitamaat Village, BC

Emmon Bach
UMass (Amherst), SOAS (U London)
e m a i l: firstinitialsurname (at) linguist (dot) umass (dot) edu
© Emmon Bach 2008. All rights reserved.
OSU 8 April 2008

Many years ago, in response to my explanation about why an American linguist like me wanted to study the language of a village in northern British Columbia, the respected Haisla elder Mike Shaw asked:

Mike Shaw's Questions:

  1. Why did you come here to learn about our language?
  2. I understand what you want. Why should we help you?
This talk will be about Mike Shaw's questions and possible responses to them. It will reflect my experience as a theoretical linguist and a field linguist working with speakers of endangered North American languages: primarily Wakashan (Pacific Northwest) and Western Abenaki (Northeastern North America).

  1. Prelude: the costs of globalization

    2. All over the world, local languages are facing possible or probable extinction. The situation is nowhere more acute than for First Nations* in the regions now called the United States of America and Canada. In the face of this situation many people have become interested in studying endangered languages. Interest in threatened languages comes from many different sides: commercial, academic, scientific, religious, and more. The most immediately affected are of course the very speakers of the languages and the communities where they live or have lived.

    [*"First Nations" or "First Peoples" are favored designations for the aboriginal peoples of Canada in Canadian English. Note the difference between the two which reflects ongoing disputes and negotiations about what "sovereignty" means. English and French are the nationally recognized official languages of Canada. Of provincial and terriorial language policies, Québec recognizes only Canadian French as an official language; Nunavut Territory recognizes Inuktitut, English, and French; Northwest Territory recognizes 10: Chipewyan, Cree, Dogrib, English, French, Gwich'in, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, Innuinaqtun, North Slavey, and South Slavey.]

  2. Why do languages die?

    3. First, let's ask the question: what does it mean to say that a language is dead?

    We talk about languages like Ancient Greek and Latin and Old English as "dead languages." Maybe it just means that a language isn't being spoken or used any more. But that can't quite be right. Latin is used all over the world as a ritual language in the Catholic Church. When I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, my Latin professor, John P. Cooke, used to travel to Italy most summers. He never learned Italian, but got along well speaking Latin to learned people. But in a sense, Latin never died. It just turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Rumanian, Ladin, Romantsch, and so on. So something more must be meant.

    I think that what is usually meant is that dead languages are languages that aren't associated with a community where everybody speaks the language and, crucially, where children are brought up surrounded by the language and learning it in a naturalistic way, from the babbling stage onward.

    Let's notice that languages, unlike dinosaurs (except in Jurassic Park), can be revived. This is the rare lesson of Modern Hebrew, which was reborn from a "Sabbath" language of ritual and prayer to a full-fledged community language in modern Israel. Everyone speaks it and babies babble their way toward it.

    So now the main question here: Why do languages die? Well, it makes sense to say that there is a natural gradual dying out, which just means that languages change over time so that eventually if people could use time-machines and travel backwards they would reach a point where -- unlike Dr Who -- they wouldn't be able to understand the language from which their own language was "descended." We could probably make out pretty much what an Elizabethan actor was saying when we climb out of TARDIS and go to the Globe theater of Shakespeare's day. We'd have a lot more trouble with Chaucer, but a bard reciting Beowulf would have no more luck with us than a modern German reciting Goethe's Faust. So that's one way in which a language "dies."

    The other way is an abrupt way, where abruptness is measured in years or decades or maybe a century or two. Here a whole population changes its speech, or the inhabitants of a region are physically replaced by a population speaking a different language from the one used in that place before.

    Now it is a fact that languages have always died out in both ways. Languages always change in spite of the efforts of "language mavens" -- Steve Pinker's term for people who write sniffy newspaper columns about language -- to keep their language from "degenerating" (Pinker 1994). And there have always been population movements, conquests, political and economic pressures that favor or disfavor one language over another, and wholesale destruction of communities and populations. Over human history there have been vastly more languages that we know nothing about than languages that we have some inkling of.

    What is unprecedented in our times is the rate of language attrition. It's hard to count languages, but a pretty fair estimate of the number of different languages spoken in the world is around 6,000.* Some linguists have estimated that by the end of this century as many as 90% of these languages will have died out. There has been a fair amount of publicity about this situation, which exceeds by far the rate of species-death which (rightly) concerns many people.

    [*It's hard to count because languages and dialects shade off into each other. By the way, a "dialect" for a linguist is just a name for a distinctive way of talking. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich once wrote "a language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy." ("A sprakh is a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot") in the article "Der yivo un di problemen undzerr tsayt." In Yivo-bieter 25.1.13.]

  3. Who cares?

    1. Communities and native speakers often do care very much.

      2. imagine being the last speaker of your language! Our sense of cultural identity is closely bound up with our language.

    2. The world should care

      3. A language is a precious and unique part of our common human heritage. How dull things would be if everybody spoke just English!

    3. Linguists should care: answering Mike Shaw' first question (A)

      4. for scientific reasons. More on this in a moment.

  4. Conflicting interests and aims

    1. Who owns a language?

      2. Some native ideas about ownership.

      In the Pacific Northwest, there are strong traditions about ownership of oral texts, names, songs based on the clan and family structures.

      Euro-American copyright law: you can't own words (but see below), you can't copyright a language, its grammar.

      You can copyright documents, stories etc.

      You can trademark names for products: linguists are often called on to help adjudicate whether something can be a brand or business name: e.g. "Bookmasters," Wordsmith? X-smith? Common useage?

      Does a community have the right to let a language die, to kill it, to prevent outsiders from learning it? Of course

      A community can (and should!) come to an agreement with linguists who want to work with them on their language.

      I like to talk about

    2. The Mike Shaw Principle:

      3. Linguists should agree to spend at least half of their time on projects that are community oriented. (I believe linguists should do this whether they are asked to or not.)

    (This idea was inspired by what Vine Deloria, Jr. (1969/1988) advocated in his book Custer Died for your Sins. The chapter "Anthropologists and Other Friends" is required reading when I teach fieldmethods.)

  5. Conflict about endangered languages among linguists

    1. linguists, linguists, and linguists

      2. s In popular language, a linguist is someone who knows a lot of languages, a polyglot.

      [Airplane story, Guiness book of world records]

      Putting this meaning aside, the relationship between languages and linguists can be characterized by asking what is at the center of the interest of the linguist. For a theoretical linguist, the center of attention is linguistic theory, most often some subpart of linguistic theory such as sound systems (phonology), the structure of sentences (syntax) or words (morphology) and their meaning (semantics). For a descriptive linguist the center of attention is a language, and linguistic theories are viewed as ways to achieve a good account for the primary linguistic data. There is conflict and consensus among linguists as well!

    2. a five-minute history of linguistics
    3. can linguists help strengthen a language?
    4. the native-speaker linguist
    5. conflicts in First Nations communities

    Unless they are community members themselves (the ideal situation), the linguist cannot do what the community itself has to do: make a decision about its language policy. It is not surprising that there can be disagreements in the community itself about language. A typical story (from the Canadian context, but probably typical also of the United States):

    A generation of community members grew up at a time when they attended residential schools, by coercion or choice, either government or church schools. At school, away from their home communities and often without any schoolmates from their community, they were discouraged from using their home language, often actively punished for "speaking Indian."

    When these people raised their own children, they sometimes consciously decided that it would be better for their children to grow up speaking the dominant language (English, say). So the chain of learning was broken.

    Sometimes this policy "don't speak Indian" was implemented in community schools, sometimes even when the teacher was a community member.

    Story about this: Write on the board a hundred times: I will not speak Haisla!

  6. Conflicts between linguists and communities.

    7. Frequent resentments. Story: "This is EB, who knows my language better than I do, and I really resent it!"

    Frequent heroic efforts by dedicated speakers. Story: "Please hurry up and learn my language so I will have someone to talk to!"

    Horror Stories!

  7. Can linguists help strengthen a language?

  8. Some points of consensus

    1. accuracy

    2. authority and attribution

    3. importance of documentation

      4. Story: jogging elders' memories with documents from a century before.

    4. manner of documentation

      5. Asymmetry of information flow: orthographies and technical jargon.

      It's generally easier for a linguist to work from a practical orthography than for the community to learn an arcane system with strange phonetic symbols, etc.

      Computers help! it's easy to program for double representations: a phonetic/phonemic and a practical orthographic

    5. getting the word out about relevant issues:

      1. multilingualism

        2. Most of the world is multilingual. There is a common idea that children are held back in their development (language-wise or other-wise) if they learn more than one language from early childhood. There is absolutely no basis for this claim, and there is some research that seems to show that the opposite is true. Linguists and educators should know this and do their utmost to counteract this popular idea. Of course, questions about language and identity are emotionally loaded.

      2. preschool immersion

      3. difficulties in way of preservation

      4. resist some "experts"

      Story: "I want the children to call me Granny! In your language."

Outlook and Expectations

References:

Bach, Emmon. 1995. Endangered languages and the linguist. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm III, Proceedings of the 1992 Seoul International Conference on Linguistics, Seoul, 1994. WAK

Bach, Emmon. 2003. Postcolonial (?) linguistic fieldwork. Massachusetts Review XLIV, 1 and 2. Pp. 167 - 181.[ Issue title: A Gathering in Honor of Jules Chametzky.]

Bach, Emmon. 2004. Linguistic universals and particulars. In Piet van Sterkenburg, ed., Linguistics Today - Facing a Greater Challenge (Amsterdam / Philadelphia: Benjamins), pp. 47-60. [= Invited address presented at the XVII International Congress of Linguists. Prague.]

Barman, Jean, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill, eds. 1986. Indian Education in Canada: Volume 1: The Legacy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Boas, Franz. 1911. Introduction. In Boas, 1911-1922.

Boas, Franz, ed. 1911-1922. Handbook of American Indian Languages . Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. 2 vols. Rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1969, 1988. Custer Died for your Sins: an Indian Manifesto. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. [Repr. with new preface, 1988.]

Duff, Wilson. 1969. The Indian History of British Columbia. Vol. 1 The Impact of the White Man. Victoria: Province of British Columbia: Royal British Columbia Museum. Anthropology in British Columbia Memoir No. 5.

Fisher, Robin. 1977. Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. INDHIST BCHIST FNST

Grenoble, Lenore A. and Lindsay J. Whaley, eds. 1998. Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haig-Brown, Celia. 1988. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School. Vancouver: Tillacum Library.

Hale, Ken. 1998. On endangered languages and the importance of linguistic diversity. In Grenoble and Whaley, 1998, pp. 192-233.

Hale, Ken, Michael Krauss, Lucille J. Watahomigie, Akira Y. Yamamoto, Colette Craig, LaVerne Masayevsa Jeanne, and Nora C. England. 1992. Endangered Languages. Language 68: 1-42.

Karttunen, Frances. 1994. Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kehoe, Alice B. 1992. North American Indians: a Comprehensive Account. Second edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. INDHIST

Miller, J.R., ed. 1991. Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press. HIST FNST

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.

Sapir, Edward S. 1921. Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech . New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and Robert Phillipson, eds. 1995. Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wilson, J. Donald. 1986. "No blanket to be worn in school": the education of Indians in nineteenth-century Ontario. In Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill, eds., Indian Education in Canada: Volume 1: The Legacy (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), pp. 64-87.