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Rūrangi S1E4 (2020) dir. Max Currie
In 2012 UNESCO predicted that my language will die in 2025
However, many dedicated activists have been working to counter and reverse the trend of parents deliberately not passing on the Igbo language to their children. While Igbo still is not at the level that it should be at, it is heartening to see that it is still alive and is still one of Africa’s major languages.
Some people were displeased with UNESCO but it is not UNESCO’s fault that so many of us are ashamed of who we are and desperately want to be as white as possible.
“However, we’re a colonised people. We hold everything we do to the standard of the white man, so our food, language, and culture have become gentrified. Our children learn Chinese, Spanish and other foreign languages, but there’s a need to reorient our way of life and the value of our languages. We can’t continue to be embarrassed about ourselves. At some point, our culture will become revived and fashionable again.”
In 2012, Unesco said the language would have vanished by 2025 but 10 years later Igbo is one of the five top languages in Nigeria
In order to escape the worlds of suffering created by these inequalities, people are everywhere ‘choosing’ to learn dominant languages in order to achieve economic and social mobility. They are also ‘choosing’ to stop using languages that are denied equal recognition and support. This unjust world of forced choice, gross inequality and suffering is the architecture of the slow-motion global language crisis. However, if we look at dominant representations of the global language crisis in the popular imagination and in academia, we could be forgiven for failing to notice that it is a crisis of social justice on a global scale. We could be forgiven for seeing something else altogether.
A really interesting post about the framing of how we talk about smaller languages from Gerald Roche. Excerpt:
For the past thirty years, our dominant way of thinking about the global language crisis has used models borrowed from conservation biology and the environmental movement. This approach, known as ‘endangerment linguistics,’ has mapped global linguistic diversity, created vast databases of linguistic data, raised public awareness about endangered languages, and developed new methods to teach and learn languages.
But despite its success as an academic field, endangerment linguistics has failed as a discourse: as a way of thinking and talking about a problem, and a way of perceiving and acting on the world. It has, for example, promoted problematic analogies between human languages and biological species. But more importantly, it has veiled the social injustice that lies at the heart of the global language crisis. [...]
Oppression, not endangerment. Oppression, not endangerment, lies at the heart of the global language crisis. Languages, and the people who use and identify with them, are dominated, deprived, marginalized, stigmatized, excluded, and subordinated. These languages are not endangered. The distinction between oppression and endangerment is the distinction between an approach that is explicitly political, and one which consistently works to depoliticize the problem. Furthermore, while endangerment is a feature of languages and populations, oppression is a feature of systems, structures, and relationships. Talking about language oppression centers the political and the relational; endangerment blames the victim. While endangerment highlights symptoms, oppression focuses on the causes of the underlying problems that need to be solved.
Languages don’t oppress themselves. A failure to identify unjust political relations, and a tendency to blame victims, are entrenched in the language of endangerment discourses. These problems are often seen in the use of passive language. Languages are said to decline, vanish, die, and disappear. Populations dwindle, recede or get depleted. When active language is used, it often blames the community: languages are forgotten, lost or abandoned. Or, blame is deferred by referring to false protagonists that are described as causing endangerment, such as modernization, urbanization, migration, or globalization (none of these processes ever seems to endanger dominant languages). In order to center relations of inequality and injustice, we need use active language that places the onus on the perpetrators and aims to identify the institutions and individuals that create and maintain structures of injustice.
Read the full post.
Are you ready for AILDI 2021?
Make sure you're signed up and registered, then check out Dr. Amy Fountain's welcome and introduction on 'Evaluating Technology' at AILDI this summer!
Nobody asked, but here’s my Review of “Revivalistics” by Ghil’ad Zuckermann
Tldr; A good introduction to the field of language revival and reclamation (reclamation = bringing a language with no speakers back into existence), but the content could be a little more broad.
Ghil’ad Zuckermann is an Israeli linguist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, working with endangered and dormant aboriginal languages. In Revivalistics, Ghil’ad discusses the ins and outs of the process of reclaiming languages, focusing mainly on Hebrew, which is considered a major success story in language reclamation.
For Hebrew, which is discussed in over half the book, Zuckermann takes a deep look into how the language existed before revival, and the effects (phonological, grammatical, and lexical) of other languages (primarily Yiddish) on its reclamation in the late 19th century. These effects have all culminated into what Zuckermann calls a “hybrid” language with multiple lineages, contrary to the family tree model of language history. Zuckermann also refers to the language as “Israeli”, going against the more popular term “Modern Hebrew” given the nature of its existence and difference from its Biblical ancestry. The core of this discussion is that a reclaimed language necessarily contains elements from the native language of the reclaimers.
The success of Hebrew’s reclamation had several key factors. First, was that Hebrew was an active liturgical language. Not spoken natively, but known to some degree by practitioners. Second, there was a strong desire at the time for a new national identity for Zionists moving to Palestine. Third, there was overwhelming financial and social support. These allowed the language to grow quickly, to the extent that it has now developed its own natural changes over time.
In chapter 6/9, Zuckermann starts to discuss other revival projects, focusing now on aboriginal languages in Australia. Of particular interest is his ongoing work with the Barngarla community, whose language had stopped being spoken in the 1960s. Zuckermann discusses linguicide and glottophagy, as well as the important issues of authenticity and emblematicity- that the desire for reclaiming the language “as it was originally” is impossible given the constraints of reclamation due to the reclaimers’ native language interference. Reclaimers should focus more on emblematicity in Zuckermann’s view, which is more pragmatic and appreciate the language’s “inevitable hybridity”.
Chapter 7 discusses the importance of technology in language reclamation, using examples like mobile and computer applications. Chapter 8 talks about the tangible social and economic benefits that language reclamation has on its community, the human right to a language, as well as making the case for a legal title (i.e. compensation) for language reclamation work. This, however, is specific to those communities in Australia, who have several existing titles and institutions to work with. The last chapter talks about the mental health of communities reclaiming their languages, using data from studies in Canada and the United States as well as the author’s own experiences with the Barngarla community.
Overall, this book takes a specialized but deep look into the interdisciplinary field of language revival and reclamation for Israeli and Barngarla, comparing the processes and what is really required to bring a language back from dormancy. As languages naturally change, Zuckermann argues that language hybridity in reclamation is unavoidable but should be celebrated rather than discouraged. Language reclamation has measurable, tangible benefits for a community, and more funding is needed to ensure that the community does not suffer cultural, social, and economic collapse. Critically, I would have liked to see less detail on the specifics of Israeli and instead have a more broad panel of reclaimed languages to look at, things like Wampanoag, Myaamia, Tunica, and Chitimacha, comparing the different social and institutional barriers that exist for those language reclamation projects. More generally, I am unsure of what Zuckermann meant this book to be. It is written academically, peppered with Latin academic phrases that I had to look up, as well as linguistic terminology that would be opaque to the layperson. But it also looks like it is trying to be a sort of guide for language reclamation. Given my aforementioned criticism of the missing breadth of languages, I don’t think this version of the book is well-suited for that. This book is a great start, but there is certainly a lot more work that needs to be done to establish the field of revivalistics and I look forward to seeing new additions to this work by Zuckermann and others. 7/10, Would recommend for all linguists.
This lost Native language of Massachusetts is waking up again | Public Radio International
Six teachers work with WLRP, and they've developed thousands of lesson plans in the Wampanoag language. One of the WLRP's Native youth programs is called Neekun, which means "our house" in the Wampanoag language. Weston describes it as a means for Native youth to learn the language through fun activities — which is more effective than rote learning, especially after kids have already spent a full day at school. "We try to keep it activity based," she explained. Neekun started in 2015, and it is one of four youth-based programs hosted by WLRP. Within the programs, the kids are always trying to learn ways to easily incorporate the Wampanoag language into their daily lives. This is why one of the first things they learn is how to introduce themselves.
(vía This lost Native language of Massachusetts is waking up again | Public Radio International)
While talk of a new golden age of Celtic cinema might be premature, there’s no mistaking an eclectic new wave of projects making an impact elsewhere: cinemas, television and streaming platforms. Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language horror movie The Feast (Gwledd, 2021), shortlisted for the Sutherland Award at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, was released in US cinemas last year. The first Breton-language drama series, Fin Ar Bed (2017-), was a major hit with French audiences. And Alastair Cole’s acclaimed Boat Song (Iorram, 2021), a lyrical portrait of the Gaelic-speaking fishing community in the Outer Hebrides, is the first cinema documentary entirely in Scots Gaelic.
With interest and investment both increasing rapidly in Irish-, Welsh- and Cornish-language films, it feels like a breakthrough moment.
So the true irony of people claiming Māori has been forced upon them because it's spoken on the TV, added to the national anthem and seen in place names and used and pronounced correctly a lot more often now, is overlooking the fact that for 100 years English was literally beaten into their fellow New Zealanders at school.
Many of them were their schoolmates, it was actually, physically forced upon Māori children for generations.
COMMENT: My dad was caned at school for speaking Māori to his mate - one generation ago.
