Languages In the World (54 page)
Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
Much has been made of the role played by social media in the Egyptian Revolution of January, 2011. In the summer of 2010, a Facebook page was created by a man named Wael Ghonim. This page became the virtual town square that would eventually sound the call for an uprising on January 25 in Cairo's physical Tahrir Square (ASCII-ized: Meedaan al Ta7reer). On the assigned day, the turnout on Tahrir Square was higher than anyone had imagined and led to a nationwide media campaign condemning the protests. It also led to Ghonim's arrest by the Egyptian State Security on January 27. What happened the next day was most unexpected. In his memoir, Ghonim writes:
Then, the Egyptian regime committed a fatal mistake. On the morning of Jan28, all communication in the country was cut off. All three cellular operators, Internet services, and short messaging services ceased to work. Little did the regime know that this was the single largest promotional effort possible for the revolution. Every citizen who had not heard of the uprising now realized that a major challenge to the regime must be under way. Huge numbers of people decided to take to the streets, some for no other reason than just to find out what was happening. (2012:212)
A lot of commentary does not seem necessary here. People like to be connected and stay connected: 100 kya, we sat around the campfire, telling the day's stories; today, we gather around the glow of our phone screens. Those with the power to deliberately cut the connection often do not have the power to control the consequences.
As we said at the beginning of this chapter, Mongolian has an 800-year history of written records starting in the thirteenth century with Genghis Khan. This period is sometimes called Middle Mongolian and runs from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It contrasts with Proto/Old/Ancient Mongolian, which refers to the time up through the twelfth century. The Modern Mongolian period begins in the seventeenth century with the conversion of the Mongolian people to Buddhism. The earliest literary work in Mongolian is
The Secret History of the Mongols
(circa 1240), likely originally written in the Mongolian version of the Uyghir script but whose only surviving copies are in Chinese characters. The long history of written Mongolian now serves various purposes: it can provide evidence for or against a relationship between Mongolic languages and languages from other stocks; and it can allow people in the present a perspective from which to observe language change in progress. We focus here on three of the eight Mongolian cases: accusative, genitive, and directive, and discover what they can tell us about both historical relatedness among languages and language change. (See Language Profile, this chapter, for the full list of cases.)
In this book we have classed Altaic as a phylum that includes three language stocks: Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic. The question of whether or not Korean and Japanese
belong here has not been settled. Everyone agrees that Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic are SOV and have postposed agglutinative morphology with similar grammatical functions as well as vowel harmony. What is at issue is whether these features are a result of: (i) shared inheritance from a proto-language; (ii) typology (certain features in language tend to hang together, and the cluster found in the purported Altaic phylum can be found in other places in the world); or (iii) contact, given that the speakers of the various languages have lived in the same part of the world for centuries.
The accusative case, which indicates the direct object, has played a role as scholars have attempted to establish a phylum for Altaic. There is an intriguing similarity between the Old Turkic accusative ending *-(i)g and the Modern Mongolian accusative ending
-iik
(spelled
-iig
but pronounced with a final [k]). What does the historical record of Mongolian tell us? It turns out that the appearance of the Mongolian -g# does not make an appearance in North Mongolian manuscripts until the end of the sixteenth century and in other varieties until the middle of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the Proto-Mongolian accusative case suffix appears to be *-i/ji. The appearance of the -g# in Modern Mongolian can be explained by the fact that in the development of the language, the genitive and the accusative endings started to merge, and certain varieties of Mongolian overcame the convergence by lengthening the accusative ending to -
jigi
, which became over time -
iik
.
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The point here is that *-g of the Old Turkic accusative and the -k (spelled -g) of the Modern Mongolian accusative are a coincidence and not a sign of shared inheritance. Some scholars are nevertheless willing to say that the vowel
-i
in the Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolian accusative is inherited from Proto-Altaic.
Another case perhaps determinative of whether or not there is a justifiable phylum Altaic is the genitive, and this is the case indicating possession. There is a strong and widespread use of the suffix
-in
and/or variations of such an ending always involving a nasal to indicate possession in Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages. It has been suggested that this so-called original [n] is found in Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages as well and also used in ways to suggest possession. It is even found in the Russian genitive case form
-un
, which is used almost exclusively with proper names and kinship terms, meaning that this ending has a non-Slavonic origin (Solntseva and Solntsev).
The widespread nature of this consonant and its associated meaning is surely not one of coincidence, as is the -g# in Old Turkic and Modern Mongolian. It is rather more an indication of an areal feature, one that is very old in this long-inhabited part of the world. That is to say that its distribution in the world's languages argues against a particular association with Altaic, as such. At the same time the appearance of this genitive in the three candidate language families for Altaic does not rule out that they shared the inheritance of it from a common proto-language, say, Proto-Altaic.
As was said in Chapters 3 and 7, in order to establish a family or a stock, the philologist must find
massive
lexical and grammatical similarities. Yes, there are lexical and grammatical similarities among the so-called Altaic languages, but they are not
massive. They seem to have come to exist through contact and diffusion, common enough processes the world over. The term
Altaic
is nevertheless justifiable in the sense that we use it in this textbook to capture the effects of this long-term contact.
Scholars of Mongolian have noticed that since the early 1990s, a new case is coming into existence, and it seems to be developing out of the directive case.
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The directive is the case that has historically indicated direction toward something, such as a person, place, or thing. It is marked with the unbound postposed morpheme
roo
or
ruu
, depending on the demands of vowel harmony (see Language Profile, this chapter). For instance, going âtoward me' is
nad roo
, while going âtoward (the town of) Erdenet' is
Erdenet ruu
. The new case has the bound morpheme ending -
eer
and could therefore be confused with one of the forms of the instrumental case, but apparently it is not. Before the early 1990s, one could say:
| bi | delguur | ruu | yavcan |
| I | store | to/toward | went |
| âI went to the store' |
and
| bi | Romin | roo | yavcan |
| I | Romania | to/toward | went |
| âI went to Romania.' |
Now, however, one can also say:
| bi | delguur eer | yavcan |
| I | store-toward/around | went |
| âI went around shopping/I shopped around' |
and
| bi | Romin eer | yavcan |
| I | Romania | toward/around went |
| âI traveled around Romania' |
The explanation for this new form is the following: only since the end of Socialism in the early 1990s did people have freedom to travel and a sense that one could âgo around' rather than just âtoward' something. This new feeling required an expansion of the unidirectional sense of
roo
/
ruu
to produce the multidirectional suffix -
eer
. Here is a very neat example of the way a language catches up to conditions. A change in political regime effected a change in behavior of the people formerly living under that regime, which also triggered a linguistic change to express that change in behavior. The development of
-eer
is still in progress.
Instead of using written records in order to look back and reconstruct some features of historical change in Hawaiian, here we use the written records of Hawaiian, along with newer technology, to look forward and account for the Hawaiian language revival, mentioned at the end of the Language Profile in Chapter 7. The very existence of the written records is one of the reasons the current language revival has a foothold. Surely they are important because they are valuable documents of the language, but they are even more important for what they represent: a time when Hawaiians were independent and self-governing. Thus, the records represent a tradition of longstanding and widespread literacy in the native population, and this tradition is alive today, given that native Hawaiians are better educated (in English) and better integrated into the American Middle Class than are most other Native American populations on the mainland (Cowell 2012). The Hawaiian language revival is, furthermore, taking place in a context that is less about reviving the language as a principal goal and more about reformulating and strengthening a Hawaiian identity that is already in place.
According to the records of the Hawaiian Historical Society, the first printing press arrived in Hawaiâi with Protestant missionaries in 1822. In the presence of those who had brought the press, the Maui Chief Keâeeaumoku did the honors: he put his hand to the lever, pushed down, and brought into existence the first page printed in Hawaiian and English. It was for a speller to be used in the schools organized by the missionaries. The chief is reported to have said
makai
âgood,' recognizing the importance of this moment. Indeed, in short order, Hawaiian was transcribed into the Latin alphabet, and over the course of the nineteenth century, both materials printed in Hawaiian and literacy rates in the native population increased. In particular, newspapers were printed in abundance. At the time, the first language of all native Hawaiians was Hawaiian.
In “The Hawaiian model of language revitalization: problems of extension to mainland America” (Cowell 2012), linguist Andrew Cowell describes the importance of the nineteenth-century records. First, as we have just said, these records anchor a tradition of literacy in the native population.
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Second, they were written by native speakers and thus reflect what was important to them. The documents record Hawaiian resistance to colonization, for instance, along with traditional oral poetry. There is, furthermore, a clear sense in the documents that part of their function was to record and save the language, to provide materials for future generations. Here we remind you that, as mentioned in Chapter 5, the decision taken almost 2000 years ago to write the Mishnah, the first documentation of the oral tradition of Judaism, was inspired by a (correct) perception that soon there would no speakers of Hebrew left. Similarly, although the Hawaiian language was alive, and literacy was spreading, nineteenth-century Hawaiians (also correctly) feared for the future of their language. Just as the long tradition of written Hebrew provided leverage to revive it as a spoken language, so can the tradition of written Hawaiian help in its revival.
The beginning of the end of the language the Hawaiians feared occurred in 1893 when American soldiers overthrew what would be the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliâuokalani. The Hawaiian language was almost immediately prohibited in schools across the archipelago, as monolingual English instruction replaced monolingual
Hawaiian instruction. Hawaiian children were punished for speaking the language, and teachers were fired for encouraging or allowing it in class. The numbers of Hawaiian speakers fell precipitously. By the 1980s, when the ban on Hawaiian in schools was officially overturned, there were only about 1000 native speakers of Hawaiian left in Hawaii, and about half were over the age of 70. Hawaiian was on the brink of loss less than a century after it was banned in schools.
Although an impassioned language revitalization movement got going in the 1980s with the introduction of immersion preschools known as
PÅ«nana Leo
, the scope of the efforts was limited, in part, by the physical distance imposed by the islands themselves. The dispersal of speakers enrolled in immersion classes across many islands made out-of-class engagement with the language nearly impossible. Moreover, Hawaiian was figured culturally as the language that connected students to their past, while English was the language of the future. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, young Hawaiians watched television in English, texted in English, blogged in English, and participated in social media such as Twitter and Facebook in English. English was the language of the digital age in Hawaii and the preferred language of the youth.
The same technology that once seemed to remove Hawaiian youth further and further from the Hawaiian language is now being recruited to revitalize it. Scholars, language activists, and educators are using digital technology to revolutionize the revitalization movement in four respects:
- to preserve existing written forms of the language;
- to make the language available in new platforms for communication;
- to cheaply develop new materials in the language; and
- to make the language available and easy to use in a variety of new technologies.
In 2002, Apple launched a Hawaiian language version of its Macintosh operating system, Kauakukalahale. In that same year, the first column in a major newspaper to be written in Hawaiian was published and became available online, and over 100,000 Hawaiian language documents were digitized and stored electronically in Ulukau, the Hawaiian Language Digital Project. The rise of self-publishing and the availability of affordable printing products have meant that authentic Hawaiian teaching materials can be produced locally, providing immersion classes with up-to-date resources. And students enrolled in those classes can now communicate synchronously via email, chat, discussion boards, and other forums with Hawaiian language immersion students outside their classes and across the archipelago. In addition, the establishment of the
KÅmikÄ Kua
â
Ålelo
âHawaiian Lexicon Committee' has helped in the revival efforts by overseeing the development of new vocabulary that did not occur naturally after the push for English in the schools and daily life began a century ago.
Perhaps most important in the revitalization effort is the sense of Hawaiian-ness and language ideology already in place on the islands. As mentioned in the Language Profile for Chapter 7, native Hawaiians did not have in the past, nor do they have in the present, feelings of exclusivity toward Hawaiian identity and the Hawaiian language. Neither was there ever the idea in circulation that if one did not speak Hawaiian, one could not be Hawaiian. Cowell describes this general cultural sense as one of “expansive inclusivity.” Thus, among all populations living in Hawaii, there is widespread
understanding of, support for, and participation in such traditional Hawaiian activities as surfing, pig hunting, hula, traditional fishing, luaus, wearing leis and aloha clothing, and the rest. This expansive inclusivity has made it easier, rather than more difficult, to recruit interest in reviving the Hawaiian language, since the language becomes one more resource to strengthen prevailing cultural values. In the terms of this book, the Hawaiian language has many activities and artifacts into which it can now loop itself. The language is not bearing all the responsibility of reviving the culture.
Cowell points out that the historical and contemporary cultural situation in Hawaii is quite different than for most mainland Native American cultures in that, despite the skyscrapers on WaikÄ«kÄ« Beach, traditional Hawaiian culture permeates the general culture, and the language has remained present in the place names, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and Honolulu â just to name a few. Native American Arapaho speakers from the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming who came to Hawaii to visit the immersion schools were struck by this cultural presence. One of them noted that the Hawaiians' “life is all around”; that is, dispersed in the general culture the way Arapaho culture in Wyoming is not. Still, it takes committed language activists to revive a language, and in Hawaii these are the native Hawaiians. They now benefit from their ancestors' openness to others. They also find creative ways to blend the new with the old. Cowell reports on a high school football team that calls its plays traditional voyaging terminology. In recent years, football practices on the islands have become increasingly “Polynesian.”
Among the conditions language is always catching up to are the technological means of reproducing the language and disseminating it along with long-existing attitudes that can be recruited for new purposes.