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Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter

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Language, Discourse, and Ideology

Language loops into ever-greater stretches of cultural and cognitive practices. These are called
discourses
, and they are characteristic ways of talking about and understanding certain ideas, attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs, all of which affect behaviors. For example, in the United States, we can identify a deeply ingrained
discourse of opportunity
that reflects and animates a set of beliefs, practices, and policies, and which intersects with another time-honored discourse, that of
equality
, as in “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” These discourses have shaped one another over the centuries, such that what is in play today is not necessarily the idea that “all men” are equal in terms of talent. Nor is it the idea that everyone is equal in deserving their fair share. Rather, it is that everyone is deserving of their fair shake. Now, we have the
discourse of equal opportunity
, and equality of opportunity is supposed to be a guarantee of United States citizenship. Discourses express accepted sets of beliefs, which, like everything else in the world, have consequences. For example, if you believe that every American citizen has equal opportunity, you may believe those with the highest status earned their status through hard work, while those with the lowest status did not work hard enough. This attitude may affect who you
become friends with, who you marry, who you apply to work with, who you hire, and so forth.

Discourses also express ideologies, which are sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious ideas about the way things work. When it comes to popular concepts of the relationship between language and dialect, correct and incorrect language, we see the working of a language
ideology
that is a set of beliefs and attitudes, loaded with moral and political interests, that speakers either impose on other speakers or assume for themselves when adopting a speaking style. Language ideologies always privilege some speakers and stigmatize others. The workings of language ideology are most powerful and effective when they are invisible, operating like the Wizard of Oz. When Toto (in this case, the linguist) draws the curtain back to reveal that eighteenth-century
grammarians
manipulated the dials a long time ago, students are sometimes surprised to discover that the attitudes and rules they have acquired through schooling and living in a particular culture do not reflect universal truths but are as contingent as everything else affecting language. Students are then sometimes moved to think differently and then act differently toward people who speak nonstandard versions of a language or a mixed language like Spanglish.

In sum, language, culture, and cognition shape one another in small and large ways that can and do change over time: culture informs language and cognition; language informs cognition and culture; cognition informs culture and language. These terms are, however, not neatly coincident. Good dead reckoners can be found in communities where an absolute frame of reference is absent, and the use of the relative spatial frame of reference is the norm. The use of knives, forks, and spoons is common across Western cultures with their many different languages, just as the use of chopsticks is common across Eastern cultures with their many different languages. Language ideologies exist everywhere in the world, and people variously accept or reject them. These examples point to only some of the complexities involved in unknotting the extended feedback system involving language–culture–cognition that we identify as the language loop.

On Major and Minor Languages

A major language could be said to be one that has a large number of speakers, widespread use over an extended geographic area, and/or a long and important literary tradition. A minor language could be said to be one that has relatively few speakers who might also be isolated from neighboring groups and/or who might have a nontechnological culture, which might be transmitted only orally. In other words, the terms
major
and
minor
have nothing to do with the richness or worthiness of the language loop characterizing a language classed as either major or minor. The terms are social designations, not linguistic ones.

Because
Languages in the World
is organized around the three themes of power, movement, and time, it is the case that major languages have more presence in the following pages than minor ones. Speakers of major languages are the ones who have typically been long involved in power dynamics, or have been constantly on the move,
and/or have produced written records that give historical linguists material objects to study. We, the authors, have tried, when possible, to bring minor languages into our discussions, but we are aware that we emphasize the languages of Eurasia, Africa, Oceania, and, to some extent, Australia at the expense of languages spoken, say, in Papua New Guinea and the Americas. We trust that instructors using this book will supplement our materials to give coverage to the languages we do not have space to properly outline.

The value of the study of minor languages should not be underestimated. Indeed, we opened this chapter with the phenomenon of dead reckoning in the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr to underscore the importance of the contribution of absolute frames of reference to the understanding of how humans around the world have variously worked out spatial cognition on the horizontal plane. Absolute frames of reference are found in about one third of the world's languages. It must be said, however, that these languages are among the lesser known and spoken. So, it is not the case that one third of the world's people speak languages with absolute frames of reference. What is the case is that such languages are found from Australia to New Guinea to Nepal to Mesoamerica and in all types of environments from open desert to closed jungle, meaning that no simple ecological determinism can explain the development of such systems (Levinson 2003:48). Without the knowledge that so many different peoples and cultures have converged on a particular way to cognize, talk about, and navigate horizontal space – all the while working out this type of system with great variety – we would be missing a significant piece of an important feature of the language loop.

Similarly, human beings the world over have found a wide variety of ways to exploit the vocal tract to produce contrastive sounds. The voiceless velar stop [k] in English is produced when the back of the tongue comes up against the velum to form full closure of the vocal tract and is then released to produce the sound. There is another type of [k] with a different quality of sound. It occurs when the glottis is closed at the same time as the velum is closed off, and this double closure compresses the air in the pharynx. The compressed air is released when the back of the tongue is lowered while the glottal stop is maintained, and shortly thereafter the glottal stop is released. Stops made with a glottalic mechanism are called
ejectives
, and the diacritic indicating an ejective is [']. You will read more about them in the Language Profile of K'iche' in Chapter 12. The point at present is this: there is nothing odd or peculiar about ejectives. The human vocal tract easily accommodates them. However, they happen to be widely found in Native American languages and languages spoken in the Caucasus, and their relatively high occurrence in so-called minor languages is a coincidence. Major languages also have them, such as ones found in Africa, for example, Hausa, which has 34 million first-language speakers and up to 18 million second-language speakers.

Sometimes, certain syntactic features have a higher incidence in minor languages than they do in what we are calling major languages, but – once again – the terms
major
and
minor
refer to social weight and are not ways of evaluating syntactic constructions. Speakers around the world have worked out different ways to conceive of the relationship between transitive and intransitive verbs, which also entails ways of treating them different syntactically. Readers of this book are necessarily familiar with what is called
accusative alignment
, where subjects of both transitive and intransitive
verbs are in the nominative case, while objects of transitive verbs are in the accusative case. Consider the following sentences:

I
see
him
subj.
verb
obj.
I
walk
subj.
verb
He
walks
subj.
verb

The object of the transitive verb ‘to see' is
him
, and it is in the accusative case. In the case of the intransitive verb ‘to walk,' the subjects
I
and
he
are in the nominative case, just as they are for transitive verbs.

In contrast, many readers of this book may not be familiar with what is called
ergative alignment
, where there is one case, namely the ergative case, that marks the subject of transitive verbs, while there is another case, namely the absolutive case, that marks the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. Now, consider this pair of sentences from Basque:

  • Martin ethorri da
    ‘Martin came'
  • Martinek haurra igorri du
    Martin child sent
    ‘Martin sent the child'

The subject of the transitive sentence, namely
Martinek
, has the -ek ergative ending. The subject of the intransitive verb, namely
Martin
, and the object of the transitive verb
haurra
‘child' have no ending, which, in the case of Basque, marks them for absolutive (Comrie 1987:13). The point here is yet again the fact that ergative alignment is widespread in minor languages, such as those original to Australia, and this distribution is coincidental. We will see more examples of ergativity in the Language Profiles for Kurdish, Tibetan, and K'iche', in Chapters 4, 6, and 12, respectively.

In other words, lesser-known and lesser-studied languages (except by linguists) are rich with the ways humans have looped their communicative interactions into their interior and exterior landscapes and into their lives.

Final Note: The Contingencies of Time, Place, and Biology

We began Chapter 1 with the story of the emergence of Spanglish as a result of Spanish speakers and English speakers meeting on the Tex-Mex border. We end Chapter 2 with a review of the linguistic effects of the encounters of these Spanish and English speakers with the very different groups of people they met in the New World, namely the Native Americans.

When the Spanish and the English began their extensive post-Columbian explorations of North and South America, they arrived on the new shores with certain similarities. They came from a similar gene pool. They came speaking languages from the same language stock. They came with similar motivations, namely in search of riches, whether it was gold or farmland or pelts or tobacco. They brought with them similar technologies: ships, navigational instruments, cartographic skills, and firearms. They both brought the all-important horse. Although they might not have brought the whole of the material culture available in their home countries – the full range of clothing, cooking utensils, furniture, musical instruments, literature, reference books, and so forth – they came with similar experiences and understandings of this extensive material culture. The Spanish were Catholic, and the English were Anglican; the Spanish were willing to fight the English to bring them back into the Catholic fold and lost what is known as the Spanish Armada in 1588. Nevertheless, the English and the Spanish both counted themselves Christian. They held very similar cultural attitudes and beliefs concerning the Native Americans they were encountering, including ideologies about the languages these indigenous people spoke. They both knew the other was on the hunt and kept track of one another's movements. The encounter of the Spanish and English explorers in the New World was certainly dramatic, but it also occurred on a fairly level playing field.
6

The same cannot be said for the encounters of the Spanish and the English with the Native Americans, the latter having had no way to know what was coming, and these encounters illustrate the notion of contingency: an unforeseen circumstance that comes into play when one group going about its business meets another group's current state of affairs, and this unforeseen circumstance then plays out with retrospective necessity. A contingent event marks the moment when being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time produces its unintended consequences for the groups of people involved in the event, and these consequences then become the preconditions for the next set of unforeseen circumstances to occur, making the history of the world one long, intertwined series of contingencies.

The first and most crucial contingency in the case of the encounter of the Europeans with the Native Americans was their respective biologies. Along with everything else the Europeans brought, they also came with smallpox, influenza, and measles, and these were diseases for which the indigenous populations, who had been alone on the two continents for at least 15,000 years, had no appropriate antibodies. There has long been dispute about the population size of Native Americans in pre-Columbian times and the percentage loss of that population after the arrival of the Europeans. However, recent genetic studies estimate a decline of 50%, which fits with the historical records telling of a drastic population loss. For the year 1900, the number of Native Americans north of Mexico is agreed to be around 500,000. Today, the number is around 3,000,000, a clear rebound. Nevertheless, the linguistic effects of European contact were immediate: lose the speakers, lose the languages.

In North America, if your tribe had settled on the east coast, you were in an unfortunate location and in the first line of groups to be killed, absorbed, or displaced.
The Last of the Mohicans
tells part of that story. If you had settled on good farmland, your situation was no better, as in the case of the Cherokee in North Carolina who were removed to Oklahoma in the infamous Trail of Tears of the 1830s. If you were in
South America, and your tribe was powerful and rich, which meant that you had a lot of gold, you were definitely in the crosshairs. You fared better if you were isolated in the dense rain forest of the Amazon, owned few valuables, and had access to few natural resources. If you survived all of this and long enough, then it is possible that your language could find some protection as an official language, as Guaraní is today in Paraguay. Or perhaps, like the Navajo in the southwestern United States, you occupied land whose resources of uranium, natural gas, and coal were not considered useful until the early part of the twentieth century, and by that time you had acquired civil rights and knew how to negotiate with the federal government. In Chapter 12, we explore the varying fates of Native American languages along with other endangered languages and speculate on the future of our globalized linguistic world.

In sum,
Languages in the World
undertakes to sketch the broad outlines of the historical and sociopolitical contingencies that have shaped and continue to shape linguistic structures and language use today.

BOOK: Languages In the World
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