The Language Revolution (12 page)

As we saw in chapter 2, the point is especially sensitive between old and young generations, the former insisting on ‘correctness' and the latter wishing to make use of ‘cool' loan words (often from English). In a ‘healthy' language, with millions of speakers, purist attitudes cause no harm, because they are swallowed up in the myriad opinions which comprise the speech community. Indeed, they probably have an important role to play, identifying one pole of a spectrum of opinion which allows other positions to be more clearly seen by contrast. There is a ‘descriptive' position in linguistics, for instance, which asserts that all usage – whether standard or nonstandard – is valid. This position becomes more sharply defined when it is seen in contradistinction to the ‘prescriptive' view, which asserts that only certain usages – those sanctioned by respected grammars and dictionaries – are valid. But when we are dealing with minority and endangered languages, purism becomes harmful. My view is unequivocal: any speech community which allows the purist mentality to dominate its linguistic policy is signing the death warrant for its language. The teenagers are the parents of the next generation of children, and if the language is to be passed on, these are the ones who have to be persuaded that there is a point. But each time ‘their' language is rejected by community elders because it is ‘incorrect', this vitality is reduced. It is another nail in the coffin.

It has to be accepted that the identity of a language will change – as it always has in the past – even, as we saw in chapter 2, to the extent of fundamentally altering its character.
This apparently unpalatable truth can be made less so by pointing to what happens when languages actually do change their character. They do not somehow deteriorate or disappear; rather, their new character becomes a fresh resource which can be used in all kinds of creative directions. English, as we have seen, provides the classic case. The result of adding huge amounts of Classical and Romance vocabulary to English has not been the deterioration of English; on the contrary, what we now have is a lexicon with a hugely increased range of expressiveness, enabling fresh opportunities for creativity. Ironically, it is the Classical lexicon which many people (though not George Orwell) feel adds ‘quality' to English. The language of the next generation is never the same as the language of its predecessor. And accepting the inevitability, if not desirability, of change is an essential part of any realistic approach to multilingualism. Part of the new mindset of a post-revolutionary era has, accordingly, to be the acceptance of much greater levels of contact effects (such as loan words), and a preparedness to encounter huge numbers of ‘code-mixed' languages in which massive intermixing has taken place (as in Singlish's use of English and Chinese).

Casting the argument in terms of an opposition between ‘old' and ‘young', or ‘correct' and ‘cool', is itself a distortion. The two positions are not totally exclusive. It is perfectly possible to have a linguistic situation in which a highly colloquial and ‘cool' level of language use exists alongside a highly formal and ‘correct' level. This kind of situation is captured by the notion of tri-dialectism described at the end of chapter 1, and also by the notion of two very different versions of a language existing at the same time
(diglossia),
illustrated by such cases as Classical vs Colloquial Arabic or Swiss vs High German. It is likely that languages will become increasingly diglossic (even
triglossic,
with three simultaneously existing versions) as contact effects increase, and these will be particularly noticeable in minority languages, where the smaller number of speakers will make the different levels stand out more prominently. Only an inclusive language policy can cope with such developments. Any policy which operates exclusively – declaring that a certain group of speakers does not speak the ‘proper' language – is on a course of self-destruction. A minority language needs every friend it can get, regardless of the kind or level of language the speakers display. Someone who has just put their foot on the bilingual ladder (with 1 per cent fluency, in the above terms) is to be welcomed and valued. Unfortunately, the surprising truth is that historical conceptions of ownership can get in the way of inclusiveness. ‘They have no right to learn our language' is an attitude often heard by traditionalists faced with incomers. The position is complex, and not entirely without point, but it is ultimately self-defeating.

The more we explore the notion of multilingualism in a post-revolutionary linguistic world, the more we find our cherished notions having to be revised or even jettisoned. Even such fundamental notions as the distinction between ‘native' and ‘non-native' languages, or between ‘first', ‘second' and ‘foreign' languages, have to be rethought. The situation referred to in chapter 1 provides an example: babies are now being born all over the world who are being taught language by parents of mixed-language backgrounds, for whom English is an essential lingua franca. In other words the babies are going to be learning ‘English as a foreign language' as a mother-tongue. Such developments can take even language professionals by surprise. What professionals need to appreciate is the even greater levels of rethinking which have to take place among the general public, where, for example, the notion that monolingualism is the norm is surprisingly pervasive (especially
in those countries which have a recent history of colonialism). Among politicians and administrators there is a natural tendency to look for neat and simple solutions – devising formulae, for example, about how many languages it is desirable for a country to teach or work towards. But notions of ‘L1 + 1' (learn one foreign language in addition to your own), ‘L1 + 2', or whatever, bear little relationship to the real world, where people operate with as many languages as they need and at a variety of levels. To my mind, the only concept which relates well to the multilingual world I see around me is that of the
language portfolio –
a notion now quite widely used in Europe which focuses on the range of languages and competences which a person has available. It is this which needs to be operationalized in school curricula and elsewhere.

To cope with revolutions we need a strategy which is sufficiently flexible to integrate many levels and types of users. Its focus has to be on ‘ordinary families' and on children at home, because this is where languages are most solidly acquired; but homes have to be seen in the context of communities (real or virtual) to avoid isolationism, and so local community initiatives need to play their part. It is this local focus which provides a means of integrating the different approaches that people use when they are engaged in language planning. In relation to chapter 2, I referred to the role of the arts as a significant strategy in focusing public attention on linguistic issues, especially in relation to endangered languages, and this point is taken up below. In chapter 3 I referred to the corresponding revitalizing potential of the electronic medium. But the home is the only place where all such factors are routinely present. The appreciation of art begins at home, from the simplest forms of home decor and body art to more advanced forms of music, pictures, story-telling and film. The appreciation of Internet technology is increasingly
based in the home, and will significantly grow with the spread of broadband communication. So it is in the home and local community where the effects of the linguistic revolution are going to be most apparent.

The arts and language death

‘Focusing public attention on linguistic issues, especially in relation to endangered languages.' How is this to be done? Anyone who works in the conservation field knows that the raising of public awareness is the most difficult goal to achieve. It has taken the ecological movement as a whole over a century to bring the world to its present state of consciousness about endangered plant and animal species. For example, the National Audubon Society in the US was founded in 1866: we have been bird-aware for nearly 150 years. For world heritage sites, we have the highly successful UNESCO programme, begun in 1972. Greenpeace, the year before, 1971. The World Wildlife Fund, 1961. The World Conservation Union, 1948. It took over thirty years before this Union was able to establish a World Conservation Strategy (1980), which led to the principles laid down in the 1991 document
Caring for the Earth.

Compared with such time-frames, linguistic achievements by way of consciousness-raising within just a decade have been remarkable indeed. Thanks to an enormous amount of effort by a fairly small number of individuals and institutions, and the availability of new communication technology, we have made great progress in relation to the three criteria which we know must be present before progress can be made with an endangered language. First, there is what might be called the ‘bottom-up' interest – the
speech community itself must want its language saved – and there are now many recorded accounts of how attitudes can be sensitively managed and energies channelled to ensure that this happens. Second, there must be ‘top-down' interest: the local and national government need to be in sympathy with the philosophy of language revitalization and supportive of the task in hand. ‘Top-down' also includes obtaining the support of international political organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, who are crucial in forming an appropriate political climate within which pressure can be brought to bear in difficult situations. We need only reflect for a moment on the number of political statements which were made during the 1990s, such as the 1996 Barcelona Declaration, to realize that enormous progress has been made in this respect – but we are still, it seems, some way from the goal of an unequivocal United Nations statement of human linguistic rights.

But neither bottom-up nor top-down support is enough without the third criterion – cash. We know that implementing a minority language policy is expensive, in the short term. In the long term, of course, any policy of balanced multilingualism, in which minority languages are respected and protected, guarantees massive savings – if for no other reason than by avoiding the huge expenditure (often in terms of life as well as money) which arises when people, seeing their linguistic identity threatened, take civil action to protect themselves and their future. But the initial outlay does cost money – not huge amounts, as we saw in chapter 2, but enough to put governments off, and enough to give support organizations (such as the Endangered Language Fund) a tough time finding capital to make even a small contribution to the present need. That is why the efforts of the large organizations, such as the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, which are
donating significant sums to the documentation of endangered languages in the new millennium, have to be loudly applauded. But the question remains: why are there not more such organizations involved? Why, if language conservation is the intellectual equivalent of biological conservation, have we yet made so little progress in obtaining the requisite funding? The World Conservation Union had a budget of 140 million Swiss francs in 2002, and many millions more go into the support of biological conservation projects worldwide. Compared with that, the support for linguistic projects is so far minuscule. Why?

The answer, I believe, is that still very few people are aware of the existence and the scale of the problem. And there are large numbers of the general population who still need to be persuaded that the situation
is
a problem. The Babel myth referred to in chapter 2 – that a single language on earth guarantees a mutually intelligible and therefore peaceful planet – is still widely believed. And many of the people who are unaware of the language crisis are the opinion-formers of this world – journalists, politicians, media personalities, business leaders and others. I doubt whether there is anyone in the thinking world who is not now aware, even if only dimly, of the crisis facing the world's bio-ecology. By contrast, only a tiny proportion of these people have any awareness at all of the crisis in linguistic ecology. How many
do
know? In preparing a radio programme on the topic during the late 1990s, I asked a series of passers-by in the street whether they were aware that so many of the world's languages were dying. The people who claimed to be aware (whether they really were or not I do not know) were one in four. The other three had no idea what I was talking about. A similar exercise at the University of Manchester got the same result. Seventy-five per cent of the population seem not to know that there is an issue, therefore. And a fair number
of the remaining twenty-five per cent do not believe that it is an important issue. How can the message best be communicated to them?

Lectures, books and radio programmes are the traditional ways – but these have limited effect. Even if one of the academic books on this topic sold out, we would be talking only about a few thousand copies. Books like my
Language Death
do not get into Christmas must-buy best-selling lists. Academic textbooks have an important role in forming intellectual opinion, but they are not the way of raising public awareness, and certainly not if we are in a hurry. We have to look in other directions. In fact there are several ways of achieving this goal, but the most important of them we have hardly begun to explore, and certainly not at an institutional level. I cite four as primary: using the media, the arts, the Internet and the school curriculum. All four need to be involved in any systematic effort to bring public awareness about linguistic ecology to the same level as that which exists in the biological domain.

Some progress has been made with reference to the first way: enlisting the support of the media. There has in fact been increased interest shown by some sections of the media as a result of the revolutionary decade. Several articles have appeared in general-interest magazines and newspapers. There have been pieces, often illustrated with stunning photographs, in such periodicals as
Civilization, Prospect, National Geographic, Scientific American,
and even the British Airways in-flight magazine,
High Life.
Radio has also served the topic well. From 2000–1 I know of a dozen or so radio programmes devoted to the topic of language death on the BBC's two main documentary channels, Radio 3 or Radio 4 – in one case a series (called
Lost for Words)
of four half-hour programmes. There seems to have been similar radio interest elsewhere: I am aware of programmes made in the United States, Canada
and Australia, and there must be several more in other countries. Television, by contrast, has been less interested. Since the mid-1990s I know often proposals to the various UK television channels for documentaries or mini-series on language death, and although three of these reached a quite advanced stage of preparation – including in one case scripted and partly filmed material – none ever reached completion. The only success story was the component on language death which was included in the series
Beyond Babel,
produced by Infonation (the former film-making branch of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office), which was screened in over fifty countries in 2002, and which is now available on DVD. This was, ironically, an account of how English has become a world language; but the producers were sensible enough to accept the argument that there was another side of the coin.