The Language Revolution (13 page)

The television failure is part of a broader scenario. There has never (as of 2003) been a television blockbuster series on the general topic of language, as such, anywhere in the world. There have of course been individual programmes on some of the ‘sexier' aspects of language – such as child language acquisition, or sign language, or speech disability. And there have been a number of series or programmes on individual languages. English, as we might expect, gets the most attention.
The Story of English
appeared in the 1980s – a huge eight-hour transatlantic co-production – and another eight-hour epic,
The Adventure of English,
appeared on UK television in 2002–3, telling the same story in a very similar way. A few other individual languages have attracted interest too. A six-part series,
The Story of Welsh,
was shown on BBC Wales in 2003; and there have been similar programmes on Breton, Irish and a number of other European minority languages, as well as on the indigenous languages of Australia, the USA and Canada.

But in all these cases, the creative energy is entirely inward-looking. These programmes tell the story of endangerment only as it affects the individual communities – the Welsh, the Bretons or whoever. None of them takes the requisite step back and looks at the language endangerment situation as a whole. The nearest we get is when a programme deals with more than one language together, such as a programme made for the Netherlands TV network, in 2001, which looked at the similar plights of Welsh and Frisian, and inevitably began to generalize as a consequence. Another is an ongoing project by the Czech filmmaker Michael Havas, whose project on a single Brazilian language spoken by the Krenak tribe, ‘Brazilian Dream', is conceived as a symbol of the world situation. Such perspectives are rare. It seems very difficult to get people who are desperately anxious about the state of their own language to devote some of their energy to considering the broader picture. It is short-sighted, because each endangered language can learn something from the situation of other languages – why some languages seem to be doing better than others. Nonetheless, in 2003 our theme still awaits effective television treatment.

Having had the opportunity to talk these issues over with several television companies, over the years, I have a sense of why there is such reluctance. There is a widely held view that language is too abstract and complex a subject for television treatment. On probing further, it usually transpires that the decision-makers are either thinking back to their days of studying grammar in school (much of broadcasting senior management is of the age when they had to parse sentences and study prescriptive grammar) or they have had a close encounter of the third kind with Chomsky, and it has scared them. They are also worried by the generality of the subject: that language does not fit neatly into a TV niche, such as current affairs, or
comedy. They are petrified by the risk of the academic approach making people switch off. Even though there have been highly successful TV series by academics and other intellectuals – Michael Wood's series on Shakespeare, Simon Schama's on history. Lord Winston's on medicine and evolution – when it comes to language, the eyes glaze over. Even the specific-language programmes are affected. Language programmes are presented not by linguists but by personalities whose primary reputation lies elsewhere –
The Adventure of English
by the novelist and arts presenter Melvyn Bragg;
The Story of Welsh
by the newsreader Huw Edwards. If the early decades of the twenty-first century do eventually see a TV series on language death, heaven knows who they will get to present it – Oprah Winfrey, probably.

But would that be a bad thing? If the content is right and the quality is assured, then a big media personality would probably do the subject the world of good. Bottom-up, top-down, cash – the three criteria will all operate at their best if a profound awareness of the nature and likelihood of language death enters the general population, and personalities can help make this happen. But it is more than awareness that is wanted. We also need enthusiasm. People have to be enthused about the issues surrounding language death. Their emotions as well as their intellects have to be engaged. Linguists have done quite a good job since the mid-1990s under the latter heading: a significant number of people now have a degree of intellectual understanding of the issues which they did not have before. But how many have an emotional grasp? How many would weep over a dying language, as people have wept over a dying animal species. How many experience real joy at the prospect of a revitalized language – like the moment in
Beyond Babel
when we hear Cally Lara, a teenager from Hupa Valley in Northern California, say: ‘As long as we're
here, as long as the valley is here, as long as our culture is alive, the language and teaching the language will be a part of what we do. It's our responsibility.' And his chum, Silischi-tawn Jackson, adds: ‘If it's up to me, this language is going to go on.' This makes the heart, as well as the mind, leap, to hear teenagers engage with language issues in this way. (Anyone who has had teenagers of their own knows how difficult it is to get them to engage in anything, apart from sex!) How many share in this sense of celebration? Indeed, how many opportunities are there to celebrate? And how many are aware of these opportunities – such as World Language Day or World International Language Day? The answer to all these questions must be: still very few. This is the challenge for the new century.

There is evidently a gap between linguistic consciousness and conscience. We have to engage with people's sensibilities, and this is the most difficult of tasks. I know of only two ways of doing it – one is through religion, the other is through the arts. And of the two, the arts turn out to be the more general, because they transcend the distinction between theism and a-theism. As director of an arts centre in my home town, I have learned, from our programme of art exhibitions, sculptures, films, plays, concerts and performances of all shapes and sizes, that
everyone
appreciates the arts, regardless of age and class. They may appreciate different kinds of art, of course; but even the people in my town who turn their noses up at an exhibition of abstract art or a concert of medieval music, calling it elitist, come to the arts centre when it is showing a James Bond film or putting on a Christmas pantomime for the children. And I have never seen a house without some sort of picture on the wall or ornament on the mantelpiece. Art reaches out to everyone. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.'
¹

So, if we want a means of getting the message about endangered languages across to everyone in the most direct and engaging way, we should be making maximum use of the arts. Artists can help us more than anyone else.
²
Repeatedly we find people acknowledging the point: US poet Archibald Macleish put it like this: ‘Anything can make us look; only art can make us see.' Another poet, Robert Penn Warren, wrote: ‘the poem is not a thing we see – it is, rather, a light by which we may see – and what we see is life.' Picasso commented: ‘We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.' And, as if drawing attention to the difference between the media and the arts, we have Ezra Pound: ‘Literature is news that stays news.' Perhaps the most apposite quotation, in this connection, is from Disraeli, in the Preface to his novel
Coningsby:
‘Fiction, in the temper of the times, stands the best chance of influencing opinion.' I conclude, from this array of opinions, that the best way forward is through the arts, in its broadest sense, to include everything sensory – visual, verbal, tactile, gustatory and olfactory – that we consider artistic. But here we meet the Great Divide in its harshest reality. For academic linguists have not been much interested in the arts, and artists (in this broadest sense) have not been much interested in linguistics.

Since the 1990s I have been trying to find examples of artists who have addressed the issue of language death within their areas of expertise, and I have found next to nothing. I have asked hundreds of artists if they know of anything in the visual arts, and hardly any do. I have seen whole exhibitions devoted to plant and animal conservation, but never seen one which deals with language conservation. I know of some paintings on the general theme of language, such as Hammond Guthrie's
WithOutWords,
published in an issue of the avant-garde on-line magazine
The Third Page
(Winter/Spring 2002) on the theme of
Non Angoro Vorto
(‘No fear of words'). But nothing on language death. I have come across one sculpture – the living sculpture produced by Rachel Berwick, shown in New York and London, in which two Amazon parrots in a special enclosure had been trained to speak some words of now-extinct Maypuré. I know of nothing in photography or ceramics or textiles. Artists are continually using the terms of language to define their roles – the ‘language of' photography, paintings which ‘speak to us'. But they do not seem to have focused on language itself as a subject.

I would have expected music and dance to be especially involved in this topic. Music has been characterized
³
as ‘the universal language of mankind' (Longfellow), ‘the speech of angels' (Carlyle), ‘the only universal tongue' (Samuel Rogers). We would expect these metaphors to have motivated composers to reach for their staves to deal with linguistic issues. But I have not yet encountered pieces which deal with the subject explicitly, apart from a short electronic live performance piece by French composer Jean Vauget: ‘instant sonore #5 pygmées'. The topic of language death deserves at least a symphony, a fantasia, an opera, a ballet or – to change the genres – a large-scale jazz piece, or a guitar extravaganza. Even the folk-singers have failed to lament about the world situation. The nearest a major musical work comes to the subject is the score Philip Glass composed for Godfrey Reggio's film
Powaqqatsi,
the second of his Hopi
qatsi
trilogy – the name means ‘a way of life [technology, in this vision] that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life'. The anthem composed for that film well expresses the notion of loss, but Reggio's theme is cultural destruction in general, as a result of technology, not linguistic loss in particular. Film itself, as a medium, also seems to have ignored the general topic.

We might expect, from its nature, that the world of the verbal arts would yield more positive results – the world of poetry, drama, the novel, the short story. Here too, though, there is very little. I know of no novel directly concerned with the general theme, though a few which reflect on an individual cultural or linguistic situation – such as Joan Bodon (Jean Boudou) writing on the death of Occitan (e.g.
Lo Libre de Catoia),
the Argentinian writer Leopoldo Brizuela's fable about an imaginary encounter between English and Patagonian cultures
(Inglaterra, una fabula),
or the Abkhazian writer Bagrat Shinkuba's account of the demise of Ubykh (translated as
Last of the Departed).
There is Alphonse Daudet's short story ‘The Last Class', about the reaction of a schoolchild to the news that French was being replaced by German in his Alsatian school. But there seems to be no novel on the general theme – and only one short story, by the Australian writer David Malouf. In a succinct, breathtaking four-page tale, ‘The Only Speaker of his Tongue', he tells the story of a lexicographer visiting a last speaker. When the scholar eventually meets the man, their encounter prompts a moment of personal reflection: ‘When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men, a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind.'
⁴
This is poetry in prose. And, to move into the genre of poetry, here a few writers
have
taken the theme on board. I have been collecting poems on the subject, and so far have about thirty. From Canada we have Margaret Atwood, whose ‘Marsh Language' stands out. It begins:

The US author W.C. Merwin has written a handful of relevant poems. Here is the beginning of ‘Losing a Language':

What is important about such poems is that they are generalizing works. They are not restricted to bemoaning the plight of the author's own language, and stopping with that. They use a personal experience to reflect upon the world situation. Some authors are very skilled at doing this. One of the poets in Wales who repeatedly wrote in this way was R.S. Thomas, an Anglican clergyman. He was desperately concerned about the loss of Welsh, but note how, in this poem, ‘Drowning', his reflections at the very end leave Wales, and become of general applicability: