The Language Revolution (8 page)

That is the main task: getting the language documented – recorded, analysed, written down. There are two reasons for this. The obvious one is educational – the need for literacy. But there is a second reason, and this is all to do with why we should care about dying languages in the first place. We should care for the very same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet. We are talking about intellectual and cultural diversity now, of course, not biological diversity; but the issues are the same. Most people would accept without need for argument the proposition that biodiversity is a good thing, and that its preservation should be fostered. Following decades of green publicity and activism, they are now aware. Linguistic diversity, unfortunately, has not had the same press. People, on the whole, are not aware. What might be done to improve public awareness is discussed further in chapter 4.

Diversity has a central place in evolutionary thought, where it is seen as the result of species genetically adapting in order to survive in different environments. Increasing uniformity holds dangers for the long-term survival of a species. The strongest ecosystems are those which are most diverse. And, in its application to human development, the point has often been made that our success in colonizing the planet has been due to our ability to develop diverse cultures which suit all kinds of environments. The need to maintain linguistic diversity stands squarely on the shoulders of such arguments. If diversity is a prerequisite for successful humanity, then the preservation of linguistic diversity is essential, for language lies at the heart of what it means to be human. If the development of multiple cultures is so important, then the role of languages becomes critical, for cultures are chiefly transmitted through spoken and written languages. Encapsulated within a language is most of a community's history, and a large part of its
cultural identity. ‘Every language is a temple', said Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.'
⁴
And if the amount of diversity is a critical factor, then the more languages we can preserve the better.

The world is a mosaic of visions. We learn so much from the visions of others, and to lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us. Sometimes the learning is eminently practical, as when we discover new medical treatments from the folk medicine practices of an indigenous people. Sometimes it is intellectual – an increase in our awareness of the history of our world, as when the links between languages tell us something about the movements of early civilizations. ‘I am always sorry when any language is lost,' said Dr Johnson, ‘because languages are the pedigree of nations.'
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Sometimes it is literary: every language has its equivalent – even if only in oral form – of Chaucer, Wordsworth and Dickens. And of course, very often it is linguistic: we learn something new about language itself – the behaviour that makes us truly human. Ezra Pound summed up the core intellectual argument: ‘The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.'
⁶
And for the complementary perspective, we can turn to George Steiner: ‘Is it not the duty of the critic to avail himself, in some imperfect measure at least, of another language – if only to experience the defining contours of his own?'
⁷

There are, accordingly, good ecological, social and linguistic reasons why we should care about language death, and get on with the task of documenting endangered languages as quickly as possible. With every language that dies, another precious source of data about the nature of the human language faculty is lost – and we must not forget that there are only about 6,000 sources in all. But nonetheless, not everyone believes in the value of a
multilingual world. Some deep-rooted myths exist. The worst is the Babel myth: people think that the multiplicity of the world's languages is a curse rather than a blessing, imposed by God as a punishment for the overweening pride of humanity. This argument runs: if only we had just one language in the world – whether English, Esperanto or whatever – we would all be better off. There would be no misunderstanding. It would be a new reign of world peace.

The argument sounds very attractive; but it is nonsense. It is nothing to do with whether you believe in the Bible or not. Let us leave aside the question of whether there ever was a single language pre-Babel. (Genesis 10 suggests there was not, as it lists the sons of Japheth ‘according to their countries and each of their languages' – well before the Babel event, which is not reported until Genesis 11.) The fact of the matter is that a monolingual world would not bring peace in the future any more than is found within monolingual countries today. Quite the contrary. It is interesting how many of the really big trouble spots of the world in recent decades have been countries characterized by their monolingualism, such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda and Burundi – the latter two pre-eminent in Africa in this regard – and the Serbo-Croatian-speaking sector of former Yugoslavia. Northern Ireland, too, if you will. And all major monolingual countries have had their civil wars. If people want to fight each other, it seems that it takes more than a common language to stop them.

We are far more likely to promote a peaceful world by paying attention to people's rights and to their identities as communities – and the chief emblem, or badge, of a community is its language. A sensitive policy of multilingualism, and a concern for minority languages, is much more likely to lay the foundation for peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence. And we develop such a policy only by becoming aware, genuinely aware, of the benefits of
bilingualism – a principle which the leading nations, largely monolingual by historical temperament, are still having some difficulty taking on board. They need to reflect on Emerson's words: ‘As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.'
⁸
Or the Slovakian proverb: ‘With each newly learned language you acquire a new soul.'

Of course, in some parts of the world, all this talk of language must be put in a broader perspective. It is axiomatic that physical wellbeing is a top priority: there is no point in going on to people about language if they are too ill to speak or too hungry to listen. If food, welfare and work are lacking, then it is only to be expected that they will direct their energies to ways of increasing resources and fostering economic growth. The same applies if military conflict, political oppression or civil disturbance threaten daily safety and survival. Language preservation then almost seems like an irrelevant luxury. And yet, it is a fact of life that circumstances, priorities and goals all change with time. If the development programmes fostered by international organizations are at all successful, then the hope is that there will come a time when, healthy and well fed, people will have the time and energy to devote to quality, as opposed to quantity, of life. At that point, they will look to revive their cultural traditions and to affirm their cultural identity. That is when they will look for their language.

One of the loudest complaints to eventually emerge is of the ‘if only' type: ‘if only my parents had …'; ‘if only my grandparents' generation had …'. This kind of reaction is very common among the members of a community two generations after the one which failed to pass its language on. The first generation is typically not so concerned, as its members are often still struggling to establish their new social position and new language. It is their children,
secure in the new language and in a much better socioeconomic state, with battles over land-claims and civil rights behind them, who begin to reflect on the heritage they have lost, and to wish that things had been otherwise. The ‘old language', formerly a source of shame, comes to be seen as a source of identity and pride. But by then, without any preservation measures, it is too late. If their language has gone, unrecorded and unremembered, there is no way in which they can get it back. By contrast, if a modicum of effort has been devoted to language preservation, even in the most difficult of economic circumstances, at least these people have kept their options open. They can make their choice, whether we are thinking about this generation, or a generation ahead.

A modicum of effort. This is the twenty-first-century challenge. Could we save a few thousand languages, just like that? Of course, if the will and funding were available. So how much would it cost? It is not cheap, when you think of what has to be done – getting linguists into the field, supporting the community with language resources and teachers, publishing grammars and dictionaries, writing materials for use in schools – and all over a period of several years, because it takes time to revitalize an endangered language. Conditions vary so much that it is difficult to generalize, but a figure of £100,000 a year per language would enable a great deal to be done. If we devoted that amount of effort over three years for each of 3,000 languages, we would be talking about some £900 million to have a real impact on the present crisis. Whether we talk in pounds or dollars, that sounds like a lot. But let us put it in perspective. It is equivalent to a couple of days' oil revenues, in an average year. Three thousand languages documented and their revitalization initiated for around a billion pounds/dollars? Where else would you get such value for money?

The process has begun, slowly and with difficulty. During the 1990s, several organizations were established to try to channel the energies involved, and to raise funds. I have already mentioned the Foundation for Endangered Languages started in the UK in 1995, and there are similar organizations in the USA, Germany, Japan and elsewhere. The UNESCO initiative which commenced in the same year was taken further by a fresh statement in March 2003 reflecting the urgency of the situation.
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There is, it seems, no shortage of applicants willing to ‘get out there' and work on these languages. In many localities, there are already several well-trained indigenous people already ‘out there'. The problem in all cases is funding. The need is obvious, but needs are met only through consciousness raising, using academic writing, broadcasting, journalism and as many channels of communication as possible – not least, as I shall argue in chapter 4, the arts. Getting a sense of ‘red alert' into the public mind, on a global scale, is probably the most critical linguistic initiative which has to be taken in the new millennium. A decade ago, it would have been very difficult to see how this might be done. Today, a number of avenues have opened up, largely due to the opportunities provided by the third feature of the language revolution – the Internet.

3

The Role of the Internet

The public acquisition of the Internet was the third element contributing to the revolutionary linguistic character of the 1990s, and the one where the epithet ‘revolutionary' is easiest to justify. Although the Internet as a technology had been around since the 1960s, for e-mails and chat, very few people began exploiting it until thirty years later. The World Wide Web itself came into existence only in 1991. But in an extraordinarily short time, people adopted and mastered the technology, and in the course of doing that encountered, adapted and expanded its highly distinctive language. To begin with, people found the linguistic novelty to lie chiefly in the slang and jargon of its enthusiastic proponents, as well as in their penchant for playing with language and for breaking conventional linguistic rules of spelling and punctuation. Linguists were especially impressed by the speed with which linguistic innovation could be circulated worldwide. But gradually, it became apparent that the Internet was manifesting more than a new stylistic variety of a language. It was providing us with a further alternative to the mediums through which human communication can take place. This alternative is so new that it still has no generally agreed name –
computer-mediated communication
(CMC) and
electronic communication
are two which have been suggested – nor is there an accepted term for the
kind of language it manifests (the term I use is
Netspeak).
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But there are good grounds for viewing the arrival of the Internet as an event which is as revolutionary in linguistic terms as it has been technologically and socially.

Revolutions of this order of magnitude are rare events indeed. The first medium of communication was, of course, speech, which emerged in the human race somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago. Then, some 10,000 years ago, in several parts of the world, we encounter the emergence of writing. Those two mediums have kept the human race satisfactorily communicating ever since, each facilitated from time to time by the arrival of new technology – notably telephony and broadcasting, in the case of speech, and printing and telegraphy, in the case of writing. We must also acknowledge the significance of a third medium of communication for an important section of society – deaf sign language, which has an obscure history until it began to be systematically recorded in the eighteenth century, and which exists today in a number of forms. But a new medium of communication affecting the whole of society has not appeared in 10,000 years.

What are the grounds for talking in such a revolutionary tone? Why am I not content to describe computer-mediated communication in traditional terms – simply as ‘written language on screen'? The answer can be seen in the struggle commentators have had to describe exactly what is happening when people communicate in this way. E-mails, for example, have been called ‘written speech', ‘a cross between a conversation and a letter', and ‘a strange blend of writing and talking'.
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When Homer Simpson asks his friends ‘What's an e-mail?', they scratch their heads. Lenny replies: ‘It's a computer thing, like, er, an electric letter.' Carl adds: ‘Or a quiet phone call.'
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And when we take the other functions of the Internet into account, the difficulty of arriving at a simple characterization in terms of
traditional speech or writing becomes even greater. Some commentators have likened the Internet to an amalgam of television, telephone and conventional publishing, and the term
cyberspace
has been coined to capture the notion of a world of information present or possible in digital form (earlier called the
information superhighway).

To appreciate the novelty of the medium, we need to consider all the functions that it is capable of performing. In the final analysis, the Internet is no more than an association of computer networks with common standards which enable messages to be sent from any central computer (or
host)
on one network to any host on any other. However, it is now the world's largest computer network, with over 100 million hosts connected by the year 2000, providing an increasing range of services and enabling unprecedented numbers of people to be in touch with each other through a variety of techniques. Three broad functions can be identified:

1 The
World Wide Web
(or
Web)
is the most widely encountered manifestation of this network – the full collection of all the computers linked to the Internet which hold documents that are mutually accessible through the use of a standard protocol (the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP). The creator of the Web, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, has defined it as ‘the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge'.
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It was devised in 1990 as a means of enabling high-energy physicists in different institutions to share information within their field, but it rapidly spread to other fields, and is now all-inclusive in subject-matter, designed for multimedia interaction between computer users anywhere in the world. Its many functions include encyclopedic reference, archiving, cataloguing, ‘Yellow Pages' listing, advertising, self-publishing, games, news
reporting, creative writing and commercial transactions of all kinds, with movies and other types of entertainment becoming increasingly available.

2
Electronic mail
(or
e-mail)
is the use of computer systems to transfer messages between users – now chiefly used to refer to messages sent between private mailboxes (as opposed to those posted to a chatgroup). Although it takes up only a relatively small domain of Internet ‘space', by comparison with the billions of pages on the Web, it far exceeds the Web in terms of the number of daily individual transactions made. As John Naughton has said, ‘The Net was built on electronic mail. … It's the oil which lubricates the system.'
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It is extremely diverse in character, comprising personal and institutional messages of varying length and purpose.

3
Chatgroups
are continuous discussions on a particular topic, organized in ‘rooms' at particular Internet sites, in which computer users interested in the topic can participate. There are two types of situation, depending on whether the interaction takes place in real time (
synchronous)
or in postponed time (
asynchronous).
In a synchronous situation, a user enters a chatroom and joins an ongoing conversation in real time, sending named contributions which are inserted into a permanently scrolling screen along with the contributions from other participants. In an asynchronous situation, the interactions are stored in some format and made available to users upon demand, so that they can catch up with the discussion, or add to it, at any time – even after an appreciable period has passed. A distinctive use of this technology takes the form of ‘multiuser domains' – imaginary environments where people can play text-based fantasy games (of the ‘dungeons and dragons' type) or construct virtual worlds (e.g. in business or education) where they can simulate real-life situations and engage in various role-playing scenarios.

These three situations are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to find sites in which all are combined, or where one situation is used within another. For example, many Web sites contain discussion groups and e-mail links; e-mails often contain Web attachments. The Internet world is an extremely fluid one, with users exploring its possibilities of expression, introducing fresh combinations of elements, and reacting to technological developments. But one thing is plain. These three functions, in their different ways, facilitate and constrain our ability to communicate in ways that are fundamentally different from those found in other semiotic situations. Many of the expectations and practices which we associate with spoken and written language no longer obtain, and new opportunities arise. As a consequence, people find they have to get to grips with the communicative potential made available to them – and here they encounter a problem. They have to learn the rules – of how to communicate via e-mail, of how to socialize in chatgroups, of how to construct an effective Web page – and yet there are no rules, in the sense of universally agreed modes of behaviour established by generations of usage. This is a clear contrast with the world of paper-based communication. Letter-writing, for instance, is routinely taught in school; and because there is widespread agreement on how letters are to be written, supported by the recommendations of usage manuals, we feel secure in that knowledge. But no such agreed guide to usage yet exists in the case of Netspeak. Before too long, Netspeak conventions will come to be routinely taught in schools. In the meantime, often the first indication that we have misconstructed a message comes when we receive an unpalatable response from our recipient.

The Internet is an electronic, global and interactive medium, and each of these properties has consequences for the kind of language found there. The most fundamental
influence arises out of the electronic character of the channel. Most obviously, a user's communicative options are constrained by the nature of the hardware needed in order to gain Internet access. Thus, a set of characters on a keyboard determines productive linguistic capacity (the type of information that can be sent); and the size and configuration of the screen determines receptive linguistic capacity (the type of information that can be seen). Both sender and receiver are additionally constrained linguistically by the properties of the Internet software and hardware linking them. There are, accordingly, certain traditional linguistic activities that this medium can facilitate very well, and others that it cannot handle at all. There are also certain linguistic activities which an electronic medium allows that no other medium can achieve. That is why it seems apposite to talk in terms of ‘revolution'.

Not like speech

Computer-mediated communication is not like speech, even in those electronic situations which are most speech-like, such as e-mailing. There are several major differences between CMC and face-to-face conversation. The first is a function of the technology – the lack of simultaneous feedback. The success of a conversation totally depends on the participants providing each other with immediate feedback. While you speak to me, I do not stay unmoved and silent: my face and voice provide an ongoing commentary on what you are saying. Nods and smiles work along with a wide range of vocalizations, such as
uh-huh, yeah, sure
and
ooh.
Such messages from our listeners tell us how we are doing, and we react to them instinctively and immediately. A puzzled look makes us rephrase.
A doubtful
hmm
makes us rethink. Without these, a conversation quickly breaks down, or becomes extremely stilted and artificial. It is difficult enough on the telephone, when just the visual cues are absent. Imagine the difficulty in a face-to-face conversation if both visual and auditory feedback were missing.

But that is how it is in e-mail and chatgroup interaction. Messages sent via a computer are complete and unidirectional. When we send a message to someone, we type it a keystroke at a time, but it does not arrive on that person's screen a keystroke at a time – in the manner of the old teleprinters. The message does not leave our computer until we ‘send' it, and that means the whole of a message is transmitted as a unit, and arrives on the recipient's screen as a unit. There is no way that a recipient can react to our message while it is being typed, for the obvious reason that recipients do not know they are getting any messages at all until the text arrives. Correspondingly, there is no way for a sender to get a sense of how successful a message is while it is being written – whether it has been understood, or whether it needs repair. There is no technical way (at the moment) which would allow the receiver to send the electronic equivalent of a simultaneous nod, an
uh-uh,
or any of the other audio-visual reactions which play such a critical role in face-to-face interaction. Messages cannot overlap. As a result, recipients are committed to experiencing a waiting period before the text appears – on their screen there is nothing, and then there is something, an ‘off–on' system which well suits the binary computer world but which is far removed from the complex realities of everyday conversation. This factor alone makes e-conversations totally unlike those which take place in ‘real world' speech.

The second big difference between Netspeak and face-to-face conversation can be illustrated from real-time chatrooms.
If you are in a chatroom, talking around a particular theme, you see on your screen messages coming in from all over the world. If there are thirty people in the room, then you could be seeing up to thirty different messages, all making various contributions to the theme, but often clustering into half a dozen or so sub-conversations. It is a bit like being in a cocktail party where there are other conversations going on all around you. In the party, of course, you can't pay attention to all of them or contribute to all of them at the same time. In a chatroom you can't avoid attending to them, and you can contribute to as many as your mental powers and typing speed permit. It has never been possible before, in the history of human communication, to participate simultaneously in multiple conversations. Now you can. This too is a revolutionary state of affairs, as far as speech is concerned.

A third difference results from the temporal limitations of the technology: the rhythm of an Internet interaction is very much slower than that found in a speech situation, and disallows some of conversation's most salient properties. With e-mails and asynchronous chatgroups, a response to a stimulus may be anything from seconds to months, the rhythm of the exchange very much depending on such factors as the recipient's computer (e.g. whether it announces the instant arrival of a message), the user's personality and habits (e.g. whether messages are replied to at regular times or randomly) and the circumstances of the interlocutors (e.g. their computer access). The time-delay (usually referred to as
lag)
is a central factor in many situations: there is an inherent uncertainty in knowing the length of the gap between the moment of posting a message and the moment of receiving a reaction. Because of lag, the rhythm of an interaction – even in the fastest Netspeak encounters – lacks the pace and predictability of that found in telephonic or face-to-face conversation.
Even if a participant types a reply immediately, there may be a delay before that message reaches the other members' screens, due to several factors, such as bandwidth processing problems, traffic density on the host computer, or some problem in the sender's or receiver's equipment.