Report on the Workshop

Language Maintenance and Death:
reports from the field and strategies for the new millennium.

By Luisa Maffi.

This workshop, organized by Simon Donnelly of U. of Witwatersrand, South Africa, was held at U. Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, July 17-18, as a part of the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (L.S.A.). I was one of the speakers and gave a paper titled "The 'business' of language endangerment: saving languages or helping people keep them alive?". The papers on the program were all very good, and so was the discussion and interaction with the colleagues present. (If you're interested, please ask me for a copy of the program). Here I'll give you the overall gist of the talks and mention a few general issues that emerged.

Perhaps as a sign that things are developing within the linguistic profession, almost all the papers were actually on the "maintenance" side and about work that linguists are doing with indigenous communities on language support programs of various kinds, or otherwise presented assessments of the status of small languages from various parts of the world, with analyses of the social, political, etc. circumstances affecting their status. Only one paper (by phoneticist Ian Maddieson) dealt with what the small, little-studied languages can tell us of relevance for linguistic theory (in this case, about the variety of human language sounds) — an enterprise that I definitely don't mean to denigrate in and of itself! Furthermore, Ian gave a nice demonstration of how one can make excellent field recordings of a language's sounds, which can serve both the goals of phonetics, and those of language maintenance and revitalization programs. It was nevertheless of special interest to me to see how a number of linguists (those present were mostly from the U.S. and Canada, plus two from Europe and Simon from South Africa) are coming to terms with re-conceiving their rôles to include service to communities in both language documentation and restoration, as well as on the development of educational programs. Many of the things the various speakers said resonated with me, and vice versa.

There seems to be much greater awareness that linguists' training (especially as it has been imparted in the past three decades of theoretical linguistics) doesn't necessarily predispose them to focusing on aspects of language that will be useful for maintaining or restoring the life of a language. Several explicitly questioned whether writing grammars and dictionaries the way linguists are normally trained to do (and as Australian linguist R.M.W. Dixon entreats that every linguist should go out and do as the only worthy response to language endangerment) actually does much to "save" a language — and not only as a means of communication for its speakers, but even as an object of study for linguists. So much of what goes into making a full language even from a purely structural point of view is simply ignored in standard grammatical descriptions — not to speak of grammatical analyses conducted from a theoretical perspective (in which the data are sought only insofar as they serve to test the theory). There was a sense that, to be really useful (to both linguists and language speakers) grammatical descriptions should be empirical and based on "real" language (real speech, conversation, etc.) rather than on elicited sentences and paradigms as had been the practice for several generations of linguists. It was also pointed out that dictionaries should be much more based on idioms rather than simple words; should not use the criterion of not including items that are "predictable" (such as, regular forms of word derivation), since "predictability" is a linguist's, not a dictionary user's criterion; and should include plenty of examples of words and expressions in use. Also notable was the recognition that the strong focus on language standardization that characterized earlier efforts at language documentation for language maintenance may have been a misconceived linguists' imposition that may have impeded rather than fostered the stated goals, and even the recognition that the overwhelming focus on "reducing" the small languages to writing may have obscured the importance of orality for language maintenance.

There was also much discussion of the successes and failures of language maintenance/revitalization programs, which I won't summarize here because it mostly covered fairly familiar ground. What I found especially significant was the description (by Pat Shaw, U. of British Columbia) of efforts being carried out in British Columbia to bring about full collaboration between First Nations on the one hand, and linguists and their academic institutions on the other: that is, not only do linguists collaborate with First Nation communities in teaching adult language classes as well as in training community members to do their own research and documentation, curriculum development, language teaching to children, etc., but also they are working to change the "academic culture" of their institutions so that the work they do with communities will no longer be considered "second-class" when it comes to academic performance evaluation and promotion. It was pointed out that this is often a concern for younger academics or students who may be interested in working with endangered language communities, but may be afraid this work will not be given proper recognition within academia (an understandable concern, at least for those wishing to make a living as academics!). In addition, these linguists have also negotiated with communities the development of legal protocol agreements on ownership, copyright, publication and usage rights related to all the linguistic materials elicited and developed in collaboration with the communities. I think there is much to be learned from such efforts.

The case studies on the vitality status of indigenous and minority languages from all continents were of interest especially in that they showed the great variety and complexity of social, cultural, political, economic, religious situations that may lead to the persistence or decline of languages, pointing to how difficult it may be to generalize at this level, at least not in a simplistic "big fish eats smaller fish" kind of way. While there is no question that in many cases this kind of situation does apply, it is not always that the "big fish" is a colonial language (such as English, Spanish, etc.); it may be a major language native to the same continent (as happens more commonly in Africa and Asia). In other cases, it may actually be a "small local fish eating another small local fish" because the former has special political and/or religious prestige. And so forth. It became apparent to me that we need a much more detailed and sophisticated understanding of the circumstances of language persistence or decline than currently available. The papers I heard were a good start in that direction. One of them (by Sue Harris Russell on Murutic languages of Sabah, Malaysia) actually tried to develop a predictive model of sociopolitical, etc., circumstances of ethnolinguistic vitality, drawing on various sociolinguistic theories and focusing particularly on dimensions of power and solidarity within a community. It was, I found, a very significant piece of work, and one I hope we'll hear more about soon (Sue is completing her dissertation based on this research). At the same time, from this paper I learned of the special interest that S.I.L. (the Summer Institute of Linguistics, of missionary-linguist fame) has in understanding issues of language vitality: such as, given the long-term commitment entailed by doing a Bible translation, it helps to know what the vitality prospects of a language may be. This brought home to me another kind of complexity — that of human goals: how excellent linguistic work may be done for completely different reasons and purposes, and what dilemmas this poses if you appreciate the work but don't share the purposes. (But then, of course, similar considerations should apply vis-à-vis any kind of linguistic work, not just that carried out by missionary-linguists).

Another effort that I was interested to learn about is the one (co-ordinated by Louanna Furbee of U. Missouri (U.S.A.), archivist for the L.S.A.) to set up an archive for materials on endangered languages (possibly at U. Missouri or at the Linguistic Data Consortium at U. Pennsylvania, U.S.A.). This stems from the fact that the American Philosophical Society (one of the oldest scholarly societies in the U.S.A., that has supported much work on languages of the Americas) has decided to keep only materials on North American languages, and has handed over the rest to the L.S.A. Currently, the materials are at U. Missouri, and Louanna discussed the possibility of expanding the collection to materials on languages from other parts of the world held in the personal files of L.S.A. members. She also discussed a variety of issues of availability vs. confidentiality and control over access to the data, depending on what data may be considered restricted, secret, sacred, etc., by the respective language communities; the need for copies of the full data sets to be handed over to the respective communities; the complicated issue of technologies for data preservation, and so forth. As we all know, there have been already a number of efforts to found such archives and/or clearinghouses, which haven't gone very far for a variety of reasons. It will be interesting to see what happens with this one. Louanna invited anybody with ideas or comments to get in touch with her at <furbeel@missouri.edu>.

Several other themes emerged in the opening panel and in discussion throughout the two days. Although human rights were not specifically mentioned in talks other than mine, this issue came up repeatedly in discussion, which I saw as another sign of change in linguistics. While a few of the people present still expressed some discomfort and felt this was outside the purview of linguists, most others felt otherwise, and that linguists should support the linguistic, cultural, and other human rights of the communities they work with (and of language communities in general) — although, as I pointed out, there needs to be much greater awareness (at least in this part of the world) of the international level at which the human rights debate is being carried out, and of the international instruments being developed in this connection.

In terms of research questions related to linguistic diversity and language endangerment, some important points were raised by Salikoko Mufwene, a creolist at U. Chicago (U.S.A.). He reminded us that, in the estimates of language loss that have been going around for the past several years, there has been little or no consideration of phenomena of language and dialect development that have been occurring at the same time. Although it may still be the case that the balance is in the red (more languages/dialects disappearing than developing), he justly urged the linguists involved in this kind of calculations to actually conduct "checks and balances" before coming to conclusions. More generally, he pointed out that, if arguments about loss of linguistic diversity are to continue to be based on, or supported by, such calculations, we need to have clearer and more explicit bases for how the calculations are done. Salikoko also noted that, in discussions of linguistic diversity, there is often confusion between different ways of understanding "linguistic diversity" (between a notion of "number of different languages" and one of "typological diversity"), and that it should be made more clear what one is talking about. At the same time, Salikoko is not among those who think that focusing on this kind of quantification based on the notion of "a language" are going to get us much further. He is, in fact, one of the people at work on the notion of language ecology (which he views more in terms of language-external ecologies, i.e., the socioeconomic environment in which languages live and change, than as the linguistic environment created by languages in contact). He therefore urged linguists interested in language endangerment to focus more on these ecologies.

Another point he made was that the argument about loss of knowledge, world views, ideational potential, etc., accompanying language loss also needs to be better substantiated if it is to continue to be used in support of linguistic diversity; i.e., careful linguistic and ethnographic analyses should be carried out to show whether and how exactly language loss coincides with loss of knowledge, etc. In both cases, I believe he's right to think that these are important questions, and that furthermore the "hard-nosed", both within academia and in the "real world", will be asking for more concrete evidence in support of the arguments we're making, so that we need to have good answers lest we undermine the whole cause in their eyes. On the other hand, I think we'll always have to be very clear and outspoken on the point that, whatever the evidence may show, it is a human right for language communities to keep or reclaim their languages, and that this right is in no way dependent on the evidence from these research questions. But I do agree that, when it comes to the research questions, we need to go beyond the original, generic statements that brought the whole debate to international attention, and hope that a number of people will take up these questions.