Linguistic%20diversity,%20sustainable%20development,%20and%20the%20future%20of%20the%20past

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Linguistic diversity, sustainable development,
and the future of the past

• Suzanne Romaine
• Merton College, University of Oxford

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• Barcelona is in danger of becoming a more
  provincial city than it should be, isolated in a
  linguistic fog.
• Ian Buruma 2001. Road to Babel. New York
  Review of Books. May 31. p. 23.

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• Fog in Channel, Continent cut off?

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Responses to threats to linguistic diversity

• Do nothing
• Document endangered languages
• Engage in revitalization activities

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• It is unfortunately true that very few people
  (including most of their own speakers) care about
  the impending demise of small languages.
• Joshua Fishman 1995. On the limits of
  ethnolinguistic democracy. p. 60.

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• What if half the world's languages are on the
  verge of extinction? Let them die in peace.
• Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect.
  November.

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Normalizing change

• Every day, English, Spanish, Russian and French,
  along with almost all other living languages are
  being altered by speakers to suit changing
  times. Language evolution is taking place every
  day why interfere with it?
• David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying
  Tongues When the Two Part Ways. New York Times.
  May 27F3.

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The reason why languages die

• is not because they are suppressed, but because
  native speakers yearn for a better life. Speaking
  a language such as English, French or Spanish,
  and discarding traditional habits, can open up
  new worlds and is often a ticket to modernity.
• Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect.
  November.

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• the study of languages is a scientific
  enterprise, the effort to preserve them is not.
  It is a political question.
• David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying
  Tongues When the Two Part Ways. New York Times.
  May 27F3.

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• tribalism is seen as a threat to the development
  of the nation, and it would not be acting
  responsibly to do anything which might seem, at
  least superficially, to aid in its preservation.
• Peter Ladefoged 1992. Another View of
  Endangered Languages. Language, Vol. 68 (4)
  809-811.

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• the elucidation of language in all its complexity
  is an enthralling scientific enterprise. But
  saving endangered languages is not a part of
  it.
• David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying
  Tongues When the Two Part Ways. New York Times.
  May 27F3.

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• CIPL is fully aware that as an apolitical
  organisation it is unable to reverse gradual
  decline of many languages, because this process
  is largely determined by social and political
  factors beyond our influence. we have to make an
  effort at least to record languages, do
  fieldwork, write grammars, dictionaries, and
  to preserve and make accessible their oral and
  written literature.
• R. H. Robins R. Uhlenbeck eds. 1991.
  Endangered languages. Oxford Berg. xiii.

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• Whilst the link between documentation and
  revitalisation is appreciated (and desirable),
  the prime focus of the funding is documentation.
  Applicants are encouraged to structure the
  documentation in ways which assist the local
  communities to perceive and foster language and
  also increase the potential for ELDP funds to be
  combined with revitalisation funds from other
  sources.
• Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project.
  SOAS.

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• linguistic salvage work that consists solely of
  recording for posterity certain structural
  features of a threatened small language is
  inevitably a political act, just as any other act
  touching that language would be. Fieldwork,
  however antiseptic it may try to be, inevitably
  has political overtones.
• Nancy Dorian 1993. A Response to Ladefoged's
  Other View of Endangered Languages. Language
  69(3) 575-579.

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• Preservation ... is what we do to berries in
  jam jars and salmon in cans. ... Books and
  recordings can preserve languages, but only
  people and communities can keep them alive.
• Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer,
  Tlingit Alaska oral historians

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• If the information and political will are
  present, Ubykh can be revived 500 years from now.
  Hebrew, after all, was brought back from ancient
  texts into daily use after 2,000 years.
• David Berreby 2003. Fading Species and Dying
  Tongues When the Two Part Ways. New York Times.
  May 27F3.

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The future of the past

• One of the great ironies of the information age
  is that while the late twentieth century will
  undoubtedly have recorded more data than any
  other period in history, it will also almost
  certainly have lost more information than any
  previous era.
• Alexander Stille 2003. The future of the
  past. How the information age threatens to
  destroy our cultural heritage. New YorkFarrar,
  Straus and Giroux.

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Indigenous peoples and biolinguistic diversity

• The greatest linguistic diversity is found in
  some of the ecosystems richest in biodiversity
  inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent
  around 4 of the world's population, but speak at
  least 60 of its 6,000 or more languages.
• Nettle Romaine 2001. The Last Survivors.
  Cultural Survival Quarterly 25(2)44.

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Language loss and biodiversity

• linguistic and biological diversity have common
  locations, common causes, and face common
  threats.
• Nettle Romaine 2000. Vanishing Voices. The
  Extinction of the Worlds Languages. Oxford
  University Press.

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Preserving linguistic diversity through
sustainable development

• the needs to preserve languages and the need for
  development in the world's peripheral societies
  are not opposing ones, but complimentary aspects
  of the same problem.
• freedom of choice is both a principal means and
  end of development. Good development involves
  local community involvement, control and
  accountability.

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Languages need communities

• A language can only exist where there is a
  community to speak and transmit it. A community
  of people can exist only where there is a viable
  environment for them to live in, and a means of
  making a living. Where communities cannot thrive,
  their languages are in danger. When languages
  lose their speakers, they die.
• Nettle Romaine 2000. Vanishing Voices. p. 5.

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Inuit of Nunavut

• are a dwindling group on the edge of the world.
  Their suicide rate is horrendous. But they do
  still speak their language. Another expression of
  their identity is shooting rare Bowhead whales
  with .50 caliber hunting rifles. The point here
  is not to be facetious. The hunts are not just
  for the meat. They are defended on cultural
  grounds shooting whales is deemed essential for
  the preservation of identity. This, surely, is
  not what the ecolinguists have in mind.
• Ian Buruma 2001. Road to Babel.

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Commercial whaling
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Inuit children at residential school, Roman
Catholic mission, Cape Dorset, NWT 1951
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• much in common with reactionary,
  backward-looking visions that seek to preserve
  the unpreservable, and all are possessed of an
  impossibly nostalgic view of what constitutes a
  culture or a 'way of life' it is modernity
  itself of which Nettle and Romaine disapprove.
  They want the peoples of the Third World, and
  minority groups in the West, to follow 'local
  ways of life' and pursue 'traditional knowledge'
  rather than receive a 'Western education'. This
  is tantamount to saying that such people should
  live a marginal life, excluded from the modern
  mainstream to which the rest of us belong. There
  is nothing noble or authentic about local ways of
  life they are often simply degrading and
  backbreaking.
• Kenan Malik 2000. Let them die. Prospect.