Mr. Verb

... all wrapped up in one nice package in this morning's New York Times!

It's a little hard to know where to start. Well, let's start with ignorance. The media never gets stuff about language right, so that's no surprise. And in some places it's hard to tell whether it's the journalist or the musician who's saying something stupid (it'd be nice to live in a world where journalists were smart about language but alas). Here's a nice quote:

The last vestiges of some minority languages are preserved as song, and a musical ear can be an advantage in studying the kind of tonal languages prevalent in parts of Asia.

Non sequitur much?

Appropriation just runs through everything these musicians say. The most explicit is a quote from Vivian Fung (who the journalist helpfully tells us is a Canadian):

"It's about finding the parts of the research [on minority languages in China] that speak to me ... and filtering it so that it becomes mine."

Oh Ms. Fung, please take Anthropology 101.

And taking a recording of Ishi and setting it to piano?  Maybe read up on Ishi's story. Maybe read up on what happened to his brain. When I teach about Ishi, all the students are horrified at how he was made into a living museum exhibit. Now, about a century later, he continues to be exploited.

I'm also just so tired of reading things like "these enigmatic utterances" - enigmatic? Oooh, enigmatic and mysterious and inscrutable.

"A work like Mr. James's 'Counting in Quileute' ... is like a time capsule shot into space - except the meaning was already opaque at the time of its sealing." 

I wonder what the Quileutes would have to say about that?

They do give about a paragraph and a half to Greg Anderson's concerns about the ethics of all this, but the composers' responses are supposed to put our minds at ease.

Maybe this is all sour grapes because of the opening paragraph that says:

For the most part, ethnographers and linguists are helpless in the face of the gradual erasure of collective memory that goes along with this loss of linguistic diversity.

That actually raises some complex issues. Calling us helpless implies that we think (or someone thinks) we should have some control but we don't. The reality is that many of us have learned the humbling lesson that language loss or language retention is not up to us; it's up to the people who really do have a claim to these languages - the communities where they're spoken. And I'm not saying we're perfect. I know I've made my share of blunders along these lines. But at least I'm trying to learn to be respectful.

My dad has had to listen to me talk about linguistics for over 30 years now, but the other night he asked me what linguists say when people ask why it's important to maintain, revitalize, and reclaim languages.  It was probably on his mind because of McWhorter's recent column on the topic.  I told Mr. Verb about the conversation and he said I should post something about it.  I certainly don't pretend that my answer is anything new - lots of people have said this - but it's worth repeating.

So first, there's the linguistcentric reason: if all these languages die, what the heck are we going to do with ourselves?  But only linguists care about that one.

Second, people often say that languages express unique worldviews ... well, yes and no.  I do agree with McWhorter that this can lead to the "when a language dies, a culture dies with it" mentality - which I've always found quite offensive towards groups whose languages are dormant.  Having met a lot of incredible language activists at the 2013 DC Breath of Life whose languages are no longer spoken (or just beginning to be spoken again), I can tell you that they are totally still culturally connected.  (See here for the 2015 BoL.)

But the third reason is social justice: colonization has caused loss after loss after loss.  If I can put my energy into trying to prevent a further loss, then I should do it.  As Crawford (1995) put it, "After all, language death does not happen in privileged communities.  It happens to the dispossessed and disempowered, peoples who most need their cultural resources to survive."  I've always thought that was such a good quote.

P.S. "Linguistic Justice is Social Justice" - see Colleen Fitzgerald's excellent post on this topic too.

People are talking today, rightly, about John McWhorter's piece in the NY Times, "Why save a language?".  But a similar question is treated beautifully in a piece by Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins and colleagues (University of Victoria) in the Times Colonist, "Language a strong symbol of cultural identity". It treats revitalization efforts in British Columbia. Here's the punchline:

Supporting the health of these languages is … one way to support and strengthen the well-being of individuals and communities, and to support education and economies.

Language is, in the relevant sense here, very local, and the focused perspective of this piece makes it particularly valuable. But especially relevant for us here in Wisconsin is the partnerships between linguists and communities in revitalization work.

It's important to have good answers when the why-save-a-language stuff comes up (and it does), but the hard work on the ground here is far more important.

Happy Giving Tuesday! The Endangered Language
Fund is sending around this:

GivingTuesday is today!!! What is GivingTuesday? We have a day for giving thanks. We have two for getting deals. Now, we have GivingTuesday, a global day dedicated to giving back. On Tuesday, December 2, 2014, charities, families, businesses, community centers, and students around the world will come together for one common purpose: to celebrate generosity and to give. The Endangered Language Fund depends on member contributions. You can contribute to ELF and become a member here. Thank you!

ELF supports endangered language preservation and documentation projects around the world, providing small grants to individuals, tribes, and museums.

Help them out!

I had forgotten all about Boontling - when I lived in the Bay Area it was something everyone knew about.  But now it's endangered.  Sigh.  I guess calling it an invented "language" is slightly overstating the case - it sounds like it's just lexical substitution - but it's a lot more extensive than you'd expect, not to mention truly cool.  (HT to JJ for the story.)

Wow, this is something I am really excited about:  there's going to be a movie about John Peabody Harrington.  If you don't know who he was, well, it's complicated.  He was a linguist (1884-1961) who was obsessed with recording the speech of every single California Indian he could find (and some who were from elsewhere too).  He was tremendously talented and tremendously paranoid, hiding his materials here and there in attics and other places around the state.  What has been found makes up an enormous (dare I say GInormous) treasure trove of recordings of languages most of which are no longer spoken.  There's a project on his materials at UC Davis - it says that he left behind about 500,000 pages of notes, of which approximately half are on CA languages.  Well, that's the number of pages we know about, anyway.

You can watch a trailer for the movie here - I gather it's still in production.  It looks like it'll be good (although I couldn't figure out why they had math symbols floating around in several scenes - no phonetic alphabet font???), and they also have a Facebook page.

Can't wait!

(Here are a couple of additional links where you can read about JPH:  link, link, link.)

A commenter on my earlier post about the girl being punished for using Menominee language in school just told me about a petition you can sign here.  I just talked to the girl's grandmother, who told me that they still have not received the public apology they asked for.  I'm also going to contact the school and offer to come talk to them about the topic, if they would let me.  (So far they have refused to take the Menominees up on such offers; I just thought maybe they'd listen to an outsider.  Well, it's worth a try.)

Heard a really appalling story when I was up on the Menominee reservation this past week, involving a kid being punished for speaking Menominee in a Catholic school classroom in Shawano. The Shawano Leader published a brief article about it here.  The version I heard was a bit more extreme (I guess the Leader was trying to be fair and balanced...), so I'll be interested to see what else comes out about it.  I'm hoping it hits the news big time.

(HT to JMZ for the link to the article.)

Update 2/1/12: another article here.

The NYT Magazine has an interesting article by Tina Rosenberg about technology and endangered languages today. It's mostly a good article except for the author's utter inability to distinguish between a writing system and a language. Why oh why don't they run these things by a linguist before publishing them?

Two recent pieces in the news about Wisconsin's indigenous languages, this very nice article called "Weight of the Words" from the UW's alumni magazine, On Wisconsin, and this from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

One of UW's student newspapers, the Badger Herald, posted this story (and see this at indianz.com) quoting State Rep. Scott Suder as saying:

“The governor should concentrate more on using our tax money to preserve jobs rather than preserving dead languages.”

Of course, most Native languages of Wisconsin are definitely alive, with some L1 speakers and many semi-speakers and learners. And the money is 250,000 out of a 20+ billion dollar budget. Not offended yet?

Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, called the program “goofy and crazy” given the state’s current financial atmosphere and the loss of so many jobs throughout Wisconsin.

…

Suder also said the taxpayers should not be forced to pay for this program because most tribes make enough revenue from their casinos to pay for it. He added he is sorry for the situation but jobs are definitely more important than dead language preservation.

As indicated, Suder represents Abbotsford in northern Wisconsin, pretty close to a number of reservations, and surely a district with some number of Indians in it.

Say, I wonder how many dollars go to teaching Latin in this state, at the high school and university levels? Classical Greek? Biblical Hebrew? Vastly more than 250K.

Thanks to Dennis Baron's post to ads-l yesterday (which you can also read here), many of us have been reminded that it's "International Mother Language Day", so designated by UNESCO. The folks at UNESCO have done a pretty massive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, with nice interactive mapping, pretty extensively updated and developed since the earlier versions, if memory serves. These maps are always fraught with problems, even when they're done by really good specialists, and it would be easy to nitpick about how 'unsafe' the status of Welsh is or whether Hawaiian is best counted as 'critically endangered' or not. Personally, I'm not always comfortable with what counts as a language in various cases.

But this isn't a place for a lot of griping: it's a very nice and powerful tool. You can zoom in to places, as you see below for Belgium and surrounding areas (showing the rollover on Walloon here), display languages by estimated numbers of speakers, etc.

So, happy International Mother Tongue Day. I'll be speaking mine some today, if the phone lines to the home country are working.