The Language Revolution (14 page)

The point could not be clearer: this is a people and a language ‘identifiable with other places', and the image of the drowning language would resonate anywhere.

But the genre which puzzles me most, because it is the genre most obviously applicable to expound the subject of language death, is theatre. Where are the plays? Here too there have been works which deal with the problems of a particular linguistic/cultural situation – a well-known example is Brian Friel's
Translations
, about Irish. Another is Louis Nowra's
The Golden Age,
about the community discovered in the wilds of Tasmania in 1939, for whom the playwright created a special variety of speech. But which plays deal with the problems of language endangerment in general, or which generalize from individual instances in the way R.S. Thomas's poem did? Harold Pinter's
Mountain Language,
a twenty-minute virtuoso explosion, is the only published instance, but that is of little general use for it deals only with the topic of linguistic genocide, which, relevant as it is for some parts of the world, is only a part of the overall picture.

It was because of the lack of professional playwriting contributions to the theme that I followed up a proposal from a British theatre director, Greg Doran, to make a personal contribution to the genre, which resulted in the play
Living On
(1998). This play takes the theme which I consider to be of maximum dramatic potential, that of the ‘last speaker'. I created an archetypal character (Shalema)
and community derived from the personalities and traditions which have been studied in many parts of the world, invented a language, based on linguistic universale, for him to speak, then explored the motivations and tensions which affected him as he decides whether to allow his language to be recorded for posterity or not. The following extract illustrates Shalema's state of mind as he talks to the linguist who wants to record his language:

Although the play received readings of various kinds, its subject-matter never attracted the interest of mainstream theatre.

Perhaps this is not surprising. It appears that language death is not just ‘not mainstream theatre' – it is not mainstream anything. It is so far outside the mindsets of most people that they have difficulty appreciating what the crisis is all about, because they are not used to thinking about language as an issue in itself. Somehow these mindsets need to be changed. We need to get people thinking about language more explicitly, more intimately, more enthusiastically. Interest in language is certainly there, in the general population – most people are fascinated by such topics as where words come from, or what the origin of their town's name is, or whether their baby's name means anything; they are certainly prepared to play Scrabble and a host of other language games ad infinitum;
and language games are a major interest on radio and television – but a willingness to focus that interest on general issues, a preparedness to take on board the emotion and drama inherent in the situation of language endangerment, is not something that happens much. This a goal which artists can make attainable.

I believe the arts are the greatest untapped resource that we can exploit to engage public interest in language death. And one of my fondest hopes for the new century is that national and international organizations will introduce language and arts initiatives in which the artists of the world become mobilized to address the theme, using all the resources at their disposal. Artists are extraordinary people. Once you catch their interest you do not have to persuade them to act. By their nature, they cannot not. The trick is to draw their attention to the fact that language, as such, is an issue. This is demonstrated by the work of Lucy Crystal in Amsterdam, in relation to a project called ‘Language as Arts and Arts as Language'. She made contact with artists in several European countries, none of whom had ever thought of producing work in relation to this theme, but all of whom proved keen to do so. An array of fine ideas came out of the preliminary thinking, but in the absence of funding the project remained in abeyance. Two achievements have so far arisen from the initiative. In 2002, during a month-long project in Arizona, a small team worked with the rurally isolated youth of three US Amerindian communities – the Hopi, Navajo and Gila – to teach them how to use digital story-telling techniques to record on film aspects of their communities' oral histories.
⁹
And in 2003, another team made a film of a Neapolitan story-telling ritual (the
Tammurriata)
still practised in towns and villages in parts of southern Italy, focusing on an annual celebration at Maiori, near Naples. Part of a projected series of films
called ‘Stories from the Edge: the Art of Survival', this initiative demonstrates that there is a great deal of interest, expertise and potential within the artistic community, and I have no doubt that this exists worldwide – but it needs to be tapped.

Give artists an opportunity and they will take it. The problem is that, in so much work, opportunities are missed – not because of any active antagonism towards the language question, but simply because people have just not thought of it as an issue. In 2001 I returned from Brazil with a beautiful glossy art-book of photographs on the country, in which the writer and photographer had gone out of their way to find communities and environments at risk. However, there was not a single mention of the Brazilian language crisis in the whole book. There were statistics about the amount of rainforest which was disappearing, but none about the number of languages which were disappearing. The writer, I suspect, had simply not noticed it, or had taken it for granted, or had forgotten about it. The photographer had not even conceived of the exciting artistic challenge of attempting to pictorialize it.

We need the arts to help us get our initiative into the three domains where it can make greatest impact – the media, the school and the home – and these suggest the kinds of action which need to be taken if we are to make significant progress in reversing the phenomenon of language death. For the media we need a stock of memorable, quotable statements from writers, pop-singers, film-stars and others in the public eye. Linguists are writers themselves, so they can do their bit; but good slogans come best out of the mouths of artists. The media love artists. If a famous artist cuts a little finger it can be headline news with a photograph. If an academic linguist breaks a neck, it might make a late edition, on page 17, at the bottom, misspelled.

For the school, we need to get the issue into the curricula – something which is beginning to happen in a small way. In the UK, for example, the topic of language death is recognized in the A-level English Language syllabus that children begin at age 16. But age 16 is far too late; awareness of the biological crisis is in schools at age 5. Art projects can help here too. There have been entire art exhibitions by children on the theme of wildlife extinction. There need to be language extinction exhibitions too.

But above all we have to get awareness of the language crisis into the home, and there are only two real ways of doing this on a large scale: through the Internet and through the arts. The Internet is an important and still under-used resource for this theme, but, as we saw in chapter 3, it has its problems: it is still not available to a huge proportion of the human race; it can be slow and cumbersome, especially in downloading multimedia material; and those who do use the Internet routinely know how difficult it is to get a simple message across – or even noticed, within the floods of pages that exist. But the arts can get into the home every day in all kinds of mutually reinforcing ways – whether it be via a radio or television programme, a CD or DVD, a computer game, a wall decoration or painting or photograph, a novel, a postcard or a text-message poem (currently one of the coolest of artistic mediums among the young). There are so many opportunities, and so few have yet been exploited.

An example is Christmas – but the same principle can apply to non-Christian festivals – when many homes receive Christmas cards. Several are bilingual or multilingual, but the languages are all healthy languages, full of
joyeux Noëls
and
fröhliche Weihnachtens.
There seem to be no Xmas cards in which last speakers wish us happy holidays in their languages – possibly for the last time? There
seem to be no cards wishing us happiness in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his disciples, a language which is so near to extinction in the present-day Middle East that, if he were to return using his mother-tongue, he would soon find no-one able to understand him.

None of the major issues raised by language endangerment and death seem to have received artistic treatment. Has there ever been an artistic oeuvre in which we see portrayed, for example, the communication gap between grandparent and grandchild, or any of the other striking images which we know characterize this field? There is certainly no shortage of images. In a poem, ‘It Hurts Him to Think', R.S. Thomas writes:

An image such as ‘my mother's linguistically infected milk' cries out for imaginative portrayal in other media. Or again, in ‘Reservoirs' he writes:

‘Elbowing a language into a grave' is another striking image. And there are many such dramatic and memorable images in the slowly growing poetic literature. In some cases people might find these images shocking. They might even offend their sensibilities. But at least they would have made people sit up and take notice.

Alongside the properly technical concerns of language documentation and analysis, therefore, initiatives for the new century need to focus on communication with the general public. Collaboration between linguistics and the world of the arts and media is the most promising way forward, and means need to be found of making this collaboration easier. At the very least, there needs to be an archive or library of data about endangered languages, accessible to journalists, broadcasters and artists, so that they can easily find examples of what is happening in order to make their point. One means of doing this would be to establish a public depository, such as exists in the book world, for copies of works – radio programmes, magazine articles, interviews with last speakers and community leaders, stock footage of communities – anything which relates to language death. Then positive steps need to be taken to attract the interest of artists. One way would be a prize. Modern society is obsessed with prizes – Oscars, Grammies, Emmies, Golden Globes, Bookers, Pulitzers, Goncourts … The annual award of the Turner prize, in its often controversial decisions, has generated an extraordinary amount of discussion about the nature of art. There needs to be a prize for artistic achievement in endangered languages. It could be announced on World Language Day.

5

Language Themes for the Twenty-First Century

Because there was so much linguistic innovation and change in the 1990s, several of our assumptions about language which we took for granted in the twentieth century are having to be revised for the twenty-first. The arrival of a global language, English, has altered the balance of linguistic power in unprecedented ways, and generated a whole new set of attitudes about language and languages. Many speech communities have begun to feel threatened by a situation which can alter the character of their language, or, in the worst case, cause the use of their language to become so reduced that its very survival is at risk. Several are finding it necessary to introduce protective policies, or at least to find ways of managing the effects of the linguistic changes they are experiencing. At an international level, such as in the European Union, more sophisticated strategies are having to be implemented to safeguard the principle of language equivalence while recognizing the practical fact that virtually everyone speaks English. At the same time, communities want to exploit the opportunities for empowerment opened up by the availability of an international lingua franca. They find themselves having to take fresh measures, such as devoting resources to English language teaching, introducing an English-language dimension at senior levels of
management (at least, for corporations which have an international remit), and ensuring that their tourist potential is maintained by incorporating an English interpreting facility into important venues.

Then, within the community of English users itself there is also a degree of turmoil, as speakers (including learners and their teachers) find they have to get to grips with a rapidly diversifying language, in which evolving regional standards and an increasing number of ‘New Englishes' complicate a world where once only British and American English ruled. The process of change, moreover, has been radically affected by the arrival of the Internet, which has not only given humanity a third medium of communication, whose potentialities have hardly begun to be exploited, but has also initiated a process of graphic translation, from paper to screen, of all previous styles of written language, and motivated the emergence of brand-new linguistic varieties, in the form of Netspeak. Here too there is a need for fresh policies and strategies. Teachers of English as a foreign language are finding they must broaden the remit of their activities to give their students exposure to new varieties and forms of English, a process which will become more focused as teaching materials and examination systems adopt a global perspective. And mother-tongue teachers too are having to adapt, as they find themselves needing to replace a previously exclusive attention to the standard language with an approach which pays respectful attention to regional accents and dialects, both nationally and internationally. But it is not only teaching which is affected. Everyone has to come to terms with the linguistic potential (for good and evil) of the Internet, and to devise appropriate management strategies – such as in relation to the legal status of its documents, or the copyright position of creative work.

The prominence of English on the world stage, and the role of the Internet in contemporary society, in their different ways both reflect the same process of globalization which has caused such havoc in relation to the planet's linguistic diversity. There is no doubt that the crisis facing the world's languages is unprecedented in its scale and urgency, and in the twenty-first century is the main responsibility facing those governments, international organizations, philanthropists, artists and activists who profess to acknowledge the importance of language in their lives. The fact that a language is becoming extinct, somewhere in the world, around every two weeks dwarfs the scale of species endangerment in botany and zoology, and cries out for special action. The situation is being helped by the way the Internet has evolved in such a short time to provide a tool for the use of many minority and endangered languages – offering a level of expressive capability that their communities could never have dreamed of a decade ago. But the technology is simply not available to help two-thirds or more of the languages that are most in danger, so alternative strategies have to be found. We know from the activities that have gone on around the world in the past few years that documentation and revitalization can be successfully carried out if the political and financial will are present. That is the chief linguistic challenge of the new century. The 2003 UNESCO conference on language endangerment was an important step in the right direction, but whether it proves to be a small step or a large one remains to be seen.

The three trends of my revolutionary decade interrelate in all kinds of ways, and indicate the importance of a further perspective. Taking action to promote, support, protect, manage, teach and fund languages presupposes a certain awareness of the nature of language as such. What is language? How did speech evolve in the human race?
How does it develop in the individual human being? How did reading and writing develop? How is language structured? In how many ways can language be used? Are there properties of sound, or grammar, or meaning found in all languages? Such questions are the be-all and end-all of linguistics, but they go well beyond linguistics in their general interest and relevance to the solution of everyday language problems. For everyone, at some point or other, has to deal with the issues and procedures introduced by mother-tongue or foreign-language learning, translating and interpreting, using dictionaries, ensuring precision and clarity of expression, and a host of other practical tasks in which the ability to produce and understand language is critical to success or failure. It may seem like a truism, but it still needs to be said: everyone, in an age of global communication, needs to be language-aware.

Schools can and do help, especially since the 1990s, when in several parts of the world new curricula began to draw children's attention to the principles and practices of language study in fresh and interesting ways. But there is still a noticeable absence of institutions capable of meeting the mature curiosity and needs of an adult population. It is interesting to compare the way in which other curricular domains are treated. If we are interested in botany, zoology, geology, textiles, transport, history, the arts, science or technology, we can feed our interest by visiting an appropriate museum, exhibition hall, gallery, arena or other space devoted to the subject. Every major city has an art gallery of some kind, or a natural history museum. But where is the ‘gallery' devoted to language? Where is the space where people could go to see how language works, how it is used, and how languages evolve?

The 1990s in the UK was revolutionary in one further respect. A group of experts came up with the idea for a ‘World of Language', which would fill this gap. It would
have been a multi-storey building, the first of its kind, with floors devoted to the world of speech, the world of writing, the world of meaning, the world of languages and the world of language study. A building had even been identified, in Southwark, right next to Shakespeare's Globe. The plans had reached an advanced stage, with the support of the British Council, and all that was required was a small tranche of government funding to get the project off the ground. Things were looking promising. But then the government had a better idea. It was called the Millennium Dome.

The money which was wasted on the Dome project would have supported twenty ‘worlds of language'. We still have none. Abroad, others have come up with similar ideas. The various projects have a variety of names, such as ‘the language city', and ‘the town as a linguistic landscape'. A few already exist, but on a very small scale, such as the Kiev Language Educational Museum. In several countries, the subject of language forms a part of a broader remit, such as at the Heureka Museum in Finland and the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. Many museums, of course, including some in the UK, have sections devoted to the history of writing. And there are also several virtual projects, such as the Virtual Museum of American Linguistic Heritage, and ‘The House of Languages', an initiative of the European Centre for Modern Languages. But all projects suffer from a lack of finance, and few have got past the proposal stage. Despite the avowedly fundamental role of language in relation to human society and thought, there is an extraordinary reluctance to give it the public educational treatment it demands.

We still await the arrival of the world's first comprehensive ‘Language Gallery', and perhaps the twenty-first century will produce it. In the meantime, I conclude by
reflecting on the main preoccupations which should be characterizing the linguistic mindset of the new millennium: