David Crystal in Dublin
David Crystal is a linguist, famous among other things for the book Language Death in which he deals with the subject of languages dying out. On 1 February 2006 he came to Dublin to give a public lecture titled Saving Languages on the same topic. The widely attended lecture was organized by the Royal Irish Academy and took place in Dublin Castle. The following are notes from that lecture, with the exception of text in square brackets, which is my own thoughts and observations on the subject of language death and language revival.
David Crystal is a skilled public speaker, and the lecture we heard was probably his “single transferable lecture”, or one of them, because he spoke without any notes and at the same time spoke completely fluently, in well-dressed sentences, without any of the disfluence one would expect in unrehearsed speech.
What is language death
He started by explaining that a language dies when its last speaker dies – or maybe when the second-to-last speaker dies, since the last one then has no-one to talk to? Crystal then mentioned the now quite notorious “96/4” statistic, which consists of the observation that 96% of the Earth’s languages are spoken by only 4% of people and conversely, only 4% of the planet’s languages are spoken by 96% of people. This means that most languages in the world are spoken by very small numbers of people, and are therefore especially exposed to the danger of dying out.
Languages have been dying out [and new ones have been evolving] throughout human history, so why is it a problem now? Crystal gave three wide groups of reasons why languages die:
- Physical reasons such as natural catastrophes: if a language is spoken only by a single village and that village is wiped out by a tsunami, then the language dies. [This is nothing new, events like this have been happening ever since humans started walking the Earth.]
- Administrative reasons such as laws prohibiting the use of minority languages. Crystal observed that there is surprisingly a lot of antipathy in the world towards minority cultures and their languages. [This is a relatively new development, encouraged by the establishment of nation-states in Europe since approximately the 17th century.]
- Cultural domination, [which is largely a product of colonialism and later, globalization]. A person perceives a foreign culture, and the language that comes with it, as culturally superior, as offering a better standard of living, and makes an effort to pass that foreign language, rather than the native local language, to his/her children, hoping that it will help them achieve that better standard of living. After three of four generations, the imported language may completely replace the native language. Crystal calls these culturally dominant languages “steamroller languages”. On a global scale the steamroller language number one is of course English, but there are other steamroller languages as well, for example Spanish and Portuguese have steamroller status in South America, slowly but surely pushing indigenous languages to death.
While the physical reasons such as tsunamis are nothing new, the other two types of reasons, administrative and cultural, have only been happening over the last few centuries, and have been accelerating the process of language death at a scale never experienced before in human history. This is why language death is now an issue needing humankind’s attention.
Should we care?
The question of course is, is it a bad thing that languages are dying out? Should we care? Many people indeed do think that it isn’t a bad thing, that it would actually be a good thing if all languages died out but one, a single language all people in the world would speak and understand. Crystal quoted two arguments the single-language lobby usually presents, and also told us how to rebut them:
- “If everybody spoke the same language, there would be no misunderstandings, no conflicts, no wars.” Crystal said that you only need to mention examples of war in monolingual territories, such as the American Civil War, to prove this argument wrong.
- “Multilingualism is a curse God imposed on humankind for being too cocky.” This sometimes deeply held belief comes from the Bible, but Crystal said that it is a very limited interpretation of the position the Bible takes towards multilingualism. There are other references to multilingualism in the Bible beside this one where multilingualism is not presented as an evil or as a curse.
On the other side of the barricade, the argument in favour of multilingualism is based on the observation that each language encapsulates a particular way of looking at the world, and we don’t want to lose this diversity of viewpoints. [By having so much linguistic diversity, we as humankind have at our disposal many alternative ways of understanding the world and acting towards it. If we lost this diversity, we would be less well equipped to deal with change and to adapt if our circumstances changed. It is a pity that Crystal didn’t go into this topic deeper. The argument touches on the linguistic relativity debate, that is, on the question whether language influences thinking, and how much. How differently do speakers of different languages conceptualize the world around them? If the difference is significant, then it is indeed important that we maintain this diversity. But if we all have more or less the same conceptual understanding of the world around us, regardless of which language we speak, then the maintenance of linguistic diversity becomes less important. In my opinion, most people who consider linguistic diversity as important believe so for various sentimental, patriotic and emotional reasons – but many people are immune to such arguments. It wouldn’t hurt to have some “materialistic” arguments in favour of linguistic diversity that make economic sense.]
Can anything be done?
If you realize that a language is in danger of dying out, what can you do to resuscitate it? The good news is that something certainly can be done since there have been success stories such as Modern Hebrew, Welsh [and Czech] when an endangered language has been brought back to live not by coincidence, but by concerted human effort.
Crystal said there are three things that need to be present if a language is to be saved:
- There has to be grass-roots support for the language. There has to be a community of people who want to save the language [even though they may not be able to speak it themselves at the beginning]. This is sometimes difficult to achieve, especially when the process of language change has only recently started and the first generation of “linguistic converts” have a low esteem of their native language themselves. Later generations, however, once they have had the dominating “steamroller” language and the coveted “better standard of living” handed down to them for a generation or two, tend to want to look back and “explore who they are”. Such sentiments are conductive to language revival.
- There needs to be an interest in the language from official places, for example a local government that has language revival as one of its goals and has the power to enact and enforce legislation towards that goal.
- Finally, you need money. Teachers, books, TV channels will need to subsidised for a number of years before demand for content in the language becomes strong enough to keep the language afloat its own.
Global awareness
Crystal’s last major theme of the lecture was the fact that people generally are not aware of the fact of languages dying out and of it being a problem. Sometimes people may be aware of particular language being in danger, such as those who live in Ireland and in Wales, but not many people are aware of it as a global problem. He made a comparison between biological diversity and linguistic diversity. The fact that biological species are dying out on a global scale and that they need to be saved is known to the general public, but the fact that languages all over the world are facing the same problem is not.
Crystal reflected on what could be done to raise awareness of the issue, and he seems to have concluded that nothing works better to attract public attention to an issue than artists and popular entertainers. If artists represented the issue of language death more often in works of art, the public would be more attentive to the issue. And sure enough, Crystal himself has made a contribution by writing a drama, a piece of which he and a woman (his wife?) re-enacted on stage at the end of the lecture. The drama is about the last speaker of a language (played by Crystal) and a female field linguist recording the language off him. The piece we saw was about the speaker refusing to help the linguist record the language, and the linguist persuading him to change his mind.
Questions and answers
After the inevitable applause there were a few questions from the audience, two of which I found interesting enough to record here.
The first one was from a German man observing that Crystal often presents languages as if they were living organisms, and asking whether this is not taking the analogy too far. He wondered whether it would be more prudent to consider languages as habits, behaviours, or tools, whose departure usually doesn’t provoke such emotional response as the death of a living organism. Crystal essentially agreed that the metaphor shouldn’t be taken too literally by professional linguists but he didn’t have an issue with using the metaphor copiously when presenting the issue of language death to the general public.
The second interesting question came from a girl whose accent I couldn’t quite place. She asked about the changes that happen to a language when it comes in contact with another. She seemed to me to say (she didn’t word it that way) that when a “steamroller” language invades a new territory and begins to dominate it, it itself becomes changed into a new dialect, as for example happened to English in America. [Is this not at least a partial substitute for the diversity lost in the death of the original native language? Crystal didn’t quite answer that, although I think his answer would have been that, although the newly evolved diversity may partially substitute for the loss of another language, it is not nearly enough.]
Instead, Crystal answered a slightly different question, one about language change when it occurs in a minority language. He warned against too much linguistic puritanism and resistance to change from the language promoters because it tends to discourage the general populace from ever warming up to the language. He even said that the biggest danger to a language is “from within”, from a self-appointed elite who resist language change and accuse the general population of speaking a substandard travesty of the original pure language.
[While I agree with this point, there is one type of language change which I consider highly undesirable no matter what the circumstances, and I was surprised that Crystal didn’t mention it: it is when the minority language adopts so much of the expressive means of the majority language that it becomes more or less a copy of it. If a language’s value is mainly as preserver of an alternative viewpoint on the world, then what’s the point in saving a language if it espouses the exact same viewpoint as another? Suppose the vocabulary and syntax of Irish changed so much that its words and phrases would have exactly the same meanings and connotations as their English counterparts: what would be the point of saving Irish at all? Simply, Irish words would then be different labels for exactly the same concepts English words stand for, instead of being windows into a different conceptual system altogether.
Take the English verb to fix, for example. This has numerous translation equivalents in Irish, depending on the exact meaning. If you’re talking about fixing somebody a meal or a snack, it’s réiteach, which in other contexts also means to solve a problem and to get on well with somebody. If you’re talking about fixing a broken device it’s caoi a chur ar rud, literally to put “caoi” on something, where caoi means proper order, proper condition but in other contexts it also means a way to do something in the most general sense. If you’re talking about fixing a meeting or fixing a date in a calendar, the translation is socrú, which has a host of other meanings as well, for example to arrange items in a pattern or to agree with other people on something. And so the list goes. The morale is this: all the different meanings that one language (English) groups under a single label (the verb to fix), another language (Irish) chooses to group with other meanings under other labels (réiteach, caoi, socrú, ...). This is what I imagine the phrase “languages are alternative viewpoints on the world” means: where English sees a similarity between fixing a meal and fixing a broken device, Irish doesn’t. Where Irish sees a similarity between preparing a sandwich (réiteach) and solving a problem (also réiteach), English doesn’t.
Nowadays, as a result of excessive and one-way language contact between Irish and English (every Irish speaker is bilingual in English, and most people’s English is actually better than their Irish), the conceptual system of English is being imported into Irish. People subconsciously feel that Irish needs to have a verb which expresses the exact same meaning as the English to fix, and they solve this perceived problem by borrowing from English (fixáil as an Irish verb is not uncommon now) or by extending the meanings of existing Irish verbs. As a result, Irish is (in danger of) developing towards a situation when it doesn’t really offer anything different from what English offers.
So, to summarize, I wouldn’t be so “trigger-happy” about language change as David Crystal seemed to suggest during his lecture. It all boils down to the question why we value linguistic diversity and why it is important to save languages from dying out.]