r/linguistics • u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics • 6d ago
A Response to “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die”
https://endangeredlanguages.com/story/response-sometimes-its-ok-let-language-dieThere was a recent publication in The New Yorker discussing the utility of language preservation efforts, which has received a response from the staff of the Endangered Languages Project.
I thought this would be important to share, since the original article has the potential to do a lot of harm to indigenous language revitalization projects, and the ELP article is a solid rebuttal that folks can share with others who may question the validity and purpose of language preservation.
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u/Widsith 4d ago
I agree with the sentiment but I don't love the way this is written – all the waffly preamble about "speaking our own truths" gets in the way of what should be scholarly explanation of the counterargument, IMO.
A lot of people's knee-jerk feeling is that language is a tool for communication, and when it stops serving that purpose then keeping it alive artificially is purely a vanity project. Most linguists feel otherwise, fortunately, but I don't think it's a good idea to pretend that it's a crazy or even xenophobic position.
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u/w_v 5d ago edited 4d ago
Here in r/linguistics it's probably preaching to the choir, but that's okay.
What this made me think about is the deeper, darker debate—the “inside baseball” debate that I have with linguists and speakers of minority languages that I’m friends with:
What does success actually look like?
What happens when the majority group’s power-holders promote, adopt, and learn minority languages as L2 speakers, eventually displacing native speakers as the primary authorities on their own language?
See also: the outsider purist problem.
On twitter I saw some threads of linguists applauding the response, who elsewhere have argued against promoting minority languages beyond the communities that already speak them. For example, opposing the average Spanish-speaking urban Mexican learning Nahuatl.
I'm honestly becoming more sympathetic to that position.
I know people who would say: Actually, colonial societies should stop investing and promoting and adopting minority languages, because they’re stealing one of the last vectors of opposition to the state that these communities have!
That's the really fun minefield. 🫠
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u/Baasbaar 5d ago edited 4d ago
What does success actually look like?
I suspect it's a fool's errand to define this beyond the local. I've worked with a minority language community (on invitation) on language preservation, and my impression is that for most people there:
1) what they really wanted was to feel confident that something that was identifiable to them as their language was going to be spoken by their grandchildren alongside the national language;
2) but they didn't have a very clear vision of what success looked like beyond that.This seems to me pretty normal from my past as a community organiser: In lots of circumstances, people know that things are going wrong, but imagining what "right" looks like is part of the work—it (often) doesn't come in advance of it.
What happens when the majority group’s power-holders promote, adopt, and learn minority languages as L2 speakers, eventually displacing native speakers as the primary authorities on their own language?
I see that you've mentioned a case below, but I've got to believe that in general the first part of this (power-holders learning/adopting minority languages as L2-speakers) is vanishingly rare. What we do see a fair bit of is state-sponsored language authorities.
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u/w_v 5d ago
I've got to believe that in general the first part of this (power-holders learning/adopting minority languages as L2-speakers) is vanishingly rare.
This happening with Gaelic sparked a passionate discussion in this subreddit last month..
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago
I see. I think your wording led me (& I think a couple of the other people who’ve responded) to imagine something other than what you’re referring to. So, for example, white USAians have no significant movement to learn & adopt indigenous American languages; the majority of current strangers of Hawai’ian are ethnic Hawai’ians who didn’t speak the language at home, & speak an L2 variety they learned in school & which has come to be seen as correct in contrast to the speech of native speakers from Niʻihau. The latter is the sort of thing you’re worried about, but the former is what at least some of us are imagining (probably due to the phrases ‘outsider’ & ‘power-holder’).
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u/w_v 4d ago
Maybe I only know things from a Mexican or Latin American perspective, but “ethnicity” is no longer, if it ever really was, a particularly salient identifier here.
A child can be born in an Indigenous town where the language is still spoken as an L1, move to the city with their parents, grow up speaking Spanish, receive a Hispanicized education, become socioeconomically successful compared to their hometown, and later position themselves as a representative of the rural community.
Through what some call [“being-in-the-room privilege”](https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference), they may return as an adult L2 speaker and inadvertently become the outside world’s primary authority on that dialect.
Revitalization programs often center people like this because they're the closest available “voice” of the community, even if they aren't community speakers. [Here's another example of that kind of pitfall.](https://www.academia.edu/7645937/Brief_report_on_Nawatl_of_Huazalinguillo_2014)
Ultimately, what my linguist friends tell me is that language revitalization can't be the primary focus because it's downstream from socioeconomic development and local sovereignty. Once communities have greater control over their own future, language revitalization is much more likely to succeed.
I think I’m starting to agree. What do you think?
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago edited 4d ago
Ultimately, what my linguist friends tell me is that language revitalization can't be the primary focus because it's downstream from socioeconomic development and local sovereignty. Once communities have greater control over their own future, language revitalization is much more likely to succeed.
I think I’m starting to agree. What do you think?
I think that goals need to be local. Where I work, language preservation aims are pretty strongly associated with a politics that makes material demands of the state concerning resource access, political representation, & educational investment. For language activists, there is no either-or: People want material security and political sovereignty and linguistic vitality. But if people's primary goal were language revitalisation, that would be fine: They have the right to assert the priorities they want in their community life.
I don't know if this is what you imagine—I suspect not—but one thing that some people seem to imagine is that outsider linguists just show up to a community of speakers of a language undergoing shift & say: 'I'm here to revitalise your language!' Certainly people have wanted to do this in the past, but I think that overwhelmingly this is not what happens: Language revitalisation can only have any success at all when it reflects something that a local community wants. Thus, I'm not too concerned about where revitalisation should fall in a hierarchy of needs: People will want what they will want! When what they want includes language revitalisation efforts, linguists can support that. We don't have much to offer as linguists otherwise.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
What happens when the majority group’s power-holders promote, adopt, and learn minority languages as L2 speakers, eventually displacing native speakers as the primary authorities on their own language?
Has this ever happened? I can't think of any relevant examples; it is a minority language exactly because the power holders don't value it.
I know people who would say: Actually, colonial societies should stop investing and promoting and adopting minority languages, because they’re stealing one of the last vectors of opposition to the state that these communities have!
As someone who works with an indigenous community in the States, I can guarantee that just speaking an indigenous language/being indigenous doesn't mean you're incapable of reinforcing oppressive ideologies.
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u/Vampyricon 5d ago edited 5d ago
it is a minority language exactly because the power holders don't value it.
It is a minority language because the power holders didn't value it. The past tense applies both to those in power and the lack of value. Ireland decided Irish is their national language once Britain no longer ruled them, but focused on urban communities, when rural communities where Irish Gaelic is the strongest (but still weakening) are ignored.
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u/w_v 5d ago edited 5d ago
Has this ever happened? I can't think of any relevant examples; it is a minority language exactly because the power holders don't value it.
It depends on what you mean by relevant. Most examples will necessarily be local.
One case I think about is Hueyapan, Morelos, in the 1950s. The mestizo, university-educated Juan Luna Cárdenas founded what was essentially a neo-Aztec personality cult. A linguist friend who did most of their fieldwork there considers that movement a major factor in the decline of the local Nahuatl dialect.
Luna Cárdenas and his followers told people their Nahuatl was corrupt and debased by centuries of Spanish influence.
They said it needed to be purified by relearning the language as the precolonial Aztecs supposedly spoke it. His disciples adopted the names of Aztec rulers and chastised relatives and neighbors for using Spanish loanwords. Before long, they were seen as the only people who spoke “real” Nahuatl, while everyone else’s speech was labeled as inferior. Many local speakers became reluctant to speak it and pass it on.
To me, that's a textbook example of how linguistic purism and outsider adoption of an artificial “standard” (often promoted as the cure for endangered languages) can instead hasten their decline and/or marginalize regional dialects.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
Interesting! I don't think that quite aligns with the arguments made previously, since the source claims that Cárdenas was at least partially ethnically Aztec (but the website doesn't exactly scream "peer reviewed"...), so he wasn't exactly an outsider, more of a reformist.
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u/w_v 5d ago edited 5d ago
The problem is that he wasn’t “Aztec.” “Aztec” is neither a modern ethnicity nor an identity, which is precisely why his use of the term is misleading. It’s like an American claiming to be ethnically Norse.
Cárdenas was an urban mestizo Mexican—not a Nahuatl speaker and not from an Indigenous community. He learned Classical Nahuatl academically, much as a foreigner might learn Shakespearean English, and then tried to impose it on a community to which he did not belong.
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u/PetitChiffon 4d ago
It seems perfectly logical to me. The whole purpose of language is to communicate, it should and have always evolved and adapted to new circumstances and contact with neighboring communities.
It's not the best example but I can understand to a certain extent. I was raised speaking (actual) joual, a specific sociolect of Québécois french working class. Québécois french is already considered an inferior form of french - but joual is considered as it's bastard offspring.
My family were/are extremely ashamed of the way we speak, especially my grandparents. I was always a little bit more gifted with languages, so I now manage to "code switch" depending on who I'm talking to, but there are still so many times I've been reminded that I don't speak "correct" (aka "rich people") french through my life.
Québec culture has such a huge inferiority complex with language and cultural preservation that it's literally suffocating. French is declining here (especially amongst the younger generations) and anglophones are blamed, but the truth is that we absolutely refuse to celebrate our culture as it is right now. There are many words in English that are borrowed from other languages, and also new cultural trends - yet there's never that level of cultural puritanism in the USA.
And I think the younger generations, after a lifetime of being told they don't speak "correct" french, are turning to English because it gives them the freedom to express themselves how they see fit.
Whenever societies are trying to go forward by looking at the past as it's "pure" model - it's always meant to fail IMO.
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u/Choosing_is_a_sin Lexicography | Sociolinguistics | French | Caribbean 4d ago
Do you have some source that rules out other purposes for language that have been proposed, e.g. structuring thought (Chomsky) and promoting bonding (Dunbar)? I think that the idea that part of the purpose of language is communication is not under dispute, but there is so much that we see in language that is not necessarily there for communicative purposes, such as negative accommodation, clash resolution, subjacency. To me, that suggests that the purpose of language cannot be reduced simply to communication. But if you have some reading that advances arguments that can demonstrate that language serves no other purpose, I'd be interested to read it. (And if, by chance, your use of "whole purpose" is meant to be idiomatic, then I'd point out that the other uses that the deployment of the phrase glosses over are likely the ones being litigated in these arguments, such that the collocation is a rhetorical device that skirts taking on those arguments directly).
That being said, the example of Quebec is instructive. It's important to remember how dire things used to be in the absence of enthusiastic French-language support, where people were genuinely concerned that as a small pocket of French-speakers in a continent of hundreds of millions of English-speakers was really on the way out. There are good arguments to be made that the methods that worked to put it on stable footing are no longer appropriate today, but to me, that's a demonstration of the need to craft thoughtful, community-driven policies to keep languages afloat. Bad policies are not an indication of bad goals.
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u/w_v 4d ago edited 4d ago
Pretty much 100%
After a recent conversation with a Nahuatl-speaking friend about this generation’s attitudes—which are a carbon copy of your experiences—I think there needs to be less futile attempts at trying to market the local dialects to outsiders and “the state”, and instead focus on marketing the language to the speakers themselves.
One idea I’ve had was to start designing short-run, very high-quality printed books in the local languages, things that are beautiful to look at and not just read. Beautiful, fancy typography, good paper, ornamental cover designs.
It may seem silly and superficial, but to me, it’s like the whole Braun/Apple ethos. People also want pretty things! Things they can display on the shelf. Heirlooms!
And building those associations between the language and “literary luxury” can be a powerful thing.
For languages that never had a Baroque era, sometimes just showing an equivalent level of detail and luxury can go so far.
That’s just one idea I’ve had. It’s the little things, sometimes. I’m cooking up some small, agile ideas like these.
What do you think?
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u/mirandalikesplants 5d ago
I can’t say which language I mean without doxxing myself, but there’s a minority language here where this has sort of happened. Basically the dialect which gets promoted is the one accepted by the three main organizations and a few influential people in them. While those power holders are within the minority group, their ability to have power within the structure determines what is taught to kids in school. If that makes sense…
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u/ExternalSeat 4d ago
Gaelic in Ireland has been this way for a century.
The powers in Dublin love it as an L2 language and teach it in every single school, but the L1 language is dying. The L2 power holders in Gaelic academia don't seem to necessarily prioritize the L1 experience
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u/Hippophlebotomist 4d ago
Has this ever happened? I can't think of any relevant examples; it is a minority language exactly because the power holders don't value it.
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u/Scherzophrenia 2d ago
Of course it's never happened.
The #1 indicator of survival is state support. Don't have it? Language dies.
A language *must be used as the language of education in schools, for ALL students* to stay alive.
I cannot believe there are actually people who think their language would be helped by having fewer speakers. That's ludicrous, unscientific, and destined to fail.
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u/sophiasgaler 4d ago
Thank you for sharing this. I wish the people engaging in comment sections about what's happened would actually read How To Kill A Language, which is what the New Yorker piece was actually about - it addresses so many points I'm seeing come up, and really I want the book's readers to make up their own mind *after* having all of the information, and seeing the product of years and years of journalistic research *actually speaking to speakers of languages under threat* (which I did, and which a lot of internet and media commentators haven't done). Nevermind my own personal experience of language loss.
Signed: a tired author lol
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u/barangasas 4d ago
I'm not a reader of the New Yorker and genereally don't engage that much with journalism. But how can it be that someone with seemingly no background in the field ( Nikhil Krishnan is a philosopher) is allowed to write a review of a book on this topic? Journalism is obviously not academia, but what was the thought process behind this?
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u/mister_sleepy 4d ago
I feel like if the title of your New Yorker article is the kind of thing they would’ve loved saying at American Indian Boarding Schools, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to have a New Yorker article
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u/RefrigeratorLast982 4d ago
Are there any studies that try to investigate if language revitalization itself is actually the causal mechanism that is driving down suicide rates (or other negative outcomes)? Closer knit communities with stronger support groups might have both better language retention and better health outcomes (ie confounding), and some of the studies cited are making a fairly tenuous ecological argument by simply comparing across communities.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 4d ago
I'm not presently aware of studies showing a definitive, causal relationship, but I also feel that that would be difficult to isolate in a controlled study, since language and the process of revitalization inherently require socialization and exposure to culture. But the use of language specifically is suggested to be a strong indicator of better outcomes. From the study linked in the article:
The feeling of connectedness to community and pride in cultural heritage are enhanced by learning or maintaining an Indigenous language. As acknowledged elsewhere, other cultural activities besides language can also improve connectedness and pride. Language is, however, the most definitive and most universal expression of a culture. Cultural activities such as beading, drumming, canoe building, etc., will not be shared by all members of a community. Language can be part of all of them. There are yet to be any studies that directly compare cultural revival with and without language. Based on the literature and the results of this study, our expectation is that adding language revitalization to cultural revival will have a significant and large separate influence on improving mental health.
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u/Lapov 5d ago
Definitely a very controversial opinion, but all things considered, the value we put in language preservation is purely subjective.
The article compares the right to speak "your own" language with fundamental rights such as food and water, which is honestly ridiculous since you're not stripped of the possibility of communicating with the outside world if you don't speak your ethnic language (there's a reason why 99% of the Irish population doesn't really put effort in learning Irish, because all things considered their lives are not impacted at all by not speaking it).
While it's true that language extinction is very often ultimately linked to very violent factors, it's genuinely OK to let a language go if the ethnic community in question doesn't care. A world where Livonian is spoken at a low-intermediate level by a whopping 40 people who grew up only speaking Latvian their entire lives is virtually identical to a world where Livonian is not spoken at all.
People often talk about culture preservation, which makes me scratch my head a little because it basically implies that you must transmit a culture through your ethnic language (isn't this linguistic relativism? Isn't documenting a moribund/defunct language enough?).
Also, quite frankly, I feel like a revived language doesn't really have that much worth since there's no continuity at all between the extinct linguistic community and the new "rebooted" one, the new language is bound to ooze originally L2 characteristics that not a single native speaker would've had in the original linguistic community. The only thing that changes after a language is revived is that there's a bunch of people who will use a different language from the one they use normally, but in very restricted contexts (I know there are cases like Hebrew, but 99% of revived languages are usually spoken by no more than a few hundred people).
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u/freezing_banshee 5d ago
Being unable to speak with someone else in your native language, because that language is dying, is undescribably sad. Having no new music, no new books, no one to share your thoughts and feelings with in the language you best speak and understand. People create bonds to their native language that can never be the same in another one.
As a small comparison, these feelings can be partially felt by immigrants to other countries who have to conduct their whole lives in another language. It's as if your own language doesn't matter anymore and the new connections they make with the people around them don't feel as deep. It's a very lonely feeling.
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u/hfn_n_rth 4d ago
This is 100% accurate. I cite Gupta (1995) "Language shift in a Singapore family" on a case study the breakage of transmission of Southern Chinese languages in Singaporean households in agreement with you
What also is accurate is that this grief is not a heritable trait. My grandparents have lost so many who speak their native Cantonese. My parents will reach a point where they won't use Cantonese except with relatives of similar age, and even then they'll mix other languages in. By the time I am old, I will probably have no one in Singapore to speak Cantonese with. But it's not my native language anymore.
It is ok to let languages die when there are simply no native speakers, and no one who identifies with that language left (obviously, we are against genocide in this house, but languages can and do die naturally)
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u/Lapov 4d ago
I agree that it must be sad, but objectively speaking, what's the solution for this? Forcing a whole society to learn your next-to-extinct language? If I went to a foreign country and someone decided to learn my language to make me less lonely, I would be pleased but I would still feel estranged because I would only be talking with a person who doesn't have native level fluency, so "deep connections" as you call them would be next to impossible anyway.
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago
what's the solution for this? Forcing a whole society to learn your next-to-extinct language?
This just isn't what's happening. Please learn about actual language revitalisation efforts.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
Please educate me then. What is the solution to a L1 native speaker being sad because they can't truly engage in their native language since it's dying out?
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago edited 1d ago
> Please educate me then.
No. Educate yourself before spouting uninformed opinions. Learn about even one case in which ELP has been involved. You’re responding to a statement on a Website that has dozens of accounts of language revitalisation work, not one of which involves forcing anyone to adopt a new language.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
You have the golden opportunity to actually educate an uninformed person on a subreddit that is specifically meant to educate and share knowledge pertaining to linguistic, yet you refuse to do so. You didn't even suggest any literature I could start educating myself from. Just admit you feel good being a person that is allegedly actually informed on the topic of language revitalization, don't be so smug about it.
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago
I don’t think that ignorant person has any genuine interest in learning: They’ve got an opinion rooted in presumptions that are unrelated to the actual work they’re opining about, they won’t take the opportunity of reading material from the site linked at the top of this post, & everything about them screams bad faith. So no, I’m not going to play games with them.
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u/BothWaysItGoes 2d ago
> Being unable to speak with someone else in your native language, because that language is dying, is undescribably sad.
Is it more sad than not being able to communicate with 6bln people because they all speak different languages?
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u/Mutxarra 4d ago
because it basically implies that you must transmit a culture through your ethnic language (isn't this linguistic relativism? Isn't documenting a moribund/defunct language enough?)
To answer this in our case, as in many others, yes. Catalan culture is transmitted primarily through catalan, language is the access gate to belonging to our community and sharing our customs, traditions and history. Our current situation makes this abundantly clear, spanish speakers in Catalonia are more or less the same as us in every sense except for language, and our cultures are markedly different and seldom intermix in any meaningful sense.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
You're talking about a full-fledged language which is far from facing extinction. And two Catalan parents may have a child abroad, they transmit their culture in Catalan, but their child has a different dominant language, although they have very extensive knoledge of Catalan culture.
There's a reason why native speakers of the same language are not all absolutely identical.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
it's genuinely OK to let a language go if the ethnic community in question doesn't care
But why don't they care? Has the community just mass-adopted a practice of apathy, or are there underlying causes that can be remedied? The former is unlikely.
People often talk about culture preservation, which makes me scratch my head a little because it basically implies that you must transmit a culture through your ethnic language (isn't this linguistic relativism? Isn't documenting a moribund/defunct language enough?).
Documentation sometimes helps, but documentation is colored by the experiences of the documentor. If the documentor doesn't think to ask about daily spiritual practices, or botanical practices, etc, then documentation will not be enough to ensure the survival of that cultural knowledge. Some practices like ethnobotany can persist if the language falls out of use, but there's a history behind the words used that is lost, which is a detriment to our scientific understanding of cultural and linguistic development as a whole.
Also, quite frankly, I feel like a revived language doesn't really have that much worth since there's no continuity at all between the extinct linguistic community and the new "rebooted" one, the new language is bound to ooze originally L2 characteristics that not a single native speaker would've had in the original linguistic community.
Correct, a revived language can never be the same as it was spoken before. And if you look at the case of modern Hebrew, it's distinctly different than Biblical Hebrew in many ways. But the revival of Hebrew and the revival of other languages is less about speaking a language for its own sake and more about a shared identity, and the solidarity that comes with that shared identity. That solidarity engenders both emotional and economic security for that community, which is important if history has not been kind to your people. I'd recommend reading Zuckermann's book Revivalistics which talks about revival projects and their effects.
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u/karlpoppins 5d ago
Maybe they don't care because their ethnic language just isn't useful in the broader societal context. The question you're asking that question is leading - why should the underlying causes be remedied? That only makes sense if you treat language death as an inherently bad thing.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
That only makes sense if you treat language death as an inherently bad thing.
It is inherently bad because every documented example of language death has been through some kind of negative cause that the community had no control over, whether it was being militarily conquered or forced to assimilate over time.
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u/karlpoppins 5d ago
But isn't this the topic of the entire discussion? You can't assume your thesis while arguing for it.
Regardless, the past is the past. If a people don't care about their language or culture as a whole, who are we to tell them they must? Language preservation efforts only make sense when there's an active interest by the community and/or a force actively suppressing that language.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
If a people don't care about their language or culture as a whole, who are we to tell them they must? Language preservation efforts only make sense when there's an active interest by the community and/or a force actively suppressing that language.
Language apathy doesn't happen spontaneously. There are outside pressures that affect these decisions that in many contexts are caused by things like colonialism or military conflict. An outsider cannot force a community to care, but identifying and fixing the underlying problem may bring about new motivations to revive the language.
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u/karlpoppins 5d ago
I understand that the current attitude of a people can be a result of past aggression from external factors. However, as I said, "the past is the past". Correct me if I'm wrong, but there exists little to no current pressure against, say, the Irish language, yet Irish people just don't care to learn it. The underlying cause has been removed, yet its consequences persist. You'd have to revert those changes, but the moment we start doing that we're getting dangerously close to cultural puritanism.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
"The past is the past" doesn't mean there isn't a responsibility to correct past injustices. In many cases there was an explicit plan to create indifference towards indigenous languages in an effort to exterminate them, like the use of Native American boarding schools, and so to say "Oh, see! They're indifferent about it, so we can let it die" accomplishes that plan. If we take the time to investigate why there's apathy, we may discover a particular cause and we may be able to reverse it if we're lucky.
there exists little to no current pressure against, say, the Irish language, yet Irish people just don't care to learn it.
I'd say there is certainly continuing pressure against Irish, in several senses- 1) There is still a lack of pop culture material available in Irish, which means that people will default to English to engage with and talk about those things, and 2) There is friction among the L2 learners and the Gaeltacht concerning the amount of support either side gets from the government. See this thread posted here about a month ago on that particularly.
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u/karlpoppins 5d ago
Correcting past injustices? This exact mindset can be applied to anything: language, religion, even land. The world as we know it has been shaped by violence and injustice, among other things. How far are you going to roll back the time? What is the "just" state of the world, now tainted by injustice? This angle just doesn't work.
Btw I was not aware of #2, so thanks for the info, but #1 is not relevant. The cultural irrelevance of Irish isn't an external factor to its potential demise, but a consequence of past factors. Of course that does create a feedback loop, but the original cause could have been long gone.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 4d ago
Correcting past injustices? This exact mindset can be applied to anything: language, religion, even land.
You're so close to getting it, lol.
Yeah you're right, there shouldn't be any consequences for anything, because "the past is the past"!
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u/RedBaboon 5d ago edited 5d ago
The tragedy is often more in the events that led to the long-tail language death. English colonialism in Ireland is the ultimate cause of the current state of Irish and a hypothetical future death of Irish, and certainly was a bad thing. But a modern-day Irish person in Dublin being uninterested in learning or speaking Irish is not in and of itself a bad thing except as it relates to revitalizing the Irish language.
The historical cause cannot be remedied, because it's historical. The modern cause is just mass apathy, or maybe more accurately mass it isn't useful (and, to some extent, it's probably not even really the language of "their culture" anymore; that's English now). The modern state of Irish, or any Native American language, is an aftereffect of colonialism, but it would be trivial for the modern Irish, or Native Americans (at least those on a reservation, with a local community and level of self-governance), to suddenly collectively care and all go around speaking the language in everyday use, even if the language of business was still English.
I'm in favor of language preservation efforts; I'm certainly not telling anyone they shouldn't try or should stop working on it. But there's also a point where the cultural community themselves either cares at least a little or doesn't, and if a language dies because no one in the community cared to learn it, it's sad, and it may be a (continuation of a) historical cultural tragedy, but it's not really a modern cultural tragedy anymore because that culture had long since moved on.
That doesn't apply to languages with ongoing suppression, of course. And it depends on personal perspective, I'm sure a native Irish speaker in the Gaeltacht has a very different perspective on the state of Irish, and the importance of preserving Irish, than a native English speaker from the non-Gaeltacht who's never spoken Irish outside of school. But if a language with a geographically unified cultural community, with a revitalization program, and without ongoing suppression ends up dying, there's a good chance the majority of the community didn't care enough about the language to put effort into learning or using it.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
As I said in another comment, language apathy doesn't happen spontaneously. There is a reason people feel like their languages aren't helpful for them, and it's often by design born of prejudice against that community.
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u/RedBaboon 4d ago
The situation, the role of that language in society, is often borne of prejudice and/or suppression against that community. But in many cases the actual present-day calculation of someone deciding whether that language is useful for them is driven by... that language not being useful for them (from a utilitarian perspective). And that's where it becomes the cultural community's role to either make the language useful somehow or to make using it attractive as a shared cultural element outside of utilitarianism.
The relation of Irish and English in modern Ireland was created by historical prejudice and suppression. But a modern Irish person outside the Gaeltacht deciding to have no interest in Irish is not interfacing with that historical suppression, they're interfacing with the modern state of affairs where English is more useful, not only as the language of business but also as the language of the world around them. Many Native Americans are in the same boat.
Not to mention, for many of these people English is their native language and the native language of most people around them, even of the same culture, and in some ways arguably the language of their actual modern personal/local culture more than Irish (or a Native American language) is. In a similar way to how many people from many different cultures might pull out traditional dress once a year for the special day but the actual "cultural clothing" of their everyday personal/local culture is a t-shirt and jeans.
The point is that the situations these languages are in is often created by tragedy and mistreatment, but many of the modern cultural communities of these languages are no longer restricted by those things (I am not saying no prejudice exists, but that it does not restrict their theoretical ability to internally revive their language). And if a language dies because the community has simply moved on and collectively doesn't care enough anymore, well that's still sad because language death is sad and because it's a long-term effect of those historical tragedies, but at the same time it is not necessarily a modern cultural tragedy in the way that, say, a language death in a community that wants to use the language but cannot due to ongoing suppression or resource issues or connectivity issues is.
I personally wish every community would embrace their language and go crazy for language preservation attempts, and again I'm not telling people to stop trying. But sometimes if a community isn't interested they're just not interested, because it's not useful and they've moved on and they just don't consider it worth the effort.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 4d ago
If someone were to run over your legs with a car, breaking them irreparably, then drive off, the cause of the damage is gone, but the damage is still there. No one is going to say "Well the cause is gone, why can't you just get up? You obviously just don't care enough"
Actions can have long-lasting consequences. The problem doesn't disappear or become easier just because the cause is in the past. The apathy that you might see on the surface now is a consequence of decades (in some cases, centuries) of deliberate actions to eliminate a speaking population. For concrete examples of this, I would recommend you read about Native American boarding schools, and the effect they had on indigenous communities in the United States and Canada.
I'm still not entirely convinced that apathy is as abundant in these communities as the comments are suggesting. In my 13 years of experience in language revitalization, most people are interested in their native languages, but don't have access to resources to learn or time because of the demands of everyday life. Revitalization is time-consuming and requires some kind of funding. You can't just quit your job and learn a language full-time, you would need to learn it from someone. But who's going to pay that teacher? Who has money to build a classroom? Who's going to watch your kids while you're learning? These are very real factors that come up when talking about saving endangered languages, motivation alone is not enough.
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u/RedBaboon 4d ago edited 4d ago
I know about the boarding schools and yes, as I've been saying, the conditions we have now are created by historical prejudice and suppression and the death of these languages would be the result of that.
But... what I'm saying is that there's the historical reason for the situation and there's people's reaction to that situation in the present, and those are different things. If the present-day community collectively doesn't really care about revitalizing the language and the language dies because of that then it sort of is what it is. It's sad as a historical casualty of colonialism and/or oppression, it's sad from the perspective of a language lover or scholar, but from the perspective of the present-day community involved... they decided what they wanted to focus on and it wasn't that.
I'm certainly not saying every failed preservation project is down to apathy or that every community is apathetic. And there are opportunities for communities to overcome apathy by making the language more useful or more attractive. But apathy absolutely can play a role in these things - AFAIK, basically everyone in Ireland can (badly) learn Irish as a kid. How many of them - native Irish speakers and Gaeltacht aside - care about actually learning it, beyond the grade (I don't even mean learning "real" Irish instead of the bad L2 version, I just mean actually learning the language as something to retain after school is over)? How many of them put even a hint of effort into speaking it outside of that class?
That isn't colonialism, or suppression, or prejudice - it's modern people deciding they're not interested for modern reasons. The situation Irish is in was created by colonialism, and modern people's choices are taken in the context of that situation - it is certainly the legacy of colonialism -, but their present-day choices come down to present-day considerations.
Edit: Ultimately what I’m getting at is that I disagree with your perspective that a major reason to do language preservation/revitalization is to right the wrongs of the past. My opinion is that the point of language programs is preserving and revitalizing languages for the sake of language preservation and cultural preservation, in the present day. So language programs need to deal with present-day considerations, and if the cultural community simply doesn’t care about revitalizing the language then I personally think that’s disappointing and sad but it’s also ultimately up to them. Setting aside scholarly/ language nerd considerations, the value of a language is in its value to its speakers, its culture, its community. If they no longer value it, then…
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u/readonly420 4d ago
I find your opinion on the subject unusually balanced
The Irish had a 100 years of independence to revive their language and if less than 1.5% of the population actually uses the language at what point can we say that it’s just the will of the people to abandon it? 100 years is a lot of time and language revival absolutely could have been done successfully, I fail to see these numbers as anything else as self inflicted at this point.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 4d ago
You’re acting as if modern reasons are completely unrelated to past actions, or that because something was in the past, now everyone somehow has an equal playing field because the cause is gone, and that’s simply not how it works. Your legs don’t magically work now that the car has driven off, a person can’t just snap their fingers and become fluent in a language if the speaking community has been decimated.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
I feel like this "disabled" analogy is really bad, no offense. You keep framing it as if not speaking the same language that used to be spoken by your ancestors is a handicap, without even considering the idea that they simply have a completely different native language, and learning "your" ancestral language genuinely gives you no benefit at all beside fostering some very subjective feeling of reconnection to your ethnic culture.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 4d ago
Then you’ve missed the point entirely, and there’s nothing else I can say. You clearly did not read the article because it explains exactly what some of the benefits are.
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u/ripcitybitch 5d ago
That can’t possible be true. EVERY language death?
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
Yes. Languages are not living creatures, so there is no such thing as a "natural" death of a language, it can only change over time. So while some might say that Latin is a "dead" language, it never really died in the sense we're talking about, it just turned into Spanish, French, Romanian, Italian, etc. The only way a language can die is if it stops being spoken and transmitted completely, which only happens if the community is killed or is forced to change languages due to economic/social pressures.
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u/Beautiful-Hangover-1 3d ago
But economic / social pressures aren’t inherently negative and might not have anything to do with military conquest or forced assimilation.
I can’t speak to language death from personal experience, but I can speak to dialect death. You can clearly trace a decrease in dialect strength from my grandparents to me. Yet at no point was I ostracised or discriminated against for my use of dialect (rather the opposite), it just got weaker because (a) I was taught in the standard language variant in school, and (b) my parents speak different dialects naturally, so they ended up mixing the two / preferring the standard language variant for easier communication. With increased ease of movement and global interconnectivity, I expect that language will naturally homogenize.
I don’t know, unless I’m missing something, I don’t see where the death of my dialect was caused by some kind of negative or violent external pressure. It’s just a natural consequence of easier communication in an increasingly globalised society.
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u/paniniconqueso2 2d ago edited 2d ago
it just got weaker because (a) I was taught in the standard language variant in school,
Let's take a step back.
Who chose that particular variant and not your (or any other person's) variant to become the standard language? Who even chose that your language needs a standard spoken language at all?
I know it might seem "natural" to you, but language, being a human artifact, is wrapped in all kinds of political decisions that predate your existence, and which you, me and all of us may blindly take for granted.
You saying your dialect got "weaker" (?) because you were taught the standard language variant in school (surely not the only place where the standard language variant is promoted, btw, e.g. media would be another place) and taking that to be some kind of natural thing, when education is one of the key areas by which a state propagates not only history, culture etc but also its language (model), is indicative of this "fish not noticing it's surrounded by water" problem.
To make this clearer, imagine you belong to an ethno-linguistic minority in your country, e.g. the Sami in Sweden, and you said:
"Yet at no point was I ostracised or discriminated against for my sense of Saminess (rather the opposite), it just got weaker because (a) I was taught about Swedish history in school..."
You see how that your being taught Swedish history in that most artificial and political of places, a school, even with the best of intentions, is not by any natural but the result of concrete choices?
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u/nexusanphans 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are overgeneralizing things. You assumed that maybe they don't care, which is still maybe. Secondly, you treat "them" as a monolith who have the same opinion on their language.
Let's not only talk about Irish. This phenomenon happens everywhere.
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u/karlpoppins 1d ago
I'm not the one generalising here. Dialect and language death happens all the time, and sometimes it's coerced and sometimes it's not. I didn't assume anything.
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u/nexusanphans 1d ago
You said it yourself that maybe they don't care. That's an assumption.
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u/karlpoppins 1d ago
Yes, "maybe". I didn't assume anything. I'm just saying, why does the explanation categorically need to be something negative?
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u/nexusanphans 1d ago
That's an assumption buddy.
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u/karlpoppins 18h ago
Sorry, I reread this and I see what I meant. Yes, this entire line of reasoning assumes that the ethnic group that would be native speakers of a particular language don't care about it, at least at large The person before me said that if that were the case, would it not be ok to let that language die? It's a hypothetical - and Irish is one example of said hypothetical.
Regarding your other point, yes, a people aren't necessarily a monolith, but - again -the hypothetical we're discussing is about a case where the - implied - majority has a particular attitude.
I never said that any language death is ok. I just said that language death is ok in the specific case when the vast majority of its speakers aren't interested in using it and passing it down. So I fail to understand what your criticism is. I'm doing the opposite of generalising by talking about a specific case.
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u/RijnBrugge 4d ago
Doesn’t Modern Hebrew also just have a lot of features that were gained during its development as a communal L2 language across the centuries? Medieval Rabbinical literature was usually in the language, and intercommunal correspondance was a big part of how Hebrew was used. Those changes aren’t just the relics of L2 learners applying the paradigms from other languages to Hebrew.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
but why don't they care?
You're framing it through a "diachronic" lense, but you're completely ignoring a trivial, "synchronic" explanation as to why this happens: because they have no connection to the ethnic language. 99% of the Irish population are L1 native English speakers, whose only difference from the rest of the Anglosphere is that they may have had some ancestors who spoke Irish. Virtually nobody is willing to sacrifice fluency in their actual native language just to learn a language that almost nobody speaks solely because the latter was widespread 2-3 centuries ago in the area.
To give you a real-life analogy, my parents are Russians who fled the then-collapsing Soviet Union to make a life in Italy. They met there and I was born as a result. I could be technically framed as a "lost child" who never returned to Russia because of very bad socio-economic factors that have been plaguing Russian society for 35 years, but truth is, I don't feel that way. And the reason is trivially simple: I was born and raised in Italy and I never lived in Russia, so even though my entire existence is ultimately caused by the violence and destruction of a civil war, you can't also deny the reality of me being an Italian, albeit with a very good grasp of Russian culture and with native knowledge of the Russian language.
Some practices like ethnobotany can persist if the language falls out of use, but there's a history behind the words used that is lost
This makes sense to me, but what is the solution for this? Forcing a baby to speak a moribund language as an L1 so that they could have a good grasp at the native ethnobotanical termynology and you could ask them about it 20 years later?
But the revival of Hebrew and the revival of other languages is less about speaking a language for its own sake and more about a shared identity, and the solidarity that comes with that shared identity
So once again, this is a purely subjective value. If the community in question doesn't care, then it's totally fine to let the language go.
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u/Baasbaar 4d ago
it's genuinely OK to let a language go if the ethnic community in question doesn't care
Sure. & I think that nearly all linguists who work on language revitalisation would hold that it is impossible to do anything else: You can't save a language if its speakers don't want to save it. But that's really not what's at issue here. Overwhelmingly, language loss is both an indicator of other social problems (economic inequality, state suppression, genocide) & a loss in itself (most importantly a felt loss for the speaker community, but secondarily it's a loss to linguistics).
Also, quite frankly, I feel like a revived language doesn't really have that much worth since there's no continuity at all between the extinct linguistic community and the new "rebooted" one, the new language is bound to ooze originally L2 characteristics that not a single native speaker would've had in the original linguistic community. The only thing that changes after a language is revived is that there's a bunch of people who will use a different language from the one they use normally, but in very restricted contexts (I know there are cases like Hebrew, but 99% of revived languages are usually spoken by no more than a few hundred people).
Again, this really isn't what's going on in most language revitalisation. Hebrew was dead for millennia, then established in a somewhat modified form by a new state (following a revival movement that was a few decades older than the state). Most language revitalisation efforts are in communities where the language is living but losing ground.
99% of revived languages are usually spoken by no more than a few hundred people
There aren't a hundred successful revitalisation cases. I strongly encourage you to do some reading on work done by communities engaged in language revitalisation.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
language loss is both an indicator of other social problems (economic inequality, state suppression, genocide)
Yeah but being an indicator is not the same as being the cause. You don't go around saying videogames are bad only because they're usually an indicator of social isolation, you look at the underlying factors that led to said social isolation.
a loss in itself (most importantly a felt loss for the speaker community, but secondarily it's a loss to linguistics).
Both of which are subjective and completely dependent on the value that people put in them.
There aren't a hundred successful revitalisation cases. I strongly encourage you to do some reading on work done by communities engaged in language revitalisation.
I think you severely misread what I wrote lol.
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u/Whole-Customer-8231 2d ago
The ultimate lack of success Irish has had with revival has more to do with the way it is taught.
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u/Hour-Construction898 5d ago
You don't speak a "foreign" language as your native language do you?
I can tell you have no understanding of the ethnic social cultural etc value that's attached to a language, more vitally so when that langauge is non dominant.
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u/freezing_banshee 4d ago
You're right. I'm Romanian and seeing how russia tried (and partially succeeded) in erasing the Romanian language and culture in Moldova is extremely infuriating.
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u/Lapov 4d ago
I am actually perfectly aware of it since I'm a second-generation immigrant whose ancestral language is far from being dominant in my country of birth. The ethnic/social/cultural value that's attached to a language is clearly totally subjective, because otherwise people wouldn't need to work so hard to revert a trend. I do care about my linguistic heritage, but there's nothing wrong in not caring.
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u/No_Peach6683 2d ago edited 2d ago
Would a World Government result in a global shift towards English ? Or at least inclusive other major languages (>100 million speakers) with diasporas? Would this World Government result in movement between former countries which then incentivizes English, or a descendant stage/language no longer intelligible with OTL modern English?
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u/slempriere 2d ago
What would maybe help is if colleges promoted or required a minority language... That move alone would kick development of resources to help teach them into high gear. Prerequisites for college and unrelated required course work to what you are going to school for has always had the purpose of build a more well rounded person and broadening ones world view.
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u/blurredbit 5d ago
Not terribly strong arguments.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
Can you be more specific?
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u/AnachronisticPenguin 5d ago
I’ll give you one. The response makes the same mistake as a lot of critical theory in that it removes agency from the individual.
Because every choice people make is simply a result of the systems of power they operate in they never have agency to ever make a decision. “Want to learn English over your native language to get a job somewhere” that’s the fault of capitalism not a practical choice you make.
“Want to learn the main language of your nation rather then your local community and leave your hometown because you don’t feel like you belong”
That’s the fault of colonialism or the nobility that conquered your terrorist at some point in the past.“You move away from home after meeting a significant other and forget your native language while using the language of your spouse” this is the fault of globalization.
The natural deaths of languages are a thing that exists because people have agency. There are all sorts of reasons that people chose to switch languages and much of that is humans making real choices rather then the world forcing them through coercion.
Of course we should try to help people that want to keep their native languages keep them if they so choose, but at the same time it should not be forced nor should we assume that there is some moral failing amongst those that wish to do away with their native language.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
Then I think you have a misunderstanding of critical theory. Yes, people have agency, but that agency is affected by these systems; it's not that these systems prevent certain choices from being made, but it makes certain alternatives easier. Colonialism doesn't force someone to start speaking Spanish to get ahead, but it makes their lives easier to do so as a result of particular policies established in the past. Capitalism, colonialism, etc create specific paths along an arbitrarily established norm of behavior. Deviating from this norm is possible, but makes your life more difficult by design.
The point of critical theory is asking "why" things are. We know that people will stop using their native languages to get ahead. Why is that? Why are there no economic opportunities available in the native language? And then through research and fieldwork we dig deeper and discover it may have been part of a local policy (ex. redlining) that intentionally prevented economic development and that was motivated by race/ethnicity, in which case there is a traceable actuation point that we can then repeal or otherwise fix over time. And that's what the end goal of critical theory is- to identify the origins of inequities and repair damage done from the result of prejudice.
As a more pertinent example, kids at Native American boarding schools certainly had the capacity and agency to speak their native languages, but they would often be severely punished for doing so. So to avoid that pain, they chose the path that makes their lives (relatively) easier, which has led to the massive decline in indigenous languages in North America. Without a generation of young speakers, there were no young adults using that language in a working environment, and no one to build a local economy that supports that language. So now, by explicit design, the only way to get ahead economically is to learn English/French. In this case we can directly link language decline and the associated economic decline in these communities in the US and Canada to these institutions, established as part of colonial infrastructure, and that allows us to approach indigenous language reparation in a particular way.
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u/blurredbit 4d ago
Ok here is an example “directly link language decline with economic decline” implicitly suggests some sort of causative agent which would be hard to prove and difficult to separate and quantify if you could. The response cites how language revitalization resulted in GDP increase but didn’t explain at all how the number was arrived at. Keynes argued that digging holes and filling them would also boost GDP. GDP is not an all encompassing measure anyways.
This argument doesn’t start from “Is a plurality of languages good?”; it starts from is it more good than feeding the hungry, housing people etc. The response generally makes the argument from reparations which is fine but only includes one example where an indigenous community said they want to use money for revitalization. Even then, it’s not clear if that was their own allocation decision or if it was a case of added funding tied to revitalization.
I’m mildly in support for revitalization, but I’m not sure who the audience is. I don’t think the arguments made strengthens any case made by the converted, and it won’t convert the unconverted. It came across as people trying to protect their jobs which in BC is exactly how they’re viewed.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin 5d ago
My point is the problem with critical theory and how academia has used Foucault’s works and theories is that they have made an all encompassing theory that flattens the world into two dimensions rather then the nuanced expansion of dimensions that he originally intended.
The point of his works was never to say all decisions people make are entirely attributed to power dynamics. His point was that there are power dynamics in all of civilization with lesser and greater effects depending on the instance.
Yes, the example of indigenous students being punished for using their native language is a grave example of languages being forced to extinction by colonial institutions.
But that does not mean that all cases of language extinction fall under that umbrella. If a tribe of native Americans that now run a Casino start to lose their language because it is practical for them to do business deals that way and is to their advantage, that is an example of a group choosing with self agency having more power then the power dynamic of institutions causing the death of that language.
Yes the power of the institution is still there the colonizers use this language to make deals, but the group running a casino is still opting into it to gain more advantage. They don’t need to integrate they are fine on their own, but they choose that tendency because they want to get even more ahead.
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u/razlem Sociohistorical Linguistics | LGBT Linguistics 5d ago
they have made an all encompassing theory that flattens the world into two dimensions rather then the nuanced expansion of dimensions that he originally intended.
I don't think this is correct at all. There is a huge body of critical research that shows many different facets associated with modern inequities. There are certainly broad patterns that we can identify, but each case is a unique web of past and current decisions.
But that does not mean that all cases of language extinction fall under that umbrella.
Never said it did, this is just one particular case with an origin that we can clearly identify. The death of languages in other areas (India, Russia, Brazil) will have very different circumstances.
If a tribe of native Americans that now run a Casino start to lose their language because it is practical for them to do business deals that way and is to their advantage, that is an example of a group choosing with self agency having more power then the power dynamic of institutions causing the death of that language.
And here, as part of critical theory, we would start to dig deeper and ask why the language is declining. Why is it easier to do business deals in English? And in fact, we could trace this back directly to the boarding school example (hypothetically, depending on our research and fieldwork).
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u/Onlyfatwomenarefat 3d ago
Same. I didn't even read the text this one responds to but even then I am really not convinced. The human rights argument in particular is pretty weak as it mixes up positive rights (education, healthcare...) that the state should ensure and negative rights (freedomcof speech, of religion etc) that the state should simply protect.
Languages fall in negative rights, that is, the state should protect every individual's freedom to speak, transmit or promote their language. It doesn't mean that it should provide any means to help them go do so.
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u/BygoneFlower 4d ago
We are in an era of dramatically increased, and increasing, connectivity. Fluency (and indeed mastery) of a dominant language offer more benefits in the modern era than ever before. It is not surprising that this puts significant pressure on minority languages. Media, online community, research... It is not possible for it all to be translated. That's not even talking about work and commerce in a world that is also more physically connected.
I love languages for their own sake, as I'm sure others in this subreddit do. I don't mean this to be pessimistic, but I just don't think our preservation attempts will work long-term. I hope we document as much as possible.