Safeguarding Endangered Languages: Ethics, History & Action

[00:00:15]well thank you very much Tim that was a marvelous wide ranging well-informed almost Sensational introduction I thought um I had been warned that I needed to open the field in a conventional way but I see no need to do that at all I can move straight on to the um theme that I want to take out which is really to assume that we all of us know what endangered languages are if we didn't know we know now thanks to Tim and to think why this is an issue that should concern us why should we protect endangered languages in fact um this is something that comes up whenever one is um in an interview with one of the major media they will always ask well why is it worth worrying about these languages anyway I thought that would be a good question to try to give a bit of a novel answer to so what I'm going to do is talk ethics with you to start with and then illustrate my ethical texts with one or two examples from history and leave it to my distinguished colleagues who have recent experience of working with endangered languages and think of what can be done for such languages uh to make them less endangered and possibly even vital in the future um I happen to be the chairman of something called the foundation for endangered languages this is a charity which has been going for about 15 years now and here is our raon de we exist to support enable and assist the documentation protection and promotion of endangered languages now those are um three different things and they are all important in this field documentation is all about getting a record of a language especially if the language looks as if it's not going to be around very much longer you can do all sorts of things with that record but unless you do get that record there's little you can do when the language goes out of existence on the other hand and at the other end when you're thinking about the future of the language you may want to try to reverse the arrow of time so to speak to reverse the trend to make a language which has been losing speakers gain speakers in the future that's called the process of language of revitalization so that's the past and the future if you like what I'm now going to talk about is protection how can we or rather why should we protect languages which look like they're losing speakers so I make no apologies for taking a very ethical view of this here I thought we should go to the master when we come to trying to answer an ethical question um ethics is a notoriously sticky area um Emmanuel [ __ ] tries to get some content for what there would be in ethics from the very nature of Ethics itself of a moral law what he came up with with something uh is something we know as the categorical imperative which in its simplest form is Act only according to that Maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law so ethics has to be Universal or it is nothing that's what he's really saying there and a little bit later on in the same discussion he talks about viewing other people as means to an end as against viewing them as ends in in themselves and it is the view of other agents as ends in themselves which is the distinctively ethical one by contrast U perhaps more in the positivist uh Anglo-Saxon tradition it's all about what you could get away with perhaps um life can sometimes seem to be a zero sum game um if we win you lose so in order um for us to win you have to lose that sort of idea is beyond the idea behind the idea that endangered languages are unnecessary luxuries from the past other people's luxuries of course not our own and they're in our way um we have this phrase dog eat dog I rather prefer the Sanskrit equivalent of that which is called mataya matsa a fish Naya is one of the branches of philosophy known as logic so this is fish logic and here we have a nice illustration of fish logic at its harshest and it's because people have looked at the nature of the situation of languages in the world in this sort of way that English has sometimes been called a killer language the idea is that people take up English and so they're going to lose their other languages the other languages must die now actually this is a rather considerable misconception um largely based on the world viw of people who are monolingual themselves they think um if they're going to take up our language obviously they have to lose their own now the majority of the world's population are actually bilingual they know this is a lie or least they would know this lie they stop to think about it but they tend to buy into the pro propagated lies of the Richer less than half of the world who are predominantly monolingual it has to be said um but if on the other hand we were to look at this product in the same way that we looked at um the needs for having a good life in our own Society if you want to get on with other people you don't sweep them aside saying there's no room for them because you've got to do what you need to do rather you look for good La good neighborliness um they'll do their thing and you can do yours um you might even be concerned to protect other rights some people say that is um essential to a good society and even in the um law of um landlord and tenant as I was interpreted to me by my father who used to practice as a solicitor not 10 minutes walk away from here um you the landlord's duty to his pant is to allow him undisturbed enjoyment of what he already has that would be a reasonable way for the um legislators and uh policy leaders relevant to um major languages to view the minority languages of the world another thing I learned from my father apparently is a um legal Maxim seek now I'm sure a few in this audience will need a translation of that but I have provided one for the very few um probably the monolingual English speakers um who would like it so so use your own that you do not hurt what belongs to another this is all we are asking for this is the ethical basis of the U endangered language protection movement you see members of an endangered language um speech community may sometimes be caught saying that I wish we didn't speak this language because then we wouldn't have so many problems um famously Peter loged a um phonetician at the um at UCLA in California um was doing work with a dealo speaker in East Africa who said that he didn't want his children to learn the language because it would just be too much trouble for them they'd be much better off um knowing kikuyu or Swahili or or even English and Peter logid said well who am I as a linguist to oppose that but the fact is that not all speakers of deallo have that view but they get pushed into giving up on their language whether they're constrained by circumstances bullied by people in power urged by the the mass media or simply condoled by the rising Generation Um their young children even um to do so so that they could be part of something bigger than themselves in the old days it was in order to be a good citizen of the Empire um or nowadays it's so that you can take part in the world economy you shouldn't stand in the way of progress I used to hear that all the time in the 1950s 1960s interesting we don't hear so much about it nowadays and administrators may also wish to make sure that um there are fewer languages because it means fewer forms to be drafted and um directed to particular agencies and particular populations perhaps more seriously traditionally people have thought that if there are many languages spoken in my domain I'm going to have trouble with political divisiveness let's try and iron that out so the um speakers of the endangered languages are the ones who are supposed to play the costs for all these things um they're the ones who've got something to lose nobody else is losing anything except in terms of world heritage um but the problem is that the rewards they are offered usually for giving up on their languages are all rather bogus okay there is this big Empire there is this big world economy but who is going to get access to it are you actually going to get access to it as a result of giving up what makes you distinctive whose progress is being promoted I mean in in great organizations great Empires great um lands different social groups will progress differently is there in fact only one path to a desirable future maybe different people should be doing different things and maybe they'll do better all of them severally by thinking about their own future if we look at the administrative Arguments for getting rid of endangered languages because they just get in the way um why is why are they in the way they're in the way because it's assumed that the people who speak them need to be looked after specially and the language makes it difficult to get at them but will those people actually gain by being dependent on welfare perhaps policy ought to be directed in the opposite in the right opposite Direction and most important of all I think these political divisions that we see they merge people into a larger unit if they are lost so identities are lost people sense of who they are is inevitably diminished now they may gain something by feeling that they're taking part in the great achievements of uh US foreign policy or UK foreign policy um it's difficult to see quite what else they will will will get out of it um the real point about all this is is that it's based on a misconception the idea that there's a zero SU game that um if you gain you have to lose your language in order to gain other things actually you don't gain anything by losing a language you just lose that language you've got to look to gain and to learn another language perhaps but by learning another language you don't lose your own there's no reason you should lose your own um even if you could say that getting rid of the uh the minority languages means that there's less scope for discrimination Human Society is quite good at finding discrimination and it's largely in order to keep Outsiders out you find a reason to discriminate against them if they if if they speak your language now you'll think of other things that they got that's not quite right about them they don't have the right degree of Education they have the wrong accent they come from the wrong part of town or whatever so inevitably when we lose these differentiations The Wider Community is diminished um its cultural wealth as a whole by definition is diminished you might say that there are certain forms of cultural wealth that we don't want I mean considering the uh moral problem which confronted people in the British EMP Empire working what to do out about Sati in the early 19th century um this was hallowed Indian tradition to burn widows and perhaps we should do something about stamping it out um similarly um with with tgy the um the um murdering of people on on um who were walking from one part part of India to another and that needed to be Stamped Out you could look at happened in portug in Portugal's um conquest of Brazil where cannibalism was widespread some forms of there I mean the argument I'm making has its limitations because you might say that there are higher possibly categorical imperative considerations which means that we don't actually want to have a rule which says it's okay to um to eat other people or to burn them um but in general of course um cultural variety is not as as dangerous or as evidently um delerious as that so um it's clear whatever you do that when you lose this language you are going to lose elements of cultural identity and cultural Goods now what I'm going to do very quickly now just seeing how I'm doing um is to give some examples of the past now my my friends are going to be giving examples of language endangerment in the present but this is an issue which is really as old as humanity and it's certainly as old as human imperialism and and human civilization so what I wanted to quickly do is have a look at these um cases in the past the case of the G in the Roman Empire the TP speaking Indians in Brazil the UB in zis Russia that that takes us through the last two Millennia quite well and then we can look at some people who are on the other side of history people who managed to cang on to their language one way or another and see what the effect of that was on them so let's consider to start with um this conquest of the GS um the central achievement you could say of the Roman Empire um was achieved by Julius Caesar in um from uh 59 to 49 BC Conquering the top um 2/3 of what they call Galia and we now think of as France um there's a famous picture here of the Gish General versing G on his way to surrender to Julius Caesar at the last there um this is what it's it's quite interesting actually that one has to take one's hat off to our um our cousins the French in that they try to in their um art to some extent dramatize some of these things that we all know about that the Romans conquered Gaul so what did it mean for actual people at the time and it's quite nice to see um somehow the scale of a Roman camp and how big it it must have seemed how intimidating it must have seemed even to someone who was a general on behalf of most of the Gish population at the time so this is lot's picture of the surrender of Ving G now what Caesar was doing and this is not what you find in Caesar's GIC Wars was stamp leading to the decline and extinction of the cult culture which produced the picture you see in front of you this is what was taken of the gundestrup C cauldron it's actually found in Denmark but it shows items of what must have been an extremely complicated story which was the myth of this God konos about which we now know nothing this is what happens when people give up their language and they give up they inevitably give up their culture you could say that they were doing perfectly well and in the three or four centuries it took for Gish to die out to be replaced all over what is now France by um a form of Latin which developed into French uh different forms of French of course um oxitan as well as francien but that procedure which in actually was also accompanied with the spread of the Christian religion um around France led to the loss of a an exceedingly complicated learned tradition of Doctrine and of story which we know was there because Caesar does tell us that it took people 20 years in order to get fully educated as a druid in the Gish tradition it's all gone we don't know what it was we're all the poorer by this and there were some amazing things here you see um commercial advertising had had realized that sex cells in the first century ad in Gaul here is a completely bit of gratuitous eye candy from a Potter stamp from Ruan in the first century ad all it says in Gish is made by rugos son of Sula and if you remember the pot you you may not remember why you remember the pot now what the Romans had done was effectively replace the previous um much less systematic and certainly less literate um Imperial power which had taken over Europe before them which was the GS and who apparently did it on the basis of their skill in Iron Foundry they were the first civilization to bring IR um to to Europe now what the Romans did in those five centuries from 100 BC to 400 ad was to have this language neutralizing effect in a vast area across most of um the Mediterranean as well as um Western um Europe um in the lands under EUR Roman Administration there had been 60 languages we know when they started that went down to 12 in that period in um and outside Africa and the East um the number half of those figures F fell to less than half so from 30 went down to five in fact we can say what those five languages were Latin Welsh Basque Albanian and Gish and we've just seen that Gish was not long for this world in 400 ad um other languages are just names lucanian celtiberian tartessian Iberian leguan leptic retic venetic atrasan Pine Osan mapan sickle Sardinian daian getic and ponan so that was where they were on the map of Europe in 500 BC little did they know they were not long for this world A Thousand Years Later Latin was everywhere where you can see um horizontal lines on this map so we've got much it wasn't exactly a monoculture because there was this matter of the uh Germanic invasions which came in in the fifth century ad and brought Germanic languages as a sort of overlay across the um Roman an language is something we don't tend to remember so much now because we think of the languages which have remained as the romance languages or there the French NE so they are the ones we think that came from Roman they were affected however to some extent superficially at least by Germanic languages but inevitably the number of languages there is much fewer than it was before so the that is what we lost when the Romans came and we perhaps gain the Romans did many things for us but they certainly didn't leave us with um linguistic diversity and the result was that a lot of things got lost to this wonderful all-encompassing Roman civilization if we flip forward now by a thousand years and start thinking about the Next Great Wave of European expansion which came with the Portuguese and the span is um we can look at what happened in Brazil now when the Portuguese got to Brazil by and large they didn't go very deep into it um they um stuck on the coasts which for many centuries they went on disputing with the French who were also trying to become the Imperial power in Brazil at the time ultimately they lost and so we don't tend to think of um Brazil as being a French potential French Colony but it was um however while they were doing this um fighting along the coast there were also the people who lived there who were having a perfectly nice time as far as they were concerned which largely involved speaking various dialects of the tupi language so Tupa tup nikin I don't know whe you can see the the names along the edge of the coast there you probably can't um they did did themselves up in finery which largely left them naked but would often involve them in very fine feathered headdresses and whenever they could catch one of their neighbors they would tend to eat them and U this was sort of this uh and this particularly repelled the uh Portuguese who encountered there sometimes when people were caught they were Portuguese and claimed to be French or French claimed to be Portuguese or Germans claiming to be either and this tended to have a bad effect on their survival possibilities um because they were seen as allied with the wrong tribe and hence liable to be eaten now this was a different culture which was um largely purged of its cannibalism by the Roman Catholic Church in the following Century particularly by the actions of Jesuits who were particularly good at learning the language and setting up um Christian communities or sort of communes um which flourished for a good 200 years um they also spread um the languages of the coast which was tupi into the in innermost parts of Brazil along the routs which you can see shown here um as it happens um all the languages of the coast seem to be related each other people don't know whether they originally came from the south or from the north but anyway they were spread into the interior by the uh Portuguese and the the community remained fairly un um underpopulated one could say it had nothing like the kind of vast population now that there is in uh Brazil for those two centuries but the Jesuits were able through use continuing use of the language which they found there and indeed spreading it to some extent around the country to create a a a sort of um well they called it a sort of paradise um they were not impelled by the profit motive and they um simply continued with subsistence farming while they taught each other about um Christianity and then for political reasons in in Europe the enlightenment came along and the Spanish govern first the Portuguese government and then the Spanish government decided to abolish the Jesuits they pulled them out um before they pulled them out strangely enough two two um years earlier they abolished the use of the tupe language this these things do happen and the result has been that since that time Portuguese has spread at the expense of tupi all around Brazil we have actually lost the any um real uh concept of what T culture and civilization was like much more recently here's an example from the 20th century started in the 19th with the um exp expulsion of various Central Asian tribes from north of the C Caucasus by the Zar um armies um in from 1763 17 to 1864 the Russians conquered the Caucasus and various peoples were expelled notably the ubik who were um one variety of circassians who came from um the northeastern area of the Black Sea they they left in a in a gang in a in a in a party um in around 1864 and largely moved to the Ottoman Empire where they set up um not far from Istanbul around the coast of the Sea of marmura and what they decided to do as a as a deliberate policy so as Not to cause trouble to be in order to effectively to survive individually they gave up on their language they leared um Turkish and this man tiik Essen was the last speaker of ubuk he died in 1992 now as it happened he himself was a very scholarly individual and worked with um a French linguist Jor diil um through the second half of the 20th century um to document his language so Lo documentation was important um but the language and the culture and this vast um vital energy really of a of a people you can see who did themselves up as you can see already in the 19th century they were still wearing these great furry hel helmets and the it is still possible to find out a little bit about what the music was like what the dancing was like and there is a literature called the N sagas which you may have heard of which tell us about the particularly adventurous approach that they had to history and Legend um but it's a dead culture it's gone on the other hand we can see cultures which have survived um I don't need to tell you very much about the bases they they're well known within modern Europe um they have survived as we were being told earlier uh this afternoon the attentions of General Franco but they also um was similarly um threatened by the actions of the VIS Gothic Kingdom so Goths in the um 6th Century ad threatened them they retained their identity then and they've retained it in the 20th century um let's look at another very different sort of situation where a lingua franka which was Aramaic had been adopted by a religious organization namely the uh Christian Church in the East and spread out over a thousand years all the way from Anatolia to China um they have retained their faith and they have retained bestially they have retained their language over that long period in fact it's 2,000 years now they're still there there are the uh the priests of the Jacobite branch of these syak speakers um it's more than a coincidence that a surviving ethnic group hangs on to its language a language turns out to be an extremely important thing to keep the identity of a group together and in a in a completely different context let's consider the case finally of the pipil who are a group of outliers of the naat so they were the same they spoke effectively the same language as the Aztec and a couple of hundred years before the Advent of Spaniards or anybody to uh Latin America um sorry not or anybody but anybody European to Latin America they had established themselves in a group in the South um the Aztecs obviously dominated in central Mexico this is a group you can see which is not in Mexico nor is it in Guatemala which is the country just to the south of Mexico it's in what is now El Salvador um it's a um a dialect of um naat the language of the Aztecs which has survived until this day it's just dying out probably in our own generation an example an appropriate sentence n n sorry I am a man and you can see the um first generation of Spanish conquistadores um attempted to subjugate this group failed you can see a picture of them shooting backwards and forwards into doing that and you can see another resistance movement in the late 19th century led by a man called Feliciano amama whose picture you can see on the right hand side here also maintaining the independence of the people their identity preserved by their continued use of this language so I we've we've looked at three losers and three people who three groups of people who for a time at least have become winners quite Against the Grain in a nutshell why should we protect endangered languages because if we don't those communities will vanish with all their distinctive life and their identities almost as if they had never been that's the effect of losing endangered languages thank you very much the International Phonetic Association they have a booklet which gives all the sounds that humans can make with these endangered languages do they fit in yes indeed they make use of the same repertoire of potential speech sounds that every every other language there's nothing about endangered languages which uh distinguishes them other than their political situation where they have become endangered um Latin is a uh language um which went round the whole of Europe its close relative oscan was very influential in southern Italy for um a number of centuries BC But ultimately was completely effaced by Latin they are comparable languages and if you wanted to learn Osan you would learn the same conjugations and declensions that you learn when you learn Latin but a little bit different um but osen couldn't cut it politically it's gone so there's nothing about the substance of an endangered language which makes it a funny language in some way it just means there's there are so many of them that there is a great Variety in there yes I think it's also worth touching on another misnomer that um what people might consider to be primitive languages are in any way less complex than modern languages today and um I think there are some languages which have been studied where there there's some phenomenal number of vowel sounds by using different parts of the mouth that we wouldn't normally expect in Western yes I I I I can be um corrected by my colleagues here but one tends to talk about the variet y of consonants which will be found in languages of the Caucasus um so you do find different sorts of languages specialize in different ways and become linguistically interesting in different areas but it is usually the case that the kind of things that people appeal to as showing a language of civilization like the complicated um case systems and um conjugation systems say of Latin are more characteristic of less urbanized languages than they are of um others so that in a way English is with its rather simple grammatical structure is characteristic of an imperial language in a way that Latin looks rather strange as a um an imperial language but they're both equally Imperial that's as I just said it's the politics which makes the um makes the difference not the substance the languages you talked about uh holding two languages as being a zero sum game aren't human beings so intrinsically lazy and trying to learn and maintain on a day-to-day basis two languages isn't that a an overhead that a lot of us would find very difficult to maintain thank you yes I agree with that totally in fact it's one of the major points I make in my recent book The Last Ling of franer that um what the nature of global Ling frankers shows us is that if people get can get by with one language they will they don't have to however and typically the people who live in small groups um perhaps dominated by larger groups who live nearby um have to um make the effort to learn other languages recent um psycholinguistic studies of course show that they are the gainers by this that people who are bilingual at a deep level um tend to end up um more intelligent by tests and they may even live longer so it it may be that this laziness which is what um being native speakers of a world lingua franer in enables us to indulge is not ultimately to in our best interests well of course what cheers me up is a research which tells us that the more languages you speak the less likely you are to full pre to Alzheimer's disease in later life so I'm looking forward to living to 120 um the Curious Thing of course about language is horses for courses where you are in a multilingual Community there are people that you speak one language to simply because you get through to them more easily um that's a language which has self- selected in terms you know you meet someone you say hello they say bonjour you realize your French is better than their English you switch into French um I remember once in gery and the I'm afraid I don't know what the language of gery is called but I was quite impressed with J there we are I knew the man would no gy got a specialist in his group I was afraid we would an aggression audience um and it was interesting I was staying in a hotel in gy and I heard this sort of slightly odd language I have to say outside my window one morning and the um the receptionist was talking to the to the bin man and she came in and said oh that's my French for the week and he was a gyman and she was from gery and for some reason she spoke gery French to this particular bloke on Tuesday mornings when he came to collect the bins for some reason that was a strategy which had emerged over the years they were either more comfortable or this established a bond between them because there was a load of English speakers from the mainland in the hotel so haha we'll say what we like about them because they won't understand um the person you have to emulate is King Charles I who said that I speak English to my Bankers French to my mistress Spanish to God and German to my horse another question he said it folks one for the back there back there I'm a bit mystified how primitive languages start does does a committee in the village sort of come together and say well that sound will be that that sound will be you know bread will be this and you know how does it how do primitive languages sort of start in the first place I I think this is a bit beyond our theme the language the Lang the languages are there some people do um look at the origin of languages particularly looking at how Creoles get started say where um children are in a in a sort of quandry as to knowing what language to speak because different people are speaking different languages around them and they don't get enough experience of any of them they do make something up which turns out to be an effective language and may actually starts a um pigeon English um um developed in this way um in the and and what's happened to Portuguese which was an interial language spoken around the Indian Ocean has developed into a creole with mixtures of other languages in in those Coastal communities um how languages started off before there were any other languages is a matter of of of deep um speculation ah but we do have some interesting um examples you mentioned cre the fascinating one which is beginning to emerge is London Creole where you have a London school with 57 languages spoken amongst the children many of whom don't speak English or speak it very basically when they first arrive and they're reaching for ways for making themselves understood and a simplified grammar emerges and a fairly common basic vocabulary I think it's might even be measured down to as low as 500 words they can actually get through the day before they start understanding English better and typically start to speak English very well within about a year writing takes that much longer there's also an interesting um example one of our experts might be able to help me with which is Nicaraguan sign language with all of the disruption of the sista Revolution um children who had speaking and hearing difficulties were very much marginalized and it was discovered that they hadn't found in fact found a way of communicating with each other and apparently this sort of language which was totally intelligible to a fairly large group of children had emerged during a revolutionary period of perhaps 10 to 15 years I don't know if any body else knows I mean that's I I've I've not even got chapter and verse on that that's anecdotal Peter can you help us on that you're nodding I don't know quick quick get a microphone down here to a man who can tell us uh I I don't know all of the details but um what you described is roughly the case that in fact After the revolution had had established um de schools were restarted and then when the children came together they mutually created and mutually elligible sign system which has a is a full grammatical language with its own structure and so on so if we can find out how they did it we could answer your question there's another question down here we have to watch the time a bit now then than I'd like to thank you the speaker and also for your wonderful introduction I found uh both fascinating um the the talk that Dr usler gave um was dealing with history and I was impressed by um his Illusions to trade and colonialism having the effect on languages and their disappearance I would like him to speculate on the following um China has one in six of the population at the moment is buying up considerable chunks of Africa mainly to exploit the resources its pattern of trade export trade certainly is increasing a lot and um I wonder to what extent um China will displace English as at the moment the only International linga franka and perhaps English might even disappear altogether you wrot a book on that yes how kind of you to play into my hands I I have it the last linga Franco is precisely about this the the point about world lingua Franco indeed lingual frankers generally is that they are acquired um deliberately uh as I say through recruitment you have a reason for wanting to learn them so you do so um one would expect regardless of what the um Chinese do with their Confucian institutes and so on that in Africa where there are business opportunities which involve attracting Chinese to come and deal in your part of the world you have an uh an inducement to try and learn Chinese to try and put Chinese at their at their ease and so one would predict that in Africa particularly I think that there will be a gross growth of Chinese as a ling Frank regardless almost regardless of what the uh the Chinese do as a matter matter of policy the thing about the current um Global linga francas um particularly English but preceding it um French was that they did involve um Global Powers who had meddled and established settlements in very different parts of the the world this meant that people who happen to have been affected by the English or previously by the French in different parts of the world found that for no particular reason of their own they could talk to people on the other side of the world who had also been similarly affected and this was a major factor in the um utility of of French and then English as as Global lingua franos it seems less likely that this is going to happen in the in this Century or subsequent centuries simply because of the of development all around the world is more On a par it's not possible for one power to take over and simply establish itself Ste in different parts of the world um essentially willy-nilly for the for that the population there so I think it's going to be quite difficult for future economically dominant powers to be as linguistically dominant as English has become but they will no doubt be economically dominant and they will probably be culturally dominant as well because because people tend to like singing the songss that go with these um singing peeking Opera well why not yeah there's a challenge yes it is an interesting question um and I I hope that militates in favor of uh again government language policy in terms of looking at emerging World languages especially Chinese and Arabic um so in this particular session I leave you to ponder the fact that on 911 there were more postgraduate students in American universities studying Latin and Greek than they were studying Arabic in the meantime I would like to thank Nicholas very much indeed for kicking off this after new session very very well informed very informative thank you very much indeed