One World, Many Peaces

Who's Protecting the World's Endangered Languages (All 7000)? These Guys

 

When an insect only seven people have ever seen goes extinct in a place you need a government grant to get to, more than just environmentalists feel a part of our world has gone forever. Understandably so. But what about when a language once used by thousands is down to its last speaker, and the universe of relations and ideas that language conveys will not survive them? Who protests, who runs worldwide campaigns or passes legislation against hazardous, toxic notions like "official languages" and "world languages" that creep onto and kill ways of understanding what it means to be human? A group of fifty linguists meeting at the first-ever Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure Workshop, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, realize the tragedy but aren't superheroes.

In the last 500 years, half of the world's languages have become extinct. What is new is the accelerated rate of language extinction today. Linguists predict that in the next 100 years nearly 90 percent of the world's 7,000 languages will become extinct, with a best case scenario at only 35 to 50 percent surviving (Krauss,1992). "When we lose, say, 50 percent of languages, we're losing 50 percent of human cognitive ability," says linguist Lyle Campbell.  "Linguistics is a study of human cognition, what makes the mind tick, click, and work. It's our responsibility as linguists to do what we can." Unfortunately for Campbell and his colleagues, words difficult to pronounce just aren't as cute and cuddly as panda bears and Hollywood superstars have yet to milk endangered languages for their publicity value. Try asking a panda whether or not there is life after death. Unfortunately, while hundreds of groups protect species for biodiversity, none protect endangered languages for logodiversity.

The admirable work of these linguistics overlooks one major possibility based on a historical actuality: that as languages die, new ones can and are created not in their place, but in the space they leave behind. "A language is not just words and grammar; it is a web of history that binds all the people who once spoke the language, all the things they did together, all the knowledge they imparted to their descendants," says Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University, in Science Daily. There is also such a thing as the languages of the future, beyond but also in between the lingua francas that are most likely to survive: English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. The languages of the future, whatever they may look or sound like, will be made from those of the present, which is why the study of multilingualism is at least as important as current event that can literally speak to the future.

Key Weapons in 21st Century Military are Multilingualism and Cross-Cultural Fluency for Obama

"In the 21st century," Obama pronounced with assurance facing the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "military strength will be measured not only by the weapons our troops carry, but by the languages they speak and the cultures they understand." Soldiers of the armies of the future, it turns out, will include cream-of-the-crop linguists, literary critics and cultural studies wonks who will make gun toting and tank driving soldiers look like caveman throwing rocks and cowboys riding horses, or so the President would have us believe. Waging war would be tantamount to battlefield diplomacy, peace found in translation.

Ironically, the weaponization of language (or rather what I call linguistic agency between two or more languages in Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy) is also a form of demilitarization in the traditional sense. Of course, from a General's point of view, speaking to someone in their language cannot replace shooting them in the head if you cannot and they are obstructing the completion of your mission. But we can always hope that if they communicate in writing, such violent acts can simply be replaced with ellipses ("…") and their non-English equivalents.  "If Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork," Obama went on to say, "I will veto it." Showing such cultural sensitivity to Jews and Muslim is surely leading by example.

The President's pronouncement is, globally speaking, a counter-cultural move in one sense and a breakthrough for multilingualism domestically and worldwide in another. As previously reported on One World, Many Peaces, Malaysia has imposed a highly problematic partial ban on the English language, and Turkey as well as a host of other countries continue to actively suppress local languages within their nation-states. Let us not forget, too, that the U.S. Congress declared English the official language of the country for the first time in its history in 2006 in the face of growing presence and protests by Spanish-speakers. Could Obama be reversing the monolingual tide? Could critical theory inform the miltiary strategies of the future?

I have been arguing for a better understanding of multilingualism outside and especially inside the academic humanities for almost ten years now, the study of which led me directly to peace studies in that inter-lingual and cross-cultural communication are at the heart of each discipline. What Obama has done here, however, is bring the theoretical cross-pollinations my research and writings have tried to bring to light into the actual conditions and participants in wars on the ground, with the potential financial and human resources backing that only nation-state military ventures have summoned. Multilingualism and cross-cultural fluency are current events as sine qua non of globalization, but what their militarization means in creating the future is more difficult to make out.   

Ban on English Language in Malaysia Causes More Problems than it Solves

After months of heavy lobbying by socially minded ultra-nationalists, the Malaysian state government has legislated a ban of the English language in sectors of higher education. This bold move against multilingualism in a country that was once a British colony has infuriated business leaders and educators while, proponents argue, giving more Malay students a chance at college.

The pressure for universities worldwide to ensure student fluency in English is at once  pragmatic and problematic.  Since 2003, math and science courses at the university level have been taught in English after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad deemed that doing so was essential to keeping the country's workforce competitive in the global economy. His successor has caved in to pressure to remove this law and revert to the Bahasa language by 2012, for practical social reasons as well as nationalistic ones.

On the one hand, those against the English ban argue that a multilingual workforce is vital to attracting multinational companies to the country, without which a dearth of jobs may lead to social unrest. On the other hand, those against the ban claim that it levels the playing field for aspiring students from rural areas who rarely receive any education in English, unlike their urban counterparts who often do from an early age. So the dilemma can be put thus: learn English and work, don’t learn English and go to college.

There is a deep disjunction between linguistic catering on the part of labor producers to multinational corporations, which are ironically trying to cater to local consumer markets in their own languages. The notion of "English as a world language" and national languages do not necessarily have to conflict with the notion of language rights as human rights. But banning languages for any reason creates more problems than it solves. English as a global lingua franca is a current event a long time in the making, however we must beware of it creating a monolingual rather than a multilingual future. 

See Antony Adolf's Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy for more on these issues.

Language Rights as Human Rights

Someone who studies endangered languages for a living once told me that when a language dies, so does a way of understanding who we and the world are; I would add a chance to integrate and improve both as well. Combine this notion with another saying, "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" and we find ourselves closer to the predicament in which Kurdish speakers in Turkey and Spanish speakers in the US, among many other people around the globe, find themselves on a daily basis.  To what extent is the denial of the right to communicate in a language a violation of human rights?

UNESCO's world language week ended this past Sunday, and during it legislator Ahmet Turk spoke in his native Kurdish tongue in the national parliament to which he and the constituency he represents belong. Regardless of the irony in his name, state-run television cut off the broadcast immediately. In contrast, when Penelope Cruz was at the Oscar podium receiving her reward, she pointedly made part of her speech in Spanish, to great applause and no cut offs anywhere. Yet, the drive to circumscribe both minority languages in the countries in which they are communicated is strong, albeit unequally. So one wonders whether in linguistic xenophobia (in these cases, from the inside out) degrees, personas or  platforms bear more weight in challenging status quos.

Kurdish was made an "illegal language" in Turkey in 1991, barred from state-run institutions such as schools, courts and administrative buildings. In 2006, responding to mass immigrant rallies, the US Congress voted on an act to make English the "official" language of the country for the first time in its history. Both pieces of legislation are a denial of the fact that for centuries if not millennia, multilingualism was de facto within the territories now called national geo-political borders. Banning, suppressing or hierarchically positing languages for the sake of national or international unity is,  like the anti-war protestor slogan goes, fucking for virginity. Regardless of how noble the ends may or may not be, the means are counter-productive because they are based on and perpetuate mutual exclusivity. The ultimate outcome is what I and others have called a logocide, when an endangered language becomes extinct and with it a part of the polity whose unity was supposed to be preserved in so doing.

Growing up in the province of Quebec during the second heyday of nationalist separatism was in some ways the luckiest, and in others a most traumatic experience of my life. Because my parents were both immigrants, I was forced to go to a French school under the infamous Law 101, speaking Greek and English at home, and English in my community. At the time, I often confused the benefits of becoming multilingual with the banes of being branded an internal outsider, and acted out accordingly. So began without me yet knowing my concerns with how languages can bring people together but also keep them apart, literarily, legally or otherwise, which eventually sparked and fuelled my concerns about how peace, peacemaking and other social formations can be paradoxical in the same way. 

To my knowledge, as of this writing, language rights are not human rights. Despite or because of violations of both perhaps they should be made so before endangered languages as current events become reactively endangering languages aimed at preventing a universally or nationally monolingual future where worldwide mind control is possible.

See Antony Adolf's Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy for more in-depth analysis of these issues.