Language in the Twenty-First Century
Language in the Twenty-First Century Selected papers of the millennial confere...
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Language in the Twenty-First Century
Language in the Twenty-First Century Selected papers of the millennial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, held at the University of Hartford and Yale University
Edited by
Humphrey Tonkin University of Hartford
Timothy Reagan University of Connecticut
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
8
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language in the twenty-first century : selected papers of the millennial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, held at the University of Hartford and Yale University / edited by Humphrey Tonkin, Timothy Reagan. p. cm. (Studies in World Language Problems; v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Language and languages--Congresses. I. Reagan, Timothy G. II. Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems. III. Title. IV. Series. P107. T66 2003 400-dc21 isbn 90 272 2831 0 (Eur.) / 1 58811 383 3 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 90 272 2832 9 (Eur.) / 1 58811 384 1 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)
2003048077
© 2003 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction: Language and the pursuit of the millennium Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan
1
Contexts and trends for English as a global language Paul Bruthiaux
9
Global English and the non-native speaker: Overcoming disadvantage Ulrich Ammon
23
Language and the future: Choices and constraints John Edwards
35
Interlingualism: A world-centric approach to language policy and planning Mark Fettes
47
Development of national language and management of English in East and Southeast Asia Björn Jernudd
59
The “business” of language endangerment: Saving languages or helping people keep them alive? Luisa Ma¹
67
Equality, maintenance, globalization: Lessons from Canada Jacques Maurais
87
Maintaining linguodiversity: Africa in the twenty-ªrst century Alamin Mazrui
99
Language in the twenty-ªrst century: A newly informed perspective Teresa Pica
115
Language and language education in the twenty-ªrst century Timothy Reagan
133
vi
Table of contents
Why learn foreign languages? Thoughts for a new millennium Humphrey Tonkin
145
Conclusion: Surveying the linguistic landscape: Assessing identity and change Kurt E. Müller
157
Bibliography Contributors Index
177 197 201
Introduction Language and the pursuit of the millennium Humphrey Tonkin and Timothy Reagan
The pursuit of the millennium (to use a phrase created by Norman Cohn, long before our present secular millennium came along) tends to produce linguistic visions and prophecies. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Ludwik Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, wrote a poem in his new language in which he imagined a time when the “thousand-year walls” (“muroj de miljaroj”) of language diŸerence dividing humanity would collapse before the “nova sento” of linguistic unity (Tonkin 2002). A century earlier, William Thornton, architect of the Capitol in Washington and also an enthusiastic linguist, imbued with what he saw as the universalist spirit of the French Revolution, published a book entitled Cadmus: Or, a Treatise on the Elements of Written Language (1792), proposing a universal alphabet intended to make “the world … more nearly allied” (Lepore 2002) and to usher in a new period of peace and prosperity. Across the globe, in Calcutta, the great philologist Sir William Jones expressed similar interests. A century before that, numerous erudite scholars, among them Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, pursued the dream of a universal language whose logicality of organization would lead to logical thought (Knowlson 1975; Stillman 1995). What Umberto Eco (1995) has called the search for the perfect language still goes on, though today it takes very diŸerent forms, manifesting itself in the pursuit of language universals, eŸorts to deªne universal grammar, and the pursuit of order through language planning and language policy — to say nothing of new advances in the cognitive sciences and the study of mind that suggest a universal “language instinct” embedded through evolution in the human mind (see, for example, Pinker 1995). While today’s scholars devote less attention to the Adamic language (or Adam himself, for that matter), their pursuit of the springs and essence of language is as enthusiastic as ever.
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While one should not equate visionary predictions with presumably more sober scholarly forecasts, the quantity of books and articles on the future of language now circulating, at the beginning of a new millennium, is striking. Many deal with the decline in linguistic diversity in the face of modernization and the expansion of the market economy (Hale 1992; Grenoble & Whaley 1998; Crystal 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Hagège 2000), others with the emergent world system of languages and the rates of exchange in the worldwide language market (de Swaan 1998 and 2001; Calvet 1997 and 2002), still others with the remarkable rise of English and corresponding decline of other European languages on the world scene (Crystal 1997; Graddol 1997; Ammon 1998; Chaudenson 2001; Durand 2002). They include predictions on the future of language diversity and the death of languages (much cited in the present volume, though the numbers are highly speculative), or attempt to establish whether the rise of English represents a permanent change in the world linguistic scene or merely a temporary historical dominance similar to the earlier regional hegemony of, say, Latin, or, in certain international domains, French. In June 1998, the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CRD) and the University of Hartford invited a group of experts to sit down together in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss the future of language and languages in the twenty-ªrst century. The Center, based at the University of Hartford, with a¹liates and collaborators throughout the world, and with a scholarly journal, Language Problems and Language Planning, widely recognized as a leader in the ªeld, provided each of the twenty-or-so participants with a series of questions that they were invited to address in the course of the meetings. Each of the participants was allotted a certain amount of time, in which he or she might make a formal presentation, provide some informal comments, or discuss an issue with the other participants. Plenty of additional time was allotted for further discussion. Thus the emphasis fell not on formal papers but on the give-and-take of informal interaction, without the inhibitions of tape-recorders, video cameras, or large audiences. So successful was the meeting that it was decided to meet again the following year, this time as guests of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The CRD is most grateful for the ªnancial and logistical support it received from both the University of Hartford and Yale University. Those associated with the Center for Research and Documentation, and the members of the group who participated in one or both of the meetings, were conscious of the profound changes taking place politically, economically and
Introduction
technologically in the world arena and of their impact on the relationships among languages. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and its system of satellites, profoundly signiªcant in itself, was only a ªnal stage in the collapse of the great political empires, whose emancipation began following the Second World War and continued through the decolonization movement of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The colonial wars in Vietnam in the 1960s and Afghanistan in the 1980s were apparently the last gasp of this process. Counterpointing this great decentralization of power elsewhere was a redirection of the colonizing impulse inwards, through the emergent centralizing movement in western Europe that led, by way of the European Iron and Steel Community and the EEC, to the European Union. The economic integration achieved through the European Union was also a political movement, in which relationships among the languages of government (linked to power relationships among the states) were, and continue to be, in a state of ¶ux, and in which the economic integration of the regions led, paradoxically, to a new awareness of their distinctiveness and hence the emergence of interest in minority languages and in language rights. The triumph of the capitalist philosophy of open markets and the growing equation of such a philosophy with notions of free exchange in the market of ideas and of free and open democracy — the linkage, then, of free markets, free speech and free elections — emerged as the dominant political ideology. Such a philosophy potentially makes for pluralism also in matters of language, since it empowers the consumer or user of languages and helps this linguistic consumer stake out his or her linguistic territory. A linguistic free market replaces language planning (a modernist top-down approach to the phenomenon of language) with language choice (a postmodern bottom-up approach that empowers the consumer rather than the producer). This nexus of political and economic belief in free markets was accompanied by massive technological change. The emergence of the Internet in the 1980s and its growing strength in the 1990s expanded the possibility of direct and largely unmediated exchange on a worldwide scale. Recently, China has established itself as the world’s third largest Internet user, after the United States and Japan. The growing sophistication of computerized translation systems and translation aids, and the revolution in the storage, management, and exchange of information, have all combined to in¶uence the international exchange of texts (de Swaan 1998b) and a reordering of the linguistic media of that exchange. It has also called into question assumptions about the role of reading and writing in society, about the relationship between writing and speech, and about the forms of delivery of texts (Nunberg 1996; Crystal 2001).
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Has the emergence of the Internet reasserted the role of writing? Has the ¶uidity between written texts and speech (the increasing ease with which technology can convert the one into the other) changed the status of both? Has the arrival of the computer rendered the book obsolescent? Above all, what is the nature of the economy of texts in an environment in which texts can be transmitted over great distances and targeted to very speciªc audiences through the Internet? One might suppose that the result would be a strengthening of the power of the periphery over the power of the center, but the very concepts of periphery and center have become multivalent and ¶uid. Indeed, what ultimately may be signiªcant about the language situation at the beginning of the twenty-ªrst century is not the fact that one player or set of players is winning out over another, but that the interrelationship of languages is diŸerent and more complicated, just as the interrelationship of textual delivery systems has become more plural. There was a time when, at least in the west, it was possible to live out one’s life in a monolingual envelope, removed from other languages. Even today, functional monolingualism is often regarded as the default condition, the norm, as though other languages are complicating additions, which in the best of all possible worlds might not be needed. But the day when one language could serve all the communicative goals of a single individual appears to be receding — at least for everyone but the monolingual speaker of English. What Edwards (1994b) and others call individual bilingualism, already the norm in many highly multilingual parts of the world, would seem to be on the rise. If our model is monolingualism, the world appears to be a kind of Darwinian battleground among competing languages; if our model is plurilingualism, the world resembles a network of languages in which one language supplements another. The series of questions supplied to the participants in the two seminars sponsored by the CRD included the following: – – – – –
Is the maintenance of linguistic diversity in the twenty-ªrst century an appropriate or achievable goal? How can the diverse customs, tastes, and activities distinguishing language communities survive the loss of mutual isolation? What eŸects will the globalization of markets have on language use? What is the future of language teaching and learning, and what role will these activities have in the educational system of the future? Is the idea of equality among languages and among speakers of languages, large and small, attainable or desirable?
Introduction
– – – – – –
– –
– – –
What eŸects will the likely enfranchisement of new populations have on language use, language change, and language choice? What can we expect to see in the future of language rights, the rights of speakers of minority languages, and the right to mother-tongue education? What will be the eŸects of the Internet on language and language choice? What in¶uence are advances in language technology likely to have on language use, language change, or language planning? Will technology replace linguistic communication in some areas of human activity, or stimulate it, or lead to new forms of communication? Is the goal of multilingualism in international organizations sustainable? Will, or should, the language policies of international intergovernmental organizations be modiªed? What is the future of languages associated with former empires or power blocs (French, Russian, Portuguese, etc.)? What is the likely language scenario in the United States in the coming century, with respect to such issues as foreign language teaching and minority language use (especially Spanish)? What can, or should, be done to preserve languages in danger of extinction? What role will education have in standardizing language, and reducing or stimulating linguistic diversity? What is the future of national literatures in a world of heightened language loyalty but converging cultural markets?
These questions were provided not in the expectation that participants would provide answers, but rather that the questions themselves would encourage thoughtful discussion, dialogue and debate about issues of language, language diversity, language policy, and language rights as we entered the new millennium. Presentations from participants, many of which have been expanded for the present volume, provided an additional framework for the discussions which took place during both seminars. The results, as seen in the papers that constitute this volume, are in no way deªnitive — they are rather indicative, for the most part, of the complexity and challenges posed by such issues in the present age. If the questions themselves have not been answered in a ªnal way, though, the discussions and presentations generated by the questions have proven to be remarkably insightful and powerful. What this volume presents, then, is in essence a summary of the collective, extended intellectual conversation on matters of language that emerged among an especially well-informed
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and talented group of scholars familiar with the broad landscape of contemporary language studies around the world. We are most grateful to the participants for this wealth of ideas — and to John Edwards and Rainer Enrique Hamel for helping us organize our collective thoughts for the present volume. The ªrst question that we asked among our sixteen questions concerned diversity of language: “Is the maintenance of linguistic diversity in the twentyªrst century an appropriate or achievable goal?” In varying degrees, and perhaps hardly surprisingly, most of the participants believed in the worthiness of the goal, but a further question, “What eŸects will the globalization of markets have on language use?” suggested an answer to the ªrst: while current policies tend toward an opening up of markets across the world (though not always in a spirit of equality), and hence toward diversiªcation, the growth of huge corporations, particularly in the communications ªeld, points to a highly restricted competition at the top, among a very limited number of players, often subsisting in the same linguistic environment, namely the English language. Thus, global reach and massive scale may create, at this stage, the illusion of diversity, but such diversity may not long continue. On the other hand, the answer to the question “How can the diverse customs, tastes and activities distinguishing language communities survive the loss of mutual isolation?” points to another of the features of the modern world that have a bearing on language maintenance: while increased mobility renders exclusive loyalties to particular customs and ways of life increasingly di¹cult to maintain, and while the less adaptive societies are accordingly suŸering heavy cultural losses, the very technology that drives communities apart also oŸers opportunities for the maintenance of linguistic and cultural ties: if more people are drifting apart, more people are also drifting back together. It is possible to live on one side of the world and maintain active ties with the other. The old notion of the single, isolated, fully self-su¹cient language may be fading before a diŸerent model — that of the language functioning in linguistic interstices, co-existing with other languages. Those who see the use of language as constituting linguistic behavior, rather than the exercise of language loyalty, may be closer to the mark — except that the use of several languages may be a manifestation of the multiple loyalties that the modern world allows us to maintain. Underlying virtually all of our questions was the challenge of the future of language choice. Language choice occurs at both the individual and communal levels, and is immensely complex in nature. Issues of language choice inevitably involve questions of language rights (as well as questions of language
Introduction
responsibilities), which in turn have potential impact on both the enfranchisement and empowerment of groups and on their oppression and subjugation (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1995). The maintenance of language diversity is one component of the puzzle, as is the role of mother-tongue education. The complexity of the challenges inherent in debates about language choice writ large are clearly captured in the case of South African language policy during the apartheid regime, where mother-tongue instruction — widely seen internationally as a progressive and empowering educational approach — was utilized by the government as a means of dividing the population: it provided a rationale for racially segregated schooling and hence for the eŸective disempowerment of the black majority. Minority language rights, minority language use, mother-tongue schooling, support for linguistic diversity, and so on, are not, in short, absolute goods. They are inevitably part of far more complex political, ideological and economic contexts, and it is an understanding of this contextualization that is essential in evaluating language policy options at all levels. Technological innovation overlaps issues of language choice, as well as questions related to language rights, language policy, and education. As several of the contributors to this volume make clear, the Internet paradoxically facilitates both language diversity and language domination. Other kinds of technological development in language-related ªelds and areas present similar paradoxes, as in fact do many aspects of globalization. While technological innovation does make certain kinds of linguistic pluralism more viable and cost-eŸective, it also further entrenches the relatively small number of languages of wider communication. Far from being a panacea for the very real threats to language diversity in the modern world, technology may well be playing an important role in diminishing real language diversity by supporting a more limited, essentially Eurocentric language pluralism. The contributions in this volume address these issues, and many others, forcefully and insightfully, and provide a solid foundation for further dialogue on these important and timely matters. We look forward to that dialogue, and are grateful to our colleagues for their eŸorts to help us provide a framework within which it can take place productively. We are, though, also well aware of the old adage that while everything may work out in the long run in positive ways, it is the meantime that is the most di¹cult time of all.
7
Contexts and trends for English as a global language Paul Bruthiaux
In recent years, the dominance of English as a global language has been reinforced by the emergence of the United States as sole superpower and the growth of international trade as part of a phenomenon generally labeled “globalization.” For better or worse, this geopolitical shift favors an American worldview along with its principal linguistic vehicle, English. Meanwhile, those with the ambition to take part in international exchanges tend — rightly or wrongly — to regard possession of English as the key to professional success and greater well-being. Such is the global dominance of English that competition from languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish only occurs at the regional level, at best (Navarro 1997). To be sure, perceptions of relative strength among any set of competitors can be unstable. As the violent events of September 2001 showed, geopolitical realignments and the ensuing shift in perceptions of the relative importance of speciªc cultures and languages can be sudden and far-reaching. However, the current dominance of English as a global language suggests that only catastrophic disruption of current geopolitical arrangements might jeopardize that dominance in the coming decades. What are the chances of the dominant position of English coming under serious threat in the foreseeable future? The economic, military, and technological context underpinning the position of English as a global language is well documented (for a comprehensive review, see Graddol 1997), but extrapolating from past developments in order to answer this question is unlikely to help because, as Crystal (1997) notes, the dominance of English is partly a novel phenomenon in that no language of wider communication has ever been shared by a group of speakers of such size (both in absolute and relative terms) and so widely distributed. The former role of Latin, for one, is unlikely to
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provide reliable pointers for several reasons: ªrst, because few records exist of the diŸusion and vernacular use of the language at the time; secondly, because little of the modern paraphernalia of institutional language planning tools with which to in¶uence the development and use of a language existed; and, ªnally, because the language served as a tool for wider communication only for a small elite, a situation that contrasts with the wider ownership of the language that now characterizes English worldwide. This leaves the analyst with the task of mapping out future trends by extrapolating from a combination of current geopolitical trends and relevant sociolinguistic characteristics of English as well as of other languages with potential as tools for global communication. However unimaginable it may seem at any given time, at some point in the future radical geopolitical change can and will occur. For example, at some stage this century an alternative power may come to threaten the geopolitical dominance of the United States. However, even in such circumstances the link between linguistic and geopolitical dominance is not as close as is often assumed. Any challenger to English would need to score positively on three counts: ªrst, it would need to overcome the huge advantage now accruing to English as a global language from critical mass; secondly, it would need to experience loose political and administrative control over linguistic form and usage and with it, the room to accommodate unplanned, bottom-up change resulting from transplantation to an increasing number and variety of sociolinguistic contexts; and, ªnally, it would need to replace the current incumbent, namely English, as the preferred vehicle for the kinds of sociocultural aspirations likely to motivate potential learners and users to acquire the language to a communicatively adequate standard. In principle, all languages are equally well-suited to a role as tools for wider communication provided their sociocultural base expands and provides them with the geopolitical reach necessary for that role. Clearly, sheer number of speakers is no guide: languages such as Hindi, Kiswahili, Malay, or Portuguese are unlikely to achieve global status, if only because their main sociocultural base (here, India, East Africa, Indonesia, and Brazil, respectively) is likely to remain associated with regional, not global power. In practice, the choice of which languages to discuss in an exploration of this kind is bound to be somewhat controversial, even if the discussion remains largely theoretical. In response, I will limit my discussion to languages with a relatively well-documented record of supranational reach. On the basis of this broad criterion, I will review the potential for a global role of Arabic, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. I will also review Esperanto, a language purpose-built for wider
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
communication and for which a case continues to be made (see, for example, Tonkin 2000) despite its patchy record so far. Finally, I will discuss in somewhat greater depth the chances of two potential competitors to English as a global language. One of these is French, because of its recent history as the preferred language of wider communication among elites and of continuing eŸorts to maintain that position. The other is Chinese, because current socioeconomic trends suggest that it is from China that any challenge to US geopolitical dominance is likely to emerge this century.
English as a global language and critical mass A strong predictor of the potential of a language for global communication is the amount of specialized information that it carries (Swales 1993). Thus, just as Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, Latin, French, and German have all served as linguistic tools for the transmission — or withholding — of desirable and prestigious information, English is now the code of choice for encoding information in science and technology and for transacting economic and cultural exchanges supranationally. However, similar processes also take place on a more regional basis, typically encoded in languages other than English. According to de Swaan (1998, 2001), languages form part of a worldwide system consisting of several major constellations, each with its own set of local languages related to one central language, typically the language shared by the largest number of multilinguals within the constellation. Among the constellations most readily identiªed, those centered around Russian and German correspond quite closely to the territorial borders of the dominant country within that constellation. Languages such as French or Portuguese continue to connect the former colonial power to its former dependencies over discontiguous territory. Other languages link a sociolinguistically complex population internally as well as across a widely distributed diaspora. Among these are Hindi or Chinese but also more rarely discussed languages such as Indonesian Malay or Bengali, each with more speakers than Japanese or German. In each case, the dominant language at the heart of each constellation draws its strength from the elite that speaks it as well as from the marginal populations that aspire to bridge the gap between that elite and themselves. At the global level, de Swaan’s analysis applies equally to English, a language that now occupies the central position within the widest of these constellations and is increasingly relied upon whenever communication needs to take place
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across rather than within constellations. Though English increasingly competes with French and Spanish in North America and continues to compete with Hindi and other languages in India, for example, it is now essentially unchallenged globally except in international organizations where the historical role of French continues to be felt, at least nominally. Most probably, the dominance of English is now a self-reinforcing process partly because of the rapidly increasing amount of information that the language encodes and partly because the speed at which it is adopted as the preferred medium of global communication contributes exponentially to its attraction to potential users and learners. To continue with de Swaan’s metaphor, English now so overwhelmingly connects all linguistic constellations in a network of communicative interdependence that the major underpinning of this privileged position may at this stage be simply critical mass, at which point the number and wide distribution of English-speakers and the socioeconomic opportunities accruing to them make it too costly for competitors to enter the linguistic market. As a result, potential participants in global communication have less and less incentive to make the eŸort to learn a language other than English. This is equally true both of speakers of English as a ªrst language, who increasingly come to rely on others to do their language learning for them, and of speakers of English as a second language, who often take an instrumental, non-emotional view of a language they regard as serving their interests quite adequately and see no purpose in promoting another language of global communication (Munro 1996). For these speakers, the eŸect of critical mass rules out any thought that a serious competitor to English as a global language may even exist.
Global potential and standardization Even if the dominant position derived by English from critical mass were somehow to be reversed, the potential of languages competing for a global role would still depend in part on their degree of exposure to institutionalized standardizing forces. Though resisted in many quarters, the notion of promoting a transnational standard does have its supporters. Kibbee (1993) notes that such a standard oŸers a chance of greater egalitarianism among speakers otherwise separated by vast socioeconomic inequalities. Bamgbose (1998) argues that communities of speakers of “New Englishes” are likely to suŸer indirectly from the absence of a standard for their own variety of English as this will encourage continued reliance on the only alternative, namely, the standard
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
of the former colonial power. Viewed globally, however, the chances of a language being able to increase its range of locations of use and communicative functions must be greater if it is unencumbered by the kinds of complex structural features most likely to undergo simpliªcation as it becomes localized in an increasing number of settings. From this perspective, English is in a strong competitive position — as regards its in¶ectional morphology, at least — partly because little simpliªcation is likely to occur beyond further reduction of the few in¶ectional quirks left over from Old English. Moreover, any such change under pressure from local sociolinguistic contexts is likely to meet only token opposition given the relatively weak standardizing forces that have historically operated in English. Global English can be best described as a set of varieties closely related to a relatively stable core and capable of inªnite adaptation in each local setting. In the view of commentators such as Chisanga and Kamwangamalu (1997), this arrangement recognizes that ownership of the language resides with its speakers rather than its originators and permits global interchanges without sti¶ing diversity. Numerous writers advocate the inclusion of a wide range of features of localized “Englishes” in the language curriculum, among them Hyde (1998) and Pakir (1999). Though resisted by many (for a review of the arguments for and against standards, see Davies 1999), this relativistic perspective on the nature of English as a global language re¶ects a long tradition of laissez-faire in English attitudes to linguistic norms and a history of failed proposals for controlling language form and language change. Thus, repeated attempts to set up an academy on Italian or French lines enjoyed little more than the support of polemicists such as Jonathan Swift, while the view that language use was largely beyond control was regularly conceded even by authorities such as Samuel Johnson. A second factor militating against institutionalized standardization in English is the accidental distribution of varieties that resulted from the consecutive rise to power of the United Kingdom and the United States, two poles that shared a (largely) common language. Having migrated from its original base oŸ the coast of Western Europe, the language is now distributed among several power centers with distinctive sociocultural and linguistic characteristics as well as their own network of global connections. Most dominant is of course the US variety, with standard British English still wielding in¶uence partly as a result of continued interest in the literary canon, while more recent transplants in India or Australia have resulted in localized varieties that dominate their own regional domain. Overall, such is the distribution of the language and the
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power of a number of established and increasingly prestigious — or at least, recognized — varieties that not even the US variety could conceivably come to dominate all others to the point of doing away with regional variation. This distribution across several culturally autonomous and increasingly self-conªdent poles is likely to militate against standardization and in favor of potentially inªnite adaptation to, and greater tolerance of, local linguistic in¶uences in each setting. The beneªt derived by English from its accidental multi-polar distribution (making central control unlikely even if it were desirable) is not found uniformly across all of the hypothetical challengers to English as a global language. Arabic is distributed across a vast geographical area and as a result should be relatively resistant to standardization in its vernacular uses in that no single variety is likely to dominate as the language adapts to local settings. However, even in the unlikely event of future geopolitical realignments leading to the supremacy of an Arabic-speaking coalition, this potential for a global role for Arabic would likely be constrained by its close association with a religious message that does not encourage multiple readings, especially since that message is encoded in written, hence most invariant and readily standardized, form. For its part, Spanish has a long history of standardization through the work of the Royal Spanish Academy. Yet, current attitudes to standardization are relatively relaxed (Lombraña 2000) and standardization eŸorts largely left to Spain (Sánchez 1992), with limited success in part because of the massive demographic and economic imbalances between the historical European base and powerful Spanish-speaking poles in the Americas such as Mexico and, increasingly, the United States. This combination of multi-polar distribution and the relative weakness of institutionalized standardizing forces would give Spanish a theoretical advantage in the unlikely event of some combination of Spanish-speaking countries rising to superpower status. Japanese and German can be jointly described as hypothetical competitors to English because they are both based in a single dominant culture that for historical reasons remains unwilling to assert itself culturally or politically. Unlike English, however, neither language has been signiªcantly aŸected by long-lasting territorial expansion followed by breakup, with former dependencies breaking oŸ politically while retaining the language of the former colonial power. Though Japanese functioned brie¶y as a supranational language during the colonization of Taiwan, Korea, and parts of China, no new Japanesespeaking nation ever arose to threaten the hegemonic tendencies of the center, politically or linguistically. This lack of dispersal of cultural and linguistic power
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
argues against the likelihood of Japanese being su¹ciently ¶exible to function as a language of global communication, even if it were not for the fact that Japan’s chances of regaining its recent economic dominance do not look promising. As for German, eŸorts toward standardization have tended to be sporadic and must be seen in the context of a largely decentralized political structure. One example is the recent attempt by the German government to carry out spelling reform, an eŸort that ran into ªerce opposition (Hutchinson 1999). Despite the fact that, like that of Japanese, the geographical base of German mostly consists of a single, dominant culture, the relative weakness of institutional standardizing forces suggests that the language is hypothetically well adapted to the pressure for structural simpliªcation that would inevitably follow any international spread. Whether the newspaper editors who so quickly deªed consensus and reverted to pre-reform practice (The Economist 2000: 46) would sanction such simpliªcation remains debatable. Another language with hypothetical potential as a tool for global communication is Russian, with its history of pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era expansion and of close control over the aŸairs of its neighbors. Yet Russian has a weak record of linguistic spread despite its recent forays into countries as diverse as Angola, Vietnam, or Cuba. In addition, despite the recent demise of the Soviet Union and the shrinking power of the Russian-speaking base, no new Russian-speaking nation has emerged to challenge any standardizing tendencies the Russian heartland may still be capable of imposing in times of sociopolitical adjustment and reduced central control. Taken together, this suggests that Russian is an unlikely candidate for a future role as global language. By contrast, China has so far succeeded in keeping its core territory intact, and indeed to add Hong Kong and Macau to it. This is due in part to a relatively ¶exible approach to regional variation (as regards varieties of Chinese, at least, though much less so as regards other languages spoken in Chinese Central Asia). This policy may well continue should Taiwan somehow come under mainland control, perhaps going as far as uno¹cially tolerating increasingly overt Taiwanese eŸorts to be identiªed as linguistically autonomous (for a review of these eŸorts, see Tse 2000). In practice, despite substantial variation within China as well as between China and a widely distributed diaspora, no threat to the dominance of standard Mandarin is currently discernable. Indeed, public debate over standardization aŸects mainly the incorporation into Chinese of linguistic imports and innovations as well as the issue of romanization (Chen 1996). Although there is little doubt where the seat of linguistic authority resides, the primarily logographic nature of Chinese writ-
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ing also makes it easier for institutional standardizing forces to tacitly allow for greater variation, at least as regards speech. In this sense, it could be argued that Chinese has the potential to adapt to multiple settings in the event of China acceding to global superpower status. For its part, the French nation-state has a long history of administrative centralization and the re¶ection of that trend in language policy and standardization is well documented (see, for example, Lodge 1991; Ager 1999; Safran 1999). Moreover, French continues to be closely connected to the massively dominant base of France, a situation that tends to encourage the centralizing tendencies of the base and predicts that the language will ªnd it di¹cult to develop spontaneously into an adaptable tool for global communication. While outsiders such as Kibbee (1993) advocate a relaxation of controlling tendencies if French is to regain at least some of its former global functions, many French commentators continue to regard the adaptability of English to various geographical settings as a sign of weakness (Gambier 1993). Taken as a whole, this suggests that French is not ideally suited for a hypothetical return to its former status as the preferred language of supranational communication. Finally, the chances of Esperanto acquiring a major role as a tool for global communication must be ªrst considered in the light of its lack of formal association with a nation-state. This frees it from the inevitable negative connotations that every dominant culture and the language it supports must sooner or later acquire in the eyes of some potential users. However, because Esperanto is in many ways the ultimate planned language, its very lack of organic ¶exibility predicts that it would require constant tweaking by promoters and planners to adjust to the geographical and functional expansion to which it aspires. In practice, this is an unlikely scenario since the forces that shape language in use will inevitably take the current structural conªguration of Esperanto in unforeseen directions, ultimately leading to a degree of diversiªcation that would rapidly threaten the major distinguishing feature of this language, namely, its structural regularity. In other words, Esperanto must either see its structural coherence weakened if unplanned localization is allowed to occur or maintain that quintessence by resisting localization through tight control and planning. Either way, Esperanto seems ill-suited to the supranational role which its creators envisaged.
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
Global potential and modernization In many cases, languages of wider communication have been imposed on unwilling communities through the overt repression of local alternatives (and worse). However, a key pre-condition for the globalization of a language to take place is that its must appeal to large numbers of potential users as a modernizing force. These potential users — whether entering the global language market for the ªrst time or switching between competitors — must regard their present options as somehow inadequate and the target global language as oŸering new opportunities for advancement. Into these (possibly subconscious) calculations are fed variables such as number of potential users with whom to interact and myriad intangible factors, including emotional ones. As the course of recent socioeconomic and political upheavals in Hungary shows, the rapid fall in demand for Russian-language instruction was mirrored by an equally sharp increase in demand for English language instruction (Petzold and Berns 2000). Yet, instrumental motivations cannot have been the primary force behind this switch since German was a viable alternative as the dominant second language among older Hungarians as well as the language of the major trading partner of the new Hungary. Clearly, English came to the fore — rightly or wrongly — as an intangible but powerful symbol of modernizing and liberating notions and practices. To some extent, this process is driven by a desire among potential users of global languages to plug into a hitherto inaccessible world of knowledge. That is, once perceptions of the likelihood of change spread, access to knowledge begins to be seen as within reach to the many rather than as the privilege of the few. However, if knowledge is to lead to beneªcial change, it must promote new ways of thinking and learning as opposed to simply doing things, a process that encourages inquiry and skepticism and will sooner or later lead to an interest in novel ideas probably involving democratic participation and social change (Prabhu 1994). In practice, English now connects existing as well as aspiring users of languages of wider communication loosely linked by a common set of notions and practices for which English, in particular, is seen as a relatively neutral vehicle that allows them to bypass traditional notions, changing in the process both notions and the language that gives them expression. This is not to argue that English or any other potential language of global communication is value-free. On the contrary, a key test of the potential of any given language for global communication is whether it conveys modernizing notions perceived as increasing the chances of individuals and groups of experiencing beneªcial
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social change. For as long as these notions are seen as preferable to home-grown ones and remain associated with English-speaking cultures, challengers to English as a vehicle for these notions face an uphill struggle. On this dimension, hypothetical competitors to English as a global language score very diŸerently. Esperanto, for one, is seen by its promoters as symbolizing a common linguistic heritage and set of human values (Tonkin 2000). In this sense, the language should be better placed for playing a role in promoting liberating and modernizing notions and practices than any competitor based in a speciªc nation-state because it is free of the history of separateness that all nation-states and the language with which they are most readily associated carry to some extent. However, it is di¹cult to imagine how Esperanto could both grow in global reach across a range of locations and cultures and remain free of cultural connotations. More importantly, perhaps, this very lack of cultural baggage also diminishes its appeal to potential users looking for a measure of cultural inspiration from a new language in addition to a solution to their communicative needs. Conversely, a language such as Arabic probably carries too overly explicit a set of sociocultural associations for success as a global language to be likely. Though important as a source of daily inspiration to many, the language is widely perceived as inseparable from a religious message that structures the lives of its adherents in especially inelastic terms. Moreover, a tradition of transmission of key knowledge through rotelearning encoded in Arabic, a foreign language for most followers of Islam, may result in an association between the language and knowledge seen as remote and hence not amenable to analysis. Deliberately or not, this may work against the promotion of the very values identiªed by Prabhu as likely to recommend a language as a vehicle for modernization. Japanese, for its part, is in principle in an enviable position as regards its potential as a language of global communication in that until recently it was associated with a culture that was seen as a major source of innovation in the ªelds of technology and business and that conducted a hugely successful drive for the internationalization of its interests. Yet, despite o¹cial attempts to encourage the learning of Japanese as a second language (Hirataka 1992), the language made little progress as a vehicle for regional — even less worldwide — communication, and for the most part remained a school subject. Clearly, 20th century history explains the strong reluctance of Japan to promote its culture and the unwillingness of many of its Asian neighbors to welcome it, at least o¹cially. Moreover, Japan’s recent unimpressive economic performance and poor prospects for long-term recovery do not suggest that its language will
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
be seen as the carrier of a vibrant modernizing message likely to appeal to potential users of a global language. To the extent that this is true of Japan and Japanese, the likelihood of Russian achieving global status as a carrier of modernizing values is even more implausible. In this case, the dominant culture underpinning the language must not only shake oŸ perceptions of recent social, economic, and political failure but also replace these perceptions with a sense that it carries a message likely to in¶uence the choice of potential learners of a global language. Closer to home, Russian continues to wield in¶uence through economic ties with its immediate neighbors and the presence among them of substantial Russianspeaking communities (Ozolins 1994). In other parts of the former Russian empire such as Kyrgyzstan, moreover, post-independence language laws discriminating against Russian have been weakened, in part to acknowledge the fact that the language continues to represent relative liberalism and opportunities for social advancement as opposed to conservative values associated with both Kyrgyz and Islam (Wright 1999). In the near-term, however, while Russia itself continues to experiment with novel notions and practices, there is little hope that Russian culture and language may soon help to shape aspirations to modernization elsewhere. As regards Spanish, despite signiªcant advantages such as a vast and relatively homogenous population base in the Americas, there is little reason to expect the language to extend its reach far beyond that continent. This is due in part to the absence of a clear link between the language and an ideology that might inspire individuals and nations in search of a path to modernization along a route readily distinguished from the North American alternative. At present, the contrast between the appeal — justiªed or otherwise — of the colossus to the north and the region’s own endemic social problems is so stark that Spanish does not look poised to claim an inspirational role as a potential tool for global communication. Similarly, German is essentially a language of wider regional communication, albeit with a much smaller and demographically shrinking base. In addition, like Spanish-speaking countries, Germany operates essentially within the western ideological framework and its culture is not perceived as oŸering substantial alternatives to those seeking a fresh route to socioeconomic advancement. Commentators such as Ammon (1995) and Hilgendorf (1996) note that German has now lost its earlier status as the preferred lingua franca of science and that English continues to gain in popularity — if not in use — as a result of being perceived as emblematic of modernization. Even the greater assertiveness now apparent in German politi-
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cal discourse and growing links between Germany and its Central and East European neighbors do not appear to have signiªcantly boosted the role of German as a language of wider communication regionally, let alone globally. For this to occur, the language would need to become associated with a novel and distinctive motivating message. There is no sign of this development occurring in the foreseeable future. Turning now to Chinese, it is likely that the emergence this century of China as an economic and military superpower will lead to a greater role for Chinese as a language of wider communication (Goh 1999). Already operating as a major lingua franca among a large Chinese diaspora, the language is bound to grow in geographic and sociocultural reach as increased trade brings corporations and governmental institutions in increasing contact with China. From an ideological standpoint, however, it is di¹cult to see on what grounds potential users of a global language might choose Chinese. At best, it is conceivable that a newly prosperous China might before too long be in a position to repackage through Chinese the very modernizing values that it is busy absorbing and oŸer them to eager followers. However, even this optimistic scenario is unlikely to unfold far beyond the region since no motivating message originating in Chinese culture or emblematic of recent achievements by China appears ready to ªre the imagination and in¶uence the choices of potential users of a global language worldwide. By contrast, inspirational messages are cultural exports that France likes to regard as its specialty. In addition to French being traditionally seen as the primary locus of a shared culture and the obvious vehicle for the promotion of that culture, the country was long regarded as the primary source of exciting philosophical, political, social, and artistic concepts and trends (Kibbee 1993), and it is likely that this contributed to the long dominance of French as the preferred language of supranational communication. On the one hand, reference to the country’s “civilizing mission” continues to be made in France, and to many intellectuals and policy-makers French continues to be an essential conduit for the promotion of uplifting French values (Gambier 1993). On the other hand, perceptions of a con¶ict between relative cultural and linguistic homogeneity at home and aspirations to global recognition that must at some stage involve cultural and linguistic accommodation to local conditions are gaining a degree of acceptance (Safran 1999). At the same time, discussions of French perceptions of French and English as global languages (such as Gambier 1993) continue to show an undercurrent of defensive anti-Americanism exempliªed in the frequent use of the metaphors of “siege” and “resistance.”
Contexts and trends for English as a global language
Furthermore, the overall cost of learning an additional language is such that potential users of French would have to be convinced that this choice would not cause them to be shut out of English-speaking networks or that they would be amply compensated through their membership of a French-speaking network if this were to happen. In addition, despite French protestations of cultural uniqueness, the set of values conventionally associated with French culture is not su¹ciently diŸerent from mainstream western notions to justify the eŸort of learning French as opposed to English. Even if this were so, it is not clear why French-led universalism should be preferable to the American-led alternative, still less why opposition to cultural and linguistic imperialism should take place through French as opposed to one of the local vernaculars on oŸer. Given this self-serving ambiguity, the promotion of French as an ideologically-grounded alternative to English is unlikely to win many converts among those in search of access to a language of global communication in the foreseeable future.
Predicting the future of English as a global language To conclude, geopolitical factors such as economic or military power are not su¹cient to account for the relative strength and potential of hypothetical languages of supranational communication. To be sure, critical mass is key and may prove to be the single most important factor underpinning the continued dominance of English as a global language. From a geopolitical standpoint, the most likely source of a challenge is likely to come from China as it increases in economic, military, and political power. However, any accompanying linguistic challenge will only succeed if the challenging language is based in a culture that allows for change under conditions of multiple ownership. As a newly globalizing language responds to exposure to a range of local languages and cultures, its linguistic makeup is likely to shift in the direction of structural simpliªcation under pressure from users with mostly instrumental motivations. This requires that a language with global ambition be amenable to unplanned change, a process unlikely to take place freely if the language is strongly associated with a single dominant culture with powerful centralizing and standardizing tendencies. In addition, a hypothetical challenger would need to be perceived as a vehicle for a sociocultural message with strong modernizing content. All of the hypothetical challengers discussed above — Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish
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— exhibit some of the characteristics needed for success in the global language marketplace. However, only English exhibits them all, at present and for the foreseeable future. Based on this rationale, it is predicted that it would take a geopolitical realignment on a catastrophic scale for English to be supplanted as the dominant language of global communication in the remainder of the twenty-ªrst century.
Global English and the non-native speaker Overcoming disadvantage Ulrich Ammon
In face of the bulk of literature and empirical studies (e.g. Crystal 1997; Graddol 1997; Fishman et al. 1996) a few words should su¹ce to recall that English is by far the most useful language for international communication today or, in other words, that comprehensive international communication (without the help of translation services) requires the knowledge of English. The use of other languages, like Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic and others, for communication between diŸerent countries, i.e. for international communication, is quite restricted: either to special regions (e.g. Central America, Eastern Europe) or countries (e.g. of the Francophonie), or to bilateral contacts (e.g. Germans and Hungarians), and, in addition, to certain situations or domains (e.g. marketing, sales, tourism, private encounters). For multilateral contacts, especially between divergent regions, the language which functions best in most cases, or the only one functioning, is English. As a consequence, English is generally the preferred language, even for bilateral or regional contacts, in the “international domains,” i.e. those with a great deal of multilateral contacts especially in science, politics, business negotiations, the media, sports, or tra¹c. Whoever wants to communicate in these domains will most likely have to use English sometimes. Of the various models of an “interlingual world,” World English is closest to realization (cf. Jonathan Pool and Mark Fettes 1998). In some domains, the choice of English has become the norm. In science for example, or at least in parts of it, this is so much so that using English or not can in¶uence quality judgment of texts. J. P. Vandenbroucke (1989: 1461) reports with respect to medical dissertations in the Netherlands, “By the language a thesis is written in you immediately judge its quality,” meaning that a
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thesis in English is valued more highly — as to its content! — than a thesis in Dutch or another language. Matched-guise technique with written texts in Scandinavia conªrmed such implicit value judgment. Two diŸerent texts, each in two language versions: the national Scandinavian language and English, were presented to referees: “[T]he majority of diŸerent aspects of scientiªc content was assessed to be better in English than in the national language version for both manuscripts.” (Nylenna, Riis and Karlsson 1994: 151) Under such circumstances, the use of English in domains like science becomes more and more of a necessity, at least for publishing.
Individuals’ and countries’ diŸerent degrees of preparedness It is obvious enough that individuals are equipped very diŸerently for participation in international communication in today’s world. Their command of English ranges from absolute non-speaker to practically perfect speaker and writer. For a rough classiªcation the threefold distinction between non-speaker, non-native speaker and native speaker seems useful. A closer view reveals, however, that the latter two terms cover a continuum which can be subdivided and measured in numerous ways. Linguistic skills of speakers of the same variety diŸer of course. Perhaps even more important in our context is the fact that diŸerent varieties of English vary widely in their acceptability for international communication, with American Standard English probably most acceptable, followed by British and other Standard Englishes, and the Englishes of developing countries or pidgin and creole varieties least acceptable. Therefore, nonnative speakers of American Standard English, who have had solid language training, may be better equipped for international communication than the native speakers of some non-standard variety of English. For purposes of reªnement, it might be useful to substitute the notion of “native speaker” altogether by the notion of “expertise in English” (cf. Rampton 1990), more speciªcally “in American Standard English,” “in British Standard English,” and so on. The distinction between native and non-native speaker seems, however, still useful for evoking diŸerences to which I want to attend in the following, e.g. that well-educated individuals of the U. S., Britain or Australia are, as a rule, better equipped with the skills in English required for international communication than individuals for instance of Japan, France, or Germany. For a rough orientation, one can follow Kachru (1982a), the way Crystal does (1997: 53), and picture the entrenchment of English around the world in
Global English
concentric circles: the “inner circle” of countries with English as a “primary” or native language versus the “outer” and the “expanding” circles with English “in non-native settings,” which comprise the following numbers of speakers given in spans to take into account diverging estimates: the inner circle 320–380 million, the outer 150–300, and the expanding 100–1,000. The non-Englishspeaking countries need to be added as a fourth, “outside circle,” containing over three quarters of the world population. Even within this outside circle, individuals with a good educational background will, as a rule, have acquired skills in English as a foreign language (EFL), especially the younger ones. It seems likely that individuals of a comparable social rank and level of education have a diŸerent command of English on average in the order of this classiªcation, with the best command in the inner and the poorest in the outside circle. In this paper I will concentrate on the problems and disadvantages faced by educated individuals of the outside circle, especially scientists and scholars, as a consequence of the fact that English serves as the preferred language of international communication. In the scholarly ªelds, more in natural science and technology than the humanities (cf. Truchot 1990: 95–161; Ammon 1991: 212–281), English is used extensively for research or researchrelated communication worldwide. In the outside circle, it has not in the past been widely used as a medium of teaching, but this has been changing recently: English was introduced as a medium of instruction, especially at the tertiary level, in the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands many years ago, but recently it has begun to be used in such countries as Germany and Japan (cf. Ammon 1998: 227–286). One may readily imagine that scientists, scholars, advanced students or individuals in the outside-circle countries ªnd themselves less perfectly equipped linguistically for such activities as publishing than their colleagues of the inner circle. There are, in addition, diŸerences among outside-circle countries, depending on loyalty to their own language or its linguistic distance from English. Thus, scientists in countries like France or Germany, who until recently enjoyed their own international language of science, have been slower to accept the new realities than their colleagues from Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands, who have long used a foreign language for their work. Japanese scientists may have more di¹culty with English than their European colleagues, especially those with command of a Germanic language. Here, however, I will not deal with these additional distinctions, focusing instead on my own experience as a native German-speaker, in the hope that my observations will shed light on the general problem and perhaps stimulate more systematic studies.
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Standards of correctness in inner-circle countries The inner-circle countries of English, more speciªcally their educated native speakers, hold the yardstick of linguistic correctness. It is by and large taken for granted that their variety or varieties of the language are superior to any other. Even researchers who are aware of numerical proportions of speakers, or of the extensive use of English for reªned purposes in the non-inner-circle countries, ªnally stick to this assumption or evaluation. Crystal (1997: 130–139) or Graddol (1997: 10–11), for instance, go a long way in presenting and justifying the “New Englishes” of the outer- or the expanding-circle countries, but Graddol is probably right in pointing out that they, in spite of forming “distinct varieties,” often follow an “underlying model of correctness” derived either from the USA or Britain. Graddol also, like Crystal, ªnally retains traditional judgments on correctness — contrary to what he seems to profess in some sections of his work. This is at least how I understand some of his remarks, for example on the printing of a book in Hong Kong, whose “development and writing (…) require advanced ‘native-speaker’ skills” (p. 42). One must conclude that advanced non-native speaker skills would, in his opinion, not do. Correctness judgment along these lines seems to be particularly rigorous for written scientiªc or scholarly texts. US or British standards govern numerous diŸerent aspects of texts: orthography, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatic and discourse features, as well as text structure in the narrower sense. BurroughBoenisch (2000) analyzed the intricacies of the use of tenses in American or British “Scientiªc English,” which, as she demonstrates, are very hard for French, German, Spanish or Swedish scientists to master and which are not explained correctly in published manuals. Clyne (1984; 1987) shows that English and German academic texts are structured diŸerently in various respects (linearity/ digression [Exkurs], symmetry, advance organizers, and hedging) and that English texts written by Germans tend to retain typical German structures (cf. also the literature on comparisons of English and other languages with respect to text structure in Clyne 1987). Clyne also hints at the fact that non-native features are, as a rule, evaluated negatively by native readers or reviewers. One might add: perhaps also by nonnative recipients. Thus, the British reviewer of a handbook of German editors found “some of the English written by non-native speakers so bad (…) as to be almost incomprehensible” (cf. Ammon 1989: 267). Similarly, a US reviewer of another book edited by a German speaker (myself), complained about “near unintelligibility,” because “the grammatical mistakes are so severe.” He also
Global English
did not appreciate that a “decidedly German substratum peeks through in many of the papers written in English” (Di Pietro 1990: 301; for other examples see Coulmas 1987: 106f.). Similar experiences were conªrmed by about a dozen German colleagues whom I queried. A short comment on the justiªcation of such criticism might be in order. I am doubtful whether the texts under scrutiny were really always hard to understand. A negative indication is the fact that the native speakers who have “corrected” or “polished” my own texts over the years have never had serious di¹culty understanding them. That intelligibility might be dubious as a reason for negative evaluation follows from observations that non-native English is sometimes easier to understand, especially for other non-native speakers, than native English. In the Netherlands, foreign students tend to have less di¹culty understanding their professors’ English than they do in Britain (Geert Booij, oral communication). Though there is evidence that spoken non-native English is harder to understand for native speakers than native English (Nelson 1982), it has been conªrmed that “speakers with shared cultural and linguistic norms obtain higher degrees of intelligibility in their language interactions” (Nelson 1982: 60). Non-native English, at least of the same linguistic background, is understood better than native English. The question of intelligibility of non-native English can of course only be answered on the basis of comprehensive empirical research. Nevertheless, there are reasons to assume that native speakers’, or even non-native speakers’, negative evaluation of nonnative English does not derive exclusively, or even primarily, from problems with intelligibility. Such evaluation may be motivated by concerns that other recipients may have di¹culty understanding, or by no functional reasons at all. In the latter case, one might want to specify them as a sort of “linguicism,” a kind of linguistic prejudice (cf. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1995: 104), but they are just in line with usual evaluations of norm deviations. To change them requires changing the norms of scientiªc English.
Self-assessed inadequacy in English language skills: The example of German scientists Numerous anecdotes describe the “bad” English of Japanese, French, Italian, German and other scientists of the outside circle, and also the other non-inner circles of the English-speaking countries. Such anecdotes are sometimes even published in newspapers. In some countries, they have been condensed into
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the idea that “BSE,” meaning “Bad Simple English,” is the general medium of today’s scientiªc communication (e.g. Adam 2000). However, this idea does not necessarily imply the assumption that any quality of English is acceptable for science. Scientists themselves know that this is not the case. In a survey by Skudlik (1990), 11 percent of German scientists and scholars answered that they did not have all four basic language skills in English (reading, speaking, oral understanding, and writing). In some academic ªelds, ªgures for missing skills were noticeably higher, e.g. in philosophy (25 %). In a survey of a small, clustered random sample of German scientists (n = 69), about half of them from the universities and the other half from industry, even higher percentages attested to insu¹cient English language skills: 25 percent in reading, 38 percent in oral comprehension, and 57 percent in writing (Ammon 1990). In fact, whatever the real level of skills, the mere thought that they may be insu¹cient seems to keep individuals from participating in international communication. Thus, if the use of English was required, those surveyed would not engage in the following undoubtedly important activities: 19 percent would not participate in conferences, 24 percent would not have contacts with colleagues, and 33 percent would not publish (Ammon 1990). This should come as no surprise, given the anecdotes about bad English and the evaluations received by non-native speakers. Thus, the co-coordinator of the European Science Foundation made the casual remark in a conversation with me that German professors sometimes “sound like babies” when they try to speak English. To my knowledge, no one has so far investigated whether scientists and scholars from the outside countries are underrepresented in international conferences and in international research and publication projects, but I assume, on the basis of bits and pieces of information, that this might be true — a hypothesis worth examining further.
Costs of handling a foreign language and of acquiring skills in it Of the German scientists queried by Skudlik (1990: 316, Table 31) only 3 percent asserted that all publishers with whom they dealt gave them assistance with language, while 5 percent claimed that many did, 22 percent claimed that some did, and 31 percent that none did (others did not respond). A high percentage, then, received little or no support. Nor does any research foundation in Germany provide ªnancial aid for rendering texts into English or for language corrections, except in a few rare, exceptional cases. The reason is that
Global English
they would thereby “open a bottomless [ªnancial] barrel,” as a German locution has it. My own investigation (Ammon 1990) disclosed that industrial scientists often have translation services at their disposal: 65 percent claimed to use them for letters and 75 percent for publications. These services are of course costly, which is why they are mostly limited to big companies. University scientists do not have access to such services, except if they pay for them privately. Most of them try to make do in various ways, especially by getting help from nativespeaker colleagues (who sometimes ask for ªnancial compensation, perhaps $20 per hour) or native-speaker student assistants (who can cost up to $500 or $1000 annually, which may be up to a quarter of a professor’s budget for student assistants). Good quality is not guaranteed, however, since the helpers, as well as the translation services, are mostly not real experts in the ªeld. There are various additional costs, for example for English-language spell-checks. In addition to ªnancial costs, there are costs in time, since producing a text in a foreign language always takes more time than in one’s own language. Informal guesses vary from half as much again to four times as much, depending on circumstances. Part of this additional time is due to the lack of personnel competent in foreign languages. Thus, though German professors usually have their own secretary, this person will often not be able to write texts in English upon dictation, as several informants complained in my survey (Ammon 1990). German publishers, as well as of publishers in other non-English-speaking countries, often complain about additional costs as a consequence of having to handle a foreign language, i.e. English; though these costs have not been quantiªed so far. Practically all German science journals have now shifted from German to English, beginning in the 1970’s. They have had to do so, publishers claim, in order to survive economically. Thus Angewandte Chemie has changed its name to Applied Chemistry, and Archiv für KreislauŸorschung has become Basic Research in Cardiology. Similar language shifts have occurred in the journals of other non-English-speaking countries, of which those of the Parisian Institut Pasteur may have received most publicity (cf. Coles 1989). Hand in hand with change of language have come additional translation costs, changes in editors, and expansion of editorial boards, causing further costs. Such costs are sometimes cited as the main reason why German publishers have di¹culty competing with British or American publishers, i.e. why they have to ask for higher prices (oral communication from Verlag Walter de Gruyter). For basically the same reasons, German data
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banks, especially bibliographical data banks, ªnd it di¹cult to compete with their Anglo-Saxon competitors. This was conªrmed by the Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe, now the major publisher of bibliographical data banks in Germany (personal communication from Dr. H. Behrens, 20 October 1997). Whether, and to what degree, language costs were responsible for the decline of the most renowned German bibliographical data bases, has not been analyzed: Chemisches Zentralblatt, which had appeared since 1830, and Physikalische Berichte, since 1845, were ªnally absorbed by their Anglo-Saxon competitors Chemical Abstracts and Physics Abstracts in 1982 and 1995 respectively (cf. Ammon 1998: 140–142). This brings us to the question of the costs in money or time, faced by scientists or scholars in acquiring adequate English-language skills. They are deªnitely much higher than those needed to pass any of the standardized achievement tests of English as a foreign language (e.g. TOEFL), none of which can be said to qualify the recipient to write scientiªc or scholarly texts, or speak in conferences. I do not know of any reliable estimate of these costs, which may be assumed to vary considerably depending on L1’s linguistic distance from English, on the teaching or learning method, and on the individual’s general language-learning ability. They will also vary according to level of income in diŸerent countries. As to costs in time, it is safe to say that for Germanspeaking countries nine years of studying English in school, with an average of four lessons a week, are far from su¹cient. Additional courses at university, which aim at providing students with the terminology of their ªelds, do not su¹ce either. Such courses hardly ever oŸer any training in writing scientiªc texts according to Anglo-Saxon norms, as Murray and Dingwall (1997: 56) found for German-speaking Switzerland. In assessing costs, one has to take into consideration that texts in the natural sciences or technology are, as a rule, linguistically easier than in social science or the humanities, since they are more standardized. How di¹cult academic texts are in the humanities can be guessed from the fact that even professors of English cannot usually produce correct versions. Thus, all but one of 20 professors of English in Germany whom I queried, felt incompetent in producing a correct scholarly text in English and professed a need for native help at least for style. It seems, therefore, safe to assume that of scholars in other ªelds practically none can write a text in English that meets the standards of the inner-circle countries. This is so in spite of the fact that the German language and academic traditions are relatively close to their English counterparts; di¹culties may be assumed to be still greater for scientists and
Global English
scholars of culturally and linguistically more remote countries like for example Japan. Claude Piron has assessed the question of how much time is necessary for acquiring the comprehensive mastery of a natural foreign language (not an artiªcial one like Esperanto). He concludes: “Most people whose foreign language was very good had had a few years of study in a university of the relevant country, or had worked at a rather high level in such a country. They had at least 10,000 hours of language exposure … [or] rather 12,000 hours (…)”(personal letter of 6 January, 2000; cf. also Piron 1994: 76–79). It seems that practically the only way for scientists or scholars to acquire the necessary skills in English is an extensive stay, of usually several years, in an inner-circle country studying or doing academic work. This would of course be costly in most cases for the individuals going abroad, and proªtable for the receiving countries or their academic institutions. For the USA, Britain, or Australia, training foreign students at their academic institutions has become “big business” (Kaplan 2001: 3–5); for Britain, the teaching of English is the biggest branch of business, second only to North Sea oil. In contrast, countries like France or Germany have to subsidize foreign students by granting free tuition or scholarships, if they want to maintain, at the level they feel is necessary for future international relations, a cadre of foreigners familiar, and perhaps sympathetic, with the country. It seems likely that language plays a considerable role in the diŸering attractiveness of universities of English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries — a factor whose extent merits analysis. Furthermore, high-school graduates worldwide have a greater knowledge of English than of any other language, and therefore have a preference for studying in English-speaking countries. Thus individual language-related costs and beneªts carry over to national costs and beneªts, and so do other disadvantages or advantages, such as when individuals of the outside-circle countries “sound like babies” when they participate in international exchanges. Detailed studies of individual encounters between native and non-native speakers of English (e.g. Oda 2000) can also convey an idea of how entire countries are on a diŸerent footing in international communication. In short, one could argue that the global position of the English language, achieved through colonialism and through the economic, political and scientiªc-technical superiority of its inner-circle countries (ªrst Britain, then the USA), now serves its countries’ advantages. The USA could not function, at least to the same degree and with the same e¹ciency, as the present world power without the global position of its language. Conversely,
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countries with other languages than English are linguistically at a competitive disadvantage.
Possibilities of relief The present global position of English may result from imperialism (Phillipson 1992), but certainly not an imperialism unique to English-speaking countries. On the contrary, countries like Spain, France, Germany, Russia, or Japan have also tried hard, and with brutal methods at times, to spread their languages in order to gain the kind of advantages the English-speaking countries now enjoy (cf. Ammon and Kleineidam 1992). How, then, could the English-speaking countries be persuaded to give up their advantage, or part of it? And how could the advantage the present situation holds for the other countries too, namely having a global language, or a language approaching this position, be preserved at the same time? I will not deal here with suggestions, in my view utopian, for a totally alternative global language, much as I personally sympathize with endeavors like the Esperanto Movement. It seems to me more realistic to believe that the English-speaking countries, or certain groups of native speakers of English, will, in spite of their present clout, eventually cede part of their linguistic advantage. There has been a long tradition, intensiªed during the 1960’s, of criticizing linguistic discrimination, and various kinds of such discrimination have as a consequence been reduced, for example linguistic sexism. I hope I have demonstrated that global English implies linguistic discrimination against non-native speakers of the language. Why should a political campaign to reduce it be futile? Such a campaign would of course have to present, or at least ªnally arrive at, reasonably fair and practicable solutions. Jonathan Pool (1987: 16f.) has distinguished three basic remedies of linguistic discrimination: identical treatment of languages, their equal treatment, and equal treatment of speakers. Only this last opens up, in my view, realistic perspectives for reducing the kind of linguistic discrimination caused by global English. Pool mainly suggests ways of ªnancial compensation. One, among others, concerns international conferences or organizations, where countries whose languages enjoy a privileged status or function should pay for it, e.g. for translation services, or where such services should be limited to the highest bidders. The requirement to pay could in the case of the UN, for example, deprive the languages of the poorer
Global English
countries (e.g. Russian, Chinese, or Spanish) of their present o¹cial status and endow those of richer countries with it (e.g. Japanese or German). This kind of approach seems, however, insu¹cient in the case of a truly global language such as English seems on the way to becoming. When everyone understands the language, translation from it becomes super¶uous. Equally, if everyone can produce at least basic texts in it, there is no need for translation but only perhaps for linguistic improvement. Still, costs remain unequal between native and non-native speakers (extra learning, additional time and energy for handling, level of performance). As a possible compensation for this inequality one could, following Pool’s line of thought, consider that the innercircle countries pay an extra share of the general costs of international organizations or conferences. It would, however, be extremely di¹cult to arrive at a practicable solution considering the di¹culty of calculating fair shares and the huge number of pertinent organizations and conferences. The English-speaking countries would most likely refuse any such attempt categorically, for understandable reasons. Attempts of that sort might at best be worthwhile on special occasions, mainly to raise awareness of who actually shoulders the costs of international communication. Solutions other than purely ªnancial ones appear more promising. A ªrst possibility might be a campaign for raising awareness of the costs and di¹culties faced by non-native speakers of English. It would probably spawn spontaneous support, e.g. with the production of texts, more understanding of linguistic mishaps and more tolerance of variant language norms. Doing away with norms altogether would of course not be a viable option, since it would endanger successful communication. A long-term perspective might be to transform global English into a new language. There are numerous publications dealing with related questions which might be scrutinized for ideas and evidence, for instance on modiªed (mostly simpliªed) English for international communication, on English as a lingua franca, or on EFL teaching objectives (closeness to native-speaker competence; e.g. Gomes de Matos 1998). Hartmut Haberland (1989: 936f.) has proposed the development of a “new, independent norm of academic English”, which “would be diŸerent from US or British English to the degree that the speakers of those dialects would have to learn it, if they want to write it or speak it properly” and which “would serve the purposes of its community of speakers better than any existing standard of English would, since it would be far less culture-bound and ethnocentric than all the other Englishes we can choose between today.” In my view, this new language should not be limited to
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academic use, and should also be given a new name in line with its function, for example “Globalish,” as I have proposed elsewhere (Ammon 2000). Globalish should incorporate national peculiarities beyond those of today’s English, namely also those of non-native speakers. It would not only comprise American, British, Australian English and so forth, but also Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German and other Englishes. Multinationality of the language should be developed in line with the idea, and partial reality, of pluricentric languages (Clyne 1992). Pluricentric or, more precisely, plurinational languages have three essential features: ªrst, they carry a speciªc norm for each center, in this case each nation, which is important as the expression of national identity; secondly, they show close linguistic similarity between all the diŸerent national norms, to guarantee mutual intelligibility; thirdly, they accept each norm as autonomous (as long as it is compatible with mutual intelligibility), or, ideally, as equal to all the other norms of the language. Such equality is lacking in the present plurinational languages, which have therefore been called “asymmetric”; but it seems possible in principle as long as mutual intelligibility is strictly observed. Such a model can of course be no more than a rough goal. Numerous linguistic, political, and organizational questions, theoretical as well as practical, remain to be answered. One question arising immediately is whether linguistic norms developed by non-native speakers could ever be equivalent to those of native speakers. The answer is yes: there are historical examples conªrming this possibility. Thus, the North Germans, who originally spoke only Low German, took on High German along with Lutheran Protestantism beginning in the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, North Germany’s High German was generally valued (and continues to be valued) as more correct than the High German of the South Germans, its original native speakers. One reason for this situation might be the greater attention non-native speakers pay to the language in their endeavor to acquire it, causing them to shape it into a form more apt for a lingua franca. If, as I observed above, Dutch English is easier to understand for non-native speakers than British English, the British, and perhaps the Americans, might learn from the Dutch how to change English into a practicable lingua franca. In any event, there seems to be no cogent reason why any English, or Globalish, developed from non-native English should not eventually be equivalent to the English derived from a native background.
Language and the future Choices and constraints John Edwards
Very few prizes have been awarded for successfully predicting the future in any but the most trivial or obvious settings. So, collections like the present one are speculative exercises, in which opinions are presented and beliefs expressed. Acknowledging the truism that some opinions are more valuable than others, however, we might imagine that the views of language experts will be particularly germane for linguistic futurology. But I want to start here on a cautionary note, and say that experts — by the very fact of being experts — often see the world through very particular, if not myopic, spectacles. I have read many books and articles on language which are so much on language alone that the vision presented is of the tunnel variety; typically, in such treatments, the necessary contextualization is lacking. The clearest examples of this, perhaps, come from the language-revival literature, in which desired outcomes are depicted as if they could be achieved in some stand-alone fashion, in which there is no recognition of the fact that linguistic shift and loss are symptoms of a larger dynamic. The logical implication — but one which is insu¹ciently grasped by language mavens and culture specialists — is to attend to this broader dynamic: after all, you don’t cure measles by covering up the spots. No one doubts that this is di¹cult. Although massive reweaving of the social fabric, or widespread social revolution, is always possible, it is relatively rare (and fraught with danger). A further complication is that, very often, broadly-based alterations to the social fabric are not actually desired: what is wanted is some linguistic redress by which, for example, group A retains its place within the modern mainstream, its mobility, and all desired current conditions — but is somehow enabled to revive its ancestral language. That said, it is not surprising that the best assessments of linguistic conditions — in a social sense, of course — have been produced by those whose
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original and more basic allegiance was sociology, or political science, or history, or anthropology, or (dare I say?) psychology. They have been forced, as it were, to graft an appreciation of the social life of language onto a broader stem. I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that nothing valuable in sociolinguistic or sociology-of-language terms has been produced by those whose complete academic raison d’être centers upon language. Nor could I deny that there are sociological, political and historical works which try to comment on language matters and fail abysmally. But the point is obvious: it is essentially a plea for disciplinary and methodological triangulation. One could put it another way, and say that it would be an egregious error to cast your lot completely with any one set of expert interpretations. Contributors to the present collection are, I assume, already adherents of this point of view — indeed, the collection itself (and the conferences it builds upon) re¶ect a desire to reject academic narrowness. To discuss “language in the future” means to consider the social factors that bear upon linguistic strength and weakness, scope and in¶uence. For this reason, I refer brie¶y to the tensions surrounding languages — and identities — in contact, paying particular attention to the role of experts in matters of linguistic endangerment and ecology. While “small” languages, or “at-risk” varieties, naturally command our attention, their status is only deªned in relation to others; in areas where inter-relationships are paramount, discussing only the small is just as blinkered as focusing solely on the powerful. Consequently, I also make cursory reference here to types of languages, and the interplay among them.
Languages at risk — identities at risk One would surely have to be an ostrich not to realize that the “politics of identity” is particularly prominent these days. The age is one of transition and transitions are, almost by deªnition, painful. The break-up of the Soviet Union and consequent realignments in eastern Europe, the march of federalism in western Europe, the continuing agonies of Africa, the emergence of the AsianPaciªc economies, the rethinking of pluralism and multiculturalism in newworld “receiving” countries (like Canada, Australia and the United States), the struggles of indigenous people in all sorts of settings — all is in ¶ux as we move toward what has been termed (rather grandiosely, no doubt, and not without unpleasant totalitarian reverberations) a “new world order.”
Language and the future
Identity politics comprises one of the most pressing matters of our time, one of the most insistent of “complaints” — to echo Robert Hughes (1993). In a world that seems to be increasingly globalized, it is surely unsurprising that these complaints often crystallize along local-national-international axes. Although the tensions occur under many speciªc headings — language, religion, sex, class, race, geography — the struggle for identity and its recognition is the underlying issue. We could usefully recall here Saussure’s (1916) contrasting principles of provincialism and intercourse, anchor-points whose relevance extends beyond linguistics alone. On the one hand, he argued, provincialism (l’esprit de clocher) keeps a community faithful to its traditions and encourages cultural continuity; of course, it also “rend les hommes sédentaires.” On the other hand, there is an opposing force in the service of broader communication, for which Saussure used the English word intercourse (his editors stated that “nous avons cru pouvoir conserver cette pittoresque expression de l’auteur”). Saussure believed that this centripetal-centrifugal opposition was of universal applicability, relating not only to “linguistic waves” and dialect variation but to all human customs, “n’importe quelle habitude.” Saussure’s dichotomy may have a special appeal for linguists, but he is hardly the only scholar to have grappled with this essential matter. Other writers have given us “roots and options,” “civism and pluralism,” “state and community,” “tribalism and globalism” — as well, of course, as the classic distinction ªrst drawn by Tönnies: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. These (and many other) dichotomies are not exactly synonymous, but all re¶ect the tension inherent in the desire to retain something “small,” or “valued,” or “traditional,” or “authentic” in the face of larger, overarching and more impersonal forces. At the widest level, then, we are talking of matters of pluralism and assimilation, and the fact that sociologists and social historians have produced and debated such terms as pluralistic integration, participationist pluralism, modiªed pluralism, liberal pluralism, multivariate assimilation, and so on, suggests that various intermediate positions have been, or could be, occupied (between, that is, seamless assimilation into some wider mainstream and social segregation). With such tensions, with such positioning possibilities or aspirations, various risk-assessment exercises can be expected, followed by all sorts of identity negotiations (or re-negotiations). The linguistic aspects of such negotiations usually reveal very clearly the push-pull tensions mentioned above. Factors like linguistic practicality, communicative e¹ciency, social mobility, economic advancement — these become increasingly associated with “large” languages, and interfere with the
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maintenance of smaller ones. Mother tongue and lingua franca: parochialism and intercourse. In many instances of language contact between varieties that are unequal in important ways, some bilingual accommodation seems the obvious avenue: one language for home and hearth, another for the world beyond one’s gate. Bilingualism, however, is often an unstable and impermanent way-station on the road to a new monolingualism. Formal language planning on behalf of beleaguered languages — to encourage a ªrmer diglossia, for example — can often do very little to stem the forces of urbanization, modernization and mobility, forces which typically put a language on the endangered list and lead to shift. In a word, decline in the existence and attractions of traditional lifestyles inexorably entails decline in languages associated with them. Short of unethical and draconian intervention, or of voluntary social segregation, which is, historically, of extremely limited appeal, language shift often seems inevitable and bilingualism often unstable. Despite the fact that people can breathlessly write about “language loss” as if there were actually some period during which groups had no language at all, despite the fact that in many eyes globalization has become the longest fourletter word, despite the imbalance of heat and light in discussions of the social life of language, we should try to remember that — historically and linguistically — change rather than stasis is the norm. Environments alter, people move, needs and demands evolve, and such factors have a large in¶uence upon language. When considering accusations that certain societies, or groups, or institutions can be singled out as villains in the story of some language or another, we ought to bear some generalities in mind. The desire, for instance, for mobility and modernization is, with some few notable exceptions, a global phenomenon. Whether one looks at the capitalist world or the former communist one, at contemporary times or historical ones, at empires or small societies, at immigrant minorities or indigenous groups, one sees a similarity of pressures which take their toll, force change and throw populations into transitional states that have, naturally, unpleasant consequences (for some at least, in the short term at least, and so on). Original languages are frequent casualties here. It is not surprising that, because of its visibility and its overall position within culture, language often receives particular attention. Groups “at risk,” activists for change, nationalists of all stripes, traditionalists — these are some of the many constituencies for whom language retention, or maintenance, or revival becomes central. Language, after all, is far more than an instrument of communication: it possesses powerful symbolic and allegorical value. It is
Language and the future
unsurprising that this linguistic dimension — essentially part of group identity — should assume special potency and centrality during times of uncertainty, anxiety and transition. Attempts to shore up a declining language are psychologically interesting even when the outcome is dubious, for reasons which have by now become obvious. In fact, language maintenance is often a parlous enterprise because, by the time a “small” variety is seen to require it, the precipitating social pressures have assumed truly formidable proportions. It is also an enterprise that has typically been left to the amateur, the enthusiast — or, quite commonly, has been considered only a part of some broader literary revival. (In such instances, concern for the oral or the vernacular has often been much less pronounced than that for the strengthening or, indeed, the re-establishment of literary lineage.) Traditionally, linguists themselves have remained aloof from the fray, usually seeing in decline and shift a “naturalness” that eŸectively precludes — even if it were thought desirable — any useful intervention (see Bolinger’s 1980 discussion). Some contemporary ªgures, though (particularly sociolinguists and sociologists), have not shied away from engagement in what Bolinger called the “public life” of language. Joshua Fishman is a good example here. He has noted that regret over mother-tongue loss — among groups who “have not capitulated to the massive blandishments of western materialism, who experience life and nature in deeply poetic and collectively meaningful ways” (1982: 8) — has brought many academics into linguistics and related ªelds. Fishman makes no secret of his own commitment here, and has devoted considerable attention (see, for example, 1990, 1991) to the question of “reversing language shift”, an undertaking he deems a “quest” of “sanctity.” He implicitly and explicitly endorses a view of applied linguistics as both scholarship and advocacy, a stance that may perhaps involve some dangers. In a piece now well known, Krauss (1992) also called for more involved commitment on the part of linguists, noting with alarm the large number of the world’s languages now at risk. We should go well beyond the usual academic role of description and documentation, he argues, to “promote language development in the necessary domains … [and] learn … the techniques of organization, monitoring and lobbying, publicity, and activism” (p. 9). Ladefoged (1992) replied to this admonition, adopting a more traditional posture: the linguist’s job is to report facts, and not to attempt to persuade groups that, for example, language shift is a bad thing per se. Not all speakers of threatened varieties see their preservation as possible or, indeed, desirable.
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Ladefoged’s general position was that One can be a responsible linguist and yet regard the loss of a particular language, or even a whole group of languages, as far from a “catastrophic destruction” …Statements such as “just as the extinction of any animal species diminishes our world, so does the extinction of any language” are appeals to our emotions, not to our reason. (p. 810)
Dorian (1993) responded to Ladefoged, noting that all arguments about endangered languages are political and that all “facts” are intertwined with attitudes and positions; that the low status of some varieties weakens the resolve to preserve them; that the loss of any language is serious. What to do with, and about, endangered languages has lately become something of a hot topic. A collection on the subject, by Robins and Uhlenbeck (1991), was not the ªrst discussion of endangerment and death. For example, Dorian’s treatment of Sutherland Gaelic had appeared ten years earlier (1981), and her edited book on language “obsolescence” was published in 1989. But its organizational origins are important. The Comité International Permanent de Linguistes (of which both Robins and Uhlenbeck were o¹cers) had argued, through its statutes, that more academic and o¹cial attention should be given to threatened varieties. Their collection comprised a special issue of Diogenes (which means a link to UNESCO) and was also intended to serve as a thematic framework for a 1992 conference of linguists, in Quebec. This was the preparation of the ground soon to be further tilled by Krauss and his colleagues. Recent volumes include two by Brenzinger on African languages (1992, 1998), Grenoble and Whaley’s more general collection (1998), Crystal’s monograph (2000) — which opens with a reference to the Quebec conference —, Nettle and Romaine (2000), and of course Ma¹’s essay in the present volume. There is a great deal of room for debate about this important matter and, in particular, the appropriate stances for linguists and other concerned academics (see Edwards 1994a). The issue is very obviously going to be a central feature of future language discussion. One can go further, and predict that the discussion will increasingly become an “ecological” one. This is the perspective adopted by most of the authors I have just cited and it is, of course, entirely unsurprising when words like “death”, “endangerment” and “preservation” are so frequently used. Organizations, societies and web-sites dedicated to language preservation already exist, and all invoke ecological arguments (see Ma¹ for further details). The connection of language problems to broader “green” issues such as endangered species, threatened natural environments, and atmospheric pollution
Language and the future
seems to make a lot of sense, at least for the moment, at least in the western political world. It remains to be seen just how appropriate such a connection is. One could point out, for instance, that to speak of linguistic death and endangerment may be a variety of the pathetic fallacy. Or, that it is considerably easier to save animals (given su¹cient will, of course) than it is to rescue imperiled languages (where will, however strong, may run up against more formidable opposition). Or, that such undertakings may suggest noble motives while, at the same time, revealing historical naïveté. Or, as Ladefoged would no doubt repeat, that eŸorts to “save” languages at risk — to go beyond, that is, the more traditional linguistic recording and documentation — re¶ect emotion rather than rationality. And so on. Discussions around these and many other axes are likely to remain on the agenda for some time.
Languages and their status — present and future For our present purposes we can deªne four categories of languages: small stateless languages, small state languages, languages of wider communication, and constructed languages. The fate of small “stateless” languages (and sometimes dialects) has become more precarious in modern times. In a world in which the big lingua francas and the state-supported languages either ignored smaller and — it was presumed — unimportant mediums, or failed to penetrate their heartlands, the more localized forms continued on a minor but relatively stable basis. But that world has largely vanished. Now, the big languages (we could almost say, I suppose, the big language) are everywhere; their penetrative power is ubiquitous. Their strength derives from the same sources as always, but their scope has increased dramatically because of technological innovation on a scale never before seen. Their progress is like some juggernaut which crushes all in its path. Thus do English and globalization (or westernization, or Americanization) march arm-in-arm around the world. But apart from the inexorable “push” of a globalized economy, intent on selling the same shoes, soft drinks and sex — through English — to everyone from Boston to Bhutan, there is an almost equally powerful “pull” factor: globalization and its linguistic ramiªcations are welcomed by many who see in it upward mobility — physical, social, psychological. All of this is very serious for small languages without a state behind them, whose appeal to their onceand-future speakers increasingly rests upon abstract pillars of cultural continuity and tradition. The old English proverb has it that “ªne words butter no
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parsnips” — and, equally, ªne cultural appeals often seem empty to those to whom they are chie¶y addressed. Exactly the same pressures apply to small state languages. Still, it may be thought that a small language which enjoys state support is powerfully armed. Such varieties do, of course, have an increased likelihood of survival compared to their stateless cousins, but it would be a great mistake to assume that the acquisition of o¹cial status by a small language means that a corner has been decisively turned. Irish is the only Celtic language to have its own state, but that has not made it the most dominant in that family, nor has it managed to bar foreign linguistic in¶uence at the customs-post. In March 1999, I attended a meeting of the Nederlandse Taalunie (the Dutch Language Union), held in Brussels. It was convened under the title “Institutional Status and Use of National Languages in Europe.” The real thrust of the conference was the place of the smaller so-called “national languages” — Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, and so on — in a Europe increasingly dominated by French, German and, above all, English. More than seventy participants from all over the continent (and beyond) provided evidence — more than any rational observer could possibly need — that being a “state” variety rather than a “stateless” one can mean very little in the world as it is today, and as it is extremely likely to be for the foreseeable future. As for languages of wider communication, what is most relevant under this heading has, of course, already been presented, in mirror-image form as it were, in the preceding paragraphs. The fate of the small varieties, stateless or not, varies inversely with that of the large. There are, however, interesting dynamics to attend to within the ranks of the larger languages themselves, and of chief importance here is the development of (at least) a two-category division in these ranks: some sort of super-LWC status for English, and a second side in which jostling for status among French, German, Russian, Spanish and other such “world” languages becomes the main characteristic. Although not a particular devotee of constructed languages myself, I have written about them, arguing that their origins, their forms and functions, their communities and their varied (and often colorful) histories all repay further study. I think it unlikely that their range and scope will increase signiªcantly.
Language and the future
Implications for research and policy Intervention in linguistic matters can be worse than doing nothing, if there has been inadequate preparation across a wide spectrum of social life. The particular contribution of academic linguists, whether or not they become “interveners” themselves, is to assist in the groundwork and then perhaps in the translation of information into policy. Academics are not usually prime movers here, and academic research, as Elie Kedourie noted many years ago, in a slightly diŸerent context, “does not add a jot or a tittle to the capacity for ruling [read also policy-making], and to pretend otherwise is to hide with equivocation what is a very clear matter” (1961: 125). While being appropriately modest, however, researchers can make real and important contributions. Here are a few thoughts, linked to the categories presented above, about future directions. First, and most generally, we should cultivate a clearer and broader awareness of the real forces in the real world that bear upon language matters. It may be of interest to continue to point to the “logic of languages” that all varieties possess, so as to reinforce the perceived validity of “Language A.” Or, it may be useful to conduct studies showing the historical roots of “A,” to suggest that its continuity is bound up with that of its speakers’ culture. It may be valuable to point to the imperialistic and basically unfair practices of those large linguistic neighbors who are sti¶ing the re-emergence of “A” or who are preventing it from maintaining its own little place in the sun. These sorts of studies and concerns are, of course, eminently worthwhile from an academic and cultural point of view. If, however, we are concerned with policy and planning — and bearing in mind Kedourie’s cautionary note — we should realize that none of this sort of work need have the slightest relevance to actual linguistic developments on the ground. Sure to be of continuing importance is the evolving nature of the relationship between small languages and large ones. There are some particularly instructive contexts to attend to here, notably the European Union, where we see a continent coming increasingly together while, at the same time, there is more regard being given to both “stateless” and state languages of limited scope. Can a future federal Europe co-exist with a “Europe of the Regions”? What is the status likely to be of languages like Danish and Finnish — to say nothing of Provençal, of Catalan, of Welsh? Of particular importance here, I think, is a deeper consideration of the technological shrinkage of the world and its eŸects upon small varieties. On the one hand, for example, it can be argued that global technology assists the advance of English, on the other, that technology (to-
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gether with European political restructuring) actually makes it easier for small cultures (and their languages) to have that desired place in the sun. Relatedly, there will continue to be competition among the large languages. I have hinted already at what I consider to be the single most interesting question here: the emergence of a two-tiered structure within the ranks of the big languages. We need to know much more about the likelihood of English becoming super-dominant, and the eŸects of this outcome. This is not only important for the speakers of French, Russian, Spanish and so on: there are obvious knock-on eŸects which will touch the smaller varieties. A world, or even a Europe, which evolves more and more to become “English vs. The Others” will not be same as one in which the continuingly important presence of other large varieties interposes itself, as it were, between the super-language and the little ones. I have not, as yet, seen very much written on this topic. Finally, what about future developments in the use of constructed languages — those auxiliaries which may seem a logical counterweight to Babel? As already implied, I don’t see that there is much more mileage to be gained — again, if we are interested in going beyond academically interesting pursuits, and saying something about policy possibilities — in presenting detailed work outlining their internal structural regularity, the ease with which they can be learned, the logic of having them as universal second languages, their desirably neutral status among a world of varieties burdened by particular histories, and so on. The really important matters — and they have, in fact, always been central — have to do with the sociology, the politics, the psychology surrounding constructed mediums. Why has none of them managed more than a vestigial existence? Why are they so often seen, if seen at all, in negative or dismissive lights? What — realistically, now — could possibly be done to increase their use? Isn’t it the case that, as universal lingua francas, their role has been more or less totally eclipsed by English? And so on. Within a reasonably large (but essentially compartmentalized) literature, these sorts of questions have received much less attention than they ought. Attempting to answer them will illuminate much more than constructed language alone.
A concluding thought In line with what I have already said about the need to contextualize our work and to broaden its base, it is also vital to remember that what is really under discussion here is not so much language per se: it is, rather, a question of group
Language and the future
identity. If language were purely an instrumental medium, then many elements of its social existence would resolve themselves and many of the most heated controversies and debates would vanish. Language planning, as a formal exercise, would become a very delimited undertaking. As we all know, however, language has deep psychological importance; of particular note is the association with group identity and its continuity. This is why the struggle between large and small varieties is so vehement, why the apparently logical steps that improved communication would beneªt from are resisted — why, in a word, we need always remind ourselves that our work takes us into heavily mined territories of emotion. Whatever future developments may unfold, this at least will be constant.
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Interlingualism A world-centric approach to language policy and planning Mark Fettes
A brief history of language In thinking about the linguistic future, we should ªrst recognize how conditioned we are by the linguistic past. For more than ªve centuries, the central story of language on our small planet has been the story of the nation-state. It is states that have been the principal architects of language policy, that have furnished the mechanisms and resources for that policy’s implementation, and that have evolved side-by-side with a set of cultural assumptions about what language is and how it should be managed. Some two decades ago, Ivan Illich and Benedict Anderson identiªed two distinct but interrelated dynamics in the modern relationship between state and language. Illich (1981, 1983) traced how language evolved from a vernacular resource of everyday life into a centrally administered instrument of social order, a “taught colloquial” infused with norms and beliefs that are distant from people’s experience. Anderson (1981), meanwhile, drew attention to the central role of print literacy in fostering the expansion of “imagined communities” in which people could be persuaded of their commonality with distant others. Anderson’s dynamic led to nationalism’s gradual replacement of religion as the deªning element of group identity throughout the industrializing world; Illich’s propelled the gradual transformation of ruler-centered states into nation-centered states. Throughout the period now commonly referred to as modernity, which began to take on clear form in Europe in the latter part of the seventeenth century but had its origins at least two centuries earlier, the story of language has been central to the construction of modern societies (cf.
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Harris 1981). Concomitantly, all the uncountable varieties of language that were excluded from this project have been relegated to the margins: among them local dialects, standard languages lacking a state, autochthonous minorities, non-territorial languages, and sign languages. Some ªfty years ago, following the Second World War, the ªnal phase of this great construction project was inaugurated under the twin banners of decolonization and development (Sachs 1992). As the vast “underdeveloped” areas of the world, home to the greater part of humanity, were inducted into the family of nations, it was expected that they would follow the well-trodden path of linguistic standardization and modernization, just as many smaller European nations had in the preceding century. The ªeld of language planning was conjured into existence to assist them. UNESCO convened well-intentioned international meetings to discuss mother-tongue education, mass literacy programs, the translation of scientiªc literature, and a host of related issues. Everywhere states were expected to have a well-deªned national literary language, perhaps two or three at most, and possibly with some limited provision for local diversity as in the case of India. Communication at the international level would continue, as it had for centuries, in the languages of the European imperial powers: primarily England, France, Spain and Russia. Some details might need to be worked out, but the blueprint was clear. Yet states themselves were in transformation. For the preceding three centuries they had expanded, and gained in power and legitimacy, by enabling interests to be balanced, goods to be reallocated, and a value system to be a¹rmed and institutionalized within a common “horizon of signiªcance” (Taylor 1991). National languages were an essential vehicle for this process, and by the same token a valuable public good that could become the focus of political struggle. Increasingly, however, the ability of states to do these things was circumscribed by the social dynamics they made possible. Basic resources such as water, land and energy came to be tied up in enormous systems of vested interests, the inequitable distribution of goods was rendered almost unassailable by the ascendancy of individualism, and the institutions of consumer culture came to play as signiªcant a role in forming shared values and beliefs as any state-sponsored discourse. As a consequence of these developments, the path followed by the European states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (along with Japan and a few of the western colonies) began to peter out. Up until the 1920s, it was possible for even a small nation such as Finland or Norway to formulate an independent economic and cultural policy and pursue it without hindrance.
Interlingualism
Today, national economies are locked into a vast system of exchanges in world trade, currency and technology, and national linguistic ecologies are likewise locked into a communicative system that has little regard for national borders. Neither of these systems was planned, or even intended: they emerged as a consequence of the West’s success in exporting “modernity,” under the aegis of the nation-state, to the rest of the world. In considering the fate of “language in the twenty-ªrst century,” we are thus confronted with a deeper question about the future of modernity. A decade ago, inspired by the abrupt collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe, Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously argued that history had come to an end: what we see is what we will continue to get, because modernity, in its individualist, market-driven incarnation, has proven itself capable of vanquishing every rival. If this were true, it would imply the continued expansion of the languages of the mass market — essentially, those languages that have already been integrated into the industrialized economies — at the expense of all others. There is no lack of linguistic seers prophesying exactly such a future. Whether the models used are politico-economic (de Swaan 1998a, 1998b), socioeconomic (Calvet 1998), or ecolinguistic (Nettle and Romaine 2000), the results look much the same, with over 90% of the world’s languages projected to disappear within three generations. The end of history, indeed.
After modernity, what? It is notoriously di¹cult to look at one’s own historical era from outside. Certainly the architects of modernity had no sense of their project ever coming to an end: the arrow of progress pointed onwards to inªnity. Yet the last twenty years or so have given rise to an understanding of that era as a distinctive cultural interlude, based upon assumptions that are no longer taken for granted (see especially Bauman 1987, 1992, 1995). One wonders, then, about the unanimity of our linguistic oracles. Might they be overestimating the durability of our present curious civilization, product of the wealthiest, bloodiest, most tumultuous century in human history? The question is at least worth asking. On the negative side, present social arrangements appear to be courting disaster in the short to medium term. Warnings of environmental limits being exceeded have become commonplace. The time frame involved is extremely uncertain, but it seems safe to say that we cannot indeªnitely sustain, much less expand, the kind of lifestyle that modern states have used to buy the allegiance
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of their subjects. The persistence of high levels of economic inequity has already destabilized many governments and bred conditions for lasting social dysfunction. For many people, the old “horizon of signiªcance” oŸered by the nation-state has lost its imaginative power: other allegiances beckon, some of which are inimical to all the individual and group freedoms so painfully won in the era of modernity. On all these fronts, the assumption of continuity seems on shaky ground indeed. On the positive side, the past ªfty years have also seen the rise of a distinctive kind of consciousness that I shall call world-centric. To return to Charles Taylor’s notion of “horizons of signiªcance,” it has became imaginatively feasible for a small but growing minority in modern societies to conceive of themselves as members of a “world polity” which includes all states and all people within its horizon of signiªcance. This perspective is the dominant one among international non-governmental organizations, which have experienced an extraordinary rise in numbers and in¶uence since the Second World War (Boli and Thomas, 1998); to a more limited extent, it in¶uences political and cultural discourse in other arenas as well. World-centric thought and belief is quite diverse, and can indeed simply reproduce modernist discourses at the global level, as in the development of the World Trade Organization. But it does seem to oŸer an opening for new forms of thought and action as well. Admittedly, this possibility is di¹cult to quantify, and its outcomes are impossible to predict. Yet because all social arrangements depend on the coordering of consciousness, changes in values and beliefs can tip an apparently stable system into chaotic change with relative ease. Examples are not hard to come by: the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, the South African transformation of 1992, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 all illustrate the potential for rapid and dramatic transformation in social systems that most had assumed to be stable. Of course, in retrospect it is always possible to point out the warning signs, the straws in the wind, that heralded change. What is di¹cult is to read the signs in advance. This is why I take seriously the work on human consciousness by holistic psychologists and philosophers such as Clare Graves, Don Beck, Chris Cowan and Ken Wilber. They have found it useful to think of human development, at both the individual and cultural levels, as proceeding in stages, even though any individual and any culture will display a mixture or mosaic of stages of development, depending on the situation. Their work helps to highlight the tensions, contradictions and unrealized potential hidden beneath the surface of our present civilization: that is, it presents a dynamic picture in contrast to
Interlingualism
Fukuyama’s “end of history.” What it tells us is that the last three decades’ dramatic rise in “green” consciousness — pluralist, egalitarian, relativistic, sensitive — is no more of an adequate basis for integrative thinking than either the “blue” (state-centric) or “orange” (individualist-materialist) stages with which “green” thinkers see themselves in competition. In Beck and Cowan’s terminology, these are all stages of “ªrst-tier” thinking (Wilber 2001). If one’s perception of human potential is limited to these three stages, which form the apex of ªrst-tier development, then Fukuyama’s vision remains a plausible one: essentially, the long-term dominance of orange, by virtue of its technological dynamism, and ability to absorb and package for consumption the products of both blue and green thinking. The interesting point, though, is that the ªrst tier does not exhaust the range of possibilities. There is insu¹cient room here to go into the complexities sketched by Wilber, but he and his colleagues believe there to be a ªnite chance of second-tier thinking gaining a lasting hold in twenty-ªrst-century culture and unleashing a wave of transformation in every aspect of human aŸairs, from education to economics, from personal development to social welfare. Even today, there is no shortage of thoughtful people who see the need for such a transformation, in response to the deep-rooted problems mentioned earlier; what is lacking is a shared perception of how to achieve it. This is what the “integrative” stage (yellow) and the “holistic” stage (turquoise) of second-tier thinking would entail: in Wilber’s words, “in grasping big pictures, it can help suggest more cogent solutions” (2001: 58). Because human civilization does now indeed function as an interconnected global whole, second-tier thinking implies a world-centric view, and thus the clash of ªrst- and second-tier thinking can be most easily seen in the discussion of global issues such as environment and development (e.g. Sachs 1992, 1993). There is no word in widespread use to denote the cultural possibilities represented by second-tier thinking. “Postmodernity,” the word that recommends itself, has become strongly associated with the cultural stage labeled “green”; as Wilber discusses in some detail, postmodern thought tends to actively oppose integrative theories. In my own work on educational theory (Fettes 2000a), I have been impressed with the ways in which some premodern cultures seen to have deliberately cultivated second-tier thinking, and so I propose the term “transmodernity,” harking both backwards and forwards in human history, as a useful label for this alternative development paradigm for the twenty-ªrst century.
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Interlingualism: an integral perspective The stage is now set for a rather diŸerent set of insights into the dynamics of the world language system. It is not that the predictions and models alluded to earlier lack validity; it is only that they are based on conservative assumptions about global culture. One way to examine these assumptions is to consider what values are embodied in the language system they portray. Seen in a longer perspective than that of the nation-state, the story of language involves the dynamic interplay of homogeneity (unilingualism) and plurality (multilingualism). Peoples separated by physical and cultural barriers have developed and used thousands of diverse languages, while social forces such as trade, religion, education, conquest, and colonization have spread the use of particular languages across continents and oceans. Communal languages, in which diverse ideas and ways of life are cultivated, mediate ties to speciªc places and kinship groups; intercommunal languages provide a solution to the problem of communal isolation and enable collaboration (both voluntary and coerced) on social projects beyond the scope of smaller groups. The modern era, of course, has been characterized by the expansion of intercommunal languages at the expense of communal languages, intertwined with the progression of modern cultures through blue (state-centric) and orange (individualist-materialist) cultural stages. Only in the last thirty years or so has the rise of the green stage (pluralist-relativist) led to something of a revalorization of communal languages, as found in movements for linguistic rights (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000) and “reversing language shift” (Fishman 1991, 2001). Key values stressed by these cultural stages include unity (blue), e¹ciency (orange), diversity and equity (green). Historically, and certainly in the last century, these have been seen as more or less contradictory. States are viewed as stronger if they make few concessions to their internal diversity of regions and cultures; economies of scale demand minimal concessions to local particularisms; both views foster a reluctance to accommodate diŸerent treatments for diŸerent individuals and groups. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of language. The underlying cause of the massive reduction in linguistic diversity predicted for this century is the entrenchment of blue and orange thinking in political and economic structures worldwide, a situation that green thinking recognizes but cannot undo. The question to be posed, then, is whether these values are reconcilable; that is, can a world be imagined which displays the following features:
Interlingualism
– – – –
Diversity: Many languages thrive in it. Integration: People communicate and cooperate across language boundaries. Equity: Opportunities and rights do not depend on a person’s native language. Efficiency: Language-related investments of human and material capital are sustainable.
In a paper written for the ªrst conference on “Language in the Twenty-ªrst Century,” Jonathan Pool and I (1998) suggested that if such a world were shown to be possible, it would be broadly consensual. In the terms developed here, it would be the kind of world sought by second-tier thinking. We termed such a world “interlingual,” since it would be characterized by a ¶uidity of intercourse among many languages. We further identiªed ªve bodies of thought that oŸer preliminary accounts, or inspirations for accounts, of an interlingual world (“interlingualism” for short). More recently, I have evaluated the current progress and interplay of these ªve traditions (Fettes 2001, 2003). These results will be summarized brie¶y before going on to consider their implications for the present paper. Here are the ªve “interlingual ideas” that Pool and I identiªed (Pool and Fettes 1998): World English (WE) The most widespread second language of the present day, English, might make the world interlingual by becoming so well integrated in educational and social systems worldwide that it was accessible to all at minimal cost. One variant of World English is unilingualism; however, if the world’s majority were motivated to keep cultivating their autochthonous languages, and if any related economic or social costs could be compensated, English might become the world’s “second native language,” transcending but coexisting with a multiplicity of other languages. Esperantism (E) An invented language (not necessarily Esperanto itself), designed as a global auxiliary language in which ¶uency can be achieved at low cost, might make the world interlingual. If it became customary to use such a language for all translingual communication, the burden of linguistic accommodation would be both small and equal for all. If the language retained its auxiliary status, bilingualism would become a near-universal condition.
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Language Brokers (LB) Professional translators and interpreters might achieve an interlingual world by enabling people without a common language to communicate with success, despite greatly dissimilar experiences and beliefs. If appropriate conditions for such work became normative, and if translators and interpreters were e¹cient and numerous enough, they might make it possible for most people to cultivate their own languages and communicate interlingually without the burdens and risks of widespread language learning. Plurilingualism (P) A world in which knowing many languages is as normal as knowing many people might be an interlingual world. If breakthroughs in the methodology of language teaching could be veriªed and propagated, and if multilingual competence became widely valued, people who needed to communicate across language barriers would normally have or could easily develop the ability to do so. Technologism (T) Invention might resolve the apparent incompatibilities of interlingualism. If the intricacies of grammar, meaning, and communicative strategy could be understood and codiªed, language barriers might disappear altogether in the presence of fully automatic translation between the world’s tongues, or be superseded by novel, automated, non- or panlingual means of communication. On re¶ection it becomes evident that these various ideas are interpreted diŸerently by diŸerent strands of world-centric thought. Plurilingualism, for instance, has its roots in state-centric culture; for some three centuries, from Descartes to Heidegger, it was accepted throughout the European sphere that the educated person would read, write and speak several languages. In this view, still o¹cially espoused by the European Union, English was but one among several languages of culture, science and diplomacy. Yet as I have argued elsewhere (2001, 2003), this concept of plurilingualism was never designed for mass implementation: it re¶ects an elite cultural style that sits uncomfortably with both the individualist-materialist bias of orange and the pluralist-relativist preferences of green. World English, by contrast, has expanded on the crest of the orange wave, and by becoming the nearest thing we have to a global language has also been implicated in the recent green groundswell. Seen in this light, David Crystal’s rather trite observation that “English has repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time” (Crystal 1997) contains an element of truth.
Interlingualism
The consequences are interesting. Whereas state-centric thinkers can frequently be heard to express their reservations about the dominance of English, for instance in resolutions at the United Nations, green pluralists ªnd themselves in an awkward double-bind. On the one hand, English is intimately associated with the world-centric discourses on human rights, environmental standards, community-centered development, and everything else supported by green; on the other, the communicative playing ªeld dominated by English is clearly bound up with the very disparities in power, resources, and values that the green worldview seeks to dismantle. Such disparities are especially apparent at meetings, whether actual or virtual, of grassroots organizations and activists from diŸerent parts of the world, where the hegemony of English may evoke frustration and protest, or at best resigned acquiescence, but never enthusiasm. Lacking an alternative, however, the green discourse on language has tended to avoid issues of global communication, focusing instead on championing communal languages against the homogenizing tendencies of blue and orange. In contrast to the political attention given to plurilingualism and World English, there has been little public debate about the two models of interlingualism, Language Brokers and Technologism, which demand no language learning at all for the average person. Although the technical aspects of both have been discussed by specialists for decades, the spread of the Internet has given these models renewed currency. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere (2001, 2003) that they will tend increasingly to fuse into the model Minako O’Hagan has called “teletranslation,” in which international networks of language brokers and machine translation software provide services on demand, anywhere in the world (O’Hagan 1996). How this version of interlingualism is interpreted by the diŸerent strands of world-centric thought depends crucially on how far down linguistic and social hierarchies it extends. Will only major languages be served? Will prices be high? Only the orange cultural wave is indiŸerent to these questions, and, perhaps for that reason, it seems to be the worldview underlying much of the contemporary discourse on translation. Finally, there is Esperantism, a model that has been interpreted in wholly contrasting ways and both positive and negative lights by each cultural wave. To blue nationalists, the idea of an international language has appeared both as a cultural and political threat, and as a potential means of establishing parity among state-based languages. To orange rationalists, an international language can seem either a utopian fantasy or a shining example of technical ingenuity.
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Among green pluralists, it raises both the specter of global homogenization and a vision of radically egalitarian communication (for examples, see Piron 1994). In the theoretical context developed in this paper, there is a parsimonious explanation for this remarkably broad spectrum of responses to Esperanto: that it constitutes a concrete instance of a second-tier cultural stage (integrative, or yellow). If this were so, one would expect to see evidence of blue-orange-green cultural clashes being worked out in the practice of the Esperanto community; this is indeed what I and others have observed (Dasgupta 1987, Fettes 2000b, Fettes and Bolduc 1998). This in turn suggests that more may be learned about interlingualism by studying the ways in which Esperantism succeeds in coexisting with World English and other interlingual ideas. Can, perhaps, a richer concept of interlingualism be developed that treats these models not as mutually exclusive but in some way complementary to each other? My personal observations have shown that the learning and use of Esperanto can stimulate the learning of other languages, a deeper interest in translation, and a more nuanced attitude towards World English. Perhaps in these everyday occurrences are to be found the germs of a world-centric language policy for the 21st century.
Towards an interlingual dialogue The preceding arguments do not establish, or aim to establish, that the twentyªrst century will not live up to others’ predictions of widespread language death and the entrenchment of English as the uncontested global language. What they do suggest is that this is not a foregone conclusion. The ongoing contest between diŸering levels of cultural development and human consciousness, however they are conceptualized, is far from over. We all have much to learn from one another, and particularly, I suggest, from rare examples of secondtier cultural realities such as Esperanto. By the same token, the Esperanto community would stand to gain a great deal from the informed participation and constructive critique of experts on the other interlingual models. The concept of interlingualism was developed precisely as a means of breaking down the institutional discourses between various world-centric approaches to thinking about language (Pool and Fettes 1998).
Interlingualism
Let me brie¶y sketch some of the fruitful exchanges that might result: The Language Brokers model concentrates on the realities of expert translation between a wide range of human languages, including both its achievements and its limitations. Its knowledge provides high benchmarks for assessing both the Technologism model and the Plurilingualism model: How closely can machines, or regular language instruction, approximate the levels of performance deemed adequate by language professionals? It might also inquire of the World English and Esperantism models: What depth of understanding must you sacriªce in order to have a language that works across vastly diŸerent cultures? The Technologism model connects interlingualism with the present wave of technological change, encouraging us to examine its linguistic consequences and challenging models that rely on a static view of human communicative tools. It is critical of the cost and routine nature of much work under the Language Brokers model and regards the Esperantism model as useful primarily as a potential tool for its own uses. The Esperantism model projects from a small working model of interlingualism onto a global vision. The working model deserves careful study from a variety of perspectives. The global vision points to the limited number of languages included in the Language Brokers and Technologism models, the inequalities generated by the World English model, and the unrealistic educational demands of both the Plurilingualism and World English models. The World English model connects interlingualism with another global trend, the spread of English as a second language. Like Esperantism, it stresses the human desire to communicate directly and reciprocally, without the mediation implied by the Language Brokers or Technologism models, and is skeptical about the individual eŸort required by Plurilingualism. It challenges the Esperantism model to address economic and psychological issues on which it has had little to say. The Plurilingualism model focuses attention on the reasons why many people learn and use languages other than English and will continue to do so. It criticizes the World English model as culturally hegemonic, the Language Brokers model as elitist, and the Technologism model as anti-humanist. Its relationship to the Esperantism model is ambivalent, sometimes assimilating it to the World English model, sometimes to the Technologism model, and occasionally treating it as fundamentally compatible.
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Each of these types of expertise is valuable for interlingualism. Each tells us something important about the question that heads this section. Each poses important challenges to the other models. The student of interlingualism should engage with all of them. What is all this in aid of? Ultimately, a better understanding of interlingualism could plausibly help to improve language policy in virtually every area. Some examples are: – – – –
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International organizations: ªnding cost-eŸective language regimes that distribute the costs of participation in an equitable way; International law: deªning minimal standards of linguistic rights and developing acceptable and morally suasive codes of conduct for states; National governments: establishing appropriate levels of service in languages with diŸerent regional, ethnic, religious or developmental proªles; National law: enacting legal frameworks that maximize both linguistic freedom (for individuals) and linguistic development (for language communities); Language communities: enabling linguistic minorities to organize themselves eŸectively towards such goals as language maintenance, renewal, or development; Education systems: developing ways of teaching about language and teaching languages that are eŸective and support higher policy goals.
In the event that the second-tier cultural wave continues to swell, and our knowledge of the interaction of linguistic systems continues to improve, we may come to perceive humankind as co-extensive with a global linguistic ecosystem — the glottosphere, to coin a term. Interlingualism will then be seen to refer to a kind of linguistic environmentalism, founded on a profound respect for diversity, integration, equity, e¹ciency and sustainability. It took the environmental sciences several decades to move from the realm of general concepts to powerful models of global change. Interlingualism may require at least as long; but the beneªts may be at least as great.
Development of national languages and management of English in East and Southeast Asia Björn H. Jernudd
In Malaysia, national language planning has been under implementation for some 40 years, a little longer than the conventional measure of one generation. Bahasa Malaysia is now a well functioning standard language. Of course, the use of English never disappeared, even in institutions where its use was discouraged, for example in university teaching. As a matter of fact, university committees routinely approved variances to allow use of English in teaching in place of the mandated Bahasa Malaysia (Asmah 2000). But approving a variance is a very strong signal, too, that the national language is preferred. Su¹ce it to say that the national language policy was successfully implemented. It took a generation or more. Now that use of the national language has been consolidated, Malaysia can aŸord to recognize the use of English. English can be recognized for use in motivated contexts, certainly for special purpose in higher education and not just to prepare youth for study abroad. (Incidentally, this return of English in Malaysia has been accompanied by an opening up of higher education to private foreign enterprise.) There is no fear in Malaysia that such concessions would backªre so that the broadening middle-classes, professionals and the elite in general, of whatever ethnic persuasion, would revert to using English at home, or that English would reappear in the civil service, and so on. Spoken Malay under the umbrella of standard Bahasa Malaysia is well entrenched as is its routine use in written domestic communications. (At a conference at the City University in Hong Kong in 1999, Professor Dato Asmah bin Haji Omar of the University of Malaya made essentially the same point. This is strong conªrmation of the validity of the relationship between national language development and English in Malaysia, a relationship that I think is generally valid.)
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The situation in Indonesia is comparable. Bahasa Indonesia has developed tremendously in growth of numbers of speakers, in expansion of use and in intellectualization. A diŸerence from Malaysia is that Indonesia emerged into statehood with the banner of Bahasa Indonesia already ¶ying high and without the encumbrance of English. It is speciªcally the pervasive use of English around the world that pressures individuals into acquiring English. Dutch was the language of Indonesia’s colonial rulers. While Dutch faded in a rapidly developing state which depends on Bahasa Indonesia as much for its symbolic value to legitimate the unitary state as it does for its communicative value across the archipelago’s many vernaculars, demand for acquisition of English grew for purposes of international communication. Indonesia’s problem today is rather how to teach English better to more people. The relationship between national language development and aŸording English is quite general. The main point of this paper is that countries that successfully implement a national language policy can aŸord English. The claim stimulates some essential questions. Are there countries in Asia today for which a case could be made that they cannot — in speciªc ways to be enumerated — aŸord English? How would such a case be argued? There are countries that cannot aŸord English now. In Laos and Cambodia, the language situations are unsettled. What is at stake is well brought out in an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on the strategic development of education in Cambodia. Even at university level, “Serious consideration should be given to early conªrmation of Khmer as the language of instruction. This would reinforce current classroom practice, enhance the eŸectiveness of learning and teaching, and help reduce training periods. Such a policy would have a positive backwash on ensuring students’ literacy in Khmer, especially if high levels of competence were an admission requirement. It would avoid many … ine¹ciencies and distortions… Adoption of Khmer as the sole language of instruction at all levels would add impetus to modernizing the language” (ADB 1996: 32). The rush for opportunity that knowledge of English appears to open up creates a surging demand for English teaching. There is nothing wrong with demand for English in principle. Unfortunately, however, this translates often as not into use of English in o¹ces and educational institutions. This happens for several reasons: – –
experts, whether national or expatriate, carry English into the domestic setting, when using Khmer, people lack precedent in the developing domains of use,
National languages and English in Asia
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a cargo cult value (shall I call it a value?) predicts that the use of English now will somehow accelerate the arrival of the beneªts associated with the outside world where, again mistakenly, English is thought to be the language that inevitably oŸers returns, the facility with which problems appear to be solved by accepting the English that comes packaged with foreign aid is apparently attractive to bureaucrats and politicians alike.
French aid comes with an overt French language requirement. But French is not in popular demand. English is the popular choice. However, embracing English oŸers only a short-term solution to very big, very long-term, complex developmental problems. But what evidence can be brought to bear to support the claim that national language development is a prerequisite to a pattern of productive and beneªcial use of English? I would have to know very much more about these countries to calculate the relative potential future impact of diŸerential actions taken now on language-related events. Perhaps I would have to be prescient. Something will happen and that something will be in someone’s interest. Obviously, participation in education and, in particular, higher education will be limited to a small percentage of the population if a foreign language of a radically diŸerent type from the language spoken as a vernacular by most people has to be acquired for access to participation in the modern sector. This we know. Further, endorsing the use of a foreign language in at least one important sector of development, education, will divert attention away from planning the productive use and allocation of resources to the development of a national language system in any other sector. Accepting the use of foreign languages in administration and political communication and especially in education will block essential measures to widen democratic participation in decision-making processes and will increase the cost of general social mobilization into participation in the developing economy. The Asian Development Bank has a clear view on Cambodia in this regard: “The ªrst step should be for government to establish a timetable for policy and strategy implementation [for support of use of Khmer by modernizing it]. Clearly ªnal phasing and scaling will be dependent upon availability of government and aid resources… Early establishment of a national languages institute to assist with policy formulation and implementation is required as a matter of urgency” (32). “Establishing a language teaching regulatory and quality control framework is a key strategic consideration” [italics in original] (33).
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Seemingly contrary is the case of English in Singapore. But special circumstances characterize Singapore. The state is multilingual and remains multilingual even with English as its “ªrst language.” There is strong encouragement for acquisition and use of Mandarin. Cultivated ethnic languages have a recognized place in schooling. Singapore’s government went full out allocating resources for English when it became clear that parents were voting — contrary to government policy at the time — with the placement of their children in English-medium schools; and the government provided for a well-resourced, in fact priority-resourced, educational system for all children. Singapore is also small, and many people already knew some English. It is highly signiªcant that the society is a multi-ethnic mix of peoples who are used to and expect contact communication, and, need I say, had a better start than Laos and Cambodia. In Hong Kong people are now discovering how thin the English veneer was and how very much more diluted it will become unless English is contained and conªned to specialized uses for specialized learner groups. A lesson to be learned from Hong Kong is that a little bit of knowledge of English is all very well for performing commensurately less-demanding tasks under colonial supervision, but that is all that shallow English is good for. Rich as Hong Kong’s reserves may be, the HKSAR does not have the personnel or material resources to continue to teach in English while at the same time teaching the acquisition of English. Even following recent adjustments to expand the use of Chinese as a medium in secondary schools, the HKSAR would have to invest very much more money in the teaching of English as a foreign language to meet productive criteria of competence in English. These are criteria that demand not greater numbers of English-competent secondary school leavers but a much higher quality of English among university graduates than at present. A generally higher quality of Chinese is very much desired as well. A much higher educational standard of knowledge in subject matter and an evolution from knowledge regurgitation by examination to problem-solving and inventiveness are equally needed and equally wanting. As a ªrst step towards these goals, it was necessary to remove English as a medium of instruction in the majority of secondary schools beginning with the 1998/99 school year. In this light, the uneconomical nature of English as medium becomes readily apparent. Hong Kong can to a limited extent continue to buy in expertise from overseas. In Hong Kong there is still a sizable expatriate presence and not all people who functioned well under the British have left. Yet here again is a case
National languages and English in Asia
where English blocks domestic development by virtue of colonial inheritance and continuity of reliance on professionals from overseas. In Asia, development remains the major issue (Baumol 1986). International languages are, for better, contact languages for out-group communication or, for worse, troublesome presences in a developing society whose people speak other languages. Countries that have successfully implemented a national language need not fear English, because encouraging an individual to acquire English as an additional language expands that individual’s communicative competence without harm to the individual’s competence and use of a national language. It is in the person’s own interest to use “one’s own language” once consensus exists that it is appropriate to use it. That is what successful development of the language means. In the past, conquest or major migration could mean language shifts. In today’s world, are language situations in which national languages are normally appropriately used immune to shift? Conquest is unlikely and so is major migration that would lead to societal language shift — although events in Central Asia are deeply troubling. Language situations may be (peacefully) unsettled through a chain of consequences emanating from supranational language use in institutions of political integration. This is not yet so in Asia. Given the diversity of Asian country realities and the loose associations of countries, language use at summits and political-economic conferences are acts of international contact communication. ASEAN is such an arena. An obvious demonstration of their limited communicative impact is that participation in these networks is severely limited to the political and economic leaders who meet at occasional and specially arranged events; equivalently, the joint institutions sponsored by ASEAN are highly specialized professional bodies operating within limited networks of participation. Asian integration has to be placed in perspective. Allow a global jump of thought, for purposes of comparison. The Swedish politician’s participation in the European Community parliament debate is not now merely a series of acts of out-group communication. It is more than that, both as evidenced by politicians’ own discourse and in the public mind. (Incidentally, I cast my vote from Hong Kong as a Swedish citizen in those parliamentary elections and I am happy to report that I used Swedish to do so.) The Swedish politician’s participation should be as much a Swedish event as an intergovernmental one. Here is a new issue and this issue is being addressed at least in Sweden. I raise it because language competence among participants who not only share interests but who represent constituencies of interests in democratic electorates is a prob-
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lem. I quote from the section on politics and administration in a recent report on Swedish language cultivation (Språkvård 1998: 13): In the political and administrative sphere one must above all pay attention to the shift of responsibility from the Swedish parliament to the agencies of the European Union. In a long-term perspective, this shift could lead to undermining the use of Swedish in the political domain which would seriously impact on democratic discourse in Sweden.[Italics added.] Privatization and commercialization of activities that previously were conducted under public auspices may also impact on language. [Author’s translation]
Will increasing European integration drive an interest wedge between citizens and their representatives? I do not think one can learn from the business world because business systems and democratic decision-making systems are very diŸerent. Participation in global business may require English to facilitate exchange and for global or regional business corporations to function well internally and so on. EŸective implementation of supranational decisions requires shared language; and the dynamics of interpersonal interaction may propel English into supremacy within the EU bureaucracy. In these regards EU institutions — and equivalent Asian ones when they emerge — may be similar to business corporations. What is diŸerent in regional political associations however is that democratic decision-making requires communicative participation at the level of the decision-makers. The share-holders are all citizens. This dictum explains the EU’s large language budget. It also begs the question for the national language futures of Europe, and raises the issue for nations uniting in political unions elsewhere in the future, unless multilingualism blossoms and in-country electorates stand ªrm in demanding in-depth information of such precision that people experience communicative participation. The dictum predicts interesting language problems to be managed as a result of regional integration elsewhere in the world and as a result of global cooperation, for example through the United Nations. Asia isn’t there yet, but one day Asian countries will also have to face this language issue. Let me return to fundamentals and ªnish with a language interpretation of a recent prescription for the happiness of the world by the economist Amartya Sen and the World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn (International Herald Tribune, May 5, 1999). Their article proceeds from presenting general goals of well-being to outlining a “comprehensive development framework” (CDF), then detailing the freedoms and requirements for designing systems to make real the freedoms in the framework, and ends with what the writers refer to as “the key, how it is implemented.” I will begin with implementation.
National languages and English in Asia
Reaching goals must, say Sen and Wolfensohn, “involve wide participation” and development must “be broadly based and broadly owned.” Without mentioning particulars, they include the example of “trade unions and employer organizations.” Obviously, English has no place in such contexts: it is people talking to people and representing themselves to other interest groups in their country. It would be peculiar indeed if English were the language of interaction in a local trade union in an Asian country. Systems include “education and knowledge institutions,” which obviously must relate to all other systems and to the implementing agencies. Whatever the political organization, national languages are foundational to these systems. So is the fact that in order to “oŸer access to all at primary levels,” entry into school must not prejudice the success of children who come to school speaking various kinds of language varieties. Sen and Wolfensohn state that systems need not be very tangible: “culture and heritage, a major source of identity and pride for people everywhere,” “must be protected.” Clearly, diŸerences of ethnicity and language variation must be tolerated and accommodated in the development process. (I do not here discuss the issue of minority languages and dialects; in Asian countries this is a hugely important issue waiting to ignite, where it has not already done so.) Sen and Wolfensohn call for: – – – – –
freedoms of political expression and participation, transparency guarantees, eŸective and impartial legal and justice systems, open legislative and transparent regulatory systems, access to credit.
They also unambiguously call for development of indigenous languages to enable all citizens to participate fully in the development of society. Language development is a complex issue. Its overarching goal is to enable: – – –
acquisition, acquisition well enough to know, and coordination of development of languages to ensure complete availability of use in any and all specialized communicative contexts for all citizens without prejudice.
Clearly, English and other external languages in such a developing system are normally only auxiliary, to be used for special functions the most motivated of which is communication abroad. Other roles for such languages would be
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counterproductive and ine¹cient. An absolute prerequisite for a successful development journey by criteria that characterize an open and free society is at least the evolution and use of national languages and equal opportunities of access to these languages for all people. In that perspective, the domestic use of English and other international languages can only be divisive of the population and support factional rule and commercial dominance by narrow elites; even if these foreign languages are in popular demand, they must be harnessed as additional languages for contact communication for the special purpose of supporting a comprehensive development framework. Successful development implies successful accommodation of foreign languages, foremost among them English. The foreign languages take their places as varieties in individual multilingual repertoires to enable communication in complex networks beyond local boundaries.
The “business” of language endangerment Saving languages or helping people keep them alive? Luisa Maffi
Preservation […] is what we do to berries in jam jars and salmon in cans. […] Books and recordings can preserve languages, but only people and communities can keep them alive. [Dora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, Tlingit oral historians (in Lord 1996: 68)] If I know one word in my language my creator will let me go to where I have to go when I pass away. I don’t have a whole language. It is silly to think I will bring an extinct language back to ¶uency with only 300 people in an extinct tribe. I talk to my computer. I feed the language in, and when I make mistakes the computer talks back. But if I have one word, it is the power of one word, and whoever is at the garden gate — the pearly gates, the happy hunting grounds — will recognize me and it will be enough for me to go in. There is so much power in just one word. [L. Frank Manriquez, Tongva/ Ajachmem artist and language activist (in Manriquez 2001: 542)]
Much of the story of language maintenance, loss and revitalization lies between these quotations — between the circumstances in which speakers can still take action to keep their languages alive, and those other circumstances in which the languages did not have a chance to survive as the living voice of their people. The present chapter explores this story from the point of view of the role of linguists and other scholars concerned with and about the language endangerment crisis. It begins with a brief history of the increasing awareness of this crisis in linguistic and other academic circles, and now also outside academia. It then discusses the small “business” of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), foundations, committees, and other related organizations and interest groups that has sprung up in response to the challenges posed by the erosion of the world’s linguistic diversity. The chapter goes on to analyze some of the
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issues and dilemmas posed by the crisis, paying special attention to the questions professionals are asking about how they should conceive of their work and how they should set their priorities, both with respect to the crisis itself and in regard to the relationships among science, applied work, and advocacy. In conclusion, reasons are provided as to why confronting these challenges may lead to both more ethical and more relevant research.
A bit of history, and a few questions Cases of language obsolescence and loss are probably as old as the contact among human communities of unequal socioeconomic, political, and technological status. Population movements and political and economic expansion, even well before the modern era of colonization and empire building, have long contributed to reducing linguistic diversity everywhere in the world, either by the physical elimination of conquered groups, or by the cultural assimilation of the dominated. By and large, such assimilation has occurred crucially by way of linguistic assimilation — through the direct or indirect imposition of the dominant group’s language in most contexts of use, thus eŸectively annihilating the languages of the dominated or driving them to extinction (Ma¹, Skutnabb-Kangas and Andrianarivo 1999; SkutnabbKangas 2001). Estimates of the extent of the world’s linguistic diversity in the undocumented past are bound to remain conjectural and subject to debate. However, educated guesses suggest that the peak of linguistic diversity on earth may have occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic period (10,000 years b.p.), at which time more than twice the current estimated number of 6,000– 7,000 oral languages may have been spoken (Robb 1993; Hill 2001). This implies that languages have been undergoing extinction at least since that time, at a faster rate than the creation of new languages, and that communities of speakers around the world have confronted — and reacted or succumbed to — threats to their languages for centuries, indeed millennia (see Hale 1992). The other side of this coin is that, for most of our species’ history, humans have talked — and in many parts of the world still talk — a large number of small languages (Hill 2001), often with high concentrations of diŸerent languages coexisting side by side in the same areas. Intergroup communication in such situations of egalitarian contact occurred and continues to occur in a number of ways, including language continua, multi-
The “business” of language endangerment
lingualism, lingua francas, and pidgins (Pattanayak 1981; Edwards 1994b; Mühlhäusler 1996).1 As is well known by now, however, we are currently facing a language extinction crisis of unprecedented magnitude and pace. Already there may be ªfteen percent fewer languages at present than there were at the end of the ªfteenth century, when the era of European colonization began (Bernard 1992), with especially marked losses in the Americas and Australia. And the trend is now accelerating throughout the world, with Australia and the Americas (especially the USA) still in the lead. Current estimates put the number of “moribund” languages (those no longer passed on to younger generations) at 20% to 50% of the 6,000–7,000 extant languages (Krauss 1992; Harmon 1995). In some projections, if present trends are not reversed, as many as 90% of the world’s languages (most of them the languages of small communities of speakers) may become extinct or moribund in the course of the 21st century (Krauss 1992). Phenomena of language obsolescence and loss have also long been an object of study for linguists and other language scholars2 (e.g. Dressler and Wodak-Leodolter 1977; Adler 1977; Gal 1979; Dorian 1981, 1989; Hill and Hill 1986). However, a decisive clarion call about the language endangerment crisis was sounded in the early 1990s, as the accumulation of both grassroots activities and documentation by scholars began to give a measure of the global extent and implications of the crisis (Robins and Uhlenbeck 1991; Hale et al. 1992; Krauss 1992). As a consequence, professional and scholarly societies and other institutions around the world, as well as international organizations such as UNESCO, awoke to the realization that the world’s linguistic diversity was fast disappearing — and that the linguistic profession as a whole had not been paying enough attention, while the scholarly community in general, not to speak of the general public, seemed largely unaware of the phenomenon. Interestingly, in the early calls to action, parallels were sometimes drawn with another diversity extinction crisis, as a way of suggesting comparable damage to humanity’s heritage: the loss of biodiversity, that had by then amply 1. For a relevant “punctuated equilibrium” analysis of language contact, language change, and language loss, see Dixon (1997). 2. Scholars working on endangered languages and issues of linguistic diversity and language endangerment have been mostly linguists and linguistic anthropologists, but include sociolinguists and sociologists of language as well.
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reached the level of public consciousness (Hale 1992; Krauss 1992). The main thrust of such calls for action, though, was for linguists not to preside passively over the demise of the very object of their study, namely the variety of the world’s languages. (This also implied an admonition for linguists not to rely too comfortably on the assumption that statements about Universal Grammar or the nature of language could be made on the basis of just English, Japanese, and a few other major languages.) Less prominently in focus in these calls for action were the political and economic causes of linguistic diversity loss and the sociocultural consequences of this phenomenon for the speakers of languages at risk, although clear statements in this connection could be read in some of these early pronouncements,3 for example: [L]anguage loss in the modern period […] is part of a much larger process of loss of cultural and intellectual diversity in which politically dominant languages and cultures simply overwhelm indigenous local languages and cultures, placing them in a condition that can only be described as embattled. (Hale 1992: 1) [A local language under pressure by a dominant language] will lose a number of its characteristics which are rooted in the traditional culture of its speakers. […] It no longer re¶ects the unique traditional and original world-view and culture of its speakers which has been lost, but more that of the culturally more aggressive people who have in¶uenced its speakers. (Wurm 1991: 7)
Yet the implications of such circumstances for linguists, beyond their scientiªc obligations, remained a controversial issue — witness Ladefoged’s reaction to the special issue of Language on endangered languages, edited by Hale (Hale et al. 1992). In his response, Ladefoged (1992) mentioned the case of a speaker of Dahalo, a near-extinct language of Kenya, who was proud his children only spoke Swahili, had gone to school, and knew things he did not. Who am I as a linguist, he asked, to tell this man he was wrong? To this, Dorian (1993) objected that one cannot ignore the external pressure under which such decisions to stop speaking one’s mother tongue or not to teach it to one’s children are mostly made — to the point that one may wonder to what extent it is appropriate to speak of actual free choices. Granted, it is not the place of a linguist to tell indigenous or minority language speakers whether they were right or wrong in their decision to give up their languages. 3. Other researchers (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 1984, Phillipson 1992) have speciªcally and extensively delved into the social, political, and economic factors of language loss, arguing that such factors justify talking about processes of “linguicide” rather than mere “language loss” or “language death.”
The “business” of language endangerment
One might also agree that people make such decisions in an attempt to adapt as best they can to the changing parameters of their social and cultural environment (Mufwene 2003). However, as Dorian pointed out, these decisions do not happen in a power vacuum. Should then linguists, even as they consciously witness the demise of the languages they study, consider that their role is solely limited to documenting the languages before they disappear? This seems to be Dixon’s (1997: 144) position when, in relation to language endangerment, he asserts that “there is only one thing that really needs to be done — get out and describe a language!” [his emphasis]. My view is that it would at least behoove linguists to say who else is wrong when the speakers of a language are confronted with the “choice” of abandoning their language, and that they should portray to individual speakers and to the language communities they work with the possible alternatives to this “choice.” In a case such as the one described by Ladefoged, one might suggest that it is not a matter of either-or: either you keep your mother tongue and can function within your own community but remain isolated from the larger society whose majority language you do not speak, or you learn the majority language and get access to the larger society, but lose your mother tongue and what can be accessed through it. In other words, it is not a case of subtractive, but rather one of additive, language learning (Lambert 1975; Skutnabb-Kangas 1984, 2000). In addition, formal education need not come to the detriment of learning traditional knowledge — and, indeed, schools are not the only places where valuable knowledge is acquired. Positions such as those expressed by Ladefoged back in 1992 may now sound naive, if not aloof. Yet one can still ªnd evidence of them today, if perhaps with a new, updated twist. At a recent linguistics conference, an authority on a small native South American language could be heard stating, “This language has only one hundred speakers. If I don’t document it now, I know that my children and grandchildren won’t be happy with me.” Clearly, a sense that linguists may have something to account for to posterity had seeped into this linguist’s world view. That the posterity in question might be formed ªrst of all by the children and grandchildren of the speakers of that native South American language had not. The “days of ‘our’ studying ‘them’ (with the added barb of ‘before they become extinct’)” (Posey 2001: 395) are not quite over yet, although progress has undoubtedly been made.
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The “business” of addressing language endangerment In recent years the loss of linguistic diversity and eŸorts to combat or reverse this trend have been increasingly high on the agenda of many linguists and other concerned scholars, not to speak of scores of language communities. A small but growing “business” of NGOs, foundations, committees and other related organizations and interest groups has sprung up in response to the challenges posed by the erosion of the world’s linguistic diversity. This “business” has been instrumental in raising the visibility of this issue, ªrst within and now also outside the academic community.4 As with the biodiversity crisis a decade ago, in the space of just a few years the linguistic diversity crisis has gone from virtual obscurity to increasing visibility in the media — including the pages of prime newspapers and popular glossy magazines, as well as on the airwaves. As was earlier the case with biodiversity, such publicity holds positive potential. Appreciation for linguistic diversity is currently hampered by widespread and deep-seated belief in the preferability of monolingualism, according to which the fewer the number of languages, the better for both national and international stability and peace, as well as for mutual understanding. Well-informed public discussions of linguistic diversity may instead bring to the fore the many cases in which a multiplicity of languages is neither a threat to stability and peace, nor an obstacle to intercommunication, as well as those in which monolingualism is no guarantee against either con¶ict or miscommunication (Ma¹ 1998; Ma¹, Skutnabb-Kangas and Andrianarivo 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Ma¹ 2001a). The more people understand the nature of linguistic diversity, the more likely they are to support action to counter the crisis. This may in turn translate into policy, and into economic and educational initiatives more favorable to the maintenance of diversity, and mobilization of funding for that purpose. Such developments clearly did occur in relation to biodiversity. Yet, as the champions of biodiversity will be the ªrst to acknowledge, the struggle is far from over against the political and economic forces that lie behind the biodiversity crisis (in our times, mainly the forces of globalization) and the sociocul4. Organizations active internationally include the Foundation for Endangered Languages (UK), the Society for Endangered Languages (Germany), the International Clearinghouse for Endangered Languages (Japan), the Endangered Language Fund, the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation, and Terralingua (the last three based in the USA), as well as UNESCO.
The “business” of language endangerment
tural attitudes and behaviors they induce. Likewise, we should not be deluded into thinking that publicity alone will do the job for linguistic diversity, overcoming the forces at work against it and the engrained beliefs that limit its general appreciation. Nor will publicity for linguistic diversity necessarily beneªt that vast majority of humans in whom most of this diversity resides. If we are good enough at explicating and advocating linguistic diversity, the time may not be far away when someone will begin to devise ways to commercialize it (Ma¹ 1998). The growing discussion on and development of multimedia computer-aided language learning technology for language maintenance and revitalization speaks to this point. While such technology can certainly serve to gather and preserve language materials from the past or from present-day endangered language communities, it will not necessarily contribute to (re)creating or supporting vital communities in which languages can perform their full social and cultural functions. Moreover, while the technology is marketed as relatively low-tech and inexpensive, it is nevertheless well beyond the ªnancial and infrastructural reach of most language communities around the world. Most importantly, this technology may foster a faith in quick ªxes that might actually sti¶e, rather than foster, the life of a language.5 These are only some of the dilemmas raised by this one example — and the examples could be multiplied. They are dilemmas for language communities, to be sure, as the latter consider the pros and cons of possible choices for the maintenance and revitalization of their languages. But they are dilemmas for language scholars too.
Changing roles and challenges for language scholars Thus, linguists, anthropologists, and other scholars concerned with linguistic diversity must be aware of both opportunities and risks.6 This means that the 5. Nancy Dorian (personal communication June 1999) notes that this is comparable to how “the introduction of a heritage language into the school curriculum has been known to seduce communities whose language is at risk into believing that interrupted family transmission is no longer a problem since the schools are seeing to transmission.” 6. The following remarks are addressed particularly to non-indigenous and non-minority scholars doing research in indigenous and minority communities (while recognizing and welcoming the growing trend for researchers to come from those communities themselves), and to linguists and anthropologists, since they are more likely to do ªeldwork in societies other than their own. This section of the chapter overlaps in part with Ma¹ (2000).
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“business” of language endangerment is, again in Posey’s words, “a profoundly political matter” (Posey 2001: 395). There are plenty of reasons for arguing that our political analyses should be at least as sophisticated as our linguistic ones — which implies that research, applied work, and advocacy must go hand in hand. This is not to say that basic research is no longer needed, but that it can no longer proceed in a vacuum. It also means that scholars working with indigenous peoples and minorities must become much more apt at listening to what their counterparts have to say about their needs and desires, and be more prepared to ask whether and how they may help. In other words, says Posey (2001: 395), “continued research into language and cultural diversity requires a more collaborative approach in which equitable partnerships evolve from mutual interest between researchers and local communities.” From this perspective, language scholars can no longer aŸord to think that their only obligations are to the “advancement of science” — or to the latest brand of linguistic or sociocultural theory. They can no longer aŸord to believe that their credentials as scholars are justiªcation enough to gain automatic access, as detached observers and data-gatherers, to indigenous or minority communities or individuals, and then to depart leaving nothing behind. This means that scholars need ªrst of all to explain their goals fully, lay out the foreseeable consequences of what they plan to do, obtain informed consent from the people they wish to work with, establish whether and how the data they intend to collect may be put to use for community members, and ask how else they may be of service, such as by supporting local eŸorts for language and culture survival — including training local people to do their own research. Language scholars should think of any additional beneªts that their research may produce, and agree with community members on the sharing of such beneªts, while at the same time considering and discussing with them any potential risks or detrimental eŸects of the intended research and how such undesirable outcomes might be avoided or minimized. The disciplines concerned with linguistic and cultural diversity are beginning to confront these and other related issues — if hesitantly and by no means universally as yet. Changes are necessary at many levels. Some of these are discussed below, focusing on research models, training models, issues of professional ethics and human rights, and the research funding and academic merit systems.
The “business” of language endangerment
Research models There is no doubt that linguistic documentation can still be a most valuable resource, and not just for linguists, but also for language communities — whether in the form of materials gathered by earlier generations of scholars, or of current documentation projects that take pedagogical applications into account (e.g. Moore 2001). In many cases, past documentation (grammars, dictionaries, texts) may represent the only extant resource about a language that is no longer spoken in the present. In the case of truly “moribund” languages, where only a handful of elderly speakers may be left, documentation may be virtually the only option left. In all cases, however, such documentation must be conceived in ways that will make it truly useful to the language communities, rather than just responsive to trends in linguistic theory or otherwise appealing only to intellectual audiences (see Pawley 2001). At the same time (as with language learning technologies), these materials in and of themselves cannot function to preserve, let alone recreate, the natural contexts of language, i.e., the contexts of verbal interaction in which languages are acquired, used, and developed. What is needed is a shift from an extractive model of scientiªc research, in which knowledge is separated from its source and carried away to be stored ex-situ, to an integral model, one in which knowledge continues to live and thrive in-situ. Speciªcally as concerns languages, this means a move from ex-situ language preservation to in-situ integral language maintenance, restoration and development. There is a close parallel between language preservation through documentation and ex-situ conservation in biology: while both serve an important function, in both cases the ecological context is missing.7 Just as seed or gene banks cannot preserve a plant’s biological ecology, ex-situ linguistic 7. Dave Harmon (personal communication May 1999) suggests that “a mother tongue (which could be deªned ecologically rather than linguistically, as the language in which one engages the world in the most complex and interconnected manner) is a fundamentally diŸerent entity than a ‘heritage language’ (one that is ‘preserved’ in the Dauenhauers’ sense, i.e. being used just for rituals, or to preserve oral history). Attempts to revive mother tongues once they have become extinct as mother tongues (e.g., Cornish) will produce a language that is diŸerent from the mother tongue as it was before the extinction (which can be deªned ecologically as a hiatus from full engagement with the world, a kind of ecological lacuna).” Dorian (personal communication June 1999) observes that this is one of the inevitable ironies of, and practical problems with, language obsolescence and language revitalization.
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documentation cannot preserve a language’s linguistic ecology — its relationships with people, places, and other languages (Mühlhäusler 1996). In recent times, and largely because indigenous peoples and minorities have taken the initiative in organizing language support activities in their own communities, a diŸerent trend has emerged, one that places these activities squarely within linguistic communities and sees them as intrinsically linked to cultural revival (as well as environmental restoration). Here too, a close parallel can be drawn with the emergence of a newer trend in conservation biology that promotes integral biocultural conservation models, the in-situ interdependent conservation of both biological and cultural resources (see Zent 1999; Ma¹ in press). It is also essential to gain awareness of the pros and cons of language documentation. On the one hand, there may be a justiªed sense of urgency in writing down what may otherwise be in grave danger of being lost (reinforced by an awareness that the worldwide trend is toward literacy and formal education anyway); on the other, the shift from the oral to the written, from the intangible to the tangible, has already had and continues to have a profound impact on the cultural traditions of indigenous peoples and minorities. Writing of the indigenous languages of Colombia, Seifart states: It has become clear that linguistic analysis, alphabetization and ªnally bilingual education entail radical interference with originally illiterate indigenous cultures. The alphabetization of the language and the recording of traditional texts change the cultural dynamics of the oral tradition: from the moment these texts are recorded they lose their variable character. Therefore many cultures decide to take this step only after much deliberation. (Seifart 1998: 9)
Some communities may even choose against “reducing” their languages to writing altogether, as in the case of the Pirahaõ of Amazonia, who have reportedly stated: “No, keep the alphabet for Portuguese; our language is not to be written down” (Dixon 1997: 82). In commenting on this case, Dixon argues that this choice, along with the Pirahaõ’s overall inward-looking attitude, “has undoubtedly assisted them to retain their language” in spite of living in less isolation than other Amazonian groups whose languages are still vital. The pervasiveness of literacy, writing, and all other forms of tangible ªxation of ideas in the Western world should not blind us to the possibility that the very tissue that holds indigenous cultures together may be the spoken word (as must have been the case in all preliterate cultures). Listening to a traditional storyteller may be enough to convince one of this (see Abram 1997). Or, as Fettes puts it, “community consists… of… connections between expressed
The “business” of language endangerment
thought and lived experience: a dynamic cyclical relationship between the stories people tell about themselves and the ways they relate to one another and to their environment” (Fettes 1999: 32). There is a risk that the Western world’s bias toward the written word and tangible expressions of reality may lead to overlooking and neglecting, and ultimately contribute to eŸacing, this fundamental, perhaps constitutive aspect of traditional cultures. As long as a tradition of orality still exists, it should be recognized as an essential component of a society’s informal ways of transmitting linguistic and cultural knowledge, and, beyond documentation eŸorts, it should be fostered as a fundamental part of protecting cultural and linguistic diversity (Ma¹ 2001b).
Training models Scholars working in endangered language communities may ªnd themselves called upon to perform tasks of an applied nature, such as helping design language maintenance or revitalization programs.8 This comprehensive approach to cooperative language projects certainly poses great challenges for language scholars, beginning with the way in which they are trained. In addition to training in all areas of linguistics, both theoretical and descriptive, this approach requires familiarity with, among other things, ethnographic methods and cultural, social and educational theory. A small but signiªcant number of linguistics programs in the USA, Canada, Australia, and several European countries (and, increasingly, other parts of the world too) have taken this tack, oŸering training speciªcally geared toward work with endangered language communities, including cross-training in linguistics, anthropology and education. Supporting this trend also requires promoting changes in academic culture, bringing down the walls that separate academe from the outside world. Such crossover is already occurring, without evoking much of an alarmed reaction, in making academe more responsive to the goals of business, but the idea of bringing walls down to make students (and teachers) more responsive to the needs of communities and humanity at large, more willing to serve, still raises eyebrows and is often met with the most lukewarm of reactions. 8. By using the word “applied” to refer to tasks such as designing language maintenance or revitalization programs, I do not mean to imply that such tasks do not involve the use and development of theory. But such tasks put theory and its development at the service of reallife problems. (I thank Tove Skutnabb-Kangas for prompting me to make this clariªcation.)
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Yet there are things that matter beyond the bottom line — things that matter for the very survival of humanity. The current tendency toward cultural and linguistic homogenization is one of these. It is a self-destructive process, because through it we are losing the multiplicity of adaptive strategies, the culturally varied solutions to human problems that societies around the world have developed and expressed over time, largely through their languages. This process is, in the words of Mühlhäusler (1995a), increasing the likelihood that we will all converge on the same “cultural blind spots” and no longer be able to recognize maladaptive social trends and alter their course. To foster widespread understanding of this state of aŸairs is an enormous challenge, but a challenge that needs to be met, and one that academics should have a major role in addressing.
Professional ethics and human rights Academic culture must also fully embrace the relevance of professional ethics and respect for the human (including cultural and linguistic) rights of the people among whom scholars conduct research — especially the more vulnerable groups such as indigenous peoples and minorities. In recent times, a number of anthropological, linguistic, and other professional societies, international and otherwise, have been at work on revised codes of ethics and statements on human rights.9 However, bolder action may be needed to bring many such documents more into line with fundamental concepts relevant to cultural and linguistic rights contained in international standards, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and including the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, and the articles of the Convention on Biological Diversity concerned with indigenous knowledge, to cite only a few (on current and proposed international instruments, see Skutnabb-Kangas 2001; Posey 2001).
9. An example of a professional society that has taken signiªcant steps to incorporate such concepts in its Code of Ethics and Draft Standards of Practice (1998) is the International Society of Ethnobiology, founded in 1988 in Belém, Pará, Brazil to foster the professional and ethical concerns of scholars studying traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous and tribal societies.
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Language scholars should also be familiar with concepts enshrined in relevant international instruments still under development, such as the Draft UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (which deals extensively, among other issues, with cultural and linguistic rights) and the Draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (the ªrst international document entirely devoted to linguistic rights, submitted to UNESCO). Discussion of these matters at the international level, however, is proceeding largely outside the sphere of the academic disciplines most speciªcally devoted to the study of language and culture, such as linguistics and anthropology, and these instruments are hardly household names within that sphere; yet scholars could provide expert input in the revision and further development of such draft instruments. Nor is education on ethics and human rights yet commonly considered to be an essential part of linguistic and anthropological training, in spite of how closely such issues bear on whether and how scholars will be able to conduct research on indigenous and minority languages and cultures in the foreseeable future. Concern with ethics and the rights of the communities scholars work with also bears in a major way on the use of data. The norms of academic research assume publication and dissemination of research results. Yet there is growing awareness that this requirement needs at the very least to be weighed against respect for the intellectual property rights and heritage rights of the people (or peoples) from and about whom the data were gathered. In some cases such a requirement may even be in con¶ict with these people’s (or peoples’) right to privacy and be a source of cultural and social harm to them, as with conªdential information or aspects of language or cultural knowledge that may be secret or sacred or otherwise restricted (Posey 2001; Ma¹ 2001b). While in every society on earth ideas and information have ways of ¶owing from one person to the next, not every society or segment of society has developed the same concept of a “free-for-all” public domain as is taken for granted in mainstream Western societies and which lies at the root of conventional academic requirements (Ma¹ 2001b).10 The fact that a given community may have chosen to share 10. According to this concept, the “public domain” is essentially the space containing those ideas and information that are not otherwise protected by legal mechanisms such as copyright, patents, trade secrets, etc. In this space, access to ideas and information is seen as free for all, not subject to other obligations. In traditional societies there exist customary laws and practices that protect knowledge, and thus in turn conªgure a private domain distinct from the public domain. At the same time, in such societies even the public domain may not be conceived as a space as completely devoid of mutual social and moral obligations as the notion of “free-for-all” suggests. (I am grateful to Graham Dutªeld, personal communication July 1999, for help in clarifying these concepts.)
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with outsiders aspects of their knowledge or expressions of their language does not necessarily imply that they will expect or wish to see them made public according to the outsiders’ notion of the public domain. In consideration of this, social science researchers may need to apply to their ªeld a principle originally developed to address issues related to potential environmental and public health hazards, namely the so-called Precautionary Principle, which states that, where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientiªc certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent such damage. Bannister and Barrett (2000) propose extending this principle to stipulate that, if there is reason to anticipate that publication of given data may result in harm for the people who were the source of the data (where “harm” should be deªned by these people themselves),11 either the research should not be carried out, or its results should not be disseminated through the usual academic channels.
Research funding and the academic merit system Making these changes in how academics work will require signiªcant reform in the principles of research funding and the academic merit system. Currently, there is a glaring gap between the growing recognition of these issues by individual scholars (and in some cases, even by the codes of ethics of their professional societies) and the status quo of funding agencies and academic institutions. Well-meaning scholars ªnd themselves caught between their desire (and perceived ethical obligation) to change the way they work and the di¹culty — if not the impossibility — of obtaining funding and academic acknowledgment for work that does not fall under the rubric of basic research. If this state of aŸairs is not addressed, increasing numbers of scholars may decide to pursue their work outside academia (as several are already choosing to do). Indigenous and minority communities are themselves increasingly aware of the issues involved in having academics do research among them, and are increasingly demanding that adequate provisions be put in place, or even vetoing research activities if this is not done. Needless to say, in both cases the academic world stands to lose if adjustments are not made. 11. Leaving it up to the people who are the source of the data to deªne possible “harm” does not necessarily imply any easy resolution of the matter. Even in small communities people may disagree with one another on such issues. The point is that such negotiations with the source people should be conducted and all good-will eŸorts be made to ªnd agreeable solutions and comply with local people’s requests.
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Changing the status quo will imply full recognition of the cooperative nature of research projects in indigenous and minority communities, and of the need to establish appropriate protocols for prior informed consent, beneªt sharing, disposition of the data, and returning results. It will also imply acknowledgment of the applied work done with and for local communities, in addition to basic research, as fully legitimate work for both funding and merit review purposes (Bannister and Barrett 2000). Such changes may even imply confronting the controversial idea that some research questions may better not be asked, or may be better asked outside academia. In some countries, notably Canada, scholars (including linguists) have begun to lead the way in the search for viable solutions, engaging academic and funding institutions in constructive dialogue.
Why bother? Some good reasons Still, some may ask: if these are the challenges, if this is what will be required in order to work on endangered languages, or indigenous and minority languages in general, will not students and scholars get discouraged from setting out to remote places to conduct ªeldwork on these languages? Certainly, this possibility exists. Yet there is clear evidence that more and more people do realize that, momentous and di¹cult as the needed changes may be, they are changes that our times demand, and they do not shy away from them. As one anthropologist puts it, “The division between knowledge and conveying or applying it is artiªcial; seminal knowledge is created through engagement with issues in the world and without such engagement at key junctures a discipline becomes inward-looking and archaic” (Peacock 1998: 2). What is at stake with the loss of the world’s linguistic diversity necessitates more than a response in terms of “normal science.” It requires an approach whereby solutions are sought at the interface of science and action. Let us consider an example of how engagement with issues in the world might suggest more relevant research — one of many examples that might be brought to bear on this issue. Estimates of the number of extant oral languages are elaborated by linguists on the basis of more or less agreed-upon structural criteria that determine what constitutes a language — as a reasonably discrete entity distinct and distinguishable from other languages (as well as from variants of the language itself, called “dialects”). Of course every linguist also knows that in practice nothing is quite that simple with this kind of classiªca-
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tion — which helps explain the numerical discrepancies one ªnds in the literature as to the number of the world’s languages, with totals as low as 5,000 or as high as 10,000. Some linguists even question whether linguistic research should rely chie¶y on the notion of discrete languages, preferring to think in terms of forms of human communication and their interactions in a linguistic ecology (Mühlhäusler 1996). In spite of these caveats, the structural criteria are commonly applied to quantify the world’s languages, and the consensus puts their number around 6,000–7,000. Now, speakers of major languages react very diŸerently from speakers of indigenous and minority languages when told that there are 6,000–7,000 languages in the world. Almost invariably, the (commonly monolingual) speakers of major languages ask, “That many?”12 On the other hand, speakers of indigenous or minority languages commonly query, “So few?” Further questioning makes it clear that these latter speakers are by no means thinking in terms of “languages” (or dialects, or any other such structural entities), but rather in terms of forms of communication — idioms, perhaps, or simply “the way we speak”: a social, cultural, and pragmatic notion, not a structural one. Apparently, members of small linguistic communities, when thinking of other such communities around the world and their respective forms of speech, may ªnd the ªgure of 6,000–7,000 languages that seems so astronomical to speakers of highly institutionalized, standardized forms of speech, very small indeed. If, then, one takes the cue from members of small linguistic communities, their way of thinking seems to point to linguistic ecologies rather than structural notions of language. This should in turn lead language scholars to re¶ect on what perspectives might make their work maximally relevant to understanding and analyzing, and ultimately supporting, linguistic diversity on the ground. Let us pause for a moment to consider this line of reasoning. The story of language diversiªcation usually has it that languages diverge mostly due to mutual physical and/or social isolation of human populations — a process comparable to that of allopatric speciation in the genesis of biological species.13 Hunn (2001: 122) even speculates that in a pre-State phase of human 12. If this sounds surprising, consider the following: years ago, when I was a linguistics undergraduate studying the Somali language, a fellow student came up to me and declared, “I hear you’re studying African.” So much for her awareness of the linguistic diversity of Africa! 13. Allopatric speciation in biology is the process through which, over time, two mutually isolated populations of the same species develop the inability to interbreed, giving rise to
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history one might have talked of distinct allopatric “cultural species” — certainly a condition that hardly exists today. At present, Hunn suggests, human societies look more like a “single massive hybrid swarm.” However, several elements are missing from this picture. First, historically, language diversiªcation appears to have occurred (and linguistic diversity to have been maintained) also in the absence of mutual isolation, in a way similar to the sympatric speciation of biological species occupying diŸerent specialized niches within the same ecosystem. As previously mentioned, it appears that a large number of small languages often coexisted in high concentrations in the same areas (Hill 2001), with intergroup communication occurring via language continua, multilingualism, lingua francas, pidgins, and so forth. In many parts of the world this is still the case today, as with the Paciªc region described by Mühlhäusler (1996). In such cases, Mühlhäusler suggests language diversiªcation and the perpetuation of linguistic diversity may be part and parcel of the processes through which human populations maintain distinctive identities for social and cultural reasons.14 Secondly, while it may be true that, with population growth, ever increasing mobility, and the globalization of communications, humans are becoming a “single massive swarm,” it is questionable whether we are indeed becoming a hybrid swarm. It seems fair to say that there is one particular form of culture (western culture), and especially one particular variant of it (US culture), that is more likely than any other to reach, and aŸect, all others.15 So the “swarm” we are becoming seems to tend less and less toward a genuine multicultural and multilingual hybrid, and more and more toward a uniform monocultural and monolingual agglomeration.16 two diŸerent species. This contrasts with sympatric speciation, which occurs without mutual isolation, as diŸerent populations of the same species specialize for the occupation of diŸerent niches in the same ecosystem. 14. An example of this is found among several tribes in the Vaupés region of Amazonia, who practice linguistic exogamy (Sorensen 1972). 15. To speak of “Western culture” or “US culture” as single entities is, of course, a vast simpliªcation. I do not mean to obscure the great internal diversity that these concepts display on the ground. Rather, I refer to those distilled, selective images of the West or of the United States that tend to spread elsewhere through the media and other communication channels. 16. Some (e.g. Crystal 1997) appear to imply that this progressive cultural homogenization and the growth of global languages like English is a “natural” phenomenon. Others consider such a position as highly questionable — unless, of course, one also implies that the exercise of political and economic power that drives these processes is also a “natural” phenomenon (see Phillipson 1998).
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Lost in the process, as Mühlhäusler (1996) points out, are the linguistic ecologies that have sustained linguistic (and cultural) diversity throughout history — the functional relationships developed in space and time among linguistic communities that communicate across language barriers. We are losing “[t]he mechanisms that have kept complex linguistic ecologies functioning,” mechanisms that are precisely those “a functioning multilingual and multicultural society will require” as a safeguard against converging towards the same “cultural blind spots” (Mühlhäusler 1995b). Addressing the possible consequences of global languages and cultures taking over local ones, Hunn (2001: 131, fn. 6) suggests an analogy with the ecological distinction between K-selected and r-selected species: K-selected species are those whose populations have stabilized at or near their carrying capacity (K), which is a function of their stable role in a complex community of predators and prey. Presumably, such species have adopted a reproductive strategy that is “conservative,” closely adjusted to the limits of their stable environmental niche. By contrast, r-selected species pursue a reproductive strategy limited only by “r,” their maximal rate of population increase. Such species are well adapted for colonizing recently disturbed sites. They reproduce very rapidly in the absence of competition from the regional specialists that have been temporarily eliminated by the disturbance, but ultimately they will be replaced by these same K-selected specialists. The allegory of the race between the tortoise and the hare is apropos. Perhaps “tribal” cultures and languages, like the tortoise, will endure after the capitalist hare dozes oŸ short of the ªnish line.
Perhaps — and it would be poetic justice. But, again by analogy with ecology, we do not know what levels of disturbance our linguistic (and cultural) ecologies may sustain and still be able to recover. How far do we want to go to ªnd out? Here, too, the Precautionary Principle should apply. Comparing this line of reasoning to the perspectives on language that seem to be expressed by small linguistic communities (as in the previously reported anecdote) leads to the following consideration. If language scholars, instead of thinking they already know what is important, made an eŸort to listen to what the members of small language communities — including researchers from those same communities — may have to say about their own views on language, these scholars might well ªnd themselves pointed toward issues whose scientiªc relevance they had failed to consider. Again, linguistic description is still crucial, but even the best eŸorts at traditional linguistic documentation may not fully achieve what they set out to do if they fail to recognize the relevance of understanding and analyzing the ecological contexts in which
The “business” of language endangerment
forms of speech live. New, diŸerent forms of documentation will be needed (Pawley 2001) — and they will be ones, furthermore, more likely to contribute to supporting these linguistic ecologies. Biodiversity conservation organizations have been shifting their focus from the protection of individual species toward protection of entire ecosystems and species interactions — as well as toward acknowledging local communities, especially indigenous and other traditional peoples, as important agents and partners in conservation work, based on recognition that the erosion of biocultural diversity creates a coincidence of needs and interests between these peoples and conservationists (Ma¹ in press). Likewise, the language sciences will greatly beneªt from recognition that dealing with the language endangerment crisis implies broadening the horizon from the study and preservation of languages in isolation to the maintenance and revitalization of languages along with the ecological relations among human communities and their forms of communication. Addressing this crisis requires genuine collaboration and mutual learning between researchers and language communities, as well as between researchers from within and outside those communities. Over the past few years, language scholars who have been active in response to the language extinction crisis have undoubtedly registered signiªcant progress in calling attention to the crisis, operating at various levels to counter it, and generally furthering the cause of linguistic diversity and of linguistic and cultural rights, locally and internationally. Some have also made it their goal to promote knowledge and understanding of the connections between all forms of the diversity of life on earth — linguistic, cultural and biological — and to advocate in a variety of fora for the integrated protection of biocultural diversity.17 Nevertheless, it certainly remains an uphill battle. The world continues to witness case after case of hostility and con¶ict in which linguistic and other cultural diŸerences are seized upon as pretexts for struggles over economic and political power, or in which linguistic and cultural rights are curtailed or denied under the excuse of fostering national unity. Indigenous and minority communities, their languages and their cultural traditions continue to be under threat in many parts of the world. Over and over again, we also continue to witness the disruption and ultimate breakdown of viable human relation17. This has been the speciªc focus of the members of Terralingua, whose principal aims are: 1) supporting the perpetuation and continued development of the world’s linguistic diversity, and 2) exploring the connections between linguistic, cultural and biological diversity (www.terralingua.org).
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ships with the environment. Yet, in pursuing our work, we can be sustained by one conviction: that engaged science is not lesser science. It is sound science for the 21st century.18
18. Preparation of this chapter was accomplished during tenure of a National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award (fellowship no. MH11573–02) at Northwestern University, USA. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to Nancy Dorian, Mark Fettes, Dave Harmon, and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I have incorporated most of their suggestions. Errors of fact or interpretation remain my sole responsibility. I am also grateful to Timothy Reagan and Humphrey Tonkin for their careful and sensible editing of the chapter.
Equality, maintenance, globalization Lessons from Canada Jacques Maurais
In preparation for the conferences on which this volume of papers is based, and to stimulate discussion, the organizers asked the participants a series of questions (see the Introduction to this volume). The following observations are based on my answers to some of these questions.
Equality among languages Is the idea of equality among languages and among the speakers of languages, large and small, attainable or desirable? Canada’s and Québec’s experiences in language planning can shed some light on this topic. In the past decades, eŸorts have been made in Canada to achieve equality of status between both o¹cial languages. But French-speaking nationalists have been prone to point out that putting both languages on an equal footing was tantamount to putting both feet on the same language. A symmetrical vision of the relationships between languages implies equality of status and equality of use. Such a vision does not take into account the fact that one (or some) of the languages may be weaker or even threatened. According to the proponents of that principle, when rights are granted, they should be granted equally to all languages. This being so, equality results in favoring one language over the other(s). The Canadian experience invites us to re¶ect on the concept of symmetrical rights. If the goal is to achieve a situation where two unequal languages in fact become equal, this cannot be achieved by granting identical rights to both languages: “Complete equality between the languages would harm French, just as complete legal equality between the wealthy and the poor would further increase the disadvantages of poverty” (Grey 1998). Hence the need for a¹rma-
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tive action programs of some kind, like those that sought to correct age-old structures of discrimination against women or blacks. In this respect, it is worth quoting the Conseil de la langue française’s o¹cial statement: Symmetry does not take into account the fact that, of Canada’s two o¹cial languages, only French is threatened, even in Québec. Equality in use and status cannot be achieved by administering identical measures in diŸerent situations but rather through measures suited to the various situations and whose result will be equal security in status for both languages across Canada. (“[La vision symétrique] ne tient pas compte du fait que, des deux langues o¹cielles du Canada, seule la langue française est menacée, même au Québec. […] L’égalité de statut et d’usage ne saurait être atteinte par l’application de mesures identiques à des situations diŸérentes mais bien plutôt par des mesures adaptées dont l’eŸet est de donner à chacune des langues une même sécurité de statut au Canada.”) [Conseil 1988: 21 & 25].
Perhaps we should prefer equality of speakers to equality of languages. Leaving legal aspects aside, inequality among languages very often stems from inequality among speakers of diŸerent languages. This holds particularly true in the case of Aboriginal languages. Canadian statistics show that there is a correlation between low economic status, low educational level, and low level of home comfort on the one hand, and speaking an Aboriginal language on the other. Statistics also show that improvement of economic status correlates signiªcantly with risk of language loss (Maurais 1996). One of the factors at the root of Québec’s language laws was the economic inferiority of Francophones not only within the whole of Canada but within Québec itself. The commission of inquiry set up by the Québec government in 1969 came to the conclusion that French was the language of menial jobs and low incomes and not the language of access to the upper echelons and their attendant beneªts. Hence, from the sociolinguistic point of view, equality among languages cannot be achieved without socio-economically-oriented a¹rmative action programs of some kind. The goal is to allow upward mobility to minority language speakers and, more generally, participation in modern society without at the same time inducing assimilation into the dominant culture and language. In many cases, this could be a vicious circle.
Equality, maintenance, globalization
Preserving languages in danger of extinction Many questions asked by the conference organizers concerned the preservation of languages and its desirability. The gloomy forecast by Michael Krauss (1992: 7) is worth repeating here: “I consider it a plausible calculation that — at the rates things are going — the coming century will see either the death or the doom of 90% of mankind’s languages.” Is there really a right to linguistic survival? Should such a right limit the rights of individuals whose language is threatened, and how far? These themes lie at the heart of the discussion between Hale and Ladefoged in two 1992 issues of Language. Ladefoged (1992) volunteered to “challenge directly the assumption […] that diŸerent languages, and even diŸerent cultures, always ought to be preserved.” He explained his position this way: It is paternalistic of linguists to assume that they know what is best for the community. One can be a responsible linguist and yet regard the loss of a particular language, or even of a whole group of languages, as far from a ‘catastrophic destruction’ (Hale et al., 1992: 7). Statements such as ‘just as the extinction of any animal species diminishes our world, so does the extinction of any language’ (Hale et al. 1992: 8) are appeals to our emotions, not to our reason. […] We may also note that human societies are not like the animal species. The world is remarkably resilient in the preservation of diversity; diŸerent cultures are always dying while new ones arise (Ladefoged 1992: 810).
Ladefoged oŸsets the individual’s free will and interest in social mobility against the value to a community of having its ancestral language survive — which leads us to the issue of collective rights versus individual rights. In language planning, discussions often center on the dichotomy between the “principle of personality” and the “principle of territoriality”; survival of threatened languages presupposes the existence of some degree of collective rights. Is it possible to achieve a suitable balance between individual and collective rights? I would argue that we have to resort to some sort of territoriality if we want to preserve languages faced with extinction. Back in 1981, Fishman showed that Amerindians living on reservations were more likely to declare an Aboriginal language as their mother tongue than those living oŸ reservation. This shows that territoriality has beneªcial eŸects on the maintenance of minority languages. And one could also adduce as proof the case of Switzerland and Belgium, where territoriality is applied in a most rigid manner.
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Territorial solutions do not seem feasible without some sort of self-government — not necessarily complete independence, but a form of local government. In the case of Québec’s Aboriginal languages, territoriality already exists in an embryonic form in the system of reservations. In 1998 the Government proposed to the First Nations that it increase their ªnancial and governmental autonomy. To implement this new policy, it proposed that the First Nations share jurisdictions through special agreements and engage in shared development projects (Ministre des AŸaires Autochtones 1998). Control over education is at least as important as territoriality to ensure preservation of minority languages. School is a special domain where many native languages can still make a breakthrough. In several Aboriginal communities in Québec, kindergarten is conducted in the child’s mother tongue. Aboriginal language immersion programs are popular among groups where the language is no longer spoken in the family, such as the Mohawk and the Algonquin of Maniwaki and Winneway. Transition and bilingual maintenance curricula have been implemented among the Inuit and the method is being tried out by the Montagnais of Betsiamites and Sept-Îles; it is also being given serious consideration by the Atikamekw and the Cree. But, for the moment, these programs are limited to the early years of primary school. Whereas the Inuit and Cree have their own school boards (from that point of view, they have as much control over their education as Francophones and Anglophones do), the modest size of most Aboriginal communities severely limits choice in educational matters. Frequently, the number of inhabitants does not justify the construction of high schools in the communities, which forces the pupils to attend Québec schools. As a third condition to ensure the preservation of minority languages one could add the desirability of preservation projects for the speakers involved. In this respect, I would like to quote a proposal made by William Cowan (1991: 90) in a review of my book on Québec’s Aboriginal Languages: I would add one more [proposal]: make it pay to use the native language, and not pay to use French or English. Students could be subsidized to study subjects like mathematics and botany in the native language, while students who study them in French would receive no subsidy; people who are ¶uent in the native language could be guaranteed jobs in the community structure, while those who are not ¶uent would have no guarantee; scholarships could be given to those that enter teacher-training programs designed to develop teachers of the native language, while other teacher-training programs would have to be ªnanced privately; direct subsidies could be given to those who are not in the job or training market (e.g., elderly persons) but who are ¶uent native speakers and thus resources for the
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maintenance of the language. These and other economic incentives would probably be at least as eŸective as those based on ideology or personal preference.
A fourth matter I should mention is that of purism. All languages are constantly changing and minority languages are no exception. Some of them may even evolve faster, if they are in direct contact with a dominant language. Over time, native speakers become aware they no longer speak a “pure” language, and since reintroducing conventional forms of speech into the community appears unfeasible, the temptation is strong to simply switch to the dominant language. In this regard, Lynn Drapeau’s work on Montagnais lexical erosion is noteworthy. Montagnais teenagers no longer know the Montagnais terms for things as commonplace as a “bridge,” “lake,” “cloud,” “shoulder” or “knee,” but they show perfect mastery of syntax, morphosyntax and verbal paradigms that are, in fact, quite complex. The borrowings noted among younger generations of Montagnais not only describe new realities, but also replace traditional words. Slippage in lexical semantics has also been noted (disappearance of the foot/leg and hand/arm distinctions). The language appears to be evolving toward a French noun system and an Aboriginal verb system. This is suggestive of a phenomenon noted in Mitchif, a Franco-Cree creole (see Papen 1987). Once native speakers become aware they speak an impure language, they are disinclined to value what they perceive as a creole, but which may represent the future of their mother tongue. This brings to mind the famous example of a language once also deemed an unworthy hodge-podge, but that has become the dominant language of our time — English, which faced a very uncertain future indeed 1000 years ago. Lastly, I would like to mention a problem Saussure termed parochialism (“esprit de clocher”). In many regards, the breakdown into dialects that certain minority languages face is the result of social and economic domination by other languages, often accompanied by an ideological discourse that denigrates the intellectual level and degree of modernity of minority language speakers. From the linguist’s armchair, the solution would be to reduce the number of variants where possible in order to consolidate the language. Unfortunately, certain missionaries, rather than facilitating consolidation, have fostered greater dialectal fragmentation by producing translations of the Bible for very small communities of language speakers. When eŸorts are made to introduce supradialectal standards, it also vital to avoid proposing models that alienate large numbers of native speakers (see Karmele Rotaetxe 1987, and her comments on the “united Basque” standard).
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The globalization of markets and language use Free trade agreements are the most obvious sign of our globalizing economies. The trend to global markets is rooted in mass consumerism and, thus, in standardization. Globalization is an open door to linguistic domination. In actual fact, the economy’s impact on the spread of a dominant language has been studied before: a quarter century ago, Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte looked at it from the Marxist perspective of class struggle. In their research into the spread of French in France in the nineteenth century, they showed how the dictates of production created a material necessity for the capitalist class to standardize linguistic practices. On the one hand, a standard language was increasingly imposed throughout the nineteenth century, muscling out regional tongues, dialects and patois. On the other hand, to meet the capitalist need for uniformity and standard production processes, a standard system of measurement — the metric system — was introduced at the same time that domestic tolls limiting the free circulation of goods and people were progressively abolished. The spread of French occurred in time through economic progress. The fear is thus that history will repeat itself and that economic globalization will lead to the hegemony of a single language — English to be precise. Economic integration can have an impact on a language, particularly if it comes to be seen as a hindrance to the free circulation of goods, services and people. To explore this issue of languages as nontariŸ barriers to the free circulation of goods, services and people, we have to look to European jurisprudence, which to my knowledge is the most developed in the area (see Woehrling 1993, on which I rely for the following discussion). Language has yet to be raised as an issue in NAFTA, although the NAFTA agreement, it should be noted, does not apply to the circulation of people except those providing the services listed in Chapter 14 of the agreement (chie¶y commercial services, except for transportation and basic telecommunications and the services of doctors, dentists and lawyers). It should also be noted that a grandfather clause was included, meaning for example that the Government of Québec could continue to demand a knowledge of French since the Charter of the French Language predated the Free Trade Agreement. However, a side eŸect is that it is no longer possible to create new requirements for knowledge of French for the professions listed in Chapter 14. Several decisions by the Commission of the European Communities and Luxemburg Court of Justice of the European Communities — at least four —
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demonstrate that the principle of the free circulation of goods can have an impact on language. In the ªrst case, the Court of Justice ruled that the Netherlands could not demand that the word “likeur” appear on the labels of alcoholic beverages imported from Germany because this requirement was a quantitative restriction of trade and the original German label provided Dutch consumers with su¹cient information about the nature of the product. As a result of this decision, the only allowable requirements for product labeling now are those designed to protect consumers. In the ISMUNIT case (SG[85]D/ 11505 of 6.9.1985), a French laboratory demanded that the labels on reagents produced by an Italian laboratory should also be worded in French and not only in English. The Commission of the European Communities decided that the French demand would be detrimental to commerce and added that the French researchers were bound to know English owing to their specialized training. In a third case, the France Quick case (SG[85] 8791 of 8.7.1985 & SG[85] 9123 of 17.7.1985), this French corporation had been condemned by a French court on the ground that it had used on the menus of its restaurants English words such as “big-cheese,” “ªshburger,” “coŸee-drink,” and “milk-shakes” without the French translation that was compulsory according to the Law No. 75–1349 of 31 December 1975 on the use of the French language. The European Commission sent a memorandum to the French government in July of 1985 indicating that the decision handed down by the French court was excessive and that the obligation to use French constituted an additional economic cost on import operations. More recently, in the GeŸroy case (C-366/98, 12 September 2000), concerning labeling in a language other than French on Coca-Cola bottles, the Court of Justice of the European Communities precluded a national provision from requiring the use of a speciªc language for the labeling of foodstuŸs, without allowing for the possibility for another language easily understood by purchasers to to be used or for the purchaser to be informed by other means. In a similar vein, a commotion occurred over another matter involving the free circulation of goods. This example of linguistic domination was provided by a handful of bureaucrats who made the ill-considered decision to eliminate the tilde — i.e., the letter eñe — from Spanish-language computer equipment. The bureaucrats took issue with three Spanish government edicts that any computer imported into Spain had to have the letter eñe on its keyboard. The whole matter caused an uproar in Spain, but ultimately the Spaniards won. As for the free circulation of people, there have been three decisions, one by the Commission of the European Communities and two by the Court of Justice. The ªrst case involved a doctor who had to prove he was ¶uent enough
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in French to practice in France. The Commission of the European Communities ruled that, while it was preferable to know the language of the country, the government could not refuse a doctor his right to practice because he was not su¹ciently ¶uent in the national language. The second case relating to the free circulation of people was the Mutsch case. Mutsch was a citizen of Luxemburg living in the German part of Belgium. He wanted to use German in court, but he was prevented from doing so on the grounds that he was not a citizen of Belgium. The Court of Justice ruled that this was illegal discrimination against a worker of the European Community. This was a very signiªcant decision because it means that when a state accords linguistic rights to a minority group, workers from other countries who also belong to the minority group have the same rights as citizens in the minority group. A third case was the November 28, 1989, ruling by the Court of Justice on a requirement by the Irish government that applicants for a plastic arts teaching position have an understanding of the Irish language. A Dutch citizen had been turned down for the job because she did not speak Irish. The Court had to decide whether the job’s language requirements were a barrier to the free circulation of workers given two facts: – –
The requirement’s main goal was to prevent citizens from other member states from qualifying for the position. Irish was not required for the job since classes were mainly taught in English.
The Court said that a policy of promoting Irish was acceptable provided its purpose was to express national identity and culture. The Court added that the treaty creating the EEC did not prohibit such policies provided they were not out of proportion to the goal pursued and did not cause discrimination (Solé i Durany 1990). The above examples (except the last) are very good illustrations of the problems that are bound to arise when the economy is given priority over all other considerations (for example, the survival of languages). Unfortunately, a state that signs an agreement that is mostly economic in nature cannot be expected to jeopardize its economic relations to protect some other type of interest, in this case language. The foregoing discussion explains why a certain number of countries — Canada, France and French-speaking countries in general — are in favor of what is called a “cultural exception” to protect cultural products from the eŸects of open markets. Carla Hills, the former foreign trade spokesperson
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under the former Bush administration, maintained that cultural products should be subject to the law of supply and demand and should not be artiªcially propped up by government measures because such measures are barriers to free trade. This American position would have signaled the end to Canadian or Mexican government grants to the ªlm industry. It would also have jeopardized the Canadian government’s requirement for consumer products to be labeled in English and French and the Québec government’s requirement that French be used, since these would have been interpreted as nontariŸ barriers to the free circulation of products. Any analysis of the impact of globalization on language use must also take into consideration something we often tend to forget in discussions like this — the role of companies, particularly multinationals. The expression “corporate citizens” has gained currency in recent years. It could turn out to be a dangerous one, particularly if it leads us to extend to companies the same freedom of expression we accord private citizens. (The following example, taken from outside the ªeld of language, illustrates this principle. Under Québec’s Election Act, only physical persons are authorized to ªnance political parties, not artiªcial persons, in order to maintain democratic transparency and equality among parties. The Act thus limits corporate freedom in order to protect and enhance individual freedom.) Parallels are often drawn between the threat facing languages and the environmental threat to the survival of animal and plant life around the world: 90% of languages are expected to disappear or fall at risk over the course of the next century (Krauss 1992: 7), whereas 50% of plant and animal species are expected to disappear (Diamond 1991). For years, ecologists have been calling on companies, particularly multinationals, to assume their responsibility for the environment. Maybe it is time for linguists to draw attention to the damage economic globalization may wreak if nothing is done to preserve languages and cultures. Otherwise, “corporate citizens” will transmute into what Canada’s New Democratic Party called “corporate bums” not that many years ago. In closing, so as not to be misunderstood or misinterpreted, I wish to stress that the analysis I have made of the linguistic impact of free trade treaties is not an argument against such treaties, nor should it be misconstrued that a majority of Quebecers are against NAFTA. Quebecers were Canada’s strongest proponents of the free trade agreement with the United States, and the province’s two main political parties declared themselves in favor of it. What I have attempted to show is rather what economists call “perverse eŸects,” i.e., eŸects that, although desirable in themselves, are not desired in a given context, or
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eŸects that are both undesired and undesirable. It is in fact quite possible — although not inevitable — that NAFTA will have undesirable eŸects in the cultural and linguistic domains. We simply have to be aware of this possibility if we wish to avoid its perverse eŸects. Québec’s Conseil de la langue française has already made suggestions in this regard that I will now summarize.
The language issue in the integrated Americas The economic integration now under way in the Americas is an opportunity to develop a new intercontinental solidarity in order to a¹rm and bolster our cultural identities and national languages and to avoid the standardization of cultural values and content. Language and culture, like health and the environment, can certainly be the subject of international strategic alliances. Québec’s experience has made it possible to establish important distinctions concerning what should be done to protect a language in the face of the globalization of markets and to preserve the domestic interests of a nation while satisfying its foreign interests. These distinctions may be relevant to others. First, a diŸerence must be made between private communications and public communications, that is, between communications for example within a family, a group of friends or a cultural community, and communications that occur in conjunction with public events, such as work, education, commerce or business. Secondly, there is also a distinction to be made between institutional multilingualism — inherent in a supranational organization, for example — and individual multilingualism, that is, the knowledge of several languages by an individual. The latter is an occupational qualiªcation to the same extent a technical or university diploma would be. In view of the globalization of the economy and given the introduction of new technologies dominated by the use of English, it is becoming increasingly necessary for non-English-speaking nations to deªne what working in one’s national language means. This holds particularly true in sectors such as tourism, aeronautics and communications, where it may seem “easier” and “more convenient” to adopt English because these sectors, by their very nature, extend beyond national boundaries. It is also necessary to protect national languages in order to protect consumers. This question has been raised in the European Union, which has adopted supranational economic and political structures. In the ªeld of product labeling, for example, the following rule has been adopted: products must
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be identiªed and explained in one of the three main languages, that is, English, French or German, and in the national language of the country. Most big companies have simply adopted a single label in seven languages, which reduces their costs while satisfying the requirements of individual nations and consumers’ needs. It has now become obvious that the prosperity of nations depends less and less on the raw materials they possess and more and more on the ability of ªrms to produce and collect information, which cannot exist without language. For this reason, the economy, information, knowledge and language are inextricably linked. We can let information circulate in the modern lingua franca that English has become and thereby allow the other o¹cial languages of the Americas — Spanish, Portuguese or French — to lose their utility and be conªned to use in the home. Or we can take advantage of the new technologies and quickly develop communications tools, such as interfaces or Internet software, in the four o¹cial languages of the Americas. The development of innovative technological instruments and the establishment of international standards in the four o¹cial languages of the Americas are of the utmost importance from the standpoint of the broadening of NAFTA: respect for the use of national languages should be a key issue in the discussions leading to the economic integration of the Americas. If we compare the Americas to Europe, the task may be easier because there are only four main o¹cial languages. It is equally important that the countries participating in the new agreement o¹cialize the use of the four languages in any supranational organizations that may be established. In the integrated Americas, the citizens or institutions of participating countries must, like those of the EU member states, be able to use their national languages in written and spoken communication with these organizations.
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Maintaining linguodiversity Africa in the twenty-ªrst century Alamin M. Mazrui
In the course of the twentieth century, many languages died or became severely weakened — the highest proportion of these being located in the southern hemisphere. It is even possible that the twentieth century had a higher casualty rate in languages than any other century in history. Of the thousands of languages estimated to exist in the world today as many as ªfty percent are said to be in danger of extinction (Wurm 1996: 5). Does this not make it all the more necessary that the twenty-ªrst century should try its best to engage in “language conservation” instead of permitting reckless “language erosion”? As elsewhere in the world, language displacement and language obsolescence have been part of Africa’s history over the centuries. It is reasonable to assume that even in the pre-colonial period languages of conquering peoples — e.g. Mandingo in Mali, Kanuri in Kanem-Bornu, and Twi in Ashanti — may have repeatedly landed death blows on the languages of subjugated and assimilated peoples as they moved into new territories. The eŸects on the language picture in Africa of population decimation caused by enslavement may also remain one of those permanent gaps in Africa’s sociolinguistic history. When all is said and done, however, the twentieth-century colonial and post-colonial phases of Africa’s history precipitated new forces whose threat to linguistic diversity may be unprecedented. As the continent that “invented” language, Africa is now threatened with the possibility of linguistic deprivation.
The imperative of language conservation But why should “minority languages” in danger of attrition be saved at all? Several studies have tried to provide some justiªcations for the conservation of endangered languages world-wide. These have included the following:
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1. Languages can vary enormously in the kind and degree of creativity they demonstrate. Basing her study on some of the endangered Native American languages of North America, for example, Marianne Mithun (1998) demonstrates the immense creative diŸerences existing in repertoires of grammatical categories, word formation, morphological categorization and other features. Indeed, even the project of determining linguistic universals and universal constraints on human language presupposes some degree of diversity of the human linguistic experience from which a determination of what is truly universal can be made. Every language lost, therefore, potentially diminishes our opportunities to understand fully the scope of the human capacity for linguistic creativity; the loss of linguistic diversity can reduce our understanding of what is humanly possible in human languages. 2. As instruments of thought, languages may also diŸer in the way they operate: each becomes a potential instance of human intellectual genius. Languages are the wardrobes of thought; words are the items of clothing for ideas. Drawing on his research on Australian languages, Ken Hale (1998: 204) concludes that “… language — in the general, multifaceted sense — embodies the intellectual wealth of the people who use it. A language and the intellectual productions of its speakers are often inseparable, in fact… [an] intellectual tradition may be so thoroughly a part of people’s linguistic ethnography as to be, in eŸect, inseparable from the language.” When a language is allowed to disappear, therefore, it is presumably also a loss of an important fraction of human intellectual property as a result of which we may never be able to account fully for the breadth of human cognitive capacity. 3. Language loss entails culture loss, a position taken for example, in studies by Jocks (1998) and Woodbury (1998) and articulated most passionately by Wurm (1996: 1): Each language re¶ects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of a people, and it even remains a re¶ection of this culture for a while after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles…
Every language has a few select areas of meaning which are unique to itself. Every language that dies takes with it those unique areas of meaning that can never be reproduced in any other language, leading to a depreciation of the
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human cultural heritage. “Allowing languages and cultures to die directly reduces the sum total of our knowledge about the world, for it removes some of the voices articulating its richness and variety, just as the extinction of any species entails sacriªcing some unique part of the environment” (Nettle and Romaine 2000: 199). To paraphrase John Donne, “No language is an island, entire of itself. Any death of a language diminishes me, for I am involved in human discourse. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Within this interplay between language and culture, there are those who link the future of linguodiversity with the future of biodiversity. Darrell Posey, the director of the Oxford Center for Environment, Ethics and Society, maintains that it is “language that links cultural knowledge to environmental practice. Without language, indigenous concepts of nature, perceptions of environment, and categories of conservation and management would be lost. Traditional knowledge may indeed linger even after a native language is lost, but the richness and diversity of that knowledge cannot survive even one generation of language loss” (quoted by Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 259). The language and cognition thesis and the language and culture thesis are, of course, related to the linguistic relativity hypothesis that was once discredited for lack of systematic evidence in its support. More recently, however, cognitive linguistics has been quite in¶uential in rehabilitating Benjamin Lee Whorf and his (and Edward Sapir’s) relativist ideas. Not only is Whorf no longer understood to have been an absolutist in his linguistic relativism, there is now considerable body of literature that is believed to support his argument, for example, that linguistic patterns do in¶uence our patterns of attention and categorization in a culturally speciªc manner (Dirven and Verspoor 1996). 4. Historians have long recognized the importance of linguistic evidence for historical reconstruction. The totality of human history itself runs the risk of being less than adequately understood if language conservation is not given its due importance in human enterprise. It is true, of course, that, sometimes, it is in dead languages that history is recovered: “To uncover lost words, no longer durable meanings and expressions, to retrieve elements from no longer spoken dialects, jargons, and slangs, is to lift the lid from a treasure chest of past social realities, to reveal fragments shimmering with the re¶ections of lost worlds of everyday life” (Preed 1990: 8). Such an exercise in the recovery of lost worlds from dead words presupposes some measure of written documentation of the
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language(s) in question: in the case of Africa and other languages of the world of the oral tradition lost words could indeed amount to worlds permanently lost to human history. The majority of African languages were not reduced to writing until the twentieth century, mainly as a result of Christian missionary eŸorts. And many of those that have longer written traditions can trace their history only to the encounter with Islam a few centuries ago. Linguistic evidence in African history, therefore, has had to rely heavily on the living word from the realm of the oral. 5. The more material aspects of language, such as the variety of sounds and their combination, and the morphological and syntactic constructs, also constitute the human linguistic heritage. Language death deprives us of knowledge of the full range of materials and structures that have gone into constructing the arts of communication in human history and that have been the indispensable resources for linguistic theorizing. It is even arguable that the scientiªc quest of constructing an adequate theory of linguistic competence in the Chomskyan sense is itself impossible without a linguistically diverse world. More recently, the linguistic properties of languages in the process of dying have themselves become objects of linguistic investigation in a way that may further enrich linguistic theory. The collection by Nancy Dorian (1989), for example, is a good contribution to this line of investigation into language obsolescence. 6. Where linguistic diversity leads to bilingualism and multilingualism, there may also be socio-behavioral considerations in favor of language preservation. It has been claimed, for example, that bi- or multilingual individuals “are less rigid in their attitudes and have a tendency to be more tolerant of (i.e. less hostile and on the defensive against) the unknown than monolinguals, more inclined to regard manifestations of other cultures by individuals as acceptable and to be respected, though they may be diŸerent from their own” (Pred 1990: 9). 7. As a product of displacement, language death is often a result of power inequalities between groups. Those who lose their languages seldom do so as a matter of choice: Rather, they often capitulate to “superior” power, in its coercive or hegemonic form. To this extent, the maintenance of “minority” languages becomes a rights issue. States and world bodies have an obligation to promote and protect minority linguistic rights by ensuring that minority languages are not threatened with extinction by “majority” languages. Other-
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wise national co-existence can itself be in jeopardy. As Douglass Kibbee (1998: xv) points out, Political self-preservation calls for attention to linguistic and cultural peace within the territory of the nation or organization. Linguistic rights requirements help to maintain this peace by accommodating the cultural needs of linguistically dominated populations, but can threaten this peace if the economic and political cost is too high to the dominant population.
Idealistic as the linguistic rights movement has sometimes been described, it has the potential of sparing nations from undue political tensions which could, in turn, impact on issues of economic development and stability. But if there are good reasons why language diversity must be conserved, one must ask if such conservability is at all possible given the global trend of events. To answer this question we must begin with a consideration of some of the main causes of language displacement. Although there is a rich literature on the subject, Africa poses a unique if not exclusive set of possible causes that threaten its linguodiversity.
Comparative displacement: African versus European languages A major force behind the consolidation of some languages in the twentieth century and the attrition of others has been the process of globalization. The weakening and sometimes the collapse of the nation-state in Africa due to globalization, for example, may enhance the position of African regional languages like Kiswahili and Hausa which may, in turn, swallow-up “smaller languages” in the continuing ¶ux of populations and communities. Globalization is also making European languages in Africa, especially English, more and more triumphant in demographic as well as functional terms. The global spread of English has often been seen as a serious threat to the survival of indigenous languages. That is probably how a book on the spread of English (Fishman, Cooper and Conrad 1977) came to be dedicated to “those speech-and-writing communities utilizing ‘small languages’ that have already learned to live creatively in the company of ‘the mighty’ and, even more, to those still learning how to do so.” Some have described the eŸects of the spread of the language as outright “linguistic genocide” (Day 1985). Others have regarded the language as essentially “omnivorous” (McArthur 1999), an uncontrollable creature that devours everything linguistic in its path. Such views
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of English have been the subject of poetry and song as demonstrated in the following South African verses by Johnny Clegg and Savuka, as quoted by Pennycook (1994: 2): Bits of songs and broken drums are all he could recall So he spoke to me in a bastard tongue carried on the silence of guns It’s been a long long time since they ªrst came and marched thru the village they taught me to forget my past and live the future in their image Chorus: They said I should learn to speak a little bit of english don’t be scared of a suit and tie learn to walk in the dreams of the foreigner — I am a Third World Child.
In the speciªc context of the African continent, however, available evidence seems to suggest that English and other European languages inherited from the colonial era are not the “killers” of African languages that they are often presumed to be. Rather it is the local lingua francas, the African expansionist few, that are the real linguistic predators. In the words of Brenzinger, Heine and Sommer (1991: 40), European languages are often labeled as being the primary danger to African languages and cultural heritage. A closer look at the reality in most African nations today reveals, however, that it is African linguae francae and other African languages with a national or regional status which spread to the detriment of vernaculars. Minority languages are still more likely to be replaced by those few “highly valued” African languages, than by imported ones.
A fundamental factor underlying this anomalous situation — where the most prestigious, the most powerful, the most favored languages by ªat of language policy, i.e the European languages, are not the replacing languages — is, of course, the school. The acquisition of European languages in Africa still tends to be overwhelmingly through a formal system of education whose corridors are accessible only to a few. Even the most prestigious African languages, on the other hand, can be acquired in the streets and the market place, ready commodities for large proportions of people in their respective regions. The
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very mode and domain of acquisition of the European languages, therefore, and their consequent promotion of “elite closure” (Myers-Scotton 1993) limit their immediate capacity for replacing the African languages around them. Furthermore, the domains of language use of the English language are still predominantly formal. One is more likely to hear and use the language in a government o¹ce than at the market place. At the moment, then, it is possible that the role of English in Africa encourages language shift more in the direction of quasi-diglossic bi/multilingualism than of total language loss. However, to look at language endangerment purely in terms of direct displacement in the here-and-now is to adopt a rather narrow view of the problem. English and other European languages have continued to mesmerize African policy makers long after the end of direct colonialism. The result has been a disturbing unwillingness to commit signiªcant amounts of resources to the promotion and development of African languages. By fostering a psychology of linguistic neglect among policy makers, European languages do, in fact, pose a serious long-term threat to African languages. Equally important in the anglicization of Africa is the continent’s relatively weak linguistic nationalism. By linguistic nationalism we mean that version of nationalism that is concerned with the value of its own language, seeks to defend it against other languages, and encourages its use and enrichment (Williams 1994). One of the factors underlying this relative lack of linguistic nationalism is the distinction between the oral tradition and the written. The overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African languages belonged to the oral tradition until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no ancient written literature outside Ethiopia and the Islamized city states of East and West Africa. Without a substantial written tradition, linguistic nationalism is slow to emerge, although there are exceptions, such as the linguistic nationalism of the Somali based mainly on the oral tradition. The African situation contrasts sharply with that of India, for example. The main Indian languages have a long written tradition, with ancient poets and many written philosophical treatises. Works of literature, written when most of Europe was still in the Dark Ages and maintained and transmitted over the generations by priests and scholars, are invaluable in promoting linguistic pride among the speakers of the language in question. The written tradition can include one additional element — sacred literature. Linguistic nationalism among the Arabs, for example, has been greatly in¶uenced by the Holy Book, the Qur’an, as well as great Arab poets of the past (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998: 5–6).
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All these are, of course, massive generalizations with a lot of exceptions. Some Ethiopians were literate long before the written word was common currency among the Anglo-Saxons in the British Isles. Large sections of the Tanzanian population today have shown nationalistic attachment to the Swahili language as an additional language. So strong has been their linguistic nationalism, in fact, that, translated into government policy, it may have put many smaller Tanzanian languages under threat of extinction. Strong linguistic nationalists (as in Asia, the Middle East and Europe, for example) tend to resist massive dependence on languages other than their own. Sub-Saharan Africans are rarely strong nationalists in this linguistic sense (exceptions include the Somali, Amhara and Afrikaners). As Mazrui and Tidy explain (1984: 299), There is less linguistic nationalism generally in Africa than has been observed in places like Malaysia, India and Bangladesh. The African situation is characterized by an expanding use of English and French. Commonwealth African governments are introducing English at an earlier phase in the educational pyramid than the British themselves did.
The prediction, made almost a quarter of a century ago by Conrad and Fishman (1977: 56), that “as the demand for English instruction continues to increase, competition from national languages…will nevertheless bring about a decline in English medium schooling at the primary and secondary levels,” seems more far-fetched today in African education than ever before. A similar pattern of dependency on European languages is found in other domains, including government o¹ces, the legislature and the judiciary. Under these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to suggest that English will make accelerated progress and consolidate itself even further on the African continent in the years to come, in the process curtailing the use of many of the indigenous tongues. If linguistic nationalism in Africa is relatively weak, could African languages beneªt from other types of nationalism whose manifestations may include a protective orientation towards peoples’ “own” languages? The humiliation of Black people has been much more on the basis of their race than on the basis of their language. As a result African nationalism is much more inspired by a quest for racial dignity than by a desire to defend African languages. But is it possible to have a certain degree of linguistic nationalism deriving from an over-arching nationalism of race? It has been suggested that, in contrast to the African elite, the African “masses” do, in fact, maintain an anti-imperialist, and by derivation even anti-capitalist, racial nationalism that
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has a direct bearing on the future of African languages. In the words of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993: 35): What prevented our languages from being completely swallowed up by English and other oppressor languages was that the rural and urban masses, who had refused to surrender completely in the political and economic spheres, also continued to breathe life into our languages and thus helped to keep alive the histories and cultures they carried. The masses of Africa would often derive the strength needed in their economic and political struggles from those very languages. Thus the people of the Third World had refused to surrender their souls to English, French, or Portuguese.
But what is the future of race nationalism? In the twenty-ªrst century, will we experience the end of racism — to which race nationalism has been a reaction — or merely its reconªguration along a somewhat diŸerent axis? Is there a kind of global apartheid developing, as white folk in the northern hemisphere close ranks, which may in turn globalize race nationalism with a derivative linguistic eŸect? There is, on the other hand, the rather paradoxical possibility that the same limited linguistic nationalism that expedites the spread of English may also save African languages from rapid extinction in the short run. Weak linguistic nationalism probably fosters an orientation to language based on its instrumental value rather than its political symbolism. It is this linguistic orientation, in fact, which may have contributed to the unusually high rate of multilingualism on the continent, with each language in the repertoire being valued and maintained for its practical beneªts in its respective domain(s). Ironically, therefore, the African capacity for multilingual proªciency may help in slowing down the shrinkage of its linguistically diverse environment. On the other hand, an uncritical instrumental view of language may promote a kind of “do-nothing” attitude even as some languages are facing the threat of extinction. It may foster a linguistic laissez-faire — an abstention from any management, direction and planning — allowing languages to die gradually because they are deemed less and less useful. An instrumental approach to language, out of the context of the power relations that deªne speciªc communities, fails to demonstrate that language is an important site of the struggle to reshape the world that we all share. Such a failure gives undue advantage to the languages of the powerful. Strong linguistic nationalism, on the other hand, can inspire eŸorts to expand the instrumental capacity of the languages in question, consequently improving their chances of survival even under the threat of linguistic “invasion.”
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If European languages pose no immediate danger to linguistic diversity in Africa, do they threaten intellectual and cultural diversity? To what extent, for example, is English contributing to the global movement towards what Francis Fukuyama (1992) has called the “end of history?” — a kind of universalization of Western political and economic culture? Today, one can listen to Arabic rap in Egypt, Maori rap in New Zealand, and Swahili rap in Tanzania. Yet rap arrived on these diŸerent shores, each with its own distinct musical tradition, on an English-language boat. Is there some link, therefore, direct or indirect, between English and the coca-colonization of world cultures? In its initial phases, westernization could add to cultural diversity. But, if left unmanaged, it could indeed lead to cultural dependency and even to the erosion of other cultures. The western package of “modernity” has come to Africa with many cultural trappings. In this connection, there is a sharp contrast between Africa and, say, the Japanese experience. Japanese westernization aimed to protect Japan against the west, rather than merely to submit to western cultural attractions. The emphasis in Japan was, therefore, on the technical and technological techniques of the west, rather than on literary and verbal culture. The Japanese slogan of “western technique, Japanese spirit” at the time captured this ambition to borrow technology from the west while deliberately protecting a substantial part of Japanese culture. In a sense, Japan’s technological westernization was designed to reduce the danger of other forms of cultural dependency. The nature of westernization in Africa has been very diŸerent. Far from emphasizing western productive technology and containing western life-styles and verbal culture, Africa has reversed the Japanese order of emphasis. Among the factors facilitating this reversal has been the role of the school in Africa. The paradigmatic change necessary for the imported school system in the aftermath of colonialism did not in fact occur: no change took place in the conception of the school itself and what its purposes were. This lack of change in the conception of the transplanted educational system caused numerous changes in the attitudes, values and worldview of its products: since the western school was so foreign in an African context, and, especially in its postelementary phases, was transplanted with few concessions to African cultures, its impact was more culturally alienating than it need have been. A whole generation of African graduates grew up despising their own ancestry and scrambling to imitate others. The educated African became captivated by the west’s cultural mirror.
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One important source of this cultural dependency has been the very language in which African graduates and scholars are taught. For the time being, it is impossible for an African to be moderately familiar with the works of Marx or Ricardo without the help of a European language. Das Kapital is not yet available in Hausa or Kiswahili, let alone in “smaller” languages like Kidigo and Lutoro. In short, major intellectual paradigms of the West are likely to remain unavailable in any African language unless there is a genuine educational revolution involving widespread adoption of African languages as media of education. Almost all black African intellectuals conduct their most sophisticated conversations and their most complicated thinking in European languages. It is because of this phenomenon that intellectual dependency in Africa is inseparable from linguistic dependency (Mazrui and Mazrui 1999: 180–81). In a similar vein Pattanayak (1996: 200) has argued: [English] inhibits interaction between science and society and it inhibits the creation of appropriate technology. As an adversary to many languages sharing communication, it promotes alienation, anomie and blind spots in cultural perception. It is the carrier of values antithetical to indigenous cultures and results in the atrophy of cultures. It makes non-English cultures permanent parasites on English and English-speaking countries.
But the linguistic situation in Africa is by no means static. Globalization is creating new dynamics not only along the horizontal plane of human interaction , but also vertically: English is beginning to ªlter downwards to the masses and becoming more accessible to a wider spectrum of people beyond the walls of the elite. Its domains and modes of acquisition seem to be gradually multiplying. Given its tremendous instrumental value, supported by national language policies, will it, in the long run, outstrip Kiswahili, Hausa and other major African languages in its potential to eliminate smaller languages from the surface of Africa? Will the Afro-Saxons — Africans who speak English as a ªrst language (the term is Ali Mazrui’s: 1975: v) — outnumber other Africans by the end of the twenty-ªrst century? Will the African Tower of Babel ultimately crumble before an external linguistic invasion? Of course, as English becomes a mass language, it is more likely to diversify along regional lines. The language is beginning to bear the marks of popular democratization as it serves the needs, not of the elite, but of the common people and gets “distorted” in the mill of mass experience. New varieties of English are beginning to spring up throughout the continent. A global linguistic phenomenon is increasingly ªnding local articulations. These African vari-
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eties of the language have sometimes been seen as revolutionary and antihegemonic. Thus, an attempt to give the South African variety of English a diŸerent name, People’s English was explained in the following terms: To interpret People’s English as a dialect of international English would do the movement a gross injustice; People’s English is not only a language, it is a struggle to appropriate English in the interests of democracy in South Africa. Thus the naming of People’s English is a political act because it represents a challenge to the current status of English in South Africa in which control of the language, access to the language, and teaching of the language are entrenched within apartheid structures. (Pierce 1995: 108)
Thus some degree of empowerment is seen to reside in these emergent, localized varieties of the English language. In the ªnal analysis, however, culturally speciªc as this intra-linguistic diversiªcation of English may be, it is di¹cult to see how it can compensate for the loss in the full scope of human heritage that the wider inter-linguistic diversity has provided over the centuries.
Conclusion If language diversity is to thrive as part of the linguistic world order, there is an urgent need to reverse language policies that marginalize “fragile” languages, in favor of language policies that seek to strengthen them and conserve them, building their instrumental capacity and increasing their use in science and technology. Even the more powerful local languages are in danger of atrophy in the long run if they are not consciously cultivated and made compatible with the present state of knowledge. At the same time planners must seek to ensure continuity in intergenerational language use at the community level. As the location of bonds of intimacy, loyalty and identity, the community, with its varied dynamics and counter-dynamics, could be crucial to the survival and vibrancy of otherwise endangered languages. But given the history of governance in much of the Third World so far, the elite cannot be trusted to make the political determination needed to center local languages in their respective countries. Under the circumstances, a reversal of the destiny of endangered languages may depend more on spontaneous developments than on government intervention. Among the developments already evident are economic neglect and the collapse of the nation-state.
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The economic neglect of Africa seems well under way. Recent US foreign policy toward Africa calling for “trade instead of aid” is, perhaps, both an acknowledgment and masking of this new reality. With the end of the Cold War, more and more western support is now being channeled to Eastern Europe. Painful as this economic neglect is for Africa, however, it may be just what the continent needs in order to rediscover itself and pursue a more organic path of development. If that were to happen, it is not conceivable that the aims of such an alternative path could be achieved without concomitant eŸorts to re-center African languages in some fundamental ways. The collapse of the nation-state under the weight of globalization has unleashed both centripetal and centrifugal cultural forces. On the centripetal plane, a resurgence of regional experiments may ultimately favor the consolidation of African lingua francas. On the centrifugal plane, on the other hand, a greater assertion of ethnic and sub-ethnic nationalisms of various shades may produce derivative linguistic nationalism, even if at the level of the sub-conscious. This development may lend support to the observation that “not only are millions upon millions of speakers of small languages on all continents convinced of the creative and continuative contributions of their languages (usually their mother tongues) to their personal and collective lives, but … many millions are engaged in individual and collective eŸorts to assist their threatened mother tongues to reverse the language shift processes that have engulfed them” (Fishman 1992: 293). In some cases, these eŸorts have assumed the form of popular struggles for self-determination in a multifaceted manner that combines land rights, cultural rights and linguistic rights (Nettle & Romaine 2000: 202). The challenge is now to ªnd a balance between the centripetal and the centrifugal, in language as in other areas of human experience. Linguistic diversity in the world may also beneªt from a greater push for linguistic counter-penetration. The massive investments in the acquisition of English in non-Anglo societies must be counterbalanced by investments in greater exposure of the Anglo population to other languages of the world. As far as African languages in the American academy are concerned, the push has so far come primarily from African Americans seeking to reclaim their heritage — a good case of race nationalism with a linguistic nationalist sub-text. The eŸort, however, has to be trans-ethnic and trans-racial if it is to deliver its full beneªts to the human community. Just as Africa’s excessive dependency on English and other European languages can be a denial of innovation, excessive linguistic insularity in the Anglo world can be one of the causes of its own cultural decline. The Anglo world needs to realize that, in the long run, the
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strength of its own voice may depend in no small measure upon the promotion of greater linguistic and cultural interdependence on a global scale. Linguistic counter-penetration is, of course, already taking place spontaneously at an increasing rate. In spite of attempts to regulate the in¶ux of people from Africa, the Arab world, and Asia into the USA, for example, the proportion of immigrant populations is said to be swelling rapidly. In 1990 the United States Bureau of Census estimated that one in seven people in America spoke a language other than English at home. “Since then the proportion of immigrants in the population has grown and grown” (WallraŸ 2000: 54). And every eŸort by the English-Only movement to prescribe English as the only o¹cial language of the USA triggers a new wave of linguistic ethno-nationalisms that seek to ensure the survival of linguistic and cultural diversity. Of course, this situation now seems to be changing in the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. There are non-English languages that, because of their international market value, are already high on the demand scale in foreign-language programs in American universities. These include Arabic and Japanese. But the growing number of immigrants within the USA is also encouraging the study of other languages of the world. Spanish is experiencing particularly high enrollment rates due to the expanding presence of people of Latin American origin. Proªciency in Spanish, in addition to English, is becoming an asset in its own right for job seekers in the USA. Will Yoruba in New York City or Somali in Columbus, Ohio, one day acquire substantial market value as additional languages? It is possible that, in time, bilingualism in English and one or more immigrant languages may be a more marketable linguistic qualiªcation than monolingualism in English alone. As a deliberate policy linguistic counter-penetration is, of course, partly based on the belief that linguistic diversity is itself a desirable, if not altogether necessary, pursuit of the human community. It is important, however, to recognize the limitations of the ideology of linguistic diversity under the present politico-economic world order. This ideology presupposes that all languages are morally equal, and that, therefore, each has the right to have an unrepressed presence at the global linguistic banquet. In the real world, however, languages are not equal. While some are privileged as the languages of politico-economic power and control, others are marginalized, and others still are pushed to the verge of oblivion. If global linguistic diversity is to take root, then, it must be built on politico-economic empowerment based on a new world order. For a long time
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the world was polarized between two politico-economic super-powers, the USA and the Soviet Union. Then the world was essentially bicentric; now the world is contending with only one super-power, the USA, and has become virtually unicentric. A linguistically diverse world may require a more polycentric equation, a globe which, in Samir Amin’s conception (1989: 151), has multiple centers of politico-economic power and is respectful of diŸerent economic and social paths of development. Advocates of linguistic diversity, therefore, may also have to be engaged in a much wider struggle for the politico-economic reorganization of the world system.
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Language education in the twenty-ªrst century A newly informed perspective Teresa Pica
Since its inception, the ªeld of language education has not lacked for perspectives on its methodological practices, emphases, and goals. A range of perspectives has accompanied nearly every method of instruction that has come into the ªeld, however original, reformed, or recycled its design. Grounded in various strands of linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences, the methodology of language education has been highly interpretative of these ªelds, and more re¶ective of the attitudes and values of its creators, than the practice of teachers or the ªndings of researchers (see Chaudron 1988; Levin 1972). A new perspective on language education is emerging, however, and it is less methods-driven, and more classroom-focused than its predecessors. This bottom-up perspective has been informed by teachers and researchers, whose interest in classroom language learning has brought about ways of meeting the needs and goals of language learners that are more principled and contextualized than the top-down perspective which has long dominated the ªeld. This paper reviews the compatible, collaborative, and complementary eŸorts of teachers and researchers that are revitalizing the course of language education as it enters the twenty-ªrst century.
Background Over the centuries, the ªeld of language education has been host to numerous methods, framed by often competing perspectives and subject to little empirical scrutiny. Some methods have extolled grammar study while others have
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rejected it. Some have promoted the need for mimicry, the role of memory, the processes of cognition, or the goal of translation (see Kelly 1969; Richards and Rodgers 1986). In the last half-century, numerous “designer” methods have also been introduced. Among the most popular are Silent Way (Gattegno 1972), Total Physical Response (Asher 1969), Suggestopedia (Lazanov 1978), and Counseling Learning (Curran 1972). All have been framed by their creators’ views of the ways in which their methods activate cognitive and aŸective processes. Few have oŸered evidence beyond anecdotal endorsements or narrowly focused, unanalyzed, outcomes data to support the validity of their claims or the feasibility of their implementation (see Brown 1994; Richards and Rodgers 1986). During the nineteen eighties and nineties, a collection of practices based on communication dominated much of the ªeld, and found a home in professional literature more often than in actual classrooms. Known variously as communicative methodology, communicative language teaching, and the communicative approach, their common perspective was that communication, as the goal of language learning, could also be the process through which this goal was achieved (Richards and Rodgers 1986). Unlike other methods, which escaped researchers’ scrutiny, communicative methodology was studied by researchers as its components were implemented in the classroom context. Communicative techniques were found to provide uneven outcomes, with their diŸerential success conditioned by language skill emphases, learner age and ethnicity, and the types of activities and materials used for their implementation (Pica and Doughty 1985a, 1985b; Pica 1994a, 1994b). Many communicative techniques were found to be no diŸerent from teacher-directed practice activities, and not very communicative at all (see Long and Sato 1983; Pica and Long 1986). Currently, the ªeld of language education ªnds itself in what is frequently referred to as the “post-method” condition (Kumaravadivelu 1994), as it has become apparent that no single method is able to address the intricacies of the language learning process, respond to the diverse needs and multilingual goals of language learners, or draw on the knowledge, skills, and resources of their teachers (see Ashworth 1991; Kachru 1986). As the past several decades of research on language learning have revealed, language learning is too complex a process for any individual method to sustain and accomplish. Adding to this situation has been the realization that individual methods have simply not been designed to accommodate the expanding contexts of language learning and use within academic, professional, societal, and cultural domains. This is
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particularly the case as English becomes the most widely taught second or foreign language in the world, and appears not so much to be replacing other languages, as complementing them, in speciªc contexts of use (see Graddol and MeinhoŸ 1999). With these developments has come a recognition that language education must be more situated in, and sensitive to, context and more responsive to learner needs than the individual methods that have come into, and fallen out of, favor in the ªeld. Far more critical, it is now acknowledged, are teachers who can recognize their students’ needs and goals, draw on research that addresses their questions and concerns, and make informed decisions about their roles and activities in the classroom (see Prabhu 1987, 1990 for further discussion and supportive data). Teachers themselves have called for research relevant to their classroom and curricular concerns, and have become active as individual researchers, and collaborators with researchers, in their classrooms, communities, and schools. The answers to their questions and concerns have begun to provide a newly informed perspective on the ªeld of language education (Richards and Lockhart 1996; Schachter and Gass 1996). This is illustrated in several themes — the compatibility between research ªndings and classroom questions on language learning; the collaboration of teachers and researchers on learners’ needs and issues; and the complementarity of teachers and researchers in language curriculum reform. In describing examples of these eŸorts, as the ªeld of language education turns away from the top-down procedures of methods application and looks toward the twenty-ªrst century within a more bottom-up, research-based, classroom-situated perspective, the present paper begins within the perspective of classroom-compatible research, i.e., research that responds to questions that have originated in the classroom, and describes key ªndings that can inform classroom decisions. This is followed by descriptions of the ways in which teachers and researchers have begun to confront classroom questions and concerns by working together through the perspectives of collaboration and complementarity. An overview of a study on a current approach to language instruction, alternatively popular, widely embraced, but issues-burdened and constrained, is then presented. The design and implementation of the study illustrate each of these perspectives. Its ªndings raise additional questions in language education that might be similarly addressed.
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Classroom-compatible research Early research on second or foreign language learning was not related to issues of instruction, but rather, to questions on child bilingualism (see, for example, Leopold 1939–1949). Research on instruction emerged from the late 1940’s through early 1970’s, and was represented in comparison studies of diŸerent classroom methods that shed little light on the classroom learning process and did little to explain classroom outcomes. Typically, large scale, quantitative studies would compare the impact of one instructional method over another with respect to student achievement. The results of these endeavors were disappointing, as researchers found that, when preparing for their class, teachers were less likely to implement institutionalized methods of instruction than to design and implement their own activities (see SwaŸar, Arens, and Morgan 1982 for further support). Instructional methods were often sampled eclectically and applied without consistency in the education of students across age and proªciency levels. In consequence, perspectives and distinctions in methodological design were often disregarded in actual practice (see critiques by Chaudron 1988, Levin 1972). Throughout this period, moreover, teachers and researchers grew frustrated as they attempted to understand language development and its relationship to students’ native language and to explain why certain error patterns and acquisitional stages were resistant to instructional intervention. For many years, the ªeld was dominated by terms such as “creative construction” (Dulay and Burt 1974) and “natural order” (Krashen 1977). These perspectives on language learning re¶ected the overall sense that, in working out the rules of a grammar, students could achieve a more successful outcome on their own, as long as they were provided with opportunities for communication and comprehension rather than for grammar practice and instructional input. There was also an uneasiness about research applications to teaching decisions. Although language teaching had long sought for, and assumed it was based on, principles from linguistics, psychology, and pedagogy, these views were often remote from curricular decisions. The ªeld of applied linguistics, though established in the 1950’s, had yet to oŸer a broad-reaching methodology that could be applied meaningfully in the classroom. Instead, the application of linguistics to teaching largely meant the application of sentence grammar to the development of exercises and activities (see Grabe and Kaplan 1992 for an overview).
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Much has changed. The change began as teachers and researchers came to share a compatibility of interests in the linguistic, cognitive, and social processes of language learning, and in the need for authentic materials and eŸective strategies in teaching and research. Among the linguistic processes of interest were grammatical features that remained at developmental levels, particularly those involving complex or semantically opaque grammar rules and subtle sociolinguistic and pragmatic relationships of form and meaning. Cognitive processes of mutual interest included learners’ message comprehension, planning, and production, especially as they related to the social processes of classroom interaction and dialogue, and conversational revision and repair. These linguistic, cognitive, and social dimensions of teacher and researcher compatibility are discussed in the following sections.
Linguistic features and processes Despite the initial fanfare over communicative methods in promoting rapid progress in the functional dimensions of language learning, concerns were expressed among educators about their su¹ciency for building communicative competence. Speculations were raised that communicative activities might lead the language learner to settle for ¶uency at the expense of accuracy or to neglect learning of advanced, structurally complex, though optional, grammatical areas (as argued, for example, by Higgs and CliŸord 1982). For learners who sought varieties of a second language that conformed to community norms or corresponded to standardized or specialized varieties, ¶uent production was not the only objective. Research carried out in the past two decades has been able to address this pedagogical challenge, uncovering patterns and predictability with respect to linguistic features that can be learned through communication and those that need instructional intervention for their mastery. Word order, syntax and other “resilient” features, for example, have been shown to be more predictable and more sequenced in their emergence than what are known as “fragile” features, such as function words and in¶ections, that are di¹cult to perceive in communicative input (see, for example, Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman 1989 for English; Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann 1981 for German). What appeared to be needed were ways in which learners could access these latter features, and then internalize and retrieve them for subsequent use.
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One way to accomplish this was to engage learners in meaningful tasks that drew their attention to the grammatical forms needed for task completion to direct instruction of individual features that would then generalize to entire paradigms (see Loschky and Bley-Vroman 1993, Mackey 1999 and Lightbown and Spada 1993 for the former, and Doughty 1991 and Gass 1982 for the latter). Calling attention to diŸerences between their own production and that of the version to which they sought access was shown to accelerate the learning of English have and be distinctions (Lightbown and Spada 1990), and for time marking features in French (Tomasello and Herron 1988, 1989) and in Portuguese (Schmidt and Frota 1986), through a process these latter researchers labeled “notice the gap.” Numerous studies have found that to guide the learning process language learners beneªt from teaching techniques such as rule presentation, explanation and correction, as well as from more communicatively focused peer activities and conversation, all of which are found in many already existing methods. What the studies have continued to show, however, is that, to be eŸective, such experiences must be oŸered in principled ways that are relevant to learner needs and readiness for learning and are generated by opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue and communicative exchange. Decisions as to their implementation, therefore, have often come from linguistic theory, cognitive psychology, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics (see Doughty and Williams 1998; Lightbown and Spada 1993; and Schmidt 1990, 1992.) All are rooted in the social and cognitive dimensions of language learning.
Social features and processes Recent research has uncovered a wealth of information on the encoding and use of sociolinguistic rules across social contexts. Much of this work has been carried out cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, but its situational speciªcity has limited its application to the language classroom. Of note are studies on requests and apologies (Blum-Kulka, House-Edmondson, and Kasper 1989; Faerch and Kasper 1989; House and Kasper 1987), compliments (Billmyer 1990, 1992; Holmes and Brown 1987; Wolfson 1981, 1983, 1984), complaints (Cohen and Olshtain 1985, 1993), expressions of gratitude (Eisenstein and Bodman 1986) and disapproval (D’Amico-Reisner 1983), and refusals (Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz 1990). Research has shown that instruction can also
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make a diŸerence in the rate and extent to which these rules can be learned (see Billmyer 1990, 1992; Holmes and Brown 1987; Lyster 1994; Olshtain and Cohen 1990; Swain and Lapkin 1989). In countries in which there is little opportunity for students to access a second language outside the classroom, these studies suggest that at least some exposure to sociolinguistic rules is possible on the basis of classroom input alone. Among the social processes shared by teachers and researchers, peer interaction and collaborative dialogue have held major importance. These practices address learners of both language and various other school subjects as they interact in conversational groups and dyads, and they have been discussed extensively in the wider ªeld of education, particularly in the context of the classroom practice known as cooperative learning (Kagan 1986; Slavin 1981). As language educators have shown, the support provided through peer activities oŸers learners a context through which they can understand linguistic input, produce output, and respond to feedback through modiªed production (see for example Doughty and Pica 1986; Ellis 1985; Gass and Varonis 1985, 1986, 1989, 1995; Long and Porter 1985; Pica and Doughty 1985a, 1985b; Porter 1986; Swain and Lapkin 1994; Pica, Lincoln-Porter, Paninos, and Linnell 1996). The study of peer interaction has also drawn attention to the diŸerential contributions of input from native and nonnative speakers to the cognitive and social processes of L2 learning (see Gass and Varonis 1985, 1986, 1989, 1994; Pica and Doughty 1985a, 1985b; Pica et al. 1996; Plann 1977; Wong Fillmore 1992). Such research has not only shed light on the universal and particularistic dimensions of language learning, but has helped to inform decisions on classroom management and professional development of teachers. The social process of negotiation, a term that has been used to label the interactional work in which learners engage as they solve problems, reach decisions and carry out collaborative tasks, has also been shown to bear on language learning (Long 1983; Pica 1994a, 1994b). Such experiences draw learners’ attention to linguistic forms and features that are needed to communicate messages and to understand message meaning. They activate cognitive processes of language awareness and provide feedback on message form and meaning in ways that push the acquisition process toward greater accuracy in vocabulary and morphosyntax (for individual, quasi-experimental and case studies, see Mackey 1999; Pica, Holliday, Lewis, and Morgenthaler 1989; Pica, Holliday, Lewis, Berducci, and Newman 1991; and Linnell 1995, and, for
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overviews, Ellis 1994; Larsen-Freeman and Long 1992; and Pica 1993, 1994a, 1994b, and 1998). Research on actual classrooms, however, has shown that very little classroom communication consists of negotiation, despite the presence of communication of various kinds, across diŸerent groupings of teachers and students. Rather, classroom communication is more typically characterized by transmission of information, discussion of opinions and ideas, and teacher-initiated “display” or “evaluation” questions whose purpose is to check whether students’ knowledge matches their own (see, for example, Long and Sato 1983; Pica and Long 1986). This is why studies are under way to develop classroom tasks that engage learners in communication as they activate their participation in negotiation (see below). Such experiences also highlight the sociocognitive perspective taken in describing processes of language learning.
Cognitive processes Several dimensions of cognition that bear on language learning have long held the interest of both teachers and researchers. These include comprehension and message planning, production, and practice. Comprehension has been held in regard not only as a skill associated with language learning, but as a strategy for accessing structures and forms. According to Krashen’s Natural Approach (Krashen 1981), for example, when language learners can understand meaning, they are free to access unfamiliar words and structures that encode the meaning. Several studies have refuted this claim, in that they found that it was when learners did not comprehend a message that their attention was drawn to the forms and structures encoding the message. A good deal of research has shown that production is also not simply a second language skill, but a means for learners to access feedback, and to be provided a context in which to “notice the gap” between their own production and that required in the variety of language they are seeking. The processes involved have been called variously “focus on form” (Doughty 1991; Doughty and Williams 1998, Long 1996), “notice the gap” (Schmidt and Frota 1986), “consciousness raising” (Rutherford and Sharwood Smith 1985, Sharwood Smith 1991), “language awareness” (Hawkins 1984), and “language sensitivity” (James and Garrett 1991). Message planning has been shown to increase accuracy cross-linguistically, particularly in the area of written composition (see Ortega 1999; Johnson and Roen 1989). Positive eŸects of planning on
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written production have been shown for English articles (Crookes 1989) and for past regular in¶ections (Ellis 1987). Although research-compatible studies clearly outnumbered those that were complementary and collaborative in nature, this re¶ects the applied perspective that had characterized the ªeld of language education for many years. Working within this perspective, teachers would draw on the results of studies to inform their teaching, or researchers would draw on teacher questions and interrogate classroom practices to design and carry out ªeld-based and experimental studies. Increasingly, however, teachers have called for research that is relevant to the classroom and to the wider community from which their students come to school. Their concerns are often situated in the immediate term, but they also refer to recurrent classroom issues that have worried them throughout their years of experience. Many see a need for action research and activist studies that go beyond linguistic description and aim for change and reform of classroom inequities that bear on language diversity. Increasing numbers have taken on research responsibilities themselves (see, for example, Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1989). These eŸorts are illustrated below from the perspective of teacher-researcher collaboration.
Teacher-researcher collaboration Much of the impetus for collaborative research has come from teachers and researchers visiting each other’s worksites. Teachers attending university courses and professional development workshops develop an academic interest in theory and research content, but experience di¹culty in connecting this content with what goes on in their classrooms on a daily basis. Others ªnd a lack of generalizability in the studies they read, given the linguistic and cultural diversity of their classes. Other issues arise — the inadequacy of textbooks; the large size of classes; the often unrealistic expectations of students, administrators, and others toward rapid language development; and the uneven paths students take in their language learning. Teachers also note that the studies they read are seldom applicable to particular problems that arise in their classrooms, as these matters tend to be highly contextualized within the societies and communities in which they work (see van Lier 1988 for review and commentary). As Crookes (1993) has suggested, language educators have accordingly turned to action-oriented research on their own classrooms, enabling them to sort out the diŸerent ways in
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which research can, and cannot, help them with classroom particulars, and to understand, re¶ect upon, and modify their practice. Many classroom teachers work directly with researchers in these eŸorts. Researchers have been drawn to schools, communities, and classrooms for a variety of reasons. Some become involved through ethnographic study of particular communities (see, for example, Freeman 1996; Hornberger 1994). Others enter into partnerships with schools in their local community, visit schools as part of their ªeld supervision, or are themselves teachers, whose very questions led them to careers in research. An enterprise frequently implemented by teachers and researchers is the case study of individual students. The detailed proªles that they produce have had larger implications for instruction and promotion of classroom learning (see, for example, Adamson 1993; Burton 1998; Kreeft-Peyton, Jones, Vincent, and Greenblatt 1994; and Kreeft-Peyton and Mackinson 1989). Teachers and researchers also collaborate in the use of ethnographic methods to address questions about the cultural context of their classrooms, schools and communities. Here, collaboration may extend beyond that of teacher and researcher, to embrace other members of the cultural context within classroom, community, and school (see Edelsky 1986, 1994; Freeman 1996; Golombeck 1998; Hornberger 1995; Kuiper and Plough 1996; and Rounds 1996).
Teacher-researcher complementarity Often, the collaborative enterprise lends itself to complementarity, especially when it addresses larger curricular issues that aŸect members of schools, school boards, and ministries of education, who might also be involved in the research eŸort. Complementarity is nurtured by shared questions about classroom methods, materials, and activities that require detailed, micro-level implementation and examination, or by massive eŸorts to evaluate policy change and educational reform. Complementarity of skills allows teachers and researchers to work together to address questions of language learning and to use materials and approaches that are teacher- and researcher-designed, then implemented and studied in classrooms. The complementarity of eŸorts among teachers and researchers has begun to create a more complete picture of language learning and retention, through both short-term, classroom experiments and longer interventional studies. Often such experiments, use current curricular texts and activities to create
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theoretically grounded learning materials and strategies. Participating teachers then implement these materials and strategies in the classroom, and together with classroom observers, assess their impact on students’ learning. Often the materials and strategies are chosen in response to mandates from policy makers and administrators within the context of large-scale curricular change. One of the earliest experimental eŸorts of this kind is exempliªed in the work of Long, Brock, Crookes, Deicke, Potter, and Zhang (1984), who provided L2 teachers with training on how to prolong the amount of wait time they gave English L2 learners to respond to their questions, then studied the impact of this instructional strategy on qualitative features of student response. Many of the most productive uses of complementarity have taken place in Canada, through classroom experiments on French immersion programs and work in experimental classrooms in English as a second language (see, for example, Lightbown 1993). In immersion classrooms, researchers have examined the immediate and long-term impact of instructional materials and strategies, designed to assist the learning of di¹cult L2 structures. Harley (1989), for example, provided teachers with functional materials that had been created to assist in learning two French verb forms that posed considerable di¹culty for students, namely the imparfait, or habitual past, and the passé composé, or speciªc past. The teachers employed these materials over an eight-week period. Harley then studied the impact of the teachers’ instruction by comparing students’ learning in these classes with that of students in control groups. Along similar lines, Day and Shapson (1991) provided teachers with a curriculum of classroom activities, strategies, and materials. The materials had been prepared by teams of teachers and researchers, with support from school administrators and policy makers. The researchers observed the teachers in their classrooms in the months that followed these interventions, monitoring the presence of the targeted structures in teachers’ communication to students. This information helped to explain results of subsequent testing on student retention. Another illustration of complementarity can be found in a series of experiments, again in Canada, in which researchers studied the impact of theoretically motivated instructional strategies as they are employed by teachers in classrooms for English language learning (see, again, Lightbown 1992; Lightbown and Spada 1990). Of particular interest were the ways in which instructional strategies and corrective feedback assisted students’ learning of the rules and structures involved in adverb placement (White 1991) and questions
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(Lightbown and Spada 1993). These features were chosen for instructional treatment because of their resistance to the communication-oriented methods through which they had been typically taught. Teaching and research undertaken within the scope of complementarity can also extend to policy makers, whose positions within ministries of education, school boards, and o¹ces of program administration involve their participation in the establishment, modiªcation, or evaluation of language programs. Curriculum specialists might also be recruited to develop classroom materials and strategies, with application to experimental intervention, ongoing research, and follow-up testing. These eŸorts are often well intended, but not always complementary, indeed often con¶icting, as the goals and values of the policy makers may be inconsistent with those of the teachers, researchers, and language learners. This has long been a concern among many educators, most recently among those who write within the perspective of critical pedagogy (see, for example, Pennycook 1989, 1990).
The teacher-researcher relationship: Developments and directions A project is currently underway that brings teachers and researchers together to collaborate on issues of considerable mutual interest, involving classroom implementation of new instructional formats. It aims to identify and understand the scope and contributions of academic subject matter and of contentbased approaches, in light of concerns about their su¹ciency in meeting language learners’ needs (a) to access meaningful, comprehensible samples of linguistic and communicative input, and (b) to respond to feedback in ways that promote developmental processes in morphosyntax. In its simplest terms, Content-Based Second Language Teaching (CBLT) may be deªned as the integration of language and subject-matter content in both teaching processes and learning outcomes (as in Brinton, Snow, and Wesche 1989; and Snow, Met, and Genesee 1989). Many language educators view CBLT as yet another variety of communicative language teaching, and indeed the two approaches have much in common procedurally: both emphasize the use of authentic materials and interactive activities in the classroom. However, the goal of CBLT is to help students learn subject-matter content as well as language. Thus a related body of content is sustained across numerous class meetings, whereas communicative language teaching is directed primarily toward language learning. As such, it need not be bound to a sustained
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content area, but can be re-structured within or across class meetings on the basis of notional, functional, or situational categories, as needed. Much of the current conªdence in CBLT as an approach to classroom instruction has been based on the widely held view that CBLT provides opportunities for students to keep up with classmates in academic subjects, to learn the language skills they need to master subject-matter content, and to do so in ways that are of interest, relevance, and importance to their academic and professional goals. However, concerns about the eŸectiveness of CBLT for both teachers and students have emerged, largely from teachers and researchers themselves. While teachers query the soundness of making professionals in language responsible for academic and speciªc-purpose content, researchers question whether the content itself, no matter how interesting, meaningful, and accurately provided, is su¹cient to assist the language learner in an e¹cient and eŸective manner. Against this backdrop of shared concern among teachers and researchers, collaborative as well as complementary relationships surrounding issues of CBLT are ongoing as well. In the current project, for example, subject-matter teachers are pursuing research interests by examining their own classrooms (see Boyd-Kletzander 2000; Shah 2000) and working complementarily in teams (as in Pica, Washburn, Evans, and Jo 1998, and Pica, Julian, Billmyer, Blake-Ward, Buchheit, and Nicolary 2001). Research questions in the various ongoing and completed studies within the project have asked whether the interaction over academic content and skills in CBLT classrooms also provides a context for learners (1) to access positive, comprehensible linguistic input, (2) to receive negative input or feedback on the comprehensibility and accuracy of their output, (3) to produce output, modiªed for comprehensibility, accuracy, and morphosyntactic development, and (4) to attend to relationships between language form and meaning within their input and output. These conditions have been identiªed and described extensively in Lightbown and Spada (1993), Long (1996), Pica (1998), and Sharwood Smith (1991). In addition, the studies address the question of whether CBLT discourse and student-teacher interaction oŸers language learners a context that is similar to, or distinct from, that found in classrooms whose focus is on grammatical features, sentence-level exercises and practice activities. Data have consisted of audio and video tapings collected during teacherled discussion in advanced-level, pre-academic CBLT classrooms in American ªlm and literature, and during teacher-led and individual sentence-construc-
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tion exercises in grammar-focused classrooms at a comparable level. Evidence from earlier and ongoing anecdotal comments and classroom observation indicated that these activities constituted the dominant mode of interaction in the content-based language classroom. The data have been coded through categories derived from current theoretical and empirical perspectives on language learning, i.e., the input, output, and form-meaning conditions identiªed above. Analysis of the CBLT data has revealed a high incidence of positive linguistic input in the form of words and their meanings, often through teacher responses to requests, and a low incidence of teacher or peer corrective feedback, this despite a relatively high proportion of learner utterances of imprecision. Negative feedback has been conªned mainly to contributions that fail to conform to community norms, and are brief and one utterance in length. Such utterances have been relatively infrequent in the CBLT data. Instead, the CBLT students have been shown to produce multi-utterance texts, most of which are comprehensible but replete with grammatical imprecisions, during which there is minimal intervention by teachers or peers, beyond simple backchannelling and topic continuation moves. Interaction in the grammar-focused classrooms under study has been shown to diŸer considerably: sentence-construction activities, so characteristic of these classrooms, have been found to generate numerous learner productions of single utterance length, which are then followed by utterances of negative feedback from teachers and peers. There is very little tendency, however, for the students to engage in multi-utterance discourse in response to such feedback. Such brief productions of students thus also keep them from the kinds of modiªed output considered crucial for their syntactic development. Analysis thus far suggests that the diŸerences in the availability and frequency of important developmental features in the content-based and grammar-focused classrooms might be an outcome of the activity types used rather than the content vs. grammar focus itself. Thus, it appears that distinctions in classroom type, i.e., content vs. grammar-focus, may be less relevant to these results than the open-ended discussion activities or the highly structured exercises in which teachers and students engage in these classes. The next step in the research, therefore, has been to introduce communication tasks designed to facilitate interaction in ways that draw students’ attention to grammatical features of language and are more consistent with language learning processes. Indeed, the development and implementation of communication tasks that require a focus on grammatical features for their completion represent
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growing areas of mutual interest between teachers and researchers. Such tasks are being developed to focus students’ attention on grammatical features as they employ them in communication toward an outcome or goal (see Pica, Kanagy and Falodun 1993 for review). As classroom activities, these tasks provide a context for meaningful, purposeful language learning and language use and implicit grammatical learning (Long and Crookes 1993; Prabhu 1987). As instruments for data collection, they can be used in a variety of ways. For example, they can be targeted toward generation of input, feedback, and output conditions to assist researchers in their study of developmental processes and learning outcomes (Crookes and Gass 1993; Long and Crookes 1993; Pica, Kanagy and Falodun 1993). They can also be used to obtain samples of speciªc, highly complex grammatical features that can be avoided during informal classroom communication or conversational interaction, and therefore left unasked about if not understood (Mackey 1999). Finally, they can be tailored to encourage conversation that requires structural forms and features, whose impact on learning can then be monitored (Day and Shapson 1991; Doughty 1991; Harley 1989; Linnell 1995). Unfortunately, most communication tasks currently in use fall short of these goals. Typically, they involve participants in decision-making and opinion-sharing that do not require unanimous participation, nor accomplishment of one particular goal or outcome. One or two learners have been found to dominate the communication process, while others become distracted or inattentive (see Pica, Kanagy, and Falodun 1993 for review and analysis of relevant studies). Thus, even those tasks shown to promote input, feedback, and production processes among language learners, have been found to fall short in drawing their attention to the forms and structures they need as well. Instead, task participants often exchange information and work toward task goals through the use of paraphrase, word substitution, and elaboration. Such message adjustments and modiªcations inevitably engage them in manipulation of grammatical form as well, but these manipulations are not found consistently, nor are they necessarily directed toward those speciªc forms in need of further development (see Pica 1994a, 1994b for discussion, and Pica et al. 1989, 1991, 1996 for relevant research). The challenge, then, is for teachers and researchers to design tasks that guarantee the occurrence of such grammatical adjustments and thereby direct learners’ attention to grammatical form in the communication of message meaning. In that regard, there is a great deal of promise on several fronts, including grammar-oriented communication tasks and dictogloss activities.
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Thus far, the most successfully designed tasks have involved language learners in communication that focuses their attention on speciªc grammatical areas that have tended to be resistant to purely communicative activities (Loschky and Bley-Vroman 1993; see also Pica et al. 1996). As noted above, such tasks have been di¹cult to design because the range of forms that can be used to convey any one message meaning can be large, and there is no guarantee that learners will focus on the speciªc form needed to advance their learning. This pattern was evident, for example, in a study on learner communication during a story task: learners who needed to focus on past-tense markers to describe story actions and activities chose to describe the people in the story instead, thereby focusing on pre- and post-modiªcation of nouns rather than on verb formation (Pica et al. 1996). A newly emerging type of grammar-oriented communication task, known as the communicative grammar-based task, engages language learners in collaboration, decision making, and opinion exchange in order to complete grammar-focused activities (Fotos and Ellis 1994; Fotos 1992). Such activities are currently being adapted from grammar exercises, test items, and ªll-in-theblank textbook entries that owe their origins to the ªeld of language pedagogy. The reported eŸectiveness of these tasks for language learning provides a rationale for modiªcation of the traditional classroom staple of teacher-conducted grammar exercises. Finally, the dictogloss, an activity whose origins lie in the wider ªeld of language pedagogy (as described in Nunan 1989 and Wajnryb 1992), has shown success in drawing students’ attention to linguistic forms and features as they communicate message meaning (see Swain 1993). The dictogloss presents students with an oral text composed or adapted from an original text to highlight speciªc grammatical forms or structures needed for the communication of its meaning. Such a text might build an argument through its use of modals, or relate a story with a plot dependent on verb tense and aspect. As the text is read by a teacher or researcher, students ªrst take individual notes. Then they are assembled in pairs and groups to reconstruct the text. As a result, they compose various individual and collective versions until they arrive at a single reconstruction to share with their classmates. Such tasks are especially exciting because they have great relevance for both teaching and research contexts and concerns. Developing tasks that focus learners’ attention on grammar in the interest of communication is one of the most challenging areas of work around which teachers and researchers have found increasing compatibility. This enterprise appears to be moving teachers
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and researchers toward yet another relationship, in which there is convergence with respect to their interests, activities, eŸorts, and goals. Such a challenge has continued to reinforce existing relationships between teachers and researchers and may lead to new relationships, as well as to greater scope and dignity throughout the ªeld of language education, with outreach to other educational domains as well.
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Language and language education in the United States in the twenty-ªrst century Timothy Reagan
We should erect a sign at each port of entry into the United States: “Welcome to the United States. We cannot speak your language.” [Simon 1980: 1] In Paris they simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. [Twain 1996: 645]
The truth of both former Senator Paul Simon’s observation and Mark Twain’s comedic insight about the use of foreign languages by Americans notwithstanding, foreign language education in the United States has not fallen on hard times; for the most part, our position in society is no worse than it has ever been. This is not, of course, to say that the position in which we foreign language educators ªnd ourselves is a good one. As James B. Conant commented in the late 1950s, “At no time in the educational history of this country has mastery of a modern foreign language come to be recognized as the hallmark of a well-educated man or woman” (1959: 4). Little has changed in this respect in the four decades since Conant wrote these words; nor has much changed since Jacques Barzun (1954: 119) critiqued American foreign language education by noting that boys and girls ‘take’ French or Spanish or German . . . for three, four, or ªve years before entering college, only to discover there that they cannot read, speak, or understand it. The word for this type of instruction is not ‘theoretical’ but ‘hypothetical.’ Its principle is ‘If it were possible to learn a foreign language in the way I have been taught, I should now know that language.’
The problem with foreign language teaching and learning in the United States is a complex one, in which student apathy and even resistance, compounded by often ill-prepared teachers, outdated teaching methods and mate-
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rials, and institutional barriers to eŸective teaching, essentially ensure largescale educational failure. This is not, however, to lay the blame for the failures of foreign language education entirely or even primarily with foreign language teachers themselves. Indeed, both the real and perceived failures of foreign language education can be explained by factors that are well beyond the control of the foreign language teacher (see Lambert 1987; Reagan & Osborn 1998, 2002). The study of foreign languages in the United States, with very rare exceptions, begins in middle or even secondary school, which is nearly universally agreed to be far too late.1 Student contact hours in the foreign language are seldom su¹cient for language mastery, and the target language is almost never used in any other social or academic setting, thus further diminishing its real-world value to the student. Finally, foreign languages are not in fact generally seen by educated adults in the United States as really all that important. Indeed, although educators and policy-makers do give rhetorical support to the study of foreign languages, contemporary US society remains profoundly monolingual ideologically if not empirically (Osborn 2000; Osborn & Reagan 1998; Reagan 2002; Reagan & Osborn 2002). Further complicating the picture are the very ambiguous attitudes toward language in American society (see van Lier 1995: 131–32). Susan Dicker has argued, for instance (1996: 126), that Analysis of the way the press handles language issues reveals a marked double standard: the eŸorts of English-speaking Americans to become bilingual by acquiring a second language are met with enthusiasm; the eŸorts of non-native English speaking Americans and immigrants to become bilingual by maintaining their native languages while acquiring English are considered counterproductive to their adaptation to American society. The beneªts to be derived from the language abilities of those who are native speakers of non-English language are rarely recognized.
Although I agree with Dicker that there is certainly a double standard present in American society with respect to bilingualism, and while there can be little reasonable doubt about general attitudes toward non-native English speakers maintaining their native languages (see Baron 1990; Crawford 1992a, 1992b; Macedo 2000), I am a bit more reticent about the extent to which society is 1. Although the view of the relative ease and e¹ciency of early language learning is widespread, the reality of the di¹culty of L2 learning is quite complex (for an excellent discussion of this issue, see Marinova-Todd, Marshall & Snow, 2000). I do not believe, however, that this in any signiªcant way changes the basic argument presented here.
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really enthusiastic about English-speaking Americans becoming bilingual. To be sure, there is widespread rhetorical support for foreign language study and learning in the United States — as well as the $2 billion annually invested in foreign language education (Dicker 1996: 121). Nonetheless, I think that Richard Lambert is correct in describing most English-speaking Americans as “devoutly monolingual” (Lambert 1987: 10). Indeed, one of the greatest challenges that foreign language educators face in the United States is our unwillingness to confront openly and honestly the degree of apathy, if not antipathy, among both students and the general public, toward foreign languages. It is hard for us to understand that real competence in a second language is viewed with more than a degree of suspicion in this society, even as our monolingual compatriots dutifully articulate the outward advantages of such bilingualism. It seems to me that what most Americans believe is that having studied a foreign language is a condition for being an “educated person,” but that actually being able to speak a foreign language is not. Along these same lines, Dell Hymes (1996: 84–85) has identiªed what he takes to be six core, albeit generally tacit, assumptions about language in the United States: 1. Everyone in the United States speaks only English, or should. 2. Bilingualism is inherently unstable, probably injurious, and possibly unnatural. 3. Foreign literary languages can be respectably studied, but not foreign languages in their domestic varieties (it is one thing to study the French spoken in Paris, another to study the French spoken in Louisiana). 4. Most everyone else in the world is learning English anyway, and that, together with American military and economic power, makes it unnecessary to worry about knowing the language of a country in which one has business, bases, or hostages. 5. DiŸerences in language are essentially of two kinds, right and wrong. 6. Verbal ¶uency and noticeable style are suspicious, except as entertainment (it’s what you mean that counts). It is these elements of ideological monolingualism which make the task of the foreign language educator in contemporary US society so di¹cult, and until these underlying attitudes, values and beliefs are addressed, little progress is likely to made in improving foreign language learning in our society. My concern here, however, is not the failure of past or contemporary foreign language education in the United States. The focus of this book, as was that of the conferences from which this book evolved, is on the future, and it is
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the future that I wish to address. Speciªcally, I want to present two quite diŸerent scenarios of the future of foreign language education in the United States, and then describe a plot to attempt to change the present and thus the future. At the outset, let me admit that for heuristic and illustrative purposes I have made the ªrst scenario far too grim and the second far too rosy. They represent not so much alternatives, as opposite ends of a continuum of a nearly inªnite range of possibilities.
Scenario I: Monolingualism victorious In this ªrst scenario, the U. S. English movement and its ideological soul mates have succeeded, perhaps beyond their wildest dreams and expectations. Not only has the United States Constitution been amended to make English the o¹cial language of the United States, but the vast majority of the states have also o¹cially declared English to be their sole o¹cial language. Although remaining demographically diverse in many ways, the United States has experienced a signiªcant decrease in the reported number of non-English speakers in the society, with many of these individuals disappearing from public view into small ethnic enclaves in urban centers, where they are cut oŸ from the mainstream society and exist as almost non-persons. Bilingualism and multilingualism, especially for native speakers of English, have increasingly come to be seen as not only un-American, but also as evidence of social schizophrenia — and, in the post 9/11 climate, public use of languages other than English has come to be seen as downright unpatriotic. Even temporary visitors to the United States are now required to document competence in English in order to be eligible to obtain a visa. Foreign language education, in this scenario, has changed signiªcantly as well. In several states, especially in the South, the Plains states, and the Midwest, laws have been passed prohibiting the use of tax dollars to support the teaching of any language other than English. Even in more liberal environments, foreign language remains an elective, and an often easy target in tight budget times — and what other sorts of budget times are there for public schools? EŸorts to require foreign language study, either as a condition for high school graduation or for college entrance, have universally been rejected, largely as a result of the widespread view in American society that foreign languages are both unnecessary and undesirable for young people. As one twentieth century politician explained some years ago,
Language and language education in the United States in the 21st century 137
It is impossible to understand why millions of people . . . must learn two or three foreign languages only a fraction of which they can make use of later and hence most of them forget entirely; for a hundred thousand pupils who learn French, for example, barely two thousand will have a serious use for this knowledge later, while ninety-eight thousand . . . will not ªnd themselves in a position to make practical use of what they once learned. They have . . . devoted thousands of hours to a subject which later is without value and meaning for them . . . So in reality, because of the two thousand people for whom the knowledge of this language is proªtable, ninety-eight thousand must be tormented for nothing and made to sacriªce valuable time. (Hitler 1943: 419–420)
Under this scenario, there is a broad consensus in American society that language competence takes more time and eŸort to develop than it is worth, especially given the worldwide dominance of English. As Alfred Neumann, the Chancellor of the University of Houston, ironically represented this common view, If what we have wrought is so good, let them, those other people, learn about it in our language . . . if these other people do not speak the language of our superior achievements, then they must be inferior to us in other ways. Ergo: why learn the language of these inferior people? (Quoted in Simon 1980: 65)
Most Americans, in short, as jokingly described by Neumann, look forward to the day when English alone will be spoken, not only in their own country but everywhere. To be sure, there are still vast numbers of people speaking other tongues, but the number of languages in the world has continued to decline, and the rate of that decline is increasing (see Grenoble & Whaley 1998). While this fact may cause some concern to linguists (see Nettle & Romaine 2000), it is generally seen by most Americans as a reasonable price for progress. It may take a few more generations, but most Americans sleep comfortably at night knowing that someday everyone will share a common language — and that it will be English (and American English at that). In this scenario, most foreign language teachers have been displaced, many to teaching remedial English and ESL classes. Those who remain as foreign language teachers do their best to provide students with a solid exposure to the target language — or at least as solid an exposure as can be achieved in the maximum two years of foreign language study that is provided in public schools (when foreign language is allowed at all). The selection of languages oŸered varies from district to district and state to state, but the most common languages studied in American secondary schools remain French, Latin and German. Spanish has declined in importance as the large latino community in
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the United States has worked to shed its “foreignness” in an increasingly hostile Anglo-American culture. Enrollments in foreign language classes have also dropped rather dramatically, and, given the scarcity of educational resources, more and more school districts are electing to drop foreign language classes in order to protect art and music classes, whose supporters are both more numerous and more vocal than supporters of foreign languages. The debates about teaching methodology, as well as about second language acquisition theory, that had for so long divided the foreign language teaching community (see Larsen-Freeman 1986; Richards & Rodgers 2001) have for the most part slipped into the background as the focus of foreign language educators has shifted to simply maintaining some semblance of foreign language instruction in the schools. Finally, elementary foreign language programs have disappeared almost entirely, since they required time that can instead be used for such needs as test-taking strategies for mandatory basic skills exams, sex education, anti-drug and tobacco education, and bicycle and road safety. Although there are some economic challenges presented by the decline of foreign language education, software translation programs, coupled with the increasing number of foreigners who speak English, have minimized the impact of these challenges. Again, there is a general social consensus that if translations from other languages are sometimes unclear, ambiguous, or just downright bizarre, this is a small price to pay for the social and mental health advantages of living in a monolingual society. As Piet Meyer, at one time the head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, once observed, after all, all researchers in this ªeld are agreed that bilingual children show backwardness in development as compared with monolingual children . . . bilingualism leads to moral relativism which reaches right into the religious life of the individual. It is deªnitely certain that Godlessness is more prevalent among bilingual people than among monolinguals. (Meyer 1945: 41–43, my translation)2
In this ªrst scenario, then, life is happy, simple, moral and straightforward (if a bit bland) in this decidedly monolingual America of the future. Language diversity has, by both diktat and social convention, ceased to be an issue for
2. To be sure, although he was very much wrong about development in general, Meyer was, I believe, actually partially correct. I suspect that what he would deªne as “Godlessness” (which I would see as simply critical thinking on all matters, including religion) is indeed more common among bilinguals than among monolinguals, since in many societies the former are more likely to be educated than the latter.
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Americans, and language learning has been relegated to roughly the same level of educational signiªcance as learning how to use a slide rule. Is this scenario too extreme to be credited? Yes and no. Certainly there are elements in this scenario which are most unlikely, and the scenario as a whole assumes a much greater degree of social cohesion and agreement than is ever likely to exist on any topic in the United States. Some of the scenario, indeed, is simply silly; and yet, virtually every element of the scenario has both historical and contemporary real-world antecedents. If this scenario is unlikely to develop, the unlikeliness, I am afraid, is in the realm of degree rather than kind.
Scenario II: The blessings of Babel restored The second scenario that I want to suggest is a far more positive one from the perspective of linguists and language educators. About a decade ago, Einar Haugen published a wonderful book entitled Blessings of Babel. He began the book by recounting the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9), and then noted that Those of us who love languages, especially if we have devoted out lives to learning or teaching them, ªnd it hard to put ourselves in the right frame of mind to understand the concept of language diversity as a curse. We see in language a source of novel delights and subtle experience, a blessing. (Haugen 1987: 1)
In this scenario, I imagine a twenty-ªrst century America in which this view is widely shared, and in which it is monolingualism, rather than bilingualism, that attracts unfavorable attention and even a degree of pity. This is an America in which virtually any educated person, anywhere in the country, will feel comfortable speaking at least two languages, and very often more. As the authors of the National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project (1996: 7) argued in the mid-1990s, Language and communication are at the heart of the human experience. The United States must educate students who are equipped linguistically and culturally to communicate successfully in a pluralistic American society and abroad. This imperative envisions a future in which all students will develop and maintain proªciency in English and at least one other language, modern or classical.
This, then, is a social and educational goal that has been largely achieved. The “core bilingualism” that characterizes Americans in this scenario is one of “English Plus” — that is, of English and a second language (see Daniels 1990).
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This second language is often, perhaps generally, one of the languages of wider communication, and most commonly Spanish. Other languages are also strongly encouraged, however, and many students study a heritage language, an indigenous language, or a less commonly taught language as either a second or third language. This is possible since students are encouraged from the very earliest years of schooling (and even in preschool environments) to acquire competence in languages other than English, and because foreign language pedagogy has been thoroughly integrated into content teaching (see Krueger & Ryan 1993). In other words, the educational system has been restructured to ensure that language study is not so much a separate piece of the curriculum as an underlying theme and instructional medium. Nor has the educational system alone changed with respect to the use of languages other than English; television and radio broadcasts, popular music and so on increasingly allow for both the use of multiple languages and even the mixing of languages. For foreign language teachers, all of this will have been something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, of course, it is just about everything that we have ever said that we wanted — a society in which language study is valued, seen as signiªcant and important, and reinforced in a variety of ways by the community. At the same time, though, such a change has had an impact on the role of the foreign language educator in some fairly dramatic ways. Accountability has become far more important, as well as far more controversial, and it is not uncommon for angry parents to attend meetings of their local Boards of Education to complain that insu¹cient time and attention are given to foreign language study, that far too few language options are oŸered to students, and that less important subjects (such as mathematics, science, physical education, and so on) need to give way for the more important foreign language component of the curriculum. Perhaps even more unsettling for teachers, though, has been the inevitable change in the role of the foreign language educator as the “expert.” As Barbara Craig (1995: 41) has noted, Traditionally, the [foreign language] teacher’s role has been seen as that of an authoritative expert. This view is based on the conception of knowledge as a quantiªable intellectual commodity. The teacher, as an expert in a ªeld of inquiry or as an expert speaker of a language, has more of this knowledge than his or her students have. Because this knowledge has a separate existence outside of its knowers, it can be given, or taught, to the learners by the teacher-expert.
This “teacher-expert” role has been diminished as increasing numbers of people have gained high-level second language skills, and as the presumption of knowledge and expertise that we would today take for granted as foreign
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language educators has disappeared, as in fact it did for most other educators some time ago. Nevertheless, the trade-oŸ, such as it is, has been a good one, and one that foreign language educators have comfortably and conªdently embraced.
A thickening plot (just between friends) This brings us now to the plot to which I alluded earlier. I have described two admittedly extreme scenarios, each of which is grounded in elements of our own past and present. In a way, my own bifurcated view of the future is perhaps a bit reminiscent of the opening of Woody Allen’s “Speech to the Graduates,” in which he notes that More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. (1975: 81)
The challenge before us, I would suggest, is to ªnd ways in which we might make our second scenario, or at least one like it, more likely than the ªrst. I believe that there are already a number of promising eŸorts in this regard, not the least of which are the development of the national standards for foreign languages, the growing popularity not only of FLES and FLEX programs, but even more, of two-way bilingual education programs, and of course programs designed to help students develop a more critical language awareness (see Benesch 2001; Fairclough 1989, 1992; Janks 1991, 1997). While all of these developments are certainly positive and valuable, they are also demonstrably insu¹cient for seriously challenging the dominant ideological monolingualism of our society. What is required is a far more fundamental change, and it is to a brief discussion of the characteristics of this change that we now turn. The arguments generally oŸered by advocates for foreign language education in contemporary US society have been largely ineŸective, in part at least because they are not compatible with most students’ life experiences (see Reagan & Osborn 2002). As Humphrey Tonkin notes in this volume, From a political standpoint, we should be very wary . . . about arguing that Americans can’t get along without foreign languages. In the short run, at least, this is far from the truth . . . As long as the United States is the greatest world power (a point that Americans make with great frequency and that others sometimes reluctantly accept), and as long as we have things that other people want, they will speak our language.
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In fact, claims about the necessity of foreign language for most Americans ¶y in the face of both experience and reality. This does not mean, though, that there are not powerful arguments for the teaching of foreign languages — rather, it means that the compelling arguments are actually diŸerent from those most commonly oŸered. Speciªcally, the case for foreign language education should be made as part of a broader case for general education, and for education that prepares individuals for life in a modern democracy. Such arguments are not fundamentally pragmatic in nature, they are ideological and normative. Perhaps the most powerful argument for the need for students to study languages other than their own is that the point of “education” is to introduce and initiate the individual into our common human social and cultural heritage, and that this cannot be done adequately without some exposure to the diŸerent ways in which human beings, in various times and places, have constructed an amazingly wide variation of languages to meet their needs. If becoming educated is, as many scholars have suggested, the process by which one learns to join in the “human conversation,” then language skills will inevitably be required if one wishes to join the conversation at anything more than the most trivial level. On an even deeper level, one can argue that it is in the study of human language — both as an abstract entity and in terms of speciªc human languages — that one comes closest to what Noam Chomsky has called “the human essence.” Indeed, one of the more fascinating outcomes of the study of human language over the past few centuries has been the discovery that there is no such thing as a “primitive” language, that each and every human language is a full, complete and rule-governed entity capable of serving its users and their needs; and, further, the recognition that in spite of their many diŸerences, all human languages also share a number of signiªcant common features — that is, what linguists call “linguistic universals.” It is in these linguistic universals that we may come closest to identifying what it is, exactly, that makes us human. The study of languages other than one’s own can not only serve to help us understand what we as human beings have in common, but also assist us in understanding the diversity which underlies not only our languages, but also our ways of constructing and organizing knowledge, and the many diŸerent realities in which we all live and interact. Such understanding has profound implications not only epistemologically, but also with respect to developing a critical awareness of language and social relationships. In studying languages other than our own, we are seeking to understand (and, indeed, in at least a weak sense, to become) the “Other” — we are, in short, attempting to enter
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into realities that have, to some degree, been constructed by others and in which many of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of knowledge and society may be diŸerent from our own. In an important sense we are creating new “selves.” Such creation and re-creation forces each of us to re¶ect more deeply on many of the core questions related to being an educated person, as well as requiring that we become not merely tolerant of diŸerences, but truly understanding of diŸerences (linguistic and otherwise) and their implications. The sort of humility that is learned from studying a language other than one’s own is a valuable possession in its own right, though of course language learning is by no means the only arena in which humility can be learned. The case presented thus far applies only in those instances in which we conceive of the end purpose of education as the emergence of the “educated person.” To the extent to which this is not our goal, of course, the argument fails — but then we are faced with what are far more serious problems, at least for those of us committed to the ideals of democracy. In other words, the case for the study of foreign languages rests on the view that all people in a democratic society are entitled to the best and most complete sort of education possible. As the philosopher of education John Dewey so cogently asserted, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children” (1943: 7). The study of human languages must be a part of such education, we would argue, if one is truly concerned with democratic education and education for democracy (see Goodlad 1994, Gutman 1987, Soder 1996). This said, the road ahead is far from clear, and the problem is what to do not in the long term but in the meantime — and, as a wag once observed, the meantime is the most di¹cult time of all. I look forward to the inevitable discussions and debates about the ways in which this conspiracy, or one very much like it, can move forward, in the long term and, even more, in the meantime.
Why learn foreign languages? Thoughts for a new millennium* Humphrey Tonkin
The eŸective learning and teaching of foreign languages depends on two broad constituencies — the people within the schools themselves and the people outside the schools: as with any other subject, the shape and direction of foreign language instruction is determined by the internal and external politics of education. It is not just that these two constituencies look at things diŸerently, but that there is very little consensus, even today, on why languages should be taught in schools at all. Language is of course a very personal and very emotional matter. It is one of the primary means whereby we deªne ourselves, and ourselves in relation to other people. It is also one of the major socially sanctioned devices for public display: appearance matters, aŸect matters, but perhaps the most eŸective means of imposing our personality, and also our will, on others, is through the eŸective deployment of language. Language is one of the means available to us for public play: every user of language is a poet — imitating others and yet overgoing them, reusing the familiar in creative ways, reinforcing meaning by constant repetition of lexical elements and syntactic structures . When we speak or write, we speak or write the past, because all meaning is, by deªnition, historical: it has built up over time. In English, even spelling takes its logic from linguistic history. If language is so closely related to our sense of selves and our place in time and space, it should come as no surprise that issues relating to language and education are emotionally charged and much contested.
* An earlier version of this paper was given at the University of Hartford in July 1999 as a keynote address at the Conference of the National Network for Early Language Learning.
146 Humphrey Tonkin
We do not always notice, as we use language, that we are doing what we do. It was, I believe, Lewis Mumford who many years ago pointed out that when we walk down a street we walk through history. We may not be conscious of the fact that the buildings around us, through their style and the dates of their construction, form a historical envelope, but it is so, and it is deeply reassuring: architecture is a constant reminder of our continuity as a community and a society. Language, with its constant rehearsal of the past and its constant reinforcement of the semiotic known, plays a similar role in conªrming who we are and how we ªt in the ongoing process of social transaction. I mention these things not in order to wax rhapsodic on the subject of language — an ability, not to say a vice, that many teachers of language share — but in order to emphasize that what makes language important to us may be quite diŸerent from what we think makes language important. Anyone who has re¶ected for years on the subject of foreign languages in schools comes with some pretty formidable judgmental baggage, and it is sometimes di¹cult to step back from a lifetime’s practical experience. While I have lived a life determined by the laws of physics, I do not feel that I own physics in quite the same way that I own language: language is deeply personal, but the laws of physics are not. In confronting the issue of whether and how foreign languages should be taught in the schools, ªrst we must get past these psychological, cultural and social assumptions. The topic, politically and philosophically charged as it is, is not easily addressed in a spirit of sobriety. Teachers of language may, in this regard, be part of the problem. They tend to wax enthusiastic over their chosen alternative culture, perhaps not realizing that they may be merely adding an alternative ethnocentrism to the one they already have. Undergraduate programs in foreign languages, particularly, are apt to focus on the particular beauties of particular languages, rather than giving enough attention to the nature of language itself. Languages are social institutions, accorded a particular value or lack of value in a particular society, and we need to be aware of the rather obvious fact that such issues of prestige and hierarchy are socially constructed by people like ourselves (as Lippi-Green 1997 has recently reminded us). And languages are not just social institutions: they are also (consequently) political institutions. They are not of course things contained in books (when I was ªrst learning French and Latin, I had the impression that the languages somehow lurked in the pages of my textbooks, and all I had to do was release them; that’s a bit like believing that real people are hidden in photographs and all we have to do is let them out — a nice poetic idea, but not one that responds, as it were, to the laws of physics).
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Textbooks are mere snapshots of languages, which carry on a determined life of their own despite the eŸorts of language teachers to wrestle them to the ground. As those who study language and society know well, diŸerent societies use language in diŸerent ways. Some, with more than one language at their disposal, make complicated choices between languages in diŸerent settings; some use diŸerent registers or diŸerent modes of address in diŸerent circumstances. But it is remarkable how little of this quite fundamental knowledge about the nature of languages ªnds a place in the thinking of the people who design programs for the preparation of language teachers: teachers of languages may have taken some courses on linguistics along the way, but surprisingly few have anything approaching a command of sociolinguistics or fully understand the political nature of language (or, for that matter, the politics of language teaching). A recent book by Reagan and Osborn (2002) breaks new ground in raising these issues in the context of teacher preparation (see also Reagan 2002). As Reagan and Osborn imply, only if we, as language-teaching professionals, understand these issues adequately can we hope to understand the context of our own advocacy of foreign language teaching. Furthermore, the arguments that we use for the teaching of foreign languages should emerge from the assumptions that our audience possesses about languages themselves. At a time when so many subjects are vying for the attention of curricular planners, and in the midst of a national eŸort to create standards in the various disciplines, it is obviously not enough to argue that foreign languages have always been part of the curriculum and need to remain so. Nor is it easy to make a convincing link between foreign language programs in the schools on the one hand and national foreign language readiness on the other. We all understand that the country needs people with a knowledge of other parts of the world and that, if only to deal with crises, we need to stockpile a certain amount of language ability. We never really know when or where a crisis will break out. Who would have thought, twenty or even ten years ago, that there would be a high demand in Washington for Somali or Albanian, or, now, Tajik or Pashtu? In fact, are we sure that at least the demand for Somali and Albanian was ever adequately met (the jury is still out on Afghanistan)? Are the people in Washington who claim to have a command of these languages and the cultures behind them adequately competent, or su¹ciently numerous, to make sound judgments on our behalf? Are the people reporting the news capable of reading the newspapers in the very places they report from, or do they rely on the local americanophiles who know English
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well and are su¹ciently culturally adaptive, not to say eager, to tell the reporters what they think they want to hear? Or do we have so-called experts ªlling the newspapers and government reports with information gathered through interpreters and translators with their own agendas? It is a shame that State Department brieªng documents and newspaper reports do not require disclosure of such matters: “This article has been constructed from barely adequate interpretations from Pashtu and a couple of encyclopedia articles. The US Secretary of Education warns that reliance on interpreters may be detrimental to mental health and rational judgment. Do not drive a car or operate heavy machinery on the strength of what this article tells you.” From a national perspective, language readiness is all. Unfortunately, not enough people recognize this fact. But it is also, I would submit, a rather unconvincing argument for teaching foreign languages in elementary school. If you need Albanian or Somali in a hurry, you look for it in the immigrant community or you hire foreign nationals (or at least you used to: September 11 may have changed all that, provoking fear of things foreign and of the unknown that may not be all valid). If you need to stockpile foreign language knowledge, you look to the limited number of Americans actively interested in these parts of the world and you make sure that they are kept in a state of readiness through educational updates and ongoing ªnancial support. If we have army reservists, we ought to have language reservists too, so that when a particular part of the world grows suddenly hot, we have the people on hand to go out and cool it down. But I am not convinced that language readiness is anything other than a very indirect and soft argument for having good foreign language teaching in schools: it is not the kind of argument likely to grab the attention of a school board in Iowa. A similar kind of disconnect exists in the often repeated argument that we should strengthen foreign language programs in schools because American corporations need speakers of foreign languages. I remember how, some twenty years ago now (when, by the way, the international language scene was very diŸerent from what it is today), the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, eager to prove the importance of foreign language learning to the American people, went out and commissioned a report from the Rand Corporation on the corporate need for foreign languages (President’s Commission 1979: 30). Rand researchers fanned out to question hapless executives all across the country; personnel o¹cers were asked questions to which, as always in such matters, they did not know the answers. The result was a report whose inconclusiveness was masked behind charts and
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graphs, but which essentially said that most executives don’t care much about languages, generally consider language to be a Good Thing, and have taken about all the time out of their busy schedules that they are willing to devote to thinking about the subject, thank you very much. As for learning foreign languages themselves, they did that once, and have gotten over it now, and, besides, everyone they deal with speaks English. In their 1979 report, the President’s Commission told us that we had a crisis here and a crisis there (pre-millennial of course: What did they know about crises?) — that foreign language enrollments were declining, that Americans were tongue-tied (the term was Paul Simon’s), and so on. In the years that followed, the foreign language community (however we deªne it) had considerable success in convincing large numbers of people that language did indeed matter — a formidable task, given American views on language issues. One becomes American by merging with the norm, and one of the widely acknowledged deªning characteristics of Americanness is speaking English: one needs only to examine the rhetoric of the English Only movement and the anti-bilingual education people to see quite clearly that this is so (bilingual education programs may have become politicized and may not always work, but we need to improve them, not remove them). While we may be a hair more relaxed on this issue today than we once were, and a little more willing to accept foreign languages in our midst, the feeling lingers that use of foreign languages in public is somehow un-American and may even be an act of disloyalty. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. Since people who speak foreign languages are clearly hiding something from us, they must have done something wrong. So, in our society, language use is related to loyalty to our sense of selves, and opposition to foreign language is related to opposition to the encroachment of foreigners on our society — a problem exacerbated by the aftermath of September 11. The truth is that the sum of language proªciency in this country is quite high: a large number of people in our society speak another language more or less ¶uently. But to the makers of public policy they are the wrong people: they are the new arrivals, the people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, the unintegrated. Instead of going out and bottling this language knowledge, keeping it alive and turning it into an asset, our society must ªrst destroy it and then spend time and money trying to build it up again. But if the President’s Commission was successful in convincing people that our children needed to learn foreign languages, the cure may have been almost as bad as the disease. In the language debates of a few years ago, we were
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altogether too ready and eager to accept the ignorant or incomplete arguments of politicians in support of language learning. You do not look gift horses in the mouth. So when politicians started making extravagant claims about the wonderful things that foreign language programs would do for America’s young, we applauded, and helped them write the legislation. We introduced foreign language requirements and new programs all across the board with no very clear idea as to where the teachers would come from, nor what the results would be. At the best of times, not everyone is a good teacher of everything, and foreign languages are not easy to teach. By increasing the demand for foreign language teachers, we did not automatically increase the supply of good candidates. Indeed, we made very little eŸort to work on the supply side at all. As a result, much of the progress that we thought we had made was erased by the delivery of an often poor product. The gift horse turned out to be not only full of cavities but weak at the knees. But let me go back to my initial assertion, that we all have our own diŸering views on why learning languages is important. I think we need to work on getting greater consensus on this issue if we are to make lasting progress with the larger public. Personally, I do not believe that the learning of foreign languages in schools should be driven primarily by mechanistic notions of the national interest. Language learning is important because it is a fundamental element in self-understanding, a means by which we learn to break the wall of silence that surrounds us at birth as surely as the walls of the womb once did. It is also important because we will lead richer and more secure lives if we learn to appreciate diŸerence and if we can reach beyond our own social envelopes and appreciate how others are closed in theirs. It is a basic social skill and a basic tool of citizenship. In elementary school, at an age when they are open to such things, children need to learn how to manipulate language (not just their own, but language in general) and how to learn languages. Too often we are told that children should ªrst master the English language before they try to master a further language — but this line of argument is based on a false assumption, namely that English is somehow diŸerent from all other languages. Foreign language teachers need to work with English teachers to develop children’s skills not just in working with the English language, but in manipulating language, in developing the awareness that will allow them to approach any language as something learnable, manipulable, usable. Teachers of English are, or should be, the allies of foreign language teachers, and training in the language arts for future English teachers should include attention to foreign
Why learn foreign languages?
languages as well. Such skills with language are the best insurance policy we can have for dealing with the complex social diŸerences among us, and for coping with a world in which such diŸerences will grow in complexity as surely as the world’s population continues to grow. Language should open the hearts and minds of elementary-school children, not imprison them in a single linguistic medium, hedged about with don’ts to the exclusion of dos. From a public policy perspective, it is extraordinarily important that all Americans feel conªdent that they can learn languages if they need to do so, but it is not important at all that the schools make sure that there is a large enough supply of speakers of French or Albanian or Swahili. In this sense choice of language is really of very little importance. What matters above all is that young people learn how languages work, that their own language is only one of many, and that, while the language that they speak is a precious deªner of who they are, they speak that language primarily because of an accident of history and geography. Early on, they should have an opportunity to compare their own language with another, by learning how to use and manipulate a second language. That skill — learning how to imitate the linguistic behavior of another people or culture (because language is ªrst and foremost a bundle of behaviors) — is not so far removed from the art of acting. And if we believe that learning to perform on a musical instrument, or to act out a role on a stage, matters to the fullness of our lives, how much more important is learning to perform through language, and learning to project our complex personalities through the alternative behavioral repertoires represented by the various languages of the world! The student unwilling to reshape his or her personality by putting on a foreign language makes a poor pupil. This creation of a second personality helps us understand the nature of the ªrst, helps us learn about ourselves and how we express ourselves. Like the second million, the second foreign language is easier to come by than the ªrst, and the third than the second. While it may be true that commanding a foreign language comes easier when the brain is still forming, when a child is very young (a question on which there is less clarity than we may suppose, however), gaining full command of a foreign language is going to happen to very few children unless they are put in immersion situations or their language learning is strongly reinforced in other settings. But that is not the main reason why we teach foreign languages to young children. What we are achieving, or trying to achieve, is surely familiarity with the notion that one can express oneself through a diŸerent repertoire of linguistic behavior. If we come early to alternative linguistic structures, we are likely so to develop our
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language-learning facility that in later life we will be able to acquire further languages more easily. So teaching foreign languages in elementary schools makes it easier for foreign language teachers at higher grades: the success rate will be higher, and more students will pass the threshold at which a given language becomes useful as a means of communication. However, there is more to it than that: we should teach our students how languages work not just to make these students putty in the hands of our colleagues but also to make it easier for them to acquire languages on their own. In reality, most people learn languages because their social situation obliges them to. A very large section of the world’s population, probably more than half, is functionally at least bilingual (see for example Edwards 1994b on this subject). For the most part, it did not learn languages in school (in many cases it did not go to school at all): it learned languages out of necessity — in the street, in the market, in a job, on visits to the neighboring town. We are apt to associate language learning with formal schooling, but the truth is that you do not need a classroom to learn a foreign language. Indeed the classroom is really only a surrogate for necessity: in schools we create artiªcial obligations and necessities in order to anticipate the obligations and necessities of real life. From a political standpoint, we should be very wary, in my opinion, about arguing that America can’t get along without foreign languages. In the short run, at least, this is far from the truth. We have all met the phenomenon of the American who, when foreigners do not understand him, simply resorts to shouting. Such behavior oŸends us, as though foreignness and deafness were somehow related. “The person isn’t deaf: he just doesn’t understand,” we object. But what if I were to tell you that you were wrong, and that the approach of shouting at foreigners actually works like a charm? When my dog fails to obey me, I do not enunciate more clearly: I shout louder. And it works — not always, to be sure, but more often than if I improve my diction. The reason, of course, is because my dog knows I am in charge and would like to do nothing more than please me. Forgive me if my analogy suggests something Pavlovian about foreigners: the point I am trying to make is a diŸerent point. As long as the United States is the greatest world power (an observation that Americans make with great frequency and that others sometimes reluctantly accept), and as long as we have things that other people want, they will speak our language. Arguably, eŸorts to accommodate them will actually weaken our position. When, in 1919, the Great Powers sat down at Versailles to discuss the postwar settlement, Woodrow Wilson made it clear that he had no intention of speaking French
Why learn foreign languages?
(not his strongest subject at Princeton) and that he wanted to speak English. Lloyd George, eager to come across as a man of the people, did the same. Despite a century of use of French in diplomatic negotiations, the others acceded to their wishes — and thus in due course the League of Nations ended up with two working languages, and, following World War Two, these same two languages, English and French, were chosen as the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat (Tonkin 1996), while Spanish, Russian and Chinese were added as “o¹cial languages,” languages of documentation. Six languages are used by the United Nations General Assembly today and four of them (English, French, Russian, Chinese) are the languages of the victors in 1945, over ªfty years ago (Spanish was also included because of the large number of Spanish-speaking founding members). A sixth, Arabic, was introduced at the time of the oil crisis in the early 1970s. It is relative power that determines language choice: all other factors are negligible in comparison (see Fairclough 1989, Bourdieu 1991, and numerous others). So shouting, in one’s own language, can help — and we have America to prove it. This means, of course, that American policy makers are deeply ambivalent on the use of foreign languages in the conduct of American aŸairs. If they prefer to use English and can generally call the shots, they are nevertheless relatively tolerant (pace Ammon, in this volume) of foreigners’ use of English, and this rather relaxed attitude works in their favor. Furthermore, the relative situation of English has changed profoundly over the past ªfteen or twenty years. English is the Microsoft of languages, the operating system that accompanies most of the world’s technology. And the more this linguistic operating system is used, the more indispensable it becomes. Today, English occupies undisputed leadership among the languages of the world. Two recent books, by David Crystal (1997) and David Graddol (1997), make this point. Crystal acknowledges that, while languages come and go (Latin under the Romans, French during the Enlightenment, English under the Empire and beyond), this time it is diŸerent: English is on the way to breaking free of its moorings and becoming the second language of the world, more or less permanently — a point made also by Bruthiaux in this volume. In short, we are on the edge of a kind of linguistic millennium. Graddol, on the other hand, reminds us that on a world scale English is a mile wide and an inch deep, and that its dominance could readily pass. There are, as we would be the ªrst to recognize, disadvantages to this situation, this dominance of English, as well as advantages. First, English is the language of the world’s elite: we are cut oŸ, in my opinion to a dangerous
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degree, from the currents of thought and the ideas that circulate within other linguistic communities because there is so little crossover from those languages to ours. Secondly, we are unprepared for any signiªcant change in our fortunes: a decline in American prosperity, and hence in the English language that is related to that prosperity, would leave us at a serious disadvantage. We might also note that technology has not only given English an advantage but it has also made the maintenance of small languages easier: broadcasting is cheaper than it was, internet connections can now augment the mass media, and minority public opinion is easier to mobilize. The relative position of English on the internet today is actually weakening: more languages are coming on line. Of course, internet use is increasing at a rate so fast as to wipe out any absolute decline, so this statistical snippet is less signiªcant than it might otherwise be. However, it is a reminder that English is by no means invulnerable. It is also a reminder that, increasingly, we choose the languages we use. Recently I returned to my own corner of the world, Cornwall, to lead a study tour there. I found Cornish ¶ags ¶ying from ¶agpoles, books in Cornish, elaborate displays of Cornish loyalty. A few years back, there was no Cornish ¶ag and the Cornish language was essentially dead. What revived it? Not practicality. Not economic opportunity. People chose it, constructed it (Westland 1997), because they wanted to make selves diŸerent from the selves handed down to them by the existing institutions of their society. At this point, the debate over foreign languages intersects with another, highly current debate — that over the issue of globalism and globalization. Those of us involved in global education over the past several years have been advocating a greater awareness of the world by Americans. In a sense, Americans are today all too clearly aware of the world, which has come to resemble America itself, with the same cultural products, the same corporate environment, and (among a certain elite) the same value system. Globalism, in one form or another, is here to stay. But should it be used to broaden choices, to include ever widening groups of beneªciaries, or should it be allowed to close options down? Will it be, to use Thomas Friedman’s now familiar terms, the Lexus or the olive tree? Languages are dying at a rate akin to the deaths of species on our crowded planet, as several authors in this volume point out. To lose a language is to lose a way of being in the world, a chance at diversity, a reserve way of looking at ourselves. This brings us back, then, to the place where we began. We need to learn languages in schools because they oŸer us alternative ways of being ourselves — and such is the very essence of freedom. Indeed, foreign languages are a
Why learn foreign languages?
crucially important part of our cognitive development. Rendering such arguments in terms that politicians, those practitioners of the attainable, fully understand may be di¹cult. But we should be wary of telling the politicians things we do not believe ourselves. You will note that, in these brief remarks I have said nothing about individual foreign languages. I believe that the issue is not foreign languages, but foreign language, and that from a developmental point of view it does not much matter which language we teach. Of course, from a practical point of view it may matter a great deal. I view the signiªcant shift in foreign language learning towards a single ªrst foreign language, namely Spanish, in a more or less positive light, because it makes program articulation far easier, and because Spanish, as a language reasonably cognate to English, and a language whose structures are relatively transparent, is easily accessible to learners who start with English as their native language (Esperanto has many of the same advantages and rewards but is a harder sell). The challenge is how to get from Spanish as a base to the numerous other languages available to us, and how to create a public environment in which Spanish (and speciªcally Spanish) is not seen as a threat, nor regarded as something somewhere at the bottom end of the social scale, but as an asset. Equally challenging is dealing with the perception and the reality of the dominance of English on the world scene. Beware of the triumphalism of the David Crystals of this world: we can be sure that even in the future the world will change, almost certainly in ways we fail fully to predict. It was Ovid who memorably declared, “Iam seges est ubi Troia fuit,” there are now ªelds of wheat where Troy once stood. Today we might be tempted to say, “Iam seges est ubi Microsoft fuit.” Those vast and trunkless legs of stone that stand in Shelley’s desert may belong to Bill Gates. There’s a millennium underway: we’ll need bottled water and foreign languages.
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Conclusion Surveying the linguistic landscape: Assessing identity and change Kurt E. Müller
The chapters in this volume emerge primarily from a pair of conferences that carried the same title as this resulting monograph. Invited to address the topic from any point of view they wished, the authors oŸer the reader a range of perspectives in considering the status of languages in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Austronesia, and Europe. The authors deal with major languages, regional linguæ francæ, issues of languages in contact, ecology of language, language attitudes, and language pedagogy. The contributors who address language ecology are more aware than most of us that societies organize the natural phenomena they encounter diŸerently from one another, and these diŸerences are manifest in their languages. We have accepted for quite some time that technological innovation in¶uences individual languages and speciªc domains of endeavor diŸerentially across culture. The reverse is also true: If individual languages aŸect how we see the world and therefore how we investigate it, the ascendancy of language constraints (such as limiting discourse to English) is likely to impose limits on developments in any domain of activity, from academic disciplines, to the application of law, to research in engineering. One hopes this volume will spawn a range of discussions that will include the impact of language on various disciplines, a gap we have yet to explore. The current collection is perhaps weighted toward the anthropological interests that predominate in discussions of languages spoken by relatively few people (small languages), but this disciplinary approach is accompanied by sociological, political, and pedagogical concerns. When John Edwards speaks of small languages, he considers both those that are the o¹cial languages of nation states (state languages) and those that do not enjoy state support (stateless
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languages). My attention in his discussion is immediately drawn toward Europe, and my orientation toward language issues there is largely political. It may well be that his organization of the topic, moving from consideration of state languages to stateless ones, focuses the reader’s attention on such questions as the maintenance of a language within a larger society dominated by another language, one usually imposed by conquest. Similarly, when Jacques Maurais speaks of contact between English and French in Canada, he leads me to matters of language politics. Maurais’ interest is broader than the issue of two major European languages, exported to North America and thence to the world. He also points us toward matters of language identity among the original inhabitants of North America. Investigations of language identity may well lead to diverse observations depending on the location of one’s inquiry. When Luisa Ma¹ and Alamin Mazrui speak of small languages, they draw our attention to Africa and Asia, oŸering us a complementary set of observations on the preservation of languages in various circumstances. Mark Fettes also emphasizes political dimensions when he describes the history of language as inseparable from that of the nation state. The stateless variety of language he sees as “relegated to the margins” — not to dismiss their importance but, in contrast to Ma¹ and Mazrui, to describe how these languages have been treated by most scholars of language.
Language identity Given the regions under discussion, it is not surprising that several authors explore the tension between language ecology and language shift. In their 2000 book, Vanishing Voices, Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine point out that “70 percent of all languages” can be found “in just twenty nation-states, among them some of the poorest countries in the world” (32). Supported with a map Nettle had included in a 1998 journal article, they highlight two belts that feature a great diversity of languages and note that 85% of the estimated 5,000– 6,700 languages spoken in the world tally fewer than 100,000 speakers, with the median language populace between 5,000 and 6,000 (6, 32). This world is very diŸerent from that of the largest languages, all of which are languages of state, and many of which exercise political, cultural, and philological in¶uence beyond their native borders. The names of all languages with over 100 million speakers are readily recognizable, but even some with more than ten million
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speakers may not be recognized by educated persons. Many of the small languages are in oral cultures with little or no written history. Against such a background, Alamin Mazrui wisely distinguishes between languages with predominantly oral traditions and those that enjoy a literary tradition, notably some with sacred scriptures. His description of the absence of any language nationalism across Africa highlights diŸerences between short- and long-term threats to smaller languages. Distinguishing between languages used in the marketplace and those used primarily for academic purposes, he ªnds that English and other European languages pose only a long-term threat to the smaller languages: in their facility to expand local economies, it is the indigenous languages of wider communication that pose an immediate threat to small languages. Whereas Mazrui relates a positive impact of both Christianity and Islam on establishing written traditions for languages that had been exclusively oral, Maurais ªnds that missionaries have contributed to the fragmentation of languages by providing written records (Bible translations) in more dialects than may be desirable. From yet another perspective, Ma¹ looks at the imposition of writing on oral cultures and ªnds a tension between the linguist’s desire to document languages before they disappear and the potential damage such attempts may bring. For those of us who come to language study from an academic tradition of investigating ancient texts, the notion that “the very tissue that holds indigenous cultures together may be the spoken word” is a radical concept, particularly in comparison to languages such as Chinese, for which the written language is intelligible over time although a contemporary speaker of one dialect cannot understand another, or Greek, for which a long written tradition may help explain its longevity. Ma¹ presents evidence for her position by citing the decision of the Pirahaõ of Amazonia to keep their language strictly oral, ªnding writing appropriate for Portuguese but not for their vernacular. The matter of language shift from a local vernacular to a language of wider communication, whether regional or transnational, concerns several of our authors as well as those they cite in support of their positions. John Edwards seems to ªnd a certain romanticism (or perhaps Rousseauism) in Joshua Fishman’s attempt at reversing language shift. One might interpret this view as seeing on the one hand a naïve, poetic existence in nature and on the other a quest for Western materialism. Edwards pointedly reminds us that one’s choice of language loyalty or language shift is subject to multiple in¶uences. While language itself may not be a conscious value on the part of individuals
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seeking a better standard of living, the con¶ict between traditional values and westernization/urbanization often has language dimensions. East Asia supplies appropriate examples of the impact that pursuit of economic development and improvement of living standards may have on local languages. One of the threads evident in Björn Jernudd’s observations on language planning in East Asia is the choice between English and the vernacular in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Jernudd sees two developments in various East Asian nations that use both English and a national language. Successful policies in the development of national languages have resulted in a circumstance in which English is not currently a threat to the national language. But in instances requiring a high degree of proªciency in English, the likely impact on the labor force is either an inveterate reliance on expatriate labor or the development of a local elite that dominates the masses commercially. The diversity of societies presented by our collection of authors oŸers diŸering pictures of group identity as manifest in language. Some observations portray groups that use a language of wide communication, such as Africans using English, in pursuit of supraregional goals, but without con¶ict over their identity as part of a smaller, local group. Others look at groups that pursue both a small-group cohesion supported by oral language and regional participation through a national language. Except as seen by outsiders, these examples do not oŸer us a landscape of a group’s own struggle for identity in the face of competition from dominant groups, either within the state or outside it. But there are also examples of identity fracture and separatism. Nettle and Romaine cite Ken McElhanon’s study in Papua New Guinea of speakers of Selepet and his note that a village decided to diŸerentiate themselves “from other Selepet-speaking villages by adopting a new word (bunge) for ‘no’ to replace their usual word (bia) shared by all Selepet speakers” (88). One need not go so far as Papua New Guinea to ªnd examples of exclusionary linguistic identity. I suspect the deªnition of a language as a dialect with an army emerged from experience in Europe. Danish and Norwegian were once deªned as Dano-Norwegian. Dutch and Flemish are mutually intelligible, and the term “Nederlands” is even used by the Flemish speakers of Belgium. Eastern European studies used to refer to Serbo-Croatian as one language with two writing systems: Serbs use the cyrillic alphabet and Croats the Latin. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croats consider their language a separate idiom from the one spoken by Serbs. In his 1998 grammar, Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language, Thomas Magner hedges the issue by unhy-
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phenating the adjective but retaining the singular term “language.” In a prefatory note, he disputes the separate nature of the two, observing that Croatian philologists maintain their language has been separate for centuries but that those with no nationalist agenda might “date the birth of the modern Croatian language” to the separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia (ix). This particular dispute does not end with Croatian and Serbian, however. The basic document of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (otherwise known as the Dayton Peace Accords) was prepared in three equally valid texts, with the third language version, named Bosniac, demanded by Bosnian Muslims. Negotiation of the peace accord was undertaken at least partially in German, a neutral language, and the numerous annexes to the document were agreed in only one language: English. Language identity within a group is subject to outside in¶uences current at the time one seeks to undertake a census. Maurais notes that Fishman showed in 1981 that Amerindians living on reservations were more likely to declare an aboriginal language as their mother tongue than those living oŸ reservations. That comment accounts for location as a variable in determining linguistic identity. But time may also play such a role. In the 1966 collection edited by Fishman et al., Heinz Kloss had noted that in the 1940 US census there were close to one million third- or subsequent-generation Americans who considered German their native language. Somehow this segment of the populace that had been successfully maintaining their ancestral language subsequently disappeared into American society. Did the language use disappear over a single decade or did the speakers’ pronouncement of loyalty change? Peter Nelde ªnds such a problem in conducting social-science research in Belgium. Research on language use cannot be conducted there because questionnaire results are skewed by political concerns or loyalties of the respondent. Two of the authors in this collection address identity from an international — as distinct from local, national — perspective. In addition to recognizing the regional hegemony of various languages and the standardization that statebased language academies may exert, Paul Bruthiaux looks at the ability of a language to adapt to new circumstances as a factor that may win new adherents. Of course language shift is often associated with the pursuit of economic opportunity, but Bruthiaux’s point is broader. Modernizing society and the promise of “beneªcial social change” are longer-term goals than expanding one’s income by adopting a new language. Whereas Bruthiaux considers the persistence of French among international organizations as anomalous in the expanding reach of English, Mark Fettes notes the appeal of English in this very
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environment. If language is a badge of community, those who perceive themselves “as members of a ‘world polity’” are doing so in a diminishing number of languages. Esperanto is of course one of these, as French has been, but Fettes points to English as “intimately associated with the world-centric discourses on human rights … and everything else supported by green.” Fettes does us a great service in relating perceptions of language — use, diversity, loyalty, etc. — to competing values among societies. By applying to language choice a color-denominated approach to contemporary issues, he oŸers us an additional paradigm for understanding competition and collaboration among languages.
Language and disciplinary a¹nity If one re¶ects on the organizational structure of the university departments that teach various languages, one ªnds signiªcantly diŸerent disciplinary a¹nities in the value systems that underlie both teaching and scholarly inquiry. Such value systems diŸer even among those who teach the same language, e.g., faculty in a department of English in an anglophone university undertake radically diŸerent inquiries from those in a department of English as a Second/Foreign Language. The same distinction exists between Germanistik and Deutsch als Fremdsprache and, I suspect, between faculty in departments of French in francophone universities and those who teach français comme langue seconde. In the US, the interest in Eastern European languages is largely attributable to the Cold War and eŸorts to better understand adversaries. Because of a closer relationship with area studies than exists for Western European languages (which enjoy a more established presence in American academe), these languages demonstrate a stronger in¶uence of political science at the upper levels of study. The study of Spanish in the US is a hybrid, in¶uenced in many programs by the literary criticism that forms the common disciplinary identity of the most commonly taught languages, but in¶uenced by political science in those programs with a Latin American focus. These distinctions await another volume for examination, but they point toward additional diŸerences in disciplinary a¹nity that the series of Papers of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CRD) has explored. Even within this volume, divergent disciplinary values are evident. Interest in the least-taught languages, which are also those with the fewest speakers, is largely under the in¶uence of social sciences other than
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political science. These divergences oŸer us a panoply of approaches to questions of language status and use. Recognizing the destructive potential of outsiders trying to document endangered languages or insinuating Western values into oral cultures, Luisa Ma¹ advocates restraint in research and dissemination of information on the languages of some communities. Suggesting the application to social-science research of a principle related to environmental and public-health hazards, Ma¹ raises the Precautionary Principle not only to justify intervention to preserve languages from extinction but to consider a contrary concern, “if there is reason to anticipate that publication of … data may result in harm” to the subjects of investigation, “either the research should not be carried out, or its results should not be disseminated.” This tack is reminiscent of Timothy Reagan’s call, in a previous CRD volume, for the application to language planning of a basic medical principle. In that chapter, “The Contribution of Language Planning and Language Policy to the Reconciliation of Unity and Diversity in the Post-Cold-War Era,” Reagan argued that those who engage in language planning and policy should strive ªrst not to exacerbate extant problems. Ma¹ notes that the constraints she proposes would require “reform in the principles of research funding and of the academic merit system.” Her suggestions oŸer fruitful areas for discussion, and I should point out that they require adoption of disciplinary values that are quite foreign to studies in many languages. Models for such research exist but, so far, have limited applicability to the academy. Two salient examples come to mind. Among government agencies there is a substantial investment in continuing education. Although I draw my example from military experience, I suspect the model holds true for diplomacy, treasury, law-enforcement, and other executive agencies as well. At middlemanagement and executive levels of continuing education in government, students encounter guest speakers whom the faculty of the institution encourage to speak openly about policy issues and decisions. To facilitate this openness, the speaker is aŸorded a “non-attribution policy,” the underlying principle of which is that they will not be quoted. Academic research has a contrary value. In many academic disciplines, whenever a writer borrows a concept or cites an example that has appeared in someone else’s work, that writer must document the source or face the accusation of plagiarism. These two divergent approaches to investigating a topic — academic and government — may be reconciled, but we should recognize that the means of acquiring and disseminating information in these two domains are at odds with each other.
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A similar divergence is oŸered by a comparison between the academic enterprise within some government agencies and its counterpart in the academy. Historians and political scientists may engage in classiªed research for government agencies and not be allowed to disseminate the results of their work except to those readers who are speciªcally granted access. A historian who writes volumes that can be read only by a restricted audience has a limited outlet for recognition. So long as such individuals are employed by a government agency, they have some employment security, but their mobility among academic positions is constrained. The same may be true, to a lesser degree, of those in various disciplines who, while holding academic positions, engage in either classiªed research for government or proprietary research for a corporate entity: the restrictions on dissemination of their research are at odds with the basic values of the academy. To the extent that ªeld research is funded after peer review of proposals, a similar concern arises for funding as for tenure and promotion. If peer review is replaced by a constrained review process that is not open to scrutiny, will the impact be to undermine the connection between research and its appreciation?
Language discrimination Two interrelated types of language discrimination arise in these chapters: (1) constraints on the mobility of individuals because of the language (or variety of language) they speak and (2) exclusionary treatment on the basis of language. Once again a diversity of examples informs a set of common interests. The pervasiveness of English is a ubiquitous theme in these discussions, but the impact of English diŸers across the societies considered, from the ªrst world to the third. Using very diŸerent examples, both Ulrich Ammon and Jacques Maurais suggest that language discrimination must be resolved by focusing on the equality of individuals who speak various languages rather than the equal treatment of languages. Ammon cites Jonathan Pool’s special issue of Language Problems and Language Planning, published in 1987 (11/1, Spring 1987), and that issue of the journal remains valuable to considerations of language discrimination. Maurais oŸers several examples from North America and Europe and deals with both aboriginal and European languages. In his North American examples, he notes the economic status of speakers of minority languages in a
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society dominated by English and ªnds that for speakers of both aboriginal languages and minority languages, language a¹nity is related to economic status. In his European examples, Maurais points to several decisions of the Commission of the European Communities that relate to language discrimination and the matter of whether language requirements were appropriate or were screens to hinder the free movement of labor or, in one instance, a matter of failure to extend to non-citizens civil rights granted citizens of the same ethnicity. Paul Bruthiaux tackles the global dominance of English with a view to assessing the chances of other candidate languages to compete for regional or global hegemony. He supplies a checklist of characteristics that a candidate must meet to serve as a supraregional or global lingua franca. Both he and Ulrich Ammon concentrate on literate usage as distinct from oral communication as the basis for the appeal the language may exhibit in attracting new adherents, but they demonstrate diŸering dynamics. In his treatment of French as a competitor to English, Bruthiaux notes the niche that French has enjoyed among international organizations. Those who have worked in this realm probably recognize the substantial language politics employed to keep an emphasis on French, which indeed facilitates the participation of more players than can be accommodated solely in English. But one should also recognize the language politics that are played in favor of British English, and here Bruthiaux’s comments on the dominance of American English must also be contrasted with Britain’s thus far successful lobbying for British usage as the standard in organizations such as the United Nations and NATO. Bruthiaux mentions aŸective dimensions in choosing a second language, and his factors in favor of adoption are suŸiciently compelling. I would add negative factors as well, such as we see in reviewing the record of various societies that have sought to dominate others. Thus both French and German have at various times been adopted on the basis of extending one’s opportunities or rejected as a result of aggressive attempts to establish political hegemony. In Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftssprache? Ulrich Ammon documented the shift to publishing in English among academic journals across disciplines. That study gives him su¹cient cause to raise questions of discrimination against non-native speakers seeking to publish in English. Citing a newspaper article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he discusses “bad simple English” as the increasingly recognized language of scientiªc papers. On
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the one hand, we have the criticism of the abuse of English and on the other, we have numerous authors whose work is rejected for a range of “errors” from non-idiomatic usage to infelicities of style. This exploration evokes two recollections regarding language style. Even among native speakers there is considerable latitude in the use of English across disciplines, with style in professional writing ranging from elegant to atrocious. I recall receiving a visiting professor of English as a Foreign Language, who asked me if he could keep a copy of a document he found in our organization’s waiting area. It was a report on research in the social sciences, and he found it fascinating that native speakers could write such abominable English. The tyranny of the native-speaking editor leads Ammon to suggest developing a global version of English that could more easily be employed by non-native speakers. His examples of parallel developments are both appropriate and cogent — and reminiscent of some of the purposes of Esperanto — but the proposal evokes for me a recollection of lectures in graduate seminars by the eminent medievalist William T. H. Jackson, who oŸered his students accounts of reciprocal slander by humanists from various European states who criticized the Latin employed by fellow humanists in other states. Ammon’s proposal for development of pluricentric English is worth exploration, but I note that pluricentric languages, too (e.g., German), demonstrate issues of acceptability, with a dominant variety and variants. Ammon’s perception of the distribution of costs for language services in multilateral organizations is enlightening. This theme has been persistent in the series of conferences that ran for some years under the cosponsorship of CRD and the United Nations Division of Conference Services, but Ammon oŸers a fresh perspective from the aspect of language discrimination. It has often struck me that the o¹cial languages of the United Nations have varying degrees of utility within that organization. It must have struck the founders as perfectly reasonable to designate Chinese an o¹cial language because of the proportion of the world populace that speaks Chinese. But, as Eugeniusz Wyzner points out in a previous CRD volume, only one delegation used that language. The di¹culty that non-native speakers encounter in the use of languages in which they are not fully proªcient has also been a matter of discussion in the series of UN-CRD conferences (see both Wyzner and Stephen Pearl). The cost to a delegation of using a dominant language from its own society is nil. But Ammon tells us that the costs fall disproportionately on those delegations that must employ a language that is not used natively in their societies.
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Language attitudes and pedagogy Language discrimination is at its base a matter of attitude toward speakers of that language. Timothy Reagan looks at the potential development of Americans’ attitudes toward speakers of other languages within American society by proposing two scenarios — one accepting of multilingualism, the other rejecting the polyglot citizen — and the repercussions such attitudes could have on language instruction. Reagan paraphrases Richard Lambert’s comment about Americans being “devoutly monolingual,” and sees the comment as indicative of both suspicion and apathy. Under his negative scenario, his citations supporting suspicion are masterfully chosen, and one can see a number of America’s current politicians making the same statements without recognizing the provenance of the sentiment. Moreover, his projection of potential developments in opposition to linguistic diversity would be less scary if they did not have a base of historical experience. His depiction of constraints on tax-supported schools was once exceeded. The nasty precedent in prohibition of language teaching went beyond Reagan’s nightmare to hit not just tax-supported public education, but church-supported schools. Meyer v. Nebraska, which the US Supreme Court decided in 1923, overturned state prohibitions against the German language, a case that was brought before the court by church-supported schools that taught German. If Americans are to overcome the structural deªciencies perpetrated on the education system, Reagan’s argument is a good place to start investigating public attitudes toward learning other languages. His expressed reticence to accept the argument that Americans are generally in favor of anglophones learning other languages needs to be explored, tested, and, if needed, corrected. At the 2001 annual meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, William Rivers of the National Foreign Language Center presented data on Americans’ attitudes toward languages that were taken from the General Social Survey 2000, Module on Ethnicity. In his presentation, Rivers noted: – – –
75.1% of respondents agreed with the statement “Children in the US should learn a second language ¶uently before they ªnish [high school].” 63.6% agreed with the statement “Learning a foreign language is as valuable as learning math and science in school.” Only 18.2% agreed with the statement “Bilingual education programs should be eliminated from American public schools.”
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The survey was based on a stratiªed random sample of respondents consisting of only 1,398 individuals, so it may well be that such surveys should be replicated frequently to determine consistency of attitude or should use a larger sample. Rivers compared results of the 2000 survey with another that had been undertaken in 1979. Questions on the earlier survey (number of interviewees not mentioned), reported by Peter Eddy, then of the Center for Applied Linguistics, were phrased more stringently. Rather than asking whether high school students should learn another language, the survey asked whether languages should be oŸered and required. To these questions, the sample responded as follows: – – –
–
92% thought a foreign language should be oŸered in junior or senior high school. 47% agreed (49% disagreed) that a foreign language should be required at this level. 76% agreed that a foreign language should be oŸered in elementary school but only 42% agreed it should be required (56% disagreed with a requirement). Minorities of 38% thought colleges should have language entrance requirements and 40% agreed with a language requirement for graduation.
On the surface, the data don’t seem to support Reagan’s position that questions Americans’ attitudes toward language learning, but as Rivers also points out, “public opinion does not equal public support.” On this measure, Reagan’s position draws from the general perception of the language-teaching profession and is cognizant of hindrances to eŸective language instruction. These perceptions are not quantiªed but should not, on that account, be discounted. To the contrary, I would hope that airing such perceptions would lead to discussion of eŸective ways to sweep aside the hindrances. The perceived opposition to multilingualism deserves additional attention. Building a background for his negative scenario, Reagan opines that one can ªnd in American society a thread of opposition to real competence in a foreign language. I should hope that exploration of this topic would appeal to Americans’ traditional self-perception of fairness and thence to remedies for such an attitude. An investigation of attitudes should look at those societies that have persecuted groups and individuals on the basis of language and might start with the totalitarian societies that persecuted Esperantists. As Tonkin (“Eastern Europe” and “Overview”) and Lins, among others, show, persecution of
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Esperantists can be based simply on distrust of people who have an interest in communicating with those in other countries. This tendency to equate multilingualism with disloyalty may prove resistant to eradication, but the extent of such insidious tribalism should be documented if we are to combat it more eŸectively. Had Reagan explored the persecution of German-Americans by “Defense Committees” during America’s participation in World War I, he might have indicated a similar basis of opposition: the conviction that someone who speaks the language of an opponent must have an a¹nity with that opponent and is therefore an enemy. I don’t raise this point here to criticize my country’s participation in such activity (we don’t have the space) but rather to indicate that such guilt by association exists across societies and characterizes states few of us would care to live in. Over the years of the CRD-UN conferences, we have often heard speakers indicate distrust of interpreters, translators, and polyglot individuals. But we have been short on documentation. I hope Reagan’s observations prompt a reader to respond appropriately. In this vein, I oŸer an experiential anecdote, for which I shall identify neither the country nor the language. At the close of a war, I had the opportunity to hasten the delivery of supplies for refugee relief and improve the reconstruction of local government services by identifying eŸective interpreters. Those whose ability across English and the local vernacular was limited could be used for certain tasks, and those whose skills were noticeable across domains and registers would be better employed in situations demanding greater precision. To that end I consulted with a scholar who had prepared a comparative grammar and devised a qualiªcation test. The local language used more than one writing system, and I needed a native informant to write test items in the vernacular. I found an appropriate individual, a graduate of a local university with a degree in English. Thinking I might have an opportunity to credit him for his work at some future point, I asked for his name. Fearing the potential repercussions of his collaboration, he declined to share that information. Thus my story returns us to some of Luisa Ma¹’s issues of recognizing the ways in which we may interfere with the crosscultural concerns of local societies. In his chapter on the place of languages in the curriculum, Humphrey Tonkin raises issues that range from assimilation of immigrants to epistemological rationale for curriculum development to emphasis on sociolinguistics in the education of language teachers. I wish to underscore several of his observations and then take issue with one in particular.
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Tonkin’s concern for language as a subject for general education leads him to distinguish between experience with speciªc languages and the nature of human communication in general. Teaching about the latter, it seems to me, is an essential task for general education, and I do not believe I have seen an education system anywhere in my travels that takes a comparative and pluralistic approach to teaching language to all schoolchildren. Although I have visited school systems with extensive programs (eight years or more) in a foreign language and have worked with government o¹cials whose education systems or professional experience ensured they became multilingual, none of these encounters oŸered any sense that the nature of human communication or the eŸects of language on epistemology were treated systematically in their national systems of education. Tonkin rightly admonishes his audience to be wary of simply adding the ethnocentrism of another group to the one children may already have from their surrounding society. Extolling the beauties of the speciªc language to which we are exposed (whether native or foreign) does not necessarily propagate appreciation for language as a phenomenon or for the treasures one ªnds across societies. Most language teachers have experienced the a¹rmation of cultural memorials to the language they have studied, but how does the appreciation of one culture translate into valuing others, if at all? I have long been struck by a subject in American schools I consider a fraud. In the early grades in the United States, the teaching of reading, writing, information gathering, and the like is called “language arts.” In a collaborative eŸort, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) have even promulgated a set of twelve standards to guide the acquisition of literacy. To their credit, they call their statement “Standards for the English Language Arts,” but to the education sector the topic is better known by a shorter title (also shared by one of NCTE’s journals), simply “language arts.” Under this rubric, the absence of a comparative dimension indicates either ignorance or charlatanism. That it passes for legitimate in the United States is attributable to the absence of languages at this level of the education structure. Tonkin oŸers the necessary corrective in advocating that “early on” children should have “the opportunity to compare their language with another.” But even in nation-states that begin instruction in a non-native language in early grades, there is no assurance that teachers value languages beyond those taught in the school. Standard 9 (of 12) in the NCTE-IRA document could get a signiªcant boost if languages were oŸered earlier: “Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects
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across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.” This standard could just as well serve as a guideline for the education of language teachers, addressing Tonkin’s concern that language teachers not replicate an extant ethnocentrism. In emphasizing the generalities of language and culture, one must recognize the need for exposure to speciªc languages and cultures. There is danger in seeking generalities without experience in the speciªcs. Because of the nation’s size and diplomatic history, the US education system tends to be more insular than should be true of a state oriented toward global trade. Advocates of global and international studies have long pointed out the isolation of academic practice that parallels some of the country’s diplomatic history. If Tonkin’s hypothetical, ethnocentric language teacher represents the Scylla of elitism in language education, those who extol the international dimension without seeing the need for any language competence represent the Charybdis of overgeneralization. In a conference presentation to language teachers, the sociologist and international-education advocate Richard Lambert once pointed out that in a study of American dissertations that could be termed “international studies,” the only references cited that were in foreign languages were in dissertations by foreign students. Only in an anglophone society could someone purporting to be an academic specialist on some remote region of the world make such claims without demonstrating the capacity to communicate in an appropriate local language. While I am grateful Tonkin addresses language education in egalitarian fashion, noting the contribution of language experience to general education, I disagree with his acquiescence in the disappearance of choice among languages in American schools. While I agree that a comparative dimension can be achieved by introducing any language, the nation at large has a signiªcant need for individuals who speak various, speciªc languages. It appears Reagan and I diŸer on this point, as he doubts “claims about the necessity of foreign language for most Americans.” Although I must admit that most Americans do not need another language in their daily work routines, America is often in a disadvantageous position because of the lack of “international literacy” we produce in the citizenry. (My experience in government service is not representative of “most Americans” but has certainly shown me instances of constraints on our ability to understand or persuade others.) I agree with Tonkin that the schools should not be expected to emphasize a language needed for a current crisis — Albanian or Arabic, Serbian or Somali. But the nation has a predictable, long-term need for competence in a variety of languages, and if we
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fail to ensure that students can choose among several major languages, we do both them and the nation a grave disservice. If schools of education are responsible for foisting the fraud of “language arts” on American schools, language educators themselves will be complicit in a fraud involving their own discipline if they neglect the nation’s needs and accept the wholesale substitution of Spanish for the diversity of languages we acknowledge as necessary. American school systems have been renaming their “foreign language” programs “world language” oŸerings to eliminate the alien connotation. But if we oŸer only one language under such a rubric, we undermine the national interest. To be sure it is easier to coordinate longer sequences of instruction if all students take the same language, but following that option would deprive the nation of language skills it needs. If reducing early language exposure to simply Spanish would lead to greater desire to learn other languages, it might be defensible. There is some hope for this development, and some are calling it “layering,” to describe enrolling in another language after early exposure to one. Unfortunately, the enrollment statistics show no such trend. To the contrary, the 2000 secondary-school enrollment survey conducted by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages shows that Spanish now accounts for over 70% of foreign language enrollment, with French reduced to 18.3%, German to 4.8%, Italian to 1.2%, and every other language below 1%. The last MLA survey of postsecondary enrollment shows Spanish now with 55% of the “market share” in college language registrations. Ammon comments that 8 years of exposure to English in Germany produces insu¹cient skill in English to strike anglophone editors as indicating “nativelike” usage, approximately level 4 on the international proªciency scale. We in the US are not close to advocating that schools produce students with level-3 proªciency in languages as widely used as French and German, though we need these languages for trade, corporate management, diplomacy, and security. Reduction in language choice diminishes our ability to enhance the proªciency we do achieve. When only one language is oŸered early, it accrues an advantage every politician covets: incumbency. If alternative languages are oŸered a few years later, an early positive experience exercises an inertia that keeps most students in that language. Thus, oŸerings in “world languages” have been subverted. Education administrators quite naturally see instruction in high-enrollment languages as more cost eŸective than that in languages with fewer students. But the threats to language choice are greater than just the narrow-mindedness of individual administrators who may direct students to the language they favor.
Surveying the linguistic landscape 173
Prospective teachers of French and German may not be hired because school districts concentrate on Spanish. Or, if the district is in fact looking to hire teachers in other languages, the downward spiral in language majors leaves them unable to hire teachers in other languages. Lack of faculty leads to fewer oŸerings in high school, pushing language choice to higher education. But, remembering Ammon’s comment about duration of instruction, higher education is far too late to begin a sequence in a language if the sequence is supposed to produce competence. Moreover, downward enrollment trends in colleges lead to fewer college faculty in languages other than Spanish, so fewer students can take other languages. In secondary school mathematics, we teach algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and in some schools, calculus. We routinely oŸer biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science as well. How many students need all these subjects? Any of the natural sciences can be used to teach scientiªc method. In retrospect, I would have derived far more beneªt from a high school course in Italian or Russian (added to the French and German I took) than I did from any mathematics beyond geometry. An undergraduate course in philosophy or political science taught in French or German would have broadened my vocabulary in these languages. As it was, I ªrst encountered some everyday business terms only after teaching full time in a department that conducted all its business in German. I devote periodic attention to maintaining French but do not have the level of comfort I would like in this language and recognize the limited domains my formal instruction addressed. Obviously one cannot predict which students will become mathematicians or physicists, but we expect many to take these subjects in preparation for later studies. The Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians routinely exhibit admirable ¶uency in English in diplomatic, military, and nongovernmental organizations because they undertook long sequences of instruction in the language. If the US government recognizes the need for individuals with competence in a given language, it can teach them in a government school. But so long as language education in US society at large is limited in choice of language and duration of instruction, such graduates will be treated as language specialists. As they become senior, government employees will then try to shed that label for fear of limiting their advancement potential. Corporate America may send executives for language schooling, but only in limited circumstances. More likely, it will recruit abroad for executives it otherwise could have produced from its own ranks. In recent international mergers, American corporate employees have found they are unfamiliar with European business culture and the lan-
174 Kurt E. Müller
guage of their new higher echelon. While one cannot readily attribute layoŸs to their monocultural experience, one would be foolish not to suspect that greater familiarity with French or German would help in Daimler or Michelin, Hoechst or Rhône-Poulenc (the latter two recently merged). Studies of language-education policy in Britain have recognized for some time that British schools’ attention to French has neglected the need for managerial employees who can contribute to the trade and industrial relationships Britain has with German-speaking Europe (see Hagen 1994, for example). Language in general education? By all means! But in extending language to all, we cannot ignore the diversity of languages we actually need. Reagan and Tonkin both emphasize a general-education goal for language education, but this emphasis should not be read as the sole rationale for the place of language in the curriculum. Language belongs in education for two reasons: (1) for general education and (2) to develop competence in languages the populace can use throughout life and that the nation needs for its interactions with others. The complex relationships we have with others in the world should lead us to engage in conversation with our business and diplomatic partners on equitable terms. And that requirement should drive a languageeducation policy that oŸers long sequences of several languages, leaving the choice of language to the individual. That circumstance describes Reagan’s positive scenario: Americans clamoring for longer sequences of language instruction and demanding a greater variety of languages. Much of the demand is based on a change in attitude toward the recognition of the instrumental value of language in reaching others. The desire to reach others leads to concern for higher levels of proªciency, and that interest brings us to consider Teresa Pica’s chapter. In preparing to look across teaching methods, Pica observes that “language learning is too complex a process for any individual method to sustain and accomplish.” This statement allows much latitude for subsequent development, both within Pica’s presentation and in follow-up investigations we may hope her chapter elicits. Just by raising the issue of pedagogical method, Pica gives us pause to consider whether the adoption of various methods, their competitors, and the pendular eŸects of education bandwagons are a symptom of the constraints under which language education labors, particularly in North America. The search for more-eŸective methods may well re¶ect the limited time the education system devotes to teaching additional languages and the best attempts of language teachers to work under this time constraint. Pica’s comments on the emphasis known as communicative language teaching
Surveying the linguistic landscape
can lead the reader in several fruitful directions; some of these she explores, others become evident as one re¶ects on her presentation. If the emphasis on communicative methods is found more readily in the professional literature than in the classroom, we must ask why the theory is not transformed into practice. Reagan oŸers us numerous targets for our investigation, and some of the likely suspects must include “ill-prepared teachers … and institutional barriers to eŸective teaching.” Much of the approach to communicative teaching emphasizes “authentic speech” as distinct from classroom formulations, and such authenticity demands multiple choices of question and response. Although all teachers should possess a greater reserve of knowledge than is required for a speciªc course, the demands on teachers of a communicative syllabus far exceed those of a grammar-based syllabus. Indeed under this approach, a truly competent teacher may forego a text entirely and choose materials to support those areas in which it becomes apparent that the students require support. To fulªll such a demanding expectation, teachers must be both skilled instructors and masters of their subject. Subject mastery, however, continues to elude undergraduate teacher candidates who have far too little exposure to the language they will be expected to teach and who are oŸered little opportunity to improve their skills in the language once they are licensed. Pica addresses professional development of teachers, particularly the current trend known as action research. It should become evident from following her description that the requirements for continuing development that various education systems are adopting must also address the contributions of master teachers. Whereas it may be all too true that beginning teachers have barely adequate subject mastery, it does not follow that they don’t improve their skills. A system of continuing education that requires the same number of hours of continuing education of all teachers, novice and veteran alike, betrays a pernicious orientation toward its staŸ that expects teachers to leave the classroom for supervisory and administrative positions. Otherwise, the system would recognize that those teachers who instruct their fellow teachers are doing double duty: keeping their skills fresh while advancing the abilities of others. The worst examples of systemic failure to empower teachers who undertake to instruct their peers are found in requirements for the presenters to take the same course they have successfully given to others. I have suggested that Americans’ unwillingness to devote su¹cient attention to language education has led to the search for more-eŸective methods of teaching. A cynic might describe the system as a lottery approach to education:
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rather than invest for the future, one hopes a small expenditure will reap a disproportionate reward. I ªnd some evidence for this interpretation in Pica’s description of an aspect of the communicative approach to language teaching: “Communicative activities might lead the language learner to settle for ¶uency at the expense of accuracy or to neglect learning … advanced … grammatical areas,” she writes. Under this topic, Pica directs her reader to work by Theodore Higgs and Ray CliŸord. I wish to take the Higgs and CliŸord reference a bit further and apply it to lifelong language learning. Pica oŸers the reader a sample of a discussion in which the teacher foregoes correcting errors so that the student can concentrate on communicating a message rather than on its correct form. That approach is intended to build ¶uency. Higgs and CliŸord were concerned that foregoing such error correction might lead to stultiªed language learning. If learners fail to demonstrate control of the morphology of the language, they cannot reach “minimal working proªciency,” level 3 on the international 0–5 proªciency scale. Thus they are labeled “terminal 2s.” Higgs and CliŸord raised this concern in the context of teaching approaches, but I should add that a similar concern accrues to ethnic speakers who are not schooled in the language or whose parents have a similar fear that correcting their children would provide a disincentive to use the language. Such speakers may have considerable ¶uency, but their control of appropriate vocabulary across domains of experience and their ability to control the morphology of the language is often so limited that they cannot be considered reliable speakers of the language. With this comment, we come back to some of the attitudes of anthropological linguists. In assessing the viability of small languages, we see some distinction between the natural transfer of language across generations and formal instruction in that language. Nettle and Romaine write that characteristics of Hawaiian learned in school “rather than naturally at home” (65) may threaten the vitality of the language and the preservation of its Polynesian characteristics. There is a long-standing divergence in approach to language between humanists, who tend to the prescriptive, and social scientists, who value the descriptive. That tradition is alive and well in our current set of chapters.
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Contributors
Ulrich Ammon is professor of linguistics and German at the University of Duisburg, with a particular interest in the sociology of language, dialectology, and the teaching of language. His recent publications include Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftsprache? (1998), reviewed in LPLP 1/2001, and Deutsche Sprache international (1999). Paul Bruthiaux has written on language policy and language education in TESOL Quarterly, Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, Language Problems & Language Planning, Current Issues in Language Planning, and Journal of Asian-Paciªc Communication. His work in written discourse analysis has appeared in Language & Communication, Applied Linguistics, and English Today. Currently a senior fellow in the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore, shortly he will join the Department of English at Texas A & M University. John Edwards is Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and editor of the Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development. His books include Language, Society and Identity (1985), Language and Disadvantage (1989) and Multilingualism (1994). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Mark Fettes is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. Along with broader interests in education, he is engaged in theoretical work on the ecology of language and imagination and in practical issues of language policy and planning, particularly in the ªeld of indigenous language revitalization and in the international Esperanto movement. He edits the Interlinguistics section of Language Problems & Language Planning and is the Executive Director of the Esperantic Studies Foundation. Björn Jernudd, now resident in Beijing, was until recently Chair Professor of Linguistics at Hong Kong Baptist University. Previously he held appointments
198 Contributors
at the National University of Singapore and the East-West Center in Honolulu. He has written extensively on language planning and management, language contact, and international communication. Luisa Maffi, a linguist and anthropologist, is co-founder and president of Terralingua, an international nonproªt organization based in Washington, D. C. She also is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Her recent publications include On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment (2001). Jacques Maurais conducts research in language policy and planning for the Conseil de la langue française of the Government of Québec and recently edited Géostratégies des langues (2001), a special issue of the periodical Terminogramme dealing with language policy issues on a global scale. Alamin Mazrui has taught at universities in Kenya, Nigeria and the United States, and is currently Associate Professor of African Studies at The Ohio State University. A specialist in the political sociology of languages and the interplay between literature and identity, he recently published The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (1998; with Ali A. Mazrui). Kurt E. Müller has held several appointments related to both language study and national security. He has been assistant director of foreign language programs for the Modern Language Association of America, executive vice president of the National Council on Foreign Language and International Studies, civil aŸairs advisor to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, for the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, and commandant of a language school for the US Army civil aŸairs community. Teresa Pica is Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, with a particular interest in language in education. She works collaboratively with teachers, administrators and students on questions that explore the interface of theory and practice in language learning and teaching. Timothy Reagan is Professor of Language, Literacy and Society in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include educational language policies, foreign language education, and the education of cultural and linguistic minority groups. He is most recently the
Contributors 199
author of Language, Education, and Ideology (2002) and, with Terry A. Osborn, of The Foreign Language Educator in Society (2002). Humphrey Tonkin is University Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Hartford. He is co-editor of the journal Language Problems & Language Planning and publishes and teaches in the ªelds of sociolinguistics and literary studies. He chairs the board of the American Forum for Global Education. His most recent book is a translation of Tivadar Soros, Maskerado: Dancing around Death in Nazi Hungary (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000; New York: Arcade, 2001).
Index
A aboriginal languages: see Australian languages, North American languages Abram, David 76 Adam, K. 28 Adamic language 1 Adamson, J. D. 124 Adler, Max 69 Afghanistan 3 African languages 7, 40, 99–113, 159; see also specific African languages Afrikaners 106 Ager, D. E. 16 Albanian 147, 148, 151, 171 Algonquin 90 Allen, Woody 141 allopatric speciation 82–83 Amazonia 76, 83n, 159 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) 172 Amerindians 161 Amhara 106 Amin, Samir 113 Ammon, Ulrich 2, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 153, 164, 165–166, 172, 173 Anderson, Benedict 47 Andrianarivo 68, 72 Angola 15 applied linguistics 118 Arabic 10, 11, 14, 18, 21, 23, 108, 112, 153, 171 Arens, Kate 118 Asher, John 116 Asian Development Bank 60, 61 Asian languages 59–66, 160; see also specific Asian languages
Asmah, Omar 59 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 63 Atikamekw 90 Australia 31, 36, 69, 100 Australian languages, 100 B Bahasa Indonesia 60; see also Indonesian Malay Bahasa Malaysia 59; see also Malay Balibar, Renée 92 Bamgbose, Ayo 12 Bangladesh 106 Bannister, Kelly 80, 81 Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen 119 Baron, Dennis 134 Barrett, Katherine 80, 81 Barzun, Jacques 133 Basque 91 Bauman, Zygmunt 49 Baumol, William 63 Beck, Don 50, 51 Beebe, Leslie 120 Behrens, H. 30 Belgium 89, 94, 160, 161 Benesch, Sarah 141 Bengal 11 Berducci, Dom 121 Bernard, Russell 69 Berns, M. 17 bilingualism 4, 38, 90, 105, 112, 118, 134– 136, 139, 152; see also multilingualism Billmyer, Kristine 120, 121, 127 biodiversity 72, 85, 95, 101 Blake-Ward, Mara 127
202 Index
Bley-Vorman, Robert 120, 130 Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 120 Bofman, Theodora 119, 120 Boli, John 50 Bolinger, D. 39 Booij, Geert 27 Bosniac: see Bosnian Bosnian 161 Bourdieu, Pierre 153 Brenzinger, Matthias 40, 104 Brinton, Donna 127 Brock, Cynthia 125 Brown, H. Douglas 116, 120, 121 Bruthiaux, Paul 161, 165 Buchheit, Lyn 127 Burt, Marina 118 Burton, Jill 124 C Calvet, Louis-Jean 2, 49 Cambodia 60–62 Canada 36, 81, 87–97, 125–126, 158 Catalan 43 Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems 2, 4–5, 162, 166 Chaudenson, Robert 2 Chaudron, Craig 115, 118 Chen, P. 15 China 3, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21 Chinese 11, 15–16, 20, 21, 33, 62, 153, 159, 166 Chisanga, T. 13 Chomsky, Noam 102, 142 Clahsen, Harald 119 Clifford, Ray 119, Clyne, Michael 26, 34 Cochran-Smith, Marilyn 123 Cohen, Andrew 120, 121 Cohn, Norman 1 Colombia 76 Commission of the European Communities 92–94, 165 Conant, James B. 133
Conrad, Andrew 103, 106 Conseil de la langue française 88, 96 conservation 75–76, 85 constructed languages 42; see also Esperanto, invented languages Content-Based Second Language Teaching (CBLT) 126–128 Cooper, Robert 103 Cornish 154 Coulmas, Florian 27 Counseling Learning 116 Court of Justice of the European Communities 92–94 Cowan, Chris 50, 51 Cowan, William 90 Craig, Barbara 140 Crawford, James 134 Cree 90 Croatia 161 Croatian 160–161 Crookes, Graham 123, 125, 129 Crystal, David 2, 3, 9, 23, 24, 26, 40, 54, 83n, 153, 155 Cuba 15 Curran, Charles 116 D D’Amico-Reisner, Lynne 120 Dahalo 70 Daniels, Harvey 139 Danish 43, 160 Dasgupta, Probal 56 Dauenhauer, Dora Marks 67 Dauenhauer, Richard 67 Davies, A. 13 Day, R. 103, 125, 129 Dayton Peace Accords 161 de Swaan, Abram 2, 3, 11–12, 49 decolonization 48 Deicke, Carla 125 Descartes, René 1 development 48, 63, 64–66 Dewey, John 143 Di Pietro, Robert 27
Index 203
Diamond, Jared 95 Dicker, Susan 134, 135 dictogloss 130 diglossia 38, 105 Dingwall, Silvia 30 disciplines, academic 162–164 Dixon, R. M. W. 69n., 71, 76 Dorian, Nancy 40, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75n, 102 Doughty, Catherine 116, 120, 121, 122, 129 Drapeau, Lynn 91 Dressler, Wolfgang 69 Dulay, Heidi 118 Durand, Charles-Xavier 2 Dutch 24, 42, 60, 160 Dutch English 34 Dutfield, Graham 79n E Eco, Umberto 1 ecology 40–41 Economist, The 15 Eddy, Peter 168 Edelsky, Carole 124 Edwards, John 4, 6, 40, 69, 152, 157–160 Egypt 108 Eisenstein, Miriam 120 elite closure 105 Ellis, Rod 121, 122, 123 Endangered Language Fund 72n endangered languages 40–41 Endangered Languages, Foundation for, 72n Endangered Languages, International Clearinghouse for, 72n Endangered Languages, Society for, 72n English 2, 4, 9–22, 24, 26, 34, 41–42, 43–44, 53–57, 59–63, 65–66, 70, 83n, 90–97, 103–112, 117, 119–120, 125–126, 140, 150, 153–162, 165–166 American 24, 26, 165 British 24, 26, 165 Dutch 34 Global 13, 21–23 Old 13
People’s 110 World 23, 53–57 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) 25, 33 English as a Second Language (ESL) 125, 137 English Only 149 equality of languages 87–88 Esperantism 53, 55–57 Esperanto 10–11, 16, 18, 21, 31, 32, 53, 56, 162, 166, 169 Ethiopia 105, 106 Ethnobiology, International Society of 78n European Community (EC) 94 European Union (EU) 3, 43, 54, 64, 92–93, 96–97 Evans, Bruce 127 F Faerch, Claus 120 Fairclough, Norman 141, 153 Falodun, Joseph 129 Fettes, Mark 23, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 77, 158, 161–162 Finland 48 Finnish 42, 43 First Nations 90 Fishman, Joshua 23, 39, 52, 89, 103, 106, 111, 159, 161 Flemish 160 Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) 138, 141, 152, Fotos, Sandra 130 France 16, 24, 25, 31, 32, 92, 94 Francophonie 23 Freeman, Rebecca 124 French 2, 11, 16, 20–21, 23, 42, 61, 87–97, 106–107, 120, 125, 137, 146, 151–153, 158, 162, 165, 172–173; see also Francophonie Friedman, Thomas 154 Frota, Sylvia 122 Fukuyama, Francis 49, 51, 108
204 Index
G Gaelic 40 Gal, Susan 69 Gambier, Yves 16, 20 Garrett, Peter 122 Gass, Susan 117, 120, 121, 129 Gattegno, Caleb 116 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft 37 Genesee, Fred 126 German 10, 11, 14–15, 17, 19–20, 21, 23, 30, 33, 34, 42, 97, 119, 137, 161, 162, 166, 167, 172, 173 Germany 19–20, 24, 25, 28–31, 32, 34, 93 Globalish 34, see also English globalization 38, 41–43, 72, 83, 92–96, 103, 109, 111, 154 Goh, Y. S. 20 Golombeck, Paula 124 Gomes de Matos, Francisco 33 Goodlad, John 143 Grabe, William 118 Graddol, David 2, 9, 23, 26, 117, 153 Graves, Clare 50 Greek 11, 159 Greenblatt, L. 124 Grenoble, Lenore 2, 40, 137 Grey, Julius 87 Gutman, Amy 143 H Haberland, Hartmut 33 Hagège, Claude 2 Hale, Ken 2, 69, 70, 89, 100 Hamel, Rainer Enrique 6 Harley, Birgit 125, 129 Harmon, David 69, 75n Harris, Roy 48 Haugen, Einar 139 Hausa 103, 109 Hawaiian 176 Hawkins, Edward 122 Heine, Bernd 104 Herron, Carol 120 Higgs, Theodore 119, 176
Hilgendorf, S. K. 19 Hill, Kenneth C. 69 Hill, Jane H. 68, 69, 83 Hills, Carla 94–95 Hindi 10, 11 Hirataka, F. 18 Hitler, Adolf 137 Holliday, Lloyd 121 Holmes, Janet 120, 121 Hong Kong 15, 26, 62–63, 160 Hornberger, Nancy 124 House, Juliane 120 House-Edmondson, Juliane 120 Hughes, Robert 37 human rights 78; see also language rights Hungary 17 Hunn, Eugene 82–83 Hutchinson, Gavin 15 Hyde, M. 13 Hymes, Dell 135 I Illich, Ivan 47 imperialism 32 India 105, 106 indigenous peoples 76, 78, 80; see also First Nations Indonesia 60, 160 Indonesian Malay 11 interlingualism 47–58 International Reading Association (IRA) 170–171 Internet 3, 5, 97 Inuit 90 invented languages 53; see also constructed languages, Esperanto Irish 42, 94 Italian 172 Italy 93 J Jackson, William T.H. 166 James, Carl 122 Janks, Hilary 141
Index 205
Japan 3, 17, 24, 25, 32, 108 Japanese 10, 11, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23, 33, 70, 112 Jernudd, Björn 160 Jo, Victoria 127 Jocks, Christopher 100 Johnson, Donna 122 Johnson, Samuel 13 Jones, A. 124 Jones, William 1 Julian, Mary Ann 127 K Kachru, Braj 24–25, 116 Kagan, S. 121 Kamwangamalu, Nkonko 13 Kanagy, Ruth 129 Kanuri 99 Kaplan, Robert 31, 118 Karlsson, Yngve 24 Kasper, Gabriele 120 Kedourie, Elie 43 Kelly, Louis 116 Kenya 70 Khmer 60–61 Kibbee, Douglas 12, 16, 20, 103 Kidigo 109 Kiswahili 10, 70, 103, 106, 108–109, 151 Kleineidam, H. 32 Kloss, Heinz 161 Knowlson, James 1 Korea 14 Krashen, Stephen 118, 122 Krauss, Michael 39, 40, 69, 70, 89, 95 Kreeft-Peyton, Joy 124 Krueger, Merle 140 Kuiper, Lawrence 124 Kumaravadivelu, B. 116 Kyrgyzstan 19 L Ladefoged, Peter 39–40, 41, 70, 71, 89, Lambert, Richard 71, 134, 135, 167, 171 language
and identity 36–39; see also language identity attitudes 134–135 choice 3, 4–7, 71 conservation 99–101; see also language revival death/decline 2, 38, 40–41, 70, 102– 103, 154; see also language endangerment, language loss, language at risk, linguicide, linguistic genocide development 65 discrimination 32, 164–166 diversity 2, 68–69, 72–74, 81–84, 89, 99–113, 158–159 ecology 158 endangerment 67, 72; see also language death, language decline, language loss, language at risk, linguicide, linguistic genocide identity 158–162; see also language and identity instinct 1 laws 19 learning and teaching 12, 21, 25, 30–31, 33, 60, 90, 104–105, 133–155, 167–176 loss 38, 67–69, 70, 100; see also language death/decline, language endangerment, language at risk, linguicide, linguistic genocide loyalty 6, 149 maintenance 38–39, 67, 76, 90–91 planning 1, 3, 38, 43, 45, 47–58 policy 7, 43, 44, 47–58 revival 38; see also language conservation rights 5, 6, 10; see also human rights shift 63, 158, 159, 161 universals 1, 100 at risk 36, 38; see also language death/ decline, language endangerment, language loss, linguicide, linguistic genocide
206 Index
Language Problems and Language Planning (LPLP) 2, 164 Laos 60, 62 Lapkin, Sharon 121 Laporte, Dominique 92 Larsen-Freeman, Diane 122, 138 Latin 2, 9–10, 11, 137, 146, 153, 166 Lazanov, Georgi 116 Leibniz, G. W. 1 Leopold, Werner 118 Lepore, Jill 1 Levin, Lennart 115, 118 Lewis, Nora 121 Lightbown, Patsy 120, 125, 127 Lincoln-Porter, Felicia 121 linguicide 70; see also language death/ decline, language endangerment, language loss, language at risk, linguistic genocide linguicism 27 linguistic diversity: see language diversity linguistic genocide 103; see also language death/decline, language endangerment, language loss, language at risk, linguicide linguistic relativism 101 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 72n Linnell, Julian 121, 129 Lins, Ulrich 168–169 Lippi-Green, Rosina 146 literacy 76, 106 Lloyd-George, David 153 Lockhart, Charles 117 Lodge, R. A. 16 Lombraña, J. V. 14 Long, Michael 116, 121, 122, 125, 127, 129 Lord, Nancy 67 Loschky, Lester 120, 130 Lutoro 109 Luxemburg 94 Lytle, Susan 123 M Macau 15 Macedo, Donald 134
Mackey, Alison 120, 121, 129 Mackinson, J. 124 Maffi, Luisa 40, 72, 73, 73n, 76, 77, 79, 85, 68, 158, 159, 163, 169 Malay 10 Malaysia 59, 106, 160 Mali 99 Mandarin: see Chinese Mandingo 99 Manger, Thomas 160–161 Manriquez, L. Frank 67 Maori 108 Marinova-Todd, S. 134n Marshall, D. B. 134n Marx, Karl 109 Maurais, Jacques 88, 158, 159, 161, 164– 165 Mazrui, Alamin 105, 109, 158, 159 Mazrui, Ali 105, 106, 109 McArthur, Tom 103 McElhanon, Ken 160 Meinhoff, Ulrike 117 Meisel, Jurgen 119 Met, Myriam 126 Mexico 14, 95 Meyer v. Nebraska 167 Meyer, Piet 138, 138n Microsoft 153, 155 Mitchif 91 Mithun, Marianne 100 modernity 49, 108 modernization 17–21, 38, 47–49 Mohawk 90 Montagnais 90, 91 Moore, Denny 75 Morgan, M. 118 Morgenthaler, Lynelle 121 moribund languages 69 mother-tongue education 48 Mufwene, Salikoko 71 Mühlhäusler, Peter 76, 78, 82, 83, 84 multilingualism 52, 54, 57, 96; see also bilingualism Mumford, Lewis 146
Index 207
Munro, V. R. 12 Murray, Heather 30 Myers-Scotton, Carol 105 N National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 170–171 National Standards in Foreign Language Education 139 nationalism 47, 105–107, 111 Natural Approach 122 Navarro, F. A. 9 Nelde, Peter 161 Nelson, Cecil 27 Netherlands 23, 27, 93 Nettle, Daniel 2, 40, 49, 101, 111, 137, 158, 160, 176 Neumann, Alfred 137 New Zealand 108 Newman, Jeanne 121 Newton, Isaac 1 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 107 Nicolary, Sharon 127 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 50, 67, 72 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 92, 95–97 North American languages 88, 90, 100, 161; see also specific North American languages North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 165 Norway 48 Norwegian 160 Nunan, David 130 Nunberg, Geoffrey 3 Nylenna, Magne 24 O O’Hagan, Minako 55 Oda, Masaki 31 Olshtain, Elite 120, 124 Omar, Dato Asmah bin Haji 59 oral culture 76–77
oral language 102 oral tradition 159 Ortega, Lourdes 122 Osborn, Terry A. 134, 141, 147 Ovid 155 Ozolins, U. 19 P Pakir, A. 13 Paninos, Diana 121 Papua New Guinea 160 Pashtu 147 pathetic fallacy 41 Pattanayak, Devi 69, 109 Pawley, Andrew 75, 85 Peacock, James 81 Pearl, Stephen 166 Pennycook, Alastair 126 Petzold, R. 17 Phillipson, Robert 7, 27, 32, 52, 70, 83n Pica, Teresa 116, 121, 122, 127, 129, 130, 174–176 Pienemann, Manfred 119 Pierce, Bonnie 110 Pinker, Steven 1 Pirahaõ 76, 159 Piron, Claude 31, 56 Plann, Sandra 121 Plough, India 124 pluralism 37 plurilingualism: see multilingualism Pool, Joanthan 23, 32–33, 53, 56, 164 Portuguese 10, 11, 76, 97, 107, 120, 159 Posey, Darrell 71, 74, 78, 79, 101 postmodernity 51 Potter, Lynn 125 Prabhu, N. S. 17, 18, 117, 129 precautionary principle 80, 84, 163 Preed, Allen 101 President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies 148–149 Provençal 43 punctuated equilibrium 69
208 Index
Q Québec 87–88, 90, 92, 95–96 Qur’an 105 R Rampton, M. B. H. 24 Rand Corporation 148–149 Reagan, Timothy 134, 141, 147, 163, 167– 169, 171, 174–175 Richards, Jack 116, 117, 138 Riis, Povl 24 Rivers, William 167–168 Robb, John 68 Robins, Robert 40, 69 Rodgers, Theodore 116, 138 Roen, Duane 122 Romaine, Suzanne 2, 40, 49, 101, 111, 137, 158, 160, 176 Rotaetxe, Karmele 91 Rounds, Patricia 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 159 Russia 15, 32 Russian 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 33, 42, 153 Rutherford, William 122 Rwanda 50 Ryan, Frank 140 S Sachs, Wolfgang 48, 51 Safran, W. 16, 20 Sánchez, A. 14 Sanskrit 11 Sapir, Edward 101 Sato, Charlene 116, 122 Saussure, Ferdinand de 37, 91 Scandinavian countries 25 Scandinavian languages 24, 160; see also specific Scandinavian languages Schachter, Jacqueline 117 Schmidt, Richard 120, 122 scientific discourse 29–30 Scotland 40 Seifart, Frank 76
Selepet 160 Sen, Amartya 64–65 Serbian 160–161, 171 Serbo-Croatian: see Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian Shah, Ismail 127 Shapson, Stan 125, 129 Sharwood Smith, Michael 122, 127 Silent Way 116 Simon, Paul 133, 137 Singapore 62, 160 Skudlik, Sabine 28 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 7, 27, 52, 68, 70, 71, 77n, 78 Slavin, Richard 121 Snow, Marguerite 127, 134n social life of language 36 sociolinguistics 36, 120–121 Soder, Roger 143 Solé i Durany, Juan 94 Somali 82n, 112, 147, 148, 171 Somalia 106 Sommer, Gabriele 104 Sorensen, A. P. 83n South Africa 7, 50, 106, 110, 138 Soviet Union 15; see also Russia Spada, Nina 120, 125, 127 Spain 32 Spanish 5, 10, 14, 19, 21, 23, 33, 42, 93, 97, 112, 137–138, 153, 155, 162, 172, 173 spelling reform 15 standard language 12–16, 48 standardization 24 Standards for the English Language Arts 170–171 Stillman, Robert 1 Suggestopedia 116 Swaffar, Janet 118 Swahili: see Kiswahili Swain, Merrill 121, 130 Swales, J. M. 11 Swedish 42, 63–64 Swift, Jonathan 13 Switzerland 30, 89
Index 209
T Taiwan 14 Tajik 147 Takahashi, M. T. 120 Tanzania 106, 108 Taylor, Charles 48, 50 teacher-training 90–91 technologism 54, 57 technology 7, 43–44, 73, 96–97 Terralingua 72, 85n Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) 30 Thomas, Geroge 50 Thornton, William 1 Tidy, Michael 106 Tomasello, Michael 120 Tonkin, Humphrey 11, 18, 141, 153, 168– 174 Total Physical Response 116 translation 29, 32–33, 48, 54–5, 57, 93 transmodernity 51 Truchot, Claude 25 Tse, J. K. P. 15 Twain, Mark 133 Twi 99 U U. S. English 136 Uhlenbeck, Eugenius 40, 69 Uliss-Weltz, Robin 120 United Kingdom 13–14, 26, 27, 31, 165 United Nations 32, 36, 55, 64, 79, 153, 165, 166, 169 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 40, 48, 69, 72, 79 United States 3, 5, 9, 13–14, 26, 31–32, 69, 83n, 111–113, 133–143, 147–149, 152, 162, 171–174 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 78 universal grammar 1, 70
V van Lier, Leo 123, 134 Vandenbroucke, J. P. 23 Varonis, Evangeline 121 Verspoor, Marjolijn 101 Vietnam 3, 15 Vincent, A. 124 W Wajnryb, Ruth 130 Wallraff, Barbara 112 Washburn, Gay 127 Welsh 43 Wesche, Marjorie 126 Westland, Ella 154 Whaley, Lindsay 2, 40, 137 White, L. 125 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 101 Wilber, Ken 50, 51 Williams, Colin 105 Williams, Jessica 120, 122 Wilson, Woodrow 152 Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth 69 Wolfensohn, James D. 64–65 Wolfson, Nessa 120 Wong Fillmore, L. 121 Woodbury, A. C. 100 World Bank 64 World Trade Organization (WTO) 50 Wright, S. 19 Wurm, Stephen 70, 99, 100 Wyzner, Eugenius 166 Y Yoruba 112 Yugoslavia 161 Z Zamenhof, Ludwik L. 1 Zent, S. 76 Zhang, Shuquiang 125
