LL-L "Language varieties" 2002.04.21 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 21.APR.2002 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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 A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian L=Limburgish
 LS=Low Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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From: "John M. Tait" <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2002.04.19 (12) [E]

Ole Stig Andersen wrote:

>Ethnologue is an instrument of the Evangelical Christian missionary
>thrust.
>It is a close companion of the Summer Institute of Lingustics, notorious
>for
>their culturcidal activities in Latin America the last half century.

I find this a surprising statement. Well, no I don't - but that's
because I'm a cynic!

The idea that Christian missionaries destroy local cultures is, in my
opinion, a myth. Most of the communities which missionaries christianise
are under severe and imminent threat anyway - the missionaries may
merely get there slightly ahead of the miners, farmers, loggers, alcohol
merchants, coke (the drink!) baby milk and cigarette salesmen. The idea
that, if it were not for missionaries, there would be endless thriving
primitive societies living in primal bliss (presumably this could be
achieved without allowing them to continue unfortunate practices such as
headhunting and cannibalism, while preserving those aspects of their
culture which we westerners find attractive!) is a misrepresentation -
these societies would simply succumb to the pressures of
colonialisation, as most of them probably do anyway, christianised or
not.

 I remember seeing a TV programme about a  society in Papua New Guinea
that had been studied by an anthropologist and subsequently
christianized by Australian missionaries. It wasn't the fact that they
were now sitting around singing hymns and taking palm-oil communion,
instead of killing and eating the inhabitants of neighbouring villages
as they had been doing a few years ago, that made me cringe. It was the
fact that the missionaries were getting them to build a concrete
building to house a computer (this was in the days when computers needed
houses) rather than adapting their own perfectly adequate native
longhouses. I could see that it wouldn't be very long before death by
cannibalism would become death by alcohol, sugar, and civilised
carcinogens. Whether the life expectancy would increase in spite of
these is a good question.

Another myth is that missionaries simply pave the way for western
culture. The fact is that western culture would get there sooner or
later anyway. The question is - how well prepared are the people going
to be to deal with it when it comes? Experience shows that the
alternative to christianisation is not primal bliss, but usually
persecution, alcoholism, commercial exploitation, and a low life
expectancy. Not that christianisation prevents these things - although I
believe it can alleviate them - but the primitive culture would succumb
to them anyway. As regards language, unless a native language is given a
written form and people are persuaded to be proud of it, it is likely to
become, just before it dies altogether, a language which is spoken only
by males when drunk (as I have heard of one native language in Canada.)

I am faintly amused and faintly angered by the implication, which I have
often come across, that Bible-translating missionaries (mainly the
Summer Institute of Linguistics) are in some way an anti-cultural
inhibition to the pure motives of academic anthropologists and
linguists. As far as I am aware, anthropologists and academic linguists
regard such cultures as resources to mine for their own descriptive
purposes, one criterion being that the status quo should be left as
undisturbed as possible. As this cannot be in order to preserve such a
culture from westernisation - which is in any case inevitable - the only
reason can be so that it remains, for as long as possible, a source of
dissertations. Of course, the process of westernisation and the
accompanying changes in language can then become material for other
dissertations.

As far as I know, only missionaries actually study languages with the
aim of giving them a written form, and teaching their speakers to become
literate in them. I don't know enough about their practices to know
whether they do this only by default - ie, whether they would bother if
everyone in a community already knew a language in which they could read
the Bible - although I gather that there is often the aim of translating
the Bible into mother tongues even where this is the case. In any event,
the peoples in question then become literate in their own language, as
well as typically in the dominant language of their country. What they
then do with these skills is up to them. The idea that they should be
left without such skills for as long as possible is simply making them
more vulnerable to the inevitable onslaught of western culture when it
comes. (I have read of one instance where a South American Indian who
had been taught to read by missionaries, upon being presented by some
incomers with a title deed which gave them rights to his land,
scrutinised it and said, 'It is a very fine Singer sewing machine
guarantee!'  But this, of course, must have been shameless missionary
propaganda to cover up the malignant intentions of their true motives!)

I feel that the attitude which derides this - seeming to believe that
illiteracy is an intrinsic part of non-dominant languages - is very
similar to that which I come across in Scotland. In a conference about
the culture of the Highlands and Islands the question came up of fairly
representing, in a course on Scottish culture, the various religious
faiths practiced in the Highlands in particular. One scholar - who was
not from the Highlands - commented 'Why should we prefer one
superstition to another.' This showed a complete failure to understand
that, however unimportant religious differences may be to Edinburgh
academics, they are very important in the Western Isles, and therefore a
study of Highland culture has to take this seriously, as Highlanders
take it seriously. To simply concentrate on those aspects of culture
which you, as a city-dwelling outsider, consider to be worthy of your
consideration, is to show how external your views are to the culture you
are purporting to study. (I consider myself to be fortunate to have been
trained in a discipline where other cultures were studied in their own
right and as a whole, not as a prosthesis of western pseudo-liberal
ideology.)

This is not, of course, representative of the practices of competent
modern anthropologists - rather, it is reminiscent of the 'armchair
anthropologists' of the 19th Century. But this scholar also took a
derisive view of the idea that the Scots language should be taught as
other languages are taught - ie, with a view to making their speakers
literate in them. These views seem to me to be part and parcel of the
same ideology - an ideology which has an external view of minority
cultures, which it wishes to preserve, or otherwise patronise, in a sort
of theme-park state which other western liberal cultural tourists can
appreciate. Has anyone seen the Truman Show?

One or two further points:

>Since the Ethnologuers' mission is to spread their Word everywhere, they
wouldn't risk to miss a language

This is unlikely to be the case. I have known of American missionaries
to Belgium, and we now see African missionaries coming to Scotland. I'm
not aware that Bible translation was high on their list of priorities!
Missionaries are not interested in translating the Bible into minority
European language where everybody can read another language fluently (as
I say above, I'm not sure that this is the case in non-European places.)
It is much more likely that the increased inventory of languages is
owing to more communities thinking on their languages as languages as
they become aware that they are losing them.

>Now also missioning and researching aggressively in e.g. Nigeria, the
Philippines and the former Soviet Union, their conduct seem somewhat
less malignant though no less destructive.

I wonder what they are destroying? Native cultures, or a western
pseudo-liberal view of what native cultures should be?

John M. Tait.

----------

From: "Randy Elzinga" <frisiancow at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2002.04.20 (02) [E]

With respect to the quote below, I recall recently reading an article on
the
internet about trying to revive, or prevent from further demise, the
Pennsylvania Dutch language, however I cannot remember the location of
the
article.  In it, one person is quoted saying the knowing Deitsch was an
asset during the war, although I don't remember if it was WWI or WWII,
since, as a soldier for the American army, he was able to understand the
German soldiers.  In this article someone, perhaps the same person, is
quoted as saying that they stopped speaking the language in public
because
of the social stigma of the "backwards country folk" attached to the use
of
the language.

This seems to be a common theme in minority or non-power languages.  I
know
that it was true, and still is, although I hope to a lesser degree, in
the
case of my ancestral language, (Westlauwers) Frisian.  From what I've
learned as a member of this list, the same stigma holds for languages
such
as Low Saxon (which may be another of my ancestral languages, since my
grandmother was either from Groningen or Drenthe), Scots and others.

Another common theme is the lack of situations where it is a necessity
to
speak the minority or non-power language.  There are few Frisian
speakers, I
presume, who don't also speak Dutch, so they can get by quite well
without
ever needing to use Frisian.  My mother's Dutch, for example, is better
than
her Frisian despite Frisan being her first language, since, upon moving
to
Canada, she was part of community with monolingual Dutch people or
bilingual
in Dutch and English, rather than a specifically Frisian community.
Again I
rely on information from this list, but I get the impression that the
case
is similar for speakers of Scots, Low Saxon, Zeelandic, Limburgish etc.
Most speakers of one of these languages will also speak English, Dutch,
German, etc, whatever the power language is.  This by itself may not
kill
the languages, but it takes away motivation to continue speaking them
when
you can get by without them.

Randy Elzinga.
frisiancow at hotmail.com

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Randy, you wrote above:

> There are few Frisian speakers, I
> presume, who don't also speak Dutch, so they can get by quite well
> without ever needing to use Frisian.

Uh-hmm ... (How do you write clearing of the throat to attract
attention?)  Let me tweak this ever so slightly by saying "There are few
*Westerlauwer* Frisian speakers, I presume, who don't also speak Dutch
..."  Frisian is used in Germany as well, and none of its speakers there
is not also fluent in German, and many are fluent in Low Saxon (Low
German) as well.

Cheers!
Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: Ole Stig Andersen <osa at olestig.dk>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2002.04.19 (07) [E]

> From: "Mathieu. van Woerkom" <Mathieu.vanWoerkom at student.kun.nl>

> What is this Ethnologue anyhow?
> Their information on the Netherlands and
> Belgium is indeed plain wrong.

So is their information on Denmark. The latest online edition lists
seven
lgs (plus the sign lg) and three of them are outright weird. Under the
state
of Denmark Danish, Greenlandic, Faroese and German are indigenous lgs.
But
Ethnologue also lists three more rather strange lgs: Jutish, Skåne and
Traveller Danish.

They achieve this near doubling of the number of lgs in Denmark by their
usual lg preference for elevating dialects to language status. More than
four years ago we discussed the Ethnologuers' discovery of "Jutish" on
this
list, so allow me to quote myself from a posting from Wednesday, January
28,
1998 5:01:54

> There are, of course, all sorts of isoglosses criss-crossing the Danish lg
area. But all Danes know that in Jylland (Jutland) we speak Jysk
(Jutish).
Speakers of the other dialects can mock Jysk intonation.
>      There are three main sub-dialects of Jysk: Oestjysk (East Jutish),
Vestjysk (West Jutish) and Soenderjysk (Southern Jutish).
>     Thus the labelling ³Jutish² in Ethnologue is misleading, as is
³Jutlandish².... It is an indisputable fact of the Danish lg that the
term
ŒJysk¹ covers all dialects in Jutland. Thus I generally refer to my own
mother-dialect as Jysk, only specifying OestJysk or Aarhusiansk when
precision (or fancy) requires  so.
>     Substituting Jysk for Soenderjysk is misleading if SJ is a dialect of
Danish, since other dialects in Jylland are also Jysk. On the other
hand, if
SJ is to be a separate lg it borders on the absurd to call it Jysk,
since
this still leaves a main group of dialects of Danish called collectively
by
that very same name.

> Whether Soenderjysk SHOULD be considered a separate lg, is quite another
matter. Using the best of criteria - ask the natives - it is NOT. They
consider themselves to be Danes (some of them Germans), and their lg to
be a
more or less clearly distinguishable variant of Danish, not of German.
IMHO
self-designation is a rather better criterion for distinguishing lgs
than
the ³linguistic² definition of Œinherent intelligibility¹.
>     ³Real Soenderjysk" is acknowledged by other Danes to be more or less
³difficult to understand² (more pejoratively ³half German²). But so are
a
couple of other peripheral subsub-dialects, Ravjysk (Amber Jutish) and
Vendelbomaal (North Jutish), not to mention Bornholmsk, all three in
urgent
need of a Bible translation before they die out. I wonder why Ethnologue
doesn¹t need a survey, too, of these three separate lgs with several
thousands of speakers each, still? Shouldn¹t we inform Ethnologue of
their
existence? Before it's too late?

I wrote this more than four years ago, and, believe it or not, in the
next
edition of Ethnologue Bornholmsk really WAS added to the list (not my
merit,
I pray), AND mistakenly christened Skåne. (We also discussed the plight
of
Skånsk (Scanian) between Danish and Swedish on this list four years
ago).

I'm looking forward to a future edition where they will have discovered
that
Greenlandic "is" in fact not one, but two lgs (West and East) or even
better: three (+ North).

There are two more tiny indigenous Lowlands lgs in Southern Jutland
which
have strangely eluded Ethnologue: Frisian and Plattysk (Low Saxon). Both
are
very near extinction in Denmark, or already over the edge, but so is
Traveller Danish, which they DO list.

I find it somewhat disturbing that a widely used reference source as
Ethnologue is so misleading on matters I DO know about. I can't help
wondering about the quality of their information on countries and lgs I
know
less or nothing about. I do use Ethnologue, though, but with caution,
aware
of their taxonomic bias and shaky statistics.

>From the introduction to the entry on Denmark we find this reassuring
information
> Literacy rate 99%.
But in my field, adult education, it is normally estimated that at least
a
quarter of a million adult Danes are functional illiterates, out of a
population of 5,3 mio.

And, no wonder, taxonomies like Ethnologue face dire difficulties with
the
modern migration.:

>  Also includes English 10,000, Western Farsi 9,000, Western Frisian, Iu Mien,
Kirmanjki, Turkish 30,000, Romani 3,000, from the former Yugoslavia
10,000,
from India or Pakistan 4,000.

But far closer to reality comes this list of non-indigenous lgs in
Denmark:
(The figures I give below are rather crude but informed estimates based
mainly on the citizenship and naturalization statistics, since Danish
census
information does not include lgs)

(Swedish)
(Norwegian)
Turkish 50.000
Arabic 45.000
South Slavic 40.000 (includes Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian & Macedonian)
English, at least 30.000
Kurdish 30.000 (Kurmanji & Sorani)
German, at least 20.000 (besides indigenous German)
North Indian 18.000 (includes Urdu, Punjabi & Hindi)
Polish, at least 15.000
Somali 15.000
Persian 13.000 (Farsi and Dari)
Vietnamese 11.000
Tamil 10.000

Next come Albanian/Tosk, Berber, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French,
Icelandic,
Italian, Pilipino/Tagalog, Spanish/Castillano, Thai/Lao (surely not in
that
order, though).
Romani is way down on the list
Iu Mien is negligible or non-existent. The country and language
information
in Ethnologue is cross-tabulated, so in the language entry on Iu Mien (a
Miao lg of Southern China) you'll also find Denmark listed as one of the
countries where it is spoken! Conversely you'll find no reference to
Denmark
under any of the absurdly many entries on Arabic (35)

> Deaf population 3,500 to 314,548 (1998).
Must be a typo of some sort

> Diversity index 0.05.
You bet.

> Data accuracy A2, B.
Well ...

Ole Stig Andersen

http://www.olestig.dk

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