LL-L "Language survival" 2002.09.29 (02) [D/E]
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L O W L A N D S - L * 29.SEP.2002 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic
V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: burgdal32admin <burgdal32 at pandora.be>
Subject: LL-L "History" 2002.09.28 (02) [E]
Lowlands-L heeft op zaterdag, 28 sep 2002 om 19:00 (Europe/Brussels)
het volgende geschreven:
> From: erek gass <egass at caribline.com>
> Subject: LL-L "History" 2002.09.27 (10) [E]
>
> It is pretty obvious that languages can disappear. Although Scots
> (which
> seems increasingly to be the major user of this discussion group) has
> survived, you need only look as far as the Highlands, asf, to see that
> Gaelic survives only with concerted effort, and not by natural
> acceptance.
> I was looking at the Nova scotia site just the other day, and noted
> that
> keeping Gaelic alive there is a difficult task (and I use the word task
> advisedly). Here in the US, there isn't a single Native American
> which has
> survived (and many have not!) that is not in some state, whether real
> or
> potential, of demise. Locally, Deitsch (that is, "Pennsylvania
> Dutch") has
> al but disappeared during my lifetime. It was healthy when I was boy
> less
> than 50 years ago.
>
> It is natural for languages to change. Old High German was not forced
> out,
> it merely evolved into modern German. Frankish (and by that mean the
> Frankish of France) simply disappeared even though it was the language
> of
> the successful people!
Excuse me,
Frankish (of France) did not disappear! It evolved in old Flemish
towards Flemish . When i look into a French etymological dictionnary
and i find a word of Frankish origine, mostly i can perfectly
understand it.
One example:
bleu:du Francique *blao (Flemish blao / Dutch blauw)
blanc: du Francique *blank (Flemish blank / Dutch: blank-> wit)
And we have to be very carefull with the explenations of the French
books because they tend to mix a lot of languages like Francique/(old)
Flemish/(old) Dutch/ High and low German/ (old) English / Normandish
etc...
Perhaps it would be interesting to send to our Lowland site all the
French words who are derived from one of the lowland tongues.
Groetjes
Luc Vanbrabant
Oekene
----------
From: John M. Tait <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "History" 2002.09.27 (10) [E]
Ole Stig wrote:
>> 90% of the World's around 6.000 languages are moribund and will disappear
>> within this century, according to the estimates of Michael Krauss. I'm
>> afraid a number of Lowlands languages are among them. The
>> decendants of the
>> speakers of these languages will carry on the genes of their foremothers,
>> but not their languages.
Regarding Sandy and Ron's comments on this, I think there is a major
difference in the case of Scots, and certainly in the case of Shetlandic,
within the last twenty years or so. The difference might be described in
terms of stages. When I was young, Shetlandic was the only language anyone
in my community spoke, with the exceptions of the minister, the doctor, and
the schoolteacher. In communities where Scots has rather less prestige, many
of those who learn it, learn it not at home, but in the playground. In other
words, the children of 'nice' parents learn the language from the children
of those who are not so concerned that their children learn to speak
'proper.' When the number of 'good' parents outweighs the 'bad' parents -
who, to adopt the point of view of the 'good' parents, care so little for
their children that they burden them with a sub-standard speech form - then
the language is moribund.
I could give many examples of the above.
Many of those Scots speakers in the Scots Language movement (and there are
few enough of those) learned their Scots in the playground rather than at
home. This reflects the fact that those who learn Scots at home are rather
more likely to be of a 'lower' socio-economic scale, and are therefore less
likely to become involved in a language movement.
The longer my son stayed at school, the less Scots and the more English he
spoke, because his Scots speaking friends tended to be less academic and
therefore to leave school earlier. Those native Scots speakers who remained,
I noticed, tended to adopt English, as they were outnumbered by English
speakers. (This would have been unthinkable in Shetland when I was at
school.)
I know a Scots speaking woman who has just qualified as a primary teacher.
Part of her final year course was a module in 'Doric', which she is
extremely interested in. However, her own children speak only English, in
spite of being brought up in places like Portsoy and Huntly. She explained
that she had brought them up to speak English not because she had anything
against the Doric, but because she regarded it as good parenting.
My small nephew said to me 'there are some children in my class who speak
Scottish, and nobody can understand a word they say.' Where does he live?
Not Edinburgh or Inverness or Glasgow, but Aberchirder, aka Fogie Loan, in
the heart of rural Aberdeenshire. His parents both speak Scots to each other
but English to the children, as do his grandparents. Scots as the language
of the playground doesn't seem to be thriving there.
A friend in Shetland said that his nephew's school report had said that the
class often had a good laugh at the way he spoke. Nobody seemed to be
offended by this.
A colleague, originally English and now a Scots speaker, told me that she
very much regretted learning to speak Scots upon coming to Scotland, which
she had only done to avoid being made fun of by the other children. She
could, of course, speak perfect English as well. It was the fact of learning
to speak Scots at all, not an inability to speak English, which she
regretted.
In other words, Scots has been maintained in Scotland only by virtue of the
fact that the ignorant - again, adopting the prevalent point of view - have
traditionally outnumbered the educated. Now that so many people go to
university, or aspire to do so, the vast pool of ignorance in which it
throve is draining away.
Scots is represented by the most influential parts of the Scots Language
Movement - themselves mostly middle class English speakers - as the
unwritten speech of the working classes, an attitude which, as well as
enabling them to be arbitrers of a language which they define as belonging
to someone else, can only increase the above tendencies.
John M. Tait.
http://www.wirhoose.co.uk
----------
From: Ole Stig Andersen <osa at olestig.dk>
Subject: Future? (was: "History")
I wrote
> 90% of the World's around 6.000 languages are moribund and will disappear
> within this century, according to the estimates of Michael Krauss. I'm
> afraid a number of Lowlands languages are among them.
Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org] replied, among other things
> Like most "futurology" such estimates tend to turn out to be nonsense.
Prediction over prediction, huh?
Though I would love it to have been the case, I'm afraid that a general
mistrust of "futurology" is not quite up to the task as far as the World
Wide Language Death that we are currently experiencing is concerned. At
present humanity is losing lgs to the tune of 1- one - a week
(The latest high-profile case I've come across is Kakadu (Gagadju/Gagudju),
a North Australian lg that died May 23rd 2002 together with it's last
speaker, Big Bill Neidjie. The minutes of the Condolence Motion carried in
the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly are published here:
http://www.icomos.org/australia/images/pdf/Big_Bill.pdf )
A lg faces an assortment of challenges on its fall to extinction, among
which are:
-. Reduction of morphological complexity
-. Loss of function domains, ending up with only ritual/religious functions
-. The mean age of the users/speakers rise over time
-. The new generation doesn't learn the lg.
-. The number of speakers dwindle until
- the lg is only spoken/remembered by a few elderly people
And more could be added
I would surmise that a lg that is no longer acquired by children is
moribund. This is the case for more than a thousand of the world's lgs
today. Hundreds of lgs TODAY are only spoken by 1-2-5 old people.
Commissioned by UNESCO in 1991 the eskimologist Michael Krauss of Fairbanks
Univ, Alaska, did not base his estimate of impending lg mass death on some
fancy private catastrophism. He based it on the known number of lgs not
transferred to or used by the new generations.
> The death of Scots within a generation or two has been
> predicted for almost as long as the language has existed.
Citing Scots as a counterexample to the global trend of Massive Language
Extinction, is a bit like claiming that New Guinea birds of paradise can't
be endangered since there are lots of sparrows in my garden.
Some of the Lowlands lgs are among the world's largest, obviously alfa-lgs
like English, Dutch and Afrikaans, but also Scots, which has an estimated
(depending on your ideology of what constitutes a lg vs a dialect) more than
1 million speakers, though hardly in all domains.
If we say, for convenience of calculation, that there is 6 bn people and
6.000 lgs, then a lg has in average 1 mio speakers, and Scots is above that
level. Together with only a few hundred other lgs. The vast majority of the
world's lgs have far below the world average of speakers, many hundreds only
af few hundred.
The level of endangerment of any lg should primarily be gauged by the age
distribution of its speakers, secondarily by the absolute size of the speech
community and thirdly by the range of domains in which it can be used.
(Maybe 2 and 3 should change place.)
What do we know about the age distribution of the speakers of beta-lgs that
are of this list's interest?:
Ap=Appalachian
B=Brabantish
F=Frisian
L=Limburgish
LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German)
S=Scots
Sh=Shetlandic
V=(West)Flemish
Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
The indigeneous lgs of North America, Australia, the Soviet Union have been
effectively eradicated in less than 200 years, mainly through warfare,
deprivation of livelihood, forced (and voluntary) migrations, missionary and
school policies, and kidnapping of children (boarding schools and adoption
schemes). Such processes are still in full swing.
New Guinea still has an astounding 1100 or so lgs, one sixth of the Worlds's
stock, but they are all so small and under such ferocious attack by the
local versions of international civilisation, that just a handfuld or two of
them can be expected to survive this century. In Africa wars and famines
have had and will have a decastating effect on amultitude of lgs. All over
the Third World urban centres grow unchecked and draw "weak" lgs into
uselessnes and oblivion.
etc Indonesia, etc India, etc Africa, etc Latin America, etc ...
The proces of losing lingustic diversity can possibly be counteracted in
some pockets, if the speakers "decide" to maintain (i.e. use) their lg, AND
if they have the means to do it.
As this list itself bears witness to, the Internet is a marvellous
instrument for storing and sharing knowledge and bringing otherwise small
and isolated groups of people and interests together, and it is possible
that such larger virtual communities will be able to keep this or that
endangered lg alive against odds. Unfortunately the Internet is not
accessible where most of the language eradication is taking place. But in
some pockets it is:
Gaelic might turn out to be such an example, though I doubt it. It is spoken
by about 60.000 mainly elderly people at the fringes of Scottish economy.
Though Gaelic enjoys considerable public respect, funding and promotion, it
is not taught much to children and cannot be used much for economic
purposes. Thus I think that even this nurtured endangered lg has very hard
times ahead.
And from a diversity point of view I think that the likely loss of Gaelic is
a far greater impoverishment than the far less likely loss of, say, Scots,
would be (no offense ;-), since ALL the Celtic lgs are endangered.
Michael Krauss' prediction was that the next millennium may see as few as
600 living lgs left on Earth. Some experts are more pessimistic, others
less, but no estimate leaves any doubt that we are entering an age of
massive unprecedented destruction of the most fundamental part of World
Heritage, the lingustic diversity.
Strangely, the current catastrophe - whatever it's exact extent may be - has
not attracted much attention in the linguist community. At least not until
recently. But now the British Lisbet Rausing Charitable Foundation has given
£ 20 million over 10 years creating the Endangered Languages Documentation
Project (ELDP) at School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
(http://www.eldp.soas.ac.uk)
The massive donation, which is said to be among the largest in Humanities
ever, envisages to describe a total of 100 dying lgs, about a third of the
number of lgs Krauss' predicts will disappear in the same period. Each lg
will be described at at price of £ 150,000 a piece. But certainly not saved!
It is characteristic of the shallow public AND professional understanding of
the problem that even serious media like Scientific American and The
Guardian have hailed the Rausing donation as a measure against Langauge
Death. That it not the case at all, the donation specifies expressly that
only lgs with a few speakers left are to be studied.
Similarly this year the German Volkswagenstiftung donated 3,5 mio Euro für
die Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen, maninly to the establishment of
Archives on endangered languages at the Max-Planck-Institut für
Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen.
Also the scholarly literature is growing, e.g.:
R.M.W Dixon: The Rise and Fall of Languages, Cambridge University Press,
1997 (especially about the Australian lgs)
David Crystal: Language Death, Cambridge University Press, 2000
Andrew Dalby: Language in Danger. How language loss threatens our future.
Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2002 (Includes very interesting descriptions
of lg death in Ancient and Classical Europe, Latins advance etc.)
And there are some places on the WWW, e.g.
Terralingua: Partnerships for Linguistic & Biological Diversity
http:/www.terralingua.org
Foundation For Endangered Languages, http://www.ogmios.org/
The Endangered Languages Fund, http://sapir.ling.yale.edu/~elf/index.html
Ole Stig Andersen
http://www.olestig.dk/sprogpolitik
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