ELL: Re: first vs. native language

[Paul_Lewis at SIL.ORG]

Both Julia and Victor make good and helpful points.

For some time now, I have been curious about the phenomena surrounding many
revitalization movements where identity, previously taken for granted based
on biological, cultural, and historical affinities, becomes increasingly a
matter of ideology. So one begins to hear that Mr. X is not Xish, in spite
of his genetic, cultural and historical background (or even his language
use patterns), but simply because he has a different ideology from that of
the campaigners. Thus it could come to pass that one's mother didn't speak
the mother tongue though perhaps she did speak the native language.

Similarly,  I have heard campaigners, many of whom no longer speak their
heritage language well or at all, complain that their mostly monolingual
elders are obstacles to the preservation and revitalization of the heritage
language.  This curious and paradoxical state of affairs seems to me to be
quite akin to the kinds of loyalty confusion found in adoptive and foster
children as pointed out earlier.

I also find the notion of "who owns the language" an interesting issue to
consider.  Victor's point that languages "live" in social networks is an
important idea to keep in mind. It strikes me that languages which are on
(or need) life support are rarely those which have such a social network.
Two speakers or even ten, do not a healthy social network make. Attempts to
preserve a language, can be those which attempt to preserve it unchanged -
essentially putting it in a glass case in a museum - another butterfly for
the collection, carefully pinned down, well-displayed, but very very dead.
On the other hand, languages which are going to go on living necessarily
need to be placed in an environment where they can thrive.  It seems that
the creation of a supportive social network needs to be the top priority
and along with that the language needs to be allowed to grow and adapt to
the social environment in which it finds itself. I fear that too often
preservation and advancement of the ideology overrides concerns for the
preservation of the society and its language.

I fear that many campaigners tend to wrench the language out of its social
setting in order to preserve it rather than attempting to nurture the
social setting in order to give the language a place to begin to grow
again.

M. Paul Lewis


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