Endangered Languages in Museum

[Rottet, Kevin James]

This has indeed been an interesting discussion. To follow up on the question of why there was such a negative reaction to the coffin imagery, here is my two cents' worth.

If I want children to celebrate and appreciate their grandmother, I'm hardly going to show them pictures of her in her coffin. Things that are in coffins are things that one avoids touching, things that one wants to put out of sight as quickly as possible, things that (at some level) one dreads. Showing something in a coffin does not seem to me like a good way to get children to appreciate it.

Additionally, the coffin display shows far too much certainty about the outcome of individual cases. For many endangered languages there are programs being developed, attempts to reverse the course or stem the tide. For lots of these languages the outcome is really not known. "Endangered" and "dead" are simply not the same thing.

One last point. With one of the communities I work on, I used the phrase "language death" during a talk at an academic conference. This is a commonplace metaphor in linguistics, so I thought nothing of it, but two native speakers were in my audience, and during the Q&A session both of them reacted negatively to my phrasing. One of them said something along the lines of "I'm not going to kiss my grandmother goodbye until she is actually gone. The language will not be dead during my lifetime at least, because I speak it every day." These were very good points, and they made me aware that even at an academic conference among adults, sensitivity to how these things are represented is important--certainly when members from the community in question are present. It hadn't really occurred to me before that this metaphor which linguists take for granted might be unhelpful or even offensive to people from the communities in question. 

Kevin 

________________________________________
From: Endangered Languages List [ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES-L at listserv.linguistlist.org] on behalf of Marion Gunn [mgunn at UCD.IE]
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 6:36 AM
To: ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES-L at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: Endangered Languages in Museum

A close relative of mine this year lost a little girl to illness. Only
eight years old. Her favourite flower was the sunflower. Two grew in my
garden this summer. Not planted by me. Grew from seeds I fed the birds
during the harder days of winter. I think that makes a better image.
Sunflowers turning their faces to the sun, every day, as she rises, the
way children wake up with a smile. A faith in their land and in their
language. Better than coffin posters on their bedroom walls. Yesterday,
we buried one of our own greatest poets. Winner of a Nobel Prize. He had
many stories to tell. One of them related to his filling in a form for
his child's admission to school, where there was a space to state
father's occupation and finding that, wiithout his saying anything, the
school entry form already had pre-entered on it the word "file" (the
Irish for "poet'). Maybe this is a cultural thing, a dislike of the
coffin image. Maybe, in some other cultures, children need to have such
words screamed at them, such images as to scare them into doing
something or other, into carrying a burden for which their shoulders are
still too small. Not here. Not now. Never, I trust.
mg

Scríobh 01/09/2013 21:41, Doug Whalen <whalen at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>:
>    It is great that you are trying to do language in a museum--it's
> not easy.  And the endangered language issue is complex enough to be
> that much harder.
>    Still, the education parallel is somewhat mistaken--support for
> education in general is enough of a given that the coffin metaphor can
> be taken in context.  The context is, as you point out, completely
> lacking for the general public.  That is where the confused messages
> come in...