Endangered languages

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Actually, in my mind, this article could be fairly useful as a tool to
get people (say, students and colleagues) to talk about language
diversity.
While Michaels's piece wouldn't work as a scholarly analysis of the
phenomenon, it's rather effective at bringing together some of the
issues that many people have on their minds, at least in the United
States (and, to a certain extent, here in Canada). Despite all its
flaws (and there are many), the New York Times is often seen as
somehow representative of "mainstream culture" in the United States.
In this respect, Michaels's article is more appropriate than many
others (including many in the NYT)

Of course, it's far from perfect.
Absent from the piece is the issue of multilingualism. Michaels seems
to assume that the generational pattern will always remain monolingual
(Spanish) to bilingual (Spanish and English) to monolingual (English).
Certainly, it's a rather frequent pattern among immigrant groups in
North America. But why would that mean that bilingualism is
"unstable?" Who is to say that North America won't become like other
parts of the world with long histories of stable multilingualism?

Richard's comment about new languages is spot on, IMHO. If we're to
follow the biological metaphor often used when discussing language
diversity, we should certainly talk about language birth, instead of
limiting ourselves to language death. Language diversity, like
biological diversity, might be declining overall, but new language
"species" are being born out of contacts and that is part of the
equation. In fact, we could use the distinction between "natural" and
"artificial" languages to get people to think about social dynamics
within and between speech communities.
Michaels is careful to avoid some of the biological bias and his
"train robbery" analogy reveals an interesting perspective on
languages as resources. One of his points is that people are still
allowed to speak their native languages, whether or not those
languages have any value in the overall market. Replacing a biological
metaphor with a market-based approach is merely shifting the focus.
Yet that shift might be significant, at least heuristically and
pedagogically.

As others have pointed out, Michaels's perspective is mostly about
national and official languages. Like many others, Michaels focuses on
political issues related to language. Yet he avoids the typical "if
Latinos want to live in our country, they should speak English and
abandon Spanish." You probably all remember the controversy over the
"This is America: speak English" sign in a Philadelphia sandwich shop.
In such a context, Michaels's piece is kind of refreshing.
Michaels even pays lip-service to the issue of language identity
saying, as some of our colleagues have been saying, that language loss
doesn't necessarily imply culture loss or identity loss.

IMHO, Michaels's piece could make for good reading material in some of
our classes. We just need to contextualise it and make sure we have
time for discussion.

-- 
Alexandre, in Montréal (Québec)
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/


On 10/4/06, Celso Alvarez Cáccamo <lxalvarz at udc.es> wrote:
> I didn't like the article a bit. I agree with what Richard says:
>
> >It seemed to me that Michaels was implying that diversity
> >would probably still occur, but that there will inevitably be language
> >shift and change, and that it's silly to wring our hands over the
> >problem (or waste resources, I assume), whether from a chauvinistic
> >position of any particular language (in this case English), or from one
> >that wishes to preserve or encourage any and all languages.
>
> That's called linguistic ultraliberalism: Just Don't Intervene, as
> languages take care of themselves. Fallacious. Like the self-called
> "conservatives" of Human Events, Michaels is also talking about THE
> National Language ("our language"). And the perspective that Spanish would
> replace English in the USA as "our" language would imply that the
> Anglo-speaking majority and, particularly, the Anglo dominant minority,
> would have been replaced by new Spanish-speaking groups. That's what the
> self-called "conservatives" fear, not the language issue. But by pretending
> to counterargue, Michaels is actually demonstrating that he embraces the
> ultraliberal rationale. The type of Spanish Michaels is talking about in
> his hypothetical scenario is, after all, Spanish as THE national language
> of the USA, which is neither a real possibility nor the main issue for
> language minorities who claim their social space. So, Michaels is saying,
> 'let them Latin American immigrants speak Spanish, and let us proclaim the
> potential equality of all languages; there's no problem in indulging in the
> possibility that English could dissapear, because if Euro-Americans do
> their job well economically, that's not going to happen'.
>
> I haven't read the articles that Michaels refers to. I browsed Human Events
> but I couldn't find anything relevant. But, by what Michaels' article says,
> it seems that the so-called conservatives and Michaels coincide in no
> assigning any protection to any language: language shift and loss are
> "natural". A real conservative interventionist argument would be that
> English won't cease to be "our" language in the USA with the necessary,
> appropriate state and official protection for the national language. That's
> the English-Only conservative view. But, by foreseeing a future scenario
> where English might not be "our" language, those Human Events writers are
> actually reflecting the ultraliberalist socio-darwinist view of language.
> Michaels agrees with this model: what if, by continuous immigration,
> Spanish would end up being the USA national language? So, what's the
> difference between Human Events "conservatives" and Michaels? As good
> nationalists, the "conservatives" want to fence off the USA (the "Secure
> Fence" against tresspassers, modeled on the Israel wall) so that
> Spanish-speaking immigrants can't come to conquer the national market and
> replace English. Michaels, on the contrary, contemplates this possibility
> as a legitimate (though unlikely) one. In short, it is Michaels who
> believes in the 19th century free market utopia.
>
> Cheers,
> -celso
>
> Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
> lxalvarz at udc.es
> http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac
>
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