30.1441, Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1441. Mon Apr 01 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1441, Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism

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Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2019 12:23:30
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism

 
Saving Endangered Languages with Prescriptivism

Re-Printed from the Speculative Grammarian

by: Neil de Veratte
Director of Fieldwork Studies
Winter Academy of Language

All over the world, languages are being lost at an alarming rate. Field
linguists do their best to preserve these languages, but find their speaker
communities apathetic. “Why should I learn Wotʃa-Korlitt?” they ask, “It’s
Spanish I need to get a job.” We need to look at successful languages, whose
speakers are engaged with their language, to see what endangered languages can
learn from them. When we do, we inevitably find that the most successful
languages are those which possess a tradition of prescriptivist grammar.
English has an army of armchair pedants who tell us all to never split an
infinitive, that the passive should be avoided, and that prepositions must not
be used to end a sentence with. French has the Academie Française to pronounce
arbitrary bans on loanwords, and Spanish the Real Academia Española, which
aims to ensure everybody talks like Cervantes. The Chinese are taught from an
early age to regard all Sinitic languages as dialects of Mandarin.

All these languages were originally documented by their own speakers, who made
up arbitrary rules to show off their own cleverness. The results are
invigorating. Such rules are endlessly debated, denounced, defended and
defied, and as a result, the speakers care about their language.

Contrast the situation with endangered languages. These are documented by
outsiders, schooled in the descriptivist method, and content to simply record
what they find. Their work may result in a Bible translation, but that is as
close to arbitrary commandments as they’re likely to get.

A new approach is necessary. Fieldworkers should no longer passively describe
a language. They must set out to create new rules for the language, so as to
stimulate the debate that keeps a language alive. As such rules must be
internally unmotivated, the researcher needs to think carefully about where to
obtain them. A good strategy is to copy rules from a language that the speaker
community considers prestigious, as English pedants do with Latin. In South
America, Spanish or Portuguese would be the first choice, although it may be
wise to base rules on the European form of the language rather than the local
one. This approach has two advantages—those who accept the new rule will see
it as conferring the prestige of the dominant language on their own, whereas
those who reject it will see the dominant language as tainted by association
with the hated rule.

Other researchers may prefer to manufacture rules based on theoretical
considerations. This raises the question of which framework to use for the
purpose. On one level, it makes little difference, as they will all be equally
incomprehensible to the speaker community, but I would recommend Metasyntactic
Heuristics, (for further discussion of these topics, please see these
discussions: http://specgram.com/CLXVI.2/05.mcmosky.frameworks.html ;
http://specgram.com/CLXVIII.2/04.berish.heuristics.html ) since it is now
understood only by two aging academics in remote English universities, and
they haven’t spoken to each other for 25 years.

Our fieldworkers are now reporting back from the first trials of this method.
We are still analysing their findings, but one has reported spectacular
results from convincing an Amazonian tribe that they are not allowed to
discuss abstract concepts.

----

This article was originally printed in SpecGram Vol. CLXXII, No. 4

Thanks for reading this special LINGUIST List announcement of this important
April 1st news article re-printed with permission from the Speculative
Grammarian. Check out SpecGram at http://specgram.com/

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