Language Revitalisation / Revival

[Stephen Morey]

Dear RNLD list

I’d like to add an international angle to the discussion.

Languages can be revitalised. My own ancestor’s language, Cornish, is a case in point. While there is debate about when Cornish ceased to be spoken, there is not much doubt that throughout the whole 19th century it was not spoken actively at all. From 1904 a revival has been going on: the old texts were carefully studied, teaching and reference grammars written, the structure and forms of the language discussed and debated by the key revivalists. By now there are a significant number of people who can speak the language with the fluency of the best adult learners of any second language. And they can speak about pretty much any topic they wish to. I have directly experienced this, having learned one version of revived Cornish well enough to be able to appreciate the best speakers. There are claims that some of the children of these revivalists should be treated as new native speakers, though to the best of my knowledge their usage and competence has never been tested, and I have not met any of them.

It is true that there are several versions of revived Cornish, and passionate debates about the merits or otherwise of each. This division has slowed the revival down. But a process over the last couple of years has brought each group closer together, not without difficulty, and there is now more common ground than before.

So why has the revival been as successful as it has? The following reasons spring to my mind, without really going into this too deeply (it’s not a refereed paper after all!)

1)	Considerable investment of time by many people over many years (much more than a class a week)
2)	The revival has always been done by Cornish people themselves; and the careful study of the original sources has also been done by the same people. Of course not everyone who is learning the language takes a keen interest in the linguistic issues, but it is not the case that the bulk of the linguistic work is being done by people outside the community. On the other hand, outside linguists are welcome to work on the language.
3)	The sources for the language, though modest in size, were easily interpreted and available.
4)	There are closely related living languages, from which new forms could be coined by analogy. In the Cornish case Breton and Welsh provide much of this material.
5)	The Cornish community is comparatively well off and people have time and money to put into the cause.
6)	It is a large community, several hundred thousand, so there is a large pool of people from which a small group only are interested in the language.

We can perhaps compare this to another group I have been working with, the Tai Ahom of India, we see that the Tai Ahom revival has not had the same level of success. Although Ahom ceased to be spoken at around the same time as Cornish, and although its population is much larger (perhaps a couple of million), and although the revival has been going on for longer than the Cornish (since at least the mid 19th century), there are very few Tai Ahoms who can speak Tai language to the point of being able to hold a conversation, and those that can do so because they are second language learners of closely related Tai varieties. (I also learned the other Tai varieties the same way.

Of the six points above, (1), (4) and (6) are met for the Ahoms.

The major difference relates to the interpretation of the sources. For Ahom there is a much larger corpus that for Cornish (possibly 50-100 times larger), and Ahom has continued to be used as a ritual language to this day. But the interpretation of the old manuscripts is extremely difficult and the vast majority of them are untranslated. 

The main reason for this is that Ahom is a tonal language but tones are not marked in the script. It is a monosyllabic isolating language and a single syllable may have many as 12 different meanings, nouns, verbs, adjectives, particles. Only by a very deep knowledge of the language can the sources be read, and this knowledge in Assam itself is lost.

I have been working with a team of people consisting of 
i)	an expert in reading Tai manuscripts from many related languages who has come from Thailand
ii)	speakers of closely related Tai languages in India
iii)	the Ahom priests and guardians of the manuscripts
iv)	local linguists, and
v)	me, who has training in Tai linguistics and in field work in the area over many years.

I have to stress that all are needed to do this work, but between us we have been able to translate some of the manuscripts. From this a grammatical study of the language can proceed, and I am writing such a thing right now, and I hope it will be a help to the revival when it’s done. However, while the work on our project might go some way to meeting condition (3) above, it certainly doesn’t meet condition (2) because the linguistic study is still in the hands of non-Ahom people.

On the other hand I don’t want to suggest that the Ahom revival has produced no benefits; a program of teaching Ahom in schools has produced a generation of Ahom children who at least know they have their own language and can perhaps recognise its unique script.  

What I am sure of is that the Ahom people will continue to pursue the revival of their language; it will require immense efforts on the part of many people, as has been the case with Cornish, and most of that effort will be by language learners attending classes all over the Ahom area.

I’m sorry these comments are so lengthy. They are complex issues.

Stephen Morey