Language Revitalisation / Revival

[Dr Christina Eira - VACL]

Forwarding for a friend (this discussion is going outside the rnld as
well!)

Well, it was years ago that I read about the status of Cornish (don't
even remember where), and I won't second guess Stephen. But in my
uninformed opinion (which you can feel free to forward):

Stephen acknowledges the conflict between the Cornishes, and doesn't
quite sweep it under the rug. It really was a problem. The welcome page
to the Cornish wikipedia is trilingual for that reason. Maybe there has
been some rapprochement over the past few years (haven't been
following), but there will not be One Cornish. That's not debilitating,
but it is an issue.

Is Cornish revival *more* successful than what you and others do with
First Peoples communities? Doubt it. People can talk in it on a variety
of topics --- and they can do that in Klingon too (and I've witnessed
that). Is Cornish more successful than Klingon? Not sure.  
Esperanto is more successful than Cornish, with 1000 native speakers;
and Hebrew still remains a one-off.

Because of all that, I'm wary of anyone saying "learn lessons from
Cornish, so much more successful in language revival than X". It's
somewhat successful, and that's all; it's one data point. (And Hebrew?  
Still a one-off :-)

You know, looking at these points, I feel I should chime in about
Esperanto. Any counter that Esperanto (or Klingon) are no Worthy Topics
of Discussion, because they do not encapsulate the Herderian Soul of a
People like Cornish or Nahuatl, I will swear impolitically about. There
are no worthy or unworthy languages linguistically, that's superstrate
judgements. There are languages as vehicles of ideology (including
Trekkiedom!), and there is linguistic praxis, and that's what we're
discussing here.

To Stephen's points:

1. Time investment: you do need more than a class a week. The
Esperantists sneer at the "eternal beginners" who don't invest more than
that; and they are the majority of Esperantists. (In fact, Esperanto has
an elite and a semi-competent mass; I wonder how common that is in
language revival overall.) Esperanto and Klingon don't always have
family immersion practical, but they do have venues where you can use
the language, including correspondence and mailing lists, and a
literature. That matters.

2. The revival being done at grassroots: that's a social superstrate,
and of course it's inapplicable to artificial languages.  Of course, the
reason Cornish got derailed was that Cornish Version 1 was not done by
professional linguists, and got the reconstruction wrong. (The broader
question was, did it matter enough to bring about Cornish Version 2. And
that's the debate about what linguistic authenticity actually means,
which you've already engaged with.)

I am somewhat skeptical about the Sinn Fein ("Us Ourselves") angle being
critical; but yes, you do need people with an emotional investment to
sustain the revival.

3. Yeah, true.

4. Yes, but in fact not critical. Ben Yehuda looted Arabic for Hebrew
for the same reason --- and Hebrew as it actually happened in the
kibbutzim was not going to use Arabic words for tomatoes and
electricity. It did calques and soundalikes and perverse
reinterpretations of obscure biblical words. That was the authenticity
issue again: better to reuse a Biblical term to mean "landmine", as far
as Jews in Palestine were concerned, than borrow an Arabic word for
tomato. So I don't agree that the existence of Breton was not as
critical here as Stephen makes out. (Not to language *revival* as a
social action; it just helps the result look more linguistically
correct, which is not the same thing.) In fact, the degree of reliance
on Breton and Welsh was also a point of contention between Cornish Mark
1 and Cornish Mark 2.

5. Affluence. Yes, because it gives people the leisure to get caught up
in the revival work (point 2).

6. Large community. It helps, but is not critical. Lojban was quite
vibrant in its online community with just a dozen people. Depends on
your definition of the pool of people to draw on. Admittedly, if ethnic
background is your criterion for who is interested, size of the ethnic
community matters. But with artificial languages, that's not the
decisive criterion. And for languages like Irish (and Cornish), one
cannot dismiss the interested outsider language nut, the Lisa Simpsons
of this world. (The most exposure the black and white flag of Cornwall
ever got was on the Simpsons.) To dismiss them is to play the game of
Herderian Essentialism again, and I think that's an orthogonal issue.

No idea about the Tai Ahom situation, but I would have thought that
(5) is rather more critical than (3). If people are enthusiastic, they
will make do with very poor sources. As has happened in Australia.  
Remember: the point is not linguistic accuracy (sorry, but it isn't, and
Cornish Mark 2 was a detour). The point is something the community can
call its own. And (without knowing anything about the Tai Ahom
community) that enough of the community have the leisure to think about
issues of identity rather than subsistence. Because when the Papua New
Guinean parent says "why they hell should my child go to a tok ples
school, instead of getting English schooling to get a good job in
Moresby", it's not the western linguist's place to second guess them.
(They can suggest ways of providing both tok ples and English; but
language death is as Marxist an issue as it is Herderian.)

(from Nick Nicholas)

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Morey [mailto:S.Morey at latrobe.edu.au] 
Sent: Saturday, 4 April 2009 12:42 PM
To: Resource-Network-Linguistic-Diversity at unimelb.edu.au
Subject: re: Language Revitalisation / Revival

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
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