All the empathy of a well-trained mortician.

[Pat Warren]

Academics, at least those who are commited to their work and somewhat
successful in their own eyes, are in it for themselves. Academics publish
for other academics to read, so they can get a mix of approval and drama
from their colleagues. The real draw of participating in academia is the
quest for credit. When you get citations, you are approved of in academia.
Academic work hinges on the spread of an identity - people get to know you
as a figure in the field, which feels good - and the citations that start
to accumulate and hopefully you save up enough points to get the fancy
faculty position and research grants, complete with underlings (students)
who can do work for you and help you accomplish your personal academic
goals.

This process is less applicable to those who aren't as successful at the
academic game, but this process is what holds the whole thing together. You
don't become a decision maker like chair of a department, unless you've
done decently well in the publication and citation-harvesting business
(unles the department is amazingly underfunded and desperate, and then your
position will probably be classified as "interim" until someone with more
points is found).

As John Kyle just wrote:
>"For many linguists, our work is to 'distill' the order out of language.
...Our joy seems to come from finding those regular patterns that the
lexical items fit into. ...It would be a real hindrance to linguistics if
we had to learn all the languages we deal with."

This is my stereotype of a linguist. Essentially the joy of the linguist is
to take diversity, boil it down to very consistent patterns, translate it
into english, and publish. This is very intellectually satisfying work. I
know. I do it. It's fun, without a doubt. What a sad image of your language
being squeezed through a complex series of test tubes and such.

But what kind of work can be done, and what the consequences are of this
approach to language, is what I'm trying to get at in this discussion. A
linguist who does not learn the language he studies is never going to be
able to do anything more than transpose that language into english. Your
subject is the language, but to work with it at all you have to first
convert it to english. All you are ever able to do is take things out of
their context of meaning (though you'll develop ever more sophisticated
methods of surgical removal). And this then limits the kinds of materials
you can produce. All the materials produced by linguists who study native
american languages are, according to studies in second language acquisition
research and the experiences of the majority of students in any language
class I've ever been in, nearly useless for most learners. You don't learn
another language through translation, you learn it in spite of translation.
No one can produce material (without just using the hard work of a native
speaker) that contributes to language acquisition, without actually being
part of the speech community.

But this is the conflict of interest: a linguist's audience and primary
concern is other linguists. Linguists, usually without admitting it, are in
it for the intellectual enjoyment of translating a language to english and
finding and arguing about patters they find, and in building an ever
stronger academic reputation by astonishing their colleagues with their
great skill in finding patterns in a language they couldn't carry on a
conversation in, or would choose not to even if they could muster up the
passive knowledge they unavoidably gain over several decades of study.
Linguists aren't usually language learners in my experience. Some are, most
aren't. This isn't true for the study of languages that are themselves
dominant languages, like spanish, french, etc. As a non-native speaker, to
even get your foot in the door in the linguistics of those languages you
have to speak the language. They have large populations of native speakers
with plenty of their own linguists and a long tradition of study of their
languages. But this isn't the case with indigenous languages almost
anywhere in the world.

I think linguists now like the idea of helping with revitalization efforts.
But I think it's also ethically obligatory now. It's hard to ignore anymore
the sociocultural reality of language and culture loss when you want to go
take someone's language, so I don't give much credit for being ethically in
style. And it seems to that now linguists are building up their own
self-images as emergency-room surgeons by pretending that their work is
going to have anything to do with determining whether these ailing
languages disappear. The day that a linguist can produce any materials
without english (or french or spanish, etc.) doing all the work of carrying
the meaning, then maybe this image of "preserving indigenous languages"
will mean something more than just polishing another indian's skeleton to
put on your bookshelf.

Keep in mind that for linguists, these are the predominant patterns. But a
lot of people play other roles than just linguist, and do accomplish great,
empathetic work in empowering native people when they play these roles. But
if you primarily think of yourself as a linguist (rather than also as a
Dakota person, a teacher, etc.) this probably applies to a great extent. I
just want to know how much this applies, if anyone is actually open to this
much soul-searching.

It's frightening to me to open up a book entitled "Making dictionaries:
preserving indigenous languages of the americas" and the first line creates
the image of linguists as being at war: "Lexicographic war stories are a
special genre of tales of impossibility and thanklessness." I'm not a
native person. I imagine that if I were, and someone came to me with that
self-image, of being at war, of being heroic, and doing the impossible
without being thanked, I'd think "bueno, los conquistadores han vuelto." It
sound like the same old great european explorer attitude to me. I mean,
couldn't you guys have thought of a better metaphor than "war stories?" And
I can't wait to be told by a linguist that I'm reading too much into this.
That would be funny.

It's a sad state of affairs when the vast majority of linguists studying
native languages are themselves monolingual. Why would someone who loves
language so much avoid the wonderful experience of communicating in another
language? It's not the languages they love. It's the knife. The languages
are incidental.

Thankfully there are now people who are actually realizing that when you do
know the language you study, and you use it, there's a lot more linguistics
you can do, and what you produce will be of exponentially better quality,
and will have great applicability beyond the cubicle of the linguist next
door. These are the people who can empathise with speakers and communities,
who see these people as ends in themselves and not the means to another
publication. And the languages too can then be given the respect they
deserve, and the irresponsible and probably invalid methodology of
analyzing the language as if it were really english in disguise can be left
behind.

I have great respect for my Dakota language teacher, Neil McKay. Neil is
himself Dakota. He didn't grow up speaking the language, though he
certainly did hear some words and lots of cultural knowledge. Neil first
studied the language at the University of Minnesota. And now he is the
Dakota language teacher there, and is getting better at what he does all
the time. He has benfited greatly from his several identities: he is
Dakota, he is a linguist, he is a teacher, he is a speaker, he is a father
(of two boys who are learning Dakota as a first language) he is a husband,
a star wars fan, and much more. Neil has worked hard to learn the language,
to make himself fluent through classes, books, elders, teaching, and
practice. And he's done it. Neil is a great speaker. He always works to
increase his knowledge, to be a better speaker, to create better materials,
and to pass on the language to his students at the university, at the
language tables he hosts, at home to his children, and in more ways than I
probably know. Nina tanyan onspeic'iye ka tanyan waonspewicakiye do. He's
my idea of a language scholar who contributes very positively to the
language he studies. I am very hopeful for people like Henning Garvin, or
nonnative people like David K. who feel it very important to be able to
empathise with speakers of the language they study by being speakers
themselves.

Heced ibdukcan do. Hecetu yedo.
Hepi miye do.

Pat Warren