On supporting threatened languages

by Trond Trosterud, trondt@barsek.hsf.no

The bottom line is that only the speakers themselves can save their language. But as linguists, there are a lot of things we can and should do. The following points are collected on the basis of personal experience, focusing on topics at least I haven't seen that often in the discussion.

EXACT INFORMATION ON THE STATE-OF-THE-ART

A bilingual society can change into a monolingual assimilated one very fast, without fluent speakers realising what is going on until it is too late. Thus, in unclear and critical cases, age pyramids should be set up that show the fluency of (each speaker of) each age group. Panu Hallamaa, Helsinki, has done some nice work on both Aleut and Skolt Saami, and he also discusses general methodological questions involved.

ACTIVE UTILISING OF INTERVENING MAJORITY LANGUAGE BORDERS

Languages always die via a bilingual stage (except genocide cases). With all speakers fluent in the same majority language, "there is no use in speaking the minority language". Contact across majority language borders should thus be encouraged. In cases where the minority language spoken on the other side of the majority language border is a different, but related language, both passive (speak own lg - understand other lg) and active bil-ingualism (speak-understand both) should be encouraged. A "useless" minority language can be turned into an important device for international com-munication if it is used as a basis for learning a related language in a neighbouring country. Minority language speakers may end up as much-needed interpreters, and multilingualism within the ethnic macrogroup will also strengthen own ethnic identity. Thus, both active and passive bilingualism should be taught.

THE RIGHT TO POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH OWN ETHNIC IDENTITY

School education in and on one's mother tongue is more and more seen as a part of linguistic human rights. In addition to that, I will emphasise the right to learn the language of one's ethnic group, also when it is no longer the mother tongue for the pupil. This is of central importance for the self-identification of the pupil.

DICTIONARY FROM THE MAJORITY LANGUAGE

Every minority language should have a dictionary from the majority to the minority language, a dictionary giving the speakers back words in exchange for all the words that are stolen as a part of assimilatory language pol-icy. Such dictionaries will provide a (common) vocabulary for phenomena outside the domestic and traditional sphere, and they will function as guidelines when borrowing new concept from the majority language. Today, minority language dictionaries are all too often made by linguists in order to understand collected text material, thus, they are FROM the minority language, they contain only words found in the text collections (hence no neologisms), and they are typically not written in any official orthogra-phy.

NOT ONLY SMALL LANGUAGES ARE THREATENED

For us, as linguists, the "worst case", is when the last speakers (of a lg without close relatives) dies. But large-scale language shift can as well start on million sized languages (the Mordvinian languages of Russia are a bad example), and happen more or less simultaneously (and fast). Shifting the perspective to the speaker, it is sad to loose the lg of the community, even though it is spoken by a Diaspora group some hundred kilometres away.

INTERNET AND THE NUMBER OF GRAPHEMES IN THE CHARACTER SET STANDARDS

Internet and interactive Text-TV will soon become wide-spread. Radio has proven useful for minorities, it is cheap and does not require literacy. Internet poses some additional problems, that must be addressed by us lin-guists at once, especially since we are the ones to blame in the first place: Often, we were the ones that invented good, phonemic or syllabic writing systems, utilising a large number of graphemes not contained in the A-Z English (or in the A-JA Russian) alphabet. I prefer the Czech solution (one-phoneme graphemes) to the Hungarian and English one (digraphs) myself, but having invented these graphemes we must now make them available on the net. To do this we need code table standards and information on how to use them. Cf.Work on the Sámi languages , especially Funny characters on the net. What information technology can (and cannot) do to support minority languages;, by Trond Trosterud.

To be specific: We must make sure that every grapheme of every written language of the world (including tone and length diacritics if in use) is found in the 32-bits ISO/IEC 10646-1 standard. There are holes there, and we are the ones that should fill them. Today, 3/4 of the space in part 1 of 10646 (Basic Multilingual Plane, or the first 65536 character positions) are being filled by Chinese characters. After having had their basic (some tenths of thousands of characters) in BMP, the Chinese should be satisfied, and given a whole plane of their own. The BMP should then be reserved AT LEAST for phoneme- and syllabic-based symbols of all the worlds written languages. Raising the number of Cyrillic positions from the current 256 to e.g. 512 would make no difference whatsoever to the space consideration of Chinese, but it will solve ALL problems for the Cyrillic-based scripts (today, not even the stress-marks of Russian are included, which will come as a great surprise to text book providers). Also, minority languages should have local 8-bits standards while waiting for 10646-1 to be implemented. In the Saami community, it has been (and still is) hazardous to transfer electronically (by exchanging discs, sending e-mail..), thus making all publication and communication slower and more expensive. When minority languages are claimed to be "difficult" to read or write (even though we as linguists know that their orthography are incredibly much bet-ter than the ones of e.g. English or Norwegian), it is due to the fact that their languages are never seen in print. This is one of the most important ways of making them visible.

MINORITY LANGUAGE ROAD SIGNS

Road signs and public other public sign in the minority language is a very important measure, as seen by the strong reactions of the majority popula-tion against them wherever they are introduced. Sometimes minority group members that have lost their language are among the strongest opponents to introducing minority language signs, perhaps because they in a way feel be-trayed by the country administration to whom they gave their language loyalty. Making minority languages visible is the most important effect of these signs, but they also teach how to write local place names, and they show the official name of public institutions in the minority language.

HERITAGE

As a result of the work of philologists and comparativists, huge bodies of fairy tales, myth-o-logical texts, legends on the creation of the world, etc., are compiled and published, often with a parallel translation. These test should be translated from the phonetic transcription they probably are written in, and into the official orthography that hopefully exists for the language today, and then published. Simultaneously, the syntacticians among us get searchable, machine readable corpora to work with. Thus, such work can be financed by university grants. The publications will tell about tra-ditions before the cultural suppression set in, and it give the peoples in question back their own cultural heritage. Linguists visited the peoples and got their stories, now is the time to give them back.

PASSIVE BILINGUALISM IN FAMILIES

Many parents that otherwise are motivated to pass their language to the next generation will eventually give up speaking their mother tongue to their children when the children (al-ways/of-ten/more and more) answer them in the majority language. But why should they? As long as both participants in the conversation understand each other, they can talk like that for the rest of their life. The child will learn the majority language anyway, and by knowing the minority language well passively, it later on will have a chance to activate it.

I recently heard about a case like this, where the child in question mixed the two lgs (as they of course do), but got teased and hit in kindergarten, and with no support from the staff there. These problems (not relevant for bilinguals with high-status 2nd lg) should be anticipated and addressed in advance.

ANECDOTE

Attending a meeting of Sámi and Norwegian officials, one of the Sámi participants was asked: Do you need an interpreter? No, she answered, I don't. But I will give my talk in Sámi, so it might be that you will need one.