Reversing language obsolescence

For linguists, the loss of any language is to be mourned in the same way as a zoologist mourns the loss of a species. Many languages can indeed be likened to ‘endangered species’: only around 10 per cent of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages are thought sure to survive to the end of the twenty-first century. For activists, too, the loss of a language represents a loss of cultural heritage which must be resisted. Arresting the decline of a language or language variety is known as language revitalization, and often begins with demands for its recognition by a nation state and for the granting of language rights to its speakers, for example the right to be educated or tried in that language in a court of law, or merely to have it included in the school curriculum. Noteworthy language revitalization success stories include Catalan, suppressed for decades under Franco in Spain, but now a first language for most Catalans (almost all of whom also speak Spanish), and enjoying co-official status with the national language in Catalonia, and Welsh, which has stabilized after years of decline.

All too often, however, activists face an uphill battle. Firstly, by the time a language has become threatened, both it and its speakers have generally become stigmatized as ‘backward’ or ‘old-fashioned’, while the dominant language is perceived to symbolize modernity by virtue of assocation with socially favored groups. To speak the threatened language is then to identify with qualities which mainstream society presents as undesirable, reinforcing these negative associations in what quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A second major problem is the lack of a standard or prestige variety. Standard languages tend to emerge because they are associated with a prestige or elite group, but in the case of a threatened language, those who would form such a group are generally among the first to abandon it as they rise in society.

The absence of a recognized standard removes normative pressure, leaving the language to fragment into microdialects, which are either mutually incomprehensible or, equally importantly, perceived to be so by speakers themselves, prompting recourse to the dominant language as a lingua franca. This in turn means that attempts to produce a standard language are less likely later on to be supported by the speakers themselves. This has important consequences, because resources are generally too limited to support preservation of a multiplicity of obsolescent microdialects.

Activists may well see promotion of a standard variety as the best route to preserving a language, but a standard created artificially by intellectuals, may well encounter resistance, as indeed might a standard variety created on the basis of regional criteria, as in Ireland, where a standard Irish was based largely on Connacht usage, a central variety seen to bridge north and south. A final option is polynomia, i.e. a multiplicity of norms: in effect ‘anything goes’. This approach appears to have worked reasonably well in Corsica, an island community where linguistic and physical boundaries coincide, and internal communications are good enough for most Corsican speakers to be aware of other variants, but it would not appear a practical option in Brittany or in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, where dialectal fragmentation is coupled with isolation.