Language and identity trends tracking project

Language as a proxy for conflict

thenextwavefutures — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:21:39 +0000

Andrew writes:

Language seems to be a theme of Gary Younge’s recent book, Who Are We – and Should It Matter In The 21st Century?. I chanced on an extract in a recent Guardian, and there are a couple of good quotes from it which seem to reflect the theme of our project. Of course, he has visited Belgium:

Belgium’s linguistic divide mirrors a reversal of economic fortunes whereby the once wealthy, industrial French-speaking Walloonia has now been eclipsed by a far more productive, hi-tech Flanders.

Language, then, all too often becomes the most intimate proxy for broader societal conflicts that have little to do with what people actually speak. “National languages are . . . almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally . . . virtually invented,” writes Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism. “They are the opposite of what nationalist mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national culture and the matrices of the national mind. They are usually attempts to devise a standardised idiom out of a multiplicity of actually spoken idioms, which are thereafter downgraded to dialects.”

And a relevant historical observation from later in the same piece:

The notion that a British monarch would speak English as their native tongue – if indeed at all – is a relatively recent one, and the barons responsible for the Magna Carta, who are today hailed as the among the first patriots, did not speak English. Hobsbawm estimates that only 2.5% of Italians spoke the national language at the time of unification. … At the time of the French revolution, half of France didn’t speak French and only 12-13% spoke it correctly; while for Spain the issue is still far from resolved. The official language is Castilian, but roughly a quarter of the country also speaks one of the three main co-official regional languages – Catalan, Basque or Galician.

In other words, the use of language as a form of identity is a modern invention.

There’s also an interesting review-cum-reflection by a British writer of Pakistani background.

Reviving isiZulu as a political weapon

Alex Steer — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:50:32 +0000

Quick note from Alex:

Update: The BBC has a good summary of Julius Malema’s recent controversies here.

The last few months have seen language choice re-emerge as a hot topic in South African politics. (This is nothing new: the 1976 Soweto Uprising had its roots firmly in the 1974 Afrikaans Medium Decree, for example, which manded 50-50 use of Afrikaans and English in black schools.) The issue has arisen as part of the controversy over ANC Youth League’s leader, Julius Malema, who is increasingly (I’d say worryingly) outspoken on the theme of white imperialism, recently praising Mugabe’s government and land reform programme after a visit to Zimbabwe, expelling a BBC journalist from a press conference for querying him, and attacking the profile of ethnic minorities in government and the economy.

During an ANC Youth League rally at the University of Johannesburg in March 2010, Malema sang the radical isiZulu anti-apartheid song ‘Dubula iBhunu’, translated ‘Shoot the Boer’ or ‘Shoot the White’. The full lyrics in isiZulu and English are here. He continued to sing it at other rallies until the Northern Gauteng High Court banned him from uttering any of the relevant words of the song in English. Since then he has sung it in defiance of the order, saying ‘this is the court ruling of the white men in South Africa but we are not going to obey it’. More obliquely, he has appeared wearing a t-shirt with the word ‘Dubula’ on.

This represents a concerted attempt to reactivate isiZulu as a language of political struggle, as it was through much of the apartheid era, and more generally to make language a hot and divisive topic within South Africa. This is one of several not-so-weak signals that language may still be a useful pressure point for those who wish to emphasise divisions within South Africa, despite the constitution’s official multi-lingualism. Since language use is often such a clear marker of other segmenters like geography or wealth or race, not all of which have faded in their prominence since the early 1990s, it can feasibly be used to signify other sectoral grievances (for example, continued black poverty and white wealth) that have not always been well articulated in South African public life.

Quick thoughts on Globish

Alex Steer — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:18:22 +0000

I enjoyed the extract from Globish, and its thesis is basically right. A few first thoughts, queries and caveats:

The unprecedented rise of English since 1990: probably true, though I’d like to see some figures on the (population-relative) spread of English during the late 19th century.
‘Englasian’ (Chinglish, Singlish, Konglish, Indian English, etc.) is set up in opposition to British/American English – which is true, but it’s also increasingly in opposition to emerging standards of English (based on BrE/AmE) in Asia. See my link about the Chinese government trying to crack down on ‘embarrassing’ Chinglish.
McCrum sees too strong a connection between political ideological aggression and language uptake, for my money. In that sense his thesis already feels very ‘Bush-era’ (with obvious caveats about assuming too much change per administration, etc.). While ideology helps language survival and can act as a vector for spread (esp. religion – think of Arabic as a first language or Sanskrit as a second), trade and movement of people are the key determiners for language adoption. English is precarious as a global language because trade spread has been out of proportion to movement of native English-speaking populations for the last century.
I tend to disagree with McCrum’s strong connection between cultural and linguistic ‘imperialism’, on the same grounds. Culture in the rather narrow sense McCrum uses (jeans, burgers and rock music) exists largely as a side effect of trade, which brings us back to the economic power of language (and the linguistic power of economics, I suppose). Cultures can propel languages in the absence of trade, but characteristically the propelled languages end up as museum pieces – consider Greek in the Roman Empire, or Latin in the Holy Roman Empire. The spread of English, as the book notes, is characterised by the kind of variation that occurs when the language is useful for trade but doesn’t have that much cultural prestige. (This is what happened when Latin broke down into the Romance languages in western Europe, while at the same time ‘surviving’ as a classical language because of continued religious devotion and cultural admiration.)
There are some really interesting insights in this extract, and I’d like to read the whole book to catch some more. I’d love to know more about English’s use of the web, and the distribution between varieties of English online. Many of the commonly traded stats on this are deeply flawed. On a similar note, has anyone else noticed the increasing propensity for riot police to have ‘Police’ written in English on their uniforms, for the benefit of international news crews?
The development of ‘a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure’ is eerily recollective of the language contact processes that led to the Romance languages and Middle English – both of which occurred when the Roman world was becoming less internationalised, not more.
Finally, glad to see some words of sense from the late Bob Burchfield, who was Chief Editor of the OED (but sadly left several years before I worked on the project) – worth flagging: ‘English, as the second language of many speakers in countries throughout the world, is no more likely to survive the inevitable political changes of the future than did Latin, once the second language of the governing classes or regions within the Roman Empire.’

Alex

Globish

thenextwavefutures — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:59:08 +0000

No time to write a proper post:

How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century

‘Throw away your dictionaries!’ is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon – and its links to big money.

And here’s a taster:

[I]n the early 1980s…. when Bill Gates was still an obscure Seattle software nerd, and the latest cool invention to transform international telephone lines was the fax, we believed we were providing a snapshot of the English language at the peak of its power and influence, a reflection of the Anglo-American hegemony. Naturally, we saw our efforts as ephemeral. Language and culture, we knew, are in flux. Any attempts to pin them down would be antiquarianism at best, doomed at worst. Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah.

We were, of course, dead wrong. The global power and influence of Anglo-American language and culture in the broadest sense were about to hit another new high. When the cold war ended, after the Berlin Wall came down, and once the internet took off in the 1990s, there was an astonishing new landscape to explore and describe.

Language diversity in unexpected places

thenextwavefutures — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:42:14 +0000

Andrew posts:

Rapid note to capture a long New York Times piece which says that language diversity is more likely to be found in urban areas with long tradition of migration – such as New York.

A flavour:

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

Husni Husain, 67, says he doesn’t know of any other person in New York who speaks Mamuju, an Austronesian language.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

New York may be home to 800 languages (about 175 are spoken in the city’s schools). And – weak signal – a city academic is setting up “the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.”

Topography, biodiversity and language

Alex Steer — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:01:37 +0000

More on this theme from Abu Dhabi’s The National, which reports on the state of endangered languages in the Indian subcontinent, and includes the following from Nicholas Ostler:

Linguistic diversity is like biodiversity… It increases the closer you are to the equator. Mountains and jungles are also hotbeds.

We don’t know how many of the languages in India got to be there… Successive invasions introduced new languages but they were never entirely successful in wiping out the native ones.

There’s an obvious (and long-standing) question about the impact of technologies that overcome geographical limitations – both transport and telecommunications technologies. It’s the reason Chinese is feeling pressure from English within its borders (witness it taking steps to limit Chinglish).

So far I’ve not found much on the impact on language diversity of mobile phone technology, which is now rolling out most quickly and gaining deep penetration in precisely those areas which have traditionally preserved languages: remoter rural parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Update: It seems the Long Now foundation are thinking about mobile (of course) – see this piece.

Language danger and geography

Alex Steer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:06:09 +0000

Two recent finds:

1. Weak signals of concern about the threat to Chinese from English are picked up on in the Telegraph. Anyone interested in the longer history of Chinese and its relationships with its neighbour languages should start with the chapter entitled ‘Triumphs of Fertility’ in Nicholas Ostler’s excellent Empires of the Word, but in brief China has always successfully held off major external influences on its language, through a combination of socio-political good luck and the difficulty of adapting its writing system. The widespread influence of a non-neighbour language with a dominant writing system (English, Roman script) may be felt to be changing the game a little.

2. UNESCO’s fascinating ‘heat map’ of endangered languages. Andrew has mentioned a link between language diversity and biodiversity on this blog before. Looking at the map for severely and critically endangered languages, there seems to be a fairly strong correlation between endangered languages and forestation. This correlation is less strong for extinct languages*, perhaps suggesting that the enclosure afforded by forestation is a mechanism for keeping languages alive. A cursory glance suggests topography might have a similar effect.

* It’s worth noting that counting extinct languages is harder than counting endangered ones, as it’s impossible to tell what proportion of extinctions has been noticed.

Bigger languages are simpler

thenextwavefutures — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:26:18 +0000

Alex sends this:

According to research quoted by the Economist, the number of speakers of a language correlates best with its lack of complecity.

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15384310

The researchers are Gary Lupyan of the University of Pennsylvania and Rick Dale of the University of Memphis. The research is described in the Public Library of Science.

The number of speakers of each language correlated best with morphological complexity, better than the area the language is spread over or the number of neighbours. This makes sense because a language with a large population of speakers has probably already been learned by many non-natives in the past. A language with many neighbours today would be, by this rationale, more likely to become simpler in the future, if the language spreads. Of course, languages in families share certain features, but Dr Lupyan and Dr Dale found that their results were significant even when language family and region were factored out.

Andrew notes the link between cultural and linguistic diversity reported in resurgence and SEED – which may be reinforced by this research?

Regional accents – on the up, or not?

thenextwavefutures — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:59:32 +0000

The Daily Telegraph has a story that they are.

Forecasts have suggested accents would disappear and merge into a national way of speaking, albeit with some class and regional variations. But experts found that Geordie, Scouse, Mancunian, and Brummie accents are, if anything, becoming more distinct. However nuances between districts within the big cities are disappearing.

Outside the cities, the hundreds of accents that once distinguished small towns and rural districts are gradually being subsumed into regional “super-accents”. Experts have identified eight to 10 of these likely to predominate within the next 40 years. They include estuary English, the burr of the southwest and separate accents in the West Midlands, Yorkshire and north and south Wales.

But Russ wondered if the headline and the story were out of sync (from his email):

“Britain’s regional accents are becoming more widespread despite the increasingly homogeneous nature of society, according to academic studies.”

But what they then talk about the research finding is that the individual features of accents are becoming more prevalent rather than the actual numbers of people using or identifying with regional accents becoming larger. They report that in Southern England, only London and Bristol have strong accents, which seems to go against the line they take in disagreeing with the assertion that:

“Accents will disappear and merge into a national way of speaking, albeit with some class and regional variations”

One main point that they miss is that identity through language is as much what people say (dialect) as the way in which they say it (accent). Looking at one as a marker of identity, without looking at the other can only give part of the picture. Also looked at across a longer time line, I would argue that there is an ever increasing homogeneity of the way in which we communicate. A couple of centuries ago, villages only 20miles or so apart would be almost mutually incomprehensible. In comparison, pretty much any two ‘English speaking’ individuals from the UK would be able to speak with and understand each other fairly clearly. Given another couple of centuries of language evolution, we may well end up with an ever diminishing number of people identifying with a regional accent or dialect but who use its features more vociferously as a marker of their differentiation.

Alternatively, it may be that the most common features of the super accents they identify (London. Bristol, Geordie, Scouse, Mancunian, and Brummie) are co-opted by other speech groups and that over time (centuries) we will end up speaking a mish mash of all of them (Perhaps this is what is happening with the Scouse ‘ch’ sound moving into Northern Wales as they report).”

Egypt boosts Arabic web content

thenextwavefutures — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:09:57 +0000

[Andrew]

Egypt is going to put its archives, in Arabic, onto the web to promote the amount of Arabic web content available globally. The domain name organisation ICANN voted to allow non-Latin scripts in domain names in November, although the domains themselves won’t become operational until 2010.

There are 300 million Arabs – about 5% of the global population – but only 1% of internet content is in Arabic. One of the reasons why mobile phones are widely used in Egypt is because of their Arab-language function.

My thought is that much of the received wisdom about the internet was that it was going to be the vehicle which turned English into a global language. But increasingly it’s becoming an agent for cultural expression in people’s own languages, as a quick trip to Wikipedia demonstrates. 28 languages now feature more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles, and another 62 are past the 10,000 mark, including Piemontese, Euskara (Basque), Breton, Estonian, and Nepalese. Lithuanian and Hebrew are about to cross the 100,000 article threshold, while German is about to join English in the previously exclusive 1,000,000 club.

[Update: And I've just noticed this Guardian article - based on a study by Opera on the mobile web - which also has some interesting data on language usage on the African internet.]