Speak not: dying languages
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In Asian Review of Books (10/20/21), Peter Gordon reviews James Griffiths' Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language (Bloomsbury, October 2021). Although the book touches upon many other languages, its main focus is on Welsh, Hawaiian, and Cantonese.
…
That Speak Not is more politics than linguistics is telegraphed by the title. For Griffiths, language is the single most important aspect of group identity, both as marker and glue: that what makes the Welsh Welsh or Hawaiians Hawaiian is primarily the language, rather than lineage, culture, belief systems or lifestyles. While some might debate this, governments have all too often taken aim at minority languages with precisely this rationale in the name of national unity.
Griffiths takes each [of the three languages] in turn, going back a century or more to put the language and language policy in a historical context. Both Welsh and Hawaiian are stories of formal repression and neglect. Less explicitly sinister, but just as harmful, inward anglophone immigration has meant that both are now minority languages in their own homelands. More recent attempts at regeneration and restoration hold out some hope: the jury is still out on their future, but Welsh in particular, writes Griffiths, seems to be on an upswing that may prove sustainable.
In short sections between the longer ones, Griffiths adds discussions on Africaans, Hebrew, Yiddish and, somewhat incongruously, Esperanto.
Cantonese fits less well into this narrative, since any repression, at least as far as Hong Kong is concerned, is hypothetical rather than actual, nor are Hong Kong’s Cantonese speakers in imminent danger of becoming a minority in their own city.
Griffiths’s intention, however, is to show a path by which Cantonese might possibly descend to irrelevance if not oblivion. He first places Cantonese into the context of a more than century-long process of linguistic centralization in China, including the development of Putonghua and the history of romanization of Chinese (something covered in more detail in David Moser’s A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language). The discussion of Cantonese itself is rather brief and it’s never quite clear how the past or present of Chinese language policy makes the jump to apply to Cantonese in Hong Kong.
…
Griffiths' book just came out this month. He had probably been working on it since early in 2020 and more likely at least from 2019. But something radical happened to Hong Kong on June 30, 2020, viz., the PRC government imposed the National Security Law on the city. This means that Hong Kong is now essentially no different than any other city in the PRC. Among changes to the legal, penal, financial, political, social, educational, and all other aspects of life in Hong Kong, language usage is already feeling the sharp bite of pro-Mandarin policies.
As explained in "Hong Kong Cantonese in jeopardy" (9/19/21), the linguistic situation in Hong Kong has changed rapidly since mid-2020, such that — if the political situation in the PRC remains more or less stable — Cantonese could be quickly eclipsed in schools, in courts, in entertainment, and other key facets of daily life in the city.
I am in close touch with Hong Kong citizens who are deeply alarmed by the prospects of the looming loss of their language (as has happened with many other topolects and languages in the PRC) and have begun to take action to prevent the demise of Cantonese under the threat of the PRC language juggernaut. In the coming weeks and months, I will be reporting on their efforts.
Selected reading
- "National Security Law eclipses Hong Kong" (6/2/20)
- "The Future of Cantonese" (5/27/18)
- "The future of Cantonese, part 2" (6/10/18)
- "Public Romanization in Canton" (5/30/20) — "Speak Mandarin; Write Standard [i.e., simplified] Characters"
- "A quick exit for Cantonese" (7/22/15) — how hard it is nowadays to find a decent elementary school in Hong Kong that offers instruction in Cantonese, rather than in Mandarin
- "Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters" (7/28/19)
- "Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2" (9/1/19) — includes a lengthy list of posts on the language and writing of the Hong Kong protesters
- "Hong Kong anti-China graffiti" (7/26/19)
- "A new polysyllabic character" (4/3/16)
- "Polysyllabic characters in Chinese writing " (8/2/11)
- "Polysyllabic characters revisited " (6/18/15)
- "Vocabulary of Hong Kong protest slogans and new characters" (9/1/19)
- "Hong Kong: language, art, and resistance" (5/24/20)
- "Cantonese v Mandarin: When Hong Kong languages get political",
[h.t. Don Keyser]
J.W. Brewer said,
October 20, 2021 @ 6:03 pm
Without disputing that the immigration of newcomers who did not speak the local language was potentially a factor in both Wales and Hawai'i,* it was so much larger a factor in Hawai'i, just numerically, that it seems odd to treat them as parallel situations, but maybe that's the reviewer oversimplifying a more nuanced presentation in the actual book.
*In Hawai'i, unlike Wales (for the most part), there were lots of immigrants from Asia etc. who arrived having neither English nor the traditional local language as their L1, but for a variety of obvious social/political reasons they and their kids ended up learning English rather than Hawaiian.
Calvin said,
October 20, 2021 @ 7:20 pm
Cantonese is also well-used in Macau, and has similar standing as in Hong Kong. Why it wasn't mentioned?
Even Macau has only about a 10th of population comparing with Hong Kong, and much less news worthy, I think it should be included when the topic is concerning about Cantonese's future as a language, not just in the context of Hong Kong.
Victor Mair said,
October 20, 2021 @ 7:53 pm
@Calvin
Thank you for mentioning Cantonese in Macau. I hope that in future we'll hear more news of the situation there. It's interesting, though, that both the full review and the author of the book mention Macanese patuá.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macanese_Patois
jfruh said,
October 20, 2021 @ 11:41 pm
The assertion that "what makes the Welsh Welsh … is primarily the language, rather than lineage, culture, belief systems or lifestyles" seems just completely insupportable on the face in Welsh-adjacent territories, as the Irish and Scots have managed to maintain an extremely strong sense of identity despite having had their national languages essentially replaced by English over the last 200 years in ways that the Welsh (of whom I believe a solid 20% are still L1 Welsh speakers) have not. (You could make an argument that the Scots never had a true single national language in the first place.)
philip said,
October 21, 2021 @ 4:14 am
jfruh – as regards a single national language, the Scots did have one – but it was Irish. The literal translation of Scots Gaelic in Irish is 'The Irish of Scotland', just as the Irish for Manx is literally 'The Irish of the Isle of Man'.
Victor Mair said,
October 21, 2021 @ 5:59 am
It's interesting that the maternal side of my family always spoke of their Scots ancestry as "Scots Irish".
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
October 21, 2021 @ 7:08 am
Isn't "Scots Irish" more-or-less synonymous with "Ulster Scots"?:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
languagehat said,
October 21, 2021 @ 7:51 am
The assertion that "what makes the Welsh Welsh … is primarily the language, rather than lineage, culture, belief systems or lifestyles" seems just completely insupportable on the face in Welsh-adjacent territories
It's insupportable in general, and not just for Welsh. What language makes the Swiss Swiss, or Jews Jews? Or, for that matter, Americans Americans? The fact that "governments have all too often taken aim at minority languages with precisely this rationale in the name of national unity" is neither here nor there — governments have taken aim at all sorts of things in the name of national unity, and I'd say language is pretty far down the list. This is a half-baked idea that should have been thought about more carefully before anyone tried to turn it into a book.
DJL said,
October 21, 2021 @ 8:58 am
@languagehat Oh, I think that's a bit harsh. After all, nation-states (and national identities, for that matter) did arise from the pretty top-down process of making a given territory linguistically homogeneous to a significant extent.
Rodger C said,
October 21, 2021 @ 9:51 am
@Benjamin E. Orsatti: Yes. The 1980s US government atlas of ethnic groups botched this terribly.
Rodger C said,
October 21, 2021 @ 9:54 am
@hat: An awful lot of Americans believe that the language that makes Americans Americans is English, in precisely the form spoken by themselves.
Coby Lubliner said,
October 21, 2021 @ 11:53 am
Other than perhaps the Hakka and the Hui, do any speakers of Sinitic languages in China think of themselves as being of an ethnicity other than Han?
Terpomo said,
October 21, 2021 @ 12:02 pm
@jfruh, languagehat
Well, I've heard some people take the view that the Scots and Irish are at this point essentially Anglicized in every meaningful sense but play-acting as Celts in the same sense that e.g. Mussolini and his fellows were play-acting as ancient Romans or American Afrocentrists play-act as ancient Egyptians, though I can't say I agree
@philip
You mean "the Gaelic of Scotland" and "the Gaelic of the Isle of Man". It wasn't that long ago that they were considered varieties of one language and shared a common literary standard.
The presence of Esperanto is actually not that incongruous; there is a history of persecution against it, see the book 'La Danĝera Lingvo', which I believe has been translated under the title 'Dangerous Language ― Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin'. It's true that Esperanto speakers are mostly so by choice (though there are a few natives!) but then again, people are religious by choice and we condemn persecution on that basis.
David Marjanović said,
October 21, 2021 @ 12:10 pm
No, most or all of the Lowlands, including Edinburgh (I'm not sure about Glasgow), never spoke Gaelic. That's where Old English developed into Middle Scots.
Belgium is a top-down creation, and its French has ended up as slower-Parisian-plus-septante-huitante-nonante, but…
languagehat said,
October 21, 2021 @ 12:29 pm
An awful lot of Americans believe that the language that makes Americans Americans is English, in precisely the form spoken by themselves.
An awful lot of people believe all sorts of stupid things. So what? The statement was that "language is the single most important aspect of group identity," and I'm saying that's hogwash. Like most sweeping statements about humanity, it's true in some cases and not in others. As with most sweeping statements about humanity, you can cherry-pick support wherever you can find it, but there are always counterexamples.
After all, nation-states (and national identities, for that matter) did arise from the pretty top-down process of making a given territory linguistically homogeneous to a significant extent.
If you define "nation-state" (a nebulous concept, to my mind) as a polity that is linguistically homogeneous, then that's trivially sort-of-true (modulo the whole "top-down" thing). If not, not.
DJL said,
October 21, 2021 @ 2:09 pm
@languagehat nothing nebulous about the concept of a 'nation-state', it's a pretty well-defined concept in the study of nationalism, the literature I had in mind with my comment (especially the so-called 'modernist' school represented by Gellner and Hobsbawm). But it is certainly not to be defined as 'a polity that is linguistically homogeneous' – where did you get that from? I certainly didn't say such a thing. And the whole thing was no doubt a case top-down, social engineering: no country in the world has become linguistically homogeneous (to some extent) without the active employment of state tools to make it so (especially, the use of universal and compulsory schooling and printing). Again, I'm just alluding to widely-accepted issues in the study of nationalism.
ts4q said,
October 21, 2021 @ 3:34 pm
Foreign language media in Mexico:
Cinema:
+ Adult films: subtitled.
+ Children's films: dubbed.
+ "Crossover" films: choice of subbed or dubbed. E.g. went to see Avengers Assemble and realized about a minute in "oh, this is the dubbed version" and exchanged our tickets for a subtitled showing.
TV:
+ Broadcast television: dubbed. Sometimes original/English available on SAP (Second Audio Program)(at least it was back before I went full internet. Don't know now.)
+ Cable TV: subtitled.
As I speak both English and Spanish (and have worked in translation between the two), when watching subtitled shows I spend way too much time comparing and critiquing the original and the translation, a problem I'm relieved of when it's dubbed.
But it has given me a few chuckles over the years.
+ "I heard he stopped a rhino with just a stare…" – con una escalera (stair)
+ "If I need any help, I'll give you a ring" – te doy un anillo (as in a piece of jewelry worn around the finger)
+ "…Iran, Iraq and other rogue nations" – Irán, Irák y otras naciones de tapetes (other rug nations)
languagehat said,
October 21, 2021 @ 4:29 pm
nothing nebulous about the concept of a 'nation-state', it's a pretty well-defined concept in the study of nationalism
Nonsense. It's a widely used concept in the study of nationalism, sure, but I defy you to find two scholars who agree on the exact definition. I have a whole shelf of books on nationalism, which is a long-standing interest of mine, and I'm pretty sure if there were a standard definition I'd be aware of it. Everybody defines it however best suits their theories. Frankly, I think it's a useless concept no matter how defined — it merely allows people to shove differences under the rug.
But it is certainly not to be defined as 'a polity that is linguistically homogeneous' – where did you get that from?
From your own remark I quoted, which is in italics, directly above my own response to it: "After all, nation-states (and national identities, for that matter) did arise from the pretty top-down process of making a given territory linguistically homogeneous to a significant extent." Or do you dislike the word "polity" for some reason?
DJL said,
October 22, 2021 @ 4:08 am
@languagehat
Well, if you read those books the same way you read these posts, then we are in trouble. It is not the notion of a nation-state per se that is controversial in studies of nationalism. I mean, the idea, to quote the Britannica in this occasion (but I could quote anything else, really), of a territorially bounded sovereign polity (i.e., a state) that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation, is not something most scholars actually have an issue with. What is controversial in the field is the origins and history of nations (and of the concept of nationalism), and as you must know there are many takes on this issue – modernism, primordialism, Anthony's ethno-symbolism, etc. – but this is a related and clearly distinct discussion.
And no, no problem with the word 'polity' – still ascribing random interpretations to others, are we? My point, obviously, was that a linguistically homogeneous region/country/whatever is the result of the emergence of the nation-state, not that the latter is defined in terms of the former.
And in any case the point of my original post was that any country or region that is linguistically homogeneous to some extent is always the result of some sort of social engineering, something that is widely accepted in studies of nationalism.
SusanC said,
October 22, 2021 @ 11:55 am
My family is from Wales, and I kind of doubt this. There's a whole lot of other aspects of national identity that manage to persist even when nearly everyone can speak English.
Historically, there were attempts to e.g. stop klds speaking Welsh at school, but that is I think quite a long way back … e.g. even my grandmother is from a time when being bilingual English-Welsh was definite advatange, and not knowing Welsh would put you at something of a disadvantage,
On the other hand: I give a certain amount of credence to the view that the lack of a common language is one of the main barriers to the European Union working as a political community. (Although a large number of EU citizens know English as a foreign language, and I have been at more EU sponsored meetings than I care to count where the draft resolution was circulated in N different translations, for a fairly large N. It is sometimes an instructive exercize to see what the translators have done with your text that you originally wrote in English. "OMG, it ends up meaning *that* when translated into German,,, we'd better revise the English master document to make it clear that it should not translated into German that way"
Per peeve: English is a very good language for writing documents that appear to be an agreement to do something but which on closer examination (e.g. by lawyers) turn out to be an agreement to do nothing whatsoever. The translators are sometimes quite effective at turning the obfuscation into something more blunt..
cliff arroyo said,
October 22, 2021 @ 1:19 pm
My idea is that with pluricentric languages (like English, Spanish etc) a 'national' variety serves the same function as distinct languages do as symbols of identity.
What binds Americans linguistically is not "English" but "American English" (with GAE as a general standard for a number of local variants).
Mexicans don't want to speak like Spaniards or Cubans but maintain a distinct standard that serves as a symbol of national identity in a way that the Spanish of Spain or Argentina doesn't.
A few years ago I knew of a student was looking at language and identity in Taiwan and came to the conclusion that Taiwanese Mandarin (quite distinct in writing and speech from the mainland) had become a more important symbol of Taiwanese national identity than "Taiwanese" ever could be.
Robert said,
October 23, 2021 @ 7:37 am
@jfruh @philip
I'm trying to remember my history here, but isn't it the case that English wasn't imported into Scotland by the English? I thought, and I'm happy to be corrected if this isn't the case, that both England and Lowland Scotland were settled by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and English and Scots developed together coterminously.
Also, wasn't the pre-English/Scots language of Lowland Scotland essentially a dialect of old Welsh, and Scots Gaelic a more recent import from Ireland?
Nothing I've written is an assertion of fact, this is all from memory and I may well be wrong about some or all of it.
ktschwarz said,
October 24, 2021 @ 1:40 pm
languagehat said: This is a half-baked idea that should have been thought about more carefully before anyone tried to turn it into a book.
The sentence with "what makes the Welsh Welsh … is primarily the language" is the reviewer's, not the author's; it doesn't appear in those words in the book. Whether it's an oversimplification or a fair summary is hard to say without reading the whole book. An earlier short version was published on cnn.com in 2019 and discussed at Language Hat at the time.
The statement was that "language is the single most important aspect of group identity," and I'm saying that's hogwash.
That's the reviewer; I don't think Griffiths makes such a sweeping statement, he's focusing on specific communities where there are activist speakers who believe it's true of their own language. Perhaps the book would have benefited from some comparison of Irish identity (after language shift) to Welsh identity, as a counterpoint.
languagehat said,
October 24, 2021 @ 1:56 pm
Good points; I should try to remember that the reviewer/reporter is almost always to blame for dumb statements.
philip said,
October 26, 2021 @ 5:28 pm
@Robert @Terpomo
I do not mean 'The Gaelic of Scotland'. When I am wrting in English, I use the English word 'Irish' to denote the Irish language; when I am writing in Irish, I use the word Gaeilge'. Same thing with 'crack' and 'craic'.
As for who invaded Scotland first … before the English got there, the kingdom fo Dal Riada straddled the upper north-west of Ireland and the east of Scotland – maybe just the highlands part (ie REAL Scotland) – as the main method of transport was by boat. The island of Rathlin – my maternal grandmother's birthplace – was an important staging post, and later, when Dal Riada was breaking up, a strategic fortress and defence post for various Irish and Scottosh clans. The Irish of Rathlin, when it came to be studied in the early 20th centruy, showed features distinct from mainland Irish and some Scots Gaelic features,