Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Margaret J.-M. Sönmez, Maia Wellington Gahtan, Nadia Cannata, Margaret J.-M. Sönmez, Maia Wellington Gahtan, Nadia Cannata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138589483
• eBook ISBN: 9780429958427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage presents essays by practitioners based in language museums around the world. Describing their history, mission, and modes of display, contributors demonstrate the important role intangible heritage can and should play in the museum.

Arguing that languages are among our most precious forms of cultural heritage, the book also demonstrates that they are at risk of neglect, and of endangerment from globalisation and linguistic imperialism. Including case studies from across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, this book documents the vital work being done by museums to help preserve languages and make them objects of broad public interest. Divided into three sections, contributions to the book focus on one of three types of museums: museums of individual languages, museums of language groups – both geographic and structural – and museums of writing. The volume presents practical information alongside theoretical discussions and state-of-the-art commentaries concerning the representation of languages and their cultural nature.

Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the first volume to address the subject of language museums and, as such, should be of interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of museum and cultural heritage studies, applied linguistics, anthropology, tourism, and public education.

1 Introduction

Maia Wellington Gahtan, Nadia Cannata, and Margaret J.-M. Sönmez¹

This volume of essays arose from the editors’ and contributors’ awareness that language museums are an under-theorised and insufficiently recognised area of endeavour in the field of intangible cultural heritage. Our introduction presents the historical and theoretical underpinnings of this new subject, making reference to various forms of language collections, addressing the issue of language as intangible heritage, and discussing language museums within up-to-date discourses of defining and safeguarding intangible heritage, as well as new movements in museology. Each chapter that follows presents and explains to the reader the origins, contents, visions, and missions of its author’s (or authors’) language museum. The museums represented by these chapters are to be found in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America; they both preserve and share with their visitors many different aspects of language, including language as a subject in itself. Coming from different traditions and with differing foundations, the chapters describe multiple and various display techniques and contents, including interactive modules and engagement in community activities. Language museums are increasing in number, but only recently has an association of language museums been founded to allow and encourage greater interactions and discussions between them. It is hoped that this volume will prove to be a useful introduction to this area, an encouragement and aid to others who plan any sort of language exhibition, and a contribution to scholarship on the safeguarding and appreciation of intangible cultural heritage.

Among our most precious forms of cultural heritage, languages have long been recognised – by Plato and Aristotle, and also by ancient Indian, Roman, and medieval European writers such as Roger Bacon and Dante Alighieri² – as lying at the root of human nature and, ultimately, at the foundation of civilisation, language being the means through which human society is built, preserved, and regulated. Language has also been acknowledged as bearing a significant relationship to our perceptions of human identity, and therefore as constituting a significant form of universally shared cultural heritage.³ The association of language with community identity is documented from biblical times onwards:⁴ in the Bible, Noah’s descendants are listed according to the seventy language groups that replaced the one language and one speech originally given to mankind, and the division of nations and languages is explained as the punishment given for the people’s attempt to build Babel, the tower reaching to the skies.⁵ The tower has become a recognised image, representing both language and diversity. Often depicted in art, Towers of Babel are also a staple of those language exhibitions and museums that take on the task of exhibiting multiple languages. Two of the language museums discussed in this volume (see Chapters 7 and 13) display Tower of Babel exhibits to highlight the unique qualities of individual languages and cultural groups, while at the same time establishing connections between them.⁶

Language and linguistic diversity have also been objects of discussion across cultures, and it is ultimately such lines of inquiry that nourished the first safeguarding efforts and thus also lie at the foundation of the first language museums. Western models have postulated, parallel to their understanding of the monogenesis of mankind, an original unity at least of language families – although not all cultures share this idea.⁷ Related debates concerning language primacy were especially heated during the European Middle Ages, when the issue of linguistic diversification and of the proliferation of different languages concerned, for the first time in centuries, not only common speech and everyday exchanges, but crucially the language of writing, of religion, and of philosophy; these debates eventually led to the replacement of a single prestige language, Latin, by several different languages, none in itself possessing the status of Latin but all, nevertheless, setting out to acquire it (see Chapter 13).⁸ Prestige and unity within diversity were also factors in the development of Classical Arabic and of Chinese, for which a writing system was shaped, during the Qin dynasty, that could accommodate the many languages of the larger region, so that mutual communication was possible across vast cultural and geographic space as well as time (see Chapter 16). Such historical dichotomies of abstract standards and vernacular manifestations often characterise language exhibits. What follows is a description of the different steps taken to describe and preserve languages and writing since ancient times, with reference to the recent museological and museographic approaches to language and intangible cultural heritage overall.

Describing languages: grammars, dictionaries, institutions

Historically, one of the cornerstones of safeguarding languages resides in their analytical description. With the exception of Sanskrit, most languages had no independent written grammars until fairly late in their histories. The extreme earliness of work on Sanskrit grammar is explained by its religious significance: in Hinduism, grammar was first articulated by the god Indra, and grammatical wisdom was also associated with Siva; linguistic commentary is thus an integral part of Sanskrit.⁹

The ancient Greeks and Romans, with no such divine inspiration, seemed not to have been too interested in analysing the languages they spoke as what we would today define as grammar: for them their languages did not need questioning; they knew and used them, and all foreigners were barbaroi, without distinction, because they (literally) babbled funny idioms. The varieties of Greek languages were happily acknowledged and described as dialektoi (‘common speeches’, although each endowed with a rich literature), and at least five of them were contemporarily in use – Ionic, Doric, Attic, Eolic, and the common koiné – from the third century BCE onwards. In contrast, no dialects have ever been recorded for Latin.¹⁰ Grammars of both languages were produced only in late antiquity,¹¹ as an effort to teach and stabilise languages that were starting to lose meaningful links with their centres of origin. We have no documentation of any further effort to protect, safeguard, or promote in any way either of the two languages. Culturally valued writings could be seen as exemplifying and preserving the best written forms of their own languages, as Virgil for Latin, or pre-Islamic and classical poetry and the Koran for standardised written varieties of Arabic. A Greek grammar first appeared in the second century; an Arabic dictionary, work on prosody, and grammar, are due to the late eighth century Basra school; and the versified Hebrew grammar by Solomon ibn Gabirol dates to the eleventh century. Chinese grammars, written by Westerners, belong to the seventeenth century, whilst the first grammar written by a Chinese linguist appeared more than two hundred years later.¹²

Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe saw various commitments to describe and promote individual languages as mother tongues of a community or of people in courts, chanceries, and cities, as the new languages were being promoted as fit for institutions, literatures, and commerce.¹³ Such efforts did not, however, result in the publication of grammars and lexica or in the foundation of institutions devoted to the description, promotion, or protection of the respective languages until the sixteenth century. Leon Battista Alberti’s grammar of Tuscan (1441–1442),¹⁴ and Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramatica de la lengua castellana (Salamanca, 1492), are the earliest grammars we have for European modern languages, followed by Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (Venice, 1525). Valentin Ickelsamer was the author of the first guide to German, Die rechte weis auffs kürtzist lessen zu lernen (Erfurt, 1527), and of the first Teutsche Grammatica (Augsburg, 1534). A few years later, Joao de Barros published his Gramatica da lingua portuguesa (Lisbon, 1540), then came Meigret’s Tretté de la grammere françoese (Paris, 1550), and in England Bullokar’s Bref Grammar (London, 1586) and Mulcaster’s First Part of the Elementarie, containing a list of 8,000 English words, also designed and compiled for school children (1582).

More recognisable monolingual dictionaries started in the seventeenth century with Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 word list entitled A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard vsuall English words … gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. It responded to the need for some solid semantic and orthographic reference for the ever-expanding written uses of a language that had previously been considered inappropriate for intellectual or literary use, and its followers reflected the ever-growing vocabulary of a language that expanded with the commercial empire that England was creating.¹⁵ Numerous and increasingly large dictionaries came off the London presses through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, ‘the first attempt at a truly principled lexicography’ for English is commonly identified with Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in London over a century later (1755) which, by its fourth edition, counted 140,871 definitions and 222,114 quotations, and effectively introduced quotations from the language in general use as a founding method of lexicography, a ‘practice which has informed high-quality English dictionaries ever since’, and which set English lexicography apart from its European counterparts.¹⁶

In some countries, early grammars set the stage for the formation of language academies towards the end of the sixteenth century; these had the express purpose of describing, promoting, and preserving particular usages. The first language academy in Europe, the Accademia della Crusca (1582), was established in Florence (see Chapter 7). It undertook the task of defining and safeguarding the correctness of the Italian language as used by its major literary authors. It was followed by similar institutions all over Europe, such as the Fruitbearing Society in Germany (1617; see Chapter 5), which closely followed the language philosophy of the Crusca, and the Académie Française (1635). In 1713, the Académia Real Española was established; it took the Académie Française as its model and aimed at the preservation of the excellence of the Castillan language, described as ‘dominant in Spain and second to none in Europe’.¹⁷ Major lexicography relating to modern languages is datable to the period just before and after these societies, and was inaugurated with the publication of the Thresor de la langue françoise (1606) and the first edition of the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca in Florence (1612). Under the auspices of the German Fruitbearing Society, Kaspar Stieler published Der Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum und Fortwachs oder Sprachsschatz (1691),¹⁸ the first significant effort in providing language norms for German, together with a thorough lexicographic description of the language. The Spanish Academy was established with the principal aim of collecting and publishing a dictionary of the language, ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Museums of individual languages
• PART II Museums of languages, linguistics, and language groups
• PART III Museums of writing
• AFTERWORD
• Bibliography
• Index