Living Languages and New Approaches to Language Revitalisation Research

Tonya N. Stebbins, Kris Eira, Vicki L. Couzens, Tonya Stebbins, Vicki Couzens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367594510
• eBook ISBN: 9781351977944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book advocates for a new model of describing the practices of language revitalization, and decolonizing the research methods used to study them. The volume provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical and methodological foundations of working with communities revitalizing their languages. It lays out the conceptual framework at the heart of the project and moves into a description of the model, based on a seven-year research process working with Aboriginal communities in eastern Australia. Six case studies show the model's application in language revival practice. The book critically engages with the notion of revival languages as emergent and ever-transforming and develops a holistic approach to their description that reflects Aboriginal language practitioners' understandings of the nature of language. It seeks to demonstrate how the conceptual tools developed from this approach can support efforts to develop deeply collaborative research, highlight the diversity of language revitalisation practice and map between the realms of old and new, local and global, and the social, cultural, and textual dimensions of language, making this an ideal resource for researchers and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies.

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Introduction

1.1 Introduction

This book is about language revitalisation and how it requires the discipline of linguistics to move into new territories. It is also about the work of Indigenous language activists and the tensions and connections their work has with epistemologies of language founded in linguistics. The tensions reflect the fact that language revitalisation in Indigenous communities is a relatively new phenomenon that challenges many cherished views of what constitutes language, authenticity, and productive collaborative work in linguistics. The connections provide the windows to ways forward, moving through and beyond these challenges to more effective and mutually rewarding ways of working together. For this study we take a close look at the revitalisation of a number of languages traditionally spoken in parts of eastern Australia. In this region, as in many other locations around the globe, language revitalisation is integrally linked with journeys of cultural reclamation, self-empowerment, and decolonisation. As such, language revitalisation confronts the researcher with the need to recognise the context of language data at all levels, and to critically reflect on their own assumptions and positions in the hierarchies of research.

The book presents the findings of a seven-year project in which our research and writing team developed a theoretical and methodological foundation for working with language revitalisation. We demonstrate a new model for describing the process of language revitalisation as it occurs in day-to-day interactions and decisions in the present. Our approach accommodates the fluidity and diversity of both language revitalisation and the resulting languages-in-process, in ways which embrace the holistic view of language central to Aboriginal epistemologies.

This work was developed through a deeply collaborative research process, which contributes to wider goals of decolonising research partnerships and processes. We base our model on our understanding of the theorising that Aboriginal language activists, researchers, and teachers have been doing as they work on their languages in their communities. We hope that the new paradigm this provides to linguistics for understanding revitalisation languages will facilitate a deeper engagement with community-led work. In this book we also report on the ways that we have observed choices and strategies in one area of language work to influence decision-making in other areas.

The book presents many examples of current language data contributed by six communities in the process of language revitalisation, with analyses and reflections that break down barriers between atomised linguistic analyses, sociocultural approaches, and community-internal perspectives. The insights gained through this project have implications for other marginalised language situations, including mixed languages and endangered languages internationally.

The book is addressed to researchers across a range of subdisciplines of linguistics whose work involves the documentation of endangered or emergent languages. These researchers include language revitalisation practitioners, linguists, and others who work collaboratively in Indigenous communities across a range of disciplines associated with cultural revitalisation. These may be the fields of anthropology, education, cultural studies or postcolonial studies. The book responds to growing interest in critical engagement with a range of fieldwork issues which arise in the context of documentation and description projects, and the awareness of a need for improved postgraduate training in this area.

1.1.1 Why This Book About Language Revitalisation?

This book develops a set of research methods for analysing language revitalisation practice and data, established through collaborative processes involving community-based language revitalisation practitioners and linguists. A key focus of the book is the introduction of descriptive methods based on an understanding of language in context. We address the themes of decolonisation, language revitalisation, collaborative research, and research methodologies using this approach, to present a range of diverse language data produced through language revitalisation practice. The core objectives are:

• to contribute to contemporary efforts to decolonise academic research processes, by raising and exploring issues arising in different epistemologies in language research, with a view to advancing principles of collaborative language work;
• to explicate, exemplify, and promote an approach to studying language revitalisation that is holistic, integrates Indigenous and academic perspectives on language, and is amenable for use with an object of study which is inherently in-process;
• to provide a means for linguistic description of new and emergent languages on their own terms, moving on from models of language endangerment that focus on degradation and loss; and
• to develop and demonstrate a theoretical framework that assumes the validity of language revitalisation and accommodates the diversity of language revitalisation in practice, useable for ‘top-down’ applications such as language planning and ‘bottom-up’ applications such as language data analysis.

The book provides a way of understanding language revitalisation as a process that seeks to balance the ancient and the contemporary in terms of language content, form, and practice as well as in terms of the deep-lying goals that drive language revitalisation. The set of conceptual tools developed here support language work in many minority language settings, mapping the complex interaction between old and new, local and global, language as socially motivated, language as an expression of culture, and language as textual data. While this is developed in the context of current practice in Australia, the conceptual tools provided will be relevant to language revitalisation in the many other regions where this type of language work is emerging or already in focus.

By now there are a number of good surveys of language revitalisation, in terms of theoretical discussion (Tsunoda, 2006; Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), case studies (Lewis & Ostler, 2010; Amery & Gale, 2008; Hinton & Hale, 2001), and practical discussions of methods (Hinton, 2013; Thieberger, 1995; Littlebear, 1999; Gale, 2016). These are but a sample of the burgeoning field in this area. In this book we do not cover this ground again, though we provide some brief considerations in Section 3.1. Rather, we build on this literature from the perspective of our own research and experience, specialising in languages in southeast Australia which are in the process of being revitalised after a break in transmission.

In this book we break new ground by developing an approach to language revitalisation that accommodates the fact that languages undergoing revitalisation are emergent—changing all the time—and that fully integrates sociolinguistics and cultural context right into the linguistic description. Acknowledging that language revitalisation is an act of decolonisation leads to the recognition that research into language revitalisation necessarily also involves decolonisation of the research process. In this project we reworked theory and methodology from this perspective, using a reflective collaborative process throughout. By working closely with six case study communities we were able to document a range of up-to-the-minute language revitalisation data. Finally, we have developed and demonstrated an integrated methodology that makes use of both academic and Indigenous community understandings of what language is.

Collaboration is a fundamental aspect of how language revitalisation practice can happen effectively regardless of where communities are based. The disjunctions between academic and Indigenous ways of seeing language are relevant across the globe. Understanding language in a holistic way, maintaining the relevance of the social context of a piece of text to its syntactic analysis, for example, is important for allowing collaboration, establishing common ground, and developing meaningful descriptions of language revitalisation texts.

Language revitalisation is a major stream in the new Australian National Curriculum for Indigenous Languages but until now has been significantly undertheorised. Research and teaching in language endangerment is expanding to encompass practices that move beyond language documentation to participation in restoring language to its communities. There is a range of courses in connected areas such as language revitalisation and language documentation. Because language loss is happening at such a fast rate around the world, language revitalisation is increasingly the practice even in areas where a generation ago a language maintenance approach would have been appropriate. Research on language revitalisation is happening at a number of levels, including efforts by the community and collaborating linguists to retrieve language data from archives and community memory, to develop this data in useable ways, and more broadly to understand the phenomenon of language revitalisation itself.

1.1.2 Language Revitalisation in Australia: Relational and Research Challenges and Opportunities

In many communities around Australia, Aboriginal languages have not been used as everyday community languages for a number of generations. Two national Indigenous language surveys show current trends (McConvell & Marmion, 2005 and Marmion, Obata, & Troy, 2014). Although there are over 250 Australian Indigenous languages, in 2005 about 145 were still spoken, with around 110 severely or critically endangered. Of the rest, only about 18 languages were still spoken by all generations. By 2014 however, only about 120 languages were still spoken with 13 considered strong.

As in other countries colonised by Europeans during the 18th and 19th centuries, many Aboriginal people in Australia are struggling to address the legacies of the history of contact and to take control of even the most fundamental aspects of their lives. Language is an important area in this context: precisely because it has been a site of overt oppression, it is also a site of potential resistance. Language revitalisation is an expanding area of practice in a range of Aboriginal communities across Australia (Amery & Gale, 2008; Simpson, Amery, & Gale, 2008; Walsh, 2003). Efforts at language revitalisation mark the beginning of what participants realise will be a long process of restoration—not only of language but of culture and economic independence as well.

As a relatively new phenomenon, revitalisation languages pose a range of descriptive challenges to linguistics, not least because they are emergent languages, being researched and developed at the same time as they are learned and used. Successful language revitalisation depends crucially on people in communities regaining authority over their languages as well as developing the ability to use them in a wide range of contexts.

Language revitalisation is distinct from other types of language-in-practice in many significant ways. In terms of its linguistics, the most notable difference is the emergent nature of language revitalisation—the language develops as it is spoken and written, rather than being used in the context of numbers of fluent speakers and/or a documented widely agreed standard (Couzens & Eira, 2014). In terms of the sociopolitical environment of language, its most notable feature is that it is produced within and because of a context of cultural oppression, experienced within Indigenous communities as colonisation and its continuing aftermath.

Language revitalisation journeys are always about cultural reclamation and community healing as well as the nuts and bolts of grammar and lexicon (Eira, 2007; Rosborough, 2012). People within the community worry long and deeply about issues of correctness and authenticity, wanting to do the very best they can with the resources they have at hand. Linguists look for ways to support language revitalisation efforts and have at their disposal a range of tools that have been honed to make incisive decisions in the areas of correctness of language form and meaning. Difficulties arise when shared concerns about correctness or authenticity become points of conflict (Eira & Stebbins, 2008; Easton & Stebbins, 2015; Florey, 2004; Irvine & Gal, 2000). Given the very different types of cultural frameworks that are available for dealing with these issues, it is not surprising to find that there may be a range of quite different answers to the question of which form of a widely remembered word is ‘right’.

1.1.3 Some Debates in the Field of Language Revitalisation

Although early examples of language revitalisation include efforts to restore languages such as Cornish or Hebrew and reach back into the 19th century, in recent decades this activity has spread significantly, becoming the focus of increasing numbers of Indigenous people and their communities as well as an area of specialist activity within the discipline of linguistics. At the same time, within linguistics, there has been a flowering of new methods of work with endangered languages, particularly under the banner of language documentation, as well as ongoing debate about the proper role of linguists and linguistics in the social project of language revitalisation. Before turning to briefly summarise these strands of the discussion on language revitalisation, we want to draw the reader’s attention to the reasons why communities are likely to engage in these types of activities.

It has now been clearly documented that there are significant correlations between language vitality in Indigenous communities and other measures of well-being (see Section 2.1.2). Within our data, the relationships between language knowledge and individual and community well-being are explained as relating to reconnection with Indigenous spirituality, a stronger sense of identity and a move away from being positioned as a dependent in ongoing relationships with the dominant community.

As soon as you start teaching them a few words, they feel the language. Because it belongs to them …. It comes up through the ground into ’em.

Geoff Anderson (Couzens, Eira, & Stebbins, 2014, p. 104) ¹

[I]f we don’t go back and learn our language, then our kids, in future generations will be like us, looking for our identity, going through that identity crisis—and they shouldn’t have to. They shouldn’t have to in these days. If we’ve got enough knowledge of going in and utilising the education system, and taking it back out.

Jenni Beer (Couzens et al., 2014, p. 130)

It is noteworthy to us that each of these sets of statements can be read as a powerful assertion of personal and community sovereignty. And it is precisely this aspect of language revitalisation that we seek to celebrate and support through this work.

In this work we also seek to acknowledge just what is needed in order to revitalise language and how few of these resources and activities are within the direct sphere of linguistics. At the same time, it is clear that linguistics has crucial and unique tools and insights to contribute to this work and that, as a discipline, linguistics also stands to gain a great deal of understanding about the nature of human language when linguists engage as partners in these projects.

We have new places for Language to live. We have old places for Language to bring to life. We need words for practising Culture. Words for living in cities. We need linguistics. We need ancient traditions. People with different skills. Reconciliation. We need Language in schools. Linguistic reconstruction. Individual creativity. We need Language in English. Traditional grammar. English grammar. Elders. Children. Families. Universities. Spelling. Books. Soundfiles. Apps. Traditional technology. Dreaming trails. Knowledge of Country. Meaning for 2014. Meaning for 1814.

People reviving languages are breaking the barriers to learning and using Language in every way possible. Tak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Decolonising Linguistic Practice
• 3 Concepts
• 4 Description of the Model
• 5 Applying the Model
• 6 A Contextual Typology of Language Revitalisation
• 7 Language Revitalisation Practice
• 8 Meeting Points in Language Revitalisation
• Appendix 1: Interview Guidelines
• Appendix 2: Research Questions
• Appendix 3: Dataset
• References
• Index