Linguistic Genocide in Education--or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights?

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135662356
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this powerful, multidisciplinary book, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas shows how most indigenous and minority education contributes to linguistic genocide according to United Nations definitions. Theory is combined with a wealth of factual encyclopedic information and with many examples and vignettes. The examples come from all parts of the world and try to avoid Eurocentrism. Oriented toward theory and practice, facts and evaluations, and reflection and action, the book prompts readers to find information about the world and their local contexts, to reflect and to act.

A Web site with additional resource materials to this book can be found at http://www.ruc.dk/~tovesk/

Part I
Setting the Scene

Chapter 1
What Is Happening to the Languages of the World

1.1. Our knowledge about ‘language’ and languages

1.1.1. Problems in Identifying what is ‘a language’

1.1.2. Our knowledge about languages is shaky

1.2. The world’s languages: number of languages and number of speakers

1.2.1. Number of languages

1.2.1.1. Reliability of statistics

1.2.1.2. Where are the languages?

1.2.1.3. Megadiversity countries

1.2.2. Number of speakers of each language

1.3. The state of the languages: the ‘moribund’, the ‘endangered’, and the ‘safe’

1.4. Examples of languages pushed into disuse

Table 1.1 The countries with most languages in the world

Table 1.2 Variations in estimates of number of languages in the most diverse countries

Table 1.3 The 10 most linguistically diverse countries, according to Robinson 1993

Table 1.4 The top 10 oral languages in terms of number of first language speakers, all more than 100 million speakers

Table 1.5 The languages with between 35 and 100 million first language speakers

Table 1.6 Languages with between 10 and 35 million home speakers, numbers and ranks

Table 1.7 Overview of oral language sizes and numbers

Table 1.8 Threatened and safe languages, definitions, and estimates

Definition Box 1.1 Linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas)

Definition Box 1.2 Endo-definitions and exo-definitions (autonyms and heteronyms)

Definition Box 1.3 Endemic species & languages

Definition Box 1.4 Community language

Definition Box 1.5 Moribund, endangered & safe languages

Info Box 1.1 Are these names of languages? (see Task Box 1.2)

Info Box 1.2 Most likely to hear the language in country x?
(see Task Box 1.3)

Info Box 1.3 Where are Arabic and Chinese widely spoken?
(see Task Box 1.4)

Info Box 1.4 Languages widely spoken or with official status
(see Task Box 1.5)

Info Box 1.5 Languages apart from English which have official status in British Isles (see Task Box 1.6, A)

Info Box 1.6 Literature describing and classifying the world’s languages

Info Box 1.7 UNESCO World languages report

Info Box 1.8 International Clearing House for Endangered
Languages

Info Box 1.9 Differences in estimates on numbers of languages in prehistoric times

Info Box 1.10 Examples of difficulty in getting reliable census figures

Info Box 1.11 ‘Community languages’ in Africa

Info Box 1.12 Languages with over 1 million home speakers— total 208 languages

Info Box 1.13 None of California’s roughly 50 native languages widely learned by children

Info Box 1.14 Canada—3 out of 53 native languages have
‘an excellent chance of survival’

Info Box 1.15 Cameroon—travel 50 kilometers, almost a dozen languages

Info Box 1.16 Central Nigeria—95 of 100 languages with under 200 speakers ‘completely undescribed’

Info Box 1.17 Aboriginal peoples in Australia

Info Box 1.18 Skolt and Ánar Sámi in (the Finnish part of) Sápmi

Insert 1.1 Kurdish and Turkish

Insert 1.2 ‘Lappish’ and Finnish

Insert 1.3 Dialect/language villages

Insert 1.4 Name ‘Kaurna’ comes from neighbouring people

Insert 1.5 Census returns for ‘mother tongue’, India

Insert 1.6 Number of languages in the world is 300, number of states is 2,000 (a classroom scene, USA)

Insert 1.7 Paul Keating: Australians understand all languages

Insert 1.8 Moribund slaves and languages

Insert 1.9 Last speaker of Tuscarora dies

Insert 1.10 I will not for the world give up (Meänkieli, Sweden)

Address Box 1.1 The journal Languages of the World

Address Box 1.2 UNESCO World languages report

Address Box 1.3 International Clearing House for Endangered Languages

Address Box 1.4 The Ethnologue

Reader Task 1.1 Language or dialect?

Reader Task 1.2 Names of languages?

Reader Task 1.3 Most likely to hear the language in country x?

Reader Task 1.4 Where are Arabic and Chinese widely spoken?

Reader Task 1.5 Widely spoken or official languages?

Reader Task 1.6 Official status for English? other languages? largest number of speakers?

Reader Task 1.7 Place languages geographically—Eurocentrism?

The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. We think of our language as the language of the land. This means that the land has taught us our language.¹ The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings. To know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them.²

We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh that is our body is pieces of the land that came to us through the things that this land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be dis-placed … I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is being tom, deforested, and poisoned by “development”. Every fish, plant, insect, bird, and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names, and I touch them with my spirit. (Jeannette Armstrong 1996: 465-466, 470)

Some people have described Kauma language as a dead language. But Kauma people don’t believe this. We believe that our language is a living language and that it has only been sleeping, and that the time to wake it up is now and this is what we’re doing. (Cherie Watkins in Warranna Purruna—Pa:mpi Tunganar—Living Languages video, DECS, 1997, quoted in Amery 1998: 1)

This chapter shows that languages are today being killed at a much faster pace than ever before in human history, and relatively much faster than biodiversity. As a consequence, linguistic diversity is disappearing. Some of the direct main agents for this linguistic (and cultural) genocide³ are, as we shall see in later chapters, part of what is called the consciousness industry: formal education and the mass media (including television, the ‘cultural nerve gas’ as Michael Krauss, 1992: 6, has called it). Behind them there are of course still more macro-level agents, also to be discussed extensively. Even if formal education is the agent I analyse most in this book, schools alone cannot save languages, as sociolinguist Joshua Fishman has repeatedly pointed out (again in 1998: 414-415)—but schools can kill them more or less alone. Of course schools reflect the rest of society.

The following chapters argue that linguistic (and cultural) diversity are as necessary for the existence of our planet as biodiversity, and that they are related. We as humans are just one part of the planet and its diverse inhabitants, as Jeannette Armstrong so beautifully describes above. Languaging the planet, knowing, using, maintaining, developing further, and cherishing all the languages which over millions of years have developed to describe specific lands and environments and specific peoples and their cultures, necessarily has to be done in localised ways, in addition to studies about the universal aspects of each language, and global human experience. Language and languages are an essential aspect—maybe the most essential aspect—of being human. The importance of both language and linguistic diversity is growing, as many of the chapters will show. Acknowledging this importance is hopefully soon bound to make people work against those aspects of globalisation which are killing all aspects of diversity, including linguistic diversity. Unless governments not only accept but indeed support diversity and localisation, they are heading for trouble very soon, if we are to believe the quote from the Chilean Commission on Indigenous Peoples below.

In our times, unity is achieved through diversity. Pluricultural, multiethnic, and multilingual societies rise. The states that don’t accept this trend are opting for conflict (1993 Annual Report of the Chilean Commission on Indigenous Peoples [CEPI], quoted in Ekern 1998: 4).

1.1. Our Knowledge about‘Language’ and Languages

1.1.1. Problems in identifying What Is ‘a Language’

If we want to preserve and develop further the world’s linguistic diversity, we have to know what to preserve. The first questions then are: What are the languages of the world, how many of them are there, and where are they? The short defensive answer is that we do not really know exactly. The number of ‘languages’ in the world is not known—and cannot actually be known. Why? There are some good reasons and some bad ones.

The most important ‘good’ reason is that we don’t even properly know what ‘a language’ is. There are continua of communication (see Chambers & Trudgill 1980). There are no unambiguous criteria for what forms of communication should be called ‘two different languages’ and what are Varieties of the same language’. These ‘varieties’ can be geographical varieties, dialects, social varieties, sociolects, gender-based varieties, sexolects or genderlects, age-based varieties, situational or stylistic or subcultural varieties, etc. How can we then differentiate between languages on the one hand and varieties of the same language on the other hand. What are the criteria? What are your criteria (Reader Task 1.1)?

Reader Task 1.1 Language or dialect?

Do you remember (or can you think of) a situation where you had (or might have) difficulty understanding what somebody said in (what is supposed to be) a ‘dialect’ or another variant of your own language?

Or the opposite: where you understood something of (what is supposed to be) a different, ‘foreign’ language (one that you have never studied)?

If you did not understand (much of) the ‘dialect’, would you then call it a different language?

Or if you understood some of the ‘foreign’ language, would you in fact have to call it a dialect of your own language? Or call your language a dialect of this foreign language?

Why? Why not? What criteria do you use when you label something ‘a dialect’, or something else ‘a language’? List them!

1. ___________________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________________

(add more lines if you need them)

Do you know of cases where former ‘dialects’ of the same language have become different ‘languages’. This happened recently, for instance, with what from 1919 to the early 1990s used to be called Serbo-Croat⁴—now it is declared in law to be two different languages, Serbian and Croatian. The reinvention of them is a result of politico-linguistic engineering and the decisions to make the differences as large as possible have been quite explicit. Several linguists are now busy making them more dissimilar, to fit the wishes of many politicians in both Serbia⁵ and Croatia (see Jaksic 1996, Jakšić (ed.) 1995). Do you know of other cases? Is ‘American’ a language (see the Noah Webster quote from 1789 in note 8, chapter 6), or a dialect of English? Are British, Australian, Indian, Nigerian, and American Englishes all dialects of one language, English? Or are there several Englishes? What is ‘Ebonics’?

There are no linguistic criteria for differentiating between a language and a dialect (or vernacular or patois—see 3.4.2.2.2). Structural similarity or dissimilarity can only tell apart very dissimilar languages. Thus it is easy to confirm that, for instance, Chinese and English, or Kurdish and Turkish, are clearly different languages because their linguistic structures are so dissimilar (but see Insert 1.1).

Insert 1.1 Kurdish and Turkish

The existence of major structural differences does not always guarantee the recognition of separate languages. Turkish propaganda has claimed that Kurds are mountain Turks who have lived isolated in the mountains for so long that they have half-forgotten their mother tongue, Turkish, and now speak a variety that differs slightly from ordinary Turkish. This has then been used to legitimate the assimilation of the Kurds and the oppression of the Kurdish language. Erik Allardt, a distinguished sociology professor who wanted to mention the oppressed Kurds sympathetically in his article in Contact Linguistics. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research (Goebl et al. (eds), 1996), wrote, by mistake, relying on some propaga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the Scene
• Part II Linguistic Genocide, State Policies, and Globalisation
• Part III Struggle Against Linguistic Genocide and for Linguistic Human Rights in Education
• Bibliography
• Preface to Indexes
• Author/Person Index
• Languages and Peoples Index
• Countries/States Index
• Subject Index