Revitalising Indigenous Languages

How to Recreate a Lost Generation

Marja-Liisa Olthuis, Suvi Kivelä, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847698872
• eBook ISBN: 9781847698902
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education
• Index: Social Sciences

The book tells the story of the Indigenous Aanaar Saami language (around 350 speakers) and cultural revitalisation in Finland. It offers a new language revitalisation method that can be used with Indigenous and minority languages, especially in cases where the native language has been lost among people of a working age. The book gives practical examples as well as a theoretical frame of reference for how to plan, organise and implement an intensive language programme for adults who already have professional training. It is the first time that a process of revitalisation of a very small language has been systematically described from the beginning; it is a small-scale success story. The book finishes with self-reflection and cautious recommendations for Indigenous peoples and minorities who want to revive or revitalise their languages.

1	Introduction

This book has a positive message: it is possible to revitalise a seriously endangered language! Instead of people just stating that a language is extremely endangered and feeling sad about it, or merely working to describe and archive it, the language can be given new life! New first- as well as second-language speakers and new environments where the languages can be used can emerge. The degree of endangerment can be lowered, even when languages which are numerically very small will of course always remain endangered. This book tells the story of one such language, Aanaar Saami (AS), spoken only in Finland by some 350 speakers today. Others who are interested in numerically small languages may become inspired. It is hard work, though. Dedicated individuals are needed, but in fortunate circumstances even a few people can make a huge difference.

If one puts one’s trust in a state to do the job – even a state such as Sweden which superficially seems to support Indigenous and minority languages through signing and ratifying international and regional human rights instruments – a language may disappear before the necessary state measures are put in place. The following quote comes from an official report by the Swedish church entitled Våga vara minoritet. En rapport om minoritetsrättigheter i Sverige 2012 [Dare to Be Minority. A Report on Minority Rights in Sweden 2012]:

Children’s right to learn their minority language is, however, not guaranteed within the Swedish educational system. This poses a serious threat to the survival of the national minority languages and violates the obligations in minority conventions. If this is not corrected immediately, as the Council of Europe has repeatedly urged Sweden to do, there is a grave risk that the acutely endangered minority languages will not survive. This is particularly true for the smaller Saami varieties. (Svenska Kyrkan, 2012: 4, our translation)

Info Box 1 Criticism of Sweden’s Current Minority Policies and Practices, gives some more examples of critique from the summary of this Swedish report, especially in the field of education. In Norway the educational rights situation is much better and in Finland it is somewhat better than in Sweden. Many measures in support of Indigenous languages have been and are being taken in several Latin American countries and in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Some practical measures to use learners’ home languages in education are in place, even if haphazardly, in many countries in Africa and in some Asian countries, especially India and now also in Nepal (see, for example, articles in Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh, 2012; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2009; see also Kosonen, 2009; McCarty, 2012; Rubagumya, 2009; Walter & Benson, 2012). Despite these positive developments, the criticism of Sweden could be applied to more or less every country in the world. Even though most necessary measures are not in place in Sweden, however, the educational rights of Indigenous/tribal children as a whole are, in our estimation, better in the three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) than anywhere else in the world.

It is realistic to claim that Indigenous/tribal, minority and minoritised (hereafter ITM) languages are disappearing at a faster rate today than ever before in human history (see Info Box 2 Language Endangerment). Much more attention is needed if we want the world’s almost 7000 spoken languages and many sign languages (nobody knows their number) not only to survive but to develop and prosper – to become ‘normalised’ in the way AS may be on its way to achieving. Many people agree on this – but what can be done?

There are many experiments and suggestions, most of them very small scale. Some of them have been summarised in the chapters and Info Boxes in this book. The references here (and in the very large bibliography at http://www.tove-skutnabb-kangas.org/en/Tove-Skutnabb-Kangas-Bibliography.html) give further hints. However, the kinds of measures described in this book regarding AS are new and innovative.

According to the 2009 Ethnologue count (see Info Box 3 The Situation of the World’s Languages) 5348 of the world’s 6909 languages had fewer than 100,000 speakers, and 3524 languages had fewer than 10,000 speakers. Many of these languages, especially in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, are still spoken, by both adults and children, and may be transferred to children at least for the next couple of generations. For at least half of them, however, maybe up to 90–95%, this transfer may stop before the end of this century.

Our conviction is that most ITM languages have been and are being killed. They disappear as a result of linguistic and cultural genocide (see Info Box 4 Linguistic and Cultural Genocide in Education), not as a result of any kind of ‘natural’ language death or as an ‘inevitable’ result or side-effect of what is called modernisation and/or globalisation. There are people who think that the disappearance of small languages is good. Many people think that both individuals and groups benefit from this language shift, especially economically, and that the small languages are not important, neither for the speakers and their identities, nor for the world in general (see Info Box 5 Ethnic Identity and Language). However, most ITMs who have been able to express their views seem to disagree completely with this opinion. We have collected just a few of their views in Info Box 6 Indigenous Views. Joshua Fishman’s (1997) book, In Praise of the Beloved Language. A Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness, gives many examples. It is very clear to us, from our own experience, worldwide networks and reading, that most of those groups/peoples who are aware of the fact that their languages are endangered and may disappear do want to revive and revitalise their languages. They do manifestly not want them to disappear.

However, many groups seem to ‘wake up’ very late. Suddenly they realise that their children no longer speak or even understand the ancestral language. This may come as a surprise to them – somehow they have thought that their languages would of course continue to live forever; it is beyond their imagination that this might not be the case.

Starting a revival or revitalisation process presupposes that the group has enough material and psychological resources for it, including a solid knowledge base and preferably a network of contacts with other revitalisers. Revitalisers can learn from each other, even if all solutions have to be extremely context sensitive. Some basic principles can be deduced, even though there are no onesize-fits-all solutions.

Many of the revival/revitalisation experiments in ‘Western’ countries have been with languages that have already ceased to be spoken, or languages that have only a few elderly speakers. This will most probably be the situation for most of the endangered languages (regardless of the degree of endangerment – see UNESCO’s categories in Info Box 2 Language Endangerment) before the end of this century. At the point when few or no children speak the language, language nests for children with their elders’ support have been started in many places, with the Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Hawai’ians in the USA (who started only a couple of years later) being models for inspiration (see Info Box 7 Language Nests and Info Box 12 Advice From Revitalisation in Hawai’i). Similar nests using the endangered language as a day-care language will probably be started by/for many other endangered languages in the near future. Often the young caretakers in language nests are second-language speakers (i.e. not ‘native’ speakers) of the language; they work alongside native-speaker elders. Following the language nests, schools or classes with the ITM language as the main medium of teaching may be started (see Info Box 8 Immersion Programmes). Ideally, this could later lead to the endangered language becoming (one of) the mother tongue(s) of the next generation, not only in terms of internal identity but also in terms of at least some other criteria for identifying a mother tongue (see Info Box 9 Mother Tongue Definitions).

However, a serious question that all language revitalisation groups are facing is this: who will be the teachers, the caretakers, those who are language models? In general, where are all those (including parents) who make it possible for children, youth and adults to start or to continue using the language as a normal everyday language of communication, not only in the language nest and the immersion school but in the whole society, including at home?

What can be done if the speakers are mainly young children and elders, if one or two generations of speakers in the middle barely exist? Especially when those professionals who make it possible for new speakers to emerge and those who enable renewed use of the languages in diverse environments are missing?

This was the situation a few years ago for AS, an Indigenous language which is spoken only in Finland. Chapter 3 gives a detailed description of the development of speakers and the various estimates of how many speakers exist today. It is fair to claim that there are approximately 350 speakers of AS at present; this includes both first- and second-language speakers. Thus the language is in the group of the smallest languages in the world.

This book tells the story of what was done to reverse the language shift. How were new speakers created for the missing generations, speakers who were needed within the various professions so that the whole AS community would be able to function much more through the medium of AS?

Obviously a revitalisation process is something that the whole community, both speakers and non-speakers, should ideally participate in. There have been many debates about whether, to what extent, and how outsiders with positive attitudes could and should participate. In the AS case, the measures described in this book were based on several years of earlier mobilisation by the Aanaar Saami that included most of the community at some level. Some people and families, for example the Morottaja family (see p. 66), had already worked for this revitalisation in many capacities, doing almost more than is humanly possible for a few people. Along with Ilmari Mattus, who spoke AS to his son, these two families were for a long time the only AS families where children learned the language as their first language – and one of these children became the main language teacher in the revitalisation project described in this book. Some ‘outsiders’ (i.e. ethnic Finns, with Finnish as their mother tongue) also participated, and some learned the language (e.g. Annika Pasanen, who knows two Saami languages and who now speaks AS to her own children who are in a language nest; see section 4.5.2 The language nest). However, the creation of and main responsibility for the project described here rested to a large extent with one person, Marja-Liisa Olthuis. She is so far the only Aanaar Saami in the world with a doctorate; her study was about bird and mushroom species names in AS (Olthuis, 2007). Marja-Liisa lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, with her Dutch husband, and speaks AS only to their two daughters. She has spent much of her time during recent years in Aanaar, driving the activities described here. She is the primary author of this book.

Suvi Kivelä, a journalist, the second author of this book, is currently a researcher responsible for the Saami Archives in Finland, which were established in 2012 as part of Finland’s National Archives services. Of Finnish ancestry, she was one of the 17 professionals who participated in the intensive one-year AS language education that Marja-Liisa created. Suvi’s children’s grandmother, Nuuvdi Ailâ (her Finnish name is Aili Koskinen), is Aanaar Saami, but she did not speak her language to her own children, meaning that the father of Suvi’s children did not learn it. During the project described here, Nuuvdi Ailâ, 81 years old in 2012, started speaking her language again, and now speaks it to her two grandsons. One of them is in an AS language nest and the other attends an AS-medium school (see the video Reborn, at http://www.casle.fi). Suvi also now speaks AS to her children.

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is an outsider who has worked with various Saami colleagues and friends, mainly in Norway and Finland, for some 45 years, but does not know any of the Saami languages (except for reading a little bit of North Saami if it is about her own areas of study). Marja-Liisa and Suvi requested her to write some shorter sections of the book, including this introduction.

As you will notice while reading the book, we have very different styles of writing. Suvi as a journalist writes in a way which flows and is much more fun to read than Marja-Liisa and Tove – we are more boring, with more traditional academic styles and lots of references (especially Tove). We have agreed that Suvi, in addition to providing descriptions, will also write more personal reflections. We hope that this makes the book come alive, and that our different areas of knowledge and styles complement each other.

The distribution of labour in this book has been as follows. Marja-Liisa has mainly been responsible for Chapters/Sections 2.1, 3.1, 4, 5 (Planner’s view), 6 and Info Box 17. Suvi has mainly been responsible for Chapters/Sections 2.3, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 and 5 (Student view) and for Info Box 13. Tove has mainly been responsible for Chapter 1 and for all other Info Boxes. All of us have read all the chapters and given extensive feedback to one another, and we all have contributed to the final Chapter 7.

Back to the role of the state. Some of the other Saami languages are spoken in several countries (see p. 30). The revitalisation in Norway, with the largest Saami populations, started in a strong way, somewhat earlier than in Finland. Norwegian revitalisation has been an invaluable support, organisationally, ideologically and in terms of awareness raising. So has the support from speakers of other Saami languages, including those in Finland. Many national and regional (all-Saami) organisations have been demanding more rights for some decades, and there seems to be a breakthrough happening at present. The official Finnish revitalisation action plan from February 2012 (see Info Box 10 Visions for Saami Revitalisation, Finland) may be a really positive harbinger. Cross-border contacts and networks are flourishing – daycare, education (the only Saami-medium university is on the Norwegian side of Sápmi/Saamiland), family visits and marriages, and many organisations work across state borders. Still, taking back the language and bringing it forward is cumbersome even for highly motivated individuals, as Ann-Helén Laestadius’ example in Info Box 11 shows.

Combs and Penfield (2012: 462) define ‘language activism’ as ‘energetic action focused on language use in order to create, influence and change existing language policies’. Language activism may need to be noisy, with ‘disrupters, campaigners and ideological pests’ because if there is ‘no noise, no improvement’ (Todd Gitlin in Letters to a Young Activist, 2003, quoted in Combs & Penfield, 2012: 461). It can a...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 How Did the CASLE Project Start?
• 3 Aanaar Saami: A Small Saami Language
• 4 The CASLE Revitalisation Method
• 5 The CASLE Year
• 6 Complementary Aanaar Saami Language Education as a Project: CASLE 2009–2010
• 7 What Has CASLE Achieved? What Does the Future Hold?
• Info Boxes
• References