Dr Ragnhild Ljosland, Orkney College UHI
We have all heard it. Headlines like these: “90% of the world’s languages may die out within a century”. It is a scary thought when you hear it. It makes you think of the predicted disaster facing our planet’s bio-diversity, with rapid declines in wild animal populations and predicted extinctions such as the polar bear or the great panda.
The words that are commonly used to describe the situation are very similar in both instances. Look for example at this quote from the book Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (F. Grin 2003, p. 4):
“To this day, remarkably little is known about how to influence these dynamics, for example in order to prevent some languages from dying out, to revitalise other languages in order to guarantee their continuing presence as elements of mankind’s cultural heritage, or to restrict the extent to which certain languages, seen as predatory, render other languages obsolete and squeeze them out of existence as living languages. The causal links that result in languages surviving, spreading or declining are complex, making any type of intervention difficult. At any rate, enough experience has been accumulated in the past decades to make one thing clear: the protection and promotion of threatened languages requires some careful planning.”
It is written by one of Europe’s leading experts on minority language issues, Francois Grin. And don’t get me wrong, I admire Francois Grin; he has done some remarkable work over many years. Later on in the book he presents some very useful models for practical support of minority languages. However, here in the introduction, the death metaphor is the prevalent image.
My own interest in this topic goes back nearly twenty years, but it is still as relevant as ever. In the early 2000s, there was a broad international interest in the phenomenon of language shift – but it was termed “language death” in the media and even by some linguists, too. The conversation spanned across countries: It originated in America, but quickly also came to involve the Netherlands, UK, and many other countries. What started out as a conversation between academics, in an academic journal, grew arms and legs as journalists got involved.
I came into contact with this big dialogue in 2001, when it all of a sudden and with a lot of public interest grew a Norwegian arm – or leg. The Director of the Norwegian Language Council, Sylfest Lomheim, went to the media and proclaimed with great bravado that Norwegian as a written language would be dead within 100 years. Whereupon my own sociolinguistics professor at the university in Trondheim shot him down in flames in a very public and heated exchange. This one, “Language at Stake”, is from 2004 – His first newspaper article, in 2001, was entitled “Nådetid for norsk” – which implies that the days for the Norwegian language are numbered.
The language councils across Scandinavia took the threat seriously and sat down to investigate and write reports and updated language policies to take internationalisation and English as a global language into account. These reports and policies were not sensationalist and were very well considered, but at the same time they also used the rhetoric of natural disaster and death.
Sweden was first, with Mål i mun - Förslag till handlingsprogram för svenska språket (suggested action plan for the Swedish language) which came in 2002 (SOU 2002:27).
Even Denmark, which had been rather lax when it came to language planning prior to this, made a similar document: “Sprog på spil” – language at stake. It came in 2003.
Norway was last, with “Norsk i hundre” which came in 2005.
Metaphors we live by
So, what are these death metaphors and why is it important to notice them? Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live by from 1979 famously showed that we humans depend on metaphors to structure our thoughts, but this also guides our behaviour.
Some excellent examples from their book include “argument is war” – which I used a few seconds ago when I said my supervisor shot down the Language Council director in flames – which leads us to think and behave as if we are indeed involved in hostilities – We attack the other’s position and defend our own, we launch counter attacks, gain ground, and so on.
Another famous one is “Happy is up.”, for example when we say “I’m feeling down” versus “my spirits rose”, “she was soaring”, “I am in top form” which gets connected to the “more is up” and therefore “more is good” metaphors as in “our profits are up”, to become an “Up is good and down is bad” metaphor that we can see for example in “things are looking up” or “I wouldn’t stoop to that”.
Lakoff and Johnson end up concluding that not just the way we speak, but the human thought process itself is largely metaphorical. It shapes how we think about an issue. For example, because of the “more is up and up is good” metaphor, we easily believe that GDP must increase, and living standards must improve, and turnovers must be more year by year. Anything else would be bad!
Using one metaphor highlights some aspects and hides other aspects of the situation. And therefore, it does matter – it matters very much – how we speak about things such as minority language issues. Using the death metaphor here highlights the inevitability and hides that sociolinguistic changes are in fact driven by human action, by politics, budgets, market mechanisms, attitudes, demographic movement, and so on. In other words, the death metaphor brings our minds over to the realm of biology and hides the structural causes.
So what I’m going to do now, is firstly to investigate the history of the death metaphor in connection with minority languages, and next suggest an alternative way to talk about minority language issues.
When and where did the death metaphor originate?
So going back to the figure about 90% of the world’s languages being in danger of death within a century. In a very useful article in Wilson MacLeod’s book Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland (2006), Emily McEwan-Fujita traced the origins of this figure. It turns out it started in the US in 1992, when the linguist Michael Krauss wrote an article in the journal Language, published by the Linguistic Society of America. Here, he tried to calculate a figure for how many languages are endangered by first figuring out how many languages are “safe”. To find that out, he picked a somewhat arbitrary figure of 100,000 speakers out of the air. With 100,000 speakers, a language would be safe, he thought. He found that about 600 languages have 100,000 speakers or more. Then, he compared that to the estimated total number of languages in the world of 6-7 000, to end up with the figure that 10% of the world’s languages have a reasonable safety in numbers. This was done with a lot of discussion and hedging, and he was clear and transparent about the assumptions he had made along the way in his argument. He stated clearly that this was only meant as a very rough figure for the sake of his argument there and then.
But then, this calculation started running a bit wild (yes, I’m using a metaphor!). Emily McEwen-Fujita’s detective work revealed that in 1998, Ken Hale had utilised Michael Krauss’s concept without citing him, and without including any of Krauss’s explanations or qualifiers, hedging and so on, so that nobody saw, now, that it was originally a plausible rough figure based on an arbitrary estimate of a safe number of speakers.
By 2000, that article by Hale had become very well known among linguists. In Britain, the respected linguist David Crystal, who is popular with the media, used Krauss and Hale’s line of thinking in his popular book Language Death that was published in 2000. Then, journalists started picking it up. First in popular science magazines. The magazine Science ran a double article in May 2000 – a main article and a sidebar article – that quoted Ken Hale and others, and the opening sentence stated that “most experts expect that at least half and perhaps 90% will disappear in the 21st century”. (McEwan-Fujita, p. 285). So that was when it turned from “safe” languages to “90 % endangered” which sounds much more alarmist. Emily McEwen-Fujita goes into much more detail in her article, and investigates how various linguists have been misquoted.
This was then picked up by the British newspapers, and newspapers in other countries. The Independent wrote: “Most of the world’s languages will vanish by 2100”, The Scotsman turned it into an article specifically about Gaelic, and wrote “Gaelic could die out by the end of the century if more children are not encouraged to learn the language, a leading linguist warned yesterday”. The Independent on Sunday then turned that into “Gaelic doomed as speakers die out”.
Then Gwynne Dyer wrote an opinion column, which was printed in around 175 newspapers in 45 countries in late July 2000. In this text, Dyer wrote (quoted in McEwan-Fujita, p. 289):
“As nature provides us with endless variations on a genetic theme, so the evolution of language as human beings expanded around the globe has given us endless variations on a linguistic theme. But not every sperm is sacred”
This implies that language ‘death’ is a natural process and advantageous in the long run just like Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.
It was about this time that the conversation first hit Norway, and the Language Council director Sylfest Lomheim connected with it – and I’m now going to leave McEwan-Fujita’s excellent research here and venture a bit further into investigating the historical background of the death metaphor.
Because the premise that a language is a living organism, and therefore has the life cycle of a living organism and can be studied in terms of evolution and survival of the fittest, goes back much further than the 90% endangered discourse.
This idea can be traced back to the 1800s, when European linguists, who were mostly writing in German, developed the field of autonomous linguistics. They were inspired by the natural sciences. Newton had set out the laws of physics, Carl von Linné had classified plants. The latest was Darwin’s theory of evolution, which showed how species develop. All of that inspired these linguists to engage in the task of comparative historical linguistics.
A leading linguist early on was Franz Bopp, who wrote in 1836:
“Die Sprachen sind nämlich als organische Naturkörper anzusehen, die nach bestimmten Gesetzen sich bilden, ein inneres Lebensprincip in sich tragend, sich entwickeln, und nach und nach absterben […]” (Quoted from Koerner 1995: 50)
One must regard the languages as natural bodies, which form in accordance with certain laws, carry within them an inner life principle, develop and gradually die.
Another central person was August Schleicher, who elaborated further on what he saw as the natural life cycle of languages, which independently of their speakers’ will or consciousness has its own periods of growth, maturity, and decline.
In the late 1800s, the Jung-Grammatiker or in English the Neogrammarian school in Leipzig isolated what they called the unchangeable laws of sound change. By comparing languages as they appear today and in their known historical forms, they identified what they saw as natural laws of sound change to be able to postulate reconstructed older forms of words and thereby eventually get all the way back to a reconstruction of the ultimate ancestor language to the European languages: Indo-European. They produced a lovely family tree that showed how the various European languages are related and all stem from this common ancestor. (I hope you are noticing the biological metaphor here.)
There is a significant amount of teleological thinking here. Teleology as a way of explaining change goes back to Aristotle, who said that a thing consists not just of matter, but also of form and that when a sapling grows, for example, it is because it is striving towards its true form. Applied to language change, one would say that changes happen because it is built into the structure.
It's worth going back to the quote by Franz Bopp from 1836. After the bit about languages being natural bodies, he goes on to say that languages die when they have become so corrupted that they no longer recognise themselves.
We can see an example of how this explanation was applied in the study of the Norn language. The pioneer in the field was Jakob Jakobsen. He was a Faeroese scholar who visited Orkney, but his main piece of fieldwork was in Shetland where he spent two years in 1893-95 working on his PhD, and gathering material for what was later published as the “Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland”. It is a tremendous piece of work and I don’t want to say anything negative against it, but it was informed by the latest linguistic ideology of the time and therefore not explicitly but as a whole gives the impression that the Norn language was replaced by Scots bit by bit, word by word, until the ratio tipped in favour of Scots. And at that point, the Norn language no longer recognised itself, and died.
It was made explicit by a professor from the University of Illinois, George Flom, who wrote a paper in the Saga Book for 1926 that has the subtitle “A study in the decay of one language and its influence upon the language that supplanted it”, where he tried to estimate at what time the ratio balanced and when it tipped and reached the surprising conclusion that the point of balance was around the year 1900! Laurits Rendboe then went on to illustrate this graphically in 1984.
Even though nobody these days seem to subscribe to this more literal interpretation of languages as living organisms, the death metaphor is still prevalent, so if we don’t stop to think and say hang on, wait a minute, then we may be taken in by the metaphor and feel it’s only natural that some languages die.
The MacPherson paradigm
There is another interpretative repertoire at work here too, which arose independently of the dialogue about endangered languages, but which informs and feeds into it. And it means that Gaelic in particular is prone to attracting this death discourse from journalists and others. I would like to quote my UHI colleague Innes Kennedy and call it the “MacPherson paradigm”. Also known as the “romantic pastoral”, it is part of the National Romantic quest to define national culture, and here in Scotland of course an influential figure in that respect was James MacPherson who wrote the Poems of Ossian. So within this paradigm, the “true” and “genuine” culture is something that can be found if you seek out the “noble savages” such as the Gaelic speakers who live in the wilderness in a beautiful and rugged land. They are the tradition bearers of a culture whose period of achievement lay in the past. Only fragments are retained now, which can be discovered and preserved like gold dust. The dominant emotion is cloudy melancholy. Celtic Twilight. In this frame of mind, all variation or change is bad because it is corruption. 19th century antiquarians went about collecting and as they saw it rescuing the last remnants of a once great culture in a more pristine, homogenous and authentic past. The Gaelic culture was forever dying, but never quite dead yet.
This view has informed much of the public debate about the Gaelic language, too, as well as other European minority languages (see Susan Gal, 1989, p. 316), but perhaps especially Gaelic because of Ossian. As Susan Gal points out, it is the “vanishing primitive”: “always dying out, but never quite dead.”
The death metaphor today
So with all of this in mind, let’s get back to how the death metaphor is used today.
When linguists use the death metaphor, it is usually either with a lamenting tone, or a warning finger. When journalists use it, it can be the same, but sometimes their use of the metaphor can be rather more graphic and lead to comparison with controversial debates about euthanasia, patient resuscitation, and NHS spending priorities for example whether it is worth administering expensive treatments to very old or terminally ill patients. Consider for example the headlines “Gaelic on life support”, “Now, Gaelic appears to be dying, but is it worth resuscitating the patient?” (McEwan-Fujita, p. 282)
This one from The Herald 26 April 2018 “If Gaelic is dying does it deserve a financial kiss of life?” I find particularly vicious and revealing. In addition to the medical metaphor the article even mentions Darwinism explicitly: ““But perhaps we should let social Darwinism decide what happens to Gaelic. And if it has to go the way of Latin as a spoken language, so be it.” This sort of vicious article rises directly out of two hundred years of biological metaphors without stopping to think about what it’s saying. At this point, one of the HARC seminar participants spoke up and told us that Wilson MacLeod had invited the article author Brian Beacom to a debate, which you can read Beacom’s response to here.
We are so used to these death metaphors that we don’t really notice that they are metaphors anymore. We forget to think about which rhetorical tradition we are taking part in.
In his first contribution to the “90% endangered” dialogue in 2001, the Norwegian Language Council director Sylfest Lomheim said that since all languages sprung out of a common ancestor language, but were corrupted Babel-style due to migrations and groups of people being isolated from each other, now that the world is more connected it is natural that we also go back to one global language.
As if diversity were unnatural, and uniformity is natural. This is social Darwinism: A social variant of “survival of the fittest”. Nancy Dorian, who is a great sociolinguist who worked for many years in East Sutherland with Gaelic speakers there, had pointed this out already three years previously. She observed that subscribing to this Social Darwinist paradigm leads to a certain arrogance from speakers of the most widely spoken languages, because they come out looking like “the fittest” as if there were something inherently better in the internal makeup of their language compared to the rest.
Free Market Economics
There is a competing but similar metaphor at work, too: That of free market capitalist economics, where we are used to thinking of survival of the fittest in economic terms: The fittest products and companies survive competition from others.
Pierre Bourdieu famously analysed language as capital, where certain ways of using language can establish or maintain power relations, or be converted to other forms of capital – to put it very simply, if you speak the right way, you get a job that allows you to exercise power and earn a lot of money, to access groups or networks, and so on … and inhabiting such a role also influences the way you speak. This is an analysis that I find useful. To give you one example, speakers of many smaller languages find it difficult to speak or write in that language in an academic or research context because among other things the very role of “expert” requires you to use English or another bigger language. It takes courage and dedication to go against that expectation – as members of UHI staff bravely do when speaking and writing in Gaelic. In many subject fields, the expectation to use English is so strong that it has become invisible: it feels normal and natural.
So, I think Bourdieu’s use of the concept of linguistic capital is useful, but there are other metaphors in circulation too that use words, images and ways of thinking from the field of free market capitalism which are not so useful in my opinion. Abram de Swaan, for example, in his book Words of the World from 2001, gives a mathematical formula for calculating a language’s Communication Value, which he calls Q. To find Q, you first take the number of speakers and divide it by the total population – either the world’s total population or some kind of closed group that you are studying such as the number of physicists in the world, to get the Prevalence. Secondly, you calculate the Centrality by taking the number of speakers of this language who also speak one or more other languages and divide it by the number of speakers in the total population who speak two or more languages. Lastly, you multiply the Prevalence and Centrality to find the Q or Communication Value. What this does, is create a hierarchy where it seems quite natural, based on the Q values, that speakers of smaller languages such as Sami are able to speak several other languages above them in the system, in this case for example Norwegian, German and English. At the same time, native speakers of Norwegian learn German and English, upwards in the system, but not Sami, because it does downwards in the hierarchy. Chances are also low that native speakers of German will learn Norwegian. Right at the top, like the centre of the universe, sits English the Global Language, with no incentive to its speakers to learn any other language. There may be a grain of truth in this, but I think de Swaan goes too far when quantifying it, and he completely ignores any other motivation for learning languages than pure market forces and the utility calculations of free market capitalism.
So to conclude now, I think a better way to talk about minority language issues that lets us see clearer and feel more positive would be by challenging the death metaphor.
Instead of saying that a young, bilingual speaker’s way of speaking a minority language is “broken down” or “corrupted” or represents “decay”, we may instead call it “innovative” or a “multi-ethnolect” or see it as representing a possible future for the language.
And instead of saying that a language is “dying” or “moribund”, there are other ways of describing the situation: One term that is widely used among sociolinguists is “Language shift”. Another one, which is used for example by Susan Gal is “Language obsolescence”. And, as we discussed in the seminar, the expression “a minoritised language” is useful because it draws attention to the sociopolitical circumstances.
Sometimes we need to get away from metaphors altogether, and instead get down to the nitty-gritty. If we lift our vision out of the death metaphor, and out of the biological field of metaphors we see that where nature is causal, its opposite, culture, is rooted in human action. Language is culture, and language is likewise rooted in human action. The biological metaphors blind us to that.
Some of the human actions that lie behind sociolinguistic change are easy to point out: As when the Norwegian state in the 19th and 20th centuries required speakers of Sami to use Norwegian exclusively in school, or similarly.
Other kinds of human action are more difficult to spot, but are nonetheless there. Those are all the micro-actions which together make a great force, and in that regard there is one term that I think we can borrow from market economics: that is the Invisible hand.
I once read the entire “Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, to find out what the Invisible Hand was, and this quote sums it up nicely (and this may come as a surprise given how Adam Smith has in recent years been used to legitimise global free trade):
"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention"
This means that if we want to change the macro-level, we must influence the micro-level. And if we want to understand the dynamics of so-called language “death”, we must investigate what is actually happening in a myriad of classrooms, playgrounds, workplaces, committee rooms, parliamentary groups, rugby teams, pubs, and so on.
Rudi Keller, in his book On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language, expressed the process in this figure. He used it to explain long-term changes in language, for example how we went from Anglo-Saxon to modern English and Scots. I, however, find it equally useful to explain language obsolescence. The language “death” or shift is here represented in the circle “explanandum”. What leads to it? On the left is the micro-level: The everyday interactions of the speakers. Each little action, each of the many everyday choices of should I now use this language or that, this word or that, is influenced by the “ecological conditions” which is a total sum of factors which influence the choice of action. So everything from official language policies to whether or not you feel your mates will approve. Understanding language shift is understanding the motives, intentions, goals, convictions and so on, on which the actions of the individuals are based and the general conditions of their actions. What links this myriad of individual actions to the phenomenon itself arising is the invisible hand: the unintended, causal, collective result when the myriad of actions, due to similar conditions, go in one direction.
I will end now by going back to where I started: With the book Language Policy Evaluation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, by Francois Grin. Himself an economist, and describing his field as the “economics of language”, Francois Grin identifies three major factors influencing whether people use a language:
Capacity, Opportunity and Desire – He calls it the COD model. To use a language, people have to know it, i.e. have the capacity to speak it, and they need someone to speak it with or a use for it in a situation, that is the opportunity, and they need the desire to do so. A simple example of this would be that my English skills improved enormously when I suddenly got an English-speaking boyfriend. Opportunity and desire in a bundle! Building on this is Strubell’s Catherine Wheel, which points out that more learning of the language (capacity) leads to more demand for and therefore supply of and consumption of goods and services in the language (opportunity), which then leads to a perception of greater usefulness of the language and therefore a greater motivation to learn and use it (desire), which leads back again to more learning of the language.
And on that positive note, it is time to end – I hope you are now able to see the death metaphors for what they are: No more than metaphors, and moreover hopelessly outdated, so that next time you come across headlines such as “If Gaelic is dying does it deserve a financial kiss of life” you can see it for the complete crap that it is!
Ragnhild Ljosland, 30 May 2019