Aida Ribot Bencomo
University of California, San Diego

In the previous decade or so (2010-2019), castells or human towers—literally “castles”—, arose as an emblematic expression of the Catalan society. They appeared and gained visibility in myriad contexts—for example, covers of academic journals, bank commercials, tourist posters, and beer commercials on television. This came about amid a debate on the sovereignty of the Catalan people and the growing support for proindependence positions that developed in the same period. The ethnographic work I carried out within two castellers teams (known in Catalan as colles castelleres) in the metropolitan area of Barcelona during 2016 revealed micropractices that, although specific to the casteller activity , promoted a sense of community and collective responsibility that is based on solidarity, equality and cooperation between participants. Two of the practices that I analysed and will present here focus on the use of the body and physicality, as well as on communication between members of the team, who are known as castellers. In the previous decade, popular and political movements related to the Catalan sovereign project—for instance, Òmnium Cultural and the ANC (Assemblea Nacional Catalana)—strategically extrapolated this sense of community found at castells to reimagine a present-day Catalan society based on similar relations.

If a Catalan thinks about the world of castells, even if he or she does not have much knowledge of it, he or she will probably know the traditional values that are always repeated: “strength, balance, courage and common sense,” or the expression fer pinya (literally, “to make/form a pine cone,” a reference to the base of a castell; the expression is used more generally by Catalans to convey the idea of working together to achieve a common goal). These expressions are not only a metaphorical interpretation of how castells are defined by its members and the practice underpinning its activity. Rather, in the embodiment of these expressions via participation in the activity, they are interpreted in a much more literal way. That is, participants embody or materialize these values and expressions through their bodies and the physicality—or physical contact—that they experience, generate, and promote.

The notions of cooperation, collective responsibility and egalitarian relations surrounding castells are partially developed through the body and the physical contact required to build the towers. Bodily practices related to the construction of towers, distinctive clothing, and beer drinking were three very practical activities that participants learned and used to form a casteller identity within this community. Although some activities raised concerns and tensions among participants (such as the use of alcohol, the roles and the regulation of bodies), the practices I analysed required participants to interact, cooperate and be responsible for one another. For example, when castellers put on their support sashes, they usually need another person to help them wrap it around their waist. And when participants learn to position themselves in the pinya or the base of the castell, they must protect others with their hands and arms, in addition to sharing the burden and balance with others. If they do not do so, the castell collapses. Castellers then learn to withstand pressure and pain collectively and learn to support each other to decrease individuals’ exposure and risk.

The perspective of the body is especially interesting in the Catalan context: none of Catalonia’s other emblematic and representative cultural expressions mobilizes the body to achieve the same level of continuous and supported contact between participants as castells do. Mountaineering, choral associations, football, sardanes and other folk activities (for example, correfocs and bastoners) associated with Catalan culture require minimal or no physical contact. Traditionally in Catalonia, the use of one’s own body, postures or the expression of emotions has been understood in a refined and contained way. In general, the cultural forms that have been considered distinctively Catalan since the nineteenth century have emphasized this sense of both mental and physical restraint. To give an example, the physical rigidity, discipline and restraint embodied in sardanes have been symbolic of the type of “refined” Catalan urban identity of the middle classes of the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. Meanwhile, less contained, less refined and more physical and emotional forms (such as castells) had never been representative of this identity up until now. Today, the use of the body in castells seems to break the association between social classes in Catalonia, as this activity voluntarily brings together people from different backgrounds, creating a practice that violates everyday Catalan norms and stereotypes.

From a linguistic perspective, castellers also had to learn to become members of the community—that is, they had to socialize into castellers. This entailed learning to interpret and communicate with others in a context of tension; team members had to make use of the most economical and practical language possible because they often have to adjust their body in a matter of seconds so as not to endanger the structure. It is important to keep in mind that Catalan was the most frequently used language among participants, even in the case of those who self-identified ethnolinguistically as Spaniards, Argentines or Americans, among other identities.

Directives, through which the listener is called on to do an action via orders, were the linguistic practices that participants most commonly used during the construction of castells. Contradictory though it may seem, the forms employed emphasized the cooperative aspect in the decision-making process. For example, the team leader and other participants who held positions of power in the team hierarchy did not usually exploit power imbalances during the construction of the castell. They used first-person plural forms to give orders—for instance, aguantem (“let’s hold”) and tanquem la pinya (“let’s close the base”). And they deployed other forms that are unconventional within the literature on speech acts, face-threatening acts (FTA), and so on (Searle; Austin; Brown & Levinson), issuing orders from which the typical imperative forms were absent—for example, pugen (“they climb”), van pujant (“they keep climbing”), baixant (“coming down”), avall (“down”), amunt (“up”), terços (“thirds”) or quintes (“fifths”) —the latter two commands refer to the people who are assigned to form specific storeys of the human tower. The second person plural “you,” vosaltres, was non-existent, and the second person singular “you,” tu, was highly unusual. However, among participants who had similar roles in the castell (such as those in the base or the trunk), the use of unreserved orders was common and expected. During their first day, novice team members received instructions on how to ask for help and give orders when necessary, such as calling out pit (literally “chest,” an expression used to make team members push closer together) when they were in the base. This use, in fact, promoted relationships of closeness and solidarity that are more typical of interactions between family members or within much closer and trusting relationships. Explicit instruction to novices to give orders and the nonexploitative use of power relations with unconventional forms of orders empowered participants and helped them feel more immediately and horizontally included in the activities. In addition, this way of communicating challenges many communicative boundaries that are commonly found in everyday life and that are often subject to gender, age, experience, status and other relations. Learning to speak for oneself when help is needed or when there is an unbearable pain that one cannot stand anymore is also a way to learn to be responsible for others, because if one person falls, so do the others.

Since 2010, civic, cultural and political associations have mobilized the casteller community to represent a new national project. In doing so, they extrapolated to the national level the characteristics that have popularly been identified with castells and that thus appealed to a community that is increasingly diverse on the social, cultural and linguistic levels. Sardanes and the characteristics that had iconically represented the type of cultural identity and the type of Catalanism of the late twentieth century have fallen by the wayside. In the last decade, Catalan society has valued and made visible aspects such as hard work, the historical activity, teamwork and the tenacity of castells, characteristics that were popularly represented symbolically and humorously via the Catalan donkey in the early 2000s. In addition, aspects such as pride, courage, physical and mental strength and youth have been added, antagonistically represented by the image of the Spanish bull. Both the bull and the donkey humorously represented the two social, cultural, political, and linguistic communities of the turn of the century. This polarization strengthened the bonds within each imagined community, but it also exacerbated the boundaries between them. Castells therefore incorporate—including symbolically—images, styles and aspects popularly recognized by the two communities, and they have become a symbol that represents more and more people.

The new image for the national project has sought to emphasize some of the features in the world of castells analysed here, such as the collective responsibility, the cooperation, the egalitarian relations, the democratic means of participation, the courage, or the physical contact and the expression of uncontained emotions. The new project has revolved around the idea of letting people decide and build for themselves in a more democratic way something from below (as it occurs with castells), instead of receiving something imposed from above. Moreover, the new image is about speaking loudly and clearly and being responsible for others if the situation (whether social, economic or political) is unfair or feels that way, because speaking up is beneficial to the whole community (as in castells). It has sought to recognize the power of civil society (or the “pinya” of the castell) to make any structure possible (despite contradictions, frictions and differences). It has tried to challenge power and its limits, as well as to celebrate diversity in society, in the same way the casteller world usually celebrates and encourages diversity in shapes, sizes, gender, age or experience. And, finally, this extrapolation has also revealed a modern perspective of Catalan society that, despite being rooted in a historical and local activity such as castells, included aspects that had not historically been associated with Catalan cultural identity before (youth, maintained physical contact, unrestrained expression of emotions, competitiveness, and so on). This combination of elements has emphasized the changes that Catalan society in general experienced during the previous decade to build a reimagined sense of community that has increasingly appealed to a more diverse population.

Kathryn Woolard
UCSD

Linguistic naturalism is a belief found among professionals as well as laypeople that language is an autonomous natural entity not subject to speakers’ will (Joseph 2000). As an ideology, it conflates the is and the ought: naturalness is seen as good, with both social and linguistic implications. Although naturalization is a central topic in language ideology studies, it is less often recognized that it takes various and competing forms that are worth distinguishing since they may have different consequences for language and society. This essay will briefly characterize several variations, drawing illustrations primarily from Spanish and Catalan contexts, although linguistic naturalism is by no means peculiar to them.

At its most general, linguistic naturalization transforms history, the process by which things in the human world are made, into nature, a supposedly harmonious display of essences, as do all ideologies (Barthes 1972). However, rarely are all linguistic varieties treated as equally natural. In a familiar version, linguistic naturalism bestows the inevitability and transparency of nature almost exclusively on nation-state languages, and this courtesy extends mutually among independent states. For example, the British Guardian drew on linguistic naturalism to intertwine transnational immigration and the Catalan sovereignty movement as problems:

The influx of millions of immigrants into Spain…has transformed parts of Catalonia… The biggest single group is from Romania, followed by Morocco, Ecuador and Great Britain…..Those in Catalonia face an immediate problem: the language. This has put pressure on the education system as immigrant children have to learn Catalan before they can be taught anything else. (Burgen 2012)

This account erases the identical challenge of learning Spanish that Romanian, British, and Moroccan children would face before they could be taught in Spanish-medium schools. The naturalization of Spanish licenses a false implicit distinction between dominant and minoritized languages in Spain, even in English media.

Linguistic naturalness is often linked to linguistic superiority and dominance, but in two distinct ways. A linguistic variety may be represented as naturally superior in and of itself (stronger, more euphonic, or communicatively precise). The invisible hand of a linguistic free market supposedly moves naturally toward the most perfect form for communicative function, which thus becomes dominant naturally, not through arbitrary historical developments. Thus the Spanish academician Gregorio Salvador is quoted as writing: “a great part of Castilian’s success has to be attributed to its five cleanly differentiated vowels, the most perfect vowel system possible” (Moreno Cabrera 2010, 11).

If linguistic dominance is natural, then a multilingual state is unnatural. For example, in debates over language policies in the Second Spanish Republic, Miguel de Unamuno endorsed the survival of the fittest, in which “lawmakers have no business.” Unamuno argued that the problem of multiple languages would resolve itself because dialects would fuse with the “strongest language, in accordance with the laws of nature” (Monteagudo 2013, 111-112).

However, the causal arrow between the natural and the superior can be reversed, to hold that whatever is most natural is best. In the earliest example, Dante characterized the vernacular as nobler because it is natural to us, in contrast to Latin grammar, which is artificial. The 16th century Spaniard Juan de Valdés asserted that popular refrains revealed the true character of Castilian, whose unaffected essence couldn’t be deliberately learned because vernaculars couldn’t be represented in grammatical rules. In the modern era, professional linguists have often suggested that some linguistic varieties are the more genuine object of inquiry than others, because they are allegedly more natural, acquired without study and uncontaminated by the artificiality of grammar or literature (Joseph 2000).

The perspectives evidenced by Dante and Valdés lead toward a more specifically socio-linguistic naturalization that links each individual to a specific language variety. This version celebrates not the referential fit of language to the world, as do ideologies of linguistic dominance, but rather the iconic fit of language to the speaker or writer’s authentic self. There is only one true form for each person, usually the “mother tongue.” The consequence of sociolinguistic naturalism is that speaking in a language other than the first acquired may be felt as false, a betrayal of self, if not simply impossible. In turn, only native speakers can use a language whose value is based in this kind of natural authenticity (Woolard 2016). Entire languages are seen as almost impossible to acquire deliberately, as Valdés wrote; these are the minoritized languages of the modern period.

This naturalistic equation of language and the sincere self is the ethos of contemporary hip-hop just as it is of Protestantism and of Romantic nationalism, of which it has been a central feature.  The political theorist Judith Shklar summarized the social effects of Romantic naturalism generally, which apply to language par excellence:

Romantic morality may reflect…the anguish of people who leave the social world of their childhood behind them and adopt new manners and roles. The true inner self is identified with one’s childhood and family, and regret as well as guilt for having left them behind may render new ways artificial, false, and …a betrayal of that original self. This personal self is seen as having a primacy that no later social role can claim; and indeed the latter may be despised as demeaning…simply ‘fake’…less genuine than the primordial self. (Shklar 1984, 75-76)

This anguish of Romantic naturalism inhibits second language learning, as epitomized in Barcelona by the “monologic truth” espoused by some young working class Castilian-speaking men (Pujolar 2001). Their masculine sense of self could only be expressed in a direct voice they viewed as their own and as incompatible with Catalan, and possibly with any secondarily acquired language.

Is this sociolinguistic form of naturalism not simply natural itself? Undoubtedly, a primordial, habitual linguistic variety will feel more “natural” – available without conscious effort – to its speakers than some other forms they might acquire. But this kind of bodily and mental naturalness does not automatically confer value on a linguistic variety, which is the case in sociolinguistic naturalism. This linguistic window on the speaker’s primordial being could logically be disparaged as childishly unformed (and is in some other linguistic ideologies), but this specific naturalizing ideology valorizes it instead.

Naturalness in language is obviously not always valued, nor is artifice always seen as inauthentic (in the Spanish tradition, see Góngora’s culteranismo, for example). The late modern period has brought some ruptures with primordialist naturalism generally, as captured by the reflexive American novelist Philip Roth:

Being [myself] is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself…. The whole Western idea of mental health…:[tells us that] what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious separation of those two things … recognizing that one is acutely a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness. (Roth 1986, 319-320)

Increasingly, sociolinguistic studies are finding a similarly non-naturalizing sense of linguistic authenticity. For example, In Catalonia in the 2000’s, some Castilian-speakers who had rejected Catalan when young came to embrace the language later, as an expression of a freely chosen self: “A person is a speaker of whatever languages s/he feels like speaking” (Veu Pròpia Bages 2008). Those I interviewed saw their youthful rejection of Catalan as immature foolishness and were proud of the personal growth that allowed them to take up a language they had considered alien. The Romantic relation of originary linguistic form to the self had broken down for them. Speaking Catalan was a different kind of act of identity that expressed not where they came from, but who they believed they had become: flexible, tolerant, mature, and above all, individual.

A Castilian-speaking journalist similarly reported the pleasure he took in speaking Catalan with a Castilian-speaking taxi driver in Barcelona:

We both know that we’re making an effort to speak in Catalan, and even so, we know that it’s an effort that we enjoy. An effort that connects with a self that is not the one that life has given us randomly, but rather part of the identity that we have chosen. We’ve decided to be a person who speaks Catalan, and we do it with pleasure. (Puente 2016)

Commodification, hybridity, superdiversity, and a neoliberal emphasis on self-formation have all been described as characteristic of late modern language. One thing these all share is an anti-naturalist, anti-primordialist character that dissociates essence from origins to enable new projects of linguistic identity, in place of Romantic authenticity and its accompanying guilt. However, the rejection of primordialist sociolinguistic naturalism also naturalizes a narrative itself, just a different one. My interviewees’ accounts cast movement into bilingualism as the normal process in a diverse society (related to views found in communities described as “superdiverse” and “metroethnic”). This too is an ideology of linguistic naturalism, but it represents human beings as naturally choosing to acquire languages that are present in their environments. As a form of naturalization it is polyglot rather than monoglot, and it privileges agency, choice, and openness over primordialism, nativism, and eternal essences.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.

Burgen, Stephen. 2012. Immigration complicates Catalonia’s separatist picture. The Guardian, November 20.

Joseph, John E. 2000. Limiting the Arbitrary; Linguistic Naturalism and its Opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Monteagudo, Henrique. 2013. Spanish and other languages of Spain in the Second Republic. In A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language, ed. José del Valle, pp. 106-122. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Moreno Cabrera, Juan Carlos. 2010. Lengua/nacionalismo en el contexto español. June 29, 2010. http://bretemas.blogaliza.org/files/2010/06/Texto_Juan_Carlos_Moreno_Cabrera.pdf.

Puente, Arturo. 2016. Una batalla cultural contra la demanda de drets polítics. NacióDigital, February 22. http://www.naciodigital.cat/opinio/12616/batalla/cultural/contra/demanda/drets/politics

Pujolar, Joan. 2001. Gender, Heteroglossia and Power; A Sociolinguistic Study of Youth Culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Roth, Philip. 1986. The Counterlife.  New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Shklar, Judith N. 1984. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Veu Pròpia Bages. 2008. Perquè un immigrant parla català?  Veu Pròpia Bages. May 13, 2008. http://bagesveupropia.blogspot.nl/2008/05/perqu-un-immigrant-parl-catal.html.

Woolard, Kathryn A. 2016. Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Xavier Lamuela
Universitat de Girona

My aim here is to recall the connotations particular to the conception of subordinate languages within the historical context of social-modernization processes and to observe how some of these connotations, valued negatively within that context, have a very different role in the current conception of linguistic subordination.

Ninyoles refers to the conception of subordinate languages using the expression “diglossic ideologies,” which subsequently, adapted to become “diglossic representations,” has been used by Occitan sociolinguists and, in general, within the revindicating sociolinguistics produced in the French context. Ninyoles (1971: 69) observes,

In the last century, “diglossic” ideologies have found a characteristic expression in the “nature” versus “culture” paradigm, based on which we could elaborate an endless series of dichotomies: “natural peoples” (= Naturvölker) and “cultural peoples” (= Kulturvölker), “people” versus “elite,” “mass” and “minority,” “popular culture” versus “high culture,” “feeling” versus “reason,” and so on. This pernicious dualism has survived through concepts of “natural language” and “mother tongue” as opposing notions to that of “language of culture.”

Based on the observations made by Ninyoles and others made by Aracil (1983: 55-56), I established (Lamuela 1994: 71-73) a list of opposite terms stuctured along the lines of those used in the semantic differential technique. Below I reproduce a version of this list accompanied by some labels that correspond to a series of summarizing categories:

Similarly, Gal (2018: 233) has established an axis of oppositions between the properties attributed to standard language on the one hand and those attributed to subordinate linguistic forms on the other:

If we make a brief comparison between the two lists, we see that mine, focused on the opposition between dominant and subordinate languages, is more detailed in some respects, such as the distinctions it introduces within the axes of rationality and practical value. By contrast, Gal pays particular attention to the properties that characterize the opposition between a codified language form and dialectal varieties: anonymity ↔ authenticity, universal ↔ particular/emplaced, homogeneous/unified ↔ various. I would highlight that the anonymity ↔ authenticity polarization conveys the series of oppositions established under my labels (3) and (4) of link to rationality and link to secondary relations.

Gal (2018) presents certain uses of subordinate languages as practices that challenge their codification. Here is one of her examples (Gal 2018: 236-237):

A striking example is Urla’s (2012) [1] discussion of “pirate radio” in the Basque country. Young people who opposed middle class intellectuals and their creation of a standard register of Basque responded by organizing illegal broadcasting that deliberately mixed Basque and Spanish, used familiar and rural registers of Basque while playing decidedly unfolkloric, rock and other popular youth styles of music. The radio stations were unofficial, uncommercial and not middle class, thereby turning upside down the values of standardizing preservationists. Arguably, they were not traditional or backward looking. Indeed, they enacted another form of modernity.

In my view, this way of presenting the issue ignores the fact that over the last few decades there has been an essential, though not completely generalized, change in the values associated with linguistic uses and, in particular, in the series of connotations included under the labels of link to rationality and link to secondary relations. On the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the dual conception of languages particular to modernization processes was entirely in force. It was closely linked to the political will to generalize knowledge and use of languages considered to be “national” where other varieties were generally used. It combined the economic interest of consolidating a state market (with a possible colonial extension), the principle of political authority associated with the nation-state, the principle of linguistic and cultural authority associated with the apparatus of state culture, and the ideological will to build a national unity requiring linguistic unification. In a context in which written language was the only significant vehicle for communication that went beyond direct interpersonal contacts, the project of generalizing the use of state languages, manifested in a voluntarist manner, adopted intellectual and socioeconomic elites as a model, strengthened reference to the principle of authority and emphasized the features that characterize the dual conception of languages.

This conception was included in the era’s common ground of thinking (Van Dijk 2003: 22), [2] and so it also played a significant role in the political positions that were put forward to achieve an egalitarian society. This is illustrated by the following Gramsci quote (1975: 1377), which is additionally representative of the dual conception of languages and in particular of the elements that I list under the label of link to rationality:

A person who only speaks a dialect or who understands the national language in varying degrees necessarily enjoys a more or less restricted and provincial, fossilized and anachronistic perception of the world in comparison with the great currents of thought which dominate world history. His interests will be restricted, more or less corporative and economic, and not universal. If it is not always possible to learn foreign languages so as to put oneself in touch with different cultures, one must at least learn the national tongue [well]. (translation reproduced from: Antonio Gramsci (1957) The Modern Prince and other writings by Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd. p. 59.) [3]

Throughout the 20th century, however, compulsory schooling ensured general knowledge of state languages and various levels of familiarity with the culture they conveyed, and the expansion of audiovisual media consolidated linguistic standardization, understood as the population’s internalization of the linguistic forms proposed as a model for generalized use. Writing ceased to be the only vehicle of non-immediate interpersonal communication, and standard oral language became present everywhere. Writing itself, adapted to all kinds of media, was becoming less formal. In the last third of the century, it was common in the comments of scholars—for example, Kloss (1978: 21-22; see Lamuela 1994: 158-161)—to observe the linguistic consequences of these processes: relaxation of explicit rules, unself-conscious use of linguistic variation’s resources and a positive assessment of uses that were considered to be transgressive. These trends have experienced highly pronounced progress in recent years owing to computerized communication procedures, which have made immediate interactions without personal contact widespread and written uses completely commonplace (Coupland & Kristiansen 2011). At the economic level, state markets are increasingly subordinated to the globalized market, and commercial mechanisms have undergone radical changes. The relationship between economic interests and communication phenomena means that they are governed by marketing principles, which make the most of the possibilities of ICT. Publicity and propaganda, conveyed via the huge variety of media and their technical possibilities, govern the functioning of economics and politics.

In this context, the language associated with rationality (abstract, precise, denotative, rational, controlled, organized and elaborated) continues to be valid in certain areas, such as academia and law, where it maintains its association with certain mechanisms of power. By contrast, the dynamic and changing character—fluid, “liquid”—of general communication and the power that flows from propagandistic use of language are making traits that run counter to rationality (the world of the concrete, imprecision, connotation, emotivity, spontaneity, improvisation and naturalness) acquire positive value. In practice, we are witnessing a hypervaluation of these traits, and it is paving the way for all sorts of demagogic discourses. These are sustained on a common ground that also now includes revindicating discourses. With the claim of combating authoritarian positions, these discourses are on the fringes of a serious critique of language uses, and they idealize uses that are considered to be spontaneous but, in fact, only accommodate what is now perceived as (post)modern.

It is worth examining the situation of dominant and subordinate languages from this perspective. Standardization of dominant languages ensures, on the one hand, availability for elaborated uses that are still necessary and effective in our society, and, on the other, the generalized internalization of a “standard colloquial” language that forms the basis of spontaneous uses of all registers and also of the possibility of playing with linguistic resources of various origins, including those considered transgressive, such as the use of slang and oral forms traditionally proscribed in formal language. Subordinate languages, on the other hand, suffer from the deficiencies of a lack of standardization when it comes to their application in elaborated uses. In spontaneous uses they are the object of compensatory idealization when they are made to appear as the quintessence of naturalness, but they are marginal within propagandistic uses, subject as these are to the configuration of linguistic dominance, which relegates subordinate languages to intragroup use and communicative fragmentation within the linguistic community itself.

Notes

[1] Jacqueline Urla (2012) Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation and Cultural Activism. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.

[2] Gal (2018: 222 and passim) speaks of sociolinguistic regimes and specifically of standard regime to refer to a conception of languages that privileges their standard form.

[3] “Chi parla solo il dialetto o comprende la lingua nazionale in gradi diversi, partecipa necessariamente di una intuizione del mondo più o meno ristretta e provinciale, fossilizzata, anacronistica in confronto delle grandi correnti di pensiero che dominano la storia mondiale. I suoi interessi saranno ristretti, più o meno corporativi o economistici, non universali. Se non sempre è possibile imparare più lingue straniere per mettersi a contatto con vite culturali diverse, occorre almeno imparare bene la lingua nazionale.”

References

Aracil, Lluís V. (1983) “El racionalisme oligàrquic”. In: Dir la realitat. Barcelona: Països Catalans. 47-65.

Coupland, Nikolas, & Tore Kristiansen (2011) “SLICE: Critical perspectives on language (de)standardisation”. In: Tore Kristiansen & Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo: Novus Press. 11-35.

Gal, Susan (2018) “Visions and revisions of minority languages: Standardization and its dilemmas”. In: Pia Lane, James Costa, & Haley De Korne (eds.) Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery. Abingdon / New York: Routledge. 222-242.

Gramsci, Antonio (1975) Quaderni del carcere [1929-1935], 4 vols., edited by Valentino Gerratana. Torino: Einaudi.

Kloss, Heinz (1978) Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800, 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Schwann.

Lamuela, Xavier (1994) Estandardització i establiment de les llengües. Barcelona: Edicions 62.

Ninyoles, Rafael Ll. (1971) Idioma i prejudici, 2nd ed. Palma de Mallorca: Moll, 1975.

Van Dijk, Teun A. (2003) Ideología y discurso. Barcelona: Ariel.

Joan A. Argenter
UNESCO Chair on Cultural and Linguistic Diversity
Institut d’Estudis Catalans

In memory of Ferdinand de Saussure on the centenary of the Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916)^[1]

C’est, en dernière analyse, seulement le côté pittoresque d’une langue, celui qui fait qu’elle diffère de toutes autres comme appartenant à certain peuple ayant certains origines, c’est ce côté presque ethnographique, qui conserve pour moi un intérêt.^[2]

Ferdinand de Saussure

(Letter from F. De Saussure to A. Meillet, 4 January 1894. [É. Benveniste (ed.) “Lettres de Ferdinand de Saussure à Antoine Meillet publiées par Emile Benveniste”, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 21: 89-135 (1964) – p. 95]

Historical-comparative linguistics aims to study the evolution of languages. This was the predominant current of linguistic science in the 19th century. The Swiss Indo-Europeanist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) put himself at the heart of it. Everything he published in his lifetime was the product of that intellectual interest. He moved with ease in this area. Saussure’s genius became apparent long before the appearance of the Cours. At the age of 21, he published Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1879), a major contribution to Indo-European linguistics that shaped how this field evolved. In the field of comparative linguistic reconstruction, Saussure postulated that there was a need for there to exist in Proto-Indo-European an element that, although undocumented in any known language of the Indo-European family, allowed greater generalization in describing the Indo-European vowel system and made it possible to account for that system’s evolution in Indo-European languages. He called this element “sonant coefficients.” Unfortunately, Saussure would not witness the empirical confirmation of his hypothesis, which came about with the discovery and deciphering of Hittite, an Anatolian language that was probably the oldest among the Indo-European languages. From 1927, another great linguist, the Pole Jerzy Kuryɫowicz (1895-1978), developed his theory of “laryngeals”—the hypothetical “sonant coefficients” predicted by Saussure—based on Saussure’s theoretical and empirical foundations.

However, Saussure’s brilliant theoretical contribution to Indo-European and historical-comparative linguistics is often ignored owing to the spectacular shift he brought about in the discipline a hundred years ago when he taught courses on what he called “general linguistics,” an area in which, in contrast to his free movement within historical-comparative linguistics, he proceeded with great caution. Like many scientific questions, what Saussure asked was seemingly quite simple: What is a Language?

Until then—he thought— linguists had considered how our object of study evolves, and we have made progress in understanding the mechanisms of this evolution (phonetic laws). However, we did not ask questions about what the very nature of our object of study is. Answering this simple question entailed abandoning the historical-evolutionary perspective and approaching language from a perspective that decouples the state of a language at a given moment from its previous state—and its later one, where applicable. This is a “synchronic” perspective. “Synchronic” elements coexist in the minds of individuals of a generation or generations who live alongside one another. Consider, for example, the opposition between the sounds represented in Catalan by l and ll (alveolar lateral approximant [l] and palatal lateral approximant [ʎ]): col / coll ‘cabbage’ / ‘neck’ or fila / filla ‘line’ / ’daughter’. Synchronic elements stand in contrast to “diachronic” elements, which have existed in the minds of individuals of different and often distant generations. In the case of Catalan, consider, for example, libre [de les dones] (‘Book [of Women]’; Francesc Eiximenis) / llibre [de les dones] (today), or latí (‘Latin’; Ramon Llull) / llatí (today). The initial Latin sound l became ll in Catalan, unlike in Spanish: Cat. llei / Sp. ley ‘law’; Cat. lluna / Sp. luna ‘moon’; Cat. llac / Sp. lago ‘lake´. In Catalan the sound l from Latin changed to ll in word initial position. Nothing was lost: the l / ll opposition is typical of the synchronic sound structure of today’s Catalan. The two sounds differentiate words, as is shown by the aforementioned col / coll or fila / filla, and therefore both sounds are functional entities of the language’s sound structure. When the aforementioned change was no longer active, learned words borrowed from Latin were introduced, and this has led to the coexistence of synchronic pairs such as llengua ‘language’ / lingüística ‘linguistics’, llei ‘law’ / legal ‘legal’ and llac ‘lake’ / lacustre ‘lacustrine’.

The answer to Saussure’s question is well known: every language is a “system”, an autonomous and autotelic whole formed by a set of elements that are defined by their relationships and oppositions within the “whole.” It’s a “system of differences”: the elements are not defined “by what they are” but “by what they are not”—by the capacity for distinction and reciprocal relations, such as the l / ll opposition within Catalan’s phonetic system. They do not work or evolve separately from each other. All this marked a paradigm shift, and that is why Saussure is considered the initiator of “modern linguistics.” Since then there has been other paradigm shifts in linguistics, but at bottom these are all still indebted to Saussure’s.

One way of looking at things would be the assertion that throughout its development linguistics had its Darwin before its Linnaeus.

But we all have hidden vocations; views of an object that are different from what we convey because it is “scientifically plausible,” “academically sound” or “politically correct”; vague intuitions; inclinations; and hidden intellectual affections. At one moment or another, everyone has likely wanted to do or see things or approach facts in a different way.

Such a moment came about as a personal, chance manifestation in Saussure’s case. Saussure wrote the lines that begin this article in a letter to his disciple Antoine Meillet. Despite his scientific approach to the study of language—this was already emerging in his Indo-European work (in fact, the letter predates the lectures of the Cours)—Saussure was fascinated by what makes one language different from another; by what links it to a land and a people, to particular origins and to a history; by its ethnographic dimension. All these things are far removed from an extremely formalist conception—one that he himself had promoted and which others would carry on—centred on a formal “structure” that is independent from speakers, their environment and their sociolinguistic history.

Saussure added:
“et précisément je n’ai plus le plaisir de pouvoir me livrer à cette étude sans arrière-pensée, et de jouir du fait particulier tenant à un milieu particulier. ”^[3]

His profession kept him from the joy and pleasure of studying or considering language from an ecological point of view, taking into account the habitat, its organisms and its interactions—that is, its people and its uniqueness. And, in my opinion, he could still have turned everything on its head: a language unfolds in an environment, in particular social surroundings, but it is also an environment in which the activities and thoughts of those who speak it unfold.

As with any scientific discipline, the aim of linguistics is to discover the invariant elements of its object of study. The tension between invariance and variation is innate in language and linguistic research, as is the universality and diversity of language in its empirical manifestation. And so is the tension between the reduction of language to a formal object or to a very specific cognitive structure of the human mind and the recognition of its public dimension. The lack of such recognition in linguistic study can only be sustained not only if previously that reduction has served operationally to delimit and to define the object of study but also if that object of study has been identified exhaustively as “language”—a strategy explicitly followed by authors whose works have not been around for a century.

Interestingly, in a certain sense and to some extent, this contrast between the invention of a new linguistic paradigm and a divergent personal inclination within the Swiss scholar is the opposite of the relationship that has often been attributed to Pompeu Fabra, with or without basis. It has been stated that if Fabra had not set himself the overriding goal of bringing about the codification of modern Catalan and social and institutional acceptance of this language—“the straightening of the language”—he could have had a brilliant career as a linguist. That is, he might have been a scholar of language with no prescriptive aim. We do not know whether this could have been so: the truth is that he completely gave himself over to that task until he absolutely achieved it. We know that Fabra was familiar with the works of his contemporaries Ferdinand de Saussure and Otto Jespersen, as well as with the works of the historical-comparative Romanists who first inspired him. Ferdinand de Saussure laid the foundations of what would later be called “structuralism”; Otto Jespersen reformulated the foundations and analytical practice of “traditional grammar.” But Fabra also did linguistics in a modern sense. Establishing the normative image of a language is to set out a certain model of language, namely “a totality,” with more or less precise or more or less blurred margins; to define its elements; to exclude outside elements from it; to bring out its functioning and internal regularities; to discover its “system”; and—this is where the divergence comes about—to intervene in it, prescribing its legitimate form and reorienting its evolution. All this is to be done according to scientific criteria, though not with the primary intention of advancing a discipline or shaping the description of a language as a “linguistic system,” but instead with that of abiding by the “dimension that makes it different from all others in that it belongs to a particular people with particular origins” and endowing this people with a common linguistic reference point.

Saussure uses the term “ethnographic” with a hint of condescension: the use and expansion of ethnographic method and theory were soon to emerge (Bronislaw Malinowski received his doctorate in London in the year when the Cours appeared). In any case, from a perspective that does not forget the public dimension of language, what is of interest are the things that make one language different from another, that root it in a people and a space, that give it a historical validity, that make it inseparable not only from what its speakers say but also from what they do. What is of interest is the role that language plays in its speakers’ communicative and cultural practices, in the value of its uses and its silences, in the interaction between the way in which people speak and how the social and natural world is represented, in how through language a category of person is culturally constructed and a social order is reproduced or challenged, in the verbal resources that the members of a community engage with, in the solidarity and the social cleavages created by the use of these resources, in their maintenance or replacement, in their vitality or decay—in short, in their expansion or potential extinction. When he wrote to Meillet, Saussure likely did not think a great deal about all this. But it all leads to “find[ing] joy in a particular fact attached to a particular milieu”—or in understanding it.

[1] This text was drafted in 2016 but had never been published. After conquering some academic qualms, I decided to let it see the light of day.

[2] “In the final analysis, it is only the picturesque dimension of a language—an almost ethnographic dimension that makes it different from all others in that it belongs to a particular people with particular origins—that retains my interest”.

[3] “I no longer have the pleasure of being able to engage in such study at face value, or to find joy in a particular fact attached to a particular milieu.”

Susan Gal
University of Chicago

Those of us engaged in research on gender and language are often scholar-activists. That is, in addition to our research, we have worked to make changes in public linguistic practices: for instance, to limit the deleterious effects of generic pronouns, discriminatory address terms and occupational labels for women. Attention to linguistic matters such as naming, politeness and the dynamics of power differentials in interaction have long been central in feminist politics. We have even studied our own practices of “consciousness raising” as a political genre. Communicative phenomena are crucially involved in all sorts of political activism, like fighting for reproductive rights and marriage equality. These too have attracted close analytical attention. The personal continues to be political; discourse – including our own – is crucial to both.

Yet, research paradigms have changed. Scholars, over the years, have repeatedly risen to the challenge of analyzing changing feminist dilemmas in the everyday sociopolitical world. One of these, currently, is the attack on feminist goals and policies by powerful figures of the extreme right in many parts of the world. Right-wing activists undermine feminist projects of equality in employment and wages, they counteract movements for reproductive and sexual rights, and obstruct attempts to stop domestic abuse. There is a linguistic aspect to these attacks. One way in which right-wing politicians challenge feminist projects is by creating a category of talk they deceptively label “genderism” and “gender ideology,” which they then anathemize and stigmatize in rightist speech and writing. Right-wing activists say they are “anti-gender,” a view that – to scholars who study how gender-relations work – seems to make as little sense as being against “gravity.” Political scientists point out that anathemizing of “gender” in this way is, in part, a backlash against the notable successes of feminist organizing that have made the policies of international organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union more woman-friendly, more willing to attend to the rights of women and sexual minorities. What can sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology add to this political insight? I believe we have the analytical tools to grasp how talk of “anti-gender” spreads and how it gains its authority and persuasiveness, as it increasingly does.

For understanding the communicative aspects of this right wing discourse, the most important analytical change in language scholarship has been the turn to reflexivity or metacommunicative processes. On the one hand, reflexivity is the recognition that we are part of what we study; analysts have positions, ones we inevitably consider when describing the positions of others. There is no “view from nowhere.” On the other hand, reflexivity means that we study not just talk, but the presumptions and ideas with which we and other participants approach any instance of talk. Just as feminist theory shifted from studying women and men to studying gender as a more abstract category and a set of relations, so lesbian and gay studies shifted to conceptualizing sexualities in relation to sexual normativities. These reconceptualizations are reflexive moves. In linguistic anthropology, the same kind of leap led to posing questions not only about how men and women speak, but about what regiments and organizes the categories of masculinity and femininity and their expression in communicative practices. If these differences are neither natural, nor a matter of essences, then how can we track empirically how they are made, how they might be re-made or unmade? What kinds of authority sustain them? These are questions about communication, to be sure, but also reflexively about meta-communication.

The focus on metacommunication arose in part from unexpected complications encountered in our research. Since the 1970s and with more energy in the 1990s, gender and sexuality have been investigated as questions of “identity.” Yet, scholars have repeatedly found that “women” and “men” – “straight” and “gay” – are not homogeneous groups or categories. On the contrary, even within a single society, stereotypes of men, women and their speech vary dramatically. This is why the classic question of whether women are leaders or followers in language change is simply unanswerable. As Penelope Eckert argued long ago, stereotyped contrasts between “men” and “women” are inadequate for tracking linguistic variation. These contrasts are invariably part of wider systems of differentiation: ethnicity, race, class, cultural distinction, among others.

A further important complication was whether we were investigating stereotypes or practices. One could not take for granted which everyday linguistic and interactional practices signalled which stereotyped categories in specific sociocultural contexts. Furthermore, although speakers sometimes were found to be stigmatized for not speaking as generally expected for the local gender stereotype to which they were relegated, equally frequently, and to the surprise of scholars, speakers stretched the bounds of gender and sexuality stereotypes. The evidence from many societies and social groups has been overwhelming: sometimes women speak like men and vice versa; homosexuals speak like heterosexuals or the reverse; ethnics of various kinds imitate each other and so on and on. That is, speakers are not simply performing pre-existing selves or identities, nor are they constructing gendered practices simply through performative iterations. Rather, they are creating selves in ways that rely on presupposed normative stereotypes as starting points for interpretation, even when transgressing or contesting those very norms and creating new ones.

A key theoretical point has emerged: stereotypes are powerful not (only) because they sometimes force conformity to a norm, but because they are part of what we would now call ideological constraints to which speakers must orient in some way in everyday talk and interpretation. Participants orient in many ways: by aligning with norms, but also by disaligning, rejecting, changing or fudging norms. Or by imitating and thus citing and acquiescing with them; or by citing in a mocking frame, parodying or faking what is normally expected. One cannot speak without inviting such inferences.

We have learned that the social effect of gendering emerges out of  a three-way dynamic. Linguistic forms of many kinds – phonological, syntactic, discursive – cohere for speakers into “ways of speaking.” We would now call these “registers” of talk, what John Gumperz called contextualization cues. They index interactional stances. Such stances come to “count” as “feminine” and/or “masculine” (intersecting with other axes of difference). Participants construct and then presume the social meanings of registers, in communities of practice. On the basis of those presumptions, speakers take up and interpret what they hear and produce; they often also reconstruct how they interpret practices. Crucially, this triangulation – category presumption/ practice/ interpretive uptake – works because ways of speaking are discursively constituted as part of cultural conceptions about social difference. In short, they are aspects of language ideologies. “Ideology” here does not presume a correct vs. false consciousness. On the contrary, language ideologies are metacommunicative presuppositions – regimes of value –  that are necessary for any and every interpretation of a sign system. There is always more tan one ideology in any social scene, so a sense of contestation is built into the notion.

To put it in semiotic terms, speakers take up various ways of speaking in interactions, thereby “voicing” the social types (personae) that those forms index, and thus aligning (or disaligning, differentiating) not only with respect to their immediate interlocutors, but also simultaneously and necessarily with respect to categories of typified (stereotyped) social persons that are recognized as part of linguistic ideologies. New combinations of speech features are typified – enregistered – when a new set of speech forms is heard to index a typified persona within a field of circulating possibilities: when the forms are taken up in further interactions. A first order of indexicality, as Michael Silverstein argued, points to the stance and hence the social relationship that the register indexes in a specific situation. A simultaneous second order points to the “kind of person” who is enacted by speaking that way in such a situation for those who recognize the enacted person type. Every repetition of using the register is a citation-with-a-difference, interdiscursively linking the earlier use to the current one, indeed often constructing the new context, in relation to but distinct from the earlier context of use.

It would be a mistake to imagine that registers, stances and their related categories of personae emerge spontaneously from the interactional routines and cultural patterns of particular communities of practice. On the contrary, the making of gender stereotypes and registers is often a political and always an ideological process. Discourses about many matters – modernization, nation, moral worth – metacommunicatively constitute the “voice” of personae, even when the types of individuals who would instantiate the social categories do not exist. Miyako Inoue’s demonstration of how “modern Japanese women’s language” was constructed by intellectual men in the early 20^th century is a classic example. No such educated Japanese women existed at the time, but intellectual men’s eagerness to write realist novels that would help modernize Japan led to the invention of that category of woman and its “voice.” Whether or not women actual used the idealized forms – or should do so – became a second-order issue on which politicians could take a stance, thereby expressing positions on modernization and other matters.

The concepts of language ideology, register and the discursive construction of stereotypes are all needed in conceptualizing the rightwing discourse that is currently opposing international policy towards the rights of women and sexual minorities. There is deep contradiction in this opposition. Right-wing public figures distort and ridicule feminist ideals even as these figures gain authority by “riding” on – grafting their positions onto – the increased global legitimacy of claims to rights, autonomy and equality. My own research has focused on eastern European cases. But the same processes are appearing in other regions as well. Indeed, the global circulation of the phenomenon is among its central features.

For instance, as Agnieszka Graff and others have noted, it was a shock to feminist researchers in Poland in the early 2010s to find newspaper headlines protesting against “genderism.” Most Poles had never heard of “gender” till then; it was a term limited to a small group of researchers. Yet, the terms “genderism” and later “gender ideology,” were invented in the late 1990s by Pope John Paul, taken up by Popes Benedict and Francis, and are now used widely by far right groups, journalists and writers in Europe, as well as the World Congress of Families – a U.S. based transnational group – and most recently by authoritarian leaders such as the prime minister of Hungary. The label is part of a register of denunciation against equal rights for women, civil unions, marriage equality, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, IVF and contraception. “Genderism” or “gender ideology” is framed, moreover, as a “colonial imposition,” a totalitarian force that is “worse than communism and fascism,” a threat to children, parents and the nation, a violation of nature, and a secret means of de-populating the world. A full analysis of this phenomoneon is beyond the task of this brief essay, but let me provide a start.

Armed with an understanding of metacommunication, we can recognize the term “genderism” as part of a discourse register. Its propositions function pragmatically as a first-order index, identifying one side of an implicit argument, arguing against the claims of feminists and sexual minorities. To simply contest its propositional content or its definition of “gender” would miss the more important second-order effect: the label identifies a political position that enables disparate rightist groups to recognize and collaborate with each other despite their vast differences. The rapid spread of the discourse suggests as much. When interviewed recently about state policies towards sexual minorities, the Hungarian prime minister promised tolerance and liberality, ending his response with: “but leave our children alone.” The phrase would have been incongruous, were it not recognizable as an exact quote (citation) from concurrent and much more rancorous Polish debates on sex. The Hungarian prime minister had not taken a substantive stance against LGBTQ people; on the contrary, he explicitly promised tolerance. But, by citing a snippet of talk common in Polish pronouncements against “genderism,” he succeeded in subtly aligning with Polish government discourse, which had. Clearly, propositionality alone is less important than pragmatics and an ideological field: what are the positions such a declaration occupies and what collaborations and opponents does it evoke. A more complicated question is how this discourse register shifts shape as it circulates. We need a parallel to Deborah Cameron’s deft anatomy of “political correctness” some twenty-five years ago.

It is also important to ask how this register gains authority, when it does. Much research has effectively analyzed several ways of establishing linguistic authority. The norms of standard languages are authorized via ideologies of correctness and reason; these erase the arbitrariness of standard forms and their positioning as gatekeeping devices. The legitimacy of ritual transformations is established by the performativity of the rituals themselves. In another kind of authority, as Judith Irvine and I have argued, one site of practice can anchor another site that is interdiscursively connected to it, and thus authorizes it, as in baptism or licensing.

The authority of “anti-gender” discourse – its persuasiveness for some audiences – is achieved in yet another way. It resembles citational phenomena of irony and parody, and the appropriation by dominant groups of forms associated with disdained subordinated groups, as in the “mock” forms described by Jane Hill. However, “anti-gender” is not based on irony; nor does it use the forms of the subordinated. On the contrary, anti-gender discourse deceptively adopts the terms and forms of the most powerful international organizations, grafting itself onto the authority of their widely accepted moral values, while directly opposing and undermining those very values. In this it is akin to “reverse racism” in the United States, which accuses subordinated racial minorities of racism. “Anti-gender” discourse presumes that “rights” are valuable, the protection of children is important, and “colonialism” and “fascism” are to be resisted. And then it accuses those speaking for the rights of women and sexual minorities of trampling rights, harming children and imposing colonial hegemony and fascism. Grafting itself onto the declared values of the EU and the UN, “anti-gender” discourses deceive by riding on the authority of values espoused by powerful international organizations, and redirecting that authority to themselves, indeed to their own diametrically opposed purposes.

The effectiveness of activist responses to this increasingly present mode of political discourse that undermines feminist and egalitarian goals will depend in part on how it is further analyzed. Our tools – especially a consistent move to reflexivity and register – are necessary to this understanding. At the same time, comprehending the mechanisms by which such counter-discourses operate under conditions of political polarization will surely extend the reach of sociolinguistic and its analysis of gender and language.

Gerald Roche
Senior Research Fellow
La Trobe University, Australia

Another Global Crisis

While our attention remains consumed by the global crisis of the COVID pandemic, we are also living in the midst of another, slow-motion global crisis. This crisis sees millions of people around the world stigmatized, marginalized, excluded, and discriminated against, and even killed because of the languages they speak, sign, and use. This crisis affects Australia, where I live, and also Tibet, where I have lived and conducted research. This global language crisis means that at least half of the languages used today will most likely no longer be used by the end of the century.

The town of Guza in eastern Tibet, where many Tibetans speak the Gochang language.
Like the Manegacha language discussed below, Gochang is one of Tibet’s unrecognized languages.

This crisis is fundamentally political: it is an issue of social justice. In any given country, and within our world at large, different languages and the people who use them receive unequal respect, resources, power, and attention. It is these inequalities, this linguistic injustice, that drives the global language crisis.

In order to escape the worlds of suffering created by these inequalities, people are everywhere ‘choosing’ to learn dominant languages in order to achieve economic and social mobility. They are also ‘choosing’ to stop using languages that are denied equal recognition and support. This unjust world of forced choice, gross inequality and suffering is the architecture of the slow-motion global language crisis.

However, if we look at dominant representations of the global language crisis in the popular imagination and in academia, we could be forgiven for failing to notice that it is a crisis of social justice on a global scale. We could be forgiven for seeing something else altogether.

Beyond Biology

For the past thirty years, our dominant way of thinking about the global language crisis has used models borrowed from conservation biology and the environmental movement. This approach, known as ‘endangerment linguistics,’ has mapped global linguistic diversity, created vast databases of linguistic data, raised public awareness about endangered languages, and developed new methods to teach and learn languages.

But despite its success as an academic field, endangerment linguistics has failed as a discourse: as a way of thinking and talking about a problem, and a way of perceiving and acting on the world. It has, for example, promoted problematic analogies between human languages and biological species. But more importantly, it has veiled the social injustice that lies at the heart of the global language crisis.

If we want to address the global language crisis, we need to stop talking about endangered languages, and thinking about this human problem through the lens of biology and ecology. However, it’s not enough to simply point out how endangerment discourses are problematic. In addition to critique, we need a positive project to bring a paradigm shift to our view on the global language crisis. Most of all, we need new language to help us think about and address this problem.

In other fields of social justice, we already recognize that how we talk impacts how we think and how we act on the world. We use gender neutral pronouns. We capitalize Indigenous. We refer to ‘undocumented migrants’ rather than ‘illegal immigrants’. We avoid slurs and language that belittles and demeans. It’s time we applied the principles of just language to the global language crisis.

Towards a New Language of the Global Language Crisis

We need new language to talk about the global language crisis, to help us see it as a social justice issue. But what does that language look like? I think the following four points should be central to our new language of global language injustice.

Oppression, not endangerment. Oppression, not endangerment, lies at the heart of the global language crisis. Languages, and the people who use and identify with them, are dominated, deprived, marginalized, stigmatized, excluded, and subordinated. These languages are not endangered. The distinction between oppression and endangerment is the distinction between an approach that is explicitly political, and one which consistently works to depoliticize the problem. Furthermore, while endangerment is a feature of languages and populations, oppression is a feature of systems, structures, and relationships. Talking about language oppression centers the political and the relational; endangerment blames the victim. While endangerment highlights symptoms, oppression focuses on the causes of the underlying problems that need to be solved.

Languages don’t oppress themselves. A failure to identify unjust political relations, and a tendency to blame victims, are entrenched in the language of endangerment discourses. These problems are often seen in the use of passive language. Languages are said to decline, vanish, die, and disappear. Populations dwindle, recede or get depleted. When active language is used, it often blames the community: languages are forgotten, lost or abandoned. Or, blame is deferred by referring to false protagonists that are described as causing endangerment, such as modernization, urbanization, migration, or globalization (none of these processes ever seems to endanger dominant languages). In order to center relations of inequality and injustice, we need use active language that places the onus on the perpetrators and aims to identify the institutions and individuals that create and maintain structures of injustice.

People, not languages. Endangerment discourses focus on languages: how languages are lost, how many are endangered, how we can record or revitalize them, what it means when a language dies, what the value of language maintenance is, and so on. A social justice approach focuses on people. Speakers and signers of a language are oppressed. Communities are excluded. People are stigmatized and suffer. To constantly remind ourselves that language oppression is a human tragedy, and not an abstract decline in knowledge or diversity, we must constantly work to center people. The global language crisis is, in truth, a global crisis of human suffering.

Disadvantage, not deficit. Endangerment discourses often portray languages as suffering from deficits. Languages ‘decline’ because they are not written, or not taught in schools, or lack prestige or vitality, or have failed to expand into new domains, or because speakers have negative attitudes. Languages are seen as failing to withstand the challenges posed by false protagonists like globalization. Instead of focusing on language deficits, a social justice approach centers how speakers of oppressed languages are harmed and disadvantaged by inequalities. Languages don’t wither because they lack the tools to survive in the modern world, people stop using them because injustice connects those languages to social disadvantage, pain, suffering, and trauma.

Endangered and Oppressed Languages in Tibet

Let me contrast these two ways of speaking about this issue, with an example from my own research. I originally began working with endangerment discourses, but now use a social justice approach. My work focuses on the languages of Tibet. Here, I will introduce my research twice: once using an endangerment discourse, and again using a social justice discourse.

Endangerment discourse: Endangered languages in Tibet. Tibet is linguistically diverse. Many of its languages are endangered. Under the impacts of rapid urbanization and unprecedented development, these languages are losing speakers. Different languages in Tibet are endangered to different degrees. While Tibetan is threatened by the national language (Putonghua, or Modern Standard Mandarin), other languages are much closer to extinction. Soon, some of them may vanish completely.

One such language is Manegacha, spoken by about 8,000 Tibetans on the northeast Tibetan Plateau. This language is currently spoken in four villages, but many families in these communities are abandoning it and shifting to Tibetan instead. Furthermore, the language has failed to expand into many new domains, such as digital media. If this situation continues, this unique aspect of human heritage and the knowledge it contains will be lost.

Overlooking the village of Tojya Wodkor, where the majority of people currently speak Manegacha,
one of Tibet’s unrecognized languages.

Social justice discourse: Language oppression in Tibet. Tibetans in China speak and sign several languages. National policy promotes the national standard language, known as Putonghua or Modern Standard Mandarin, at the expense of all other languages in Tibet. Policy also unofficially creates a distinction between recognized minority languages, like Tibetan, and unrecognized languages, which the state refuses to acknowledge. While recognized languages are under-developed and deprived relative to Putonghua, they do receive limited state support. Meanwhile, unrecognized languages are slated for elimination and denied all support. Often, the state achieves its goals through measures beyond language policy, by refusing to support languages in the course of highly disruptive state-building  processes, such as urbanization and development.

Manegacha is one of Tibet’s unrecognized languages. The 8,000 Tibetans who speak it are denied the right to use their language in education, employment, media, healthcare, and other crucial contexts. In order to provide better life chances in their children, and to spare them from facing linguistic discrimination, many Manegacha speakers are making the difficult decision to not transmit their language to their children. Without significant political change, this program of elimination and the hardship it causes will continue.

These two discourses provide very different pictures of the same situation. The social justice framing identifies the perpetrator, puts the onus for change on them and demonstrates how injustice negatively impacts victims, while also emphasizing the possibility for positive change. In contrast, the endangerment discourse presents a world that is abstract, impersonal and mechanical, where certain processes seem inevitable, and where languages are lost but nobody suffers.

Shifting our Language

In my research, I have been working hard to shift my language. I am constantly trying to center social justice and eschew endangerment discourses in how I talk about languages in Tibet. I think this is the best way to do justice to the people I work with and write for, the best way to represent their interests, and to repay the generosity they have shown me.

But shifting language isn’t easy. Endangerment discourses have predominated as long as I have been thinking about these problems. And although they have been repeatedly critiqued, they still haven’t been shifted from their position of prominence. Often, I find endangerment discourses speaking through me – choosing my words, and shaping the way I portray the world.

If we want to help build a new language for addressing the global language crisis, one thing we can all do is hold ourselves and each other accountable for our language. This doesn’t mean we should attack and blame one another. Instead, we should endeavor to work together so that the language of social justice is always at the tip of our tongue, always at the ready to shape the way we describe, think about, and act within the global language crisis.