***

New Media is defined as the combination of traditional media, such as television, newspapers, radio with information and communication technology (ICT), such as smartphones, computers and the Internet, in all its forms (social networks, search engines etc.). When the new media emerged, information began to be considered as fast, omnipresent, economical, democratic and interactive, encouraging users to provide feedback, form a community and creatively participate in the creation of such content.

However, this wealth, that is access to information, is not distributed equally and the convergence of traditional and new media has not been everywhere completed. Poor communication infrastructure has halted the spread of information to more rural areas where the majority of people live. Particularly, access to health information, education and promotion, has been limited, even though it sometimes is the main factor for dealing with the spread of contagious diseases.

Such contexts are evident across Africa. Africa has a rich oral tradition. The transmission of knowledge, history and experience, especially in West Africa, occurs mainly through story-telling rather than written texts. This tradition guides social and human morals, gives people a sense of place and purpose, while at the same time, being a community activity, it educates children and passes on history, values and lessons.

virALLanguages as a bridge

The Internet could become the solution for this inequality in information sharing. However, according to Chhanabnai and Holt (2010), there are certain limitations: connectivity, IT literacy, cultural appropriateness, and accessibility. The virALLanguages project is trying to combat these limitations and make the Internet a bridge for endangered language communities around the world to achieve access to accurate and culturally appropriate information, while keeping in mind issues of connectivity and accessibility. The most evident examples of this come from piloting the project in Cameroon.

IT literacy

The virALLanguages library

In Cameroon, there is limited infrastructure in terms of education, and literacy, numeracy, and IT skills are limited (Mbaku, 2016: 150). The virALLanguages project contributes to overcoming these limitations, by enhancing IT skills of younger community members who take part in the project. Older members contributed by performing their role as storytellers who share knowledge with the community. Contributors learn how to document themselves and their language in an additional medium apart from community memory, that of the Internet. In the process, they also enhance their IT skills.

Accessibility and Connectivity

As much as possible, virALLanguages project materials (videos, audios and pictures) are available in various forms and media. An Internet Archive account is provided with the option to download the materials, from low to high quality, adapting to connectivity and accessibility, since the productions (even the videos!), can be shared as voice messages on WhatsApp, a popular and accessible option for Cameroonians.

Additionally, radio and television continue to be popular throughout Cameroon. Radio, in particular, remains the most important and most effective way of disseminating information (Mbaku, 2016: 173). For this reason, virALLanguages has reached out to local radio stations (like Radio Echos des Montagnes) adapting the recordings in languages spoken within the reach of these radio stations. Popular traditional and new media come together in the town crier, who opens this Babanki recording by Julius Viyoff and Godlove Zhuh.

In short, virALLanguages is located at the convergence of old and new media in Cameroon.

Cultural Appropriateness

The Babanki team, Julius Viyoff (right) and Godlove Zhuh

In oral traditions, information is perceived as reliable when it is demonstrated. This is possible in the virALLanguages project because of the use of video. In the Mundabli video, for example, the speaker demonstrates the adequate distance to be kept between individuals. In terms of cultural appropriateness, virALLanguages also encourages participants to share information in a culturally appropriate manner, in the local language and by choosing leaders or respected people of each community. This way the reliability of the message is underlined while at the same time oral tradition rituals are followed, with the community gathering in order to receive this important piece of information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the inherent complexities of technology and developing country setting are significant obstacles to the fast transmission of Covid-19-related information materials. Against this background, the virALLanguages project hopes to contribute not only to the dissemination of public health information but also to community development. The technology used in the project is simple and local, it builds on what is already there, it involves users in the design, it strengthens the capacity to use, work with and develop effective ICTs, it introduces greater monitoring and evaluation, and, last but not least, encourages ongoing improvement of communication processes.

Reference

Mbaku, J.M. (2016). Cameroon, Republic of  (République du Cameroun). In Toyin F. and Jean-Jacques D. eds), Africa: an encyclopedia of culture and society. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.

But if language revitalization is political, just what sort of politics is it?

Here, I want to think about language revitalization as a form of radical politics, based on a reading of the recently published Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics.

To begin with, what is radical politics?

Radicals don’t propose a single definition of the concept. My understanding of radicalism is that it is oppositional, and seeks fundamental transformation (rather than superficial tweaks), through the abolition of various forms of domination. In this sense, language revitalization is radical, because it challenges the global status quo: a planetary system of language oppression that is presently eliminating at least half of the world’s languages.

Language revitalization seeks a different world, not a better version of this one. It seeks a world where structural power arrangements allow all languages to flourish. This requires a fundamental transformation of current social and political arrangements, which are presently geared towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples and the continuing subordination of other groups according to race, ethnicity, caste, and religion.

Radical politics seeks to achieve this transformation through direct action. Although campaigning, lobbying, consciousness-raising, and other forms of progressive politics are part of the radical toolkit, more important are acts of civil disobedience, protest, disruption, hacktivism, and so on.

Moments of direct action have always preceded language revitalization movements. Such movements can only occur in the context of greater rights, expanded freedoms, and diminished domination that are won through struggle.

A key case in point is the revitalization of Indigenous languages in settler colonies such as Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. In all these contexts, larger revitalization movements emerged out of earlier efforts to maintain languages only after civil rights had been secured through protest and other forms of direct action. States did not grant these rights willingly; rather, these rights were won as a result of coordinated, purposeful, direct action by Indigenous peoples, fighting simultaneously in their homelands whilst networked across the globe.

Language revitalization is also connected to direct action in another way. If we accept that current structural arrangements lead to the elimination of certain languages, then simply using those languages is a form of direct action. In this sense, the anthropologist and Chickasaw language activist Jenny Davis has called language revitalization an “act of breath-taking resistance, resilience, and survivance.”

In addition to direct action, language revitalization demonstrates another important feature of radical politics: prefiguration. Prefiguration refers to efforts to create the sought-after forms of justice in the process of achieving structural transformation: to prefigure the world one wants to build. Language revitalization is prefigurative in that it restores languages to a community and the world before broad-scale transformation has taken place, as a model of how the world could and should be.

In addition to direct action and prefiguration, another important feature of radicalism is critique. It aims to name, describe and expose systems of domination, and to clearly outline their harms and their perpetrators. Radical politics is thus typically ‘anti’: antifascist, antiracist, anti-capitalist, antimilitarist, anticolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchy.

This sort of critique has so far played only a limited role in language revitalization. Instead, discourses of language revitalization, particularly in the popular imagination, have been dominated by tropes of what Jane Hill called ‘hyperbolic valorization’: the heaping of abundant praise on these languages. Such praise, without a critique of domination, leads to what Daniel G. Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal call ‘conformist resistance,’ which works towards social justice by offering ‘Band-Aid’ solutions that do not address deeper, systemic issues.

However, a structurally-informed critique is gradually emerging in relation to language revitalization. For example, Alice Taff and her collaborators use the term ‘language oppression’ to describe the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion,’ and I have written about how language oppression can be analyzed similarly to other forms of oppression that occur in relation to race, nation, ethnicity, and religion. Indigenous scholars such as Wesley Leonard, Jenny Davis, and Michelle M Jacob are increasingly tying language revitalization to a critique of colonialism. Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, in discussing the radical language politics of political prisoners in what is currently Northern Ireland, ties their language revitalization work to broader struggles against colonialism and neo-colonial globalization. And in Australia, Kris Eira has stated that, “what causes the loss of languages is dominance of one group of people over another.” Together with Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens, Kris Eira has therefore called for the decolonization of linguistic practice.

This focus on a critique of colonialism and a positive project of decolonization increasingly forms a central aspect of radical politics, due to efforts to ensure that radical politics are intersectional. This means that radical projects explore how varying forms of domination and oppression interact, through discussion of concepts like racial capitalism, environmental racism, and the decolonization-decarbonization nexus. They also seek to ensure that radical projects do not create injustice for some while seeking justice for others, for example, through anti-oppression policies.

Because radical politics seeks to be intersectional, solidarity is central to its practice: solidarity within, across, and between movements. The first type of solidarity is highly relevant to language revitalization, given its communal nature. Thinking about solidarity as a form of negotiated goal-setting and coordinated action seems to provide a more constructive way of dealing with the conflicts that often arise in the process of language revitalization, compared to present interests in achieving ‘ideological clarification’.

Solidarity across movements refers to how people outside a movement can act as advocates, allies, affiliates, or accomplices to those within it. For example, I see my role as that of an ally for linguistic justice, rather than a language revitalization practitioner. One thing I think we can usefully do as allies is to help create safer spaces for language revitalization. As Ruth A. Deller explains in the handbook, safer spaces are those where, “…people from different marginalized groups can gather, speak and be resourced safely”—these may be physical or virtual. Whatever practices of solidarity we engage in, it is crucial to think about how we can decolonize solidarity—how we avoid reproducing the power structures and relations that cause language oppression in the first place.

Thinking about the third form of solidarity—between movements—provides a critical insight into an important shortcoming of the Routledge handbook. In a volume containing a chapter on radical bicycle politics and another dedicated to discussing what does and does not constitute radical music, language barely rates a mention. In a book that takes intersectionality and decolonization as organizing principles, the near total absence of any discussion of language is indicative of the need for a more expansive and more inclusive vision of what counts as radical politics.

This presents an opportunity for language activists, advocates, and allies to engage with radical academics and activists. We need to demonstrate how any analysis of oppression is incomplete without understanding the ways in which language serves as a contour of domination and an objective for emancipation. In turn, we have much to gain from a deeper engagement with the practices and philosophies of radical politics.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Shannon Woodcock, Christopher Annis, Rokhl Kafrissen, and Ingrid Piller for discussions and comments that helped improve this article.

“The English” migrated to their “ancestral homeland” in the first few centuries of the Common Era (Source: Wikipedia)

“Indigenous languages” and “immigrant languages” are much discussed in language policy research, but surprisingly little time is spent actually defining those terms. In general, “indigenous” tends to encompass two features: a long heritage in a place; and some form of contemporary disadvantage, usually associated with prior colonisation/invasion. But those criteria are seldom explicated.

An example comes from Nancy Hornberger (1998). She compares the languages of “indigenous groups” and “immigrants”, and efforts to protect these languages – focusing principally on education. But no space is given to defining “indigenous groups”, or indeed “immigrants”. And these blurry defining criteria mean that the two are not clearly distinguished. From here some wrinkles open up, and people can get trapped inside those (more on that later).

Now compare popular articulations of indigeneity. The English (to pick a completely random example) like to see themselves as immemorially Anglo-Saxon (see Reynolds 1985), but try telling that to the sixth-century Britons being shoved westward by waves of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Franks (who were themselves later shoved around by the Vikings, and so on). The Anglo-Saxons were once invaders, but at some point in the popular consciousness became indigenous. At which meeting was that agreed?

As I noted above, “indigenous” is not just historically significant. It relates to present-day disadvantage (by no means limited to language). This is perhaps why “indigenous” is less frequently used in European countries, whose homegrown ethnolinguistic minorities might be marginalised but not as acutely as the indigenous people of the always delightfully euphemistic “New World” – who drag behind them nasty histories of dispossession, and carry on top of them desperate social exclusion in the present (relative poverty, disproportionate incarceration, shorter life expectancy, etc.).

There are, then, deeply political resonances behind the mobilisation of a term like “indigenous”.

“Indigenous” European Minority Languages (Source: Barbier Traductions)

Now consider a piece of governmental language policy, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. For “indigenous” it prefers “autochthonous”, and for “immigrant” it uses “allochthonous”. Autochthonous languages are defined vaguely as “traditionally used within a given territory of a State”, while the latter, the “languages of migrants”, are excluded from the Charter’s remit. Here we come closer to defining and distinguishing “indigenous” and “immigrant”, but not much closer.

Perhaps the clearest deconstruction of indigeneity is Anthea Fraser Gupta’s book chapter, ‘Privileging Indigeneity’ (1997). She pertinently asserts that “groups do not remain discrete, but merge, especially through marriage. Migration, language shift, and intermarriage are long established human practices. They have not stopped. It is dangerous to solidify this fluidity into policy.” This throws things into sharp relief: if “traditionally used” is a definition of indigeneity, then how long, in years, is “traditional”?

Consider Hindi in the UK. It’s a minority language with a centuries-long tradition, but happens to be associated with an ethnic group whose migration is ongoing, not ancient history.

Of course, Hindi is not a minority language everywhere, but what about, say, Potwari in the UK, ‘traditionally’ spoken in Pakistan but a minority language there and everywhere else too.

What’s that? Not traditionally spoken in the UK? Oh, sorry.

Gupta’s 1997 chapter has never been followed up substantially, or even cited more than a few times – mostly pretty superficial citations too (judge for yourself: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=14790778410856718429). One other useful contribution comes from Lionel Wee. In his book Language Without Rights, he argues that “the communicative needs of immigrants cannot be appropriately addressed by … the collective right of an ethnic minority group to a heritage language. … In this regard, the traditional notion of language rights will need to be recast as an individual’s communicative right to be heard and understood” (2010: 143). This is the beginning of a much needed fundamental debate in language policy research. (Sadly this point of Wee’s is something of a diamond in the rough; his book is otherwise not very good – see my rather scratchy review here.)

But this rabbit hole gets deeper. What about languages that are not only associated with migrants, but that don’t even have an intuitive ethnolinguistic heritage or a long history?

“Le nouchi ivoirien, une langue à défendre!” (Source: http://www.lebabi.net/actualite-abidjan/le-nouchi-ivoirien-une-langue-a-defendre-14233.html)

Take the creole Nouchi, in the Ivory Coast, arising in the 1980s through contact between French and various Ivorian languages. Nouchi is indigenously Ivorian but has no obvious ethnic pedigree. It arose because street traders, itinerant workers, and others in the Ivorian grey economy – who didn’t share a common language – needed to communicate. From a rich mix of diverse people striking deals, talking shop, agreeing, disagreeing, socialising, eating, dancing and falling in love, came about a more distinctive set of words, phrases, and grammatical features. This story of language genesis is as old as human speech itself. And in the worldwide context of overwhelming language death, Nouchi could be celebrated as a new indigenous minority language.

So is it celebrated? Not quite. Although a vibrant feature of Ivorian popular (sub-)culture, Nouchi is typically looked down on by mainstream media and other guardians of all that is right and good in the world, as broken French and/or a subversive subaltern code. That even includes minority language sympathisers. In a book-length discussion of Ivorian minority languages, Ettien Koffi (2012) mentions Nouchi only once (p. 207) and then only as a kind of curiosity. (See my somewhat irritable review of Koffi’s book here.)

The same fate has befallen Tsotsitaal in South Africa, another recently born creole “including elements of Zulu and Afrikaans … from the working class outskirts and townships of Johannesburg … used by (would-be) gangsters and rebellious township youth. … [L]anguages like Tsotstitaal are not legitimated … and their speakers are marginalized” (Stroud & Heugh 2004: 202).

Dynamic urban vernaculars also have a tendency to change and transform much more quickly than older languages. That is of course part of the appeal for their speakers, but another reason for indifference among those who prefer languages to sit still.

No maps exist for emergent “indigenous” languages (Source: Sueddeutsche)

This kind of sneering at emergent contact-based vernaculars is common elsewhere, for example Rinkeby Swedish (Milani & Jonsson 2012), Kiezdeutsch (Wiese 2015), and Multicultural London English (Kerswill 2013, 2014) – even though, like “indigenous languages”, these are also used by minorities, spoken nowhere else on earth, and associated with poor, marginalised ethnic groups. Because they lack an identifiable ethnic lineage, and because they arose in the grubby dirt of modern cosmopolitanism – not the sacred dust of bygone ages – they paw at the lowest rung of the linguistic hierarchy.

This is perhaps the biggest problem for poorly defined terms like “indigenous” and “immigrant”: people get caught in the wrinkles between them. Speakers of emergent vernaculars are so distained they don’t even get a term of their own.

So the meaning of “indigenous” in language policy is complex, seldom explicitly defined, and even more rarely problematised. But whatever its meaning, it clearly isn’t just “us what was here first”. That in turn begs the more important question for “immigrants”: if the Anglo-Saxons ultimately became indigenous, then how long will others take to qualify? How many centuries do you have to be around? Why not decide, in years, how long it takes to be counted as indigenous, traditional, autochthonous, etc.? I hope it’s clear that I’m sketching a rather large red herring. The answer is neither possible nor desirable.

Perhaps a better solution would be to balance consideration of indigeneity with other factors, not least socioeconomic disadvantage. “Indigeneity” as currently discussed is still important: historically unjust land grabs followed by centuries of being disgracefully screwed over – continuing into the present – still need redress. But combining this with a broader focus on material wellbeing could yield greater parity with speakers of “immigrant languages”, and even of emergent vernaculars.

“[A] frequent critique of language endangerment discourse is that it displaces concerns with speakers on to a concern with languages” (Heller & Duchêne 2007: 4–5). In the wider social sciences, debate crackles and sparks over whether the “cultural turn” has over-interpreted inequality as culturally driven, stealing attention away from social class and other structural barriers (e.g. Crompton 2008: 43–44). That kind of debate in language policy is well overdue. Since her 1998 article (cited earlier), Nancy Hornberger and others have managed to dislodge the constrained focus on education in promoting minority languages. Surely the next advance should be to get beyond “indigenous”/“immigrant” as the prime categorisation, even to get beyond languages as such (an unsettling thought for a linguist), and to consider more fully the lives of the people who speak them.

Related posts: The diversity of the Other, Inventing languages.

References

Crompton, Rosemary. 2008. Class and stratification. Bristol: Polity Press.

Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 2002. Privileging indigeneity. In John M. Kirk & Dónall P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Language Planning and Education: Linguistic Issues in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 290-299. [Pre-print available: http://anthea.id.au/papers/belfast.pdf.]

Heller, Monica & Alexandre Duchêne. 2007. Discourses of endangerment: sociolinguistics, globalization and social order. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (eds.), Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages. London: Continuum. 1–13.

Hornberger, Nancy. 1998. Language policy, language education, language rights: Indigenous, immigrant, and international perspectives. Language in Society 27(4): 439–458.

Kerswill, Paul. 2013. Identity, ethnicity and place: the construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer et al. (eds.), Space in Language and Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. 128–164.

Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: the discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter. 428–455.

Koffi, Ettien. 2012. Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy: Game-theoretic Solutions. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Milani, Tommaso M. & Rickard Jonsson. 2012. Who’s Afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, Complicity, Resistance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(1): 44–63.

Stroud, Christopher & Kathleen Heugh. 2004. Lingusitic human rights and linguistic citizenship. In Jane Freeland & Donna Patrick (eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Perspectives. Manchester: St. Jerome. 191–218.

Wiese, H. (2015). “This migrants’ babble is not a German dialect!”: The interaction of standard language ideology and ‘us’/‘them’ dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society 44(3), 341-368. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404515000226

Private school in Machar, Karachi

Last year the British Council initiated a dialogue about language policy and particularly language-in-education policy in Pakistan, and their report was recently published. The introduction includes the following two statements:

The report […] is the result of two visits made by Hywel [=British education consultant Hywel Coleman] to Pakistan in March and July 2010 taking him to Sindh, Punjab and Azad Kashmir, as well as over six months of desk-based research. (p. 4)

This document is a report on a consultancy visit to Pakistan between 4^th and 17^th March 2010. (p. 3)

While these quotes from the report are inconclusive as to whether the consultant was in Pakistan once or twice, he comes to some sweeping and far-reaching conclusions. The report argues that Pakistan has a language crisis in its schools and calls particularly for the promotion of indigenous languages through making them a medium of instruction in Pakistan.

In principle the idea of promoting students’ home languages is appealing. It certainly touches the heart; less so the intellect, considering the practical, social and political constraints prevalent in the country. The report argues that in contemporary Pakistan, Urdu and English are being imposed on speakers of other languages. This may or may not be the case. The fact is that Pakistanis of all stripes and colors want to learn both Urdu and English from as early as possible because they understand the social and financial implications, and teaching through indigenous languages is a very low priority.

In order to understand language policy and education in Pakistan, and the global South more generally, I think people must experience what it means to live in Pakistan in the present circumstances. In Pakistan the central issue is not the language crisis but poverty. Pakistan is a country where 23% of the population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125^th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Pakistan is a country where water is more precious than human lives. People are killed every day, no one bothers. The media report loss of human lives in numbers only. “So and so many people have been killed in this bomb blast, and so and so many people in that suicide attack.” Humanity has simply been numbered in this part of the world: 30 killed, 40 killed etc.

The salary of a private sector university lecturer in Karachi is less than GBP1,200 per year; even so, this is considered a very good salary by local standards. At the same time, it is not enough to put the fees of a good school for their children within the reach even of university lecturers, not to mention the vast majority of the population.

Power cuts for four hours a day are routine in city areas and in villages they exceeds eight hours every day. Imagine living without electricity every day for eight hours! Who gives a thought that the severed heads of the suicide bombers are often the young ones of their family? What makes them go to this extent? Do they have anything in their lives to live for or to look forward to?

Anyone talking about the promotion of indigenous languages among the poverty-stricken multitudes of Pakistan cannot be but alien to the realities of our lives. Why should we care about maintaining indigenous languages in the face of such bitter life experiences? Common ordinary Pakistanis want to have access to socio-economically powerful languages. They know very well that multilingualism is strength and they want to teach their children local, national and global languages at the same time.

Language death, language preservation, language revitalization and mother tongue education are for those who haven’t walked in our shoes. The way I see it they are nothing but distracters from the real issues of grinding poverty, suicide bombings and the energy crisis.

My 88-year-old grandma, my mamanjoon

My 88-year-old grandma, my mamanjoon, is the most wonderful nana anyone could have and I am very close to her. She has played a significant role in my development. Throughout my education, she has always been a great source of support and encouragement. When I crammed for various high-stake national exams, I suffered from anxiety and tension. However, no sooner would I begin to speak with my grandma that all my worries would fade away! The melodious tone of her voice, the words and expressions she uses, would serve to relieve any anxiety or tension. She speaks an old Isfahani dialect which is not only different from the Persian of other parts of Iran but also differs markedly from the speech of younger Isfahanis. In particular, my nana’s speech is characterized by older Isfahani words that are no longer in use and religious terms borrowed from Arabic. Whatever she says bears a spiritual connotation which is sweet, encouraging and uplifting. Yet, her dialect can no longer be heard in the streets of modern Isfahan. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why she feels alienated as she walks in the streets and prefers to stay at home. Her dialect is dying out.

I have often felt saddened by the lack of attempts to preserve the old Isfahani dialect. It goes without saying that, as time passes by, all languages change and that this process cannot be foiled. However, shouldn’t we at least try to record and document this dialect which is so intimately interwoven with our history?

As a professional linguist, I could start by recording the many conversations I have with my grandmother. However, there is a problem! The problem is that my grandmother objects to recordings of any kind for religious reasons. It is only during wedding ceremonies that old women like her can be caught on tape because during these ceremonies the camera nowadays keeps rolling no matter what, and old women have to choose between their objections to being recorded on camera and blessing the newly-wed couple and the next generation. Of course, the latter wins.

Isfahani Muslim women of my grandmother’s generation are not the only ones who object to being audio- or video-recorded. Many traditional peoples around the world have similar objections. This makes me wonder whether saving endangered languages is really all it is cracked up to be. Who are we to disregard the explicit wishes of speakers – people – so that we can “save” a language, which is, after all, nothing more than a set of practices and ideas?