In Praise of the Garrulous Page 13

  In the past and still today in the Third World, the city feeds off the periphery and the periphery feeds off the city, but when the periphery is no longer culturally and linguistically distinct from the city, then periphery simply becomes an extension for the city: its playground and retirement area. We now face a depressing reality that can only be defined as the suburbanisation of rural Scotland. This process can only be halted or at least slowed down by defending our indigenous cultures: Scots and Gaelic.

  Official hostility towards bilingualism may be widespread but it is not based on any sound sociolinguistic data. Politicians use linguistic prejudices just as they use all other ones. David Blunket famously told immigrants that they should be talking English at home. This kind of remark is based on the mistaken belief that knowledge of another language somehow interferes with one’s ability to speak English properly and to integrate. Blunkett is not alone: when speaking to a young American official at the UNHCR, who was brimming with self-confidence and certitudes, I was told that he rejected the Canadian “mosaic” solution and felt that it was not in the best interests of immigrants for them to maintain their own culture. “We prefer integration in the States. I think that we have to integrate them.” I believe the opposite: the only healthy integration is one in which the immigrant community, where possible, retains its language and culture, and learns the host language and culture as an addition to its own identity. Moreover, studies show that bilingualism is a powerful educational tool, and far from eating up resources and distracting children from more important tasks, it improves children’s educational performance. Recent statistics released by the Scottish Executive have shown that Chinese and Gaelic-medium schoolchildren considerably outperform other groups. Against an overall average of 172, Chinese schoolchildren scored 214, Gaelic-medium 201, Asian/Indian 191, Asian/Bangladeshi 176, Asian Pakistani 174, English 170, Black/African 169 and Black/Caribbean 124 (there appears to be no figure for indigenous, English-medium Scots, but given that they are by far the largest group, the figure cannot be far off the overall average).14 Now it is not easy to make much sense of the figures, as they are organised along rigid racial lines that put together people who have just arrived and those who may be second- or even third-generation Scots. Social factors obviously play an important part in educational performance. It would be more sensible in my opinion to collect data on people’s linguistic background and their length of stay. A second-generation monoglot Pakistani Scot is indistinguishable from an indigenous monoglot Scot in linguistic and perhaps even in cultural terms, although social problems such as racism may divide their experience and sense of identity. However, I will try to make some broad assertions: most importantly the Gaelic-medium children (mainly, I suspect, indigenous Scots with a few English) dramatically outperform the average. The Chinese, mostly recent arrivals, are probably bilingual, while the Asian communities will be split between bilinguals and monoglot English-speakers. Indeed, the problem is not that immigrants are not integrating; it is that they are losing their languages often within a generation, and we are therefore losing a cultural resource.

  There are really two arguments here: first that teaching in more than one language increases the linguistic ability of a child, and second that this also increases a child’s whole educational performance. The educationalist Richard Johnstone argues,

  There is potential advantage in starting early, in that with appropriate teaching and a sufficient amount of time each week it can bring children’s intuitive language acquisition capacities into play. This may help them over time in acquiring a sound system, a grammar and possibly other components of language which have something if not everything in common with a native speaker’s command.15

  Johnstone is talking not about bilingual teaching but teaching a foreign language. With various caveats, he admits that earlier is better, which happens to agree with a widelyheld view based on personal experiences. Younger is better, although people can always learn languages. Above the age of seven or eight, children are more anxious about foreign language acquisition. He also claims that early language learning “fosters important underlying qualities such as a child’s literacy, language awareness, and personal development (social, emotional, psychomotor and cognitive)”.16 This reference to personal development seems to me to be particularly important. Many observe that in the more extreme example of bilingual education, children appear more relaxed and less aggressive. If you accept that a child’s very large brain (90% of the size of an adult brain at the age of five) is designed for the mammoth task of language acquisition, then enlarging the task is not stressing the child but providing it with an environment in which it can do what it does well.

  Sadly both Conservative and Labour governments have been reducing language teaching in Britain, possibly on the spurious basis that English-speakers no longer need to learn other languages. The British Academy has recently stated,

  Language training and take-up at GCSE and beyond in secondary schools is inadequate to support the development of high-level graduate studies and academic research in the humanities and social sciences. Research in all subjects is becoming increasingly insular in outlook, because PhD students do not have language skills, or the time to acquire them.17

  As far as I am concerned, education should be about creating intellectually alive and balanced human beings who will decide as young adults what they want to do with their lives, but as we live in simple pragmatic times obsessed with the vocational, I would like to point out that two widely spoken languages amongst our immigrant communities are Chinese and Urdu, which is very closely related to Hindi. All languages are for me valuable assets, but Chinese and Hindi are the languages of the two rising world powers. Surely even the pragmatists should be able to realise that these are important resources.

  I would like to make a suggestion to our educationalists and politicians. We should start to see the introduction of “foreign languages” into our society as an opportunity rather than a problem. Of course, adults who do not speak English would be well-advised to learn the language in most cases (although not all, and the idea of testing applicants for British citizenship or immigrants in general is a mistaken one). The current government’s oafish approach to language issues is typified by Ruth Kelly’s statement to the Politics Show on BBC1: “I do think translation has been used too frequently and sometimes without thought to the consequences. For example, it’s quite possible for someone to come here from Pakistan or elsewhere in the world and find that materials are routinely translated into their mother tongue, and therefore not have the incentive to learn the language [sic].”18 The idea that someone would give up learning a language simply because of the provision of a few translations is so absurd that it is hardly worthy of debate. Another language is difficult to learn in adulthood, particularly if the learner is a monoglot. I don’t know if Ruth Kelly speaks more than one language, but she certainly benefits massively from the provision by foreign governments of material in her own language. Even those immigrants who have learnt very good English as adults would probably prefer to read important documents in their native tongue, as any misunderstanding might have damaging consequences (Kelly was talking about information provided by councils and the NHS, which probably use a very different register of English from the one the immigrant has learnt through living in Britain). If she is genuinely concerned about this question, she should be encouraging the government to invest more in free English-language courses for immigrants (but all we hear of is cuts). Children, however, will unfailingly learn English, usually with the local accent. If they are isolated, then the family will inevitably be thrown back on their own resources when it comes to keeping their own language alive in the next generation. If numbers are discrete, then government could provide resources for a school in that language to provide tuition for a few hours a week over an area wide enough to bring in sufficient children. If there is a concentration of a particular language group, the government could provide resources
for bilingual schools in English and the other language.

  This is a truly revolutionary proposal and I can sense the horror it will arouse not only amongst the bigoted but also amongst right-minded liberals like the man from the UNHCR. Calm reflection will show that the idea has many merits: it should be immediately made clear that to work such schemes would have to be open to all children in the area and would therefore constitute a resource for both the immigrant and the indigenous families. I visited a bilingual school in Slavia on the Italian side of the border between Italy and Slovenia. The school applied a system of complete equality between the languages: one week the morning lessons would be in Italian and the afternoon ones in Slovenian, and the following week it would be the other way round. All subjects were taught in both languages with the exception of those that were closely related to one of the languages: so Italian literature and Italian history were taught in Italian and Slovenian literature and Slovenian history in Slovenian. The other subjects were not separated out, so a biology class in Italian would pick up where the last one in Slovenian left off. The school was attended by children from both Slovenian and Italian-speaking families, and both languages appeared to be spoken in the playground. In other words, the school was perfectly bilingual and it turned out perfectly bilingual children. Most importantly it was a means for drawing the two communities closer together; it was integration on the basis of complete equality.

  There is a note of caution to this story. There are two other Slovenian-speaking areas in Italy (Trieste/Trst and Gorizia/ Gorica), and there relations between the two communities are not particularly good. They are areas where Slovenian peasants were introduced following widespread destruction and depopulation left by a Turkish army during the sixteenth century. Slavia, on the other hand, has been Slovenianspeaking since the eighth century and, after the wars between the Frankish and the Byzantine empires, it found itself just on the western side of a new border between eastern and western Europe. During the period of the Venetian Republic this translated into a privileged role in defending the passes against attack from the east. The Republic was not known for its kindness to its mainland territories, but for strategic reasons it gave Slavia the right to elect two consuls to be sent to Venice and insisted on peasant ownership of the land rather than aristocratic estates. As a result of these ancient liberties, the people of Slavia developed a firmly entrenched identity as Slovenian speakers belonging to a western European and “Italian”-speaking environment. It seems quite possible then that a bilingual school of the type I have just described is only workable in areas where the two communities in question have reasonably good relations.

  Social problems should never be underestimated, and politicians rarely lead from the front. However, the educational advantages of having bilingual schools in say English and Punjabi or English and Polish are undoubted. Above all there would be enormous educational advantages, and the social advantages would not be negligible. It would be particularly advantageous to children of monoglot English-speakers, as some parents are finding out in the case of Gaelic. In a sense, it does not matter what the other language is, as all languages can provide the extra stimulus and an opening to a different world.

  Such ideas would of course face a great deal of hostility and indeed incredulity. One of the strangest things about dominant languages is their misplaced sense of insecurity. In spite of the unprecedented linguistic hegemony of American English, many Americans worry about the future of their language. While English is beamed into literally millions of non-English speaking households around the globe (particularly in small countries where the costs of dubbing are prohibitive and it is more usual to use subtitles), troubled Americans have formed an organisation called English First, although it should really be called English Only. Ten years ago their rather bizarre website was prey to a hysterical dislike of Clinton and his fiendish multilingual plot, which seemed to have been triggered by a few bilingual signs in hospitals and the fact that information on welfare rights had on occasion been provided multilingually. Today they are only marginally less frenzied and are concerned about the effects of Clinton’s Executive Order 13166. I cannot say that I really know what this Order specifically intends to do as it is written in a language that must be a close relation to New-Labour-Speak. Stakeholders are to be consulted – I can tell you that – but mainly I think that several government agencies will be talking to each other and exchanging reports. I don’t think that the members of English First should be losing too much sleep over this. As for Mel Martinez, their new primary hate object, he seems to be guilty of having uttered a few Spanish words from the Senate floor.19 In fact Spanish is the source of all their nightmares, but if they bothered to look at the statistics, they would find that Spanish is going the same way as all other immigrant languages, namely into oblivion. For me, this is very sad. A growing Spanish-English bilingual community could have constituted a cultural bridge between the two Americas, and might have helped North America out of its monolingual mindset.

  Spanish is no better in Latin America. More indigenous American languages have survived in the South, but this must be at least partly due to the fact that Central and South America were more populous and their political organisations more developed when the Europeans arrived. However, Latin America does contain one shining example that gives encouragement to sociolinguists and language campaigners around the world. It is the case of Paraguay and its indigenous language Guarani. Since 1992, Guarani has been an official language alongside Spanish (one of the surprisingly few cases of twin official languages), but the roots of its significant role in Paraguayan society go back into the nation’s history. The European settlers adopted the language as well as passing on Spanish to the indigenous population. The situation is slightly diglossic: Spanish inhabits the formal world and Guarani the informal one, but it would also appear that speakers have full command of both languages – courtship apparently commences in Spanish and ends in Guarani. The result is a rate of bilingualism in excess of 90%, and a strong identity for the Paraguayan nation.

  The American example shows the absurdities of linguistic paranoia, and the Paraguayan one shows the great cultural benefits of bilingualism, particularly for small nations.

  One of Scotland’s indigenous languages, Scots, is what the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman would define as an ausbau language, from the German for “remove from” or “build away from”. This refers to the fact that the ausbau language is “genetically” similar to the dominant language, and therefore can gradually distance itself from its more powerful cousin. Other examples are Catalan in relation to Spanish, Frisian in relation to Dutch and Venetian in relation to Italian. Clearly we are talking about the relationship between state and non-state languages here, because Dutch, for instance, is not dissimilar to the North-German dialects that surround it, but Dutch is a national language and has the prestige that goes with that. Should Frisian discover the political will, it would be easier for it to regain its lost ground than it would be for a non-ausbau language. Spanish is a national language and for a large part of the twentieth century a brutal dictatorship did all it could to extirpate all the other languages within Spain’s borders. Catalan was able to find the will to re-establish itself as the national language of Catalonia in a very short period, partly because it is an ausbau language and partly because its geographical position close to the principal European markets has turned it into an economic powerhouse. Non-ausbau languages, such as Gaelic and Basque, are brittle and can break. If they lose ground, it takes a long time to regain even a small part of it, because they are more difficult to learn for those speakers of the dominant language who wish to return to a language lost by their forbears. Their only advantage is that they are less open to contamination. Modern speakers of Venetian are often not speaking Venetian but are actually using Italian vocabulary that has been adapted to Venetian phonology (accent) and morphology. This may also be the case with Scots, but it would be a reasonably easy task for an e
ducation system to regenerate the lost vocabulary as speakers have retained the phonology, grammar and perhaps most importantly the spirit of the original language.

  This is not to say that languages like Scots and Catalan lack distinctiveness. I have heard Edwin Morgan, the distinguished poet and translator, read his translation of a Latin bucolic carmen (or lyric poem) into Scots. He explained that he chose Scots rather than English because he wanted to subvert the original, and ridicule its idealised view of country life. Scots, it seems, is very good at irreverence. Without any personal knowledge of the language, I sense that its shares the plain-speaking of English but is devoid of the pomposity occasionally displayed by my native tongue. Scots is itself, which means that it is a more Anglo-Saxon language than English. It is not the child of English, but the slightly crabbit parent or perhaps Northumbrian uncle who speaks with a Gaelic accent (to use the proper linguistic term, Scots has a Gaelic substratum). English, on the other hand, is the spoilt child who went off and got the fancy foreign words and diction. There is no reason why Scots could not be resurrected – not to replace English but to live alongside it, so that each can enrich the other. Today the only place this regeneration could be started is in the schools. Scots-medium education is only prevented by a lack of imagination amongst our political class.

  How can we retain at least part of the variety of our languages? Minority or non-state languages fall into two categories, which I will call the “weak” and the “strong” for the want of a better term. I have not used “endangered”, as all these languages are endangered to some extent; indeed, such is the pace of globalisation that even some state languages are endangered in the long term. Both Scots and Gaelic fall into the “weak” category, and for that reason bilingual schools are not good enough. English is so pervasive that the children will pick it up almost in the air; they need an initial concentration on the weak language in the early years at school, as is provided by Gaelic-medium and could be provided by Scots-medium. “Strong” languages are strong in a relative sense, and are often minority languages that are state-languages elsewhere. This gives them a foreign sponsor as well as a continuous flow of cultural products. Languages can move from one category to another: Welsh has arguably shifted from the weak to the strong category, while Catalan has undoubtedly shifted from the strong to the state category and by so doing it has shifted Catalan in the Alghero region of Sardinia from the weak to the strong category. There can be no doubt about it: weak languages will die very quickly where they are not assisted by central government. We would not let our great cathedrals and other national monuments crash to the ground, so why do so many look on with indifference at the destruction of something fashioned by endless generations of people – by an act of collective creativity across millennia? In reality, the sums of money are not enormous, in spite of the hysterical rants of those who have a voice in our societies. Speakers of minority languages are also taxpayers, and very probably they and their ancestors have been paying for their own culture to be destroyed for many centuries. Each language has its own peculiar problems: some lack a clearly defined heartland and are reduced to various pockets scattered over a large area (Irish), others have an ageing demography (Breton and Sardinian), others have lost their will to survive (Sami) and yet others face not only neglect but also state repression (Kurdish). Some languages suffer from a mixture of these complaints, although not to the same degree. To some extent, Scottish Gaelic suffers from the first three, but the indicators are not extreme, so the language could be saved if its speakers and our politicians really wanted it.