In Praise of the Garrulous Page 14

  Fishman has stated, “In language as in business, nothing succeeds like success.”20 Actually this is probably true of any human activity, but it is particularly true of language.

  Given that Fishman has used business as his analogy, I will stick with it: languages are like assets in a free market; their worth reflects the value attributed to them by both speakers and non-speakers. The fact that everyone wants to buy into English only increases the number of people who want to buy into it. In a global market, this can have the same destructive effects on the linguistic environment that unregulated trading in raw materials can have on the ecological environment. But the state can and should intervene and regulate. Of course, it always has in the past, but only in order to strengthen the powerful languages even more than before. Today, some small steps to reverse this process have been taken, but usually on the basis of too little, too late. Successes in small languages are not dramatic affairs but they do start to change the perception or the stock of a language, and increase the chances of further successes. Once confidence has been restored to some degree, speakers can see a future for the language and work to rebuild it or to stop further decay. Our relationship with the languages we speak is very personal. Siblings from the same family with exactly the same upbringing and perhaps little age difference can have very different linguistic personalities. One may acquire a local language or dialect and the other fail to. One may reject the linguistic stimuli triggered by an itinerant family life and the other may be irresistibly drawn to them. Where a language or dialect lacks prestige, there will always be some who wish to distance themselves from their linguistic roots. This is the slow attrition that almost every minority language suffers; this is the friend of homogenisation. However, there is nothing natural about it; it reflects the constant allure of power, particularly when there is a degree of social mobility, however small.

  For an excellent example of this process, we can return to the recent history of Catalan. During the period of outright repression under the Francoist regime, speaking Catalan was an act of rebellion and certainly not the route to good jobs and social status. It clung on because there was sufficient national identity and attachment to the language, but inevitably it would have died if there hadn’t been a change in regime. In the new autonomous Catalan state, the immigrants from Spanish-speaking areas send their children to Catalan-medium schools because they see this as the way to improve their children’s chances in life, and as Catalan is an ausbau language with a long-established literary tradition, regeneration has proved relatively simple. The dominance of Spanish and the survival of Catalan have nothing to do with inherent qualities in either of these languages, and it is worth restating that there is no natural environment for language (or not since our hunter-gatherer ancestors) and it is all a matter of politics and power.

  It is worth restating this, as people will forever say, “Is there a place for Gaelic / Navajo / Warlpiri in the modern world? Do they have the right vocabulary? What is their word for television?” (Warlpiri is an Aboriginal or Koori language, and interestingly Koori languages do not appear to have spread by military campaign but instead very gradually in what may well have been a kind of natural linguistic environment). These languages will find a place in the modern world, if their speakers achieve sufficient political clout, as in the case of Catalan, Quebecois French and Modern Hebrew. This last example is unique and involved the resurrection of a dead language – a language that was purely liturgical even at the time of Christ, as by that stage Jews were speaking Aramaic. That must be a harder task than “modernising” a language that is still being spoken, and yet it has been achieved. This is an extremely important point, because a large part of the social mind is not recorded (tangible) but carried within the individual minds of a language community. If a language, even one with a large literature like Hebrew, dies or almost dies and can then be resurrected, this is evidence that the social mind is capable of healing itself, although it will of course never return to what it was before.

  I should make clear before proceeding any further that personal choices of language certainly do not only reflect power, although this is the case once you start to look at populations. As individuals we are capable of anything, and few can have had such a curious linguistic history as that great eccentric intellectual Elias Canetti. He was born a Bulgarian Sephardic Jew. Like many European Jews his family was both cosmopolitan and patriarchally static (a rather clumsy term to describe a complex reality). The male line was static, but his mother and paternal grandmother came from elsewhere, and indeed the latter came from Turkey, which provoked in Canetti a strange kind of Eurocentric intolerance untypical of the man. As a small child, he therefore spoke Ladino (a language very closely related to Spanish and spoken by the Sephardic community) and Bulgarian, which he lost, as it was not considered any more than a necessity for communicating with servants and tradesmen. His father wished to break free of an oppressive patriarchal situation and chose to move to Manchester, where Canetti learned English. Only when he was eight did he move to Vienna and then Zurich, where he learned German, a language in which he wrote and to which he remained utterly loyal throughout the rest of his life, even though much of it was spent in England and he took out British citizenship. The instructive part of this story is the reason for his great attachment to German, at least according to the autobiography of his childhood, The Tongue Set Free. His parents, neither of whom were native German-speakers, always spoke to each other in German, because they had met in Vienna and were great admirers of Viennese culture. He felt excluded from his parents’ personal language and always wished to know it. German appears to have become associated with cosmopolitanism and cultural openness, in spite of the events that were shaking the German-speaking world. But then Canetti did not think in the present and no one could accuse him of what I call chronological provincialism. You can fall in love with a language just as you can fall in love with a person, because a language has a personality and it also has emotional associations.

  We worry today about our lack of physical exercise. We no longer walk, and most of us are engaged in some kind of sedentary occupation. My father’s contempt for those who are “chained to a desk” would now amount to a condemnation of most people working in the West. To compensate for this inactivity, we rush off to the gym and develop absurd amounts of quite useless muscle (I do not speak personally here). But how conscious are we of our mental inactivity and our neglect of that strange grey oily sponge we call a brain? Languages are not just a means to become linguists, but exercise machines for becoming better doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc. Languages are dropped from school curricula as unnecessary things that take away time from “practical” subjects, but nothing is more practical than developing the language skills of our children in order that they can do other things better.

  In this context, what Marx called “national refuse” has become a resource for creating complex mixes of language built around the lingua francas I will discuss in Chapter Seven.21 A healthily multilingual society is more aware of what it is and how it relates to the rest of the world. If we allow our cultures to be driven solely by the free market and to become the dumping ground for low-grade cultural products mainly, but not only, from the United States, then we will find ourselves in a dysfunctional, homogenised and depressingly impoverished world. Cultural products in national states can be defended by a sensible mix of cultural protectionism and reciprocity. Cultural products in small languages (“lesser-used languages” to use the correct E.U. terminology) will have to be subsidised. Cultural products are not like consumer goods; they affect the psyche of a society and a dearth of them will interfere with the generational transference of the social mind. This is not a call for cultural autarchy, and the importation of some cultural products from a wider range of sources is an excellent idea. It is however a plea for a system that is not simply laissez-faire, but takes responsibility for the important outcomes of cultural policies without interferin
g with individual freedoms. Not an easy task, but one that deserves to be thought about in greater depth.

  Chapter Six

  Register

  A meeting of international importance took place in the seaside town of Inverness on Cape Breton Island. Its aim was to restore Gaelic to its former glory, both in its native land and in the various communities flung like so many pebbles by the random forces of empire. No less. The venue, being the Prince Charles Hotel which had been decaying for as long as anyone could remember, was hardly deserving of so distinguished a purpose. Nevertheless the Reverend Angus Murdo MacLeod of the Permanently Presbyterian Church of Scotland was there to add his divine support to the cause.

  It has been noted that if the notions of his own particularly strict faith were indeed true, then Gaelic would at least be the majority language in heaven. And given that his mother was called Angusina and his maternal grandfather Angus too, it is quite possible that Angus is the majority Christian name in heaven. Of course, it may also be that there are different heavens for each religion, which would be a more equitable way of rewarding all that energy expended on blind faith. In that case, the heaven for the Permanently Presbyterian Church might be surrounded on all sides by large faiths from which it is separated by high walls. On one side there might be the Catholic Church and on another the Sunnis, while if it were at the centre of a cross connecting four religions, it might also buttress against the Orthodox Churches and the Shias. Thus it would resemble a corner-shop surrounded by four supermarkets, or a peasant’s freehold by four immense estates or latifundia belonging to Arab businessmen and American pop stars. And in spite of its marked absence of ecumenical tolerance, its comfortable certainties and its passion for judging others, the Permanently Presbyterian Church is not without a certain quixotic grandeur; it returns the vacuous stare of modernity with its own one of proud and unflinching inflexibility.

  The Reverend MacLeod from Stornoway in the old country climbed up to the platform to make his speech. He is a small man with an enormous and vaguely threatening presence. He also dresses entirely in black and wears an old-fashioned homburg, and can be seen darting about town with the look of a someone whose divine business is not only demanding but infinitely more important than that of the two bank managers, the Lord Lieutenant, the Vice-Convenor, the MP, the MSP, and the Director of Education – all put together. The Reverend MacLeod is a man charged with a mission, and the survival of Gaelic is only a small part of the task that lies ahead of him. Hence he was a little more relaxed than his usual self, which is still a great deal more severe than most of us can ever be, and that includes his brother Calum who owns a croft in Ness, drinks the odd bottle of whisky, sleeps with the publican’s wife and writes scurrilous poetry in the old tongue lampooning the worthies of Lewis and raising the poor reverend’s blood pressure.

  The Reverend MacLeod is not without a sense of humour, but he keeps it well harnessed. So the assorted language campaigners who made up his audience, most of whom were secular intellectuals who in the previous two or three decades had only darkened the door of their church for the unpleasant task of burying their nearest and dearest, were uncertain as to whether the title of his speech wasn’t some kind of a joke: “The future of the feminine dative in the twenty-first century”. The clergyman was of course doing what all clergymen do: he was starting with the specific and enlarging it to cosmic dimensions. He finished his speech, during which his listeners had the uncomfortable feeling that the decline in the Gaelic language was in fact being considered a direct result of low church attendance, with the following memorable words: “I tell you now that there will always be the final slenderisation of the feminine dative in our Gaelic language, or it will be our Gaelic language no longer.” The audience applauded with unexpected enthusiasm, perhaps in part because everyone wanted time to work out exactly what the final slenderisation of the feminine dative might sound like. They certainly did not want to give the impression that they were soft on the question of the decline in grammatical correctness.

  As the exhausted conference-goers flocked out onto the street for their mid-morning tea break, they passed Mrs. MacPherson, the last Gaelic-speaker in Inverness, that is in this Canadian Inverness. It was not that Mrs. MacPherson had been childless: she had two daughters and a strapping great son who had moved to the United States, where he had obtained celebrity status for his prowess in ice-hockey and egg-eating competitions, but somehow she had failed to hand them down the language which was so much part of her being. She alone understood these curious, earnest strangers who congregated in huddles of disenchanted men and a few women outside the Prince Charles Hotel to speak ill of those other conspiratorial huddles, or so it appeared to Mrs. MacPherson. Of course, she could not understand absolutely everything they said, because they used a lot of fancy words. For instance, she didn’t have words for “feminine gender”, “dative” or “slenderisation”, but what neither she nor the language campaigners she overheard knew was that she was someone who quite instinctively always slenderised her feminine dative, even when she was speaking to the cat, but then the cat was now the only living creature with whom she regularly conversed in Gaelic.

  Not only is our diversity of languages around the world under threat, but also the languages within our languages which we call registers – the different ways we express ourselves in different social contexts. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that we now speak in the same way to our parents, our children, our friends, our enemies, our employers, our employees, our spouses and our lovers. Gone are the days in which Italo Svevo’s character Zeno Cosini (The Confessions of Zeno) agonised over whether he should propose an affair with his would-be lover in Italian or in dialect. It goes without saying that the proposal of marriage, which occurred in another chapter, had to be in the standard language. When it comes to language, the human mind can be very subtle and it learns a nuanced sensitivity to what is appropriate in a given social situation. In the sixties, we teenagers of the time used to laugh at the way our mothers shifted into “posh” language on the phone. It was seen as affected and reflecting an acceptance of the class structure. It may be time to reconsider that interpretation: perhaps their change of register simply denoted the greater linguistic sophistication of women compared with men. Women, of course, have been accused of senseless garrulousness since time began, but garrulousness is no waste of time – it is the path to a command of language and of different types of language. But things have changed: the language of men and the language of women are now much less dissimilar than they were twenty years ago. That too is part of the flattening out of the linguistic universe.

  The problem for an egalitarian is that much of the diversity within language was based on social hierarchy. Sociolinguists come up with eccentric societies that have different “languages” for men and women,1 or for different classes. An example of the former is an extinct Arawak language and an example of latter is Javanese which has five clearly distinct status styles. There is an informal style or “language” (ngoko), a intermediate one (madya), a deferential one (krama), a highly deferential one (karma inggil) and one for the royal court (basa kedaton). These are merely highly structured and formalised examples of something that exists in all societies. Where there were any divisions in societies, there were also linguistic distinctions, which in some cases were highly formalised and therefore called “languages”. These distinctions, but not necessarily the divisions that underlie them, are disappearing, because of a process of compression mainly driven by the mass media and the technologies that make them possible.

  Register concerns our ability to shift the manner in which we speak to conform to our situation: this may refer to our social situation or it may refer to the familiarity of a situation. If a situation is familiar to both speaker and listener, the speaker can use a kind of shorthand that does not require full sentences, because a great deal is understood by both parties. Let us take an extreme example. The expression “over th
ere!” does not constitute a full grammatical sentence in English, but in many cases it would be more than adequate for its purpose, and anything more would be redundant. It could mean “Go over there!”, “He is over there” (two people are looking for a man and one has just seen where he is), “Throw it over there”, “Look over there”, and so on. In context, there would be no doubt about the meaning and this is not an example of inarticulate speech. Tom Shachtman makes this point in The Inarticulate Society, a study of the problem which provides some interesting data on the commodification of cultural products in the United States. His arguments are however trapped within the American monolingual mindset, and his rather dismissive views on non-literate societies (based on the work of Luriya, a Russian sociolinguist) are not convincing in my opinion. But Shachtman is surely right when he argues that American schools have abandoned the teaching of “articulate behaviour”, and we would have to extend his comment to our own British schools. He starts his second chapter with the fairly banal example of a Puerto Rican woman living in New York who intentionally loses her accent in the company of the majority community and reverts to it when in her own community. We are talking here about two varieties of English, and the shift between them. Nothing could be more normal. Unsurprisingly for an American of his time, he rejects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that languages affect the way we think, and therefore believes that there is no reason why we should speak differently. I agree with his argument that all children should be taught in Standard English, but I arrive at it by a very different route. Particularly interesting are his comments on Labov’s championing of BEV (Black English Vernacular). Labov pointed out quite rightly that BEV is just as developed in terms of capacity for conceptual learning and has the same logic as English. But this is a truism. Labov’s conclusion that BEV speakers should be taught Standard English only when they were in their teens is quite monstrous, and is rightly criticised by Shachtman, particularly as some urban districts actually implemented these recommendations, thus cutting the children off from the books and learning they, like everyone else, needed. Children, as I have made quite clear, are capable of learning different languages and different registers. Standard English does not have a linguistic or conceptual advantage, but it does have many other considerable advantages that go beyond the petty one of social prestige. It gives the speaker access to a massive speech community and even more importantly to literature and learning. It is quite natural for BEV-speakers to desire recognition for their own language, and there are two clear solutions. They can either continue to speak their dialect and learn Standard English at school, which is a situation shared by most people to some extent, or they can formalise their dialect and turn it into a language. They can invent an orthography, carry out lexicographical studies, commence a loose standardisation and start writing. In that case, they would then be well-advised to introduce bilingual education: part of their lessons in Standard English and part of their lessons in BEV. It is to be hoped that someone would also invent a better name for the language than BEV or Black English Vernacular (a name that has American anthropologist stamped all over it).