kengr

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/how-to-minoritize-a-national-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18798

Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:

Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.

Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.

And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.

The first is Put your language in italics (“We don’t think in italics”); the section closest to my heart is:

2. Don’t hire a proofreader
3. Don’t check your translations with a fluent speaker

I recently read an othertwise very good anthology of Scottish nature writing in which many contributors were proud to talk about (italicised) Gaelic words and for which no-one had hired a Gaelic proofreader. Many words were misspelled, and more were mistranslated. Here, in a nature writing context, Gaelic stood in for ecological authenticity, for a connection to land, but the lack of care with which the language was treated belied the project. It was sufficient for the project of the book that Gaelic be present but not necessary that it be Gaelic.

I also liked the end:

19. Call any thorough use of the language fake, unnecessary or purist

Once a review complained about the way I spelled arkaeolojist. But in English we don’t spell it archéologue, arqueóloga or αρχαιολόγος.

20. Be a purist

The only thing more dispiriting than your language being ignored by everyone else is arguing amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re using our language right. What matters is using it.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing; rozele says “a lot of it’s very familiar to me from yidishland; it’s all connected to many Hattic conversations,” which it certainly is.

https://languagehat.com/how-to-minoritize-a-national-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18798