On Language...
We have been having a conversation about what is enriching, empowering, hindering, advantageous about being a native speaker of a dominant or minority language in a given environment--this stemmed in part from Janelle's discussion of cosmopolitanism: we wondered if cosmopolitanism negates a firm sense of local identity,
and, by the same token, is protecting and supporting the literacy within and use of a language in a specific locality in opposition with the notion of being a world citizen fluent in whichever languages are (economically/communicatively) useful.
In an international environment where English is the linguistic meeting place, there are obvious advantages to English speakers...But... these same English speakers who are not required to learn another language in order to communicate are deprived from an enriched and extended vocabulary--and broadened capacity to understand....As language shapes our thoughts...
There is a very important distinction between the benefits of learning / knowing an 'other' language for economic/employability or for cultural/ emotional/ intellectual enrichment. Would a more multilingual society be a more empathetic, just, enriched world? (where an economic pecking order is more moot?)
What is the importance of helping 'non-useful' (as defined by economic or global measures) languages to thrive?
If you don't need a language functionally, is its formative influence still doing the work of defining a culture even if another non-native language is more commonly used.
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That is an excellent question, "What is the importance of helping 'non-useful' (as defined by economic or global measures) languages to thrive?"
ReplyDeleteI think a fantastic answer is provided by a National Geographic anthropologist called Wade Davis. He says:
"a language is not just a body of vocabulary or set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. A vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an outgrowth forest of the mouth a watershed of thought an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities"
http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html
What has always amazed me is besides the intrigue and novelty of unfamiliar sounds is how ideas are communicated through different metaphors, thought structures, and ontology. The fact that we cannot translate many of the key words directly aptly demonstrates how we can think of and understand the world in different, novel, and unique ways.
We only become aware of our own thought process, our own way of being through learning and thinking about different ways of orientating ourselves on the earth.
One of my favorite examples Davis gives is of how A kid from Montana sees the mountains as a pile of rocks to be mined, while a child from the Andes sees the mountain as an "apu" spirit which will direct his or her destiny. Davis goes on to say he grew up understanding that Canadian forests to be cut, rather than a bridges to heaven. Further, there have been many cases where cultures in Papua New Guinea misintupret words in English like 'time', 'value' and 'money' because these concepts do not exist in their cultural ideology. Thus by realizing this discontinuity we ourselves can understand that those very words are constructed and perhaps work to better understand the way such comments structure our lives as 'facts'. Languages literally create different realities.
Thus how are we changing the thought process through a neo-colonial emphasis on english? Are we inherently destroying 'other's' relationship to the world by teaching 'them' a new language? Yet at the same time how else can we 'communicate' as well as deconstruct our own thought process with out a common ground of understanding.
I personally believe that like Davis suggests, we must try and 'protect' (as colonial as it sounds), other languages and cultures. This sounds extremely 'colonial' in a supposedly 'post colonial world'. Yet, there are power structures and certain cultures DO have a stronger voice. Thus rather than 'protecting' maybe we can try to learn to speak with rather than for other cultures as suggested by Alcoff (1991) in "The Problem of Speaking for Others". For article see: http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html
"Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also to further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard. This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on."
(Alcoff 8).
Alcoff goes on to argue that dominant countries and cultures have a stage to speak on where the 'imperialized' do not. Thus completely stopping speaking for/with others actually is just as damaging as speaking about them. Therefore we need to carefully consider how and if it is possible find a way for cooperative empowerment which provides 'others' with a place/space on world stage that facilitates a dialogue of representation rather than total dominance. For me, this is the closest solution that i can think of to preserve our 'ethnosphere'.