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J O S E P H E R R I N G T O N
G et ting Language Rights: The Rhetorics o f
Language E ndang erm ent and Loss
ABSTR AC T Endangerm ent loss death and related terms are increasingly familiar in descriptions
of
sociol inguist ic change now oc-
curring at an unp rece dente d scale because of forces of globa lization . They can serve bot h as names for shared con cerns of linguists a nd
anthropo logists, a nd as descriptions
of
otherwise different scenes
of
social encou nter, because they are subject
to
mu ltiple uses and
interpretations. This article focuses on tacit, enabling assumptions
of
three distinct strategies for framin g and redressing thr ea ts
to
marginal ized languages and speech com mun it ies. Recognit ion
of
their ide ological gro unds helps develop a sharper sense
of
their di f-
ferent uses, and the different social saliences that linguistic descriptions can have in and for marginalized communities. [Keywords: lin-
guistics, ideology, language change]
T
HIRTY YEARS AGO there was
a
parting
of
discipli-
nary ways between linguists, whose new formalisms
led them
to
Language
as a
universal object
of
study, and
cultural anthropologists, who became increasingly involved
in the politics
of
postcolonial representation. As increas-
ingly abstract models propelled linguists
in
the direction
of cognitive neuroscience, anthropologists were abandoning
the notion tha t culture could
be
conceptualized along
the lines
of
any sort
of
language-like system. But now,
as
hundreds
of
languages become marginalized, endangered,
and die around
the
world, globalization
is
casting
a
shadow over the science
of
language t ha t is hard even
for
the most theoretical and lab-oriented practitioners
of
this
science
to
ignore. This progressive d imi nishm ent
of
e m-
pirical resources
is
obliging linguists
to
think about lan-
guages not only as durable objects
of
descrip tion but also
as collective projects th at can be aban doned from one gen-
eration to th e nex t, like a sinking ship.
With
the
1992 publication
of a
group
of
articles
on
endangered languages
in
Language (Hale
et
al. 1992), this
problem came into open professional view,
at
least in the
United States. But since then, there
has
been little evi-
dence suggesting that linguists are thinking through
the
ways this rapid sort
of
language change is bound up w ith
broader issues of culture or identity. This article deals with
some
of
these larger questio ns as they have tacitly figured
in different framings
of
language endangerment,
and in
practical work aimed at redressing threats
to
m arginalized
communities of speakers.
These are situations
in
which linguists may find tha t
their objects
of
description
are
also objects
of
claims
to
rights,
and
that projects aimed
at
getting —that
is,
procuring—such rights
are
shaped
by
broader ways
of
getting —that is, understanding—what those rights are.
This can mean that their own descriptive interests, how-
ever sharply defined, cannot always be separate d easily
from
the
m ore diffuse values
of
those marginalized lan-
guages
for
their speakers. Nor can they be sure that their
work will circulate or be used
in
ways they might choose.
It
is
importan t, then,
for
linguists
to
be willing
to
recog-
nize the meanings and uses of their work outside the acad-
emy,
for
persons with othe r inve stm ents, direct
or
indi-
rect, in endang ered languages: speakers of these languages
and their descendants; officers
of
funding institutions,
governmental agencies,
and
nongo vernm ental organiza-
tions; writers
in
the p opular press; and so on.
In
all these
ways globalization is making old que stions ab out language
and culture new again, and also making
it
useful
for
lin-
guists
to
think about lessons that cultural anthropologists
have already learned about multiplying meanings and in-
terpretations
of
research and writing ou tside
an
academic
in-group.
Certainly there can be conceptual dissonance between
enabling premises
of
linguists' professional work
and
rhetorics that they can mount on behalf of endangered lan-
guages. A good example
can be
take n from
a
publicity
flyer circulated
by
the Endangered Language F ound ation
(discussed further below).
It
prom inently displays the as-
sertion by Steven Pinker, prominent cognitive neuroscientist
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
105 4):723-732.
COPYRIGHT
© 2003,
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
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7 4 Am erican An thr op olo gis t • Vol. 105, No. 4 • December 2003
and social Darwinist, that every time a language dies, we
lose thousands of unique insights, metaphors, and other
acts of gen ius (Endang ered Language Fund n.d.) Rhetori-
cally powerful appeals to meta pho rs and acts of genius
draw on relativist traditions of thought that animate some
of the work on endan gered languages I discuss below, and
that anthropologists may associate with the writings of
Edward Sapir. But that is a tradition that is very much at
odds with linker's own antirelativist approach to linguis-
tics.
It is a long way from his arguments about universal
mentalese (1994:59-64) to images of precious, language-
specific acts of gen ius, but he acco mplish es this shift
easily as he shifts audiences and purposes.
Questions of rhetoric like these may be hard to avoid
wh en endan gered languages become topical for non pro-
fessional audiences, which makes it worth co nsidering
here more specific questions about relations of the rheto-
ric and practice in the emerging linguistics of endangered
languages. To do so I suggest that we can usefully distin-
guish three broadly different ways of engaging the prob-
lem of language endangerment, each of which draws on a
distinct tradition of thought about language and involves
different strategies for redressing threats to languages.
Two of these are traditions of thought that help to
presen t languages as forms of life, and so play naturally
int o the specter of language de ath (e.g., Crystal 2000) or
ex tinc tion (e.g., Nettle and Rom aine 2000). But each in-
volves a different biological metaphor, associated with dis-
tinct purposes and different issues: One keys to value-
laden links between language and natural locales while
the other figures individual languages into a broad spec-
trum of quasi-natural diversity. Both may seem like intel-
lectual throwbacks for anthropologists, who have long
since jettisoned biological metaphors of culture, but it is
hard to deny their usefulness in this new field, because
they circulate easily across contexts, allow diffuse pro-
cesses to be concretized, and make generalizations easy to
draw across otherwise different situations. But their rhe-
torical strengths come at the cost of limited applicability,
which lends practical importance to a third notion of lan-
guage endangerment, the notion that language falls under
the broad purview of a contestable tradition of human
and social rights.
LANGUAGE A ND THE MA KIN G OF PLACE
Endangered languages have recently begun to figure into
the kinds of place-making strategies that Amy Muehle-
bach (2001) describes as having coalesced in the transna-
tional UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in
1982.
These are activist efforts to mobilize indigenousness
as the basis of claims on behalf of communities whose
members count as inheritors and stewards of particular lo-
cales,
and not just citizens living on segments of national
territory. Aboriginally can be leveraged in this way into
claims of ownership, trumping rights of access that might
otherwise be claimed by and granted to encroac hing out-
siders. These are situation s in which languag es can take
on value if they are portrayed as organically bound up
with place and culture, and as likewise under threat of en-
croachment.
At the same time that languages can be value-laden
diacritics of local distinctiveness, their internal makeup—
specifically, their lexicons—can be portrayed as symbolic
embodiments of intimate, lived relations among speakers,
communities, and environments. When knowledge of
language is referred to a sense of place, these particulars of
language structure are most readily mobilized as the con-
crete evidenc e and bearer of alterna tive values and types
of being-in-the-w orld . . . [and] specific n otio ns of an in-
digenous morality (Muehlebach 2001:416).
Images of language as aboriginally embedded in a
nexus of place, morality, and community resonate clearly
with Romanticist traditions of political thought that have
been important in Europe at least since Johann Herder
(1772,
reprinted in 1966) propounded his organistic con-
ceptio n of language and cu lture in his Essay on the Ori-
gin of Langu age. Althou gh Herder himself was oriented
to the inadequacies of biblical accounts of human origins
and animated by a broad crisis of German national iden-
tity, themes that he developed in that essay and in his
later work have continued to shape the politics of ethnic
nationalism and language scholarship alike. In fact,
Herder can be identified as a founder of the relativist tradi-
tion of thought tacitly invoked by Pinker in the quotation
discussed above.
Organistic conceptions of language-in-nature figure
prominently, for instance, in self-descriptions of the lan-
guage activist group Terralingua, which closely parallel
those of other activist organizations devoted to the preser-
vation of endangered species. Terralingua's mission state-
ment (2003) describes endangered languages in terms that
recall the importance given to charismatic megafauna
(pandas, whales, and so on) in the prose of groups like the
World Wildlife Fund, in which they are made focal for the
work of preserving natural environments. It is this tacit
parallel that makes it rhetorically plausible for language
end ang erm ent to be represented as a third extinction cri-
sis
(Maffi 1999:21), after biodiversity and the erosion of
traditional cultures.
This broad rhetoric has specific practical implications,
insofar as it places greater symbolic weight on relatively
culturally salient lexicons, over and against phonological
and morphosyntactic systems, which are generally more
interesting for linguists. At the 1992 UN Conference on
Environment and Development, for instance, lexical sys-
tems were a recurring reference point for portrayals of lan-
guages as con cretiza tions of lived local know ledge, re-
positories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledge
and experience (Brundtland 1987:114). W hen lexicons
count as mirrors of nature and sedimentations of cultural
knowledge, loss of language can be seen as a harbinger not
just of language dea th but also of the extin ction of expe -
rience (Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993).
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Errington • Ge tting Language Rights 725
This image has a strong moral tenor that can be com-
plemented by appeals to lexicons' values as means of refer-
ence, which m ay only become ap parent in the future. By a
kind of linguistic taxol argu me nt, lexicons can be fig-
ured as relatively isolable information bases—in dictionar-
ies, encyclopedias, and so on—which are in danger of fall-
ing out of use before they are codified, or before the uses
of information they embody are discovered. When lexi-
cons become the focus of rhetorics of language death, eth-
noscience becomes new again, at least for nonanthro-
pological audiences.
A double linkage between words and place, both refer-
ential and existential, helps to motivate not only linkage
between communities and environments but also steps
that are taken to prevent language death throug h in situ
preservation:
There is a very close parallel between [ex situ] language
preservation and ex situ conservation in biology: while
both serve an important function, in both cases the eco-
logical context is ignored. Just as seed banks cannot pre-
serve a plant's biological ecology, ex situ linguistic docu-
mentation can not preserve a language's linguistic
ecology. [Maffi 1999:40]
This can be called a broadly localist framing of end an-
gered languages as embodiments of knowledge and iden-
tity—endowed with value that makes each a target of local
language activism aiming to redress outside threats.
This rheto ric is powerful in part because it keys so spe-
cifically to locales. For the same reason, it is relatively re-
stricted in applicability and more plausibly invoked for
languages with rich lexical resources, spoken in and about
relatively biodiverse environments, than others. It applies
less well to languages whose relatively limited lexical re-
sources might be a function of relatively nondiverse envi-
ronments in which they are spoken, perhaps because
speakers themselves have reduced local biodiversity in
course of subsistence activities (hunting, agriculture), pro-
duction of cash crops, and so on.
Localist rhetoric also keys crucially to a sense of inal-
ienable links between language and place, embodied and
mediated by indigenous communities of speakers. This
kind of nativism, entirely consistent with Herder's vision
of ethnolinguistic identity, is in fact written into the Draft
Universal D eclaration of Linguistic Rights of 1996, which I
discuss below. As Tove Skuttnab-Kangas (1999:50) notes,
that document contains relatively stronger claims for lan-
guage rights of mem bers of indigenous com mu nities,
over and against those accorded to languages spoken by
mem bers of mig rant grou ps. This very broad difference
can make for surprisingly fine distinctions, as can be
shown with one example taken from descriptions by Peter
Sercombe (2002, in press) of a Penan community in the
interior of Brunei, on the island of Borneo.
Pena n is com mo nly used to nam e groups of no-
madic forest dwellers and hunter-gatherers who live in
this part of the island as well as its eastern, Indonesian re-
gions. It also names the closely related native dialects, one
of which is spoken by members of a community that
sedentarized about forty years ago, in which Sercombe
spent time. Its youngest members continue to use the
Penan language among themselves, at least for the time
being, but these new residential patterns have led mem-
bers of that community to acquire one or two other lan-
guages (Malay and Dayak). This has also, Sercombe indi-
cates,
led to progressive loss of knowledge of Penan
ethnobotanical lexicons (2002:188-193). This can be seen
as a kind of linguistic correlate of a break with th e na tu-
ral environm ent, even though these people continue to
live in close prox imity to th e forest. By localist criteria like
those set out by Luisa Maffi (1999) and Skuttnab-Kangas
(1999), this partial dislocation would make it a less valu-
able target for efforts of revitalization, even if its speakers
may not be migrants in the usual sense or count as mem-
bers of a group rather than a com mu nity.
Localist rhetoric can invoke a quasi-purist sense of
boundedness in time as well as space, with collateral ef-
fects like those described by Renee Sylvain (2002) for the
indigenist claims to territorial sovereignty made by and
for the San people of South Africa, under the International
Labor Organization Convention of 1989. She shows how
such claims operate to perpetuate lines of cultural differ-
ence they presuppose, with a long-term collateral effect of
bracketing future San participation in a larger political
economy. Cultural rights that are linked to natural re-
source use key also to preservation of a way of life, such
that the more essentialized the 'cultural' features become,
the more they are seen as contrary to the historically tran-
sitory features of political ec on om y (2002:10 76). As with
culture, so with language: Sylvain's observations are easily
transposed to localist rhetorics of language rights, which
likewise make it easy to devalue or residualize language
change arising from extended conta ct with outside groups
and institutions.
Like the Romanticist tradition that it invokes, localist
rhetoric can be interpreted as involving totalistic linkage
between language and identity, a point that has emerged
as a leitmotif in criticisms of language activism made from
otherwise differing points of view. These include a kind of
loyal linguistic opposition (e.g., Ladefoged 1992; Mufwene
in press), cultural critics (e.g., Malik 2000), and more or
less eth no ce ntric ed itorialists such as Joh n Miller (2002).
In different ways these observers all argue that langu age
dea th is a misno mer for wha t is actually language shift,
the sort of cumulative process of language change that re-
sults from the self-interested, rational decisions that indi-
viduals make in the course of their lives, which happen to
include choices between and transmission of one language
rather than another. These arguments, founded on the
premise that speakers are autonomous, knowledgable so-
cial agents, can in turn be rebutted by calling into ques-
tion easy distinctions between self-interested choic e and
institutio nal coerc ion, especially in circumsUimvs of rapid
sociolinguistic change (e.g., Dorian 1993:575-579; Maffi
1999:37).
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This debate is not easily resolved because it repro-
duces, in specific terms, much broader ideological differ-
ences,
whi ch I take up in discussion of ideas of lang uage
rights below. But first this organistic image of language en-
dangerment needs to be contrasted with another biologi-
cal metaphor, one that frames endangered languages
within the context of global diversity, rather than local
particularity.
VALUING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
Where localist rhetoric foregrounds unitary relations be-
tween threatened languages, cultures, and environments,
this second approach emphasizes the unity of all lan-
guages with each other as specific manifestations of uni-
versal human capacities. From this point of view the prop-
erties of languages take on importance and value in the
aggregate, so that what is threatened by the death of any
one language is the cumulative diversity of the whole.
This involves a broad com parative framing of languages as
tokens of a quasi-biological semiotic type, foregrounding
structural pro perties exhibited in data of language use over
the life of language in a community or environment. Far
from requiring in situ language preservation, it motivates
research rationales and descriptive techniques that make it
possible to alienate languages radically from interactional
contexts, natural environments, and communities.
This approach to language endangerment shows strong
continuity not just with received goals and methods of
contemporary linguistics, but with the 19th-century para-
digm of comparative philology, which can be sketched
here with reference to one of that discipline's major fig-
ures,
August Schleicher. Schleicher developed what are now
canonic styles for presenting structural evidence and his-
torical conclusions about the diversity-within-unity of In-
doeuropean languages, and about patterns of migration
that led to dispersion of speakers and the rise of language
difference. Contemporary proponents of work on endan-
gered language have now globalized this picture of the
past. In important comparative work like Johanna
Nichols ' s (1992) Linguistic D iversity in Space and Time, for
instance, typological and historical questions are brought
togethe r on a global basis, such that the study of genetic
diversity am ong m ore or less related languages can be in-
tegrated with a survey of structu ral diversity of configu-
ratio nal traits distri bute d across all languages. This is a
project whose scope is knowledge of language diversity on
a global scale, and so it confers value on endangered lan-
guages around the world.
Schleicher is also famous as the first linguist to trans-
pose Darwin's natural history of speciation to the study of
linguistic diversity (and using it to develop what now
seem egregious conclusions about subjugated peoples and
the fatedness of their languages to die). This broad linkage
continues to motivate writing about language death and
diversity—including, for example, The Rise an d Fall of
Lan-
guages, Robert Dixon's (1997) account of linguistic diversi-
fication that has explicit recourse to Stephen Gould's
punctuated equilibrium model of speciation. Conversely,
ecologists—for example, William Sutherland (2003)—see
the problems of endangered languages and species on a
global basis as broadly parallel, statistically relatable pro-
cesses. One need only understand languages to be differ-
entiable members of a species, or species of a genus, in-
stead of part of the fabric of shared experience in
communities of speakers.
Strategies of engagement motivated by comparativist
approaches to language endangerment differ considerably
from those sketched earlier, because they privilege the
gathering of data over the revitalizing of communities. So
in this field the problem of language death has led to a re-
finement in use of received field methods, as in Nikolaus
Himmelman's suggestion (1998), for instance, that two
distinct phases of research be recognized: comprehensive
documentation on the one hand and data assessment on
the other. The same co ncern with bodies of data is evident
in predictions by Douglas Whalen (in press)—professional
linguist and president of an academic-cum-activist organi-
zation, the Endangered Language Fund—that new infor-
mation about endangered languages will transform theo-
retical linguistics. This transformation will be aided by the
power of computer technology not only to aid the analysis
of data sets but also to make them highly portable via the
World Wide Web.
So, too, forward-looking linguists like Robert Dixon
(1997) and John McWhorter (2001:248)—who argue that
the study of at least one dying language should be a gen-
eral training requirement in the field—are oriented to
problems of language endangerment for the profession as
much or more than for communities of speakers. But it
does not follow that such work can be carried out with due
regard for interested observers, most particularly speakers
from whom linguists seek data. Jane Hill (2002) has rightly
called for recognition of the nonneutral values this work
involves and the collateral effects it can have for others.
Hill (2002:123-125) provides good grounds, for in-
stance, for being suspicious of the kinds of hype rbolic
valorization of diversity evident in Pinker's com m ent
quoted above or, to cite one of many other examples,
Leanne Hin ton's com m ent that the world stands to lose
an important part of the sum of human knowledge when-
ever a language stops being used (2001:5). This rhetoric
can be seen as mobilizing universal claims about the value
of languages in general to license claims of access to lan-
guages in particular, not just for the sake of their speakers
but for us, the world, or hum ani ty at large. Linguists
who seek to document global language diversity—what
the Endangered Language Fund's mission statement calls
the dissemination, to both the native communities and
the scholarly world, of the fruits of these efforts —are in
the first place aiming to appro priate local linguistic know l-
edge. This work can be self-interested in ways that may be
clearer to speakers of those endangered languages than to
outsiders whose interests may not even extend to the goal
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Errington • Getting Language Rights 7 7
of learning
to
speak them.
As
cases
in
point, Hill cites
speakers
of
Hopi
and
Cupeno whose felt rights
of
owner-
ship
of
their languages lead them
to
reject claims
of
access
by nonspeakers.
Linguists may choose to regard such cross-cultural dis-
agreements
as
rare
or
specious enough
to be
negligible,
but anthropologists should
be
more sensitive
to
parallels
between these sorts
of
encounters
and
claims centering
on
other natural resources. Appeals
to the
com mo n linguistic
heritage
of
humanity
can be
heard
as
resonating with
the
rhetoric
of the
com mo n natural heritage
of
humanity
which governments
and
NGOs have mobilized
to
license
interference
in
local community
and
prevention
of
their
access
to
natural resources. Those
who
would seek
to pre-
serve
or be
stewards
of
language diversity should keep
in
mind these (post)colonial precedents
for
their engage-
ments
as
outsiders with speakers
and
comm unities.
AUTHORIZING LANGUAGE RIGHTS
Localist
and
comparativist framings
of
endangered
lan-
guages,
as I
have sketched them here, involve tropes
of
language
as
life, which intim ate t hat thre ats
to
languages
are threats
to
preexisting, natural condition s.
A
third,
quite different sense
of
endangerment presupposes
lan-
guages
to be
possessions
of
speakers, rather than natural
phenomena. Under this profile, endangered languages'
values
are
linked
to
speakers' shared social biographies
and collective identities: They
are not
natural conditions
to
be
maintained
but,
rather, rights
to be
recognized
by
sources
of
political authority. Such claims
to
language
rights presuppose
and are
shaped
by
different understan d-
ings
of
such au thority, involving political
and
philosophi-
cal issues that
I can
broach here with
an eye to
just three
relatively narrow issues: (1) the kinds of legitimacy presup-
posed for, or attributed to, such au thority; (2) the scope of
claims that can be legitimately made; and (3) the shaping
effects of those claims on languages that are their objects.
The simplest, most powerful claims
to
language rights
are made
to and
motivated
by
God—the ultimate source
of authority
and
underwriter
of the
oldest
and
largest
or-
ganization devoted
to the
p reservation
of
endangered
lan-
guages.
For
members
of
this group,
the
Summer Institute
of Linguistics (SIL), respect
for
language rights
is a
piece
of
the mission
to
save souls,
as
Benjamin Elson's (2002)
Lin-
guistic Creed shows. Given that language is the most dis-
tinctly human and basic of God-given characteristics, El-
son asserts, all languages deserve equal respect and careful
study as part of the heritage of the hum an race. In this
way language rights
are
grounded
in
religious doxa that
can
be
universal
in
scope—keying
to
salvation through
di-
rect acquaintance with translatable scriptural truth—but
is
not universally accepted: What works
for the SIL
would
not work,
for,
say, proselytizers
for
Islam.
When Elson notes almost in passing that each lan-
guage
is
also deserving
of
being published,
he
recognizes
that these language rights are
in
fact bound
up
with
a dou-
ble mission
of
conversion—of pagan
to
Christian,
and
speech to text—for w hich prin t techno logy is crucial.
Rights
to
language
are
best respected when they
are re-
duced,
as an
expression prevalent
in the
colonial
era has
it,
to
writing. This
way of
figuring local languages
in
universal missions of conversion shows strong continuity
between
the
work
of the SIL and
earlier generations
of
missionaries.
In
fact, colonial history
(see, e.g.,
Harries
1988; Ranger 1989; Steedly 1996), suggests strongly that
a
by-product
of
work
by
missionaries
to
convert people
through their own languages was
the
creation
of
linguistic
hierarchies. These studies
and
others demon strate how
the
deployment of print technology has the collateral effect of
privileging some speech varieties relative
to
others
and,
perhaps, stimulating cumulative processes
of
shift from
less
to
more valuab le oral varieties.
The
moral
of
these
older stories, then,
is
that
SIL
m issionaries
are
obliged
to
define
the
languages
to
which speakers have rights.
Secular efforts
to
respect language rights involving
print technology
can
have similar hom ogeniz ing effects,
as shown
by the
case
of
linguistic work done
as
part
of a
development project among speakers
of the
little-studied
languages of Lombok, just east of Bali in Indonesia. These
languages have been described
as
comprising five
dia-
lects that are ordinarily lumped together und er
the
rubric
Sasak language (Indonesian: bahasa Sasak (Thoir
et al.
1985).
They actually con stitute
a
complex continuum that
ca n
be
broken down into
two
mutually unintelligible
groups. My
own
brief inquirie s suggest tha t speakers h ave
little sense of the nature or degree of variation that exists
in these forms
of
speech; Indonesian
is
known
by
some,
not all,
as the
second, national language.
In keeping with recent trends
in the
field
of
develop-
ment, employees
of a U.S. NGO
sought
to
implement
a
vaccination program against Hepatitis B
on
Lombok with
full respect
for the
rights
of
local people
as
active partici-
pants, in and through their own language. A linguist con-
sultant, Daniel Ajamiseba, w as brou ght
in as a
team
mem-
ber
to
help develop
a
sense
of
ownership
of
what
is
going
to
be
done
in and
through
the
project (1996:14).
His re-
search
led him to
select
one
dialect, w hat linguists have
come
to
call Ngeno ngene [rpnorpne],
as
mo st useful
for use
in
the
printed material
and
educational programs that
helped to implement the project around the island.
Though done
in the
name
of
local rights, this project
ac-
complished
a de
facto codification
of a
kind
of
protostan-
dard Sasak
by the
process Einar Haugen (1966) long
ago
described
as
selecting, codifying,
and
elaborating
a
dialect
into
a
language. Secular development, like religious
con-
version,
can
create hierarchies
of
language
(and,
perhaps,
speakers). Although these strategies m ight be suspect from
a radically localist point
of
view,
it is
hard
to
gainsay their
practical logic
if
they serve,
say, a
monolingual mother ' s
interests
in the
health
of her
children.
Steps taken
to
respect language rights
in
relatively
limited engagements with relatively homogeneous
com-
munities
may
seem
not
only morally legitimate
hut
also
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highly practical. But more complex conditions of social
and linguistic pluralism raise difficult questions as to how
minority speakers' rights to native languages can be disag-
gregated from the sum total of civic rights and obligations
accruing to them, and all other speaker-citizens, in a
dem ocra tic society. This proble m is at the cen ter of a con-
siderable literature on language rights that is oriented not
to the extinc tion of languages as such but, instead, to
the loss of coherence of communities that are distin-
guished by the use of some native language. In these situ-
ations questions of language rights play directly into what
Cha rles Taylor calls the politics of reco gnitio n (1992).
According to Taylor, core values of democratic plural-
ism require that claims to cultural, religious, or linguistic
rights not be arbitrated on a demographic, political, or
economic basis. They must be articulated and accommo-
dated, he argues, within broader relations between state
institutions and minority communities, such that the le-
gitimacy of the former is recognized as being bound up
with reciprocal recognition of the latter's authentic (lin-
guistic) distinctiveness. This complementarity helps Tay-
lor to articulate his own position on the politics of Franco-
phone identity in Quebec and Canada, now further
comp licated by the new politics of identity involving C an-
ada's First Nations.
In these and other instances the politics of linguistic
rights can map onto, and coarticulate with, the politics of
territorial autonomy, but they take a different form when
claims are mounted on behalf of members of migrant
groups. Their native languages are doubly asymmetric
with one or more others that are spoken natively by domi-
nant segments of a national population and are also fo-
cally associated with rights and obligations of citizenship.
So it can be difficult to avoid or resolve a politics of lin-
guistic identity in linguistically plural democracies that, as
Seyla Benh abib observes, act in the nam e of universal
rights which are then circumscribed within a particular
civic com mu nity (2002:450). In these situations questions
of lang uage righ ts play ou t in tacit or official specification s
of institutional contexts in which they should be accom-
modated (schools, voting booths, motor vehicle depart-
ments, and so on).
I can only consider these culturally fraught issues of
scope here with an eye to the 1996 Draft Universal Decla-
ration of Linguistic Rights, discussed briefly above. This
document invokes the Universal Declaration on Human
Rights of 1948 and (at least implicitly) the French Declara-
tion of Human Rights in 1791 as general precedents for its
specific claim that all individuals are naturally endowed
with the capability to choose between languages, each for
herself or
himself,
as part of the good life. By foreground-
ing languages as possessions of individuals, this statement
brackets their collective nature as resources shared by
members of some collectivity. So, too, its universality keys
not to human capacities to acquire any natural language
but, instead , to ind ivid uals ' biographica l fated ness to ac-
quire some particular language from childhoo d, na-
tively, as a mem ber of a collectivity. The decla ration fur-
ther presupposes that languages can be objects of choice,
such that rights must be claimed for one that is in some
way counterposed to another, which is in some way su-
perordinate, dominant, or useful. And, finally, it predi-
cates rights of choice of autonomous, self-interested, and
rational agents who are capable of espousing one view or
other, adopting one course of action or other, and so on.
In effect, then, the universal declaration of human rights
distingu ishes betwe en two kinds of language de ath. Ille-
gitimate language shift is the causal outc om e of coercive
forces external to a minority community and needs to be
dist inguished f rom that ar ising f rom cumulat ive, self-
interested, knowledgeable choices by social agents be-
tween one language rather than another. It is this latter
scenario, centered on autonomous, rational decision-mak-
ing speakers, which Peter Ladefoged, Salikoko Mufwene,
and others invoke in their cautionary critiques of images
of language death.
But beyond its overt focus on individuals as speakers,
the universal document tacitly privileges collectivities of
speakers that can be identified by locality. This is because,
as also noted above, it accords greater strength to claims to
native languages for indigenous com mu nities than for
migra nt grou ps. In this way it appears to straddle two
views of language rights in relation to the good life. On
the one hand, its appeal to universal human capacities
elides quest ion s abou t social forces th at differentially af-
fect members of different generations, genders, classes,
and so on. On the other hand, it tacitly privileges place as
a criterion for identifying language communities without
specifying how to determ ine whe ther a do min ant lan-
guage is impose d or chose n, whe ther a local minor-
ity language is auth entic or limiting, and so on. In
this way the document's breadth allows for strategic invo-
cation in a variety of specific situations. It seems no coin-
cidence in this regard that the promulgation of the univer-
sal declaration was held in Catalonia, a region of Spain
where claims to linguistic and political autonomy are be-
ing mounted on the basis of shared historical experience
and territorial residence,
Whether the kinds of claims to language rights I have
discussed here are grounded in claims of faith or philoso-
phy, they are framed as being universal in scope. But that
does not mean they are accepted universally, as one can
see from an interesting parallel that developed during the
late 1970s and early 1980s between the so-called Asian
values controversy, and a language engineering project
undertaken by the city-state of Singapore. At that time,
Western doctrines of human rights came under broad, re-
lativist criticism from representatives of the Malaysian,
Singaporean, and Chinese governments, who portrayed it
as the thin ly disguised exte nsion of the soft power of
endu ring Euro-American imp erialism. (A con ven ient ex-
ample of this anti-Western critique is presented by the
Singaporean author Chee-Meow [1977].) Against the
Euroamerican tradition of the Enlightenment, these critics
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Errington • Getting Language Rights 7 9
pitted
a no
less reified Asian tradit ion
of
rights, taken
to
accrue
to
collectives—family, co m m un ity, state—of w hich
individuals
are
first
and
foremost members. Languages,
subsistent
as
they
are on
collectivities
of
speakers,
are
readily appropriated
to
this logic,
a
fact th at can legitimize
roles assumed
by
states
as
arbiters
of
their values
and
asso-
ciated identities.
Around
the
same time,
in
1979,
the
city-state
of Sin-
gapore was embarking
on its
Speak Man darin campa ign.
Fifteen years later,
as
research
by
Christina Hvitfeldt
and
Gloria Poedjosoedarmo (1998) shows,
the
program
had al-
ready shown considerable success
in
inducing Singapor-
eans descended from southern Chinese migrants
to
aban-
don their native dialects —H okkien, Hakka, Fujianese,
an d
so
on—for M andarin. Two contingencies contributed
to that success: Mandarin's orthographic privilege over
these non mu tually intelligible dialects
and the
specter
the Singapore government held
out
tha t local Singa-
porean Chinese identity
was
threatened with fragmenta-
tion
in
the face
of
the rise
of
English as the city-state's ling ua
franca.
But
this language engine ering cam paign
had an-
other collateral effect:
It
produced
a
communi ty
of
speak-
ers
of the
dominant language
in the
People's Republic
of
China,
a
long-term target
of
trade
and
economic coopera-
tion.
The
success
of the
Speak Mandarin campaign
can be
read, then,
as
symptomatic
of the
legitimacy that citizens
accorded
to
claims made
on
them
by the
state,
in the
name
of
the collective.
The last important issue
I
must note here involves
a
return
to
linkage between language rights
and
print liter-
acy,
a
technology that requires
not
only selection
of
speech varieties
for
which rights
are
recognized
but
also
deselection
of
others that
are not.
Because langu age
fig-
ures
as an
unanalyzed notion
in the
universal declaration,
the document must remain vague with respect
to the
poli-
tics
of
choice among varieties, which must
be
made
in or-
der that claims
to any
language rights
may be
redressed.
The larger social
and
cultural importance
of
such choices
can
be
illustrated here with another example from Indo-
nesia, whose national constitution explicitly guarantees
citizens' rights
to
speak their native languages
in
addition
to
the
nationa l language.
Because
the
constitution (like
the
universal declara-
tion) does
not
specify
how
those rights accrue
to
different
forms
of a
single language,
it did not
prevent
the
state
functionaries from arriving
at a
curious
way of
preserving
the rights
of
the nation's d om inant ethnic group, the Java-
nese, to
their own language.
In the
1980s state functionar-
ies publicized worries that Javanese, well known
for its
elaborate stylistic variants, was becom ing corrupt
and los-
ing ground
to
Indonesian.
As a
result
the
Department
of
Education made
it a
subject
of
instruction
in
national
schools
in
predominantly ethnic Javanese areas.
But the
variety selected
for
such treatment
was
just tha t refined,
restricted variety that
was
emblematic
of an
imagined
courtly past, never widely known among Javanese
at
large.
On
the
face
of
things,
the
state's respect
for
speakers'
rights to their native language led to a linguistic museumi-
fication that
had the
collateral effect
of
devaluating every-
day kinds
of
speech (Errington 1996).
These
and
other ambiguities give
the
universal decla-
ration
of
language rights
its
tremendous scope
but
also
make
it, in the
words
of
one UNESCO witness
to its
prom-
ulgation,
a
linguistic time bo mb (Gatera 1998). W hethe r
or
not its
rhetorical sweep gives
it
practical purchase
on
any particular situation,
it has
been useful here
as a
way
to
survey
the
comp lex presuppo sitions involved
in
efforts
to
redress threats not only to languages but also to language
rights, because they refer
to
questions
of
social authority
on
the one
hand
and the
politics
of
linguistic identity
on
the other.
CONCLU SION: THE POLITICS OF LINGUISTIC
REPRESENTATION
I have juxtaposed
in
quick succession three different senses
of language chan ge that
are
presupposed
to be
part
of
th e
bad
consequences
of
rapid social change: language
death, language endangerment,
and
loss
of
language rights.
The result
is a
m ultiplicity
of
images that might lend
rhe-
torical force
to
claims ab out
the
values
of
endangered
lan-
guages. Languages
are
seen
as
m irrors
of
nature
or
unique
formal systems, instruments
of
thought
or
bodies
of
iden-
tity, objects
of
inalienable rights
or
situated resources,
etc.
Each image derives rhetorical strength from cultural
and
political traditions that
it
respecifies
and
recycles,
in
this
way tacitly helping represent
the
shape
of
social change
and possible futures of marginalized c omm unities.
But beyond such rhetorical considerations,
the
core
work
of
linguists—to metalinguistically objectify languages
as lexicons, sound systems, and grammatical systems—
remains mute with respect
to the
ways speakers en gage,
re-
sist, or exploit social change, for better or worse. The gap
between abstract language structures
and
social life will
seem barely reducible
as
long
as one
perceives
the
former
as having what William Sewell calls
the
most modest
re-
source effects (1992:23 )
of any
aspect
of
social life.
By
this
he
means that patterns
of
sound
and
grammar have
little purchase
on the
social dynamics
in
which agents
construe contexts
and
mobilize resources (material
and
symbolic)
for
particular purposes . Sewell suggests th at
the
neutrality
of
language systems with respect
to
dynamics
of
power
is
evident
in
their relative durability over time:
They
are the
most stable
of all
structured aspects
of
social
life.
But
this
is an
observation that
can be
phra sed differ-
ently, with
an eye to
questions
of
sociolinguistic change
and language endangerment,
to
suggest
a
different con clu-
sion: If those structures are among the clearest traces of
the past
in the
present,
and
also
are
embodied
in
that part
of social practice which is talk, then they are available for
mobilization
in the
service
of
larger claim s
on the
past
as a
scarce resource (Appadurai 1981).
In fact, different visions
of the
past inform each
of the
three strategies
I
sketched above
tor
valorizing endan gered
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languages , which invoke lived con tinuity between pre-
sent conditions and an environment that was once pris-
tine but is now threatened, migrations by ancestor-speak-
ers in recent or distant history, originary acts of creation
by God, and so on. Nor are these the only ways that the
durability of language structure can take on v alue as a
symbolic resource. In Imagined Comm unities, for instance,
Benedict Anderson (1991) makes broadly similar argu-
ments by identifying languages as crucial sources of conti-
nuity with indefinitely deep national pasts, and of frater-
nity among members of an imagined community in the
present. Although the rest of his argument centers on just
those technologies and ideologies that now seem to be
causing death and endangerment of nonnational lan-
guages around the world, it also points to the possibility
that language might be a focal resource in alternative
forms of invented traditions, grounded in communities of
discursive practice (M cConnell-Ginet and Eckert 1992).
From this point of view, the work of linguists might
be put to service as a means for invoking the past in the
present, such that recognition of local dialects or lan-
guages can be presented as valid sym bolic substrates for
collective identities and legitimate instruments of collec-
tive agency. To be sure, linguistic expertise itself has little
purchase on these possibilities and cannot make descrip-
tive work speak to any particular historical and cultural
circumstance. So, for instance, linguists can demonstrate
the empirical gaps between reality and a do m inan t com-
pla int trad itio n of English (Milroy and Milroy 1999) but
can claim no privilege for those findings in public dis-
course. And when controversy coalesces around marginal
dialects like African American Vernacular English (Ebon-
ics), the expert testimony of linguists might sway a judge
in a court of law but has no place in the court of public
opinion (Labov 1998).
But in communities that are marginal not only to
dominant languages but also to dominant language ide-
ologies, it may be that there are grounds for recognizing or
augmenting alternative linguistic traditions through lin-
guistic descriptions. It may also be that such alternative
traditions can develop independently of linguistic descrip-
tions or even technologies of literacy. Performative linguistic
norms, for instance, have proven an effective means of re-
sisting outside social forces for 300 years among the Tewa,
a Pueblo Indian group that has maintained its language as
a minority within a minority. Ancestors of those now living
on the easternmost of the Hopi mesas removed themselves
from Spanish influence in 1
700,
and their descendants
continue to use an indigenous Kiowa-Tanoan language in
bilingual and trilingual language repertoires.
Notwithstanding this double marginality the Tewa ap-
pear, in Paul Kroskrity's (1998:104) words, to be paragons of
linguistic conservatism, thanks to ritual continuity in the
gendered, exemplary space of the kiva. Here purism is em-
bodied in performative connections with the past, rather
than made the object of normative structural descriptions.
Notwithstanding inadvertent osmosis of foreign words into
these compartmentalized performances, a linguistic sense
of tradition and identity can key, as linguists would ex-
pect, to grammatical and phonological elements of kiva
talk, which represent the most stable embodiments of the
past in the present, enhancing its distinctiveness and
authenticity for the community at large.
This appears to be a situation in which the work of
linguistic description has little purchase on community
integrity. But this may not be true of others that have al-
ready engaged with techniques and products of literacy,
along with encroaching institutions, ideologies, and lan-
guages. One such community is on Rapa Nui (Easter Is-
land),
off the coast of Chile. It was initially se ttled by Poly-
nesians; however, their descendants were kidnapped by
Blackbirders in the 1860s, displaced from large tracts of
land by colonialists in the 1870s, and decimated by illness
from the very onset of contact with Europeans. Massive
outside influence broke down old clan structures by the
time the Chilean navy took control in 1953; and Spanish,
language of the nation-state, was in increasingly common
use by Rapa Nui natives, who were reduced in numbers to
less than 1,000, many of whom were migrating to the
mainland with increasing frequency.
On the face of things, Rapa Nui is a prototypically
moribund language that has undergone enormous gram-
matical simplification and relexification as a result of con-
tact with Spanish (Makihara 2001). But in the last two dec-
ades,
the situation on the island has changed in ways that
are giving it new value and new life. As more tourists have
been attracted to the island's famous archeological rem-
nants, the land has taken on value beyond its use as pas-
turage for sheep. Locals (mostly wom en) are exploiting
economic opportunities offered by tourism, which are not
directly dependent on mainland institutions. At the same
time,
new laws have modified the Chilean state's asym-
metric power relations not only with ethn ic mino rities
on the mainland but also on Rapa Nui. The upshot is that
new claims can be made for local rights to newly valuable
land.
These claims are now being asserted in a new sort of
local public sphere, a scene of articulation of representa-
tive democratic politics in a new sort of Rapa Nui lan-
guage. Since 1988, when an improvised Counc il of Elders be-
gan to assert local rights of control to the entire island, a
massively Hispanicized genre of Rapa Nui—structurally
impure by historical standards, but socially distinctive in
local contexts—has become appropriate for oratory, help-
ing to mark speakers' local allegiances and to distinguish
its audience. As Sarah Thomason and Terence Kaufman
suggest, a language like Rapa Nui can only survive through
syncretic, heavy structural borrow ing (1988:91-95 ), no t
just of lexical items but also of syntactic and phonological
elements from the dominant language. This process has
given rise to an impure but authentic language that em-
bodies a prenational past and identities shared with in-
digenous ancestors. In the absence of external national
and global forces, the new Rapa Nui language might be a
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Errington • Getting Language Rights 731
collective project that would collapse, as did Mexicano
(Hill and Hill 1986). But an appropriate constellation of
political and economic contingencies has given relatively
durable
;
socially distinctive features of talk on Rapa Nui
new importance for a new linguistic tradition and place-
making project.
In this and other situations, the survival of endan-
gered languages is bound up with technologies and politics
of literacy, as Hinton and Kenneth Hale's (2001) survey of
language revitalization efforts shows. So, too, these are
contexts in which the work of linguists to make distinctive
forms of speech writable may help to mobilize linguistic
traces of the past in the present. Thus, linguists contribute
to linguistic traditions that may be invented, but are none-
theless authentic, and so much more than merely false
construal[s] [of the past] whose object is political in na-
ture (Friedman 1993:745). Descriptive work that serves to
redress threats to languages may be strategic and rhetorically
keyed but can also help frame and answer politically
fraught questions
of
identity. Linguists can then contrib-
ute to the preservation of senses of community if they
share with others a heightened sense of the larger stakes
involved in the politics of writing and of endangered lan-
guages.
JOSEPH ERRINGTON Department of Anthropology, Yale Uni-
versity, New Haven, CT 06520
NOTES
Acknowledgments. In addition to other participants in the panel in
which
the
first version
of
this article was read,
my
thanks
go to
Doug Whalen and Peter Sercombe for discussion and material not
yet published, and
to
Asif Agha, Greg Urban, and Jo nat han Amith
for valuable discussion of these issues.
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