Why are the Native Languages of the Chinese Malaysians in Decline?
by Tze Wei Sim
published in 'Journal of Taiwanese Vernacular' Vol.4, No. 1, 2012
The vast majority of Chinese Malaysians have originated from south China with their native languages, Hokkien, Hakka,... more The vast majority of Chinese Malaysians have originated from south China with their native languages, Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Teochew, Hokchew and Hainanese. Most of these native languages are weakening due to lack of intergenerational transmission. Languages spoken in the families are largely shifting to Mandarin and English. This paper has investigated the reasons why the community is shifting away from their native languages. Language attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies held by the majority of Chinese Malaysians have been collected and they are presented together with the historical development of Chinese languages. The origins of the factors, which put their native languages into disadvantageous positions, are discussed. This paper also explores the possibilities of running language revitalization programmes in the community.
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Download (.pdf) Standardising Cornish: The politics of a new minority language
by Dave Sayers
Forthcoming in Language Problems & Language Planning 36(2):99‐119. http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lplp.36.2/toc. Pagination in this document will not match the published article. Contact the publisher John Benjamins for permission to re‐use or reprint this material in any form.
The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars... more The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars have made separate attempts to reconstruct its written remains, each creating a different orthography. Later, following recognition under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2002, Cornish gained new status. However, with government support came the governmental framework of “New Public Management”, which emphasises quantifiable outcomes to measure performance. This built implicit pressure towards finding a single standard orthography, for greatest efficiency. There followed a six- year debate among supporters of the different orthographies, usually quite heated, about which should prevail. This debate exemplified the importance of standardisation for minority languages, but its ultimate conclusion saw all sides giving way, and expediency, not ideology, prevailing. It also showed that standardisation was not imposed explicitly within language policy, but emerged during the language planning process.
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Why Do Languages Die?
Published with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Why do languages die? This is a question that troubles many linguists, but one which we still lack really solid... more
Why do languages die? This is a question that troubles many linguists, but one which we still lack really solid theories for answering. My own approach to the matter focuses on the incentives put in place by the nation-state, and how the existence of the nation-state itself is antithetical to language diversity. I take a praxeological approach, following Ludwig von Mises, which aims to understand the actions of individuals and the choices they make in accordance with the incentives presented to them.
This article tackles this very hoary question of how languages die. I argue that, while economic reasons exist for language death, they are largely secondary to the institutionalized way in which the state interrupts the process of intergenerational transmission. The article is published on Mises.org, the online arm of the Mises Institute, an organization dedicated to the advancement of Austrian economics.
“Realistic Prescriptivism”: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of “Good Grammar” and Lexpionage, and the Native Israeli Speakers
Israel Studies in Language and Society 1.1: 135-154. (2008)
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2008. ‘“Realistic Prescriptivism”: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of “Good... more Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2008. ‘“Realistic Prescriptivism”: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of “Good Grammar” and Lexpionage, and the Native Israeli Speakers' Israel Studies in Language and Society 1.1: 135-154.
HEBREW Revivalists’ Goals vis-a-vis the Emerging ISRAELI Language
Pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7) of Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García (eds), Volume II (The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts) of Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, New York: Oxford University Press.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2011. ‘HEBREW Revivalists’ Goals vis-a-vis the Emerging ISRAELI Language’, pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7)... more
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2011. ‘HEBREW Revivalists’ Goals vis-a-vis the Emerging ISRAELI Language’, pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7) of Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García (eds), Volume II (The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts) of Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, New York: Oxford University Press.
I. LONG ABSTRACT
"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so." (Haldane 1963: 464)
The public media and public education are understandably often drawn to successes rather than to failures. This chapter provides some insights into the limitations of human involvement or intervention in planned social (and linguistic) change.
Do I only see the the glass half empty? Not at all! Israeli, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. 'Modern Hebrew', is indeed - partially - the result of a successful partial revival of literary Hebrew. But although the Hebrew revivalists, most of them native Yiddish-speaking, very much wished to speak Hebrew - with Semitic grammar and pronunciation (like Arabs), they could not avoid their Ashkenazic European background.
Their attempts (1) to deny their (more recent) roots in search of Biblical ancientness, (2) negate diasporism and disown the "weak, persecuted" exilic Jew from public memory, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they regarded as zhargon) failed.
Although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very components the revivalists sought to erase. The alleged victory of Hebrew over Yiddish was a Pyrrhic one. Victorious "Hebrew" is, after all, partly European at heart. Israeli is a hybridic Eurasian language, both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-)European. It is based simultaneously on "sleeping beauty"/"walking dead" Hebrew, "mame loshn" ("mother tongue") Yiddish, as well as other languages spoken by revivalists.
The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on “sleeping beauty” or “walking dead” Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish. The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at six or seven.
More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit (i.e. European) and discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary (i.e. Hebrew): 10.
The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables - not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is thus most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s).
From the perspective of cultural heritage, attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated. But we should refrain from a purist’s approach and feel no shame about hybridity.
II. ABSTRACT
The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success, the Hebrew revival is at 6 or 7. More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit: 1 (i.e. European), discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1, sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2, semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3, word order (syntax): 3, general vocabulary: 5, word formation: 7, verbal conjugations: 9, basic vocabulary: 10 (i.e. Hebrew).
III. KEYWORDS
Revival, Hybridity, Multiple Causation, Jewish Sociolinguistics, Hebrew Bible, Yiddish Diaspora, Zionism.
IV. BRIEF BIO
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular) (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Professor of Linguistics and Endagered Languages, and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow, at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His website is www.zuckermann.org .
V. CHAPTER
Hebrew Revivalists’ Goals vis-à-vis the Emerging Israeli Language
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)
A Senegalese poet said “In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
(Cellist Yo Yo Ma, White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy, 28 November 2000)
Introduction
Five Jews changed the way we perceive the world: Moses said, “the Law is everything,” Jesus said, “Love is everything,” Marx said, “Money is everything,” Freud said, “Sex is everything,” and then Einstein astutely added: “Everything is relative!”
Unfortunately, some people see the world in black-and-white terms. However, Judaism is all about “on the other hand.” In the famous play Fiddler on the Roof, after Tevye’s daughter Hodel and her radical student lover Perchik announced their engagement, Tevye, a religious Jew opposed to the match, memorably reckons: “He loves her. Love, it's a new style ... On the other hand, our old ways were once new, weren't they? On the other hand, they decided without parents, without a matchmaker! On the other hand, did Adam and Eve have a matchmaker? Well, yes they did. And it seems these two have the same matchmaker!” (cf. Stein 1964: 113).
“Modern Hebrew” (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999) is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.
Hebrew has been spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitutes a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. I believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD, among other reasons, because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)
For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was not spoken. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.
Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the sociolinguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language and politics, and practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no longer spoken language.
The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic, Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European, Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the “substratum,” whilst Hebrew is the “superstratum” providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath & Wexler 1997). According to my own mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, “genetically modified” Israeli is a “semi-engineered,” multi-layered language, which is a Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybrid; it is both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-) European. It is based simultaneously on “sleeping beauty” / “walking dead” Hebrew and “máme lóshn” (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to modern Hebrew, and the many other languages spoken by revivalists, such as Russian, Polish, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Arabic, German and English. Israeli is therefore not a case of rétsakh yídish (Israeli for “murder of Yiddish”) but rather of yídish rédt zikh (Yiddish for “Yiddish speaks itself” [beneath Israeli]).
Was the Hebrew revival then a failure? Einstein reminds us that, “Everything is relative!” For example, in the famous “duckrabbit” picture (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: Part 2, Section 11), one could see either a duck or a rabbit. Similarly, the American consul in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, claims, “non ho studiato ornitologia” (I have not studied ornithology). Hence, I propose that one see in the rare bird Israeli either a phoenix rising from the ashes (Hebrew) or a cuckoo laying its egg in the nest of another bird and tricking it into believing that the baby cuckoos are its own offspring (Yiddish). Israeli is thus a phonenicuckoo cross with some characteristics of a magpie, the latter representing the ongoing borrowing – or rather “copying” or “stealing” – e.g. from American English.
The Hebrew revival cannot be considered a failure tout court, because without the zealous, obsessive, enthusiastic efforts of the symbolic father of Israeli, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman), and of teachers, writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals, political figures, linguists, and others, Israelis would have spoken a language (such as English, German, Arabic and Yiddish) that could hardly be considered Hebrew. To call such a hypothetical language “Hebrew” would have not only been misleading but also wrong. To call today’s Israeli “Hebrew” may be misleading but not wrong: Hybridic Israeli is based on Hebrew as much as it is based on Yiddish. So, although the revivalists could not avoid the subconscious influence of their mother tongue(s), they did manage at the same time to consciously revive some components of clinically-dead Hebrew.
On the other hand, had Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jews arrived in Israel before Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, and provided that they had similar ideology and motivation to those of Ben-Yehuda and his collaborators, there is no doubt in my mind that the language resulting from their hypothetical revival would have been much more Semitic than is Israeli.
Did the guardians fail in this particular respect more so than in other areas of the national ethos? That is still to be determined by various interdisciplinary scholars, but I hypothesize that the answer is negative. Multiple causation and the often-camouflaged impact of the Diaspora can be found in each and every component of Israeli society, for example, in music, popular songs, film, economics, urban geography, architecture, political system, and more. For instance, Rami Kimchi (personal communication) explores the parallels between the allegedly-mizrahi “burekas films,” which feature Moroccan Jews living in Israeli slums, with the Ashkenazic shtetl life that can be found in works by Mendele Moikher-Sforim. In fact, the directors of such mizrahi films are often of Ashkenazic heritage. Furthermore, I strongly believe that linguistic insights such as the Congruence Principle below can be usefully employed by researchers of other areas of scholarship.
Why use the term “Israeli?” Several days before the publication in Tel Aviv of my most recent book (Zuckerman, 2008a), I finally received its cover. Whereas the title of the book was israelít safá yafá, i.e. Israeli – A Beautiful Language (challenging and modelled upon the old Zionist slogan ‘ivrít safá yafá “Hebrew is a beautiful language”), the last sentence on the back cover was “this is his first book in Hebrew!” Worried, I called the publisher, Am Oved, and was given an ultimatum: either we leave it as “this is his first book in Hebrew” or change it to “this is his first book in Israeli and his last book at Am Oved!”
Eventually, the compromise was “this is his first book published in Israel.” This is an example of a case in which the (meta-linguistic) name is extremely important because it determines the way people perceive the thing it stands for. Just as thought influences language, language can shape thought. For example, 2,500 years ago, Confucius said that the first thing one has to do is “to rectify names” (Analects, Book 13, Verse 3).
Had I continued to call Israeli “Modern Hebrew,” “Israeli Hebrew,” or merely “Hebrew” tout court, you might have assumed that my model is yet another wise-guy version of the view that Israeli is simply an evolution of Hebrew, influenced by “foreign languages” such as Yiddish. But that’s a far cry from the two main arguments proposed here: hybridity and native speech.
Hybridity and the congruence principle
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
(Nelson Mandela)
Israeli is not an evolutionary phase of Hebrew but rather a new hybrid language, based simultaneously on Hebrew, Yiddish, and a plethora of other languages spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s. Thus, Yiddish is not a “foreign language” vis-à-vis Israeli, and the word intuítsya “intuition” – to give but one example out of thousands of alleged loan words – is not a loan word (from Yiddish intuítsye, Russian intuítsiya, Polish intuicja etc., all meaning “intuition”) but rather an integral part of Israeli from its very beginning.
According to the Congruence Principle, the more revivalists speak contributing languages with specific linguistic features, the more likely these features are to prevail in the emergent language. Based on feature pool statistics, this principle weakens August Schleicher’s famous Family Tree theory in historical linguistics, which often gives the wrong impression that every language has only one parent.
For example, most revivalists spoke languages, mainly Yiddish, that lacked that Semitic pharyngeal gulp ‘ayin (represented, for instance, by the apostrophe in my Christian – actually Jewish – name Ghil‘ad). Naturally, their children – the ones who, in fact, shaped the real character of Israeli – could not buy the argument “do as I say, don’t do as I do!” The result is that most Israelis do not have this sound in their speech.
Similarly, má nishmà, the common Israeli “what’s up?” greeting, looks like a calque – loan translation – of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning “what’s heard?” but actually functioning as a common greeting. However, a Romanian-speaking immigrant to Israel might have used má nishmà because of Romanian ce se aude, a Polish-speaker Jew because of Polish co słychać and a Russian-speaker Что слышно chto slyshno, all meaning the same thing and functioning in the same way.
The distinction between forms and patterns is crucial here as it demonstrates multiple causation. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, “the language defendants regiment” (cf. Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít “Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew,” used to tear down signs written in “foreign” languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the members of this group only looked for Yiddish forms, rather than patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak “Hebrew.” The language defendants would thus not attack an Israeli speaker saying má nishmà.
To varying degrees, Israeli differs from Hebrew in all components of language, including sounds (phonetics and phonology) (Zuckermann 2005), meaning (semantics), word order (syntax), words (lexis) and even in word formation (morphology) (Zuckermann 2009). Some elements, however, are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations, and connotations.
My research analyzes the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g. crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) (Zuckermann 2003) and portmanteau blends (e.g. motel, from motor+hotel, or sprummer, from spring+summer) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect – often subconsciously – semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít “firefly, glow-worm” – coined by poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaħelet “burning coal, glowing ember.” Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaħelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in using an element associated with “glow,” in fact replicates a European mindset, apparent for example in the Yiddish word glivórem, or “firefly,” literally “glow” (cf. gaħelet) + “worm,” or in German Glühwürmchen.
And yet contemporary Israelis are indoctrinated to believe that they speak the same language as the Prophet Isaiah, “with mistakes.” It is thus high time to acknowledge that Israeli is very different from ancient Hebrew. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” We should embrace – rather than chastise – the multisourcedness of Israeli!
Almost all revivalists were native Yiddish-speakers who wanted to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, like Arabs. Research should be conducted on the Hebrew revivalists’ perception of the “noble savage” Arab, who was, on the one hand, an enemy and, on the other, an enviable Semite riding a Middle-Eastern camel, entering a biblical city and speaking a Semitic tongue with autochthonous pharyngeal consonants.
Not only were the revivalists European, their revivalist campaign was inspired by European – e.g. Bulgarian – nationalism. At the time, although territory and language were at the heart of European nationalism, the Jews possessed neither a national territory nor a unifying national language. Zionism could be considered a fascinating manifestation of European discourses channelled into the Holy Land (cf. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, 1876).
Reversing language shift (“RLS”) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010) is a crucial issue. In his seminal work, Reversing Language Shift, Fishman (1991: 287) argues that RLS efforts often originate in Europe. In the case of Hebrew, he is even more right than he might have thought. RLS efforts in the case of Hebrew are not only sociological – the mindset behind the motivation to revive the language was a reflection of a European nationalism – but also linguistic – the mindset of the emerging language itself is European. The revivalists’ attempt to (1) deny their (more recent) roots in search of Biblical ancientness, (2) negate diasporism and disown the “weak, persecuted” exilic Jew, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they despised) could not fully succeed. Ironically, although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very scorned syncretism and despised diasporism the revivalists sought to erase.
The reason is simple: the revival of a no longer spoken language is most unlikely without influences from the mother tongue(s) of those at the forefront of the revival. Thus, when most native Israeli-speakers speak Israeli, their intonation is much more similar to that of Yiddish, the mother tongue of most revivalists, than to that of Arabic or any other language belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family.
Native Israeli speech and the Academy of the Hebrew Language
On a bus in Tel Aviv, a mother was talking animatedly, in Yiddish, to her little boy – who kept answering her in Hebrew. And each time the mother said, “No, no, talk Yiddish!”
An impatient Israeli, overhearing this, exclaimed, “Lady, why do you insist the boy talk Yiddish instead of Hebrew?”
Replied the mother, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”
(Rosten 1970: xxi)
Since its conception, Israeli has been the subject of purism (the dislike of foreign words – as in Icelandic: Sapir and Zuckermann 2008) and the enforcement of correct pronunciation. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for “Hebrew,” the Academy of the Hebrew Language (known in Israeli as haakadémya lalashón haivrít) is funded by the Ministry of Education, which increasingly suffers from budgetary cutbacks. It superseded the (Hebrew) Language Council (váad halashón (haivrít)), which was established in 1889 – as a branch of Safá Brurá (Clear Language) – by Ben-Yehuda and colleagues.
As described on its website, the Academy, based in Giv‘at Ram, Jerusalem, “prescribes standards for Modern Hebrew grammar, orthography, transliteration [in fact, transcription], and punctuation [vocalization, vowel marking] based upon the study of Hebrew's historical development.” (http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/english.html) The Academy's plenum – which holds five or six annual sessions – consists of 23 members and an additional 15 academic advisors. These are either scholars from the disciplines of languages, linguistics, and Jewish studies, or accomplished writers and translators. The Academy's decisions are binding upon all governmental agencies, including the Israel Broadcasting Authority.
As defined in its constitution, the Academy's functions are:
(1) To investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon according to its historical strata and layers;
(2) To study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language; and
(3) To direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, its daily and academic needs, by setting its lexicon, grammar, characters, orthography and transliteration [in fact, transcription].
The first goal is most useful, as Israeli is indeed a multi-layered language. For example, one could say both (a) khashkhú enáv, literally “His eyes became dark,” meaning "He saw black" (‘black’ in this context meaning ‘bad news’), and (b) niyá/naasá lo khóshekh baenáim, meaning the same, albeit structurally different. While khashkhú enáv is Hebrew, niyá lo khóshekh baenáim is a calque of the Yiddish phrase siz im gevórn fíntster in di óygn, which might in turn be an adaptation of the very Hebrew khashkhú enáv (transcribed here in its Israeli form, which would have been almost unintelligible for an ancient Hebrew-speaker).
Israeli has many other minimal pairs, such as asá din leatsmó and lakákh et hakhók layadáim, both referring to a person violating the law, with the latter being more colloquial, as well as yamím kelelót, literally “days as nights,” and misavív lashaón, literally “round the clock,” both often referring to hard work.
Somewhat resembling the “catastrophic success” of the 1928-1936 Turkish Language Revolution (see Lewis 1999), many referents have several Israeli signifiers, one of which is puristically Hebrew and the other, often more commonly used, “foreign” (in fact, Israeli ab initio). These include many “internationalisms,” such as opozítsya “Opposition” (according to the Academy, the word should be negdá – cf. Hebrew néged “against”) and koalítsya “Coalition” (according to the Academy: yakhdá – cf. Hebrew yaħad “together”).
However, goal three, to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, is intriguing (cf. Zuckermann 2008b:139) is oxymoronic. If the nature of a language is to evolve in a specific direction (cf. Sapir's “drift,” the pattern of change in which the structure of a language shifts in a determinate direction), why direct its evolution by language policing?
Despite such intensive efforts towards grammatical enforcement, Israeli is by now a fully-fledged language, and can never be Hebrew. Some prescriptive purists – for instance, Sarid (2008), Hitron (2008) and Levitan (2009) – argue that the current generation of Israelis is reckless and that Israeli used to be much better. I, on the other hand, view many alleged “reckless changes” within Israeli as recognition that the language was never Hebrew ab initio. For example, unlike the common myth that such a development is recent, Israeli-speakers “made mistakes” in the numeral-noun polarity-of-gender agreement from the very inception of Israeli. I once asked an old man, “Have you changed throughout your life?” His response was very telling and relevant to the Israeli language: “I haven’t changed but I suddenly realized who I was.” Every live-and-kicking language changes through time, but the most important change I predict for Israeli is that the myth that we speak the language of Isaiah will eventually be replaced by a more sober, syncretic analysis of Israeli genesis.
There is no good reason to force a Hebrew grammar on native Israeli-speakers, simply because they already speak their mother tongue perfectly, according to internalized grammatical rules. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term “habitus” to refer to a social convention; for example, eating with chopsticks versus a knife and fork. Unlike literary language, which is indeed a “habitus,” the native spoken tongue is not learned but rather acquired automatically and effortlessly. This is the diametric opposite of the admired, albeit mistaken, claim, made in 1953, by the former president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim: “one learns his spoken language in years of effort, in very hard work throughout one’s life” (cf. Ben-Hayyim 1953: 83 and 1992: 80).
The relationship between hybridity and native speech is complex. Supporting one of them does not necessarily imply accepting the other. For example, I might convince some that Israeli is a wonderful mishmash of many languages yet they would still prefer enforcing an elitist standard on Israeli-speakers. Overlooking its hybrid vigor, others might continue to blindly believe that Israeli is Hebrew but would still allow Israelis to speak as they wish. Nevertheless, the main innovation here, besides the hybridity model, is the link between hybridity and native speech: Even if there are numerous Israelis who believe that we must enforce a standard, might they eventually be convinced to modify the characteristics of that standard? Who said that it must be based on Hebrew?
Let my people know! Do Israelis really understand Hebrew?
Language is a guide to “social reality”. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
(Sapir 1921)
One of the arguments against my synthesis has been that Israelis can easily understand the Hebrew Bible. The otherwise perspicacious intellectual Avi(ezer) Ravitzky wrote that “Modern Greek, for example, boasts many similarities to its ancestor, yet a speaker of the current language must struggle to read ancient texts. The modern Hebrew speaker, however, moves smoothly through the Bible” (2000: 13-14). Leaving aside the crucial difference between the evolution of Classical into Modern Greek and the unparalleled genesis of Israeli, the alleged smoothness is mere myth.
Israelis not only do not understand the Bible, but much worse: they misunderstand it without even realizing it! By and large, Israeli-speakers are the worst students in advanced studies of the Bible. Notwithstanding, Israel’s Education Ministry axiomatically assumes that Israeli is simply an organic evolution of Hebrew and that the Bible is thus written in the very same language – albeit in a higher register, of course – spoken by Israeli pupils at primary and secondary schools. The publishers of Hartom-Cassuto, and other volumes providing numerous glosses to the unfathomable Biblical verses, have benefited from such a purism prism, which might be related to self-righteousness, hubris, simple conservatism, or blindness on behalf of Israel’s educational system.
Israelis might understand the most general meaning of “bereshit- bara ’elohim ’et hashamayim we’et ha’arets” (Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth) but very few would be able to explain the construct-state nomen regens (nismákh) bereshít-: in the beginning of what? And how many Israelis could fathom this sentence from the perspective of the temporal sequence of creation: were the heaven and the earth created at the same time? Is it, therefore, possible that the expression “the heaven and the earth” here refers to “the world” in general? And which Israeli-speaker uses a Verb-Subject-Object word order (a.k.a. constituent order) as in “created God the heaven and the earth”? Ask Israelis what “’avaním shaħaqú máyim” (Job 14:19) means and they will tell you that the stones eroded the water. On second thought, they might guess that semantically it would make more sense that the water eroded the stones. Yet such an Object-Verb-Subject order is ungrammatical in Israeli (see Zuckermann 2008a, 2009).
How many Israelis can really fathom “tohu wavohu” or “təhom” (Genesis 1:2), the Israeli misleading senses being “mess” and “abyss” respectively? Or “haşvi yisra’el ‘al bamotekha ħalal” (II Samuel 1:19: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places)? Most Israelis understand “yéled sha‘ashu‘ím” (Jeremiah 31:19, King James 20) as “playboy” rather than “pleasant child.” “Bá’u baním ‘ad mashbér” (Isaiah 37:3) is interpreted by Israelis as “children arrived at a crisis” rather than as “children arrived at the mouth of the womb, to be born.” “’Adam lə‘amal yullad” (Job 5:7) is taken to mean “man was born to do productive work” rather than “mischief” or “trouble” – in the Bible this sentence stands as an accusation of the inherent wickedness of mankind.
Some Hebrew normativists repeat the red herring that if we correct Israelis’ alleged “grammatical mistakes” they would be more likely to understand Classical Hebrew. Does an Israeli saying “asará shkalím” (10 shekels) have more chance to understand the unfathomable “egla meshulleshet” (“a heifer of three years old,” Genesis 15:9) than if he stuck to the actually more commonly grammatical “éser shékel?” Just as the “Jerusalem artichoke” has nothing to do with either Jerusalem or artichoke (even though some Jerusalem restaurants take pride in serving it), what Yossi Sarid – to mention but one linguistic right-winger – calls “mistaken Hebrew” is neither mistaken nor Hebrew: it is grammatical Israeli!
Obviously, one could give thousands of other examples, and from post-Biblical Hebrew too. For instance, how many Israelis can follow the meaning of the Passover Haggadah or the Hanukkah hymn “Ma‘oz Tsur Yeshu‘ati?” Is Hebrew “menabeaħ” (blaspheming) indeed related, after all, to Israeli “novéakh” (barking)? Most importantly, however, the available examples are far from being only lexical: Israelis are incapable of recognizing moods and aspects in the Bible. For example, “nappíla goralót wened‘á” (Jonah 1:7, “let us cast lots”) was thought by some Israelis to be the rhetorical future rather than the cohortative verb tense, the latter apparent, for example, in Israeli “yeushar hataktsiv!” (may the budget be approved!).
Despite eleven years of Biblical training, Israeli-speakers still understand the perfect aspect (e.g. ’amar “said” as in “I will have said…”) as if it were past tense. The imperfect aspect (e.g. yomar “would/will say” as in “I thought I would say…”) is misunderstood as the future tense. In reality, a Biblical verb in the perfect aspect can refer to a completed action in the future – cf., mutatis mutandis, the Israeli colloquial question “záznu?” (literally, “have we gone/moved?”), utterable instead of “yala bay,” meaning “let’s go.” I remember my tironut (IDF recruit training) commander ordering us in a sadaút session (“fieldcraft,” etymologically unrelated to sadism): “od khamésh dakót hayítem kan!” (Within five minutes you will have been here), hayítem being, in Israeli, grammatically past but actually referring, in this specific colloquial case, to an action in the future. In the Bible, heyitém refers regularly – not only colloquially – to an action that has been completed, regardless of whether or not it is in the past or future – hence the term “aspect” rather than “tense.” Such Biblical mindset is in harsh contradistinction to the Weltanschauung of the Homo sapiens sapiens (the human who knows s/he knows) israelicus vulgaris, and to the way Israelis read the Hebrew Bible.
Negating the Diaspora, Ben-Yehuda would have been most content had Israelis spoken Biblical Hebrew. Had the Hebrew revival been fully successful, Israelis would indeed have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Middle English because we would have bypassed more than 1,750 years of natural development. On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew had never died as a spoken language by the second century AD and it continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They would eventually have returned to the Holy Land, continuing to speak Hebrew. From the perspective of mutual intelligibility, it might well be the case that that Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does Israeli, but this says little about the genesis of modern Israeli.
Given such a magnificently hybridic yíkhes (heritage), as well as the omnipresent misunderstandings of the Hebrew Bible by Israelis, Israel’s Education Ministry should revise the way it teaches the Bible and instead teach the Bible the way Latin is taught, employing the most advanced methods of second language teaching, which can be most joyful and memorable. Such a measure has the potential to reduce Israeli pupils’ disdain for Bible lessons, as well as to attract more secular Jews to Biblical scholarship.
Thus, Tanakh RAM – a project recently launched by the experienced Bible teacher Avraham Ahuvia, as well as the insightful publisher Rafi Mozes, acronymized in this biblionym – fulfills the mission of “red ’el ha‘am” not only in its Hebrew meaning (Go down to the people) but also – more importantly – in its Yiddish meaning (“red” meaning “speak!”). Ahuvia’s translation is most useful and dignified. Given its high register, however, I predict that the future promises biblical translations into more colloquial forms of Israeli, a beautifully multi-layered and intricately multi-sourced language, of which we should be proud.
On the other hand – and as if the picture were not complex enough – Yadin and Zuckermann (2010) demonstrate the success of Zionism in deifying the Israeli State by shrewdly employing divine Hebrew terms and turning them into signifiers for nationalist referents. For example, Biblical Hebrew mishkån meant both “dwelling-place” and “Tabernacle of the Congregation” (where Moses kept the Ark in the wilderness) and “inner sanctum” (known as ’ohel mo‘ed). Israeli mishkán haknéset, however, refers to ‘the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) building.’ Translating mishkán haknéset as ‘The Knesset Building’ (as on the official Knesset website) is lacking. The word mishkán is loaded with holiness and evokes sanctity (cf. sanctuary), as if Members of Knesset (cf. MPs) were, at the very least, angels or seraphim. Another example, not mentioned by Yadin and Zuckermann, is mékhes: Whereas in the Hebrew Bible it was a tribute to God (e.g. Numbers 31:37), in Israeli is it “customs” paid to the State.
Conclusion
I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.
(Haldane 1963: 464)
The fin-de-siècle Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with revivalists of indigenous languages such as no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages in Australia. For example, (1) extensive documentation (e.g. the aforementioned Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah), (2) Hebrew was considered a most prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for example), and (3) Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common, whereas there are dozens of “sleeping” Aboriginal languages to be revived and it would obviously be extremely hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English.
And yet, the Hebrew revivalists - who wished to speak pure Hebrew - failed in their purism prism. The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on “sleeping beauty” or “walking dead” Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish. The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at six or seven.
More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit (i.e. European) and discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary (i.e. Hebrew): 10.
The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables - not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is thus most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s).
From the perspective of cultural heritage, attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated. But we should refrain from a purist’s approach and feel no shame about hybridity.
References
Ahuvia, Avraham 2008. Tanakh RAM (The Hebrew Bible with translation into Israeli). Even-Yehuda: Rekhes.
Ben-Hayyim, Ze’ev 1953. “Lashón atiká bimtsiút khadashá (sikhót al beayót balashón haivrít hakhayá)” (An ancient tongue in a new reality. Discussions on Issues in the living Hebrew language). Leshonénu La‘am 4.3-5 (35-37): 3-85. (The Academy of the Hebrew Language)
Ben-Hayyim, Ze’ev 1992. Bemilkhamtá shel lashón (The Struggle for a Language). Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language.
Confucius c. 480-220 BC. Lún Yǔ (Analects).
Eliot, George 1876. Daniel Deronda. Edinburgh – London: William Blackwood and Sons.
Evans, Nicholas 2010. Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Malden – Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon (UK): Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.) 2001. Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective. Clevedon (UK): Multilingual Matters.
Hagège, Claude 2009. On the Death and Life of Languages. Yale University Press.
Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson 1963. Review of The Truth About Death in Journal of Genetics 58: 463-464.
Hartom, Elia Samuele and Cassuto, Moses David 1956-1961. Tanakh (The Hebrew Bible with Commentary).
Tel Aviv: Yavneh (15 volumes).
Hitron, Hagai 2008. “Meshakhnéa, nekhmád, mazík” (Convincing, Cute, Harmful), Haaretz. (24 December 2008)
Horvath, Julia and Wexler, Paul (eds) 1997. Relexification in Creole and Non-Creole Languages – With Special Attention to Haitian Creole, Modern Hebrew, Romani, and Rumanian (Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph Series, vol. xiii). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Levitan, Amos 2009. “Dalutá shel haisraelít” (The Poverty of Israeli), Iton 77 (March-April 2009).
Lewis, Geoffrey L. 1999. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ravitzky, Aviezer 2000. “Religious and Secular Jews in Israel: A Kulturkampf?” Position Paper, Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute.
Rosten, Leo 1970. The Joys of Yiddish. London: W. H. Allen.
Sapir, Edward 1921. Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Sapir, Yair and Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008. “Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching,” pp. 19-43 (Chapter 2) (References: 296-325) of Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner (eds), Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages. Clevedon – Buffalo – Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Sarid, Yossi 2008. “Kof lekóf yabía ómer” (Monkey to monkey, will the message be lost?), Haaretz. (28 December 2008)
Shur, Shimon A. 2000. Gdud meginéy hasafá beérets israél 1923-1936 (The Language Defendants Regiment in Eretz Yisrael 1923-36). Haifa: Herzl Institute for Research and Study of Zionism.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2001 [1953]. Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations). Blackwell.
Yadin, Azzan and Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2010. “Blorít: Pagans' Mohawk or Sabras' Forelock?: Ideologically Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms in Socialist Zionist Israeli,” Chapter 6 of Tope Omoniyi (ed.), The Sociology of Language and Religion: Change, Conflict and Accommodation. London – New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 1999. Review Article of Nakdimon Shabbethay Doniach and Ahuvia Kahane (eds), The Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. International Journal of Lexicography 12: 325-46.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. London – New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2005. “Abba, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, prescriptivism and the real sounds of the Israeli language.” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 19, pp. 210-231.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008a. Israelít safá yafá (Israeli – A Beautiful Language. Hebrew As Myth). Tel Aviv: Am Oved.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008b. “‘Realistic Prescriptivism’: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of ‘Good Grammar’ and Lexpionage, and the Native Israeli Speakers.” Israel Studies in Language and Society 1.1: 135-154.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2009. “Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns.” Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40-67.
Genocide and Ethnocide: The Suppression of the Cornish Language
by Jon Mills
Published in Interfaces in Language (2010)
This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years.... more This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years. The social status of Cornish is examined along with attitudes towards the language held by monarchy, government and their agencies. During the middle-ages, Cornish was relatively stable and indeed enjoyed some prestige amongst the gentry who used Cornish as their preferred language for family mottoes. However, following the Tudor accession, the number of Cornish speakers was greatly reduced following the brutal repression of several popular uprisings when a significant proportion of the Cornish speaking population were exterminated. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Cornish continued to be used amongst the poor in Cornwall's fishing communities. The revival of Cornish began around 1900 and the number of speakers grew throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, the government and state education system provided no support for Cornish language learners until 2002 when the European Union granted Cornish official “minority language” status under Part II of the 1992 Council of Europe Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. In 2005, the government confirmed modest funding support for the Cornish language. Local government in Cornwall are currently implementing a Cornish language strategy to determine a standard written form for Cornish that can be used for official purposes, such as signage, and for education in schools.
Endangered languages have a new champion / Candy Gibson
Adelaidean, June 2011
Endangered languages have a new champion
The University of Adelaide has appointed Australia's... more
Endangered languages have a new champion
The University of Adelaide has appointed Australia's first Chair of Endangered Languages - Israeli-born, Oxford-educated linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann.
Professor Zuckermann, who holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellowship, has vowed to make Adelaide a world centre for language revival.
His new role as Professor of Linguistics and Endangered Languages in the School of Humanities will involve both research and teaching, with the aim of establishing a new sub-discipline of linguistics - "revival linguistics".
"Along with my colleagues Professor Peter Mühlhäusler and Dr Rob Amery, I shall be analysing how to resurrect languages that are no longer spoken or about to become extinct," Professor Zuckermann said.
These include more than 100 Aboriginal languages that are "critically endangered".
Professor Zuckermann said one of his goals was to raise the value of language diversity in today's society, given the prediction that 90% of the world's 6000 languages will disappear by 2100.
"From an Australian perspective, it is critical on a number of fronts that Aboriginal languages are revived and preserved.
"These fascinating, complex languages provide a sense of identity for Aboriginal people, reflecting a close interaction with their culture, heritage and history. Reclaiming and maintaining Aboriginal languages helps to empower some Indigenous people and give them a strong sense of pride and purpose."
Professor Zuckermann said Aboriginal traditions, spirituality, ecology and land were inextricably linked to their languages.
The multilingual Israeli academic is internationally renowned for his innovative and provocative approach to language revival (Modern Hebrew in particular), defining himself as an anti-purist.
"I don't think we should be rigid about languages. They are forever changing and evolving and are the result of cross-fertilisation of numerous lects and languages.
"Even if you isolated a community on the moon without external influences, you would find in the space of several generations that their language would have altered significantly."
Professor Zuckermann holds doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge universities and has taught at universities in the United Kingdom, United States, China, Israel, Singapore, Slovakia and Australia. He has also been a senior research fellow in Italy and Japan.
He has published several books and numerous articles in eight different languages.
Professor Zuckermann has also consulted to the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford University Press, among many others, and delivered hundreds of keynote speeches, plenary conference papers and public lectures.
Although he officially started at the University of Adelaide in February, Professor Zuckermann spent the first three months of his appointment as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai International Studies University.
"I hope to make Adelaide known in the world as the place where revival linguistics emerged as a new paradigm of linguistics," he said.
"We have the core expertise here - with strengths in Kaurna, Israeli and creole languages - and with the help of the Mobile Language Team, established in 2009 through Federal Government funding, we can go a long way towards supporting and reviving Aboriginal languages in South Australia as a first step," Professor Zuckermann said.
To read more about the University of Adelaide's work supporting Aboriginal languages and resources in South Australia, visit: ua.edu.au/linguistics/mlt
The University of Adelaide offers both undergraduate and postgraduate linguistics degrees. If you're interested visit: ua.edu.au/programs/2011
Story by Candy Gibson
New Vision for "Israeli Hebrew": Theoretical and Practical Implications of Analysing Israel's Main Language as a Semi-Engineered Semito-European Hybrid Language
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5.1: 57-71
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2006. 'A New Vision for "Israeli Hebrew": Theoretical and Practical Implications of... more Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2006. 'A New Vision for "Israeli Hebrew": Theoretical and Practical Implications of Analysing Israel's Main Language as a Semi-Engineered Semito-European Hybrid Language'. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5.1: 57-71.
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Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns
Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40-67. (2009)
Author: Zuckermann, Ghil'ad
LINK TO THE ARTICLE:
http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2009. 'Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. Journal of Language... more
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2009. 'Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40-67.
LINK TO THE ARTICLE:
http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Hybridity_versus_Revivability.pdf
The aim of this article is to suggest that due to the ubiquitous multiple causation, the revival of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character. The article highlights salient morphological constructions and categories, illustrating the difficulty in determining a single source for Israeli grammar. The European impact in these features is apparent inter alia in structure, semantics or productivity. Being an article rather than a long book, this paper does not attempt to be grammatically exhaustive but rather to cast new light on the partial success of language revival in general and on the genetics of Israeli in particular.
Multiple causation is manifested in the Congruence Principle, according to which if a feature exists in more than one contributing language, it is more likely to persist in the emerging language. This article discusses multiple causation in (1) constituent order, (2) tense system, (3) copula enhancement, (4) calquing, and (5) phono-semantic matching in ‘Israeli’ (Zuckermann 1999, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. ‘Revived Hebrew’ / ‘Modern Hebrew’). It suggests that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. ‘Revived’ languages are unlikely to have a single parent.
Generally speaking, whereas most forms of Israeli are Semitic, many of its patterns are European. It is proposed that (1) Whereas Hebrew was synthetic, Israeli – following Yiddish etc. – is much more analytic; (2) Israeli is a habere language (cf. Latin habere ‘to have’, taking the direct object), in stark contrast to Hebrew; (3) European languages sometimes dictate the gender of Israeli coinages; (4) The (hidden) productivity and semantics of the allegedly completely Hebrew system of Israeli verb-templates are, in fact, often European; (5) In Hebrew there was a polarity-of-gender agreement between nouns and numerals, e.g. ‘éser banót ‘ten girls’ versus ‘asar-á baním ‘ten (feminine) boys’. In Israeli there is a simpler – European – system, e.g. éser banót ‘ten girls’, éser baním ‘ten boys’; (6) Yiddish has shaped the semantics of the Israeli verbal system in the case of inchoativity; (7) Following ‘Standard Average European’, the Israeli proclitics be- ‘in’, le- ‘to’ and mi-/me ‘from’, as well as the coordinating conjunction ve- ‘and’, are phonologically less dependent than in Hebrew; (8) Word-formation in Israeli abounds with European mechanisms such as portmanteau blending.
Israeli possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a fascinating and multifaceted laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis and hybridity, social issues like language vis-à-vis politics, and practical matters, e.g. whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language. The multisourced nature of Israeli and the role of the Congruence Principle in its genesis have implications for historical linguistics, language planning and the study of language, culture and identity.
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Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures
Australian Journal of Linguistics 31.1: 111-127. (2011)
Authors: Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael
LINK TO THE ARTICLE: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Revival_Linguistics.pdf
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael 2011. ‘Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to... more
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael 2011. ‘Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures’, Australian Journal of Linguistics 31.1: 111-127.
LINK TO THE ARTICLE: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Revival_Linguistics.pdf
Final version:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a932426202~frm=titlelink
DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2011.532859
Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL)
Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2011, pages 111 - 127
Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures
GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN and MICHAEL WALSH
University of Adelaide and University of Sydney
ABSTRACT
The revival of Hebrew is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping tongue and is a language movement that has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements in Australia are in their infancy. This article provides comparative insights and makes information about the Hebrew revival accessible to Australian linguists and Aboriginal revival activists.
Needless to say, the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language reawakening must involve a long period of thoroughly observing, carefully listening to the people, learning, mapping and characterizing the specific indigenous community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.
This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.
Keywords: Revival Linguistics, Language Revival, Aboriginal Studies, Hebrew, Social Empowerment, Hybridity and Multiple Causation, Purism versus Compromise, Language and Identity, Contact Linguistics, Yiddish, Aboriginal English, Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Endangerment, Resilience Linguistics, Revitalization, Renewal.
Dedicated to Professor Michael Clyne z"l
ARTICLE
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)
The main aim of this article is to suggest that there are perspicacious lessons applicable from the relatively successful Hebrew revival to the reclamation, maintenance and empowerment of Aboriginal languages and cultures. 'Language is power; let us have ours', wrote Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway on 26 November 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Previous revival efforts have largely failed (for obvious reasons, we are not going to single out specific failures here). While there have been some good results from several projects since 1992 (e.g. Kaurna, see below), Aboriginal people overall do not see as many positive outcomes from revival programmes as they would like. In large part this is the result of shortage of sufficient (continuity of) funding, lack of technical expertise, and lack of integration of school-based programmes with community language programmes. However, there are purely linguistic reasons too: Many revival efforts were not supported by a sound theoretical understanding of how successful language revival works. As pointed out by Thieberger (2002), decisions about the appropriate target for language maintenance programmes are too often driven by structural linguistics, where the supposed ideal is intergenerational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained, thus creating unrealistic expectations among the Aboriginal community.
This article is the first of its kind as it will innovatively draw crucial insights from 'Modern Hebrew' (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999), so far the most successful known reclamation attempt of a sleeping tongue. Zuckermann's (2008a, 2009, 2010, 2011) research on Israeli demonstrates which language components are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations and connotations. We should encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic, and not to chastise English loanwords and pronunciation, for example, within the emergent language. Applying such precious conclusions from Hebrew will closely assist Australian revivalists in being more efficient, urging them not to waste time and resources on Sisyphean efforts to resuscitate linguistic components that are unlikely to be revivable.
While the results the endeavors we are proposing here have considerable value as a research enterprise, one can also consider them in terms of a cost-benefit analysis (Mühlhäusler and Damania 2004, Walsh 2008): Language revitalization contributes to social reconciliation, cultural tourism (Clark and Kostanski 2005), capacity building, and improved community health for Indigenous peoples (Walsh forthcoming B). In the process of language revival, some Aboriginal people will go from being dysfunctional (cf. Sutton 2009) to well-balanced, positive people. The benefits to the wider community and to Australian society are immense.
Reversing language shift (RLS) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010, Walsh 2005a, Zuckermann 2011) is thus of great social benefit. Language revival does not only do historical justice and address inequality but can also result in the empowerment of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life.
Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name. Consequently, some Indigenous Australians do not find it important to revive their comatose tongue. We, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!'
Background: The Hebrew Revival
I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. (Haldane 1963: 464)
'Hebrew' is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.
Hebrew was spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. We believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)
For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was ‘clinically dead’. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.
Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language, identity and politics, and important practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language.
The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic: Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the 'substratum', whilst Hebrew is the 'superstratum' providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). According to Zuckermann's mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, Israeli is not only multi-layered but also multi-parental. A Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybrid, Israeli is both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-) European. It is based simultaneously on 'sleeping beauty' / 'walking dead' Hebrew and 'máme lóshn' (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to Israeli, and a plethora of other tongues spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s, e.g. Russian, Polish, Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Turkish, German, French and English.
The Success Rate of the Hebrew Revival
The vernacularization of Hebrew was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but we would roughly estimate that on a 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at seven. More specifically, we propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which Israeli can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit: 1 (i.e. European); discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; constituent/word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary: 10 (i.e. Hebrew).
The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables – not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as the symbolic father of Israeli, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman, 1858-1922), were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is therefore most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, when most native Israeli-speakers speak Israeli, their intonation is much more similar to that of Yiddish, the mother tongue of most revivalists, than to that of Arabic or any other Semitic language. It is high time to acknowledge that Israeli is very different from ancient Hebrew. We should embrace – rather than chastise – the multisourcedness of Israeli.
That said, the Hebrew revival cannot be considered a failure because without the zealous, obsessive, enthusiastic efforts of Ben-Yehuda and of teachers, writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals, social activists, political figures, linguists and others, Israelis would have spoken a language (such as English, German, Arabic or Yiddish) that could hardly be considered Hebrew. To call such a hypothetical language 'Hebrew' would have not only been misleading but also wrong. To call today’s Israeli 'Hebrew' may be puristic but not wrong: Hybridic Israeli is based on Hebrew as much as it is based on Yiddish. So, although the revivalists could not avoid the subconscious influence of their mother tongue(s), they did indeed manage at the same time to consciously revive important components of Hebrew.
Hybridity, Camouflage and the Congruence Principle
Israeli is a new hybrid language rather than an evolutionary phase of Hebrew. Yiddish is not a 'foreign language' vis-à-vis Israeli, and the word intuítsya 'intuition' – to give but one example out of thousands of alleged loan words – is not a loan word (from Yiddish intuítsye, Russian intuítsiya, Polish intuicja etc., all meaning 'intuition') but rather an integral part of Israeli from its very beginning.
According to the Congruence Principle, the more revivalists speak contributing languages with a specific linguistic feature, the more likely this feature is to prevail in the emergent language. Based on feature pool statistics, this principle weakens August Schleicher’s famous Family Tree theory in historical linguistics, which may give the wrong impression that every language has only one parent. For example, most revivalists spoke languages, mainly Yiddish, that lacked that Semitic pharyngeal gulp ‘ayin (represented, for instance, by the apostrophe in Zuckermann's Christian – actually Jewish – name Ghil‘ad). Naturally, their children – the ones who, in fact, shaped the real character of Israeli – could not buy the argument 'do as I say, don’t do as I do!' The result is that most Israelis do not have this sound in their speech.
Similarly, má nishmà, the common Israeli 'what’s up?' greeting, looks like a calque – loan translation – of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning 'what’s heard?' but functioning as a common greeting. However, a Romanian-speaking immigrant to Israel might have used má nishmà because of Romanian ce se aude, a Polish-speaker Jew because of Polish co słychać, and a Russian-speaker Что слышно chto slyshno, all meaning the same and functioning in the same way.
The distinction between forms and patterns is crucial here as it demonstrates multiple causation. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, 'the language defendants regiment' (cf. Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít 'Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew,' used to tear down signs written in 'foreign' languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the members of this group only looked for Yiddish forms, rather than patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak 'Hebrew.' The language defendants would thus not attack an Israeli speaker saying má nishmà. Ironically, even the language defendants regiment's anthem included calques from Yiddish.
Zuckermann (2011, forthcoming) analyzes the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g. crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) (Zuckermann 2003) and portmanteau blends (e.g. motel, from motor+hotel, or sprummer, from spring+summer) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect – often subconsciously – semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít 'firefly, glow-worm' – coined by poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaħelet 'burning coal, glowing ember.' Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaħelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in using an element associated with 'glow,' in fact replicates a European mindset, apparent for example in the Yiddish word glivórem, literally 'glow' (cf. gaħelet) + 'worm', or in German Glühwürmchen.
Native Israeli Speech and the Academy of the Hebrew Language
Since its conception, Israeli has been the subject of purism (the dislike of foreign words – as in Icelandic: Sapir and Zuckermann 2008) and the enforcement of 'correct' pronunciation. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for 'Hebrew', the Academy of the Hebrew Language (known in Israeli as haakademya lalashón haivrít) is funded by Israel's Ministry of Education. It superseded the (Hebrew) Language Council (váad halashón (haivrít)), which was established in 1889 – as a branch of Safá Brurá (Clear Language) – by Ben-Yehuda and colleagues. As defined in its constitution, the Academy's functions are: (1) To investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon according to its historical strata and layers; (2) To study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language; and (3) To direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, its daily and academic needs, by setting its lexicon, grammar, characters, orthography and transliteration [in fact, transcription].
The first goal is most useful, as Israeli is indeed a multi-layered language. For example, one could say both (a) khashkhú enáv, literally 'His eyes became dark,' meaning 'He saw black' (‘black’ in this context meaning ‘bad news’), and (b) niyá/naasá lo khóshekh baenáim, meaning the same, albeit structurally different. While khashkhú enáv is Hebrew, niyá lo khóshekh baenáim is a calque of the Yiddish phrase siz im gevórn fíntster in di óygn, which might in turn be an adaptation of the very Hebrew khashkhú enáv (transcribed here in its Israeli form, which would have been unintelligible for an ancient Hebrew-speaker).
Israeli has many other minimal pairs, such as asá din leatsmó and lakákh et hakhók layadáim, both referring to a person violating the law, with the latter being more colloquial; as well as lelót kayamím, literally 'nights as days' (also yamím kelelót, literally 'days as nights'), and misavív lashaón, literally 'round the clock,' both often referring to hard work.
Somewhat resembling the 'catastrophic success' of the 1928-1936 Turkish Language Revolution (see Lewis 1999), many referents have several Israeli signifiers, one of which is puristically Hebrew and the other, often more commonly used, 'foreign' (in fact, Israeli ab initio). These include many internationalisms such as opozítsya 'Opposition' (according to the Academy, the word should be negdá – cf. Hebrew néged 'against') and koalítsya 'Coalition' (according to the Academy: yakhdá – cf. Hebrew yaħad 'together').
However, goal (3), to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, is oxymoronic (cf. Zuckermann 2008b: 139). If the nature of a language is to evolve in a specific direction (cf. Sapir's 'drift,' the pattern of change in which the structure of a language shifts in a determinate direction), why direct its evolution by language policing?
From the Promised Land to the ‘Lucky’ Country
The three principles of linguistic revival and survival:
(1) If your language is endangered --> Do not allow it to
die!
(2) If your language died --> Stop, revive, survive!
(3) If you revive your language --> Embrace the
hybridity of the emergent language!
Questions of this kind, albeit in an implicit and sometimes confused fashion, are being raised within the context of Australian Aboriginal languages. Current language revival activities are worthy but often under-theorized. The tendency has been to attempt to revive the language en masse despite what has been indicated about the Hebrew rate of success for take up of particular components of language. There is a need to examine a range of existing language revitalization programmes with a view to assessing the rate of success for take up of particular components of language and at the same time adduce the preferences (and sometimes the prejudices) of the group in question (cf. Couzens and Eira forthcoming).
Indigenous Australians have been living in Australia for more than 40,000 years. Today Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders make up 2.6% of Australia's population. Unfortunately, one of the main findings of the most recent National Indigenous Languages Survey Report (2005) was that the situation of Australia’s languages is grave (in both senses). Of an original number of over 250 known Australian Indigenous languages, only about 145 Indigenous languages are still spoken and the vast majority of these, about 110, are critically endangered: they are spoken only by small groups of people, mostly over 40 years old. Eighteen languages are strong in the sense of being spoken by all age groups, but three or four of these are showing some disturbing signs of moving into endangerment. So of an original number of over 250 known Australian Indigenous languages, only 6% (i.e. 15) are in a healthy condition.
Aboriginal language revival began recently – from the late 1970s (Amery and Gale 2007) – and has therefore much to learn from other revival efforts, especially that of Hebrew, which began in the late nineteenth century. There has been little coordination among the geographically-scattered language revival efforts in Australia. Most recently, language revitalization practitioners have begun to share experiences at various conferences and workshops (Hobson et al. forthcoming). There is thus an urgent need for an on-the-ground, ongoing input, creating intellectual and practical synergy and complementing the mission of the regional Aboriginal language centres and the recently-established mobile language team based at the University of Adelaide – by adding significant advice based on scholarly and universal perspectives. Practical outcomes will include a useful handbook of the best practices for language revival in Australia (Christina Eira, pers. comm.), and an improved sense of well being in the local Aboriginal community.
There is community support in some parts of the country for revival and heritage learning programmes: either in reclamation proper (e.g. extensive courses similar to Israel’s ulpaním) or only in symbolic, postvernacular maintenance (teaching Aboriginal people some words and concepts related to the dead language – cf. postvernacular Yiddish among secular Jews in the United States – see Shandler 2005). At its broadest level language revival refers to the range of strategies for increasing knowledge and use of a language which is no longer spoken fully across all generations. In practice, however, this can range from largely symbolic uses of ancestral languages like naming buildings or places through to more constant involvement with the language through school-based language instruction (Walsh 2005a).
Comparative Analysis of Hebrew and Aboriginal Language Revival
Although they too were at the beginning very few in number, and encountered great hostility and animosity (e.g. by those who saw the revival as the desecration of a holy tongue), the Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with Australian revivalists. Consider the following:
(1) Documentation: extensive – consider, for example, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah.
(2) Accessibility: Jews have been exposed to literary Hebrew throughout the generations, e.g. when praying in the synagogue or when saying the blessing over the meal. It would be hard to find a Jew who did not have access to Hebrew (unless in totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union).
(3) Prestige: Hebrew was considered a prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for instance, whose Australian sociolinguistic parallel might be Aboriginal English). It is true that some Aboriginal languages are held in high regard by their owners/custodians but unfortunately usually not by the wider Australian society.
(4) Uniqueness: Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common (Aramaic was not as prominent), whereas there are dozens of 'sleeping' Aboriginal languages and it would be hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English. The revival of a single language is much more manageable than that of numerous tongues in varying states of disrepair.
(5) National self-determination: revived Hebrew was aimed to be the language of an envisioned state, where speakers of Revived Hebrew would eventually have the political power (cf. Yadin and Zuckermann 2010).
(6) Lack of ownership: Unlike in the case of Aboriginal languages (cf. Walsh 2002), anybody has the right to speak Hebrew, without getting permission from the Jews.
(7) Easy borrowing: Loanwords and foreign words are not considered theft. In fact, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda loved borrowing from Arabic, Aramaic and other Semitic languages.
(8) Lack of place restriction: Hebrew could be and was revived all over the globe – consider Haim Leib Hazan’s coinage mishkafáim ‘glasses’ in 1890 in Grodno (see Zuckermann 2003: 1-4).
(9) Multilingualism: Jews arriving in Eretz Israel in the time of the revival were used to multilingualism and did not have a ‘monolingual mindset’. For example, back in Europe many of them spoke Yiddish at home and Polish in the market, and prayed in Hebrew (and Aramaic) in the synagogue.
(10) Number: There are many more Jews than Aboriginal people in Australia.
But, as it happens, Aboriginal revivalists actually have some advantages vis-à-vis Hebrew revivalists. Consider the following:
(1) Deontological reason for the revival: As we see it, Aboriginal tongues deserve to be revived for historical, humanistic and social justice, inter alia addressing inequality (cf. Thieberger 1990). This can provide strength to the revival attempts. We hear again and again 'native title' but where is the 'native tongue title'? Is land more important than langue and (cultural) lens? And if land, langue and heritage are bound together as a trinity, then why ask for reparation only for land?
(2) Numerous utilitarian reasons for the revival: The revival of sleeping Aboriginal languages can result in personal, educational and economic empowerment, sense of pride and higher self-esteem of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life (see concluding remarks). The Hebrew revival had many less utilitarian purposes, the main one being simply the constitution of a unifying tongue to Jews from all over the world. It would have been unfair, for example, for Ladino-speaking Sephardim if German were selected.
(3) Governmental support: Although it could obviously be greater, the Australian government does support the reclamation and maintenance of Aboriginal languages, or at least there is an obvious address to apply for money from. This has not been the case in fin-de-siècle Palestine.
(4) Similarities between Aboriginal English and Aboriginal Languages: Aboriginal English (e.g. Nunga English in Adelaide), spoken by some revivalists, contain various linguistic features – such as connotations, associations, sounds and morphological characteristics like the dual – of the reclaimed Aboriginal languages at stake. One might perspicaciously argue that Israeli semantics, which is deeply modelled on Yiddish semantics, also maintains the original Hebrew semantics after all because Yiddish, a Germanic language with Romance substratum, was deeply impacted by Hebrew and Aramaic. However, the Yiddish dialects that have been the most influential ones in Israel, e.g. Polish Yiddish, are, in fact, the ones that underwent Slavonization from the thirteenth century onwards, when Jews moved from Germany to Slavonic-speaking areas in Eastern Europe. Aboriginal English is much younger and therefore is much more likely to retain features of Aboriginal languages, than Yiddish is to retain features of Hebrew.
Universal Constraints of Language Revival
And yet, although obviously language revival attempts should be tailored to the specific contexts, needs and desires of each community, there are some universal constraints that should be recognized. As we have already seen, Hebrew revivalists, who wished to speak pure Hebrew, failed in their imprisoning purism prism, the result being a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle Israeli language, both multi-layered and multi-sourced. Most relevantly, some Australian interest groups (cf. Tiwi in Dorian 1994: 481-4) get hung up on misled views akin to the slogan ‘Give me authenticity or give me death!’ (cf. ‘Give me Liberty, or give me Death!’, the famous quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention in America on 23 March 1775), where the death, of course, ends up being the Indigenous language they wish to save from ‘contamination’! (On authenticity and language revival, see also Wong 1999 and Hinton and Ahlers 1999.)
Why should we encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic? Purism creates unrealistic expectations that may discourage learners from acquiring the emerging language. A revived language should not be viewed negatively if it is seen to be influenced by a neighbouring language or by English. The use of words from a neighbouring language should not discredit the revived language. There might be some rare occasions when it is more appropriate for revivalists to favour purism – see Harlow (1993) on Maori. However, in the case of reclamation proper (i.e. the revival of a language that has no native speakers such as Hebrew), one must learn to embrace, celebrate and champion – rather than chastise – the inevitable hybridity of the emerging language.
One might argue that the difference between the conditions that surround Aboriginal languages and Israeli are so large that it is impossible to learn across these contexts. But denying universal traits or constraints in human language in general, and in reversing language shift in particular, is counter-productive. Linguistic reality lies between relativism and universalism. No progress will be made by turning a blind eye to any of these extremes. Based on a critical analysis of Israeli, one can predict accurately the situation in various reclaimed Aboriginal languages such as Kaurna [ga:na], a resurrected language spoken around Adelaide, which is the result of one of the most successful revival attempts in Australia – cf. Gumbaynggirr (Ash et. al. forthcoming), Ngarrindjeri, Walmajarri and Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay.
There are scholars, e.g. Dalby (2003: 250), who scoff at some attempts at reviving the use of an endangered language: 'this is no longer a language, any more than musicians are speaking Italian when they say andante and fortissimo. These are simply loanwords used in a special context'. A more balanced view is manifested in Crystal's (2000: 162) comments on Kaurna:
The revived language is not the same as the original language, of course; most obviously, it lacks the breadth of functions which it originally had, and large amounts of old vocabulary are missing. But, as it continues in present-day use, it will develop new functions and new vocabulary, just as any other living language would, and as long as people value it as a true marker of their identity, and are prepared to keep using it, there is no reason to think of it as anything other than a valid system of communication.
The impact of English (Aboriginal or Australian English) on reclaimed Kaurna is far-reaching. Consider the following:
* At the level of phonology, there are often spelling pronunciations, especially for sequences of er (as in yerlo ‘sea’ and yerta for instance), ur (as in purle or purlaitye). In classical Kaurna, the r in these words belonged with the consonant (it was be retroflex) but many times we hear an er vowel as in English slur or sir. The original vowel was /a/ in yerlo and yerta, and /u/ in purle and purlaitye. Stress is often placed on the second syllable rather than on the first (Amery 2000: 121-122; Amery and Rigney 2004: 2-3).
* At the level of vocabulary, there are many calques – see Amery 2000: 124, as well as Chapter 12 Wodlingga 'In the Home' (pp. 63-70), Chapter 15 Tidnaparndo 'Football' (pp. 81-84) and Chapter 16 Kuya Pirri-wirkindi 'Fishing' (pp. 85-88) in Amery (2007), where a range of calques have been developed – especially evident in the names of AFL football teams such as Kuinyunda Meyunna (lit. 'sacred men') for the St Kilda Saints. Knowingly – and jocularly – cricket (the sport game) was replicated as yertabiritti (the term for the insect with the same name in English) (Amery 2003: 86). It should be noted, however, that in reclaimed Kaurna there are relatively few loanwords/foreignisms from English per se, far less than we see in any ‘strong’ language such as Pitjantjatjara or Yolngu Matha.
* Constituent/word order is free in classical Kaurna as in other Aboriginal languages, though it tended to be SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Naturally, there are contemporary users of Kaurna who tend to produce more SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) sentences, replicating English (Amery and Rigney 2004: 5).
* English semantics tends to carry through to Kaurna words (Amery and Rigney 2004: 5-7).
* The most pervasive influence from English is at the level of discourse. Almost everything said or written is translated from English. Thus, the turn of phrase and the idiom are from English (Amery 2001a: 190-194; Amery 2001b; see also Amery and Rigney 2006).
And still, the impact of English on Kaurna is less than in many other revived languages in Australia – cf. the neighbouring Ngarrindjeri, where published texts are practically English calques: an isomorphic 1 to 1 translation of English, including the use of interrogative ‘where’ for ‘were’ and ‘thus’ for ‘the’. Case suffixes are used as prepositions – see p. iii of Reviving Languages: warranna purruttiappendi: tumbelin tungarar: renewal and reclamation programs for indigenous languages in schools (1999), as well as Rhonda Agius in Proctor and Gale (1997: 4-6).
We predict that any attempt to revive an Aboriginal language will result in a hybrid, combining components from Australian English, Aboriginal English, Kriol, other Aboriginal languages and the target Aboriginal tongue. But we are going to assist Aboriginal revivalists to make their efforts more efficient and to embrace hybridity.
Concluding Remarks
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. (Nelson Mandela)
This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.
There is a need to map the revival attempts throughout Aboriginal Australia by (1) assessing the success of the revival so far; and (2) categorizing the specific need on a continuum of revival efforts, e.g. reclamation (e.g. Kaurna), renewal (e.g. Ngarrindjeri) and revitalization (e.g. Walmajarri) – cf. other RE-terms to be defined such as restoration, resurrection, resuscitation, reinvigoration, reintroduction, regenesis, revernacularization, reawakening, rebirth and renaissance.
Needless to say, even if there is eventually a sound understanding and awareness of the linguistic/sociolinguistic issues involved and even if the endeavour is well-theorised, language revival efforts may well still fail. Internal factional politics are likely to be far more influential in deciding the fate of a language revival movement that any linguistic theory or lack of one. There is no doubt that the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language revival involves a long initial period of carefully observing, listening, learning and characterizing each indigenous community specifically. Only then can we inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be most useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.
While we know that language revitalization can have numerous beneficial effects, we also know that some revival efforts are more successful than others (see Walsh forthcoming A). A better understanding of success in this arena by surveying numerous language reinvigoration efforts in Australia, and by drawing on lessons from the Hebrew revival, will enable less waste of resources and better outcomes. Besides significant scholarly impact and intellectual benefits, the results of such endeavours will also improve substantially the future of Australia's Indigenous communities, promoting and maintaining their physical, spiritual and cultural good health through:
(1) Transformation of disturbed individuals;
(2) Capacity building: Some Aboriginal people will undertake training only because they are interested in language(s). However, what they will learn in the process are useful generic skills such as literacy, computer literacy, conducting research and giving speeches in public;
(3) Improved sense of well being in the local Aboriginal community;
(4) Reconciliation and potential decrease in racism towards Aboriginal people in some country centres;
(5) Promoting cultural tourism to Aboriginal areas in order to learn about their cultures and languages.
Regaining language is a life-changing experience for many Aboriginal people. One Aboriginal person has told us that he used to be angry, often drunk and in trouble with police and his home life was a mess. Two years later, when he had regained his language, his situation had turned around and his family life had greatly improved.
Through this and other experiences we became convinced that a small investment in language revitalization could yield very significant dividends. Language revival can result in the saving of vast amounts of money and resources going into housing, social services and health intervention to little effect. A small investment into language revitalization can make an enormous difference to society. Public health can benefit from language intervention.
To date such money as has been devoted to Aboriginal language revival and maintenance has not been well targeted. This is partly because Australian Indigenous language policies have been piecemeal and un-coordinated at best or otherwise non-existent or implicit (Liddicoat 2008, McKay 2007, 2009, Truscott and Malcolm forthcoming; see also http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/ aust/policy.html – accessed 6 July 2010). We aim at a better informed Indigenous language policy at the national level, as well as in particular institutional contexts. For instance, in considering Indigenous policies of Australian universities, Gunstone (2008: 107) complains: ‘it is apparent that universities are still largely failing to adequately address the educational needs of Indigenous staff, students and communities.’
As cellist Yo Yo Ma said on 28 November 2000 at the White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy:
A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
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Brief Bios:
Prof. Ghil'ad Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics of Endangered Languages and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and 211 Professor at Shanghai International Studies University. He is the author of Language Revival and Multiple Causation (Oxford Univ Press, forthcoming), Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli - A Beautiful Language) (Am Oved, 2008) and Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has taught e.g. at the Univ of Queensland, Univ of Cambridge and National Univ of Singapore, and has been research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center (Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (UT Austin) and Japan's National Language Research Institute. www.zuckermann.org
Ghil'ad Zuckermann's EMAIL: gzuckermann@gmail.com.
Since 1972 Dr Michael Walsh has conducted fieldwork in the Top End of the Northern Territory, mainly in the Darwin-Daly region. This has been a mixture of academic endeavours as well as consultancies since 1979 mainly relating to Aboriginal land issues. From 1999 he has participated in the revitalization of Aboriginal languages in NSW. From 1982 until 2005 he was part of the teaching staff of the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. Since then, he has continued his research interests especially through a large ARC grant involving a team of linguists and musicologists running from 2004 to 2010. http://azoulay.arts.usyd.edu.au/mpsong/
Michael Walsh's EMAIL: michael.walsh@sydney.edu.au
