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avh.unit.no>David Powers has obviously stirred up quite a wasp's nest with his "flame" on the relevance of the ONL project. I don't want to be accused of trying to go for (or jump down) Dave's throat, as some others seem to done in the lively discussion which followed his initial contribution. Iwould though, like to bring up the question of at least one family of minority languages and cultures which seems to have documented a particular ability to survive processes of decay and depletion due to their percieved (on the part of more dominant cultures) lack of value as language systems, dissolution of the political and cultural systems they coexist with, increasing levels of inter- and intracultural mobility for minority language users and minority culture members, development and dissemination of more and more knowledge to steadily increasing numbers of people by means of "majority" languages. In spite of an apparent complete lack of "survival value" within the "economy" of the lingustic and cultural systems of the world it would seem that this particular family of languages will probably manage to survive such processes for a very long time to come. As such they will surely be of great interest, not only as objects for study, but also as languages and cultures which should be actively promoted and developed. It is also important that the people responsible for the work of documentation, promotion and development are, to as large a degree as possible, themselves members of these cultures, and users of these languages. The particular family of languages and cultures I am referring to here is of course the various native sign languages and cultures of deaf people throughout the world. Why have these particular languages and cultures been so resilient? The most obvious reason is their essential functionality for the deaf and hard of hearing communities who have chosen to use, maintain and devlop them. Another important reason, which is closely linked to this particular functionality, is the fact that these languages and cultures represent an important, and in many cases, absolutely necessary, choice and are a prerequisite for development of a realistic, tenable and positive bi- and/or multicultural identity for the deaf and hard-of-hearing people who are speakers of these languages. (I use the term "speakers" here quite consciously by the way, in spite of the fact that it can seem somewhat anomalous do do so when talking about visual-spatial languages that do not involve the use of the channel we generally use for speech, i.e. the vocal-auditory channel. Up until quite recent times, the sign languages of deaf people have not had any status at all as "real languages" from the point of view of the majority cultures they exist in close relation to. In some darker periods of our collective history sign languages and the cultures of deaf people have even been systematically suppressed within education of the deaf, and well-meaning attempts have also been made to replace these languages with other types of visual-spatial code systems, developed with the aim of visualising spoken language structures. Interestingly enough, none of these constructed code-systems have shown any survival ability within the various communities and cultures of deaf people around the world. Sign languages have also survived in spite of the fact that no official writing systems have ever been developed for them. The cultures of deaf people, and their sign languages have been, and are still essentially transmitted and maintained orally. Sign languages and deaf people's cultures have constantly to compete with, and yet exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship to, the majority spoken and written languages that are all around them. What is becoming more and more apparent now though, is that deaf people's cultures and sign languages in general represent a vital resource for any society, in the sense that they constitute a pool of carefully refined procedural and propositional knowledge, built up over many generations, for how to successfully manage a life in a predominantly hearing culture without being able to hear sound, and even without having the possibility of naturally acquiring and/or maintaining full use of a spoken/ written language that can be 100% functional in everyday life together with people who hear. It might be interesting to hear how Dave (or others) would view this particular family of cultural an d linguistic minotities, within the framework of a language unification- type theory? Will the need for the knowledge resources sign language and deaf culture represent gradually disappear because deafness at some time in the future will be totally eradicated? What then will happen to those who suddenly become irretrievably deaf as a result of accidents etc., or children who are born deaf in spite of the last advances in genetic engineering etc? When languages and cultures disappear it is not just the language that disappears, but the procedural and propositional knowledge bases that go with them; knowledge bases which only to a very small degree have been written down and formalized, even within our own more "advanced" westernized cultures, but especially in more orally literate cultures. pat coppock dept of applied linguistics university of trondheim n-7055 dragvoll norwayMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
dfki.uni-sb.de>A small thought experiment: suppose that I, as a linguist, were studying language extinction processes. Should I attempt to further (would I be justified in furthering) my scholarly ends by discouraging indigenous literacy movements? What about externally motivated ones? Another one: suppose a language that is widely spoken in some places is threatened with extinction in another. Should it receive the same attention that a language faced with global extinction might? Does it matter whether this language is a primary vehicle of cultural transmission? Whether the culture so transmitted is distinctive? Does it matter whether the threatened community has, in practise, access to the publication facilities of the broader language?Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue