LINGUIST List 33.1675
Wed May 11 2022
Review: Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Zuckermann (2020)
Editor for this issue: Billy Dickson <billydlinguistlist.org>
Date: 01-Mar-2022
From: Patrick Heinrich <patrick.heinrich
unive.it>
Subject: Revivalistics
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AUTHOR: Ghil'ad Zuckermann
TITLE: Revivalistics
SUBTITLE: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2020
REVIEWER: Patrick Heinrich, Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia
INTRODUCTION
The first thing that draws the reader’s attention when picking up Revivalistics is that it does not use terms such as “language endangerment”, “endangered languages”, or “language death” on its cover. It seems that many have grown weary of the alarming tone that has accompanied the topic over the past decades (Hill 2002). The field has moved on, and quantification of languages in danger of extinction, decreasing numbers of speakers, or hyperbolic statements such as that the survival of humanity may be at peril if languages are not saved have given way to more nuanced, situated, and user-centered accounts. This is a welcome development. The field of study has matured. There are good reasons for a change in tone, and in structure. To start with, the study of endangered languages has grown into a large-scale field and no longer needs to call for attention in the way it had to in the 1990s (Krauss 1992). At the same time, the study of language endangerment has developed unevenly, with language documentation and language archiving witnessing a notable upsurge and new developments, while the field of sociolinguistics has largely remained centered on the by now classical works of Gal (1979), Dorian (1981), and Fishman (1991, 2001).
What then can Zuckermann’s book contribute to the sociolinguistics of language endangerment and revitalization? His new term “revivalistics” brings together the reclamation of languages that are no longer spoken, the revitalization of languages where domains of language use have been almost completely lost, and the reinvigoration of languages where language utility is diminished. The book tackles revivalistics from two main perspectives. Part One discusses the reclamation of Hebrew. Part Two discusses practical lessons drawn from the Hebrew reclamation for other endangered languages in the world, most prominently Aboriginal languages in Australia. The two parts are only loosely connected, and one can read them separately.
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
The book starts with a brief introduction which describes the structure of the book and defines the term revivalistics. It announces its focus on speakers rather than on languages.
Chapter 1 is Zuckermann’s original analysis of the Hebrew language reclamation. It is a critical account of both the linguistic outcome of this reclamation, as well as of the linguistic research and political and ideological debates that accompanied the reclamation process. Already the terminological multiplicity we find for this case hints at the fact that this pioneering language reclamation has been fraught with conflict: “Israeli, Reclaimed Hebrew, (spoken) Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, Contemporary Hebrew, Hebrew Jewish, etc.” (p. 23). Zuckermann argues that the outcome of reclamation is a mixed language, and he therefore proposes the term “Israeli” to be most adequate. Two principles, he maintains, have shaped Israeli: the founder principle and the congruence principle. The former claims that the first generation of settlers in a new territory or of a newly reclaimed language has a large impact on the language structure even if the number of individuals is small. The fact that the pioneers of the Hebrew language reclamation spoke Yiddish is therefore important. The congruence principle, on the other hand, maintains that a linguistic feature is more likely to be incorporated into the revived language if it is shared across many languages. According to Zuckermann, we must expect these principles to shape any outcome of language revival and, hence, “one should expect to end up with a hybrid” (p. 33) in general.
Chapter 2 is a detailed discussion of crosslinguistic influences in revived Hebrew on the main levels of description. This chapter is language-focused, and it is richly documented by examples. The data presented underline Zuckermann’s claim that revived languages are necessarily of hybrid character. It is therefore not possible to see revived languages simply as a linear development from the formally dormant (“extinct”) language to the reclaimed language.
Chapter 3 shifts focus from language structures to language ideologies which have accompanied and rationalized the reclamation process in Israel. While the processes discussed in Chapter 2 were subconscious, those in Chapter 3 are of a conscious nature. This chapter provides a detailed discussion of language nationalism and lexical modernization in Israel. These developments are religiously and culturally conflicted, leading Zuckermann to observe an “absence of a unitary civic culture among citizens who seem increasingly to share only their language” (p. 149).
Chapter 4 gives details on how language ideology has shaped the work of the Hebrew Language Academy. The Academy, established in 1953, was tasked “to direct the development of Hebrew in the light of its nature” (p. 151). This ideologically contradictory view on language – language as an artifact versus language as a (quasi) natural entity – manifests itself in conceptual tensions. These have resulted in strong prescriptivism and criticism of the ways that the reclaimed language is used. More recently, the Academy has started to acknowledge actual speech. Zuckermann depicts how it has been slow to move from the former to the latter position, and he argues that the Academy should have been dissolved once the language had successfully been reclaimed.
Chapter 5 marks the last part on the reclamation of Hebrew. Zuckermann uses Google Books to analyze publications in Hebrew and reclaimed Hebrew. He terms this kind of study “culturomics”, by analogy to the study of genomics. He studies the “sequencing” of cultural concepts encoded in language across history. This allows him to shed light on historical developments and on the outcome of language contacts, which leads Zuckermann to conclude that “[t]he Hebrew revival is complete” (p. 184). Put simply, he shows that the reclaimed language now fully reflects the communicative needs of contemporary society in Israel.
Starting with Chapter 6, we move into the second topic of the book, that is, considerations of what can be learned from the Hebrew reclamation for revivalistics elsewhere. Chapter 6 features, among other things, a structured comparison between Hebrew and Aboriginal language reclamation in Australia. With this chapter the emphasis starts to shift from historical and linguistic details to issues such as wellbeing, empowerment, and health. Language reclamation is predicted to “become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing” (p. 187). To do so, revivalistics as delineated by Zuckermann needs to be trans-disciplinary and to involve the study of language from a plethora of perspectives. He exemplifies this by discussing language revitalization from the points of view of architecture, music, theatre, and art (pp. 204-206).
Chapter 7 explores the role of technology in revivalistics. More precisely, this chapter depicts the use of technology in the efforts of reclaiming the formerly dormant Barngarla language in Australia, a project to which Zuckermann has devoted most of his time and energy over the last decade. This chapter explores two topics. One is a book by a nineteenth century missionary on Barngarla that is now central in the reclamation processes, and the second is the appropriation and adaptation of the information in this book in a Barngarla dictionary app.
Chapter 8 is about legal issues and language rights in the Australian context, and Zuckermann proposes compensation for linguistic and cultural oppression (“linguicide”) that lead to language shift and loss. Zuckermann argues that there is an ethical responsibility on the side of the government to revitalize Aboriginal languages in Australia, and he explores the legal possibilities of establishing a Native Tongue Title Fund to which Aboriginal language groups could apply.
Chapter 9 concludes this book. It discusses links between language and wellbeing. Some attention has been paid recently to the fact that language loss negatively affects mental and physical health. Zuckermann summarizes such research and, most importantly, adds observations in the other direction (i.e. language revival improves wellbeing) from his own involvement with the Barngarla community in the Eyre Peninsula in Southern Australia.
CRITICAL DISCUSSION
Revivalistics is an unusual book in that it consists of two parts that are only loosely connected. Actual lessons from the Hebrew reclamation experience consist in showing that language purism is a major problem in language revitalization, and that the reclaimed, revitalized, or reinvigorated language will bear strong traces of the dominant or replacing languages that language activists already speak. In the case of Hebrew, reclaimed Hebrew shows notable influences from Yiddish. This is an important insight, and this point is forcefully and repeatedly made in the book.
“Revivalistics” is meant to fulfill two objectives. One is to distinguish different sociolinguistic situations of language endangerment. There are many good reasons for doing so. Reclaiming a dormant language or reinvigorating a retreating language are very different activities. The second distinctive function is the transdisciplinarity of the field of study. Zuckermann delivers mostly with regard to the second point. He does not purposely explore the social and linguistic differences between types of language endangerment in his book. However, anybody looking for transdisciplinary ideas of how to study or practically approach an endangered language will find many new and promising ideas in this book. These are mainly presented as suggestions that derive from Zuckermann’s own observation of language endangerment situations around the world. They are rarely spelled out as a research program or accompanied by empirical data. Vignettes (and jokes) fulfil the role of illustrating his ideas. The second part of the book is therefore often more inspirational than empirical, but that is not a bad thing for a field of study that has been conceptually stagnating over the past years.
In large parts the book very directly reflects the life of the author, and this makes for an interesting read, albeit one that is less structured than usually expected. This book does not therefore suggest itself as a new textbook for teaching the subject at hand. The book is too fragmented, does not give a state-of-the-art overview, is anecdotal over large parts, and does not introduce or define key concepts and research methodologies. Julia Sallabank’s (2013) book “Attitudes to endangered languages” would be a more appropriate choice for a course textbook here. Specialists to the field will be interested in the book though, particularly in the detailed accounts of language hybridization in reclaimed Hebrew and in the many research ideas proposed in the second part of the book. Individual chapters can be assigned for reading in classes. Chapter 2, “‘Nother tongue: Subconscious cross-Fertilization between Hebrew and its revivalists’ mother tongues”, Chapter 6 “Stop, revive, survive”, and Chapter 9 “Our ancestors are happy: Language revival and mental health” come to mind here. This last chapter on the connection of language and wellbeing has the potential to move the field of study into a new direction, a direction where the topic of language endangerment is placed in a new context. Research into this direction, both qualitative and quantitative, could well produce powerful arguments about why language endangerment matters for speakers of endangered languages, and could lead to further maturation and development of the field of study.
REFERENCES
Dorian, Nancy C. 1981. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gal, Susan 1979. Linguistics: Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. San Francisco: Academic Press.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, Joshua A. 2001. Can Threatened Languages be Saved? Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Hill, Jane H. 2002. “Expert rhetorics” in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2): 119-133.
Krauss, Michael. 1992. The world’s languages in crisis. Language 68 (1): 4-10.
Sallabank, Julia. 2013. Attitudes to endangered languages: Identities and policies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Patrick Heinrich is professor of Japanese Studies and Sociolinguistics at Ca'Foscari University in Venice. He has coedited the Handbook of Ryukyuan Languages with Shinsho Miyara and Michinori Shimoji (de Gruyter Mouton 2015) and the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics with Yumiko Ohara (Routledge 2019).
Page Updated: 11-May-2022