Maintaining Languages What Works? What Doesn't?

Maintaining Languages What Works? What Doesn't? (1)
Joshua Fishman


The last time many of us were assembled at this university Dang Pham, Deputy Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, indicated that the United States Government recognizes a special debt of responsibility to assist Native American peoples to foster and strengthen their languages. This second conference at Northern Arizona University was to be a more concrete step in that direction, listening to ideas, perhaps formulating plans that could benefit from such support, and I am sure that all of you are going to be very alert, just as I am, are going to be very alert, to see if any of the promises that were made at the first meeting will materialize. It is an understatement to say that I am pleased and honored to be here. The opportunity to interact with American Indian languages and their activists is an experience that very few sociolinguists in the United States have been able to have. The reason old-timers like myself still come to these meetings is because sometimes we hear a younger colleague saying things that make us understand language maintenance even better than before, let alone finding out what they are doing, which is what we really have to keep up with.[continue]

Joshua Fishman : What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?

G. Cantoni (Ed.) (1996), Stabilizing Indigenous Languages
Flagstaff: Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona University


What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?(1)
Joshua Fishman


The first paper that I wrote in 1948 on native languages had to do with what is the impact of bilingualism on students. There were still parents then who were concerned that if their children learned another language it would ruin their English accent. If you would hear the tones of another languages every time they spoke English, how would they get a job and what would people think of them? Today, forty-five years later, we are still not "home" at convincing public opinion and the authorities that it is worth having all the languages we have today. Therefore, I want to start with this question, "What is lost when a language is lost?" It is amazing how people are uncomfortable about answering that question. I remember my mother always telling me, "When you start off a talk, make sure people know what the question is and ask a good question. A good question is worth everything." And I would say to her, "Ma, you know, Americans, they start off a conference with a joke. You have to tell a joke for people to know that you're about to speak?" She said, "Jokes? Ask a good question" That is an old Jewish tradition, if you have a good question, you have something worthwhile to worry about.

Attitudes toward language-loss depend on your perspective. When a language is lost, you might look at that from the perspective of the individual. Many individuals suppressed their language and paid the price for it in one way or another -- that remaining, fumbling insecurity when you are not quite sure whether you have the metaphor right in the expression that you are going to use and you know the one that comes to mind is not from the language that you are speaking at the moment. So, there is an individual price, in every sense.

You can also speak from the point of view of the culture lost. The culture has lost its language. What is lost when the culture is so dislocated that it loses the language which is traditionally associated with it? That is a serious issue for Native Americans. We can ask it from the national point of view. What is lost by the country when the country loses its languages? We have had this very haphazard linguistic book-keeping where you pretend nothing is lost -- except the language. It is just a little language. But, after all, a country is just the sum of all of its creative potential. What does the country lose when it loses individuals who are comfortable with themselves, cultures that are authentic to themselves, the capacity to pursue sensitivity, wisdom, and some kind of recognition that one has a purpose in life? What is lost to a country that encourages people to lose their direction in life?

Today, I would like to just talk about language loss from only one of these perspectives, the perspective of the culture. Because losing your language is, technically, an issue in the relationship between language and culture. What is the relationship between language and culture? Is it like the relationship of my handkerchief and my trousers: you can take it out and throw it away and put another handkerchief in? Or is there some kind of more substantive relationship between a language and culture? Even there, there are various perspectives. There is an "outsider," often disciplinary, perspective as we anthropologists and linguists sit and think about it. When we consider the relationship between language and culture, it occurs to us as outsiders, not being members of those cultures, what the relationship might be and then we try to gather insightful comments, even from the outside. There is a kind of lexical or, I would say, an indexical relationship between language and culture. A language long associated with the culture is best able to express most easily, most exactly, most richly, with more appropriate over-tones, the concerns, artifacts, values, and interests of that culture. That is an important characteristic of the relationship between language and culture, the indexical relationship.

It is not a perfect relationship. Every language grows; every culture changes. Some words hang on after they are no longer culturally active. "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey." Well, who knows what a tuffet is any more, and you can not find anybody who knows what curds and whey are any more without doing research. Those are frozen traces. Even if there is often a good relationship between the words of the language and the concerns of the culture, there are more important relationships between language and culture than the indexical one.

The most important relationship between language and culture that gets to the heart of what is lost when you lose a language is that most of the culture is in the language and is expressed in the language. Take it away from the culture, and you take away its greetings, its curses, its praises, its laws, its literature, its songs, its riddles, its proverbs, its cures, its wisdom, its prayers. The culture could not be expressed and handed on in any other way. What would be left? When you are talking about the language, most of what you are talking about is the culture. That is, you are losing all those things that essentially are the way of life, the way of thought, the way of valuing, and the human reality that you are talking about.

There is another deep relationship between language and culture, the symbolic relationship. That is, the language stands for that whole culture. It represents it in the minds of the speakers and the minds of outsiders. It just stands for it and sums it up for them -- the whole economy, religion, health care system, philosophy, all of that together is represented by the language. And, therefore, any time when we are at outs with some other culture, we begin to say snide things about the language. "Oh, it sounds so harsh. And it sounds so cruel" because we think its speakers are cruel or it sounds so poor or it sounds so primitive because we think they are primitive. The language symbolizes for us the whole relationship.

Actually I do not care much for this presentation of the outside view that I have made to you. It is a highly intellectualized abstraction. If you talk to people about what the language means to them, if you talk to members of the culture, they do not mention indexicality. They do not say anything about its symbolism for the whole ball of wax. They talk in totally different terms. And this tells you what they think they lose. They tell you some things about the sanctity of the language. Sanctity is not a little thing to throw around. At least, I have never felt so. Now sometimes you do not exactly mean holy -- holy, holy, holy. But nevertheless, when people tell you that there is a cultural view of how that language came about, that it came to be when the earth was created, when the worlds were created, when heaven and earth was created, when humanity was created, they are giving you what you might think of as a myth, but the importance of it is beyond its truth value. That is actually the definition of a myth -- something that is so important that you hold on to it because it has an importance beyond its truth. They may have the view that it was created before the creation of the world, as white fire or black fire. Every time the Lord spoke out, it came out as white fire or black fire in their own ethnocultural letters. That may sound ridiculous to you, but it is a sense of sanctity. People tell you things like that; ordinary people in ordinary Native American groups will tell you things like that. They will tell you things that have to do with the great Creator. They will tell you about the morality that is in the language. Morality is, after all, just sanctity in operation. The things you have to do to be good, to be a member in good standing, to meet your commitments to the creator. Some languages that are holy in themselves, and other languages have brought holy thoughts and holy dictums and holy commandments. People tell you metaphors of holiness. This is the most common thing, the most common expression of holiness that people tell you about their language. And that means they are going to lose the metaphor about the language being the soul of the people The language being the mind of the people. The language being the spirit of the people. Those are just metaphors, but they are not innocent metaphors. There is something deeply holy implied, thereby, and that is what would be lost. That sense of a holy, a component of holiness that pervades people's life the way the culture pervades their life, through the language.

Another dimension of what people tell you about when they tell you about language and culture is why they like their language, why they say it is important to them. They tell you about kinship. They tell you that their mother spoke the language to them, their father spoke the language, their brothers, the sisters, the uncles, the aunts, the whole community. All the ones who loved them spoke the language to them when they were children. Just before their mother died she spoke the language to them. All the endearments, all the nurturing, that is kinship is tied into a living organism of a community by people who know each other, and they know they belong together. That is what the old sociologists call "gemeinschaft." We belong together. We have something in common. We are tied to each other through the language. That precious sense of community is not a thing to lose just as is the sense of holiness. Woe to the people who have lost the sense of holiness, where nothing matters, and woe to the people who have lost a commitment one to the other. And that is what people tell you about when they tell you about their language, and that is neither the anthropological nor any other exterior view of the relationship between language and culture. It is not an intellectualization, because it is so emotionally suffused and focused on the internal experience.

Another thing people tell you about their language is that they have a sense of responsibility for it. They should do something for it. That is a rarer, but not altogether rare, aspect of what people tell you about their language. "I should do something. I should do more for it. I haven't done the right thing by it. I'm glad I'm working for it," as if there were a kind of a moral commitment here and a moral imperative. It is a value. It is kinship-related. And, if I am a decent person, I owe something to it for what it has given me -- love and nurturance, connection.

These three things taken together, this sense of sanctity, this sense of kinship, and this sense of moral imperative, are not a bad componential analysis of positive ethnolinguistic consciousness. People are positively conscious of their language, without having taken a course in linguistics to spoil it for them, to intellectualize it for them. When they are positively ethnolinguistically conscious, they tell you deeply meaningful things to them. That is what they would lose if they lost the language. They would lose a member of the family, an article of faith, and a commitment in life. Those are not little things for people to lose or for a culture to lose.

And so, therefore, it is no surprise that the generalized topic of this conference, "reversing language shift" or "stabilizing indigenous languages," represents an ideal for literally millions of people on all continents. That is a good thing to realize. Small Native American communities might think that they are the only ones out there in the cold that have to worry about this. That is not so. There are millions upon millions of people around the world that are working for their language on all continents. In Europe, Irish, Basque, Catalan, and Frisian, just to name obvious cases, are threatened.

I remember when I was in Egypt, a Copt coming up to me and, realizing what I was interested in (people have to feel you are sympathetic before they tell you deeply painful things), told me how they were working on reviving Coptic and had made little books for their children in Coptic. He wondered if I wanted to see them. Coptic has not been spoken vernacularly for thousands of years and they were trying to revive it. I also had conversations recently with Afrikaans speakers. Now that South Africa has set apartheid aside, the language most likely to suffer is Afrikaans. English is going to be the link language. Nine or ten other African languages are going to be declared as national languages. The language that will probably come out holding the short end of the stick is the language of the previous regime, the language that has a symbolic association with apartheid. That is not the only symbolic association you should have with it; however, Afrikaans is already losing status at all levels.

In Asia and the Pacific those aboriginal and Australian languages that have survived are now having much "rescue work" being done on them. One example is Maori, an indigenous language of New Zealand. I recently met with a visitor from there who told me that there are now six hundred schools of a nursery-kindergarten, child-care nature to get children who are not Maori-speaking to be taken care of day after day by Maori-speaking older folks. There are now an increasing number of elementary schools where they are continuing Maori language instruction.

So on every inhabited continent, not just immigrant North America, people share concerns over indigenous languages. You can meet with representatives of the Greek church and of the Armenian church in the United States, and they will tell you about their efforts. They ask "Can you be Greek Orthodox without knowing Greek?" To them this is an American aberration; it never happened before in Greek history. "Can you be Armenian Orthodox without knowing Armenian?" Armenians have a saint associated with their language. That is how holy they feel Armenian is. The alphabet is of saintly, sanctified origin. But in America the question has arisen "Can you be Armenian without the language?" Spanish, which is a colonial language, has had much language loss associated with it, particularly in New York City. There is now an inter-generational study that confirms it, following up the same people and their children. "Can you be Hispanic without speaking Spanish?" It is a new question to ask, and the truth is that everybody now has a nephew or a niece who does not speak any Spanish. Something is felt to be deeply wrong there, and the sense of loss is very deep.

So members of indigenous language communities wanting to revive languages, wanting to strengthen languages, wanting to further languages, are in good company. They are in the company of many people who have tried very hard to do somewhat similar and sometimes very similar things, and there are some successes to talk about, although on the whole, relatively speaking, it is not a good business to be in. It is never good, my mother told me, to be poor and old and sick. And it is never good to be a member of a small, weak, and economically poor culture. But we really cannot pick our mothers, and we cannot pick our cultures. If you work for your culture, you have a sense of gratification that is at least a partial compensation. And this is being done to such an extent all over the world that I think it is high time we got together to share experiences, to share failures, because it is important to know about failures and to share successes. The successes keep us from burning out. And it is important to know the failures because if you do not know the failures then you repeat them. If you do not know that something has been tried time and time again and has not worked out, then you do it yourself because you do not know it has failed and it sounds good to you. There are a number of reasons I think it is important for us to start out realizing that language restoration is, at best, a very hard job.

There are many reasons why there are so many more failures than successes in stabilizing weak languages. First of all, whenever a weak culture is in competition with a strong culture, it is an unfair match. The odds are not encouraging for the weak. They never are. Whatever mistakes are made, there is not enough margin for error to recover from them. It is like a poor man investing on the stock market. If you do not hit it off, you do not have anything to fall back on. Small weak cultures, surrounded by dominant cultures, dependent on a dominant culture, and dislocated by those very cultures, and yet needing those cultures, are not to be envied. They have undertaken to resist the biggest thing around, and frequently, they begin to do so when it is too late.

There is a kind of resistance to the very idea that something is happening to their language. "Oh, it'll pick up. Oh, it happened before. Oh, the younger generation will come around. When they get older, they'll start talking it." Doing it too late, can be too late in several ways. First of all, it can be too late biologically. That is, sometimes cultures "catch on" to that something should be done when there are no longer people around of child-bearing age. The older people around may even be talking the language, and enjoying it, and joking in it, telling stories in it, and doing all the traditional things in it, but they are not likely to have any more children. In terms of a kind of self-sustaining, inter-generational link, it is now too late for the usual things. You might still try something, but it is like freezing an embryo and then trying to bring it back a hundred years later. There are some unusual things one can still try to do for a language that no longer has a natural generational flow, but, in most cases, it is too late because those unusual things are really very unusual and really hard to do.

It is usually too late ideologically or, if you like, culturally, by then, because a new modus vivendi has been worked out. When languages die, people do not stop talking. Cultures do not fold up and silently steal off into the night. They go on and they talk the new language. They go on in the other language; they work out a new relationship between language and culture. The relationship is detachable; it is dislocated; it takes a lot of time; and it takes a lot of doing to once more have a traditionally associated language, having once lost one. Meanwhile, you have another language that has already entered the tent. People have said, "Well, we can be, whatever, Chippewa, Seneca, Blackfoot, whatever, we can be it in English." That is another language-culture relationship, and, because of that new relationship, it becomes very difficult to bring back and to strengthen the old language, which is already undergoing so many stresses.

Another reason why language restoration is relatively unsuccessful, with all the commitment that I have mentioned to you, despite all the sense of holiness, despite all the sense of kinship, despite all the sense of commitment, is because people do not know what to do. It is like fighting a disease without having an idea of what to do. People generally do not understand the difference between, for example, mother tongue acquisition, mother tongue use, and mother tongue transmission. They are not the same thing. So, they frequently settle for acquiring the language not as a mother tongue, but during the school experience. By then it is not the mother tongue, because they already have another mother tongue. And schools are not inter-generational language transmission agencies. Schools just last a certain number of hours and a certain number of years and then, after that, they are over. How is the language learned there going to be transmitted to the next generation? So because of this confusion, having devoted a number of hours per week, per year, at school for a certain number of years, people frequently conclude, because the children are bright and pick up language, that they have done their bit.

But they have not started a system going that is self-renewing, which is self-replenishing because after school there are many years until that child has his or her children and could pass the language on. That is really a terribly important issue, to realize that the school itself is not going to transmit it to the next generation because the society has not set up a transmission mechanism that picks up after school. School is a wonderful agency, and a crucial agency for particular aspects of language use, like literacy, versatility, or formality. But that is neither acquisition of the mother tongue nor transmission of the mother tongue. Finally, not knowing what to do and not having things like this clarified for them, people start altering all kinds of things simultaneously and that is about as desirable as taking all kinds of medicines simultaneously because you might hit upon one that might help you. But think about all the other things that are going on there that are expensive to do, which are disappointing when they do not work out.

So what to do is really a terribly important issue and what to do when is a very important issue. For example, you might have someone suggest,

Listen, the most important newspaper in this country is The New York Times. Why do not we take out full-page ads in Navajo in The New York Times and that will show everybody that we've got a very decent language here. That should really clinch it. We are always using their language. Let them see our language when they open up their newspaper.

Well, it is just not the right thing to do. It is not a productive thing to do.

The most productive thing to do really depends on the stage that you are at.(2)

Or the nature of the impairment or, if you like, the nature of the threat or the seriousness of the danger. Is the problem, for example, which is currently worrisome, that the mother tongue does not have recognition in the inter-ethnic work sphere? That is a problem among the Pennsylvania German (Pennsylvania Dutch) today. There is no more land to buy in Lancaster County. A good proportion of the youngsters marry and must go off to Kansas or some other place where there is still land, or they go to work in some factory in town. When they work at the factory in town, since they all know English anyway, they talk English to each other, not only to others working in the factory, and the elders are very concerned.

If that is the problem with the language, then you are in a certain stage of dislocation that is not very far from the transmission stage. Everybody may still be acquiring the language in the orthodox community as their mother tongue and using it in their regular services, but of the maybe four to five thousand languages in the world, the majority are not being used in the inter-ethnic work force. The majority even of those that are hale and hearty, so you have to see that problem in perspective.

Is the problem that the mother tongue is neither used in the school nor in classroom education nor in literacy? Well, that is a more serious problem because literacy provides a community or it creates access to communication across time and space. It creates a community over time and space. We can talk to people who are no longer alive through literacy. We can talk to people not yet alive and far, far away through literacy. There is also a prestige factor when non-literate languages are in touch with literate languages, and the school is the literacy-conveying agency of this era. It was not always; it was not everywhere, but again I would like to assure you that most of the healthy languages of this world today are not (or not strongly) related to literacy and are not considered exceptionally school-worthy. That does not mean it is no problem because maybe it is a problem wherever you are. It definitely means there is support for acquiring literacy in some other language and that means you have got to be able to bear the strain between the language of literacy and the language of home, intimacy, love, and sanctity. You have to be able to bear that strain, that this one language, which is not yours, is the one of literacy and that one, which is yours, is not the language of literacy.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain minority languages when the print and non-print media are impinging on them more than ever before. If the lack of literacy in your language is a particular weakening factor, then literacy must be developed in your language. But it will not be transmitted to the next generation automatically. The funny thing about literacy, even in languages of great literacy, is that every generation starts off with zero literacy. Even though their parents are literate. I know there are two percent of parents who come from Harvard graduate schools, whose children start off literate even before kindergarten, but that is not yet a wide-spread phenomenon. Every generation as a rule starts off illiterate and has to be made literate from ground zero. That is not the way mother tongues work. Mother tongues are self-sustaining and a new generation does not wait until it goes to school to get its mother tongue. It usually gets its mother tongue at home in the community, in the neighborhood, among the loved ones -- the ones shaping the identity of the child. And if that is what your language lacks, then that is a very serious problem indeed if you want to hand it on to another generation as a vernacular. But something can still be done about that. I would say even when there are no more speakers of child-bearing age, when there are no more fluent speakers, something can still be done, but I doubt whether a full-page ad in The New York Times is exactly what to do at any particular time.

Let us turn our attention to different kinds of things that could be tried. Some of the things that could be tried, some of the things that should be avoided. For example, do not start too high. That is The New York Times start. Do not start there. Do not start too far away, if you are interested in the mother tongue being self-sustaining. Do not start too far away from things that have to do with home, family, and community on an inter-generational basis. That is where a mother tongue or vernacular is handed on. Particularly do not start too far away if you are weak and your language is about to crumble because it might crumble in another generation while you were paying attention to full page ads in The New York Times.

When Hebrew was being revived -- a very unlikely success story -- it had not been spoken in two thousand years, and those who knew the language best were opposed to its vernacular use. It was revived through terminologies, first by working out terminologies for carpentry and for kindergarten. Very close to what you need to have for every day, what adults needed every day and what teachers needed every day with those new children who were going to be the first children to be given the language very early, but not by their parents because their parents did not speak it. Rather by the few teachers who had learned to speak it. They were the ones to whom the children were entrusted. Children did not live with their parents. They lived in the children's home in a kibbutz with those teachers, the few teachers who had forced themselves to learn how to speak it, not naturally but fluently. They needed a vocabulary for kindergarten, and the parents needed a vocabulary for carpentry. So, start low. Start exactly where the mother tongue starts and try to aim at that. Even the school can help you aim at that. Another bit of advice is, do not concentrate along institutional lines. Most languages are not institutional, but informal and spontaneous. That is where language lives. Children live; they play; they laugh; they fall; they argue; they jump; they want; they scream.

When the illegal Basque schools were working under the Franco regime, they became underground schools. It was prohibited to speak Basque in public because the Basques had resisted Franco, the Fascist dictator, and had resisted him bitterly until the end. Franco got even with them. They were arrested; they were punished; they were killed; they were shot; and their language was outlawed and was laughed off the stage as vulgar, barbarous, barbaric, uncouth, and animalistic. So they had to run primary schools and pre-schools centered around resistance. They provided nursery and child care when you started school, and they provided health care for people who were afraid to visit the doctor. Because of their Basque nationalist association, doctors were afraid to treat them.

They did not institutionalizing Basque on a narrow basis. Quite the contrary, the school was a haven in the society, an underground parallel society. The schools were creating their own cultural space. Creating cultural space is very important for a language if it is to become competitive within its own culture.

I remember when the psychologist John MacNamara told a story about having studied Irish all his childhood in school. He was scolded one day by the lady who ran a candy store. He had just bought the candy from her and began talking English to his sister. "You have learned Irish all your life. How come you're speaking English? You should be talking Irish to your little sister." Later, out on the street, the sister asked him, "Is Irish really for talking?" That really did happen. It had not occurred to them that Irish was for talking. It was a school subject like geography and arithmetic. How many people go down the street talking geography or arithmetic? So a real -- not institutional -- social space has to be created for the language. And in the revivalist movement that Irish went through, they tried to create that space. A young adult community, a sports community, a language community for young people. All-Irish, mainly Irish, and partly Irish schools were recognized by the government, but not really very sympathetically recognized. It was a kind of tokenism. The school has to go beyond the tokenism. We must know enough to beware of tokenism. The Romansh and Friulians have an exchange program between their respective districts, all over those little valleys where they may live just a couple of miles apart but will never see each other. They send tapes to each other, so they are communicating. They send games to each other and not only that, they send games and tapes and videos home from school as family home work. Something for the family to do together, and the whole family listens to the tapes. They stay in touch that way with folks that they are not going to see as flesh and blood, talking to them and playing with them.

Creating community is the hardest part of stabilizing a language. Lack of full success is acceptable, and full successes are rare. Now that Hebrew is so well-established and vernacularized, the minister of education of Israel recently tried to open some English schools. He was attacked and raked over the coals for his efforts because some advocates of Hebrew still feel insecure. So the sense that the Hebrew language is safe has still not arrived in Israel, even though objectively it is safe. Emotional safety comes a lot later. The Franco-Canadians in Quebec are also not sure they are successful yet. They think they are suffering. The Catalans are not sure they are successful. A culture has been traumatized a long time, but it came back. So even in your lack of full success, dedicated language workers, whether they be Maoris, Bretons, or whatever, become committed to each other and therefore they are members of the community of belief.

In conclusion I want to tell you something about my grandchildren. My wife engages in laptop publishing. She publishes in the Yiddish language for our grandchildren. But let me tell you, the true lap top here is my lap and her lap and the laps of the children's mother and father. That is a bond with the language that will stay with them after we are long gone. That is the lap top of language. And if you want that language revived, you have to use your lap also with your children or your grandchildren or somebody else's children or grandchildren. Adopt a grandchild. Adopt the grandparents. It is your lap that is part of the link to sanctity, the link to kinship, and the link to purpose. Now, in our affluent American society it turns out that one of my grandchildren already has an e-mail account. He writes messages to me to give to one of his cousins on the other coast. I go from coast to coast throughout the year because I have grandchildren on each coast. I have got to be sure that they sit on my lap during the year. So he writes to his cousin on the other coast on e-mail. He has to transliterate the Yiddish language into Roman characters because e-mail only works in Roman characters, and he makes a lot of mistakes in that. But it is recognizable. He is only seven, and the last e-mail I received was a little note saying, "I have got a little mechanical bird. It speaks Yiddish. Ha, ha. That's a joke."

So there are family building, there are culture building, and there are intimacy building prerequisites for language fostering, things that you have to do because no school is going to do them. However, the school can put that on the agenda of what has to be done. The school has intellectuals in it. The school has a building, a budget, a time, and a place. Now it has to put the life of the language, not just the literacy of the language, not just the grammar of the language, not just the lexicon of the language, but the life of the language in the home and the community on its agenda if the language is going to be passed along.

Reversing language shift is a research field, it is an applied field, it is a cultural values field, it has new horizons, there are new things to do, things that are, if you like, differently focused than the ordinary school has been. And reversing language shift asks, "What happens with the mother tongue before school, in school, out of school, and after school?" so that it can be passed on from one generation to another. I started with a good question and I am ending with a good question and that is the question. "What are you going to do with the mother tongue before school, in school, out of school, and after school?" Because that determines its fate, whether it is going to become self-renewing. That is my question for you, no joke!

Notes:

1. This paper is adapted from the speech given by Dr. Fishman at the first stabilizing indigenous languages symposium on November 16, 1994.
2. For a discussion of these stages see my book Reversing Language Shift (Multilingual Matters, 1991).

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Maintaining Languages What Works? What Doesn't

Maintaining Languages What Works? What Doesn't? (1)
Joshua Fishman


The last time many of us were assembled at this university Dang Pham, Deputy Director of the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, indicated that the United States Government recognizes a special debt of responsibility to assist Native American peoples to foster and strengthen their languages. This second conference at Northern Arizona University was to be a more concrete step in that direction, listening to ideas, perhaps formulating plans that could benefit from such support, and I am sure that all of you are going to be very alert, just as I am, are going to be very alert, to see if any of the promises that were made at the first meeting will materialize. It is an understatement to say that I am pleased and honored to be here. The opportunity to interact with American Indian languages and their activists is an experience that very few sociolinguists in the United States have been able to have. The reason old-timers like myself still come to these meetings is because sometimes we hear a younger colleague saying things that make us understand language maintenance even better than before, let alone finding out what they are doing, which is what we really have to keep up with.

But it will take more than conferences to keep most American Indian languages from becoming extinct. If all it took was conferences, then the languages would not be in the sad condition that most of them are in now because many of them have been exposed to anthropologists and conferences before. If not conferences, what then? Lots of different approaches have been tried. Is there anything that can be learned from these past efforts, not just among American Indians, but all over the world? A huge proportion, perhaps even the majority, of the world's languages are faced by the very same problems, and people all over the world have tried the best they could. So what can be learned from all that experience?

I spend my summer and winter months at Stanford in the Linguistics Department and my fall and spring days in New York on the campus of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. I told one of my medical colleagues there that I would be talking today on the topic "What works? What doesn't?" So my medical colleague, hearing that, said, "Oh, what works? What doesn't? What disease are you into?" So I looked him straight in the eye and I said, "Lack of sufficient inter-generational mother-tongue transmission." And he said, "Oh, you must be in speech pathology." He was not too far wrong, except that most of the pathology that I am into is sociolinguistic in nature.

But his general point was very well taken. Before one can answer the question "What works? What doesn't?" one must specify the disease as precisely as possible. Language endangerment or language destabilization is not a specific disease entity, is not a specific diagnosis, but rather the name of an entire cluster of diseases. If you like, it is an entire department in the medical school. It is what pulmonary medicine is to pneumonia, or cardio-vascular medicine is to a heart murmur, or rehabilitation medicine is to a fractured pelvis. That is, we have to get down to the specific diagnoses, rather than to talk about the departments as such. Lack of sufficient inter-generational mother-tongue transmission is not the only and not even the most serious of the diseases of endangered languages. You have already heard about them, so I am assuming that in the stance of the good teacher, you can stand to hear it again. Sometimes, if you hear it again in other words, it becomes clearer in a different way.

There are at least two other more serious problems for endangered languages, more acute than just lack of mother-tongue transmission. There are languages whose last fluent speakers are already gone or are about to go. At a meeting at Glorieta near Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few months ago, we had actually the last living speaker of one of the languages come. It was a very sad experience for everyone, not just for that woman. And perhaps the saddest thing is that she cannot even talk to her sister anymore, who was the next-to-last speaker before she recently died. She can not call up anybody. The only person for her to talk to is a linguist and that is no fun.

Those who speak still living but severely endangered languages no longer constitute speech communities. They are scattered in old age homes, in convalescent centers, in the geographically dispersed homes of kin or even of non-kin. They cannot interact with other speakers because other speakers are exceedingly few or exceedingly far between. So the question that could be put is: How can they be saved from oblivion? Now I think it is an important thing to ask because those of you coming from strong languages, particularly Navajo, may not think I am talking about you. But there are already communities in your language that are like that. In fact, in many areas, such as Hualapai, those communities speak distinctive dialects that are going to be gone. And the loss of a dialect is as much a loss of authenticity as the loss of a language. Having the language shrink down to one dialect is itself a great loss because those dialects were different because there were also other differences. There are never just dialect differences. They go along with differences in customs, and those differences also get lost.

Well, an obvious answer might be that if we could at least adequately record the spoken language before it was lost entirely (adequately record might mean audio and video and also producing a printed record), we could approximate a good bit of the grammar. We could approximate the phonology; we could approximate a good bit of the lexicon or at least the word forming features of the lexicon. I say approximate because by the time that you are down to the last few speakers of the language, you are often not getting the genuine article anymore. It has already changed in the process of attrition. It has changed and is not what it was, even in strictly linguistic terms. Yet you are getting an approximation, approximation of the prosody, of the rhythm of the language, which is actually one of those elusive areas of the beauty of languages that are very quickly lost and very hard to note down and very hard to learn. And we would also get some of the world view, some of the wisdom, some of the folklore, some of the belief system as well.

For languages hovering on the verge of extinction, the answer to "What works?" is perhaps an archival collection. I remember going to the archival collection for Welsh dialects. Welsh is not about to die, but it has terrible problems. But most of its dialects have gone and fortunately they recognized this as long ago as there were automatic recording devices, and they have recordings of now-vanished dialects for the whole century. In fact, their problem now is how to transfer these recordings to new equipment because the equipment in which they recorded originally is no longer available. Not only is the dialect gone, but the recording equipment is also gone. There is no machinery to listen to some of those early tapes. They are now beginning to digitalize these tapes. That will now take many years. But a serious archival collection is an answer to what works for languages about to disappear, and it would not hurt for many of us to realize that maybe we should give some attention to that.

We do not think we are there. We certainly hope we are not there, but the better part of caution is to start working on that because part of it is going, even if part of it is staying. So the sooner and more completely this is done, the better. Then such archival material can be used to learn the language as a second language, so that even such terribly weakened languages do not have to die entirely. They live in the way museum specimens live. Languages live under glass, too. Now you know that is not really living, but that is the most we can do for some of them. It is an honor that we owe them, to at least do that for them, having abused and neglected them as much as we have.

I am aware of only one language to have been fully re-vernacularized, to have become fully societally revived from the written record, namely Hebrew. And only a few more have been re-vernacularized in some small and atypical clusters of speakers, based upon the record. There are such small clusters of speakers of Sanskrit who raise their children speaking Sanskrit. There are small clusters of speakers of Gee. When I was in Egypt, soon after the Israeli-Egyptian accords were signed, I had the pleasure of being taken around by a Coptic gentleman who was one of a small group that was speaking Coptic to their children. There are also such small revivals from the record for Manx, Cornish, and even Latin. In the Vatican, there are little groups of clergy that have lunch together. "Let's have lunch next Thursday," they say, the Thursday Latin lunch. They have a Latin table at which they sit and have lunch in Latin. However, such very small revivals are not really speech communities. They are what I might call gatherings of hobbyists. Their language is their hobby, and they come together on rare occasions to indulge themselves in it.

Since there are literally thousands of languages in the world that are detached societally, vestigial societally, it is important to realize that this solution, archivization, works in the sense that if started early enough, socially vestigial languages can be saved from total extinction. But the question is whether "that is really living."

Many languages are dead as far as certain beholders are concerned, i.e. some languages are "wished to be dead." This is because they represent cultures that are problematic for their opponents. I could finance this conference if I had a dollar for every time since the beginning of the nineteenth century opponents said that Welsh was dead, Irish was dead, Scots Gaelic was dead, Frisian was dead, Alsatian was dead, Breton was dead, Basque was dead, and Occitan was dead, just to stay in western Europe, not to go into Soerbian, Yiddish, Belorussian, and Ainu and so on and so forth in other parts of the world. It is a diagnosis often pronounced prematurely. Even by people who should know better, because they are from that speech area. One of the problems of disintegrating languages is that their speech communities and networks are no longer in touch with each other. The fact that it is dead in one place is maybe unfortunately true, whereas at the same time, in speech networks miles away it can still be functioning, even functioning intergenerationally. You should guard against the subjectivity that is involved in proclaiming a language dead; even with respect to medical school problems. The actual definition of when someone is dead is not an open and shut case. And with respect to societal phenomena, it is even less open and shut. Nevertheless, many languages have really died. We may have no record of them, and the best that can be done for others is to archive them before it is irreparably too late.

So, for some languages the question is, Is an archives a mausoleum or is it really living? Is it "let's pretend living" or is it "really living"? Well, if the alternative is complete extinction or obliteration, then an archive might be viewed as "really living." That is as close to really living that some languages are going to be. There will be scholars and graduate students, some of them coming from the same background that mausoleum language represents, and they will examine it again. Now that we have audio-recording, they can examine it even better than they could before, if you are wise enough to do the archive as the Welsh did, not just in transcription, but in audio. So, if it is not really living, if you quarrel with that, it might still be heard in the walls of the classroom where it could be taught again or it could be that someone will organize a society for the lovers of Manx. They will get together on alternate Thursdays and they will say some of those words again. That will be as close to living as some languages will get, perhaps.

However, if the alternative for a particular language is not just the mausoleum, perhaps it can aspire to societal re-attachment or even more to inter-generational mother-tongue transmission, not just to societal re-attachment. It may realistically aspire to the inter-generational transmission of that re-attachment, so that it becomes the mother tongue of a vibrant speech community.

I have been collecting what people say about their languages. I have now thousands of statements, for hundreds of languages. I remember this one off-hand from Ainu in Japan, the statement is, "We will not go into the museum. We will not be archivized. We can still become pregnant. We can still bear children. And they can still laugh with Ainu on their lips." So, for some languages, a mausoleum would be really premature death, that is killing the patient in front of you. The issue is: Is there really an alternative to the mausoleum?

There are some societies represented in this room where elderly folk still enjoy life and they do so largely in their beloved language. They converse in it; they argue; they sing; and they pray, if prayer is permissible in that language. They entertain; they reminiscence; they counsel; and they feel fully alive in doing so and if you visit them, you can see the pleasure that they have. But their children and grandchildren do not do that. These old folks might not even realize just how endangered their languages are because they speak so freely, because they enjoy so fully. They enjoy their reminiscences and the stories and the anecdotes and the proverbs, and, at times, some of them have newsletters and records and performances that they go to. But they have no younger heirs. In another decade or two or three, their ranks will be so thinned that anyone wondering how it sounded to banter in the language would have difficulty finding an answer. I got an e-mail request from a young scholar in California this week asking 'are their any recordings of just animated natural conversation' in a language that he is trying to learn, because all he has is language records where the teacher says the words very slowly and carefully and the other person in the conversation responds in the same fashion. So if you really want to know how it really sounded, you better get it while it is really being spoken, if only as an insurance policy, and do it when informants are plentiful, rather than you only have one left and you have to take whatever that one has.

Now it has been said by scoffers that languages do not die, they commit suicide. And sometimes this is literally true. Some of them begin to do it far before they have any need to. Some of them do it toward the end. Sometimes they may say they wish there was a younger generation that knew the language, but they do not really do anything about it. At an unconscious level, some of them may even enjoy being the last real native speakers. I have had people in old age homes come up to me and saying with pride, "Don't listen to him; listen to me. I am the real last native speaker." Such people might be quite upset to find out that there is a young speaker or there is still a club of young speakers. So, worry about denial, that is important, and worry about death wish, not only death wishes toward someone else's language, but toward your own, at the end. Reinterpret the fact that older speakers sometimes do not even seek new ways of re-establishing the inter-generational connection in light of the fact that they can only do the things they have been doing. They can only do the things that they have been doing all along. That is the only thing they know how to do. They have their cohorts; they have their hobby group or their club; and those things are age-graded. The things they talk about, the things they sing about, are old-age-graded and no young person is going to get any pleasure out of these kinds of conversation. ("What did the doctor tell you last time you went there?") Those are not young topics.

New ways are needed because, obviously, the old ones have not succeeded. And these communities of old timers, enjoying the language, they will soon have to fish or cut bait. Fish -- that means to galvanize themselves to work out a joint effort with the generations of their children and grandchildren. Sometimes it is easier with the grandchildren than with the children. The grandchildren, at least, do not have the guilt experience of having chucked the language themselves. So, I want to say to our Hualapai speaker who dreads becoming a grandfather, that it could be great fun. I must say, having five grandchildren who speak my threatened language, that, if I had known grandchildren were so much fun, I would have started with them. It is the biggest lift. They make me think that maybe I will triumph over death when I hear them speaking to me. So, that is the fish. They have to find young people or young people have to find them. Both of those things are important and there are California programs of sharing young people with old people They find grandparents, who are still speaking endangered languages, for young people who want to learn them, providing two way satisfaction and another chance for vernacularizing. Cut bait --begin building oral history and oral cultural archives that will outlive these old timers that are enjoying themselves and will be available for their great-grandchildren.

So, as far as what works and what does not, there are two possibly gratifying and successful inter-generational options when societally intact seniors are still plentiful and available. They can go in one direction, the progressive de-vernacularization of the archival variety or they can go in the inter-generationally re-vernacularizing direction. Most of the languages that I have studied intensively are not Amerindian ones. The only Amerindian one that I have had repeated contact with, as you have heard, is Navajo over very many years, and not enough contact even there. But the inter-generational re-vernacularization route has turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, particularly when the two generational hiatus already exists. The grandchildren may be more positive. They have less guilt, but they only know about the rumor of where the fire burned, where the holy fire was. They only see that as a story. The life is no longer there and the language is a lot easier to teach than to build a culture that surrounds and needs and uses that language.

The question is why is re-vernacularization so hard? Much harder than either language teaching or language learning, that are hard enough. We are not very good at language teaching because vernaculars are inter-generational on informal, spontaneous bases, outside any formal institutionalized bases. That is what they are. I listened to what Damon Clarke, the Hualapai, was saying, and he was talking about informal life. All of his examples about girls and about grandparents were informal, daily life. Vernaculars are acquired in infancy, in the family, which means in intimacy. They are handed on that way, in intimacy and in infancy. Schools teach and students learn, even languages sometimes, but schools are programmed and not generally inter-generational institutions. I do know of a few schools where it is required that the parents attend the school if the child is to be admitted to the school. But there are very few schools of that kind. Fortunately, my wife once attended such a school when our child was admitted. My wife did know the language, but most of the parents did not. Therefore, they were learning everything the child was learning and they could go home and talk about those same things that the teacher was talking about in the school and do so in the language of the teacher. But schools are normally programmed and not inter-generational, and mother-tongues are inter-generational and not programmed. You see, they have almost completely opposite constellations of forces.

Why is breaking through to this crucial stage of inter-generational intimacy and informality so hard for any large number of people? I know thousands of people who have decided to do it. So, "will" is very important. But it often is just not enough. Why can not we organize for institutionalized languages, languages of formal institutions? We can organize for languages of school; we can organize for languages of church; we can organize for languages of government; we can organize for languages of the upper-work sphere. Yet none of the foregoing result in informal, inter-generational mother-tongue transmission. All those thousands of years that Hebrew was transmitted through formal institutions did not help it to become a mother-tongue. It took a group who said, "We don't want that formal institution. We don't want it at all." They, therefore, broke away. It was a break-away group. Right, they were secessionists. They broke away from society and created a society of their own. It is very hard to do that.

Vernacularization is the opposite of institutionalization. Re-vernacularization requires not only inter-generational language transmission, but societal change. More than a language involved. If you are going to change the language, you have to change the society. That is, informal society must change its way of living during the long stretch from one generation to the next. Schools do not stretch that long, from one generation to the next. Informal role relationships already established in a new language must come to be implemented in the old language, in order for the old language to be transmitted from parents to children. Parents are already talking the new language; they have to change themselves , and they need a society that is changing, too, for them to transmit it to a newborn as a mother tongue. Informal topics and places already associated with the new language must come to be associated with the old language, if it is to be transmitted via intimacy and in infancy.

There must be consensual advantages for changing from the new ways to the old ways. No one changes to cut off their nose to spite their face. No one does it because they are masochists and they are just looking for something that is going to hurt. That is not why people change their way of living. There has to be something that they are gaining, that they believe they are gaining, something that means so much to them that it is a worthwhile gain to them. Every infant acquiring the beloved old language at home must have ample out-of-home interlocutors, topics, and places for informal use of the language all the way through to the time when he or she becomes a parent. Every student, and I think this may shake many of you in this room, acquiring the beloved language in school must have ample out-of-school and after-school informal interlocutors, places, and topics to see him or her through to his or her own child-bearing stage. Re-vernacularization requires changes in established informal conventions and their reinforcement from various directions, from status-gain, from friendship-gain, from affection-gain. All of these are sources of support that endangered languages (and institutionalized languages) typically lack.

Now I want to make it clear: I do not say that we can do without institutions such as schools, churches, or other agencies. But languages can become institutionalized and remain only within the institutions that teach them and espouse them and use them. Institutions, although important, should be on tap and not on top of a language. The language does not belong to them. The language makes use of them. Those who are building the language make use of them. Above all, these institutions should foster the language as links with the outside world, with the informal interactions that constitute the bulk of life, the crux of inter-generational mother-tongue transmission. And that is why it is hard to break through. That is why a revolution is required. That is why those very folks who broke away from the book of the church, the Jewish book of the Jewish "church," led the way to re-vernacularize Hebrew. They were social revolutionaries.

This is something the Irish revivalists learned late and to their chagrin in having banked on the school and on the Minister of Finance to do the job. Neither of them together, and they were not always pulling together, could do it for most of the children growing up. There is a catch 22 here that I am sure you have noticed. Endangered languages become such because they lack informal inter-generational transmission and informal daily life support, but, in order to cease being endangered, they need exactly what they do not have and cannot easily get. To move from being have-nots to being haves, a societal revolution is required so that not one or two institutions support the beloved language. It is crucial informal relationships that constitute the lion's share of normal daily life (listen again to the Hualapai speaker), crucial informal relationships that constitute the lion's share of normal daily life. These relations are the ones that bring you back into inter-generational mother-tongue transmission and give the beloved language the support it needs. Can this be done? Is such a revolution possible? Can people change their daily life by planning together to do so? Well, I have both good news and bad news for you. The good news is that my experience with thirteen in-depth cases, that I have devoted about a quarter of a century to, tells me that it is possible for small groups of quite atypical individuals to re-arrange their lives individually and collectively exactly in this revolutionary way. The more dislocated the language is, the smaller those groups will be. A language that is far gone requires a great deal of idiosyncratic support. It is hard to predict who is going to devote their lives to them any more. It will be an exceedingly small group. This is one of those cases that "To them that have shall be given, and to them that have not, shall be taken away." The smaller the group, the harder it is for them to find even a small handful of people that will really rearrange their lives on their behalf. In language as in business, nothing succeeds like success.

What do they do, these small groups of totally dedicated individuals who rearrange their lives, not for the language, but for the lifestyle, the lifestyle that the language is related to? First of all, they depend primarily on themselves and on each other, rather than on outside support. Outside support comes from people that are not using the language. They have nothing to gain from helping you use the language and, therefore, if they do support you at sometime, they are not going to be there when you need them, down the road. So these folks depend primarily on themselves and on each other. They start with feasible goals and their immediate informal or local lower-level formal environment, with the kind of school they can support, the kind of school they can run, the kind of school they can control, and also other environments that they can control. They will win friends and influence people by offering them valuable rewards, services, and co-opting them informally as well.

I have here this little book titled Social Work and the Welsh Language. Every page is in both languages, not every other page, but every page is in both languages, so all you have to do for any word you do not know is to go across the line to find it in English. And what is the book Social Work and the Welsh Language about? It is about using Welsh in job training, job retraining, health counseling, literacy efforts, school transitioning, helping kids go from elementary to high school, bereavement counseling, building happy peer group ties, and vocational planning. In other words, Welsh language activists offer these services to the community.

They will help you with your problem, but you may have to join a little peer group that is meeting afternoons to have lunch in Welsh. It may be worth it to you, to get help with job or with school transitioning, or with physical recovery after an illness. So they win friends and influence people by offering them valuable rewards and services, mostly at the inter-personal level and co-opting these people informally as they go along. They concentrate on inter-generational experiences that include the young and the very young, together with the older. They focus on those functions that they can fully control -- family, friendship, lower level formal institutions, and, above all, they do not wait too long to get started on all of the above. An early start before inter-generational mother-tongue transmission has ceased to occur is worth more than tons of sage advice. It is better and easier to foster informal life when it still exists. It is the hardest thing to create afterwards. It is very hard to create, to program that which is essentially not programmed or programmable. At best, you can program situations that might facilitate it.

One thing we can be sure of, those who do not give up, but try again and again, become a community of hope, a community of dedication. They become a gemeinschaft rather than a gesellschaft, if you know those German sociological terms. So "what works, what does not" sounds like a simple question. But it is really a most difficult question. As in most complex societal areas, the answer is, "It all depends." You know that. It all depends on what the degree of endangerment is because the solution of what works varies with the problem. It depends on the resources available, particularly man-power resources to make things work. It depends on imponderable, historical, contextual circumstances, like "Are you fighting English or are you fighting Frisian?" I once went and visited a Frisian area and they brought in a small group that are surrounded by Frisians. They thought Frisians were the enemy. It makes a difference whether you are fighting English, Dutch, or Frisian because all those languages differ greatly in what they have to offer to those who will totally join their ranks. So there are imponderables and you have to just hope on the flip of a coin you come out the right way. There is nothing you can do about some of those things, but, as you know, imponderable advantages have a way of going in favor of those people who are on top anyway. That means you do not have much latitude for mistakes. If you bark up the wrong tree, you will not live to bark many other years. If you bet on things that do not lead to inter-generational mother-tongue transmission, but rather lead to nice graduation parties from school, then you have lost another go at it.

Many of you know about the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson, an English lexicographer and conversationalist of the eighteenth century. He had a habit in his dictionary of giving highly personal word definitions. To illustrate the word "focus", which was a new word in English at the time, borrowed from French, he gave the following sentence: "Nothing focuses the mind like an imminent hanging. One's [own] even more so than another's." All right, I am going to give you a quotation from Dr. Samuel Johnson who defined "lost cause." He said, "A lost cause is a cause whose adherents permit hope to take precedence over experience."

And what we have to ask ourselves, "Is reversing language shift a lost cause?" Well, perhaps it is. But all of life is a lost cause. We are all sitting and dying right in this room, except you feel it more than I do because I am talking and you are listening. All of life is a lost cause. We all know the road leads only downward into the grave. There is no other way it will go. Those that have hope at least share the benefits of hope, and one of those benefits is community. Reversing language shift efforts on behalf of the inter-generational mother-tongue transmission is community building, that is what is essentially required, in and through the beloved language. So, what have they accomplished, those Irish revivalists whom I have studied for such a long time? Can you imagine, in seventy-five years of work, which is longer than most of you have worked on this problem by a long shot, they have gone from a time when five percent of the Irish population was Irish mother-tongue to a time when three percent is Irish mother-tongue. After having tried everything that you are ever likely to think of. But, by this time, two-thirds of the population understands Irish, which was not the case at that earlier time. Two-thirds of it have been strongly influenced by all these things that the revivalists did, even though few of them ever actually speak the language. Irish would be in even worse condition had the revivalists not done all they did.

The Irish revivalists have voluntary neighborhoods in which all community services and all community informal life is in Irish. They are involved in a constant outreach effort (through clubs, camps, vacation spots, and teams) toward the appreciation and understanding of the Irish language. And that is why there are two-thirds of them now in the country who when they go to France and do not want to be mistaken for an Englishman, talk Irish to each other in a Paris cafe , even though they do not do it when they get back to Dublin. They could, but they do not. Their life has not changed that way. So, can anyone doubt that Irish today would be dead as a vernacular had it not been for the insistence of the stubborn revivalists that they wanted it for themselves and their children, regardless of what other Irish folk say, regardless of what other Irish folks do.

I want to say in closing that a huge proportion of my quotations in my new book deal with sanctity, that is with the sense that there is something holy about the language. It may be sanctity itself or sanctity once removed, sanctity by translation. The holy script was translated into this language of mine. Or I just feel God through that language because it brings me closer to the spirit and the soul and life as well as life after death. So, underlying all of this there must be a life-style in which there is a sense of the sanctity of custom and tradition. The ultimate source of all societal dedication is a feeling that one is dealing with something that is out of the ordinary, hum-drum experience.

As one who is the child of two language activists and the father and grandfather of language activists, I am sure that the lives of four generations have been enriched and even ennobled by the struggle. Our language is still endangered, but it would be infinitely more so without our struggle. Archives have been built for this language, nice mausoleums, but we activists decided that we were going to live in it. The prophetic reading for this week, for the lection of this week in Jewish Orthodox houses of worship, includes the following: "The days are coming when the plowman will be overtaken by the reaper." The imagery here is that the wheat will grow so fast that the reaper who is cutting the wheat will catch up with the plowman who is putting in the new seeds. "And the planters [will be overtaken] by the ones treading the grapes, new wine will drip from the mountains and from all the hills, they will plant new vineyards and drink their wine. They will make gardens and eat their fruits." So, here is my parting sentences: Do not give up; but do not get your priorities wrong, because you do not get many chances in this game. And above all remember that living languages are not primarily in institutions, but above them, beyond them, all around them.

Notes:


1. This paper is adapted from the speech given by Dr. Fishman at the Second Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium on May 4, 1995.

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