This reading reminded me of a book I read recently, Spoken here: travels among threatened languages by Mark Abley. It was a sad read, and monotonous in its tale of woe: chapter after chapter showcased a traditional language gradually being eroded as the native speakers watch their children and grandchildren turn to English (and English was invariably the culprit; I’m sure there’s instances where, for example, Chinese has taken out another language, but Abley as an English speaker couldn’t really investigate that). This process is not helped by the fact that the two grand media of our time, TV and the internet, are (US) English-dominated, so it was good to read of some of the initiatives towards the end of the chapter that show that other languages are getting more of a hearing.
That said, I think the author was a little unfair with the way he phrased some things: like early on when he says English speakers “took the opportunity” to establish English as the default language on the internet. That makes it sound like the everyday user of the early internet was rubbing his hands with glee at the opportunity to use English at the expense of other languages; but really, it was an artefact of the first users being American. Other users, and therefore other languages, are increasing now. It was a fluke, admittedly because of English colonialism, rather than a conspiracy.
The one thing native English speakers can do, apart from not getting in the way of other language speakers’ attempts to give their own language more prominence, is to be aware that publishing on the internet has a global reach, and to therefore be careful of regionalisms, local slang, and spelling norms.
2 comments:
This reminded me of a project I read about that aimed to archive as many Australian Indigenous languages as possible. So I searched google, and although I couldn't find the one I was actually looking for, i was struck by the huge number of similar enterprises. Saving Aboriginal languages is going on all over the world. I noticed Canadian sites, European sites, and Indian ones, in the 2 minutes I spent looking.
This actually reminds me of a practice in anthropology. Anthropologists often write ‘salvage ethnographies,’ which are texts that record a culture before it ‘dies out’ (often due to colonisation or globalisation). One such example is by Hoebel on the Cheyenne Indians of North America. The Cheyenne lived in the 1800s, but Hoebel recorded their history by talking to a few informants in the 1930s. He wrote this in order to keep those old Cheyenne stories alive, before the old informants died. I think because of globalisation, more anthropologists are being hired to record cultures and languages that are dying. And maybe the internet, while assisting in the globalisation of the world, can also enable dying cultures to record their histories and languages and keep them alive, as opposed to locked away in anthropological texts.
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