siiky
2023/08/29
2023/08/29
2023/08/29
post,science,culture
In other cases, such language contact results in something closer to the incoming language, a new localised dialect. But as linguist Peter Trudgill argues, this too can hold a highly local identity. In another study in Ghana, one research interviewee says of the localised form of English: “I own this language that everyone speaks”. Similarly in Singapore, “Singlish” (a mix of English, Cantonese, Malay, and others) holds an important identity function. After all, these different new varieties are spoken nowhere else on earth.
These new contact-based vernaculars are globally unique, and many are spoken by disadvantaged minorities, but nobody calls for them to be celebrated or protected. Indeed, they are often looked down upon – for example, Singapore’s government has a campaign to eradicate the “blunders” of Singlish. Linguistically, though, these are just as fully structured as any other language. Perhaps it’s harder to romanticise something new than something old.
If a people lost their language after being oppressed by colonialism and then further trampled on by rampant globalism, they probably lost a whole lot more than language. Canadian researcher Chris Lalonde focused his work on health and well-being in Canada’s indigenous communities, and what he found was much more complicated. A co-authored report did find positive effects of increased fluency in their native languages, but here comes the most important – and politically most difficult – point. In a later analysis (chapter 30 of this book), he and his colleagues showed that simply promoting language on its own – even language and indigenous culture – was not influential on a fundamental measure of well-being, suicide rates:
> “While culture [and language are] important, it is the integration of social, family, education and training, job creation and other elements that bring cohesion to a community. Indigenous youth suicide must be addressed as a community by forming community cohesion.”
Simply adding your ancestral language as a new school subject isn’t very helpful if your school is falling down, you’re not eating well, your people are disproportionately incarcerated, or you don’t have adequate political representation. To think anything much can be solved just by performing CPR on a minority language is to ignore how complicated human society is, and how many different simultaneous needs we have.