Carme Junyent: “I think linguistic diversity is the real hope for Catalan”

At an important moment, meaning that the direction is changing a bit. When we started with this, there wasnʼt a lot of research on this topic. Actually, we started in 1992 but we began publishing a lot of things and it consolidated as a research line around 2000. During this period of time, a lot of work has been done on endangered languages; we know how languages die and we know the language threats. Now the idea is revitalization. We know how languages die; now letʼs think about what to do to stop this.

 

 

During the 20^th century, linguists have had a motto, a slogan, which is still working in some way: linguistics describe but do not prescribe. Therefore we are the perfect model to avoid commitment. Regarding death of languages, it was obvious that great 20^th century linguists were seeing how languages were dying in front of them. And everything they say is “we are losing data for research”. They do not think about what happens to the speakers. Therefore linguists always live aside this. When you realize this has implications for the speakers you have to commit. I regard linguistics as a way of commitment.

 

 

Although they have different realities, the same happens to all of them in the end. Not long ago Ngugi wa Thiongʼo, a writer from Kenya, visited Barcelona, and I saw an interview that took place in New Zealand, in which he said that after a conference on the Kikuyu language, a Maori woman told him afterwards “you have not talked about the Kikuyu but the Maori”. Afterwards he went to Norway and a Sami came to him and told him “you have not talked about the Kikuyu, you talked about the Sami”. Despite different circumstances, in the end all languages undergo the same processes when disappearing. And this makes them similar.

 

 

In fact, we cannot talk about any revitalized language strictly. We have not seen results yet. There are some progresses, but not enough to be sure that language has been recovered, I do not know of any. There is the extreme case of Cornish, a language that disappeared and some people take it to pass it on to the children, or languages that are still being transmitted and people are trying to revitalize them, such as Catalan. The only essential thing to revitalize a language is to use it and transmit it. We can have the media, the school, justice even. This is very important and it gives prestige, and can stimulate its use… But you can have all of those and the language can still disappear. One of the things we saw in the 25^th anniversary of GELA international conference, and we would like to work on it, is that when people talk about revitalization they talk about different things. I think the best ones are those who think about promoting its use and transmission. Because this is what really helps revitalization. The superficial actions are not that efficient (they are efficient when promoting dominant languages). When revitalizing, if these actions do not come from the roots, efficiency is more than doubtful.

 

 

The speakers are the ones who have to save the language. And when I say speakers I mean speakers of the threatened language but also speakers of dominant languages, who can help in this. Otherwise, it is almost impossible to reset the eco-linguistic balance. According to current data, the 96% of humanity speaks the 4% of languages in the world, and vice-versa. And around twenty years ago it was about the 95%. It is clear we are moving towards homogenization quite fast. Therefore, if there is not a commitment from the speakers of dominant languages, this situation is hard to recover.

 

 

We started the inventory of languages spoken in Catalonia around fifteen years ago. We have more than three hundred inventoried languages now. That means we found someone who speaks that language; there are languages that might have an only speaker in Catalonia. There is around a 12% of Catalans that do not have Catalan or Spanish as their first language. This is a lot. We have to think what to do with this. What do we do with these languages?

 

I think linguistic diversity is the real hope for Catalan, although I do not know if we will know how to benefit from it. In GELA we brought up this question: some languages underwent the same conditions of those that died have survived, why? There are languages that have undergone the same pressures than others and still survived. From these cases we can take that these happen in multilingual societies. People from societies that speak four or five languages are used to learn their neighboursʼ language, thus when someone new arrives that means a new language is introduced too. However, in homogeneous, monolingual societies, since they are used to do everything in one leading language, the other disappears. This can be clearly seen in the Pacific, where they have been under more than two hundred years of colonization. Islands where people spoke one language received colonial languages, which ate the indigenous languages (Samoan, Tahitian, Hawaian, etc.), in monolingual areas. However, there are other areas such as Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, places with lots of diversity, where there is a certain threat but diversity is still preserved. Therefore, considering this, we think that if we were able to regard Catalonia as a multilingual country, it could help the revitalization of Catalan. However, there is a risk, when we speak in Spanish to all those people who speak other languages. We should do this properly to help revitalization.

 

 

This is the consequence of the linguistic imperialism. English does not have gender and feminists see that when using any term, for instance jobs, they do not know if they are talking about a man or a woman. When you say the writer, the lawyer, the teacher you do not know if that is a man or a woman. They think this is a problem that makes them invisible and that they have to find a way to be visible, mostly when talking about mental representations.

 

We get to this history of visibility, but here we have a language feature: grammatical gender. Few languages in the world have something similar to gender (only in Dravidian languages, in southern India, which have male for men and female markers for women). I mean that we have ethnocentrism: we associate a universal phenomenon such as chauvinism with a strangeness of our language. In Swahili, and all Bantoid languages, men and women belong to the same gender. There are languages that have non-fixed gender. In Indonesian there are more status markers than gender ones. Guarani does not have gender. And they are not feminist societies.

 

If we rebuild this gender division in Indo-European, we can see that at the beginning it was about a division between animated and inanimate. And this has changed. We are still living out of the Greek categories in the study of language: Protagoras, in the 5^th century BC, gave male gender to the unfixed gender and female to the fixed one. And it began here. We still have male and female gender for things that donʼt have anything to do with sex. If I speak about the authorities of the country, these are female. And all of them are men. I mean, gender is arbitrary. Promoting this relation of gender-sex is what makes it man or woman, and this is discriminating women. Besides, it excludes all those who do not feel men or women. This is not the right way.