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April 7, 2002
REVIEW: Language and power
TOVE Skutnabb-Kangas has become famous as a champion of language rights, an area in which she has published some of the most powerful and insightful academic work for two decades. Unfortunately, her work has not reached Pakistan, or at least not in significant quantity, so that she remains relatively less well known, even among the few linguists in Pakistan, than she deserves to be.
Dr Skutnabb-Kangas, a Finnish-Swedish academic and scholar now working in a Danish university, tells us that the essence of socially committed scholarship is to help people formulate ‘why’ questions so as to understand how weak people and communities are exploited in the name of progress, development, nationalism or globalization.
The author introduces us to the languages of the world. She tells us that many languages, specially those of pre-modern or weak communities, are dismissed as being ‘dialects’ or ‘patois’ or something other than languages. Moreover, ‘deaf languages’ are generally not counted as natural languages. According to some estimates there are between 6,500 to 10,000 languages with an unknown but quite a large number of deaf languages. Most of these are small languages — spoken by a few people — and are disappearing fast.
The author’s main argument, which she makes at several places, is that this is not merely a natural phenomenon. Languages do not simply ‘die’ a natural death. What happens is that formal schooling, the fact that the languages of the powerful are acceptable in the job market, and that media spreads the powerful languages only — such realities of our globalized existence — ‘kills’ languages. In short, what is going on is linguistic genocide.
Biodiversity has a deep connection with linguistic diversity. The world is richer if it preserves diversity. Languages are carriers of world view and when a language disappears the world view it created, or which was expressed through it, also disappears. Indigenous knowledge, preserved and transmitted through a language, also disappears. Communities are devalued and become, so to speak, clones of the larger colonizing languages which they adopt in place of their own languages. This is unacceptable because it leads to a MacDonaldization of the world which is in the interest of the powerful, English-speaking part of the West — Anglo-American powers — and nobody else.
Several aspects of injustice and oppression are connected with language rights and their violation. The author’s sources are very wide-ranging — from linguistics, sociology, economics, education, law and politics to history and anthropology.
The most crucial chapters are the ones linking state policies and globalization, in that order, to linguistic genocide. She makes the point that educational practice, specially in schools, contributes to linguistic genocide because it makes children less competent in their own languages than the ones they are taught at school. This chapter brings evidence from the Nordic countries, Turkey, Canada, the United States, Australia and other countries as to how children were punished for speaking their own languages and even separated from their parents so as to forget them.
One of the most insidious devices to do this is to make children ashamed of their own languages and culture. This, incidentally, is what happens in Pakistan. Affluent children studying in English medium schools become ashamed of their mother tongues as well as Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.
The chapter on globalization is very thorough. It argues that globalization will create the kind of uniformity in the world which will make Western people, specially English-speaking monolinguals, feel at home everywhere. It will help Western countries, specially the United States, stay rich and powerful. However, all this will be at the cost of marginalizing people, dominating them, depriving them of the ‘good life’ while promising it to them and killing off their cultures and languages.
This radical critique of globalization leads the author to her final three chapters on linguistic human rights, the languages to be used in education and alternatives to linguistic genocide. Essentially, she argues that every person has the right to be educated in her or his mother tongue (however the concept of the mother tongue may be understood). Moreover, the state or society must ensure that this is not just a paper right but one which is actually given by providing schooling in one’s mother tongue.
Dr Skutnabb-Kangas argues that this will actually help one learn the dominant language and make one an ‘additive bilingual’. In general what happens is that people become ‘subtractive bilinguals’ i.e they do not function as well in their mother-tongue than in the other language they have learned at school. She hopes that monolingual speakers — who are generally speakers of dominant languages — must consider this a drawback and should always learn other languages.
All this is music to the ears of someone like myself who has been saying much the same things about the language policies and practices in Pakistan. However, it seems to me that power and success are so impressive for most human beings that we internalize the very values which dominate us and make us appear unworthy. Thus, quite apart from the fact that English gives us jobs, we are so proud of our excellence in it for snobbish reasons that we dismiss our own languages with all the arrogance of our neo-colonial masters.
Moreover, even if teaching can be arranged in at least medium sized languages by enlightened elites, their speakers would still remain handicapped unless these languages also become languages of employment and the fashionable media.
These things make me feel that, perhaps, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is more optimistic than the facts warrant. It also appears that, apart from appealing to the enlightened self-interest of elites, she has not addressed the question of costs both to governments and the dominated groups who very often resist their own languages because of the time taken to learn them when jobs are not available in them.
Another small criticism I have is that the author has not presented data from Pakistan although such data would have strengthened her case because in this country almost all the indigenous languages of the people are not taught effectively and are also held in contempt. However, she has used so many sources that this is a very minor omission which does not affect her arguments at all.
In the end one has to say that the book is a major work of scholarship and vision. Even while I do feel that most minor languages and the languages of the powerless will be killed by the forces of globalization and the internalized values of the subaltern peoples themselves, I admire and wonder at the author’s moral commitment, social consciousness and sense of justice.
Moreover, it may be that my scepticism and despair prove to be wrong. It is always bold creators of ideas and systems who give blueprints of change to humanity. Even if some of the present policies change; even if it is recognized that our language policies are killing our languages; even if data and arguments have been made available for preserving the world’s dying languages and cultures — it is a monumental achievement!
Linguistic genocide in education or worldwide diversity and human rights?
By Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey
ISBN 0-8058-3468-0
785pp. £38.95
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