Getting Language Rights-rethorics of Language Endangerment

8/8/2019 Getting Language Rights-rethorics of Language Endangerment

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J O S E P H E R R I N G T O N

G et ting Language Rights: The Rhetorics o fLanguage E ndang erm ent and LossABSTR AC T Endangerm ent loss, death, and related terms are increasingly familiar in descriptions ofsociol inguist ic change now oc-curring at an unp rece dente d scale because of forces of globa lization . They can serve bot h as names for shared con cerns of linguists a ndanthropo logists, a nd as descriptions of otherwise different scenes ofsocial encounter, because they are subject to multiple uses andinterpretations. This article focuses on tacit, enabling assumptions of three dist inct strategies for framing and redressing "threats" tomarginal ized languages and speech com mun it ies. Recognit ion of their ideological grounds helps develop a sharper sense of their di f-ferent uses, and the different social saliences that linguistic descriptions can have in and for marginalized communities. [Keywords: lin-guistics, ideology, language change]

THIRTY YEARS AGO there was a parting of discipli-nary ways between linguists, whose new formalismsled them toLanguage as a universal object of study, andcultural anthropologists, who became increasingly involvedin the politics of postcolonial representation. As increas-ingly abstract models propelled linguists in the directionof cognitive neuroscience, anthropologists were abandoningthe notion that "culture" could be conceptualized alongthe lines of any sort of language-like system. But now, ashundreds of languages become marginalized, endangered,and "die" around the world, globalization is casting ashadow over the science of language that is hard even forthe most theoretical and lab-oriented practitioners of thisscience to ignore. This progressive diminishment of em -pirical resources is obliging linguists to think about lan-guages not only as durable objects ofdescription but alsoas collective projects th at can be aban doned from one gen-eration to th e nex t, like a sinking ship.

With the1992 publication of a group of articles onendangered languages inLanguage (Hale et al. 1992), thisproblem came into open professional view, at least in theUnited States. But since then, there hasbeen little evi-dence suggesting that linguists are thinking through theways this rapid sort of language change is bound up withbroader issues of culture or identity. This article deals withsome of these larger questions as they have tacitly figuredin different framings of language endangerment, and inpractical work aimed at redressing threats tomarginalizedcommunities of speakers.

These are situations inwhich linguists may find thattheir objects of description are also objects of claims to"rights," and that projects aimed at "getting"that is,procuringsuch rights are shaped by broader ways of"getting"that is, understandingwhat those rights are.This can mean that their own descriptive interests, how-ever sharply defined, cannot always be separated easilyfrom themore diffuse values of those marginalized lan-guages for their speakers. Nor can they be sure that theirwork will circulate or be used inways they might choose.It is important, then, for linguists to be willing to recog-nize the meanings and uses of their work outside the acad-emy, for persons with other investments, direct or indi-rect, in endang ered languages: speakers of these languagesand their descendants; officers of funding institutions,governmental agencies, and nongovernmental organiza-tions; writers in the popular press; and so on. In all theseways globalization is making old que stions ab out languageand culture new again, and also making it useful for lin-guists to think about lessons that cultural anthropologistshave already learned about multiplying meanings and in-terpretations of research and writing outside an academicin-group.

Certainly there can be conceptual dissonance betweenenabling premises of linguists' "professional" work andrhetorics that they can mount on behalf of endangered lan-guages. A good example can be taken from a publicityflyer circulated by the Endangered Language Foundation(discussed further below). It prominently displays the as-sertion by Steven Pinker, prominent cognitive neuroscientist

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 105(4):723-732. COPYRIGHT 2003, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION


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and social Darwinist, that "every time a language dies, welose thousands of unique insights, metaphors, and otheracts of genius" (Endangered Language Fund n.d.) Rhetori-cally powerful appeals to "metaphors" and "acts of genius"draw on relativist traditions of thought that animate someof the work on endan gered languages I discuss below, andthat anthropologists may associate with the writings ofEdward Sapir. But that is a tradition that is very much atodds with linker's own antirelativist approach to linguis-tics. It is a long way from his arguments about universal"mentalese" (1994:59-64) to images of precious, language-specific "acts of genius," but he accomplishes this shifteasily as he shifts audiences and purposes.

Questions of rhetoric like these may be hard to avoidwhen endangered languages become topical for "nonpro-fessional" audiences, which makes it worth consideringhere more specific questions about relations of the rheto-ric and practice in the emerging linguistics of endangeredlanguages. To do so I suggest that we can usefully distin-guish three broadly different ways of engaging the prob-lem of language endangerment, each of which draws on adistinct tradition of thought about language and involvesdifferent strategies for redressing threats to languages.

Two of these are traditions of thought that help topresent languages as forms of "life," and so play naturallyinto the specter of language "death" (e.g., Crystal 2000) or"extinction" (e.g., Nettle and Romaine 2000). But each in-volves a different biological metaphor, associated with dis-tinct purposes and different issues: One keys to value-laden links between language and natural locales whilethe other figures individual languages into a broad spec-trum of quasi-natural diversity. Both may seem like intel-lectual throwbacks for anthropologists, who have longsince jettisoned biological metaphors of culture, but it ishard to deny their usefulness in this new field, becausethey circulate easily across contexts, allow diffuse pro-cesses to be concretized, and make generalizations easy todraw across otherwise different situations. But their rhe-torical strengths come at the cost of limited applicability,which lends practical importance to a third notion of lan-guage endangerment, the notion that language falls underthe broad purview of a contestable tradition of humanand social rights.LANGUAGE A ND THE MA KIN G OF PLACEEndangered languages have recently begun to figure intothe kinds of "place-making strategies" that Amy Muehle-bach (2001) describes as having coalesced in the transna-tional UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in1982. These are activist efforts to mobilize indigenousnessas the basis of claims on behalf of communities whosemembers count as inheritors and stewards of particular lo-cales, and not just citizens living on segments of nationalterritory. Aboriginally can be leveraged in this way intoclaims of ownership, trumping rights of access that mightotherwise be claimed by and granted to encroaching "out-

siders." These are situations in which languages can takeon value if they are portrayed as organically bound upwith place and culture, and as likewise under threat of en-croachment.At the same time that languages can be value-ladendiacritics of local distinctiveness, their internal makeupspecifically, their lexiconscan be portrayed as symbolicembodiments of intimate, lived relations among speakers,communities, and environments. When knowledge oflanguage is referred to a sense of place, these particulars oflanguage structure are most readily mobilized as the con-crete evidence and bearer of "alternative values and typesof being-in-the-w orld . . . [and] specific n otio ns of an in-digenous morality" (Muehlebach 2001:416).Images of language as aboriginally embedded in anexus of place, morality, and community resonate clearlywith Romanticist traditions of political thought that havebeen important in Europe at least since Johann Herder(1772, reprinted in 1966) propounded his organistic con-ception of language and culture in his "Essay on the Ori-gin of Language." Although Herder himself was orientedto the inadequacies of biblical accounts of human originsand animated by a broad crisis of German national iden-tity, themes that he developed in that essay and in hislater work have continued to shape the politics of ethnicnationalism and language scholarship alike. In fact,Herder can be identified as a founder of the relativist tradi-tion of thought tacitly invoked by Pinker in the quotationdiscussed above.Organistic conceptions of language-in-nature figureprominently, for instance, in self-descriptions of the lan-guage activist group Terralingua, which closely parallelthose of other activist organizations devoted to the preser-vation of endangered species. Terralingua's mission state-ment (2003) describes endangered languages in terms thatrecall the importance given to charismatic megafauna(pandas, whales, and so on) in the prose of groups like theWorld Wildlife Fund, in which they are made focal for thework of preserving natural environments. It is this tacitparallel that makes it rhetorically plausible for languageendangerment to be represented as a "third extinction cri-sis" (Maffi 1999:21), after biodiversity and the erosion oftraditional cultures.This broad rhetoric has specific practical implications,insofar as it places greater symbolic weight on relativelyculturally salient lexicons, over and against phonologicaland morphosyntactic systems, which are generally moreinteresting for linguists. At the 1992 UN Conference onEnvironment and Development, for instance, lexical sys-tems were a recurring reference point for portrayals of lan-guages as concretizations of lived local knowledge, "re-positories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledgeand experience" (Brundtland 1987:114). When lexiconscount as mirrors of nature and sedimentations of culturalknowledge, loss of language can be seen as a harbinger notjust of language death but also of the "extinction of expe-rience" (Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993).


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Errington Ge tting Language Rights 725This image has a strong moral tenor that can be com-plemented by appeals to lexicons' values as means of refer-ence, which m ay only become ap parent in the future. By akind of linguistic "taxol" argument, lexicons can be fig-ured as relatively isolable information basesin dictionar-ies, encyclopedias, and so onwhich are in danger of fall-ing out of use before they are codified, or before the usesof information they embody are discovered. When lexi-cons become the focus of rhetorics of language death, eth-noscience becomes new again, at least for nonanthro-pological audiences.A double linkage between words and place, both refer-ential and existential, helps to motivate not only linkagebetween communities and environments but also stepsthat are taken to prevent language death through "in situ"preservation:There is a very close parallel between [ex situ] languagepreservation and ex situ conservation in biology: whileboth serve an important function, in both cases the eco-logical context is ignored. Just as seed banks cannot pre-serve a plant's biological ecology, ex situ linguistic docu-mentation can not preserve a language's linguisticecology. [Maffi 1999:40]

This can be called a broadly "localist" framing of endan-gered languages as embodiments of knowledge and iden-tityendowed with value that makes each a target of locallanguage activism aiming to redress "outside" threats.This rheto ric is powerful in part because it keys so spe-cifically to locales. For the same reason, it is relatively re-stricted in applicability and more plausibly invoked forlanguages with rich lexical resources, spoken in and aboutrelatively biodiverse environments, than others. It appliesless well to languages whose relatively limited lexical re-sources might be a function of relatively nondiverse envi-ronments in which they are spoken, perhaps becausespeakers themselves have reduced local biodiversity incourse of subsistence activities (hunting, agriculture), pro-duction of cash crops, and so on.

Localist rhetoric also keys crucially to a sense of inal-ienable links between language and place, embodied andmediated by indigenous communities of speakers. Thiskind of nativism, entirely consistent with Herder's visionof ethnolinguistic identity, is in fact written into the DraftUniversal D eclaration of Linguistic Rights of 1996, which Idiscuss below. As Tove Skuttnab-Kangas (1999:50) notes,that document contains relatively stronger claims for lan-guage rights of members of indigenous "communities,"over and against those accorded to languages spoken bymembers of migrant "groups." This very broad differencecan make for surprisingly fine distinctions, as can beshown with one example taken from descriptions by PeterSercombe (2002, in press) of a Penan community in theinterior of Brunei, on the island of Borneo.

"Penan" is commonly used to name groups of no-madic forest dwellers and hunter-gatherers who live inthis part of the island as well as its eastern, Indonesian re-gions. It also names the closely related native dialects, one

of which is spoken by members of a community thatsedentarized about forty years ago, in which Sercombespent time. Its youngest members continue to use thePenan language among themselves, at least for the timebeing, but these new residential patterns have led mem-bers of that community to acquire one or two other lan-guages (Malay and Dayak). This has also, Sercombe indi-cates, led to progressive loss of knowledge of Penanethnobotanical lexicons (2002:188-193). This can be seenas a kind of linguistic correlate of a break with the "natu-ral" environment, even though these people continue tolive in close prox imity to th e forest. By localist criteria likethose set out by Luisa Maffi (1999) and Skuttnab-Kangas(1999), this partial dislocation would make it a less valu-able target for efforts of revitalization, even if its speakersmay not be migrants in the usual sense or count as mem-bers of a "group" rather than a "community."Localist rhetoric can invoke a quasi-purist sense ofboundedness in time as well as space, with collateral ef-fects like those described by Renee Sylvain (2002) for the"indigenist" claims to territorial sovereignty made by andfor the San people of South Africa, under the InternationalLabor Organization Convention of 1989. She shows howsuch claims operate to perpetuate lines of cultural differ-ence they presuppose, with a long-term collateral effect ofbracketing future San participation in a larger politicaleconomy. Cultural rights that are linked to natural re-source use key also to preservation of a way of life, suchthat "the more essentialized the 'cultural' features become,

the more they are seen as contrary to the historically tran-sitory features of political economy" (2002:1076). As withculture, so with language: Sylvain's observations are easilytransposed to localist rhetorics of language rights, whichlikewise make it easy to devalue or residualize languagechange arising from extended contact with "outside" groupsand institutions.Like the Romanticist tradition that it invokes, localistrhetoric can be interpreted as involving totalistic linkagebetween language and identity, a point that has emergedas a leitmotif in criticisms of language activism made fromotherwise differing points of view. These include a kind of

loyal linguistic opposition (e.g., Ladefoged 1992; Mufwenein press), cultural critics (e.g., Malik 2000), and more orless eth no ce ntric ed itorialists such as Joh n Miller (2002).In different ways these observers all argue that "languagedea th" is a misnom er for wha t is actually "language shift,"the sort of cumulative process of language change that re-sults from the self-interested, rational decisions that indi-viduals make in the course of their lives, which happen toinclude choices between and transmission of one languagerather than another. These arguments, founded on thepremise that speakers are autonomous, knowledgable so-cial agents, can in turn be rebutted by calling into ques-tion easy distinctions between self-interested "choice" andinstitutional "coercion," especially in circumsUimvs of rapidsociolinguistic change (e.g., Dorian 1993:575-579; Maffi1999:37).


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This debate is not easily resolved because it repro-duces, in specific terms, much broader ideological differ-ences, wh ich I take up in discussion of ideas of lang uagerights below. But first this organistic image of language en-dangerment needs to be contrasted with another biologi-cal metaphor, one that frames endangered languageswithin the context of global diversity, rather than localparticularity.VALUING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITYWhere localist rhetoric foregrounds unitary relations be-tween threatened languages, cultures, and environments,this second approach emphasizes the unity of all lan-guages with each other as specific manifestations of uni-versal human capacities. From this point of view the prop-erties of languages take on importance and value in theaggregate, so that what is threatened by the death of anyone language is the cumulative diversity of the whole.This involves a broad com parative framing of languages astokens of a quasi-biological semiotic type, foregroundingstructural pro perties exhibited in data of language use overthe life of language in a community or environment. Farfrom requiring in situ language preservation, it motivatesresearch rationales and descriptive techniques that make itpossible to alienate languages radically from interactionalcontexts, natural environments, and communities.This approach to language endangerment shows strongcontinuity not just with received goals and methods ofcontemporary linguistics, but with the 19th-century para-digm of comparative philology, which can be sketchedhere with reference to one of that discipline's major fig-ures, August Schleicher. Schleicher developed what are nowcanonic styles for presenting structural evidence and his-torical conclusions about the diversity-within-unity of In-doeuropean languages, and about patterns of migrationthat led to dispersion of speakers and the rise of languagedifference. Contemporary proponents of work on endan-gered language have now globalized this picture of thepast. In important comparative work like JohannaNichols ' s (1992) Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, forinstance, typological and historical questions are broughttogether on a global basis, such that the study of "geneticdiversity" among more or less related languages can be in-tegrated with a survey of "structural diversity" of configu-ratio nal traits distri bute d across all languages. This is aproject whose scope is knowledge of language diversity ona global scale, and so it confers value on endangered lan-guages around the world.Schleicher is also famous as the first linguist to trans-pose Darwin's natural history of speciation to the study oflinguistic diversity (and using it to develop what nowseem egregious conclusions about subjugated peoples andthe fatedness of their languages to die). This broad linkagecontinues to motivate writing about language death anddiversityincluding, for example, The Rise an d Fall of Lan-guages, Robert Dixon's (1997) account of linguistic diversi-

fication that has explicit recourse to Stephen Gould'spunctuated equilibrium model of speciation. Conversely,ecologistsfor example, William Sutherland (2003)seethe problems of endangered languages and species on aglobal basis as broadly parallel, statistically relatable pro-cesses. One need only understand languages to be differ-entiable members of a species, or species of a genus, in-stead of part of the fabric of shared experience incommunities of speakers.Strategies of engagement motivated by comparativistapproaches to language endangerment differ considerablyfrom those sketched earlier, because they privilege thegathering of data over the revitalizing of communities. Soin this field the problem of language death has led to a re-finement in use of received field methods, as in NikolausHimmelman's suggestion (1998), for instance, that twodistinct phases of research be recognized: comprehensivedocumentation on the one hand and data assessment onthe other. The same co ncern with bodies of data is evidentin predictions by Douglas Whalen (in press)professionallinguist and president of an academic-cum-activist organi-zation, the Endangered Language Fundthat new infor-mation about endangered languages will transform theo-retical linguistics. This transformation will be aided by thepower of computer technology not only to aid the analysisof data sets but also to make them highly portable via theWorld Wide Web.So, too, forward-looking linguists like Robert Dixon(1997) and John McWhorter (2001:248)who argue thatthe study of at least one dying language should be a gen-eral training requirement in the fieldare oriented toproblems of language endangerment for the profession asmuch or more than for communities of speakers. But itdoes not follow that such work can be carried out with dueregard for interested observers, most particularly speakersfrom whom linguists seek data. Jane Hill (2002) has rightlycalled for recognition of the nonneutral values this workinvolves and the collateral effects it can have for others.Hill (2002:123-125) provides good grounds, for in-stance, for being suspicious of the kinds of "hyperbolicvalorization" of diversity evident in Pinker's commentquoted above or, to cite one of many other examples,Leanne Hinton's comment that "the world stands to losean important part of the sum of human knowledge when-ever a language stops being used" (2001:5). This rhetoriccan be seen as mobilizing universal claims about the valueof languages in general to license claims of access to lan-guages in particular, not just for the sake of their speakersbut for "us," "the world," or "humanity" at large. Linguistswho seek to document global language diversitywhatthe Endangered Language Fund's mission statement calls"the dissemination, to both the native communities andthe scholarly world, of the fruits of these efforts"are inthe first place aiming to appro priate local linguistic know l-edge. This work can be self-interested in ways that may beclearer to speakers of those endangered languages than tooutsiders whose interests may not even extend to the goal


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of learning to speak them. As cases in point, Hill citesspeakers of Hopi and Cupeno whose felt rights of owner-ship of their languages lead them toreject claims of accessby nonspeakers.Linguists may choose to regard such cross-cultural dis-agreements as rare or specious enough to be negligible,but anthropologists should be more sensitive to parallelsbetween these sorts of encounters andclaims centering onother natural resources. Appeals to the common linguisticheritage of humanity can be heard as resonating with therhetoric of the "common natural heritage of humanity"which governments and NGOs have mobilized to licenseinterference in local community and prevention of theiraccess to natural resources. Those whowould seek to pre-serve or be stewards of language diversity should keep inmind these (post)colonial precedents for their engage-ments as outsiders with speakers and communities.

AUTHORIZING LANGUAGE RIGHTSLocalist and comparativist framings of endangered lan-guages, as I have sketched them here, involve tropes oflanguage as life, which intimate that threats to languagesare threats to preexisting, "natural" conditions. A third,quite different sense of endangerment presupposes lan-guages to be possessions of speakers, rather than naturalphenomena. Under this profile, endangered languages'values are linked to speakers' shared social biographiesand collective identities: They are not natural conditionsto be maintained but, rather, rights to be recognized bysources of political authority. Such claims to languagerights presuppose and areshaped bydifferent understand-ings of such authority, involving political and philosophi-cal issues that I can broach here with an eye to just threerelatively narrow issues: (1) thekinds of legitimacy presup-posed for, or attributed to, such authority; (2) the scope ofclaims that can be legitimately made; and (3) the shapingeffects of those claims on languages that are their objects.

The simplest, most powerful claims to language rightsare made to and motivated by Godthe ultimate sourceof authority and underwriter of the oldest and largest or-ganization devoted to thepreservation of endangered lan-guages. For members of this group, the Summer Instituteof Linguistics (SIL), respect for language rights is apiece ofthe mission to save souls, as Benjamin Elson's (2002) Lin-guistic Creed shows. Given that language is the most dis-tinctly human and basic of God-given characteristics, El-son asserts, all languages deserve equal respect and carefulstudy as part of the heritage of the human race. In thisway language rights are grounded in religious doxa thatcan beuniversal in scopekeying to salvation through di-rect acquaintance with translatable scriptural truthbut isnot universally accepted: What works for the SIL wouldnot work, for, say, proselytizers for Islam.

When Elson notes almost in passing that each lan-guage is also deserving of being published, he recognizesthat these language rights are in fact bound up with a dou-

ble mission of conversionof pagan to Christian, andspeech to textfor which print technology is crucial.Rights to language are best respected when they are "re-duced," as an expression prevalent in the colonial era hasit, "to writing." This way of figuring local languages inuniversal missions of conversion shows strong continuitybetween the work of the SIL and earlier generations ofmissionaries. In fact, colonial history (see, e.g., Harries1988; Ranger 1989; Steedly 1996), suggests strongly that aby-product of work by missionaries to convert peoplethrough their own languages was the creation of linguistichierarchies. These studies andothers demonstrate how thedeployment of print technology has the collateral effect ofprivileging some speech varieties relative to others and,perhaps, stimulating cumulative processes of "shift" fromless to more "valuable" oral varieties. The moral of theseolder stories, then, is that SIL missionaries are obliged todefine the languages towhich speakers have rights.

Secular efforts to respect language rights involvingprint technology can have similar homogenizing effects,as shown by the case of linguistic work done as part of adevelopment project among speakers of the little-studiedlanguages of Lombok, just east of Bali in Indonesia. Theselanguages have been described as comprising five "dia-lects" that are ordinarily lumped together under the rubric"Sasak language" (Indonesian: bahasa Sasak) (Thoir et al.1985). They actually cons titute acomplex continuum thatca n be broken down into two mutually unintelligiblegroups. My ownbrief inquiries suggest that speakers havelittle sense of the nature or degree of variation that existsin these forms of speech; Indonesian is known by some,not all, as the second, national language.In keeping with recent trends in the field of develop-ment, employees of a U.S. NGO sought to implement avaccination program against Hepatitis B on Lombok withfull respect for the rights of local people as active partici-pants, in and through their own language. A linguist con-sultant, Daniel Ajamiseba, w as brou ght in as a team mem-ber tohelp develop "a sense of ownership of what is goingto be done in and through the project" (1996:14). His re-search led him to select one dialect, what linguists havecome tocall Ngeno-ngene [rpnorpne], asmost useful for usein the printed material and educational programs thathelped to implement the project around the island.Though done in the name of local rights, this project ac-complished a de facto codification of a kind of protostan-dard Sasak by the process Einar Haugen (1966) long agodescribed as selecting, codifying, and elaborating a dialectinto a language. Secular development, like religious con-version, can create hierarchies of language (and, perhaps,speakers). Although these strategies m ight besuspect froma radically localist point of view, it is hard togainsay theirpractical logic if they serve, say, a monolingual mother 'sinterests in thehealth of her children.Steps taken to respect language rights in relativelylimited engagements with relatively homogeneous com-munities may seem not only morally legitimate hut also


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728 American An thro po log ist Vo l. 105, No. 4 December 2003highly practical. But more complex conditions of socialand linguistic pluralism raise difficult questions as to howminority speakers' rights to native languages can be disag-gregated from the sum total of civic rights and obligationsaccruing to them, and all other speaker-citizens, in adem ocra tic society. This proble m is at the cen ter of a con-siderable literature on language rights that is oriented notto the "extinction" of languages as such but, instead, tothe loss of coherence of communities that are distin-guished by the use of some native language. In these situ-ations questions of language rights play directly into whatCharles Taylor calls the "politics of recognition" (1992).According to Taylor, core values of democratic plural-ism require that claims to cultural, religious, or linguisticrights not be arbitrated on a demographic, political, oreconomic basis. They must be articulated and accommo-dated, he argues, within broader relations between stateinstitutions and minority communities, such that the le-gitimacy of the former is recognized as being bound upwith reciprocal recognition of the latter's authentic (lin-guistic) distinctiveness. This complementarity helps Tay-lor to articulate his own position on the politics of Franco-phone identity in Quebec and Canada, now furthercomp licated by the new politics of identity involving C an-ada's First Nations.In these and other instances the politics of linguisticrights can map onto, and coarticulate with, the politics ofterritorial autonomy, but they take a different form whenclaims are mounted on behalf of members of migrantgroups. Their native languages are doubly asymmetricwith one or more others that are spoken natively by domi-nant segments of a national population and are also fo-cally associated with rights and obligations of citizenship.So it can be difficult to avoid or resolve a politics of lin-guistic identity in linguistically plural democracies that, asSeyla Benhabib observes, "act in the name of universalrights which are then circumscribed within a particularcivic community" (2002:450). In these situations questionsof lang uage righ ts play ou t in tacit or official specification sof institutional contexts in which they should be accom-modated (schools, voting booths, motor vehicle depart-ments, and so on).I can only consider these culturally fraught issues ofscope here with an eye to the 1996 Draft Universal Decla-ration of Linguistic Rights, discussed briefly above. Thisdocument invokes the Universal Declaration on HumanRights of 1948 and (at least implicitly) the French Declara-tion of Human Rights in 1791 as general precedents for itsspecific claim that all individuals are naturally endowedwith the capability to choose between languages, each forherself or himself, as part of the good life. By foreground-ing languages as possessions of individuals, this statementbrackets their collective nature as resources shared bymembers of some collectivity. So, too, its universality keysnot to human capacities to acquire any natural languagebut, instead , to ind ivid uals ' biographica l fated ness to ac-quire some particular language from childhood, "na-

tively," as a mem ber of a collectivity. The de claration fur-ther presupposes that languages can be objects of choice,such that rights must be claimed for one that is in someway counterposed to another, which is in some way su-perordinate, dominant, or useful. And, finally, it predi-cates rights of choice of autonomous, self-interested, andrational agents who are capable of espousing one view orother, adopting one course of action or other, and so on.In effect, then, the universal declaration of human rightsdistinguishes between two kinds of language "death." Ille-gitimate language shift is the causal outcome of coerciveforces external to a minority community and needs to bedist inguished f rom that ar ising f rom cumulat ive, self-interested, knowledgeable choices by social agents be-tween one language rather than another. It is this latterscenario, centered on autonomous, rational decision-mak-ing speakers, which Peter Ladefoged, Salikoko Mufwene,and others invoke in their cautionary critiques of imagesof language death.But beyond its overt focus on individuals as speakers,the universal document tacitly privileges collectivities ofspeakers that can be identified by locality. This is because,as also noted above, it accords greater strength to claims tonative languages for indigenous "communities" than formigrant "groups." In this way it appears to straddle twoviews of language rights in relation to "the good life." Onthe one hand, its appeal to universal human capacitieselides quest ion s abou t social forces th at differentially af-fect members of different generations, genders, classes,and so on. On the other hand, it tacitly privileges place asa criterion for identifying language communities withoutspecifying how to determine whether a "dominant" lan-guage is "imposed" or "chosen," whether a local "minor-ity" language is "authentic" or "limiting," and so on. Inthis way the document's breadth allows for strategic invo-cation in a variety of specific situations. It seems no coin-cidence in this regard that the promulgation of the univer-sal declaration was held in Catalonia, a region of Spainwhere claims to linguistic and political autonomy are be-ing mounted on the basis of shared historical experienceand territorial residence,Whether the kinds of claims to language rights I havediscussed here are grounded in claims of faith or philoso-phy, they are framed as being universal in scope. But thatdoes not mean they are accepted universally, as one cansee from an interesting parallel that developed during thelate 1970s and early 1980s between the so-called Asianvalues controversy, and a language engineering projectundertaken by the city-state of Singapore. At that time,Western doctrines of human rights came under broad, re-lativist criticism from representatives of the Malaysian,Singaporean, and Chinese governments, who portrayed itas the thinly disguised extension of the "soft power" ofendu ring Euro-American imp erialism. (A con ven ient ex-ample of this anti-Western critique is presented by theSingaporean author Chee-Meow [1977].) Against theEuroamerican tradition of the Enlightenment, these critics


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pitted a no less reified Asian "tradition" of rights, taken toaccrue tocollectivesfamily, community, stateof whichindividuals are first and foremost members. Languages,subsistent as they are on collectivities of speakers, arereadily appropriated to this logic, a fact that can legitimizeroles assumed bystates as arbiters of their values andasso-ciated identities.Around the same time, in 1979, the city-state of Sin-gapore was embarking on its "Speak Mandarin" campaign.Fifteen years later, as research by Christina Hvitfeldt andGloria Poedjosoedarmo (1998) shows, theprogram had al-ready shown considerable success in inducing Singapor-eans descended from southern Chinese migrants to aban-don their native "dialects"Hokkien, Hakka, Fujianese,an d soonfor Mandarin. Two contingencies contributedto that success: Mandarin's orthographic privilege overthese nonmutually intelligible "dialects" and the specterthe Singapore government held out that "local" Singa-porean Chinese identity was threatened with fragmenta-tion inthe face of the rise of English as the city-state's linguafranca. But this language engineering campaign had an-other collateral effect: It produced a communi ty of speak-ers of the dominant language in the People's Republic ofChina, a long-term target of trade and economic coopera-tion. Thesuccess of theSpeak Mandarin campaign can beread, then, as symptomatic of the legitimacy that citizensaccorded to claims made on them by the state, in thename of the collective.

The last important issue I must note here involves areturn to linkage between language rights and print liter-acy, a technology that requires not only selection ofspeech varieties for which rights are recognized but alsodeselection of others that are not. Because "language" fig-ures as an unanalyzed notion in theuniversal declaration,the document must remain vague with respect to thepoli-tics of choice among varieties, which must bemade in or-der that claims to any language rights may be redressed.The larger social and cultural importance of such choicescan be illustrated here with another example from Indo-nesia, whose national constitution explicitly guaranteescitizens' rights to speak their native languages in additionto thenational language.Because the constitution (like the universal declara-tion) does not specify how those rights accrue to differentforms of a single language, it did not prevent the statefunctionaries from arriving at a curious way of preservingthe rights of the n ation's dom inant ethnic group, the Java-nese, to their own language. In the 1980s state functionar-ies publicized worries that Javanese, well known for itselaborate stylistic variants, was becom ing corrupt and los-ing ground to Indonesian. As a result the Department ofEducation made it a subject of instruction in nationalschools in predominantly ethnic Javanese areas. But thevariety selected for such treatment was just that refined,restricted variety that was emblematic of an imaginedcourtly past, never widely known among Javanese at large.On the face of things, the state's respect for speakers'

rights totheir native language led to a linguistic museumi-fication that had thecollateral effect of devaluating every-day kinds of speech (Errington 1996).These and other ambiguities give the universal decla-ration of language rights its tremendous scope but alsomake it, in thewords of one UNESCO witness to its prom-ulgation, "a linguistic time bomb" (Gatera 1998). Whetheror not its rhetorical sweep gives it practical purchase onany particular situation, it hasbeen useful here as away tosurvey the complex presuppositions involved in efforts toredress threats not only to languages but also to languagerights, because they refer to questions of social authorityon the one hand and the politics of linguistic identity onthe other.CONCLU SION: THE POLITICS OF LINGUISTICREPRESENTATIONI have juxtaposed in quick succession three different sensesof "language change" that are presupposed to be part ofth e "bad" consequences of rapid social change: languagedeath, language endangerment, and loss of language rights.The result is a multiplicity of images that might lend rhe-torical force toclaims about the values of endangered lan-guages. Languages are seen as mirrors of nature or uniqueformal systems, instruments of t hought or bodies of iden-tity, objects of inalienable rights or situated resources, etc.Each image derives rhetorical strength from cultural andpolitical traditions that it respecifies and recycles, in thisway tacitly helping represent the shape of social changeand possible futures of marginalized c omm unities.But beyond such rhetorical considerations, the "core"work of linguiststo metalinguistically objectify languagesas lexicons, sound systems, and grammatical systemsremains mute with respect to theways speakers engag e, re-sist, or exploit social change, for better or worse. The gapbetween abstract language structures and social life willseem barely reducible as long as one perceives the formeras having what William Sewell calls the most "modest re-source effects" (1992:23) of any aspect of social life. Bythis he means that patterns of sound and grammar havelittle purchase on the social dynamics in which agentsconstrue contexts and mobilize resources (material andsymbolic) for particular purposes. Sewell suggests that theneutrality of language systems with respect todynamics ofpower is evident in their relative durability over time:They are the most stable of all structured aspects of sociallife. But this is an observation that can be phrased differ-ently, with an eye to questions of sociolinguistic changeand language endangerment, tosuggest adifferent conclu-sion: If those structures are among the clearest traces ofthe past in thepresent, and also areembodied in that partof social practice which is talk, then they are available formobilization in theservice of larger claims on the past as ascarce resource (Appadurai 1981).

In fact, different visions of thepast inform each of thethree strategies I sketched above tor valorizing "endangered


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730 American An throp olog ist Vol. 105, No. 4 December 2003languages," which invoke lived continuity between pre-sent conditions and an environment that was once pris-tine but is now threatened, migrations by ancestor-speak-ers in recent or distant history, originary acts of creationby God, and so on. Nor are these the only ways that thedurability of language structure can take on v alue as asymbolic resource. In Imagined Com munities, for instance,Benedict Anderson (1991) makes broadly similar argu-ments by identifying languages as crucial sources of conti-nuity with indefinitely deep national pasts, and of frater-nity among members of an imagined community in thepresent. Although the rest of his argument centers on justthose technologies and ideologies that now seem to becausing death and endangerment of nonnational lan-guages around the world, it also points to the possibilitythat language might be a focal resource in alternativeforms of invented traditions, grounded in communities ofdiscursive practice (M cConnell-Ginet and Eckert 1992).

From this point of view, the work of linguists mightbe put to service as a means for invoking the past in thepresent, such that recognition of local "dialects" or "lan-guages" can be presented as valid symbolic substrates forcollective identities and legitimate instruments of collec-tive agency. To be sure, linguistic expertise itself has littlepurchase on these possibilities and cannot make descrip-tive work speak to any particular historical and culturalcircumstance. So, for instance, linguists can demonstratethe empirical gaps between reality and a dominant "com-plaint tradition" of English (Milroy and Milroy 1999) butcan claim no privilege for those findings in public dis-course. And when controversy coalesces around marginaldialects like African American Vernacular English (Ebon-ics), the expert testimony of linguists might sway a judgein a court of law but has no place in the court of publicopinion (Labov 1998).But in communities that are marginal not only todominant languages but also to dominant language ide-ologies, it may be that there are grounds for recognizing oraugmenting alternative linguistic traditions through lin-guistic descriptions. It may also be that such alternativetraditions can develop independently of linguistic descrip-tions or even technologies of literacy. Performative linguisticnorms, for instance, have proven an effective means of re-sisting outside social forces for 300 years among the Tewa,a Pueblo Indian group that has maintained its language asa minority within a minority. Ancestors of those now livingon the easternmost of the Hopi mesas removed themselvesfrom Spanish influence in 1700, and their descendantscontinue to use an indigenous Kiowa-Tanoan language inbilingual and trilingual language repertoires.Notwithstanding this double marginality the Tewa ap-pear, in Paul Kroskrity's (1998:104) words, to be paragons oflinguistic conservatism, thanks to ritual continuity in thegendered, exemplary space of the kiva. Here purism is em-bodied in performative connections with the past, ratherthan made the object of normative structural descriptions.Notwithstanding inadvertent osmosis of foreign words into

these compartmentalized performances, a linguistic senseof tradition and identity can key, as linguists would ex-pect, to grammatical and phonological elements of kivatalk, which represent the most stable embodiments of thepast in the present, enhancing its distinctiveness andauthenticity for the community at large.This appears to be a situation in which the work oflinguistic description has little purchase on communityintegrity. But this may not be true of others that have al-ready engaged with techniques and products of literacy,along with encroaching institutions, ideologies, and lan-guages. One such community is on Rapa Nui (Easter Is-land), off the coast of Ch ile. It was initially settled by Poly-nesians; however, their descendants were kidnapped byBlackbirders in the 1860s, displaced from large tracts ofland by colonialists in the 1870s, and decimated by illnessfrom the very onset of contact with Europeans. Massiveoutside influence broke down old clan structures by the

time the Chilean navy took control in 1953; and Spanish,language of the nation-state, was in increasingly commonuse by Rapa Nui natives, who were reduced in numbers toless than 1,000, many of whom were migrating to themainland with increasing frequency.On the face of things, Rapa Nui is a prototypicallymoribund language that has undergone enormous gram-matical simplification and relexification as a result of con-tact with Spanish (Makihara 2001). But in the last two dec-ades, the situation on the island has changed in ways thatare giving it new value and new life. As more tourists havebeen attracted to the island's famous archeological rem-nants, the land has taken on value beyond its use as pas-turage for sheep. "Locals" (mostly women) are exploitingeconomic opportunities offered by tourism, which are notdirectly dependent on mainland institutions. At the sametime, new laws have modified the Chilean state's asym-metric power relations not only with "ethnic" minoritieson the mainland but also on Rapa Nui. The upshot is thatnew claims can be made for local rights to newly valuableland.These claims are now being asserted in a new sort oflocal public sphere, a scene of articulation of representa-tive democratic politics in a new sort of Rapa Nui lan-guage. Since 1988, when an improvised Counc il of Elders be-gan to assert local rights of control to the entire island, amassively Hispanicized genre of Rapa Nuistructurallyimpure by historical standards, but socially distinctive inlocal contextshas become appropriate for oratory, help-ing to mark speakers' local allegiances and to distinguishits audience. As Sarah Thomason and Terence Kaufmansuggest, a language like Rapa Nui can only survive throughsyncretic, "heavy structural borrowing" (1988:91-95), notjust of lexical items but also of syntactic and phonologicalelements from the dominant language. This process hasgiven rise to an impure but authentic language that em-bodies a prenational past and identities shared with in-digenous ancestors. In the absence of external nationaland global forces, the new Rapa Nui language might be a


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collective project that would collapse, as did Mexicano(Hill andHill 1986). But an appropriate constellation ofpolitical and economic contingencies has given relativelydurable ; socially distinctive features of talk on Rapa Nuinew importance for a new linguistic tradition and place-making project.

In this andother situations, the survival of endan-gered languages is bound up with technologies and politicsof literacy, as Hinton and Kenneth Hale's (2001) survey oflanguage revitalization efforts shows. So, too, these arecontexts in which the work of linguists to make distinctiveforms of speech writable may help to mobilize linguistictraces of the past in the present. Thus, linguists contributeto linguistic traditions that may be invented, but are none-theless authentic, and somuch more than merely "falseconstrual[s] [of the past] whose object is political in na-ture" (Friedman 1993:745). Descriptive work that serves toredress threats to languages may be strategic and rhetoricallykeyed but can also help frame and answer politicallyfraught questions of identity. Linguists can then contrib-ute to the preservation of senses of community if theyshare with others a heightened sense of the larger stakesinvolved in the politics ofwriting and of endangered lan-guages.

JOSEPH ERRINGTON Department ofAnthropology, Yale Uni-versity, New Haven, CT 06520NOTESAcknowledgments. Inaddition to other participants in the panel inwhich the first version of this article was read, my thanks go toDoug Whalen and Peter Sercombe fordiscussion and material notyet published, and to Asif Agha, Greg Urban, and Jonathan Amithfor valuable discussion of these issues.REFERENCES CITEDAjamiseba, Daniel1996 Linguistics for Development Purposes: A Case Study amongthe Sasak Language Speakers. Culture Series 23. Department ofMalay Studies. Singapore: National University of Singapore.Anderson, Benedict1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Appadurai, Arjun1981 The Past as aScarce Resource. Man, n.s. 16:201-219.Benhabib, Seyla2002 Transformation of Citizenship: The Case of ContemporaryEurope. Government and Opposition 37(4):439-465.Brundtland, Gro1987 Our Common Future. World Commission on Environmentand Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Chee-Meow, Seah, ed.1977 Asian Values and Modernization. Singapore: Singapore Uni-versity Press.Crystal, David2000 Language Death. New York: Cambridge University Press.Dixon, Robert M.

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