Understanding Languages.

I stood at a bus stop in Oldham town centre today. Two women were talking away nineteen to the dozen, probably in Punjabi but it could well have been one of the other Asian languages. After a while, a large, red faced man looked around at the rest of in the queue and said, " I can't understand a word they are saying". "No," I thought, "and you probably wouldn't understand if they were speaking German either." 

Except that I didn't just think it; I said it out loud. He was a bit surprised but finally agreed with me and went on to mutter something about the women having their faces covered. One of them was wearing the headscarf while the other did have a black veil as well, hiding her face. "If you live in this country," he observed, "you should live by our rules". Ok, fair enough, but I don't think we have rules about what you can wear in the street. And so long as there is no obvious security problem we should maintain our country's freedoms. I don't think there was any question that this was a woman chatting to a friend. And provided she would be prepared to unveil in private when asked to do so by a female police officer, I really don't see what the problem is. 

I can't say I really like the increase in the wearing of the burka in our towns and cities but neither do I like rules and regulations that say what you can and cannot wear. If we go down that road, we'll ban young people from dressing as Goths, young men from shaving their heads and wearing aggressive looking piercings, not to mention tattoos. It's far too easy to take offence at what people wear and to judge them by their outfits. 

What I didn't say was that if the fat, red faced man had been standing at a bus stop in a city in the Indian subcontinent, chatting away in English to a friend, there would probably have been people at the stop who understood him. And quite possibly those two ladies also understood what he said. When Phil and I are abroad, even in a country where we speak the language well, we tend to speak English to each other. It's normal. Although I know people who claim that after years of living out of the UK the language of their adopted country has come to dominate their brain, I still think your first language does to some extent define who you are. 

Which brings me to languages that are at risk of disappearing. The language expert Christopher Moseley of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies has compiled a list of 33 languages that are under-threat, including four languages spoken in British territories: Jersey French, Guernsey French, Manx and Cornish. Jersey French still has about 1000 native speakers but Manx is in a bad way because the last first-language speaker died in 1974. There are still Manx speakers in the Isle of Man but English is their first language. Dr Moseley says that Cornish and Manx have been / are being revived in a systematic fashion and there are tourist organisations running study holidays for all the languages. 

And once again, I find myself in two minds about the whole business. It's a shame for languages to disappear but if they are kept alive in an artificial way is that truly a good thing? Is such a language still a living language? 

I'm reminded of something I heard on one of Stephen Fry's TV programmes about language, in which he went around the UK looking at local dialects and showing off his ability to put on regional accents. In one of the programmes he interviewed an American who had spoken only Klingon to his small son for the first two years of the child's life. Dr d'Armond Speers, a linguist from Minnesota, wanted to see if it would be possible for his son's first word to be "vav", Klingon for "dad". 

Now, Klingon is a language invented for the TV series Star Trek and lacked a whole lot of everyday vocabulary, such as "baby bottle". Consequently, despite Dr d'Armond Speers working very hard at it, his project was only partially successful. Add to that the fact that his son was spoken to in English by everyone else and quickly learned that Daddy also spoke English and you can see why the child pretty soon made more progress in English than in Klingon. Here's a link to an article about Dr D'Armond Speers' project. 

Even languages such as Basque have had to "borrow" from languages such as Castilian Spanish to provide modern vocabulary. And Basque is a language that has probably been around longer than almost all others so what chance does a totally invented language have. 

You can't legislate for the way a language develops. Maybe the minority language speakers need to find an additional way of asserting their identity.