Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:
Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.
Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.
And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.
The first is Put your language in italics (“We don’t think in italics”); the section closest to my heart is:
2. Don’t hire a proofreader
3. Don’t check your translations with a fluent speakerI recently read an othertwise very good anthology of Scottish nature writing in which many contributors were proud to talk about (italicised) Gaelic words and for which no-one had hired a Gaelic proofreader. Many words were misspelled, and more were mistranslated. Here, in a nature writing context, Gaelic stood in for ecological authenticity, for a connection to land, but the lack of care with which the language was treated belied the project. It was sufficient for the project of the book that Gaelic be present but not necessary that it be Gaelic.
I also liked the end:
19. Call any thorough use of the language fake, unnecessary or purist
Once a review complained about the way I spelled arkaeolojist. But in English we don’t spell it archéologue, arqueóloga or αρχαιολόγος.
20. Be a purist
The only thing more dispiriting than your language being ignored by everyone else is arguing amongst ourselves about whether or not we’re using our language right. What matters is using it.
It’s well worth reading the whole thing; rozele says “a lot of it’s very familiar to me from yidishland; it’s all connected to many Hattic conversations,” which it certainly is.
Welsh is in a better state, though hardly one that inspires solid hope for the future, alas. I think that a lot of the threat comes down to economics. (The maps at the top of the article resonate with me.) Young people don’t stay in areas where the language is still widely spoken: there are no jobs for them, and they can’t afford to buy houses there in competitition with English holiday-home buyers. (Or, to be fair, anywhere else …)
In the cities, the ratchet is one-way. Welsh is a minority language and there is no purely practical need to learn it. For all but a small minority, ethnic pride is just not a sufficiently powerful motivator in itself for people to persevere in the hard work of learning (and regularly using) a language which, after all, is more different from English in most respects than French or German is.
There is also a surprising amount of actual hostility to the Welsh language, by no means all of it from far-right farts like that fellow we encountered as a “biographer” of Anthony Burgess the other day. English incomers can feel threatened by it, and the (understandable) politicisation of language preservation by Plaid Cymru makes not a few di-Gymraeg* Welsh people uneasy that they might end up as second-class citizens one day. Also understandably (though wrongly, I am sure.)
* I don’t think italicisation is, in fact, a major threat to minority languages …
I’m a bit confused by the verso/recto peeve. I think of the standard approach to “facing page” translations as giving the original text on the left and the translation on the right, presumably because we (in our culture) read from left to right. It is true that the right side is more “prominent” in some contexts – i.e. some books are set up to have new chapters always begin with a recto page even if that requires a blank page after the previous chapter – but that seems a slightly different issue. (And when you eventually turn the page, you look at the left of the new spread first.) But if you are presenting a Gaelic translation of an English original, sure put the Gaelic on the right.
Are there other conventions for facing-page translations that put the original on the right? This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing where US and UK publishers would diverge, but what do I know?
As to the complaint about people with the attitude that “Scots is basically just English with funny spelling,” why not hit back with the attitude that “English is basically just Scots with funny spelling”?
Maybe italicization doesn’t go far enough. You want all of your own language’s words typeset in something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_type to underscore their different-ness. That’s how you tell the major languages apart in India, innit?
This is the motivation behind some more recently invented scripts for African languages, like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vai_syllabary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%27Ko_script
While this adds to the gaiety of nations, I’m not convinced it does a lot to promote actual language use. I would (as often in such cases) be happy to be proved wrong.
The best bets (I’d have thought) would be those that really are traditional, like the Arabic ajami Hausa script. Still around, despite concerted deliberate Brit colonial attempts to kill it off.
It’s true that the Arabic script is not ideal for writing – well, any language – but there are ways round the most obvious problems, and in any case, this is just a matter of degree. The unmodified Latin alphabet is not brilliant for many languages either (including Latin.) Even Swahili has phonemic distinctions not noted in the standard orthography.
Misneachd = bravery
If you have the collection Scothscéalta by Padraic Ó Conaire, there is a story “Beirt Bhan Misniúl” (two brave women), which I remember as very affecting. I could not find the text online.
“A maiden of great appetite with an intensely white, dense spade went through my good little porker’s hat.”
Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
I’ve tried everything.
To be fair to Edinburgh, wasn’t it always an “English” city? It was certainly never a Gaelic speaking town, and the burghs were one of the institutions by which Inglis displaced Gaelic. I would no more expect to find a thriving Gaelic community in Edinburgh than I would Welsh speakers in London.
Maybe italicization doesn’t go far enough.
Just so we’re on the same page, I trust you realize the author is objecting to italicization.
wasn’t it always an “English” city?
Ahem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidyn
Welsh speakers in London
Curiously enough, (a portion of) the London Welsh Male Voice Choir sang (in Welsh, naturally) at my less-Hispanic son’s wedding in that fine Welsh city. (Llundain, as it is called in English.)
Of course, the true North British nationalist will favor Pictish-revivalism, since both Gaelic and Scots are residues of earlier waves of settler colonialism. (And maybe Pictish was as well but we don’t know much about whoever it was that the first P-Celtic speakers that far north subdued or supplanted.)
To Vanya’s point I imagine that Edinburgh as a metropole has over time attracted many residents who descend from the former inhabitants of now depopulated rural areas, including up into the Highlands. But that said, the migration to the big city may have coincided with assimilation and exogamy. I don’t know how many people in Edinburgh would, for example, have had at least 5 out of their 8 great-grandparents be L1 Gaelic-speakers. Probably significantly more would have a single Gaelic-speaking great-great-grandparent, as I do. (Also I suppose one L1 Scots-speaker, but I expect the process by which that great-great-grandfather transitioned from being a Scots-speaking teenager in Inverness to an English-speaking adult with a Scottish accent in Manhattan was sufficiently smooth that it doesn’t obviously look like language shift as opposed to code-switching. Or would you think that a teenager in Inverness in the 1840’s would already have been code-switching between Scots and English and it was just a question in the U.S. of sticking to one of those settings?)
From the article:
That’s insane. Subtitles I don’t need are distracting; I do switch them off when I can.
In Wales there are no longer really any Welsh-language monolinguals, though there are still old people whose Welsh is better than their English. (My great-aunt forgot the English she had learned as a teenager in her old age, but I don’t think the subtitling issue was very salient for her back then.)
Mostly, this is gesture politics, of course. The minority language must be treated exactly like English, to maintain the prestige of the language. Not a pointless objective, but terrible if it’s prioritised over measures that are actually directly helpful. Worse yet, if it is actually impossible, as that gives aid and comfort to your enemies, who think your whole aim of preserving your language is foolish and quite probably unpatriotic, if not actually racist.
Plaid Cymru, also prone to linguist gesture politics (though happily not exclusively so) came up with a classic of this genre a few years ago, and pushed it into actual legislation. All hospital correspondence had to be in Welsh on demand (so far, so good) on exactly the same basis as English (not so good.)
Specifically, no additional delay (so translation was assumed to be instantaneous) and (my favourite touch) signed by the correspondent in exactly the same way as the English version.
This meant that non-Welsh speaking medical staff (the great majority) were required by law to sign communications about vital (and possibly confidential) medical information that they could not read, understand, or check for errors; there was to be no record of who had performed the actual (presumably instantaneous) translation or what their qualifications as a technical medical translator* might be.
[Technical: hell, I don’t know how to say “polypoidal choroidopathy” in Welsh. Does anybody?]
As I pointed out in vain at the time, for a doctor to sign a potentially critically important document in such circumstances is completely unethical (as in, grounds for referral to the GMC.)
As far as I can make out, this law is a dead letter, but remains around as a sort of unexploded ethics bomb: a testimony to the stupidity of not bothering to consider the simplest actual practical objections to your obviously virtuous proposals.
* I’ve come across perfectly competent professional translators who have refused to translate for patients in clinical settings where they were already physically present, because they had been told it might expose them to legal jeopardy in cases of misunderstanding.
And the only broadcast content in which English subtitles aren’t hard-coded is the children’s television
I get that there may be older AV recordings where subtitles are burned into the video, and sometimes a broadcaster must use that version because there is not yet any version with configurable subtitles. But that should not be an issue with new content.
Perhaps public-service broadcasters are worried about some viewers who lack either the equipment or the knowledge to call up optional subtitles? Less bad to foist superfluous subtitles on others than to deny needed subtitles to the backward.
I’ve come across perfectly competent professional translators who have refused to translate for patients in clinical settings where they were already physically present, because they had been told it might expose them to legal jeopardy in cases of misunderstanding.
How does that work? In the US at least, hospitals employ professional medical translators, for the benefit of patients who do not share a language with the physician (as far as I can tell, they mostly work over the telephone, for both more common and less common languages.) How does that work in the UK?
Some years ago I saw a call for translators between English and various Mexican Indian languages, because there were and probably are Mexican immigrants who speak little English or Spanish.
professional medical translators, for the benefit of patients who do not share a language with the physician (as far as I can tell, they mostly work over the telephone
Same here, including the telephone bit (it’s a highly unsatisfactory system, but is, of course, relatively cheap, when it works.)
But patients occasionally come with professional translators who’ve been helping them on the journey to hospital. It seems to be a common thing for them to have been warned off helping with the actual consultation. Maybe there’s some specific disastrous episode that got their employers so defensive, but I don’t know.
(That’s all it takes. If you go in for a cataract operation in the UK, you’ll be spontaneously told there’s a risk of losing the other eye. This is true, though you’re probably more likely to be run over by an ambulance on your way in. It’s because of one specific lost negligence lawsuit in Australia: the surgeon in fact did nothing negligent in any meaningful sense*, but had been asked by the patient pre-operatively if his other eye was in any danger from the surgery, and had told him no, as indeed any eye surgeon in his shoes might well have done at that time.)
* the problem was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_ophthalmia
Its incidence after cataract surgery is minuscule. But it has happened.
Beside the cases (not after cataract surgery, but after serious injury) mentioned in the WP article, there’s also the Conquest of Mexico historian William Prescott. (I didn’t know about Thurber: I thought his trouble was myopic degeneration, but I see that he did indeed lose an eye to injury when he was seven. I could have stopped him going blind, nowadays …)
At one medical practice I go to, I have quite often seen patients accompanied by translators. Who provides them I don’t know. But I assume they go into the consultation with the patient, because how else could the patient know what the doctor is telling them? The languages are most often Vietnamese and Chinese, I believe, and the patients are generally elderly.
The phone method is not necessarily cheaper, but it is more efficient. You might have a hospital in one place which at a given moment needs five Cantonese translators, while one a hundred miles away might not need any at the moment but might need them tomorrow. With rarer languages this becomes even more of an issue.
To further Vanya’s point, even a majority of the rural hinterlands of Edinburgh have been Germanic-speaking for half a millennium, nearly as long as that area had the Gaelic. Gaelic in those regions seems to date to, or more likely after, the engulfment of the Fortriu lands by the Kingdom of Alba in the ninth century. While scholars say the inhabitants of Fortriu spoke a Pictish language, I like to think their language was Fortran.
While the article’s author (or editor?) chose to accompany the map of percent Gaelic/Scots speakers with a map of 2nd home percentages (so low that it’s hard to believe it’s pricing people out in a vast, lightly populated region, maybe they still entail estates?), they could as profitably have set a map of altitude alongside it, or arable land.
The match between that map and the map of Gaelic v Germanic speaking regions in the 15th century is instructive. Arable land is the best proxy we can have for population density, so the comparison shows just how demographically embattled Gaelic already was as the Wars of the Roses ended 20-25 generations ago.
Are there other regions of Europe where a language has endured for five centuries without even a proper trading town to sustain it? The surprise to me is not that it’s faltering but that it made it this far.