Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact: Methods and Cases 9783110810752, 9027978662, 9789027978660

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Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 6

Editor

Werner Winter

Mouton Publishers The Hague · Paris · New York

Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact Methods and Cases edited by

William Francis Mackey Jacob Ornstein

Mouton Publishers The Hague · Paris · New York

Professor William Francis Mackey International Center for Research on Bilingualism Universit6 Laval, Quebec Professor Jacob Ornstein Cross Cultural Southwest Ethnic Study Center The University of Texas at El Paso

ISBN 90 279 7866 2 © Copyright 1979 by Mouton Publishers, The Hague. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. Printing: Karl Gerike, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer Buchgewerbe GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany

PREFACE The study of language contact has been central to no single discipline, although many sciences have studied the phenomenon to the extent that it might throw light upon some of their particular problems. Sociologists and ethnologists have studied the contact of languages in order to obtain a better understanding of the nature of societies and cultures. Linguists have long been interested in language contact to the extent that it helped explain the changes in the forms and meanings of linguistic structures. Psychologists have studied bilingualism in so far as it contributed to the understanding of the workings of the mind. The study of language contact has likewise contributed to such disciplines as political science, law, economics, education and anthropology. Language contact and the related questions of ethnicity, language survival, regionalism and cultural freedom have become some of our most pressing problems contributing to one of the most basic dilemmas of our age — the contradiction between the right of the group to ethnic survival and that of the individual to cultural freedom. It is essential that the study of this important dilemma become a main and central object of research rather than a question which remains marginal to a number of different disciplines. It was this need which led to the organization of the Unesco Seminar on the Description and Measurement of Bilingualism in 1967 and to the founding in the same year of the International Center for Research on Bilingualism. It also has motived this Center to organize periodic international multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary seminars on problems related to language contact such as the one in 1972 devoted to the problems and solutions of multilingual political systems and the 1976 seminar on multidisciplinary typologies in the study of minorities. Similar motivations led to the founding of the Cross Cultural Southwest Ethnic Study Center at the University of Texas at El Paso with support of the Spencer Foundation, Chicago. It is the continuing need for such multidisciplinary studies that constitutes the main justification for the present volume. It is the work of sociologists, linguists, geographers, educators and humanists — all of whom have studied the contact of languages mainly as a social phenomenon. The interdisciplinary thrust of this collection, however, is mainly sociolinguistic, and in compiling the volume, this orientation became our main criterion. It was with this in mind that we asked scholars in various parts of the world to permit us to preprint or to reprint some of their works; some of them even offered to write studies especially for this collection. It is now our pleasure to thank all of these contributors for their generosity, their patience

VI

PREFACE

and their understanding throughout the numerous delays which the publication of this book has occasioned. A special debt of gratitude, however, is due to Karin Hardt Dhatt for her valuable editorial assistance in handling the numerous versions of the text and in maintaining contact with our contributors in the four quarters of the globe. Finally, we owe our sincere thanks to Richard Vigneault of the ICRB for the patience and skill with which he has handled the production of the book. William Francis Mackey International Center for Research on Bilingualism and Jacob Ornstein Cross Cultural Southwest Ethnic Study

Center

INTRODUCTION Language contact is essentially a social phenomenon resulting from the meeting of peoples speaking different languages. The causes of contact are multiple and they include the dominance of certain languages and their social functions, the location of language communities and their demographic, political and economic importance, and the motives which push peoples to master another language in addition to their mother tongue. Since all these factors are variable and are more marked in some cases than they are in others, the study of them must recognize degrees of variation and hence the need for quantification. Language contact varies therefore according to the distribution of the languages, their stability and their social function. In examining the distribution of languages in contact, we must try to answer the question: Where are the speakers of each language and what do they do? This calls for special studies in language demography. The distribution may take on a number of patterns each being related to certain possibilities of language dominance or language survival. The stability of each of the languages in contact depends on a number of factors. These include the degree in which a given tongue is established or has roots in a given area, the rate of increase or decrease in the number of its speakers and their degree of dependence on other languages. The function of each of the languages in contact may be quite different. What a language is used for is itself an indication of what it will become. Some languages are used only in the home, or only for speaking, or only for certain types of work; others have a multiplicity of functions, including schooling, religious services, business and mass communication. Peoples speaking different languages meet not only at the border of different countries, but also within these countries, especially in large cities which are associated with a high rate of mobility. Language contact has always been associated with the movement of peoples. This has been recorded throughout history and has had far-reaching effects on the politics, the societies and the languages of the areas in which contact has occurred. We are all familiar with the effects on the great migrations of the past associated with the rise of Babylon and with the fall of Rome. In more recent times we have seen the effects of colonization on the languages of the New World as the old-World languages circled the globe and finally dominated it. This was done through trade, commerce, industry and military occupation on the one hand, and through science, culture and religion on the other. Language domination, however, was not the purpose of such expansion; it was only an inevitable effect.

VIII

INTRODUCTION

Since the old-World languages were very few in number and the other languages of the world were numbered in the thousands language contact between European and non-European languages became more and more extensive. The Westernization of the latter and the urbanization of their rural minorities caused a great increase in the incidence of language contact during the latter half of the twentieth century. The rate of increase has tremendously accelerated as a result of the phenomenal developments in means of communication during the past quarter century, with effects that Thomas Lunden has carefully analysed in the following pages (Chapter 2). The complexity and variety of language contact situations change from country to country to such an extent that the situation in each region or polity is best considered separately since it is in reality a configuration of variables in language demography which may be studied as a profile peculiar to a given political entity. The construction of such profiles has been the work of Grant D. McConnell (Chapter 3). In each polity the importance of each language can now be assessed and enable one to project its chances of survival when certain conditions are varied. Quantitative and operational methods for such language assessment have been the work of mathematical anthropologists like Douglas R. White, who here illustrates his own techniques, in collaboration with the sociolinguist Lylian A. Brudner (Chapter 4). The value of such techniques and the possible application of powerful optimization methods ultimately depends on the accuracy of the data which are thus treated. The mass of the data base needed for an entire country necessitates the use of large-scale surveys such as those of the census. Methods for using existing census data and techniques for improving their use and accuracy are therefore essential. Geocoding is one of these techniques and the conditions and cautions for its use are the object of the study contributed by Donald G. Cartwright and myself (Chapter 5). These four chapters on language demography are therefore complementary. In contradistinction to these essentially descriptive methods are those operational techniques based on working models; the example of one such model is included here in Els Oksaar's study of bilingual interaction (Chapter 6). Although the foregoing sections on models and language demography together comprise what is intended to represent the methods part of the collection (Part I), this in no way implies that the second part, devoted as it is to case studies, is devoid of method. On the contrary, most of the chapters in the second part have been included, not so much because of the interesting information on language contact which they supply, but because they teach something about methods which have been used in the study of language contact. But it is research method as applied to specific types of cases — the study of ethnicity, of language maintenance, of diglossia, of group competence or of the relationship between language contact and education on the one hand and language and the community on the other.

INTRODUCTION

IX

The first section in Part II (Section IV) is devoted to the study of language and ethnicity. It begins with a chapter on the language controversy in Greenland by Inge Kleivan (Chapter 7) and continues with a detailed study by Thomas Brockmann of the complexities of ethnicity and communication in the British Honduras (Chapter 8) followed by a report by William J. Samarin and I. Kalmar on their research into the ethnic reactions of immigrants in Toronto to foreign accented speech (Chapter 9). The section concludes with the survey of Leo Pap comparing receptions of minority status and language attitudes in Switzerland, Peru and the United States (Chapter 10). For many ethnic minorities, one of the most emotive, politicized and often disheartening questions is that of the eventual survival of their language and culture. Objective studies in this area are often welcomed by these minorities as well as by scholars in the field. Two studies on language maintenance have been included here, each representing a different type of language situation. The first takes us to the Philippines as studied by N. Asuncion-Lande and Emy M. Pascasio (Chapter 11) and the second elucidates the fate of Welsh as so well portrayed in the four documents presented by Robert Maynard Jones (Chapter 12). One of the special characteristics of those in daily contact with people speaking another language is that their social, and especially, their language behavior are different from those of unilingual or linguistically isolated populations. Three studies illustrate these differences. The first illustrates the type of behavior shown by bilingual Spanish speakers of English in the American Southwest as analysed by Donald M. Lance (Chapter 13). More subtle again is the difference in the behavior of speakers of English in the British West Indies as portrayed by Sue A. Pace in her sociolinguistic study of the language situation in Grenada (Chapter 14). Finally, an entirely different type of language behavior, that of the use of a language of countries thousands of kilometers away is reflected in the effects it has had on the national language; the sociolinguistic aspects of such situations are considered by M. Higa as they particularly affect the lexicon of modern Japan (Chapter 15). Language behavior in situations of language contact can, however, be so structured and so predictable as to constitute a different type of phenomenon. When language or varieties of a language take on regular social roles within a speech community their functional distribution is known as diglossia. We present two very different studies to illustrate both the range of this phenomenon and the methods used to study it. The first study, by E.H. Flint, is essentially a probe into an historical accident whose documentary uniqueness makes it a privileged case study in societal diglossia; it supplies us with a detailed analysis of the language functions of the survivors of the mutiny on the Bounty and their island descendants (Chapter 16). The

χ

INTRODUCTION

second study, half a world removed, takes us to contemporary Belgium where B. Meeus has studied the diglossic distribution of dialectal and standard Dutch among urbanized populations (Chapter 17). Another special aspect of language behavior is the type of competence which it supposes. If the English of the Mexican-Americans is not that of Japan, the reason does not reside exclusively in the structural differences between Spanish and Japanese. Two studies demonstrate that there are essential social differences. The first study by Betty Lou Dubois shows the societal correlates of the English of Chicano university students (Chapter 18). In the second study, Curtis W. Hayes analyzes the type and social functions of English as used in Japan (Chapter 19). These types of behavior must, however, exist within the speech community one of whose functions is the transmission of the languages through formal education from one generation to the next. In the section devoted to language contact and education we present two different types of study, the first being a descriptive one by C.M.B. Brann on multilingualism in Nigerian Education (Chapter 20); and the other, is an experimental study by our colleague Jacob Ornstein on bilingualism and biculturalism as viewed in the light of socio-educational correlates, an investigation of the language traits of Mexican-Americans in El Paso undertaken in collaboration with the sociologist Paul W. Goodman (Chapter 21). Less detailed but more inclusive are the two studies which make up the section on language and community. Here we offer the contrast of extremes. The first is a brief description of the language situation in the local polity of a national state as illustrated in the account by R.J.H. Matthews of language choice and bilingualism in the Swiss canton of Ticino (Chapter 22). The second is an analysis of the language of a non-territorial speech community held together, not by ethnic loyalty, but by allegiance to a constructed language; the study of this community is the contribution of R.E. Wood (Chapter 23). Finally, by way of conclusion, an attempt is made (Chapter 24) to abstract from all these studies some basic problems in theory and method, the purpose of which is to caution those who will evaluate these and other studies or attempt some of their own. The suggested framework for considering these problems is an ecological one. The intention is to meet the guidelines with which the book begins. Since language is a component of culture, all these situations of language contact can be considered, in the last analysis, simply as particular cases of intercultural relations and should therefore first be situated within a larger cultural context. It is to this end that we have begun our methods with the sociological overview of Jacques Brazeau. It is to his guidelines, therefore, that we now turn. William F. Mackey

Table of Contents

Preface

V

Introduction

VII

PARTI METHODS

I

II

III

Guidelines: 1. Guidelines for the Study of Intercultural Relations Jacques Brazeau

3

Demography: 2. Language Minorities in a World of Communications Thomas Lundin

11

3. Constructing Language Profiles by Polity Grant D. McConnell

23

4. Language Attitudes: Behavior and Intervening Variables Lilyan A. Brudner Douglas R. White

51

5. Geocoding Language Loss from Census Data William F. Mackey Donald G. Cartwright

69

6. Models of Competence in Bilingual Interaction Els Oksaar

99

Models:

XII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART II CASES

IV

Language and Ethnicity: 7. Language and Ethnic Identity: Language Policy and Debate in Greenland Inge Kleivan

117

8. Language, Communication and Ethnicity in British Honduras Thomas Brockmann

161

9. Evaluational Reactions to Foreign Accent among Immigrants in Toronto William J. Samarin Ivan Kalmar

181

10. Language Attitudes and Minority Status Leo Pap V

Language Maintenance: 11. Language Maintenance and Code Switching among Filipino Bilingual Speakers Nobleza Asuncion-Lande Emy M. Pascasio 12. Welsh Bilingualism: Four Documents R.M. Jones

VI

Language Behavior: 13. Spanish-English Bilingualism in the American Southwest Donald M. Lance 14. A Sociolinguistic Consideration of English Spoken in Grenada, British West Indies Sue A. Pace

197

211

231

247

265

TABLE O F CONTENTS

15. Sociolinguistic Aspects of Word-Borrowing Masanori Higa

XJJJ

277

VII Diglossia: 16. Stable Societal Diglossia in Norfolk Island E.H. Flint

295

17. A Diglossic Situation: Standard vs Dialect Baudewijn Meeus

335

VIII Language Competence: 18. Societal and Linguistic Correlates in an Investigation of the English Writing of a Selected Group of University Level Chicanos Betty Lou Dubois 19. Language Contact in Japan Curtis W. Hayes IX

X

Language and Education: 20. Multilingualism in Nigerian Education C.M.B. Brann

363

379

21. Socio-Educational Correlates of Mexican-American Bilingualism Jacob Ornstein Paul W. Goodman

393

Language and Community: 22. Bilingualism in a Swiss Canton: Language Choice in Ticino R.J.H. Matthews

425

23. A Voluntary Non-Ethnic and Non-Territorial Speech Community Richard E. Wood XI

347

Conclusion: Problems in Theory and Method: 24. Toward an Ecology of Language Contact William F. Mackey

433

453

PART ONE

METHODS

I

Guidelines

GUIDELINES FOR THE STUDY OF INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS Jacques Brazeau

Diversity of racial background, historical origin, religion and mother tongue within a society brings in relation members of ethnic groups whose modes of living are considered to be different. If these groups are closely interdependent in daily affairs, rather than related indirectly while separate and isolated, their members share a common way of life while they maintain some more or less obvious specific characteristics. In a society whose population is of various backgrounds that are still indentified, two major issues exist regarding social homogeneity and diversity: the adoption of modes of interaction between the members of cultural groups and the sharing of available social experiences between individuals and groups and within society as a whole. In a multicultural society, the truly important intercultural relations are not generally those of annual ethnic festivals and of other symbolic manifestations; they are rather those that effectuate a sharing of responsibilities in daily affairs in accordance with the existence of a common way of life and of some unshared traditions. These relationships give the various categories of society's members the means for exploiting one another at times by virtue of the diversity of their traditions. It is through an examination of how this is done that we are provided with guidelines for the study of intercultural relations. Institutional Framework, Specific and Common Organisations In a plural society, the diversity of backgrounds often produces, first, the duplication of some institutions. Ethnic groups have a tendency to develop their own institutions. This allows them to benefit from the existence of some special services and to see a number of their members earn

4

JACQUES B R A Z E A U

their living within the group. But other groups, especially those that wield social power, limit the growth of this parallelism. Local, regional and national society defines the legitimacy of institutional duplication. Some duplication is tolerated, in areas like religion, welfare, leisure, small business and the professions, but a large number of institutions must rather be common. Society often places the school within the common set of institutions because of the role that schooling plays in the handing down of culture from generation to generation. There is a first source of inequalities in intercultural relations that stems from the fact that the groups which are large and powerful have a large network of their own institutions while less important groups have a more restricted set. On the other hand, it is the groups that are well provided to create in their own image and likeness the common social institutions in which all population elements participate as producers or consumers. As a result of this, there is quite commonly an uneven social participation of various population elements within the common" institutional framework. A strong tendency toward inequality within the competition that takes place within those institutions that constitute the major network for society as a whole combines with discrepancies between ethnic frameworks. An examination of the Canadian situation allows us to explain these two elements of social unevenness. An examination of many other cases could serve the same purpose. A look at Canadian social organisation points to the widespread development of institutions that could be identified as Anglo-American in character, the duplication of these by French-language institutions in that part of the country which constitutes a French concentration, and the limited nature of the institutional framework available to groups of other cultures, native and immigrant. The asymmetry is obvious with respect to the institutions of which each group can make use to insure the maintenance of its cultural heritage. The asymmetry is even more evident when one thinks of the sharing of contemporary experience between cultural groups. The culture of a group within an industrial society includes a pool of knowledge related to the production, the distribution and the consumption of goods and services. The most valuable items of this knowledge are possessed by administrators, technicians and skilled workers. This is a knowledge that is not acquired mainly in schools but much more through the sharing of the experience available as one has a career in a large organisation, public or private. Originating in a work situation within a group of persons who are professionally involved, this knowlege spreads into the general population through interpersonal contacts just as much as through the media and advertising. The culture of a group is made up of the sum of the knowledge that its members possess and can share, because of the experience to which they have access and considering the ease which they have to pass this knowledge around them. It is not primarily the immigrant who works within

GUIDELINES

5

his ethnic community who introduces in it the knowledge that prevails in larger society. The immigrant who works outside his group can do so but according to the level of his participation there and according to his communicative facilities outside his group and when he returns to it. This example shows that individuals whose culture and mother tongue are those of most of the institutions in the community are more likely to have access, first, to an enriching experience and to be in a position, second, to share within their group the knowledge which is the fruit of that experience and which has global social usefulness. Members of the more important social groups are favoured in common institutions because they are given an opportunity for re-inforcing the cultural heritage of their own background by virtue of the fact that it is this cultural heritage which is utilised in society's large institutions that have a daily influence on the whole population. Cooperation and Competition within an Institutional Network Canada has two main language groups: a people of English mother tongue, who are of British origin and of other origins than British; a French group that accounts for 26% of the population and that maintains itself only in Quebec and in regions of high concentration in Ontario and New Brunswick. The country has many other language groups that are less important numerically, those of natives and those of immigrants and their descendants. Canada is striving to be bilingual in her public institutions, in accordance with the idea that the main language groups have some right to obtain services in their own language and that their members ought to be ale to develop each as a cultural group. The country takes pride in the diversity of t h e b a c k g r o u n d of its population and supports formally the multiculturalism of this population. It is nevertheless the case that, historically, Canadian bilingualism and cultural pluralism existed together with the prevalence of the use of English in large institutions, public and private. Demographic and historical factors have supported recourse to English. An ecological factor has given it support as well, it is the development of an industrial region in Southern Ontario and Western Quebec in close interdependence with large U.S. centres. The North American example has influenced Canadian opinion on assimilation: English Canada has wished for unilingualism in the whole of Canada and might have questioned this wish had Canada been located in Europe or in Africa; but English Canada has used bilingualism also as an asset to distinguish the country from the U.S.A. The closeness and the mutual dependence of Canada and the United States have affected most directly, however, the selection of modes of interaction in the administration of large private concerns. Even in Quebec, these concerns

6

JACQUES BRAZEAU

gave first priority to relationships with head offices, suppliers and distribution outlets of the North American industrial system. Giving priority to these aspects of communication allowed for the recruitment of English-speaking unilingual personnel in managerial functions and the h o m o g e n e i t y of m a n p o w e r at t h i s level required that internal communication within firms be carried out largely in English. The involvement of French Canada took place via the English language and according to the creation of ethnic layers in the division of labour: management was largely English-speaking, except in personnel and sales, while workers in Quebec were more predominantly of French and of other mother tongues. One cannot say that the sharing of responsibilities, experience and privileges in a Canadian urban milieu between persons of English, French and other mother tongues has been totally independent of the selection of modes of interaction which favour those who are English-speaking by virtue of their origin or by adoption. Within the network of Quebec's public concerns, opposite methods have given analogous results, favourable this time to the French-speaking. The prevalence of English within Canadian institutions as a whole brings about the rapid assimilation of persons of non-official languages, if they participate in common undertakings and leave their isolated ethnic community. The same fate is likely to be that of French Canadians who are outside the main concentrations of their isolated ethnic community. The same fate is likely to be that of French Canadians who are outside the main concentrations of their group in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. French-speaking Canadians who are part of the French territorial mass escape this fate because of their group's density, the extensiveness and the strength of their own institutions, the possibilities which they have to work within their own ethnic sector or in close rapport with it if they are involved in the activities of common institutions. Consequences for Cultural Groups and Society as a Whole Intercultural relations within concerns of the common network lead to the limited utilisation of the immigrant who does not know the relevant local language. These relations bring about the rapid blossoming of an ephemeral bilingualism within the first generation in the adopted country, through the maintenance of the mother tongue for familial and associative relationships and the adoption of another language for professional purposes. The mother tongue -being kept in limited surroundings, having little relevance in the urban community as a whole and being a subject in which formal schooling is limited- borrows substantial additions from another language with which it is in contact and which is used for the full range of social activities in the administration, production and distribution of goods

GUIDELINES

7

and services. Only rural isolation, the arrival of new immigrant populations of the same stock, and careers within the ethnic community, help in the maintenance of a foreign tongue in a society which tolerates it, does not help it and does not use it. It is not surprising that the third generation is characterised by the loss of the cultural possession that a language constitutes. It cannot be maintained and developed, if it is not used. We cannot solve easily the problem of intercultural relationships for small groups disseminated in an urban setting and confronted with a group whose language and culture are predominant. One could hope, however, that members of the main group will favour the existence of other ethnic institutions than their own and give ethnic groups the possibility of teaching their mother tongue to their own children. This would make the foreign language more useful during the period of its survival and would lengthen the period of bilingualism in some cases. It is not altogether preposterous either to think of the possibility that some public servants in the larger society, especially school teachers, might learn a non-official language and use it in their relationships with a local population that does maintain it. The case of massive cultural groups which benefit from the existence of their institutional network is different. They can hardly be assimilated rapidly in an area of their concentration. By virtue of their number, the level of their social participation and development is highly consequential for society as a whole. Consequently, in their case society must find means by which its modes of interaction will not create the necessity for great numbers of them to assimilate a foreign language and participate in common social activity on the basis of it. Quebec's French population, and that of some regions in neighbouring provinces, are large enough for us to ask who ought to be bilingual in order that these populations have a beneficial relationship with North American industrial society. It is already established that the asymmetry of the past will not endure regarding these populations. It is already becoming apparent that within these regions the yoke of bilingualism eventually will be borne by those who would find it light, the English and the French educated classes. This would mean an increasing use of French in French-language regions and in intergroup relations within the common institutions, public and private, of these areas. In Quebec, the arrangement would bring about the use of French as the main language of intergroup contacts and the use of English, by persons of English and of French mother tongues, for external rather than internal communication. T h e introduction of this profound social change, once non-French Quebeckers would have benefited from bilingual schooling, would mean neither the assimilation nor the downfall of the English-speaking population. It would continue to draw from the whole of North American culture for the maintenance of its Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage. In cooperation and in competition with French-speaking persons in an institutional milieu where

8

JACQUES BRAZEAU

French would have gained importance, it would contribute to the progress of Quebec's industrial civilisation via the French language. Other language groups in Quebec would also meet requirements of adopting French. Intercultural relations in Quebec thus would become a parallel case to those that have developed in English-Canadian milieus. Attempts would be made to use different modes of bilingualism that would each seem appropriate in the light of regional differences in terms of population composition. Only the future will tell if there will be the adoption of equivalent and complementary modes of bilingualism for industrial regions such as those of Toronto and Montreal. Undoubtedly, measures will be taken to insure this social transformation and others to prevent, it. The result of such a transformation in intercultural relations would mean that two languages, English and French, would be utilised more equally than previously in the full range of social activities and at all professional levels. They would be used very inequally, on the other hand, in different regions according to the characteristics of the local population. In all likelihood, it would follow from this that experiences shared by the two major groups in common would become more numerous and that these groups would become more similar. We would see the disappearance of some differences that are the result of an inequality in relationships rather than of specificity of background. Two cultural groups would take better account of the similarity of their potential as well as of their differences in linguistic matters. The net result of this evolution would be the enrichment of a local culture whose means of expression and of dissemination are French without the impoverishment of the English-language culture. The necessity for the optimum development of substantial cultural groups has been recognised in a number of plural societies. The issue has been raised in Canada. There is no reason to doubt that this society could also, on examining the issue, find means for improving within its midst the modes of interaction between members of cultural groups.

II Demography

LANGUAGE MINORITIES IN A WORLD OF COMMUNICATIONS Thomas Lunden

In this paper the autochtonous linguistic minorities of the Northern Hemisphere are discussed against a situation of occupational and spatial change. Changes in the Occupational Structure of Europe It can be argued that the occupational structure of an area is a key determinant of the total life situation of its inhabitants. In Europe as in North America this structure has undergone a tremendous change during the latest 200 years. Europe of the late 18th century was politically unstable, but its economy was firmly based on agriculture, other occupations making up a very small portion of the population. Beginning in England, the industrial revolution — a complex of technical and psychological innovations — spread in time and space, reaching peripheral areas only by the beginning of the 20th century. As a result, a massive shift from primary to secondary occupations took place. The farmers and farm-hands who previously had mastered the whole chain of production — consumption from sowing the grain to eating the meal eventually became only one in a row of individuals/occupations making their small contribution to the process. Subsequent changes have been lees remarkable, and less "visible". Industrialisation created a need for occupations which were not directly linked to production, but to the maintenance and development of the production organisation, either to the production process itself (technicians etc.) or to the organisation "before and after" the machines (e.g. distribution, transport and trade). This tertiary sector grew in importance, especially when its efforts to mechanize and de-humanize production resulted in stagnating or diminishing numbers of industrial workers. (C. Clark).

12

THOMAS ΙΛΙΝϋέΝ

A fourth occupational sector can be discerned, consisting of those who are occupied in the spread and manipulation of communications. It is clear that this sector accounts for a good deal of the present growth in occupations. In short, a shift in occupational structure has occurred, from "production of food and shelter" to processing of food, shelter and machines, to handling (dealing) with processed food, shelter and machines to manipulating and addressing communications on food, shelter, machines and men. (For a detailed discussion of this, see D. Bell). Spatial Changes as a Result of Occupational Changes The complex of technical innovations made an enormous impact on the map of the Northern Hemisphere. 1) Transportation The invention of a new means of transportation made the world shrink in time, space and cost space — but in an uneven way (Janelle). Railways, canals and steamship lines were drawn according to needs perceived by governments and industrial interests. The role of state politics in this process has been illustrated for Canada by Wolfe. Terrain with accessibility strongly influenced by nature and straight line distance was transformed by transport lines decided upon politically within certain decision territories, the states. 2) Population The break-up of the areally-based economy into a focal one resulted in heavy migration to urbanized industrial areas, generally localized to areas of raw material supplies, especially coal. 3) Transportation and population The invention of cheap and efficient public transportation virtually made urban growth and suburbanisation possible. This was expecially important for the transition from a secondary into a tertiary type of economy in which the importance of the above mentioned, rather amorphous industrial settlements were reduced in favour of the central place type of capital or town. (See e.g. Hall's discussion, ch 1). Commerce, trading etc., not industry, is the main function of these towns which were centered around a business district. This development has been further enhanced by the growth of the quarternary sector (cf Meier) in which the metropolis is the centre of communications, knowledge and control. In this type of occupational structure, formal and functional ties between a centre and other main centres of the world may be more important than contacts with the surrounding area. The position in a communications network may be more important than actual "geographic" distances. There is clearly a strong link between occupational structure and nationalism, the latter concept operationally defined as the will or opinion that certain individuals bound together in a perceived "commonness" should

LANGUAGE MINORITIES

13

create and become members of a national state. Nationalism thus is one form of institutionalism defined by its territorially and individually exclusive character. According to some sociologists (see e.g. v.d. Plank, p. 123) institutionalism is helped by the existence of a) an important problem common to all individuals in the group b) leaders c) a certain common heritage in societal culture d) frequent interaction e) co-ordination of interaction. Znaniecki regards the development of towns as the necessary impetus for the growth of organized groups or associations "functioning in order to promote the creative development and expansion of national cultures" (p. 60). Deutsch ( 1 9 5 3 ) sees nationalism as an outcome of social communication which is also the sine qua non of the national group and the nation state. The organizational structure of this social communication is nodal and clustered, thus resembling the theoretical central place pattern of Walter Christaller who constructs a landscape of a "high order" central place, surrounded in a spatially regular fashion by semi-dependent lower order places, in turn being surrounded by places of a still lower order. While the higher order places perform all functions existing in the "smaller" ones they also have additional functions. Low order functions are, for example, grocery shop and local cinema, while opera and research libraries represent high-order functions (see Lunden 1974 for a short discussion). National institutionalism is thus dependent on social communication which is primarily nodal. Urbanization (= nodalization), being one outcome of organization, integration and division of occupation, promotes institutionalisation and social communication. From this reasoning, one should expect a period of strong urbanization also to be a period of growing national consciousness. In the ideal case we can imagine a rural area with a small central place, a low degree of partitioning of different types of work between individuals and thus small needs for integration and organisation. Each household unit is producing enough of food and traditional culture to be rather autarchic. There are few language conflicts even when the autochtonous language is not used by state officials, because the state is not influencing the inhabitants to any important extent. With a growing partitioning of work (industrialisation and later developments) the need for integration, organisation and social communication becomes ardent. State or church authorities partly take over education from the parents. The location of industries to certain areas means that a large part of the population have to

14

THOMAS L U N D i N

1) give up traditional within-the-family/village partitioning and integration of work in favour of within-the-state/world partitioning and integration of work. 2) "mobilize" spatially which results in massive flows of uneducated workers from country to town, to industrial agglomerations and to "frontiers" (Zelinsky). The effect of this on nationalism and "linguism" has been remarkable. Language being the most important means of social communication, growing communications meant strengthening and widening of the impact of the language in uni-lingual areas and growing language conflict in multi-lingual areas. It can be hypothesized that nationalism did not gain ground until language and nation was questioned, v.d. Plank shows that in the partly Germanized industrial area of Upper Silesia the remaining rural population was more Polish in language and tradition than urban Poles but also less nationalistic (p. 130 f). This may hold for situations where no language was significantly superior (in terms of social strength). In Wales the relation between nationalism and the maintenance of the language was more multilateral. As long as the immigrants to the expanding coal mines and industries in South Wales were mainly welsh speakers, the language developed into a means of communication well suited to the new environment. It was not until the proportion of English and Irish increased above a saturation point of linguistic assimilation that English began to gain ground at the cost of Welsh (B. Thomas). During this time nationalism in Wales was more dedicated to religious freedom than to linguistic equality (Rees). In other industrial areas in Wales such as the North Wales State quarries and collieries where immigration was low the Welsh language flourished (see Burns and Vaughan). The teamwork type of job evidently strengthened the language (R.M. Thomas, ch. 3). Industrialization alone does not result in language shifts. On the contrary, the industrial type of work (with a rather closed contact-sphere among the majority of its employees) may promote a small language as long as the workers are linguistically homogeneous. In the tertiary and quarternary sectors, however, the actual work implies meaning of communication. Very early, market places in S. Wales and in the Border area were bi-lingual or completely Anglicized. (R.M. Thomas). In spite of a low rate of immigration of English-speaking persons, language shifts took place — probably as a result of contacts with a non-Welsh world. Later investigations have shown that the contact system of Wales is heavily dependent upon centres outside the Principality and on Anglicized Welsh towns. (WKD Davies — CR Lewis). In general, the shift to partition of occupation roles enhanced the impact of the state and its official language and national ideology on its citizens. Nationalism became a question of forming nation — states. The

LANGUAGE MINORITIES

15

outbreak and the outcome of World War I showed this importance which states and individuals put on the communications aspects of the individuals' lives. The Spatial/Hierarchical Location of European Linguistic Minorities Today Ex-point-facto, the end of World War II also became the (ultimate? ) end of transboundary conflicts based on real or alleged national loyalties or aspirations. The idea of frontier revision as a means of equalizing state territory with national territory was much weaker than earlier (Cloude p. 126). In the post-war politics of Europe, national minorities almost never played an important role — compared to other problems — in the policies of any state. In spite of this, there are linguistic and "national" minorities in all states of Europe, with the possible exclusion of Iceland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Malta. If the definition is restricted to locally autochtonous individuals making up not more than e.g. 25% of the population of a certain state, the following "locational laws" can be formulated 1) Minorities are located in areas lying close to adjoining states and/or in the geometrical periphery of the state territory. There are at least two reasons for this a) The states formed or reshaped after the defeat of the Entente states were shaped according to a modified "national territory model" in which boundaries were drawn as dividers between areas of different nationality (e.g. Denmark-Germany, Austria-Yugoslavia), resulting in border minorities. b) Older states were formed in "core areas", extending and assimilating into more peripheral areas. England conquered Wales and Ireland, Swedisn and Danish/Norwegian power gradually grew in the northerna part of Scandinavia inhabited by Lapps. Within the conquered area the linguistic assimilation often started from a certain geographical area and from the most important towns (see e.g. Ο Cuiv). In this case the r e m a i n i n g o r i g i n a l language group generally does not have co-"nationals" making up the majority in any other country. This obviously has important socio-cultural implications. 2) Within their autochtonous territory, most minorities have an areal distribution which is negatively co-variant with the central place system, the percentage of minority population being high in rural areas and lower in "bigger" (in terms of external importance) towns or places. Examples of this can be taken from most countries in Central and Western Europe, while some states in Eastern Europe show the inverse relation. In some of these cases part of the minorities belonged to classes in a superior

16

THOMAS L U N D i N

position vis-a-vis the majority population. In other cases, minorities were only semi-autochtonous groups, specializing in commerce and trade, e.g. Armenians, Greeks and Jews. This second remark connects the problem with that of central places (e.g. towns), serving as nodes in a spatial system of communications and transportation. The raison d'etre of towns being exchange and mobility, towns are often the point of dissemination of ideas and informations from other places. The local town in the minority area is thus the link to the capital and its inhabitants are often engaged in direct or indirect communication with "majority areas". As individuals they are mobile and their occupations are more directly dependent upon decisions taken in the capital (Cf the example from Wales above). The Minority Individual in the Spatial Communications System Seen from the viewpoint of the minority language individual, his selection of education, occupation, marriage partner etc. is also very important for the linguistic situation of himself and of other people related to him. Such important decisions are made during different stages in the individual's life cycle. a. Until maturity, most important circumstances affecting the individual result from of decisions made by other people, parents and community. The economic, occupational and residential structure of the family determines — within certain limits — the home language and the language used outside the family. Family aspirations also determine the type of education chosen, which in turn may decide the entire future occupational and spatial location of the individual. Long and specialized schooling restricts the possibility of remaining in the home place. Furthermore, in many minority areas, all education above elementary schools is located outside the minority area. b. Military training is generally linguistically homogeneous all over the state (in Finland there is a Swedish language regiment, although orders are given in Finnish) and individuals generally cannot choose their place of training. This may be an important change in the former family-dependent life of the individual. c. Occupations: The number of occupations requiring a specified type of education is increasing because of specialization. In general, each area needs a specific mix of occupations in order to perform its production of goods and services within the national or international economy. Some occupations form "chains of opportunity", that is, an individual may proceed from one lower position to a higher one without a large i n v e s t m e n t in re-education (White). But as the number of opportunities is restricted in space and in time (vacancies occur

L A N G U A G E MINORITIES

17

irregularly), an individual has to move around if he wants to climb the ladder of opportunity (or, perhaps, to survive in a time of underemployment in his "occupational opportunity chain"). This problem certainly is of relevance to linguistic minorities. Here some examples will be taken from a mono-lingual area, the small town of Engelsberg, Sweden, with some hundred inhabitants (Lunden 1975). During a span of fifty years from 1900, the total number of railwaymen employed was about 250. The number employed at a time, however, never exceeded 40. At the turn of the century, boys were locally recruited as station hands. But eventually they moved to other stations in order to get better jobs. At the same time men from other stations moved in to fill vacancies higher up in the hierarchy. The more specified the jobs grew, the more difficult it became to find the right person within Engelsberg. In fact, the railwaymen made up a community of their own. A community not related to a specific area or point, but to a line or network. Teachers are another interesting category. The small school at Engelsberg needed only two teachers. Any young person at Engelsberg striving for a position as a teacher in the native area would have to face the problem of graduating from a teachers' college just at the time when a teachers vacancy occurred at Engelsberg. In fact, in the 20th century history of the town, a total of 25 teachers came from 16 different provinces (out of 24) in Sweden. In other words, the integrated school system of Sweden was functioning as a large-scale transfer of individuals. If Engelsberg had been situated in a linguistically mixed country, the implications would have been clear. In fact most minority areas suffer from an exchange of native for alien population because of the spatial inconsistencies of the labour market. This is particularly the case on jobs where formal competence is regarded as more important than personal relations, in other words in state and other types of nation-wide administration. The minority areas of Italy; Trieste, Aosta and South Tyrol offer ample evidence of this. But even if a minority individual happens to get a job within his language area, the degree of specialization requires high integration with other specialized occupations all over the state — i.e. the language used in his office will be the majority language. In Ceredigion, Wales, where 3 / 4 of the population speak Welsh, 58% speak it at home, 51% with friends but out of those 65% who work, including farmers about only 35%, use it at their place of work (Madgwick, chapter 5). d. This high degree of spatial mobility will also be important for the selection of a mate. Institutionalization of society means that the

18

THOMAS LUNDEN

probability of marrying the girl/boy next door or in the same village is diminishing while a growing number of acquaintances are made within formal organisations: in the office, at evening courses etc. (Cf Haavio Mannila). There is ample proof that the number of bi-lingual marriages is increasing and in a situation of linguistic inequality, the dominant language is chosen for (but not necessarily by) the next generation. Summing up, the following trends in society today are a threat to minority languages: Growing specialization in occupations Growing spatial mobility Growing local and regional dependence on other, not necessarily adjacent areas. In this situation and in the day-cycle of the minority individual, family interaction can be carried out in the native language if both parents are autochtonous occupational activities in most jobs will be in the majority language interaction between individual and organizations will be in the majority language. Thus, activities giving conspicuous and measurable rewards (status, income, titles etc.) are carried out in the majority language. There are two exceptions to this: 1) In occupational and other activities within minority organizations language maintenance is rewarded, but as most negotiations between minority and "the outer world" are carried out in the majority language, minority leaders are often required to be fluently bilingual and to have g o o d e d u c a t i o n — implicating mobility. Besides, the minority organisation headquarters is often — for communications reasons — located to the most important centred place within or close to the minority territory, a place which is often partly or wholly "deminorized" (e.g. Ligia Romontscha in German-speaking Chur, Switzerland, Sorbian Domowine in Bautzen, DDR, Breton organisations in Rennes etc.). 2) For certain occupations, fluent bilingualism is an asset which could be favouring bilingual minority members whose native language is the official language in another state. But there are obstacles to this. First, education in the minority language may be so inefficient (or completely lacking) that the minority member's formal competence using his own language for communications purposes is lacking. Or, even if he had this competence it may be a competence not formally certified, which may be given less weight than half a year of formal university studies of the minority language by a formerly monoglot majority member. (E.g. Flemish in France, Finnish in Sweden). Besides, if the minority has a strong command of the language gained through a good educational system, their attachment to their state of residence may be questioned by

LANGUAGE MINORITIES

19

majority members as in the case of the Slovene minority in Italy (cf Gilbert). Proposal for Remedies The general conclusion of this discussion would be that the assimilation of linguistic minorities is not taking place along a linguistic — geographical boundary but down the urban hierarchy through social communications. This interpretation also means that formal legislation concerning official bilingualism is of little help if the structure of social communications is strongly in favour of the majority language. If, for example, a Val d'aostan wants to climb the societal ladder in his home region, he must speak Italian very well — especially as certain occupational strata are monoglot Italian. If he wants to climb the ladder and retain his French language without stress, he has to migrate to France or Switzerland. If this assimilative trend is to be counteracted, the trends mentioned above must be understood and tackled. 1) Growing specialization in occupations. This is in itself no danger, if in every occupational strata within the minority territory there is a sufficient portion of minority members. But generally, the opposite is true. Minorities often have a very skewed occupational structure (v.d. Plank p. 107 and Hocevar — Lokar) which counteracts the use of the language in communications between different occupational strate. 2) Growing spatial mobility. This result of specialization is especially detrimental as it affects people with good education and good command of the language. If the mobility could take place within the language area it would not be a negative effect. This is, however, seldom the case. 3) Growing local and regional dependence on surrounding areas. This is of course a result of spatial specialization. The change needed would be a greater amount of planned integration within the language area. There are many problems in this context. Industry may seem to be a good way of strengthening the viability of the minority region. But this has to be very carefully planned, as the history of the Gaeltarra in the Irish Ghaeltacht shows. If, e.g. emigrated natives are encouraged to return to the Ghaeltacht, the crucial point is if they will remember — and if they will speak — their native language. If not the effect will be a very negative one. Another factor, also discussed in the Ghaeltacht report, is the provision of a good system of central places within the language area. They must be an integrated part of the area, not islands of foreign speech. But certain functions have to be performed by external centres. Very few minority areas are large enough for a university. The most difficult problem in this context

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THOMAS LUNDEN

is that of threshold levels for schools and institutions. Can a university be established for an area needing 150 graduates per year, divided into, say 10 different lines of specializations? If one new job as a dentist is needed in Friesland each year and two Frisians graduate one year and no one the next this means that one Frisian has to be "exported" and one non-Frisian to be i m p o r t e d . (Cf Hägerstrand's discussion on "kopplingsrestriktioner" "combinatorial restrictions"). This is of course a double loss. In Wales, the university colleges of Aberystwyth, Bangor and Llanbedr are situated within the Welsh language area. But very few students and still fewer teachers come from this area, and as a result the non-Welsh element of the towns is growing. But what would be the remedy? Universities cannot be cut off from outside and Welsh speakers cannot be forced to remain unemployed in Aberystwyth waiting for "their" special job to become vacant. In my opinion, linguists have focused too much on a view of the question of language shifts as a problem of relation between the languages only, while social scientists have shown very little interest in language as part of society. Together both groups have neglected the "technical" side of the problem, i.e. how to preserve or restore the conditions for minority language maintenance. This certainly is a difficult task, needing further research. The most important thing seems to be to "invent" flexible organizations with low threshold levels, such as small schools and universities, efficient but small and cheap mass media and a sufficient form of regional autonomy, providing for intra-regional integration of the spatial economy. But this also involves a number of moral problems. In a recent, rather provocative article, J.G. Adams has criticized the belief in growing mobility as being in itself beneficial to human life. "Shrinking of space" may mean alienation and stress without improving other facets of human life. In the case of minorities, there are many reasons to think twice before spatial mobility is given further priority in relation to other goals.

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21

Bibliography Adams, J.G.U. 1972:4. Life in a global village. Environment & Planning, 381-394. Bell, David. 1974. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Heinemann. London. Burn, Michael. 1972. The Age of Slate. Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales. Clark, Colin. 1940.Conditions of Economic Progress. Macmillan, London. Claude, Inis I. 1955. National Minorities. An International Problem. Cambr. Mass. Christaller, Walter. 1967 (1933). Central Places in S. Germany, Englew, Cliffs, N.J. Davies, W.K.D. and C.R. Lewis. 1970. Regional Structure in Wales: Two Studies in Connectivity, in H. Carter — W.K.D. Davies, eds., Urban Essays: Studies in the Geography of Wales. Longmans, London. Deutsch, Karl W. 1953. Nationalism and social communication. New York. Gubert, Renzo. 1972. La situazione confinaria. Lint, Trieste. Hägerstrand, Torsten. 1970:14,4. Tidsanvändning och omgivningsstruktur. SOU. Hall, Peter. 1966. The World Cities. Hocevar, T. and A. Lokar. 1974. Economic Policy Implications of differentiated occupational structures of Slovenes and Italians in Trieste. Conference paper. Univ. of New Orleans, Universita di Ancona. Janelle, Donald. 1968:1. Central-place development in a time-space framework. Professional Geographer. Lunden, Thomas. 1974:2. National Allegiance and the State System, in Europa Ethnica, Wien, p. 59-61. A Community and its Inhabitants in Time and in Space, In Engelsbergs Bruk, European Architectural Heritage Year 1975, forthcoming. Madgwich, P.J., Griffiths, N. and Walker, V. 1973. The Politics of Rural Wales. Hutchinson, London. Meier, Richard L. 1965 (1962). A communications theory of urban growth. MIT press, Cambr. Mass. Ο Cuiv, Brian. 1951. Irish Dialects and Irish-speaking Districts. Dublin, van der Plank, P.H. 1971. Taalassimilatie van Europese Taalminderheden. Rotterdam. Rees, Chris. 1973. The Welsh Language in Politics, in The Welsh Language Today, ed. Meie Stephens, Gomer Press, Llandylsul, p. 230-247. An tSuirbheireacht ar Ghaeltacht na Gaillimhe. 1969. The Galway Gaeltacht Survey. Director B.S. Mac Aodha. Social Sciences Research Centre,

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University College, Gal way. Thomas, Brinley. Nov. 1959. Wales and the Atlantic Economy, in Scottish Journal of Political Economy, p. 169-192. Thomas, R.M. 1967. The linguistic geography of Carmarthen-shire, Glamorganshire and Pembrokeshire from 1750 to the present day. M.A. Thesis, University of Wales, (unpubl.). Vaughan, J.N. 1971-72. Community Structure on the Anglo-Welsh Border in N.E. Wales. B.A. Diss, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. White, H.C. 1970. Chains of Opportunity. Cambr. Mass. Wolfe, Roy. 1962. Transportation and politics. Annals, Ass. of American Geographers, p. 176-190. Znaniecki, Florian. 1952. Modern Nationalities. Urbana, 111.

CONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE PROFILES BY POLITY Grant D. McConnell Introduction Research into language statistics is finally coming into its own. More and more people are becoming interested in statistics on language, either to provide them with such general information such as the total number of speakers of a language, or even the number of second language speakers. Such information, although of essential interest to many areas of study, is not as readily available as might be imagined. Sociolinguists, who are probably at the moment the main instigating force behind this new interest in language figures, are interested not only in these figures per se, but also in the knowledge that can be obtained on a population by comparing different types of language figures, of its constituent speech communities, for example, on mother tongue, monolinguals and bilinguals. Other types of comparisons of the same type of figure, such as 'mother tongue' over a period of years, are also valuable in divulging changes and trends in the numerical strength of speech communities. Although numerical strength is important, sociolinguists are not content simply to compare language units with other language units. Languages are spoken by people making up social units. A language exists in a living, changing context, i.e. in the speech community, and it is important, therefore, to know not just how many people speak a language but who speaks it and where they speak it. This opens up a whole new range of comparisons between language units and other types of social units, such as tribe, ethnicity, religion and even race. Not only does this give a more accurate perspective to any language figure, but it is often through figures based on social units that linguistic orientation can be deduced, especially when language figures as such are not available. Social factors often influence the results of language counts to the point of distorting them.

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By using both types of figures when they are available, they complement each other and allow us to obtain new information through cross-tabulations and comparisons. In the following discussion, it will be seen that both in the typology and elsewhere, both types of units viz. social and linguistic, and many kinds of figures are included, with the aim of building up a language profile by country, although the general aim can apply to any other smaller geographical or political unit as well. The origin of most of the above kinds of figures, whether of social or linguistic orientation, is the decennial census, although other sources such as the results from specialists' field work are also sometimes available. However, as long as the geographical unit is as large as a country, the main source for such figures remains the census. This instrument has the advantage of technical and financial government backing as well as the possibility of testing large numbers of the population which can often give more accurate results. The disadvantages are that the governments often have a biased point of view and include in the census what is considered to be important from an official point of view. A two-way approach using the official census and extensive field work by specialists working in smaller areas on heterogenous populations can bring about the best results. In the following pages, we will discuss some of the different kinds of social and linguistic figures; the types of questions asked in order to obtain such data; the need for definitions of some basic linguistic terms; the criteria employed to define as basic a term as 'language' and some problems involved concerning names of languages to be used in a census. Finally, some recommendations will be made concerning the use and improvement of the census for sociolinguistic research. A Typology of 'Lingual' Statistics 'Lingual' statistics in our sociolinguistic research have a common denominator — language factor — which allows us to classify all entries under a language name. All data is then 'lingual' in the sense that it refers directly or indirectly to language. We have, therefore, classified all statistical data under either of two captions 1) linguistic and 2) paralinguistic, the latter including all entries that are other than linguistic ones. The so-called paralinguistic or 'ethnic' data have one thing in common, that the basic unit which is something other than language, e.g. race, ethnicity, religion, caste, nationality, contains also an important language factor which can be more or less accurately determined. Paralinguistic ('ethnic') data then do not indicate language as such but do permit one to draw relatively safe conclusions concerning the approximate number of speakers of certain identifiable languages. Such figures cannot, of course, automatically be presumed to be 'monolithic'1 in nature, though in some cases they are.2 A whole series of possible cases can be hypothesized from a unit that is 100% lingually monolithic to one in which many or a few language groups are included

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25

(multilithic). 3 The more a figure is monolithic e.g. 80% and over, the more it is language-interpretable; the more it is multilithic, the more it is language-relatable. This is because language-interpretable figures can easily be interpreted in linguistic terms whereas language-relatable ones cannot be so easily interpreted because of their heterogenous make-up. Graphically the above relationships may be represented as follows:

Inclusion of 'ethnic' or paralinguistic data has necessarily forced us to c o m e t o s o m e c o n c l u s i o n c o n c e r n i n g guidelines distinguishing language-interpretable from language-relatable figures. Briefly, language-interpretable figures include groups, at least 80% of whom speak the same language (the unit may be tribal, racial, ethnic, religious or national). Immigrants from America and Australia are considered to be of English mother tongue 4 because at least 90% of the native-born population is English-speaking. In such cases we must overlook the fact that a few immigrants from the above countries may not in fact speak English as a mother tongue, due to the large numbers of foreign born in these countries and also to the substantial number of native born groups having other mother tongues. 8 However, none of these other languages iure likely to be represented in sufficient numbers to warrant consideration in this context. Figures from Soviet sources such as the Atlas Narodov Mira give an ethnic presentation to the figures, but in most cases these can be linguistically 'interpreted'. The 1953 Ceylon census gives a 'racial' or ethnic classification by group of 1) Burghers, 2) Ceylon Moors and 3) Malays, etc. which can be interpreted linguistically by mother tongue as speaking 1) English, 2) Tamil and 3) English in that order. The same situation holds for many ethnic or tribal censuses taken in Africa where tribal and language groups o f t e n c l o s e l y correspond. The above data are open to language-interpretation, although in all such cases a good knowledge is necessary of the ethnographic and sociolinguistic contexts involved. From the linguistic point of view the problem that arises concerning language-relatable figures is the need for relatability of multilithic data to one or more languages. This too cannot be determined without a good knowledge of ethnographic and sociolinguistic contexts. The inclusion of language-relatable statistics has enabled us to present a more detailed and

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G R A N T D. M c C O N N E L L

more complete profile for each country than would be otherwise possible. To exclude all language-relatable material for purist reasons, or because 'we cannot know exactly' would be most regrettable at such a time when language profiles by country are so lacking in basic data. Such language relatable data is not only useful when linguistic and other data are missing; they can also be used in cross-tabulations which can reveal additional language information or at least highlight or underline linguistic data apart from other types of social data. It must be admitted, however, that language-relatable figures are less easy to interpret linguistically as they point not to one language but to a number of languages. Such figures have a multilingual composition and include 1) immigrant figures from multilingual countries, 2) ethnic figures which do not correspond to language figures and 3) composite figures including two or more languages. Examples would be 1) an immigrant figure from Belgium (Dutch 55%, French 44%, German 1%) which would be entered under Dutch and French in the statistical tables as each language represents at least 20% of the total population of the country; 6 2) figures on Amerindian bands and 3) composite figures which represent a language group e.g. Naga languages. To sum up, in the field of language statistics, any typology will have to include all data (lingual) having both a direct and indirect language factor. We are forced to this due to a lack of language data per se, but also because such a juxtaposition of linguistic and para-linguistic data could be the basis for an information grid (cross-tabulations) having both linguistic (language) and societal (tribal, race) components. This may constitute a pied ά terre for a sociolinguistically oriented factorial analysis. Once a great deal of such data has been obtained and important cross-tabulations established, indicating or inferring where, when and by whom a language is used, a next step would be to compare this data with external factors e.g. economic, political and ideological data that are nevertheless quite relevant to the position of a language.7 Our own data gathering proceeds on the level of macro-analysis — the census being a particularly effective instrument for eliciting such data. Here a fine line should be drawn concerning such data as mother tongue, second language, language read or spoken and a micro-analysis which includes such data as registers, styles and the like. It is not that the latter are unimportant but simply require a finer instrument than the census is likely to provide. "To expect a census to tap such dimensions as interference, switching, diglossia, dialects, styles and registers, would be like listening to a soprano amplified through the sound system of a ball park." 8 Also, such micro-data are not indispensable in arriving at our aim of an overview or language profile configuration by polity.

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27

Census Profiles and Dimensions Statistical data may be either static (simple) or dynamic (complex) in nature. These are of course two extremes. Most censuses offer a choice somewhere between the two. To be static, a census has merely to present a single type of language figure (mother tongue) for a particular year (Figure 1). Here the data is unidimensional-synchronic. Many countries that have embarked for the first time on gathering language information have only a synchronic aspect to offer. 9 FIGURE 1 Unidimensional-Synchronic Year 1974 A

mother tongue(s) numerical strength

When two types of data are gathered and presented for the same year, the result is bidimensional-synchronic (Figure 2). FIGURE 2 Bidimensional-Synchronic Year 1974 A

Π"

IT

ΊΓ

mother tongue(s)

·> Β

second language(s) (bilinguals)

3

numerical strength

On the other hand, the above types of data can appear in a succession of decennial censuses giving a unidimensional-diachronic 10 or a bidimensional-diachronic aspect. 11 FIGURE 3 Unidimensional-Diachronic Year 1954

mother tongue(s)

1964 1974 numerical strength

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G R A N T D. M c C O N N E L L

FIGURE 4 Bidimensional-Diachronic Year 1954

A mother tongue(s)

1964

Β second language(s) (bilinguals)

1974 1'

2

3

4

numerical strength

The above graphs are becoming increasingly complex, both as to the types of material offered and to the period of time (diachronic) for which they are offered. What degree of detail should the average census try to attain in order to be of optimum utility? The answer would seem to be that, a census should offer as complete a set of basic data as possible, over the longest period of time. In reality, this is an ideal to be reached. Everyone knows that language census data is in many cases neither continuous nor stable as to the type of data offered. The following figure illustrates a more realistic situation, comprising three consecutive decennial censuses and three types of material. It is nevertheless multidimensional-diachronic in that it presents a set of data over a period of time (Figure 5). FIGURE 5 Multidimensional-Diachronic A mother tongue(s) Β second language(s) (bilinguals) C unilinguals

numerical strength This set of data should present different types of material on e.g.

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m o t h e r tongue(s), unilinguals, second language(s), foreign born (by language(s), which best reflect the reality of the country in which the census is being taken. The same set of data becomes valuable for determining changing language loyalties towards or within a linguistic group 12 , as well as for keeping track of new adherents to a language community, by birth, immigration and the like, or as the case may be, of the loss of adherents by death, war or other disasters, migration, and language-switching away from the group. The resulting diachronic overview of a series of sets of data would be a valuable instrument for reflecting language change and shift in a polity through a comparison and a cross-tabulation of the data obtained. These sets of data would normally reflect linguistic habits of how many people were speaking what language, where, at the time the census was taken. Such data could indicate: — mother tongue, — language usually spoken or most frequently used in the home, — second (or third) language best spoken. Graphically, the process can be shown as follows: Diachronic Overview Comparisons A census (data set) Β census (data set) C census (data set)

A
B

At the same time that present linguistic habits are recorded, past linguistic habits can also be sollicited giving what could be termed a diachronic 'inview'. This would be obtained by asking questions of the following nature: — language spoken in the home in childhood, — language first spoken or learned as a child, — language spoken by parents in the home, — language spoken by the person's forefathers. Diachronic Inview

A l present habits A census

Comparisons Αχ >A2

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A 2 could represent past habits once removed and A3 past habits twice removed in time. This method of diachronic inview has been a particularly neglected aspect of language census gathering, appearing only incidentally rather than as a concerted effort to recover past linguistic information. This is a great pity, as it can be a valuable instrument of comparison with present day language habits and at the same time shed light on past language habits for which no census was available.13 Diachronic inview can disclose important information on sociolinguistic phenomena such as language switching between generations or within the same generation and language loyalty, with the proviso that pairs of similar type questions be asked on 1) present and 2) past activity (either once or twice removed): 1. Present habits: A 1 Language usually spoken in the home 2. Past habits (once removed): A 2 Language spoken in the home in childhood 3. Past habits (twice removed): A 3 Language spoken by one's forefathers Classification of Language Questions and Definition of Basic Terms Classification of Language Questions There are, of course, limitless possibilities in the number and type of questions that can be asked in a language census. These questions contain at least some of the following aspects: 1. Aspect bearing on present linguistic habits (synchronisis). 2. Aspect bearing on past linguistic habits (diachronisis). 3. Aspect bearing on competence (passive) i.e. that which has been learned or acquired (interiorized). 4. Aspect bearing on performance (active) i.e. that which is being used, as in reading or writing a language (exteriorized). 5. Aspect bearing on domain (where) i.e. context, and frequency (how often) i.e. when. Most censuses are not nearly as ambitious as this and with good reason. There are so many possible questions and combinations of aspects that could enter into a single question that the results would be as bewildering as they would be impractical. Linguistic census taking is not yet at this refined state. Our present concern is for basic questions and basic facts presented as clearly and as simply as possible. But what constitues a basic question? This is difficult to answer, for what is basic in one context may be far less so in another. It may be generally stated that present linguistic habits should be known and recorded before past habits, performance (active) before

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competence (passive) and, of course, domain (where) and frequency (how often) are useful in combination with all other aspects. Basic census questions on language can be reduced to the following areas of interest: 1. On mother tongue. 2. On main or principal language. 3. On second language. 14 Mother tongue is usually 'identical' in past and present activity, in performance and competence (the former the result of the latter) and rated high in domain (where) and frequency (how often). This is because most people keep and use the first language they learn throughout their life. If mother tongue represents past linguistic activity, low performance and low rating in domain and frequency, another language has taken its place. This is the case in many countries with large numbers of immigrants, in countries where there is replacive bilingualism or language-shift. 15 In such cases, information must be obtained on the main language which now fills the role of the former mother tongue. In the Turkish census of 1960 and 1965, for example, the questions asked were 'What is your mother tongue? ' and 'What is the second language which you are in command of best, other than your mother tongue? ' Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who is claiming, for example, Turkish as a mother tongue in groups having other 'ethnic' backgrounds e.g. Kurds. There are no cross-tabulations possible and no data available on those of Kurdish ethnicity who are now claiming Turkish as a mother tongue. No distinction is made between past aspect, 'language spoken by one's forefathers' and present aspect 'language usually spoken in the home'. Mother tongue as indicated in the Turkish census must include all those who consider a particular language to be their principal language — in use and importance that is. Turkish is the only language with official and national standing in spite of the over 2 million officially recognized Kurds. 16 It is not surprising then to learn that about 40% of them also speak Turkish. What is somewhat surprising, however, is that over 400,000 Turks i.e. of Turkish mother tongue and ethnicity speak Kurdish as a second language. Could not most of these in fact be former Kurdish mother tongue speakers who have switched allegiance to Turkish? Such information comes through a combination of good guess-work and inference. Second language information is always valuable in any context, but language censuses have still far to go before dealing with such details as competence and performance in such matters. Most countries are content with a blanket statement on second language(s) known. In many cases 'known' or 'used' means 1) spoken, 2) written, 3) read or even 4) understood or any combination of the above. The respondent may be asked simply to list his second language or the second language best spoken, as noted in the

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Turkish censuses above. In summary, language questions may emphasize present or past language habits, competence or performance, and domain and frequency in any combination with the above three types of basic questions. Present: What is your mother tongue? What is your main language? What second language do you speak best? Past: What is your language first spoken and still understood? 17 What language did you speak in early childhood in your home? What is the language your parents spoke in your home? Competence and Performance: What language do you know best? What language or languages do you know or use i.e. speak, read, write, understand? What second language do you speak, read, write or understand best? Domain: What language did you speak in early childhood in your home ? 18 What language do you speak, read, write in the home, at work, at school ? Frequency: What language do you usually speak? -use most frequently ? 19 What language do you speak daily? -in everyday life? As already indicated, questions soliciting information on past and present linguistic habits are particularly useful when used in the same census to indicate degree of assimilation, or change in linguistic loyalty. In countries where there is a high degree of replacive bilingualism or where there is a great deal of language-shift as in immigrant populations, it is important to have questions on both past and present language activity. A question as asked in the 1961 Canada census 'language first spoken and still understood? ' aims at determining the chronologically first language but cannot take into account those that have abandoned their language for another. 20 Thus, the above question cannot hope to represent the proportion of those using their mother tongue daily. It was not until the 1971 census that a question was added on 'language most often spoken at home', thereby accounting for present performance. This question was based on a one third sample of the population. The 1961 Israel census stressed 'principal language used' but did not neglect to indicate the mother tongue of immigrant Jews, at least from 1947 to beyond 1955. Failure to do so would have robbed us of an important piece of information. The Mauritius Island census of 1962 gives a good juxtaposition of past

LANGUAGE PROFILES BY POLITY

33

(diachronic inview) and present linguistic habits: 1. Mother tongue spoken in the person's home in his childhood (diachronisis). 2. Language currently or most often spoken in the home (synchronisis). The results from these questions indicate that the many mother tongues of the island are giving away quickly to the indigenous and dominant French Creole language. 21 Second language is becoming an increasingly important category. The Soviet Union, for the first time in 1971, gave the many 'national' or 'ethnic' groups the choice to say whether or not they also spoke 1) Russian or 2) 'other languages' as second languages. In the 1970 Mexico census, statistics were included for the first time on Amerindians (by language) 'who also speak Spanish'. This group of second language speakers (bilingual group) had previously been excluded from the census, thus diminishing the numerical importance of the Amerindian population. 2 2 The present data is obviously much more complete and reflects a much improved census. With an increasing amount of multilingualism, censuses will have to draw more attention to knowledge of three or more language, with third and fourth languages appearing in distinct categories and not simply treated as a series of languages on an equal footing, as for example in the Indian census of 1961. Although the 1950 Cyprus census distinguishes between mother tongue on the one hand, for example Greek, and second languages on the other, e.g. English and French, there is no clue indicating for how many French is a second and for how many a third language. 23 In the 1972 Israel census, second and third languages are listed and named separately in the questionnaire. It is altogether regrettable when second languages are grouped as one unit and not named individually. In the Lebanese census of 1970 the concepts of monolingualism and bilingualism are used in terms of competence in Arabic. (1. Ne connaissent que Varabe, 2. Connaissent Varabe avec au moins une autre langue.) This is respectively 929,000 and 880,000, if all residents of the country are included. The unfortunate part is that there is no way of telling what languages the 880,000 bilinguals use, let alone the number of bilinguals per language. A third category indicates those that (3. Ne connaissent pas Varabe) viz. 17,000. Again, unfortunately, we have no idea of the language or even languages they do know. With very little additional effort, much more information could have been obtained on the bilingual situation in Lebanon. 2 4 Language censuses should strive not only for uniformity and stability in types of questions asked, but for economy in the types of information gleaned. Instead of replacing or dropping questions giving sound basic information, these should be retained and new questions added when necessary. General information on bilingualism is of little use if we do not

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know how many are bilingual in what languages. Definition of Basic Terms Definition of basic terms refers to definitions used in basic questions when referring to such concepts as mother tongue or main language. This is important for adding precision to census information. The same question may be asked in the same country in two censuses using the same terms, e.g. mother tongue, but the definition or question asked may vary slightly. For example, in the 1961 India census, those speaking 'dialects' closely related to a 'standard' mother tongue were not considered bilinguals. Whereas, in 1971, this stipulation was excluded, the result probably being a larger number of bilinguals and a larger number of languages. 25 Those only interested in the figures and not in the questions asked or the definition (if there is one) applied, will be faced with two sets of figures that are not quite comparable. 26 The results could be less reliable in dealing with two or more different countries. It is true that the type of question asked and to whom and where it is applied, constitutes a partial definition or a restriction in scope; but further precision has to be given to specific terms such as mother tongue, main language and second language, which require defining. It is always in terms that everyone takes for granted that we are faced with shades of meaning and different applications of data. Language statistics could profit from a more uniform notion of what constitutes mother tongue; at least, definitions of these terms should always be clearly stated. Mother tongue in the Hungarian census of 1 9 6 0 is defined as: 'The language which the person speaks and considers his mother tongue'. In the 1 9 6 0 census of Switzerland, mother tongue is defined as: 'The language in which a person thinks and which he knows best'. In the 1961 Pakistan census, mother tongue is 'the language spoken from the cradle'. As pointed out in a new version of Handbook of Population Census Methods, a definition of mother tongue was given in 13 of the 18 censuses in which the topic was investigated. In each case the definition pertained to the language usually spoken in the individual's home in early childhood. 27 But as pointed out by Lieberson, 2 8 this may not be preferable to asking for the 'first language which the respondent learned as a child'. Definition of second language is extremely important and usually refers to one of the four basic skills. For 'mother tongue' we usually presume — perhaps wrongly — that the four basic skills are already acquired. Thus in the 1 9 6 5 Turkish census, one is bilingual if he has a 'spoken command' of his second language. In the Philippines in 1960 and in Canada in 1971, one has to be able 'to carry on a simple conversation' or in Ceylon in 1953 'to understand and answer questions put in that language'.

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35

This leads to an exciting aspect concerning 'bilingualism' in the census i.e. degree of skill needed in the second language to qualify as a bilingual. Here much more could be done to bring about conformity in the questions asked and the definitions used. (It matters not whether one is dealing with impersonal — usually governmental — bilingualism, or personal — individual or group — bilingualism.) The same goals or objectives are there, i.e. knowledge of the skills of second language learners. Reference here is made especially to acquired bilingualism rather than natural bilingualism, where a child has learned two languages from birth. Although the latter, of course, count as bilinguals, their particular study is more in the domain of micro-analysis as we presume them to be knowledgeable in all four skills of both languages. Census counts of bilinguals in the four basic skills or at least in two of them — speaking and reading, could be most revealing. Statistics on such subjects are difficult to come by and as a result it is difficult to determine the scope of use and importance of second languages in most countries of the world. In Sweden, figures are available as to the number of original works (not counting translations) written in English (975 in 1970) but practically nothing is known of those who speak let alone read English. Two Important Types of Bilingualism in the Census Context Typologizing bilingualism is as difficult as it is intriguing. The results often depend on the number of countless social parameters one wishes to bring into play. The end results are often, that the specialists in the field have a number of different names for the same unit they are trying to describe. 29 Concerning bilingualism and language census data there is some advantage in viewing the phenomenon of bilingualism from two points of view: 1) from the point of view of the government, often called impersonal bilingualism, and 2) from the point of view of the private individual, often called personal bilingualism. In most cases it is the government that is responsible for the decennial and other more limited censuses. Although this can be an advantage in terms of resources available, it can also be a great disadvantage, since impersonal bilingualism is mostly selective in nature as to the number of languages included for consideration. In one sense, this is normal enough, because what is often wanted is information that will be useful to an institutionalized set-up i.e. government itself, either at national, regional or local levels. It is true that it is individuals that are always counted but usually in terms of specific pairs of languages — usually the official or national languages, less often the small weaker languages or foreign languages. Personal bilingualism in census taking is much more rare and considered as usually incidental. It is comprehensive in nature allowing for any combination of any two (or more) languages on the part of an individual. This personal vs. impersonal point of view is expressed in a publication from South Africa which deals with bilingualism on these two

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levels, either 1) two indigenous (official) languages, each being spoken in a community, or 2) a foreign language and a local vernacular. 'In the case of an individual, it means generally the ability to use either of two languages without apparent difficulties when required to do so in a bilingual community. It is therefore not quite the same as simply knowing a foreign language as well as a local vernacular.'30

Although some countries such as India 31 and the USSR have made laudable efforts to record all mother tongues within their boundaries, many countries ignore or disregard their lowly vernaculars. That is why in language censuses there is often a predisposition or a prejudice against mentioning other than official and national languages or of classifying other languages in a group as vernaculars or native languages.32 Not only are census respondents often reluctant to mention certain of their vernaculars, those speaking a vernacular and an official language are often not considered to be bilingual. In this one-way bilingualism, speakers of vernaculars are invited to state their knowledge of one or more official languages only. If personal bilingualism were incorporated into the census, all languages including vernaculars would be counted both as first and second languages. If such a question were asked in Canada of each individual, our country would contain a far larger percentage of bilinguals in a few dozen languages.33 As most censuses are carried out under government auspices, however, it is usually the officially sanctioned 'view of things' that prevails. This need not be interpreted as false representation; it it often the result of what is considered as primordial or important to the nation. It is true that language censuses reveal the linguistic background of individuals, but the census reveals only part of this background, or the part considered important. The Canadian census then records bilingualism from an official point of view. More and more countries are beginning to supply figures for the first time on this type of bilingualism. In Mexico, bilinguals are Amerindians who speak Spanish as a second language and never those speaking another Amerindian language. In South Africa, to be counted as bilingual, one must speak English and Afrikaans. 34 The Cyprus census gathered many 'bilingual' figures only in relation to two national tongues i.e. Greek and Turkish. In black Africa, very few figures are available on bilingualism, although it is known that all of these countries in the former European colonies have bilingual elites, usually speaking French or English in addition to an African language. From our past experience in gathering language statistics we have learned that it is difficult enough to obtain mother tongue figures, without hoping for the luxury of bilingual figures. The fact remains that information on those knowing a second language will have to be obtained before complete language profiles can be drawn up on these countries.

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Statistics on Bilingualism, Second Language and Total Speakers With the increasing interest in multilingual situations, the number of censuses producing data on those knowing two or more languages is also increasing. Bilinguals are those individuals knowing (competence) two or more languages. However, the bilingual phenomenon or the category bilingualism as seen in terms of language statistics is not so clearcut as is usually imagined. Figures on bilingualism or bilinguals, unless related to some definite context of mother tongue or second language (these have been termed 'basic' data) are of very little use. Such bilingual figures may be termed 'floating' because they give no anchorage in basic information. Basic data is important because through calculation it can give bilingual data. Basic data Bilingual data

V^

Bilingual data Basic data

Bilingualism as a category does not reveal the context in which bilinguals, either as individuals or groups, must live and react. Such bilinguals must be attached either to a common mother tongue (Equation I), in which case they may all speak the same second language or a number of them, or to a common second language (Equation II), in which case they may all speak the same mother tongue or a number of mother tongues. The important thing to know is: who speaks what as what? The following equations indicate two contexts in which bilingual data are found: EQUATION I (Total) Mother Tongue = Unilinguals (language X) (language X)

Bilinguals (language X) (Second Language(s)

EQUATION II Total Speakers (language Y)

=

Mother Tongue (language Y)

Second Language (bilinguals) (language Y) (Mother Tongue(s)

The examples that follow are taken from censuses indicating 1) bilingual data as a category (bilingualism), 2) bilingual data (bilinguals) indicating those having a common mother tongue including a list of second languages, 3) bilingual data (bilinguals) indicating those having a common second language including a list of their mother tongues.

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In the 1963 Ceylon census, bilingualism as a category is given as follows: 3 5 Tamil and Sinhalese (837,930), 2) Tamil and English (102,438) and 3) Tamil, Sinhalese and English (324,512). Such data is striking at first encounter, but in reality, little of value is revealed as to the linguistic habits of the speakers. Nothing is revealed as to who speaks what as mother tongue, second or third language. We can, of course, calculate the total Tamil speakers by adding up the three figures, but such a figure could easily have been calculated anyway, if data on mother tongue and second language had been recorded (Equation II). In the 1960 Cyprus census, bilingual data is available for those speaking a common mother tongue, e.g. Greek. The approach is just the opposite from the previous one — with mother tongue data given along with second language data (the bilinguals are the sum of the second languages spoken (Equation I). Again in the 1960 Cyprus census, data on total speakers of a language can be calculated (Equation II) because both mother tongue speakers and second language speakers of e.g. Greek are given. In the 1970 Mexico census, for the first time, total mother tongue speakers of each Amerindian language could be calculated because the bilingual speakers (second language Spanish) were included for the first time (Equation I). 3 6 Basic data must necessarily come from basic questions asked, such as: What is your mother tongue? What is your second language? Information on bilingualism as a category comes from such questions as: — What mother tongue and other languages do you speak? — What language or languages do you speak? — Ability to speak designated language or languages? — Which of the national languages do you know? (Censuses of British Honduras 1960, Switzerland 1956, Philippines 1960 and Belgium 1947). Such questions give aggregate returns such as 'total speakers' per language which may be particularly useful for official or national languages, but as we have seen, basic data must also be available. In the case of a country like India, which has a long experience in language censuses, all of this basic information is available, so that a figure on total speakers can easily be calculated. Reliable 'total speakers' figures are hard to come by, especially for languages with large numbers of second language speakers in a number of countries. For languages such as English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, we do not have reliable figures on total speakers. The task of gathering them is made more difficult because such languages are spoken in many different countries from which there are unequal census returns.

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Assamese (1961 Indian Census) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Total speakers ( 2 + 3 ) Mother tongue Spoken as a second language Mother tongue Assamese speaking other languages: Bengali English Hindi etc.

8 452 101 6 803 463 1 648 638 3 7 610 225 159 150

2413 8 781 481 326

Amateurs of language statistics are in the habit of citing figures on the total number of speakers of such languages as English and French which have been compiled by adding up the total population of those countries (particularly in Africa) using these languages officially. Since there is a great dearth of second language figures, there is little concrete evidence to support 'total speakers' results in such cases.39 For such languages as French and English, people interested in these figures have to turn to incomplete or tentative information on literacy and school attendance, as these often indicate the only sources of second language learning, or in the case of many developing countries, of official language learning — but such information is not always available. Second Language Competence and Performance If it is true that language censuses reveal the linguistic background of individuals, it is also true that what is revealed is also what the individual wants revealed, or just simply what he sees as reality. 40 The subjective factor then is always very strong but in monolingual contexts or in contexts where, what is considered a language and a dialect, is firmly established in the minds of the individuals, there may be less need to worry about the accuracy or inaccuracy of the census returns.41 However, in a 'multilingual' or a 'multiglossic' situation there is much more room for ambivalence. If it is difficult for some peoples to decide just what their mother tongue really is, how much more difficult it must be to get accurate and and valid statements on second languages. Yet, if we are finally to obtain a complete grid of lingual information on each country, such types of information will have to be obtained. The accuracy of second language claims is very rarely questioned. For practical reasons this is normal enough, given the fact that large numbers of people are involved in a census and at the same time are usually spread over a large territory. As our present concern is on the level of macro-analysis, we must try first to establish a wide grid of basic linguistic and social units. A t the present stage of language censuses, it would not be feasible to undertake

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a competence test on second languages nor a test of the reliability of self-evaluation, although the former could be done on a limited number of persons and the latter in a particular area. 42 Such testing is hampered for practical and monetary reasons, especially concerning the decennial census. Even if such testing would be carried out, the reliability of the tests themselves could be put into question leading us into an area that is perhaps best handled by specialists in didactics and language testing. Although the setting up of language competence tests is beyond our immediate concern, questions relating to competence or performance are not. In fact, our 'testing', at least at the macro-analytical level, must depend upon carefully formulated and precise questions. Thus, the 1971 Canada census is no longer content to ask people if they are bilingual, i.e. know French and English but inquire if they are 'able to carry on a conversation' in the second language, which is a matter of competence and performance in speaking. When using the category 'bilingual' or even when speaking of a particular second language, the emphasis is usually on the spoken word. However, this is still far too much of a generality, as there is nothing to stop people who understand or who read or write a language 'a bit', from claiming to be bilingual. The four general areas of competence and performance then are the same as the four basic skills in language learning, viz.: COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE

Speaking

Writing

Reading

Understanding

The above information can be used profitably in all countries and even in largely homogeneous areas (all speak the same mother tongue) where there will always be come bilingual 'readers' or 'understanders'.43 Such information which is lacking in most countries today is of basic importance for language profiles. As long as such information is lacking in language censuses, sociolinguists will have to turn to secondary sources such as the use of second languages in the schools. Even here, information is scarce. The 1951 and 1961 Pakistan censuses, besides enquiring into the 'additional languages spoken' other than the mother tongue, also asked questions on 1) ability to read and write and 2) ability to read only. 4 4 In the present context this was of particular value as it added a new dimension to such foreign languages as English, which has a large number of second language speakers and readers: (1961) total speakers, 1,262,140 of whom

LANGUAGE PROFILES BY POLITY

41

1,241,797 were second language speakers; total literates, however, were 2,452,297. The full importance of a language within a country can hardly be known without this type of data. 4 6 Such questions as the above on reading and writing etc., are already far more detailed than those most censuses have offered. However, even these questions are not detailed enough if we want to eliminate the maximum amount of misinterpretation on the part of the respondent. The respondent must be pinned down to some concrete act in speaking or reading etc., which would have a close rapport with his actual performance or competence. More specifically, a question could be asked at the census not just on whether he speaks, reads or writes a particular language, but in speaking (being able to keep up a conversation), in reading (being able to read a newspaper), in writing (being able to write a letter) and in understanding (being able to follow a conversation). 46 What country today would not benefit (if the said country were really genuinely interested in obtaining such information) from a few such questions asked at its next decennial census? 4 7 By taking this more detailed and concrete approach in the formulation of questions, the result will not only be more useful details but possibly more valid results as well. More valid because of concrete situations which should reduce misinterpretation and increase the respondent's situational identification. On the other hand, there should not be so many distinctions that the respondent becomes confused. A further refinement in performance e.g. 'being able to keep up a conversation' could be indicated as follows: a) 'very good', b) 'good', c) 'fair', or simply 1, 2, 3, etc. where the respondent is asked to check his performance or competence along a declining scale. Such detail may, however, be less compatible to most decennial censuses. It could increase complications re. interpretation of results without increasing the degree of validity. Such detail could be used in a micro-analysis or in a limited intercensus survey in order to test more general results obtained at the decennial census. In Canada, where competence in second language teaching is so often decried as a scandal, what better test would there be to expose our own incompetence. The practical benefits would be immense. Very little is being done anywhere in the world today to use the decennial census for such purpose. The results would be more wide-ranging than any investigation (although valuable in itself) as to the use of second languages at the primary, secondary and university levels. However, such an investigation as an interim approach would be most worthwhile for our purposes. 48 It should not be forgotten that in our present day world of mass media, other areas of the spoken and written word will have to be investigated for a more complete picture of the role a language plays on the national and international scene. 4 9

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The Language Census and the Language-Dialect Continuum In language census taking we are faced with the problem of what constitutes the basic unit or units, e.g. what 'speech varieties' should be included. What is deemed worthy of being added to a list of language names for the purpose of a census? The problem can be resolved in at least one of three ways: either by using a juridical, a linguistic or a social (sociolinguistic) bias. 5 0 From the juridical point of view, as we have seen, it is often the governmental 'view of things' that holds, i.e. what is considered important. A linguistic interpretation of the problem fits nicely when everyone is agreed as to what constitutes a language and a dialect. Also, in many cases, the strictly linguistic viewpoint can give a measurable proof that such and such speech variety is indeed a language because of its horizontal distance (threshold of intelligibility) from other speech varieties. The linguistic approach has been put into question in the light of much social and ethnographic research where it has been found that the said 'language' is an amalgam of different ways and levels of talking, which has come to be called a 'repertoire', and is anything but homogeneous. Further analysis of these repertoires, which for us are largely in the domain of micro-analysis, stress the tendency to highlight differences rather than similarities in a language. Such repertoire dissection goes beyond the immediate ken of present decennial censuses except in the case where it can shed some light on the question of the language-dialect continuum. The third — social (sociolinguistic) — point of view is particularly useful where language boundaries do not have an aura of fixity. 5 1 Here, one can operate at different levels e.g. the national, provincial (associate state), regional or sub-regional level, or the regional and tribal level, to give but a few examples. Each level has its own particular attraction for study depending on who is doing the work and each level represents a particular slice of reality. For the decennial census it cannot be said in advance that it favors a particular level. Everything depends on the ethno-social context or the human grouping proposed. Thus, in the case of Hindi, it may be as necessary to know the total population of the 'Hinduist' or 'Hirdu' speakers in Khubchandani's H-U-P region, as it is to know the Hindi speakers minus the Urdu-Punjabi speakers. It may be less interesting to know the number of Hindi speakers by region or the household Hindi spoken within a particular state. But again it depends on priorities, although in a decennial census too much detail may be misleading and impractical. The ideal solution may be to choose ethno-social units that are large enough but at the same time correspond to a particular language reality (unit). The reverse also could be said — a linguistic unit large enough but corresponding to an ethno-social reality (unit). An eye must be kept both on the language and on the social unit. That is why a definition of speech community at least for the decennial census should have both ingredients. For example, Gumperz amended his

LANGUAGE PROFILES BY POLITY

43

definition to read: 'any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage'. 6 2 Here, 'frequent interaction' indicates a closely knit social aggregate (which may be more or less frequent because of size or distance) and 'body of verbal signs' (which, however, may give quite a varied communication pattern). The size (slice) of the social or linguistic unit that one chooses for a decennial census should be large enough to be socially, linguistically and politically meaningful in terms of the polity wherein the census is being taken. We now turn to the related problem of the 'language-name' where the name chosen in a census for a language unit has very little meaning, either linguistically or socially. On some occasions, new names are 'created' for a speech variety, or any name is entered that happens to be given by the respondents. Less trouble is caused if there is a subsequent 'classification' of all names given, as in the case of the Indian census. In the case, where a name suddenly appears that is totally unknown or not previously known in that context, those responsible should turn to specialists for a verification of the term. The 1961 Israel census lists 'Bukharian' as a language of immigrant Jews from Russia, a name given by the people to their language from the region where they live. The language in question is in reality closely related to Tajik with which it should be connected. On the other hand, 'Yahudic', a Jewish correlate of Arabic, is not mentioned for those Jews coming from Yemen, Iraq, Bahrein, Morocco, Algeria and other countries. In the 1 9 6 5 Turkish census, new speech varieties appear for what are really subgroups of major languages. Thus, Zaza, Kirman and Kirdas 53 are subvariants which should be identified with Kurdish. 54 Other 'mother tongues' in the same census — which come as a surprise — are 'Jewish' (probably Dzhudezmo speakers), 'Bosnian' (Serbo-Croatian speakers) and 'Pomak' (Bulgarian speakers). It is important that the language statistician or sociolinguist knows what he is deeding with when he is presented with such so-called 'languages'. In a language list, all such entries should at least be presented with a footnote of explanation. Such language names may be presented out of ignorance, carelessness or by design, with the aim to decrease the numerical strength (influence) of a group. In other cases, there may be some internal ethnic, religious or other differences within the speech group that, from a sociolinguistic point of view, are of minor importance. 5 5 Contrariwise, there is the practice of entering groups of languages as if they were one language. In the 1 9 7 0 Mexico census, some 30 Amerindian languages are listed, whereas the Summer Institute of Linguistics, on the basis of mutual intelligibility tests, where the threshold of intelligibility is less than 80%, has 'discovered' about 150 different languages. For example, Zapotec has 2 8 3 , 3 4 5 speakers according to the 1 9 7 0 census. The official

44

G R A N T D. M c C O N N E L L

S.I.L. list of languages has already listed 14 Zapotec languages that are not mutually comprehensible (threshold of intelligibility less than 80%). Conclusion The charge has often been made, and sometimes rightly so, that those concerned with statistics of any kind, can make statistics say exactly what statisticians and others want them to say and no more. Language statisticians are no exception to the rule. In fact, because of the political and social connotations involved in language statistics, there is a very great temptation to 'modify', 'restructure' or completely falsify the results. This may be done simply by choosing certain languages and not others, or by the choice of certain language names based on distinctions that are not important in a language census or excluding those that are. It would help immensely if a few simple rules were agreed upon. In a language census: 1) basic data and basic questions should always be included on mother tongue, main language and second language. Questions should be clearly and simply worded and refer to as concrete a situation as possible; 2) standardized questions based on a union list of questions should be asked from one census to another, unless basic conditions have changed. These questions should contain relevant aspects of present and past linguistic behavior, including competence, performance, domain (where) and frequency (how often); 3) standardized language names also based on a union list should be used wherever possible. If other names are used, there should always be an explanation indicating the connection with the standard name; 4) questions on second languages should be included on the four basic skills. One of the main objects of language statistics is to provide us with as complete a set as possible of linguistic data. It is only then that a good profile configuration can be obtained for all languages within a country, thereby laying the groundwork for a more serious analysis with other extra-linguistic factors. For the time being, such profiles will be made up of 'lingual' data (linguistic and 'ethnic'), the two main sources of language facts. For this, a complete list of languages and a complete list of 'ethnic' units is required for each country. It is these lists that constitute the macro-analysis mentioned above. If one was to ask the question what was more relevant in language profile, macro- or micro-analysis, we would have to opt for the former 66 with the proviso that micro-analysis should not be neglected and in fact, can be carried out concurrently with a macro-analysis. If the factors 'language-tribe' are more intimately connected with a macro-analysis, any subdivision of these e.g. 'register of a language concerning males of a tribe'

LANGUAGE PROFILES BY POLITY

45

are more connected with a micro-analysis. We first must know the population of the tribe and the language or languages it speaks, before we can inquire into the stylistic variants of this language by sex etc. In countries such as India with a long experience in language statistics, work has been progressing in both areas since the 1960 census. 57 The final outcome for a country could be two analytical models, one dealing with macro-analytical data involving main language and societal units and the other with micro-analytical data concerned with subunits such as detailed stylistic variations including idiolects, registers and the like. Each could complement the other, one giving macro data, the other micrp (detailed) data. Such an analysis could bring about important comparisons and cross-tabulations on all levels. All such data could then be used in a further comparison with extra-lingual data i.e. economic, ideological and political factors, which play a large role in the growth and evolution of languages.

46

G R A N T D. M c C O N N E L L

NOTES Characterized by rigid uniformity. A group of 3,000 Icelandic immigrants would be considered a monolithic whole, concerning their mother tongue. 3 Multi ± Xi0os (stone), Oxford English Dictionary. 4 A few will undoubtedly speak little English and some may have English as the second but dominant or most frequently used language. 5 Noteworthy are the French and Spanish mother tongue groups in the USA and the Italian and Greek mother tongue groups in Australia. 6 20% is an arbitrary but reasonable figure. A language spoken by 20% of the population ought to be well represented in an immigrant group, even though migrants might not come in equal portions from both parts of the country. 7 For an actual measurement of some of these factors see Mackey, W.F.: Three Concepts for Geolinguistics, publication B-42, ICRB, Quebec 1973. 8 Lieberson, Stanley: "How Can we Describe and Measure the Incidence and Distribution of Bilingualism? " in Kelly, L.G., ed.: Description and Measurement of Bilingualism, An International Seminar, University of Moncton, 1967, p. 284. 9 Yemen (Aden) and Yemen (Saana), for example, are proposing for the first time a language census as did Lebanon in 1970. 1 0 In reality, many countries gather data only on mother tongue, which in many cases is a large enough task in itself. 1 1 "Census data on mother tongues and bilingualism provided decade after decade present not just a static picture but help one to discern the dynamic aspect of the interplay of linguistic groups...". A. Chandra Sekhar, in: Nigam, R.C.: Language Handbook on Mother Tongues in Census. Census Cententary Monograph No. 10, New Delhi 1972, Foreword p. ii. 1 2 This can involve subtle reinterpretation of what one's mother tongue really is, i.e. the local vernacular, the regional vernacular or the overarching national standard. 1 3 "Censuses provide a very powerful instrument for determining the past linguistic condition of the population." Nigam, R.C.: Language Handbook... p. xii. 1 4 " D a t a on languages as have been obtained in different countries in the world may be of three principal varieties, viz. a) Mother tongue, b) Principal language or languages currently used , c) Knowledge of a designated or specific language." Nigam, R.C.: Language Handbook..., p. xiii. 1

2

L A N G U A G E PROFILES BY POLITY

15

47

The phasing-in of one language and the phasing-out of another, often due to coercive language policy or to lack of educational facilities and other kinds of neglect, may be so termed. 16 Some organizations estimate from 5 - 8 million Kurds. 17 The italics indicate other aspects in the same question, e.g. present competence, etc. 18 Italics refers to the domain aspect. 19 Italics refers to the frequency aspect. 20 The question is in fact a combination of past performance in speaking and present performance in understanding. If the individual no longer understood the first language learned he was to report the next one learned and still understood. 21 The percentage loss is: Chinese (30%), Gujarati (43%), Hindustani (55%), Hindi (16%), Marathi (35%), Tamil (59%), Telugu (58%). 22 Compare the total figure of the Amerindian group for 1970 (3,111,415) with those counted in 1960 (1,104,955) and 1950 (795,069). 23 The same is true for English. 24 T h e census does include a table (in percentages only) of nine languages other than Arabic that are spoken or read (4. Frequence des langues parlees ou lues au Liban.). For example, 38% of the total population speak or read French and 15.1% English (by calculation 694,000 and 276,000 persons respectively). How many of these are speakers and how many of these just readers? How many are monolinguals (foreigners? ) and how many of the bilinguals are foreigners or Lebanese? How many Lebanese are Arabic speakers and how many Armenian speakers? These questions remain unanswered. 25 Those language varieties already treated as mother tongues will now all be worthy of being included as separate entities in the bilingual category. Indirectly, this might lead to the disclosure of the 'home' variety of the mother tongue as opposed to the regional variety or the national variety, e.g. Bagelkhandi vs. Hindi. 26 Unfortunately, the 1972 Mauritius Island census dropped the question on 'mother tongue' i.e. 'language usually spoken in the individual's home in his early childhood' and has adopted the term 'linguistic group' which means 'the language spoken by the person's forefathers'. 27 Handbook of Population and Housing Census Methods, Part IV, Survey of population and housing census experience, 1955-1964, Section II, Studies in Methods, Series F, No. 16/Add. 4, United Nations, New York, 1974, 95 p. 28 Lieberson, Stanley: op. cit. p. 291. 29 The unit can also be considered from a number of different points of view. 30 Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, Vol. 2, 1970, E.G. Malherbe, p. 323.

48

GRANT D. McCONNELL

In India, the enumerator must take down any name the respondent gives him, the result being a proliferation of mother tongues, some of which have strong religious, cast or other overtones, e.g. Brahmani, Islami. 3 2 This is what is done in most South American countries and also in Canada concerning Amerindian languages. 3 3 In Canada, those having a mother tongue that is not an official language e.g. Ukrainian, and who speak e.g. English as well, are not considered bilingual for census purposes. 3 4 T h e situation has changed with the creation in 1971 of Bantu Homelands within which the Bantu languages have become both 'official' and 'national'. 3 5 Bilingualism here includes those speaking two or more languages. 3 6 Total speakers of each Amerindian language are not yet calculable because second language speakers are yet unknown either among the other Amerindian tribes or among the Spanish mother tongue speakers (Equation II). 3 7 Equation II. 3 8 Equation I. 3 9 Even the task of gathering a complete set of mother tongue figures by country has not been achieved. 4 0 The reverse side of the coin, as we have seen, is what the census officials (government) want to reveal, or what they see as important. 4 1 " . . . to an ordinary speaker, language is more of symbolic significance, of identifying oneself with the group, than its purely formal criteria." Khubchandani, L.M.: Fluidity in Mother Tongue Identity. Ill International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Copenhagen, August 1972. 4 2 Some idea of the deviation from reality may be had if local conditions are intimately known. For example, religion might make some people claim a mother tongue that they know only superficially. 4 3 Understanders can be 'passive second language speakers' or 'passive mother tongue speakers' in the case where the mother tongue is loosing out i.e. being replaced by another main language. The phenomenon is known as 'replacive bilingualism' and effects many languages today, i.e. most Amerindian languages, languages of immigrant groups, etc. 4 4 Strangely enough, the 1961 census stipulated 'ability to read with understanding'. This was to exclude those who could read a few lines of the Koran from claiming to be able to read Arabic. 4 5 Such information on those reading and writing a language should be given in addition to mother tongue and second language and should not replace the later. The French Polynesia census of 1962 only gives information on languages read and written, therefore excluding illiterate Tahitian speakers who constitute about one third of the population. 4 6 A micro-analysis would be more interested in 'level' of conversation 31

L A N G U A G E P R O F I L E S BY P O L I T Y

49

or in the case of written material, the register i.e. vocabulary, syntactic and morphological structures used. This, of course, is outside the area of census taking. 47 We seem able to enquire as to the number of refrigerators, stoves, telephones and other modern appliances owned by householders. Surely these items are no more important than being able to read or write. 48 Especially in countries where the official language i.e. of the schools is an adopted language as in many African countries. 49 Kloss, Heinz and G.D. McConnell, eds. The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use, ICRB, Les Presses de l'Universite Laval, Quebec, 1977. 50 Kloss, Heinz: "How Can We Describe and Measure the Incidence and Distribution of Bilingualism? " Commentary in Kelly, L.G., ed.: Description and Measurement of Bilingualism. An International Seminar, University of Moncton, June 6-14, 1967, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969, p. 296-316. Bi This is one of the capital problems in the Indian census for what L.M. Khubchandani terms the 'fluid zone'. 52 Gumperz, John J.: "Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities" in: American Anthropologist, Vol. 66, 1964, p. 137. 53 Mother tongue speakers: Zaza 150,644, Kirman 45, Kirdas 42. 64 Such sub-variants are not listed in the 1960 census. 55 There are always micro-analytic speech variations of a particular linguistic interest that need not be covered in such a macro-analysis e.g. the many variants of Tajik (Persian) in Afghanistan or of Turkish in Turkey. 56 Especially when dealing with censuses. 57 Evidence can be seen of this in some of the papers presented at the Indian Census Centennial Conference in New Delhi, October 1972.

50

G R A N T D. M c C O N N E L L

Bibliography Gumperz, John J. 1964. "Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities" in American Anthropologist, Volume 66. Khubchandani, L.M. 1972. Fluidity in Mother Tongue Identity, III International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Copenhagen, in A. Verdoodt, ed., Sociolinguistics, forthcoming. Kloss, Heinz and G.D. McConnell, ed. 1974. Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World, Volume 1: Central and Western South Asia, Quebec, ICRB, Les Presses de l'Universite Laval. . 1977. The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use Volume 1: The Americas, Quebec, ICRB, Les Presses de l'Universite Laval. Kloss, Heinz. 1969. Commentary in: Kelly, L.B., ed.: Description and Measurement of Bilingualism. University of Moncton, 1967, Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Lieberson, Stanley. 1967. "How Can We Describe and Measure the Incidence and Distribution of Bilingualism? " in: Kelly, L.G., ed.: Description and Measurement of Bilingualism. An International Seminar, University of Moncton. Mackey, William F. 1973. Three Concepts for Geolinguistics. Quebec, Publication B-42, ICRB. Malherbe, E.G. 1970. "Bilingualism", Standard Encyclopedia of Southern Africa, Volume 2. Nigam, R.C. 1972. Language Handbook on Mother Tongues in Census. New Delhi. Census Centenary Monograph No. 10, Census of India, 1971. United Nations. 1959. Handbook of Population Census Methods, Vol. 3. Demographic and Social Characteristics of the Population. United Nations, New York (revised version ms.).

LANGUAGE ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR AND INTERVENING VARIABLES Lilyan A. Brudner Douglas R. White

Consider how it happens that one language continues to survive, while another declines or dies out entirely. Presumably the fate of a language is determined by what people do, think, and feel about it. But precisely on what basis do individuals make decisions about what language or languages they speak? How important are language attitudes? How do they relate to what people actually do? It has frequently been assumed that attitudes "play a powerful role in determining our behavior," (Lambert and Lambert 1973: 77), that they "affect our judgments and perceptions of others; they influence our speed and efficiency of learning; they help determine the groups we associate with" and the like. Still, as Lambert and Lambert also note, people differ in their strength of attitude, as well as in the extent to which private attitudes (e.g., beliefs, feelings, and predispositions) influence their social behavior. In this paper we examine the relationship between attitudes and behavior at the national level in the Republic of Ireland. In Ireland, English is the most widely spoken language, although Irish is the first national language. Here an extensive government campaign has been waged to restore the Irish language, or at least to prevent its further decline. Throughout 1972 and 1973 we served respectively as Director and Deputy Director of research on language evaluation to the government of the Republic of Ireland. Major detailed findings of the research are published in a report issued by the Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research (1975). That report was an extension of a draft prepared by Brudner, White, and staff. Six major questions were examined in the research report: (1) What attitudes and beliefs do people hold about the language and in what ways are these related to each other?

52

L I L Y AN A. B R U D N E R A N D D O U G L A S R. W H I T E

(2)

How are these attitudes distributed in the population; and to what extent can it be explained how and why they are distributed in particular ways? (3) How are attitudes related to people's actual abilities and conversational/communicative competence in the language? (4) To what extent have educational programs been successful in raising communicative competence levels to the point of enabling people to actually use Irish in interpersonal interaction? (5) Even given adequate competence in the language, what are the main factors that intervene in translating that competence into usage', especially in a predominantly English monolingual environment? (6) Given a set of valid and reliable answers to these questions, what policy developments offer the best chance of success, and to what extent would the public support such policy development? The data collected to assess these questions include detailed information on a range of language attitudes and policy preferences, as well as information on speakers' backgrounds, educational history, home contact with Irish, abilities in Irish, involvement in Irish activities and use of Irish outside the home. In this paper we are concerned with the organization of multiple attitudes towards Irish, and with the question of which attitudes, if any, exert independent effect upon language use. We use two methods of factor analysis to explore the structure of language attitudes in our various populations. Then we examine the relationship between specific attitudinal factors and behavior, and attempt to relate both attitudes and behavior to such intervening variables as language ability, opportunity, and certain norms of use. Two alternative models of the relationship between attitudes and behavior are tested here. One is an internalized motivations model: this views attitudes as mental predispositions strongly influencing behavior. The other is a situational interaction model, which views behavior as an interactive process involving individual capabilities, situational opportunities, and other environmental factors which structure human responses. In the later model, attitudes may be viewed as reflections of behavior, but not as prime motivating factors for behavior. In the situational interaction model, sociological variables intervene between attitudes and behavior. Behavior is seen in Lewin's terms as a "function of the person in the environment" (Ehrlich 1973: 268). Samples and Attitudinal Questions Five samples of the population of the Republic of Ireland are used in the attitudinal surveys discussed below:

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

53

1. Dublin sample (N=399), a pilot survey, using probability sampling within selected occupational groups. 2. National sample (N=2443), the main survey, using regionally stratified probability sampling. 3. Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking districts in the west of Ireland) sample (N=542), complementary to the main survey, using the same sampling design but a higher sampling fraction because of the small population size. 4. Teacher sample (N=2000 post-primary and 600 primary teachers), an educational survey, sampled by type of school program. 5. Pupil sample (N=2000 post-primary and 2000 sixth year post-primary pupils), sampled from the same schools as teachers. The pilot Dublin survey contains 124 language attitude items. Some pilot survey items were dropped. Others were added for the National and Gaeltacht surveys. The educational surveys were designed to contain a common core of attitude questions which overlapped with the other surveys. The 47 attitude items common to all five surveys will be presented in the analysis. Factor Analysis Two types of factor analysis are used for comparison of the structure of language attitudes in the five samples: principal components and rotated factor analysis. In principal components analysis, the first factor is a vector associated with the greatest degree of covariance with all of the attitude items, the second factor is associated with the greatest residual covariance, and so forth. In rotated factor analysis, the factor vectors are rotated so that the items loading on each factor are maximally distinct. The difference can be visualized as a problem in plane geometry, as in Figure 1 showing the rotation of two principal component axes to capture distinct clusters of items located (by factor scores) in the factor space. Principal component factor analysis of the National sample attitudinal data yields four clear factors, all of which are replicated in the Gaeltacht sample, Dublin sample, Teachers' sample, and pupils' sample. Four factors are also replicated in the rotated factor analysis. The relationship between the two factor solutions is shown in Table 1.

54

L I L Y AN A. B R U D N E R AND DOUGLAS R . WHITE

FIGURE 1 Illustration of Difference between Principal Components and Rotated Factor Analysis Principal Component Rotated I

XV Ν

\

Rotated II \ \

\

^

\ —r \

\

Principal Component II

\ .

\

\

\

\

\

\ \

TABLE 1 Principal Components and Rotated Factor Analysis, Replicated for National, Gaeltacht, Dublin, Teacher and Pupil Samples Principal Components

Factors

Rotated

1. Attitudes Towards Irish

R l . Attitudes towards Irish as an Ethnic Symbol R2. Attitudes towards Irish as taught in School

2. Beliefs Regarding the Place and Viability of Irish

R4. Beliefs Regarding the Place and Viability of Irish

3. Preference Constraining the Use of Irish

R3. Interpersonal Use of Irish

4. Willingness to Use Irish

55

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

The effect of the rotated solution is to break-up the first principal c o m p o n e n t (attitudes towards Irish) into two distinct attitudinal sub-systems: Attitudes towards Irish as an Ethnic Symbol, and Attitudes towards Irish as taught in School. The beliefs factors remains essentially unchanged under rotation. Factors 3 and 4 in the principal components analysis, however, are collapsed into a single factor in the rotated solution, titled Interpersonal Use of Irish. It is clear from the two factor analyses that at least five global attitudinal scales are needed to describe the structure of Irish language attitudes. 1 These five scales will not necessarily be independent or uncorrected. The scales are: 51. Attitudes towards Irish as an Ethnic Symbol 52. Attitudes towards Irish as taught in school 53. Willingness to Use Irish in Conversation 54. Beliefs about the Place and Viability of Irish 55. Constraining Preferences or Norms in Irish Use Intercorrelations between scales are shown in Table 2. TABLE 2 Intercorrelations (Pearson's R) for Five Attitude Scales Irish Language Attitudes 51 52 53 54 55

Ethnic Symbol School Language Willingness to Use Beliefs about Viability Constraining Preferences

SI

Intercorrelations S2 S3 S4

.41 .55 .56

.33 .37

*

*

S5

.39 **

* correlation below .20 ** correlation above .20, but relationship is curvilinear Attitudes towards Irish as an Ethnic Symbol are fairly highly correlated with Attitudes towards Irish as a subject taught in school, with willingness to use Irish, and with beliefs about the place and viability of Irish. The latter three scales (S2-S4) are also moderately intercorrelated. The items in scale S5 are not intercorrelated with previous scales. Preferences constraining the use of Irish (e.g., "I do not like to begin a conversation in Irish") are largely independent of the other attitudes. A more detailed analysis of items in this scale shows certain peculiarities: "I

56

L I L Y AN A. B R U D N E R A N D D O U G L A S R . W H I T E

don't like to begin a conversation in Irish" and "I don't like to speak Irish with people who may know it better than I do" are related curvilinearly with willingness to use Irish (highest agreement is toward among those with moderate willingness) and with ability in Irish (highest agreement is found among those with moderate ability). The constraining preference "I don't like speaking in Irish when others are present who don't know Irish", on the other hand, shows greater agreement the higher the level of ability in Irish, and similarly for reported willingness to use Irish. Thus, it would appear that there are greater constraints, or perhaps different social sensitivities or norms, for those with better abilities in Irish as opposed to those with moderate levels of fluency. Attitudes and Behavior One might expect that such attitudes as "willingness to use Irish in conversation" would have strong correlations to self-reports of language use. A scale of adult usage of Irish is constructed by combining self-reports of use in conversation since leaving school, at home, and on the job. As expected, the correlation between the Irish usage scale and the attitude scale " w i l l i n g n e s s t o use Irish" is high (r=.49). The second highest attitude-behavior correlation (r=.31) is between attitudes towards Irish as an ethnic symbol and positive ratings on the usage scale. To test the relative independent effect of language attitudes on behavior, as contrasted with effects of ability and opportunity as intervening variables in fluency language use, we employed the technique of multiple regression. We attempted to determine which factor was the best predictor of language usage, while controlling for the effects of other intervening variables. In the multiple regression analysis, the multiple R2 is an indicator of the proportion of variance accounted for by each factor. Table 3 shows that language ability alone accounts for 53% of the variance in self-reported usage. Various opportunities to use Irish accounts for another 10%, while the attitudinal factors account for only 2% of the variance in usage. Possible Explanations When ability and opportunity to use Irish are held constant, there is virtually no relationship between global language attitudes and global language behavior across respondents, even by self-report. Clearly, ability and opportunity are major factors generating both language attitudes and usage. The lack of any notable independent effect of attitudes on behavior calls for some explanation. An obvious issue is that people generally do not feel they know Irish well enough to use it, as other data strongly show. Two additional possibilities are visible from analysis of the present data. First, what we have called "constraining preferences in the use of Irish" may reflect widespread and powerful social norms constraining the use of Irish.

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

57

TABLE 3 Multiple R2 for Predictors of Adult Usage of Irish

1 2 3 4 5 6

Usage Ability Opportunity 1 Opportunity 2 Willingness to Use Irish Attitudes - Irish as Ethnic Symbol

2 .55

3 .55 .39

4 .52 .48 .44

5 .49 .63 .33 .37

6 .31

R2

*

.53 .07 .03 .02 .00

* *

.55

1 Irish related activities or Clubs 2 School activities * data not readily available from report Usage may be constrained, then, not by internal attitudes, but by external social and situational pressures. Persons with less than adequate Irish feel constrained not to initiate conversations in Irish, not to use Irish with those who know it better, and not to use their Irish with persons of different status. Persons with fluent or native Irish feel constrained not to use Irish when others are present who do not speak Irish at all, or as well. The second possible explanation for the lack of any independent relationship between global language attitudes and global language behavior is that language attitudes are not a powerful unified system motivating behavior, but a set of preferential responses reflecting diverse situational experiences. If this were the case, then the structure of language attitudes would reflect the way in which associations and experiences related to the language were themselves organized and articulated. In exploring this hypothesis, however, a more fine-grained analysis of the intercorrelations between attitude items is required. This analysis of attitudinal structure is presented below. Attitudinal Ousters and Their Contents The factor analytic structure of language attitudes masks a more fine-grained attitudinal structure that is highly differentiated in its contents. Table 4 presents a detailed clustering of the 47 attitudinal items common to the national, Gaeltacht, educational and pilot surveys. The clustering is done by grouping the most closely related items both in terms of factor loadings and semantic contents of items. The grouping of items in Table 4 is also replicated in the five surveys.

58

L I L Y AN A. BRUDNER AND DOUGLAS R. WHITE

TABLE 4 Clustering of 47 attitude items common to National, Gaeltacht, Educational, and Pilot Surveys on the basis of Factor loadings on the Four Principal Components Ouster Name

Item

I

Factors II III

IV

Communj

Willingness to use Irish

275 279 272 271

.49 .43 .58 .38

.29 .28 .20 .17

.19 .16 .16 -.02

.38 .28 .28 .29

Involvement in Irish-related Activities

339* 312* 307*

.62 .46 .48

.27 .33 .20

-.08 .08 .24

-.03 .12 .08

46 34 33

Constraining Preferences in the Use of Irish

278 277 276 273

.09 .07 .07 .03

.04 -.04 .02 -.03

.65 .62 .62 .47

.19 .16 .16 .10

47 42 38 23

Attitudes toward Irish as an Ethnic Symbol

353 329 342 328 332

.66 .53 .58 .57 .47

-.11 -.29 -.15 -.11 -.13

.01 -.15 .00 .06 .01

.00 .13 .14 -.10 .08

45 40 38 35 24

Attitudes toward Irish as a spoken Language

336 343* 346 327*

.56 .44 .52 .37

.07 .15 .07 .20

.10 -.28 .10 -.23

-.02 .09 -.02 .04

33 30 29 23

Attitudes toward Irish speakers

348 311 310

.36 .33 .27

-.43 -.34 -.34

-.17 -.16 -.16

-.11 .01 .01

36 25 21

Attitudes toward Irish as taught in School

299* 298* 295* 300*

.33 .35 .33 .27

.36 .36 .23 .28

-.23 -.19 -.27 -.12

.07 -.06 .05 -.08

30 29 24 17

50% 50 48 26

59

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

Attitudes toward the transmission of Irish

293 301 326

.47 .43 .45

-.06 -.09 -.03

.08 .14 .15

.00 .08 -.04

23 22 21

Attitudes toward Irish nationality

847 318 352 324

.32 .23 .30 .31

-.36 -.34 -.31 -.19

-.19 -.14 -.08 -.03

.05 .20 .02 .09

27 23 19 14

Beliefs about the place of Irish in Society

344* 351* 313*

.20 .25 .20

.38 .33 .33

-.12 .15 .08

-.16 -.09 -.16

22 20 18

Beliefs about the practical benefits of Irish

349 315** 325

.17 -.23 .08

-.43 -.33 -.36

.01 .18 .14

-.15 -.07 -.04

Beliefs about Personal and Public Apathy towards Irish

341* 331* 296*

.35 .31 .16

.30 .21 .26

-.17 -.17 -.12

-.05 .08 -.05

24 18 11

Beliefs about the viability of Irish

334* 340* 337*

-.11 + .03 +.13

+ .49 + .34 +.26

+ .01 -.01 -.07

-.20 -.13 -.20

29 13 13

* These items have been reversed in sign such that loadings on factor I are positive, and signs of loadings on other factors accordingly reversed. ** While the sign on factor I for this item is negative, the item is most similar in factor loadings to other items in this cluster, which would be obscured by a reversal of signs.

60

LILYAN A. B R U D N E R A N D DOUGLAS R. WHITE

The clusters, then, may be regarded as having factorial validity.2 Clusters are named on the basis of the semantic content of the items in the cluster. The items in each cluster are given in Table 5. TABLE 5 Attitude Items in the Detailed Clusters Willingness to Use Irish

1 2 3 4

+ + + +

275. 279. 272. 271.

I will always speak Irish if spoken to in Irish I will sometimes speak Irish if spoken to in Irish I wish I could use the Irish I know more often I am committed to using Irish as much as I can

Constraining

Preference in Use of Irish

1 - 278. I do not like to begin a conversation in Irish 2 - 277. I do not like to speak Irish with people who may know it better than I do 3 - 276. I do not like people speaking in Irish when others are present who do not know Irish 4 - 273. People in my circle just don't use Irish at all Involvement

in Irish-related

Activities

1 - 339. Far less money should be spent reviving Irish no matter what effect this has on the language 2 - 312. What the government do about the Irish language is not important to me 3 - 307. Most activities run by the Irish language organizations are of little interest to me Attitudes

Toward Irish as an Ethnic

Symbol

1 + 353. Ireland would not be Ireland without the Irish-speaking people 2 + 329. Using the Irish language would make Ireland more independent of England 3 + 342. W ithout Irish, Ireland would certainly lose its identity as a separate culture 4 + 328. No real Irishman can be against the revival of Irish 5 + 332. To really understand traditional Irish culture, one must know Irish Attitudes

towards Irish as a Spoken

Language

1 + 336. It is better for people to speak Irish badly than not at all 2 - 343. Irish is less useful than any continental language

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

61

3 + 346. There are important things that can be expressed in Irish that cannot be expressed in English 4 - 327. The Irish language cannot be made suitable for business or science Attitudes

towards Irish

Speakers

1 + 348. People who know Irish well have a chance to meet important people 2 + 311. People are much happier in the Gaeltacht than in English-speaking areas 3 + 310. Gaeltacht people are more trustworthy than other people, generally speaking Attitudes

towards Irish as a School

Subject

1 - 299. Many children fail their examinations because of Irish 2 - 298. Most children resent having to learn Irish 3 - 295. Children doing school subjects through Irish don't do as well as those doing subjects through English 4 - 300. There is too much punishment associated with Irish in the schools Attitudes

towards the Transmission

of Irish

1 + 293. If Irish were taught better in the schools, more people would speak it 2 + 301. Parents don't take enough responsibility for seeing that their children learn Irish 3 + 326. Irish traditions have a valuable contribution to make to modern life Attitudes

towards Irish

1 2 3 4

Irish people are usually more sincere than English people Ireland's ties with England are too close Ireland is the only place where a true Irishman can be happy Ireland is very different from England and should remain different

+ + + +

347. 318. 352. 324.

nationality

Beliefs about the Place of Irish in

Society

1 0 344. Most people view all things associated with Irish as too old-fashioned 2 0 351. Irish people will have to give up their traditional way of life entirely to take part in the modern world 3 0 313. Being in the EEC will contribute greatly to the loss of Irish language Beliefs about the Practical Benefits of Using Irish

1 0 349. People who know Irish well have a better chance to get good jobs

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and promotions 2 0 315. Many Civil Servants get their jobs just because they have Irish and not because they are better suited to the job 3 0 325. Many people in the Civil Service are held back because of lack of ability in Irish Beliefs about Personal and Public Apathy 1 0 341. Most people don't care one way or the other about Irish 2 0 331. Whether people speak Irish or English does not matter to me 3 0 296. Children seldom learn enough Irish to use it after leaving school Beliefs about the Viability of Irish 1 0 334. If the Gaeltacht dies out, Irish will die also 2 0 340. If nothing is done to prevent it, Irish will disappear in a generation or two 3 0 337. Gaeltacht areas are dying out at present On a post-hoc basis, categories of willingness, preference, involvement, attitude and belief are identified by the type of statement, as follows: Willingness: "I will " Preference: "I do not/do like . . . Involvement: " . . . is important/of great interest to me . . . Attitude: any statement not included above, determined by judges to indicate a positive or negative orientation towards Irish. Belief: any statement not included above, determined by judges to be indeterminate or neutral in orientation towards Irish. Clusters of items were classified into one of these five categories according to the predominant type of statements contained in the cluster. Statements in Table 5 are also coded as +, -, or 0 according to the determination of a panel of native judges regarding attitudinal content. It should be noted that statements of willingness, preference, or involvement also have a definite behavioral content or orientation, while beliefs, by definition, do not. The six clusters which are labelled as "attitudes" in Table 4 are preferences clearly differentiated in terms of behavioral contexts, or, psychologically speaking, in terms of concrete differences in manifestation of the attitude object associated with behavior, persons, or institutions. The contexts of these different attitude clusters include Irish as an ethnic symbol, as a spoken language, as a school language, as a characteristic of speakers, or as a trait in an intergenerational process of transmission. Attitudes toward Irish nationality (not specifically tied to the Irish language) Eire, in the factor loading of items, most similar to attitudes toward Irish speakers, and next most similar to attitudes toward Irish as an ethnic

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ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

symbol. This suggests a close association between Irish speaking and other markers of Irish national identity. Other associations between the clusters also suggest a reflection of situational factors in Ireland. Involvement in Irish-related activities and attitudes toward Irish as taught in school are similar in factor scores: schools and school networks typically give access to opportunities to participate in Irish-related activities. Similarities between attitudes toward Irish as a spoken language and toward the transmission of Irish also reflect patterns of response that are closely associated. Evidence from the belief clusters, on the similarity between beliefs about the place of Irish in society, and public apathy towards Irish, the place of Irish in the nation and the viability of Irish, also support the hypothesis. The fine-grained attitudinal cluster analysis gives a strikingly different image of the structure and coherence of elements of the attitudinal system than the earlier factor analyses. First, attitudes are much more highly differentiated than was apparent in the factor analyses. Second, the specific clusters of willingness to use Irish, involvement in Irish-related activities, and constraining preferences in use emerge as the most coherent or highly structured elements in the attitudinal factor structure. Coherence in the factor structure is measured by communalities of each item, given in the right hand column of Table 4, and summarized for average cluster communalities in Table 6. The communality of an item is the proportion of variance in responses that can be accounted for by the factor structure, from factor scores for respondents. Thus, the higher the communality, the more the item is intercorrelated with other elements in the attitude system, and the lower the communality, the more the item varies independently. TABLE 6 13 Attitude clusters, ranked by communalities with the overall factor structure of language attitudes Communality (average of items)* 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Willingness to use Irish Involvement in Irish-related Activities Constraining Preference in Use Ethnic Symbol Attitude: Spoken Language Attitude: Speakers Attitude: School Subject Attitude: Transmission

44% 38% 38% 36% 29% 27% 25% 22%

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L I L Y A N A. B R U D N E R A N D D O U G L A S R . W H I T E

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Attitude: Nationality Belief: Place in Society Belief: Practical Benefits Belief: Apathy Belief: Viability

21% 21% 20% 18% 18%

* Computed from national sample factor analysis (principal components); communalities from other samples are comparable in both magnitude and rank order. The ranking of attitude clusters by communality, as shown in Table 6, clearly shows that: 1) willingness to use Irish, involvement in Irish-related activities, and constraining preferences in use are the most coherent elements in the attitude structure; 2) attitudes towards Irish as an ethnic symbol is the next most coherent element in the structure; 3) other attitudes (spoken language, school, etc.) show moderate coherence in the attitude structure; and 4) beliefs (place of Irish, viability, etc.) show the lowest coherence in the structure. These findings lead us to conclude that the language attitude system in Ireland is primarily unified around concrete behavioral factors such as willingness to use Irish, involvement in Irish-related activities, and constraining preferences in use. These clusters load heavily on factors 1, 3 and 4 in the factor structure and are maximally independent while having a high degree of coherence with the factor structure. Attitudes are secondarily unified around features of the Irish language such as Irish as an ethnic marker, as a speaker characteristic, as a spoken language, as a language for transmission, and as taught in school. These clusters load heavily on factor 1 (general attitudes) but are differentiated with respect to factors 1, 2 and 3. Beliefs about Irish are more refracted in the overall attitude structure, and are differentiated on factors 2 (general beliefs) and 1 (general attitudes). Interpretation of Evidence from the Attitude Cluster Analysis It is our hypothesis that the language attitude structure in Ireland and the lack of any independent effect of attitude on a person's own language behavior can be accounted for as follows: the most coherent attitude clusters (willingness, involvement, and constraining preferences) are a reflection of three basic constraints on behavior. These are: 1) language ability strongly influences an individual's willingness to use Irish in conversation. Ability accounts for 44% of the variance in "willingness to use Irish," while other possible influences on willingness are

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

65

found to account for only 5% of the variance (parental attitudes 4%, controlling for ability; and amount of Irish taken in school 1%, controlling also for parental attitudes). 2) opportunity to be in contact with Irish speakers strongly influences an individual's perception about the importance of involvement in Irish-related activities. This is shown most clearly in our social network analysis of language behavior, opportunities, and attitudes, discussed in our report (1975). 3) situational norms and sanctions related to usage strongly influence an individual's constraining preferences or self-consciousness about language use. This is shown in the network studies and also in the attitudinal surveys, as discussed previously. Conclusions Language attitudes in Ireland, while highly structured, internally coherent, and superficially correlated with language usage, do not appear to exert any independent effect on the individual's own language behavior. Both attitudes and behavior, however, are strongly influenced by ability and opportunity to perform and by degree of group support for performance in Irish. In addition, language attitudes appear consistently across a range of behavioral settings. We have found no evidence that positive attitude towards Irish is a sufficient motivation for its use. By way of illustration, relatively few people go out of their way to violate language norms, to join Irish-speaking groups or organizations, or to enroll voluntarily in programs that may enhance both ability and opportunity to use Irish. In a large proportion of the population, despite stated language preferences for Irish, ability in Irish tends to decay over time, after people leave the school situation in which Irish is learned. An internalized motivation model of language attitudes does not accurately predict what language a person will use in Ireland. The primacy of abilities, opportunities and situational norms in accounting for both language abilities and behavior clearly suggests that behavioral contexts, reference groups and networks, and other social pressures on individuals must be taken into account in order to predict language behavior and factors affecting the survival or decline of a language in peril. This is not to say that language attitudes are not without behavioral consequences, or that they do not in the long run have an independent effect on language maintenance. But the place to look for the behavioral consequences of such attitudes is not in the immediate contexts of language use. Attitudes towards Irish as an ethnic symbol, for example, show very strong correlations with attitudes towards Irish language policy support (r=.75). Thus, while language attitudes do not have a direct effect on a person's own language behavior, they may have a strong direct effect on

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L I L Y A N A. B R U D N E R AND DOUGLAS R . WHITE

political support and voting behavior (where language is an issue in political platforms). Through governmental policy supports in Ireland, then, language attitudes could have a long term effect on language behavior — and language survival — by affecting concrete language policies. But such policies, to affect language behavior, must deal directly with supports for learning Irish, for opportunities to use Irish, and norms favoring the use of Irish in various societal contexts (Brudner, White and Walters 1976).

ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR

67

NOTES 1

To construct these scales, the 17 items with highest loadings on rotated factor R1 were used for scale SI; the four items with highest loadings on rotated factor R2 were used for scale S2; four of the items related to willingness to use Irish from factor R3 were used for scale S3; and the five items with highest loadings on rotated factor R4 were used for scale S4. The four items in scale S5 will be discussed separately. 2 For each survey, intercorrelations between items in the same cluster are higher than those between items in different clusters. By this criterion, the clusters are the same in the different surveys. This establishes the factorial validity of the clusters, by replication in different survey samples.

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L I L Y A N A. B R U D N E R A N D D O U G L A S R . WHITE

Bibliography Brudner, Lilyan Α., Douglas R. White and Anthony S. Walters. 1976. "National Policy Programming: A Prototype Model for Language Planning." In P. Sanday, ed., Anthropology and the Public Interest: Fieldwork and Theory. New York: Academic Press. Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research. 1975. Report (Tuarascail). L.A. Brudner, D.R. White and D. Hannan, main authors. Dublin: Government Stationery Office. Ehrlich, Howard J. 1973. "Attitudes, Behavior and the Intervening Variables." In I. Deutscher, ed., What We Say, What We Do. Illinois: Scott, Foresman. Lambert, William W. and Wallace E. Lambert. 1973. Social Psychology 2/e. Foundations of Modern Psychology series. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS FROM CENSUS DATA William F. Mackey Donald G. Cartwright

Introduction The truth and accuracy of conclusions based on language data obtained from a census or language survey depend ultimately on the nature of the information yielded (1), its compilation (2), interpretation (3) and treatment (4). 1. NATURE OF THE INFORMATION The value of the information gathered depends on three things: 1) the questions, 2) the responses, and 3) the records. 1.1 The Questions The value and usefulness of a language question depends on what is asked (its semantic coverage) and on how it is asked (its specificity). 1.1.1

Seman tic Coverage

The semantic area covered by a -language-related question may vary greatly — mother-tongue, home-language, ethnic group, languages used. Most of these areas, however, may be grouped into two main types — questions on language use and questions on language ability. 1.1.1.1 Questions based on language use may be either contextual, personal or temporal. Context-related questions include such categories as language of the home, language of work, language of instruction. Person-related items include all those questions of the form "Which language do you use in communicating with X? " Time-related questions generally have to do with frequency — "Which language do you use most often? " These types are not mutually exclusive. 1.1.1.2 Questions on language ability may be related to the conditions

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WILLIAM F. M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

of learning or to the skills mastered. Acquisition-related questions include such items as "language first learned, and still understood" — sometimes called the mother-tongue question, language acquired in school and language learned as an adult. Skill-related questions include self-estimates of the respondents' ability in reading, writing, speaking and understanding the spoken form of one or more languages. The value of the information may depend on the number of such questions included. For example, a single question on the language most often used in the home will throw no light on the degree and amount of family bilingualism or on the practice of diglossia within the families of a given region unless it be supported by an additional person-related question designed to yield such information. 1.1.2

Specificity

The information potential of each of these questions also depends on how it is asked. As an analysis of the 1961 India Census has indicated, the questions "What language is spoken at home? " and "What language do you know? " have yielded unreliable results because of their lack of precision. By making a question more precise, its reliability can be increased. By changing the question "What language is most commonly spoken in the home? " to "State the language most commonly spoken by each person in the home". The margin of error in the South African census was reduced from 2% to 1.6%. 1.2 The Responses The usefulness of the responses supplied depends both on the respondent's interpretation of the question at the time it is asked and on the consistency of his replies. 1.2.1

Comprehension

In language questions one is never absolutely certain how the respondent will interpret the question. Even well educated respondents have been known to misinterpret a question. A comparison of responses to the 1961 Canada Census with later surveys reveals a possible error of 2% among public servants. The census question "Can you speak French? " yielded 4.7% whereas the survey, which made a distinction between the skills, yielded 2.6% for speaking and 4.2% for understanding, seeming to indicate that some English speakers may have interpreted the census question to mean the ability to understand or even to read the language. There is also a spatial element in the usefulness of responses. For example, those who are well removed from Canada's French-language zone (Quebec, Northeastern New Brunswick) or the bilingual zone (the Sudbury-Moncton axis) lack the opportunities for interaction with the

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

71

French-language hearth of Canada and hence fail to assess accurately their capability in the other official language. English speakers living hundreds of miles from a French-speaking community like those in Victoria, B.C. or St. John's, Newfoundland, for example, who responded "bilingual" to the official language question, may have answered quite differently had they been exposed to a French speaking environment for a period long enough for them to discover how bilingual they really were. If the question therefore is asked of a group with an imperfect knowledge of the language — and in some areas this may include the majority — it may be ambiguous to all except to the most ignorant ("no") and to the most fluent ("yes"). This is especially true in areas of language contact. On the other hand, if people living 'in an area dominated by one language belong to an ethnic group associated with another language they have a higher probability of estimating their knowledge of that other language, if only through the reaction of grandparents and other relatives. This is just one of several reasons for not entire discounting either origin data in cross tabulations, as some language demographers have suggested. Kralt, for example, rejects the use of ethnic origin in any close tabulation of variables which he refers to as the language trinity, that is: mother-tongue, home-language and official language. In his opinion, language may be used as a guide in the determination of an individual's ethnic origin. Language is also an important component of an ethnic group's 'ethnicity' or sense of identity. However, as such, ethnic origin is not a census language concept and is therefore not part of the 'Language trinity.' the use of ethnic origin in his profile has therefore been studiously minimized for this very reason, in order to avoid the possible confusion between 'ethnic group' or 'origin' and 'language' 1 . It must be pointed out however that ethnic origin as defined by the census is not a concept but a functional response variable associated with a factual question. Data from such responses can be used as they indeed are in this paper to substantiate such concepts as language maintenance. While we can appreciate the desire to avoid confusion, particularly in metropolitan areas, when trying to isolate language-in-use, we must not, because of this, reject completely the significance of language for a culture group ("Ethnic group refers to ethnic or cultural background traced through the father's side... Language spoken by the person or by his paternal ancestor on first coming to this continent was a guide to the determination of ethnic or cultural group in some cases". (Dictionary of the 1971 Census Terms, Catalogue 12-540, p. 6). Nor can we overlook the fact that the paternal ancestor from abroad would probably be capable of speaking the designated language of the cultural group to which he belonged. And, while language is only one component of cultural (ethnic) identity, it has been considered a

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WILLIAM F . M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

sufficiently significant indicator to use as part of the definition of ethnicity ("If applicable, the language spoken at that time by the person or by the paternal ancestor was used as a guide in determining the person's ethnic group" (Catalogue 92-774: Introduction; see also section 4.2 below)). 1.2.2

Consistency Partly because of this, and for other reasons, the respondent may facilate in his replies from one period to the next. Especially in language questions based on a self-estimate of a behavioral trait which is emotionally charged, it is likely that there may be a certain amount of inconsistency in the replies. For example in the 1961 Canada Census, according to one inter-census study, the index of inconsistency and deviation was highest in questions referring to mother-tongue, bilingualism and ethnic origin 2 . 1.3 The Record In practice, many responses may have to be interpreted by the field-worker before they can be fitted into one of the available slots of the questionnaire. Some surveys leave more latitude than do others when it comes to the type of record made by the enumerator. Some field instruction manuals may instruct the enumerator to use his one judgment. Instructions for the 1960 census of Americans living overseas, for example, included the item: "If he knows only a few words of the language, check "no". In multilingual areas where language questions do not lend themselves to yes-or-no replies the recording and classification of language competence based on general questions may depend entirely upon the whim of the enumerators or on their haphazard and perfunctory appraisal of the language situation in the home. 2. COMPILATION AND COMPUTATION The usefulness of data derived from census and language surveys depend of course on what is counted as what. If a bilingual population is computed on the basis of a single question such as one related to the ability to speak a certain language, with the inference that the majority language will be known, the replies are not comparable with those yielded from two separate questions each dealing with a different language. If there are only two languages A and B, spoken in an area, unless a respondent lists B, it is often assumed that he speaks language A. If one assumes that in a given area everyone speaks language A, anyone claiming to speak language Β is sometimes counted as bilingual. In cases where there are two or more language-related questions one of them may be administered to the entire population while the other is asked only of a sample. One may ask how comparable these questions can actually be. In the Canada Census of 1971, the comparison was made by computer

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

73

generation of the one-third sample to equal the responses to questions given to the entire population. Some language demographers have used both the real and the computer-generated populations in arithmetic operations of comparison as if both populations were identical. When considering the entire population the difference may indeed be negligible; but when deeding with special areas — especially those with small populations — the error may be greater than the differences measured. In the result of the HL ( h o m e - l a n g u a g e ) and t h e MT (mother-tongue) questions for the Chicoutimi-Jonquiere area in the 1971 Canada Census the difference is 180, which in the total population of the non-urban fringe. It is identical to the difference" between the computer-generated total and the actual count 3 . 3. INTERPRETATION Interpretations based on the results of the computation of the answers to the questions may vary greatly from one person to the next. Differences between MT and HL in an area may be interpreted as language loss; by others it may simply be used as an indicator of the number of bi-ethnic marriages, or as a measure of diglossia. If the percentage of mother-tongue speakers of a given language has declined in the area since the previous census, what can one infer? In a given area can one actually speak of losses and gains? Differences between mother-tongue and home-language aggregates have been used as indicators of language transfer. It has been argued that if in any given area the home-language percentage is smaller than the mother-tongue percentage, there has been transfer from one to the other language. If both languages show a gain from home-language to mother-tongue, then the language with the higher percentage gain has been indicated as the dominant one 4 . To what extent is the difference between the mother-tongue and the home-language percentages a true indicator of ethnic group allegiance? Does the fact that some ten thousand Montrealers of English mother-tongue have indicated their usual home-language to be neither French nor English prove that Anglo-Canadians assimilate to foreign language groups in Canada? 5 Before making inferences on the basis of difference in percentage between MT and HL in any area, one must study the implications of the figures based on each of these questions. Mother-Tongue (MT): "Language first learned and still understood". (Q 5: 1971 Census, total population). In interpreting this question the respondent is asked to adhere to the criterion of understanding. "In this question you must understand the language you report. If you do not now understand the first language you learned, report the next one that you learned and still understand. For infants, who have not learned to speak, report the language spoken most often at home". (Instruction Booklet,

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WILLIAM F. M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

op.cit. p. 7, emphasis theirs). Home-Language (HL): "What language do you most often speak at home? " (Q 17: 1971 Census, one-third sample). Identical answers to this question may cover a multitude of differences in language behaviour — ranging from complete unilingualism to a balanced bilingualism in home language usage. The answer is to be based on the respondent's estimate of frequency of use according to the instructions provided: "If you speak two or more languages at home, report the one which, in your opinion, you use most frequently. If you live alone, report the language you use most frequently in your daily routine". (Instruction Booklet, op.cit. p. 11). What are the implications of this important HL question and of the figures based on it? The HL will probably be one which everyone in the home at least understands. In bi-ethnic families composed of one or more unilinguals it will probably be that of the unilingual. HL is not necessarily an individual's main language or even the language he prefers, although some demographers who have used these figures seem to assume that these three concepts are one and the same. Nor is the HL necessarily the language of work. In all the bi-ethnic homes in an area — the result of marriages between people of different MTs — at least one of the partners must, in the nature of things, have reported a language other than his or her MT in answer to the question "language most often spoken at home". At least part of the MT-HL difference must be due to the number of bi-ethnic marriages in the area. Part of this MT-HL difference must therefore be attributed, not to choice, but to necessity. In many bi-ethnic homes there are really two home languages; but most census surveys simply do not admit this possibility. The obligation to designate one of the languages as "most often spoken at home" often obliges the bilingual family to list the language of the surrounding community — since friends and neighbours do contribute to language used in the home, especially in the case of families with children, — despite the fact that the stronger language and the language of ethnic allegiance may not be the language "most often spoken at home". Most c e n s u s surveys do not provide for home bilingualism. Consequently, HL figures, can easily lead one to assume that everyone in the country has a single home-language, since HL can only be A, Β or Ο (other), that is, either, but not and. In reality, most cases of MT-HL difference may be due to the existence of bilingual homes whose bilingualism may vary from one family to another. The difference does not in irself indicate a shift of group allegiance, as is often supposed, since bilingualism is, in the last analysis, a matter of degree. The type and degree of home bilingualism depends largely on the type of bi-ethnic marriage. What are these basic types? Either both partners are

G E O C O D I N G L A N G U A G E LOSS

75

monolingual in their respective MT; both partners are bilingual, or only one of the partners is bilingual in both languages A and B. In sum, the three possibilities are: /A & B/, /A & AB/, /AB & AB/. In the A & Β type, it seems likely that if one of the languages (A or B) is that of the surrounding community it may become the language most usual used in the home; or this may actually be a third language which is the MT of neither of the partners. In the A & AB type, one of the partners being bilingual may be obliged to use the language of the unilingual partner, thus making it the language most often spoken at home. But the degree with which this sort of accomodation is possible may well depend on the community in which the home is situated. In the AB & AB type, there may really be no dominant language but simply a difference in distribution of uses. There may also be the dominance of a receptive bilingualism in which AMT speaks A and BMT speaks B, both of them, however, comprehending languages A and B. In the results of the 1971 Canada Census there were, for example, more than a thousand cases across the nation where the husband or wife reported "English" as both mother-tongue and the only one of the official languages known and the spouse responded "French" to the same questions. Since home-language data were collected and recorded on an individual bases and not as a family variable, data on home bilingualism are not available for households, so that this home language behaviour is not revealed. In bi-ethnic families such as these homes what is the cause of the apparent shift in home-language from MT to another language? To imagine a plausible answer to such a question it is necessary to look at the age of the respondent. In those over 18 it may have been marriage to a person speaking another language, it may have been a move to a community where the dominant language is not the individual's mother-tongue, or it may have been a job in an environment where another language is the language of work. In the case of unmarried adults, it is the two latter determinants that have to be studied. For persons under 18 but over 6 the shift from MT to HL may indeed be due to schooling in another language, especially if that language is the only one used by schoolmates and friends. In sum, census and survey figures for such variables as home-language, mother-tongue, official language and even ethnic origin are best interpreted by taking into account the answers to each type of question within the context in which it was posed. 4. TREATMENT Statistical treatment of the results may stress territoriality or personality. In other words, the grouping and presentation of the results of language-related statistics may be area-oriented or population-oriented. Let us take a look at the implications of this difference as it affects the assessment of language transfer.

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76

4.1 Area Orientation The statistics on the answers to language-related questions may be presented in such a way as to show the number of people in any given area using a given language. Such a presentation means: " A t this place at this time so many people have made this statement about their language use". The place or area is accordingly categorized as being dominated by the presence of one or more languages. Most language statistics are of this type, and indeed they seem to be sufficient for most purposes. When one wishes to calculate the incidence of language loss or language transfer in one of the areas, however, comparisons are made between the percentage of persons claiming a given language at one time with the percentage of persons claiming the same language at an earlier period. This is often interpreted as a loss or a gain for that particular language loss as such. The difference may simply be an indicator of any one of a number of factors, including the mobility of the population. T o illustrate, let us take two areas where the percentage difference between two surveys (1960 and 1970) are identical; we shall call these hypothetical areas simply Area X and Area Y and the languages used in them languages A and B. Now let us examine Figure 1. The distribution of both languages in both areas is identical in 1960, A being equal to Β in both cases. It is also identical in 1970, both showing a 50% increase for Β and a corresponding decrease for A. But are both areas comparable? The point which the figure is designed to illustrate is that transfer of language in one area may be due to an actual shift in mother-tongue or in home-language, while in another area the "transfer" may actually be due to the fact that one is dealing with different people. Of course, between any two censuses, we are admittedly dealing to a certain extent with a different generation, since the prevailing death-rate and birth-rate will have their respective effects on the composition of the population in each area. One cannot, however, assume that all change in an area is due to the behaviour of one generation as opposed to the next. In language statistics this is often the interpretation given when language figures in the same area are compared over a period of time. One cannot do this with any degree of accuracy without first accounting for the incidence of mobility. 4.1.1

Mobility

When one realizes that in any year in North America about a fifth of the population will change residence, one wonders how it is possible to attribute changes in behavioral traits to a population in any given area on the basis of those of a population in the same area ten years earlier. At the current rate of mobility, the number of moves in North America over a ten year period is twice the number of people. It is true that the mobility figure may mean anything from the man moving next door to the family

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

77

emigrating to Australia. But even if the vast majority of the moves are over short distances they are bound to affect language transfer figures in the smaller areas. A look at Figure 2 will show what can happen in two adjacent farming communities (Areas X and Y) as regards the change in dominance in languages A and B. If one of the agricultural areas includes a town, this can attract people from the adjacent agricultural area. If the farms in this area (X) of language A can maintain only a certain population, as has always been the case in traditional French Canadian farms, for example, operated on the principle of promigeniture, it is not surprising that some of the sons and daughters of the farmers in X will take up residence in the town situated in Area Y, thus decreasing the population using language A in the former area. It is conceivable, however, that those from Area X who have moved to the town in Y may be able to maintain their language. That situations like this are frequent may be inferred from the actual statistics in the Canada Census. If one language group is largely rural and the other mostly urban, one might be able to predict the degree of mobility and the consequent language-area change, by taking into account the relation between the length of the move and the number of people moving (see Figure 3). 4.2 Person Orientation If comparison of areas over time gives no sure indication of language loss or language gain, how can such phenomena be measured? Language-related questions answered by the same person, may be used as a basis for such measures. If so many persons in a given area have indicated a transfer from language A to language Β this becomes a surer measure of language loss than does the fact that the number of persons in the same area using language A at one period of time is proportionately less that the number of persons using that language at a later period. The smaller the area, the greater the difference between both measures is likely to be. Person-oriented language statistics can be obtained by placing people in categories of language maintenance according to the way they have answered the various language-related questions, using one Q. as a base (e.g. ethnic origin) (See Section 1.2.1 above). This type of language statistics helps explain what is happening to a language in a given area, since it provides a basis for the analysis of trends in language behaviour. For example, in the figure on language loss (Figure 4), the 0-20 cohort declines to degree 4 (and probably indicates an increase beginning in degree 3 had data been available, where the dramatic increase becomes a manifestation of the gain in 21-40 cohorts in degree 2). Person-oriented language statistics also makes possible some sort of assessment of cultural viability. Of course the implications of the results must be interpreted on the basis of an analysis of the implications of the questions posed. The results of

78

W I L L I A M F. M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

language loss must provide for the fact that such a phenomenon is always a matter of degree which lends itself to categorization. 4.2.1

Ca tegoriza tio η What are some of the categories of language behaviour into which a population can be placed. This depends on the number and type of language-related questions. In the Canada Census there have been at least four such question, viz. mother-tongue, home-language, ethnic origin and o f f i c i a l l a n g u a g e . We have already seen the implications of the mother-tongue and the home-language questions (see above). Let us now take a look at what the ethnic origin and the official language questions involve. Ethnic Origin (EO): "To what ethnic or cultural group did you or your ancestor (on the male side) belong on first coming to this continent". (Q 15: 1971 Census, one-third sample). Weaknesses here are due to the fact that the origin is limited to the male ancestor and that ethnic origin is not directly related to language use. Nevertheless in interpreting this question the respondent is instructed to use language as a criterion: "Use as a guide if applicable in your case: 1. The language you spoke on first coming to this continent, if you were born outside Canada. 2. If born in Canada, the language spoken by your ancestor on the male side when he came here". (Instruction Booklet, 1971 Census of Canada, Ottawa: DBS 25.2.1, p. 11). Official Languages (OL): "Can you speak English, French, well enough to conduct a conversation? " (Q 18: 1971 Census, one-third sample). Although answers to this question are based on self-estimates of language competence, the respondent is instructed to mention only the language or languages in which he can converse freely on a variety of topics and to exclude any language taken exclusively as a school subject. "Do not report a language studied at school unless you can conduct a conversation in it. By this we mean being able to carry on a conversation of some length on various topics". (Instruction Booklet, op.cit. p. 11). Although none of these questions gives us the exact information we require, a combination of them could provide the answers, insofar as it a f f e c t s a population speaking one of the official languages as a mother-tongue. For example, if an individual reports that he learned French as a first language and still understands it (Q 5) and, in addition to that, he can still speak it (Q 18) and/or he actually uses it at home (Q 17), he can s a f e l y be c l a s s i f i e d as using "an official language spoken as a mother-tongue''. Statistical treatment of second-order census results is often used to arrive at certain implications and assumptions on the language behaviour of populations (for example, Stanley Lieberson's Language and Ethnic Relations in Canada, and most other studies of this type, including the

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

79

reports of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism). For our study, however, it would be most advisable to rely as much as possible on first-order data, that is, on figures directly related to answers to census questions. This is especially important in small, marginal areas where population replacements are likely to falsify figures on language trends. In the past, people have resorted to complex statistical manipulation of census aggregates — often with uncertain results — simply because cross-tabulations of individual answers were not available. This restriction, however, is no longer applicable. In areas where language trends are used as criteria, cross-tabulations, according to generation (Q 6: 1971 Census) of individual responses to the four language-related questions (Q 15, Q 5, Q 17, Q 18) may be used. First and second generation immigrants who may or may not have been assimilated can easily be identified. For the simple reason that their situations contain more variables, however, they must be divided into a greater number of categories according to whether they and their parents are native or foreign born (Q 11 - Q 13) and whether they are recent or well-established immigrants (Q 12). Second and third generation immigrants whose ethnic origin is neither English nor French can even be grouped, if necessary, into one of these categories, according to mother-tongue, and treated as parts of the native English or French official language groups. This does not admittedly answer all possible questions as to the probable causes of language loss in any given case. It is possible, however, if one uses the computer addresses of households to locate homes inhabited by people of different mother-tongue and to count those representing two or more l a n g u a g e s . In t h e case of bi-ethnic homes (two or more mother-tongues) each can then be re-classified by home language. 4.2.2

Con tex tualiza tion To be properly interpreted, person-oriented language statistics must be analyzed within a space-time continuum. Analysis of spacial variants include population distribution, interaction potential and context all expressible through geocoding. Geocoding is done through a geographically referenced data storage program designed for the retrieval and tabulation of census data characteristics for any specified area. In the past, a data user was largely confined to the standard hierarchy of statistical areas established by the Census Division; province, county (census division), municipality (census subdivision, census tract and/or enumeration area). Added to these geostatistical units a geocoding system permits the tabulation of information for "user-specified areas" such as minority-language communities. The census enumeration area (EA) outside specific urban centres, is the "building-block" of the geocoding system. In each of the EA geocoding

80

WILLIAM F. MACKEY A N D DONALD G. CARTWRIGHT

areas, a point known as the centroid, represents the approximate centre of gravity of the population for that area. Hence, a user is provided greater flexibility in the way in which user-oriented areas may be described. Such capabilities were linked to the computer-mapping program of Statistics Canada. The impact of the tabular information was thus enhanced through cartographic representation at a scale that satisfied the needs of the user rather than just the hierarchy of statistical units. The system has been described as follows: "Previously, nearly all of the maps published in conjunction with census data were reference maps. They showed the physical location of the boundaries of the statistical areas, and related features, but no socio-economic data of any kind were ordinarily shown on them. That is, the raw data were kept strictly separate from any geographical array of the spatial framework. Now, thematic maps are available to integrate the data with the geography of the relevant statistical areas, in order to give a generalized overview of the spatial structure of these data. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth, for example, a thousand numbers arranged in a table according to the alphabetic order of the statistical areas. There are three basic elements to any thematic map, whether it is made by conventional or automated techniques: the base map, the data and the specifications. The preparation of the computer base map takes the greatest amount of time because much of the work must be done by hand and semi-automatic machine. However, the base map may be readied before the release of the required data, and once the base is prepared it may be used any number of times with any data set at any scale, to produce a wide variety of thematic maps". 6 In sum, the program can be adapted to measure the degree of language loss or transfer. One can then study the relation between this feature and the geo-social conditions (e.g. degree of urbanization) affecting any given area (Table 1). As an example, let us compare two such areas in one of Canada's language zones inhabited by both French-speaking and English-speaking populations (see Figure 4). The area is located in Southern Ontario, the Western end (Windsor) is not far from the American city of Detroit; the Eastern end (Cornwall) is adjacent to French-speaking Quebec. We shall call these areas the Windsor-Tilbury District and the Cornwall-Hawkesbury District, the names given them by the Second Bilingual Districts Advisory Board 7 . 5. SAMPLE STUDIES 5.1 Windsor-Tilbury District A census metropolitan area ( C M A ) carries with it, by definition, the criteria of geographical and social relationships. The basis for the delimitation of a CMA is the extent of the main labour-market area of a

GEOCODING L A N G U A G E LOSS

81

continuous, built-up region that has a population of 100,000 or more. Hence a labour-market area, "... corresponds to a commuting field or a zone where a significant number of people are able to travel on a daily basis to work places in the main built-up area". (Dictionary of 1971 Census Terms, Catalogue 12-540, Statistics Canada, Ottawa, 1972, p. 47). Since the labour-market area is the fundamental concept, for the delimitation of a census metropolitan area, it should be apparent, that in countries like Canada, for example, rural language minorities in satellite areas become absorbed by the nearby city. Francophone communities situated along the south shore of Lake St. Clair, for instance, have experienced encroachment by people who work in or near the city of Windsor, near Detroit, but choose to live beyond the city-limits (see Figure 5). With two major highways and a railway line that traverse the northern portion of the Essex peninsula these communities are unable to avoid absorption into the orbit of the city of Windsor. Thus, the urban centre of Windsor and the satellite communities to the east comprise a part of the integrated labour market in which daily commutation is economically feasible for a large portion of the suburban residents. One consequence of this growth in the urban influence of Windsor is the dilution of the French-language population in Essex County (see Table 2 and Figures 6 and 7). Peer-group compositions change and the potential for bi-ethnic marriages increase. The computer map of Windsor-Tilbury illustrates the pattern of inundation while the language loss tabulations measure the impact of the phenomenon over time. Given the inertia of urbanization in Canada, the histogram of language loss in Windsor-Tilbury demonstrates the trend in language shift and is a harbinger of the developing sociolinguistic patterns of the region. 5.2 Corn wall-Ha wkesbury District The population of French ethnic origin in Eastern Ontario is larger by approximately fourteen thousand than the same cultural group in western Ontario (see Figure 8). However, the difference in language usage and retention is of greater magnitude and cannot be attributed to the disparity in population size alone (see Table 3). Language maintenance in the Cornwall-Hawkesbury District reflects the spatial features of minimal distance from the core area of French Canada, the potential for interaction with kin and kind within this core, and the exposure to French-language media-radio, television, newspapers and magazines. Major transportation routes pass through this region as well, but their influence by the mid-seventies, had not fostered the movement of unilingual English h o u s e h o l d s or p e o p l e of " o t h e r ethnic origins" into French-dominant communities. Improved communications had apparently reinforced cultural linkages with Quebec, reduced the potential for bi-ethnic

82

W I L L I A M F. M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

marriages, and sustained some elements or the cultural heritage. These features of location and interaction are manifest in the proportion of the French ethnic population which constitutes degrees 1 and 2 in the tabulation of language loss for Cornwall-Hawkesbury (see Figures 9 and 10). In Windsor-Tilbury, over seventy percent of this population were contained in degrees 2 and 4 while in Cornwall-Hawkesbury only seventeen percent had been absorbed into these assimilative categories (compare Figures 6 and 9). On the margin of the Eastern Ontario District are three urban centres (Ottawa, Montreal and Cornwall) that have a much higher proportion of Francophones to total population than have the two major urban centres in Western Ontario (Windsor and Chatham). Within the latter, the potential for French-language usage in commercial, governmental and institutional services is slight, compared to what it is in the former three centres that are in or near the Cornwall-Hawkesbury District. For the Francophones of Essex and Windsor, this is another feature that propels the minority population into degrees 2 and 4. The demographic thrust of the large census metropolitan areas, had not yet penetrated Cornwall-Hawkesbury, as it had in the Windsor-Tilbury district. Conclusion We have chosen these examples of our work to illustrate the possibility of area-based and person-oriented studies of language maintenance. Any area can thus be treated to obtain a fairly good approximation of the real picture as it concerns the language behaviour of populations within the areas. The geocoding of the language shifts in different sectors of a population living in areas of language contact may hopefully contribute to the development of methods for studying the long-term effects of various geolinguistic forces on the language behaviour of bilingual populations. Since there are few entirely monolingual areas in the world, the possibilities for applying this technique of analysis might justify our efforts in perfecting it.

83

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

TABLE 1 Degrees of Language Loss by Age-Groups 1.1 French Q.15

Q.5

Q.17

Q.18 Degree

Ages: under 20

Q.6 21-40

41-60

over 60

% of total populati

EO

MT

HL

OL

F

F

F

F

0

%

%

%

%

%

F

F

F

Β

1

%

%

%

%

%

F

F

Ε

Β

2

%

%

%

%

%

F

F

Ε

Ε

3

%

%

%

%

%

F

Ε

Ε

Ε

4

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% total population

1.2 English Ε

Ε

Ε

Ε

0

9&

%

%

%

%

Ε

Ε

Ε

Β

1

&

%

%

%

%

Ε

Ε

F

Β

2

&

%

%

%

%

Ε

Ε

F

F

3

9&

%

%

%

%

Ε

F

F

F

4

9&

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% total population

SIGLA F Ε Β Q

(French) (English) (French and English) (Census Question No.)

Q.15 Q.S Q.17 Q.18

EO (Ethnic Origin) MT (Mother Tongue) HL (Home Language) OL (Official Languages)

84

WILLIAM F. M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

85

86

WILLIAM F . M A C K E Y AND DONALD G. CARTWRIGHT

FIGURE 1 Model of Language Distribution Changes in Two Areas 1960 Area X A A A Β Β Β

A A A Β Β Β

6A + 6B

r Λ c\ A A A Β Β Β

BB Β Β Β Β Β

% pop. replacement

1961-1969 % bilingualization

Area Y Α Α Α Β Β Β

1961-1969 % Mobility in Area

Α Α Α Β Β Β

6Α + 6Β

Α Α Α Β Β Β

AB AB AB Β Β Β

50% HL transfer

Χ = Υ

1970 Area X Α Α Α Β Β Β

Β Β Β Β Β Β

3A + 9B

Area Y Α Α Α Β Β Β

Β Β Β Β Β Β

Υ = 3A + 9B

X- Y

Χ (6A -

3A) — pop. displacement

Υ (6A -

3A) = HL transfer

GEOCODING L A N G U A G E LOSS

FIGURE 2 Model of Population Movement from One Language Area

AREA X

AREA Y

A

A

A

A

A

Β

A

A

A

A

A

Β

A

A

A

A

A

Β

Β 1

tΒ

Β

Β

Β

Β

Β

Β

Β

Β

Β

PII

Town

FIGURE 3 Relation Between Size of Area and of Population Mobility

Size of area in EAs (or Census tracts)

90

WILLIAM F. MACKEY A N D DONALD G. CARTWRIGHT

FIGURE 6 Frequency of Language-Loss in Windsor-Tilbury "District," Ontario, 1971

Degree Sourca:

Statistics

of Language Canada,

special

Loss tabulation.

91

G E O C O D I N G L A N G U A G E LOSS

FIGURE 7 Composition of Language-Loss Degrees, English and French, by Age Cohorts, Windsor-Tilbury "District," 1971

English

French

Degree of Language

* Totti

population

too small

Source:

Statistics

for meaningful Canada,

Lota

competition

apaclal

by ago

tabulation.

cohorta.

92

WILLIAM F. M A C K E Y AND DONALD G. CARTWRIGHT

a« ο ο ο

Ο

2υ 13

β c & w fc >» «»Η Ό Ο β Ο Χ!

S

CA

S

σ> σ> CVI

S« σ> σ>

5« Ο Ο

93

GEOCODING L A N G U A G E LOSS

FIGURE 9 Frequency of Language-Loss in Cornwall-Hawkesbury "District," Ontario, 1971 English

French 40—ι

30Age

Cohorts

60+

41-60

•5 21-40

ibfetefefe

llll

0-20

10-

Degree Source: Statistics

of Language

Losa

Canada, special

tabulation.

94

WILLIAM F. MACKEY A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

FIGURE 10 Composition of Language-Loss Degrees, English and French, by Age Cohorts, Cornwall-Hawkesbury "District," 1971

French

English

Degree of Language Losa * Totti

population

too email

Source:

Statistica

for meaningful Canada,

composition

apacial

by ago

tabulation.

cohorts.

GEOCODING LANGUAGE LOSS

95

NOTES 1

J o h n Kralt, Languages in Canada. Ottawa: Statistics Canada Monograph (in press). 2 1.P. Fellegi, Response Variance and its Estimation, Journal of the American Statistical Association 59 (1964) 1016-1041. 'Richard C. Joy, Les groupes linguistiques et le recensement de 1971, Le Devoir, 19 July 1973, and personal communication: "Some Comments on a Method Proposed by Charles Castonguay", Ottawa, September 1974. 4 Charles Castonguay, Dimension des transferts linguistiques entre groupes anglophones, francophones et autres d'apres le recensement canadien de 1971. Ottawa: Departement de mathematique de l'Universite d'Ottawa 1971. Also: Opportunities for the Study of Linguistic Transfer in the 1971 Census-Ottawa: University of Ottawa, Department of Mathematics, August 1974. 6 Richard C. Joy, Language Trends Shown by Census Figures, Paper prepared for the Language and Community Conference, Concordia University, Montreal, 5 April 1975. 6 R.S. Page, Census Thematic Maps Using Computers. Paper prepared for the Provincial Census Data Workshop, Ottawa, 17-22 October 1971: "The type of map most suitable for use with census data is called a cloropleth map. On such a map, each statistical area is coloured in with one of a series of graded tints, each of the tints being associated with a different quantitative class interval. For example, on a population density map a pale grey shade may be associated with densities of from 5 to 15 persons per square mile, and so on. The base for a choropleth map must delineate the boundaries of each required statistical area. For a computer map, the boundaries of the statistical areas must be generalized into straight-line segments. The vertices of these segments, called nodes, are the heart of a computer mapping system. The boundaries of a statistical area are the delineated by 4 to 99 nodes arranged in clockwise sequence, with the first node repeated at the end, and the location of each node recorded in x-y co-ordinates on a punch card. The computer base map is thus simply a deck of punch cards outlining a group of related statistical areas" (R.S. Page, op. cit.). 7

(Paul Fox et al), Report of the Second Bilingual Districts Advisory Board, Ottawa: Information Canada 1975. See also: D.G. Cartwright, Language Zones in Canada. (Reference Supplement to the Report of the Second Bilingual Districts Advosory Board) Ottawa: Secretary of State 1976.

96

W I L L I A M F . M A C K E Y A N D D O N A L D G. C A R T W R I G H T

Bibliography Lieberson, Stanley. 1969. How can we describe and measure the incidence and distribution of bilingualism? in L.G. Kelly, (ed.). The Description and Measurement of Bilingualism. Toronto: Toronto University Press 1969, p. 287-295. See also the Commentary by Heinz Kloss, p. 296-316. Mackey, William F. 1974. Three Concepts for Geolinguistics. (CIRB Publication B-42). Quebec: International Center for Research on Bilingualism 1974. See also: Puissance, attraction et pression des langues en contact: modeles et indices in Les etats plurilingues: problemes et solutions. (CIRB Publication A-9) presentee par Jean-Guy Savard et Richard Vigneault. Quebec: Presses de l'Universite Laval 1975.

III

Models

MODELS OF COMPETENCE IN BILINGUAL INTERACTION Els Oksaar

The object of this paper is to contribute to the study of linguistic norms and interactional competence of bilinguals and to the theoretical and methodological discussion in the field of languages in contact. It attempts to explore these phenomena with emphasis on data drawn from recordings among Estonians in Sweden and Canada in the years 1970 and 1971. These data are part of the material in my larger sociolinguistic research programme among Estonians in Australia, USA, Canada and Sweden (Oksaar 1972b) in the field of contact-linguistics and theory of interferences (Oksaar 1972c). 1 Since the beginning of the sixties there has been an increasing sociolinguistic interest in "an examination of the interaction of language structure and social structure and of the inter-implications of speech behavior and social behavior" (Grimshaw 1971: 93). In connection with this there has been a keen interest in the complex problems of language contact, bi- and multilingualism, language conflict, language loyalty and other related problems. Studies by Haugen, Weinreich, Mackey, Gumperz, Labov, Fishman and others have opened new vistas for treating these topics. However, in the field of contact linguistics we still have to meet with considerable difficulties: there is not yet an overall linguistic theory that could offer a solid basis for treating problems arising out of languages in contact, though various attempts have been made. 2 One of the difficulties is further, that we know very little yet about the contact-phenomena among subcodes such as sociolects, dialects, registers and styles in one language and the structure, motivation and function of interferences as a result of these contacts. When dealing with the contact of two languages the problem gets still more complicated as the matrix of possible contact areas is much bigger then. Modern socio- and psycholinguistics have given- rise to the point of view that there is not such a fundamental difference between the behaviour of an unilingual and a bilingual individual as has commonly been assumed,

100

ELS OKSAAR

because the unilingual, too, is to a certain extent multilingual within the area of his mother tongue, where he has the possibilities of choosing and mixing various subcodes. Hence, contact phenomena have often been treated on the basis of a single theoretical model. 3 Pragmatically, however, the possibility and frequency of occurrence of contact phenomena such as code switching with or without interferences in the frame of one language is greatly different from that of two languages. Qualitative methods must be combines with quantitative ones if research in the competence of bilinguals shall cast light on how natural languages actually function (cf. Oksaar 1972c). A great deal of linguistic theory, influenced by Chomsky and his followers, has been dwelling in the vacuum of a homogeneous society, focusing on the linguistic competence of an ideal speaker-listener, often in a quite esoteric way. The past fifteen years have shown that these approaches have not enlarged our knowledge of how natural languages function in society, also because of the neglect of variation in performance. One could state that these approaches have in some ways hindered the effective analysis of natural languages, as the theoretical concepts of generative transformational grammar have failed to account for vital parts of them. Natural languages are used by real speaker-listeners in real societies — and these are not homogeneous. Therefore also variations have to be included in the scientific contemplation of language4, especially when dealing with questions of competence. Studies like Fischer (1958), analysing the social influence in the choice of a linguistic variant, have made evident that linguistic units need not be treated from the categorical point of view in all-or-nothing rules. Sociolinguistic research in the sixties has demonstrated that language cannot be separated from the social context of language users — in which certain socio-cultural rules of behaviour have also to be taken into consideration — and therefore a study of competence has also to consider the conditions and effects of language use. Since the days of Ferdinand de Saussure the langue-parole dichotomy has remained an antithesis in the conceptual reality of linguistics, activated through Chomsky's competence-performance. Though voices for a theory of parole have been heard not only recently (Skaliika 1948), there is no theory of parole yet. Realizing the consequences of the fact that competence can only be reached through studying performance and as this has to be carried out in social behaviour, a broader view must be connected with both concepts than has been done by homogeneous linguistic theory. 5 Paying attention to the fact that the relations between them are dynamic, it is time that linguists should consider that there is also a need of a unified theory of competence and performance. Bilingual behaviour analysis may offer new insights into this area. The perspective from which I shall present the following analyses thus

MODELS O F COMPETENCE

101

starts from the claim that linguistic theory has to deal with the real speaker-listener in a real, that is heterogeneous speech community, if linguistics is to be a science of natural languages and if we want to analyze the vast field of problems arising from the contact of languages and from sociological variation. This seems to me a more rational way than that of the school of Chomsky. It provides a better basis for idealizations and generalizations, because it has to take into consideration psycholinguistic facts as well as sociological variation. A bilingual lives by definition "in a non-homogeneous speech-community" as Einar Haugen has put it (1970: 3) and is not an ideal speaker-listener. Also Labov (1970), Hymes (1971), Fishman (1968), Gumperz (1969) and others have emphasized in various investigations that language issues cannot be dealt with in a vacuum and on the assumption that monolingualism of persons and groups is the normal case, cf. also Oksaar (1972a, 1972b and 1972d). We have to find new approaches. As natural language is a system of communicative and cognitive abilities to be used for social interaction, an analysis of speech behaviour can only be effective when socio- and psycholinguistic viewpoints are integrated. When analyzing language using abilities we have to correlate them among other things with the functions of language. Language is a means of communication and expression. But it is at the same time a means of identification and a factor of identity. Therefore we need more studies in speech behaviour of various groups, concerning bilinguals as well as monolinguals. These studies must include observations of social conditions, such as partner, topic, situation, in which the interaction takes place (cf. Hymes 1967, Oksaar 1972b). What we need is: more case studies also analyzing group behaviour and paying more attention to the situation and the correlations between the linguistic and social dimensions of code selection and interference. The variables of performance have to be analyzed with respect to their external and internal conditions including the social identity of the speaker in his relation to the hearer. These components constitute important factors for determining the ability which I should like to call interactional competence. If competence is "the most general term for the speaking and hearing capabilities of a person"®, a differentiation can help to clarify the complex mechanism of this ability, so much the more as the commonly recognized formulation of competence and performance dichotomy cannot come to grips with the necessary sociocultural requirements for language using ability.7 As a matter of principle the concept of competence has to be differentiated also in order to account for various kinds of communicative capabilities, as oral communication in a face to face interaction does not only comprise speaking and hearing capabilities but also paralinguistic and visual ones. Communicative abilities comprise verbal and non-verbal (kinesic features,

102

ELS OKSAAR

mimicry, etc.) actions, but also non-actional components such as silence, which may or may not be replaced by verbal and/or non-verbal components. I use the term interactional competence as the bilingual's ability to perform and to interpret verbal actions which are efficiently designed to achieve the goal of imparting or exchange of information according to the sociocultural and psychological rules of the community in all speech situations. For bilinguals the traditional terms grammaticality and acceptability come into another light when judged against their real use of language in concrete situations. As we shall see, these cannot be used on the basis of Li and L

Intell. Rating (%)

Μ V ο β υ § Ο υ 0 •a «Α 0 •Μ 0 .ο· Ο'

Ml, Fl; 50-60 years Ml, F2; 6-8 years

Individual factors: sex, age group, etc.

Λ0 Sz

InteU. Rank

320 E.H. FLINT

to

m

to

oo

9)

Island Ufe (home activities) Island life and environment

Ml, F5; 30-50 years M2; 30-50 years

00 αά m

to Λ

fH tH

Island social life

Fishing and food Island social life; reminiscences of early life and history Farming, rural life

Ml, Fl; one 30-50 years, one 50+ Ml, Fl; 50+ highly emotive speech; extroverted Ml, Fl; 50+; emotive speech

CO 00 to Μ rH

43.6

34.1

32.5

Μ rH

F2; one 30-50 years, one 50+

rH

50.4

I

ο

CO CO rH

Farming, home activities, cookery

35.3 64.7

85.9

o to

CO

CO

•o
n

to

t-

rH

00

rH

CO

rH

rH

23.4

rH

10.5

•Ί; αϊ 89.5

in

76.6

Ο ιΩ

90.6

33.1

30.1 69.9

66.9

39.1

60.6

lO

45.6

85.6

CO

>o CO

54.4

90.5 48.1

Ο m

51.9

15.4 27.3

·

72.3

σ>

41.2

to

F3; two 30-50 years, one 50+

40.8

59.2 14.1

93.6

Non-Eng.

Sentences Non-Eng. Eng.

Words

rH

44.1

Eng.

φ

|Q r-

54.3

Simple Complex

Utterances

% of total occurrences

Linguistic features

Λ

55.9

Syllables per second Rate of utterance

to

•a Μ

55.5

The tourist trade

2M; 30-50 years

InteU. Rating (%)

Stylistic factors: topic and content

in

01

Individual factors: sex age group, etc.

Dial. No.

ο

InteU Rank

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321

CO tc4

rH

322

E.H. FLINT

The results of this test show that degree of intelligibility correlates well with topic and content of conversation and with the proportion of English to non-English sentences; fairly well with rate of utterance; but poorly with percentage of English vocabulary cognates and relative complexity of utterances. The two least intelligible dialogues have percentages of 90.6 and 89.5 of English vocabulary cognates respectively. None of the seven less intelligible dialogues (ranks 11-17) has a percentage of English vocabulary cognates below 84.6. On the other hand, none of these has a percentage of English-type sentences above 69.9. None of the ten more intelligible dialogues (ranks 1-10) has a percentage of English-type sentences below 69.9, except Dialogue No. 11 (rank 2), where the percentage of 67.2 is balanced by a very slow rate of utterance of 1.8 syllables per second and a percentage of English vocabulary cognates of 95.5. The dialogues with the highest intelligibility ratings are all on topics relating to industries and social activities which Norfolk Islanders share with the outside world. When conversing with non-Islanders on these topics, they would use the Η form. One of the speakers of Dialogue No. 13, whose conversation concerned his work in the post-office, said that he found it hard to speak Norfolk on that subject, "he did not know why." The reason is obvious to the sociolinguist. The Η form, not the L form, is appropriated to the domain of the post-office. The informant's conscious effort to speak the L form ran against his internalized speech habits which inclined him to use the Η form for conversation about his official work. It is noteworthy that only in the utterances of this speaker was there some slight evidence of code-switching, with substitutions of L form for Η form words. That percentage of vocabulary cognates alone is not a satisfactory indication of degree of intelligibility is independently corroborated in the study of Wurm and Laycock (1961: 129). Probably no single criterion can be safely adopted for determining degree of intelligibility, since this depends on a number of sociolinguistic and linguistic factors in complex interaction. The results of the above intelligibility test provide sufficient syntactic and lexical evidence to show that the Norfolk L form is an English-based contact vernacular. None of the dialogues has a percentage of English-type sentences less than 54 (Dialogue No. 3), and most, including the two least intelligible dialogues, are well above this. The intelligibility rating of the highest-ranking L form dialogue (Dialogue No. 9, 79.7%) is close enough to the 100% intelligibility of the Norfolk Η form to suggest that the Norfolk Η and L repertoires are continuous. Therefore Norfolk Island English as a whole may be described as a language, with socially conditioned H-L diglossic variation, not two separate languages. The Η form is not a superposed variety: it has co-existed with the L form from the origin of the speech community. The L form may be described as a contact social dialect, in the sense that it has phonological,

SOCIETAL DIGLOSSIA

323

grammatical, and lexical features which are different from those of the Η form and which are due to the contact language situation in which it originated. Within the L form is a continuum of functionally differentiated varieties, in which selection from the repertoire is conditioned mainly by a combination of stylistic and individual factors. The L form of Norfolk Island is changing, as all linguistic systems do with time. Changes in the environmental material culture and in social customs mean that some words will drop out of use. But words alone do not make a language; and there is evidence that the L form, far from dying out, is reproducing itself through being acquired by non-Islander young children. The stability of the diglossic situation on Norfolk Island is to be explained by the appropriation of the L form to intragroup communication in the home domain and of the Η form to intergroup communication with non-Islanders. This also explains why increasing social contact with the outside world has affected the L form little. As long as Norfolk Islanders retain their sense of cultural identity as a distinct and separate community, along with their ambivalent pride in their British heritage, so long is their speech likely to be characterized by diglossia.

324

E.H. F L I N T

Ackno wledgements In the preparation of this article valuable assistance was received from many sources. It is desired especially to acknowledge the help of Professor H.E. Maude, for references in historical documents relating to the development of the language on Pitcairn Island; of Dr. John D. Cushing ( M a s s a c h u s e t t s Historical Society), Dr. James Lawton, Curator of Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, and Dr. Ann L. Wadsworth, Library of the Boston Athenaeum, for information relating to Samuel Topliff, and to the personalities and manuscripts mentioned in his letter in the New-England Galaxy; of Mr. Robert R. Newell (Whale House Gallery, Norwalk, Connecticut) for information relating to the log of the Sultan and its contents; and of Sir George Samuel Knatchebull Young, Mr. R.C. Mackworth-Young (Librarian, Windsor Castle), and Mr. O.A.N. Young (Mittagong, New South Wales) for helpful information relating to family history.

SOCIETAL DIGLOSSIA

325

NOTES 1

Topliff says that he obtained a loan of the private journal of "Mr. George Newell, First Officer" of the Sultan, giving an account of the voyage in 1817 during which this vessel called at Pitcairn Island. (This was the same voyage on which the Sultan took 'Jenny' back from Pitcairn Island to Tahiti). After reproducing the account in this journal of the visit to Pitcairn Island, Topliff says that he learnt from "Mr. Downs, Second Officier" of the Sultan, that John Adams had given to Captain Caleb Reynolds, master of the ship, two manuscript books giving personal statements concerning himself, and that Reynolds had given one of these to "Mr. Greenwood," of the New England Museum. Topliff obtained a loan of this from Greenwood and reproduced from it, in his letter in the New-England Galaxy, the statements made by Adams concerning Quintal and himself. The historical identity of "Mr. George Newell" and "Mr. Greenwood" is well established. Mr. Robert R. Newell (Norwalk, Connecticut) holds a copy of the log of the Sultan (kept by Mr. George Newell, its First Officer), begun in February 1818, covering the part of the voyage subsequent to that which included the visit to Pitcairn. The log mentions a "Mr. Downes" as a member of the crew. The First Officer of the Sultan is the same George Newell who later, as Captain of the bark Sea Breeze, made a voyage round the world in 1850 (R.R. Newell, 1961). The New England Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts (owned by Mr. Ethan A. Greenwood, 1779-1856) was damaged by fire in 1832 (Watkins, 1917: 127-128). Its collection passed, on the closure of the Museum in 1840, to Moses Kimball, and then to the Lowell Museum, which ^ in the third of three fires, was finally destroyed in 1855 (Cowley, 1856: 116, 118). It is thus most unlikely that the Adams manuscript has survived. 2 These include one tradition of Scottish origin, two of Irish origin, and even one of American origin. The family of Robert Moffat (1795-1883), a Scottish missionary who was born in East Lothian and worked in Africa, believe that he was related to Alexander Smith of the Bounty. A copy of a letter (6 February 1936) interleaved in a Mitchell Library copy of Shapiro's Heritage of the Bounty, written by Mrs. J.F. McGowan, Pittsburgh, U.S.A., to the author, claims that Alexander Smith was born in County Armagh, Ireland. Mrs. McGowan, who claimed that her grandmother was a daughter of Smith, said that he deserted his family soon after the birth of his daughter, went to Glasgow, and was never seen by them again. They learnt

326

E.H. FLINT

afterwards that he had sailed on the Bounty. Mrs. McGowan suggests that he changed his name to Adams after Folger's visit to prevent his family hearing what had happened to him. Mrs. McGowan admits that these statements have no documentary support, and Professor Shapiro himself did not rate them highly as historical evidence (Letter of 19 April 1960). Bolton (1941: 297-300), after referring sceptically to a tradition of American origin, quotes a view that the mutineer was the son of James Adams of Enagh, Count Derry, that he was born in 1767, and that he went to England and took the name of his uncle Alexander Smith. The supporting evidence for this view appears weak. Finally, Bolton quotes Topliff and the Bounty Muster, but does not offer any documentary corroboration of Topliff's statements, though he appears to accept them as genuine. 3 The beginning of Adams's statement quoted by Topliff, "Alexander Smith Elias Adams," would tend to suggest that Smith was the original name. This would agree with Delano's opinion that the mutineer assumed the name Adams after Folger's visit to Pitcaim in 1808. However, if Adams had indeed entered the Bounty under the false name of Smith, he would probably have been reluctant to admit this in writing, especially as he had since been involved in a mutiny. 4 Sir George Young, with Sir Joseph Banks and others, took up actively in 1784 the proposal of Jean Maria Matra for the colony of New South Wales, and wrote a paper containing a plan for this which became, together with that of Matra, the basis for the official scheme on which the expedition of Governor Arthur Phillip was started. Strangely enough, Sir George Young also applied to the Colonial Office for the grant of Norfolk Island, but it had just been taken over by Lieutenant King to serve as a penal settlement (Young, 1927: 28-31). 5 Bligh does not say that Young was a half West Indian, though, if this had been so, he might have been expected to make the most of it, because of his dislike for Young for his part in the mutiny. Moreover, it is most unlikely that the Bounty crew would have accepted a half West Indian as midshipman. The mutineers called even the Tahitians 'blacks,' and their treatment of the Tahitian men as slaves was one of the main causes of the conflict which developed on Pitcairn Island (Maude, 1964: 53, 64). The reliability of Brodie's statement is not enhanced by the one with which he follows it: he attributes the method of distilling alcohol from the 'Te-Root' to Young, whereas reliable early sources attribute this to McCoy. 6 Rev. S.C. Damon, editor of The Friend, a religious periodical published in Honolulu, states that the articles are based upon a manuscript left behind by Buffett on a visit to Honolulu in 1845-1846 and upon conversations which he had with Buffett himself. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the information contained in these articles. 7 None of the Musters of the ships on which Nobbs claims that he

SOCIETAL· D I G L O S S I A

327

served (Roebuck, Chanticleer, Snipe, Indefatigable, Hero) shows any entry in the name of Nobbs (or Rawdon, or Hastings, or Ffrench) at the times which he states. The will of the Marquis of Hastings was never registered and the Administration granted in 1839 mentions only the five legitimate children of the Marquis. During the Irish civil troubles many records were burnt; and vital personal documents relating to Nobbs's parentage are said to have been destroyed by water soakage during the migration to Norfolk Island (McComish Papers, Extract from a letter of B. Branckner). Documentation of Nobbs's Chilean naval career is lacking. Secondary sources here are even misleading. Goddard (1940: 284n) professes to quote "Lady Callcotte," Journal of a residence in Chili in 1822, concerning Nobbs's career in South America. The book of Maria Graham (later Lady Callcott) was published in 1824, but a search of the one English and two Spanish editions reveals no mention of Nobbs. Nobbs himself does not make any extravagant claims to accuracy in detail in the account of his career: he professes to give a "superficial, but as far as memory serves, correct account" of his career between 1812 and 1828. Evidence to corroborate Nobbs's statements may yet be found, but if it is not, the sociolinguist will not be surprised. Nobbs was born at a time when, as observed above, the discourse types of letter, journal, and autobiography were still sometimes used for the literature of entertainment as well as for factual record. Moreover, in the later period of British colonialism, a well-known pattern of social behaviour for immigrants from England to the colonies was to seek to win social prestige in their new community by claiming even a distant relationship to the British aristocracy: this habit persisted in Australia even as late as 1939. Nobbs's statements about his aristocratic origin may not have been unconnected with a power struggle on Pitcairn Island. The Mitchell Library tentatively dates the first statement of Nobbs concerning his parentage at 1837. This was soon after Nobbs returned to Pitcairn after having been ousted as head of the community by a dictatorial interloper named Hill. Hill claimed to be a near relative of the Duke of Bedford and a representative of the British Government. Unfortunately for Hill, the captain of a ship which called at Pitcairn Island in 1837 was a son of the Duke of Bedford. The discovery that Hill's claims were false led to his removal from the Island (Maude, 1964: Ί0-Ί2).

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Bibliography [Adams, John]. Narrative of the Mutiny of the Bounty Given to Captain F.W. Beechey at Pitcairn's Island on 5th December 1825. ML (Mitchell Library, Sydney) MS A l 8 0 4 . Barrow, Sir John. 1831. The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. 'Bounty.' London: Murray. Beechey, Captain F.W., R.N. 1831. Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Straits. London: Colburn and Bentley. Belcher, Lady D. 1870. The Mutineers of the 'Bounty' and their Descendants on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands. London: Murray. Bender, M.L., Cooper, R.L., and Ferguson, C.A. 1972. "Language in Ethiopia." Language in Society. 1: 215-233. Bligh, Lieutenant W. 1787-1789. "Log of the Proceedings of His Majesty's Armed Vessel Bounty " PRO (Public Record Office, London), Adm. 55/151, Supplementary, Series 2. Bligh, Captain W. 1794. "Description of the Pirates Remaining on Board His Majesty's Armed Vessel Bounty on 28th April 1789." List of Proofs, No. 5. In An Answer to certain Assertions Contained in the Appendix to a Pamphlet Entitled "Minutes of the Proceedings on the Court Martial Held at Portsmouth, August 12th, 1792...". London: G. Nicol. Reprinted Melbourne: Georgian House, 1952. Cf. PRO Adm. 1/1506/9: "The Original Despatches of Lt. William Bligh,"... 9 January 1788-29 November 1790. Bolton, C.K. 1941. "John Adams of Pitcairn's Island." The American Neptune. 1.3: 297-300. Brodie, W. 1851. Pitcairn's Island and the Islanders in 1850. London: Whittaker. [Buffett, John]. 1845-1846. "A Narrative of 20 Years' Residence on Pitcairn's Island." The Friend (Honolulu). 4: 2-3, 20-21, 24-28, 34-35, 50-51, 66-68. Buffett, John. 24 August 1868. "Letter to G.H. Nobbs." Nobbs Papers: 1829-1885. ML MS A2881' 9 : 413-416. Christian, Edward. 1795. A Short Reply to Captain William Bligh's Answer. London: Deighton. Reprinted Melbourne: Georgian House, 1952. Cowley, C. 1856. A Hand Book of Business in Lowell with a History of the City. Lowell: Green. De Camp, D. 1961. "Social and Geographical Factors in Jamaican Dialects." Proceedings of the Conference on Creole Language Studies, p. 61-84. Creole Language Studies 2. London: Macmillan.

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. 1971. "The Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages." In Hymes, D. ed. Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, p. 13-39. Cambridge: C.U.P. Delano, Amasa. 1817. Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Boston: House. Reprinted 1970. N.Y.: Praeger Scholarly Reprints. Ed. Grattan, C.H. Department of External Territories. 1972. Annual Report on the Territory of Norfolk Island, 1/7/70 — 30/6/71. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Dictionary of American Biography. 1936. N.Y.: Scribner's. Ferguson, C.A. 1959. "Diglossia." Word. 15: 325-340. Firth, J.R. 1935. "The Technique of Semantics." Transactions of the Philological Society, 36-72. Fishman, J.Α., Cooper, R.L. and Ma, R. 1971. Bilingualism in the Barrio. Indiana University Language Science Monographs No. 7. The Hague: Mouton. Fishman, J.A. 1972. "The Historical Dimension in the Sociology of Language." Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics (MSLL). 25: 145-155. Flint, E.H. 1968. "Aboriginal English." English in Australia. 6: 3-21. . 1970. "A Comparison of Spoken and Written English: towards an Integrated Method of Linguistic Description." In Ramson, W.S. ed. English Transported. Canberra: Australian National University, p. 161-187. . 1974. "Outline of an Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description." In Heilmann, L., ed. Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Linguists, Aug. 28 — Sept. 2, 1972. Vol. 2, p. 799-803. Bologna: Societä Editrice il Mulino. [Folger, Captain M.]. 1808. "Extract by Lieutenant Fitzmaurice from the Log Book of Captain Folger of the American Ship Topaz of Boston." PRO: Adm. 1/19, Q a 110. Folger, Captain Μ. 1 March 1813. "Letter to the Lords of the Admiralty." In Delano, Amasa, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, p. 126-127. Cf. The Calcutta Journal. 13 July 1819. 4.133: 163-164. Goddard, R.H. 1940. "Captain Thomas Raine of the Surry." Royal Australian Historical Society: Journal and Proceedings. 26.4: 277-317. Graham, Maria. [Later Lady Callcott]. 1824. Journal of a Residence in Chili during the Year 1822 and a Voyage from Chili to Brazil in 1823. London: Murray. Gumperz, J.J. 1966. "On the Ethnology of Linguistic Change." In Bright, W. ed. Socio linguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964, p. 27-49. The Hague: Mouton. Cf. Gumperz, J.J.

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1 9 6 4 , " T h e Ethnography of Communication." American Anthropologist. 66.6, part 2: 137-153. . 1970. Verbal Strategies in Multilingual Communication. Georgetown University MSLL. 23: 129-147. . 1 9 7 2 a . " T h e Communicative Competence of Bilinguals: Some Hypotheses and Suggestions for Research." Language in Society, 1: 143-154. .

1972b. "Introduction to Gumperz and Hymes," Directions in Sociolinguistics, p. 1-31. Gumperz, J.J., and Hymes, D. eds. 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication. N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Halliday, M.A.K. 1961. "Categories of the Theory of Grammar." Word. 17: 241-292. . 1964. Syntax and the Consumer. MSLL. 17: 11-24. . 1967. Intonation and Grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton. Henderson, Captain J. 1819. The Government Gazette. Calcutta. 6 May 1819. 206, Supplement: 4. India Office Library, Foreign Office, London. Hoare, Merval. 1969. Norfolk Island: an Outline of its History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hymes, D. ed. 1964. Language in Culture and Society. N.Y.: Harper and Row. . 1972a. "Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life." In Gumperz, J.J., and Hymes, D. eds. Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication, p. 35-71. . 1972b. The Scope of Sociolinguistics. MSLL: 25: 313-333. Jakobson, R. 1960. "Closing Statement." In Sebeok, T.A. ed. Style in Language, p. 350-377. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Labov, W. 1964. "Stages in the Acquisition of Standard English." In Shuy, R.W. ed., Social Dialects and Language Learning, p. 77-104. . 1971. "The Study of Language in its Social Context." In Fishman, J.A. ed. Advances in the Sociology of Language I, p. 152-216. The Hague: Mouton. . 1972a. Where Do Grammars Stop? MSLL. 25: 43-88. — \ 1972b. "Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology." Language in Society. 1: 97-120. Lucas, Sir Charles ed. 1929. The Pitcairn Island Register Book. London: S.P.C.K. Lyons, J. 1969. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: C.U.P. McComish, J.D. Papers Relating to Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands. ML Uncat. MS: Set 87. . 5 February 1873. Extract from a Letter of B. Branckner. . 2 October 1879. MS Extract from a Letter of G.H. Nobbs. . n.d. Typescript Statement Concerning George Hunn Nobbs on Pitcairn Island.

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. n.d. MS Genealogy of Norf oik Islanders. McGowan, Mrs. J.F. 6 February 1936. "Letter to H.L. Shapiro." Typescript copy interleaved in Shapiro, Heritage of the 'Bounty.' ML 999.7 3A1 Mackaness, G. 1931. The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh. 2 vols. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Mackey, W.F. 1970. "The Description of Bilingualism." In Fishman, J.A. ed. Readings in the Sociology of Language, p. 554-584. The Hague: Mouton. Marshall, John. 1825. Royal Naval Biography. Vol 2, part 2. Maude, H.E. 1958. "In Search of a Home." Journal of the Polynesian Society. 67: 104-131. Reprinted in Maude, Of Islands and Men, p. 1-34. . 1959. "Tahitian Interlude." Journal of the Polynesian Society. 68: 115-140. Reprinted in Maude, Of Islands and Men, p. 284-314. . 1964. "The History of Pitcairn Island." In Ross, A.S.C., and Moverley, A.W. The Pitcairnese Language, p. 45-101, 120. London: Deutsch. . 1968. Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History. Melbourne: O.U.P. Morrison, James. [1792]. Morrison's Journal on H.M.S. Bounty and at Tahiti. ML MS 1/42. Murray, T.B. [I860]. 12th ed. Pitcairn: the Island, the People and the Pastor. London: S.P.C.K. Musters of H.M. Ships: PRO, Bounty, Adm. 36/10744, Series 1, 1787-1790; Catherine Yacht, 36/10675, Series 2, 1784-1785; Burford, 3 6 / 9 6 2 8 (1) to 36/9635, 1779-1784; Chanticleer, 37/3022, 1810-1812, 37/4536, 1812-1814; Hero, 37/2775, 1811; Indefatigable, 37/4326, 37/5323, 1813-1814; Nymph, Sloop, 36/8193-8194, 1779; Snipe, 37/2927, 37/3765, 1811-1813; Phoenix, 1/7466; Roebuck, 37/2422, 1810-1811; Triumph, 36/10563-10564,1786-1787. Newell, R.R. 1961. Two Brothers: Narrative of a Voyage Round the World in the Bark "Sea Breeze," Captain George Newell. Norwalk, Connecticut: Whale House Press. Nobbs, G.H. 1829-1885. Papers. ML MS A2881. . 1837? . Statement Regarding his Parentage. A2881" 3 : 139-140. . 1838 (January-May). The Pitcairn Island Recorder. ML MS C.134. Presented to the Mitchell Library by Donald Gunn, Esq., son of Dr. W. Gunn, R.N., Surgeon of H.M.S. Curacoa, which visited Pitcairn Island in 1841. Letter of Donald Gunn, 28 February 1936, S.P.C.K. Archives, London). . 1852. Letters of Orders. ML MS An52. . 20 February 1865. Letter to Rev. J.B. Willcocks, A2881" 3 : 193-196. . 5 August 1869. Letter to John Buffett From Norfolk Island. A2881" 3 : 267-270. Ornstein, J. 1971. "Language Varieties along the U.S.-American Border." In

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Perren, G.E., and Trim, J.L.M. eds. Applications of Linguistics: Selected Papers of the Second International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, 1969, p. 349-362. Cambridge: C.U.P. Pipon, Captain P. R.N. 1814. Narrative of the State (sic) Mutineers of Η.Μ. Ship Bounty Settled on Pitcairn's Island ... . ML MS copy A.77 (Banks Papers, Brabourne Collection. 1: 17-51). Raine, .Captain Thomas. 1821. "Captain Raine's Narrative of a Visit to Pitcairn's Island in the Ship Surry," 1821. The Australian Magazine. 1: 80-84, 109-114. Ramsay, Dr. D. 1821. Scrap Book of the Log of the Ship Surry (Captain Thomas Raine) Giving an Account of the Ship's Visit to Pitcairn's Island in April 1821. MS copy of original in the possession of E.R. Raine, Esq., Sydney. ML MS As 125/1. Reinecke, J.E. 1938. "Trade Jargons and Creole Dialects as Marginal Languages." Social Forces. 17.1: 107-118. Ross, A.S.C., and Moverley, A.W. 1964. The Pitcairnese Language. London: Deutsch. Shapiro, H.L. 1936. The Heritage of the 'Bounty'. N.Y.: Simon and Schuster. London: Gollancz. . 19 April 1960. Letter to E.H. Flint Concerning the Letter of Mrs. J.F. McGowan. Shillibeer, Lieutenant J.W., R.N. 1817. Narrative of the 'Briton's' Voyage to Pitcairn's Island. London: Law and Whittaker. Shuy, R.W. ed. 1964. Social Dialects and Language Learning. Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Staine (sic), Captain Sir T., and Pipon, R.N. Interesting Report of the only Remaining Mutineers of His Majesty's Ship Bounty, Resident on Pitcairn's Island in the Pacific Ocean. Anonymous MS copy dated 14 March 1820. ML MS Q999.7s. Staines, Sir Thomas, R.N. 18 October 1814. "Letter to Vice-Admiral Manley Dixon." Briton, Valparaiso. PRO, Adm. 1/22, Extract, MS copy. [Teehuteatuaonoa] ('Jenny'). [1817]. "Account of the Mutineers of the Ship Bounty and their Descendants on Pitcairn's Island." [Dictated to an Anonymous European]. The Sydney Gazette, 17 July 1819. The Gentleman's Magazine. 1818. Anonymous Letter. 38.ii: 37-38. Topliff, Samuel. 12 January 1821. Letter in the New-England Galaxy. 4: 120, "Pitcairn's Island." Von Kotzebue, Otto. 1830. A New Voyage Round the World ... . London: Colburn and Bentley. 2 vols. Wakelin, M.F. 1972. English Dialects: an Introduction. London: Athlone Press. Watkins, W.K. 1917. "The New England Museum and the Home of Art in Boston." The Bostonian Society Publications. 2 (Second Series): 103-130.

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Wright, J. 1898-1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. London: Frowde. . 1905. The English Dialect Grammar. Oxford: Frowde. Wurm, S.A., and Laycock, D.C. 1961. "The Question of Language and Dialect in New Guinea." Oceania. 32.2: 128-143. Young, Sir George (3rd Baronet). [1927]. Young of Formosa. Private printing. [Reading: Poynder and Son]. Young, Rosalind Amelia [Mrs. R.A. Nield]. [1894], Mutiny of the 'Bounty' and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790-1894. New ed. Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association.

A DIGLOSSIC SITUATION: STANDARD vs DIALECT The case of Dutch in Belgium, especially in relation to urbanization Paper read at the 3rd International Congress of Applied Linguistics (1972). Baudewijn

Meeus

While studying the language situation in Belgium, we noticed that besides the official bilingualism, French-Dutch, there existed also a diglossic situation in which the Standard Dutch of Belgium and one of the regional Dutch (Flemish) dialects was used. The original diglossia concept, as developed by Ferguson in 1959, dealt largely with societies that maintain two quite independent languages (e.g. Spanish and Guarani, as it has been studied by Rubin (1970), classical and vernacular Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish, High German and Swiss German); but the same line of thought is equally applicable to any superposed variety maintained by a speech community, including the local, regional and national varieties of speech available in most so-called 'monolingual' polities. Although Belgium is officially a bilingual country, two large monolingual territories do legally and also factually exist: the southern French-speaking part and the northern Dutch-speaking part. For clarity in this paper, we will only consider Flanders, as a community that maintains two "languages": Standard Dutch and the regional dialects, in a more or less stable manner. The diglossic situation Dutch-French in Brussels will not be treated here. The development of Standard Dutch, which in Dutch is called "Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands" to be translated into English as General Cultivated Dutch, must be sketched as parallel with the growth of the national state in Holland in the 17th-18th century, and later on with the Flemish movement in Belgium (Goudsblom, 1964 and De Vooys, 1952).

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In Belgium the development and spread of Standard Dutch was held back for some centuries because of the dominant position of the French language in the higher social classes and in the big towns. Education in secondary schools in Belgium was officially provided in French until 1883, but the use of Standard Dutch did not increase very fast after that date until 1932. Like any other language the Dutch language has many varieties, such as dialects, "group" languages and Standard Dutch itself. Standard Dutch can be seen as the model for language behaviour in the Netherlands and in Belgium, a model with a range of alternatives. Standard Dutch is used to facilitate communication in certain social structures. The two aspects "general" and "cultivated" have their specific functions within the Dutch-speaking language community. The first function of the standard language, as may easily be guessed, is to facilitate communication between all Dutch-speaking people. This is illustrated by its historical development: Standard Dutch reflects in its growth and spread the national unity and integration of the Netherlands. Already in the 16th century the first attempt was made to establish a "common language" on the basis of the regional varieties of Flanders, Holland, Gelderland, Kleef and Brabant. This first attempt failed and only at the beginning of the 18th century was a common language attained (Goudsblom, 1964). The separation of the Netherlands and Belgium favoured the evolution in the Netherlands but was at the same time a disadvantage for the evolution in Flanders. But the "general" character of this national language was rather restricted to begin with. Contacts between the different regions existed only through the urban upper classes; the people of the country and the urban lower social classes did not participate in these contacts, because their mobility was very low. The social loci in which the common language developed did not form a closed geographical area. This growing unity of the language, spoken among the prominent citizens, was obtained at the same time when the gap between this minority and the vast majority that remained faithful to their local vernaculars, was widening. The spread of Standard Dutch was in the first place a sociological and not a geographical phenomenon. In the middle of the 18th century, a "general" Dutch developed because of the interlocal contacts, and it was modelled on the language use of the urban patricians of Holland, more specifically those of Amsterdam. It is thus clear that the rise and growth of Standard Dutch is a phenomenon that is connected with the process of urbanization. Whereas in the 19th century Standard Dutch was still a nearly exclusive mark of the urban elite, it is now becoming increasingly widespread and used in all layers of society, but not in the same degree.

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The growing contacts with the isolated regions, on the one hand, and the decrease of social barriers and town limits, on the other hand, have pushed forward the social integration of Dutch society. No longer are the contacts between the different parts of the country restricted to contacts b e t w e e n the elite. Standard Dutch became a "lingua franca" for inter-regional contacts. The fact to be remembered here is that Standard Dutch forms now a leading model, the imitation of which can be seen as very important, if not essential, at least desired for the achievement of success. In the Netherlands this happens very spontaneously, but the pattern is very weak and artificial in Belgium. The second characteristic of "cultivated" Standard Dutch, is more difficult to describe. Cultivated, in this case, is a heavily value-loaded word, and must be seen as what is socially acceptable. Standard Dutch might also be seen as the language of the cultivated group, as a kind of group language. The social origin of "cultivated speakers" can be easily located. Another aspect that can be pointed out is the double goal to be achieved in using a language: i.e. communication and distance. In its historical perspective and in comparison with the regional dialects, the standard pronunciation has this specific character of civilization: a very strict regulation of behaviour according to a model. "Diglossia", as defined by Ferguson (1959), "is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language, there is a very divergent, highly codified superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation." The superposed character of the standard language is questionable as will be pointed out later, because the standard language can also be learned in primary socialisation. The most important feature of diglossia is the specialised functions for the Η and L variety. This must be accepted for the Dutch-speaking society in Belgium as a whole but must be rejected when the substructures are analysed. In order to find out whether diglossia exists in Belgium we must operationalise the description we gave of Standard Dutch. Factors that seemed important to us were: occupational status, education and residential features. These factors were used to elaborate the seemingly significant diglossia that was shown by analysing language behaviour in several spheres. Of the scholars in the field of diglossia, some very important ones should be mentioned, i.e. Schmidt-Rohr (1933), Rishman (1964), Gross (1951), Braunshausen (1928), Mackey (1962, 1965, 1966), Rubin (1940) and Greenfield (1971). In this paper ten different, formal as well as informal,

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spheres will be studied.* Before we start with the analysis of diglossia, a short description of the different spheres should be given. The different spheres of human behaviour can be divided into two large categories, i.e. a more private and intimate sphere of life and a more public sphere. The structure of the sphere and the situation that the sphere forms for the actor determine the actor's behaviour and also his language use. The most important factor in explaining this behaviour is found in reference-group theory. In each sphere the actor deals with values, norms and expectations, on the one hand, and on the other hand with the definition of that situation or sphere by himself. Due to the various role-expectations the spheres will differ in structure. The more private sphere of life is composed mainly of affective and intimate expectations, the public sphere of life is based on instrumental and transactional expectations. The family for example, is not one sphere, but should be subdivided into different spheres. The spheres can be classified in relation to the different expectations, but already now it can be assumed that the variable "identification" will be important in language behaviour. The most affective sphere, which is characterised by the great vagueness of the expressed role-expectations, is the sphere of the relationships with the other members of the wider family, apart from the parents and the children of the nuclear family. These relatives may be parents, brothers and sisters of husband and wife, or uncles and aunts. For these actors the role-expectations are formulated rather vaguely because the contacts take place on the basis of affection. According to our data in 90% of the contacts with members of the family the regional dialect is used. People go back to the first language learned. This happens also when other people are present who are talked to in Standard Dutch, but who are left out of the conversation when talking about the past. The old solidarity-pattern plays a role here. The (nuclear) family, as the second private sphere of life, holds the basis for the future primary socialisation and the language used. In relation to this sphere, the president of the Belgian society for promotion of Standard Dutch, said, "the language of dating and courting is the language of the future nuclear family". The role-expectations are more clear-cut in relation to language use.

*The results quoted here are drawn from an investigation that took place in 1971. About 350 persons in different parts of the Dutch-speaking area in Belgium were interviewed. The questions were intended to collect data on language use in specific spheres of life. It is almost certain that language usage patterns are mixed with languages attitudes. Because of its rather complex character we only analyzed the interviews at face-value. Underlying attitudes will not be analyzed here.

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When we stated that people go back to the first language learned in the former sphere, we can state that here we have a possibility to break up the traditional use of dialect. It is here that people can decide which variety they will use when speaking to each other; according to our research about 84% use the dialect. The language used by the parents is mostly the same because it grew out of a variety of contacts. The role-expectations are still vague and the definition of the situation does not play a role as yet. It should be noted that in this sphere the degree of spontaneity is no longer that of the first sphere. Next to the contacts with their family and with each other, husband and wife also have contacts with friends. Language use here is also determined by previous contacts people had with each other because they went to the same school, worked in the same firm, and other similar situations. Also here the stress is put on the informal character of the relationship, and a high proportion of dialect users is to be expected, i.e. 78% A further differentiation of this sphere, e.g. a distinction between home contacts with friends and outside contacts during leisure time, does not show any relevant difference. Language behaviour is significantly correlated in both situations. This pattern is logical because there are no competing role-expectations on these levels; both rather belong to the private sphere of life than to the public. The public aspect of leisure outside the home is not so important as its more emotional character. These four situations discussed so far belong to the more private sphere of life, the following ones to the more public sphere. Here not only the role-expectations play a role, but also the definition of the situation and the identification of the actor. The identification does not go back to the past, but is oriented towards objective factors such as status, group membership, and so forth. The first public sphere that can be considered is the street. Language use is no longer influenced by the affective relationships but, what is more important, by the identification one wants to receive. Language use is rather inspired by the social label one wants to receive than by what is expressed. The difference between the residential areas should be noted, though 75% of the whole group studied still used dialect. A second public sphere, closely related to the first, is the sphere of shopping. Dialect is used by about 70%. Here also identification will play an important role. This tendency will be accentuated in most public spheres. It can be explained by reference-group behaviour that aims to be identified with a certain social group that has a higher status. The third sphere, although a typical family situation, is the language used in contacts between parents and their children. The increased usage of Standard Dutch can be explained by the conscious choice of this variety by

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the parents, even when they speak the dialect variety with each other. The difference between these two spheres is considerable. The parents speak the dialect variety with each other in 87,5% of the cases, and only in 69% of the cases with their children. The higher frequency of those using Standard Dutch proves that the parents themselves are aware of the value of the standard language for their children. The so-called superposed variety is, in some cases, learned in the family and not only in formal education. When the parents do speak Standard Dutch with their children, much of the effect will depend on the other contacts of the children in the peer-group and the language used there. Most parents speak Standard Dutch (or try to) when they are teaching their children new words, even when they are not used to doing so in other situations. On the other hand, when the children come into contact with other children and other older people, they will get acquainted with the dialect variety, and what is more, they will consider the dialect as the normal language. When parents speak the dialect with their children, this will contribute to a greater intimacy between the parent and the child in most of the cases.

The fourth sphere of public life is the work sphere. Here the use of dialect has fallen to about 57%. Language use in this sphere is highly determined by the place of work and the job actually performed. The use of the standard language increases when the informal character of the relationships at work decreases. This is caused by the formal role-expectations that will be formulated in relation to the actor in this situation. The fifth public sphere to be treated here is contacts with public offices. The highly formalised character of this sphere and the strict role-expectations that are formulated induce the use of the standard language. A restriction should be made for the contacts with public offices in the country because of the very closed nature of this society and the predominance of more informal relationships. The most important sphere, if a policy of standard language promotion should be followed, is the primary school system. Here the highest use of Standard Dutch was reported. Although quite a lot of schools (77,4%) use the standard language as a medium, the influence of groups outside the school, such as peer-groups and family, destroys the result of what was done in class. The problems of children accustomed to a dialect-milieu, coming to a school where the standard language is used, are sometimes overlooked by teachers. The spontaneous utterances of this children will be restricted when they get a response in a different variety. A child's success in the elementary school often depends on the use of the dialect as a medium of instruction in the school. It must be clear that language use is determined by the structure of the sphere in which behaviour takes place. The more informal the sphere the more dialect will be used. From the results of our research we see that the

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use of dialect decreases when going from informal to formal, from primary to secondary relations. Dialect is used most where role-expectations are less strictly formulated, Standard Dutch is used most where behaviour is most formalised. For the total population we should, according to our data, accept the functional differentiation of language behaviour and the existence of diglossia. If, however, we subdivide this population, diglossia becomes very unclear and language behaviour will be functionally differentiated along different lines. We already mentioned the three categories that were used to operationalise the features of Standard Dutch: occupational status, education and place of residence. When we combine the place of residence with the variable "education" we obtain as a result that for the lower educational levels no indication of the existence of diglossia is to be found. What is to be noted is a trend, though not a significant one, which indicates a very slight decrease of the use of dialect when moving from informal to formal speech situations. In rural areas the use of Standard Dutch for the lower educational levels never rises above 2% in urbanised areas and towns it rarely exceeds 20%. The only sphere where Standard Dutch is used somewhat more frequently is in contacts with public offices. For the lower educational level diglossia is non-existent; for the higher educational levels there is a sharp cut between the formal and the informal sphere. In the formal sphere Standard Dutch is used most, in the informal spheres dialect is. The difference between residential areas is not significant. When combining place of residence with the variable "occupational status" the same trend is noted: no diglossia in language behaviour of the lower social classes, in which the use of dialect is predominant. Also here there is an increase in the use of Standard Dutch when going from rural to urban areas, but it is not significant. In the higher social classes diglossia exists, but this is no longer the case for those living in the country. Two people use Standard Dutch mainly or exclusively in all speech situations. Conclusion Not until further refinement in the assessment of language use has been obtained will it be possible to establish the determinants of language behaviour. Standard Dutch is kept out of certain spheres. As such it is a part of the machinery of "representative behaviour" (Bahrdt, 1961). Bahrdt considers this as formalised manners for secondary relations. Where social distance is important, where class-difference is not immediately clear, and where integration is not complete, behaviour will be modelled on standardised

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rules, which makes understanding possible, with due observance of an accepted reserve. The functions of Standard Dutch can be described in terms of communication and distance; understanding and reserve. As an element of culture, Standard Dutch seems to fit into a certain type of social structure, characterised by secondary relations. The general conclusion that there is a difference for "high status" but not for "low status" between urban and rural can be illustrated by the following picture: Urban High Status - J Formal Informal •

Rural High Status

1

Casual (Non-intimate) Standard

I

Standard

Formal

Informed

Intimate

Standard Dialect

Standard

Casual (Non-intimate)

Intimate

Standard Dialect

Dialect

Low Status (Rural and Urban) ι

Formal

L

Informal Casual (Non-intimate)

I

Intimate

Dialect Dialect Dialect Standard 1) The rural in-group. This group is composed of the autochtonous inhabitants of the local non-differentiated and mostly agrarian society. The closed network patterns exercise a large influence on behaviour of the members of that society. Social control is high and deviant behaviour characterizes the actor as an outsider. Language behaviour pattern is determined by the undifferentiated structure and is focused on local variants of the standard language, i.e. dialects. As well in formal as in informal spheres, dialect is used because the formality aspect of certain social contacts is not perceived, as a consequence of the overall control of the total community and the non-existent patterns of a hierarchical structure. 2) The out-group in rural societies. This group is composed of the commuters, mainly of higher social status. Because of their out-group character, social control exercised by the local community isolates them

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from the in-group. This isolation can be wanted and the use of an other dialect or the standard language can easily obtain this result. Although they ask for an out-identification by speaking the standard language, they mostly have a functional differentiation in their language use pattern. In formal situations the standard language is used and in informal occasions a non-local or local variant of the standard is frequently used. 3) The lower status group in urban societies. The lower status group is a sub-culture of the urban community and has a rather similar social structure pattern as the rural in-group. The main difference is that they only are the lower sub-structure in the hierarchical order of the urban community and as such they differ from the autonomous rural community. The control facilities are rather highly developed in the informal sphere and this leads us to the conclusion that the differentiated character of the community obtains a functional differentiation. The use of standard varieties does not follow from a wish to be identified but from the social pressure of the standard language in formal situations. 4) The higher status group in urban societies. Being also a sub-culture, under control of a standard language usage pattern, the urban higher status group differs from the lower urban and the rural out-groups because they have only very seldom a functional differentiation pattern. This is due to the fact that formal agencies are predominant for this social class and because they form a peculiar open-closed community system based on voluntary membership. The use of dialects is very restricted and sometimes identified as something that should only be used by lower class people. Although some incongruences are still apparent, this scheme should be refined by using better measurement methods based on a more exclusive operationalization of the used concepts. Although this model is tentative, it is based on an analysis of a sociological research and already gives an indication of the direction that should be followed in revising the original diglossia concepts. Societal bilingualism is, as it follows drom the above, a rather limited phenomenon and for some classes it has only an ephemeral character.

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Bibliography Bahrdt, H.D. Die moderne Gross-stadt, Hamburg, (1961). Braunshausen, Ν. Le bilinguisme et la famille, in Le Bilinguisme et l'education, Geneve, (1928). Daan, J. Sociodialectologie, in Mens en Maatschappij, Vol. 38, (1963), nr. 6, pp. 422-443. De Vooys, N. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taal, Antwerpen, (1952). Ferguson, C. Diglossia, in Word, Vol. 15, (1959), pp. 325-340. Fishman, J.A. Language maintenance and language shift as a field of inquiry, in Linguistics, (1964), nr. 9, pp. 32-70. Goudsblom, J. Het algemeen beschaafd Nederlands, in Sociologische Gids, Vol. 11, (1964), nr. 3, pp. 106-124. Gross, F. Language and Value Changes among the Arapaho, in International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 17, (1951), p. 10-17. Hartig, M. and Kurz, U. Sprache als soziale Kontrolle. Neue Ansätze zur Soziolinguistik, Frankfurt, (1971). Hughes, E.C. The linguistic division of labor in industrial and urban society, in Georgetown University Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, RTM 23, (1970), Washington, (1970). Kloeke, G.G. Haagse volkstaal uit de achttiende eeuw, in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal en Letterkunde, Vol. 57, (1938), pp. 15-56. Nuytens, E.T.G. De tweetalige mens. Een taalsociologisch onderzoek naar het gebruik van dialect en cultuurtaal in Borne, Assen, (1962). Rubin, J. Bilingualism in Paraguay, Den Haag, (1970). Schmidt-Rohr, G. Mutter spräche, Jena, (1933).

VIII

Language Competence

SOCIETAL AND LINGUISTIC CORRELATES IN AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ENGLISH WRITING OF A SELECTED GROUP OF UNIVERSITY-LEVEL CHICANOS Betty Lou Dubois Like many another country, 1 the United States has a history replete with instances, some of them dramatic, of the contact of groups of differing languages. Nowhere in our country has there been a greater variety of such relationships over a large geographic area than in the American Southwest. Today, in fact, only great metropolitan centers of the magnitude of the cities at the Atlantic shore evidence more linguistic diversity than the region composed of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California. In the period before the arrival of western Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century, there was an abundance of indigenous tongues. The advent of the Spanish in what is now the United States marked the beginning of a new era — political, cultural, linguistic — in which English speakers, now known in many parts of the Southwest as Anglos, played an increasingly important part. Other linguistic groups and individuals from other linguistic groups have made their contribution to the Southwest as well, and the linguistic history of the entire region, with a contemporary linguistic demography, remains yet to be written. It will be of supreme interest when finally complete. It is fair to say that the melting pot or assimilationist philosophy

1

The research was partially supported by Grant 3105-876 from the Arts and Sciences Research Center of New Mexico State University. I am greatly indebted to Professor Morris Finkner, Head of the University's Department of Experimental Statistics, who shepherded the statistical analysis to a successful conclusion, and above all to Professor Jacob Ornstein of the University of Texas at El Paso, who so generously encouraged me, at a critical point in my career, to undertake the present work.

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prevailed, at least officially, throughout the United States, but in certain areas of the nation, New Mexico, for example, some nonEnglish languages were successfully maintained not only because of numbers of speakers in established speech communities, but also because the very remoteness of the region delayed effective contact with the official national language, in some cases far into the twentieth century. Nowadays, as group after group takes cognizance of its ethnicity and of its language or its English dialect as the most obvious manifestation of that ethnicity, cultural and linguistic pluralism has begun to displace assimilationism — never generally effective in the Southwest anyway. While Native American languages have long been respectable objects of study, at least in departments of anthropology, Southwestern Spanish has only lately been regarded as a legitimate dialect instead of "border slang," "Tex Mex," or a collection of pachuquismos. Southwestern English dialects as objects of serious study are comparative neonates, one reason being the lack of an institutional framework for their study. A prime factor in the development and channeling of such increased interest is the Cross-Cultural Southwest Ethnic Study Center of the University of Texas at El Paso, whose codirector Jacob Ornstein has proved the inspiration not only for the broad gauge Sociolinguistic Studies of Southwest Bilingualism (for a description of the Center's work and of the SSSB, see Ornstein 1973), for the founding of SWALLOW (Southwest Areal Language and Linguistic Workshop), whose annual meetings have become important linguistic events, and for the newly formed SKYLARK, an organization devoted to the description of the Southwestern varieties of English. The Center chose to begin the enormous task of studying the languages of the region, together with associated social attitudinal and educational variables, with a study of the language of the area's largest minority, the Chicanos. A Chicano /öi'kanow/ is an American whose first loyalty is to the unique culture of the Spanish-speaking Southwest. An important part of his cultural roots lies in Mexico, although he is not Mexican; he has an ancestor whose first language was Spanish although he himself may not be a Spanish speaker. The question of the essence of the Chicano will not be resolved without much further study, which the present work aims to further by helping to define the Chicano linguistically, relating socioeconomic and attitudinal variables to certain features of university-level Chicano writing. To study Chicano writing, I have used chiefly the English-language essays of the Center's V series. These writers compose a stratified random sample of 30 unmarried undergraduate Chicanos of the University of Texas at El Paso. Each subject wrote three essays, choosing one topic from each of three groups of topics, the groups being differentiated by an increasing degree of abstraction. An example of the progression in abstraction is the following series of essay topics: (1) Life in El Paso; (2) Travel in Mexico; and

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(3) My Philosophy of Life. I have studied three kinds of phenomena by collecting data on incidence of contrast with widely accepted usage, i.e., my own. Some of these phenomena will mark the essays as, in layman's terms "bad English," some as "different English," and some as "unEnglish." I have described these more fully elsewhere (Dubois 1974), and I refer the reader there for full detail, including a preliminary subjective assessment of communicative competence. For the present study, I concentrate on two types of phenomena: both are what Mr. Fiddich would call mistakes; part are grammatical and part are mechanical (spelling, punctuation). Some illustrations follow. COMMAS. No one who has been an editor or taught what in the United States is called composition can approach the subject of comma use with anything like certainty, because of questions of style and usage. I have been extremely generous in my categorizations of errors and have accepted such things as "I was so tired, I went to bed," even though I would not write them myself. The following represent what I judge to be mistakes according to current standards of acceptability. Comma splice. "I thoroughly enjoyed it, it gave me a chance to learn . . . . " 15 instances. Missing comma in setoff element. "The mountains and canyons notwithstanding their wild appearance which seems to reject all human beings, are fertile . . . . " 4 instances. Element mistakenly setoff. "I, then, became involved in almost every activity at school." (Here, then means next.) 1 instance. Element not setoff. "The pace of living in Mexico although somehow faster than in El Paso is still. . . . " 7 instances. Semicolon for comma. ". . . by one-thirty in the morning; the latest." 6 instances. Comma missing after year or state. " . . . and was born in El Paso, Texas November 19, 1948." 1 instance. Interruption of clause or phrase. "His poetry is not all on love themes for, he is also critical of . . . . " 5 instances. Comma missing in series of three. "I do not love or seek money in any way shape or form . . . . " 3 instances. Appositive not set o f f . "Philosophy in life is this that a person is like a flour." 1 instance. Comma and conjunction in series of two. " . . . these people manage to cross to the United States, with either a local passport, or to establish residence." 2 instances. Comma instead of conjunction in series of two. "My favorite pastimes are playing guitar, piano . . . . " 3 instances. Adjectives requiring comma separation. "I never try to may [make] the wealthy well educated person any more important. . . . " 1 instance.

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Nonrestrictive modifier not set o f f . . . to Saint Patrick's where I finished my elementary schooling." 7 instances. Comma separating main sentence elements. Subject and predicate. "What I like about the life there, is that . . . . " 1 instance. Main verb and direct object. " . . . I didn't pick up, but a few words in English . . . . " 4 instances. Other. " . . . I could execute what they're doing, three times faster than they." 2 instances. RUNON SENTENCES. ". . . at times I'm too shy to talk that's why I don't meet. . . . " 7 instances. FRAGMENTS. "Time for the young to become old." 9 instances. SPELLING. Orthographical errors are a distinguishing mark of poor education, and thus in this area it will be easiest to show its effects. It must be remembered that some of these Chicanos are not Spanish speakers, and most were educated in Texas, but to give interference its due, I have attributed errors to interference from a written Spanish cognate or to Spanish phonology wherever possible. Cognate interference, "dilema" 19 instances. Spanish pronunciation interference, "this [these] trips" 6 instances. Spanish spelling rule, "dollares" 3 instances. The following types appear not to be interference based. English pronunciation interference, "bachlor" 5 instances. Letter missing, "benefical" 6 instances. Letter substitution, "quitar" 3 instances. Apparent confusion with other word, "loose" (for lose) 4 instances. Letters out of order, "deseris" (for desires) 3 instances. Letter added, "elclipse" 5 instances. Unclassifiable. 3 instances. Small word substitution, "a" (for I) 11 instances. Homonyms, "too" (for to) 19 instances. Wrong choice within the English system, "expencive" 36 instances. The total number of errors counted is 179, of which the maximum number attributed to interference is 28, or 15.7%. SEGMENTATION ERRORS. As one word, "eventhough" 12 instances. As two words, "out look" 10 instances. Misuse of hyphens, "with-out" 5 instances. VERB SYSTEM. Auxiliary missing. "By five o'clock I heading home . . . . " 1 instance. Agreement. Singular subject. "It grow faster than . . . . " 7 instances. Plural subject. "My aims in life is to be happy." 3 instances. Clause instead of (for)/to construction. "My aims in life are that I graduate from college . . . . " 3 instances. Wrong verbal complement. " . . . help students learn and enjoy learn." 5 instances.

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SINGULAR FOR PLURAL NOUN. "I believe there are other disadvantages . . . . " 3 instances. If we look at just these phenomena, which can be called mistakes, there appear to be four groups of writers in the V series. I charted comma/spelling errors against verb/noun number-errors with the following results: Group 1 II III IV

Verb/Noun Errors 0 0 1-2 5-8

Spelling, Etc.

Number of Writers

2 4-13 4-22 14-17

2 12 14 2

As a check of whether the samples stratified on the basis of sex, age, socioeconomic status and so on resulted in a linguistically stratified sampling, I checked the type I essays of the AC series of 26 writers (an incomplete sample) against the V series. These 26 writers made 69 mistakes of the kind listed in the chart above. The 30 V writers should have made 79.6 at the same rate. Their actual total, 84, puts the number of errors in approximately the same range. The grouping above is that which results by inspection if one considers the essays as written. It fails, however, to take into account the range of words per writer in the series. V 11 wrote 762 words (all counts include titles), whereas V 17 wrote only 200. It is obvious that V 11 had nearly four times the opportunity to make errors that V 17 had. Assuming that each writer makes errors at a constant rate, I set up a simple proportion to arrive at the number of errors each subject would have made if he had written 762 words. I then ranked the subjects twice according first to number of grammatical errors, and within those groups, according to number of mechanical errors. The first rank order is made from the count of the original essays, the second rank order of the number of errors I assume they would have made if each had written 762 words. The latter I call the corrected rank order, and by subtracting the corrected rank number from the original rank number, I have obtained the rank order difference. The results are shown in Table 1.

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TABLE 1 Rank Ordering of V Series by Number of Grammatical and Mechanical Errors Subject

Original Rank

Corrected Rank

Difference

VI V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 Vll V12 V13 V14 V15 V16 V17 V18 VI9 V20 V21 V22 V23 V24 V25 V26 V27 V28 V29 V30

28 13 22 16 23 29 10 26 3 17 13 6 16 27 20 6 1 1 24 24 19 4 10 20 9 4 30 15 8 12

25 13 24 15 21 29 4 17 5 27 6 7 20 19 22 9 2 1 16 23 18 8 11 26 10 3 30 28 12 14

+ 3 0 - 2 + 1 + 2 0 + 6 + 9 - 2 -10 + 7 - 1 - 4 + 8 - 2 - 3 - 1 0 + 8 + 1 + 1 - 4 - 1 - 6 - 1 + 1 0 -13 - 4 - 2

It can be seen that the first and fourth groups, the "best" writers and the "worst" remained relatively stable, but there was a great deal of shifting in the middle groups. The greatest drop was V 28's -13; the greatest gain was V 8's +9. We have just seen how the writers of the features under study would have been distributed in that ideal world in which, given the direction to

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write three essays, each subject wrote exactly the same number of words as the one who spontaneously produced the most. In the real world, to the contrary, such uniformity does not obtain, as shown by the essays written in the actual circumstances. Indeed, one extremely important variable in written English communicative competence — certainly not a simple linear one — is length, the ability to produce that quantity of writing judged suitable to communicative intent. Here, when university students were asked to write essays on topics well within their experience, maximum length I judge to be a positive aspect. On the other hand, if students were asked to write a proposal, say, four pages in length, it is not at all certain that V 11 would rank first again. The variability in quantitative production of the V series essays is matched by their variability in social, attitudinal, and education factors, as measured by the Center's Sociolinguistic Studies of Southwest Bilingualism, of which a brief description follows. In addition to extensive group interviews of the subjects under the direction of specially trained bilingual peers, the Center probed for nonlinguistic factors via two written instruments. The first is the Sociolinguistic Background Questionnaire (Brooks, Brooks, Goodman, and Ornstein 1972), which contains 106 questions mostly in multiple choice form, devised and validated at the Center for use in the study of southwestern Spanish-English bilingualism. The special value of the instrument is that, besides the customary demographic items, it has some of the attitudinal sort, on usage of English vs. Spanish in various domains, and on work ethnic and life style. The second written instrument is the commercially prepared College and University Environment Scales (CUES) (Pace et al. 1969). The CUES test consists of five subtests which assesses students' evaluation of their educational institutions (here, the University of Texas at El Paso). The five subtests, with a brief explanation of what they measure, are: (1)

Practicality — Is students' education relevant to the world of Work? (2) Propriety — Do students behave responsibly and properly, or do they riot, destroy property? (3) Community — Does the institution foster a spirit of belonging? (4) Awareness — Do students concern themselves with the art, politics, and economic concerns of the community? (5) Scholarship — Does the institution project an image of serious academic concern? The CUES test may be scored in two ways. In the first, only those items on which 66 2/3% respond in identical fashion are retained, forming a profile of the school's perceived climate. In the second, a student's response is considered correct if it advances his institution along a given scale. The number of an individual's correct answers constitutes his own profile, and it

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is the latter which I use for the correlation studies below. The Center itself is engaged in a large scale ongoing attempt to interrelate the variables it has collected, including measures of overall preformance in Spanish and English, arrived at by averaging the global estimates of proficiency from a panel of bilingual judges who rated the essays on a scale from one through five. When all pertinent information from all subjects for a variable is present, the Center has 300 subjects (the entire stratified sample of the unmarried undergraduate student body of UTEP, of which the V series is a stratified subsample) and hence is able to do Chi square correlation calculations in which the tables have as many as 20 cells. For example, the table shich studies the correlation of CUES II and whether the student subsequently graduated looks like this: TOT

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

158 141

4 0

2 9

7 9

12 22

14 16

19 24

25 16

27 21

36 18

12 6

If the 30 students of the V series were distributed uniformly through the 20 cells of the table, half the cells would have two entries, half one. In fact, some of the cells and even some of the rows would be empty, which makes the table useless in connection with the V series writers alone. In order to compute Chi square on the 30 subjects, it was necessary to do two more groupings: (1) As the scores fall into more or less natural divisions, to make two or three columns; (2) to reduce the original grouping of the writers (see pages ) to two (those who did and those who did not make grammatical errors), because of the low numbers in Groups I and IV. To illustrate, the CUES II table for the V series looks like this:

A Β

TOT

1

2

3

14 16

4 3

4 7

6 6

Two questions are immediately suggested by the table above: (1) Why bother at all with the statistical analysis of such small numbers and such few groups? The answer is that, making due allowance for admitted shortcomings, the Chi square tests that were done do show relationships which are not obvious on inspection alone. (2) Why not begin from a much larger data base, i.e., instead of 90 essays, why not 900? The answer is time, which reduces itself to money. It took a great deal of effort to collect the 90 essays of the V series, and given the level of financing available to the Center, it was not possible to obtain more. Even if more essays were available, one should not underestimate the great amount of time required to search the

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essays for specific features, some of which work can be turned over to relatively untrained but intelligent assistants (for example, the counting of words, spelling errors, etc.), some of which can not. An obvious solution to the problem of dealing with large corpora is computerization. In fact, SKYLARK I, held October 17, 1974, on the UTEP campus under the sponsorship of New Mexico State University and Trinity University, was devoted to the problems attendant on collection and computerization of corpora (see Dubois and Hoffer 1975). Once again, the solution depends on locating significant funding sources for the professionals are ready to begin work. Granting that the following correlation studies would certainly have been improved had they been conducted on a much larger sample, I nevertheless offer them as the best evidence currently available on trends in dependence of grammatical and societal, attitudinal, and educational variables for university-level Chicano writing. The subjects of the V series have been divided, as mentioned earlier, into two nearly equal groups on the basis of the grammatical contrasts or errors studied: Group A (14 subjects) made none; Group Β (16 subjects) made one or more (the grouping corresponds roughly to a division into native standard and other than native proficiency of the features in question). Besides the five CUES variables mentioned above, the following were studied (they are listed with my number and the Center's descriptor): 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

High School Rank Age Ethnic Composition of Elementary School Ethnic Composition of High School College Enrolled In Total Aspirations Hourly Salary (if employed) Numbers of Hours Employed per Week % of College Costs Paid by Student Father's Birthplace Father's Education Mother's Education Social Class Father's Annual Income Mother's Birthplace Mother's Salary Number of Siblings Total Score: Language Usage Attitude toward Assimilation Problems Mexican Attitude

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Importance of English English Capability I Spanish Capability I Spanish Capability II English Capability II Language Attitude (Ethnicity) SAT Verbal SAT Math Major Total Hours Attempted Total Hours Completed Last Cumulative GPA Graduated

Because the five parts of the CUES test form an independent subgroup among the variables, I will discuss them separately. None of the correlations reaches the kind of significance once can find in studies of large bodies of data; the great variability of ρ values among the five cause them to fall into two groups. The three in the lower group can certainly be considered indicative of trends. Group

Variable No.

Descriptor

ρ Value

I

3 2

Community Propriety

.80 .70

II

1 4 5

Practicality Awareness Scholarship

.30 .20 .10

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The remainder of the correlations of variables with absence or presence of grammatical errors fall into four natural groups (I — 0.0, II — .95-.75, III — .6-.3, and IV — .15-.02), as follows: Group

Variable No.

Descriptor

ρ Value

I

19 25

Father's Income Mexican Attitude

II

17 27 8 9 18 38 12 15 16 23 24 30 31 33 6 29 37 13 14 22 28

Mother's Education English Capability Ethnic Comp. Elem. Sch. Ethnic Comp. High School Social Class Graduated Hourly Salary Father's Birth Father's Education Language Usage Total Assimilationism English Capability II Usage of Spanish/English SAT Math High School Rank Spanish Capability II GPA Hours Employed Costs Paid Number of Siblings Spanish Capability I

.99 .99 .95 .95 .95 .95 .90 .90 .90 .90 .90 .90 .90 .90 .80 .80 .80 .75 .75 .75 .75

III

32 7 34 11 26 36

SAT Verbal Age Major Total Aspirations Importance of English Total Hours Completed

.60 .50 .50 .40 .30 .30

IV

20 35 10

Mother's Birthplace Total Hours Attempted College Enrolled In

.15 .15 .02

0.0 0.0

Distribution of the variables, both with and without CUES, can be seen from the figure below.

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Distribution of the Variables, both with and without CUES

£3 2 1 0 .1

.2

.3

.4

.5

.6

.7

.8 .9 with CUES-without CUES

0

ρ Value Group I displays perfect independence of the variables in the group and grammatical errors. There might also be independence from mother's income, but incomplete data prevent the calculation of Chi square for this variable. The independence from Mexican Attitude is quite surprising, since one might expect English grammatical errors to bear some (inverse) relation to a positive Mexican Attitude. The largest group, II, which contains 21 variables which are essentially independent, contains some startling information, too. Neither the Center's group of rating language capabilities in English and Spanish nor the total language score nor the subject's relative daily amount of use of the two languages is related to the factors I have counted. Certain home facts that were collected (number of siblings, social class, father's birthplace) likewise prove unrelated. The cluster of educational factors (education of either parent, high school rank, university grade point average, and, most unexpectedly, the ethnic composition of elementary and high schools attended) again bears no relation to the absence or presence of noun-verb contrasts or errors in writing. The figures suggest that ethnic composition of public schools may not be as important as many of us have thought, likewise that the educational background of the home is unrelated to skill in English grammar, and, perhaps most important, that university success is not necessarily dependent on the absence of stigmatized features in written English. With Group III, certainly with factors of attitude toward the importance of English and with the number of hours completed, the dependence of variables begins to be perceptible. One might expect that a student who views English as important is likely to be one whose English corresponded all along to academic norms or who succeeded in making it do

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so. The .30 correlation of grammatical errors and total hours completed suggests at least two questions for further investigation, given the previously discussed independence of Grade Point Average: are students who make these elementary "errors" progressively squeezed out at higher levels, despite the fact that they appear to be unrelated to achievement? Or does Group Β attempt fewer hours than Group A? Only three factors (Mother's Birthplace, Total Hours Attempted, and College Enrolled In) appear closely correlated, the latter attaining significance at the 0.02 level. The mother's birthplace (whether in Mexico or the United States) is the single family variable that bears in an important way on these aspects of English proficiency of the writers of the V series. That fact raises questions about the functioning of the Chicano family and may also have important educational ramifications. The 0.15 ρ value of variable 35, total hours attempted, appears to confirm one of the possibilities suggested by the correlations of educational factors in Groups II and III: that students who make fewer grammatical errors are those who have attempted more hours. The dependence which captures attention is College Enrolled In, for it is fraught with implications for those of us who are interested in increasing educational opportunities for Chicanos. It will be necessary to determine whether Chicanos with given grammatical skills gravitate toward particular colleges, or whether they are specifically recruited into them. It is equally important to see how Chicano enrollment from "opposite groups" can be attracted and retained equally in all colleges. The educational goal is clear: it is to strive toward independance of these variables. Studies such as the one I have described are based on an implicit assumption that there is a norm of English that Anglo university-level writers conform to, and that among Chicano writers there are those who conform and those who do not. In routine matters of the order of spelling, punctuation, and noun and verb "errors," it is relatively easy to say what the norm is, hence to assess differences. With certain other kinds of phenomena, however, much greater difficulty arises. From the essays of the V series, for example, I have extracted all instances of the following: ECHOES OF THE SUBJUNCTIVE. . . since it is not sufficient that a woman be entirely dedicated to her family." INVERSION OF SUBJECT AND VERB. "After a certain hour, say 10 p.m., rarely are people found." REFLEXIVE VERBS. ". . . that we may someday perhaps transcind ourselves . . . ." Few of the instances of features shown above do I consider to be wrong, yet it is my belief, which I cannot now support with evidence, that there is greater incidence of these features in the V series essays than there would be from Anglo writers, which causes them to appear subtly different.

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How can we find out? One possibility is to determine relative frequency by a count of the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English Prose. The search for reflexives can easily be computerized, but the other two will apparently have to be done manually. The three counts would indeed give us a better way to appraise Chicano writing performance than we have at present. Yet, because the prose included in the Brown Corpus is written largely by professionals and, more important, because it is edited, it would perhaps put the university-level Chicano writer at a disadvantage. What is needed is a corpus from equivalent university-level Anglos, for Chicano writing can best be evaluated by a comparison with peer writing. I have also noted in some essays what strikes me as excessive repetition of content verbs. Certainly in my own edited writing, I would not repeat key phrases so many times, but would substitute do, synonyms, deletions, verbal nouns, and so on. As I attempted to draw conclusions from these excessive repetitions, it became clear that I lack objective knowledge about patterns of verb repetition in English, which I am now in process of studying experimentally. I have extracted eight passages which strike me as overly repetitious, and by means of a modified CLOZE test, I am attempting to determine whether there are significant patterns of repetition and whether these patterns differ from Anglo to Chicano to Navajo university students in New Mexico. Having established the patterns of repetition, I can study the V series papers to see their conformity to patterns and, after that, to see whether conformity/nonconformity is significantly related to any social, attitudinal, or educational variables.

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Bibliography Brooks, Bonnie S., Gary D. Brooks, Paul W. Goodman, and Jacob Ornstein. 1972. Sociolinguistic Background Questionnaire: A Measurement Instrument for the Study of Bilingualism. Rev. El Paso, Texas. Cross-Cultural Southwest Ethnic Study Center. Dubois, Betty Lou. 1974. "Written Communicative Competence of UTEP Chicanos: A Preliminary Report." System. May, 1974. Dubois, Betty Lou, and Bates Hoffer. 1975. Papers in Southwest English. I: Research Techniques and Prospects. San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University. Ornstein, Jacob. 1973. "Sociolinguistic Studies on Southwest Bilingualism." In Garland D. Bills, ed. Southwest Areal Linguistics. San Diego, California. Institute for Cultural Pluralism. Pace, C. Robert, et al. 1969. College and University 'Environment Scales (CUES, FORM X-2). Princeton, New Jersey. Educational Testing Service.

LANGUAGE CONTACT IN JAPAN Curtis W. Hayes

"Notice: Takanawa Ganka Eye Clinic will be re-opened on March 21, 1972 with modern ophthalmic instruments and traditional Japanese Constitution Building" (Advertisement in Japan Times, 18 March 1972).

The role of English, and other Western languages, in the Japanese school curriculum can be traced from the Meiji Restoration, approximately a century before, and not merely to the more recent Occupation. The Japanese, anxious to participate in profitable commercial relationships with Western nations, soon discovered that success in these ventures would depend greatly upon a knowledge and understanding of the languages spoken in the West, and especially English. The Japanese government quickly created a corps of translators, who were directed to provide translations of books, articles, tracts, any written document, in fact, which would benefit and aid the government in dealing with the foreigner. The particular kind of language skill involved here, that of translation, is important to note, as it continues to be emphasized in the Japanese schools today, and it also continues to plague, especially since 1945, the Japanese English teaching establishment. After World War II and during the Occupation, the Japanese, for obvious reasons, initiated efforts to make English a second language, a predictably difficult undertaking since the Japanese have not only a history of homogeneity of race and culture but a strong strain of ethnocentricity, including a hesitancy to speak any language other than their own. Translation was considered acceptable as it did not mean speaking the language being translated. It is still usual to encounter English classes in the public schools where the teacher calls upon the student to translate, sentence by sentence, line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word, from texts on

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which the instructor has become an expert of sorts. The tradition is still followed at some leading universities where we may observe professors who employ a self-annotated edition on the first 42 pages of Hemingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, the first 60 of LIGHT IN AUGUST, and so on. There are, indeed, in any university, the progressives, usually the younger members of the faculty, who can speak, read, and write the English language with fluency, but these examples are few, scattered, and isolated. Teachers have remained teachers of translation. There is the current saying in Japan that if you want to learn English stay away from the public schools, and it is precisely for this reason that a number of successful language teaching organizations, say, the various English Speaking Societies (ESS) have flourished, attached to the schools but still apart. Private organizations especially constituted to teach English abound, particularly in the larger, more cosmopolitan areas of Japan, where English is much more useful than it is in the rural areas. The various Japanese newspapers, English language as well as Japanese, abound with the advertisements of various language organizations. An indication of their popularity is the relative ease with which a native speaker, even one not trained in language teaching, can secure a position teaching English. Other organizations, whose primary purposes are not pedagogical, have provided teachers and meeting places where those who want to learn English can study. Especially important are the Ym and YWCA's. Private companies, f o r e x a m p l e , Mitsui and Mitsubishi, from among those who are internationally minded and who regularly send their executives abroad to live where English is spoken, require their "young men on the way u p " to attend classes in foreign languages which they provide for their employees. These classes are often taught by native speakers or very fluent Japanese. It is generally agreed, however, that clubs, organizations, and the efforts of private companies, abound only because they fill a need, they fill a vacuum, the inability of the public school to teach more than a very small minority of its students the skills of language. It might be instructive to examine one community and its schools to determine what has gone wrong, what made it go wrong, and whether there it any hope for the language morass in which a small conservative community is hopelessly foundering. The City of Kumamoto is a relatively small commercial-farming community on the island of Kyushu, about 600 miles southwest of Tokyo. The city boasts 450,000 inhabitants, little notable industry, and is famous, or more precisely, noted for three attractions: Mt. Aso is situated about 25 miles to the north, and is an active volcano into which it is said despondent lovers and unsuccessful candidates for admission to the local universities have thrown themselves; Suizenji Park, a much praised Koen, is in the city, as is the castle, and both were constructed for a major daimyo at a time

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when travel was difficult and expensive and the notion of defense imperative. In the middle of the park is a small hill bearing an unmistakable similarity to Mt. Fuji. The castle, once in a state of disrepair, has now been restored and sits upon a bluff overlooking the city. Although Kumamoto is visited by the inveterate Japanese tourist, relatively few foreigners visit the city, owing perhaps to its great distance from Tokyo and the presence of other cities and regions better known and more attractive to the time-limited traveler. There exist a small number of foreigners living in the city, including Germans, Danish, Americans, and an Australian. Most are missionaries or hold church-affiliated positions; some teach in the local parochial schools; a few have established missions; and two are connected with the local home for children and the aged. At least two non-missionaries, who live elsewhere, visit the city regularly to teach at local universities, of which there are three. The British Council, which assigns teachers and lecturers to a number of universities in Japan, has so far ignored Kumamoto, but until recently there was a Fulbright lecturer assigned to Kumamoto "University, the national and only public university in Kumamoto. When the Fulbright program was cut back, Kumamoto was among those to lose the support of the Fulbright Commission. English language courses and classes in American literature were taught by part-time instructors. Last year, to alleviate the shortage of foreign teachers, the Monbusho (Japanese Ministry of Education) funded a professorship, to be held by an Americah scholar from abroad. "It's good to see your corpulent belly again" ( f r o m student

paper)

The educational establishment in Kumamoto, like that of most other communities in Japan, must follow national educational policy as set forth by the Ministry of Education: all middle school students and most senior high school students shall study a foreign language; for a variety of reasons, English has been that language for 99 per cent of the students in Japan. As a matter of statistics, approximately 99 per cent of the middle school students begin their study of English in the 7th year, 70 per cent of the high school students continue this study, and 20 per cent of those who attend college enroll in English languages courses. Local school establishments, at least outwardly, follow the guidelines of the Monbusho, and the Monbusho has decreed that: 1. All students at the beginning of their middle school years shall be familiarized with the phonology of a foreign language: the basic language skills to be taught are hearing and speaking. Two courses are available to the beginning language student, depending upon his future plans, whether he wants to enter a university or whether his high school education is terminal.

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If he elects English course A, the student studies English for 105 hours a year, and at the end of three years of instruction he has accumulated 315 hours. English course B, usually taken by those who wish to sit for the university examinations, involves 175 hours of instruction per year. At the end of three years the student will have had 525 hours of instruction. 2. Students should also learn the "basic usage" of the language being taught, and should be able to read and write it. 3. Through the knowledge of a foreign language students should increase their awareness and come to understand a culture other than their own. No nation upon earth seemingly has expended as much in resources, time, energy, and enthusiasm in the attempt to become bilingual and bicultural as has Japan. Japan, a nation geographically isolated, its people ethnocentric and homogeneous, where innovation and change is not without extreme effort and where vertical relationships in human affairs enforce loyalty to one's superiors, to the corporation for which one works, to the State as well as to one's family, and whose ethnocentricity has occasionally led to periods of nationalistic excess, is a country where failure does not exist — except in its English language program. Students, even after instruction in the language from 6 to 10 years, still cannot comprehend or compose more than the simplest English sentence and cannot read, write, or speak with any and kind of fluency. Observations of this failure stem from both Japanese and American sources. Charles Haynes, an American professor and linguist, spent two years in Japan teaching English, consulting with prefectural boards of education, advising private non-profit foundations in the teaching of English concerning the direction that English language instruction, in his opinion, should follow. He says that what is really shocking about the program in Japan is not that "it has simply failed to produce English speakers but that it has failed so spectacularly, and this in a country that has hardly known the meaning of the word failure since 1945." 2 One of the largest and most influential Japanese dailies, the Mainichi Shimbun, in commenting upon language programs and specifically how English is taught in Japan, pointed out that the number of those who after many years of instruction can "satisfactorily read, write, or speak is, so to speak, as few as the stars that can be seen in the morning sky." 3 In Kumamoto, as elsewhere, the aim is to teach English to every student. Perhaps the efforts to teach a language correspond to the Meiji ideal of providing a liberal education for every citizen and not merely for a cultured and moneyed elite, as one former Fulbrighter seems to believe: "Any program this massive leaves no question that its goal is not merely to prepare a trained elite to carry out the necessary foreign business of the nation, since Japanese is sufficient for virtually all the internal business of

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the country and English is ad ways and only a foreign language there. The foreign language curriculum in the schools is so prominent that it forces one to conclude that its intentions and goals are really those of mass liberal education. Nothing less seems sufficient to justify the scope of the efforts being made." 4 The language situation in Kumamoto, however, a city in a sense largely untouched by the Meiji Restoration, contrasts sharply with that in the more cormopolitan, commercial, and tourist regions of Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, where there is, at least, a practical reason for learning English and where there is a sizable English-speaking contingent, many of whom are engaged in commercial enterprises. Even these areas contrast with other areas in Asia, especially with parts of Southeast Asia, where trade and tourism are important livelihoods. Hong Kong, for instance, is multilingual. Hotel clerks and shop clerks, those with whom the tourist would most likely come into contact, speak at least three languages: Chinese (usually Cantonese and/or Mandarin), English, and Japanese. Although Hong Kong is British, the region is 99 per cent Chinese. The clerks and shop owners are not totally bilingual — they know only the part of the language useful for transactions. It is a commercial dialect which they speak and involves answering such set questions as "How much is that? ", "How old is it? ", "Is that discounted?", "Where can I buy some post cards? ", and so on. Questions, which do not directly pertain to commercial matters, would likely result in bewilderment. The ability of some Hong Kong high school graduates to speak and write fluent English presents us with yet another example of English teaching in Asia and one that we can contrast to English teaching practices in Japan. This ability to use the language is not surprising when we examine how English is taught and under what circumstances it is employed to instruct. In many schools English is taught as the first language (instruction in all subjects is carried on in English), Chinese is taught sis a second language. Very few schools in Japan can provide the ideal language learning situations which are offered in Hong Kong. Yet English, as in the rest of Southeast Asia, has two practical uses in Japan. First, since Japan is increasing its commerce with English speaking nations, or with nationals who speak English, English will assume a role of a lingua franca, as it has already in some parts of the world. The second reason for learning English — uniquely Japanese — is that it "disciplines" the mind. In Japan and Southeast Asia, and increasingly in the United States as witnessed by the fact that students have been successful at certain institutions in eliminating the foreign language requirement, language instruction is a highly charged social and political matter. Any effort to change or to reform an already existing program is met by resistance. Richard B. Noss in his paper "Politics and Language Policy in Southeast

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Asia," points to efforts in Southeast Asis " t o defer English teaching or make it more selective." These efforts have been "derided as being 'undemocratic,' even by people who have no hope of sending their children as far as the university." Yet, he asks, "setting aside a handful of diplomats, businessmen, journalists, and scholars, how does it (external communication) relate to the masses of people in terms of official, educational, or general policy? Only in countries like Singapore or Laos are sizeable percentages of the population likely to come in contact with foreigners." 6 If we substitute Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto for Singapore or Laos, we can see what transpires when official policy confronts local reality. In these areas there is a need for English compared with little need in conservative areas in Japan, where a sizeable portion of the population will never have an opportunity to talk with foreigners, and many will never leave the prefecture, much less the village or city, of their birth. " A s there's no skinship between human beings, lots of mental diseases happen" ( f r o m a student paper)

The Japanese educational establishment has received much unrequited criticism of its policies and goals and has attempted, from time to time, to revise its language curriculum, though very little change has or is currently taking place. Even with the popularity of linguistics in Japan — seminars are held yearly where important and influential linguists, usually of the generative cast, including Noam Chomsky, John Robert Ross, James McCawley, and Paul Kiparsky, have been invited to present and discuss current crucial issues in linguistic theory — teaching goes on as before. Linguistics has always held a fascination for Japanese scholars, especially in the post-war years, and there have been many attempts to apply the insights of theoretical linguistics to the teaching of English, with little apparent success. The "linguistic method" of teaching languages, so called because it derived from efforts of linguists during the war to teach languages to armed service personnel, became popular in Japan when it was discovered that the grammar-translation method of teaching was incapable of instilling the language skills which the Ministry believes to be so important. Here we can also find the perennial search for a better method to teach languages. It is usual, especially in Japan, to fault either the method or the teacher for the inability to produce language users; and we had in the post-war years the attempt to replace a long revered tradition with the new. The linguists who formulated the guidelines under which languages were to be taught were structural linguists, anti-mentalist in orientation, and closely followed the behavioristic principles of Leonard Bloomfield. These linguists characterized language as primarily spoken and writing as an imperfect representation of the spoken language. Language, to them, was a series of habits which could

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be conditioned and reinforced in the modern classroom setting. Prominent l i n g u i s t s were i n v i t e d t o J a p a n t o introduce the new order. Language-teaching organizations (with acronyms like ELEC and COLDT) popularized and encouraged the new way of teaching English. A new technology, to go along with the new linguistics, evolved — with textbooks which emphasized the spoken word, language laboratories where students could practice their language skills. The Fulbright-Hays Act supported the effort by providing opportunities for American linguists and teaching specialists to lecture and give demonstrations. But the image of the new remained clouded with the reality of the old. Even though teachers, a few administrators, and some school boards subscribed to the new principles, the audio-lingual method failed just as miserably as had the grammar-translation a p p r o a c h of old. Despite intensive pattern practice, mimicry and memorization exercises, and substitution drills, students still could not carry on conversations in English. Yet the Japanese continued to believe that either teacher or the method was at fault, so as a result continue programs — such as the Intensive Course in English, partially funded by the Kumamoto Prefectural Board of Education — which seek to develop the competence of teachers to use the language and to apply still newer theories of linguistics, principally generative-transformational, to the teaching of English. A series of textbooks just prepared and introduced by COMET (Council of Modern English Training), written exclusively for the Japanese, reflects the linguistic trends and biases of the post-war era. The Comet staff found English Pattern Practices by Robert Lado and Charles C. Fries, two of the most competent and renowned linguists of the Bloomfieldian school, as the "most suitable" model to base its texts upon. In its manuals to the teacher and student, Comet rehearses a few of the major pitfalls of English language learning and instruction, citing the all too often heard plaint that "Many Japanese students had studied English conversation for years, yet could not carry on even the most elementary conversation in English." The principles upon which the Comet -staff predicates its texts follow the familiar audio-lingual tradition: drill, or better yet, mass drill is the touchstone of their method. "Intensive mass drill, in which all students in the class practice SPEAKING correct English sentences over and over loudly and quickly in unison (without reading or analysis) is the most effective method of developing correct English speech habits — it is the quickest way to learn to speak English well." Mass drill is necessary, so the Council says, because like practicing bowling, golf, or playing a musical instrument, it develops proficience. Practice, the Council says, makes perfect. "Through continual practice English speech patterns become habitual — the student will be able to use them instinctively. He has practiced correct patterns, and he will speak using correct patterns." After these patterns are learned, it is but an easy

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step to employ these patterns in conversations; as "surprising few patterns are needed for most ordinary conversations. If we know one or two hundred of the most common English patterns, and have suitable vocabulary, we can carry on ordinary conversations about a wide variety of subjects." 6 Simple enough, yet recent research in psycholinguistics, particularly in first and second language acquisition, would tend to contradict the tenets of language learning upon which Comet bases its entire series. A common trap, it seems, is that of predicting a theory of learning upon a theory of language which may be changing or in a state of flux from year to year. The Japanese, as well as others in the language teaching business, would do well to consider Noam Chomsky's warning: Chomsky is "rather skeptical about the s i g n i f i c a n c e , for the teaching of languages, of such insights and understandings as have been attained in linguistics and psychology." "It is difficult to believe," he goes on to say, "that either linguistics or psychology has achieved a level of theoretical understanding that might enable it to support a 'technology' of language teaching." He also points out that "the willingness to rely on 'experts' is a frightening aspect of contemporary political and social life. Teachers, in particular, have a responsibility to make sure that ideas and proposals are evaluated on their merits, and not passively accepted on grounds of authority, real or presumed. The field of language teaching is no exception. It is possible — even likely — that principles of psychology and linguistics, and research in these disciplines, may supply insights useful to the language teacher. But this must be demonstrated, and cannot be presumed. It is the language teacher himself who must validate or refute any specific proposals. There is very little in psychology or linguistics that he can accept on faith." 7 "Yes, we have a wine list, but unfortunately we have no wine" (waiter's remark)

The widespread failure of public school language teaching in Kumamoto and elsewhere in Japan may reflect the unique characteristics of the Japanese psyche, the culture itself, the relative lack of freedom for innovation and change, and the rather short period of time that Japan has been open to the rest of the world. Let us examine the following circumstances to see what has happened to negate the stated, liberal and progressive, some would even call far-sighted goals of the Ministry. First, we might consider the objective of bilingualism. To Richard Noss "true bilingualism, even on an individual basis, is a relatively rare phenomenon in this world." 8 That bilingualism can be achieved in a classroom setting is questioned by Leon Jakobovits, who argues, "Second language learning as a classroom subject is one thing, and being a bilingual person is another thing, and these two things have often very little to do

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with one another." 9 Perhaps the main reason for the failure to teach even a modicum of language use in Kumamoto is the city itself. There is very little reason for teaching the spoken language in Kumamoto. It makes more sense for students to leam the written language, to be able to read well, as a "window on the West", an objective which can then merge with another of language instruction, that of cultural assimilation. Yet even here Kumamoto fails. No window upon a culture is provided by the uniform standardized texts — which must be approved by the Ministry — according to John Brownell's now classic report on the teaching of English in Japan. 1 0 Second, one of the chief causes for the failure of English language instruction is "the over-powering fear, by everyone concerned with high school education, of the college entrance examination." 1 1 The examinations for high school and college forces the system to teach "translation" English. The June 4, 1971 Mainichi editorial cites the opinion that "students may be studying English, all right, but what they are really doing is studying 'examination English' — English just to pass entrance examinations. They are not studying the language in the real sense. Because it is 'examination English', it is unreasonably difficult and complicated. And once the examination is over, most is completely forgotten. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the English taught is not real English but 'test English.' The teachers, too, are 'test teachers'." Here, in selection of students for advanced education, we have a paradox: image is divorced from reality. The Monbusho imposes the official goals of English language teaching, while the high schools and the universities control the entrance examinations. What the Monbusho states is to be taught is in fact not taught; any attempt, moreover, to teach the skills of reading, writing, or speaking is patently unfair to the college-bound student, who has to pass an entrance examination if he wishes to enter the establishment. It would appear at first grance that the universities are at fault for perpetuating such a system, yet the Monbusho shares much of the responsibility, as Professor Brosnahan attests; and he argues that the "Ministry emerges as the major obstacle to the attainment of its own official goals. The very size of its centralized operation discourages any change or innovation. It has changed on paper the goals of an old profession, expanding the profession's ranks enormously, but inevitably lowering its general competence. It has trained only about half of the teachers who enter the system annually, and in training them it has not equipped them in accordance with the official goals. Its control of texts and syllabuses has hindered rather than helped teachers. It has built language laboratories and left them without funds, staff, or sometimes even tapes. F i n a l l y , it has r e s i s t e d over the years the relatively consistent r e c o m m e n d a t i o n s f o r i m p r o v e m e n t proposed by individuals and organizations professionally interested in improving language teaching in

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Japan. It has consistently failed to practice what it preaches or to carry out or facilitate the carrying out of its own official goals, and it has tolerated such a high rate of failure to accomplish its goals for so long a time that it brings more and more frequently into question the sincerity of its committment to those goals." 1 2 "But we are pure Japanese" (a teacher's

comment)

Other causes of the failure of English teaching in Japan are perhaps also due to attributes uniquely Japanese. The inward nature of the Japanese, the periods of ethnocentricity, ultra-nationalism, and xenophobia all augur against the teaching of English. It may very well be that the Japanese do not want to learn English, or for that matter, any foreign language, as the bilingual and those having spent any time abroad are "deviant" in the Japanese eye, not to be entirely trusted. In his book, Japan: Images and Realities, Richard Halloran characterizes the feeling toward the foreign service and those who, by their choice of career, must spend long periods of t h e i r lives abroad. Such persons after their long service may be " c o n t a m i n a t e d " and no longer "pure" Japanese. And, too, this ethnocentricity contributes to the implied wish for others to learn Japanese rather than for the Japanese to learn English. Further, the Japanese believe that they have little ability to learn foreign languages. Perhaps the Monbusho has recognized, though belatedly, the fallacy of encouraging instruction in foreign languages for those who already have an inherent distrust of the foreign (the Japanese fear that if fluency in a foreign l a n g u a g e is e n c o u r a g e d , t h e n t h e i r own language will become "mongrelized"). This year the Ministry will reduce by 25 per cent the amount of support that it will give to the teaching of foreign languages. It thus appears that since English instruction is inept, then one way out of this dilemma is to reduce the amount of time devoted to "ineptness." Perhaps this is not the last reduction we shall see in the foreign language budget. The classroom itself is another source of failure of language instruction: not only is instruction mostly carried on in Japanese, but the student, especially the humble and dignified male, sits silent. And as language is "noise", the constraints upon the Japanese student discourages any practice and experimentation with the set of noises which comprise a foreign language. Brownell points out that the student values "not speaking even to the extent of leaving the most fundamental things unspoken, accessible only by intuition." 1 3 One important factor inhibiting students as well as teachers is that all are "error conscious", afraid of making mistakes. While the Japanese educational system makes allowances for errors in such academic subjects as

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373

mathematics, it is somehow unforgiveable to make errors when constructing sentences, ignoring the fact that language users do make errors when using language. The requirement that Japanese learners must use only well-formed sentences hinders rather than encourages the acquisition of language. "The vomit of man's sexual appetite is protected socially" (student paper)

With the spectacular failure of Japanese language-teaching policy, it seems wise for the Japanese to re-think and re-examine the goals of instruction. Albert Marckwardt suggests that perhaps in times past too much emphasis was placed upon the teaching of the spoken language, one natural result of the linguistics of the 1950's: "At one time," he says, "we taught languages as if they were only to be read and that no one would speak them. Then we turned about and acted as if they were only to be spoken and heard, and that no one would ever read them." 14 Some societies, especially those which are isolated geographically from foreign speaking areas, must realize that bilingualism is not an educational goal to be realized by every student, that even the ability to read with fluency may be more important in those areas where there is little, if no, opportunity to use the spoken language, that there is an aptitude for language learning, suggesting that some students will learn faster than others, and that grammar and translation are not requisites for learning a language. Motivation for learning a second language should also be re-appraised, as no longer may one motivation, however far-sighted, serve for all. The practical worth of second language learning has been emphasized in the past: for instance, Edwin O. Reischauer, former Ambassador to Japan, and much respected and admired by the Japanese, has said, "English is the world language as of the present moment. There axe many countries, much less important in world trade, much less advanced in the process of modernization than Japan, which seem to have a much larger voice, simply because they have better mastery of this tool of communication, the English language."15 His position is emphasized in the Comet publications: "When you have mastered spoken English, you will have accomplished a feat that you can be justly proud of. English is the most useful language in the world. The ability to speak English well offers many rewards. It may help you in your job. It may lead to better job opportunities, promotions, and opportunities to travel abroad." 16 Kumamoto may realize with time that there are more cogent reasons than bilingualism — the practical and useful — for learning languages, which may appeal to the student and teacher who view language as an indispensable component of a liberal education. Marckwardt, among others, has argued that "The case for language instruction as an important, one might almost

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say an indispensible element in a liberal education has not changed. Language is still a uniquely human activity." The person who knows no language other than his own "operates under constraints which limits his experience, and his understanding and appreciation of that experience." 1 7 "I like my older sister best. Her name is Kyoko and she is 24 years old. She is loved by all the people that made an intimate intercourse with her and I assure you she is unconscious of her power of making the person's heart pleasurable, but it is a fact that she has that power" (student paper)

What are the alternatives to be explored and considered by the Kumamoto School District if it decides that English should remain in the curriculum — even though the Ministry may reduce its support? One fact stands out from all the rest: the goals of language teaching are at the same time too ambitious and too inadequate. Leon Jakobovits, in a paper presented to a convention of foreign language teachers in the United States, addresses himself rather boldly and honestly to the question of language teaching in the classroom. He says that "bilingualism cannot as a rule be achieved in the FL classroom," a premise that is important to the classrooms in the States and in Japan as well. Jakobovits argues that FL learning cannot o f t e n o c c u r in the artificial environment of the classroom as a "communicative need" does not exist and, when discussion becomes deep or abstract, when there is a serious need to explicate a difficult language or cultural feature, the class relapses into English. "Developing communicative competence in a language requires," he insists, "conditions in which communicative needs exist. One can put this in a slightly different way which might be more useful: the degree of communicative competence acquired by an individual is proportional to the extent of his communicative needs." 1 8 Obviously, no need is felt in the English classroom in Kumamoto — even if the teacher is a competent speaker of the language. Japanese is the medium of instruction and so it will remain. There are no borders, as in Europe, when another language would be immediately useful or necessary. And the increment of courses one takes in English never expands beyond the singular. Here then is where schools in parts of Southeast Asia and in the United States have an important advantage over schools in Japan. Either the medium of instruction for all courses is a foreign language, as, for example, in Hong Kong, or classes in a language increase as a student moves toward graduation, as is the case in American universities. If we assume, as we must, that the Japanese student possesses the ability to become competent in a foreign language, then we must carefully examine why such emphasis is placed on the teaching of a foreign language and why so few successful results occur. The time spent on instruction is too

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little, the admiration for and stimulation of curiousity about the language of a foreign culture too rare, and the rewards in terms of value realized by a foreign language learner too scarce. When considered within the framework of ethnocentricity and culture, all augur against the learning of any language which is covertly felt to be of an inferior culture.

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NOTES 1

Leonard Newmark, "Grammatical Theory and the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language," Newmark's article appears in Mark Lester, Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 217. 2 Haynes along with Leger Brosnahan wrote "English Language Teaching in Japan: Two Views," Exchange, Spring 1971, 84. 3 From a June 4, 1971 Mainichi editorial. 4 See Note 2, Brosnahan, 73. 5 Language Sciences No. 16., August 1971, 28-29. 6 Comet, Manual for English Students and Manual for English Teachers, Council of Modern English Training, 1970. 7 Noam Chomsky's remarks appear in "Linguistic Theory" in Lester, Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar, 52-55. 8 Noss, Language Sciences, No. 16, August 1971, 28. 9 "The Psychological Bases of Second Language Learning," Language Sciences, February 1971, 22. 10 J o h n A. Brownell, Japan's Second Language, subtitled, A Critical Study of the English Language Program in the Japanese Secondary Schools in the I960's. National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign, Illinois, 1967. 11 Sargent Smith, "An Evaluation of High School English Language Education by College and University Students," Bulletin of the Japanese Association of College English Teachers, 1970, 78. 12 P. 76. 13 P. 20. 14 " A Note to the Language Teaching Profession," Linguistic Reporter, Spring 1971, 8. 15 From a Speech Addressed to the 11th Annual Conference of the National Federation of the English Teacher's Organization in Tokyo, 1961. 16 P. 38. 17 P . 9.

IX

Language and Education

MULTILINGUALISM IN NIGERIAN EDUCATION C.M.B. Brann

It is not possible at the present time to say precisely which languages in Nigeria are spoken by whom in diglossia, and which as third or fourth languages. It has been seen that the mother tongue can be one of four types: a dialect of a larger group of languages like Ibani (dialect of Ijo); a vernacular not yet fully standardized, like Shuwa Arabic, Pidgin or Abua; a fully standardized vernacular like Efik or Idoma; or it can be English, as in the case of some Nigerian children of mixed ethnic parentage. Or, taking the criteria of quantity, the tongue can belong to one of six categories of Nigerian languages. Individual multilingualism will depend on the monoglossia or diglossia of the child's home, the monodemoglossia or didemoglossia of his wider community, the monopaidoglossia or dipaidoglossia of his school. What the actual position in this regard is, the object of empirical enquiry which, in view of the large population, can at best be made on a sample basis. For the moment we will have to content ourselves with a logical typology. Half of the Nigerian population are speakers of one of the three major languages and could therefore theoretically remain unilingual, were it not for schooling in English. How many of these achieve bilingualism in one or other variety of Nigerian English is open to investigation. The other half of the population, even though they may be increasingly schooled in their own mother tongue, are bound to learn one or other of the Nigerian contact languages, or dominant languages of the nearest large ethnic community, as well as English. If in the north we add Arabic to the languages normally to be learnt by a young pupil, then we have a state of triglossia or tetraglossia which need not be a special burden, as each language will have its own domain. For this reason it would seem difficult to limit the optimum to two-and-a-half languages per person, as put forward by A. Dil (1971). Nor are psycho-linguists unanimous

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380

as to the dangers or advantages of multilingualism in the overall educational process. In Nigeria there are two main views on language education, one holding that thorough cognition is best achieved in mother-tongue unilingualism, the other that since bilingualism is the educational goal of the country, it might as well be brought about in the 'mollia tempora fandi': this is the school of 'straight for English'. Added to this exoglossic bilingualism, there is a strong current of opinion that every Nigerian should know another (major) Nigerian language (NERC 1972). As a m o d e l of variations in the development of individual multilingualism, the present sliding scale of second language inception has been devised from which cases may be drawn for the subsequent models of formal language education. Sliding Scale for Multilingual Language Learning No.

Home (M.T.)

Community

School 1

School 2

1.

LI (Unilingual)

LI unioglot

LI

LI

2.

LI

LI

LI

L2

3.

LI

LI

L2

L2

4.

LI

L2

L2

L2

5.

LI

LI

L2

L3

6.

LI

L2

L2

L3

7.

LI

L2

L3

L3

8.

LI

L2

3

L4

9.

Ll/2 bilingual

L2

L2

L2

10.

Ll/2

L2

L2

L3

11.

Ll/2

L2

L3

L3

12.

Ll/2

L3

L3

L3

13.

Ll/2

L3

L3

L4 dipaidoglossia

14.

Ll/2

L3

L4 dipaidoglossia

L4

15.

LI

Ll/2 diglossia

L2

L2

16.

LI

L2

L3

381

NIGERIAN EDUCATION

17. 18.

LI LI

19.

LI

20.

LI

21.

LI

22.

LI

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

MEXICAN-AMERICAN BILINGUALISM

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