The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-Fifth Birthday 9783110859010, 9783110128062

Citation preview

The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought

The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-Fifth Birthday Edited by Robert L. Cooper Bernard Spolsky

1991 Mouton de Gruyter Berlin • New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication

Data

The Influence of language on culture and thought / essays in honor of Joshua A. Fishman's sixty-fifth birthday / edited by Robert L. Cooper, Bernard Spolsky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89925-802-6 (alk. paper) 1. Language and culture. 2. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I. Fishman, Joshua A. II. Cooper, Robert Leon, 1931 — III. Spolsky, Bernard. P35.I47 1991 306.4'4 —dc20 91-440 CIP

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication

Data

The influence of language on culture and thought : essays in honor of Joshua A. Fishman's sixty-fifth birthday / ed. by Robert L. Cooper ; Bernard Spolsky. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1991 ISBN 3-11-012806-3 NE: Cooper, Robert L. [Hrsg.]; Fishman, Joshua A.: Festschrift

© Copyright 1991 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting: Satzpunkt, Braunschweig. Printing: Gerike G m b H , Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents

Introduction Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky

1

The wax and wane of Whorfian views I. M. Schlesinger

1

Linguistic relativity revisited John Macnamara

45

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis Vera John-Steiner

61

The "mother tongue" Einar Haugen

75

Linguacentrism and language history Nancy C. Dorian

85

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality G. Richard Tucker Integrating theory in the study of minority languages Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets Hebrew language vitalization within a general theory of second language learning Bernard Spolsky Language choice and the Halakhic speech act Lewis H. Glinert Individual and social in language change: Diachronic changes in politeness agreement in forms of address Charles A. Ferguson

101 113

137 157

183

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology Shirley Brice Heath Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God Robert L. Cooper The future of Chinese characters Florian Coulmas Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory compiled by Gella Schweid Fishman Index

Introduction Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky

Editors of a volume honoring a scholar as prolific and influential as Joshua Fishman face a difficult choice when inviting colleagues to contribute to it. If the editors invite all those whose work is relevant to any of the topics to which the scholar has contributed, they risk producing an unduly large, expensive, and diffuse book. Alternatively, if they confine the volume to a single topic, they can invite only a small number of contributors and thus they risk offending the many persons who would like to honor the scholar but whose work is not germane to the chosen area. The dilemma is particularly acute in Joshua Fishman's case because he has been a seminal thinker in not one but several fields of inquiry. We have chosen to limit this volume to a single area. The problem we have chosen is the influence of language on culture and cognition. This is a topic to which Joshua Fishman contributed as early as 1960 ("A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis") and to which he has returned many times, most recently perhaps in 1982 ("Whorfianism of the third kind: ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset"). Its fascination to him can be explained, perhaps, by the tension it generates between universalism and particularism. On the one hand, our common humanity implies universals in the relationships among language, society, and thought, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic universals, so to speak. All who are born without severe disabilities learn the languages of the communities into which they are born; all learn multiple codes or ways of speaking; the social roles and positions they occupy are reflected in their speech and writing, as are the social roles and positions of those whom they address; all are sensitive to the social meaning of linguistic variation; all use languages whose codes change inexorably, sometimes as the result of planning, sometimes spontaneously and unconsciously, but always as the outcome of social processes; and all speak languages whose structure and use are constrained by the possibilities of human cognition. If these statements are taken for granted today, we can thank Joshua Fishman for helping to make many of them so. On the other hand, if language structures and language use have universal properties, constrained by human cognition and social structure, they are nonetheless particular languages, each spoken in particular communities, each marked by its peculiar structural properties, and each the carrier of its own cultural and emotional freight. Particularity ought to make a difference. Our humanity, Joshua Fishman argues, is determined not only by what we share but also by what makes us unique. Our uniqueness is determined in part by membership in groups, each of which distinguishes us from those outside its boundaries. It is commitment to a

2

Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky

group, with its own patterns of believing, feeling, and acting, which connects us to the past and to the future, which makes possible intimacy and rootedness, and which helps give meaning to our lives. These culturally validated and selfaffirming behaviours include patterns of speaking, reading, and writing, not only standard languages but local vernaculars. Joshua Fishman's articles on behalf of "small" languages and "little" traditions are among the most eloquent writings in all of the social sciences. Although all our contributors wrote papers relevant to the influence of language on culture and cognition, they addressed a relatively large number of themes. The first three papers, by Schlesinger, Macnamara, and John-Steiner, focus on cognition. Schlesinger provides a historical sketch of the development of the notion, propounded for centuries and now associated with Whorf, that our perception of the world is determined by our language; he specifies the various theses included or implied by this notion; he explains changes in scholarly reactions to it; and he reviews a large number of studies which offer empirical support for it. He suggests that the notion that "languages differ in the thoughts they afford to us" constitutes a research program - a remarkably fruitful one - but not a falsifiable hypothesis. If Whorf emphasized linguistic and cognitive diversity, he also believed that there are universals in human cognition and in human languages. It is the search for commonalities which motivates the paper by Macnamara, who seeks notions of count nouns which transcend linguistic boundaries and which imply cognitive presuppositions for their learning. He proposes three rules for deciding which nouns are count nouns in any natural language, rules which depend on the semantic notions of individuation and identity, a position which draws "syntax and semantics closer together than has been popular in the last thirty years". Whereas Schlesinger discusses the effect of linguistic diversity on cognition, and Macnamara considers cognitive universals which constrain linguistic diversity, John-Steiner emphasizes not linguistic but cognitive diversity. Proposing a pluralistic approach to thinking, she denies the existence of a single, universal language of thought. Mental representation may be based not only on verbal language, she argues, but also on "abstract visual schemata, musical representations, or kinesthetic images", among other possibilities. While an individual may employ a dominant internal code, he or she may also use many other codes as well, sometimes in a coordinated fashion. In support of her argument that the internalization of socially elaborated representation is not confined to language, she brings examples from music, mathematics, and literature. Whereas the first three papers consider diversity and uniformity in linguistic or cognitive structures, the next five papers examine some of the sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic implications of languages in contact. Haugen's historical treatment of the notion "mother tongue" suggests that the term arose in a bilingual society in which the vernacular was viewed as the unlearned language of women

Introduction

3

and children, in contrast to Latin. Haugen follows the term from this unpromising beginning to the Reformation, when vernacular translations of the Scriptures converted the mother tongue into a holy language, and to the Romantic Movement, in which the mother tongue became "a concern of the heart". Mother, in short, "had been promoted from being a mere wet nurse to becoming the spokesman of God and finally a human being". Dorian's paper also examines language attitudes, in particular the ethnocentric claim by historical linguists that cultural inferiority explains the dearth of Celtic loanwords in Standard English. She attacks the credibility of this explanation by focusing on another instance of contact between a form of English and a form of Celtic - the junction, in Lowland Scotland, of Scots, a decendant of Northumbrian Old English, and Gaelic. Dorian notes that, from the second half of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, Scots was a prestigious speech form in Scotland, the language of law, literature, and parliamentary record. Yet, as her analysis of Robert Burns' poetry demonstrates, Scots was hospitable to Gaelic loanwords. Cultural inferiority, therefore, is an implausible explanation for the few Celtic loanwords in Standard English. She provides several far more sensible explanations for the paucity of Celtic loans in Standard English as well as a convincing explanation for the ethnocentric claims of language historians. Ethnocentrism, of course, is not confined to language historians, as the "English only" policy advocated by many Americans demonstrates. It was the proposal to declare English and only English to be the official language of the United States which motivated Tucker to write his paper as a "positive counterbalance". He describes an emerging innovative educational practice, "bilingual immersion", which, he argues, offers benefits not only to language-minority pupils but also to native speakers of English. These programs, which enroll both language-minority and native English speakers in the same classroom, use both a minority language and English as media of instruction and provide second-language instruction to each language group in the other group's language. His review of the recent research literature supports the assertion that participation in bilingual education programs is associated not only with positive cognitive development but also with positive cross-cultural attitudes. He concludes that such programs should lead to "a culturally rich, competent, and socially sensitive society, rather than a divisive and fragmented society as predicted by those who advocate 'English only'". While bilingual education programs may result in cognitive and social benefits, it may also help a community to maintain its language in the face of a powerful majority language. It is the survival or non-survival of minority languages for which Giles and his colleagues construct a model. Their discussion, which integrates empirical studies and theories in the social psychology of language, intergroup behavior, and intercultural communication, shows the complexity of the forces which constrain language maintenance, shift, spread, and decline. Among the most spectacular examples of language spread is the revitalization

4

Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky

of Hebrew, which Spolsky compares to efforts to revitalize Maori and Irish. He analyzes the unique circumstances that led to ideological commitment for and the practical feasibility of restoring not just the normal daily spoken use of Hebrew but also its vitality. When languages are in contact, bilinguals must choose which language to use, with whom, and when, to paraphrase Fishman's well-known formulation. Whether choices are made among languages or among registers of the same language, speakers and writers manipulate the elements of their verbal repertoire in conformity with pragmatic rules, i.e. rules of communicative appropriateness. Three papers, by Glinert, Ferguson, and Heath, consider the pragmatic context of language use. Glinert describes the attitudes of Jewish normative law (Halakhah) to language choice in the exercise of three sacred acts, marriage, vows and oaths, and the public reading ot the Scroll of Esther. Here the choice under consideration is that between Hebrew and other languages. He also examines the relation between the philosophy of language choice, as pronounced by the religious elite, and the actual fulfillment of these acts in the folk religion. His analysis employs a distinction between speech acts with a material effect, as in a declaration of marriage, and speech acts with no such effect, acts of worship. He shows that the "elaboration of this distinction brings with it notions such as felicitous communication, knowledge of a language, secular vs sacred language, substandard vs norm, dialect and Creole, artificial vs natural language, euphemism and distortion of language". Halakhah, in other words, demonstrates considerable sociolinguistic sophistication. Whereas Glinert considers speech acts, Ferguson examines another traditional area of sociolinguistic research, forms of address. Here he examines mismatches in politeness agreement for second-person pronouns in Persian and Portuguese and on the basis of this examination offers testable cross-language generalizations. He hypothesizes that the "stretching of a grammatical rule for pragmatic considerations" indicates a change in progress in grammatical form, social interaction, or both. His analysis provides a rare example of integrating findings from micro- and macro-level research. Heath provides another unusual example, here a combined sociohistorical and sociolinguistic study. Analyzing primary sources drawn from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American periodicals, books, and collections of "table-talk", Heath considers the relationships between conversation, the reading of literature, and the development of the literary essay in American society. She asks why it is that although Americans expressed a high opinion of women's speech, women rarely served as models of speaking or writing in the collections of literary essays which, by the early twentieth century, became standard tools in the teaching of English in higher education. Her essay is an exercise in cultural history, a contribution to our understanding of the development of American language ideology, "the integrated assertions, theories, and goals that attempt to guide collective sociopolitical beliefs and actions regarding language choices".

Introduction

5

In Heath's paper, we see an effort to relate spoken to written genres. In the last two papers, those by Cooper and Coulmas, we see a consideration of written rather than spoken forms. Cooper discusses the many new writing systems invented during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and notes that a large percentage of them are associated with divine revelation or inspiration. He asks why it is that some peoples want a script of their own, instead of adopting the writing system in use by surrounding peoples or by the dominant power, and why it is that so many of these unique systems are regarded by their users as gifts of God. The well-known relationship between culture, religion, and writing which he mentions is also noted by Coulmas, who considers the future of the Chinese characters. He argues that many commonly-held beliefs about the Chinese writing system are either inaccurate or incomplete: the facts are more complicated than the suppositions. He also argues that modem computer technology is more likely to promote the maintenance rather than the replacement of the system. Inasmuch as writing systems may serve as symbols of identity and subjects of emotional involvement, "predictions about changes in literary culture are risky". Thus declarations that the Chinese writing system will soon become a relic must be viewed as "merely conjectures". This brief review indicates the breadth of the themes considered by the contributors to this volume. We are reminded of Macnamara's comments that there "leaps from Whorf's pages something like a gardener's joy in the beauty and variety of nature. The human mind refuses to be confined to a single expressive system and produces an astonishing multiplicity of linguistic forms." Similarly, our contributors have refused to be confined to a single theme, and we, the gardeners of this volume, are delighted by the variety which they have displayed. Just as linguistic, cognitive, and social structures represent both uniformity and diversity, so the contributions to this volume are both uniform and diverse: they all are relevant to the problem we have chosen, the influence of language on culture and cognition, but their relevance stems from different methodological orientations and theoretical perspectives. The diverse contributors are additionally united in dedicating this book to Joshua Fishman, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, with admiration, appreciation, and affection.

The wax and wane of Whorfian views / . M.

Schlesinger

1. Introduction Few beliefs are more cherished and of greater concern to us than the belief that our thoughts are free. Though our actions may be largely constrained by the conventions and norms of society, we can always distance ourselves from these, we would like to believe, and are able to pursue any humanly possible line of reasoning. This conviction has been forcefully attacked by Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), who remonstrated that the patterns of the language we speak largely determine the patterns of our thought processes and, ultimately, of our culture. Whorf's arguments cut to the quick. Fishman (1980: 26) regards Whorf as comparable in some ways to the "great debunkers" - Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Whorf's views sparked much interest, and in the early nineteen fifties a spate of experimental research was carried out bearing on his claims. More recently some disillusionment appears to have set in; as Lakoff (1987: 304) observes, " . . . most 'responsible' scholars have steered clear of relativism. It has become a bête noir, identified with scholarly irresponsibility, fuzzy thinking, lack of rigor, and even immorality". Changing attitudes toward Whorf's views seem to have been determined not so much by the results of empirical research but largely by general philosophical conceptions. Whorf claimed that our view of the world is determined by language, and by a curious irony the evaluation of his views on language has been determined largely by the respective writer's world view. In this respect, too, there there seems to be a parallel with Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. Like other great "debunkers", Whorf has predecessors. In fact, none of his central ideas were new with him. The first section sketches the historical development of the views now associated with Whorf's name. Then follows a conceptual analysis of the Whorfian thesis (Section 2) and an examination of the reactions to it by the community of scholars (Section 3). Next I review the empirical evidence for the thesis (Section 4). The final section raises the question of whether Whorfianism is on the wane and discusses the methodological status of the Whorfian thesis.

8

I. M. Schlesinger

2. Historical development Who are Whorf's spiritual ancestors? I propose that Whorf's thesis reflects a confluence of three strands of thought, which may be formulated in the form of three theses: Thesis 1. Thesis 2. Thesis 3.

All thinking goes on in language. Language may distort thinking. Languages differ in the thoughts they afford to us.

Theses 2 and 3 are each stronger than the one preceding it; Thesis 1, while not actually presupposed by Thesis 2, makes the latter seem more plausible; and similarly for Theses 2 and 3. Thesis 3 is further analyzed in Section 2.2, below. Let us now plot the historical development of each of these claims. 2.1. The role of language in thought Language as the garment of thought Various approaches are possible to the issue of the role of language in thinking. The commonsense view seems to be that the function of language is communication; language expresses thoughts that are already there prior to their expression. This view can ultimately be traced to Aristotle (De Interpretatione 16a), for whom "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. . . . the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all . . . " (McKeon 1968: 40). This conception of language was shared by thinkers of the Enlightenment: Language was regarded to be the creation of Reason; its only function was held to be expression of thought and its communication (R. L. Brown 1967: 54, passim). In the 19th century this view was expressed by philologists like Whitney (1875: 30), who saw in language "the means of expression of thought . . . An acquired language is something imposed from without upon the methods and results of mental action. . . . While working by it [i.e., language], the mind also works under it, shifting and adapting, changing and improving its classifications, working in new knowledge and better insight." Language, in short, is the garment of thought. Language as the instrument of thought "But what", asks Sapir (1921: 15), "if language is not so much a garment as a prepared road or groove?". A variant of this view has been formulated above as Thesis 1.

All thinking goes on in language.

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

9

This thesis has been argued for since the earliest days of philosophy. Plato remarks in his Sophist, 263-264: "Are not thought and speech the same, with this exception that what is called thought is the unuttered conversation of the soul?" (Jowett's edition, volume 5, p. 400; cf. also Philebus, 38-39; Theaitetos, 189-190; Cratylus, 388.) This is also the view of the Nominalist school of thought, which regards all concepts - "general ideas", as they were called - as having no other reality than that of the names given to them. Thus, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his Leviathan (1651), Part 1, section 4, states that there is "nothing in the world universal but names" (p. 21) and without names no general statements can be made (pp. 2 1 22 of Molesworth's, 1839, edition). Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) went beyond the Nominalists: "Nous ne pensons qu'avec les mots" (quoted by Miiller, 1899: 76). For Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) language is an aid in thinking, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose views on language will be discussed further on (Section 2.3), sees in language the "thought forming organ". The German writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), in an article entitled "On the gradual creation of thoughts by speaking" (1895), presents a vivid description of how thoughts take shape in the course of expressing them, and concludes: "l'idée vient en parlant" (Theo Herrmann, personal communication). The "identity" view of language and thought was embraced by the philologist Friedrich Max Miiller, who writes about "the impossibility of thought existing apart from language", these being "two names of the same thing under two aspects", since thinking is just "speaking without voice" (Muller 1899: 84-85), and in this century by Fritz Mauthner (1901-2; see Weiler, 1970, for a discussion of Mauthner's views on language). The writings of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1959; first published posthumously in 1915) became very influential in the twentieth century. On the role of language in thought he writes: "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language." 1 The linguist Sapir (1921: 15) suggests that "language is an instrument originally put to uses lower than the conceptual plane and . . . thought arises as a refined interpretation of its content. The product grows, in other words, with the i n s t r u m e n t . . . ." Today the opinion is widespread that not only conceptual activity - as the Nominalists argued - but all cognitive activity is linguistic. This is largely due to the work of philosophers like Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961/1921, section 5.6: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"; cf. also Wittgenstein, 1953, para. 373), and it jibes with the approach of psychologists like Vygotsky (1962: 125): "[T]hought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them."

10

I. M. Schlesinger

Prelinguistic thinking Thesis 1 may be objected to on the ground that prelinguistic infants and animals are capable of some cognitive activity. Moreover, to acquire the native language, the child must be capable of exercising certain cognitive activities (distinguishing, generalizing, etc.). This much is presupposed by any theory of language learning. Clearly, these cognitve activities cannot be performed in a linguistic medium. There is a large gap, however, between the levels of thinking attained by animals and small infants and that of adult humans capable of speech. It appears therefore that Thesis 1 needs to be modified: It should be taken to apply only to higher levels of thinking attained by adults. In this connection it is of interest to note that in the nineteenth century there were those who held that there can be at least primitive forms of thought ("Vorformen") without language (Kainz 1954). The controversy today The issue of the role of language in thought is being debated to this day, as evidenced by a recent symposium in Acta Psychologica (Vol. 10, nos 1-2). Among philosophers, Vendler (1977) presents arguments against the Platonic view. 2 Much of the controversy is due to different definitions being employed of language, on the one hand, and of thought on the other. As pointed out by Langacker (1976), the more widely you define language and the more narrowly you define thought, the easier it is to defend the identity thesis. Further, it should be appreciated that between the "dualistic" view of the Enlightenment that thinking precedes language, and the identity thesis claiming that all thinking is in language, there is a place for various brands of middle-of-the-road views, which recognize, besides linguistic thinking, other kinds of thinking that are not carried out in the linguistic medium. 2.2. The relation of language to knowledge and truth Once the central place of language in thinking is recognized, one is brought up against the question of whether the influence of language is always beneficial. The possibility suggests itself that language may sometimes be a hindrance to clear, correct thinking. As noted by Bertrand Russell in a paper first published in 192425, "A word is applied at first to things which are more or less similar, without any reflection as to whether they have any point of identity. But when once usage has fixed the objects to which the word is to be applied, common sense is influenced by the existence of the word, and tends to suppose that one word must stand for one o b j e c t . . . " (Russell 1956: 331). Urban (1939: ch. 1) distinguishes between periods when there was a high valuation of language as revealing truth and those of low evaluation. A "high" evalua-

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

11

tion (with which Urban concurs) is to be found in Descartes and other Rationalists, and is often associated with the idea of a Universal Language which can express each and every thought (see Cassirer 1953: 127-132 on universal language). This view of language contrasts with that of thinkers of the 17th and 18th century, who stressed the danger of use of words. Earlier we have formulated this view as Thesis 2. Language may distort thinking. Thus, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his Leviathan, Part 1, section 4, observes that since words are important in memory and thinking, there lurks the danger of their abuse: " . . . as men abound in copiousness of language, so they become more wise, or mad than ordinary . . . " (p. 25 of Molesworth's, 1839, edition). Similar caution is expressed by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Essay on Human Understanding (Locke, 1894/1690, Book III, ch. x, sections 14-16, 22), and by George Berkeley (1685-1753), who even makes the suggestion (not easy, perhaps even impossible, to comply with) that to avoid error one ought to turn to "ideas divested from words" (Berkeley 1937; section 21). An especially pregnant formulation is due to the German writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (17421799): "Our false philosophy is incorporated in the whole of language; we cannot reason without, so to speak, reasoning wrongly. We don't realize that to speak, no matter about what, is to philosophize" (quoted in Black 1968: 71). Much of contemporary philosophy is in agreement with this bleak view of the role of language in the attainment of knowledge. In fact, much of contemporary philosophy is devoted to revealing the ways in which language misleads us. As Waisman (1952: 2) puts it: " . . . philosophy begins with distrusting language". 2.3. The relation between culture and language Any comparison of languages reveals differences not only in the phonological material employed in expression but also in the way each language expresses a given state of affairs. If Thesis 1 and Thesis 2 are correct and language is indeed the medium of thought and may affect it, the conclusion seems to be forced upon us that speakers of different languages have different ways of thinking. This is the third thesis proposed above: Thesis 3. Languages differ in the thoughts they afford to us. Note that Thesis 3 refers to language as system, whereas Theses 1 and 2 (discussed in Sections 2.1 and 2.2) pertain to the use of language. Thesis 3 was promulgated by Whorf, who called it the "principle of relativity". Whorf did not invent this principle; centuries before him similar views were voiced, with greater or lesser explicitness.

12

I. M. Schlesinger

Early statements The first writer, to my knowledge, to perceive a relation between linguistic and cultural differences was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). In De dignitate et arguments scientiarum (Book 6, ch. 1) Bacon observes that there is a correlation between a language and the world view of its speakers. By comparing languages one may obtain "signs of no small value ... concerning the dispositions and manner of peoples and nations drawn from their languages". Bacon illustrates this comment with a handful of examples, but does not develop it any further. In particular, he neglects to deal with the question of what influences what: Does language affect the culture of a people, as stated in Thesis 3 and as Whorf would argue later on, or is language itself merely the creation of the culture? The first scholar to relate to this question is John Locke (1632-1704), who conceived of language as the determining factor. In his Essay concerning human understanding we already find isolated remarks pertaining to the differential influences of languages (Locke, 1894/1690, especially in Book III, v, 8 and 11; but see also Book II), e.g.: "Where languages have failed to give correlative names there the relation is not always so easily taken notice o f ' (II, xxv, 2). 3 The eighteenth century The view that a language is a formative factor in the culture of its speakers came into its own in the 18th century. Two writers deserve special notice: Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). This was the period of the Enlightenment, and to appreciate the novelty of the views expressed by these two scholars, one has to look at them against the background of the prevailing climate of opinion. The "ruling assumption" of the Enlightenment was "that Reason - usually conceived as summed up in the knowlege of a few simple and self-evident truths - is the same in all men and equally possessed by all; . . . and therefore that universal and equal intelligibility, universal acceptability, and even universal familiarity ... constitute the decisive criterion of validity or of worth ..." (Lovejoy 1936: 288-289). This led to a tendency "to the simplification and to the standardization of thought and life" (1936: 292) and to "... the struggle to realize this supposed purpose of nature, the general attack upon the difference of men and their opinions and valuations and institutions ..." (1936: 292-293). Condillac (1746; English transl. 1756, part ii) in his chapter "Of the character of language" treats of the influence of language on the thought processes of the individual and on national character: " . . . every language expresses the character of the people that speak it" (section 1, chapter 15, paragraph 142, p. 285). Languages "give a new insight into things, and dilate the mind in proportion as they are more perfect". Newton could not have produced his system at an earlier stage of the development of English: "The success of geniuses ... depends intirely [!] on the

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

13

progress of the language ..." (ibid., para. 147, p. 288). As a language improves, it makes possible "the display of great abilities", and great men by their contributions (especially poets) in their turn contribute to improvements in the language (ibid., para. 153, p. 292-3). "Since the character of languages is formed ... according to that of the people, it must needs have some prevaling quality" (ibid., para. 155, p. 294). "The French, by the simplicity and clearness of its construction, gives an early precision to the mind, which by degrees becomes habitual, is greatly preparatory to the analytical progress; but it is not favorable to the imagination." Ancient languages "contributed more to improve the fancy, and thereby rendered the habit of it more natural than that of the other operations of the mind. This is, I think, one of the causes of the superiority of modem philosophers to those of antiquity" (ibid., para 156, p. 295). Herder's views were most directly influenced by those of his teacher Johann Georg Hamann, (1730—1788).4 For Hamann, reason is relative to the language we speak; the differences between languages parallel differences between ways of thinking (see R. L. Brown 1967: 61 and Miller 1968, on Hamann). Herder developed Hamann's views. He claimed that we think in language: Words are the "moulds in which we see our thoughts". There is a parallelism between the thoughts of a nation and its language. Culture is transmitted from father to son through language. With the words of his language the infant picks up also the emotional flavor given to them by his parents. Thus language becomes the "collective treasure" of a nation. The consequences Herder drew from this are of special importance. "Let the nations freely learn from one another," he writes, "let one continue where the other left o f f ' (quoted in Barnard 1969: 172-174). And "every nation has its center of felicity in itself alone, as every sphere has its center of gravity ... Is not the good distributed throughout the whole world? ... it was divided into a thousand forms, transformed - an eternal Proteus! - in every region to the world and in every century . . . " (quoted in Hendel's Introduction to Cassirer 1953, 1: 39). 5 Herder may thus be regarded as a forerunner of Romanticism, which insisted "... not only t h a t . . . there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence" (Lovejoy 1936: 293). Romanticism substituted diversitarianism for the uniformitarianism of the Enlightenment (1936: 294). Languages, then, are stated to differ in the way they shape our world perspectives. But, it may be asked, is any world perspective the "correct" one, or more nearly correct than others? Which language comes closer to the truth? Which one provides a better picture of reality? Herder did not deal with these questions; for him all languages are valuable, since they reveal different aspects of our experience of reality. But this is only one possible conclusion that can be based on the Herderian thesis, as will be seen in our discussion of Humboldt's views.

14

I. M. Schlesinger

The nineteenth century With Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) we pass into the 19th century (since it was only at the turn of the century that language became Humboldt's main concern; see Aarsleff 1988). Humboldt's views on the relation of language and culture are generally held to have been influenced mainly by Herder, but recently it has been argued that they were no less due to Condillac, Diderot, and French scholars influenced by the latter, who lived in Humboldt's time (Aarsleff 1988). According to Humboldt (1836/1935), language does not express already known truth; it discovers it. From "formless thought a word pulls out a certain number of features". Differences between languages correspond to differences in Weltansichten, or world perspectives (Lenneberg's, 1954/55, translation of this term). Language is the "outward manifestation" of the mind of the speech community (the "nation" in Humboldt's terms). Language itself develops from the interaction of (1) the external world; (2) the nature of language; and (3) the characteristics of the nation speaking it. The culture of centuries shapes language and the latter in turn affects the individual. While conceding that everything can be expressed in every language, Humboldt holds that what is important is not what a language can be forced to do, but what emerges from it naturally, what it invites us to and inspires us with. The structure of language influences both perception and thought processes of its users (R. L. Brown 1967: 114). 6 The primary influence of language, according to Humboldt, is that of the grammar rather than that of the lexicon. Let us return to our question: What language is the most propitious for thought? While Herder, as we have seen, would not have regarded this as a valid question, Humboldt offers a clear unequivocal answer: What we call Indo-European languages are the most suited for the formulation of thought. By implication, Humboldt holds that the mentality of the speakers of those languages is superior to those of others. Some scholars of his time deplored this Europeo-centrism. During the 19th century Humboldt's ideas on the relationship between language and culture failed to gain widespread acceptance (cf. Miller 1968: 35; Verburg, 1949/50). Sporadically, however, one encounters writers espousing similar opinions. One of the great philologists of the century, Whitney (1875), writes of the learner of a native language: "Every single language has thus its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which ... is cast the content and the product of [the learner's] mind ..." [1875: 21-22]. Whatever language he first acquires, this is to him the natural and necessary way of thinking and speaking; he conceives of no other as even possible." (1875: 22) Echoes of Condillac's remarks on the influence of language on philosophy are found in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings: "Where there is affinity of languages it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar - I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions - that

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

15

everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of subject is least developed) look otherwise "into the world" and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims ..." (Nietzsche 1966/1886: 27-28; cf. also Nietzsche 1958/1887, Erste Abhandlung, section 13, p. 43; pp. 293^1 of 1968 ed.). The twentieth century At the beginning of our century the Humboldtian stance was adopted by the philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1901-02; see Weiler 1970: 221-224; 277-288, for an exposition of Mathner's views on this issue). From the nineteen-twenties on we find a resurgence of relativistic views in Europe. In a paper first published in 1924-5, Bertrand Russell (1956: 323-343) writes about "the influence of syntax in the case of Indo-European languages", in which the subject-predicate form of propositions makes it "natural to infer that every fact has a corresponding form, and consists in the possession of a quality by a substance" 7 (1956: 331). Nietzsche's ideas are also reflected by the philosopher Waisman (1952/53: 2): "... a whole world picture is wedded to the use of the transitive verb and the actoraction scheme that goes with it - that if we spoke a different language we would perceive a different world." The philosophical work of Ernst Cassirer is suffused with Humboldtian ideas. According to Cassirer, language, myth, art, religion, and science "provide the building stones from which the world of "reality" is constructed for us" (Cassirer 1953: 91; original German edition: 1923). 8 Besides philosophers, modern linguists began to evince interest in Humboldtian ideas: the Swedish linguist Tegner (1922; quoted in Haugen 1977: 20), and the Germans Porzig (1923) and Trier (1931). Special mention should be made of the voluminous work of Weisgerber from the nineteen twenties on (whose views on language are summarized in Miller, 1968). Weisgerber coined the term "sprachliche Zwischenwelt" (translated by Basilius, 1952, as "linguistic intermediary world"). He claimed that the individual's " . . . mental activity is more strongly determined by the world-view of his native tongue than by his individual personality". (Weisgerber 1932: 197, quoted by Hormann 1979: 272). Humboldtian views on the role of language were introduced to America by Franz Boas, who came there from Germany and was conversant with the ideas of Herder. His influence is marked in his student, the great American linguist Edward Sapir (1897-1941), who, like Boas, came to the United States from Germany. The following quote shows that Sapir espoused what we have called Thesis 3: " . . . the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language

16

I. M. Schlesinger

habits of the group. . . . The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. . . . Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose (Sapir 1929: 207-214). Among Sapir's students was a young engineer, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897— 1941). In the following section we turn to the views that go by the name Whorfian hypothesis, and sometimes by that of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

3. An analysis of Whorfian views What is the thesis Whorf argued for? This question is notoriously difficult to answer. Whorf all too often expresses himself in a rather vague and ambiguous fashion. He was out to make a case, to provoke, to promote a new approach, and occasionally he flouts canons of scientific circumspection. All this makes it difficult to pin him down on some crucial questions. The aim of the present section is to analyze the possible meanings of the linguistic relativism thesis, and to ferret out, as far as possible, which of these was espoused by Whorf. Thus, while the stance of the previous section is historical, that of the present one is systematic. There is no dearth of attempts to formulate Whorf's claims in more precise terms. Fishman's (1960) "systematization" is deservedly among the best known. Fishman distinguishes between the influence of language on the individual and its influence on the culture as a whole. 10 He further distinguishes between the influence of the vocabulary of a language and that of its grammatical system. Whorf (1956: 156) held the latter to be more important and far-reaching than the former, and in this he was preceded by Humboldt (see Section 2.3, above) and by Alexander (1936: 267), who argued that ". . . morphology comes nearer to natural and primitive systematization of the world than does vocabulary . . . " . In the following I will show that there is yet another distinction relevant to the literature on linguistic relativism that is often not paid sufficient attention to. 3.1. Linguistic determinism and parallelism We turn now to an examination of Thesis 3, repeated here for convenience: Thesis 3. Languages differ in the thoughts they afford to us. It is important to realize that this thesis consists of two independent claims (cf. Brown 1976). A distinction has to be made between:

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

17

(i) Linguistic determinism: This is the claim that language affects cognition. Reality may not be regarded as given: perception of reality is not language-independent. This claim is an expanded form of Thesis 2. (ii) Linguistic-cognitive parallelism or linguistic-cultural parallelism: This is the claim that there is a close correspondence between linguistic patterns, on the one hand, and cognitive and cultural ones, on the other. Each language reflects the culture of its speech community. In the following this claim will be called parallelism, for short. 11 These two claims are logically independent of each other. There can be parallelism without linguistic determinism - correspondence between language and culture, with either culture influencing language, 12 or both culture and language being influenced by a third factor (Hymes 1966: 120-121). There can also be linguistic determinism without parallelism: Recall that the 17th and 18th century philosophers who sounded warnings about the detrimental effects of language on thought did not have to refer to any differences between languages (Section 2.2). Suppose it were true that all the world's languages except one had become extinct; then it still would make sense to talk about the influence of the structure of this language on an individual's thinking and on the culture as a whole. Further, the parallelist thesis presupposes differences between languages in the way they structure reality, and it is at least conceivable that no such differences exist; in this case linguistic determinism might still hold true. Whorf, like some of the scholars before him whose writings we have reviewed in the previous section, espoused Thesis 3, that is, the conjunction of linguistic determinism and parallelism: He writes of "our linguistically determined thought world" (Whorf 1956: 154) and the differential effects of European and Indian languages on the mentality of their speakers. Occasionally, however, he seems to have merely parallelism in mind (as when he speaks about the "connections" between language and culture: Whorf 1956: 159). 13 Whorf recognizes the existence of two directions of influence - from culture to language and from language to culture. He argues, however (Whorf 1956: 156), that, since grammar is more resistant to change than culture, the influence from language to culture is predominant. 3.2. Assumptions underlying Thesis 3 The Whorfian claim rests on the great differences found to exist between languages in the way they categorize experience. Examples of this are legion, even within European languages (which Whorf proposed to view as belonging to

18

I. M. Schlesinger

one large complex, as far as his thesis was concerned). Thus, while in English the same word, "wood", is used to refer to both the material and to a stretch of land covered with trees, there are two different words for these in both German and Spanish (and Hebrew uses the same word for the material and for "tree"). A handy example in the realm of grammar is the difference in gender assignment. For instance, in French the word for the sun is masculine and that for the moon - feminine, whereas the reverse is the case in German. Note, however, that the mere existence of such linguistic diversities is insufficient evidence for the parallelist claim of a correspondence between language on the one hand and cognition and cultlure, on the other, and for the determinist claim of the latter being determined by the former. This has been pointed out by critics of Whorf, who objected to his citing linguistic differences and viewing these as evidence for his thesis. Rather than reflecting the way we think about reality, our way of talking about it may be metaphorical, and metaphors, we know, may be dead.14 Hockett (1954) reports that in Mandarin Chinese the word for train is a compound, meaning "fire cart". That this is a psychologically dead metaphor is shown by the Chinese word for electric train - "electric fire cart" - although this kind of train does not spit fire. It has been found that children are at first unaware of the similarity implied by certain metaphorical expressions (Asch and Nerlove 1960). It is reasonable to argue that linguistic differences imply cognitive and cultural ones when the following three conditions are met: 1. The linguistic distinction in respect to which two languages differ is not an arbitrary one, but corresponds to the reality referred to. 2. This non-arbitrary connection is transparent to the ordinary speaker. 3. Speakers are ordinarily conscious of this connection. The above three conditions may be sufficient for Thesis 3 to hold, but they are not all necessary conditions. Condition 3, consciousness of the connection, is not a necessary condition: there is not a priori reason why a linguistic difference should not affect us unconsciously. In fact, Whorf explicitly mentions that language "conceals unconscious presuppositions" (Whorf 1956: 83) and he writes of "dimly felt, barely conscious (or even unconscious) meanings" (1956: 105). His teacher, Sapir, too, regarded thought as "the conscious counterpart of an unconscious linguistic symbolism". (Sapir 1921: 16) Condition 2, transparency, posits a weaker requirement than Condition 3, since it pertains to what can be understood, rather than what one is actually conscious of. Thus, our above example "fire-cart" is a transparent one, but this does not imply that speakers of Mandarin are ordinarily conscious of the etymology of this expression. At any rate, Whorf did not consider Condition 2 to be necessary. His most important examples relate to the cognitve influence of what he calls "cryptotypes", that is, pervasive structural patterns of a language which it takes consider-

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

19

able ingenuity to discover (Whorf 1956: 70f, a notion which he claims originated with the French nineteenth-century grammarian Fabre d'Olivet; 1956: 74—75). We are left therefore with Condition 1. Is it conceivable that even completely arbitrary patterns and classifications somehow affect the way we perceive the reality referred to? Take the various noun classes in some languages (e.g., Latin) which differ in the way they are inflected. There is nothing incoherent in the idea that speakers of these languages may conceive of the referents of nouns of a given class as somehow belonging together, and such a claim would be empirically testable. However, neither Whorf nor anyone I know of has ever come up with a similar proposition; 15 Condition 1 has always been honored, so far. 3.3. Radical linguistic

determinism

Consider now an important implication of the previously discussed Thesis 1, restated here for convenience: Thesis 1. All thinking goes on in language. If all thinking goes on in a linguistic medium, then we are completely at the mercy of language, unable to transcend the limits it imposes on us. A speaker of language A can comprehend only what can be conveyed in language A, and to the extent that language B structures reality in a different way, it must remain incomprehensible to the speaker of A. Speakers of different languages live in different mental worlds, and any attempt at mutual comprehension is doomed to failure. Languages and the world perspectives that go with them are not mutually translatable. This view may be called radical linguistic determinism (or radical determinism, for short); what we have called linguistic determinism in Section 3.1 may be called weak determinism,16 Radical determinism is implied by Thesis 1 in conjunction with linguistic determinism and parallelism. Radical determinism is untenable It is generally recognized that this extreme position involves us in inconsistencies and internal contradictions. Radical determinism implies that no specific claim can be made concerning a world perspective mediated by a different language. To a speaker of a European language Hopi mentality would be incomprehensible, according to this thesis, since he has not been reared in a Hopi-speaking environment. Hence Whorf himself would have been unable to express how Hopi thought differs from that of speakers of English. He could not have avoided this predicament by learning Hopi, because, to become truly bilingual, he would first have had to acquire the mentality that goes with the Hopi language, and that mentality is accessible only to a speaker of Hopi, according to radical determinism (see Feuer 1953: 96). Furthermore, the fact that one can translate from one language

20

I. M. Schlesinger

into the other is prima facie evidence against radical determinism (Black 1962: 249; see also Langacker 1976: 309-310). Radical linguistic determinism must therefore be rejected. But radical determinism, we have seen, is based on Thesis 1. Does this mean that Thesis 1 has to be abandoned altogether? In the following, I propose two alternative moves by which such a conclusion can be avoided. Mental language Thesis 1 may have to be modified. While it may be true that much of thinking goes on in language, this is perhaps not true of all thinking, as stated by the thesis, since there is another medium of thought besides language. Many writers postulate the existence of a mental language (language of thought, lingua mentis, or "mentalese"). 17 The connectionists (e.g., Rumelhart et al. 1987) hold that thinking is independent of any symbolic medium, but instead is grounded in distributed neural structures. Paraphrases The second approach one might take is to retain the extreme formulation of Thesis 1, and to argue that it is possible to express any thought in any language. Any notion not provided for by the linguistic apparatus of a given language is expressible by means of paraphrase. 18 As Feuer (1953: 90) puts it: "every language lends itself to the appropriate tinkering required to convey the new meanings". Missionaries have succeeded in bending native language to their need of getting generalized ideas across for which the native languages had no expressions. Feuer also cites the case of Modern Hebrew, which became a spoken language after having served for many centuries as a literary language, mainly in religious writings. Weak determinism It should be realized, however, that while each of these two approaches avoids the radical deterministic conclusion, there is nothing in them to rule out the possibility of an influence of language on thought. The need to paraphrase an idea, stating it in a relatively roundabout way - or to decode an idea thus paraphrased - may result in a greater load on the processing mechanism, and this may have behavioral consequences. And if processing is carried out in a medium different from natural language, the contents may be coded simultaneously in the native language and thereby exert some influence. Thus, while radical linguistic determinism, for reasons given earlier on, is unacceptable, weaker versions of linguistic determinism are not. The following closely related modes of influence on other cognitive functions may be accorded to language:

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

21

(i) Language creates certain cognitive predispositions; "... not that linguistic patterns inescapably limit sensory perceptions and thought, but simply that, together with other cultural patterns, they direct perception and thinking into certain habitual channels" (Hoijer 1953: 560). Hymes (1964: 117) distinguishes between the potential range of perception and thought, which is universal or nearly so, and habitual behaviors, "to which our language is geared". (ii) Language draws attention to certain aspects of reality. It acts as a "lure to cognition", in Brown's (1958: 207) felicitous formulation (see also Bertalanffy 1955: 255). (iii) "Languages differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what is relatively easy to say" (Hockett 1954: 122; see also Carroll 1979: 97). Whorf's position At various points Whorf's formulations are of the radical deterministic brand, for instance, when he writes about the "unbreakable bonds" of language (Whorf 1956: 256), or its "inexorable laws" (1956: 252), or: "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY . . . " (1956: 213-214; capitals in the original). It is unlikely, though, that Whorf was unaware of the difficulties and logical inconsistencies such an extreme thesis leads to. The above quotes are from Whorf's later writings, in which he popularized his views. In various other passages he expressly voices the weaker deterministic view, as when he writes about kinesthesia that " . . . though arising before language, [it] should be made more highly conscious by linguistic use of imaginary space and metaphorical images of motion" (Whorf 1956: 155; italics mine), or when he ascribes to language "patterned resistance to a way of thinking" (1956: 247). He also writes of "experience more basic than language" (1956: 149); 19 and when he denies that thinking is entirely linguistic (1956: 66), he thereby deprives radical determinism of its basic (see also his comments 1956: 139 and 267). These more balanced appraisals of the role of language seem to be more representative of Whorf's real views on the subject than are his more extreme statements. The latter may have been the result of his succumbing occasionally to the urge to be provocative and to drive a lesson home. As a consequence, he has often been regarded as a proponent of the radical deterministic position, for which he has been severely criticized.

22

I. M. Schlesinger

3.4. The antecedents: Availability, classification, and selection Our job of disentangling the various strands of Whorfian ideas is not completed yet. The weaker version of linguistic determinism can actually be broken down into at least three distinguishable theses. These pertain to the process by which language affects cognition. The Availability Thesis: The relative availability (Fishman 1960, refers to this by term "codifiability") of categories in a language affects other cognitive functions. Consider, for example, Whorf's (1956: 141) observation concerning the English construction for referring to discrete portions of materials denoted by mass nouns: "piece of cloth", "stick of wood", "bag of flour", etc. This construction, argues Whorf, makes us conceive of reality in terms of "substance" (formless matter) and "form". In the Hopi language, by contrast, mass nouns are not a formally distinct category, and the way its speakers conceive of the world, claims Whorf, is therefore different in this respect from ours. This is an example of what Brown (1958: 253) calls a "forced observation" imposed by language: the speaker is required by the rules of the language to make the relevant distinction. Whorf's writings are replete with such examples; see, e.g., Whorf (1956: 51) on the Hopi aspect contrast. It is widely held that, in principle, everything that can be said in one natural language can be said in every other one. What is at issue here is therefore relative, not absolute, availability: there are differences in the ease with which a given distinction can be made in various languages. Some languages have a certain contrast built into their grammar, which may therefore be more readily attended to than in other languages, the speakers of which have to resort to circumlocutions to express it. That is, they have to resort to them if they wish to express the distinction in question; but very often they will not wish to do so, precisely because of the effort required. So far we have considered the crosslinguistic version ot the Availability Thesis. Another version applies to linguistic constructions within a single language: the more available the construction is to an individual, the more the underlying cognitive notion will be attended to and otherwise influence cognition. This may have important practical implications for the cognitive functioning of special populations, like the deaf or the retarded. The Classification Thesis: The way language categorizes certain items affects cognitive processes of its speakers. Whorf (1956: 215) claims that the categorization of words in a given language into verbs and nouns affects the way its speakers conceive of the entities named. Lightning, a wave, or a puff of smoke are not inherently more thing-like than many events referred to by verbs, but English classifies the former as nouns, and as a consequence we conceive of them as things of a sort. Not so the Hopi lan-

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

23

guage, which codes these phenomena as verbs; speakers of Hopi therefore look upon them in a different way. 2 0 The Selection Thesis: Cognition is affected by the way the language user avails himself of the resources made available to him by his language. One might predict, for instance, that the verbal label provided for a situation affects the way it is conceived of; e.g., when it is described by as verb, like "to swim", it is judged as more active than when it is described by the corresponding noun, "a swim" (a prediction Flavell, 1958, failed to find support for). Strictly speaking, the Selection Thesis, does not involve linguistic determinism. Unlike the Availability and the Classification Theses, it pertains to language use, not to language as a system (see Longacre 1956; Lenneberg 1953: 464; and Black 1969, on this distinction). Nor does this thesis involve parallelism: 21 It applies within a single language and its testing does not require any cross-linguistic research. I am not aware of any statement by Whorf that can unequivocally be construed as belonging to the Selection Thesis (perhaps some of his anecdotes, like that about the conflagration caused in an "empty" container (Whorf 1956: 135-137) comes closest: there are other ways of describing this state of affairs). Some of the research purportedly dealing with Whorfian ideas, however, involves this thesis (e.g., Flavell 1958). Weisgerber (1958) also discusses a phenomenon that belongs under this heading.

4. The reception of Whorf's ideas The publication of Whorf's views caused a flurry of excitement. Symposia were organized - most notably the 1953 Conference sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at Chicago University (Hoijer 1954) - reviews and criticisms appeared in professional journals, and a great deal of anthropological work was sparked by his ideas. That his writings had such an impact may seem strange, considering that similar views had been promulgated for a long time, often for centuries, before him (as our historical review in Section 2 has shown), without generating a comparable amount of interest. What, then, accounts for the effect of Whorf's writings? 4.1. Reasons for interest in Whorf There are a variety of factors that seem to account for the impact Whorf had: (i) His style. As Haugen (1977: 23) remarks, Whorf's "writing skills and infectious excitement over the discovery of new areas of knowledge accomplished something which his more cautious colleagues were unable to do."

24

I. M. Schlesinger

(ii) His extremism. Whorf was more radical in his formulations than most writers before him. As we have seen, he occasionally propagated radical determinism (which he could not have seriously believed in himself). Naturally, such extreme formulations commanded attention. (iii) The prevailing intellectual climate of the time. "When different behaviors of primitive cultures were discovered by anthropology, moral relativism became a popular standpoint in ethics" (Landesman 1961: 617). Relativism - cultural (see Kluckhohn 1954), biological, and other - is a "powerful current of modem thought" to which Whorf's thesis should be considered to belong (Bertalanffy 1955: 247, who mentions in this connection also Spengler's famous The decline of the West, 1922). The conventionalist approach to science promulgated at the turn of the century by Poincaré and Le Roy may also be considered part of this current (Schaff 1976: 37 ff). And, last but not least, mention should be made of Einstein's relativity theory, to which Whorf's theory - in spite of the crucial differences involved (see Feuer 1953: 56) - bears some resemblance. 22 The then prevalent Zeitgeist thus favored acceptance of Whorf's views. In fact, ideas similar to Whorf's appeared in the writings of many scholars during the period Whorf published his. Among linguists we have already mentioned Tegnér, Porzig (1923), Trier (1934), Weisgerber (from the 1920s on), and Vossler (1932), and among philosophers - Cassirer (1923). There are also a number of anthropologists who published findings they interpreted along Whorfian lines. In Norway, Sommerfelt (1938) analyzed data reported on an Australian tribe, and Lee in the United States (1938, 1940, 1944ab) published data on the Wintu, which she interpreted similarly. Alexander (1936) discussed the relationship of language to the individual's Weltbild, illustrating his views by the Navaho language. The Chinese philosopher Chan Tung Sun, in a paper first published in Chinese in 1939, compared Chinese with Western philosophy as reflected in the respective languages (Tung-Sun 1952). Granet (1934) wrote about the correspondence between Chinese language and thought. See also Vossler's (1929: 65) claim that the French language has developed sensitivity for emotions in French poets.

4.2. Criticism of Whorfian ideas Many welcomed Whorf's ideas, many were disturbed by them, and many reviewed them critically. Some of the criticisms were methodological: Several writers deplored Whorf's tendency to adduce linguistic data as sole support to his claims about the influence of language on thinking, and pointed out that it is inadmissible to argue from the existence of a linguistic difference to a corresponding mental one (Lenneberg, 1953; Bedau, 1957; Black, 1959: 230, calls this the "linguist's fallacy"). 23 This point has been discussed in Section 3.2, above. The claim that the philosophy of a people is constrained, or even determined,

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

25

by its language drew the fire of Feuer (1953) and of Landesman (1961). Against Russell's claim that Western philosophy has been crucially influenced by the subject-predicate structure of language (see Section 2.3), Landesman (1961: 6 3 1 632) argued that it is the poor theories of grammar that may have affected philosophy, and not the grammar itself. That Whorf may have overemphasized differences between languages at the expense of universal linguistic features has been argued by Longacre (1956), who points out that languages of the world have much more in common than is implied by Whorf. Whorf's formulations are often vague and lacking in rigor, and at times he even contradicts himself. This makes him easy prey for a trained philosopher. At times, however, philosophers criticizing him seem to have overshot the mark. As an instructive example it is worth while to take a closer look at the treatment accorded to Whorf by the philosopher Max Black (1959). When Black shows that Whorf's conclusions do not follow from his arguments, his reasoning is convincing. But when he accuses Whorf for entertaining a "mythical psychology", and remarks on the "amateurish crudity" of his metaphysics (Black 1959: 230, 237), we ought to examine his claims more carefully. Black notes that it is unlikely that the ordinary speaker becomes aware of covert grammatical categories (cryptotypes) which it took the "virtuosity" of Whorf to discover (1959: 230). Likewise, he takes Whorf to task for imputing to the Hopi a certain world view merely on the evidence of properties of the Hopi verb system. Black blames Whorf here for presupposing that the Hopi are aware of these linguistic properties and their implications for a world perspective. "How much of this would the average Hopi recognize?", he asks (Black 1959: 234). This sarcasm is inappropriate. There is no need to assume that for a category to regulate the ordinary speaker's behavior, he has to become fully conscious of it. Whorf himself has pointed out that it need not be fully conscious to be operative (see Section 3.2). In discussing Whorf's claim that since "hold" is a verb, the speaker perceives the situation it refers to as an action, Black objects that "hold" is not modified by those adverbs used to modify other verbs (e.g., we may say "strike slowly/jerkily/ energetically" but not "hold slowly/jerkily/energetically"; 1959: 234—235). But by arguing that "hold" is viewed as a verb Whorf presumably meant that it is so perceived in some, not in all respects. To conclude, while Whorf's formulations certainly leave much to be desired, one should interpret his writings charitably, rather than impute to him views he presumably never held. 24

26

I. M. Schlesinger

5. Empirical research While Whorf, as we have seen, did not always get a good press, his ideas inspired a major research effort by anthropologists and psychologists. We now turn to the question of what research on the relation of language to thought has shown. Has Whorf been vindicated? This question has occasionally been answered in the negative, and it has been argued that his hypothesis therefore ought to be abandoned. Lakoff's impression of the prevailing opinion regarding Whorf's thesis (which Lakoff himself does not share) has been quoted in the Introduction. One of the first psychologists to put Whorf's ideas to an experimental test, Roger Brown, has recently argued that the case for linguistic relativism no longer seems to be convincing, and that the available evidence now points toward cognitive universalism (Brown 1986). Empirical studies pertaining to Whorf's claims have often been reviewed, but those reviews I know of each report on a mere fraction of the studies that have been carried out. This is of course insufficient for reaching a verdict concerning the Whorfian thesis. The present section is based on a much larger number of studies which have come to my attention, but only those that have yielded positive results will be reported here. 5.1.

Testing the parallelist

claim

In Section 3.1 we distinguished between linguistic determinism and parallelism. Research in two disciplines, Anthropology and Psychology, is relevant to Whorfian theory, but they differ in the claims they pertain to. Anthropological research may be relevant to linguistic-cultural parallelism; it may reveal parallels between the language of a community and its culture. Such research leaves open the question of the direction of causality: conceivably, it may be the culture and a people's mentality that have affected their language, or both may have developed in interaction with each other. The parallelist claim already appears in writings of anthropologists at the beginning of the century; Gabelentz (1901) and Levy-Bruhl (1910) wrote in what today we would call a Whorfian vein. There were also first-hand observations of parallels between linguistic and behavioral variables. Thus, Rivers (1901; quoted in Brown 1956: 306) reported that natives of the Torres straits sorted colors in a manner different from what the explorers would have found natural, and that their sorting was related to the native names for those colors. In Section 4.1 we mentioned some of the work that was carried out at about the period that Whorf himself was active, and the interest of anthropologists in Whorfian ideas has not abated to this day; see, e.g., Levy (1973: 288-307), Witherspoon (1977), Friedrich

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

27

(1979), Denny (1979), Brugman, quoted in Lakoff (1987: 313-317), Wierzbicka, (1988: ch. 2), and Longacre (in press). There are studies that supply only linguistic data, without citing any evidence for corresponding cultural phenomena. Obviously, these fall short of supporting parallelist hypotheses. Whorf occasionally supplies translations from a foreign language into English, and leaves it to the good faith of the reader to accept the conclusion that here must have been a corresponding cognitive or cultural phenomenon. Of course, such translations, though suggestive, do not constitute evidence for the parallelist claim (Lenneberg 1953).

5.2. Testing the determinist

claim

As stated, differences between languages corresponding to differences between cultures may be indicative of linguistic-cultural parallelism. Such differences do not provide evidence for linguistic determinism, which claims that there is an influence of linguistic structure on cognitve functioning. To establish this, experimental studies may be carried out, with a view of obtaining a correlation between linguistic and behavioral variables. While such a correlation in itself does not tell us which variable is the cause and which the effect, the linguistic determinist explanation may often be the most plausible one. Not all of the experimental studies attempting to test Whorf's theory were crosslinguistic ones; some were performed with speakers of a single language. The behavioral effects obtained in such studies may indeed be interpreted as evidence for linguistic determinism. At times, however, they may provide support, by implication, for parallelism as well. This applies to one of the better-known studies inspired by Whorf's ideas. Brown and Lenneberg (1954) found (in some of the tasks investigated) a positive correlation between the codability of a color and its recognizability. Their study (which was subsequently replicated by Van de Geer 1960; see also Lantz and Stefflre 1964) was for some time regarded as a striking vindication of Whorf's ideas. The authors realized that since their study was carried out with speakers of English and did not include any cross-linguistic comparison, it did not provide direct evidence for W h o r f ' s thesis, but argued, cogently enough, that if codability of a color affected its recognizability, and if languages differed in codability, then recognizability is a function of the individual's language. It subsequently became clear, however, that languages do not differ appreciably in codability, as Brown and Lenneberg had assumed. Eleanor Rosch showed (1) that codability is higher for focal colors, across languages of a wide variety of language families, (2) that recognition memory is higher for focal colors, and (3) that even speakers of a language that lacks names for basic color hues, the Dani, showed superiority in memory for focal colors. From these findings she concluded

28

I. M. Schlesinger

that both codability and recognition are the result of the greater salience of focal colors (Heider 1972). It appeared therefore that the Brown and Lenneberg study failed to prove what it presumed to prove. However, Lucy and Shweder (1979) have tried to show that Rosch's results may have been due to an artifact. Rosch's pulling the rug out from under Brown and Lenneberg's research may have contributed to the disillusionment with Whorf's theory met with some quarters. It should be noted, however, that two subsequent studies on color recognition involved crosslinguistic comparisons: Stefflre, Castillo, and Morley (1966) found a positive correlation between an index of "communication accuracy" and recognition accuracy for speakers of Spanish and of Yucatan separately (but see the comments of Heider 1972), and Lenneberg and Roberts (1956) obtained some positive results with speakers of Zuni. But any results with differential recognition and discrimination of colors have now to be interpreted with the utmost caution in view of Bornstein's (1973, 1975) data on physiological differences between members of various societies which affect focality of colors. To partial out the effects of physiologically determined focality, Lucy and Shweder (1979) used an elaborate experimental design and found an additional effect of communication accuracy, thus supporting Brown and Lenneberg's conclusions (see, however the methodological criticism of their study by Kay and Kempton 1984). Support for linguistic determinism in some domains comes from studies deploying the Brown and Lenneberg paradigm of within-language comparison with stimuli other than colors. Codability has been shown to correlate with recognition of faces (Van de Geer and Frijda 1960) and of facial expressions (Koen 1966). These studies, then, may be regarded as supporting Whorf's thesis (unless, that is, some non-linguistic determinant of the "focality" of such stimuli shows up). Furthermore, positive results were obtained in some studies involving crosslinguistic comparisons and a variety of behavioral variables: color matching (Greenfield and Childs 1974), color discriminability (Kay and Kempton 1984; see, however, McNeill 1987: 183-184), and comprehension and use of deductive arguments (Galda 1979). Guiora, Beit Halachmi, Fried, and Yoder (1983) found that gender identity developed later in children speaking Finnish than in those speaking Swedish: Swedish, but not Finnish, marks nouns for gender. In the studies reviewed so far the independent variable was the relative availability of a linguistic category; they thus pertain to the Availability Thesis. Much less research has been devoted to the Classification Thesis (see Section 3.4). Introspective evidence was obtained at the beginning of the century by Rowland (1907), who found that the imagery aroused by adjectives differed from that aroused by the corresponding adverbs. Experimental evidence in a crosslinguistic study by Carroll and Casagrande (1958) for the effect of lexical categorization on a sorting task was less clearcut; however, a successful replication has been reported (Fishman 1960: 335).

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

29

As for the Selection Thesis, the label given to a color has been found to affect discrimination (Bornstein 1976) and recognition (Wang 1972; reported in Cole and Scribner, 1974: 47-48). The classic Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) experiment showing the effect of labelling on memory and its various replications (Herman, Lawless, and Marshall 1957; Daniel, 1972; Bruner, Mintum and Busiek, quoted in Bruner 1966a) also come under this heading, as do the well-known studies by Loftus (1975; Loftus and Palmer 1974) on the effect of the phrasing of questions on memory; Greenfield, Reich, and Olver's (1966: 313-314) observation on test performance in Wolof children; Glucksberg and Weisberg's (1966) findings on problem solving (but see Ranken 1963), and Shanon's (1990) introspective data on the role of language in thought sequences. Further we should mention in this connection Luria's (1959) studies on the effects of non-semantic aspects of language on the regulation of motor behavior and their replications (Wozniak 1972; Tinsley and Waters 1982). This short review shows that quite a few predictions generated from Whorf's theory have been sustained by experimental research. True, in a certain proportion of studies (not reviewed here) negative results were obtained. 25 Such failure to corroborate a hypothesis does not count too heavily against it, however, since it may have been due to an infelicitous use of experimental tasks or to other weaknesses in the studies concerned. Furthermore - and this point is crucial - Whorf never claimed, nor could he reasonably have claimed, that the effect of language makes itself felt in every single cognitive task; his claim was that such effects do exist. It stands to reason that in some tasks the external stimulus may be so clear and unequivocal that it overrides any effect of linguistic structure, whereas in other tasks an influence of language on cognition may turn up in further research.

6. Is Whorfianism on the wane? If linguistic relativism indeed no longer casts its spell on the scientific community, as statements like those by Lakoff (1987: 304; see Section 1) and Brown (1986) imply, we ought to examine the reasons for this change of heart (at least on the part of psychologists; anthropologists seem to be as happy with linguistic relativism as ever; see Fishman 1982). Particularly so, since the verdict of research findings has been anything but unfavorable. Nor has there been any sign of the steady output of findings relevant to Whorfian theory diminishing. Why, then, this increasing skepticism in regard to Whorf's ideas?

30 6.1. Reasons for

I. M. Schlesinger

disillusionment

The current disillusionment with Whorfianism seems to be due not to the absence of research findings supporting his theory, but, in part, to the triviality of these findings. Whorf made far-reaching claims about the pervasive effects of language on the mental life of a people, and all that experimental psychologists managed to come up with were such modest results as the effect of the vocabulary of a language on the discriminability of color chips. Experimental Psychology can be counted on to produce just such results - call them modest or trivial, if you will but the fact that Whorf's grandiose claims were thus whittled down apparently has had a sobering effect. The only attempt at testing a prediction of seemingly greater import was that of Bloom (1981), who found that speakers of Chinese were less inclined to reason with counter-factual implications and to understand such reasoning. Bloom accounts for this finding by the lack of a corresponding construction in Chinese. Serious methodological objections have been raised in connection with this study, however (Au 1983; see Bloom's 1984 reply, Au's 1984 rejoinder to it, and Liu's 1985 findings agreeing with Au; see also the discussion of this controversy by Brown 1986). The remaining studies pertaining to Whorfian theory have concerned themselves with issues that may seem paltry in comparison with what seems implicated by Whorf's propositions.26 There is a large gap, then, between the expectations raised by Whorf's resounding pronouncements and the kind of results typically obtained in experimental research. Whorf's global thesis held out promises that experiments cannot be expected to cash in. This does not reflect, of course, on the value of either Whorf's hypothesis or of laboratory research; instead, it reflects the limitation of bringing the one to bear on the other. An additional and deeper-lying reason for the rejection of Whorfian views in some quarters is of a more "ideological" nature. Whorf's views may engender severe feelings of discomfort. They may appear to lead one into an "egocentric quandary, unable to make assertions about reality because of doubting one's own ability to correctly describe reality" (Penn 1972: 33). True, this follows, strictly speaking, only from radical linguistic determinism (Section 3.3), but very often Whorf was interpreted as making just this radical claim (Kay & Kempton 1984). There was a time when relativistic views were welcome. It was this Zeitgeist that promoted the interest in Whorf's views (Section 4.1). But in recent years the tide has turned; Universalism seems to be "in". Universal cognitive constraints are invoked to explain differences that appear to be linguistically imposed (Hill 1988). The transformationalist school, which is perhaps the most influential current trend in linguistics, stresses universals of language (see Bloom 1981, Introduction). Langacker (1976) has proposed that one of the reasons why adherents of this school evince "non-enthusiasm" about linguistic relativism is their universalist ap-

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

31

proach, their emphasis on linguistic creativity, and their insistence that underlying representations are more uniform than surface representations. He also points out that transformationalists are more concerned with syntax, whereas it is the lexicon where Whorfians can more easily provide examples. The prevalent trend in cognitive psychology deploys computational models: cognitive activity is viewed as computations performed on symbols. The system of these symbols may be taken to correspond to a mental language. The latter may serve to liberate cognitive processes from domination by the structure of the native language. While the mental language assumption is not necessarily incompatible with linguistic determinism (see Section 3.3), it has made the latter appear less convincing than it did at the time Whorf promulgated it. 6.2. The methodological

status of Thesis 3

There is something basically wrong with the reasons for skepticism concerning Whorf's thesis, outlined in the preceding. These reasons are based on the assumption that the Whorfian thesis must be either wholly wrong or wholly correct: if it is wholly correct, we are in an "egocentric quandary"; if it is wholly wrong, Universalism wins out. Now, this misses the rather obvious point that Thesis 3, which is Whorf's thesis, does not state what is true in all cases. Parallelism states merely that there exist parallels between language on the one hand, and culture and cognition, on the other, and linguistic determinism - that there exist influences of language on culture and cognition. Such existential propositions are not empirically refutable. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that color discrimination is found to be unaffected by the language one speaks. This finding, important as it stands, would not refute the Whorfian thesis: There may be other cognitive functions that are affected by language. It does not make much sense, therefore, to speak of refuting "the" Whorfian thesis (as Bruner 1966b: 320, for instance, does when he writes that his findings of Wolof children, who prefer to sort by color although their language is poor in color terms " . . . reject the lexical form of the Whorfian hypothesis"). Rather than being an empirically refutable research hypothesis, Thesis 3 has the status of a research program on the basis of which a large number of empirical hypotheses can be formulated, and in fact have been formulated in the past. A research program is not true or false; it can be neither corroborated nor refuted, but only turn out to be fruitful or not. Once this is realized, "ideological" considerations like those discussed above will not have much of a role to play. Wholesale corroboration or acceptance of the thesis is not in sight; all one can hope to achieve is to stake out laboriously various areas in which certain linguistic variables have a greater or lesser effect on certain cognitive and behavioral variables,

32

I. M. Schlesinger

and presumably, such findings would hardly be perceived as posing a threat to anyone's Weltanschauung. 6.3.

Prospects

Whorf's research program has been fruitful in the past (as shown in Section 5). It is to be hoped that future work within the program will be less beset by ideology. Ideology is a poor guide to reality and should be regarded as irrelevant to empirical issues. What remains to be done is to map out various aspects of language and of cognition and to investigate which cognitive functions are influenced by what aspects of language, and under what conditions. Many additional hypotheses can be formulated within the Whorfian research program that have not been investigated so far. As Brown (1977: 187) points out, many hypotheses presumably have not been adequately tested, the reason being perhaps that "no psychologist has been sufficiently ingenious." (Note that here Brown is much less disillusioned with Whorfian ideas than in his later statement quoted in Section 5). Some of the results will perhaps appear trivial, but seemingly trivial results may be of theoretical importance. Let me point out, in conclusion, some of the areas where an influence of language on cognition may be expected. 1. Behavior that is relatively less stimulus-bound A potentially influential linguistic factor may fail to affect a behavioral task, because the referent of the relevant expression has an overriding effect. This is suggested by Flavell's (1958) finding that while verbs presented in isolation were rated as more active than nouns, this effect disappeared when the words were presented as labels of drawings of the situations they referred to. Similarly, Ervin (1962) found nonsense words with Italian masculine endings to be rated differently than those with feminine endings; the gender of meaningful words, by contrast, had no effect on the way these are perceived (see Section 5.2). Most previous studies pertained to what Lenneberg (1967: 33; Lenneberg & Roberts 1956) has called the "language of experience" - i.e., expressions describing sensations of physical properties - and when the effect of such expressions is pitted against that of their referents, the latter may, not too surprisingly, turn out to be stronger. This line of reasoning led Cole and Scribner (1974: 59) to speculate that the influence of language on cultural concepts (e.g., social roles, attributes defining categories of people, theoretical concepts) is more likely to be felt, because such concepts "acquire their meaning through their being embedded in explanatory verbal networks".

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

33

2. Subjects of younger age groups It may turn out that children are more influenced by linguistic factors than adults. There are several possible reasons for this. First, while adults may counteract the possible effects of linguistic structure by paraphrasing (Section 3.3), children only gradually acquire this skill. Furthermore, it is conceivable that the child starts out by performing many cognitive tasks by the use of his or her native language, and gradually the language of thought (Section 3.3) matures and takes over many functions of the native language. Finally, the use of language becomes more automatic with age. The linguistic form demands increasingly less attention, and as suggested by Brown (1958: 253), the semantics of the grammatical form class (noun, verb) may "drop from consciousness as language skills become smooth and rapid". As a consequence, the importance of language for thought dwindles. In fact, there has so far been little research aimed at assessing the differential influence of language on cognitive development. A notable exception is the study by Guiora, Beit Halachmi, Fried, and Yoder (1982) on the development of gender identity in children speaking Finnish and Swedish (Section 5.2). 3. Construal of the message The grammatical form of the sentence may contribute to the way the hearer construes the message. Thus, there may seem to be no difference in meaning between "John borrows a book from Paul" and "Paul lends a book to John", but the choice of subject may determine which one of the participants is seen as more in control of the situation (Schlesinger, in press b). Similarly, it has been shown (Schlesinger, in press a) that when the experiencer is in subject position (as in "Mary admires Susan") she is conceived of as being more in control than the person acting as stimulus, and the reverse is the case when the stimulus is the subject and the experiencer is in object position (as in "Susan impresses Mary"). This line of research has been little explored so far. It should be clear, however, that this is an effect of language use on communication, whereas Thesis 3 pertains to the effect of language as a system on cognitve variables. To conclude, Whorf's ideas, while not original with him, have exerted a great influence on contemporary anthropological and psychological research. It is to be hoped that they will continue to do so. The effects of language on cognition and culture is an issue of the utmost importance, which should be investigated without any regard for those "ideological" underpinnings that have bedevilled much of what has been written on this theme.

Notes I am very grateful to Mordechai Rimor for his careful reading of the manuscript and his many suggestions for its improvement, and to Howard Kendler for helpful discussion.

34

I. M. Schlesinger

Comments by Naomi Goldblum are also gratefully acknowledged. A previous version of this paper has appeared as Working Paper No. 32, The Goldie Rotman Center for Cognitive Science in Education, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1990. 1. In Schlesinger (in press a) it is argued that this is a developmental thesis. See also Vygotsky's (1962) theory regarding the origin of thinking in language. 2. To my mind his arguments show only that thinking cannot be said to be equated with speaking, and they do not pertain to the possibility that once thinking occurs it is carried on in language. 3. See Weimann (1965) for a review of the remarks of Bacon and Locke on the topic of linguistic relativism. 4. On other influences on Herder's thought see Aarsleff (1988) and Christmann (1967). Christmann shows that the notion of Weltbild already appears (in isolated passages) in Giambatista Vico (1668-1744). The view became widespread in 18th century Europe: in France through Condillac and the Encyclopedists, in Germany through Johann David Michaelis. The latter influenced Italian writers, notably Melchior Cesarotti. 5. Fishman (1982) considers Herder's pluralism to be his most important spiritual heritage and holds that Whorf's contribution lies in lending new vigor to it. On Herder's pluralism see also Berlin (1976). 6. Humboldt changed his views from the Universalism of his earlier writings to the Relativism of later ones, though universalistic views are still to be found in the latter. At first he was influenced by Kant's disciples and Port Royal grammarians, but due to his descriptive work on languages (he is regarded by some as one of the founders of comparative linguistics) he became critical of the universalistic approach (R. L. Brown 1967: 96f).

7. 8.

9.

10.

For treatments of Humboldt's views see Brown (1967), Miller (1968), Kutschera (1971), and Penn (1972). Russell (1921: 212) quotes a nineteenth century philologist, Sayce, as suggesting that had Aristotle been a Mexican, his system of logic would have assumed a wholly different form. According to Lenneberg (1954/55), Cassirer later modified his view on this issue, since he realized that one cannot discover differences of world view by inspecting descriptions of other languages, because we conceive of these in terms of our own "knowledge structure". Sapir wrote his master's Thesis on Herder's Abhandlung iiber den Ursprung der Sprache. On influences on Sapir's thought see Christman (1967). Sapir's views are discussed in Bruner (1966a), Hymes (1966: 116-119), and Schaff (1976: 52-62). For a more reserved position expressed by Sapir see his Language (1921: 216-219). Language is formed by the speech community and thus is influenced by its mentality and culture. But once it has developed within the culture, language may affect the individual who lives in the culture. Its effect on the mentality of individuals may in its turn affect the culture (Kutschera 1971: 300-301). There is a lag here: language, which reflects culture at an earlier stage, influences contemporary culture (Kainz 1965: 197). Landesman (1961) is therefore wrong when he states that the fact that cultural factors affect language argues against Whorf.

11. The term "linguistic relativity (or: relativism)" is used by some to refer to the conjunction of claims (i) and (ii) (e.g., Carroll in his Introduction to Whorf 1956), and by others to (ii), e.g., Cole & Scribner 1974: 41). I propose therefore to use instead the less ambiguous terms determinism and (the one newly introduced here) parallelism. For a discussion of the epistemological implications of linguistic determinism see Kutschera 1971, section 4.4). 12. The nineteenth century philologist James Byrne (1820-1897) wrote a two-volume work on the influence of a people's dispositions on the structure of their language (Byme, 1985). This work is discussed briefly by Whorf (1956: 76-77). A more complex approach is that of Vossler (1932: 115f). On the one hand, Vossler sees language as expressing "national character", and on the

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

35

other, he distinguishes between logical thought that can be independent of linguistic thought, although he recognizes the influence of language and speaks of "the labours that logical thought [has] to undertake in order to free itself from linguistic thought" (1932: 201). 13. Hymes (1966) shows that Whorf opted for different alternatives on various occasions. 14. Whorf was aware of this possibility: He distinguishes between figures of speech and a linguistic form that "stems from some more deep and subtly pervasive undercurrent of thought" (Whorf 1956: 79). While he occasionally confined himself to linguistic evidence, in at least one of his papers he also described the cultural pattern corresponding to it (Lucy 1985). 15. This does not include partially arbitrary distinctions, such as grammatical gender, which only partially correlates with natural gender. Some studies have explored the cognitive effects of the gender classification of nouns, but so far with negative results (Hoffstatter 1963; Guiora, Beit Halachmi, and Sagi 1980; Guiora and Sagi 1978). 16. The term "determinism" is sometimes used for what I call here radical determinism (e.g., Hill 1988). 17. This view is now espoused by writers of the classical Artificial Intelligence persuasion, but it has much earlier roots. The notion of a mental language already appears in St. Augustine's (354-430) De Trinitate (Wierzbicka 1980: 2). Several writers in the late 19th century held that there can be at least primitive forms of thought ("Vorformen") without language (Kainz 1954). More recently, Black (1959: 232) has argued that since we have far more concepts than words, there may be "ad hoc symbols", that is, nonverbal tokens, in addition to dictionary words. 18. This possibility is disregarded by Penn (1972), who deduces from the fact that Humboldt and Sapir argue for identity of language and thought that they must have held the radical deterministic view. 19. Once he even speaks of language as "a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness" (Whorf 1956: 239). See Lucy and Shweder (1979) for an interpretation of Whorf's views. 20. Note that this is not a case of differential availability of categories (in both languages the noun and verb categories are available). Whorf's claim here pertains therefore to the Classification Thesis, not to the Availability Thesis. Admittedly, the boundary between the Availability Thesis and the Classification Thesis is fuzzy, but this does not imply of course that the distinction is not worth making. Elsewhere (Schlesinger 1988) I have adduced evidence for certain effects on adult cognition of the categorization imposed on the child at the language learning stage. 21. Note that the Selection Thesis is the weakest of the three and is presupposed by them. Perhaps this is part of the reason why researchers have attempted to put this thesis to a test: it deals with the hold language has on cognition, and its corroboration would be a preliminary step in vindicating Whorf's ideas. 22. Whorf was of course aware of this. He calls his theory "a new principle of relativity" (Whorf 1956: 214; cf. also Whorf 1956: 58; cf. also Sapir 1924: 155: "the relativity of the form of thought"). Heynick (1983) finds in Whorf's writings a preoccupation with some of the concepts of the Einsteinian physics. 23. Not a few writers have committed this fallacy. Apparently they started from the assumption that thought is identical to language (Thesis 1), and believed that by supplying examples of linguistic differences that thereby had already supplied examples of differences in mentality (Penn 1972: 30). However (as argued in Section 3.3), even on this assumption this does not follow. 24. Other criticisms include those by Greenberg (1954), Marshall (1965), Haugen (1977), Schaff (1973), and Langacker (1976). Some of these criticisms are directed against the radical deterministic view. See Fishman (1980) for a summary of criticisms. For more favorable analyses see Lakoff (1987) and Lucy (1985). 25. Further, some of Whorf's pronouncements on Indian languages were claimed to be wrong; see

36

I. M. Schlesinger

Gipper (1972). Malotki's (1983) 677-page monograph presents data showing that, contrary to Whorf, many Hopi temporal terms have spatial reference. 26. A similar point is made by Kay and Kempton (1984), who argue also that much of the research on Whorf's ideas was based on the tacit assumption that "[t]he semantic systems of different languages vary without constraint". This assumption, they claim, has been discredited by subsequent research on color lexicons.

References Aarsleff, H. 1988

Introduction to W. von Humboldt, On language: The diversity of human language structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind. Transl. by P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alexander, H. G. 1936 "Linguistic morphology in relation to thinking", Journal of Philosophy 33: 261-269. Asch, S. E. & H. Nerlove "The development of double function terms in children: An exploratory 1960 investigation", in: B. Kaplan & S. Wapner (eds.), Perspectives in psychological theory: Essays in honor of Heinz Werner. New York: International Universities Press. Au, T. K. "Chinese and English counterfactuals: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited", 1983 Cognition 15: 155-187. 1984 "Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom", Cognition 17: 289-302. Barnard, F. M. 1969 J. G. Herder on social and political culture. London: Cambridge University Press. Basilius, H. 1952 "Neo-Humboldtian ethnolinguistics", Word 8: 95-105. Bedau, H. H. 1957 Review of "Language, thought and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee W h o r f ' , Philosophy of Science, 24: 889-893. Berkeley, G. 1937 [1710] The principles of human knowledge. London: A. Brown. Berlin, I. Vico and Herder: Two studies in the history of ideas. London: Hogarth Press. 1976 Bertalanffy, L. von 1955 "An essay on the relativity of categories", Philosophy of Science 22: 243-263. Black, M. 1959 "Linguistic relativity: The views of Benjamin Lee W h o r f ' Philosophical Review 68: 228-238. 1962 Models and metaphors: Studies in language and philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1968 The labyrinth of language. New York: Praeger. "Some troubles with Whorfianism" in: S. Hook (ed.), Language and philosophy: A 1969 symposium. New York: New York University Press. Blank, M. 1974 "Cognitive functions of language in the preschool years", Developmental Psychology 10: 229-245.

The wax and wane of Whorfian views Bloom, A. 1981 1984

37

The linguistic shaping of thought: A study of the impact of language on thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. "Caution - The words you use may affect what you say: A response to Au", Cognition 17: 257-287.

Bomstein, M. H. 1973 "The psychophysiological component of cultural differences in color naming and illusion susceptibility", Behavior Science Notes 8: 41-101. 1973 "Color vision and color naming: A psychophysiological hypothesis of cultural differences", Psychological Bulletin 80: 257-285 1975 "The influence of visual perception on culture", American Anthropologist 77: 774-798. "Name codes and color memory", American Journal of Psychology 89: 269-279. 1976 Brown, R. W. 1956 "Language and categories", appendix to J. S. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow & G. A. Austin, A study of thinking. New York: Wiley. Brown, R. 1958 Words and things, Glencoe: Free Press. 1976 "Reference: In memorial tribute to Eric Lenneberg", Cognition 4: 125-153. 1977 "In reply to Peter Schonbach", Cognition 5: 185-187. 1986 "Linguistic relativity", in: S. H. Hülse & B. F. Green (eds.), One hundred years of psychological research in America: G. Stanley Hall and the Johns Hopkins tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Brown, R. W. & E. H. Lenneberg 1954 "A study in language and cognition", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49: 454-^62. Brown, R. L. Wilhelm von Humboldt's conception of linguistic relativity. The Hague: Mouton. 1967 Bruner, J. S. 1966a "On cognitive growth: II", in: J. S. Bruner, R. R. Olver & P. M. Greenfield (eds.), Studies in cognitive growth. New York: Wiley, 30-67. "An overview", in: J. S. Bruner, R. R. Olver & P. M. Greenfield (eds.), Studies in 1966b cognitive growth. New York: Wiley, 319-326. Byrne, J. 1885 General principles of the structure of language. Vols. 1 & 2. London: Triibner. Carmichael, L„ Hogan, H. P. & A. A. Walter 1932 "An experimental study of the effect of language on the reproduction of visually perceived form", Journal of Experimental Psychology 15: 78-86. Carroll, J. B. & J. B. Casagrande 1958 "The function of language classification in behavior", in: E. E. Maccoby, T. C. Newcomb & E. L. Hartley (eds.), Readings in social psychology. New York: Holt. Cassirer, E. 1923 Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Vol. I. Die Sprache. Berlin: B. Cassirer. 1953 The philosophy of symbolic forms. New Haven: Yale University Press. Christmann, H. H. 1967 "Beiträge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild der Sprache", in: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der Geistesund Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse. Jahrg. 1966, No. 6 Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Cole, M. & S. Scribner 1974 Culture and thought: A psychological introduction. New York: Wiley.

38

I. M. Schlesinger

Condillac, E. B. de 1756 An essay on the origin of human knowledge (Transl. by Nugent). London [1976] [Reprinted New York: AMS.] Daniel, T. C. 1972 "Nature of the effect of verbal labels on recognition memory of forms", Journal of Experimental Psychology 96: 152-157. Denny, J. P. 1979 "The 'extendedness' variable in classifier semantics: Universal features and cultural variation" in: M. Mathiot (ed.), Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf revisited. The Hague: Mouton. De Saussure, F. 1959 Course in general linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library. Ervin,S. 1962 "The connotations of gender", Word 18: 249-262. [1973] [Reprinted in S. Ervin-Tripp: Language acquisition and communicative choice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 156-172.] Feuer, L. S. 1953 "Sociological aspects of the relation between language and philosophy", Philosophy of Science 20: 85-100. Fishman, J. A. 1960 "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis", Behavioral Science 5: 323-329. 1980 "The Whorfian hypothesis: Varieties of valuation, confirmation and disconfirmation: I", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 26: 25-40. 1982 "Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a world-wide social asset (The Whorfian hypothesis: Varieties of validation, confirmation and disconfirmation II)", Language in Society 11: 1-14. Flavell, J. H. 1958 "A test of the Whorfian theory", Psychological Reports 4: 455^462. Friedrich 1979 Language, context and the imagination. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Gabelentz, G. von der 1901 Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. (2nd ed.) Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Galda, K. 1979 "Logic in non-Indo-European languages: Yucatec Maya, a case study", Theoretical Linguistics 6: 145-166. Gipper, H. 1972 Gibt es ein sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip?: Untersuchungen zur Sapir-Whorf Hypothese. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Glucksberg, S. & R. W. Weisberg 1966 "Verbal behavior and problem solving: Some effects of labelling in a functional fixedness problem", Journal of Experimental Psychology 71: 659-664. Granet, M. 1934 La pensée chinoise. Paris: Renaissance du Livre. Greenberg, J. H. 1954 "Concerning inferences from linguistic to nonlinguistic data", in: H. Hoijer (ed.) Language in culture: Conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The wax and wane of Whorfian views

39

Greenfield, P. M. & C. Childs 1974 "Weaving, color terms, and pattern representation: Cultural influences and cognitive development among the Zinacantecos of Southern Mexico", [Unpublished Ms., Harvard University.] Abstract in: J. Dawson & W. Lonner (eds.), Readings in cross-cultural psychology. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 112-113 Greenfield, P. M„ Reich, L. C. & R. R. Olver 1966 "On culture and equivalence: II", in: J. S. Bruner, R. R. Olver & P. M. Greenfield (eds.), Studies in cognitive growth. New York: Wiley. Guiora, A. Z., Beit-Halachmi, B„ Fried, R. & C. Yoder 1982 "Language environment and gender identity attainment", Language Learning 32: 289-304. Guiora, A. Z., Beit-Halachmi, B. & A. Sagi 1980 "A crosscultural study of symbolic meaning", Balshanut Shimushit 2: 27-40. Guiora, A. Z. & A. Sagi 1978 "A crosscultural study of symbolic meaning - developmental aspects", Language Learning 28: 381-386. Haugen, E. 1977 "Linguistic relativity: Myths and methods", in: W. C. McCormack & S. A. Wurm (eds.), Language and thought: Anthropological issues. The Hague: Mouton. Heider, E. R. 1972 "Universals in color naming", Journal of Experimental Psychology 93: 10-20. Heynick, F. 1983 "From Einstein to Whorf: Space, time, matter and reference frames in physical and linguistic relativity", Semiotica 45: 35-64. Herman, D. T., Lawless, R. H. & R. W. Marshall 1957 "Variables in the effect of language on the reproduction of visually perceived forms", Perceptual and Motor Skills 7 (Monograph Supplement 2): 171-186. Hill, J. H. 1988 "Language, culture, and world view", in: F. J. Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Vol. 4, 14-36. Hockett, C. F. 1954 "Chinese versus English: An exploration of the Whorfian thesis", in: H. Hoijer, (ed.), Language in culture: Conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hörmann, H. 1979 Psycholinguistics: An introduction to research and theory. (2nd ed.) New York: Springer. Hofstätter, P. R. 1963 "Das Problem des grammatischen Geschlechts von Sonne und Mond", Zeitschrift für experimentelle und angewandte Psychologie 10: 91-108. Hoijer, H. 1953 "The relation of language to culture", in: A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology today: An encyclopedic inventory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoijer, H. (ed.) 1954 Language in culture: Conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Humboldt, W. von 1836/1935 Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Wasmuth.

40

I. M. Schlesinger

Hymes, D. 1964 1966

Kainz, F. 1954 1965

"Introduction to Part III", in: D. Hymes (ed.), Language, culture and society: A reader in linguistics and anthropology. New York: Harper & Row. "Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography)", in: W. Bright (ed.), Sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the UCLA Socioiinguistics Conference, 1964. The Hague: Mouton.

"Vorformen des Denkens", Acta Psychologica 10: 61-92. Psychologie der Sprache. Vol. 5: Psychologie der Einzelsprachen. Part 1. Stuttgart: Enke. Kay, P. & W. Kempton 1984 "What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?" American Anthropologist 86: 65-79. Kleist, H. von 1895 Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Fock. Kluckhohn, C. 1954 "Culture and behavior", in: G. Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of social psychology. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 921-976. Kutschera, F. v. 1971 Sprachphilosophie. München: Fink. Koen, F. 1966 "Codability of complex stimuli: Three modes of representation", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3: 435^441. Lakoff, G. 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Landesman, C. 1961 "Does language embody a philosophical point of view?" Review of Metaphysics 14: 617-636. Langacker, R. W. 1976 "Semantic representations and the linguistic relativity hypothesis", Foundations of Language 14: 307-357. Lantz, D. & V. Stefflre 1964 "Language and cognition revisited", Journal of abnormal and social Psychology 69: 472-481. Lee, D. 1938 "Conceptual implications of an Indian language", Philosophy of Science 5: 89-102. 1940 "A primitive system of values", Philosophy of Science 7: 355-379. 1944a "Categories of the generic and particular in Wintu", American Anthropologist 53: 362-369. 1944b "Linguistic reflection on Wintu thought", International Journal of American Linguistics 10: 181-187. Lenneberg, E. H. 1953 "Cognition in ethnolinguistics", Language 29: 463^171. 1954/55 "A note on Cassirer's philosophy of language", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 15: 512-522. 1967 Biological foundations of language. New York: Wiley. Lenneberg, E. H. & J. M. Roberts 1956 "The language of experience: A study in methodology", International Journal of American Linguistics (Memoir No. 13).

The wax and wane of Whorfian views Levy, R. I. 1973 Lévy-Bruhl, L. 1910 Liu, L. G. 1985

Tahitians: Mind and experience Chicago Press. Les fonctions France.

in the Society

mentales dans les sociétés inférieures.

41

Islands.

Chicago: University of

Paris: Presses Universitaires de

"Reasoning counterfactually in Chinese: Are there any obstacles?" Cognition 239-270.

21:

Locke, J. 1894/1960 An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford: Clarendon. Loftus, E. 1975 Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology 7: 560-572. Loftus, E. F. & J. C. Palmer 1974 "Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 585-589. Longacre, R. A. 1956 Review of "Language and reality" by Wilbur M. Urban and "Four articles on Metalinguistics" by Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language 32: 298-308. in press "Some Trique grammatico-lexical characteristics: A world view?", in: M. Dascal (ed.), Cultural relativism and philosophy: North and Latin-American perspectives. Lovejoy, A. O. 1960/1936 The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. New York: Harper and Row. Lucy, J. A. 1985 "Whorf's view of the learning mediation of thought", in: E. Mertz & R. J. Parmentier (eds.), Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives Orlando: Academic Press. Lucy, J. & R. Shweder 1979 "Whorf and his critics: Linguistic and nonlinguistic influences on color memory", American Anthropologist 81:581-615. Luria, A. R. 1959 "The directive function of speech in development and dissolution", Word 15: 341-325, 453^164. Malotki, E. 1983 Hopi time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in the Hopi language. Berlin: Mouton. Marshall, J. C. 1965 Review of B. L. Whorf, "Language, thought, and reality", Linguistics 15: 78-81. Mauthner, F. 1901-02 Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. Stuttgart: Cotta. McKeon, R. (ed.) 1968 The basic works of Aristotle. New York: Random House. McNeill, D. 1987 Psycholinguistics: A new approach. New York: Harper & Row. Miller, R. L. 1968 The linguistic relativity principle and Humboldtian ethnolinguistics: appraisal. The Hague: Mouton.

A history

and

42

I. M. Schlesinger

Molesworth, W. The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. London: John Bohn. 1839 Müller, F. M. Three lectures on the science of language. (3rd ed.) Chicago: Open Court. 1899 Nietzsche, F. 1966/1886 Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. (Transl. Walter Kaufmann) New York: Vintage. Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. Berlin: de Gruyter. 1968/1887 016ron, P. Language and mental development. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1977 Penn, J. M. Linguistic relativity versus innate ideas: The origins of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in 1972 German thought. The Hague: Mouton. Porzig, W. 1923 "Der Begriff der inneren Sprachform", Indogermanische Forschungen 41: 150-169. Ranken, H. B. 1963 "Language and thinking: Positive and negative effects of naming", Science 141: 48-50. Rowland, E. H. 1907 "The psychological experiences connected with different parts of speech", Psychological Review, Monographs Supplement: 8 (Whole no. 32). Rumelhart, D. E.. McClelland, J. L. & the PDP Research Group 1987 Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Vol. 1, Foundations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Russell, B. 1921 The analysis of mind. London: Allen & Unwin. 1949 A critical exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz. London: Allen & Unwin. 1956 Logic and knowledge: Essays 1901-1950. (Edited by R. C. Marsh). London: Allen & Unwin. Sapir, E. 1921 Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt and Brace. 1924 "The grammarian and his language", American Mercury 1: 149-155. 1929 "The status of linguistics as a science", Language 5: 207-214. 1931 "Conceptual categories in primitive language", Science 74: 578. Schaff, A. 1973 Language and cognition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schlesinger, I. M 1988 "The origin of relational categories", in: Y. Levy, I. M. Schlesinger & M. D. S: Braine (eds.), Categories and strategies in language acquisition theory. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. in press a "If de Saussure was right, could Whorf have been wrong?", in: E. Dromi (ed.), Language and cognition: A developmental perspective. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. "The relation between thought and language: Some thoughts on linguistic relativity", in press b in: K. Benyamini, A. Dolev, M. Amir, E. Cohen, and I. M. Schlesinger (eds.), Theory and application in psychology: Volume in memory of Israel Lieblich. Jerusalem: Magnes. Shanon, B. 1990 "Why do we (sometimes) think in words?", in: K. J. Gilhooly, M. T. G. Keane, R. H. Logie, & g. Erdos (eds.). Lines of thinking. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley & Sons.

The wax and wane of Whorfian views Sommerfelt, A. 1938

43

"Les formes de la pensée et l'évolution des catégories de la grammaire", Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique: 170-184.

Spengler, O. 1922 Der Untergang des Abendlandes. München: Beck. Steffin:, V., Castillo, V. V. & L. Morley 1966 "Language and cognition in Yucatan: A crosscultural replication", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4: 112-115. Tinsley, V. S. & H. S. Waters 1982 "The development of verbal control over motor behavior: A replication and extension of Luria's findings", Journal of Child Development 53: 746-753. Trier, J. 1931 Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes: Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 1934 "Das sprachliche Feld: Eine Auseinandersetzung", Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 10: 428^149. Tung-Sun, Chang 1952 "A Chinese philosopher's theory of knowledge", ETC 9: 203-226. [Translation from a Chinese paper published in 1939) Urban, W. M. 1939 Language and reality: The philosophy of language and the principles of symbolism. New York: Macmillan. Van de Geer, J. P. 1960 Studies in codability: I. Identification and recognition of colors. (Report No. E001-60, State University of Leyden, Psychological Institute, The Netherlands.) Van de Geer, J. P. & N. H. Frijda 1960 Studies in codability: II. Identification and recognition of facial expressions. (Report No. E002-60, State University of Leyden, Psychological Institute, The Netherlands.) Vendler, Z. 1977 "Wordless thoughts", in: W. C. McCormack & S. A. Wurm (eds.) Language and thought: Anthropological issues. The Hague: Mouton. Verbürg, P. A. 1949/50 "The background of the linguistic conceptions of Bopp", Lingua 2: 438^168. Vossler, K. 1913 Frankreich im Spiegel seiner Sprachentwicklung. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 1929 Frankreichs Kultur und Sprache. (2nd ed.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 1932/1925 The spirit of language in civilization. (Transi, by O. Oeser.) London: Routlege & Kegan Paul. Vygotsky, L. S. 1962 Thought and language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Waisman, F. 1952/53 "Analytic-Synthetic. V", Analysis 13: 1-14. [Reprinted in Black.][1962] Weiler, G. 1970 Mauthner's critique of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weimann, K.-H. 1965 "Vorstufen der Sprachphilosophie Humboldts bei Bacon und Locke", Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie. 84: 498-508. Weisgerber, L. 1958 Verschiebungen in der sprachlichen Einschätzung von Menschen und Sachen. Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag.

44

I. M. Schlesinger

Whitney, W. D. 1875 The life and growth of language: An outline of linguistic science. New York: Appleton. Whorf, B. L. 1956 Language, thought, and reality. (Edited by J. Carroll.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wierzbicka, A. 1980 Lingua mentalis: The semantics of natural language. Sydney: Academic Press. 1988 The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Witherspoon 1977 Language and art in the Navajo universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1953 Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. 1961/1921 Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge & Paul Kegan.. Wozniak, R. H. 1972 "Verbal regulation of motor behavior: Soviet research and non-Soviet replications", Human Development 15: 13-57.

Linguistic relativity revisited* John

Macnamara

Introduction Benjamin Lee Whorf's writings about language (see J. B. Carroll's edition, 1965) are suffused with the belief that language is the main key to the secrets of the mind. Those secrets, he insisted, await the adventurous linguist under the seemingly dry linguistic facts about grammatical categories, morphology, aspect and phrase structure. In this broad belief I feel he was fully justified. Human thought makes essential use of symbols in grammatical constructions and the study of these symbols and constructions is a fundamental component in the study of human thought. There also leaps from Whorf's pages something like a gardener's joy in the beauty and variety of nature. The human mind refuses to be confined to a single expressive system and produces an astonishing multiplicity of linguistic forms. Whorf is justly renowned as an observer of this inventiveness. But he is perhaps, more renowned for the claim that differences among languages entail cognitive differences among the peoples that speak them. Echoing Einstein, he coined the expression "linguistic relativity" for this theory. Others had made the claim before Whorf, notably his friend and teacher Edward Sapir. No one, however, formulated the claim so clearly and so boldly as Whorf himself in one of the last pieces he wrote Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language - shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language - in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (Whorf 1956: 252) Nature's exuberance, then, seems to engender in Whorf a streak of skepticism. Different linguistic families, he seems to say, are constrained by unconscious and inexorable linguistic laws to think in radically different ways and, it seems to

46

John Macnamara

follow, to misunderstand each other. Whorf seems to side, then, with those like Copernicus and Darwin, who have toppled established systems of thought and with those like Freud and Duhem (the historian of physics) who undermine blithe confidence in the power of the human mind to get at truth. Joshua Fishman noted these strains in Whorf. In his celebrated paper "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis" Fishman (1960) reacted to Whorf's skeptical conclusions and brought down an influential judgement that Whorf's claim, in all but some minor matters, was not proven. Twenty five years later, however, Fishman (1985) reassessed this supposed skeptical streak in Whorf and gave more weight to the gardener's joy in diversity: Whorf may not be a detractor or a debunker at all. Indeed, he may be an admirer of a human potential that is, regrettably, all too often lost: the potential to learn languages and be enriched by it. There is, of course, in Whorf's work a third strain that is somewhat overshadowed by the other two. In the very last piece collected by J. B. Carroll Whorf speaks of a "human brotherhood" (p. 257) based on the fundamental nature of the mind, which is common to all human beings. He remarks that in this connections that an unlettered Papuan possesses the same set of basic mental properties that ground mathematical insight as does Einstein. He also noted (p. 163) that in fundamental respects human perception does not vary from one linguistic group to another. And across the linguistic variability he claimed that there is a common "sublinguistic" (p. 239) that underlies all language learning and language use. My own studies suggest, to me, that language, for all its kingly role, is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness, which are necessary before any communication, signalling, or symbolism whatsoever can occur ... (p. 239) In the years since Whorf died the discipline of linguistics, inspired by Noam Chomsky, has pursued this sublinguistic resolutely and, in the beginning at least, without much attention to linguistic diversity. Of course linguists no longer speak about a sublinguistic but about universal grammar, or UG as it is known in the trade. And contemporary linguists, who are quite as sensitive to linguistic diversity as Whorf was, bear Whorf out in his judgement that the study of linguistic diversity is of enormous importance for the specification of the sublinguistic (UG) that unites all human languages. In this essay I would like to develop the implications of some recent work on the logic of count nouns for the task of specifying this sublinguistic. In this way the universal or sublinguistic element in Whorf's writings will be strengthened. Whorf himself had a great deal to say about count nouns. Our inquiry, then, will enable us to evaluate an important component in Whorf's work on linguistic diversity. Our inquiry will not, however, lead to an overall judgement about the

Linguistic relativity revisited

47

justice or lack of justice in Whorf's claims for linguistic relativity. Instead, it will follow Fishman's (1960) advice to concentrate on particular aspects of language; and in general it will tend towards a conclusion that is broadly in sympathy with Fishman's. At the same time it will, I hope, illuminate and greatly strengthen Whorf's fundamental stance about the importance of linguistic studies for the understanding of cognitive states and processes. Thus we will be in close contact with all three of the tendencies that I have underlined in Whorf's writings. My strategy will be to seek notions of count noun that transcend linguistic diversity and to inquire into the cognitive presuppositions for the learning of count nouns. But first some more general observations about how the perspective of language relates to our theme.

B ¿Unguals The extent of the linguistic relativity that Whorf claims in some passages is enormous. For example, he claims that the correct speaking of Hopi presupposes quite a different understanding of the world and of facts in the world from that which is presupposed for the correct speaking of English. Specifically, he claims that Hopi Indians have almost no understanding of time that overlaps with that of English speakers - see Whorf (1965: 87 ff). Moreover, he claims that in Hopi the distinction made in English between nouns and verbs exists only in a shadowy way, whereas in Nitinat (p. 99) and in Nootka (pp. 215 and 242) the distinction is nonexistent. Now, this would mark a fundamental difference in conceptual life between English speakers on the one hand and Hopi, Nitinat and Nootka speakers on the other. The reason is that in English count nouns specify a domain that is divided into individuals with identity across times and circumstances, whereas verbs do not. It makes sense to try to count dogs or shirts but none at all to count cycled(s) or will run(s). The reason is that cycled individuates nothing which can be counted as distinct from something else. It might seem at first that there are obvious exceptions to this rule. For example, one might say I cycled twice last week and give the impression that cycled is being individuated and counted. But clearly this is not so. Twice means "on two occasions" and it is the occasions that are individuated and counted. A verb is not the sort of word that supports counting. I will come back to this later. Any linguist setting out to describe the semantics of a European language presupposes a domain of individuals with identity. That is, the linguist assumes that for speakers of the language there are distinct individuals and that the same individuals are to be found at different times and in different circumstances. Suppose now that Hopi, Nitinat and Nootka really did not distinguish between nouns and verbs and that their single noun-verb class was interpreted like our verbs. Then it

48

John Macnamara

would follow that speakers of Hopi, Nitinat and Nootka could not conceive of there being any such individuals as our people, dogs, tables and so forth. Incidentally, if this were so, it ought to be apparent in the way their languages fitted the world. Their languages, for example, ought to have no proper names, because proper names pick out individuals that persist throughout a range of times and circumstances. The absence of proper names would surely become apparent to a sensitive linguist from the West. The reason for pointing this out is to make clear that a deeply divergent semantic system would reveal itself to one who watched closely how language was applied to the world. Consider now persons who had learned, say, both Nootka and English. What about their expressive powers? There would seem to be only three choices, if Whorf were right. (1) They could, when speaking and listening to either Nootka or English always employ the semantic framework appropriate to one of the languages, say Nootka. The problematic language would then be English, because they would be attempting to impose the semantics of Nootka on English. This should mean that their attempts to understand English or make themselves understood in it would be quite futile. (2) They might develop a hybrid semantic system to be employed no matter which of the languages they attempted to communicate in. Then they would run the risk of understanding on one and being understood by no one. (3) They might have two semantic systems, one appropriate to Nootka and one to English. Then they could communicate with speakers of either language, but they would be able to restate in one language the gist of what they had heard in the other. These implications of Whorf's linguistic relativity run afoul of one guiding principle of natural-language semantics: science and technology apart, whatever can be expressed in one language can be expressed in any other language. I think that principle is a useful guide and that Whorf neglected it needlessly. The principle, however, does not decide the truth or falsehood of Whorf's claims, which as we have seen are at least to some extent empirical ones. Incidentally, though Charles Hockett (1958: chap. 26) sided with Whorf in the view that Nootka lacks distinct grammatical categories corresponding to noun and verb in English, he later (Hockett 1963) came to the conclusion that Nootka does show "something very much like the noun-verb contrast". In view of what is at stake conceptually the change of mind is hardly surprising. More recently, Malotki (1983) has reexamined Whorf's claims about Hopi and rejected many of them including the claim that Hopi does not distinguish nouns from verbs. So it seems that in the judgement of subsequent linguists, Whorf was not correct in those linguistic claims that we have been examining. Nowadays psychologists generally assume a language of thought, a language into which languages such as Nootka and English (as well as messages from various perceptual channels) are compiled, a language of cross-channel communication for the mind. The idea has been powerfully proposed by Fodor (1975),

Linguistic relativity revisited

49

though it was standard in such ancient writers as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. It is, unless I am mistaken, also implicit in Aristotle's doctrine of the common sense, the internal sense that is common to all the external senses such as vision, hearing, feeling and smell. Armed with the language of thought together with its semantic system, the present day psychologist is not likely to look with favour on claims of linguistic relativity. The reason is not just that the input of all external channels of communication must be translatable into the language of thought but even more that the language of thought with its semantics places constraints on the semantics of any natural language like Nootka or English. It is interesting to note, by way of contrast, that when Whorf was writing, behaviourism was in its heyday; so there was little official interest in the mind let alone any talk of a language of thought. In such an intellectual climate linguistic relativity seemed more plausible than it does today.

Whorf's own language learning It was evident to many of Whorf's readers early on that if linguistic relativity on the scale he proposed were true, then Whorf's own learning of languages like Hopi and Navaho would be extremely mysterious. Of course all language learning is mysterious but one has the feeling that if linguistic relativity were true than it ought to be well nigh impossible for a native speaker of English to learn a North American Indian language. Whorf wrote that "facts are unlike to people whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them"(p. 235). It should follow that initially what Whorf, the English speaker, saw in his environment was not what a Hopi informant saw. The perceived environment would not, then, be the same for Whorf and for his Hopi informant and would not provide a means of calibrating their understanding of each other. Indeed Whorf himself recognizes the extreme difficulty of "calibrating" (his word, p. 214) languages of widely different stock. Davidson (1974) argues that the problem is worse, that without a commonly construed environment Whorf's learning of Hopi would have been impossible. As we have seen, it ought to be possible to detect with reasonable assurance whether the speakers of some language construe the world as containing some individuals with identity. So empirical observation could reveal at least some divergence between the semantic systems of two languages. I have no idea of how in principle to draw a line marking where empirical observation would necessarily fail; nor does Davidson offer any. So I am content to say that if the Hopi construed the environment as Whorf claimed they did, then Whorf's own learning of Hopi would have been far more difficult and far more tentative than he intimated. Remember, too, what Whorf spoke of "inexorable laws of pattern of which [a person] is unconscious" (p. 252). If Whorf's thoughts were subject to "inexorable

50

John Macnamara

laws", especially laws of which he was himself unconscious, presumably he could not have modified this thinking in ways that broke with the supposed English laws and conformed with the supposed Hopi ones. It is simply a confusion to say that one can change inexorable laws. And yet in the next breath after speaking of inexorable laws Whorf claims that these very laws are "shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages" (p. 252). If Whorf's English thought laws really were inexorable they would have so conditioned his understanding of Hopi as to have, by Whorf's own account, misled him utterly in his interpretation of Hopi. I am afraid that the passage cited above from Whorf (1956: 252) is simply a muddle. En passant, it is of interest to note that Davidson (1974) addresses the same reproach not only to Whorf but to Thomas Kuhn (1962) and those other philosophers and historians of science who claim that bye-gone scientific theories are incommensurable with those that have succeeded them. Without speaking of inexorable laws of thought Kuhn and those who think like him argue, for example, that there is no way to calibrate the language of Maxwell, say, with that of Fyneman. The point is interesting in that it shows that belief in linguistic relativity is not confined to the linguists and linguistic anthropologists of a certain period. Another area where one might be tempted to look for evidence of linguistic relativity is in the study of mentalities (culturally conditioned mind sets), which has become common among historians. The sort of thing that interests historians is changing attitudes to women, to miracles, to homosexuality or whatever. While, however, historians may employ the evidence of linguistic usage to support some particular claim, they do not feel that they can read a mentality straight off a people's vocabulary or linguistic pattern. For, the same vocabulary and linguistic patterns may be common to those who have a mentality and those who do not. One uses the same word ghost to say either that one does or does not believe in ghosts.

Child language learner At first a child learning its mother tongue would seem to be in a better position then either the bilinguals we have considered or than Whorf himself. For the child is not yet subject to the inexorable laws of any natural language. It will not, then, be hampered by any inexorable laws in the learning of its mother tongue. But does this absence of linguistically conditioned laws not constitute a serious weakness in the child? Is not the supposed plasticity of mind a distinct disadvantage? What is going to guide the child to place the correct construction on the parents' utterances? To grasp the force of these questions let us turn for a moment from Whorf to some philosophers who have explicitly addressed the issue of first language learning from a Whorf-like standpoint. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French

Linguistic relativity revisited

51

existentialist, was convinced that children do not discover for themselves any kinds of individuals in the world about them, that kinds are thrust upon them by the language they leam - very much the sort of stance one would expect Whorf to take in view of his claims about the absence of a noun-verb distinction in several languages. Here is Merleau-Ponty: It is not because two objects resemble each other that they are designated by the same word; on the other hand, it is because they are designated by the same word and thus participate in the same verbal and affective category that they are perceived as similar. (1963: 169-170) Michael Dummet goes even further. He denies that infants can make out either individuals or kinds before they learn their mother tongue. In writing about infants he concludes: The picture of reality as an amorphous lump, not yet articulated into discrete objects, thus proves to be the correct one, so long as we make the right use of it. It serves to emphasize that, in learning the use both of countable general terms [count nouns, like dog] and of proper names, we have to learn the criterion of identity associated with them ... Such a picture corrects the naive conception ... [which] presupposes that the world presents itself to us already dissected into discrete objects, which we know how to recognize when we meet them again, in advance of our acquiring any grasp o language at all. (1981: 577-578) One point to begin with. I believe that Dummett is right that there is no coming to know individuals without a kind to specify what is to count as an individual and what is to count as the same individual from one occasion to the next. I also believe he is right, that one cannot invoke kinds in the way that is necessary to individuate objects and trace their identity without count nouns to refer to the kinds. It follows that one does not confront a world of individuals with identity in advance of "any grasp of language at all". But this principle proves to be a twoedged sword. It also serves to rule out Dummett's own approach to language learning as well as Merleau-Ponty's and to raise serious problems for Whorf's linguistic relativity. The very close agreement between Whorf on the one hand and Merleau-Ponty and Dummett on the other is brought out by these words from Whorf s paper on "Science & Linguistics." The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare us in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds. We cut nature up ... as we do, largely because [of] ... an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language." (p. 213)

52

John Macnamara

We must now consider why such theories as these cannot work. Merleau-Ponty wonders how children know what categories of objects there are: dogs, chairs, spoons and the like. He realizes that the creatures we call dogs vary in size, shape, weight, colour. His solution to the problem of how children thread their way through the confusion is that they listen to their parents, see which things they call dog, catch on and enter the speech community. There is a great deal to be said about this, such as what one might mean by catch on, but let us go on and look rather at the word dog. That word sounds differently when pronounced rapidly or drawingly. As a physical entity it varies enormously with linguistic context: when preceded or followed by a vowel, a stop consonant (e.g., d or t), a fricative (e.g., s o r / ) and so on. As a physical signal, too, it varies as it is stressed or unstressed. How, then, can children recognize such different physical entities as examples of the word dog? Remember, the initial problem was to explain how children can recognize physically diverse objects as all belonging to the kind dog. The solution Merleau-Ponty offers raises exactly the same sort of problem, only shifted to the perception of speech. In other words, he simply assumes in one sensory modality the solution he needs for the same problem in another modality. This is not, of course, to deny that once you have sorted out the words and structures of your mother tongue you can use them to learn about the world; it is to deny that the initial problems of classification can be solved in the way Merleau-Ponty says. Michael Dummett proposes that the child is confronted, in experience, by an "amorphous lump"; that what carves out individuals in the lump are proper names and what traces the identity of those individuals is the continued application of the same proper name to an individual and the application of such expressions as the same dog. Let us not pause to inquire how children could know that a proper name was being applied many times to the same individual, unless they could see, independent of the name, that it was the same individual. Let us confine attention to language itself. There is hardly anything that is more suitably described as an "amorphous lump" than speech in an unfamiliar language. I have a test I routinely apply in class. I offer $10 to anyone who can say what the first word is in an Irish poem of which I recite a few lines. No one has ever collected from me. (Of course, Irish people are ruled out.) I do not chew up the words or cheat and the first word happens to be a monosyllable. Perhaps we articulate with special care for infants but that is beside the point, because we have to equip infants with perceptual and conceptual skills to benefit from our careful articulation. That is, we have to equip them with the skill to individuate words and (as we saw in discussing MerleauPonty) recognize physically different entities as examples of the same word. Dummett looks to proper names and common nouns to individuate the amorphous non-linguistic mass and handle the identity of the individuals arrived at. What is going to individuate the amorphous mass that is language and handle the

Linguistic relativity revisited

53

identity of the linguistic individuals (words) thus arrived at? Well the description of a proper name is a name in quotes. The description of Harry's name is "Harry". One trouble from the point of view of the infant is that we don't show clearly which we mean a name or its description. W e say to children: "This is Harry" and in the next breath "Say 'Harry'". In writing we distinguish; in speech we generally do not. But even if we did, on Dummett's account, we would need descriptions of descriptions of names to individuate the descriptions of names. An infinite and hopless regress opens before us. The same goes for count nouns. T o describe the nonlinguistic world we have words like dog, house, spoon, and to describe the linguistic one we have the category words noun, verb, adjective and so on. The linguistic categories are remote from the perceptual array. A word's nounness is far less obvious in its sound than Harry's humanity is in his appearance. But even if it were not, we would be caught in a hopeless regress, if Dummett's account of mental development were correct. For, in order to leam the categories noun, verb, adjective and so on we would need words; and to learn those words we would need other words, etc. Similar remarks can be applied to Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions." A t root what is wrong is the very idea of minds being formed, to the extent Merleau-Ponty, Dummett and Whorf claim, by the learning of a mother tongue. Consequently there is something seriously the matter with linguistic relativity, at least if it is understood in the strong sense that Whorf intended.

Some linguistic universals While berating specific theories of language and specific theories of language learning, I have insisted on the central role of language in cognition. In the concluding section I want to give some idea of the type of insight into mind that close attention to language can yield. The insight, however, is into universal properties of mind, not into local or cultural ones. Consider the question, Are there count nouns in other languages besides English? It is likely to receive a brusque answer, O f course. But how do we know? The old schoolmaster defined noun as the "name of a person, place or thing." His definition appeals to the meanings of a class of words, not to the functioning of the class inside a syntactic system. The definition, however, is seriously defective, as is well known. One serious trouble is that a noun like dog does not name any of the creatures one finds running around in the neighbourhood; instead it refers to the kind (or category) to which those creatures belong. There is all the difference in the world between a particular dog and the kind to which it belongs. So the definition should not have restricted the notion of noun to name for things unless among things were included such abstract entities as kinds. A second problem is with the word thing. Certainly a dog or a table is a thing in some intuitive sense of

54

John Macnamara

the word and dog and table are nouns. But is an idea a thing? - idea is a count noun. And then there are all those nouns formed from verbs and adjectives; for example, a walk, a talk, length, depth. They are all count nouns but they cannot be said to name kinds of things in the sense the schoolmaster probably intended. So the old definition is not going to help to determine if there are count nouns in other languages besides English. If you consult a modern grammar you will probably not find a definition of count noun. The word will be freely employed with the assumption that every reader knows what it means. You might try to construct a definition of count noun for English by studying the role played by count nouns in English phrase structure (or whatever nowadays takes the part of phrase structure). This might lead you to conclude that count nouns are those words that can be heads of certain noun phrases. The problem with this approach, apart from that of specifying what is meant by head, is that it is circular. It would define count noun by reference to a certain type of noun phrase and, of course, the relevant type of nounphrase would be specified by reference to count noun. This may be fine for the purposes of English grammarians but it does not generalize. English phrase structure differs noticeably from that of even so close a language as French in which for one thing adjectives generally occupy a different position from English. Other phrase structures differ from English far more. Besides, the definition, being circular, would be no help at all to field linguists attempting to decide if there are count nouns in some new language they are studying. So how do field linguists decide the matter? Conversations with some linguists suggest that plural morphemes, if one or more can be identified, are important clues. Apparently linguists instinctively look out for the class of words that take plural morphemes and these they tend to take as count nouns. This appears to be on the right lines, because as we have seen count nouns in English individuate their extension; and where there is individuation there can be plurality. Unfortunately there are snags. In many languages, like Irish and Latin, adjectives and verbs also take plural morphemes. To the plural morpheme on its own will not infallibly isolate count nouns. To make matters worse there are also many languages, like Japanese and Chinese, that have no plural morphemes. In such languages some other way must be found. One could probably be guided by the quantifiers and assign to the category of count noun all and only those words that take such quantifiers as a, another, one, two ... Following a line of thought that stems in recent times from Peter Geach (1957, 1962 & 1972), Anil Gupta (1980) and Reyes (in press), a line whose linguistic implications are developed in Macnamara (1986a & 1986b), it is now possible to supply a set of rules for deciding which words are count nouns in any natural language. The rules are ordered, as is typical in linguistics.

Linguistic relativity revisited

Rule 1.

55

A count noun is a word that refers to a kind satisfying two conditions: a. All of the kind's members are atoms. b. The kind supplies a principle of identity for the members.

To say count nouns are words is to assume that languages are essentially divisible into words. The requirement that each count noun be a single word, however, is too strong. Canada Goose is a count noun, yet on the face of things it is composed of two words. Still Canada Goose is a linguistically simple expression something on the lines of such French proper names as Jean-Claude. You cannot, for example, say that a Canada Goose is Canada, by analogy with the fact that a tall man is tall. The fact that a count noun refers to a kind distinguishes it from a proper name, which refers to an individual. The first condition distinguishes prototypical count nouns from mass nouns, like water, furniture. Compare frog with water. Frog specifies a membership consisting of frogs. Two frogs do not constitute a frog nor does a frog's leg. By contrast two glasses of water constitute some water and so does half a glass. This shows how a frog is an atom in the kind frog, whereas a glass of water is not an atom in the kind water. One might at first glance imagine that furniture specifies atoms, such as lamps, chairs and tables. This is incorrect. Article offurniture, a count noun, does specify atoms but furniture on its own does not. To see this consider a standard lamp. A standard lamp is furniture and so is the shade. On the other hand two lamps are furniture. This is enough to show that furniture does not specify a domain consisting solely of atoms. This is not to claim that there are no atoms in the domain. It may be that only detachable parts of furniture count as furniture. But that is beside the point. The kinds referred to by count nouns supply a principle of identity for their members. Adjectives and verbs also denote kinds, but not ones that specify atomic members to which the logic of identity applies. For example, it makes sense to ask if this frog on the grass is the same frog as the frog that was in the water a while ago. What Geach pointed out was that there can be no logic of identity without a common noun to support the identity sign. Sameness of frog is not dependent on sameness of shape, position, colour, weight even general appearance (remember the tadpoles). Sameness of frog is something quite special to the kind frog; it is the sameness that is traceable only in that kind. Mark Baker pointed out to me that some languages have morphological rules with the semantic effect that whatever a verb expresses is reduplicated. Thus in these languages verbs can express a plurality that is independent of count nouns, which might appear to constitute a counter example to Rule 1. As it happens, Whorf (p. 52) gives an example. Hopi expresses the reduplication in question by repeating the last syllable of the verb and adding the morpheme -ta. For example, ho' 'ci means it forms a sharp angle and hoci'cita means it forms a series of sharp

56

John Macnamara

angles or zigzag; pa' 'ci means it is notched and paci'cita means it is serrated. An example closer to home is given by Ray Jackendoff (1986) - John kept running to the barn. This means that John repeated the action several times. Notice that since John and barn are singular the plurality is expressed by the verb phrase. The point is a valid one. But notice that if we wish to engage in the logic of identity and, for example, inquire whether the time John stumbled over the tree root while running to the barn was the time he ran to fetch the screwdriver, we have recourse to a count noun such as time or run (as noun). It follows that the example taken from Jackendoff fails to satisfy the second condition of Rule 1. But there are count nouns that do not satisfy Rule 1. There are many count nouns that combine with mass nouns to specify part of the extension of mass nouns: part of the porridge, a body of water, a piece of cheese and so on. Extension in this context means the stuff or individuals that belong in the kind to which the mass nouns refers. Part of part of the porridge is still part of the porridge, in a way that part of a frog is not a frog. This suggests Rule 2.

A word is a count noun if it combines with a mass noun to designate part of the extension of the kind referred to by the mass noun and if the combination takes quantifiers that presuppose individuation.

In English the quantifiers in question are a, many, one, two ... and such like. The idea is that language learners and linguists identify these quantifiers through their use with prototypical count nouns as specified by Rule 1. Having thus identified these quantifiers, learners can use them, in much the way Brown (1957) shows children can, to identify non-prototypical count nouns. The reason quantifiers are necessary is to block the conclusion that words like some are count nouns, though in combination with a mass noun they designate part of the extension of the mass noun. Some water is an example. Another exception to Rule 1 is the class of collective nouns, like flock, herd, army. Part of a flock of sheep may well be a flock. An interesting feature of such nouns is that they specify what is to count as an atomic member of the collection. For example, a flock of sheep consists of sheep; part of a sheep, an ear say, is not a member of the flock. This leads to Rule 3.

A word is a count noun if in the singular form it refers to a kind that consists of numbers of atomic individual members in the extension of a prototypical count noun.

The idea, this time, is that the identification of count nouns by Rule 3 presupposes the identification of prototypical count nouns by Rule 1 and by the identification of the plural morpheme(s), if there are any, through their use with prototypical count nouns. I do not claim that Rules 1 - 3 constitute a definition of the notion count noun. Perhaps there are other exceptions that require other rules for other languages and

Linguistic relativity revisited

57

even for English. What I do claim is that the key to all such rules is supplied by the semantic notions of individuation and identity. My conjecture is that these notions constitute the only non-circular guide to solving the question of whether there are count nouns in languages other than English. Notice that Rules 1 - 3 conform to a very general pattern in linguistics, that of rule and exceptions rather than to the model of a definition. So far as I can tell the rules are correct, though I have to leave it to comparative linguists to decide if they capture the intuitions across all languages. My conjecture, however, is that the rules supply the only guide to count nouns in languages other than English and that they are the sole means of solving the question whether there are count nouns in languages other than English. It becomes a matter of seeing if there are words that satisfy the rules. The rules can also be pressed into service in the explanation of child learning. In A border dispute (chaps 7 and 8) I offer a theory of how children come to understand the count nouns their parents teach them. In the theory the rules for count-noun status play a crucial role, though not in the form in which they are expressed above. I will not repeat the theory here. I would like to add, however, some remarks relevant to our theme of how to decide if there are count nouns in a language and, if there are, how to distinguish them. Besides individuating frogs and tracing their identity children, as we have seen above, have to individuate the word frog and trace its identity. For this they need an appropriate count noun. Word would suffice for some purposes but not for all. Accepting Chomsky's arguments, recently reiterated forcefully by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), that children must learn the grammatical rules of their mother tongue, we have to recognize that children need the kind count noun and also an expression count noun with which to refer to it. It follows quite naturally that when children learn the word frog for the kind to which certain creatures belong they simultaneously assign the word frog to the kind count noun, since it fits the rules given above. Of course if the children were very young and showed no sensitivity to the syntactic differences between count nouns and mass nouns they could get by with the expression common noun - but for this they might have to be very young, if some recent findings by Leslie McPherson (1988) about the learning of mass nouns are to believed. It is immaterial, by the way, that children do not normally use the English expression count noun until they are well into their school years. They simply have to recognize the grammatical categories of words much earlier and denote them by means of appropriate labels, if they are to express the grammatical rules of their mother tongue. Parenthetically, there has been much discussion as to whether young children's knowledge of grammar is explicit or implicit. The question is, Are they or are they not conscious of the grammatical points they pick up? The matter is tangential to the interests of this paper. But while some of the grammatical points children pick up surely escape their conscious attention, not all do. The notion of count noun may well be conscious. Children could express it to themselves as words for kinds

58

John Macnamara

of things, where things is taken as meaning intuitively-given individual objects. So as children spot that frog means a kind of thing, they might also spot that frog is also a kind of word, a word for a kind of thing. To return to the main line of thought. Implicit in the account of noun learning just sketched is the theory that children come to language learning with an unlearned expression (in the language of thought) for the category of count noun together with rules for its application. The rules have to incorporate the conditions of their application in some procedure-like fashion. Of course, pursuant to my remarks on Dummett, experience must be organized in a perceptual and pretheoretic manner to serve as material for the application of the rules. But I will not repeat here what I have written about that in A border dispute. It is, of course, the same unlearned expression, and the same rules for its application that guide the learning of count nouns at any age including the learning of count nouns in new languages by field linguists. The commonality across learning situations and languages is discovered only by rising to a high level of abstraction. When one does rise to that level, what one discovers is perhaps the most fundamental element in our conceptual lives, the element that grounds our positing of domains of individuals with identity. In the last chapter of Syntactic structures Noam Chomsky explores what came to be known as the autonomy thesis, the thesis, or rather hypothesis, that the rules of syntax should be expressed without any reference to semantics. Chomsky was, presumably, inspired by the practice of logicians who invariably give the rules for the wellformedness of formulae independently of the semantics. If what we have just seen is right, we now see that the hypothesis is not entirely correct. In formulating the rules for count noun we came closer to the oldfashioned schoolmaster than to the modern linguist; we based the rules on the semantic considerations of individuation and identity. Though this is not the place to go into detail, similar rules can be supplied for mass noun, proper name, and, I believe, for verb and adjective, perhaps for all the open syntactic categories. This means that when stating the rules of grammar over these categories, one's statements are making essential use of semantics. This is not to demolish the autonomy hypothesis; there is much more to grammar than the grammatical categories. It is, however, to draw syntax and semantics closer together than has been popular in the last thirty years. And it is to return in some measure to the spirit of Whorf. Remember, the first strain that we isolated in his writing is the insistence that the diligent study of grammar would yield deep insight into the nature of the human mind. I hope that what we have just been considering will be seen as support for than intuition, though more for what it reveals of the sublinguistic than of linguistic relativity. I believe, too, that our discussions have also brought us closer to one of the great sources of modem interest in language, a source to which the origins of linguistic relativity are sometimes traced, Johann Gottfried Herder. In Herder there seems to be an even greater concern with the sublinguistic than in Whorf. In his Essay on

Linguistic relativity revisited

59

the origin of language (1772/1966) he insists that "man is organized to be a creature of language" (p. 145). He also notes that for any reflection about the world or about language to occur prior to the establishment of a language like English a "language of the soul" (p. 125) would be required. The reason is a just one: "without language man has no reason, and without reason no language" (p. 121). These are principles that were operative in the writing of this essay. In a way I see the work on count nouns as revealing one fundamental way in which "man is organized to be a creature of language". The emphasis on the universal sublinguistic does not preclude linguistic relativity of a more manageable and more peripheral sort than Whorf was advocating. At least nothing that has been said rules it out. With that I find I have reached a position very similar to that reached by Fishman, following a rather different path, in 1960. This is hardly surprising, because he is one of the people who have always guided my thinking about linguistic relativity.

Note * In writing this article I have had the benefit of helpful discussions with Mark Baker, Paul Bloom, Joyce Macnamara, Michael Makkai, and Gonzalo Reyes.

References Brown, R. 1957 Chomsky, N. 1957 Davidson, D. 1974

Dummett, M. 1981 Fishman, J. A. 1960 1985

Fodor, J. A. 1975 Geach, P. T. 1957 1962

"Linguistic determinism and the part of speech", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 55: 1-5 Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme", Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (Reprinted in D. Davidson 1984). Inquiries into truth and interpretation.) Oxford: Clarendon, 183-198. Frege: Philosophy of language. (2nd edit.). London: Duckworth. "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis", Behavioral Science 8: 323-339. "The Whorfian hypothesis: Varieties of valuation, confirmation and disconfirmation", in: J. A. Fishman (ed.), The rise and fall of the ethnic revival: Perspectives on language and ethnicity. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 457-471. The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Mental acts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reference and generality. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press.

60

John Macnamara

Gupta, A. K. 1980 Herder, J. G. 1772 [1966] Hockett, C. F. 1958 1963 Jackendoff, R. 1986 Kuhn, T. S. 1962 Macnamara, J. 1970 1986a 1986b McPherson, L. 1988

The logic of common nouns. Yale University Press. "Essay on the origin of language", in: J. H. Moran & A. Gode (ed. and trans.), On the origin of language. New York: Friedrick Ungar. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan. "The problem of universals in language", in: J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Consciousness and the computational mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. "Bilingualism and thought", in: J. E. Alatis (ed.), Georgetown University, 21st Annual Round Table 23: 25-40. A border dispute: The place of logic in psychology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press. "Principles and parameters: A response to Chomsky", New Ideas in Psychology 4: 215-222.

The learning of count nouns and mass nouns. Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Psychology, McGill University. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1963 The structure of behavior. Boston, MA: Beacon. Molotki, E. 1983 The Hopi Time. New York: Mouton. Reyes, G. (in press) "A topos-theoretic approach to reference and modality", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. Whorf, B. L. 1956 Language, thought & reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis* Vera John-Steiner

The relationship of language to thought - and the specific hold of a particular language upon its users - has intrigued scholars through the ages. In spite of such interest, however, there are only a few theories which have advanced bold claims in depicting this connection and its critical role in human knowing. One of these is the thesis of linguistic relativity: "The most brilliant, stimulating, and fruitful formulations of the thesis, which are still passionately debated, are probably those put forward in the '30's by Whorf" (1973: 1), wrote the Italian linguist, RossiLandi, forty years later. He recognized that the hypothesis which Whorf presented so effectively had its origins with much earlier thinkers; the earliest notion of linguistic relativity can be traced back to Herodotus (Fishman 1985). In this paper, I will focus on one aspect of the Whorfian hypothesis, first expressed by Sapir: "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation" (quoted in Spier et al., 1941, p. 57). The amazing variety of our experienced world cannot be represented effectively without some selectivity. This task has become even more demanding in the twentieth century. Human beings are flooded with information; the challenge to notice, to remember, and to try to make order out of it is awesome. Language is a primary means of simplifying and categorizing experience. The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. (Whorf 1956: 213) The linguistic ordering of experience serves interpersonal functions, that of communication and the maintenance of intersubjectivity, and intrapersonal functions, that of codification and representation. The way in which Sapir and Whorf s thinking has influenced our contemporary ideas about the link between these two aspects of the language-thought relationship will be the central theme of this discussion. In examining issues of mental representation, I will look at them from a Whorfian and interdisciplinary point of view. While most scholars in language-related disciplines agree with Whorf's fundamental insight concerning the linguistic ordering of our experiential world, their disagreements center upon some of the specific implications of this hypo-

62

Vera John-Steiner

thesis. As Joshua Fishman has shown in a series of carefully argued papers (see, for example, 1985), research has failed to support the strong, or deterministic, version of the Whorfian hypothesis. Accorrding to this version, differential language structures are the causal factors in "value structures, Weltanschauungen, cultural outlooks, and cognitive styles, whether viewed across cultures or within any one or another of them" (1985: 466). In spite of the lack of support for this unidirectional view of language and thought, Fishman suggests that "there have obviously been several very positive by-products of struggling with it" (1985: 466). The Whorfian claim has been sufficiently controversal that contemporary scholars have continued to study "the impact of society upon language, the circular impact of society upon language and of language upon society, [and] the identity (or interpénétration) of language and society" (Fishman 1985: 4 6 7 ^ 6 8 ) . Perhaps Whorf's most important legacy was his unwavering commitment to linguistic diversity. This aspect of his thinking continues to be relevant to scholars and to society at large. But the exploration of Whorf's opinions about pluralism is overshadowed by his better known claims. This argument was presented by Joshua Fishman in his article, "Whorfianism of the Third Kind: Ethnolinguistic Diversity as a Worldwide Asset." In making the case for the continued importance of local languages in the face of powerful world languages, Fishman and Whorf were joined by the linguist, George Lakoff, who wrote in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: Just as the gene pool of a species needs to be kept diverse if the species is to survive under a wide variety of conditions, so I believe that diverse ways of comprehending experience are necessary to our survival as a species. I believe that vanishing cultures and languages need to be protected just as vanishing species do. And, like Whorf, I think we have a lot to learn from other ways of conceptualizing experience that have evolved around the world. (1987: 337) Lakoff sees the issue of linguistic diversity as closely linked to cognitive pluralism, and he supports Whorf's notion that different languages provide different ways in which speakers note, combine, represent, and remember their experience. Contemporary researchers have rejected the notion that a particular language determines a particular way in which experiences are cognitively structured. But some recent research supports Lakoff s assumption that "Whorf was right in observing that concepts that have been made part of the grammar of a language are used in thought, not just as objects of thought, and that they are used spontaneously, automatically, unconsciously, and effortlessly" (1987: 335). Both in lexical choice and in the way in which syntax designates complex relationships, the features of each language affect conceptualization. Kay and Kempton (1984) examined the performance of subjects in two related tasks requiring perceptual judgements. They predicted that English-speaking subjects would use a "name strategy" when making color distinctions among chips whose

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

63

colors were near the boundaries between blue and green. The English speakers' performance was compared to that of Tarahumera-speaking subjects. (Tarahumera is a Uto-Aztecan language from northern Mexico.) It has only a single term, "siyoname," which means blue or green. Kay and Kempton found that in the task where the name strategy was relevant, English-speaking subjects exaggerated the subjective distances close to the boundary. The Tarahumera speakers did not show this effect. In a second task, where the name strategy was of no use, "English speakers' subjective similarity judgments revert to conformity with the underlying discrimination distances" (1984: 75). The authors interpret their findings as follows: "There do appear to be incursions of linguistic categorization into apparently nonlinguistic processes of thinking, even incursions that result in judgments that differ from those made on a purely perceptual basis" (1984: 77). They then suggest a reformulation of the linguistic relativity notion: "The case seems to be first, that languages differ semantically but not without constraint, and second, that linguistic differences may induce nonlinguistic cognitive differences but not so absolutely that universal cognitive processes cannot be recovered under appropriate contextual conditions" (1984: 77). In this study, it was shown that naming devices can contribute to exaggerating differences between stimuli. A different linguistic resource is implicit in the use of certain grammatical devices when applied to the condensation of complex experiences. One often quoted example given by Whorf is the English rule of treating some tangible and intangible entities in the same way: We say 'ten men' and also 'ten days'. Ten men either are or could be objectively perceived as ten ... ten men on a street corner, for instance. But 'ten days' cannot be objectively experienced. We experience only one day, today; the other nine (or even all ten) are something conjured up from memory or imagination. ... In Hopi there is a different linguistic situation. ... Such an expression as 'ten days' is not used. ... 'They stayed ten days' becomes 'they stayed until the eleventh day'. (Whorf 1956: 139-140) In English the same grammatical operation (for instance, pluralization) can be applied upon men as well as days, a process that Lucy and Wertsch suggest results "as if they were the same sort of term, that is, as if they denoted the same sort of object. By contrast, this is not the case in the Hopi language, which fact reveals that this linguistic treatment cannot be regarded as a direct reflection of a universally given classification of experience" (Lucy and Wertsch 1987: 74). The issue of whether there are universally given cognitive processes is of interest to psychologists, particularly those engaged in research on infants. But even if some very basic processes of categorization are universal (for instance, the difference between stationary and moving objects) it is quite likely that the way in which these are organized, grouped, and communicated will vary from one speech

64

Vera John-Steiner

community to another. The literature on the sharply differing ways in which languages facilitate classifications has been growing since Whorf first published his analyses. An interesting contrast in spatial terminology is discussed by Lakoff in his comparison of English terms and those in Mixtec (a language of western Mexico). While English relies on prepositions to indicate spatial directions, in Mixtec location is indicated through the use of body parts as representatives of directions. For example, to say "He is on top of the mountain," the Mixtec equivalent is "He is located the mountain's head" (p. 313). Such metaphorical extensions are not limited to concrete spatial directions in Mixtec; in a sentence meaning "I taught my son to work", the Mextec term for 'face' is used to indicate interaction (Lakoff 1987: 315). The diverse ways in which languages order, compare, and group the consequences of human experience have been of particular interest to linguists, who have been, for the most part, the ones to continue to examine Whorf's ideas. Their focus has been on language, both lexical and grammatical devices, while sociolinguists have studied language diversity and language functions. A full contemporary assessment of Whorf's contributions requires, in addition to a review of linguistic research, a new look at studies of thinking from the vantage point of linguistic relativity theory. Part of the effectiveness of language for thinking comes from the contrast between automatic linguistic processes (concepts which have become part of a speaker's grammar) and the deliberate choices in careful lexical selections. The balance between these two processes, central to effective communication, is also of interest to the psychologist studying cognitive effort, and to people examining what Slobin has called "Thinking for Speaking" (1987). The interdependence of language and thought is more and more widely accepted by those "haunted by the restless ghost of Benjamin Lee W h o r f ' (Slobin's phrase), but the analysis of thought is not as thorough or imaginative among these scholars as is the analysis of language. It is frequently assumed that the representations of experience, or memory, or problem-solving are rather universal processes which are given shape by particular languages with their specific resources for condensation and classification. Diversity in linguistic categorization has thus been studied and widely reported by scholars interested in the Whorfian legacy. But the possibility of cognitive diversity, or what I have called "cognitive pluralism", is less widely acknowledged. Linguists have been studying language universals as well as specific grammatical devices according to which languages vary. Similarly, in examining the domain of thinking, commonalities as well as differences in mental representational processes are being examined by cognitive scientists. I address this issue with the term "cognitive pluralism".

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

65

Cognitive pluralism, or the languages of the mind Do we think in words? Is language the primary mode by which experience obtains its inner representation? The attempt to answer these questions has provoked intense debate in the cognitive sciences (as has the evaluation of the Whorfian hypothesis in language-linked disciplines). Some of the issues that divide cognitive scientists are definitional. There are those who conceive of mental representations as a propositional code - a language of thought composed of "sentence analogues" (Pylyshyn 1984). We will refer to this view as "monist." Other concepts include images, verbal propositions, musical notations in their representational theories (Kosslyn 1980; Goldman 1986). Thinking about the language of thought reaches back to Greek philosophers; Aristotle, for instance, perhaps influenced by the importance of vision in Greek speech, suggested that we often think and remember with images. The contemporary philosopher Hannah Arendt presents a complex and interesting discussion of language and thought in Thinking: "The sheer naming of things, the creation of words, is the human way of appropriating and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all, each of us is born as a newcomer and a stranger" (1977: 100). Her position appears to be a monistic one, ascribing a central role to language in thinking. She writes that "discursive thought is inconceivable without words already meaningful" (1977: 99). But then, in a surprisingly Whorfian twist, Arendt adds: These observations on the interconnectedness of language and thought, which make us suspect that no speechless thought can exist, obviously do not apply to civilizations where the written sign rather than the spoken word is decisive and where, consequently, thinking itself is not soundless speech but mental dealing with images. This is notably true of China. ... There "the power of words is supported by the power of the written sign, the image" (1977: 100, and footnote 63). Arendt says that among philosophers only Wittgenstein shared her interest in hieroglyphic writing and its visual precision. He wrote that such a script "depicts the facts that it describes" (1977: 102). Arendt's discussion of variations in the internal aspects of thought as linked to cultural practices (i.e., literacy), raises important issues for a theory of representation. By including images in her conception she differs from monists such as Fodor and Pylyshyn, who developed a semantic and computational model of cognition. In addition, she proposes a link between external forms of symbol systems - alphabetical or hieroglyphic writing systems - and internal codes. These notions are akin to my own approach to representational thinking, which I call "cognitive pluralism". 1

66

Vera John-Steiner

Representational codes The beginnings of the cognitive revolution at mid-century can be linked, in part, to the formulation of a 'representational level' of analysis. "When working at this level," Howard Gardner writes in The Mind's New Science, "a scientist traffics in such representational entities as symbols, rules, images" (1987: 38). This level of analysis is needed if we wish to account for the ability of humans to learn from the consequences of their experiences; or, as Jerome Bruner expressed this notion: "Representation, or a system of representation is a set of rules in terms of which one conserves one's encounters with events" (1973: 316). Implicit in such a statement about representation is the notion that the events that one encounters are patterned in certain ways. Ecology, history, culture, and family organization may play roles in such an organization. The question then becomes, are there relationships between certain patterns of experience and their modes of representation? Arendt's example of hieroglyphic writing would argue in favor of the claim that socially organized knowledge, for instance a particular literacy practice, has implications for the societal prevalence of a particular internal code. On a more individual level, there are interesting variations in the way in which persons engaged in certain domains of activity rely upon one or another thought modality. Anne Roe's study of scientists (1970) supports such a position. She found that social scientists rely upon verbal processes of thought while physical scientists favor visual thinking. In looking more closely at the use of diverse internal codes, one finds, in addition to broad group differences, varying reliance upon internal codes among members of a single profession. Such an example is discussed by Davis and Hersh in The Mathematical Experience. They distinguish between analytical and analogue approaches to mathematics: in the former, symbolic and verbal processes predominate, while in the latter, geometric and visual intuitions play an important role. They give the following example: Some years ago I [one of the authors] spent considerable time working in the theory of functions of a complex variable. This theory has a considerable geometric underlay. In fact, it can be developed independently from a geometric (Riemannian) or from an analytic (Weierstrassian) point of view. The geometrical illustrations in textbooks often feature spheres, maps, surfaces of an unusual kind, configurations with circles, overlapping chains of circles, etc. As I was working along with the analytic material, I found it was accompanied by the recollection or the mixed debris of dozens of pictures of this type that I had seen in various books, together with inchoate but repetitious nonmathematical thought and musical themes. I worked out, more or less, a body of material which I set down in abbreviated form. Something then came up in my calendar which prevented me

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

67

from pursuing this material for several years. I hardly looked at it in the interval. At the end of this period, time again became available, and I decided to go back to the material and see whether I could work it into a book. At the beginning I was completely cold. It required several weeks of work and review to warm up the material. After the time I found to my surprise that what appeared to be the original mathematical imagery and the melody returned, and I pursued the task to a successful completion, (pp. 310-311) This account highlights the usefulness of multiple codes as well as the role of certain external tools of thought, for instance, textbook illustrations. Of particular interest to this analysis is the authors' discussion of visual/geometric imagery for memory as well as for problem-solving. The philosopher Alvin Goldman suggests a similar useful role of spatial representations in mathematics. "In trying to construct a proof it helps to represent the general structure, outline or contours of the envisaged proof. Many cognizers may find that such a representation consists in an imaged spatial structure" (1986: 272). There are individual differences among mathematicians as well as among physical scientists in the extent to which they rely upon multiple internal codes. And there are periods within a discipline when a particular research style becomes influential, with the result that cognitive pluralism may be narrowed among its members. Such may have been the case in mathematics at mid-century, with the impact of the Bourbaki group. They were committed to a thorough formalization of their field, emphasizing analytical approaches. A concomitant degradation of analog, kinesthetic, and geometric approaches took place at that time. But there is an interesting change, once more, as chronicled by the geometer Robert Osserman: The recent rise to prominence of such unabashed geometers as Thurston and Yau is a sign that the low ebb in the fortunes of geometry has passed. I would predict that with no effort on any of our parts, we will witness a rebirth of geometry in the coming years, as the pendulum swings back from the extreme devotion to structure, abstraction, and generality. (1981: 244) I suggested at the beginning of this paper that the representation of human experience requires some reduction and schematization of the complexity of these experiences. There are many examples of such condensations, both in the study of natural languages and in mathematics. The systematic use of mathematical symbols illustrates an important form of condensation; the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it as follows: "By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race" (quoted in Davis and Hersh 1981: 123-124). A similar increase in the efficiency of thought is provided by the use of

68

Vera John-Steiner

certain grammatical devices. This is a point strongly argued by George Lakoff in his defense of Whorf's contribution to the role of language in thought. While simplification is necessary for thought and communication, particularly as represented in symbol use, in categorization and in the development of certain notational systems, it is but part of the dynamics of cognition. Together with habitual simplification, we use linguistic devices which contribute to the distinctiveness of represented experience. One such approach was exemplified by Kay and Kempton's work described above, where participants maximized perceptual differences through the use of color labels. Careful lexical choice contributes to the salience of what is noted, communicated, or remembered. It helps to focus the attention of both speakers and hearers on some segment of the flow of language. This dynamic between efficiency and distinctiveness is achieved by the speaker's concurrent reliance upon habitual, grammaticized categories, and his/her careful selection of lexical items. There is an interesting parallel between these language dynamics and the contrasting and frequently complementary roles of analytic and analog approaches in mathematics. Analytic approaches, particularly in the systematic use of mathematical symbols, may contribute to efficiency, while analog approaches and a reliance on mathematical imagery my bolster vividness. Such a role was implied in the mathematical recollection quoted above. In the domain of music, Jeanne Bamberger suggested the importance of "figural" and "formal" frameworks. She writes: My concern is to show evidence for both kinds of behavior or more precisely for behavior that tends towards one or the other. Most of all I will argue that the movement from figural to formal strategies is not a unidirectional process. Our capacity to maintain a persistent transaction, even coordination, between these ways of knowing and responding to the world around us may indeed account for truly musical behavior and also for new insight, learning, and invention in other domains as well. ... Research in the development of competence in the arts is in a peculiarly important position since, if it is done seriously, it can engage what is becoming a central issue in learning and development - namely, the investigation of internal or intuitive representations of knowledge and their relation to formal descriptions. (Bamberger 1978: 174) The use of multiple internal codes is illustrated by the accounts of experienced thinkers drawn from a variety of domains. I use these accounts extensively in Notebooks of the Mind\ one of the most interesting of these was provided by the British writer, Margaret Drabble. She is a writer of great verbal fluency; "Thinking about things and translating them into words is a continuous and instinctual activity with me," she said. "I can hear all my sentences being said, I can hear them in my head to a marked extent" (quoted in John-Steiner 1987: 32). And

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

69

while she is aware of this strong presence of words in her writing, Drabble also reported on selected use of imagery in her work. When there is a needed change in her narrative, she tries to visualize an event in her developing plot. This method is a useful counterpoint to her rich and easy verbalization. The importance of visual representations in thought is supported by experimental work in addition to the self-reports of experienced thinkers. The studies of mental rotation by Shepard (1982), of visual scanning by Kosslyn (1980), of dual coding by Paivio (1971) have resulted in a widespread interest in imagery. Freyd's recent exploration of movement representations (1987) suggests the need to rethink the concept of stationary images in thought, to abandon the metaphor of pictures, or photographs in the mind's eye, in favor of dynamic representations. The robustness of some of these phenomena - as identified in repeated experimental studies - supports the pluralistic stance of those cognitive theorists who oppose the notion of a single computational language of thought. In proposing a pluralistic approach to thinking, I have argued that while an individual may have a dominant mode of representation (or internal code), there is no single universal language of thought. As human beings, we each embody a subset of human possibilities. There are wide variations among individuals in the extent to which their internal, symbolic codes are based on verbal language, abstract visual schemata, musical representations, or kinesthetic images (see Gardner [1983] for additional possibilities, and a fuller discussion of multiple codes). In addition, I suggested that the coordinated use of two differing codes can assist a thinker in successfully solving a demanding task (e.g., Drabble's approach to plot changes).

Dynamics of diversity In this discussion of cognitive pluralism, I am building upon some Whorfian notions of diversity. Rather than emphasizing differences between languages, I have stressed the diversity of cognitive codes. But a discussion which focuses primarily on individual differences is a limited extension of Whorf's thinking. His concerns were with communities of speakers and with the overt and covert grammatical categories of the languages they shared. In a similar fashion, a careful examination of thinking requires a social as well as an individual level of analysis. This is a hard task, as it counters the dominant paradigm in the study of thought. Cognitive scientists approach their subject by focusing on the individual, and in much current work, they favor biological and evolutionary models in which genetically programmed mechanisms are seen as the substrata for thinking. In such a framework, the goal is to specify innate mechnisms that are the basis of cognitive "computational" programs (Cosmides & Tooby 1987).

70

Vera John-Steiner

What is frequently ignored in such approaches is the relatively indeterminate nature of the human newborn, for, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has suggested, humans are born biologically unfinished (1973). The lengthy human dependence on caretakers - a biological universal of our species - is a clear and specific adaptation necessary for cultural organisms. As I have suggested elsewhere: The prolonged dependence of young children on their caretakers is a basic condition of human life. The adult-child interactions during this period of dependence form the primary social sources for the development of linguistic and cognitive processes. The subsequent mastery of language, extending the meaning and scope of these early reciprocal exchanges, enables growing children to internalize the cultural knowledge of their communities and to reflect on their experiences. There is both receptivity to others and self-initiated exploration in the behavioral repertoire of very young children. The tension between these two highly adaptive tendencies contributes to the processes of inidviduation and enculturation in the course of children's semiotic development. (John-Steiner and Tatter 1983: 86) Children's biological immaturity and dependence provide the condition for the internalization of cultural knowledge. At the same time, the specificity of the contexts of socialization and children's own predispositions contribute to differences in their cognitive organizations. In this exploration of cognitive pluralism, I wish to discuss briefly some possible sources of these differences. In the course of development, children are exposed to recurrent, culturally patterned activities. Embedded in these activities are symbolic tools which assist young learners in noticing, ordering, representing, and remembering the consequences of their experience. These socially constructed ordering systems, or semiotic means, become the basis of internal codes. This claim is based upon Sapir and Whorf's work on language categories and Vygotsky's theory of semiotic mediation. These three scholars shared a common orientation in emphasizing the central role of language for categorizing experience. My argument is that the slow internalization of socially elaborated representational and symbolic means is not restricted to language. Additional means which are internalized by the developing child may include mathematical symbols; visual conventions, ideographic, syllabary or alphabetical writing systems; or musical notational systems. (See Bamberger's study of the acquisition of musical structures, 1986.) The appropriation of a notational system, or of a socially developed system of communication, is central to the development of thought. The process of internalization is a slow one. Vygotsky's description of internalization stresses this point. At first, children use language for simple communicative exchanges. Only years later do they succeed in relying upon language categorization and condensed meaning as the basis of their (inner) verbal thinking. Transformation of a socially

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

71

developed form of shared knowledge into a personal, individual mode of representation is described by Vygotsky as follows: Inner speech develops through a long cumulative series of functional and structural changes. It branches off from the child's external speech with the differentiation of the social and the egocentric functions of speech. Finally, the structure of speech that the child masters becomes the basic structures of his thinking. (1987: 119-120) The relationship between communicative language and inner verbal thinking is explored by Vygotsky's followers in many countries (Diaz & Gaskill 1986; Berk 1989; Levina 1968). The way non-verbal representational codes are constructed is less well understood. The work of Brent and Marjorie Wilson on visual narratives provides an important source for the examination of a visual code of imagery. They have argued: We believe that young people in their narrative drawings are in the process of building interior models of themselves and of their worlds and that in so doing they are repeating the same process and achieving the same ends that artists have always accomplished for themselves and for all of us - providing a source of unique knowledge of ourselves and of our worlds, (p. 107) If a close analogous schema cannot be generated, then a new configuration (new for the individual) may be drawn by "mapping" a series of generated sub-schemata already existing as mental graphic-like images onto a schema that is not readily translatable into lines and forms, (p. 106) It seems quite logical and credible to speak of the transmission of specific symbolic configurations in drawings, but it is quite another matter when mythic images, such as the odyssey, metamorphosis, life and death, good and evil, are considered. These images are not even necessarily visual in nature. Indeed, these images function through the assumption not of one but of a plurality of specific forms, (p. 106) The Wilsons' description of the construction of mental images with the aid of visual conventions is central to my line of argument. I have suggested that representational codes are scaffolded by symbolically organized input. While there are many differences between visual, mathematical, verbal, and musical codes, this is a dynamic they share - namely, that "raw data" becomes organized through the categorical means available within a domain. Individual processes of thought are socially structured to the extent that the categorical organization of a domain is a social endeavor. The power of symbols in thinking transform the fluctuating complexity of experience in the raw. As these symbols are socially created and chiseled they also contribute to mutual understanding. When these internalized symbols are

72

Vera John-Steiner

combined with the specificity of individual experience, they transcend the known, the past. This dynamic of social and personal codification of experience is akin to the commonality and diversity in language so powerfully captured by Whorf and Fishman. 2

Notes * I am grateful for financial support provided by the Spencer Foundation. 1. For Arendt's discussion of Hans Jonas' work, "The Nobility of Sight," see footnotes 84 and 86 in Life of the Mind. 2. This paper was completed in Study 28 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). It is in this study that Joshua Fishman spent his year as a Fellow at CASBS. This wonderful coincidence highlights my sense of gratitude to Joshua Fishman, with whom I spent many exciting and productive years at Yeshiva University. I thank him for his encouragement and friendship. This paper greatly profited from sustained discussions with Reuben Hersh and Marta Field. Their superb knowledge of the English language improved this Hungarian American's incessant struggle for clarity of expression. In addition, lunchtime conversations with Fellows at the Center also contributed to my understanding of what I was trying to explore.

References Arendt, H. 1977 The life of the mind. Vol. 1: Thinking. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich. Bamberger, Jeanne 1978 "Intuitive and formal musical knowing: Parables of cognitive dissonance", in: Stanley S. Madeja (ed), The arts, cognition, and basic skills. St. Louis, Missouri: CEMREL. 1986 "Cognitive Issues in the Development of Musically Gifted Children", in: Robert J. Sternberg & Janet E. Davidson (eds.), Conceptions of giftedness. New York: Cambridge University Press. Berk, L. 1989 Child development. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Bruner, J. 1973 "Beyond the information given", in: J. Anglin (ed.), Studies in the Psychology of Knowing. New York: N. N. Norton. Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. 1987 "From evolution to behavior: Evolutionary psychology as the missing link", in: J. Dupre (ed.), The latest and the best essays on evolution and optimality. Cambridge: MIT Press. Davis, P. & Hersh, R. 1981 The mathematical experience. Boston: Birkhausen Diaz, R. M„ & Gaskill, M. N. 1986 Issues in the empirical study of private speech. Paper presented at the Conference of the Southwestern Psychological Association, Dallas, TX.

Cognitive pluralism: A Whorfian analysis

73

Fishman, Joshua, et al. 1985 The rise and fall of the ethnic revival: Perspectives on language and ethnicity. Berlin; New York: Mouton. Fodor, J.A. 1975 The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Freyd, J. 1987 "Dynamic Mental Representations", Psychological Review 94, 4: 427^138. Gardner, H. 1983 Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books. 1987 The mind's new science: A history of the cognitive revolution. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. 1973 The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goldman, Alvin 1986 Epistomology and cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. John-Steiner, Vera 1987 Notebooks of the mind: Explorations of thinking. New York: Harper & Row. John-Steiner, Vera & Tatter, Paul 1983 "An interactionist model of language development", in: B. Bain (ed.), Sociogenesis of language and human conduct. Plenum Press. Kay, P., & Kempton, W. 1984 "What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?" American Anthropologist 86:1, 65-79. Kosslyn, S. M. 1980 Image and mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Levina, R. E. 1968 "L. S. Vygotsky's ideas about the planning function of speech in children", Voprosy Psikhologii No. 4: 105-115. Lucy, J. A., & Wertsch, J. V. 1987 "Vygotsky and Whorf: A comparative analysis", in: M. Hickmann (ed.), Social and functional approaches to language and thought. New York: Academic Press. Osserman, Robert 1981 "Structure vs. substance: The fall and rise of geometry", The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 12, 4. Paivio, Allan 1971 Imagery and verbal processes. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pylyshyn, Z. W. 1984 Computation and cognition: Toward a foundation of cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press. Roe, Anne 1970 "A psychologist examines sixty-four eminent scientists", in: P. E. Vernon (ed.), Creativity. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Rossi-Landi, Ferrucio 1973 Ideologies of linguistic relativity. The Hague: Mouton. Shepard, R. N„ & Cooper, L. A. 1982 Mental images and their transformations. Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

74

Vera John-Steiner

Slobin, D. 1987

"Thinking for speaking", in: J. Aske, N. Beery, L. Michaelis, & H. Filip, (eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Berkely Linguistic Society. Spier, L„ Hallowell, A. I., & Newman, S. S. (eds.) Language, culture, and personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir. Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund. Vygotsky, L. S. 1987 The collected works. Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology. (Ed. by Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton.) Plenum Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee 1956 Language, thought, and reality, (ed. by John B. Carroll.) New York: MIT Press. Wilson, Brent & Wilson, Marjorie 1978 "Recycling symbols: A basic cognitive process in the arts", in: Stanley S. Madeja (ed.), The arts, cognition, and basic skills. St. Louis, Missouri: CEMREL.

The "mother tongue" Einar Haugen

The term "mother tongue" is so current in most European languages today that one rarely thinks about its origin or history. Most people take it for granted that a child learns its first language from its mother, though one could easily demonstrate that it is just as likely to acquire the tongue of its father. In fact, Cicero referred to Latin as the sermo patria, i.e. the language of the fathers. The term "mother tongue" is not attested prior to 1100 A.D., and does not appear to occur in any ancient tongue (Byskov 1913: 2). Yet we never speak of the native language as one's "father tongue", though we do speak of the "fatherland". To my knowledge the problem has never been addressed in the literature. As the Danish scholar J. Byskov once wrote: "It takes something special before a person would begin including the mother tongue among the things he thanks God for" (cited in Kristensen 1926: 66). While this is self-evidently true, one may well wonder just what that "something special" might have been. Byskov traced it back as far as the 14th century, "when Latin had long since become a dead language that was only used by learned men", and he concluded that the German and Scandinavian equivalents that occurred then and later were translations either from Latin or spoken German. However, medieval evidence provides an earlier origin. Kluge in his Etymologisches Wörterbuch offers a reference from Strassburg to materna lingua as early as 1119 (Kluge 1967, s. v. Muttersprache). Unfortunately he does not identify his source, which has remained unexplained. But almost simultaneously Guibert de Nogent in his autobiography Monodiae from 1114-1121 wrote: "Fiebat autem res non materno sermone, sed Uteris," i.e. the matter was debated, not in the mother tongue, but in learned letters (cited by Jan Ziolkowski, personal communication). And in a verse composition (to be dated 1190 or 1191) that accompanies his Tractatus contra curiales et officiales clericos Nigel of Canterbury tells his book to behave properly in speaking to its dedicatee, the Norman William Longchamp: "Lingua tamen caveas ne sit materna, sed illa/Quam dédit et docuit lingua paterna tibi," i.e. watch out that you be not the mother's tongue, but the one that the father's tongue gave and taught you (Jan Ziolkowski, personal communication). Medieval dictionaries confirm the usage for later centuries, e.g. Latham has maternus with lingua for 1293, lingua materna for 1246 and 1503, and lingua maternalis in 1453. Maigne d'Arnis translates materna lingua in 1503 as vulgaris, vemacula, l'idiome vulgaire (Latham 1965; Maigne d'Arnis 1858). In his comments on Nigel's usage Boutemy (p. 31) refers to an article by Kugener (not yet located): "Ils se prêtent pourtant à une autre interprétation: lingua materna serait la

76

Einar Haugen

langue vulgaire opposée au latin (lingua patria, lingua patema), ou plus généralement sermo patrius" (Jan Ziolkowski, personal communication). The medieval evidence points unmistakeably to a usage that equates the father's language with Latin and the mother's with the vernacular. The fact that the earliest reference comes from Strassburg leads to the further idea that the term arose because Strassburg was located at the border between the northernmost extension of Latin and the southernmost area of Germanic resistance to its extension. In the Germanic area there was a real need for the distinction, since men continued to be taught to read and speak Latin, while women did not. The evidence does not enable us to determine whether the term arose in Germanic or Latin speech, since all the writings by learned men were in Latin. Kluge was inclined to think that the Germanic word was a loan translation from Latin, but there is no clear evidence concerning the actual point of origin, nor its language. It is significant that the classical term was sermo patria. We recall the fact that in the Middle Ages only men received a "proper" education, and that women were relegated to the "inferior" task of nursing the infants. The distinction therefore seems to have arisen in a bilingual society, with women and their language seen as inferior to men and their language. The Swedish writer Thavenius has pointed out that medieval authors on pedagogy held that "woman's nature makes her quite unfitted for teaching" and that "only a man's nature has the firmness, strength, order, and force that is needed to transform nature into culture and thereby save the child's soul" (Thavenius 1981: 57). Whatever we may think of his theory, there seems no doubt that the first uses of lingua materna were rather more pejorative than favorable. In the later Middle Ages we perceive a gradual elevation of the term. Dante wrote his Divina Commedia in the early 1300's, using the palar materno, but in defending its use he wrote in Latin, producing his book De vulgari eloquentia {New Century Cyclopedia, s. v. Dante). Here he was addressing the learned world, not the illiterate laity. Whatever the source, the term soon acquired equivalents in all the Romance languages: French langue maternelle, Spanish lengua materna, Italian lingua materna, Romanian limba materna. In German the word for "language" was derived from a word for "speak": Low German sprake, High German Sprache, in Dutch taal (modersprake, Muttersprache, moedertaal). In Scandinavian the word adopted in all the languages was mâl (from which mcela "speak" was derived). It occurs in the Icelandic poem Lilja, attributed to one Eysteinn Asgrimsson, who may have died in 1361: Fyrri menn, er fraedin kunnu forn ok klok af heidnum bokum slunginn mjukt af sinum kongum sungu lof med danskri tungu; i fvfliku modurmâli

The "mother tongue"

77

meir skyldumz ek en nokkui j>eira hvaerdan dikt med astarordum allsvaldanda kongi at gialda. (Cited in Kristensen 1926: 67) [Ancient men, who learned From pagan books their lore, Shaped winsome words for kings, Sung in Danish speech their praises; In such a mother tongue I am more than any due To honor the Almighty Ruler With my loving words of praise.] (Author's translation) The word mal (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish mal) is the traditional word for "language", now partly replaced by the German loanword Danish sprog, Norwegian/Swedish sprak. It tends to be limited to spoken language, speech, or even dialect. In Eysteinn's poem it is equated with donsk "Danish", then the usual word for Old Norse. Its continued association with the meaning "speech" supports my contention that modersmal is originally a woman's language, in contrast with Latin. In English this is reinforced by the corresponding use of tongue in mother tongue, and in Dutch by taal in moedertaal. Other medieval examples were cited by Marius Kristensen in a noteworthy article on the subject (Kristensen 1926: 69-70). He found a remarkable vacillation in the Danish archbishop Andreas Sunesen's paraphrase of the Scanian Law (c. 1210). In his desperate efforts to find Latin equivalents for Danish legal terms, the archbishop is driven to insert expressions in Danish, describing them as being so called in materna lingua vulgariter, or natale ydioma, or vulgari nostra, or most often lingua patria, apparently as the most classical choice. In a Swedish translation of Acts from 1385 the passage (Chap. 2, v. 11) where the Holy Spirit speaks to all men "in our tongues", the text reads "p§ vor tungu och modhor male" for which the Vulgate has no model (Kristensen 1926: 68). Another Swedish example appears in a manuscript of the Vadstena Monastery Rules dated end of the fifteenth century, but originally from c. 1371: priests are directed to explain the Latin text in the modher maale (rendering the Latin lingua materna). Finally, an amusing (if also tragic) example from Norway is the legal document detailing the quarrel between two men from Telemark, Arne Tolleifson and Lidvord Aslakson, in 1489 (H0dneb0 1966: 93-94; cited in Haugen 1976: 339). Lidvord greeted Arne with a Low German phrase "Got synth j w " (God bless you). Arne replied "I don't like that gabble ... Let us speak our father's and mother's tongue - we won't be any greater than they have been". It ended with Lidvord's knifing Arne

78

Einar Haugen

so he died. Here the father's and the mother's language are accepted as equal. We seem to perceive a new spirit of equality for the mother tongue. The example set by Dante and his contemporaries of the Renaissance led to the liberation of religious discourse from its male chauvinist tinge. The English reformer Wycliffe wrote in 1380 "Seclyr lordys schuld, in defawte of prekytes. lerne and preche the law of God in here modyr tonge" (OED, s. v. Mother Tongue). And in Brut for 1400 we read that "Hit was ordeyned, that men of lawe ... fro that tyme forth shold plede in her moder tunge" (OED, s. v. Mother Tongue). Circa 1382 Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, in defiance of the Pope's orders. Not until 1534 did Luther follow his example by completing a translation into German. From now on we can say that God began to speak in the mother tongue. In 1525 Luther wrote of "die rechte mutter sprache", which he recommended for his new church (Kluge 1967, s. v. Muttersprache-, Grimm & Grimm 1885, s.v. Muttersprache). But in his writings he still used Latin, and his Tischreden to his disciples are a glorious mixture of German and Latin. Scandinavians, whose kings followed the example of the North German princes in adopting Lutheranism, quickly set translators to work on the Bible. From the 1520s translators were busy, and final versions of the complete Bible appeared, the Danish version of King Christern III in 1550, which was also introduced in Norway; the Swedish King Gustavus Vasa's Bible in 1541, and the Icelandic Bishop Gudbrandur torlaksson's in 1584 (Haugen 1976: 323ff.). These versions gave the mother tongues of these respective countries a new official status as standard languages. Although Latin was still the language of the schools, the mother tongues had broken through and established themselves as the norms of discourse for the layman. From this time on the term modersmal became a part of general Scandinavian usage. But as long as the average layman remained illiterate, the mother tongue was still a stepchild in relation to Latin. The most famous work of the seventeenth century in Denmark was Eleonora Christine's diary of 1685, known as Jammersminde. It was written in Danish, and she speaks of a woman who "hawver glemt noget aff sit modermaal" (has forgotten some of her mother tongue) elsewhere modersmaal (Skautrup 1953: 2, 277; Kristensen 1926: 68). In 1685 the first Danish grammar written in Danish appeared, whose author Peder Syv was a warm defender of the mother tongue (Skautrup 1953: 2, 285). Not until Ludvig Holberg began publishing his comedies in 1723 did Danish really get established as a literary language. In his jesting way he introduced them by writing: "Vort Danske Moders Maal i Aar en Moder bliver, Og med Comedie-Kunst sit f0rste Foster giver" (Our Danish mother tongue this year becomes a mother, and as her first offspring gets the art of comedy) (Ordbog over det danske Sprog, s. v. Modersmaal). But Holberg's serious works were all in Latin. As long as the average layman was still illiterate, the mother tongue remained a stepchild in relation to the universal Latin language. Not until the French

The "mother tongue"

79

Revolution of the late eighteenth century did the demand arise for an educated laity. England had led the way by its flowering of an English-speaking literature from Chaucer's time, with Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the great example. Germany gradually was restored after the establishment of the Reformation. In Scandinavia the Napoleonic wars awakened uneasiness; Sweden and Denmark chose different sides, and Sweden usurped Denmark's long unquestioned leadership. Denmark lost its Swedish provinces, and in 1814 the European powers handed over Norway to Sweden in compensation for giving Finland to Russia. The Dano-German war of 1864 deprived Denmark of SchleswigHolstein. In World War II Denmark also lost Iceland. Each of these countries was now on its own, and one consequence was that the standard language became an important symbol of nationhood. While each section or province had its own speech, which had now come to be seen as a dialect, the standard languages were raised into symbols in a movement known as Romanticism. In Germany Romanticism flourished already in the late eighteenth century, sometimes known as the Sturm und Drang period, which can be traced to the writings of Herder (1744-1803) on behalf of a specially German nationality. Great writers like Goethe (1749-1832) and Schiller (1759-1805) followed in his footsteps. In the early 1800s the most imminent threat was Napoleon, who had acquired dominance over much of Germany. There was as yet no united Germany, only such struggling states as Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hannover, and Prussia. Austria was the strongest power through its leadership in the AustroHungarian Empire. At this point the young voice of Max von Schenkendorf was heard in a hymn to the mother tongue which has long reverberated in the Germanspeaking world. 1 It was the special contribution to the movement of resistance to French domination which we can attribute to the Romantics, that they made the national symbol into a poem. His poems of resistance against the French "tyrant" were sung by soldiers at the front and even though his name is now largely forgotten, his poems have long held a prominent place in German anthologies. Schenkendorf (1783-1817) was a young nobleman born in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia (Grosz 1912; Köhler 1915; Baehr 1888; Hagen 1883). 2 His early poetry is gentle and elegiac, romantic in tone; after he joined the army he wrote flaming verse against his enemy; his poems were set to music and sung in battle. His poem "Muttersprache" was printed in 1814 and held its position in German anthologies down to World War II; I cite two stanzas: 3 Muttersprache, Mutterlaut, wie so wonnesam, so traut! Erstes Wort, das mir erschallet, süszes, erstes Liebeswort,

80

Einar Haugen

erster Ton, den ich gelallet, klingest ewig in mir fort. Ach, wie trüb ist meinem Sinn, wenn ich in der Fremde bin, wenn ich fremde Zungen üben, fremde Worte brauchen musz, die ich nimmermehr kann lieben, sie nicht klingen als ein Grusz! [Oh mother tongue, oh mother sound, How blissful, how beloved: The first word to me reechoed, The first sweet word of love, The first tune I ever babbled, It rings forever in my ear. Alas, how sad at heart am I When I in foreign lands reside, When in foreign tongues I speak, Have to use the foreign words That I can never really love, That do not ever reach my heart!] (Author's translation) Schenkendorf died young like so many of the poets of Romanticism, contrary to his Danish counterpart, the poet Grundtvig, who lived to ripe old age (17831872) (Grundtvig 1840 4: 201, 2, 162-163). 4 The comparison with Schenkendorf is due to Grundtvig's having also written a famous poem about the mother tongue (1837). It begins as a poem about "mother": "Moders navn er en himmelsk lyd, sä vide som b0lgen bläner" (Mother's name is a heavenly sound as far as waves are blue). But most of the more than twenty stanzas begin with "modersmälet" (the mother tongue) and end with the refrain "S0dt i Lyst og s0dt i N0d, s0dt i Liv og s0dt i D0d, s0dt i Eftermaelet" (Sweet in joy and sweet in need, sweet in life and sweet in death, sweet in reminiscence). Grundtvig grows ecstatic in his praise of the mother tongue: not only is it "the cradle song that pleases us best of all"; it has a "heavenly sound"; it is the language of beauty, of our kings and heroic ancestors, and the "ribbon of roses that binds us all together". In the most classic and oft-quoted verse he proclaims: Modersmaal er vort Hjertesprog, Kun 10s er al fremmed Tale. Det alene i Mund og Bog Kan vjekke et Folk af Dvale.

The "mother tongue"

81

[The mother tongue is the language of our hearts, All foreign tongues are but loose. It alone on our lips and books Can waken a people from their sleep.] (Author's translation) For Grundtvig it was a matter of moment to waken his people to the dangers that faced them. His poem served as a motto for his book Skolen for Livet (The School for Life), which contained his vigorous attack on the Danish Latin school. This had also been his school, and yet he now denounced it as a "school for death". It was then the only advanced school in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia and Germany. He declared that "it begins with letters and ends with book learning ... All letters are dead, though they be written with the fingers of angels and the pens of the stars, and all book learning is dead that is not tied to the reader's life." He directed his poem to Denmark's mothers, who "will understand his call for the right of life above that of theory". In time his agitation would lead to the founding of the folk high schools. In his youth Grundtvig had made three journeys to England to reveal the Nordic spirit in Anglo-Saxon literature. He became a pioneer in the study of Beowulf. In his Nordisk Mytologi (1832) he advanced a whole program of religious and social reform inspired by the old Germanic literature. He also produced Danish translations of the Latin History of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus and of the Icelandic history of Norway by Snorri Sturluson known as Heimskringla. He had good reason to be uneasy about the future of Denmark; Danish had actually become the "ribbon of roses that binds us all together". Romanticism soon won a foothold in Sweden as well, though it did not result in any hymns in honor of the mother tongue. The young Swedes of the early 1800's found their heroic models in the Old Icelandic sagas, which they called "Gothic" (from Swedish Gotaland) (Gotiska Forbundet; see Blanck 1918: 6 ff.; Wahlstrom 1907: xx; Geijer 1923-1931, 2: 35; Tegner 1817: 197-198; cited in Haugen 1976: 433). Such poets as Erik Gustav Geijer (1783-1847) and Esaias Tegner (17821846) were fervent advocates of Swedish letters, and they found abundant opportunity to express their love in romantic poems. When the teaching of Swedish became strong enough to support an organization in 1894, they adopted Modersmalet as the name of their subject until 1969, when Modersmalsforbundet became Svensklararfdreningen, and their subject became Svensk (Ordbok over svenska spraket, s. v. modersmal, v. 17, sp. 17.1252-1253). In Norway Romanticism was indissolubly tied to the new state that came into being in 1814, when the union with Denmark was dissolved. The poet Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845) became the first advocate of a thoroughgoing nationalism that felt uneasy about Norway's use of Danish in its writing. In his essay Om norsk Sprogreformation (1835) (On Reformation of the Norwegian Language) he called for a Norwegian language (Wergeland, 1918-1940: 4, 2.172; cited in Hau-

82

Einar Haugen

gen 1966: 27). His appeal inspired two scholars to work out proposals: Knud Knudsen's for the stepwise Norwegianization of the established Danish and Ivar Aasen's for the creation of a radical new Norwegian norm. These resulted in the two Norwegian language forms now known as Bokmal (book language) and Nynorsk (New Norwegian). While the B o k m i l people could adopt Grundtvig's poem, the Nynorsk adherents got their own hymn in a poem by Anders Reitan (1867): Maalet hennar M o ' r me vil aldri, aldri gl0yma! Kor det gjeng i Verdi til, det vil Tunga gj0yma Der me fekk i Moder-Arv alt det betste, Hjartat tarv! [Mother's tongue we will Never, never forget: Whatever happens in the world, Our tongue will treasure it! A heritage our mothers gave us Of all the best our heart doth need!] (Author's translation) In conclusion, I would suggest as a reasonable hypothesis that the term "mother tongue" has passed through three phases. In the early Middle Ages it was a primarily pejorative term to describe the unlearned language of women and children. It was in contrast with the "father's language" which was Latin. W e cannot be sure whether it arose in Latin or German, but its presence in the Romance languages suggests that it may have been Latin. There is no reason to place it farther back than 1100. It arose to describe the new contrast between m e n ' s and w o m e n ' s language. A second stage came with the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the mother tongue became also the language of God, speaking through the Bible. Thanks to Wycliffe in England and Luther in Germany and their Scandinavian followers, the mother tongue became a force to be reckoned with. But it remained to a great degree limited to the religious sphere. Not until the Romantic eighteen hundreds did it become a concern of the heart that came home to every man and woman. After people like Dante, Shakespeare, and Holberg had created a public for the vulgari eloquentia, it became a point of honor to promote and care for the folk language in country after country. Then writers like Schenkendorf and Grundtvig could write lyrics to the mother tongue. Mother had been promoted f r o m being a mere wet nurse to becoming the spokesman of God and finally a human being.

The "mother tongue"

83

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

My attention was first drawn to Schenkendorf by Grace Jungkuntz (Mrs. Richard), Tacoma, Washington. On German Romanticism and the mother tongue see Daube (1940) and Weisgerber (1957). Schenkendorf, Christliche Gedichte 1814; also in his Gedichte, ed. Grosz (1912: 84-85) and Baehr (1888: 25). On Grundtvig see Aronson (1960); Hay (1960); Nägele (1971). Den norske Folkeskole 28th february 1867; cited in Haugen 1976: 436-437.

References Aronson, Harry 1960 Baehr, Paul 1888 Blanck, Anton 1918 Byskov, Jens 1913 Daube, Anna 1940

Mänskligt och kristet: En Studie i Grundtvigs Grundtvig-selskabet). Scandinavian University Books. Max von Schenkendorf

als patriotischer

teologi

(Skrifter

utg.

af

Dichter in seinen Liedern. Halle a. d. S.

Geijers götiska diktning. Stockholm. Modersmalet.

K0benhavn.

Der Aufstieg der Muttersprache im deutschen Denken des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt a. M.: Diesterweg. Den norske Folkeskole 1923-31 Tidsskrift. Christiania. Geijer, Erik Gustav 1923-31 Samlade Skrifter. 13. vol. Stockholm Grimm, Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm 1885 Deutsches Wörterbuch 6, s. v. Muttersprache. Leipzig. Grosz, Edgard 1912 Max von Schenkendorf: Gedichte. Berlin. Grundtvig, N. F. S. 1840 Vcerker i Udvalg, ed. G. Christensen og H. Koch, K0benhavn: Gyldendal. Guibert de Nogent 1981 Autobiographia Book 3, Chap. 4, ed. and trans. Edmond René Labande. Paris. Hagen, A. 1863 Max von Schenkendorfs Leben, Denken und Dichten. Berlin. Haugen, Einar 1966 Language conflict and language planning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1976 The Scandinavian languages: An introduction to their history. London: Faber and Faber; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hay, Marie 1960 N. F. S. Grundtvig: En kortfattet beretning om hans livs historic og hans verk. K0benhavn: Busck. H0dneb0, Finn 1966 Utvalg av norske diplomer 1350-1550. Oslo.

84

Einar Haugen

Kluge, Friedrich 1967 Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. (17. ed.) Berlin: de Gruyter. Köhler, August 1915 Die Lyrik Max von Schenkendorfs: Eine stilistische Untersuchung. Diss., Marburg a. L. Kristensen, Marius 1926 Bidrag til dansk ordhistorie. Danske Studier 1926: 66-71 Latham, R. E. 1965 Revised medieval latin word-list from British and Irish sources. London: Oxford University Press. Nägele, Horst 1971 "Von 'Echten Deutsch' und von den 'Deutschen Sprachen des Herzens'", Grundtvig Studier: 74-78. New Century Encyclopedia of Names. 1954 Ed. Clarence L. Bamhart. New York: Crofts. Nigel of Canterbury 1959 Tractatus contra curiales et officiates clerices, ed. André Boutemy, vol. 1. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 13, 31. OED Oxford English Dictionary. Ordbog over det danske Sprog 1933 ed. V. Dahlerup, vol. 14, 234-235. K0benhavn. Ordbok över svenska spräket 1943 utgivet av Svenska Akademien, vol. 17, col. 1252-3. Lund 1943. Schenkendorf, Max von 1814 Christliche Gedichte. Berlin. Skautrup, Peter 1953 Det danske sprogs historie, vol. 3. K0benhavn: Gyldendahl. Tégner, Esaias 1817 Smärre samlade dikter. Stockholm: Norstedt. Thavenius, Jan 1981 Modersmcel och fädersarv: Svenskämnets traditioner i historien och nuet. Stockholm: Symposion Bokförlag. Wahlström, Lydia 1907 Erik Gustaf Geijer. Stockholm: Norstedt. Weisgerber, Leo 1957 Die Muttersprache im Aufbau unserer Kultur. Düsseldorf: Schwann. Wergeland, Henrik 1918-1940 Samlede Skrifter, ed. H. Jasger og Didrik Arup Seip. Oslo: Steenske Forlag.

Linguacentrism and language history Nancy C. Dorian

In his determination to shake the speakers of various Indo-European languages from the complacency and smug self-assurance engendered by their political, economic, and social dominance, Benjamin Lee Whorf chose a method of presentation which emphasized to the greatest possible degree the differences in linguistic structure between Hopi, his chief non-Indo-European exemplar, and English (or the Standard Average European [SAE] which included English). The section headings in his paper on "The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language" (1956) demonstrate his method of diametric contrasts perfectly: "Plurality and numeration in SAE and Hopi"; "Nouns of physical quantity in S A E and Hopi"; "Phases of cycles in SAE and Hopi"; and so forth through six sets of oppositions. Fishman (1985: 464) has pointed out two serious criticisms to which this habit, among others, has left Whorf open: that he had an oversimplistic view of the speech community as invariant; and that he had an equally rigid view of language structures as given and unmodifiable. At the same time Fishman, more than most, has given Whorf his due, recognizing in him a champion of multilingualism who "stress[ed] that ethnolinguistic communities have their unique ways of viewing the world" and argued "against the excessive pride of English monolinguals" (1985: 453). Just how variable speech forms actually are has been demonstrated by dialectologists and sociolinguists; just how modifiable they are has been the concern of historical linguists most especially. In general we can say that when languages are in close contact over a long period of time, they prove remarkably permeable to one another and make considerable mutual accomodation. Although this seems an obvious matter, it proves to be something which requires special attention if the extent to which it is true is to be appreciated. Where language-contact settings in our own time are concerned, two factors in particular tend to prevent full recognition of the reciprocal nature of languagecontact influence. One is that a great many of the contact settings are also language-shift settings, in which one or another " m a j o r " language such as Spanish, English, or Russian is replacing a language of much lesser currency with a very much smaller population base. Since the shrinking language is showing considerable structural change under the pressure of the ongoing shift, and is also in many cases in danger of disappearing altogether, investigators working in such settings (the present writer included) expend nearly all of their time and energy investigating the condition of the imperiled language, something which is a vast un-

86

Nancy C. Dorian

dertaking in itself if it is done with any thoroughness. Whenever the expanding language is one which is well-known and well-studied by comparison with the shrinking one, near-exclusive focus on the shrinking one seems all the more justified. The second factor in the failure to recognize fully the mutuality of language influence in contact settings is probably a tendency to think too much in terms of the standard language when dealing with specific cases of shift to a widely spoken and numerically well-represented expanding language. Thus in the dismayingly large number of settings where English is replacing some other local language, many investigators take "English" to be an obvious entity most of whose features are already established and therefore don't require discussion. Yet it is certain that the English which threatens to displace Sutherlandshire Scottish Gaelic is very different from the English which threatens to displace the Norman dialect of French spoken in the Channel Isles, and different again from the English which threatens to displace Pennsylvania German in the U. S. In fact, the moment the locales of Sutherland, the Channel Isles, and the "Dutch" part of Pennsylvania are invoked, anyone who has spent time in one of those places can hear in memory the very distinctive and very local form of English spoken there even by many completely English-monolingual but locally-born families. That is, the local English is being influenced by the local non-English language, as well as influencing it. Only in the cases of whole countries where English is known not to have been the native language of the vast majority of the indigenous inhabitants, yet is now the only language spoken by some (or even all), do we acknowledge influence so profound as to constitute a locally general substratum effect; in two of the most obvious cases, we speak of Irish English and Indian English accordingly. Historical linguists working over broader stretches of time have done better at recognizing reciprocal influence than students of contemporary language-contact situations, on the whole, if only because they are forced by their data to reckon with bidirectionality. The long-term effects left by shrinking languages on expanding ones are often too profound to be ignored. Thus the absence of retroflexed consonants in other IE languages makes it difficult for Indie specialists to overlook the likelihood of influence from Dravidian, even though Dravidian languages apparently retreated before expanding Indie speech forms; 1 similarly with the click consonants which are phonemically prominent in Bantu languages exposed to Khoisan, despite the weak position of the surviving Khoisan languages today vis-a-vis neighboring Bantu languages. Syntactic influence from shrinking languages is also widely acknowledged in similar situations, for similarly unblinkable reasons; morphological influence of this kind has been easier to ignore, as Thomason and Kaufman (1988) have shown. Lexical influence on expanding languages from shrinking languages is well acknowledged, in principle, partly because it is often very obvious and partly because it is often very superficial. Yet it was a particular case in which lexical

Linguacentrism and language history

87

influence in the history of an expanding language is explicitly denied which set me thinking about Whorf's method of deliberately stark contrasts and the assault he intended to mount on - as Fishman puts it - that "excessive pride of English monolinguals". The language history in question is that of English, and the influence denied is that of Celtic. Historians of the English language sometimes tout its receptivity to loanwords very particularly. Albert Baugh in A History of the English Language and Thomas Pyles in The Origins and Development of the English Language both use the approving term "cosmopolitan" in connection with the English penchant for borrowing: Prominent among the assets of the English language must be considered the mixed character of its vocabulary. ... English has shown a marked tendency to go outside her linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual capacity for assimilating outside elements. ... So cosmopolitan a vocabulary is an undoubted asset to any language that seeks to attain international use. (Baugh 1957: 9-10) The fact that we have taken words from many sources is indicative of a cosmopolitan attitude which is the very opposite of the lexical provincialism of, say, Icelandic and to a lesser extent German. (Pyles 1971: 340) Seeing the free-handed lexical habits of English at the asset he does, it's perhaps not surprising that Baugh makes much of what two other historians of English have called "the curiously small extent of the Celtic influence ... upon the English word-stock" (Robertson and Cassidy 1954: 164). In the course of several pages devoted to the subject Baugh comments: Nothing would seem more reasonable than to expect that the conquest of the Celtic population of Britain by the Teutons and the subsequent mixture of the two races should have resulted in a corresponding mixture of their languages; that consequently we should find in the Old English vocabulary numerous instances of words which the Teutons heard in the speech of the native population and adopted. For it is apparent that the Celts were by no means exterminated except in certain areas, and that in most of England large numbers of them were gradually absorbed by the new inhabitants. ... In the east and southeast, where the Teutonic conquest was fully accomplished at a fairly early date, it is probable that there were fewer survivals of a Celtic population than elsewhere. Large numbers of the defeated fled to the west. Here it is apparent that a considerable Celtic-speaking population survived until fairly late times. ... It is altogether likely that many Celts were held as slaves by the conquerors and that many of the Teutons married Celtic women. In parts at least of the island, contact between the

88

Nancy C. Dorian

two races must have been constant and in some districts intimate for several generations. ... When we come, however, to seek the evidence for this contact in the English language [,] investigation yields very meager results. Such evidence as there is survives chiefly in placenames ... ... Outside of placenames, however, the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible. Not over a score of words in Old English can be traced with reasonable probability to a Celtic source. Within this small number it is possible to distinguish two groups: (1) those which the Anglo-Saxons learned through everyday contact with the natives, and (2) those which were introduced by the Irish missionaries in the north. The former were transmitted orally and were of popular character; the latter were connected with religious activities and were more or less learned. The popular words include binn (basket, crib), bratt (cloak), and brocc (brock or badger); a group of words for geographical features which had not played much part in the experience of the Anglo-Saxons in their continental home crag, luh (lake), cumb (valley), and torr (outcropping or projecting rock, peak), the latter chiefly as elements in placenames; possibly the words dun (dark-colored), and ass (ultimately from Latin asinus). (1957: 83-85) Baugh then has to account also for the fact that few of these already few loanwords achieved permanent lodging in the English language, either disappearing altogether or surviving only in regional dialects of English. His explanation is as traditional for histories of English as is his reckoning of the meager loanwords: The surviving Celts were a submerged race. Had they, like the Romans, possessed a superior culture, something valuable to give the Teutons, their influence might have been greater. But the Anglo-Saxon found little occasion to adopt Celtic modes of expression and the Celtic influence remains the least of the early influences which affected the English language. (1957: 86) The Baugh quotations here are from an edition of his work which was published more than three decades ago; but a more recent edition (Baugh and Cable 1978) shows no changes in these sections dealing with English-Celtic language contact. 2 Otto Jespersen, in his Growth and Structure of the English Language, tries still more scrupulously to cover the same ground. He considers not only the possibility that the Anglo-Saxons exterminated the native British Celtic populations (which like Baugh he rejects on grounds of placename evidence; and he further adds the evidence of Celtic personal names among the Anglo-Saxon conquerors [1938: 3 8 39]), but also the possibility that Latin had become so widespread in the period of the Roman occupation as to displace British speech forms. This he also rejects in

Linguacentrism and language history

89

its extreme form, though he entertains the possibility that some or all of the urban populations spoke Latin while the people of the countryside still spoke "Keltic" (1938: 37). Jespersen's explanation of the lack of Celtic lexical influence in English is essentially the same as Baugh's, though it is more pungently rendered: There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives; it could never be fashionable to show an acquaintance with that despised tongue by using now and then a Keltic word. (1938: 40) There is nothing in the least wrong with these explanations in theory. It's perfectly true that languages have social status in accordance with that of their speakers, and that the language of an expanding population which has its status supported by military power, and by the political and economic dominance which military power supports, will often prosper, while the language of a conquered population will equally often decline; also that the former typically contributes many more loanwords to the latter than it receives from that source. The simplicity of the explanation, and its credibility, are damaged all the same when we shift the focus to a different location in Anglo-Saxon territory where a form of English and a form of Celtic came into protracted contract, namely Lowland Scotland. An offshoot of Northumbrian Old English, the language called Scots emerged in the second half of the 14th century, gaining ground as the French which came in with the Norman Conquest faded and Gaelic retreated northwards. It is crucial to recognize that Scots, from the second half of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th, was a distinct speech form, prestigious in its own right. The Scottish Parliament used Scots as its language of record, and it was the language of both law and literature during this period. For the century 1 4 6 0 1560, one historian of Scots and English writes of "the Scots tongue as a full national language showing all the signs of a rapidly developing, all-purpose speech, as distinct from English as Portuguese from Spanish, Dutch from German, or Swedish from Danish" (Murison 1979: 9). He points to the Reformation as the force which eventually, in the 16th century, began to move Scotland away from its special relationship with still-Catholic France and to reorient the population of Scotland in the direction of England; the latter became Protestant and produced an English-language Bible read and honored fully as much by the Scots as by the English (Murison 1979: 9). Subsequently, in 1707, the parliaments of Scotland and England were united in a single Parliament located in England, and during the 18th century Scots steadily lost ground to English in all public spheres. One special feature of Scots makes it particularly valuable as a counterbalance to English, where contact with a Celtic population is concerned. As legitimate and fully established a language within Scotland, for a time, as English within England during the same period, Scots took shape in a region which was spared the full weight of Roman occupation. Even a quick glance at a map of Roman

90

Nancy C. Dorian

settlement in Britain indicates the contrast: southern England, and especially the southernmost third of the modern-day country apart from Cornwall and most of Devon, is awash in Roman towns and villas, whereas there is not a single town or villa north of Hadrian's Wall in what would be Lowland Scotland today. (See for example the map in Wacher 1981: 123.) The Roman presence in Scotland was essentially a military presence, consisting of forts which served as bases for the Roman army. (See for example the map showing the location of legionary fortresses, "normal forts", and "fortlets" in Clayton 1980: 31.) England was under Roman occupation for almost 400 years; Scotland was never really "occupied" by the Romans at all, though the Roman army was certainly a presence there in the last two decades of the first century A. D. and the first decade or so of the next. In southern Scotland, then, the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia, established in the 6th century and extended as far north as the Firth of Forth (i.e. to the site of modern Edinburgh) in the 7th (Murison 1979: 3), came into contact with Celtic-speaking populations which had not been subject to centuries of Roman rule and Roman settlement. And though this northern AngloSaxon presence established itself securely and extended its influence gradually over all of Lowland Scotland, in this part of Britain, tellingly, the Baugh and Jespersen accounts of minimal lexical impact do not apply well. Knowing full well from personal experience in a part of the Scottish Highlands where English reached the general populace late, but with enormous social and economic force, that English is not inherently immune to Celtic lexical influence no matter how unequal the social positions of the English speakers and the Celtic speakers, it occured to me to check for Gaelic lexical evidence in that other part of Scotland where English appeared much earlier and spread through all social ranks at an earlier stage in the history of contact between the two languages. To make the check I used a collection of the poetry of Robert Burns, because of its ready accessibility 3 in the first place, and in the second, because Burns was notable in his time (the 18th century) for his effective and relatively extensive use of Scots in lyrical as well as in humurous poetry. Furthermore, Burns was not a well educated man who might have known something of the great Gaelic poetic tradition and might deliberately have turned to that source for inspiration or for a model. His parents were ordinary working people, his father a gardener and tenant farmer (Ferguson 1965: vii), and he had very little formal education. Burns (1759-1796) is the best known poet of the early Modern Scots period, and he was both prolific and popular. By his time Scots was no longer a serious rival of English in southern Scotland, either in range of use or in prestige; it had become a colloquial speech form reserved largely for humorous and popular verse insofar as it served literary purposes. That is to say, Scots had become a regional vernacular. It is difficult to establish precisely what the strength of Gaelic was in Burns' home region, Ayrshire, at any particular time in the two to five centuries before

Linguacentrism and language history

91

his own. One Scottish historian is surely realistic when he states that "[b]y 1200, at latest, south-west Scotland had become a true melting-pot of languages"; he goes on nonetheless to try to locate strongholds of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic speech and includes Carrick, the region just south of Ayr in presentday Ayrshire, as an area where "Gaelic remained the ordinary language" (Barrow 1981: 12). Another Scottish historian ventures the assertion that the landowning class of the region which includes Ayr had become Scots-speaking by the late 13th century (Duncan 1975: 451); and the town of Ayr itself, chartered as a royal burgh in 1205, must have been a major entry point for the establishment of Scots along that part of the west coast, since the rise of these burghs was quite generally "the most significant factor in anglicisation" within Scotland (Murison 1979: 5). At least one specialist nevertheless believes that the town of Ayr still had a "substantially Gaelicspeaking" population in the 16th century (MacQueen 1983: 57). However, with Germanic speech spreading outwards from the valley of the river Clyde (the site of the city of Glasgow) from as early as the 13th century (Barrow 1981: 12), and Ayr itself a southwest-coast center for trade, the position of English (in its Scottish form) as the language of commerce guarantees that Ayrshire was lost to the Gaelic language well before Robert Burns' time. Not only lost to Gaelic but - in common with the rest of Lowland Scotland - hostile to Gaelic lifeways generally. That is, the "Anglo-Saxons" of Lowland Scotland were no less disdainful of the Celts than the Anglo-Saxons of England whom Baugh and Jespersen depict in their respective histories of the English language (Dorian 1981: 16-17). In spite of this, the sample of Burns' Scots poetry which I surveyed yielded a list of Gaelic lexical items which is surprising in three respects. For one thing, the Gaelic lexicon which I located in Bums' poems does not consist only of nouns, typically the word class most heavily drawn from in borrowing, but includes one certain and one likely adjective, plus one verb. For a second, the semantic domains represented include both those which are typically associated with the shift of an indigenous substratum population to a new and dominant language (such as retained terms for local animals, vegetation, and landscape features, and for tools or other items distinctive to the indigenous culture) and others which are more typically associated with borrowing in the strict sense of the incorporation of foreign elements into a maintained native language (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 39; 116-117; 134). For a third, most of the loanwords typical of borrowing are "gratuitous" in that there were words of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman origin potentially available by Burns' time which could have served the purpose of the Gaelic lexical item. In Table 1, the Gaelic loanwords which I found are entered at the left, with an English gloss to the right of each entry. Those which are gratuitous in the sense just noted are entered in boldface; any English gloss which represents an English

92

Nancy C. Dorian

counterpart of Anglo-Saxon (or other Germanic) or Anglo-Norman origin already established in English by Burns' time is entered in italics. Table I. Gaelic lexical material from Robert Bums' Scots poetry A) Characteristic of indigenous substratum interference via language shift instrument! tool culturally distinctive item claymore 'broadsword' claymore 'broadsword' •*• crummock 'broomstick' 'heap of stones' caim 'kilts' philibegs 'whiskey' usquebaeb 'whiskey' whiskey B) Characteristic of borrowing into a maintained language adjectives airt 'quarter [= sonsie 'pleasant' probable: compass direction] ' dour 'stubborn, cairds 'tinkers' dour' clachan 'village, hamlet' gab 'mouth' 'great-grandchild'c ier-oe kebars 'rafters' messin 'mongrel' spleuchan 'tobacco pouch' c tocher 'dowry' probable: cranreuch 'rime, hoarfrost' a b c

animal designation brock 'badger' Luath" 'Swift'

verb toom

'empty

This is the proper name given to one of the two dogs in the poem "The Twa Dogs", This is an orthographic rendering closer to the Gaelic than the long-established loanword whiskey. The elements constituting the gloss are attested for English before Burns' time.

Note that so-called core vocabulary is not immune to borrowing here: one of the gratuitous loanwords is a term for a bodypart and one a kin term. The adjectives and especially the verb are quite ordinary items, too, not in any way exotic lexemes. The proper name Luath given to the dog, however, presumably is intended to be exotic. Despite the fact that final -th is silent in Gaelic, the word is fully and correctly Gaelic in spelling (not true of usquebae or ier-oe, two other non-Anglo-Saxon-looking renditions of Gaelic terms), and the name of the other dog in the same poem, Caesar, is unusual and non-Anglo-Saxon as well. Of the 21 words in this table, only one (brock) appears among the words listed by Baugh and Jespersen as Celtic loanwords in the Old English period. If another form of Anglo-Saxon which came to prominence in the British Isles turns out to have been host to a considerable amount of Celtic lexical material, including some terms for which non-Celtic lexemes were theoretically available and some which belong to domains supposedly not much subject to borrowing, how does one then explain the dearth of Celtic lexical material which has survived

Linguacentrism and language history

93

in Standard English? Baugh and Jespersen were not mistaken about the fewness of the words, but it becomes difficult in the face of the evidence from Scots to maintain their position that this was quite simply the result of cultural inferiority on the part of the Celtic populations which a superior Anglo-Saxon culture encountered. In order to explain the difference in such purely cultural terms as Baugh and Jespersen invoke, one or more of several arguments would have to be made convincingly. One could argue that the Celts of what became Lowland Scotland were markedly superior culturally to those of southern Britain and hence less inferior to the Anglo-Saxons; or that the Anglo-Saxons who extended their speech form in the north were markedly inferior to those of the south and hence less superior to the Celts; or both. It has quite often been argued that the Romans reduced the military prowess of the British Celts, whose fighting spirit and skills may be supposed to have diminished somewhat as a result of conquest and occupation; but in the cultural sphere it is usually asserted that long contact with the Romans raised the level of the British Celts. Wacher, for example, discusses the development of urbanization, accompanied by growing sophistication in government and commerce, which took place among the native Celts under Roman rule (1981: 102-105); and Baugh himself refers to "many fine country houses, some of which were probably occupied by well-to-do natives" during the Roman period (1957: 52). It's equally difficult to make the argument that the Anglo-Saxon culture which arose in the north was inferior to that of the south, vis-à-vis the local Celts or otherwise. The cultural level of northern Anglo-Saxon areas, usually called simply "Anglian" in the context of southern Scotland, presumably partook of the enrichment which transplanted Anglo-Saxon culture experienced once in Britain; and Scots culture in particular emjoyed a remarkable flowering in the 15th and 16th centuries (Nicholson 1974: 579-586). In neither Scotland nor England can one safely assume a greatly predominant proportion of genetically Germanic stock, furthermore; native Celts were not eliminated in either area and may well have contributed substantially to the gene pool in certain locations. The southwestern part of Lowland Scotland was moderately recently Celtic in Burns' time, so that the undercurrent of Celtic language and lifeways may have been rather near the surface; but the Ayrshire of Burns' day did not offer him contemporary Ayrshire folk who were Gaelic-speaking, whereas the Anglo-Saxons establishing themselves in southern Britain in the 5th century were mixing directly with Celtic speakers in what was presumably the formative period of Old English. The explanation for the presence of significant Celtic lexical material in Burns' poetry and the absence of such material in Old English and in Standard English generally seems to me to lie most probably in three factors, two of which were alluded to briefly above. One is the historical fact that the Celts of what is now southern England were twice conquered, the Anglo-Saxons following immediately on the heels of a conquering power which had settled in and maintained a strong

94

Nancy C. Dorian

presence for nearly four centuries. Although no one argues that the Celts of that part of Britain had given up their native speech forms en masse and shifted entirely to Latin, there is evidence that Latin was known to skilled artisans as well as to the high-born among the Celtic natives during the Roman occupation, as Baugh himself acknowledges (1957: 152). The Romans clearly were more advanced militarily, politically, and technologically than the Celts whom they conquered, and during the centuries of Roman rule the native Celts within the chief settlement area must necessarily have been conscious of the lesser position of their own culture and language. Subordinate peoples already for four hundred years, they are not likely to have been a linguistically confident or assertive population when a new wave of conquest followed the Romans' departure and ushered in a second long period of military and political subordination. Southern Scotland offers the obvious contrast: without any real history of Roman occupation, the Celts of that part of Britain did in fact transfer substantial lexical material to an Anglo-Saxon speech form expanding at their expense some centuries later. Beyond this, the "cosmopolitan" trait of openness to foreign lexical material which characterizes later stages of the development of the English language was not a characteristic of Old English, which instead tended to coin new terms from native Germanic roots and affixes or else to extend the meaning of existing lexicon to incorporate new meanings: Roughly speaking, Old English clung to the native word, Middle English often preferred the borrowed one. ... [0]n the whole, the ... liberal attitude toward word-borrowing prevailed in the Renaissance and ... has prevailed in general through the Modern English period. (Robertson and Cassidy 1954: 180-181) Baugh acknowledges the lexical conservatism of Old English and dates the beginning of a change in that regard to the steady christianization of the AngloSaxons from the 7th century on (1957: 106). Another major part of the explanation for the paucity of Celtic lexical material in Standard English surely lies precisely in the fact that it is the standard language which is being scrutinized for Celtic lexical impact. Not only does Standard English have its roots in a southeastern form of Middle English (the East Midland dialect, particularly that of London) - that is, in an area of heavy Roman settlement and influence - but it is indeed a standardized form of the English language. As noted above, we have fallen into the habit of looking chiefly at standardlanguage forms when we make comparisons across languages, except in special cases where we are struggling to find sources for what some perceive as persistent archaisms or very atypical dialect divergences. 4 Yet the standard language is often the least likely place to look for language-contact phenomena. It generally derives, as in this case, from a maximum-density part of any original settlement territory,

Linguacentrism and language history

95

so that any previous population is likely to be more deeply submerged precisely there than in other parts of the same general settlement territory. In addition, it has often undergone something in the nature of linguistic "purging" over time, with grammatical and lexical monitors of one or another puristic persuasion tinkering at it. 5 In fact, cultural superiority and inferiority do not seem to have as much to do with the influence which languages exert on one another as other factors which are more obvious and less loaded with the potential for ethnocentric and linguacentric bias: the length of the contact between the languages, the relative numerical strengths of the respective populations, and the level of bilingualism in the contact populations. Thomason and Kaufman, who demonstrate the role of these factors in connection with many cases of contact-induced change, bring up the role of attitudinal factors with specific reference to a case of Celtic and English language contact, namely Irish English. They note that the English settlers in Ireland 6 were not likely to have been positively motivated to imitate the Irishinfluenced English of the native Irish who were shifting via bilingualism to English, and yet an Irish-influenced English ultimately prevailed in the country generally (1988: 43). They not only point to the obvious falsity of the notion that cultural or social prestige are necessary for interference arising from substratum shift, they also discount any necessary role for prestige in cases of borrowing, citing Jakobson (1962[1938]: 24) as a predecessor who had already taken the same position (1988: 4 3 ^ 4 ) . One might add to the evidence which they adduce the case of English in contact with Yiddish in at least the Middle Atlantic states along the east coast of the U. S. Yiddish is certainly not a prestige language vis-à-vis English in this region, yet in my experience it is the rare eastern seabord resident of these states, regardless of ethnicity, who doesn't have a good many Yiddish-origin lexical items in his or her vocabulary. 7 Yiddish-influenced idiom and syntax are common as well (e.g., / should live so long; so tell us already; what does she know from sports cars?; you want I should leave?). Yiddish influence is strongest in colloquial style and may reach a peak in the register of humor; but since colloquial style is the dominant style in spoken language, this does not represent any lesser influence. It may on the other hand lead to an underestimate of that influence among academics, lexicographers, and others who give disproportionate attention to relatively formal styles and to written language. Marckwardt, in his American English, devotes just one paragraph to the contribution of Yiddish to the American lexicon and mentions exactly three words, one of them a slang word which he (correctly) terms "somewhat outdated", as having passed into American English generally; otherwise he acknowledges solely passive recognition of five to seven others among "many people in the metropolitan centers" (1958: 56). Pyles does not even give Yiddish a paragraph of its own, subsuming it instead under German-American; and he terms

96

Nancy C. Dorian

the eight Yiddish-origin words he mentions "German words and minced forms of German words" (1971: 333). This necessarily means that he ignores Yiddishintroduced words of Hebrew origin such as goy and kosher. Baugh makes no mention of Yiddish at all, nor does Jespersen, through both offer examples of loanwords from Persian and from Russian, and Jespersen instances Turkish, Hungarian, Malay, Arabic, Polynesian, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal borrowings as well. It seems that the Celtic languages are not alone in having suffered at the hands of historians of the English language. The attraction of the cultural superiority argument in accounting for the lack of Celtic loanwords in the history of English seems obvious: it flatters the AngloSaxons. And in language history as in military history, it is the victors who secure the privilege of writing the "official" version of the contest. The lack of Celtic lexical influence in Standard English is odd enough so that most historians of English have felt compelled to comment on it. But while they perceived the oddity, they seem not to have perceived the seductive oversimplicity of their favored explanation. Since Jesperson was a Dane, and since reputable language historians are normally bi- or multilingual at least passively - that is, in reading knowledge historians of the English language cannot simply be charged collectively with "the excessive pride of English monolinguals". They can be faulted for resorting to a facile explanation of a conspiciously linguacentric sort, however - and perhaps also for anti-Celtic bias. 8 Whorf saw the speakers of modern Indo-European offshoot languages quite generally as ignorant of the true range of linguistic form and expression and unjustifiably arrogant in their blinkered linguacentrism. But the arrogance of linguacentrism operates even within that family of languages itself, where the representatives of speech forms which by accident of history have emerged as national languages are very likely to feel that there is something naturally superior about their mother tongues and the cultures they embody when compared with those speech forms which have not - or not yet - become the official languages of technologically advanced nation-states. The last word can be entrusted to Whorf himself in his role as champion of linguistic diversity and scourge of expandinglanguage complacency: The relatively few languages of the cultures which have attained to modem civilization promise to overspread the globe and cause the extinction of the hundreds of diverse exotic linguistic species, but it is idle to pretend that they represent any superiority of type. On the contrary, it takes but little real scientific study of preliterate languages, especially those of America, to show how much more precise and finely elaborated is the system of relationships in many such tongues than is ours (1956: 84—85)

Linguacentrism and language history

97

Notes I am grateful to Suzanne Romaine and Edward Finegan for helpful comments and suggestions which led to some refinements and clarifications in this paper. 1. Some do try to deny Dravidian influence nonetheless, as noted by Masica (1976: 2). 2. I am indebted to Edward Finegan for checking on the form of these quotations in the more recent edition. 3. The collection which I used was not complete, nor did I check every word which had no obvious counterpart in Standard Modern English. The collection which was ready to hand was a Heritage Press volume (Ferguson 1965) which offered a glossary down the side of each page alongside the lines of poetry. I scanned the glossary for possible Gaelic lexicon on the basis of knowledge of Scottish Gaelic and a good deal of training in Old and Middle English and other early Germanic languages; modest experience with Old Norse and Modern Swedish in particular was helpful in ruling out the fairly plentiful words in Scots which are derived from Nordic languages and are without parallel in Modem Standard English. The Oxford English Dictionary was the arbiter in assembling the final list of items of Gaelic origin. 4. Dillard (1972: 240-41) instances efforts to trace Black English in the U . S . to "archaic British English from a variety of 'regional' dialects." 5. Determined suppression of the multiple negation native to English is a good example of grammatical purism in the history of Standard English. Strictly lexical purism is probably seldom successful, but at least in the case of a linguistically stereotyped item such as ain't, the unfavorable labels attached to the entry in most dictionaries (and its exclusion from some short popular dictionaries) have fuelled its rejection in even the historically appropriate context of the negative interrogative lst-person-singular present-tense tag. Certain lexico-syntactic items - an example is for to in the sense of '(in order) to', still a serviceable part of Shakespeare's English - have also lost their genteel status and fallen out of favor. The double negative, the historically appropriate negative interrogative tag ain't or am(n)'t, and the purposive for to are still to be found in various dialects of English. But one consequence of failure to maintain a place in the sanctioned standard-language form of Modern English is that such usages (whether native material, as in these cases, or borrowed material) will not be treated in most histories of the English language, regardless of antiquity or widespread distribution in dialects of the language. 6. Presumably English settlers from late Elizabethan and especially Cromwellian times onward, i.e. the 17th century and after, are intended. Earlier settlers from England, the so-called Old English, had frequently embraced Irish Celtic lifeways, including the language. 7. In the part of central New Jersey where I grew up and in the part of southeastern Pennsylvania where I lived longest, loanwords from Yiddish in common use among non-Jewish speakers of English included the following: chutzpah, kibitz(er), kvetch, mensch, meshuga(na), nebbish, nudnik, schlemiel, schlep, schlock(y), schmaltz(y), schmuck, schnook, and shtick, as well as many terms for foods and a number of interjections and exclamatory phrases. The suffix -nik enjoyed some productivity (e.g. no-goodnik), and the deprecatory reduplicative element schm- (e.g. doctorschmoctor) was in common use with English words of any origin at all from the open classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives) so long as they were stressed on the first syllable. Some of these borrowings had been in use among non-Jewish speakers long enough to have an "English meaning" somewhat different from their original meaning in Yiddish, with the change usually in the direction of semantic bleaching; mensch had lost some of the positive force of the Yiddish equivalent and meant roughly 'fine fellow, fine person', and schmuck had no sexual/obscene overtones whatever, meaning simply 'jerk, idiot', though it retained enough of its original sense to be applied only to males, so far as I can remember.

98

Nancy C. Dorian

8. There is a long history of Celtophobic writing in English stretching back to Edmund Spenser and some of his late 16th-century contemporaries. Sad to say, even scholarly writing in English is not quite free of this taint, even today. Peacock (1986: 25) quotes an entry on the writer William Dean Howells in a major reference work, the Dictionary of American Biography: His ancestry was mixed, a welsh ingredient predominating strongly on his father's side, and a Pennsylvania German on This mother's. An English great-grandmother sobered the Welsh ferment; an Irish grandfather (mother's father) aerated the Teutonic phlegm. This absurd passage at least faults the Teutons as well as the Celts and offers the Irish element the conceivably positive metaphorical role of a leavening agent. But there is nothing at all to redeem the astonishing implication, late on in L. S. Hearnshaw's otherwise meticulous and serious biography of the psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, who was discovered posthumously to have built a career and a scholarly reputation on fraudaient data, that Burt's partly Celtic ancestry might have had something to do with his dishonesty: "Burt's ancestry was a mixed ancestry, part Saxon, part Celtic. His father was of stolid Saxon stock; his mother a more volatile Welsh woman, whose own brother was an unstable artist, constantly in debt" (1981[1979]: 271).

References Barrow, G. W. S. 1981 Kingship and unity: Scotland 1000-1306. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Baugh, Albert C. 1957 A history of the English language (2nd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Croft. Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable 1978 A history of the English language (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cassidy, Frederic G. 1954 The development of modern English (2nd ed., revised by Stuart Robertson). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Clayton, Peter A. (ed.) 1980 A companion to Roman Britain. Dorset. Dillard, J. L. 1972 Black English: Its history and usage in the United States. New York: Random House. Dorian, Nancy C. 1981 Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Duncan, Archibald A. M. 1975 Scotland: The making of the kingdom. New York: Barnes and Noble. Ferguson, Delancey (ed.) 1965 The poems of Robert Burns. New York: The Heritage Press. Fishman, Joshua A. 1985 The rise and fall of the ethnic revival: Perspectives on language and ethnicity. Berlin: Mouton. Hearnshaw, L. S. 1981 Cyril Burt, psychologist. New York: Random House. Jakobson, Roman 1962 [1938] "Sur la théorie des affinités phonologiques entre des langues", Selected writings, vol. 1. The Hague: Mouton. Jespersen, Otto 1938 Growth and structure of the English language (9th ed.). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Linguacentrism and language history

99

MacQueen, John 1983 "The biography of Alexander Scott and the authorship of Lo, quhat it is to lufe," in: J. Derrick McClure (ed.), Scotland and the Lowland tongue. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Marckwardt, Albert H. 1958 American English. New York: Oxford University Press. Masica, Colin 1976 Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murison, David 1979 "The historical backgound", in: A. J. Aitken & Tom McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland. Chambers. Nicholson, Ranald 1974 Scotland: The Later Middle Ages. New York: Barnes and Noble. Peacock, James L. 1971 The anthropological lens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pyles, Thomas 1971 The origins and development of the English language (2nd ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman 1988 Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wacher, John 1981 The coming of Rome. London: Granada. Whorf, Benjamin Lee 1956 Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. ed. by John B. Carroll. New York: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley and Sons.

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality G. Richard Tucker

Much of the early educational literature suggested negative cognitve, personal, and social consequences of bilinguality (cf. Hakuta 1986; Macnamara 1966). However, a reexamination of much of the early literature revealed serious methodological flaws in the research. The work by Peal and Lambert (1962) suggested quite different, and much more positive, correlates of bilinguality. In this paper, I will describe briefly the likely cognitive and social correlates and consequences for individuals who are "caused" to become bilingual by their participation in innovative language education programs such as immersion, bilingual immersion, interlocking, or two-way bilingual programs. My reason for doing so is to provide a positive counterbalance to the negatively-charged debate surrounding the continuing discussions about amending the U. S. Constitution to declare English to be the sole and official language of the country (see, for example, Crawford 1989; Nunberg 1989). In part, fuel for the controversy over an official language policy for the United States hinges around misunderstanding of issues related to one important aspect of language (education) policy - namely that of bilingual education. Proponents of an "English Only" viewpoint misrepresent or misunderstand the accumulated research literature concerning the consequences and correlates of bilinguality. Supporters of "official" English appear to imply that an individual caused to become bilingual will suffer irreparable cognitive and social harm and that this individual will become an alienated and non-contributing member of our society. Consequently the fabric of society will begin to disintegrate. In this paper, I wish to sketch the changing (language) educational needs of language minority and language majority youngsters; describe an innovative approach to language education designed to foster additive bilingualism; and identify the likely correlates of such bilingualism on the basis of a review of recent relevant research literature.

Demographic changes Despite the fact that the school-aged population of the United States is decreasing in absolute terms, the number of language minority students is increasing dramatically. In 1981, the percentage of minority students in California, New Mexico, and Texas had exceeded 35 % while the percentage in Florida, Illinois, and New York was nearing 35 %. Moreover, the national percentage is projected by the Education Department to increase to 38.4 % by the year 2000. Due to a com-

102

G. Richard Tucker

bination of migration patterns and family size, the fastest growing population in the United States is the language-minority population. In addition, almost one million refugees entered the United States between 1975 and 1985. Added to these numbers are the several million undocumented aliens who arrived from Central America and the Caribbean. Moreover, both racial and ethnic minority families, particularly Black and Hispanic, are characteristically larger than those of the American majority population. If current trends continue, we can expect that 53 of the major American cities will have language minority youngsters as a majority of the school-aged population by the year 2000. In many parts of the country, such students now - or shortly will - constitute a majority of the pupils in Local Educational Agencies (LEAs). In many instances, these students enter school with little or no proficiency whatsoever in English. In other instances, language minority students who seem - at least to all outward appearances - proficient in social language skills have difficulty in acquiring the cognitive academic language skills which they need for success in their mathematics, science, social studies, or other academic subjects. Unfortunately, academic achievement and school completion rates for many minority students - particularly Hispanic students, who are the largest minority and the fastest growing sector of our population - are woefully low. In the Southwest, Rendon (1983) reports that 40 % of the Hispanic students drop out by the 10th grade, and that an additional 10 % drop out before completing high school. A recent study by Cardenas, Robledo, and Waggoner (1988) suggests that unfortunately these already high estimates might be woefully low. Of those students who do graduate from high school, only a small percentage attend college and the majority of those who do choose community colleges. Of those who attend fouryear colleges, the majority study education, business, or social science. Fewer than 3 % of the science, math, and technical majors are Hispanic. By the year 2000, the nation will have a smaller pool of potential workers and college students, and the people in this pool will be less prepared for work and college study due to circumstances such as poverty, unstable homes, and lack of English language skills (Johnston 1987). While these statistics document a problem for all minority groups - particularly Hispanic and Black children - language minorities (those for whom English is not the native language) are notably at risk. The purpose of this paper is not to reenter the debate on the optimal educational strategy for such youngsters; others have done that (e.g., Hakuta 1986; Willig 1985). Rather, I intend to describe an emerging educational practice that seems to offer great promise for such students, and then to examine the likely cognitive and social correlates of the children's participation in such programs. With respect to language majority students, the situation is slightly different. For these youngsters the problem is one of depressingly low foreign or second language proficiency. Language majority children often participate in sequences of foreign language study at the elementary or secondary level without ever develop-

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality

103

ing any meaningful proficiency in their language of study. A nationwide survey of foreign language enrollments conducted by CAL staff (Oxford and Rhodes 1988) revealed that approximately 22 % of our nation's elementary schools and 87 % of our secondary schools offered programs of foreign language instruction. However, the best guess that we can make from the data based on a 5 % sample survey of all public and private elementary and secondary schools in the country is that fewer than 1 % of the students who are enrolled in such programs - already a relatively small number of youngsters - participate in programs in which the development of bilingual proficiency is either an attainable objective or even a demonstrable program goal. That is, the average English-speaking youngster enrolled has virtually no chance whatsoever to acquire bilingual proficiency by following the sequence of foreign language courses typically offered in either our public or private school system. Although this statement holds true for the commonly taught languages such as French, German and Spanish, the situation is even more discouraging for the so-called less commonly taught languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Swahili) which for all practical purposes are not even offered as subjects for study. In fact far fewer than 1 % of our youngsters have the opportunity to study languages which in the aggregate are spoken as primary or secondary languages by more than 90 % of the world's population. Is it realistic for language majority children to acquire bilingual proficiency by participating in foreign language programs within our public school system? What are the likely correlates of such participation? Again, the purpose is not to examine here the broad array of methods and approaches used to deliver foreign language instruction or to evaluate their efficacy (cf. Larsen-Freeman 1986; Richards and Rogers 1986), but rather to describe an educational practice that holds great promise for improving the quality of foreign language instruction, and concomitantly the degree of proficiency attained for all youngsters.

An alternative educational model For a number of years, many of us have been flirting with a special kind of innovative language education program - one which integrates the teaching of language and content to the fullest degree possible. Previously, I had written about the potential value of an "enrichment model" (Tucker 1986) or a program which could be designed to capitalize on the fact that language-minority students and language-majority students can participate meaningfully and effectively in shared or cooperative education. An approach which maximizes the integration of language and content instruction for members of major language contact groups simultaneously would seem to hold great promise for building and for sustaining

104

G. Richard Tucker

valuable natural language resources within the United States which now are either allowed to decay or are never sufficiently developed. As noted on several occasions (Tucker and Crandall 1989; Crandall and Tucker 1990) there is an emerging awareness, particularly in the United States, of the possibilities, the power, and the promise of bilingual immersion programs. Let me operationally define an exemplary bilingual immersion program. Let us suppose, for example, that in a typical grade one class comprising 28 youngsters, 14 are Hispanic, Spanish-speaking youngsters and 14 are Anglo or English mothertongue youngsters. These youngsters would be placed together in a combined class (which would usually have been assembled on a voluntary basis) in which some portion of their day typically would be devoted to English language arts (for the Anglos), English as a second language (for the Hispanics), Spanish language arts (for the Hispanics), Spanish as a second language (for the Anglos), and the teaching of selected content material - let us say mathematics - in English, and other content material - let us say history - in Spanish. Over the course of several years, the idea would be to offer a program of bilingual instruction in which children from both of the ethnolinguistic groups would have an opportunity to develop and to sharpen their literacy skills while simultaneously developing the fullest possible academic language proficiency in each of their two languages. Care would be taken to insure that children had an opportunity to study all of the content subjects in both of the languages during the course of their school experience. This would be done to facilitate the development of the appropriate academic "registers" for mathematics, science, social studies, etc. in each of the two languages. The daily instruction would be offered within a bilingual ambiance in which the teachers as well as the students would be available to provide good language models and to maximize the opportunity for cooperative learning, peer group tutoring, etc. (Optimally, instruction in each language would be provided by separate teachers with native proficiency in the respective language.) In many ways, such an approach resembles the early French immersion programs begun in Montreal in the mid 1960s (cf. Lambert and Tucker 1972; Genesee 1987); but with a notable exception. In the early immersion programs, only language majority children were involved - there were no children whatsoever from the target language group. There were no youngsters available to act as peer models who could assist the English speakers in acquiring both the social as well as the academic register of the target language. As noted previously (Tucker, in press), we had worried a good deal about what we referred to as the "absent peer group," but political, religious, and other social factors prevented us from developing and implementing a fully-integrated or two-way bilingual model. Nevertheless such an idealized model was always in the back of our minds.

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality

105

Exemplary bilingual immersion programs Under the federally funded Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), Lindholm (1987) compiled a list of extant preschool through secondary school bilingual immersion programs. At the present time, with additions which have occurred during the past two years, there are more than 100 such programs in California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Virginia, and Washington, D. C. The most prevalent languages used are English and Spanish although there are programs involving English and other languages such as Arabic and Greek as well. Lindholm discussed the rationale for bilingual immersion education and presented a theoretically-motivated operational definition of such programs. She described existing programs in some detail and delineated criteria which she believed to be essential for successful bilingual immersion programs: 1. The instructional treatment should be provided for at least four to six years (note the difference from the typical "early exit" transitional bilingual education program which usually provides only one or two years of bilingual treatment); 2. There should be a focus on the regular academic curriculum as well as on language development (that is, care must be taken to insure that the regular curricular objectives for mathematics, science, social studies, etc. are covered); 3. There should be the fullest possible integration of language arts within the total content curriculum; 4. Dual language input should be provided through communicatively-sensitive language instruction and subject-matter presentation (this requires careful and dynamic collaboration between all of the teachers, resource specialists and administrators concerned with the child's educational development); 5. There should be ample opportunity and demand for language output (that is, the child should be required to utilize the language productively as well as receptively); and 6. Instruction should be carried out in what Lambert (1980) has referred to as an "additive" bilingual environment. The identified set of criteria are fully compatible with those described by Snow, Met and Genesee (1989), Short, Crandall and Christian (1989), Crandall and Tucker (1990) as well as with the earlier theoretical construct of Mohan (1986). In an earlier paper (Tucker and Crandall 1989), I described briefly two exemplary bilingual immersion programs - one in Arlington, Virginia, and the other in Santa Monica, California - which were chosen because they were implemented under quite different social and ethnolinguistic circumstances in two widelyseparated parts of the country, and because each had been and continues to be the subject of careful research attention. The results of the various available evaluations can be summarized as follows. Bilingual immersion education proved to be a powerful vehicle to promote the development of bilingual language

106

G. Richard Tucker

competence in these early elementary school-aged youngsters. The children mastered receptive and productive language skills in their two languages and mastered content material at a level appropriate to their grade and peer-group controls as well. They developed positive attitudes toward the program, the target language, and its speakers. This innovation represents a "special case" of the fullest possible integration of language and content instruction. Apparently its success rests on the teacher's ability to foster the development of solid building blocks in both languages which can lead to the development of social as well as academic language skills (or what others such as Snow (1984) have called the development of contextualized and decontextualized language abilities). Critical attributes appear to include a sensitivity by teachers to the language needs and the inherent abilities of the children; to the fact that material which is inherently interesting and appealing for children (such as science, mathematics, and social sutudies) can be a conceptual peg upon which to build the development of language and higher order thinking skills; and that students who work collaboratively accross language boundaries - in these examples Mexican-American or Central American youngsters and Anglo youngsters - can serve to reinforce, to extend, and to solidify their respective language skills. Thus we noted that teachers working within an ambiance conducive to the promotion of "additive" bilingualism can utilize the natural resources which both groups of students bring naturally to the learning environment. These abilities can be nurtured and can be extended by careful planning and by creative and sensitive teaching; but the children themselves play a key role in fostering and facilitating this crosslanguage development. In conclusion, it appears that despite the generally poor performance of language minority youngsters who are mainstreamed or submerged in typical American classrooms, and despite the poor second or foreign language proficiency attained by most language majority youngsters there exists an educational alternative which can facilitate the development of bilingual competence and subject matter mastery for such youngsters. What, then, might we expect to be the correlates or consequences for children who participate in such an innovative educational program?

Correlates of bilinguality This paper began with a brief consideration of the changing demography of the enrollment patterns in American public education as well as with several summary statements concerning the generally poor academic performance by language minority youngsters coupled with the poor level of foreign language competence typically achieved by language majority youngsters. I then described a slightly different type of program known as bilingual immersion which is gaining in popularity in the United States. This approach takes as its explicit goal the

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality

107

development of bilingual language proficiency and content subject mastery on the part of all participating youngsters. To date, the majority of such programs have been implemented at the elementary school level, and the research which has been conducted - where it is longitudinal in nature - has followed children through the first several years of their elementary schooling. Although it has not yet been possible to track children throughout their entire scholastic career, on the basis of the earlier immersion literature (see, for example, Lambert and Tucker 1972; Genesee 1987; Swain 1984), it seems safe to conclude that the gains observed during the first several years of bilingual immersion will continue and persist throughout elementary and indeed secondary schooling. In addition to the abundant literature reviewed by Hakuta (1986) and by Hakuta and Suben (1985), there are a number of other relevant recent studies which offer strong support for the existence of a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development. Thus, for example, Diaz (1985) and Hakuta (1987) working with Puerto Rican, English and Spanish bilingual, youngsters found that the degree of bilingualism is positively related to cognitive abilities. Diaz further noted that the degree of bilingualism appeared to be a causal factor affecting children's cognitive abilities. That is, youngsters with a high degree of bilingual proficiency exhibited enhanced flexibility, creativity and divergent problemsolving abilities compared to their monolingual counterparts. This interpretation is fully consistent with research results reported by Lambert and Tucker (1972) and that summarized by Swain (1984) in which it was noted that otherwise-English monolingual children who became bilingual by virtue of their participation in French immersion programs developed greater cognitive flexibility, creativity, and divergent thinking skills than their carefully matched, monolingually-educated control counterparts who participated in traditional English medium instruction programs. Likewise, Secada (1989) in his examination of the degree of bilingualism and performance on problem solving tasks noted a positive relationship between language proficiency and problem solving and found that cognitive benefits appeared in bilingual student's study of academic subjects. The accrued benefits were dependent upon the extent to which students had developed decontextualized or academic language proficiency. In addition, Cleghorn, Merritt and Abagi (1989) found in a very different (African) setting, that the phenomenon of bilingual language development had definite (positive) cognitive implications particularly since the process of language shift and mixed language utilization "caused" the students whom they studied to focus on and better clarify lesson material which in turn seemed to enhance their development of cognitive language proficiency, divergent thinking abilities, and creativity in general. Most recently, Bamford and Mizokawa (1989) found a significant increase over time on nonverbal measures of divergent thinking for youngsters participating in immersion programs. Thus, there seems to exist a variety of research evidence from quite disparate

108

G. Richard Tucker

settings which cumulatively suggests that youngsters who have been "caused" to become bilingual and who concomitantly develop a high degree of cognitive academic language proficiency or of decontextualized language abilities in both of their languages will also develop a more diversified and flexible set of problemsolving strategies or of cognitive abilities than their monolingual peers. This present emphasis of course is also consistent with earlier evidence reported by Lambert and Tucker (1972), Genesee (1987) and Swain (1984). Additionally, there are a number of studies which suggest that bilingualism may have positive or facilitating effects on social development. For example, Bamford and Mizokawa (1989) report that incipient bilingual children develop a more diversified and positive cross cultural attitudinal inventory than their monolingual counterparts. This research is consistent with earlier work by Lambert and Tucker (1972), and by Genesee (1987) where children who have been "caused" to become bilingual have developed generally more positive, charitable, and open views toward members of other ethnolinguistic groups than their monolingual counterparts. It should be pointed out, in all fairness, that the social psychological changes that have been reported in the literature may be more transient - at least based upon the results of the so called immersion studies - than many would hope to be the case. The results are certainly consistent with results reported by Gardner (1983) who noted that positive attitudes toward the second language community may be an outcome or byproduct of the second language learning process and that therefore one might expect those who become more proficient in the second language to develop more positive and charitable views toward diverse others. In the case of immersion programs, the lack of available continuing role models which leads to sharply reduced contact between members of the groups may come over time to result in a diminution of the positive attitudes and affect toward diverse other ethnolinguistic groups. However, one would certainly expect that long-term participation in bilingual immersion programs would provide the most supportive ambience for the development of positive attitudes toward members of the contact ethnolinguistic groups and that the enhanced continuing contact would promote over time tolerance and acceptance for a culturally diverse society.

In conclusion In this brief paper I have tried to argue that there exist innovative educational programs for both language minority and language majority youngsters known as bilingual immersion programs which can result in the development of bilingual proficiency and academic content mastery. I argue further that extant research results suggest that participating youngsters who continue in such programs for a substantial period of time (cf. Collier 1989) will develop cognitive and possibly social advantages when compared with their monolingually educated counterparts.

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality

109

The net result should be a culturally rich, competent, and socially sensitive society, rather than a divisive and fragmented society as predicted by those who advocate "English only". According to the present optimistic view the encouragement of personal bilingualism through participation in innovative educational programs should be accorded a high social priority.

References Bamford, K. W. & Mizokawa, D. T. 1989 Cognitive and attitudinal outcomes of an additive bilingual program. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association meeting, San Francisco, CA. Cardenas, J. A., Robledo, M. & Waggoner, D. 1988 The undereducation of American youth. San Antonio, TX: Intercultural Development Research Association. Cleghorn, A., Merritt, M. W. & Abag, D. 1989 "Language policy and science instruction in Kenyan primary schools", Comparative Education Review 33: 21-39. Collier, V. P. 1989 "How long? A synthesis of research on academic achievement in a second language", TESOL Quarterly 23, 3: 509-531. Crandall, J. A. & Tucker, G. R. 1990 "Content-based language instruction in second and foreign languages", in: Proceedings of the RELC Seminar of Language Teaching Methodologies for the Nineties. Singapore: Regional Language Center. Crawford, J. 1989 Bilingual education: History, politics, theory and practice. Trenton, NJ: Crane. Diaz, R. M. 1985 "Bilingual cognitive development: Addressing three gaps in current research", Child Development 58: 1376-1388. Genesee, F. 1987 Learning through two languages: Studies of immersion and bilingual education. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. Hakuta, K. 1986 Mirror of language: The debate on bilingualism. New York: Basic Books. 1987 "Degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability in mainland Puerto Rican children", Child Development 58: 1372-1388 Hakuta, K. & Suben, J. 1985 "Bilingualism and cognitive development", in: R. B. Kaplan (ed.), Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 6: 35^15. Johnston, W. B. 1987 Workforce 2000: Work and workers for the 21st century. Indianapolis, IN: Hudson Institute. Lambert, W. E. 1980 "The two faces of bilingual education", NCBE Forum 3. Lambert, W. E. & Tucker, G. R. 1972 The bilingual education of children. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

110

G. Richard Tucker

Larsen-Freeman, D. Techniques and principles in language teaching. New York: Oxford University 1986 Press. Lindholm, K. J. Directory of bilingual immersion programs: two-way bilingual education for 1987 language minority and majority students. (Educational Report No. 8). Los Angeles: University of California, Center for Language Education and Research. Macnamara, J. Bilingualism and primary education. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. 1966 Mohan, B. A. Language and content. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 1986 Nunberg, G. 1989 "Linguists and the official language movement", Language 65: 579-587. Oxford, R. & Rhodes, N. C. 1988 "Foreign language in elementary and secondary schools: Results of a national survey", Foreign Language Annals 21. Peal, E. & Lambert, W. E. 1962 "The relation of bilingualism to intelligence", Psychological Monographs 76 (27, whole No. 546). Rendon, L. I. Mathematics education for Hispanic students in the Border College Consortium. 1983 Report on the Math Intervention Project. Laredo, TX: The Border College Consortium. Richards, J. C. & Rodgers, T. S. 1986 Approaches and methods in language teaching: A description and analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Short, D. J., Crandall, J. & D. Christian How to integrate language and content instruction: A training manual. (Educational 1989 Report No. 15). Los Angeles: University of California, Center for Language Education and Research. Secada, W. G. The relationship between degree of bilingualism and arithmetic problem-solving 1989 performance in first-grade Hispanic children. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association meeting, San Francisco, CA. Snow, C. E. 1984 Beyond conversation: second language learners' acquisition of description and explanation. Paper presented at Deleware Symposium on Language Studies. Snow, M. A., Met, M. & F. Genesee 1989 "A conceptual framework for the integration of language and content in second/ foreign language instruction", TESOL Quarterly 23: 201-217. Swain, M. 1984 "A review of immersion education in Canada: Research and evaluation studies", in: P. Allen & M. Swain (eds.), Language issues and education policies. Oxford: Pergamon. Tucker, G. R. "Developing a language-competent American society", in: D. Tannen (ed.), 1986 Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics, 1985. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.

Cognitive and social correlates of bilinguality in press

111

"Developing a language competent American society: The role of language planning", in: A. Reynolds (ed.), Proceedings of the McGill Conference on Bilingualism: A tribute to Wallace E. Lambert. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Tucker, G. R. & Crandall, J. A. 1989 "The integration of language and content instruction for language minority and language majority students", in: Georgetown University Round Table on languages and linguistics, 1989. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 39-50. Willig, A. C. 1985 "A meta-analysis of selected studies on the effectiveness of bilingual education", Review of Educational Research 55: 269-317.

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

If we are sensitive to the loss suffered by our collective 'quality of life' on this planet when endangered species are further decimated, if we strain to do something on their behalf so that their natural habitats will be protected and their life chances improved ... then the need to look steadfastly and act affirmatively in connection with endangered languages should be even more obvious. (Fishman 1989: 391) The field of minority languages has been considerably enriched by the scholarly work of Joshua Fishman, most of whose professional life has been dedicated to the twin issues of language and ethnicity. These interests were inherited, at least in part, from his parents' concerns with the pursuit of minority linguistic goals, and were thrown into relief by the sociolinguistic climate in which he grew up. This special insight is evident in his approach to formulating, testing and revising theories of language and ethnicity. In addition to an active and seminal engagement in the sociology of language, he has also served on the faculty of a graduate school of psychology. The resultant dovetailing of sociological and psychological perspectives on language issues has, he says, allowed him to combine insights from both schools and to apply them to language and ethnicity while maintaining his preferred emphasis on sociolinguistics. Fishman has been most vociferous among sociolinguists in explicitly supporting cultural and linguistic heterogeneity, differentiating between ethnicity, nationalism and nationism, and arguing that the parts (i.e. minority languages) may flourish within the whole. His work spanning issues in language policy, language maintenance and shift, sociohistorical concerns, and educational contexts is the keystone for an integrative theoretical, empirical and applied science of minority languages. And it is by way of a move towards further integration, particularly of current theoretical traditions, that our own modest contribution to this Festschrift is made. Following Giles, Leets and Coupland (1990), we will discuss various lacunae within an existing sociological model and consider how recognizing important cognitive and interactional processes may help extend its potential to explain minority language survival/non-survival. In addition, we will bring together a

114

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

diverse set of research efforts and theories in the social psychology of language and intergroup behavior on the one hand and intercultural communication on the other. Hence, our initial assumption is that the formal recognition of these broad literatures may well be useful in devising a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework. These literatures tackle a plethora of different issues and constitute, for the most part, a set of independent areas of enquiry. Often, they pay no more than lip service to each other in passing. Here, we shall at least attempt to organize these areas into an integrative statement which has some predictive value. Finally, we shall address the formal modeling of sociological and cognitive forces, ending up (conventionally enough, but we think necessarily here) with an agenda for the future. Many research efforts are geared to the description - often historically and dynamically - of different minority language situations here and there (Aikio 1984; Fishman 1980, Gillies 1987; Neville 1987; Shield 1984). While this natural phase of investigation is essential in providing us with fundamental data to work on, there is obviously still more to be accomplished in this vein. We now need a consensually agreed-upon set of ground rules that will establish the parameters of our field, permitting us to address our local concerns within the context of the larger-scale enterprise. Integrative themes are plain to see. It seems that we are all oriented towards at least two clusters of issues. First, the explanatory paradigm: what conditions give rise to language maintenance, survival, preservation, revival, and death, when and why? (Fishman 1976, 1980, 1985). Second, the interventionist paradigm: given emotional identification and often pragmatic involvement with minority language survival in the context of widespread linguicism, what are the most appropriate means (educational, conflictual, or in terms of institutional support) of protecting which minority language rights, and how? As Fishman (1982: 5) has noted, these two paradigms are often intertwined, the second predisposing many of us to work in the field and, defensibly, conditioning our moral positions on "little peoples" and (hence) "little languages". What relevant theory is available to model these integrating themes? A fairly prototypical, yet inclusive and parsimonious sociological model, proposed by de Vries (1984) (see Figure 1), neatly illustrates the direct and indirect influences demographic factors can have on language survival. As languages become dominant and spread because they give access to technology and modernity, they are often simultaneously contributing to the demise of minority or non-dominant languages. Fishman (1972) argues that language policy should ideally protect endangered languages; language planners would then be drawn towards particular kinds of sociostructural and political-legal enabling forces as a means of facilitating language maintenance.

115

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

social strucural factors

demographic

minority group

factors

survival

political-legal factors Figure 1. de Vries' (1984) model

From a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective, we would have to note a few caveats in de Vries' model (Giles et al. 1990). First, it beams into "collective survival" as the ultimate dependent variable. It seems - and in fact this is acknowledged in other aspects of de Vries' (1987) conceptual work - that we also need to focus explicitly upon related phenomena including "promotion", "revitalization", "reintroduction", "conservation", "maintenance", "revival", "expansion", and "preservation" (see also Fishman 1989). These are different constructs to the extent that they presuppose different survival baselines. Contrary to general usage, we need to operationalize whichever terms prove to have contrastive value more precisely and in a consensually-agreed manner (see Bourhis 1984a). Certainly, the processes underscoring these outcomes (assuming we do specify them as unitary phenomena) are likely to be qualitatively different and therefore the interventions deemed appropriate will be necessarily various. Moreover, the focus on "survival" needs to be balanced with systematic attention to "non-survival" processes such as "assimilation", "atrophy", "deterioration", "decline", "loss", "contraction", "death" and "language suicide" (Dorian 1989; Fishman 1989). Again, it is likely that processes enabling non-survival are not simply the converse of those facilitating survival (cf. Giles & Byrne 1982). Second, minority group survival is conceived of here in an intergroup vacuum (see Tajfel 1978). Fishman (1989) himself recognizes the importance of an intergroup perspective and has argued, for example, that ethnolinguistic diversity per se does not cause conflict. Rather it may be the interaction of the various social identities of the groups involved, minority as well as majority groups. Thus, an analysis of the dominant group's idelologies, strategies, and language status is an important and dynamic set of contributing forces here, as discussed by Coupland and Thomas (1989), Nelde (1987), and others. If language is an important aspect of dominant group identity, changes in the status of a minority language (be they growth or decline) are likely to have direct implications for dominant language identity in ways that social identity theory and ethnolinguistic identity theory (Giles & Johnson 1987) can articulate, and in ways that will, transactively, then affect minority language-related activities.

116

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

Third, the focus here is on group products and sociological antecedents. Some of us concerned with the development of the notion of 'vitality' (i.e., those statusrelated, demographic, and institutional factors working in favor of or against a group's survival; see Giles, Bourhis & Taylor 1977) would argue that the potency of sociostructural and political-legal factors are necessarily mediated by individuals' subjective evaluations of languages and statuses in an intergroup context. In other words, the cognitive representation of these sociological forces is open to differential interpretation at different historical times and, with regard to different ideologies, even amongst members of the same group. There are cognitive processes at work mediating group-level pressures towards maintenance and death (Giles & Johnson 1987) - what we shall shortly refer to as "intergroup cognitions" . Fourth, the processes of influence as specified are abstracted in an interactional vacuum. Yet the fates of languages, more obviously and directly than most social 'realities' are in crucial respects worked out, defined and redefined in everyday discourse among members of the minority or majority language communities, as well as in intergroup encounters (see also Collier & Thomas 1988). An insufficient number of studies have been conducted (see however Gorter 1987; Ytsma 1988) into how the minority language is introduced as topic and talked about in context, managed and reacted to by ingroup and outgroup collectives. Such interactional experiences are compelling day-to-day fodder for sustaining or inhibiting language use at the group level over the longer term, and could usefully be set alongside sociolinguistic paradigms which investigate code-switching and interlingual processes. Giles, Leets and Coupland's (1990) conceptualization and elaboration of de Vries' model is modestly revised and appears in Figure 2 below, de Vries' demographic, socio-structural and political-legal factors are labeled sociological climates. In addition, the model captures the intergroup arena of minority language situations, recognizes outcomes and processes beyond survival, attends to "cognitive climates" as a mediator of minority language status (see also Foster 1980; Bourhis 1984b), and emphasizes the interactional dynamic nature of the entire process. Thus outcomes and climates are not frozen a priori or a posteriori states but reflexive, dynamic and transactive processes (Cronen, Chen & Pearce 1988). We are well aware of epistemological dilemmas involved in blithely wedding sociological and sociopsychological viewpoints, as well as those involved in meshing subjectivist and objectivist (Burrell & Morgan 1979) - let alone textual and contextual - levels of analysis together (Williams 1988). However, that does not mean we should abandon the exercise as hopeless and that interdisciplinary meshes are of necessity doomed to failure (see, for example, Edwards 1988; Haarman 1986; Haugen 1972). In terms of a "subjectivist" position, our viewpoint is admittedly "objectivist" (see Gudykunst & Nishida 1989) in its origin and we would not wish to dismiss such epistemological and

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

117

Figure 2. An elaborated componential model of minority language group status

ontological differences. However we do feel that these two perspectives are not incommensurable and that many communalities exist. Specifically, we would embrace the subjectivists' emphasis on constructive processes (Applegate & Sypher 1988), multiple identities negotiated through discourse (Collier & Thomas 1988), systems (e.g., Kim 1987, Yum 1988a) and dimensions of culture (Hofstede 1980). Thus the models unfolded during the course of this chapter are an attempt to scratch the surface of productive engagement. Much effort has, rightly of course, been devoted to defining the sociological climates of language maintenance and shift (e.g., Akutagawa 1987; Fishman 1982; Wande 1984). Let us now see what is on tap to explore the sociopsychological, intergroup, and interactional climates. There is much work in sociolinguistics, social psychology, and communication studies which bears directly on the integrative themes we drew out as of concern to us. However, little of this is explicitly directed towards minority language issues, and the body of work itself is oriented towards different problems set at different levels of analysis. There have been attempts at rapprochement, but usually limited and no more than citational cross-references (see, however, Gudykunst 1986). We shall attempt to introduce these diverse frameworks systematically in an elaboration of Giles et al.'s schema (see Figure 3), our goal being to highlight general traditions of research, to point to key existing studies, and to draw out implications for future developments. Commencing at the top of Figure 3 and working down, let us consider briefly some of the sociostructural perceptions possible for analysis (see also, Giles &

118

H o w a r d Giles, N i k o l a s Coupland, A n g i e W i l l i a m s , and Laura Leets

Sociostructural realities & perceptions (e.g., Ryan, et al, 1982;

* overall vitality

Allard & Landry, 1986;

* vitality beliefs

Sachdev & Bourhis, 1990;

* power, status, numbers

Kim 1987, Yum, 1988a

* networks

Triandis, et al, 1988 •

* idio/allocentric

Intergroup c o g n i t i o n s (e.g., Gallois, et al, 1988;

* dependency

Turner & Oakes, 1988;

* solidarity

Berry, et al, 1987;

* interpersonal

Applegate & Sypher, 1988

* intergroup * self-stereotyping * outgroup valued

Intercultural c o m p e t e n c i e s (e.g., Hammer, 1987;

* psychological stress

Kim & Rubin, 1988)

* establish relationships * communicate effectively

Ethnic language attitude m o d e l s (e.g., Gallois, et al, 1984;

* generative

Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1990;

* cue salience

Bradac, 1990 •

* profiles

Intercultural c o m m u n i c a t i v e strategies (e.g., Coupland, et al, 1988;

* attuning

Ting-Toomey, 1988) •

* conflict styles

Interactional c o g n i t i o n s (e.g., Taylor & Simard, 1975;

* values

Hewstone & Giles, 1986;

* anxiety

Gudykunst, 1988a;

* satisfaction

Hecht, et al, 1990)

* perceived efficiency * miscommunication

L a n g u a g e learning (in/out group) inclinations (e.g., Gardner, 1985;

* motivation/attitudes

Garrett, et al, 1989)

* situational anxiety * intergroup cognitions

Figure 3. A n integrative m o d e l s p e c i f y i n g predictive interrelationships

Franklyn-Stokes 1989). As mentioned already, different people have different fluctuating views about the vitality of their group and its language vis à vis rele-

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

119

vant others (see also d'Anglejan 1984). The stronger the perceived sociostructural support for the language amongst the group and beyond it, the more it may seem worthwhile investing energy in supporting it (see Fig. 3). Hence, Ryan and Giles (1982) have formulated a model in which they speculatively place language attitude situations (including language minorities) in two dimensional space of standardness-nonstandardness and increasing-decreasing vitality. Allard and Landry (1986) have pointed to the fact that vitality can be usefully unpacked in terms of separate belief systems, namely the extent to which you believe the vitality situation should prevail (normative beliefs), your own beliefs about your ability to contribute to it (self beliefs), and your aspirations towards these ends (goal beliefs). Interestingly, Allard and Landry find the separate belief systems to be predictive of group linguistic assimilation and not the overall vitality measure - at least as measured by them. Finally here, vitality is constituted by status/power and demographic factors (Caldwell 1984) as well as institutional support. Sachdev and Bourhis (1990) overview a series of studies they have conducted under laboratory conditions looking at the interactive effects of status/power and numbers on intergroup discrimination. They find, for instance, that experimentally-constructed, dominant minorities show considerable ingroup bias whereas subordinate minorities show considerable outgroup favoritism; and whereas the perception of group numbers is important to attitude expression, power perceptions influence actual intergroup behavior. Hence, the kinds of criteria we invoke concerning what constitutes 'minority language situations' ought to be sensitive to demographics on the one hand and power variables on the other, certainly until we have explored much further the important differential effects perceptions of these variables can have. Relatedly, Kim (1987) and also Yum (1988a) have pointed to the very important role that networks play in intercultural contexts. For example we could characterize minorities as having relatively dense networks with strong, close-knit ties, in which case dependency and solidarity (to be discussed below) would be expected to be higher; or loose networks with relatively weak ties, and thus dependency and solidarity would be lower. Additionally from our perspective, we would emphasize minorities' subjective perception of their networks (and its vitality) and its effect on minority language. Moving now to intergroup cognitions in Figure 3, much of the development of ethnolinguistic identity theory has been concerned with specifying the sociopsychological climates which promote ethnolinguistic differentiation. Most recently, Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles and Coupland (1988) have encapsulated our thinking by recourse to two continuous variables: dependency and solidarity. Dependency relates to the extent to which you are dependent on your ethnic ingroup for identity definitions and so refers to the number of social group options available to you. Solidarity relates to the degree of identification and affect subjectively associated with membership of one's ingroup. Another important distinction made here is in the way participants themselves construe interactions

120

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

between majority and minority group speakers as either "interpersonal" (i.e., dependent on the moods, temperaments, and personalities of those involved) or "intergroup" (i.e., based entirely on the interactants dealing with each other as representatives of different social categories). Indeed, rather than consider interpersonal and intergroup constructs as opposites along a single, bipolar continuum, a number of us feel it more productive to consider them as two separate continua where, for instance, one could define an interaction as low or high on both interpersonal and intergroup dimensions (Giles & Hewstone 1982; Gudykunst & TingToomey 1990). Indeed, if a person self-categorizes in terms of one salient social identity, this may lead to self-stereotyping and perception of many interactions in intergroup terms (Turner & Oakes 1988). There is a whole body of work (e.g., Hammer 1987, 1989) which looks at individual characteristics that are predictive of effective intercultural communication (again see Figure 3). On the basis of this work we would expect that maximallyeffective majority-minority relations, to the extent that these can be adequately modeled and assessed, would accrue when interactants from both sides were able to satisfy three criteria: to be able to cope effectively with psychological stress (see also Kim & Rubin 1988); to establish satisfying relationships quickly and understand the feelings of others; and to be able to communicate effectively with people from different backgrounds and deal adequately with miscommunications. The study of language attitudes has a long history (for a review, see Giles, Hewstone, Ryan & Johnson 1987). Until the early 1970s, much language attitude research was arguably descriptive and atheoretical, but now we have a plethora of models on which to draw (see Giles & Coupland 1991). While Lambert (1967) contended that language cues (as heard say in a matched-guise situation) trigger social categorizations which in turn unleash social interferences, Berger and Bradac (1982) have suggested that other, more or less complex generative models could have explanatory power. They claim that an important goal of initial interaction is to reduce uncertainty about the other, also to determine how to respond appropriately. Hence, for these scholars, language cues are important to the extent that they achieve this goal with judgments of cultural similarity as important mediators. Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1990) have speculated that the four Berger and Bradac models can be located differentially in the quadrants of the two-dimensional space of interpersonal and intergroup mentioned above. For example, under conditions of high intergroup and low interpersonal interactional perceptions, it is proposed that a speaker's language is a cue for in/outgroup membership which enables inferences concerning similarity between a speaker and his or her listeners which, in turn, has an effect on the reduction of uncertainty; if similarity is high, then reduction is large (hence Language —> Group Membership —> Similarity —> Uncertainty Reduction, see the abbreviations in Table 1 subsequently). Theories have also attended to other facets of processing. Gallois, Callan and

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

121

Johnstone (1984), for instance, have attempted to model the processes determining how linguistic cues (out of the many on offer, of course) are given evaluative significance in voice judgement studies. They claim that ethnicity is usually the prime cue in intercultural settings with 'social distance' between listener-judge and target speaker (high - low) dictating when other variables (e.g., gender, context), and which of them assume salience. Other models point to the nature of the context as determining language attitudes with particular emphasis being placed on the nature of the scales used. That is, whether the dependent variables and/or the context itself is group- versus person-stressing (Giles & Ryan 1982; see also Bradac 1990), the extent to which the topic of conversation is involving on core identity domains (Giles & Johnson 1986), also the stance your interlocutor, sociolinguistically, takes towards you, can all have predictable effects on language attitudes expressed. For instance, Bradac (1990) contends that positive outgroup attitudes emerge if another converges towards you in a normatively-valued way, but that one is more negatively-inclined if the person diverges in a non-valued direction. Finally, Ryan, Giles and Sebastian (1982) have suggested there are at least four kinds of language attitude profiles. For instance, "Type A" is where the minority accedes favorable evaluations to majority group speakers, and "Type C" is where ingroup favoritism across evaluations abounds. In more recent work (Ryan, Hewstone & Giles 1984), these Types have been conceptualized as emerging at different stages in the development of relations and conflict between groups in contact. Examining actual and perceived communication strategies in majority-minority encounters, accommodation theory has recently been elaborated sociolinguistically to take into account not only the productive performances of others in context, but also their interpretive competences (Gallois, Franklyn-Stokes, Giles & Coupland 1988). This theory concerns itself with the conditions under which speakers may attune or counter-attune discursively, including paralinguistically and nonverbally, to at least two features of their addressee: to the other's presumed facility to comprehend on the one hand, and their heard and anticipated performances on the other (Coupland, Coupland, Giles & Henwood 1988). The theory also concerns itself with the evaluative, attributional and behavioral consequences of such attuning. Majority-minority interaction can of course involve more outright conflictual matters than just symbolic ethnolinguisitic differentiations. Applegate and Sypher (1988) view communication (interpersonal and intercultural) as explicitly or implicitly, goal driven. For example, interactional goals may involve certain identity concerns to the extent of wishing to assimilate culturally with outgroup speakers or contrastively wishing to differentiate from them. An important dimension here as to which direction an interlocutor would veer would be the value they accord the outgroup culture, and its traditions and institutions (Berry, Kim & Boski 1987). In addition, cultural communication styles will be engaged in order to accomplish such goals. Work by Ting-Toomey (1988) and

122

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

others (e.g., Shockley-Zalabak & Morley 1984) is then important for us as they have identified a whole range of verbal conflict styles - including direct versus avoidance, confrontational versus solution-oriented, and collaborative versus accommodative styles - for which cultural groups have differential preferences. The language variables can of course be seen as ones which are constructive as well as reflective of the experiential climate of majority-minority encounters (Applegate & Sypher, 1988; Collier & Thomas 1988). Four very separate bodies of work relate to what we shall call 'interactional cognitions'. There is a literature which examines not only cross-national and cross-cultural value systems, but also highlights the role of the language of testing within this. Many studies have shown that when bilinguals use their second language (L2) they also shift their values in the direction of the L2 community (see, for example, Punetha, Giles & Young 1987). Bond (1983) has shown in the context of Hong Kong that this so-called 'cross-cultural accommodation' of values can sometimes, in complete contrast, be supplanted by what he terms, 'ethnic affirmation'. More specifically, he shows that when Cantonese-English bilinguals are forced to complete a values questionnaire in English, they will become more Chinese in certain of their values than when they are administered the same questionnaire in Chinese. Thus, in terms of ethnic boundary theory (Giles 1979), if a positive social identity cannot be maintained by linguistic means, then individuals who identify strongly with their group will resort to pertinent nonlinguistic means at their disposal to rescue a positive group identity. It is curious that language and values research is traditionally a quite distinct area from language attitudes, though both can affect, and can be affected by, actual language strategies used in context. Another feature of intercultural encounters, according to Gudykunst (1988b), is the amount of anxiety experienced, and doubtless other emotions too; the more anxiety, the less effective the encounter. Doubtlessly related are dimensions of 'satisfaction'. Hecht and Ribeau (1987) have studied the experiences of satisfaction-dissatisfaction in interethnic encounters and pointed to an array of these such as 'negative stereotyping', 'acceptance', and 'powerlessness' (see also, Hecht, Ribeau & Alberts 1990). Interestingly, their work highlights the fact that different groups are aware of and experience different levels and kinds of 'dissatisfaction'. Earlier, Taylor and Simard (1975) in Quebec and the Philippines demonstrated that even when interethnic communication in formal and informal encounters was as objectively efficient as intragroup communication, the participants themselves in betweengroup encounters believed their interactions to have been far less efficient relative to those in within-group encounters (see also Taylor & Simard 1984). Forgas (1988) looks at how consensual cognitive representations of social episodes evolve and are maintained and modified by culture. Finally here, models are beginning to emerge in the area of m/'scommunication (Coupland, Giles & Wiemann, 1991). Constructs such as threat to identity, clear social categories,

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

123

perceptions of social injustice, and sociolinguistic stereotyping are being linked to so-called 'intergroup communication breakdown' where fault is attributed to social group memberships (Dubé-Simard 1983; Hewstone & Giles 1986). The last component in Figure 3 is 'language learning inclinations'. Current theoretical work by Gardner (1985) and by Clément and Kruidenier (1985) looking at the sociopsychological factors responsible for L2 proficiency has highlighted two affective clusters, namely attitudinal/motivational, and situational anxiety. We, on the other hand, have preferred to see L2 learning as explicitly more of an intergroup process, claiming that intergroup cognitions such as dependency and solidarity in the context of particular kinds of sociostructural perceptions determine levels of motivation, the role of situational anxiety, and the kinds of proficiency outcomes possible (Giles & Byrne 1982). Moreover, we can specify the sociopsychological climate which facilitates proficiency on the one hand, and lack of it on the other, arguing also that the processes fostering a low motivation for learning a majority L2 are precisely those enabling a high motivation for learning one's own minority language where their proficiency is lacking (Garrett, Giles & Coupland 1989). Finally, the threads of culture weave themselves throughout these interrelationships and thus are of potential importance at every level of figure 3. Hofstede (1980, 1983), The Chinese Culture Connection (1987) and others have discussed the importance of 'core values' (see also, Collier & Thomas 1988; Smolicz 1984), or dimensions, of culture. Derived from philosophical and historical traditions, cultural dimensions may manifest themselves in communication patterns (e.g., see Gudykunst 1988a). For example, individuals from relatively more collectivistic cultures in East Asia stress the importance of ingroups along with duty and obligation to those ingroups, and communication styles may reflect this (Yum 1988b). In individualistic cultures, the emphasis is more likely to center on the realization of individual autonomy and personal goals. Triandis (1987) argues that individualistic and collectivistic cultures do not differ in the way they deal with in- and outgroups, rather, that the strength of the ingroup/outgroup distinction is different. In addition, his studies indicate that idiocentric (individualistic) and allocentric (collectivistic) individuals may be present within all cultures (Triandis, Bontempo, Villarcal, Asai & Lucca 1988). Thus collectivism and individualism may come from within as much as without, dimensions may be recreated and reinforced 'bottom up' by individuals within interactions (Cronen, Chen & Pearce 1988), as much as they are influenced 'top down' by culture. The effect of dimensions of culture or cultural values on minority language survival or decline is at present unknown, although research seems to suggest that groups with a strong set of binding values, whose language is not essential to identity, would be more favorably disposed to the instrumental benefits of learning dominant languages, and more accepting of atrophy of their own (Smolicz, Lee, Murugaian & Secombe 1990).

124

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

These interrelationships can be expressed in terms of a wheel-like structure (see Figure 4), with communication strategies and interactional cognitions at the center. In the outer ring, components are organized so as to illustrate that key interrelationships exist between these separately studied research domains and to suggest that processes and phenomena are mutually influential and interdependent. A more precise, contextually grounded, theoretical sequencing, should be a priority for future endeavors.

Though there is of course much fuzziness to the interrelationships, let us see if we can take this schema one step further, and specify a more predictive framework with respect to individuals who belong to a minority language group, whether they be functionally competent in the minority language or not. Table 1 represents a series of particular, though idealized, hypotheses deriving more or less directly from the intergroup cognitions of solidarity/dependency and the brief overview above. Minority group members are often heterogeneous in their construals of their social identity (see Collier & Thomas 1988), and here we have identified two polar opposites: high dependency and solidarity contrasted with low dependency and solidarity. We are proposing that these cognitions lead to predictably contrastive ways of perceiving intercultural encounters that are mediated by general vitality and vitality belief systems which also are associated with differential motivations to become proficient in the majority and minority languages respectively. As Table 1 indicates, perceptions of minority and majority group speakers (as realized, for example, in a matched-guise task) would lead to

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

125

Table 1. An integrative 'experiential-outcome' model Intergroup cognitions Potential for selfstereotyping = Situational dispositions • interpersonal • intergroup • networks especially when = L2 Motivational inclinations • outgroup • ingroup especially when = Intergroup perceptions • generative mechanisms • salience of nonethnic cues • attitude profile - status - solidarity especially when =

and outgroup culture valued but attenuated when majority = Language strategies • Conflict styles • Relevance of individual competencies Interactional cognitions • value expressiveness • anxiety • satisfaction and efficiency • communicative breakdown potential

High dependency High solidarity

Low dependency Low solidarity

High

Low

Low High strong/dense allocentric

High Low loose/weak idiocentric

Low High Ingroup overall vitality is High

High Low Outgroup vitality beliefs are High

Lang. > Gp. > Sim. > UCR

Lang. > Trait. > Sim. > UCR

Low

High

Ingroup + Ingroup ++ Group stressing/ Identity topic

Outgroup ++ Outgroup + Personalistic traits/ Non-identity-related topic

Low

High

Converging

Diverging

Counter - attuning direct, confrontational

Attuning indirect, accommodative

Low

High

Ingroup affirmation High

Cross-group accommodation Low

Low

High

High

Low

126

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

certain kinds of generative mechanisms where the salience of other non-ethnic cues varies, and where the attitude profile is of a particular kind. Again, various situational factors are highlighted as mediating these attitude expressions and processes. The controversy concerning the relationships between language attitudes and interactional behaviors notwithstanding, we are suggesting that the aforementioned ingroup cognitions, situational dispositions, and intergroup perceptions will all be enabling factors for certain kinds of accommodative communications and conflict styles (see Table 1). Finally, interactional experiences are likely to promote the expression of certain kinds of goals, values, and levels of anxiety, felt satisfaction and efficiency, as well as the potential for communication breakdown to occur or not. As Figure 3 diamonds attested, these experiences and outcomes have reciprocal influences, such that sufficient instances where a high dependency and solidarity person is the recipient of positively-attributed attuning, and experiences collaborative interactions with a majority group speaker, and where satisfaction is high and anxiety low, is likely ultimately to have predictable effects on their intergroup cognitions and the ways they are disposed towards defining intercultural encounters. For clarity, let us briefly describe the sequence of hypotheses outlined in one of the columns of Table 1 which are elaborated beyond Giles et al. (1990) on the four dimensions of networks, outgroup value, self-stereotyping and idio-/allocentrism. We argue that those minority group members who have low dependency upon and low solidarity with their minority group will likely see interactions with a majority outgroup member as low in intergroup but high in interpersonal terms, and will be less likely to see themselves as prototypical ingroup members and especially so for individuals with idiocentric orientations. They will be highly motivated to acquire the majority group language but far less motivated to acquire, or use extensively, their own minority group language. This will be especially the case when, after Allard and Landry (1986), they perceive the three vitality belief systems as being in favor of the majority language. In addition, they will be more likely to see their ingroup networks as relatively weak and loose. When evaluating minority-majority language speakers (say, in a voice evaluation study) then vocal cues will trigger certain personality traits which will determine the degree of similarity felt between listeners and their speakers which will, in turn, influence the amount of uncertainty that is reduced. In this situation, the evaluative salience of non-ethnic cues (e.g., gender) will be quite high (cf. Gallois et al. 1984). The actual attitude profile emerging in such a context would be very favorably inclined towards majority outgroup speakers (i.e., 'Type A' after Ryan et al. 1982) and especially on traits of status which are personalistic (e.g., intelligence, confidence; see Giles & Ryan 1982), when the context relates little to minority identity concerns, and when the outgroup culture and its institutions are valued highly (Berry, Kim & Boski 1987). Such a pro-majority group predisposition would, however, be tempered if an outgroup speaker had diverged sociolinguistically

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

127

(and particularly in a normatively non-valued direction; see Bradac 1990) from the minority listeners. In interactive situations, our low dependency/low solidarity minority speakers would attune their language, discourse and nonverbal styles towards majority group speakers (Gallois et al. 1988), and in the event of interpersonal conflict would adopt more indirect and accommodative styles of engagement; the particular communicative competencies of the minority group speaker (see Hammer 1987) would be particularly important in accessing effective attuning and conflict tactics. Finally, in such intergroup situations, these individuals would likely accommodate towards the values of the majority community, experience little anxiety, high satisfaction and communicational efficiency when talking with members of the latter, thereby creating low potential for communication breakdown. Let us now return to our interdisciplinary brief and unpack the implications for a more comprehensive model of minority language dynamics. Rather than return to our Figure 2, let us reconsider de Vries' (1984) analysis of minority language survival. Therein, he discussed the sociological climate associated with non-

Figure 5. An interdisciplinary predictive model of minority language survival/non-survival

survival in terms of a 'diffusion' model (see Figure 5 revised after Giles et al. 1990), whereas the supposed sociological climate attending survival was said to follow an 'internal colonialism' model. Although we would acknowledge the possibilities of these distinct sociological climates operating in the direct ways speci-

128

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

fied (particularly if their dynamics were compellingly specified further), we would argue that they have their effects because of the manner in which they mould the sociopsychological, and within them interactional, climates. Put another way, group level survival/non-survival is, nonetheless, often effected through the minds and acts of individuals. We contend then that the kinds of intergroup cognitions introduced above are potent subjective states to the extent that diffusion forces are likely to be associated with low dependency/low solidarity and internal colonialism forces associated with high dependency/high solidarity. Sociopsychological climates should therefore be more precise predictors of survival-non-survival than the larger-scale sociological climates which, at least arguably, gave rise to them. In addition, it is also possible that (as the question-marks in Figure 5 are meant to indicate) particular sociopsychological/interactional climates - low dependency and solidarity in the case of non-survival, and high dependency and solidarity in the case of survival - may, at least in some contexts, be determined by other sociological forces thus far unspecified. Certainly, we need to acknowledge explicitly that the sociopsychological and interactional climates are influenced in part by perceptions of the dominant group's status, beliefs and behaviors, and also what other individuals within one's own minority ingroup appear to have adopted as sociolinguistic norms and strategies (again see Figure 5). Finally, let us repeat that we ought to be wary of dichotomizing survival from non-survival, though also sociological from non-sociological. It is evident that there are other sociopsychological climates than the two completely opposing ones of Table 1; others would clearly include low dependency!high solidarity and high dependency!low solidarity. And on the basis of the kinds of predictions we could make for these intergroup cognitive types (also along the lines of Table 1), we would speculate that they would be differentially inclined towards points along the survival-nonsurvival continuum in its simplistic form as represented in Figure 5. At the very least, we are opening up the inherent variability endemic in any minority language situation and in a way that should assist in handling the complexity apparent outside the realm of dichotomies. Caveats such as those we have identified in previous models could easily be identified within the frameworks introduced here. It is possible that attempts to weld approaches involving different levels of analysis will be hampered by revealing fundamentally different ideological assumptions. The constructs in our 'menu' require further conceptual refinement and operationalization and are obviously not as static as we have perhaps conveyed. For instance, miscommunication is a multidimensional process and not simply an all-or-none phenomenon (Hewstone & Giles 1986). We need to specify more clearly the sociolinguistics of attuning and identify the discursive domains in which it operates with symbolic effect. There are doubtless richer ways of specifying situational dispositions beyond the intergroup and interpersonal, and richer ways of specifying intergroup cognitions beyond dependency and solidarity. We need to articulate better the

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages

129

sociological and sociopsychological climates underscoring the different outcomes of more or less survival, revival, protection, promotion, and so on and relate these to processes of cultural adaptation and transformation (Berry, Kim & Boski 1987; Kim & Rubin 1988). Whether the predictions formulated here will be more or less confirmed - and doubtless many will not be - is not really at issue given the larger goals of this chapter. While the kind of analysis we have suggested here has seemingly more direct relevance to what we called, at the outset, the explanatory paradigm - the who, when and why of 'survival' in its qualitatively different forms, it also has significance for the second, interventionist theme - how we intervene effectively in the promotion of minority linguistic causes. Bourhis' (1984a) model of language planning is undoubtedly one of the few frameworks which acknowledges sociopsychological climates in the pursuit of governmental and community goals. In addition to sociostructural perceptions, for the first time in the language planning literature, Bourhis (1984b) and colleagues tackle the sociopsychological, intergroup and interactional climates in which language planning efforts have emerged in the Quebec context. In addition to reconstructing our analyses of sociological climates towards successful minority language planning in educational contexts and elsewhere, we also need to tackle the sociopsychological and interactional environments in which different planners themselves operate, evaluating and implementing policy. However, we should not limit our consideration to language planning for language situations only. We need to plan our own academic and interventionist policies, perhaps by establishing a working party briefed to negotiate ground rules, integrative academic themes and objectives, and practical policies to be reported back to a definable, public assembly of scholars. Certainly the world climate is more amenable to minority language survival than ever before. However, there are still those with a more fatalistic stance. For instance, Edwards (1985) sees language shift and decline as a natural process; a language is only valued as long as the economic and social circumstances are conducive to it. Therefore, Edwards finds pluralistic integration a much more attractive and reasonable policy over the "more militant forms of cultural pluralism" (1985: 117). Understandably, we recognize social change itself as inevitable and there are some repeated patterns of change recorded historically, but to see no alternative course of development besides an ineluctable and unopposed drift of minority languages towards assimilation in all social contexts is unjustifiably pessimistic (cf. Coupland 1986). More and more we are detecting the hint of a new spirit of worldliness evolving that is cutting across narrow, parochial boundaries. It may well be that we need to harness such feelings - as an action-oriented academic body - if many of our linguistic minorities are to survive in what Cummins (1988) and many others rightly refer to as 'the global village'. As Cronen, Chen and Pearce elegantly put it, "probably the most important contribution that inter-

130

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

cultural study can make is not reassurance of some underlying unity, but an idea of the range of possibilities for being human in different but productive ways" (1988: 78). We say this, in part, because recent research is showing that positive attitudes to nuclear disarmament internationally are highly related to individuals' subscribing to a notion of 'worldliness' (Rigby, Metzer & Dietz, in press). Hence, these scholars are arguing for an about-turn in terms of attitude change interventions. They propose that in order to modify peoples' particularistic beliefs about, say, nuclear disarmament we may need to tackle - at least as well - the root-level social assumptions that are likely to underlie these if the changes advocated are ever to be realized. To carry the environmental metaphor further, the Green movement of proenvironmentalists has been, with varying degrees of commitment, embraced by political parties and ideologies in ways that would have been quite unthinkable just a few years ago. People are likely to be more susceptible now to the message of the ecological human value of maintaining valued cultural institutions and recycling languages along the same lines as they would condone preserving endangered species, raw and precious materials and localities for the common global good. Indeed, there might be some merit in consulting with environmentalist-activist groups, as well as exploring related academic literatures, in order to glean lessons and garner useful strategies here. For our purposes then, if the ecological message of language survival is transmitted widely - for example, we carry "the world's little peoples and little languages ... on our sleeves in our country rather than merely in someone else's" (Fishman 1982: 11) - and we can engender widespread support for it as well as promoting sentiments of 'worldliness' (which, incidentally, can be and have been measured, see Sampson & Smith 1957), we may have a better chance of supporting each of our own localized interests in the face of those authorities who have often to bow now to wider international pressures. That said, it is critical to work for minority language survival being endorsed more generally as an appropriate local facet of internationalism, and thereby counteracting any fallacy that 'internationalism requires international languages and no other'.

References Aikio, M. 1984

"The position and use of the same language: Historical, contemporary and future perspective", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5: 277-291. Allard, R. & Landry, R. 1986 "Subjective ethnolinguistic vitality viewed as a belief system", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 7: 1-12.

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages Akutagawa, M. 1987

131

"A linguistic minority under the protection of its own ethnic state: A case study in an Irish Gaeltacht", in: G. MacEoin, A. Ahlquist, & D. O'hAodha (eds.), Third International Conference on Minority Languages: Celtic Papers. Clevedon: Mulitlingual Matters.

Applegate, J. L. & Sypher, H. E. 1988 "A constructivist theory of communication and culture", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in Intercultural Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Berger, C. & Bradac, J. 1982 Language and social knowledge: Uncertainty in interpersonal relations. London: Edward Arnold. Berry, J. W „ Kim, U. & Boski, P. 1987 "Psychological acculturation of immigrants", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Cross-cultural adaptation: Current approaches. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bond, M. H. 1983 "How language variation effects inter-cultural differentiation of values by Hong Kong bilinguals", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2: 57-66. Bourhis, R. Y. 1984a "Introduction: Language policies in multilingual settings", in: R. Y. Bourhis (ed.), Conflict and language planning in Quebec. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bourhis, R. Y. (ed.) 1984b Conflict and language planning in Quebec. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bradac, J. J. 1990 "Language attitudes and impression formation", in: H. Giles & W. P. Robinson (eds.), Handbook of language and social psychology. Chichester: Wiley. Burrell, G. & Morgan, G. 1979 Sociological paradigms and organizational analysis. London: Heinemann. Caldwell, G. 1984 "Anglo-Quebec: Demographic realities and options for the future", in: R. Y. Bourhis (ed.), Conflict and language planning in Quebec. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. The Chinese Culture Connection 1987 "Chinese values and the search for culture free dimensions of culture", Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 18: 143-64. Clément, R. & Kruidenier, B. G. 1985 "Aptitude, attitude and motivation in second language proficiency: A test of Clément's model", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 4: 21-37. Collier, M. J. & Thomas, M. 1988 "Cultural identity: An interpretive perspective", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Coupland, N. 1986 Review of J. Edwards (1985): "Language, society and identity". Oxford: Blackwell. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 5: 53-63. Coupland, N., Coupland, J., Giles, H., & K. Henwood 1988 "Accommodating the elderly, invoking and extending a theory", Language in Society 17: 1^11. Coupland, N., Giles, H. & Wiemann, J. M. (eds.) 1991 "Miscommunication" and problematic talk. Newburg Park, CA: Sage.

132

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

Coupland, N. & A. R. Thomas 1989 "Introduction: Sociolinguistic perspectives on English in Wales", in: N. Coupland (ed.), English in Wales: Diversity, conflict and change. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cronen, V. E., Chen, V. & W. B. Pearce 1988 "Coordinated management of meaning: A critical theory", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Cummins, J. 1988 "From the inner city to the global village: The microcomputer as a catalyst for collaborative learning and cultural interchange", Language, Culture and Curriculum 1: 1-13. d'Anglejan, A. 1984 "Language planning in Quebec: An historical overview and future trends", in: R. Y. Bourhis (ed.), Conflict and language planning in Quebec. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. de Vries, J. 1984 "Factors affecting the survival of linguistic minorities: A preliminary comparative analysis of data for western Europe", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5: 207-216. 1987

"Problems of measurement in the study of linguistic minorities". Journal Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8: 23-31.

of

Dorian, C. (ed.) 1989 Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubé-Simard, L. 1983 "Genesis of social categorisation, threat to identity and perception of social injustice: Their role in intergroup communication", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2: 183-206. Edwards, J. 1985 Language, society and identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1988 Sociopolitical aspects of language maintenance and loss: Towards a typology of ethnic minority language maintenance and loss of ethnic minority languages. Noordwijderhout, The Netherlands, August-September. Fishman, J. A. 1972 Language and nationalism. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. 1976 "The spread of English as a new perspective for the study of 'language maintenance and language shift", Studies in Language Learning 20: 59-104. 1980 "Language maintenance and ethnicity", Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism: 229-248. 1982 "Whorfianism of the kind kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset (The Whorfian Hypothesis: Varieties of validation, confirmation, and disconfirmation II)", Language in Society 11: 1-14. Fishman, J. A. (ed.) 1985 The rise and fall of the ethnic revival. Berlin: Mouton. Fishman, J. A. 1989 Language and ethnicity in minority sociolinguistic perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages Forgas, J. P. 1988

Foster, C. 1980

133

"Episode representations in intercultural communication", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

"Agenda for research", in: C. Foster (ed.), Nations without a state. New York: Praeger. Gallois, C., Callan, V. & M. Johnstone 1984 "Personality judgements of Australian aborigine and white speakers: Ethnicity, sex and context", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 3: 39-57. Gallois, C „ Franklyn-Stokes, A., Giles, H. & Coupland, N. 1988 "Communication accommodation in intercultural encounters", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gardner, R. C. 1985 Social psychology and second language learning: The role of attitudes and motivation. London: Edward Arnold. Garrett, P., Giles, H. & N. Coupland 1989 "The contexts of language learning: Extending the intergroup model of second language acquisition", in: S. Ting-Toomey & F. Korzenny (eds.), Language, communication, and culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Giles, H. 1979 "Ethnicity markers in speech", in: K. R. Scherer & H. Giles (eds.), Social markers in speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, H., Bourhis, R. & D. Taylor 1977 "Towards a theory of language in ethnic group relations", in: H. Giles (ed.), Language, ethnicity, and intergroup relations. London: Academic Press. Giles, H. & Byrne, J. 1982 "An intergroup approach to second language acquisition", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3: 17^10. Giles, H. & N. Coupland 1991 "Language attitudes: Discursive, contextual and gerontological considerations", in: A. G. Reynolds (ed.), Bilingualism, multiculturalism, and second language learning: A tribute to Wallace E. Lambert. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Giles, H. & A. Franklyn-Stokes 1989 "Communicator characteristics", in: M. K. Asante & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.). Handbook of international and intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Giles, H. & Hewstone, M. 1982 "Cognitive structures, speech, and social situations", Language Sciences 4: 187-219. Giles, H. Hewstone, M., Ryan, E. B. & P. Johnson 1987 "Research on language attitudes", in: U. Ammons, N. Dittmar & K. J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. Vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter. Giles, H. & Johnson P. 1986 "Perceived threat, ethnic commitment, and interethnic language behavior", in: Y. Y. Kim (ed.), Interethnic communication: Current research. Beverly Hills: Sage. 1987 "Ethnolinguistic identity theory: a social psychological approach to language maintenance", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 68: 69-99.

134

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

Giles, H., Leets, L. & Coupland, N. 1989-90 "Minority language group status: A theoretical conspexus", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 11: 1-19. Giles, H. & E. B. Ryan 1982 "Prologomena for developing a social psychological theory of language attitudes", in: E. B. Ryan & H. Giles (eds.), Attitudes towards language variation: Social and applied contexts. London: Edward Arnold. Gillies, W. "Scottish Gaelic - the present situation", in: G. MacEoin, A. Ahlquist & 1987 D. O'hAodha (eds.), Third International Conference on Minority Languages: Celtic Papers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gorter, D. 1987 "Aspects of language choice in the Frisian-Dutch bilingual context: Neutrality and asymmetry", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8: 121-132. Gudykunst, W. B. 1986 "Towards a theory of intergroup communication", in: W. B. Gudykunst (ed.), Intergroup communication. London: Edward Arnold. 1988a "Culture and intergroup processes", in: M. H. Bond (ed.), The cross cultural challenge to social psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. "Uncertainty and anxiety", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in in1988b tercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gudykunst, W. B. & T. Nishida 1989 "Theoretical perspectives for studying intercultural communication", in: M. K. Asante & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gudykunst, W. B. & S. Ting-Toomey 1990 "Ethnic identity, language, and communication breakdowns", in: H. Giles & W. P. Robinson (eds.), Handbook of language and social psychology. Chichester: Wiley. Haarmann, H. 1986 Language in ethnicity: A view of basic ecological relations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hammer, M. R. 1987 "Behavioral dimensions of intercultural effectiveness: A replication and extension", International Journal of Intercultural Relations 11: 65-88. "Intercultural communication competence", in: M. K. Asante & W. B. Gudykunst 1989 (eds.). Handbook of international and intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Haugen, E. 1972 The ecology of language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hecht, M. & S. Ribeau 1987 "Afro-American identity labels and communication effectiveness", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 6: 319-326. Hecht, M., Ribeau, S. Alberts 1990 "An Afro-American perspective on interethnic communication", Communication monographs 56 385—410. Hewstone, M. & H. Giles 1986 "Social groups and social stereotypes in intergroup communication", in: W. B. Gudykunst (ed.), Intergroup communication. London: Edward Arnold.

Integrating theory in the study of minority languages Hofstede, G. 1980 1983

Kim Y. Y. 1987

135

Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, Sage. "Dimensions of national cultures in fifty countries and three regions", in: J. B. Derogowski, S. Dziurawiec, & R. C. Annis (eds.), Expiscations in cross-cultural psychology. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.

"Facilitating immigrant adaptation: The role of communication", in: T. L. Albrecht et al., Communicating social support. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kim Y. Y & B. D. Ruben 1988 "Intercultural transformation: A systems theory", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lambert, W. E. 1967 "The social psychology of bilingualism", Journal of Social Issues 23: 91-109. Neide, P. 1987 "Language contact means language conflict", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8: 33-42. Neville, G. 1987 "Minority language in contemporary France", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8: 147-158. Punetha, G„ Giles, H. & L. Young 1987 "Ethnicity and immigrant values: Religion and language choice", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 6: 229-242. Rigby, K., Metzer, J. & B. Dietz in press "Factors predisposing individuals to support nuclear disarmament: an international perspective", Journal of Peace Research. Ryan, E. B. & H. Giles (eds.) 1982 Attitudes towards language variation: Social and applied contexts. London: Edward Arnold. Ryan, E. B„ Giles, H. & R. Sebastian 1982 "An integrative perspective for the study of attitudes toward language variation", in: E. B. Ryan, & H. Giles (eds.), Attitudes towards language variation: Social and applied contexts. London: Edward Arnold. Ryan, E. B., Hewstone, M. & H. Giles 1984 "Language and intergroup attitudes", in: J. R. Eiser (ed.), Attitudinal judgment. New York: Springer-Verlag. Sachdev, I. & R. Y. Bourhis 1990 "Bi/multilinguality", in: H. Giles & W. P. Robinson (eds.), Handbook of language and social psychology. Chichester: Wiley. Sampson, D. L. & H. P. Smith 1957 "A scale to assess world-minded attitudes", Journal of Social Psychology 45: 99-106. Shield, L. 1984 "Unified Cornish - fiction of fact? An examination of the death and resurrection of the Cornish language", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5: 329-37. Shockley-Zalabak, P. & D. Morley 1984 "An exploratory study of relationships between preferences for conflict styles and communication apprehension", Journal of Language and Social Psychology 3: 213-18.

136 Smolicz, J. J. 1984

Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams, and Laura Leets

"Minority languages and the core values of culture: Changing policies and ethnic response in Australia", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5: 23^11. Smolicz, J. J. et al. 1990 "Language as a core value of culture among tertiary students of Chinese and Indian origin in Australia", Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 1: 229-246. Tajfel, H. (ed.) 1978 Differentiation between social groups. London: Academic Press. Taylor, D. & Simard, L. 1975 "Social interaction in a bilingual setting", Canadian Psychological Review 16: 240-254. Taylor, D. & Simard, L. 1984 "Language planning and intergroup relations. Anglophone and Francophone attitudes towards the charter of the French language", in: R. Y. Bourhis (ed.), Conflict and language planning in Quebec. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ting-Toomey, S. 1988 "Intercultural conflict styles: A face-negotiation theory", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Triandis, H. C. 1987 "Collectivism vs. individualism", in: C. Bagley & G. Verna (eds.). Personality, cognition and values: Cross-cultural perspectives on childhood and adolescence. London: Macmillan. Triandis, H. C. et al. 1988 "Individualism-collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-group relationships", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54: 323-38. Turner, J. C. & J. P. Oakes 1988 "Self-categorization theory and social influence", in: P. B. Paulus (ed.), The psychology of group influence. Hillsdale N. J. Erlbaum. Wände, E. 1984 "Two Finnish minorities in Sweden", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5: 225^1. Williams, G. 1988 "Reviews of Third International Conference on Minority Languages: General papers/Celtic papers", in: G. MacEoin, A. Ahlquist & D. O'hAodha (eds.). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Language Culture and Curriculum 1: 169-78. Ytsma, J. 1988 "Bilingual classroom interaction in Friesland", in A. Holmen et al. (eds.), Bilingualism and the individual. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Yum, J. O. 1988a "Network theory in intercultural communication", in: Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in intercultural communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 1988b "The impact of Confucianism on interpersonal relationships and communication patterns in East Asia", Communication Monographs 55: 374-88.

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning Bernard. Spolsky

Just as the most tragic topic in the study of language shift is the death of a small language, where we encounter, as Fishman (1989: 381) expresses it, the "sorrows of the losers", "their anguish, trauma and travail", so the most joyous is the successful revival of one that had seemed moribund. Perhaps the strength of emotion felt by both participants and observers sometimes obscures a clear understanding of the nature of the phenomena; it is not surprising that the study of minority languages is largely a-theoretical, as scholars' feelings of regret or triumph cloud or brighten their perception of the object of their study and of the forces working on it. This said, I am not sure that I would like the situation to be very different: dispassionate scholarship is possible only from a valueless position, and easily serves to justify the absence of concern for the people whose fate is being studied. The belief in the merit of maintaining a multiplicity of languages, persuasively identified by Fishman (1982) as "Whorfianism of the third kind," does in fact provide a social consciousness, or even conscience, for sociologists, without which the field would be both less humane and less responsible. Nonetheless, the student of language shift is still obliged to analyze and study the phenomenon with the utmost possible objectivity, stating assumptions clearly and drafting and testing empirical hypotheses, and constantly seeking those generalizations that will contribute to a supportable theory. The scope of the field was delineated by Ferguson (1983) who pointed out that language change can involve not just the modification of the nature of a language, but also alterations in its sociogeographic distribution and its functional allocation. In this paper, I am concerned with the second type of change, although it must be acknowledged that changes in language use lead also to changes in language form. More precisely, I wish to focus on one particular variety of change, a kind of language restoration, where a language that, for a period, has not been generally spoken to newborn children and used as a language of the home once again begins to serve these roles. This restoration or reversal is one kind of language revival, perhaps best called revitalization and defined as the restoration of vitality (to use the term coined by Stewart 1968) or native language use to a language that had lost or was losing this attribute. Language revitalization is a signal example of modifying the sociogeographic distribution and the functional allocation of language. Specifically, it adds a new set of speakers and a new function, a fact that turns out to be of critical im-

138

Bernard Spolsky

portance. It spreads the language to babies and young children who become its native speakers, people for whom the language is a first or mother tongue, thus effectively assuring the transmission of the language to a new generation, and it adds the functions associated with the domain of home and family, resulting in various kinds of informal and intimate language use and the related emotional associations of the language. To use the term "revival" for cases such as Hebrew revitalization can be misleading, as Cooper points out, citing Fellman (1973, 1974) and Rabin (1973): ... the term Hebrew revival is a misnomer. Hebrew is no exception to the rule that once a language has passed out of all use whatsoever, it remains dead. The "revival" of Hebrew refers to its resuscitation as a vernacular, as a language of everyday spoken life. (Cooper 1989: 12) For in fact Hebrew remained alive, widely known and used for a wide range of important functions, throughout the centuries that followed its loss of native speakers. It is a confusion of terms, an assumption that revival and revitalization are the same thing, and an associated lack of clarity about outcomes of language planning, that acount for the widespread but mistaken belief that Irish language revival has been a failure. As Dorian (1987) remarked, there are successes to be seen even in hopeless cases, for in fact, if one looks beyond the criterion of adding native speakers, Irish revival efforts have led both to an appreciable increase in the number of people who know the language and to a significant enhancement of its status. The revival efforts have not however so far led to revitalization, which makes clear the significance of differentiating between the two phenomena. In this paper, I wish to analyze the attested case of Hebrew language revitalization which took place at the beginning of this century, and I will try to clarify the analysis by looking briefly at two other cases, the revival of Irish and the new efforts underway to revive and revitalize the Maori language in New Zealand. My arguments will draw on second language learning theory. In his recent survey of the field of language planning, Cooper (1989) argues against scholars who would restrict its scope to national or state levels of activity; such restriction, he points out, would exclude international activities on the one hand and the even richer field of non-politically autonomous groups. While students of language planning are prepared to include the study of such small groups as "schools, classrooms, 'women's lib' consciousness raising circles, local professional and occupational organizations, religious congregations, and branches of fraternal organizations" which are also involved in language planning decisions, and where the same kinds of considerations are involved, most of them draw the line however at considering the family level: "But the macrosociological importance of such family decisions does not justify including them as a subject for study by students of language planning" (Cooper 1989: 66). This may well be true for some aspects of language planning, but in studying the nature of language

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

139

maintenance and shift, often the goal or outcome of language planning, I agree with Cooper and with Chen and Chen (1990) that one must go beyond this; the decision on home language use, at the family level, is in fact one of the most critical in determining the status of a language. This is why I suggest that it is worth looking at language revitalization in the context of a general theory of second language learning (Spolsky 1989a). Language shift, loss, maintenance, and spread, including revitalization, may usefully be seen as special cases of second language learning. It is true that studies of second language learning generally concentrate their attention on the individual learner, but the social phenomenon of language shift ultimately depends on groups of individuals who learn a language, who do not learn it, or who forget it. Thus what appears as a change in social patterns of language use and knowledge can be shown to depend on individual success or failure in language learning. The general theory proposes that language learning depends on previous knowledge, ability, motivation, and learning opportunities (Spolsky 1989a: 15). It proposes further that social context is relevant to language learning both in determining the attitudes and goals of the learner which lead to motivation, and in determining the learning opportunities, whether formal (e.g. educational) or informal, provided by those who interact linguistically with the learner. The model draws attention to the differential effects of varying combinations of conditions: thus, formal learning in a school setting (the result usually of an instrumental or educational rationale) is likely to lead to an increase in knowledge of the formal or standard language but not to any increase in the use of the spoken language; on the other hand, informal learning in the home or in the market-place of a non-standard variety will not necessarily be accompanied by control of literacy in the language. In this paper, I argue that language revitalization depends fundamentally on the decision of parents or other significant caretakers to speak the moribund language to the young children in their charge; I suggest further that this decision is affected by a number of factors, some instrumental or pragmatic and some ideological or spiritual; and I propose that when there is conflict between the two kinds of factors, it takes particularly strong ideological force to overcome instrumental values. The specific claim of this paper is that the possibility of successful language revitalization is to be found partly in previous knowledge of the language by the adult sources, partly in the social factors which account for their attitudes and the children's attitudes, and partly in the resulting exposure of the children, in formal and informal circumstances, to the language. The level of knowledge on the part of the teachers or other sources of innovation will clearly have a strong effect: limitations in fluency or lexicon on the part of parents or teachers or other potential interlocutors, for instance, will hamper revitalization. While there are many different social factors involved, both as causes of and as rationales for

140

Bernard Spolsky

language revitalization, they may generally be grouped in two major categories, the pragmatic or instrumental on the one hand, and the ideological or integrative on the other. That is to say, one chooses to use a language because it is directly useful (economically, practically, for access to power or control) or because one values it for some social, cultural, nationalistic, or religious reason. Successful language revitalization depends, it is hypothesized, on establishing high enough solidarity value for the language being revived to overcome any power or economic effects of the competing language. Thirdly, successful language revitalization involves providing the learners with sufficient exposure to the language, both in formal language teaching and in informal language use, to make learning possible. In terms of these hypotheses, one might consider the facts as we know them about the attempt at Hebrew language restoration at the beginning of this century, comparing it to Irish in the mid-twentieth, and Maori in the last few years. Cooper (1989) suggests that there are three major reasons for the different results of the campaigns to restore Hebrew and Irish, namely, that in Ireland, in spite of many more people knowing the language and in spite of the literary revival in it, English remains the language of daily life, while in Israel, in spite of the fact that language revival efforts did not have governmental support, Hebrew became the language of daily life. First, he points out that, at the time of the start of the Hebrew revival campaign in 1880, Jews in Palestine were linguistically diverse, needing a lingua franca, while the Irish in 1920 were not. Secondly, he notes that a good proportion of Jews in Palestine at the time already knew Hebrew (at least liturgical Hebrew), while only a few Irish already knew Irish. Thirdly, the suggests that: ... there were enormous material incentives for the Irish to retain English and relatively few material incentives to learn Irish. To the extent that material incentives favored any of the Jewish languages in Palestine, they favored Hebrew as the language most likely to be known by a Jewish speaker and thus the most practical candidate for a lingua franca. (Cooper 1989: 192) By the 1920s, he points out, Hebrew had become the main public language of the Jewish community in Palestine, so that new immigrants from then on were forced to learn and use it: Material incentives clearly promoted the spread of Hebrew once it emerged as the Jews' principal lingua franca. Material incentives were likely to have contributed to its emergence as principal lingua franca as well. (Cooper 1989: 192) He sums up the differences in the two cases as follows:

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

141

English entered Irish homes after economic incentives forced the Irish to learn it and then to conclude that there was little future for Irish. Hebrew entered Jewish homes as a vernacular after a generation had grown up with it in the schools of the new Jewish settlements. Even in the old established settlements such as Jerusalem and Hebron, those children who studied in traditional schools with diaspora languages as media of instruction, learned to read the sacred Hebrew texts and thus could learn the vernacular forms with relative ease. Further there was both opportunity and incentive to use the language as a lingua franca outside the school. (Cooper 1989: 193) There is clearly a great deal of truth in these arguments, which go a long way towards accounting both for the previous knowledge and the motivation that the model requires, but they are worth looking at a little more closely. Once Hebrew was already established as the language of school and public Jewish life, say by 1910 or so, its attractiveness to new immigrants was obvious, but how, we must still ask, did this situation come about? Our focus then should not be on what happened after Hebrew was established, when one assumes that the advantages that Cooper postulated started to have their effect, but how the Hebrew language was first established in this role. For if we move back a decade or so, say to 1900, we find that the proportion of children learning in Hebrew-medium schools in Palestine was no greater than the proportion of children in Ireland learning in Irish-medium schools in the 1930s. How did it come about that these non-native speakers of Hebrew were the start of a Hebrew nativization process, while a similar proportion of school-produced non-native speakers of Irish were not the start of successful Irish nativization? The contrast is striking. Fellman (1973) reminds us of the remarkable fact that the new agricultural settlements in which Hebrew first became a modern spoken language and where Hebrew was becoming a dominant language by 1903, accounted for only 5 % of the Jewish student population in Palestine at that time. The majority of Jewish pupils (85 %) still studied in foreign language schools (in French in ten Alliance schools, in German in the Lemel school and in Hilfsverein schools, in English in the Evelina de Rothschild school); the remaining 10 % were in the traditional ultra-orthodox Yiddish-medium schools. In Ireland, in comparison, according to figures cited by ó Riagáin (1988), the percentage of primary schools teaching all in Irish rose from 4 % in 1930-31 to 1 2 % in 1940-41, although it dropped to 9 % in 1960-61, 5 % in 1970-71 and 1980-81. Our key question then is, why was five per cent of the Jewish population in Palestine in Hebrew-speaking schools in 1900 enough to establish the language in the next ten or fifteen years, while a higher percentage of Irish in Irish-speaking schools in 1940 did not lead to the same result? To answer this, we need a clearer notion of the actual process of language revitalization, as it takes place at the individual level. In a recent discussion of the

142

Bernard Spolsky

Hebrew case, Nahir (1988) distinguishes four steps (or components, for they overlap) in what he calls the "Great Leap" to Hebrew. First, the children of the community are "instilled" with the required linguistic attitudes. Second, they are presented (in school) with a model of language use. Third, they themselves come to speak and use Hebrew not just in the school but also outside it, as a second language. Fourth, these children when they grow up start using Hebrew as the language they speak to their own children, who grow up as native speakers. Nahir documents each of these steps. The language choice in the new settlements, he claims, was essentially between Yiddish, which was the common language of the settlers, and Hebrew. Yiddish, however, was considered by its denigrators to be a reminder of rejected features of diaspora life, vulgar, a jargon used by people illiterate in Hebrew. Hebrew, to its boosters, was the language of the new nationalist movement, a language with a noble literature, the language that embodied the national spirit. It had therefore strong ideological support, especially among the settlers who had chosen to come to Palestine for nationalist reasons. Nahir's notion of attitudes is clearly an important one. Ideology provides one major rationale underlying motivation, and it is worth trying to reconstruct the ideological situation at the time. The major ideological dispute between Hebrew and Yiddish, which, as Pilowsky (1985) points out, was brought to Palestine from Europe, came to its fullest and most violent expression twenty years after the time we are concerned with, and was fought out most bitterly there within the labor movement. In 1907, Poale Zion (a part of the Labor Party) published two issues of its periodical in Yiddish, and was strongly criticized for this by another faction within the party, Hapoel Hatzair. The Labor party decided at the end of a long debate in the summer of 1907 to publish its official journal only in Hebrew. This 1907 decision sealed the ideological victory of Hebrew over Yiddish in Palestine. It is surely significant that it occurred one year before the Tshernovits conference, at which an ideological basis for the Yiddish language movement was established. Fishman (1980: 66) dates the emergence of the view that Yiddish was an expression and symbol of Jewish national identity to 1902-05. He also points out (1980: 69) that at Tshernovits it was possible to argue that because Zionists who favored Hebrew had not formally rejected Yiddish, the conference in its turn should not reject Hebrew, and so the conference declared Yiddish a and not the national Jewish language. Thus, the vital decision about language choice had been made in Palestine before Yiddish had readied itself, as it were, to take up the ideological challenge. It is important at this point to draw attention to the fundamental difference between the sociolinguistic tasks undertaken by the proponents of Yiddish revival and those of the supporters of Hebrew. For Yiddish, the goal was to add, or approve the addition of, high status functions to a widely spoken but low-status language; for Hebrew, the task was to add, or approve the addition of, daily use

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

143

and speech (a low status function but one which could be praised ideologically), to a language with high status but little spoken use. The supporters of Yiddish were saying in effect "We need to make the daily language we take for granted (or even despise as a jargon) into an exalted national language." The supporters of Hebrew had the rhetorically easier task of saying "We need to show our normalization as a people by using in daily life the exalted language of our great tradition." Over the years, the dispute between the supporters of the two languages came to be marked by strong rhetoric and worse. In 1914, for instance, Chaim Zhitlowsky visited Eretz Israel and lectured in Haifa, Jerusalem and Jaffa in Yiddish. The last of a series of lectures planned for him was disrupted by a demonstration of Herzlia High School pupils. Zhitlowsky in a later article argued that only Yiddish could maintain the unity of the Jewish people. In a reply, A. Hashin argued that Yiddish was not revolutionary; only Hebrew could be the national language. After the end of the First World War, supporters of Hebrew, concerned that new immigration from Europe would tend to strenghten Yiddish, renewed their ideological campaign. A proposal by N. Tverski that knowledge of Hebrew be a prerequisite for election to the autonomous Jewish institutions in Eretz Israel was adopted at the Third Constituent Assembly of the Yishuv in December 1918. At a meeting in Philadelphia of American Poale Zion at the same time, a resolution was passed calling for equal rights for Yiddish in Eretz Israel. The Language Question became a major issue in the struggle to unite the Labor movement. It remained a central polemical issue until at least 1925. From 1925 until 1930, the debate in Eretz Israel was much more personal, and attempts to found a chair of Yiddish at the Hebrew University in 1927 were defeated. The argument in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s was a continuation of a debate from Europe, but the important decision had been made by the Labor movement, the vanguard of Zionist national rebuilding efforts, long before. Extremists on each side stated a monistic position, ignoring the possibility of multilingualism. It was essentially a struggle within the Zionist movement; the language question was not a relevant issue in the struggle with the non-Zionists who continued, and still continue, to use Yiddish. Ideologically, the Hebraists rejected any cultural role for Yiddish in Palestine, but, in the long run, it was the lack of institutional support and human resources that explained the loss of Yiddish; the debates were intensely political. Later, in the 1940s, there was even violence with a Yiddish printing press being blown up. Paradoxically, after 1948, Oriental Jews came to identify the very elite who had chosen Hebrew with the Yiddish that they had rejected and saw it as a symbol for discrimination. I have sketched these later ideological disputes in order to give some notion of the strength and the kind of the support for Hebrew that existed in the period at the turn of the century with which we are concerned, and in order to indicate the kinds of attitudes that the Zionist settlers brought with them from Europe and passed on

144

Bernard Spolsky

to the children they sent to the Hebrew-medium schools and the kind of motivation to learn and use the language that was nurtured in these children by teachers and parents. This ideological acceptance was, I believe, of central importance in Hebrew language revitalization. The second component was exposure, referred to by Nahir (1988) as presenting the children with a model of Hebrew speaking. The relevant exposure followed directly from the decisions made in the 1880s in some Jewish schools to teach Hebrew in Hebrew, making use of the direct method. Until Eliezer Ben Yehuda's brief spell as a Hebrew teacher in Jerusalem in 1883, traditional European Jewish teaching had always assumed that Jewish studies and Hebrew or Aramaic texts were to be taught through Yiddish, the pupils' native language. This was accepted practice even in those schools in Palestine that used French or German for teaching non-Jewish and secular studies. Ben Yehuda taught, Fellman (1973: 49) reports, for a few months in an Alliance Israelite Universelle school, using (at the suggestion of the principal, Nissim Bechar) the Berlitz method of Hebrew through Hebrew. In the schools of the agricultural settlements, under the patronage of the Baron de Rothschild, the regular medium of instruction for general subjects after 1884 had been French, with Yiddish the language used for teaching Jewish subjects. There was no objection, however, when in 1886, David Yudelevic emulated Ben Yehuda and started teaching Hebrew in Hebrew. Texts were prepared; all general subjects were taught there in Hebrew by 1888. By 1891, some subjects were being taught in Hebrew in schools in several other colonies as well. In 1892, a meeting of the nineteen members of the Hebrew Teachers association agreed on a Hebrew language education policy, and decided that children of six should attend school for five years, that the Direct Method ("Hebrew in Hebrew") should be used, and that "... the explanation of the Bible is to be in Hebrew and in general all studies are to be explained in Hebrew" (Fellman 1973). The next major step in providing children with exposure to Hebrew and the opportunity to learn it came with the opening of kindergartens, or preparatory programs. In 1892, the Baron de Rothschild had opened a French kindergarten in Zikhron Yaaqov. Two years later, in 1894, a pre-school program in Hebrew was opened in Rishon-Le Zion for four and five year olds. The Hebrew teachers were untrained; their work is reported to have been unimaginative. In 1896, three-yearolds were admitted. A graduate of the school was sent to Jerusalem to be trained (at the Evelina de Rothschild school, in English); she returned to Rishon-Le Zion in 1898 to open the first modern Hebrew kindergarten with thirty pupils. More Hebrew kindergartens were opened in Jerusalem (1903), Safed, Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Rehovot, Zikhron Yaaqov, Nes Ziona (1904). Kindergartens became the main instrument of developing Hebrew fluency: "Hebrew became almost the daily language of the youngsters" (cited by Fellman from Yosef Azaryahu). "The child

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

145

became the teacher of his parents, his brothers, his sisters ..." (cited by Fellman from Chaim Zuta). A meeting of the Hebrew teachers association in 1895 adopted Hebrew as the language of instruction, with Sephardic pronunciation to be used (but Ashkenazic pronunciation was allowed in the first year in Ashkenazic schools, and for prayer and ritual). The next meeting of the association was not until 1903. At that meeting, called by Ussishkin, at which 59 members were present, Hebrew was accepted as the medium of instruction and the Direct Method for teaching it was agreed to as a matter of course; there was general agreement also to use Ashkenazic script and Sephardic pronunciation. So far we have seen the decision to use Hebrew as the medium of instruction, but there is a second important issue to consider: what sort of model of Hebrew could and did these trailblazing Hebrew-medium teachers provide? In the early years, there were no Hebrew teachers' seminars; the all-Hebrew teachers' seminar in Jerusalem was only established in 1904. How much Hebrew then could these early teachers have known? A recent proposal by Glinert (1987) helps answer this question. Glinert takes issue with the general "Zionist-Hebraist" view that was presented by scholars such as Tur-Sinai and Avineri who claimed that the Hebrew language was incapable, before its revival, of dealing with everyday life, and who attribute its enrichment to the work of secular intellectuals and committees in the early years of the twentieth century. Glinert rather argues that there was in fact a semi-vernacular religious Hebrew already available and in use. The form and resources of this variety can be judged from Ganzfried's Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh, an abridged and popularized guide to Jewish religious practice, which was first published in Hebrew in Hungary in 1864, and of which, by 1908, more than twelve editions - 400-500,000 copies had appeared, including plagiarized ones. The Kitzur was taught in the traditional elementary schools in Europe and in Palestine, and covered the daily life of a Jew, all aspects of which were fully governed by religious law. It required Hebrew words for such everyday items as fruit, vegetables and trees (some of which Avineri claims as later discoveries of the dictionary makers) as well as other normal objects of daily life. Because the first Hebrew teachers in the settlements had themselves had a religious education, they would have known these words. Fellman (1973: 51) cites the account of one of these early teachers, Yizhaq Epstein, who claims to have had little Hebrew education beyond elementary school; but this included Talmud until he entered High School, after which he read "very little" modern Hebrew literature. Glinert argues for the importance of this knowledge: The very ease with which the Spoken Revival took place, and the will to do it, suggest the existence of a fairly nonliterary underlying model, not the highly complex and daunting system of Biblical Hebrew; add to this the

146

Bernard Spolsky

less-than-scholarly nature of the teaching cadre, more at home with the unselfconscious 'unartificial' Hebrew of Kitzur and Rashi than with grammatical treatises or Enlightenment fiction .. .52. I suspect not just the teachers but also the parents of the children in the first Hebrew classes were likely to have had a similar educational background and so to have been familiar with the "semi-vernacular" Glinert postulates; this would obviously be a major factor in providing the children with a wider model, and in establishing the possibility of their later use of Hebrew at home. It is further intriguing to note, as Weinreich (1980: 311) does, that while the revitalization of Hebrew involved a separation from the Diaspora and from the Yiddish that represented the Diaspora, it was mainly Yiddish speakers who were the pioneering speakers of modern Hebrew; building on the complex pattern of functional allocation that existed between Yiddish and Leshon Hakodesh (Fishman 1976), they were able to draw on both languages as they started to use Hebrew as a daily language. It would be ironic and fitting if continued research were to establish that the contemporary Hebrew language owes its basic Indo-European bent to the Yiddish with which it successfully competed for loyalty. The third step in Nahir's model was the stage where the children in the Hebrew medium classes took Hebrew outside the school: first, they started speaking Hebrew not just with their teachers but also with each other outside school, and then with their parents and other adults. This involves overcoming what I have called the inertia condition on language choice (Spolsky 1989a: 162), a strong preference to continue using the same language to the same person. Once the children started to speak freely in class to each other, the condition would favor speaking it to each other outside. It would however require considerable effort to overcome the inertia of home language practice; the parents of these children must surely have been ideologically committed to the language shift, just as later immigrant parents were instrumentally convinced to accept their own children's switching to the Hebrew they learned in the school and the street. Nahir (1988) provides documentation on the stages of language spread outside the school. Progress at first was slow; in 1891 Hebrew school graduates were still reported to stop speaking Hebrew when they left school. But ten years later the situation had changed. Hebrew had become the "children's tongue" though not the children's mother tongue. It was spoken in the streets and homes of Rishon Le Zion. In Zikhron-Yaaqov young men and women also used Hebrew. Kindergarten students brought Hebrew into the home; the mothers then took evening classes in Hebrew. A two-year old was reported in 1905 to be speaking only Hebrew and singing songs in it; she was teaching her parents all she knew. By 1912, it was claimed, all young men and women could read a Hebrew newspaper. As time went on, a number of language islands appear to have developed; by 1902, Zikhron-Yaaqov was a place where Hebrew as a second language was the lan-

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

147

guage at least of the young, but as late as 1907, a newspaper article in ZikhronYaaqov expressed surprise at a public speech in Hebrew, considered the normal language of children in the settlement but not adults. The next step was the crowning one, as graduates of the Hebrew medium schools, for whom Hebrew had become the regular second language (and the main first language with each other), married and started to raise their children in Hebrew. This must have happened between 1905 and 1915. Bachi (1956) says that the 1916 census has 40 % of the Jews (34 000 of 85 000) claiming Hebrew as their first or only language: the figures are higher (75 %) among the young. This final step, though the most important, is easiest to explain, for it simply involved the young couple continuing to use with each other and with their children the language they had used before they married. The process of language revitalization, as I define it, then, took between twenty and twenty-five years, and while there remained a great deal to do to develop Hebrew as a full modem spoken and written language, the basis had been well established. Nahir's thesis and the research data that I have sketched provide a convincing hypothesis about the nature of this successful case of revitalization. It also points the way to research needed into the internal situation in the settlements where the process first happened. Were they in fact monolingual, in Yiddish, or was there an obvious need for Hebrew as a lingua franca? Can the educational and religious background (in Europe or Palestine) of the parents of the first generation of Hebrew-speaking pupils be established? We have some studies showing how the language spread from the settlements, how first the Hilfsverein and later the Alliance schools admitted Hebrew, culminating in the language riots over instruction in the Technion, but studies of the early years would confirm the general picture that has been painted here, or show how it must be modified. It is instructive to compare the Hebrew with the Irish case. According to o Riagain (1988), the views of the Language Revival Movement were incorporated into the policies of the new native government of Ireland in 1922, and many different language planning activities were soon underway. The aim of the original policy was to have all subjects in primary school taught through Irish. This goal was never reached: only 4 % of Irish schools taught entirely in Irish in 1930-31; this grew to 12 % in 1940-41, but dropped to 9 % in 1960-61, and to 5 % in 1970-71 and 1980-81. The proportion of schools that taught some classes in Irish reached 43 % in 1940-41, but this tendency was reversed after 1961, and now only 1 % do so. It is to be noted of course that Irish continues to be taught as a language, but it is not used as a medium of instruction except in this small group of schools. As a result, the percentage of Irish speakers in the youngest cohorts has remained steady from 1926 to 1981, at about 5 %. Cummins (1978) summarizes the development of the Irish attempts at revitalization. The movement to teach infant and primary school classes through Irish began in 1921 after the founding of Irish Free State. The number of Irish-medium

148

Bernard Spolsky

or immersion schools peaked at 300; but a survey of teachers in 1941 expressed the opinion that students received less benefit from such instruction than in English. The study by Macnamara (1966) was generally interpreted as presenting evidence for the negative effect of bilingual education. A 1975 attitude study in Ireland showed that most of the people who were asked felt that students suffered in the immersion approach. Of those children in immersion programs in Dublin, Cummins (1978) was told by teachers, 11 % of children spoke Irish at home always, 23 % frequently, 25 % sometimes, 40 % never. Outside Dublin, 7 % spoke Irish at home always, 11 % frequently, 22 % sometimes, 60 % never. Basically then, there have been important gains in the extent of knowledge of Irish: Commins (1988), for instance, reports that 30 % of the national population say they can use Irish, but the gains are limited, for only 4 % to 5 % do use it regularly. Similarly, there has been a marked increase in the symbolic role and value of the language, but this too is limited: o Riagain (1988) points out that an attitude survey in 1983 showed that only 8 % supported an all-Irish education model, whereas 72 % wanted Irish taught only as a subject. Moreover, and this is the central concern for this paper, these increases in status and knowledge have not been accompanied by an increase in language use or by language revitalization. A comparison with New Zealand is also useful. Benton (1986) points out that New Zealand and Ireland are similar in size and population, and have each of them a single major urban area, a colonial past, and an agricultural past. New Zealand is more affluent, less ethnically and culturally homogeneous, and of course the history of language contact is much shorter, dating essentially from colonization in 1840. Both however are involved with attempts to reverse language loss close to the end of the process. The situation of Maori-speakers in New Zealand is similar to Irish-speakers in Gaeltacht: small concentrated pockets scattered throughout rural areas, with language loss accompanying the process of urbanization. Fishman (1984: 45) cited New Zealand and its Maoris as a "successful" case of "translinguification," arguing that Maori ethnic identity seemed to be surviving the reported loss of the Maori language. A hundred years after the educational system had started to discourage the use of the language, the stage had finally been reached in which, as Benton (1981: 17) reported, there were only a few communities where Maori young children still spoke their language natively. By all accounts, then, in the late 1970s, Maori seemed to have become an excellent example for scholars wanting to study the process of language death. But a few short years later, it is now apparent that the obituaries were premature; a sudden flurry of community-encouraged activities, with some public and government support, is offering Maori its chance of revitalization (Spolsky 1989b). The movement for restoration appeared in the early 1980s. Graeme Kennedy (personal communication) explains the background for the revival as depending in

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

149

some measure on the spread of feelings for civil rights and of guilt at Maori unemployment and social disadvantages among non-Maoris in New Zealand, leading to support for token cultural revival activities and even for the more radical attempts at Maori language revival. There were four Maori bilingual programs in existence in 1980, but their impact was local and they did not seem to be suitable for widespread innovation, because they depended in large measure on children whose came to school speaking Maori or already bilingual (Benton, 1985). In the majority of other communities, this was not the situation; not only young Maori children but also their young parents were by then monolingual speakers of English. Initial efforts to use elementary schools for the purpose of language revival appear not to have been successful. (Ritchie and Ritchie 1979: 140) The solution proposed to this impasse was to start teaching the children Maori even before they went to school, in a move reminiscent of the Hebrew kindergartens. A meeting of Maori leaders, sponsored by the Department of Maori Affairs in 1981, suggested the establishment of all-Maori-language pre-school groups, in which older Maoris, still fluent speakers of the language, would conduct the programs, compensating for the fact that the majority of Maori parents no longer spoke the language. The first of these kohanga reos or "language nests" were set up in 1981. The Department of Maori Affairs provided some encouragement and financial support, but the full weight of local organization and implementation fell on any communicty that wanted its own programs. There were four experimental centers started in 1982; two years later, there were over 280 in existence; and by 1987 nearly five hundred centers were operating. The Government helped fund these programs, the allocations being made by an independent trust, but control was essentially local. The effect of the kohanga reo cannot be exaggerated; whereas in 1980 a bare handful of children came to primary school with any knowledge of the Maori language, by 1990 between two and three thousand children, many of them comfortably bilingual, were starting school every year after having already been exposed to daily use of the Maori language for three or more years. Accompanying this educational activity, political and legal pressure was brought to bear to support the language revitalization process. In a landmark decision in 1986, the Waitangi Tribunal, a legal body established by Act of Parliament to look into the implementation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in which the Maori Chiefs of New Zealand ceded sovereignty to the Crown, held that the Crown had failed in its promise made in the Treaty of Waitangi to protect the Maori language. It recommended (among other things) that Maori be made an official language, available as a language of instruction in schools, and watched over by a Maori Language Commission. As a result, Maori was declared an official language of New Zealand, and a Maori Language Commission was established. In addition, Maori started to be

150

Bernard Spolsky

used as a language of instruction in some New Zealand schools. This development of Maori Bilingual Education appeared to be a result of the conjunction of at least three different but related trends: the continuing attempts to teach the language in the secondary school, which for most pupils led to knowledge of the language rather than use of it; the early bilingual schools such as the ten-year-old Ruatoki program, started some years before the kohanga reo movement; and the growing swell of children coming to the primary schools who had gained various degrees of competence in the Maori language while they were in kohanga reo programs. The primary school programs usually began when they were asked for by a group of parents from one or more successful kohanga reo programs, pleased that their children were learning Maori and determined that the learning be continued. Where the school principal was willing and the school committee not unwilling or supportive, and where space was available, the key question became staffing, to find a teacher ready and willing to teach in Maori assisted by a fluent Maorispeaking kaiarahi reo (language assistant). The teacher (usually with some previous knowledge of Maori but not necessarily fluency in it) and the kaiarahi reo started to explore the nature of a Maori bilingual curriculum. Working with minimal curricular guidance and resources, they set out to develop their own curriculum model and materials and their own method of teaching. In most schools, the team arrived at a decision to teach everything (including reading and arithmetic) in and through Maori; the approach was generally labelled "immersion", but the details of implementation varied widely. The effect of these programs has so far been to produce children who have varying degrees of competence in both Maori and English, but who expect (and will be expected by their parents) to continue to learn in both languages. There has been no formal evaluation of the effects of the programs, but Hollings (personal communication) reports that there are many classrooms where pupils converse freely in Maori amongst themselves, although teachers possibly over-estimate the amount and quality. They often switch to English when the teacher cannot hear. It is rare to hear children using Maori in the playground, but this has been reported to happen in at least one school, where the children have been speaking Maori to each other at a particularly strong kohanga reo. There are also, Hollings believes, many instances where parents who are avid, even fanatical advocates of language revitalization, speak Maori with their children, but as the children grow older, there is an increase in the amount of English. The Maori case enables us to see the process in action, as it were. It is useful to analyze it from the point of view of Nahir's four steps. The ideological basis is there, at least to the extent that the Kohanga reo movement and the related school bilingual programs result from parental and community pressure for the language, and there is a strong public rhetorical support for the use of Maori. The children in the program in pre-school and school are being presented with models of language use. While the teachers themselves may not be fluent, their language assistants

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

151

are; and while the children's parents cannot often reinforce this school language use, the grandparents generally can. One special problem arising is that of dialect; it often happens that a school teacher brought from another area does not use the local dialect, facing the community with some difficult choices. For those watching the case, the critical question now is whether the third step will be taken, as the children start using Maori outside school. There is cause for concern. Benton (1986) in his comparison of the Maori and Irish cases argued that in both cases the weight of the language revival process had been left to the school, which cannot compete with the force of outside influence: In both countries the school has assumed (or been given) a major role in transmitting the language to its potential speakers ... Even when proficiency in Irish (or Maori) has enabled an individual to obtain power or influence, that power or influence has almost been exercised principally through English. The social structures of both Ireland and New Zealand have thus been overwhelmingly powerful anglicising forces, which the school systems have been ill-equipped to counteract, and which individuals and families have had even less chance of resisting. (Benton 1986:) Benton of course was writing before the present movement had started to show it force, but he draws attention to important considerations. Cooper (1989) in his comparison of the Irish and Hebrew cases stressed the material incentives for the adoption of Hebrew, that is, the value he saw for Hebrew as a lingua franca in the growing Jewish population of the Yishuv. Similarly, Fishman (1980) downplayed the importance of ideology: Intellectuals (and even an intelligentsia) alone can rarely establish a movement. Intellectuals can reify language and react to it as a powerful symbol, as the bearer and actualizer of cultural values, behaviors, traditions, goals. However for an L to spread into H functions more concrete considerations (jobs, funds, influence, status, control, power) are involved. (Fishman 1980: 55) But, as we saw in the discussion of Hebrew revitalization, these "more concrete considerations" do not seem to have been the key factor in the earlier stages. The sociolinguistic situation in those settlements where Hebrew was first taken outside the classroom seems rather to suggest that this most critical of all steps took place in communities where Yiddish already satisfactorily served as the language of communication, with no lingua franca needed, for it occurred not in the mixed Ashkenazi-Sephardi towns like Jerusalem and Tiberias but in the mainly Yiddishspeaking agricultural settlements. As suggested earlier, detailed studies of these communities in the key years may clarify this point. In the meantime, other possible explanations must at least be canvassed. First, it is most important to note clearly (following Rabin) the

152

Bernard Spolsky

difference I referred to earlier between language revival as a general phenomenon and language revitalization. The task in the Hebrew case was to take a language with virtually no vernacular use and no native learning but generally known in its written and learned forms and to add the spoken function; in other words, to add L functions to an H. The task with Irish and Maori was to take a language with decreasing vernacular use and dying native learning, but without widespread knowledge of the classical or written version, and establish both standard and vernacular use. This may be compared to the analogous but more complex task undertaken by those who set out to add high-culture functions to the Yiddish used in everyday life (Fishman 1980); it must be recalled that the arguments at Tshernovits were not that Yiddish should be a spoken language (it was) but that it should be used as a vehicle for high culture. The effect with Irish was to lead to increased knowledge, but not to reverse the decline of the spoken language; in a sense, the effect of the Irish language movement (and one suspects, of many other modern language restoration movements) is to provide the institutions needed to bring the language to a situation not unlike the one from which Hebrew language revitalization started. A second critical issue to note is the nature of the competing language. Both Irish and Maori were unfortunate enough to be competing with English, one of those languages that in the twentieth century (and particularly in the latter half of it) has shown it power to spread universally, offering itself as an attractive alternative (or at least necessary complement) to most other languages in the world (compare Watson 1989). In the struggle for Hebrew revitalization, the rivals were less powerful. Yiddish was the language that Hebrew sought to replace as a vernacular, but it was essentially, I have suggested earlier, a pre-ideological Yiddish, a Yiddish clearly (to the people concerned) labelled as not just a language associated with the Diaspora (the denial of which was their very reason for being in Palestine) but as lacking (at least before 1905) any acknowledged cultural value; indeed, many hardly considered it a language at all but a jargon. The religious culture that used Yiddish as a vernacular valued Hebrew higher, although it did recognize limited but important status for Yiddish in educational functions (Fishman 1980); the secular culture that used Yiddish for daily speech valued non-Jewish languages like French and German higher. Nor were there strong arguments for Judezmo (which turned out to have quite low language loyalty) or Arabic (for Jews in most Moslem countries had been restricted to vernacular and low valued varieties). Yiddish, Judezmo and Arabic were all perceived, in other words, as L varieties, in competition with one or more H varieties, while Hebrew already had the status as an H variety. In the Jewish schools of the Yishuv, there were two serious competitors for secular teaching, French and German. The strength of French was sapped by the withdrawal of the Baron de Rothschild in 1899; some of the opposition to his

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning

153

control had been expressed, as early as 1887, in arguments for the use of Hebrew in Rishon le Zion. The strength of German depended on the Hilfsverein schools which started to be set up in 1901; even from the beginning, however, there was strong ideological support in these schools for Hebrew, especially in schools outside the city (Fellman 1973). And it was in these schools that the language war, the struggle over whether to use Hebrew or German as language for higher scientific instruction, was fought in 1913-14. A third critical factor was the strength of knowledge of Hebrew (in its H functions) on the part of teachers. The language they knew was not (or, not only) the Hebrew of the intelligentsia, the H variety of enlightenment literature, but a combination of religious varieties, ranging from the high formality of the Bible to the semi-vernacular of the religious commentaries and codes of practice in which so many of them had been educated. Their task in starting to speak Hebrew with their pupils was not dissimilar (but in many ways easier) than that of the formally trained foreign language scholar on a first visit to a country where the language is actually spoken; not an easy task, but given the strength of motivation, an achievable one. Many parents would have had a similar level of Hebrew knowledge. Finally, I suspect then that it was not so much material conditions as the strength of motivation, arising from stronger ideological commitment, that accounts for the initial success of Hebrew language revitalization. Successful language revitalization would seem to depend on establishing high enough solidarity value for the language being revived to overcome any power or economic effects of the competing language. There is reason to believe that ideological arguments for Hebrew were strong enough to overcome not just the ideological arguments for French and German (and later, for Yiddish), but also any perceived power or economic values of all the competing languages; it was ultimately sufficiently powerful to overcome some of the power of inertia and make parents ready to switch to their children's language.

References Azaryahu (Ozrakovsky), Joseph 1910 Batei hasefer be'eretz Yisrael [The schools in Palestine], Hahinukh 1, 2. [Cited in Nahir, 1988.] Bachi, R. 1956 "A statistical analysis of the revival of Hebrew in Israel", Scripta Hierosolymitana 2: 179-247. Benton, Richard A. 1981 The flight of the Amokura: Oceanic languages and formal education in the Pacific. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

154 1986

Bernard Spolsky

"Schools as agents for language revival in Ireland and New Zealand", in: Bernard Spolsky (ed.), Language and education in multilingual settings. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Ltd, and San Diego, Calif.: College-Hill Press. Chen, Zhangtai & Chen Jianmin 1990 "Sociolinguistics research based on Chinese reality", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 81: 21-41. Commins, Patrick 1988 "Socioeconomic development and language maintenance in the Gaeltacht", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70: 11-28. Cooper, Robert L. 1989 Language planning and social change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cummins, James 1978 "Immersion programs: The Irish experience", International Review of Education (24, 3: 273-282). Dorian, Nancy 1987 "The value of language maintenance efforts which are unlikely to succeed", International Journal for the Sociology of Language 68: 57-67. Fellman, Jack 1973 "Concerning the 'revival' of the Hebrew language", Anthropological Linguistics 15: 250-257. 1974 The revival of a classical tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew language. The Hague: Mouton. Ferguson, Charles A. 1983 "Language planning and language change", in: Juan Cobarrubias & Joshua A. Fishman (eds.), Progress in language planning: International perspectives. Berlin: Mouton 29^10. Fishman, Joshua A. 1976 "Yiddish and Loshn-Koydesh in traditional Ashkenaz: Problems of societal allocation of macro-functions", in: Albert Verdoodt & Rolf Kjolseth (eds.). Language in sociology. Louvain: Editions Peeters, 39-48. 1980 "Attracting a following to high-culture functions for a language of everyday life: the role of the Tshernovits language conference in the 'Rise of Yiddish', International Journal for the Sociology of Language 24: 43-73. 1982 "Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset", Language in Society 11: 1-14. 1984 "Mother tongue claiming in the United States since 1960: Trends and correlates related to the 'revival of ethnicity'", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 50: 21-100. 1989 "Language spread and language policy for endangered languages", in: J. A. Fishman, Language and ethnicity in minority sociolinguistic perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Glinert, Lewis 1987 "Hebrew-Yiddish diglossia: Type and stereotype implications of the language of Ganzfried's Kitzur", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 67: 39-56. Macnamara, John 1966 Bilingualism and primary education: a study of Irish experience. Edinburgh University Press.

Hebrew language revitalization within a general theory of second language learning Nahir, Moshe 1988

155

"Language planning and language acquisition: The 'Great Leap' in the Hebrew revival", in: C. B. Paulston (ed.), International Handbook of Bitingualism and Bilingual Education. New York: Greenwood Press, 275-295. ó Riagáin, Pádraig 1988 "Bilingualism in Ireland 1973-1983: An overview of national sociolinguistic surveys", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70: 29-51. Pilowsky, Arye L. 1985 "Yiddish alongside the revival of Hebrew: Public polemics on the status of Yiddish in Eretz Israel, 1907-1929", in: Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages. Leiden: E. J. brill, 104—124. Pirhi, J. 1905 "A question to the founders of the kindergarten", Hashkafa 6: 21. [Cited in Nahir 1988.] Rabin, Chaim 1973 A short history of the Jewish language. Jerusalem: The Jewish Agency. Ritchie, James & Jane Ritchie 1979 Growing up in Polynesia. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Smilansky, Ze'ev 1930 "Letoldot hadibur ha'ivri be'eretz yisrael" [Towards a history of spoken Hebrew in Palestine], Hapo'el Hatsa'ir 23: 7. [Cited in Nahir 1988.] Spolsky, Bernard 1989a Conditions for second language learning: Introduction to a general theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989b "Maori bilingual education and language revitalization", Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 9, 6: 1-18. Stewart, W. 1968 "A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism", in: J. A. Fishman (ed.), Readings in the sociology of language. The Hague: Mouton, 531-545. Watson, Seosamh 1989 "Scottish and Irish Gaelic: The giant's bedfellow", in: N. Dorian (ed.), Investigating obsolescence. Press, 41-59. Weinreich, Max 1980 History of the Yiddish language, (translated by Shlomo Noble). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act* Lewis H. Glinert

1. Introduction Law and legal systems are of self-evident significance to the philosopher and the sociologist of language. Age-old issues of rational versus empirical linguistic philosophy dominate jurisprudential debate between the proponents of natural as against positivist notions of law. 1 And much, if not as much, attention has been paid to the problems posed by the language habits of lawyers and laymen in the actual administration of the legal system. 2 Much less known, however, about the attitude of legislators and judiciary to linguistic phenomena outside the language of law itself - to the choice of medium or choice of language, to acts of speech, demonstrations of semantic intent and the like. Can the act of writing be deemed equivalent to the act of speaking, for example, and if so, when? In evidence? In oaths? In defamation? Is the choice of language crucial to certain legal constructs - say, to a contract, to a marriage vow, to an affidavit? 3 Normative Jewish Law (henceforth: Halakhah) falls into the category of religious law. 4 This involves not only a civil and a criminal law defining duties between individuals, bodies and societies but also a law holding directly between man and God, sometimes with penalties of a non-judicial nature. Further, it is based ultimately on absolute and incontrovertible principles not subject to rational challenge. But what sets Halakhah apart today not only from secular law but even from many religious systems is the fact that, since the loss of Jewish legal autonomy in Early Modern Europe, it is no longer legally administered as an organic whole in any society: while portions of the Halakhah are in force in various parts of the World (thus, Halakhic marriage and divorce have the force of law in Israel, Halakhic civil law is binding in agreed arbitration in England), Halakhah today is for the most part a private matter between observant Jews and their conscience, with religious jurists only occasionally being invited to adjudicate civil cases. Such a situation, naturally, does not favour a rich elaboration and articulation of the law in response to modern circumstances and values; and our study will for the most part represent Jewish Law as elaborated in an earlier age. We would, however, emphasize that the long-standing public interest in Halakhah, deriving from the traditional religious duty for Jewish men to study the Divine Law in their spare time and from the charisma assigned to great religious jurists, has broadly

158

Lewis H. Glinert

prevented an atrophy of Halakhah and encouraged a certain ongoing degree of elaboration and articulation. In this study we examine the attitudes of Halakhah to language choice in the exercise of certain sacred acts - notably marriage, vows and worship - with particular reference to concepts of language, as and when they appear and develop in the legal literature. While much of Jewish legal discussion is not 'rational' in the conventional sense, occupied as it is with deriving duties from Scriptural verses by hermeneutic principles sui generis or simply from earlier legal precedents in the Talmud or Kabbalah, 5 it does make substantial use of 'rational argument' (sevara) to justify existing rulings and to create new ones. We shall also be casting more than the occasional glance at the popular fulfilment of these sacred acts, in what may be termed 'folk Judaism'. Here, one is restricted by the paucity of data on actual Jewish practice and attitudes. 6 But we believe that interesting connections can be traced between the philosophy of language choice articulated by the religious elite and the actual choice of language in the folk religion.

2. Language choice in the Mishnah Some of the earliest explicit references in Halakhah - and the most authoritative to language choice are in the Mishnah, 7 edited in the second century C.E. (in our translation we have added some words of explanation): These are said in any language: the declaration of the suspected adultress, the avowal for tithes [Biblical texts used in rituals in the Temple of Antiquity], the reading of the Shema, the Amidah prayer, Grace After Meals [all three are regular acts of worship, the first of them a Biblical text], the oath of testimony, and the oath concerning a deposit. (Sotah 7:1) And these are said in the Holy Tongue [Hebrew]: the First Fruits text [a Biblical text used in Temple ritual], the Halitzah [Biblical texts used in the statements by a brother-in-law and sister-in-law indicating that marriage will not take place between them], the Blessings and Cursings [historical event following the Conquest of the Holy Land], the Priestly Blessing [a Biblical text used in a regular act of worship], the High Priest's Blessing [a Temple ritual], the King's text, the text of the Heifer whose Neck is to be Broken, and the warning spoken to the people by the priest anointed for war [Biblical texts used in rituals of Antiquity]. (Sotah 7:2) The choice is between 'the Holy Tongue' and 'any language'. What is the attitudinal significance of these expressions? In Hebrew writings of Late Antiquity, Hebrew was generally referred to as leshon hakodesh ('the holy tongue') or

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

159

leshon hakhamim ('the tongue of the sages'), but this should not be taken to imply that Hebrew was solely a written language of Scripture or Religion - in fact Hebrew was a vernacular language for much of this period. 8 Rather, the names 'holy tongue' and 'tongue of the sages' seem to be underlining that Hebrew alone, of the various languages spoken then by Jews, was then a language of the Sacred (Biblical and Rabbinic) Law, and thus by association a sacred tongue. Notice, however, that the Mishnah was not going so far as to contrast 'holy tongue' with 'secular tongue' or 'profane tongue'. No such terms were used. The distinction here is between 'holy tongue' and any tongue, including the holy tongue. These laws themselves give the initial impression that - beyond the fact that the law was couched in Hebrew - there was no absolute and principled distinction between sacred and secular language in Halakhah: one sees that many rituals, some even involving Biblical texts, were allowed in any tongue. The same seems to emerge from some other Mishnaic regulations, in Tractate Megillah: Where Scriptural Scrolls differ from Tefillin and Mezuzot [two articles involving Biblical texts] is that Scriptural Scrolls are written in any tongue whereas Tefillin and Mezuzot are only written in ashurit [i.e. Hebrew language and script] 9 . Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says: Scriptural Scrolls too were only permitted to be written in Greek [i.e. in Greek and Hebrew, but in no other tongue]. (Megillah 1:8) If one reads it [the Scroll of Esther] in Aramaic or in any language, one has not fulfilled one's duty. But one may read it to speakers of foreign tongues in a foreign tongue, and the foreign tongue speaker who hears it in Hebrew has fulfilled his duty. (Megillah 2:1) In fact, it is typical of the Mishnah to state laws baldly, even abstrusely, with perhaps more concern for the "limiting case" than for the basic law itself, and with little overt sign of internal principles or extrinsic justification. The Babylonian Talmud (200-500 C.E.) goes a long way to clarifying the Mishnah and supplying why's and wherefore's - but, even in the "fine print", these are more often an appeal to Scriptural proof-texts (using Midrashic rules of hermeneutics) than a philosophy of law based on natural logical principles. So too with the Halakhah of language choice: in its Talmudic basics, it has more to do with proof-texts than with the enunciation of views on language. However, as we examine various aspects of Halakhah, we shall find that later Halakhists in particular have proposed a range of notions about language choice, both philosophical and social.

160

Lewis H. Glinert

3. Language choice in the act of kiddushin (marriage): the presumption of communication The ceremony of marriage in Halakhah involves two stages, kiddushin and nissu'in. The kiddushin10 consists of a prior communication by a man to a woman of intent to acquire her in marriage, followed by a particular symbolic act of acquisition (commonly, the placing of a ring on her finger). The exact wording of the declaration is a pragmatic matter - indeed, even if he and she have merely held a non-formalized discussion about becoming married to one another and he then proceeds to place a ring on her finger, this constitutes an act of kiddushin. It is thus hardly surprising that jurists have focused on the definition of communication here, and on the presumptions that obtain. 3.1 Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (the RoSH, ca. 1250-1327), in his commentary on the Talmud Babli, Kiddushin 6a, recognizes that Halakhic kiddushin can be effected in any vernacular, using the expressions conventional in that locale. Moreover, a man who has employed any such conventional expression (and then placed a ring etc.) cannot then "pull out" by claiming ignorance of the expression - there is a presumption of knowledge of the vernacular and of such expressions. But beyond these, there is a grey zone of uncertain expressions; these too are regarded as contributing to effect a kiddushin (such kiddushin is a safeguard against unwitting bigamy and the like), provided only that the couple were already discussing the topic. Thus the performative intent can be judged not by the form of the speech act alone but by presumption from the broader verbal context: certain forms of words are felicitous per se\ others are felicitous through context: A question was raised [in the Talmud]: 'What if someone proposes by means of the expression harufatiT An answer can be found in the Tannaitic statement: If one says harufati in Judea the woman is now married, as in Judea a married woman is termed a harufa. And similarly with all marriage formulae in every locale. But with formulae known clearly as marriage formulae one cannot believe a man who says 'I didn't know that these were marriage formulae'. Where the doubtful cases [involving uncertain formulae, as mentioned in the Talmud] arise is where he was already discussing marriage with her - if he was not, there is no substance in the doubt. 3.2 The communication of an intent to marry requires comprehension by the woman. And here we find that some Halakhists have made linguistic distinctions between the two sexes. Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher (early 14th century) and Rabbi Yosef Caro (1488-1575) appear to rule that one may not presume a woman to have comprehended a particular marriage formula - whatever the language used.

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

161

Might this reflect a concern for female vulnerability or maybe a distinction between the passive and the active participant in such a speech act? He hands her a peruta coin or the equivalent, in the presence of two witnesses, and says harey at mekudeshet li baze [you are hereby married to me], and the same holds for harey at meoreset li or harey at li leisha or for any kiddushin formula normal in that locale, provided that she understands that it is a kiddushin formula. 11 (Caro, Shulhan Arukh, Even Ha'ezer 27: 1) Later authorities have drawn distinctions between the sexes with specific refernce to comprehension of Hebrew - and of the standard Hebrew kiddushin formula in particular. Positive evidence of comprehension has been demanded for a kiddushin in Hebrew to be deemed good. This is probably an accurate reflection of a widespread, long-standing ignorance of Hebrew among Jewish women (an ignorance that is perhaps not remarkable in view of the general permission to women to worship in the vernacular - see below - and the limited emphasis on worship and study for women). Even if he said harey at mekudeshet li [you are hereby married to me], one has to know that she comprehends that this is a kiddushin formula, for not all women comprehend Hebrew. (Shemuel of Furth, Beyt Shemuel ad loc) Conversely, in the view of this authority, where the marriage proposal was made in the vernacular, the presumption is that the woman has understood it even if she claims that she has not. At the very least there is now doubt as to whether she is single, and before any further marriage she will have to take the precaution of getting a divorce. By contrast, some authorities have apparently presumed more knowledge of Hebrew by 'intelligent' women (as well as a more general responsibility by women in the vernacular). 12 And if he said a formula to her which all women know in that language, such as harey at mekudeshet, which is a customary formula in all kiddushin and is known to be a kiddushin formula by every intelligent woman, and she claims she did not comprehend, we cannot believe her. (Moshe of Brisk, Helkat Mehokek, ad loc) In summary, the Halakhah of kiddushin is taking a naturalistic view of language choice, reflecting the circumstances of women, though coloured by varying degrees of legal caution.

162

Lewis H. Glinert

4. Language choice in vows and oaths 4.1 The Halakhah of vows and oaths calls fundamentally for the same pragmatic, relativistic use of language as the Halakhah of marriage just described. 13 There are, however, several unexpected features in the major legal codes, involving notions of secular vs sacred language, substandard vs norm, dialect and Creole, artificial vs. natural language, euphemism and distortion of language. Elon (1975: 619) says of oaths in general: "The oath is pronounced either by the person taking it or by the court administering it; in the latter case, the deponent responds with 'Amen'. There was a rule to the effect that oaths must always be taken in Hebrew but it was later mitigated so as to allow the oath to be taken in the language best understood by the deponent." The vows and oaths described below involve foreswearing the use of something. Technically, a vow amounted to dedicating the thing to the Temple, while an oath meant to deny oneself to the thing, but we shall not dwell on this distinction.14 The Mishnah states, laconically: Any alternative [kinnuy] for the formula used to utter a vow, ban, oath or Nazirite-vow is like the vow, ban, oath or Nazirite-vow itself. If one says to one's fellow konam or konas, these are alternatives to saying korban ['an offering']...If one says shevuta or shekuka or a vow using the word mota, these are alternatives to saying shevu'a ['an oath']. (Nedarim 1: 1-2)

The meaning of the term 'alternative' (Hebrew: kinnuy) is at the centre of our discussion of vows and oaths. The Talmud was in two minds about it but finally (TB Nedarim 10a) decided that the word denoted vow or oath formulas in foreign languages. Maimonides (1135-1204) ruled that vows and oaths should be in the local vernacular (note that the wording of his ruling does not address a multi-glossic situation): There are places where people are dialect speakers [ilgim] and disfigure [mafsidim] the language and dub something by the name of something; there one goes according to the dubbed name [kinnuy], for instance [...] in all such cases one goes according to the language of the general populace in that locale and that time. (Mishneh Torah, Nedarim [vows] 1: 16) And not only the oath - all formulas used for oaths are like an oath. For example, if the people in that place were dialect speakers and referred to an oath [shevu'a] as shevuta or shekuka or they were Syrians, in whose language an oath is mumta and is called in dialect muha - once one has uttered a formula denoting an oath, one is liable, just like someone who utters a [Hebrew] oath formula. (Mishneh Torah, Shevuot [oaths] 2: 5)

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

163

Observe also that Maimonides regards some foreign language speakers as "disfiguring the language". This refers specifically to what were perceived as "corrupted" dialects of Hebrew. We will discuss this notion presently. Most Halakhists take a similar, essentially relativistic view of vows and oaths for example, Rabbi Yom-Tov ben Abraham Ishbili ('the RiTBA', ca. 1250-1330): Rabbi Yohanan [in the Talmud] held that kinnuy denotes a foreign formula, for such people refer to an offering [korban] as konam and an oath [shevu'a] as shevutcr, a vow or oath using these nouns constitutes an outright Biblical vow or oath in that particular locale only. The Halakhah follows Rabbi Yohanan. In other locales where these kinnuyim are not in use, they do not yield a vow or oath, but if people have other kinnuyim they are liable thereby [for their vow or oath]. It is likely that the language of Christians and Moslems and their ilk is to be regarded like kinnuyim and thus yields prohibitions. (Hiddushey HaRITBA, Nedarim 2a) And even a knowledge of Hebrew does not preclude making vows in the vernacular, in the opinion of David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra ('the RaDBaZ', 1479-1573): In vows we have the tradition of following the vernacular [leshon beneyadam], and even where an expert in the formulas makes a vow in one of these [vernacular] formulas it counts as a vow [...] as it is the language of the masses. (RaDBaZ on Maimonides, Nedarim 2a) 4.2 Beyond this basic relativism, however, some Halakhic rulings expressed a distinction between Hebrew qua sacred tongue and other languages. Rabbenu Ya'akov ("the RI") ruled that the kinnuy formulas mentioned in the Mishnah (ibid) make effective vows even if one does not understand them. By implication, the same is true, a fortiori, for vows using Hebrew formulas. By contrast, a vow using a vernacular formula has to be understood: 15 And a problem faces those who say [that kinnuyim are] 'foreign formulas': why does the Mishnah mention these formulas? It should instead have said 'any formulas in which they vow in their language constitute a vow'. Rabbenu Ya'akov's explanation is that a vow in their language is undoubtedly a vow, since they understand it, while the formulas in the Mishnah create vows even if one does not understand them. (Tosafot, Nedarim 2a) In a recent responsum, 16 Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, doyen of post-War Halakhists, has tentatively suggested an empirical rather than a metaphysical explanation for this distinction: that Hebrew and related formulas were so well-known that a court dealing with a vow simply could not accept that the vower did not understand what he was saying - a notion that recalls the various presumptions of

164

Lewis H. Glinert

understanding in the Halakhah of marriage (3.2), though the presumptions there about a woman's knowledge of Hebrew were rather different. The notion that a Hebrew speech act does not have to be understood appears unambiguously in the Halakhah of worship, to be elaborated below. It will be seen that Halakhists tend to derive it from metaphysical concepts of Hebrew as a sacred tongue with transcendent properties. But the fact that we did not find this notion in the Halakhah of marriage (above) but may have found it with vows raises the possibility that an underlying distinction could be made between acts of interpersonal communication - such as a declaration of marriage, in which a listener must comprehend - and acts in which man speaks to GoD, such as a vow. When we deal with worship, we shall find that the comprehension factor is even less salient, indeed the act of worship is linguistically non-relativistic in essence; in fact we shall argue for a more basic underlying distinction, between those speech acts (exemplified by vows) which have a direct natural effect on the person, and those speech acts (exemplified by worship) which do not. 4.3 The concept 'Hebrew' is not a monistic one. Halakhah speaks also of corrupted, substandard forms of Hebrew, though (at least in the context of vows and oaths) sometimes treating them legally like normative Hebrew. The notion of a corrupted Hebrew is present in potentia in the Mishnah Nedarim 1: 1 - 2 quoted above: the vow formulas konam, konah etc were considered corruptions of Hebrew words. The idea was articulated in the code of Maimonides, in Nedarim (see above) and more expansively in Tefillah 1: 4. There Maimonides depicts the Exile of the Jews following the Babylonian Conquest as creating a blend of Hebrew with many other tongues (of Persia, Greece etc.) - a complex Creole: ... the language of these offspring became muddled language was blended with many tongues ...

and everyone's

and the term ilgim, which we have rendered 'dialect speakers', is employed there in antithesis to ba'aley halashon hatzeha 'those possessed of the correct language'. 1 7 These views of Maimonides may be seen in context of his general conception of Hebrew, as articulated in his Guide of the Perplexed (Pines 1963, part III, ch. 8): You know the severe prohibition that obtains among us against obscene language. This also is necessary. For speaking with the tongue is one of the properties of a human being and a benefit that is granted to him and by which he is distinguished. [...] Now this benefit granted us with a view to perfection in order that we learn and teach should not be used with a view to the greatest deficiency and utter disgrace, so that one says what the ignorant and sinful Gentiles say in their songs and stories, suitable for them but not

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

165

for those to whom it has been said: "And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." [...] I can also give the reason why this our language is called the Holy Language. It should not be thought that this is, on our part, an empty appellation or a mistake; in fact it is indicative of true reality. For in this holy language no word at all has been laid down in order to designate either the male or the female organ of copulation, nor are there words designating the act itself that brings about generation, the sperm, the urine, or the excrements. No word at all designating, according to its first meaning, any of these things has been laid down in the Hebrew language, they being signified by terms used in a figurative sense and by allusions. It was intended thereby to indicate that these things ought not to be mentioned and consequently that no terms designating them should be coined. Maimonides is in fact rejecting the notion that Hebrew is holy because it is metaphysically perfect. As Stern (forthcoming) puts it, "what makes Hebrew the Holy Language, according to Maimonides, is not metaphysical but practical: Hebrew embodies an unequalled standard of moral perfection [...] The benefits and distinctions which Maimonides goes on to enumerate are all moral and political, perfections of the kind intended when Israel is commanded to be a 'kingdom of priests and a holy nation'. Thus the highest function of external language - of any particular human language - is political, m o r a l , and social, not metaphysical or theoretical. This principle, according to Maimonides, applies no differently to Hebrew than to other languages." It is remarkable that Maimonides in the passage just cited does not explicitly mention other languages, by name or otherwise. He simply invokes the faculty of language in general, and Hebrew as an exception. But the context makes it abundantly clear that Hebrew is not being conceived as entirely sui generis. Hebrew and other tongues are all subject to moral constraints, as witness the fact that (a) the same types of moral constraint as apply to behaviour in general are applied to language in particular, and (b) Maimonides nowhere calls for Jews to abandon their existing tongues and make exclusive use of Hebrew. Were Hebrew the sole guarantee for any kind of verbal holiness, he would have been constrained to utter such a call. But in fact, Hebrew appears to be a kind of abstract standard, to be held up as an example. Meanwhile, it is for all speech communities to strive for purity and elegance. 4.4 Despite being deemed decadent, these languages are, as we said, placed legally on a par with Hebrew in some opinions. Thus Rabbenu Ya'akov in Tosafot (quoted above) allows a kinnuy formula even if not understood - just like a Hebrew formula. The RiTBA, conversely, disallows it (quoted above), though his words "it is likely that the language of Christians and Moslems and their ilk is to be regarded like kinnuyim" might be seen as suggesting that the kinnuyim them-

166

Lewis H. Glinert

selves are closer to Hebrew than formulas in any other languages. 18 It is remarkable that a language considered corrupted should be placed virtually on a par with the normative language. Indeed, from earliest post-Exilic times through the Talmudic and Medieval period we have an apparent social ambivalence towards Hebrew, in effect a highly complex set of attitudes. 19 The close of the Biblical period sees Nehemiah upbraiding Judea for outmarrying and speaking creóle while some of the post-Exilic books of the Bible are eventually canonized in Hebrew and others in Imperial Aramaic (the Middle Eastern administrative lingua franca) - giving it self-evidently some kind of sanctity, although Aramaic is not called leshon hakodesh 'the holy tongue' like Hebrew. It is possible that Aramaic was already widely regarded as a corrupt form of Hebrew. (The progenitor of the Hebrews, Abraham, was held to have arrived from Aram, and was referred to by the Talmud as 'father of all the Arameans'.) Hebrew is maintained as the main vehicle of Rabbinic law and liturgy till the third century C.E. in the face of tremendous oral and written pressure from Aramaic and Greek. Greek in fact was associated through Homeric literature and the like with the religious threat of Hellenism and with the dehebraization of much of Jewry - and yet the sage responsible for collating the Mishnah in Hebrew circa 180 C.E., Rabbi Judah the Prince, is also on record as extolling Greek as second only to Hebrew. Later Talmudic times find Aramaic and Hebrew used for various sacred genres, sometimes mingled, and by the Medieval period the Talmud has assumed such authority that Aramaic gains even more sanctity by association, a process reinforced no doubt by the emergence of the Zohar in Aramaic in 13th century Provence. That Hebrew was deemed to have a transcendent sanctity does not mean that it alone was considered a "consummate language" (lashon gamur) halakhically and that everything else was just "babble". The languages of the nations too were "consummate languages", in the view of Rabbenu Nissim ben Reuven Gerondi ('the RaN' ca 1310-1375), and self-evidently good for vows; the sole need for the Mishnah to mention kinnuyim was to indicate that substandard languages too make felicitous vows - be they corruptions of Hebrew or anything else: And one may put a precise explanation on the statement of Rabbi Yohanan [in the Talmud] that kinnuyim are foreign words: what made the formulas konam, konah, konas so different from other foreign formulas as to deserve special mention? Could the Mishnah not have said 'whatever language one vows in, one's vow is a vow'! But the correct explanation I have seen [...] is that the Mishnah is going one better; not only in foreign languages that are consummate languages does a vow count as such but even in languages that are defective, such as those with konam, konah, for this is Hebrew but of a corrupted kind ... (RaN to TB Nedarim 2a)

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

167

The same idea of "consummate language" will be encountered in the Halakhah of worship below: a "consummate language" allows one to translate one's Hebrew prayers into it accurately, in standard "correct" manner; a consummate language may also become defective. 4.5 A special case of a "consummate language", one that seems to involve elements of the "transcendent", is that of an artificial language (in practice, an artificial terminology) deemed to have been created by the ancient Rabbis for Halakhic purposes. This idea surfaces in the Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 10a, as one possible explanation 20 for the kinnuyim (the alternative formulas for vows and oaths): Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said, "They are a terminology fabricated by the Sages with which to vow", meaning that these terms would wean people away from the risky practice of using formulas containing the divine name. The philosophical implications were subsequently explored in the commentary of the RaN to Nedarim 2a: ... and even for Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, who says that they [kinnuyim] are a terminology 21 invented by the Rabbis, they are like a consummate [gamur] Biblical vow, for all languages are simply a convention of each nation and a convention of our Sages is in no way inferior to their convention. In fabricating their own formulas, the Rabbis might theoretically have been regarded as departing from the natural - and vows could be seen as a natural linguistic act, to be assessed by natural linguistic yardsticks; in fact, however, the Rabbis' coinages (to Rabbi Shimon's mind) were adjudged not as "corruptions" but as equally "consummate" and "conventional" as any language. If, as one may presume, the Rabbis' very sanctity is the key factor, this is somewhat ironic language by 'convention' ordinarily stands in contrast to language of the 'essence' that expresses religious Truth, i.e. the sacred Hebrew tongue. We have now encountered two concepts of 'marginal' language, the corrupted (in fact, creolized) and the artificial. Objectively, both could be regarded as normal rather than marginal: the artificial Rabbinic formulas may have become the norm, their marginality thenceforth residing in the popular consciousness of their artificial roots. 4.6 Now we turn to an objectively marginal concept, the euphemism: ... but alternatives to alternatives [kinnuyei kinnuyim], i.e. an alternative that is very remote from this formula, are not like vows. (Tur, Yoreh De'ah, 207) ... and likewise if there are no dialect speakers at that place and time, no one who says shevuta, shekuka or muha is bound [by an oath]; and though we have seen that some people say shevuta or shekuka so as not to utter an oath,

168

Lewis H. Glinert

this is not an alternative oath formula - on the contrary, one is using this alternative so as not to utter an oath. (RaDBaZ to Mishneh Torah, Shevuot 2: 5) Both these extracts from Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher ('the T u r \ 1269-1343) and the RaDBaZ illustrate the difference between a kinnuy that represents a normal dialectal formula for an oath and a kinnuy representing a euphemism. Halakhah distinguishes between intent to make an oath and to make a pseudo-oath, and makes language a crucial factor: the pseudo-oath must involve a non-standard formula. Whether an entire speech community can ever be deemed to be no longer making oaths but merely pseudo-oaths, i.e. whether the pseudo-oath intrinsically has to be a "euphemism" (kinnuy shel kinnuy) in contrastive opposition to a real oath formula, is an issue that is not debated here. The RaDBaZ goes on to make cursory reference to the question of a multilingual society (without inter-intelligibility): ... and furthermore one may infer that if some people speak dialect [ilgim] and some speak the norm [bilti ilgim], the use of dialect formulas by the latter does not constitute an oath until it becomes universal usage [leshon klal ha-am], (RaDBaZ to Mishneh Torah, Shevu'ot 2: 5) Clearly, euphemisms rank high (in terms of ease rather than perhaps of quantity) in lexical borrowing. Interestingly, the RaDBaZ is unwilling to grant them status until the diffusion is complete. Faced with any other question of usage, he might conceivably have applied a criterion of "majority usage"; in this case, however, the notion of language change appears to be paramount, favouring a criterion of "universal usage".

5. A speech act of worship: The recital of the Megillah All the sacred texts recited in the synagogue service may be regarded as texts of verbal worship. 22 This includes prayers, praises, meditations and Scriptural readings. We would also wish to include prayers said anywhere, e.g. blessings over food, while excluding vows, oaths, declarations of betrothal and the like and we believe this can be fundamentally expressed as a two- or three-way distinction between acts with a material effect - interpersonal communication (e.g. declaration of marriage) - and those that have no such natural, as against metaphysical, effect (acts of worship). We shall examine the Halakhah for the Recital of the Megillah ('The Scroll of Esther') and compare linguistic attitudes and conceptions with those already outlined above. We shall see that Recital of the Megillah, while in many respects a typical act of worship, involves a further goal of "publicizing the miracle" that

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

169

brings worship into the inter-personal domain - with the resultant need for effective "communication". 5.1 The Megillah, the Biblical book of Esther preserved to this day in the Hebrew original, is recited aloud from a scribal scroll on the festival of Purim, commemorating the miraculous escape from genocide of the Jews of the Persian Empire. It is ancient practice to hold public readings, so that men, women and children may all hear the Megillah. The Megillah does not have to be recited personally by every individual. The general Halakhic principle obtains that listening is tantamount to speaking, and indeed in the case of the Megillah (as against many other acts of "worship") it is preferred that one person read aloud for the many. The recital has to be a reading in the fullest sense of the word. Not one word should be said by heart (unless the scroll has errors or lacunae). Faced with a non-Hebrew-speaking audience, one may not even translate verbatim into their vernacular as one goes along; that would be tantamount to reciting by heart. Even looking methodically at each Hebrew word before translating it does not alter the situation - the voice must simultaneously project what the eye sees. In the words of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (the Hafetz Hayyim, 1838-1933): Even though the Megillah is in front of him and he looks at each word and translates it for the listener, which might have been presumed to be preferable to reading by heart, we learn that he has not fulfilled his duty. (Mishnah Berurah, 690, letter 30) 5.2 But can a Megillah be written from the outset in a language other than the Hebrew original? In which language to recite it to whom has been a complex issue. The Mishnah states: If one [i.e. a Hebrew-speaker] read it by heart, or read it in Armaic or in any other language, one has not fulfilled one's obligation. But one reads it to non-Hebrew-speakers [la'ozot] in a non-Hebrew language [la'az]. And [alternatively] the non-Hebrew-speaker who hears it in Hebrew has fulfilled his obligation. (Megillah 2: 1) O n e ' s immediate impression is of a conflict of values: the recital has to be comprehensible to the Hebrew-speaker, but non-Hebrew-speakers can theoretically hear it either in their vernacular or in Hebrew! In the bare Mishnaic text, there is nothing to indicate whether Hebrew is being given preferential status qua sacred tongue or qua language of the original or maybe simply because nonHebrew recitals were hard to come by. A resolution of the conflict was provided by Maimonides: The Megillah could be recited not only in Hebrew but in Classical Greek too, even for Hebrew-speakers, the reason being that (a) the purpose of the recital is not to

170

Lewis H. Glinert

comprehend each word but to grasp the outline of the miraculous story, (b) the Greek translation of Esther in the Septuagint was so good, so well-known and so standardized as to be, in some sense, on a par with the Hebrew original. Thus Maimonides conceives the act of reciting or hearing the Megillah as getting the gist of the story from an approved text: 23 The non-Hebrew-speaker who hears the Megillah written in Hebrew in the Holy Script has fulfilled his obligation, despite not knowing what they are saying; and similarly, if it was written in Greek and one heard it, one has fulfilled one's obligation, despite not knowing [the language]. This applies even if the hearer is a Hebrew-speaker. (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Megillah 2: 3) ... and the fact that it specifies "in Greek" rather than other languages is because they understood it. Thus observe the preceding statement: "Torah Scrolls too were only permitted to be written in Greek [and Hebrew]". And the reason is that they translated the Torah into Greek for King Ptolemy and this translation gained such currency that its wording became like a second language for them, as if it were Hebrew [...] Furthermore, this language had prestige for them. "And the non-Hebrew-speaker who hears it in Hebrew has fulfilled his obligation": because despite not knowing the meaning of every word, he knows the whole story. (Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, Megillah 2: 1) That the point of the Megillah recital is (a) to recite the text and (b) to communicate the gist of the miracle is stated explicitly and authoritatively in the discussions in the Babylonian Talmud - but emphasising that the audience need not have understood the Hebrew at all. The gist, as the commentator Rashi notes, can be had merely by asking others: "And the non-Hebrew-speaker who hears it in Hebrew has fulfilled his obligation": - But he doesn't know what they're saying! - This refers to women and the uneducated. An objection by Ravina: - But do we ourselves know the meaning of [the words] ha-ahashteranim beney ha-ramakhirn! The retort: - The duty of the Megillah is to read it out and to publicize the miracle; and here too [regarding women etc] the duty is to read it out and to publicize the miracle. (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 18a)

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

171

"And to publicize the miracle": Even if they do not know what they are hearing. They ask the audience, "What's this recital about? How did the miracle happen?", and are informed. (Rashi ad loc) The objection by Ravina that even the Rabbis themselves did not understand all the Hebrew text is a theme which we shall examine presently. First, though, let us see how some Halakhists articulate the concept of "publicizing the miracle" as warranting a positively relativistic attitude to the language of the Megillah: The RaN states: ...and since they do not know Hebrew, they were given dispensation [to hear the Megillah in the vernacular] - although they can at a pinch fulfil their obligation in Hebrew - because while there is the duty of recital the Sages realized that the duty of Publicizing the Miracle in the fullest sense of the word must take priority. (RaN, Megillah chapter 2, s.v. hakore et homegillah lemafrea) Moreover, the RaN argues that Publicizing the Miracle sets the recital of the Megillah in a class apart from the weekly public Reading of the Torah. The latter ceremony was not permitted in the vernacular; at the most, it might be read out in the authoritative Greek version. The RaN presumably viewed the Reading of the Torah as the central act of public study of the Hebrew Scriptures and thus closely tied to the text. In the case of the Megillah, by contrast, though it needed reciting word by word, broad "publicity" was paramount. 24 In the "typical" case of reading the Megillah in Hebrew, comprehension would appear to be a central concern. Halakhah stipulates that all remain silent throughout and concentrate on the reading. Yet there is no imperative here to learn the meaning of every word in advance. And this appears to hold true throughout almost the entire Halakhah of worship: the type of awareness required is a general awareness of the act 2 5 and a concentration on the individual words but not a theoretical understanding, let alone a running understanding, of the meaning of each word. One must of course bear in mind that the Halakhah throughout most of its history was not catering for native speakers of Hebrew; Hebrew was always a second language at best. And yet it is theoretically feasible for the Halakhah to have insisted on a full ability to translate each word. That it has not may be due in part to the notion of Hebrew as a transcendentally sacred tongue. We shall explore this notion presently. A sharp distinction between a duty simply to verbalize and hear texts and a duty to understand them has recently been articulated in the afore-cited responsum by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. With reference to an ancient women's ritual oath, which had to be administered in the vernacular, he writes:

172

Lewis H. Glinert

Perhaps by law one should first teach her the meaning of the [Hebrew] text of the oath so that she can be said to 'know' the language even though she is being made to swear in Hebrew? But no. The Gemara apparently finds it unreasonable to read two separate requirements into the Scriptural text. If what is required is Hebrew, then the main thing is to verbalize the words, and so there is no need for her to understand; but as she does have to understand, the main thing is clearly this knowledge and concentration during the oath, that being the reason for not distinguishing between Hebrew and other languages ... (Iggerot Moshe, Orah Hayyim, Part 1, 32) A permanent problem for comprehension was the uncertainty by the redactors of the Talmud themselves about certain rare words: An objection by Ravina: - But do we ourselves know the meaning of [the words] beney ha-ramakhiml (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 18a)

ha-ahashteranim

Although Jewish scholars throughout the ages proposed glosses for all manner of problem words (the RaN himself alludes to explanations for beney haramakhim26), the Halakhah has been able to accept the idea of not understanding the literal sense of the whole text. An interesting result has been the idea of reading the Megillah in translation but inserting Hebrew words such as ha-ahashteranim beney ha-ramakhim at the appropriate points - on the grounds that one cannot claim to translate words that one does not understand. 27 Rabbi Moshe Isserles ('the ReMA', 1525-1572) 2 8 went so far as to sanction a recital in two languages. This is not as bizarre as may first appear, for Jewish vernaculars themselves (e.g. Yiddish and Ladino) have utilized masses of Hebraisms and Aramaisms - though with little obvious rhyme or reason: the seemingly most Jewish-specific items, such as divine names, have been rendered into the vernacular as often as they have been retained as Hebraisms. (Some Halakhists have in fact denounced any attempt to translate divine names in worship.) And we find Rabbi Avraham Gombiner ('the Magen Avraham', 1635-1683) objecting de jure to reading the Megillah in two languages. 29 5.3 The idea that Publicizing the Miracle can be effected loosely by explaining the gist of the story to the masses opens the door to insisting upon Hebrew and condemning vernacular readings of the Megillah (despite the fact that the Mishnah sanctions them) - on both negative and positive grounds. In a correspondence between two Spanish jurists, Rabbi Yitzhak ben Sheshet Barfat (the RiVaSH, 1326-1408) and the RaN, the former rejects the widespread custom of reading the Megillah to women in Spanish, both because of the untranslatability problem and by virtue of the long and glorious tradition of Hebrew: 3 0

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

173

... and why put yourself in a dubious position and not follow the custom of our Sages, who read for women in Hebrew, as we can infer from their statement, "This refers to women and the uneducated". His correspondent elaborates upon this theme, adding a mystical note: Even in worldly matters any intelligent person plays safe to avoid even the remotest risk; how much more then should we do so in matters of Torah and precepts, which are cosmic mysteries [kivshono shel olam] , and how can we forsake the path our holy Rabbis trod ... (Responsa of the RiVaSH, 388). The "tradition of our fathers", frequently invoked in Halakhic discussion of language, represents more than mere traditionalism or ethnicity. 31 It reflects, in the first place, the Halakhic prominence of folk custom, often capable of engendering binding laws going way beyond the requirements of Rabbinic rulings. To quote the social historian Jacob Katz, with respect to 17th—18th century Ashkenazi society (1963: 195): The tradition by which society lives is a religious one, firstly in terms of phenomena pertaining to religion per se, and secondly because the very duty to uphold tradition - and not just palpably religious phenomena is religious in motivation. Even traditional phenomena of minor Halakhic significance, such as dress or spoken language, though not backed up with the full force of Halakhah, still enjoyed a secondary religious basis, at very least, [my translation] And in the case of the language of ritual, we are of course talking about custom that reaches back palably to Antiquity - and to the Sacred Texts themselves. The fact that Holy Scripture was couched in Hebrew, and above all the notion that Revelation took place in Hebrew, were bound to lend that language a very special status: indeed, a sacred tongue must hardly have seemed easy to render into a vernacular. It is in such a light that one must view the words of the RiVaSH and the RaN concerning "the custom of our Sages" and "the path our holy Rabbis trod". If it is hardly surprising that Hebrew ceased at some point in Antiquity to be a spoken vernacular, it is understandable that it should have been zealously maintained in set ritual - and perhaps slightly surprising that a detailed understanding of it was not considered more of an imperative. The mystical importance of reading the Megillah in Hebrew was more fully expressed by Rabbi Moshe Schreiber (the Hatam Sofer, 1763-1839) - citing both the positive qualities of Hebrew and the negative qualities of any other tongues, not linguistic or aesthetic qualities but metaphysical ones: It also holds on the tip of each letter mounds upon mounds of mysteries [sodot] and wondrous effects [segulot] for those that comprehend. One can

174

Lewis H. Glinert

use it to construct worlds and to protect oneself against others and to teach wisdom to the People of Israel ... (Hatam Sofer, Hiddushim, Megillah 9a) It appears to me that at the moment of Creation the only tongue was Hebrew, but following the generation of Babel it split into seventy tongues, and foreign tongues [la'az] are malicious talk [leshon hara], as we find the word la'az in the Gemara in the expression motzi la'az 'spread malicious talk', and all the languages are come into the World by force of the Babel generation that was evil, and for this reason another language is called la'az. (Hatam Sofer, Hiddushim, Megillah 17a) The transcendent conception of Hebrew can be traced back to the Midrash of Antiquity and recurs widely in Medieval philosophers and exegetes such as Judah Halevi and Nahmanides. Stern (forthcoming) has summarized it under four headings: "First, that language and speech can be literally ascribed to the Deity; second, that language serves as an instrument of creation and, thereby, itself is 'outside' rather than 'within' the created world; third, that names signify in virtue of expressing the natures of their bearers; and, fourth, that Hebrew is perfect - in fact the most perfect of all languages - in the degree to which its names 'fit' their referents and, for this metaphysical reason, is designated 'the Holy Language'." 32 The general notion of the metaphysical impurity of the Nations was a recurrent theme of the Zohar 33 with particularly wide currency since the 14th century. Applied negatively to the languages of the Nations, it does not seem to have been invoked in support of speaking Hebrew or even just in defence of traditional Jewish Creoles until the time of the Hatam Sofer, i.e. the end of the 18th century, coinciding with a concerted campaign by German Jewish intellectuals of the 'Berlin Enlightenment' and the Reform Movement to abandon Yiddish and adopt German. 34 Until this time, the use of a Judeo-German, Judeo-Spanish etc appears to have been taken for granted as a natural product of traditional Jewish life rather than as a means of avoiding la'az. Only in the context of ritual texts does the issue of language choice seem regularly to have been raised. In the face of the "mysteries and wondrous effects" mentioned by the Hatam Sofer, all question of the translatability or even the sheer comprehensibility of ritual Hebrew is rendered for him well-nigh vacuous. The language of ritual is presumed to act supernaturally on those who use it, whether actively or passively. Further light is cast on this theme by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein {ibid.). In disposing of all leaven in one's possession prior to the Passover festival, one must make a statement annulling it (Bittul). The question at stake is why some major Halakhists have ruled that a Hebrew Bittul need not be understood word for word - whereas a Bittul in the vernacular must. Rabbi Feinstein profers two hypotheses, one empirical and the other metaphysical. The first revolves around familiarity with the particular formula: even if one does not understand the familiar Hebrew formula word for word, one knows what it is about, and such general intent to

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

175

annull is legally adequate. (This may seem to beg the question as to why, say, a Russian-speaker using an English formula cannot also be content with a general intent to annull.) The explanation is perhaps that in Hebrew and also in the kol hamira, which is a specific [Aramaic] form of words for the Bittul, the whole formula is regarded as one idea, and it is an expression of the annullment of leaven, so there is no need for one to understand each word too. But in other languages, in which such words have not become uniquely associated [nityahadu] with annullment but rather the words refer to the idea of annullment, one must properly understand the meaning of the words. Consequently, in our locations with their custom of using the Aramaic kol hamira formula rather than the Hebrew formula, only the kol hamira formula will be adequate for someone who understands the overall idea rather than the individual words, whereas in Hebrew one must understand the individual words just as with any other languages. The second hypothesis rests upon the "essential" quality of the Holy Tongue. The loosest awareness of the implications of a statement effects a speech act: Another point is that a statement in Hebrew, which is a language of the essence [be-etzem], automatically conveys the idea of annullment; and as uttering something without meaning it does not effect an annullment, it is by knowing that these words contain the idea of annullment that one may be said to mean them. But in other languages, which are only deemed languages by individual national convention (cf. the RaN at the beginning of Nedarim: this only stems from the lexical understanding of each people in its language, a matter of convention) [...] it is not a language at all in the hands of those who do not understand it [...] So although one knows that these words convey the idea of annullment, if one does not understand each word it amounts to saying nothing [...] Thus only in Hebrew can one do one's duty without understanding each word, even in our localities; whereas the Aramaic kol hamira is like any language, which requires understanding of each word even in our localities - thus there is a major distinction between these two explanations. While the present discussion does not seek to trace the Halakhah historically or socially, it is notable that the rise of secularization and the Reform Movement has prompted a particular emphasis on using Hebrew and avoiding la'az. Particularly interesting is the code of Rabbi Yehiel Michael Epstein (1829-1908). After making a detailed theoretical defence of vernacular reading of the Megillah (including bilingual readings, and even recitals by those who do not speak that particular language), he executes a volte-face and warns in practice any such ideas:

176

Lewis H. Glinert

... and all this is theoretical law [me'ikar ha-din], but in practice it is impossible to do one's duty with a Megillah written in the vernacular and we have never heard of such a thing [...] for one would have to write it by the strict rules of that language [...] and what can one do with ha-ahashteranim beney ha-ramakhim for it is untranslatable and one should not insert it as it stands for one should not write a bilingual Megillah ... (Arukh Hashulhan, 690, sections 12-14) He concludes with a verbatim citation from the RaN concerning the glorious tradition of Hebrew. But even more explicitly, concerning the language for the twice-daily reading of the Shema, he declares that for some eigthy years it has been recognized that many words are untranslatable - and denounces those who would abandon the Holy Tongue in favour of prayer in the vernacular. 5.4 Let us now turn briefly from the philosophical to the sociological. While Halakhah is not bound to be a reliable guide to folk practice, even in the most traditionalist circles, 35 it appears that the reading of the Megillah today in the Orthodox world does reflect the latter-day Halakhic emphasis on Hebrew. Ritual recital from a vernacular Megillah appears to be unknown. Given that Hebrew education is far from good, particularly for women, 3 6 this probably means that most who hear the Megillah do not understand a significant portion of it and many understand very little in word-for-word terms. A loose Publicizing of the Miracle is treated as adequate. A further indication that the recital of the Megillah is, and has been seen as, a fairly loose act of Publicizing the Miracle is the acceptance by Rabbi Joseph ben Me'ir Teomim (author of Pri Megadim, ca. 1727-1792) - endorsed this century by the widely authoritative Mishnah Berurah - of the situation that it is generally impossible to hear every word, particularly because young people have the custom to drown out each mention of the name of the Wicked Haman (this name recurs scores of times): The Pri Megadim wrote: "All who are pious |yere shamayim, i.e. stringent] should ideally [nakhon she-yihye lo] have a regulation Megillah to hand and read in a whisper word by word, as it is impossible to hear the whole thing from the official reader, particularly as the young people are disruptive". (Mishnah Berurah, 690, letter 26) Hearing every word, or merely being potentially able to hear every word, is thus being treated as an ideal for the stringent - despite the oft-repeated rulings in the codes about the necessity to hear each and every word. Shortly before, commenting on the 16th century ruling by the Shulhan Arukh that "it is a good custom to bring boys and girls to hear the reading of the Megillah", he observes:

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

177

And now the reverse is the case (and the blame is ours): not only do they not listen but they disrupt, so that adults cannot hear either, and the sole reason they come is for some "Haman-bashing" [...] and for educational purposes every father must keep his children with him and ensure that they listen to the reading, and when the reader reaches the mention of "Haman" the child can bang as normal but this should not be the main reason for bringing him. And now it is desirable that everyone have a regulation Megillah from which to read each word, as one cannot hear the reader through the din of sticks and shouting ... (Mishnah Berurah, 689, letters 18-19) In the equally influential code of Rabbi Shelemo Ganzfried (1804-1886), Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, section 141, the regulation of not missing a word and the custom of "Haman-bashing" again appear cheek by jowl. The reader is warned to wait patiently each time till the din has subsided. Particularly ironic is the predicament of women, screened from the reading by a curtain or even a partition wall: ... and similarly for all knowledgeable women standing in the women's section, it would be good for them to have, if possible, a regulation Megillah to read from, as it is difficult to hear there and women are dutybound to hear just like men ... The present writer's own experience is of never having attended a communal reading which was not regularly punctuated by cacaphonic stamping, hooting, rattling etc, to the general amusement of the entire gathering and the acquiescence of the rabbi. To hear every word is a problem. Few bring their own scrolls; few probably possess one. Thus the act of reading the Megillah would appear in practice to mediate between two goals: a technical reciting of a written sacred text (with various conditions, typical of a conventional recital, that we have not enumerated) and a publicizing of the miraculous story-line of this text. The Halakhah has gone some way to elaborating these goals and to articulating a philosophy of speech to accompany them - while folk practice has condensed these goals into some sort of reality. For both, this has involved conflicts of value: between the sanctity of the original and its incomprehensibility, between the decorum of a technically correct reading and the exhilaration of getting the message.

6. Summary We have examined the articulation of certain Halakhic speech acts, with reference to language attitudes and particularly language choice. Taking marriage declarations, vows and oaths, and the Recital of the Megillah, we have distinguished two,

178

Lewis H. Glinert

possibly three trends in attitudes to language choice: respectively - a relativistic, naturalistic conception (fully relativistic and possibly semi-relativistic) as against a semi-absolute Hebrew-centered conception. Elaboration of this distinction brings with it notions such as felicitous communication, knowledge of a language, secular vs sacred language, substandard vs norm, dialect and Creole, artificial vs natural language, euphemism and distortion of language. Arguably, these Halakhic attitudes can be ascribed to an ideal two- or threeway distinction between acts that have a material effect - interpersonal communication (e.g. declaration of marriage) and speech acts addressed to God that have a natural material effect (e.g. vows and oaths) - and those that are metaphysical rather than material in their effect (acts of worship). The Recital of the Megillah ('The Scroll of Esther'), while in many respects a typical act of worship, exemplifies the presence of other factors interfering with this ideal division, in this case the duty of 'Publicizing the Miracle' that adds to worship a note of interpersonal responsibility. Behind all such Halakhic discussion can be sensed the actual folk-practice - in many respects a product of such attitudes, but frequently an active catalyst in the Jewish legislative process.

Notes * I am indebted to Rabbi Dr. Yaakov Reinitz and Rabbi Simcha Liebermann for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Any errors are entirely mine. 1. See, for example, Jackson (1985, ch. 1). 2. See, e.g., Baldinger (1980: 42-61). 3. A major recent contribution in this sphere is Greenawalt (1989). 4. For the concept of religious vis-a-vis secular legislation with particular reference to India, see Smith (1963) and Madan (1987). 5. On the general nature and development of Halakhah, see for example Katz (1984), Urbach (1986) and Roth (1986). A succinct description of Talmudic law is Steinsaltz (1976) and Weiss-Halivni (1986). Halakhah is grounded in the ancient Rabbinic interpretation of the laws of the Pentateuch, supplemented by copious elaborations and precautions, as well as by further, distinct Rabbinic enactments. The most authoritative Halakhic resource is the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 200-500 C.E.), on which later Halakhists generally seek to base themselves. Somewhat less authoritative is the contemporaneous Jerusalem Talmud. (Both Talmuds also contain much philosophical - aggadic matter.) Among the many codes and case-books written since then, some have in turn achieved much authority and are regularly cited and re-articulated. Sometimes, however, halakhists have also appealed to the more philosophical matter in the Talmud and in the Kabbalah. 6. Specific aspects of folk Judaism have been studied by, e.g., Danziger (1989), Friedman (1987), Heilman (1973, 1983, 1988), Helmreich (1982) and Glinert (1985).

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

179

7. For references to other early sources (Tosefta, Midrashim and Beraytot) see the Commentary to the Mishnah by H. Albeck, Sotah 7: 3, endnotes. 8. See Rabin (1976) and Spolsky (1983). 9. ashurit is literally 'Assyrian', denoting the post-Exilic Hebrew script introduced from AssyriaBabylon (as against the pre-Exilic ivrit script) - and by extension the Hebrew language too. 10. As defined in Elon (1975: 356), "The kiddushin is an act performed between a man and a woman which leads to a change in their personal status, i.e. from bachelorhood to a status which remains unchanged until the death of either party or their divorce." 11. A contrary view is held by Serkes (Bayit Hadash) and Shemuel of Furth (Beyt Shemuel). 12. The precise socioeconomic background to these distinctions is beyond the scope of this study. 13. Elon (1975: 70) observes that this relativism (technically termed le-fi leshon benei adam 'according to the common usage of the people') applied more generally to deeds: "The terms which appear in a deed are to be given their broad meaning as used by people in their everyday speech and not interpreted according to their meaning in the language of the Torah and the scholars [...] The scholars drew a parallel between the interpretation of terms in documents and those by a person in making a vow." 14. See Elon (1975: 619) and Encyclopedia

Judaica, v. 16, pp. 227-8.

15. The same ruling was made by Shelomo ben Yehiel Luria ('the Maharshal'), Bava Batra 164b, concerning Nazirite vows. For a somewhat different account of the kinnuy, see Falk (1981: 174). 16. Iggerot Moshe 32, subsection d, with regard both to the foregoing and to the ruling of the Maharshal (see preceding note). 17. On the concepts lashon tzeha and tzahut, first introduced as a Jewish linguistic value by Saadiah Gaon in the ninth century, see Goldenberg (1973). The background to claims for the "excellence" of the Hebrew language is dealt with in Halkin (1963) and Roth (1983). 18. This point is made by Rabbi Aharon Yaffen in his annotations to Hiddushey Haritva (fn. 39). 19. See Rabin (1976), Spolsky (1983) and Glinert (1987). 20. We earlier referred to another explanation, by Rabbi Yohanan. That explanation became halakhically binding. 21. lashon, the Hebrew for 'a language', also means 'a term, a terminology'. We have here rendered it as 'terminology', because it is clearly used in that sense by the RaN on Nedarim 10a(s.v. leshon ummot hen). See also Rashi ad loc (s.v. lashon shebadu lahen hakhamim). 22. How to define 'act of worship' in Halakhah is no easy task. One might start from the BiblicalRabbinic term avodah 'service', used of the ancient sacrificial ritual and of prayer (avodah sheba-lev 'service of the heart'). On the other hand, one might see no particular distinction between sacrificial rituals and a host of other ritual acts required by the Torah, many of which - like the sacrifices - were or are accompanied by prayer. Instead one might single out prayer as "worship". But the definition of prayer is itself problematic: Halakhic worship, both public and private, typically combines direct acts of beseeching and praise in the second person and talk of oneself and of the Creator in the first and third person. Furthermore, some of these "prayers" are a recital of Biblical and Talmudic passages, the selfsame passages that are elsewhere recited as an act of "study". The texts themselves do not suggest a self-evident boundary line between worship and study. There are, however, a number of phenomenological and objective grounds for drawing a distinction between worship and study (Glinert 1985).

180

Lewis H. Glinert

23. Elsewhere in his code, Maimonides makes similar mention of normative language in Hilkhot Keri'at Shema 2: 10, concerning the twice-daily recital of the Shema text: A man may read the Shema in any language he understands. And anyone reading in a sundry language must beware of corruption [shibush] in that language and must be as meticulous in that language as he is meticulous in the Holy Tongue. His contemporary, The RAVaD (ad loc) rejects this ruling and the very idea of a meticulous translation - whatever may be the internal standards of a particular language: This makes no sense, for all languages are paraphrases, and how can one be meticulous with one's paraphrase? 24. Indeed, ancient regulations stipulate far greater care for the writing of the Torah scroll than for that of the Megillah. 25. The issue of intent in worship has long occupied Halakhists. See for example Maimonides Hilkhot Berakhot 1 : 1 1 , Rabbenu Yonah on TB Berakhot ch. 1 (s.v. patah uverakh bedeshikhra), Penei Yehoshua on TB Berakhot ch. 2 (s.v. shema mina mitzvot tzerikhot kavanah), Hiddushei Rabbenu Hayyim Halevi on Maimonides Hilkhot Tefilah. (I am indebted to Prof. B. Septimus for some of these references.) 26. See Responsa of the RiVaSH (Responsum of the RaN to the RiVaSH), section 390. 27. See Caro, Beyt Yosef, 690, s.v. megillah; Shulhan, section 13.

and ad loc Mishnah

Berurah,

letter 34; Arukh

Ha-

28. Gloss to Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 690, sections 10-11. 29. Section 690, letter 12. 30. He in fact opens by denouncing those who perform Spanish readings of the Megillah to women on a technicality, which has no bearing on recital in the vernacular (e.g. to oneself) per se. Whilst the historical background to Halakhah is not our concern, these strongly pro-Hebrew sentiments may reflect a particular crisis for Hebrew; they are not found in earlier codes (e.g. Maimonides and the Tur). 31. See for example Eastman (1984). The virtues of the Israelites in maintaining their identity in dress, name and language during the Slavery to the Pharoahs is an ancient Midrashic theme that recurs in Medieval and Modern Traditionalist Jewish thought. See Glinert (1987) and Glinert & Shilhav (forthcoming). 32. See further Scholem (1965, especially pp. 71-77) and (1972) and Glinert (1987). 33. See Tishbi (1949, vol. 1, 240ff.). 34. For further religious polemics in favour of maintaining Yiddish, see Glinert & Shilhav (forthcoming). A striking variation on this theme, seeking a metaphysical bond between Hebrew and Yiddish or other foreign tongues, is analyzed in Loewenthal (forthcoming). For polemics concerning the use of Hebrew or German for ritual, see Petuchowski (1968) and Waxman (1958: 43-50). 35. Examples abound in Katz (1963). 36. Scant hard data is available. On Hebrew knowledge in nineteenth century Eastern Europe, see Stampfer (forthcoming).

Language choice and the Halakhic speech act

181

References Baldinger, K. 1980 Semantic Theory, ed. R. Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Danziger, M. H. 1989 Returning to tradition: The contemporary revival of Orthodox Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eastman, C. M. 1984 "Language, ethnic identity and change", in: J. Edwards (ed.), Linguistic minorities, policies and pluralism. London: Academic Press, 259-276. Elon, M. 1975 The Principles of Jewish Law. Jerusalem: Encyclopedia Judaica. Falk, Z. W. 1981 Law and Religion: The Jewish experience. Jerusalem: Mesharim. Friedman, M. 1987 "Life tradition and book tradition in the development of Ultraorthodox Judaism", in: Harvey E. Goldberg (ed.), Judaism viewed from within and without. Albany: SUNY Press, 235-255. Glinert, L. H. 1985 Aspects of British Judaism. Occasional Papers, XI, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 1987 "Hebrew", in: Arthur A. Cohen & Paul Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish religious thought. New York: Scribners Sons, 325-330. Glinert, L. H. and Y. Shilhav in press "Holy land, holy language: Language and territory in an ultraorthodox Jewish ideology", Language in Society. Goldenberg, E. 1973 "lyyunim ba-Egron la-rav se'adyah ga'on" [Studies in Rabbi Saadiah Gaon's Egron], Leshonenu 37: 117-136. Halkin, A. S. 1963 "The Medieval Jewish attitude towards Hebrew", in: A. Altman (ed.), Biblical and other studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heilman, S. 1973 Synagogue life: A study in symbolic interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983 The people of the book: Drama, fellowship and religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1988 "Jews and Judaica: Who owns and buys what?" in: Walter P. Zenner (ed.), Persistence and flexibility: Anthropological perspectives on the American Jewish experience. Albany: SUNY Press, 260-279. Helmreich, W. 1982 The world of the Yeshiva: An intimate portrait of Orthodox Jewry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jackson, B. S. 1985 Semiotics and legal theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Katz, J. 1961 Tradition and crisis: Jewish society at the end of the Middle Ages. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. 1984 Halakhah and Kabbalah, [in Hebrew] Jerusalem: Magnes Press.

182 Loewenthal, N. in press Madan, T. N. 1987 Petuchowski, J. 1968 Pines, S. (ed.) 1963 Rabin, C. E. 1976

Roth, J. 1986 Roth, N. 1983 1985 Scholem, G. 1965 1972 Smith, D. E. 1963 Spolsky, B. 1983 Stampfer, S. in press Steinsaltz, A. 1976 Stern. J. in press

Lewis H. Glinert

"Hebrew and the Habad communication ethos", in: L. H. Glinert (ed.), Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A language in exile. New York: Oxford University Press. "Secularism in its place", Journal of Asian Studies 46: 747-759. Prayerbook reform in Europe. New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism. The guide of the perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. "Hebrew and Aramaic in the first century", in: S. Safrai & M. Stem (eds.), Compendia Rerum ludicarum ad Novum Testamentum II. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1007-1039. The Halakhic process: A systemic analysis. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America. "Jewish reactions to the 'Arabiyya and the renaissance of Hebrew in Spain'", Journal of Semitic Studies 28, 1: 63-84. "Maimonides on Hebrew language and poetry", Hebrew Studies 26, 1: 93-101. "The meaning of the Torah in Jewish mysticism", in: G. Scholem, The Kabbalah and its Symbolism. New York: Schocken "The name of God and the linguistic theory of the Kabbalah", in: Diogenes 79-80: 57-80, 164-194. India as a secular state. Bombay. "Triglossia and literacy in Jewish Palestine of the first century", Journal of the Sociology of Language 42: 95-109.

International

"Knowledge of Hebrew in its social context in Eastern Europe", in: L. H. Glinert (ed.), Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A language in exile. New York: Oxford University Press. The essential Talmud. New York: Bantam. "Maimonides on language and the science of language", in: Maimonides Sciences (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science).

and the

Tishbi, Y. 1949-61 Mishnat Ha-Zohar. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. Urbach, E. E. 1986 The Halakhah: Its sources and development. Tel Aviv: Massada (Yad la-Talmud). Waxman, M. 1958 Tradition and change. New York. Weiss-Halivni, D. 1986 Midrash, Mishnah and Gemara: The Jewish predilection for justified law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Individual and social in language change: Diachronic changes in politeness agreement in forms of address Charles A. Ferguson

Tying together findings from macro- and micro-level research has been recognized as a major problem since the earliest days of explicitly sociolinguistic research, and Joshua Fishman's has been one of the clearest voices calling attention to it (Fishman 1972). The present paper explores some aspects of this problem in one traditional area of sociolinguistic research - forms of address. It does so from the pragmatic perspective of politeness phenomena and in terms of a recognized area of linguistic theory - grammatical agreement. It describes some mismatch phenomena in politeness agreement with second person pronouns in two languages, Persian and Portuguese, for which both macro- and micro-studies are available. Finally, it offers some cross-language generalizations that can be tested from other languages. The study of forms of address has been a fruitful area of sociolinguistic research, beginning with the frequently cited and reprinted classic paper of Brown & Gilman (1960) that has served as stimulus and model for hundreds of subsequent studies.1 From the original focus on the use of different second person pronouns this research has moved steadily to the analysis of larger systems of address forms that include pronouns, kinterms, names, titles, epithets, and interjections (cf. Bean 1978, Parkinson 1985). The most recent information on the state of research and theory is generally found in the publications of the Kiel research project on address forms, especially Braun 1988 and Winter 1984. Braun et al. 1986 provides an annotated bibliography of over 1100 items. Recent attempts at explanatory theory include Braun 1988: 7-67, 253-296; Brown & Levinson 1987: 198-204 et passim; Joseph 1987. Politeness phenomena in language have become an increasingly recognized research topic from a variety of perspectives, the best known general treatment being that of Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987), which offers a detailed model that is intended to be universal, based on the notions of positive and negative politeness and face threatening acts (FTAs). Brown & Gilman (1989) analyze some forms of address phenomena using this model. Recent interest in grammatical agreement can be conveniently dated to the "universals" paper by Moravcsik (1978). Agreement phenomena, by which one grammatical element matches another in terms of some categorial feature, present a challenge to contemporary theories of grammar, and linguists of different theo-

184

Charles A. Ferguson

retical approaches and interested in different languages have struggled with agreement issues (cf. ESCOL 1984, Barlow & Ferguson 1988). Agreement in features of politeness has, however, received very little attention, often not being noted in lists of possible agreement features (e.g. Pullum 1985: 80-81, Lapointe 1988: 71).

1. Second person politeness agreement The two commonest patterns of grammatical agreement in languages are subjectverb agreement in such features as person, number, and gender and internal noun phrase agreement in such features as number, gender, case, and definiteness. Politeness agreement in forms of address may appear in either or both of these types in a given speech community. For example, if the speech community makes use of a language that has two or more second person subject pronouns of different politeness levels, the verb may show agreement with them in its subject markers. Thus in Bengali the verbs in (1) abc agree with the subject pronouns in politeness level. (1) you speak a. tui bolis you ('inferior') speak b. tumi bolo you ('ordinary') speak you ('honorific') speak c. apni bolen Likewise, a language that has two or more subject pronouns of different politeness levels may show agreement between these subject pronouns and corefential object pronouns or possessive adjectives or pronouns. Thus, in Bengali the possessives in (2) abc agree with the subject pronouns. (2) you forgot your book a. tui tor boi bhule gechis you (i) your (i) book forgetting went b. tumi tomar boi bhule gcecho you(o) your(o) book forgetting went c. apni apnar boi bhule gcechen you(h) your(h) book forgetting went These two forms of agreement in Bengali are quite straightforward, being similar to those in hundreds of languages. In Bengali, as tends to be the case in general, the number of grammatical categories overtly marked in the independent pronouns is greater than the number of categories overtly marked in the subject affixes, i.e. some features are neutralized in the verb affixes. For example, the pronouns are obligatorially marked for number (sg tui, tumi, apni; pi. tora, tomra, apnara), but there is no number distinction in the verb. Also, the honorific verb forms do not distinguish between second and third person honorific as the independent pronouns do (e.g. apni, tini bden 'you(h), he/she(h) speak(s)'). Bengali is a so-called "pro-drop" language in which the independent subject

Individual and social in language change

185

pronoun need not to be present but the subject marker on the verb must be. Also Bengali normally has no overt copula in present or timeless constructions, as in (3) abc, although in other tense/aspect categories a verb of being (ho-, ach-, thak-) appears, with appropriate subject marker suffixes (Ferguson 1972). (3) are you his brother? a. tui-ki or bhai you(i)-Q that.one's brother b. tumi-ki or bhai you(o)-Q that.one's brother c. apni-ki or bhai you(h)-Q that.ones brother Analytic problems arise of mismatches in agreement features, directionality of agreement, and the agreement status of omitted copula or verb arguments, and such problems would be treated differently depending on the analyst's grammatical theory or method of analysis. These syntactic phenomena are, however, in no way unusual or anomalous. Also, the conditions for occurrence or non-occurrence of the omissible items are, as usual, based on discourse structure or pragmatic considerations, as are the conditions for the selection of the appropriate politeness level of pronouns of the same person. Thus, these two examples of politeness agreement in Bengali make clear the kind of phenomena to be discussed in this paper. Some speech communities make use of languages that do not show politeness levels in pronouns but indicate politeness in forms of address by other means. For example, differences in the form of personal names in address may be very similar in communicative function to differences in politeness level in second person pronouns, as were pointed out in Brown & Ford (1961). More generally, politeness levels conditioned by the identity of speaker and addressee and their conversational strategies may appear in a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors. Patterned cooccurrences of various politeness markers in forms of address often belong with lexical collocational constraints, systems of textual cohesion, or patterns of social interaction, but sometimes they belong clearly in the realm of grammatical agreement, as in the examples discussed here.

2. Diachronic change One of the most common diachronic changes in pronominal systems is the introduction of a morphological or lexical distinction between the ordinary second person singular pronoun and a more deferential, formal, "polite" second person singular. Another common change is from predominantly nonreciprocal patterns to more reciprocal or symmetrical patterns. Presumably changes of these kinds are part of (and thus signal) significant social changes such as some kind of social

186

Charles A. Ferguson

class differentiation or the appearance of new social roles, and the changes make their way through the community from certain innovators and transmitters to ever larger sectors of the community. Like other sociolinguistic changes, a pronominal change such as these presumably moves from occasional variable behavior by a few people in limited contexts toward categorical behavior by larger numbers of people in a broad range of contexts. In the narrow aspect of linguistic form, the innovation of a polite 2nd sg may take any of a number of different routes, such as the use of an honorific noun (e.g. 'excellence', 'grace', 'highness'), a third person pronoun (e.g. 'she', 'they'), or a word for 'self as the new polite form, contrasting with the original second person singular pronoun. The most common of the various routes seems to be the use of the original second person plural to serve as a polite singular (Brown & Levinson 1987: loc. cit., Head 1978, Svennung 1958: 373-393). If this first step is taken (i.e. plural for polite singular), alternative succeeding possibilities may be selected. For example, the change in linguistic form may stop here, as in French, where tu is the original 2nd sg and vous is now three ways ambiguous, meaning 2nd pi ordinary, 2nd sg polite, and 2nd pi polite. Another route is the creation of new plurals for the two singulars and the original 2nd pi loses its plural sense. This is the case in Bengali, where tui is the original 2nd sg and tumi the original 2nd pi and there are now two plurals, tora, the plural of tui, and tomra, the plural of tumi (Chatterji 1926: 816-820). In this particular case a third level has come into existence from another source: the word apni 'self has come to be used as more polite than tumi, and it has acquired the plural apnara (Chatterji 1926: 846-851). English is an example of a language in which a still different route is taken - one quite unusual among the languages of the world. After the plural ye/you came to be used as a polite singular and the objective you absorbed the nominative ye, the original plural swallowed up the singular almost completely, leaving the singular thou/thee only very marginal uses limited to certain registers and certain social groups (Byrne 1936, Leith 1983: 106-110, Brown & Gilman 1989). With whatever route is taken, alternative agreement patterns are possible. For example, in languages such as French and Russian where the original plural pronoun is multiply ambiguous, the predicate agreement patterns may require singular agreement for real-world singulars and plural agreement for real-world plurals. Comrie 1975 examines some of the variety of predicate agreement patterns with "polite plurals" in ten languages and suggests important crosslanguage generalizations. His generalizations, however, have nothing to say about the value of semantic disambiguation, and - for the purposes of the present paper - have nothing at all to say about the communicative functions of the patterns. Corbett (1988: 50) recognizes the general issue and recommends research: "The choice between agreement options is influenced by a range of sociolinguistic

Individual and social in language change

187

factors ... analysis will require either extensive and careful informant work or the scanning of large corpora (or preferably both)". A few detailed studies of historical change in pronominal address systems are available, chiefly from Germanic and Romance languages. Particularly valuable for our purposes are Lapesa's articles on the history of Spanish second person pronouns and related phenomena (Lapesa 1970, 1978). At least one study (Head 1981) attempts to relate present-day variation in pronouns of address to the nature and rate of diachronic change, by comparing the rate of decrease in the use of V in addressing parents in different urban centers, as the system moves toward TT for parent-child interaction.

3. Macro and micro In spite of Fishman's efforts, the research stream of relatively large-scale analysis of speech community characteristics and the stream of relatively small-scale analysis of individual behavior and dyadic and small group interaction rarely meet. One area in which serious attempts have been made to connect the two kinds of research is that of phonological change, where sociolinguists are searching for a general theoretical model (e.g. Labov 1972, Milroy & Milroy 1985). The productive research methods used in the original Brown & Gilman paper were varied but were largely 'macro' in effect, providing considerable information on the forms and uses of pronouns of address in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (and a little on other languages) and in addition offering a general semantic framework for analysis and a hypothesis of a universal historical process of change. The authors made use of (a) direct observation of behavior in long conversations with speakers of these languages, (b) elicitation of informants' selfreport by questionnaires and interviews, (c) analysis of written texts: letters, legal proceedings, plays, and other literary texts, and (d) consultation of secondary sources: language histories and published descriptions of pronoun semantics in particular languages. Some later investigators have made use of more 'micro' research methods, chiefly the analysis of recorded spontaneous conversation and the sequential analysis of conversation in modern dramas. A few investigators have even used experimental intervention (cf. Lambert & Tucker 1976). The studies of Persian and Portuguese examined here are among the very few that have combined macro and micro levels of analysis. The Persian study, reported in Baumgardner 1982, was based in the first instance on a 108-item questionnaire administered in an open-ended interview format to 125 native speakers of Persian, born in Tehran or having lived there at least 20 years. The respondents varied in social class, sex, and age ( 3 x 2 x 3 design). The self-report data from these interviews were recorded. The micro data

188

Charles A. Ferguson

consisted of some 20 hours of telephone conversations of a 23-year-old female with 29 different interlocutors - family, friends, and strangers (wrong numbers). The woman herself and many of the interlocutors were among the respondents of the questionnaire-interviews, making it possible to check self-report against actual behavior. One study of Brazilian Portuguese, reported in Head 1976 and elsewhere, was based on written responses to questionnaires from 137 young adults, all highschool teachers, university students, or both. Thus, the respondents were very similar in age, educational level, and income, but from different geographical areas. Four large cities (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Salvador) and a smaller city inland in the state of Sao Paulo are represented in the data. Another study, reported in Jensen 1981 and elsewhere, was based on "many hundreds of written questionnaires and many hours of recordings obtained in the capital city and interior areas of the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Ceara" (Jensen 1981: 53). The micro data on Brazilian Portuguese come from the extensive dialogue in a popular modern novel, Jorge Amado's Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos ('Dona Flor and her two husbands'). This novel has a very large cast of characters of varied ages and social classes, and the dialogue takes place under a great variety of circumstances, from quite usual ones to scenes of sheer fantasy. Jensen (1982) rates the dialogue as "natural, colloquial" and claims that "the conventions used to depict social relationships through dialogue [are] the same ones recognized and used by the community."

4. The case of Persian The pronominal forms of address in Persian have not been described in detail until recently. Grammars and dictionaries of modern Persian usually treat the second person pronouns and related address forms very briefly and without discussion of sociolinguistic variation or change in progress. Recent treatment of the Persian pronominal forms of address may be dated to Hodge (1957), which deals with a range of sociolinguistic variation in modem spoken Persian and includes explicit treatment of forms of address. The first systematic study with a substantial number of subjects and quantitative data is that of Jahangiri's unpublished dissertation (Jahangiri 1980). Batani (1976) contains a paper on forms of address based on observations in Tehran, and Beeman (1986), based on extended participant observation in the city of Shiraz, a large village near Shiraz, and a number of other sites in Iran, includes an informative and insightful account of the subject (147-151). Baumgardner, however, offers the fullest treatment, although unfortunately his paper on radio dramas (1978) and his Ph.D. dissertation (1982) remain unpublished. Early Modern Persian had the simple singular-plural opposition to : soma with

Individual and social in language change

189

corresponding object and possessive forms, both independent and enclitic/affixal, and agreeing subject markers as suffixes on the verb. This system remains in use in some rural dialects today, but most Modern Persian, including the standard spoken and written varieties, exhibits the innovation of using the plural soma also as a polite singular. An elaborate politeness system of forms of address which includes lexical replacements for pronouns, such as jenab-e ali 'exalted sir' for 'you', and a set of "self-lowering" and "other-raising" lexical replacements for some common verbs is in place (Baumgardner 1982, Beeman 1986); here, however, only the pronoun forms proper will be discussed. The possessive/objective suffixes and verb subject markers corresponding to to and soma are as in table 1. Table 1. Persian second person pronouns independent pronouns

poss/obj suffixes

subject marker suffixes

to soma

-at -etan

-i -id

'you (sg)' 'you (pi; pol sg)'

A new form, somaha 'you (pi)', appears in informal speech, resolving the singular: plural ambiguity of soma, but apparently not differentiating the to and soma politeness levels. There is no evidence of the appearance of *toha as unambiguous T plural and concurrent restriction of somaha to the value of V plural, but this possibility for future development remains open. It must be noted that the -id ending alternates with -in. This difference, which apparently earlier was a regional dialect variation reflecting two different developments of earlier Persian verb morphology, has become a register variation, so that in Tehran and elsewhere today the -id is a more formal variant alongside the more informal colloquial -in. The mismatch in grammatical agreement which is the focus of this paper is the occurrence of the independent pronoun soma with (a) the verb ending -i appropriate for to agreement and/or (b) the possessive/objective suffix -cet instead of -etan. The results of the extensive macro research of Baumgardner (1982) show that the use of TT, VV, TV, VT patterns in dyadic interaction varies in relation to differences in age, gender, social class, and the presence of 'outsiders' (in the course of family interaction). Since the research was limited to Tehran and vicinity, no regional differences were noted. The data came from self-report in response to (a) an elaborate 100-item questionnaire, each item containing multiple subquestions, (b) 8 specific attitudinal questions, and (c) a 21-item information sheet to identify the respondent in terms of a variety of possibly pertinent factors. This result offers a detailed, informative analysis of the relationship of Iranian

190

Charles A. Ferguson

(pre-Revolutionary) social organization and patterns of verbal communication. This kind of analysis contrasts sharply with the few lines of description of 2nd person pronouns offered by grammars of modern Persian, which provide almost no indication of the range of uses of to and soma. This kind of data, however, does not deal with how the T/V system is used "in ways which vary from the idealized usages associated with the demographic categories of social class, sex, and age" (Baumgardner 1982: 169). Also it does not show how a speaker uses the system, for example, "to express a transient attitude or feeling, or manipulatively, to get the addressee to act in a desired manner" (Baumgardner loc. cit.). In particular, it does not reveal the agreement mismatches that are the topic of the present paper. Baumgardner's microanalysis is largely congruent with the self-report data, but it introduces the systematic use of mixed forms (M), i.e. the use of soma with T morphology. Thus in addition to the four patterns examined in the macro analysis, there are five patterns in which at least one of the interlocutors used a mixed form: MM, MT, MV, TM, VM. These new patterns neatly subdivide patterns of the macro analysis. The speaker, for example, split the VT patterns she used in talking with her parents and a set of uncle/aunt/in-law relations into MT for parents and VT for the others. In each case the use of the mixed form combined intimacy (close kin) with respect (older age). The micro analysis also showed switches during a conversation that revealed stages in changing from one pattern to another as the signaling of intimacy increased, and revealed that particular components of the genre (telephone conversation) were the loci of the incipient change of levels. Some speakers of Persian do not admit to using this kind of mismatch; others recognize its use when attention is called to it. It has very occasionally been noted in descriptions of Persian (e.g. Lazard 1957), and at least one modern Iranian novelist, Ismael Fasih, has used it to literary effect (Baumgardner 1982: 169). It is a striking example of the stretching of a grammatical pattern for communicative functions, a phenomenon that is probably widespread in human language behavior but rarely noted in grammars or in discussions of syntactic theory. At the same time, we may hypothesize that the use of mixed forms is an indication of a change in progress toward increased use of the reciprocal TT pattern, a kind of diachronic change reported in the original Brown and Gilman paper, and hypothesized also in the Portuguese case to be described next (cf. Head 1981).

5. The case of Portuguese The pronominal forms of address in Portuguese have been the object of many studies (e.g. Braun 1988: 77-99, Head 1976, Kilbury-Meissner 1982; extensive bibliography in Head 1976), and at least two extensive sociolinguistic studies of forms of address in Brazilian Portuguese were conducted in the 1970s (cf. Head

Individual and social in language change

191

1976, Jensen 1981). Portuguese (and predecessor varieties of Latin) had the simple singular-plural opposition tu : vos with corresponding object and possessive forms and agreeing subject-markers as suffixes on the verb. At some point a noun phrase "your mercy" came to be used as a polite singular that was in due course shortened to voce and acquired a plural voces. As voce lost some of its significance of politeness or high status it moved toward equivalence with tu, and a new polite form o senhor 'the lord' or 'the gentleman' (feminine a senhora) came to be the polite second person singular pronoun and in due course os senhores, as senhoras its plural. Thus Portuguese seems to have three levels: tu, voce, and o senhor, with corresponding plurals. The verb endings agreeing with voce and o senhor are, however, those of the third person, so that when the independent pronoun is not present, as is often the case in 'pro-drop' Portuguese, the verb forms are ambiguous between 2nd and 3rd person and also between the voce and o senhor level of second person. The forms and functions of Portuguese pronouns of address are, however, much more complex than the three-level model sketched here, which is that of the standard written language. For example, additional polite forms are in use (e.g. vosmice, Vossa Excelencia) and various ways of avoiding specifying the level of politeness occur. Also, the amount of regional and social variation is great. In ordinary conversation and writing many speakers of Portuguese hardly use the original vos forms at all except for certain ritual formulas (e.g. certain versions of the Lord's Prayer) and set phrases (e.g. Vossa Senhoria 'Dear Sir' in business letters), and many speakers of Portuguese simply do not know the verb endings with vos. Further, in some geographical areas and social groups the tu form is not used in speech at all and the verb endings agreeing with it may not be in the active competence of speakers. In some areas the informal : polite opposition is essentially between voce and o senhor, whereas in other areas it is between tu and o senhor. Details of this great variability, at least for some areas and social classes, appear in Head 1976, Jensen 1981, and elsewhere. What is of special interest for the present paper is the use of mixed forms of address, the phenomenon referred to in Portuguese grammar and prescriptive statements as mistura de tratamento. Although not mentioned in some grammars and condemned in pedagogical and other prescriptive texts, this mismatching of categories, the "combination of pronouns from different personal components of the tradtional paradigm" (Head 1976: 301) is probably quite widespread. It is immediately evident in recordings of spontaneous conversation and is well attested in the dialog sections of dramas and novels (Jensen 1977, 1981, 1982). The mistura is of two types, disagreement between subject and verb and disagreement between subject pronoun and object pronoun or possessive. The second type is not always a matter of sentence-internal grammatical agreement in the sense of sentences (2) abc above, but includes the use of a subject pronoun of

192

Charles A. Ferguson

one level and the object pronoun of a different level by the same speaker to the same addressee in the same discourse. The first type is relatively unimportant for the purposes of this paper since it is marginal (limited chiefly to the use of tu with 3rd person endings) and is arguably part of a general syntactic change in progress in Portuguese by which subject-verb agreement is being lost (Naro 1981). It is of interest that the marginal opposition between the use of tu with 3rd person agreement and tu with 2nd person agreement (referred to by Jensen as tu and tu+s respectively) is used by individual (educated) speakers and authors in several ways. The tu+s pattern often carries a poetic, literary, or 'exalted' flavor or represents imagined conversations or talking to oneself, in contrast to the more natural, conversational tone of tu with 3rd person agreement. This opposition is, of course, not available to speakers who lack full competence in the 2nd person verb forms. The second type of "disagreement" in Portuguese is "the speaker's freedom to choose among various members of the paradigm nominally characteristic of the tu, voce, or o senhor sets to create a wide range of potentially subtle degrees of address" (Jensen 1982: 253). The freedom of choice is in some contexts quite wide. For example, Jensen (1981: 59) lists fourteen fully acceptable versions of the sentence "You were there; I saw you", and others may also occur. One pattern is the use of te (the object clitic form of tu) with voce or o senhor. This pattern of softening the strict agreement is quite common, and some of the respondents in questionnaire studies admit using it when asked specifically about it. Jensen suggests that "within the family the power semantic may lead to the use of o senhor with a parent but the form will be accompanied by the te of solidarity" (1981: 60). He also reports that even speakers who rarely or never use tu as a subject pronoun may on occasion use the object form as a softener for either voce or o senhor: "questionnaire data show that in certain dyads Sao Paulo speakers choose te as the most popular object pronoun to accompany voce (almost half 48.6 percent - of occurrences of voce toward a teacher would be accompanied by te)" (57).

6. Discussion and conclusions In addition to the data reported here from Persian and Portuguese, evidence for instances of agreement mismatch in politeness levels can be found in other languages, such as Hindi (cf. Jain 1973) and Spanish (cf. Kany 1851), but apparently no micro analyses have been carried out on other languages that would demonstrate the communicative functions served by the mismatches. Also, detailed historical studies have been published of the changes in pronominal forms of address over time in various languages (e.g. for Spanish, Lapesa 1970 with numerous references). In such historical studies, however, even when times and

Individual and social in language change

193

places of variation in agreement are noted, attention is focused on phonological and morphological factors, not possible communicative functions of the mismatches. Thus these studies of Persian and Portuguese offer a valuable insight into the way agreement patterns may be stretched for communicative purposes and the way such pragmatically motivated variation may simultaneously be part of longterm morpho-syntactic change. Examination of the data from Persian and Portuguese suggests the following conclusions: four substantive cross-language generalizations, one general hypothesis of theoretical import, and a proposal for preferred research strategies. 6.1. Substantive

generalizations

(1) If two or more politeness levels of second person pronouns exist in a language and participate in agreement pattens, whether subject : verb or subject pronoun : possessive/objective pronoun, "mismatch" or "disagreement" patterns may arise, typically (but not exclusively) a subject pronoun of higher politeness level with a verb form or possessive/objective pronoun of lower level, to express intermediate levels or conflicting components of politeness. Examples: Persian soma 'you (pi; pol sg)' - » verb + -i 'you (sg ord)' (instead of -id 'you (pi; pol sg)'. Portuguese o senhor 'you (pol sg, subj)' —> te 'you (sg ord, indir obj)' (instead of le or ao senhor). (2) Mismatching politeness agreements tend to be out of awareness, stigmatized, and are thus more readily discernible by "micro" than "macro" research methods. Example: Many Persian speakers deny using the soma —¥ -i mismatch, but recordings of spontaneous conversations reveal principled use of them. (3) At the same time that politeness mismatch patterns of agreement serve communication functions, they are typically aspects of a change in progress in the pronoun system of the language, often a long-term change "simplifying" the system, i.e. reducing the number of overt grammatical categories and the amount of allomorphy, or a change increasing the "solidarity force" as against the "power semantic". Example: The Portuguese on senhor : te mismatch is part of the change from VT to TT pattern for children speaking with parents. (4) Diachronic changes in pronominal systems that mark politeness levels operate within universal typological (e.g. "markedness") constraints. Examples: Use of an original 2nd pi pronoun as pol sg is a common (probably the most common) source of a pol sg in the emergence of politeness levels; the

194

Charles A. Ferguson

converse (sg for pol pi) is rare or nonexistent. Greater number of politeness levels in the sg than in the pi is common; greater number in pi is rare or nonexistent. 6.2. General

hypothesis

Diachronic change in a language may proceed by having communicative functions ("pragmatic considerations") override strict syntactic patterns ("rules") in the short term, as part of a long-term syntactic reorganization. 6.3. Research

strategy

Macro methods (e.g. questionnaires, interviews) are valuable for showing distribution of politeness agreement phenomena in a sociolinguistic community, but are inadequate for discerning discrepant patterns. Micro methods (e.g. analysis of spontaneous conversation) are valuable for showing phenomena out of awareness, but are inadequate or misleading for showing large-scale, long-term patterns of change. In order to document fully and reliably the kinds of morpho-syntactic change hypothesized here it is necessary to dovetail the two types of research. For example, if a change in forms of address pattern is apparent from macro-analysis one can proceed to a carefully focused microanalysis to determine whether an agreement mismatch is part of the process, and conversely, if a mismatch in politeness agreement is apparent from microanalysis, one can proceed to a carefully focused macroanalysis to determine whether the mismatch is part of a larger process of change in patterns of address. The relation between the stretching of a grammatical rule for pragmatic considerations and the larger structural changes in grammar and/or social interaction remains the explicandum, but even the discovery and description of a simple mismatch in grammatical agreement as part of a larger diachronic change can offer a contribution to the understanding of the "relationship between macro- and microsociolinguistic research" (Fishman 1972).

Notes * This paper was read at Stockholm University in October 1989, and its final version has benefitted from comments made by G. Guy, who read a version of the paper. Unfortunately, however, I bear full responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation that remain in it. 1.

Following Brown & Gilman I use T and V as the abbreviations for the less and more polite forms of 2nd person pronouns, T/V as a shorthand abbreviation for a 2nd person pronoun system with politeness levels, and TT, TV, VT, and the like as indication of the patterns of use in dyadic interaction such that the first letter stands for the form used by EGO and the second letter the form EGO receives from the interlocutor.

Individual and social in language change 2.

195

No attention is paid here to politeness levels in 1 st and 3rd person pronouns even though they may be components of the same overall politeness system. Such levels may be involved in some of the issues raised here, and in a large-scale study they would have to be addressed. In the present paper, however, the focus has been kept as narrow as possible for the basic points to be made, so long as the omitted material would not conflict with the conclusions.

References Barlow, M. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds.) 1988 Agreement in natural language: Approaches, theories, descriptions. Stanford, CA: CSLI. Batani, M. R. 1976 Problems in general linguistics: Ten articles by Mohammed Reza Batani. Tehran: Agah. [In Persian.] Baumgartner, R. J. 1978 A new 77V series: Persian pronouns of address. Paper read at the Summer meeting of the LSA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 1982 Sociolinguistic aspects of Persian pronouns of address: A macro/micro analysis. Unpubl. Ph. D. diss., University of Southern California. Bean, S. 1978 Symbolic and pragmatic semantics: A Kannada system of address. Chicago. Beeman, W. O. Language, status, and power in Iran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Braun, F. 1988 Terms of address: Problems of patterns and usages in various languages and cultures. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Braun, F., A. Kohz, & K. Schubert 1986 Anredeforschung: Kommentierte Bibliographie zur Soziolinguistik der Anrede. Tübingen: Narr. Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. 1978 "Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena", in: E. N. Goody (ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987 Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, R. W. & Ford, M. 1961 "Address in American English", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62: 375-385. Brown, R. W. & Gilman, A. 1960 "Pronouns of power and solidarity", in: T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Byrne, St. G. 1936 Shakespeare's use of the pronouns of address: Its significance in characterization and motivation. New York: Haskell House. Chatterji, S. K. 1926 The origin and development of the Bengali language. 2 vols. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press.

196 Corrine, B. 1975 Corbett, G. G. 1988 ESCOL 1984

Charles A. Ferguson

"Polite plurals and predicate agreement". Language 51: 406-418. "Agreement: A partial specification based on Slavonic data", in: M. Barlow & C. A. Ferguson (eds.), Agreement in natural language. Stanford, CA: CSLI. Proceedings of the First Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. Columbus: Ohio State University.

Ferguson, C. A. "Verbs of 'being' in Bengali with a note on Amharic", in: J. W. Verhaar (ed.), The 1972 verb 'be' and its synonyms. Part 5. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Fishman, J. A. "The relationship between micro- and macro-linguistics in the study of who speaks 1972 what language to whom and when", in: J. B. & J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Head, B. F. "Social factors in the use of pronouns for the addressee in Brazilian Portuguese", in: 1976 J. Schmidt-Radefeldt (ed.), Readings in Portuguese linguistics. Amsterdam: North Holland. "Respect degrees in pronominal reference", in: J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.), Univer1978 sals of human language. Vol. 3: Word structure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. "Variation and rate of change in the diffusion of new patterns of address", in: D. 1981 Sankoff & H. Cedergren (eds.), Variation omnibus. Carbondale & Edmonton: Linguistic Research. Hodge, C. T. "Some aspects of Persian style", Language 33: 355-369. 1957 Jahangiri, N. A sociolinguistic study of Tehrani Persian. Unpubl. Ph. D. diss., University of 1980 London. Jain, D. Pronominal usage in Hindi. Unpubl. Ph. D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. 1973 Jensen, J. B. "A investiga?äo de formas de tratamento e a telenovela: A Escalada, Part I", Revista 1976 Brasileira de Linguistica 4, 2: 45-73. "Forms of address in Brazilian Portuguese: Oriental honorifics or standard Euro1981 pean?", in: B. H. Bichakjian (ed.), From linguistics to literature: Romance studies offered to Francis M. Rogers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. "Dona Flor and her five forms of address", Luso-Brazilian Review 19: 251-266. 1982 "Subject relevance and deferential address in Indo-European languages", Lingua 13: 259-277. Joseph, J. E. "Subject relevance and deferential address in Indo-European languages", Lingua 73: 259-277. Kany, C. E. 1951 American Spanish syntax. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kilbury-Meissner, U. 1982 Die portugiesischen Anredeformen in soziolinguistischer Sicht. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.

Individual and social in language change

197

Laberge, S. & Sankoff, G. 1980 "Anything you can do", in: G. Sankoff, The social life of language. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. 1972 Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lambert, W. E. & Tucker, G. R. 1976 Tu, vous, usted. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Lapesa Melgar, E. 1970 "Personas gramaticales y tratamientos en español", in: Homenaje a M. Pidal IV, Revista de la Universidad de Madrid 19, 74: 141-167. 1978 "Las formas verbales de segunda persona y los origines del 'voseo'", in: C. H. Magis (ed.), Actas del III Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas. Mexico, DF: Colegio de Mexico. Lapointe, S. G. 1980 A theory of grammatical agreement. Ph. D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Lazard, G. 1983 Grammaire du person contemporain. Paris: Klincksieck. Leith, D. 1983 A social history of English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Milroy, J. & Milroy L. 1985 "Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation", Journal of Linguistics 21: 339-384. Moravcsik, E. 1978 "Agreement", in: J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.), Universals of human language. Vol. 4: Syntax. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Naro, A. J. 1981 "The social and structural dimensions of a structural change", Language 57: 63-98. Parkinson, D. B. 1985 Constructing the social context of communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pullum, G. K. 1985 "How complex could an agreement system be?", in: ESCOL '84. Svennung, J. 1958 Anredeformen: Vergleichende Forschungen. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Winter, W. (ed.) 1984 Anredeverhalten. Tübingen: Narr.

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology Shirley Brice

Heath

Since the late 1970s, when literary theorists and language researchers alike began to look at reading and writing as collaborative textual exchanges, conversation has come in for some surprising attention. It has shifted from being a somewhat trivial social art praised in etiquette books to a collective activity scrutinized by humanists and social scientists alike. The writings of Soviet scholars L. S. Vygotsky and M. Bakhtin called attention to the conversational nature of private speech, the jointly constructed frames of scaffolding talk, and the multiplicity of human perception possible in dialogue. Extension of the notion of genre from certain historically acknowledged literary types to speech genres in all spheres of language use led scholars to focus on the heterogeneity of discursive exchanges - oral and written - and to look closely at conversation in its seemingly free flow as the prototype of such exchanges. Discourse analysts and ethnomethodologists laid out the rules of turn-taking, features of sequenced components, and characteristics of style for conversations in face-to-face interactions and telephone exchanges. Literary scholars acknowledged fictional portrayals of conversation as fundamental in literature's heteroglossia or polyphony - its hierarchy of languages and collection of value-laden words and forms of expression. All of these studies underscored the essential nature of collaborative exchange in conversation and the ways in which its cooperative shape is characterized by participants' social consciousness of each other and of the fact that in spite of the apparent lack of regulation in conversation, its movements generally show common progress. Conversation is then fundamentally a social process of oral exchange through which individuals define the beliefs and values that direct their social co-existence. Shared backgrounds allow conversations to move forward without the slow-down of monologic definitions and explanations, but within a dialogism that takes it for granted that we perceive ideas only against the perspective of other ideas. Especially important for the development of democracies is this contest of reason, wit, and mind. But curiously enough, even in the United States, where the role of conversation and free exchange of ideas among people of all levels was often touted as the "noblest commerce", studies of conversation have generally been ahistorical and relatively context-free. Current meanings and patterns appear as given and universal; settings and participants of conversation seem fixed in their moments of description. We know very little of the broader contexts of values, beliefs, condi-

200

Shirley Brice Heath

tions of leisure and selection of speakers and settings that have fostered conversation. In particular, we have little historical understanding of power relations and normative values that move conversation along, or of the roles of those of lesser station - such as women - in conversational gatherings. In treatments of the language ideology of particular groups, it has been rare to include such an everyday speech activity as conversation, and yet across societies with written guides to politeness, civility, and social manners, conversation receives considerable attention for its part in smoothing human relations and transacting the business of everyday life. With a particular focus on the role of women, the study presented here looks at the place of conversation in the language ideology of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The goal here is one of cultural history: "to identify the meanings in circulation in earlier periods, to specify the discourses, conventions and signifying practices by which meanings are fixed, norms 'agreed' and truth defined" (Belsey 1989: 163). From nineteenth century periodicals, books of etiquette, and collections of "table talk", we can learn much about the social situations that engendered conversation and the beliefs that fostered sets of rules and expectations that surrounded it. The case of conversation in nineteenth-century America offers special reward in that contemporary commentators wrote in considerable detail about its change and particularly their view of the transference of many of its features to the written genre of the essay. These commentators also offered frequent estimations of women as models for conversation and of the role that reading literature played in preparing them for conversation. This study is an effort to illustrate how sociolinguists can use historical data to begin to consider the connections between conversation and the reading of literature, and also between conversation and the development of the literary essay in American society. Through these data, we get some idea of the place of these language activities - reading, writing, and conversing - in their evolution through American language ideology. We draw attention here to that fact that women's speech received high acclaim in Americans' expressed views of desirable features in these discourse forms and habits of using knowledge from what one has read. Yet by the early twentieth century, when collections of literary essays for use in English courses in higher education came to be standard tools of teaching, women as models of either spoken or written language rarely appeared. This historical examination complements the attention given by literary theorists and sociologists in the late 1980s to the history of books and the material conditions that produced both books and interpretive communities that bought, borrowed, and preserved them - and, perhaps also read and talked about them. 1

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

201

Interpretive communities When, in the 1970s literary theorists rediscovered earlier writers' emphasis on the reader and the "interpretive community", 2 they sparked considerable reseach at the micro level of the uses of reading of particular individuals and groups. Scholars with an interest in reading and education came from several fields to value direct observations of readers with follow-up interviews or experimental interventions (Taylor 1983; Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines 1988; Flower 1989); others took the role of participant observer within groups that read for a wide range of purposes (Heath 1983). Still others focused exclusively on readers who read extended pieces of prose and interviewed these readers about their choices, reasons, and habits of reading (Radway 1984). Historians who chose to take a micro view of a reader and of his or her reading acknowledged the numerous difficulties that surround any attempt to look at past habits of direct engagements between readers and texts (Baym 1984; Davidson 1989). Historical record and relentless sleuthing enable us to know much about who purchased and borrowed books, who bequeathed them to family members or public institutions, and the readers that reviewers thought would and should read certain books. 3 But as the historian Carl Kaestle has reminded us, these studies do not take us across the difficulty of tracing "meaning from the text to the reader" (1985). This task is difficult enough for contemporary readers, from whom we can directly solicit information to tell us whether they have not only bought or borrowed a book but read it, and with whom they have talked about the book, or the actual use to which they have put the book. Scholars who take up various positions within the reader-response community of theorists have demonstrated also how and why individual readers vary in their readings of books and the ways in which they bring not only their own background to the book, but also their objectives for future uses of the book. 4 However, for readers and talkers of the past, we are left to depend on the particular secondary artifactual evidence they left of their reading (marginal notes, journals, diaries, and letters; see, for example, Davidson 1986). When we wish to move to another level of language behavior that extends beyond the reading itself and written reflections during or after the process, to the occasions for talking about one's reading in conversation with others who read, the lines of evidence grow thinner and thinner. Not only do we have no way of bringing to life conversations of a century ago, but we know that when recording equipment did become available, family or club conversations would not seem likely materials for recording. Even in the current era, when discourse and conversational analysts study conversations in detail, almost none of such studies focus on sustained conversations about the reading of literature. 5 For both historians and sociologists of language, materials available for the study of conversations of the past do not present talk as it occured, but talk altered to reflect the perceptions of conversation as it should be by the recorders. Buell

202

Shirley Brice Heath

(1973), in a study of conversation among the Transcendentalists, suggests some of the factors that worked against an accurate account of such occasions - then and now - even among groups that highly valued conversation and self-consciously sought ways to extend its reputation. Taking an active role in conversation proscribed writing down the exchanges of others; conversation tends to take place among those of cohesive social groups, who could see the recording of their talk as a threat to the intimacy of the occasion. Neither the elliptical nor the repetitive nature of conversation transfers well to the page; written conversations may appear dull on paper - especially those of groups such as the Transcendentalists who valued conversation for instructional purposes. Moreover, since conversation accurately transferred to the page breaks many of the conventions of written discourse forms, reporters often unconsciously edit "talk" to reshape it as a written genre.

Conversation for instruction and social interaction In the midst of slim evidence on actual reading habits and conversations that followed such reading, it is highly useful to find commentators of the past who did occasionally observe and record conversations and their links to reading and to sustaining social interactions. Those who were most likely to do so were writers for American periodicals and for books on conversation or for books prescribing rules of etiquette and paths for social climbing. 6 In American periodicals, the evolution of language in America was a consistent theme through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writers debated the comparative merits of the language structures and habits of American and British speakers and the perplexing issue of where Americans might find appropriate models for their language (Heath 1982). Throughout American periodicals of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, editorials, letters to the editor, reprinted lectures, and original essays frequently discussed women and their uses of and influences on language in the United States. Several American periodicals, particularly in the first decades of the century, sometimes begrudgingly admitted that their primary readership might well be female. For example, The Literary Companion, beginning publication in 1821, contained an opening letter of purpose beseeching the publishers "in the name of the fair sex, to whom your labours are to be for the most part devoted" to make their journal amusing and instructive, "to blend wit with reproof' (Vol. 1, June 16-September 8, 1821, p. 4). The periodical frequently commented on the double-edged effects possible from the reading habits of women: they might either raise their ideas of their own importance or lower their goals as a result of their reading; they might become too intellectual and thus henpeck their husbands with their new-found strength in knowledge. Estimations of women's influence on language - and especially on conversations of sub-

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

203

s t a n c e - are overwhelmingly positive. Their particular attributes include their sense of appropriate length (of turns at talk and of conversations in general), their willingness to speak and their ability to sustain topics, and their willingness to listen and to weave wit and wisdom into their conversations. Though some writers lamented women's lack of knowledge of Greek and Latin and speculated about the value such subjects might have on their conversational powers, most writers praised the "natural" learning of women and their subsequent independence in style, thought, and manner in conversation. In particular, the practice of reading and often of reading aloud - improved women's abilities in conversation. Early pleas that women not be condemned to work in mills, but instead encouraged to go into teaching, stressed the facility of women for conversation and the links between conversation and learning. As women began to enter higher education, some commentators noted that their practice in reading and conversing led them to know the cadences of language and to be more sensitive to its structures and styles than men. One report of written examinations given at the State University of Michigan in 1871 pointed out that with regard to style, women far outperformed the men of the university (White 1872: 17). Certain stylistic features in conversation consistently received praise: "correct" language showing a familiarity with one's own language (and not a borrowing of foreign terms); simple and clear talk (rather than a labored and affected style of "cut and dried" expressions); and talk to smooth social relations. Manuals of etiquette often contained chapters on conversation that summarized the "duty" of women to cultivate the art of conversation and to be kind and sympathetic, always alert to the possibilities of violating proprieties. The topics appropriate in conversation drew considerable attention from nineteenth-century observers. Politics, religion, family genealogies, and immediate decision-making had no place in conversation; topics either too grave or too trivial should be avoided. Desirable conversation resulted when speakers took turns, did not raise the level of intellectual demand above the comprehension of listeners, told only short and original stories to punctuate their points, and responded quickly to insure continuity of talk on subjects of interest to all in the conversational group. Wit, discrimination, keen observation, and above all signals of involvement with one's listeners insured smooth conversation that did not disrupt social relations. ... the art of pleasing in conversation seems to consist in two things; one of them to hear well; and the other to speak well. The perceptual appearance of attention, and the varying expression of the countenance of the hearer to the sentiments or passions of the speaker; is a principal charm in conversation; to be well heard and accurately understood encourages our companions to proceed with pleasure, whatever may be the topics of their discourse. (Erasmus Darwin. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding

204 Schools' Private Families, Ormrod, 1798: 89)

Shirley Brice Heath

and Public

Seminaries.

Philadelphia: John

Nineteenth century observers consistently repeated the essence of this eighteenth-century observation and pointed out that though ostensibly egalitarian and free-flowing, conversations had boundaries, rules, and domains. Most observers, for example, addressed considerable attention to the problem of a "leader" in conversations and the subtle ways in which such a role had to be played. Leaders were not those who talked most, but instead those who saw that "two-by-two" conversations did not go on too long, that all members had occasions to speak, and that "real" conversation occurred. Conversation manuals and sections of etiquette books that treated conversation reminded speakers to replay parts of conversation for those who joined a conversation after it began, to emphasize the individual view and not to give assent too freely or to offer only general statements. Women, because of their essential role in the family circle, were the "natural" leaders of conversations, but they must play such a role with extreme care and acknowledge that conversational leadership most often went to those who were the best listeners and could "spur intelligent conversation." But indeed all should "consider that every circle has its own tone, laws of decorum, and modes of thinking and talking," which one learned only by "reserved observation" before safely taking the lead of any conversation (George Winfred Hervey, The Rhetoric of Conversation; or Bridles and spurs for the management of the tongue. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1858: 13).

W o m e n ' s talk Several commentators noted with approval the American habit of including women in table-talk after meals and of not following the European practice of banning women from such occasions. The pattern of including women in conversations on literary, philosophical, and religious topics was firmly embraced by American Transcendentalists. A. Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller were the most well-known conversationalists of the original Transcendentalist Club (18391840). Fuller also offered a series of conversations in Boston (1839-1844) and Alcott traveled throughout the Northeast and into the Midwest promoting adult discussion groups that included women. Few records of these conversations remain in a form that might tell discourse analysts about turns at talk, ways that speakers kept the pace lively, and strategies that particularly marked the talk of those valued as conversationalists. The few accounts that remain, even of avid conversationalists, such as Alcott and Fuller, either greatly abbreviate or stylize the talk, and some, like Alcott's Conversations with Children on the Gospels in

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

205

two volumes (1836-1837), were written for young children and are marked by a highly dyadic and didactic tone of moral instruction. From Alcott's Table Talk (1877), however, we can learn several of the general patterns and conditions of conversations that prevailed among adults and of women's roles in such talk. Addressed to those that Alcott assumed to be of his own background and preferences in ways of spending leisure time, this volume includes the reader as an intimate "we" when referring to preferred and skilled talk and reserves exclusive pronouns of the third person to name unacceptable attitudes or habits. Alcott identifies the time after a meal as the occasion for table talk, when several participants join together to bring their disparate thoughts and experiences to their talk. Alcott writes of the importance of "the interplay of the feminine and masculine forces [as] heart and head appear and disappear in alternate rhyme of sentiment and thought, giving soul and body to the argument" (Alcott 1877: 82). Men and women in this setting played supporting roles, but the parlor was woman's domain, and thus their speech and thoughts should there conform to norms set by women. Females were of considerable help in drawing out the best abilities of male speakers: Here is woman's world, here are the graces, the proprieties, the wit, the wisdom of discourse, - woman's discretion presiding over all. And where women are, the better things are implied if not spoken. In the company of accomplished women, one finds his best gifts at command, his happiest utterances ... Remarkable, too, with what salient sense and sparkle the sex are trained in this genial school, how readily they in conversation bring forth the full opulence of speech... Oft women's wit prompts and prevails When men's best counsel halts and fails. (Alcott 1877: 82) Alcott also applauded the model that women offered of good listening and of the willingness to be silent in order to assure that others would be able to insert their views. Though discreetly speak, she can Still be silent, rather than Talk while others may be heard, As if she did hate, or feared Their condition who will force All to wait on their discourse. (Alcott 1877: 82) For Transcendentalist Alcott, table talk was best achieved through clear direct statements that did not risk direct insult. He urged that conversationalists display their ideas without impassioned conviction and in a manner of delivery that displayed respect for the group as a whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a lecture entitled "Woman" and read before the

206

Shirley Brice Heath

Women's Rights Convention in Boston in late September of 1855, chose the "words" of women as the Focus of his comments. Conversation. Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization and the best result which life has to offer us, - a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings. (Emerson 1855: 408) He held that womens gifts of observation and empathy prepared them as "mediators between those who have knowledge and those who want it" (408). Emerson chided those who would argue that women had produced no masterpieces in art or science and pointed instead to "an art which is better than painting, poetry, music, or architecture, - better than botany, geology, or any science; namely Conversation " (408). Through conversation, women civilized and "finish [ed] society, manners, language" (409). Emerson's views were echoed through the latter half of the century. Books on the "art of conversation" often commented on the role of women in bringing out the good qualities of others: the "most celebrated groups of genius" in the world could be attributed to asscociation with women (Handbook of Good Society. The Art of Conversation. New York: Carleton and Co., 1882). The role of women in mediating, pointing out the best way to solve problems and exemplifying the manner in which a rude opponent should be treated came in for considerable attention: In moral gifts for argumentation, they are manifestly superior to men. Their peculiar patience and delicate regard for the feelings of others, often greatly assist in the settlement of questions which take a strong hold on human passions and interests. (Hervey, The Rhetoric of Conversation, 1858: 139) In particular, because of women's role in the family circle, commentators hoped that their influence in conversation would expand to society. Some drew special attention to the role of women in establishing women's clubs in which "useful talk" went on that could eventually bring changes in the city and country politics and government. Thus though women might not fill public offices, they would see that men did their sworn duties. Indeed, they would extend the art of conversation to relationships between American and foreign countries, as the role of the United States in foreign affairs expanded. The effective eloquence of the future will be more conversational than oratorical, and national spirit will only be the larger expression of social spirit. (Agnes Morton. Our Conversational Circle, New York: The Century Co., 1898: 213-218) The regulation of social relations in conversation was by no means trivial or easily

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

207

achieved. The delicate balance between substantive content and the expression of individual views had to hold for conversation to achieve its goal. Neither "mere assent" and "pleasant nothings" nor conversation about the weather and everyday occurrences would do; women were cautioned: It is wearisomely tame to assent for the mere sake of assenting, or from inertia, or from timidity. How is the common stock to be enriched if social interchange is to be series of echoes? One's own deliberate, womanly conviction, modestly and courteously spoken, is a generous contribution to the public intellectual wealth. (Frederick Huntington. Good Talking a Fine Art, Syracuse: Wolcott and West, 1892: 39) In their high esteem and consideration of conversation as an art, the Transcendentalists and other Americans before them saw conversation as the natural companion of those who felt themselves linked to the literary life - as readers and writers. From the beginning of newspaper and journal publication in the United States, editors echoed the sentiments of their British brothers who had published The Tatler and The Spectator. The written word depended for its survival on the spoken word, and occasions, such as the meetings, helped ensure the life of these periodicals. In the United States, for the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, regular meetings of "the club" were commonplace. Groups, such as the American Philosophical Society or local historical societies, also held meetings to foster conversation around written texts or in response to a talk given on a particular text. Both the Lyceum movement and the Chatauqua Club, in their first decades, promoted conversation around written texts. One reason for the consistent linkage between conversation and literature becomes evident in the Transcendentalists' linkage between conversation and life. The spontaneity and sincerity so highly valued in conversation was thought to come direct from a speaker's soul or heart. Literature was art that both portrayed and commented upon life. Literature came close to life, and in conversation about literature, one came doubly close to life, to the raw, simple, sincere, and open truth of life. Emerson seemed sometimes to hold the view that women, who had not been separated from life through formal schooling, but had acquired their learning through their own will, wits, and powers of observation, were those who knew best how to say and think. Most especially, women had not through education come to see themselves as having to "explain" discoveries. Their learning from experience came rapidly and logically, so much so that Emerson felt that "any remarkable opinion or movement shared [stated] by woman will be the first sign of revolution" (1855: 406). Emerson saw women as mediators between those with knowledge and those who wanted to learn. Knowledge, conveyed by them came finely organized, filled with details. Perhaps most important, women managed to provide the "ceremony" or the

208 occasions decorated ate ritual occasions (408).

Shirley Brice Heath

in which conversation could take place, and within such occasions, they life "with manners, with proprieties, order and grace" (409). Appropriand ceremony brought conversation along, and women provided the where conversation, as "our account of ourselves," might take place

Conversation in the essay However, Emerson and others of his time acknowledged that the preparing of such ceremonies and the arranging for conditions of conversation took time. And with the changing roles of women, they should and would enter realms beyond the home, Emerson urged: "Let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs; - and in a few years the laws that are to govern them" (424). Emerson agreed that many women already had such control, in that they both learned from their husbands and exerted strong influence over them: "woman moulds the lawgiver and writes the law" (425). As women's roles changed, so the opportunities for conversations might be reduced, and society would need to find other ways of insuring "the power of self-recovery" that so often came through conversation. Why conversation? In an essay entitled "Circles," Emerson described conversation as "a game of circles": "In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side. ...When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men." (1855: 289-290). Emerson went on to point out how one's immersion in facts, the business of the day, or prior convictions of generalizations could shift during good "discourse" followed by the silence in which one garners one's thoughts and processes that which has been learned from and with others. Literature had its value in this game of circles, because literature was "a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new one may be described" (291). The use of literature was to give a platform from which one might look at the present life, and those from outside literature were those who could best see it and use it. Emerson argued that his own reading and re-reading of literature led him often to reform thoughts he had not previously been inclined to change. But even as he acknowledged that women's changing roles - along with the growing tendency for many to give lectures or lengthy discourses - might lead to the decline of conversation within American homes, he looked about for other forms. He found the essay most like conversation, a fact he noted when he explained his liking of the French essayist Montaigne: "It is the language of con-

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

209

versation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive" (Emerson, Works, vol IV, p. 168, cited from Buell 1973: 81). The essay as a written type of conversation came closest in literature to allowing "natural" communication between writer and audience. Moreover, essays offered the opportunity to make permanent one's thought, and Emerson warned "conversation is an evanescent relation - no more" (Emerson, Works, vol. II, p. 208, cited from Buell 1973: 93). However, conversation could become, in part, a central model of essays - not through its chatty style, but through its inclusion of pithy and witty statements, and its attempt to cooperate with the reader rather than dictate. By the end of the nineteenth century, the interdependence of conversation, the essay, and the reading of literature in American life played an important role in the language ideology of Americans. Laments over the loss of "the art of conversation" and the decline of reading among Americans came most frequently in essays that assumed many features of conversation praised earlier in the century. As the century ended and more women entered education and the labor force, the previous habitual social contexts of conversation in the family changed more and more. Numerous commentators on society echoed Emerson's earlier view that once women achieved such opportunities, their types of influence would shift, and conversation would decline in frequency and substantive value. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, writers in American periodicals often turned their attention to what changed habits of talk, patterns of leisure, and situations for reading might mean for American society. One such writer was Agnes Repplier (1848-1938), an essayist and biographer who published more than twenty books of essays and wrote frequently for the major literary journals of the United States. Although she was almost entirely selfeducated and never became a regular member of any academic establishment, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Columbia and was widely acknowledged not only for her prose style, but also for her insightful criticism of American and British literature. In 1935, she received the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (Stokes 1949). What follows is not a full-scale analysis of her writing, but rather some consideration of those essays she wrote in which she described habits of reading and conversation that arose out of the reading of literature. She often reviewed works of fiction written by others, but she more frequently wrote essays on topics of her own choosing, many of which related to spoken and written language in American life. She hosted writers such as Walt Whitman and Henry James at the Contemporary Club, a social group in her home town Philadelphia dedicated to the promotion of conversation about both matters of the day and literature. Repplier was fond of looking at the conditions of American life that might threaten the end of both conversation and the reading of English literature. Her observations regarding conversation, the uses of leisure time, and the role of books in daily life were

210

Shirley Brice Heath

often provoked by letters from her readers and by what she overheard from conversation on the street. Her essays then became conversations with her reading public. She wrote most often of her reading, and throughout her essays, she wrote as though to encourage her readers to expand their own reading. If she could not talk directly with readers through conversation, she would write essays that would create the same effects. A careful look at her essays reveals several characteristics of conversation that figured prominently in her writing. The first of these conversational features is her frequent assumption of common acquaintances. Throughout her essays, she sprinkled the names of writers as well as their literary characters so as to make her readers believe they either did know or should know these names and the thoughts of the writers or characters. For example, in an 1895 essay on "Leisure", she wrote: "readers of Dickens - if anyone has the time to read Dickens nowadays - may remember Miss Monflather's inspired amendment of that familiar poem concerning the Busy Bee" (1895: 95). Such double calls to familiarity with both writer and specific character (and consequently of the particular piece of literature in which the character appeared) rarely came with a direct naming of the source where a reader might meet the literary character cited. Instead, Repplier simply named author and character, or author and quotation, and left readers to search for the title of the book. She wrote as she thought people talked in free-flowing conversation - without direct citations, but with easy familiarity and an assumed common acquaintance. Another conversational feature comes in her asides of conditional statements or questions to comment on "obvious" conclusions about society or the state of the world in general in the midst of her treatment of a specific topic. The quotation in the paragraph above illustrates Repplier's habit of offering her observations on the general state of reading in the midst of a paragraph on leisure that refers to a Charles Dickens' character. She often enclosed such remarks between dashes, but she also included them directly as full sentences within her text. Perhaps one of the most common features of conversation - use of the personal anecdote punctuated with direct discourse - is the most frequent and obvious conversational feature of her essays. 7 She often used personal anecdotes to open a persuasive argument. Many of her essays begin with an anecdote about a literary figure - a story told in a familiar way, as though all her readers know the literary figure and can place him or her, without explanation of specific site or time of incident. For example, the essay "Leisure" opens with an anecdote about Voltaire who commented in response to a visitor's compliment on the splendid growth of Voltaire's trees: "They have nothing else to do" (94). An essay entitled "Words" (1895) opens with the following reported exchange: "Do you read the dictionary?" asked M. Theophile Gautier of a young and ardent disciple who had come to him for counsel. "It is the most fruitful and

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

211

interesting of books. Words have an individual and relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in position. This word is a mere pebble; that is a fine pearl or an amethyst..." She continues by commenting on how such "genial vivacity" can divert and yet teach us. Repplier never failed to let her readers know the conditions that stimulated conversation and reading. In "Leisure", she admonished Americans for their "Gospel of Work", and advised them that the god of labor had a twin sister "whose name is leisure, and in her society he lingers now and then to the lasting gain of both" (97). She went on by illustration from French writers (whose names were dropped like those of familiar neighbors down the street) to note the centrality of conversation in leisure. She then referred to Montaigne, reminding readers that it was in leisure that he found his spirit most pleased and that out of his leisure time, he wrought "a coin which passes current over the reading world" (99). She blasted universities for fostering in students a preference for languages of utility and suggested that the lack of classical scholarship came from the "labor worship" that prevailed in academic institutions (101-02) and dissuaded American students from reading and conversation as leisurely pursuits. In an essay on "The Luxury of Conversation" (1905), she spoofed the idea that the art of conversation was destined to die out in America. She dismissed the value of books on conversation and advised the "mournful" prophets of doom to do more talking, listening, and reading of history and literature. She especially called on them to listen: "The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas" (6). She did worry about the tendency of Americans to replace conversation with story-telling. "A feast of buns and barley sugar" was her characterization of the dinner party in which strings of anecdotes substituted for the give and take and argument and illustration of conversation. She, as many before her had done, noted the special place that conversation should have in America where new revelations in history and science - as well as "each successive pleasure yielded by literature or by art" - should spur Americans to conversation.

Language ideology This brief and summative overview of conversation, its links to reading and leisure, and evidence for its influence on essays raises more questions than it answers. How is conversation tied to the reading of extended prose texts, especially those regarded as literary? What social circumstances give rise to conversation, and what of women's roles in providing such circumstances and of playing leading roles in conversations? If conversation is indeed an undercover model for

212

Shirley Brice Heath

essays, why has conversation played almost no role in academic institutions especially English courses - where the essay is the major genre through which students display their knowledge? What of relationships between conversation and discussion? If women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the prime models for desirable conversation, and successful conversations and essays bear considerable resemblance, why have there been so few women essayists in American literary life? And, finally, why has there been since the middle of the nineteenth century a steady stream of laments over the loss of the "art of conversation"? Periodicals and literary critics alike return again and again to this "loss". In 1989, a Time essayist noted that Alexis de Tocqueville had described as early as 1835 Americans' preference for "discussion" over "conversation". Sadly, the Time essayist agreed that conversation's fundamental characteristics seemed to defy most Americans: A good conversation doesn't have any particular shape. There's a kind of rhythm to it, and the reassuring assumption that we're all in this thing together. We take our cues from each other, like porpoises in a pool. Certain it would seem that we've created an environment in this country where a genuine conversation is hard to crank up and get going. (A. R. Gumey "Conversation Piece" Time June 26, 1989: 9) Recurrent features of conversation listed in these laments are the ways that conversation allows people to respond to ideas, to engage in exchange, and to draw upon their experience to "season" talk. Oddly enough, writings on essays by American essayists echo these same qualities.8 Essays are to retain some of the qualities of the colloquial, the surface spontaneity of conversations: turns of direction, unexpected assertions, the calling-up of images, while at the same time setting commonplace matters in a wholly new light and calling forth new analogies. Essays invite brief paragraphs, abbreviated a sentences in a staccato style, and they assume a style that almost says "do you agree?" or "I know you think otherwise, but ..." Within essays, there is much to be filled in by the reader; the writer does not glue the parts together, making a seamless whole, but instead, the essay takes a series of stands that need not fit together, but serve as fillers for the making of what could be a good conversation. Numerous invitations that mark the "ourness" of ideas and the sharing of a past in conversation move within essays. Brevity is another feature; just as no conversation on a single topic can extend at any one time over too long a period, so the essay must take on a topic and then leave it, without droning on for too long. This kind of historical overview and comparison across genres makes evident a fact that social historians and sociologists of language have often noted: it is difficult to examine the roots of language ideologies and to explain differences between values expressed as ideals and actual language practices. Moreover, the

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

213

fact that a major form of evidence of hidden values within a group's language ideology comes in their laments over what they have lost does little to help the scholar who would like direct evidence of language patterns and actual practices. Nevertheless, comments on the loss of this or that form of language mark the history of any society, and we must attend to them for what they can tell us about language ideology. Any such list for the United States since the second half of the nineteenth century would mourn the decline of conversation and the reading of literature while noting with pleasure and encouragement the increased use of the essay in academic life. To be sure, some other language matters would appear on that list: correctness in language, sufficient attention to reading, and retention of the art of letter-writing. 9 Such lists inform our understanding of the language ideology of the group - the "integrated assertions, theories, and goals that attempt to guide collective sociopolitical beliefs and actions regarding language choices in communication systems" (Heath, 1988). The language ideology of a group leads its members to prescribe one language, language variety, or set of discourse forms over another. Many beliefs behind a particular language ideology do not surface directly: groups may state ideals they ignore or subvert in practice; distinctions may blur between estimations of language and evaluations of language. Collective sociopolitical beliefs regarding language choice lead to the establishment of institutions and policies that support the transmission and sustained positive estimation of certain language forms or genres. Throughout such actions, individuals may fail to acknowledge that all language decisions bear implicit and explicit symbolic as well as instrumental values. Similarly, they may fail to acknowledge the interdependence of certain language behaviors with each other and, as well with certain societal conditions. For example, throughout most of American history, the family has been acknowledged as the major setting for conversation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, social science research described the changed nature of family relations and uses of leisure time in the home; it seems reasonable to conclude that within households with only a single parent or with both parents working outside the home full-time, conversation has both declined and shifted in functions and forms. Yet, in general, those who hold most firmly to their ideologies remain convinced that certain "institutional communities" - whether families or academies, should and will continue to uphold certain genres and standards. It is common to decry or ignore any research or "facts" that they regard as threatening to their fundamental language ideology and to its societal supports. During the 1980s, it became fashionable to denounce the focus on attention only to certain canons of literature and assignations of "popular," "minority," or "light" to certain forms. Social historians and literary critics alike pointed to the important role of "lesser" genres and writers and urged serious reconsiderations of the process of selecting texts for study within English departments of higher education (e.g., Graff 1989). In comparison, relatively little attention has gone to

214

Shirley Brice Heath

preferred genres and models for such genres in academic culture. The essay remains the centerpiece of writing within the lower levels of English departments. Yet, little attention goes to its history, its links with conversation, and to the use of models written by women. This article is a step in the direction of the kind of combined social historical and sociolinguistic study needed to probe into the role of conversation and the essay in American language ideology, and the related influence of literary reading and the role of women's language as covert language model. Writings of several members of the Prague School of Linguistics and also of M. Bakhtin repeatedly illustrate the benefits of attention to conversation and its conditions, as well as its derivatives. Through the integration of empirical work and theoretical perspectives, we may come to understand the difficulty of establishing institutions that can support conversation as a form of discourse or encourage written genres that bear its central features. Of necessity immersed in the particular social situation that engenders it, conversation is not moveable to settings and participants that cannot recreate the cooperative life and secure social circumstances with which it must be closely fitted.

Notes * The choice of topic for this contribution comes from a desire to acknowledge the encouragement and strong influence of Joshua Fishman on my research on the social history of language practices and ideology in American life. In addition, the focus on conversation here pays honor to Gella Fishman, who easily creates environments for creative conversations and who models the listening, reading, and social awareness that make conversations wonderfully civil and congenial. 1. Davidson (1989), following for the United States the lead of I'historie du livre that originated in France, provides a series of articles on how printing, as well as book production and distribution, affected national or religious ideologies in the United States. The introduction to this volume provides a summary of this work by literary critics. Other fields of scholarship precede and complement scholarship on the history of the book. Those who have examined the formation of the American literary canon (see, for example, Baym 1984, Radway 1984, and Tompkins 1985) have focused on ways that institutional values have shaped the preservation and continuity of study of certain works of literature. Lockridge (1974), Graff (1979, 1987), and Soltow and Stevens (1981) have detailed patterns of literacy and corresponding changes in local institutions and individual lives of Americans. 2. Early in the twentieth century, both I. A. Richards (1924, 1929) and Louise Rosenblatt (1938) dealt in various ways with the relationship of reader and literary work. Later European critics, such as Iser (1978) and scholars of the German Rezeptionstheorie, as well as those within "reader response" criticism, developed similar theories (Tompkins 1980; Freund 1982). Fish (1980) called attention to the inherent indeterminacy of interpretation and the role of interpretive interpretation. 3. See, for example, Nord (1989) and Neuberg (1989). These works illustrate the range of methods with which historians can approach the "life" of books in earlier eras. 4. Examples of various reader-response approaches to the study of reading behavior are Bleich (1978), Holland (1975), and Tompkins (1985). For a sample of the work of cognitive psychologists

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology

215

who have used protocol analysis to draw from readers - during the process of reading - their reflections and projections of the written text, see Flower 1989. 5. The major exception comes in studies of bookreading with young children and their emergent literacy. See, for example, Cochran-Smith (1983) and Teale and Sulzby (1984). Among adults in conversation in informal settings, the seminal work on features ranging from repetition to sub-genres has been done by Tannen (1984, 1989). 6. Sources from which the discussion in this section comes include the American Periodical Series I and II (eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), microfilm editions of all periodicals (publications that appeared in volumes and numbers over a period of time, excluding newspapers) published in the United States. In addition data are drawn from approximately 350 conversation manuals and etiquette books published in the United States between 1780 and 1900. For a fuller accounting of these sources, see Heath 1978 and 1981. For citations from specific periodicals or books, the full reference will be given in the text immediately following the quote (and not in the bibliography) since the titles, especially of books on conversation, often contribute to the meaning of the quotation. For a discussion of the use of these sources by sociolinguists, see Heath 1981, 1982. 7. Tannen (1984 and 1989) treats this feature in contemporary conversation. She points out that the use of dialogue in conversation (and by extension in any other "new" context) is itself a creative act, because the "reported speech" or "direct discourse" is appropriated by the new speaker/writer for his or her own purposes (1989: chapter 4). 8. These summary points are drawn from the introductions in approximately 300 collections of essays published in the United States between 1780 and 1940. See Heath, forthcoming, for a detailed listing of the primary characteristics of essays given by American writers and editors of essay anthologies over these decades of American history. 9. Several accounts of the history of these language matters trace the recurrent laments over the inadequacy of Americans to "hold up" their spoken and written language habits always believed to have vanished with the youth of those voicing the complaint. See, for example, Finnegan (1980), Baron (1982) on correctness in language. It is somewhat curious that though the "lost" art of letter-writing appears frequently as a corollary to the loss of conversational talents, no comprehensive study exists of the history of letter-writing and its possible decline throughout American history.

References Alcott, A. B. 1877 Baron, D. E. 1982 Baym, N. 1984 Belsey, C. 1989 Bleich, D. 1978

Table-Talk. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Grammar and good taste: Reforming University Press.

the American

language.

New Haven: Yale

Novels, readers, and reviewers: Responses to fiction in antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell Universtiy Press. "Towards cultural history: in theory and practice", Textual Practice 3, 2: 159-172. Subjective criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

216 Buell, L. 1973 Clark, G. 1990

Shirley Brice Heath

Literary transcendentalism: Cornell University Press.

Style and vision in the American renaissance. Ithaca:

Dialogue, dialectic, and conversation: A social perspective on the function of writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Cochran-Smith, M. The making of a reader. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1983 Davidson, C. N. 1986 Revolution and the word: The rise of the novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, Davidson, C. N. (ed.) Reading in America: Literature & social history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer1989 sity Press. Emerson, R. W: The works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 14 vols. Cambridge: The Riverside Press. 1883 Fish,S. Is there a text in this class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1980 Flower, L. 1989 "The role of task representation in reading to write", Tech. Report No. 6, in: Reading-to-write: Exploring a cognitive and social process. Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Writing at University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. Finegan, E. Attitudes toward English usage: The history of a war of words. New York: Teachers 1980 College Press. Freund, E. The return of the reader: Reader-response criticism. London: Methuen. 1987 Graff, G. 1987 Professing literature: An institutional history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graff, H. 1979 The literacy myth: Literacy and social structure in the nineteenth-century city. New York: Academic Press. 1987 The legacies of literacy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heath, S. B. 1976 "A national language academy: Debate in the new nation", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 11: 9-44. 1978 "Social history and sociolinguistics", The American Sociologist 13: 84-92. 1981 "Standard English: Biography of a symbol", in: T. Shopen and J. Williams (eds.), Standards and dialects in English. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers. "Toward an ethnohistory of writing in American education", in: M. F. Whiteman 1982 (ed.), Writing: The nature, development, and teaching of written communication. Vol. 1, Variation in writing: Functional and linguistic-cultural differences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. 1983 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988 "Language ideology", International Encyclopedia of Communications. New York: Oxford University Press, 393-395. in press "The essay in English: Readers and writers in dialogue", in: M. Macovski (ed.), to appear in Textual voices, vocative texts. New York: Oxford University Press.

Women in conversation: Covert models in American language ideology Holland, N. 1975 Iser, W. 1978 Kaestle, C. F. 1985

Laing, R. D. 1968 Lockridge, K. 1974 Neuburg, V. 1989

Nord, D. P. 1989

Radway, J. A. 1984 Repplier, A. 1893 [1969] 1905

217

5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. "The history of literacy and the history of readers", in: E. W. Gordon (ed.), Review of Research in Education. Vol. 12. Washington, DC: American Education Research Association. The politics of experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Literacy in Colonial New England: An enquiry into the social context of literacy in the early modern west. New York: Norton. "Chapbooks in America: Reconstructing the popular reading of early America", in: C. N. Davidson (ed.), Reading in America: Literature and social history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. "A Republican literature: Magazine reading and readers in late-eighteenth-century New York", in: C. N. Davidson (ed.), Reading in America: Literature and social history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Reading the Romance: Women, patriarchy, University of North Carolina Press.

and popular literature. Chapel Hill: The

"Leisure. Words", in: Essays in idleness. New York: Greenwood Press. "The luxury of conversation", in: Compromises. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Richards, I. A. 1924 Principles of literary criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1929 Practical criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. Rosenblatt, L. M. [1983] 1938 Literature as exploration. New York: Modern Language Association. Soltow, L. & E. Stevens 1981 The rise of literacy and the common school in the United States: A socioeconomic analysis to 1870. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stokes, G. Agnes Repplier. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1949 Tannen, D. 1984 Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1989 Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, D. 1983 Family literacy: Young children learning to read and write. Exeter, NH: Heinemann. Taylor, D. & C. Dorsey-Gaines 1988 Growing up literate: Learning from inner-city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Teale, W. & E. Sulzby (eds.) 1984 Emergent literacy: Writing and reading. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

218

Shirley Brice Heath

Tompkins, J. P. (ed.) 1980 Reader-response criticism. From formalism to post-structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. 1985 Sensational designs: the cultural work of American fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press. White, A. D. 1872 Report submitted to the Trustees of Cornell University in behalf of a Majority of the Committee on Mr. Sages Proposal to endow a College for Women. Ithaca, NY: University Press. LAC 40095.

Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God Robert L. Cooper

About 55 years ago, Wido Zobo dreamed he was face to face with God. Wido Zobo was a young man, a member of the Loma tribe, located on both sides of the border between Liberia and Guinea. One day, in the 1930s, he went to Monrovia to buy some thread and to ask his friend Moriba, a weaver, to make him some clothes. In conversation with Moriba, he complained that God had not permitted the Loma to have their own script. The next night, Wido Zobo dreamed that he was face to face with God, whom he accused of leaving His people in ignorance, without a script of their own. God replied that if the Loma had their own script, they might abandon their customs and become too proud. Wido Zobo swore that if God would give them the power of writing, they would respect their traditions and the secret of initiation. God then agreed to give writing to him if he would promise never to teach it to a woman. Wido Zobo promised. God commanded him to make ink the next day by pulverizing and boiling the leaves of a creeper. This Wido Zobo did. Then he and Moriba, the weaver, together devised the Loma syllabary (Dalby 1967).1 The Loma syllabary was not the first indigenous West African script, nor was it the only West African script to be supernaturally inspired. One hundred years earlier, another young man, Momulu Duwalu Bukele, a member of the Vai, who live in Liberia and Sierra Leone, invented a syllabary, after a spirit appeared to him in a dream and showed him how to write words in Vai. The script spread rapidly among the Vai, who taught it to each other. Over the next hundred years or so, other West African tribes followed suit and developed their own scripts. Dalby (1967, 1968, 1969) identifies fourteen West African scripts. Of the twelve which were developed for more than purely personal use, seven were inspired or revealed in a dream by a spirit or deity. West African scripts are not the only indigenous scripts invented during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for which spiritual inspiration or revelation is claimed. Afaka Atumisi, a Djuka from Surinam, invented in 1910 a syllabary which he said was revealed to him in a dream (Dalby 1968). The Djuka are the descendants of slaves from various West African tribes. Indeed, Atumisi said that the spirit who revealed the script came from West Africa along with Atumisi's ancestors. The Djuka syllabary, therefore, may perhaps be viewed as a cultural cousin of the West African scripts, a West African transplant, so to speak. But there are at least four modern indigenous scripts which were not invented by West Africans or by their descendants and which are associated with spiritual revelation or inspiration. At about the turn of the century, Uyakoq invented a syl-

220

Robert L. Cooper

labary for Eskimo Yupik, which he claimed was devinely inspired, and Qiatuaq produced an orthography for Eskimo Yupik which he derived from Uyakoq's syllabary but with different symbols and which he also claimed to be a gift of God (Walker 1981); Silas John Edwards, founder of a religious movement among the Western Apache, which later spread to the Mescalero Apache, created a writing system in 1904 to record the prayers of his religion and which he claimed to have been revealed, along with the prayers, in a dream from God (Basso and Anderson 1973); and Pau Chin Hau, who founded a monotheistic religion in the Chin Hills of Burma, taught to his followers a new script, for the Chin languages, which he reported was divinely revealed to him in a dream (Census Commmissioner of India 1933). Not all new writing systems are associated with supernatural revelation or inspiration. For example, neither the Somali Osmaniya alphabet, named for its inventor Yusuf Kenadid Osman, who devised it about 70 years ago (Lewis 1980, Tucker 1971), nor the Cherokee syllabary, invented by Sequoyah about 170 years ago (Walker 1981, 1984), is associated with such a tradition. None of the new scripts invented by outsiders - the Cree syllabary, for example, invented by a Wesleyan Methodist missionary in the first half of the nineteenth century (Walker 1981), or the Miao syllabary, devised in South China around the turn of the century by Samuel Pollard and his associates at the Bible Christian Mission (Diringer 1953) - were supernaturally inspired or revealed. Of the modern indigenous systems, however, a substantial proportion were claimed by their inventors to be the product of supernatural inspiration or revelation. Indeed, of the 21 new indigenous systems that I have been able to locate systems devised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the people for whom they were designed and which are not simply an adaptation of an existing script but are comprised solely or mainly by new symbols - at least twelve are associated with supernatural assistance. This association raises two questions: (1) why do people seek a script of their own rather than adopting an established system in use by surrounding groups or by the dominant power, and (2) why are new indigenous scripts so often viewed as a gift of God?

A script of one's own While there are many unique scripts, they are much fewer than the number of written languages. Most groups are content to adopt a preexisting script, sometimes adding symbols for sounds in their languages which are not represented by the original system. Subjugated populations often want their writing systems to be as similar as possible to the script of their rulers. Perhaps they want their script to partake of the dominant system's aura. Perhaps they are interested in a script of their own chiefly as a bridge to literacy in the dominant script. Indeed, modern

Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God

221

missionaries, the chief practitioners of reducing unwritten languages to writing, typically adapt the dominant writing system to the target language in order to provide a bridge to literacy in the official language. Even locals themselves often use the dominant script to reduce their language to writing. For example, Pablo Tac, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, adapted Latin script to write Luiseno, spoken by several Native American groups in Southern California (Walker 1981), and in the 1970s the Somali government adopted Latin script to write Somali, rejecting both Arabic script and the indigenous Osmaniya script (Andrzejewski 1974, Lewis 1980). As we have seen, however, sometimes minorities or local authorities invent a script of their own rather than adopt a script used by others. There are several plausible explanations. Dalby (1967) suggests a desire for secrecy as one of the motivations for the acceptance of West African indigenous scripts. The Vais' role as brokers in the slave trade may have enhanced the usefulness of a secret script for commercial activities. Even today, it is used primarily for personal and business correspondence. Scribner and Cole (1981) report that users of the syllabary, surveyed in the 1970s, cited privacy as the syllabary's chief benefit. Commercial applications, however, are not the only factor which makes secrecy desirable. There is in West Africa a tradition of using graphic symbols for occult purposes. West Africans use not only their own indigenous preliterate symbols but also "sub Arabic" - the secret "magico-cryptic alphabets associated with Islam" (Dalby 1969: 169) - as well as Arabic writing itself for cures, divinations, and sorcery. Perhaps graphic symbols are also used in connection with secret societies, a use suggested by Wido Zobo's promise to keep the secret of initiation. In any case, the magical use of graphic symbols, surrounded as such uses are by mystery and secrecy, makes a script unknown to outsiders highly desirable. The occult use of graphic symbols, is not, of course, confined to West Africa or to relatively simple societies. The ancient Greeks believed that because the alphabet contains all the letters necessary to spell the names of all the deities, the letters of the alphabet could be used to control the gods; the Pythagorean notion that realitiy is fundamentally numerical led to the doctrine that each letter has a supernatural significance, a doctrine which spread throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods and which is reflected in Jewish and Islamic mystical literature; the nineteenth-century founders of the Bahai religion emphasized alphabet mysticism; written characters, in short, have been used for occult and mystical purposes for about as long as writing has existed (Billigmeier 1987). All of the new indigenous scripts are used for religious or magical purposes. Indeed, three of them - the Ibibio-Efik "Oberi Okaime" alphabet (Dalby 1968), the Yoruba holy writing of Josiah Oshitelu (Dalby 1969), and Silas John Edwards' symbols (Basso and Anderson 1973) - are used solely for religious purposes. Just as some groups may reject writing their languages at all, for fear that they will

222

Robert L. Cooper

thereby lose control of their secrets (Walker 1984), so other groups may protect their traditions from outsiders by using a unique script. A second reason that some peoples may desire their own script is a desire to defend their identity. It is well known that scripts often become associated with religious, national, or ethnic identity and that when this is the case their users become extremely attached to them. The use of Hebrew script by European Jews to write Judezmo and Yiddish and by North African and Middle Eastern Jews to write Arabic was as much a marker of identity as speaking Judezmo, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic. Similarly, that Roman Catholic Slavs write their languages in Latin script, while Orthodox Slavs write theirs in Cyrillic script is a function of social identity. The attachment of script to social identity is clearest, perhaps, when we see the same language written in different scripts by different subgroups. SerboCroation, for example, is written in Latin script by Catholic Croats and in Cyrillic script by Bosnian Muslims (Billigmeier 1987). If users of a script view it as part of their identity, perhaps other groups view the same script as a marker of an alien identity and thus reject it in an effort to protect themselves from assimilation. If contact with a more powerful group threatens one's identity, the possession of a unique script may help distinguish oneself from the outsider and enhance pride in one's group. A third motive for seeking a unique script is suggested by Kotei (1972), who writes that while subjugated peoples may envy the power and material advantages associated with knowledge of dominant scripts, they may also see these scripts as a means for their own subjugation. Thus they may view the use of indigenous scripts as a means not only for improving their own material conditions but also for resisting the power of alien others. Another motive, related to that suggested by Kotei, is fear of the cultural innovations associated with the dominant script. Such a fear seems implicit in Wido Zobo's dream. His revelation implies that an indigenous script can act as a sieve, separating desired from undesired innovations. That is to say, an indigenous script permits its users to benefit from modern technology without sacrificing traditional beliefs and practices. An indigenous script provides an elegant solution to the problem of how to be modern and traditional at one and the same time, a problem about which Fishman (1983, 1988) has written with great sensitivity. In sum there appear to be at least four plausible reasons for a people to seek an indigenous script: the desire for secrecy, motivated by commercial or occult considerations; the desire to protect identity; the desire to resist alien domination; and the fear of cultural innovation.

Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God

223

Supernatural assistance Why are modern indigenous scripts so often associated with spiritual revelation or inspiration? Again, there are several plausible explanations. First, the use of graphic symbols in general and of indigenous scripts in particular for religious, mystical, or magical purposes may have predisposed the adopters of indigenous scripts to attribute a supernatural origin to them. Second, divine attribution helps legitimate an innovation. The promoters of an innovation often use all the resources at their command to persuade potential adopters to accept it. The inventor of the Vai syllabary, for example, presented the local ruler, King Fa Toro, with 100 parcels of salt in order to encourage the ruler's support of the innovation (Dalby 1967). Divine revelation may be a particularly potent device in one's armory of promotional strategies. If any innovation needs divine legitimation, surely it is writing, because access to writing confers power, either occult power over supernatural forces or secular power over human beings. While Lévi-Strauss (1969) may not have been entirely serious when he claimed that the primary function of literacy is the acquisition and maintenance of power, his argument contains more than a kernel of truth. His argument may be summarized as follows: Humanity made enormous technological advances before the invention of writing. Some preliterate peoples such as the Inca displayed a highly developed technology and architecture. In contrast, the possession of writing did not save various societies from long periods of stagnation and decline. The advent of literacy, however, always accompanied the rise of cities and the establishment of empires. Literacy facilitates stable bureaucratic administration and enables elites to exact the maximum of taxes and toil from the masses. It is true that there have been empires without access to writing, the Inca for one. But Lévi-Strauss claims that these are exceptions that prove the rule because all were short-lived. It is no coincidence, he argues, that the spread of mass literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accompanied universal military conscription and the mobilization of an industrial workforce. All the supposed intellectual and cultural benefits of literacy are a secondary function - a smokescreen for its underlying function, which is to exert power over others. If we accept Lévi-Strauss' argument, it is no wonder that legitimizing myths accompany the invention of writing. Indeed, from the beginning of literacy we see that writing is attributed to gods or heroes. The Babylonians believed that Nabu, son of the head of their pantheon, invented writing; the ancient Egyptians attributed writing to Thoth, god of sorcery; the Mayans believed that the deity Itsamna was the god of writing and books; and in Islamic tradition, writing was revealed by God (Billigmeier 1987, Gaur 1984). In short, the other-worldly origin of writing and writing systems helps legitimate the worldly authority which these systems represent. When God told Wido Zobo that knowledge of writing might

224

Robert L. Cooper

make the Loma too proud, He may have meant that knowledge of writing would make the Loma god-like: possessors of supreme power. Finally, supernatural revelation or inspiration through dreams often provides an ideal way to combine innovation with tradition. In many traditional societies, dreams are seen as a means whereby the dreamer can obtain from supernatural forces positive sanctions for innovation (O'Nell 1976). Indeed, traditional cultural items in such societies are often believed to have originated in dreams (Lincoln 1970). The spirit, totem, ancestor, or deity which appears to the dreamer legitimates the innovation and, in effect, links it to traditional beliefs and practices: the new takes on the aura of the old. Bilu (1987), for example, has demonstrated this phenomenon in his work on saint worship and dreams of saints among North African immigrants to Israel. Supernational legitimation links the innovation to the sacred, to the timeless. According to Eliade (1965), in traditional societies all important behaviors were originated by gods and heros. Men and women repeat these behaviors and thereby participate in the sacred. At the same time, they struggle to defend themselves against novelty and what Eliade calls "the irreversibility of history". If Eliade is correct, the linkage in modernizing societies of a new writing system to revelation yields a paradox. By attaching writing to the sacred, the society accepts an innovation which attaches it in turn to history. On the other hand, linkage of a writing system to the sacred helps the users of writing to participate in the sacred and the timeless as the society changes around them. Thus, linkage of new writing systems to revelation or inspiration - viewing them as gifts of God - blends the sacred with the profane, tradition with change; it shores up the old, as it legitimates the new. This is what Wido Zobo accomplished when he attributed the Loma syllabary to divine inspiration.

Notes 1. Dalby reports that in an alternate tradition there was no implied tabu against teaching the script to women and that in that tradition a woman was in fact credited with helping Wido Zobo create the script after the latter's dream.

References Andrzejewski, B. W. 1974

"The introduction of a national orthography for Somali", African Language Studies 15: 199-203. Basso, Keith H. & Ned Anderson 1973 "A Western Apache writing system: the symbols of Silas John", Science 180: 1013-1022.

Dreams of scripts: Writing systems as gifts of God

225

Billigmeier, Jon-Christian 1987 "Alphabets", The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan, Vol. 1, 216-222. Bilu, Yoram 1987 "Dreams and the wishes of the saint", in: Harvey E. Goldberg (ed.), Judaism viewed from within and without. Albany: State University of New York Press, 285-310. Census Commissioner of India 1933 Census of India, 1931. Vol. 11, Burma, Part 1. Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 183-186, 194-195, 217-218. Dalby, David 1967 "A survey of the indigenous scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai, Mende, Lorna, Kpelle and Bassa", African Language Studies 8: 1-51. 1968 "The indigenous scripts of West Africa and Surinam: their inspiration and design", African Language Studies 9: 156-197. 1969 "Further indigenous scripts of West Africa: Manding, Wolof and Fula alphabets and Yoruba 'holy' writing", African Language Studies 10: 161-181. Diringer, David 1953 The alphabet: A key to the history of mankind. New York: Philosophical Library. Second and revised edition, reprinted with amendments. Eliade, Mircea 1965 The myth of the eternal return: or, cosmos and history. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Second printing with corrections. First published in French by Librairie Gallimard, 1949. Fishman, Joshua 1983 "Modeling rationales in corpus planning: modernity and tradition in images of the good corpus", in: Juan Cobarrubias & Joshua A. Fishman (eds.), Progress in language planning: international perspectives. Berlin: Mouton, 107-118. 1988 "The development and reform of writing systems", in: Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin: de Gruyter, Vol. 2, 1643—1650. Gaur, Albertine 1984 A history of writing. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Kotei, S. I. A. 1972 "The West African autochthonous alphabets: an exercise in comparative palaeography", Ghana Social Science Journal 2 (1): 98-110. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1969 A writing lesson. Tristes Tropiques. (Translated by John Russell). New York: Atheneum, 286-297. (First published in French by Librairie Plon, 1955.) Lewis, I. M. 1980 A modern history of Somalia: Nation and state in the horn of Africa. London: Longman. Lincoln, Jackson Steward 1970 The dream in primitive cultures. New York: Johnson Reprint Collection. (Originally published in 1935 by the Cressett Press.) O'Nell, C. W. 1976 Dreams, culture, and the individual. San Francisco: Chandler and Sharp. Scribner, Sylvia & Michael Cole 1981 The psychology of literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tucker, A. N. 1971 "Orthographic systems and conventions in sub-Saharan Africa", Current Trends in Linguistics 7: 618-653.

226

Robert L. Cooper

Walker, Willard 1981 "Native American writing systems", in: Charles A. Ferguson & Shirley Brice Heath (eds.), Language in the USA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 145-174. 1984 "The design of native literacy programs and how literacy came to the Cherokees", Anthropological Linguistics 26: 161-169.

The future of Chinese characters Florian Coulmas

Writing is a culture tool which defines cultural spheres more clearly than many other societal features and techniques, sometimes more clearly even than language. The Mesopotamian culture manifested itself throughout the fertile crescent by the written language of the Sumerians in cuneiform, which continued to be used for many centuries after it ceased to be spoken, influencing as it did a variety of other languages which became written after the Sumerian model and adapted a stratum of Sumerian loan words, Sumerograms, that is. The two other major cultures of the ancient Near East are most conspicuously delimited by two distinctly different writing systems, Semitic consonant alphabets and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Uniformity and difference of cultures which superposed each other is reflected in the writing systems of the Indian subcontinent. The Devanagari script and a number of related systems characterize the world of Hinduism, while the Pali script is associated with Buddhism. Perso-Arabic as the writing system of Islam is another script which follows a creed, making the difference between Urdu and Hindi look more pronounced than it would be if both were written with the same letters. The culture of Ethiopian Christianity is intimately linked with the Ethiopic writing system, as is that of other Christian confessions with other scripts like the Glagolica of Old Church Slavonic in Bulgaria, the Latin alphabet of the catholic church and the Cyrillic of the orthodox. Judaism too has its own script, the Hebrew square script which in its Ashkenazic variety is also used for writing Yiddish by way of indicating its speech community's affiliation with the culture of the Mosaic faith, thus setting it apart from all other Germanic languages. Further examples could be added to illustrate the close relationship between culture, religion and writing, as well as the fact that writing systems, once installed, tend to transcend the narrow utilitarian function of serving as a means of visibly recording and communicating linguistic information to become powerful symbols of identification and cultural association (cf. Fishman 1977). It is in this capacity that writing systems command the attention of the sociologist of language and the sociopsychologist as much as the linguist. One of the most impressive examples of a cultural sphere defined by letters is that of the Chinese script. Chinese characters or hanzi constitute the writing system with the longest unbroken tradition, which has shaped the civilization east of the imaginary line spanning from the Himalayas to the Mekong river more than anything else (Hashimoto 1987). Today the area of hanzi literacy is still a world

228

Florian Coulmas

all of its own which is hermetically closed to anyone unwilling to invest years of work to penetrate it.1 At the same time it has created a common bond of unity for some of the peoples of East Asia which are otherwise divided by language, religion, race and political boundaries. It is a writing system quite unique in its structural make-up2 and in its functions. As the medium of wenyan, the Classical Chinese written language,3 it has contributed much to the dominance of the Chinese culture throughout East Asia. For many centuries, studying classical Chinese literature, especially Confucius and Confucianism as represented in the works of Mencius, Tseng-tzu, Hsiin-k'uang and others was a key element of education in Vietnam, Korea and Japan as well as, of course, in China itself. And this presupposed, first and foremost, a thorough knowledge of Chinese characters. No other man of letters is in a more literal sense the bearer of culture than the Chinese scholar-official, and few other cultures are based on writing in a more profound sense than the Chinese. Although the sunset of the twentieth century sees the countries of the Chinese culture sphere in various situations and at extremely different levels of development, hanzi still form an active component of their respective cultural identity. Anyone who gets off an airplane in Singapore or in Hongkong, in Taipei or in Beijing, in Seoul or in Tokyo cannot fail to immediately notice the visual reality of the hanzi world. To be sure, in public places Roman letters have made some inroads, often in combination with the English language. But knowledge of Chinese characters is still vital for even basic literacy. All important print media make use of hanzi reducing the untrained foreigner to an illiterate, no matter how educated he or she may be at home. However, as the century draws to a close, the forces of unification and the leveling of differences are more vigorously at work than ever before. Although a "global culture" seems to be a contradiction in terms, some social scientists and theoreticians of development have in the past decade started to use this notion. Clearly, multinationalized business, mass tourism, homogenized cultures and, most significantly for the present considerations, globalized communication that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries are important tendencies characterizing the world of today. What will be the fate of hanzi in such a world? Will they be relegated to a museum of cultural history, to a library of specialists preserving the remains of one of the most exquisite literary traditions ever, or will they have a future in the twenty-first century? Will they be pushed aside by new information processing and communication technologies based on and designed for alphabetic writing? Or will these technologies be adjusted to deal with hanzi? It is the purpose of this paper to offer some tentative answers to these questions. To this end, that is, in order to venture any statements about the future, the past must not be forgotten. The great historical depth of Chinese character writing must be kept in mind and the fact that it has co-existed on this planet with

The future of Chinese characters

229

alphabetic writing for many centuries. Let us consider then Chinese characters in the more general context of the development of writing.

Writing systems and the Principle of Least Effort In this section the question is discussed of how or whether Zipf's famous Principle of Least Effort can be applied reasonably to the development of writing systems, especially the Chinese writing system. Influential historians of writing, in particular Gelb (1963), have described the history of writing as an evolution which proceeds from primitive pictorial representations which are not yet writing through a sequence of necessary steps to writing proper, which in turn develops teleologically with the 'ideal' alphabet as its ultimate long-term goal. Harris (1986) has aptly criticized this view as reflecting an ethnocentric bias of a European approach to the study of non-European languages and writing systems. However, his argument represents but a minority position which is at variance with the established opinion which remains committed to the superiority of the alphabet. Indeed, it is the Greek alphabet rather than writing in general which is often acclaimed as one of the greatest technological advances ever made in human history (e.g. McLuhan 1962; Illich, Sanders 1988). From this point of view, the Chinese writing system is an anomaly of sorts because, in spite of its long history, it has failed to conform to the allegedly necessary evolutionary process which should have turned it into a phonographic writing system. 4 The principal arguments advanced for the superiority of the alphabet over all other writing systems are so commonplace that they need not be repeated here in detail. They are utilitarian and economic in nature. The inventory of basic signs is small and can be easily learned, whereas it asks for substantial efforts to master a system with an inventory of thousands of elementary signs, like the Sumerian or Egyptian, which did what the Chinese, according to the evolutionary theory, should have done, namely give way to a system which can be handled with greater ease. This kind of thinking is reminiscent of Zipf's (1949) Principle of Least Effort. Recall Zipf's (1949: 6) claim that "every individual's entire behavior is governed by the Principle of Least Effort." It is important to note that this does not mean that every individual always follows a natural inclination of laziness. What Zipf argues is that there is a tendency for a person's average workexpenditure over time to be minimized. People are credited, in other words, with the ability to invest work in order to save work. It is hardly self-evident that accepting what Zipf says about individuals compels us to recognize the corresponding maxim that every group's behavior is also governed by the Prinicple of Least Effort, but let us for the moment assume that this is the case and consider

230

Florian Coulmas

the consequences. Although Zipf covers a much wider range of phenomena, we are interested here only in the implications of his principle for language and what we can learn from them about writing. What Zipf argues is that all languages share a number of important properties which can be attributed to the fact that human beings behave in accordance with the Principle of Least Effort. For example, in phonetics there is a persistent positive correlation across languages between greater ease of articulation and frequency of use of phonemes. Or, to recall Zipf's most spectacular finding, a correlation can be found between the length of words and their relative frequency of occurrence, and, more importantly, the rank order of the few words with high frequencies of use and the many of low frequencies is virtually the same for all languages. The upshot of his analysis is, very briefly, that the Principle of Least Effort which determines every individual's behavior is reflected in an internal economy of linguistic subsystems such as phonology and lexicon, systems, that is, which are produced not by individual speakers, but by groups of speakers collectively. What we might want to ask then is whether writing systems, which are linguistic subsystems,5 too, exhibit an internal economy testifying to the effectiveness of the Principle of Least Effort. As pointed out above, the history of writing has been described in terms which implicitly recognize the Principle of Least Effort as the driving force of an evolution: In every language the number of phonemes is smaller than that of syllables which in turn is smaller than the number of words. Writing phonemes which supposedly the alphabet is designed to do - is, therefore, more economical than writing any of the larger units, and hence represents either a more advanced state of development or the result of the Principle's more unobstructed operation, which in other cases, that is, word or syllable writing systems, had been inhibited by external factors. Should we say then that the Chinese writing system has, for whatever reasons, resisted the force of the Principle of Least Effort? Not quite, I think, because in a sense this Principle can be shown to be at work in the Chinese writing system. Although it would stretch our imagination a little, a truly logographic writing system consisting of thousands upon thousands of distinguishably different word signs is graphically possible. If, for example, we wanted a system for a vocabulary of 50,000 different words, we could write those 50,000 words by means of 50,000 different elementary signs. Using straight, curved and broken lines, strokes of various length and thickness and placing them at various distances above and below a given line, the great quantity of different signs could be produced. However, this is not how the Chinese writing system works. The characters of such a system would be extremely cumbersome to write and hard to memorize, and texts written with them would be excessively long. In short, such a system would be very uneconomical, indeed. It is for reasons of economy that a distinctly new elementary sign is not invented for every word or morpheme, but a relatively small set of elements are combined and permuted in

The future of Chinese characters

231

various ways to produce a vast number of configurations, each different from all others. These elements function both as hanzi and as building blocks of graphically more complex hanzi, a structural procedure which can be described as an instance of double articulation. Double articulation is, of course, one of the fundamental principles of the economy of language systems. There is thus an internal economy in the Chinese writing system finding expression, for instance, in the fact that there is a correlation between frequency of use of characters and number of constituent strokes, that is, graphic complexity: the hanzi consisting of the smallest number of strokes tend to be those which are used most frequently. Also, Zipf's observations of what he calls "the versatility of words" (1949: 75) seem to apply to hanzi in a straightforward way. There is a correlation between the frequencies of occurrence of characters in running text and the number of different meanings that can be represented by them. And just like the truncation or abbreviation of words for new objects - e.g. phone, gas, bus, TV, PC - is a part of the economy of a lexicon, the reduction of graphic complexity of hanzi is part of their history. Notice also that the work of China's Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written Language to a large extent consists in applying or reinforcing the Principle of Least Effort, the most important measures adopted so far being (1) the reduction of the number of characters in common use, and (2) their graphic simplification, that is, a reduction of number of strokes. 6 It is possible, therefore, to view Chinese characters as a writing system which changes in the course of history and changes in a way that can be described, in part at least, as a tendency to reduce the effort necessary for using it. In many respects hanzi behave much like the lexicon of a language which, as Zipf has demonstrated, adapts continuously to the communicative requirements of the respective speech community by changing in accordance with the Principle of Least Effort. Arguably then, the people using hanzi for their written communication are not an exception to Zipf's rule, since in a way their behavior is governed by the Principle of Least Effort, at least if we pretend that the Chinese writing system was the only one available to them. But what if we part with this idea and reckon with the possibility of choice? Clearly, mastering, if not using Chinese characters requires a lot more effort than a great many other writing systems. Would not the Principle of Least Effort predict that individuals, since their entire behavior is oriented towards reducing work-expenditure, rather than simplify hanzi would do away with them altogether and use a writing system which is easier to learn and to handle? Of course, the conventional nature of writing systems as well as of language restricts every individual in his or her choices. Reducing one's personal work-expenditure cannot be the sole criterion for using one system rather than another. Using a system which is economical in terms of work-expenditure may be counterproductive because it fails to fulfill the superordinate purpose, commu-

232

Florian Coulmas

nication, unless the addressee is able and willing to use the same system, so that the speaker's entire effort, relatively little as it may be, would be entirely wasted. However, reducing the collective effort of writing the Chinese language is more than an intellectual caprice. After all, the Roman alphabet has not only been around for centuries as a consciously recognized potential alternative to hanzi which has been promoted by active romanization movements dating back to the turn of the century (cf. Syboldt, Chian 1979); it has also been implemented as a functional orthography for Chinese known as hanyu pinyin. Yet, although hanyu pinyin has been available to individuals for decades and promoted in some measure by the Chinese government, it remains virtually unused for all but demonstration purposes. There are two general answers to the question why this should be so. One is that the grindstones of the Principle of Least Effort turn slowly but unfailingly, that not enough time has passed for hanyu pinyin to compete successfully with hanzi, but that eventually the principle will prevail in this regard too, and the latter will be abolished in favor of the former. The other is that other factors interfere with the Principle of Least Effort not temporarily, but as rival principles of the human condition. In order to assess the merits of these answers, it is useful to examine some functional properties of Chinese characters.

Some functional properties of Chinese characters Learnability Learning Chinese characters is a formidable task compared to which the learning of any alphabetic writing system is relatively easy. This has often been pointed out as the the major disadvantage of hanzi. Children, it is argued, spend hundreds of hours learning nothing but the proper way of writing their native language which they know anyway. While this argument can hardly be dismissed offhand, it is neither an accurate nor a complete account of what is involved in learning hanzi. First, it is worth remembering that many "alphabetic" countries have regular mother tongue education for ten years or more, part of which consists in building up a vocabulary. Depending on the relative opaqueness of the orthographic system, the spelling of new vocabulary items has to be deliberately learned until advanced grades. Learning hanzi is very much like building up a vocabulary. Next, it should be realized that while hanzi are clearly a burden to the memory, learning them is also memory training. There is nothing to suggest that there is an upper limit to the amount of information that can be stored by the human memory. The argument that not having to learn so many hanzi leaves "space" for other, more valuable things to be stored in the memory is, therefore, vacuous. Finally, although we are entering the realm of speculation here, the following

The future of Chinese characters

233

possibility should be considered. The academic diligence of East Asians is not only proverbial, but well-documented, for example, by their numerical strength in American colleges and universities. Although above-average academic performance can be found in Asian immigrants who actually never learned hanzi, it is conceivable that the underlying ethos favoring studious determination is a byproduct of hanzi culture. Conjectures of this sort are hard to test, but since writing systems are commonly associated with cultural attributes and ideologies, it may be legitimate to mention the above possibility as a matter deserving of further attention. Dissemination The alphabet has been termed a "democratic" writing system which makes universal literacy possible. By contrast, the Chinese writing system has been blamed for China's failure to achieve universal or even widespread literacy. This line of thinking is based on a simple equation of ease of learning and extent of dissemination of writing systems which has given rise to sometimes sweeping generalizations. For example, Goody (1987: 37) declares that Chinese writing because of its complexity and because of the gulf between common speech and literary usage "inhibited the development of a democratic, literate culture." What is at issue here is not whether or not there is a democratic, literate culture in China, but whether there is any evidence to support a causal relationship between its alleged absence and the systematic properties of hanzi writing. Two facts cast serious doubts on such an allegation. One is that simple, alphabet-like systems in India have never led to universal literacy; and the other is that the extremely complex system of Japanese, which uses hanzi in combination with syllable signs and is just as difficult as the Chinese writing system, has been disseminated to an extent which is on a par with literacy rates in Europe. Indeed, if we look at what is now the technologically most advanced country in the world, and if we take notice of the fact that Japan is no longer the exotic exception, but that other countries of the hanzi hemisphere like Taiwan and the Republic of Korea have become donor states of development aid which is given to Eastern European countries with a long tradition of alphabetic literacy, any link between structural properties of writing systems, their relative dissemination, and their users' social or economic development seem increasingly dubious. High literacy rates are not guaranteed by the alphabet, nor are they inhibited by hanzi. Transferability is the property of a writing system to be applicable to languages other than one for which it was designed. The question of whether or not the Chinese writing system can be transferred to other languages is subject to a great deal of confusion. On the one hand, it is thought to be virtually language independent and thus applicable to any language. 7 On the other hand it is described as a

234

Florian Coulmas

system which is suitable for Chinese only. The facts are more complicated than either of these suppositions. Every writing system reflects structural properties of the language for which it first developed and so does the Chinese. This implies that hanzi do not offer themselves easily for writing languages which are structurally very different from Chinese. Yet, hanzi have been transferred to languages genetically unrelated to Chinese and typologically very different from it, notably Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. This transfer has not been without difficulties, but the result is something quite unique. Hanzi have functioned, as it were, as the basis of a written Sprachbund. In the speech communities of the three languages just mentioned the acquisition of the art of writing proceeded from using both Chinese characters and the Chinese written language for the purposes of written communication to applying Chinese characters to the vernacular languages. This was a gradual process which as one of its results led to the incorporation of thousands of Chinese words into these languages. Since these loan words were naturally written with Chinese characters - in the case of Korean and Japanese even after autochthonous writing systems had been developed - there is a vast stock of common lexical items in these languages which are readily recognized in writing, although phonologically their relatedness has been largely obliterated by sound changes. The Chinese loan vocabulary has become the morphologically productive base of the technical vocabulary in all of the languages concerned. For many centuries this meant that achievements of the superior Chinese culture could be absorbed easily by the peripheral cultures. However, since Japan's rapid modernization in the Meiji period (1868-1911), Japanese has become the source of many of the terminological innovations of the Sprachbund. As I have argued elsewhere (Coulmas 1990), kanji, as hanzi are called in Japanese, played a vital role in Japan's modernization, since they were the linguistic resource for developing a modern technical terminology. Owing to the nature of the writing system, this terminology is accessible to the Chinese even in the absence of any knowledge of Japanese. Since, for structural reasons, Chinese does not easily incorporate loanwords from unrelated languages (cf. Gao and Liu 1958; Pasierbsky 1990), the Sino-Japanese stratum of the Japanese vocabulary is of considerable importance for China as a source of advanced terminology. The following list of Japanese loanwords in Chinese may illustrate this point.

The future of Chinese characters

235

Table 1: Some Japanese loanwords in Chinese Sources: Gao and Liu (1958); Liu et al. (1984) Japanese

Chinese

meaning

baai

chdnghé

'occasion'

bamen

chàngmiàn

'scene'

basho

chängsuö

'place'

benjo

biànsuô

'lavatory'

Bushidö

wushìdào

'Bushido, chivalry'

butai

wùtài

'stage'

dogu

dàojù

'tool'

fukusha

fùxië

'duplication'

geta

xiàtuó

'clogs'

hitsuyo

biyào

'necessity'

hoken

bàojiàn

'hygiene'

hoshin

wànzhin

'plan, policy'

mm

hyögen

bidoxiàn

'expression'

A Î Î

jinrikisha

rénliche

'rickshaw'

kaiketsu

jièjué

'solution'

keshohin

huàzhuangpin

'makeup'

kibo

xiwàng

'desire'

kinmu

qinwù

'duty'

kiroku

jìlù

'record'

kokan

jiao huàn

'exchange'

kötsü

jiao tòng

'traffic'

St ft

mibun

shenfen

'rank'

S s

mokuhyo

mùbiao

'target'

reigai

lìwài

'exception'

sanrinsha

sanlùnche

'tricycle'

M SB mm ffiBr

Î I a ? Tit

£9

«tt mm.

mm mm

mn

shihai

zhipèi

'control'

m»

shükyo

zöng jiào

'religion'

s ä t§ M

sozo

xiàng xiàng

'imagination'

wadai

huàtì

'topic'

mm m± mm

yoso

yàosù

'element'

genkin

xiànjin

'cash'

genshö

xiànxiàng

'phenomenon'

Hi

inshi

yinzi

'factor'

it* mm

kagaku

huàxué

'chemistry'

kankyo

huànjìng

'environment'

fit«

joho

gingbào

'information'

236

Florian Coulmas

Processibility No matter what technology was involved, Chinese writing has always been more difficult to process for storage and communication than alphabetic writing. This has become more apparent than ever with the advent of modern computer technology, and it is this new technology which has been viewed as forcing China, for the first time in her history, to make large-scale changes in her linguistic behavior. For example, a decade and a half ago Ong made the following prediction: "Sad though it may be, it is difficult to see how in any way Chinese character writing could long continue to survive in a technological society dependent upon typewriters, elaborate indexes, and quantified knowledge retrievable systems" (Ong, 1977: 34). For assessing this argument we shift our attention from China to Japan, because if Chinese character writing is the issue, it applies to Japan as much as to China, and it is Japan that is at the forefront of technological development. Ong could hardly have anticipated that innovations in writing technology would be so rapid that at least part of his reasoning has now already lost its basis. Typewriters are fast becoming museum pieces as computers find their way into elementary schools and private homes. In this connection it is interesting to note that the typewriter because of its alphabet-dependent design never was an important writing technology in East Asia. Rather, until very recently practically all writing was done by hand. For believers in the overwhelming power of technology for the shaping of society it is probably hard to understand or explain that a country which is economically so advanced as Japan has "wasted" innumerable manhours by administering itself in government, business and science entirely by means of handwritten documents. Indeed proper appreciation of the role of technology for social development may lead one to regard the typewriter and similar keyboard instruments such as the lino-typesetter as a compelling reason for using the alphabet instead of thousands of kanji. Nevertheless nothing of this sort happened. Meanwhile personal computers that can handle Japanese, Chinese and Korean writing have become widely used. As regards everyday requirements of business, government and science, there is nothing that cannot be done with the available software and hardware which has been equipped to write in lines and columns as well as to write in decorative cursive styles. Of late another new technology which in Japan spread even faster than the personal computer is actually giving a boost to handwriting: the Fax-machine which combines the speed of electronic transmission with the ability of using a graphically individual code. The development of writing technology was not quite parallel in the alphabetic world and in the hanzi world. The technological control of writing as shaped by the alphabet proceeded from handwriting to block printing, moveable typeprinting, mechanical and then electronic typewriting, text processing, to arrive at desk-top printing. In China, moveable type-printing was invented earlier than in

The future of Chinese characters

237

Europe, but had less revolutionary effects because of the great number of necessary types. For the same reason, typewriters were culturally insignificant. The development thus proceeded, as it were, from printing directly to desk-top printing, skipping the intermediary steps. Far from forcing the abolition of Chinese characters, new writing technologies seem to improve their chances of survival. What machines have been enabled to do is to extend the reach of the hand. This is true for all regular forms of writing. But what about writing in the domain of high technology? Unger (1987) has presented a sophisticated argument to the effect that kanji are an insurmountable obstacle to advances in artificial intelligence and will, therefore, have to be abandoned if the Japanese computer industry is to stay abreast of international developments. Unger maintains that the preoccupation with Japanese writing manageable by computers is a waste of energy and "unquestionably one of the main reasons for Japan's software problems" (Unger 1987: 3). In order to appreciate this argument, it is necessary to briefly consider what is involved in reducing written Japanese to a form communicable with programming languages required for the use of computers in science, business and government. At present, machine processing of written Japanese (or Chinese), in simple word processors as well as in sophisticated computers, involves a double conversion of Chinese characters so that the input can be done with a standard alphabetic keyboard and the output appears in kanji. This some Japanese computer scientists consider unfortunate, because it supposedly shows that the Japanese depend on alphabetic writing after all. Western scholars, Unger, for example, also accept this view, but their conclusions are different. While the latter take it as a reason for advocating that the Japanese put their linguistic house in order by writing their language alphabetically and thus avoid the cumbersome and time-consuming kanji conversions, the former take it as a challenge for the so-called fifth generation computers, 8 setting themselves the task to overcome the subordination of kanji to an alphabetic code, inherent in both input and output with computers so far. This is no doubt a very difficult task. Whether or not it is at all manageable is hotly debated. Unger (1987) says no; Japanese researchers are more optimistic. What the final outcome will be is quite beyond this writer's judgment. None the less the question can be raised whether the outcome, whatever it may be, really matters. For the point at issue is not only whether or not computers will be empowered to deals with kanji as easily as with alphabetic letters, but also whether developments in computer technology will be so consequential that the whole society will be forced to change its literate culture. It should be kept in mind that the alphabet is not really alien to the Japanese or Chinese. They are using it regularly for certain purposes, such as algebra or chemistry. There is no reason why they should not also use it as an additional auxiliary code for man-machine communication, but this does not necessarily imply that kanji should be replaced

238

Florian Coulmas

by the alphabet. It is precisely the simplicity of the alphabet which makes its acquisition and use as a supplementary system attractive, but arguing that because machines respond more easily to an alphabetic input, alphabetic writing should be used for all purposes is a little bit like saying we should use a binary digit code right away to make life for computers easier. Unger is right where he attacks as a myth the view, dear to many Japanese, that the Japanese language cannot be written without kanji. Yet, his conclusion that, therefore, romanization is necessary and inevitable is based on a faulty premise, namely that "writing is merely a reflection [of the structure of language]" (Unger 1987: 2). As a culture tool writing is more than that for many, 9 which is why utilitarian arguments, however sound, are unreliable when it comes to changing established ways. To be sure, using the alphabet as a supplementary code and thus maintaining two literacies side by side seems to be a flagrant violation of the Principle of Least Effort. But there is precedent. It should not be forgotten that the kana syllabaries which are just as simple as any alphabetic writing system have been available to the Japanese for more than a thousand years. Using them instead of kanji for writing Japanese would seem to be dictated by rationality. Yet, rather than abandoning kanji, the Japanese chose to use kana as an additional supplementary system. In sum, the argument that the reduction of writing to microchip dimensions in the course of the communications revolution spells the finale of Chinese character writing does not rest of firm grounds.

The future of kanji The fact that the Japanese use a mixed system combining hiragana and katakana syllabic signs with kanji is an important difference from the Chinese writing system which has a bearing on the future of Chinese character use in Japan and China. Japanese texts vary with respect to the amount of kanji they contain. Erudition is displayed by a text densely packed with kanji, but in principle every word for which the writer does not know the proper kanji can be written with kana just as well. This implies that, while the Chinese are faced with the alternative of using either hanzi or pinyin, the Japanese can change their system gradually by reducing the number of commonly used kanji. This is actually what is happening, both with regard to the number ordifferent kanji and the absolute frequency of kanji in running text. Before World War II, Japanese newspapers had a stock of between 6000 and 7000 characters. At present, some 2000 kanji are officially designated as characters for common use (joyo kanji). Newspapers and all official publications are bound by this restriction, but writers are free to use as many kanji as they like. Interestingly, however, writers too have changed their kanji usage.

The future of Chinese characters

239

This was first investigated by Yasumoto (1963) in a study on the future development of Japanese writing. Because of the novelty of using mathematical methods for making predictions about certain aspects of future language use, and because it was the first paper to introduce hard data into a discussion which so far had been characterized by emotional and ideological arguments, his paper aroused considerable interest at the time. Yasumoto's idea was quite simple. From a collection of modern Japanese literature he chose a novel for every year spanning fifty-four years from Izumi Kyoka's Koya hijiri of 1900 to Mishima Yukio's Shiosai published in 1954. A running text of 1000 characters was then taken from a randomly selected page of each novel. The specific question Yasumoto asked was how many of the 1000 characters were kanji as opposed to hiragana, katakana or Roman letters. He thus calculated a "kanji index" for each novel. Comparing these rates he found a steady decline over time in the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese literary prose from 39.3 % in 1900 to 27.5 % in 1954. Since his data were quite large covering more than half a century of very eventful Japanese history, Yasumoto felt that he could extrapolate his findings to make a prediction on the future of kanji, hence the title of his article. The result was that, if the rate of decline remained steady, kanji would have another 230 years before they would disappear from Japanese literary prose. By the year 2191 the kanji index would approach zero. Obviously, such a long-term prediction is only half-serious. Nevertheless, as a thought experiment it is interesting, for it sketches one possible course of development which is not at all unrealistic. Korean which is also written with a mixed system offers a comparison. In the Republic of Korea 1 0 Chinese character usage is undergoing changes reminiscent of those predicted by Yasumoto for Japanese. In the 1950s Chinese characters made up some 46 % of Korean newspaper texts. This rate was down to 28 % in the 1960s and to about 20 % in the 1970s (Miyajima 1988: 58). However, Japan is not Korea, and to get the calculation right is not the only thing that counts where changes of the kind under consideration are concerned. Any number of imponderable factors may intervene to prove the arithmetic wrong. A quarter century after the publication of Yasumoto's paper Miyajima conducted a follow-up study. To match Yasumoto's data, he used novels which had won the prestigious Akutagawa award, covering the period from 1936 to 1985. Thus there are some twenty years overlap in the two studies, and the results for this period are similar. Miyajima found a decline in kanji use quite parallel to Yasumoto's figures. However, after the end of the Pacific war, that is, after the restricted number of kanji in common use had been implemented, the curve changed from a falling line with some ups and downs to a more or less stabilized straight line indicating a steady kanji index for the last three decades (Miyajima 1988: 55). These data are backed up by figures for a weekly journal, Chuo koron, where the decline comes to a halt in 1951 and kanji use is slightly increasing

240

Florian Coulmas

thereafter. Miyajima refrains from making any extrapolations confining himself to the supposition that for the immediate future, that is, the next five to ten years, the position of kanji in Japanese literature seems to be stable. Beyond that, however, he feels that no predictions are warranted.

Conclusion Where do these observations leave us? China's ultimate language policy goal is the replacement of kanzi by pinyin except for scholarly purposes. At present, however, there is no way of making empirically based predictions when or whether the romanization of Chinese will be accomplished. The Republic of Korea seems to be set on a course to gradually phase out the use of Chinese characters, but it can hardly be taken as a foregone conclusion that the South-Koreans are really intent to follow in the footsteps of their northern neighbors and discard Chinese characters altogether. As for Japan, the most advanced and in terms of available data most transparent country, romanization is not on the agenda of public issues at present, but that does not necessarily allow any conclusions about the future of development. Miyajima's study does not prove that Yasumoto was fundamentally wrong. But there are some lessons to be learned from it. One is that even several decades are a short time when it comes to changing literary traditions, too short to make reliable predictions. Another is that it is hard to foresee all of the factors which enter into the development of a literary culture. Computers and word processors, for instance, were too hastily regarded as a new writing technology which would finally complete the triumphal march of the alphabet and reduce Chinese characters to a cultural relic with no practical use. Of course, it would be implausible to assume that the new media will have no influence on the literary culture of the hanzi world, but there is little evidence to suggest that the eradication of Chinese character writing will be the effect. The personal computer, for instance, may have a quite different impact. Being designed as it is to convert a simple input made with alphabetic letters or kana syllabic signs into a sophisticated output in kanji, its popularization may actually contribute to an increase of kanji in everyday texts, while at the same time reducing their users' ability to write kanji thus widening the gap between active and passive knowledge of kanji.11 Another factor also mentioned by Miyajima (1988) which is hard to assess is that Japanese has turned away from Chinese to Western languages and their Greek and Latin technical vocabulary as a source of loanwords. Chinese loanwords are naturally written with Chinese characters, while European loanwords are written phonetically with kana. An increase of European loanwords is, therefore, tantamount to a decrease of kanji in running text. Finally, there are educational policy and public opinion to be reckoned with,

The future of Chinese characters

241

both factors which are susceptible to pressure from various directions and unpredicatable changes. Writing systems are the most tangible part of a language, often being the subject of emotional attachment and other irrational attitudes. As a consequence, even minor writing reform projects usually spark fierce and lengthy discussions. Predictions are always risky. "Never say die," to put it in Fishman's words. Predictions about changes in a literary culture which fail to take this into consideration and work on the assumption that writing is but an instrument for the representation of speech run a particularly high risk of being corrected by the actual course of events. Declarations to the effect that Chinese character writing will disappear before long, therefore, have to be assigned to their proper place, the realm of conjecture.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

That Chinese characters function as a barrier is to be understood quite literally. Goody (1986: 126) suggests that "[t]he written cultures of China, Japan, India and the Middle East have buffered those societies against not always the military but to some extent the cultural conquest by European powers..." The most insightful of the numerous descriptions of the Chinese writing system that I know is DeFrancis (1984). In the present context it may suffice to note that each Hanzi stands for a syllable and a morpheme. In order to master the system, several thousand characters must be learned, one by one. Although Hanzi are composed of recurrent elements which allow for reasonable and to some extent regular assignments of sounds and meanings, such predictions do not work the other way round, that is, there is no orthography in the sense of a rule governed relation between phonetic and graphic units and hence no way of knowing how a given morpheme/syllable is to be represented in writing unless the appropriate character has been learned. I have attempted a functional description of Wenyan in terms of categories such as 'imperial language', 'sacral language,' 'scientific language, and 'modem standard language' elsewhere; cf. Coulmas (1989b). As a matter of fact, it has been argued by Kennedy (1951) that quite early in its history the Chinese writing system had achieved the qualities of a sound-writing system, but that the system-internal evolutionary process was actually turned back by external, that is, societal factors yet to be explained.

5.

This has not always been recognized. Indeed, in the first half of this century, many influential linguists have vigorously denied that writing systems have to be considered as proper subsystems of language systems. However, this is not the place to review their arguments. Cf., e.g., Linell 1982, Eisenberg 1983, Coulmas 1989a.

6.

For more detailed accounts of the reform of the Chinese written language see DeFrancis (1984), Zhou (1986), Coulmas (1983). For example, Krzak (1987: 61) declares that "[the] Chinese script is nowadays the most universal script for it does not essentially depend on the properties of Chinese language and theoretically it could be used for any other language." Computer technology is often discussed in terms of generations referring to the devices employed in their hardware - the generation of relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, semiconductor integrated circuits, and VLSIs (Very Large Scale Integrated chips).

7.

8.

242 9.

Florian Coulmas Also, whether or in what sense writing is a reflection of language is not as simple an issue as Unger suggests. There are good reasons to disagree with him where he says that the " . . . idea of characters totally divorced from speech is ... meaningless" (Unger 1987: 2). Harris (1986: 158) points the way to a critical assessment of this claim: "When a history of writing as writing ... comes to be written ... speech will be seen as the historical crutch on which writing was obliged to lean in the earliest phases, a prop to be thrown aside when no longer needed."

10. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abandoned Chinese characters shortly after its foundation in 1948. 11. A similar effect can be expected from widespread reliance on spell checking programs for alphabetically written languages, that is, that people can read more than they can write without the assistance of a machine.

References Coulmas, Florian 1983 "Writing and literacy in China", in: F. Coulmas, K. Ehlich (eds.), Writing in focus. Berlin, New York: Mouton, 239-256. 1989a The writing systems of the world. Oxford: Blackwell. 1989b "Function and status of written language in East Asia", in: U. Ammon (ed.), Status and function of languages and language varieties. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 216-242. 1990 "Language adaptation in Meiji Japan", in: Brian Weinstein (ed.), Language planning and political development. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 69-86. De Francis, John 1984 The Chinese language. Fact and fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Eisenberg, Peter 1983 "Writing systems and morphology", in: F. Coulmas, K. Ehrlich (eds.), Writing in focus. Berlin, New York: Mouton, 63-80. Fishman, J. A. (ed.) 1977 Advances in the creation and revision of writing systems. The Hague, Paris: Mouton. Gao Mingkai, Liu Zhengtan 1958 Xiandai hanyu wailaici yanjiu [Research on loanwords in modem Chinese]. Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe. Gelb, I. J. 2 1963 A study of writing. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Goody, Jack 1987 The interface between the written and the oral. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Roy 1986 The origin of writing. London: Duckworth. Hashimoto, Mantaro 1987 "Kokusaigo toshite no kango to kanji" [Chinese characters and Chinese words as internationalisms], in: Hashimoto, M. Suzuki, T., Yamada, H„ Kanji minzoku no ketsudan [Assessing the Kanji Race]. Tokyo: Taishukan, 327-360. Illich, Ivan & Barry Sanders 1988 ABC: The alphabetization of the popular mind. San Francisco: North Point Press.

The future of Chinese characters

243

Kennedy, George A. 1951 "The monosyllabic myth", Journal of the American Oriental Society 71: 161-166. Krzak, Miroslav 2987 "Computer technology as an aid to multilingualism", in: H. Tonkin & K. M. Johnson-Weiner (eds.), The economics of language use. New York: Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems, 55-68. Liu Zhengtan et al. (eds.) 1984 Hanyu wailaici cidian [A dictionary of loan words in Chinese]. Shanghai chishu chubanshe. McLuhan, Marshall 1962 The Gutenberg galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Miyajima Tatsuo 1988 '"Kanji no shorai' sono go" ['The future of kanji' revisited] Gengo seikatsu 436: 50-58. Ong, Walter J. 1977 Interfaces of the word. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Pasierbsky, Fritz 1990 "Adaptation processes in Chinese", in: Florian Coulmas (ed.), Language adaptation. London: Cambridge University Press, 90-103. Seyboldt, Peter J. & Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang (eds.) 1979 Language reform in China. Documents and commentary. Dawson: Sharpe. Unger, J. M. 1987 The fifth generation fallacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Yasumoto Biten 1963 "Kanji no shorai" [The future of kanji], Gengo seikatsu 137: 46-54. Zhou Youguang 1986 "Modernization of the Chinese language", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 59: 7-23. Zipf, George K. 1949 Human behavior and the principle of least effort. New York: Hafner.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory Compiled by Gella Schweid Fishman

I. Books, monographs, reports 1949 1. Bilingualism in a Yiddish School: Some Correlates and Non-Correlates (Unpublished prizewinning monograph). New York, Yiddish Scientific Institute, 125 pp. 1955 2. Negative Stereotypes Concerning Americans Among American-Bom Children Receiving Various Types of Minority-Group Education. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 51, 107-182. 3. The Acceptance of New Reference Groups, Exploratory Phase (Ruth E. Hartley, principal investigator). Annual Technical Report 1, Nonr (National Office of Naval Research) - 1957 (01). New York, The City College. 1956 4. A Review of the Research Activities of the College Entrance Examination Board, 1952-1955. New York, College Entrance Examination Board, 90 pp. 5. The Acceptance of New Reference Groups (Ruth E. Hartley, principal investigator). Annual Technical Report 2, Nonr-1957 (01). New York, The City College. 6. Supplement (1955-56) to the Review of the Research Activities of the College Entrance Examination Board. New York, College Entrance Examination Board, 10 pp. 1957 7. The 1957 Supplement to College Board Scores 2. New York, College Entrance Examination Board, 204 pp. 1958 8. The Research Activities of the College Entrance Examination Board, 1952-1957. New York, College Examination Board, 120 pp. 1964 9. Language Loyalty in the United States. New York, Yeshiva University (Mimeographed); 3 volume report to Language Research Section, USOE. 1965 10. Toward Integration in Suburban Housing (with M. Deutsch and E. Leacock). New York, AntiDefamation League. 11. For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday (ed., with L. Dawidowicz, E. Ehrlich and S. Ehrlich). The Hague, Mouton. 12. Yiddish in America. Bloomington, Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics. 1966 13. Language Loyalty in the United States (with Vladimir C. Nahimy, John E. Hofman, Robert G. Hayden, et al.). The Hague, Mouton.

246

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

14. Hungarian Language Maintenance University and Mouton.

in the United States. Bloomington and The Hague, Indiana

1968 15. Readings in the Sociology of Language (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 16. Language Problems of Developing Nations (ed., with Charles A. Ferguson and Jyotirinda Das Gupta). New York, Wiley. 17. Bilingualism in the Barrio (with Robert L. Cooper, Roxana Ma, et al.), 2 vols. Final Report to USDHEW under Contract No. OEC-1-7-062817-0297. 18. Expanding Horizons of Knowledge About Man (ed.). New York, Yeshiva University. 1970 19. Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Rowley, Newbury House. 20. Taalsociologie. Labor-Brussels, Steppe-Ninove. (No. 19, translated into Dutch). 1971 21. Bilingualism in the Barrio (with Robert L. Cooper, Roxana Ma, et al.). Language Science Monographs 7. Bloomington, Indiana University. 22. Sociolinguistique. Labor-Brussels, Nathan-Paris. (No. 19, translated into French). 23. Advances in the Sociology of Language I (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 1972 24. The Sociology of Language: An Interdisciplinary Social Science Approach Society. Rowley, Newbury House. 25. Advances in the Sociology of Language II (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 26. Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford, Stanford University Press. 27. Studies in Modern Jewish Social History (ed.). New York, Ktav. 28. Language and Nationalism. Rowley, Newbury House.

to Language

in

1973 29. Advances in Language Planning (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 30. Hasotsiologia shel yidish beartsot habrit: avar, hove veatid. Jerusalem, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Sprinzak Division. 1974 31. The Sociology of Language. Tokyo, Taishukan Publishing Co. (No. 24, translated into Japanese). 32. Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919-1970; The Interplay of Social, Economic and Political Factors in the Struggle of a Minority for its Existence. New York, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. 33. The Sociology of Bilingual Education. Final Report, under Contract OECO-73-0588, for the Division of Foreign Studies, DHEW, OE. 1975 34. Soziologie der Sprache. Munich, Hueber. (No. 24, translated into German). 35. No. 21, revised edition. Bloomington, Indiana University Language Science Monographs. 1976 36. Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective. Rowley, Newbury House. 37. No. 23, revised edition. The Hague, Mouton. 38. La Sociologie del Linguagio. Rome, Officina. (No. 23, translated into Italian). 1977 39. The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional and A. W. Conrad). Rowley, Newbury House.

Language

(with R. L. Cooper

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

247

40. Language Planning Processes (with J. Rubin, B. Jernudd, J. Das Gupta and C. A. Ferguson). The Hague, Mouton. 41. Bilingual Education: Current Perspectives; Social Science. Arlington, Center for Applied Linguistics. 1978 42. Advances in the Study of Societal Multilingualism (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 43. Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 44. Sociologija Jezika. Sarajevo, Svjetlost. (No. 24, translated into Serbocroatian). 45. No. 24, revised edition. Rowley, Newbury House. 46. No. 12, reprinted. New York, Arno Press. 47. Sociolinguistica del Lenguaje. Madrid, Catedra. (No. 24, translated into Spanish). 48. lstruzione Bilingue: Una Prospetiva Sociologica lnternazionale. Bergamo, Minerva-Italien. (No. 36, translated into Italian). 1979 49. The Ethnic Mother Tongue School in America: Assumptions, Findings and Directory (with Barbara R. Markman). Final report under Grant NIE G-78-0133 (Project No. 8-0860). Xeroxed, 716 pp. 1980 50. Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language (co-translator, with Shlomo Noble). Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 51. Non-English Language Resources of the United States (A Preliminary Return Visit) (with assistants/associates). Final report under G-00-79-01816, Research Section, International Studies Branch, Department of Education. 1981 52. Language Resources in the United States: I. Guide to Non-English Print Media (with E. G. Lowy, M. H. Gertner and W. G. Milan). Rosslyn (VA), National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. 53. Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters (ed.). The Hague, Mouton. 1982 54. Bilingual Education for Hispanic Students in the United States (ed., with Gary Keller). New York, Teachers College Press. 55. Language Resources in the United States: II. Guide to Non-English Broadcasting (with E. G. Lowy, W. G. Milan and M. H. Gertner). Rosslyn (VA), National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. 56. The Acquisition of Biliteracy: A Comparative Ethnography of Minority Ethnolinguistic Schools in New York City (with Carole Reidler-Berger, Phyllis Koling and J. Mark Steele). First Part (February); Second Part (August). Final Reports to National Institute of Education under Grant G-79-0122. 1983 57. Progress in Language Planning: International Mouton.

Perspectives

(ed., with Juan Cobarrubias). Berlin,

1985 58. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages (ed.). Leiden, E. J. Brill. 59. Ethnicity in Action: The Community Resources of Ethnic Languages in the United States (with M. H. Gertner, E. G. Lowy and W. G. Milan). Binghamton, Bilingual Press. 60. The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity (with M. H. Gertner, E. G. Lowy and W. G. Milan). Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.

248

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

1986 61. The Fergusonian Impact (ed., with M. Abdulaziz, M. Clyne, Bh. Krishnamurti and A. Tabouret-Keller). 2 vols. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. 1987 62. Ideology, Society and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum. Ann Arbor, Karoma. 1989 63. Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. 64. No. 27, reprinted in its entirety in No. 63, above. In press (as of July, 1990): 65. Yiddish: Turning to Life: Sociolinguistic Studies and Interpretations. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. 66. Reversing Language Shift; Theory and Practice of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.

II. Reviews, prefaces, comments, notes, etc. 1949 1. Nathan Ausubel, ed., "A Treasury of Jewish Folklore: Stories, Traditions, Legends, Humor, Wisdom, and Folk Songs of the Jewish People". New York, Crown Publishers, 1948; Yivo-bleter, 33, 195-206. 1951 2. Maria Leach, ed., "Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend". New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1949 and 1959, 2. vols. Yivo-bleter, 35, 264-272. 1954 3. Addition to "Guides to Psychological Literature". American Psychologist, 9, 159. 4. The Role of the Culture-Group Affiliation of the "Judge" in Thurstone Attitude-Scale Construction (Abstract, with Irving Lorge). American Psychologist, 9, 368-369. 1955 5. Suggestions on the Reading of Papers. American Psychologist, 10, 174. 6. The Roots of Hatred (Berdyaev's "Christianity and Anti-Semitism"). The Humanist, 15, 284. 7. The Study of Language - A Critical Review. Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 169-179. 8. On Hildebrand's "The Social Responsibility of Scientists". American Scientist, 43, 90-92. (Comment). 9. What's Happening to SPSSI Today? SPSSl Newsletter, April, 2 and 4. 1956 10. S. I. Hayakawa, ed., Language, Meaning and Maturity ("A 'Loyal Opposition' View"). New York, Harper, 1954. Etc. A Review of General Semantics, 13, 225-232. 1957 11. College Board Research Notes. College Board Review, No. 31, 3-4; No. 32, 3; No. 33, 2-3. 1958 12. College Board Research Notes. College Board Review, No. 34, 2; No. 35, 2-3. 13. Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia. American Scientist, 46, 152A-154A. (Invited review).

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

249

14. B. English and A. C. English, A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms. New York, Longmans Green. (Assistance acknowledged on p. viii: statistical and testing terms). 1959 15. A. A. Roback, "Destiny and Motivation in Language". Etc. A Review of General Semantics, 16, 250-251. (Invited review). 16. SRA Tests of Educational Ability, in Oscar Buros, ed., Fifth Mental Measurements Yearbook. Gryphon Press, Highland Park (N. J.), 510-511. 17. Thurstone Test of Mental Alertness, in Oscar Buros, ed., Fifth Mental Measurements Yearbook. Gyphon Press, Highland Park (N. J.), 529-530. 1961 18. David K. Berlo, ed., The Process of Communication, An Introduction to Theory and Practice ("From Language to Communication"). New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Contemporary Psychology, 6, 248-249. 1962 19. M. Carpenter, "The Larger Learning". Personnel and Guidance, 4 0 , 7 4 6 - 7 4 7 . (Invited review). 20. J. L. Moreno, et al., "The Sociometry Reader". Psychometrika, 27, 216-218. 21. H. Toch, "Legal and Criminal Psychology" (Cops, Robbers and Psychology). Contemporary Psychology, 7, 292. 1963 22. "Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States". Journal Education, 34, 176-178. 1966 23. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., "The Ethnography of Communication". Journal of American Linguistics, 32, No. 2, 193-195. 1967 24. John Macnamara, "Bilingualism and Primary Education". The Irish Journal 79-83. (Invited review). 25. J. Herzler, "Sociology of Language". Language, 43, 586-604.

of Higher

International

of Education,

1,

1968 26. William Bright, ed., "Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference 1964". Lingua, 19, No. 4, 428^132. 27. Preface to Albert Verdoodt's Zweisprachige Nachbarn. Vienna, Braumuller, 1968. 28. Remarks (on establishing the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Yeshiva University), in J. A. Fishman, ed., Expanding Horizons of Knowledge About Man. New York, Yeshiva University, 22-24. 1969 29. "International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences" (with Yoav Findling). Language, 45, 458^163. 30. Literacy and the Language Barrier (Reviews of P. E. Vernon's "Intelligence and Cultural Environment" and Joan C. Baratz and R. W. Shuy "Teaching Black Children to Read"). Science, 165, 1108-1109. 31. Abraham Ansel, "Judaism and Psychology". New York, Feldheim. Journal of Jewish Communal Service. 46, 197-198.

250

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

1971 32. Frederick Williams, ed., "Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme". Chicago, Markham, 1970. Social Forces, 641-642. 1972 33. Joan Rayfield, "The Language of a Bilingual Community". Language, 48, 969-976. 34. Preface to Glyn Lewis' Multilingualism in the Soviet Union. The Hague, Mouton. 35. Preface to Wm. F. Mackey's Bilingual Education in a Binational School. Rowley, Newbury. 36. Preface to R. Kjolseth and F. Sack Zur Sociologie der Sprache. Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag. 1973 37. Einar Haugen, "The Ecology of Language". American Anthropologist, 75, 1078. 38. Harry C. Triandis, et al., "The Analysis of Subjective Culture". Contemporary Psychology, 18, 557-558. 1974 39. Peter Ladefoged, et al., "Language in Uganda". American Anthropologist, 76, 646. 40. Discussant: Contemporary Jewish Studies at the College-University Level. American Historical Quarterly, 63, 369-378.

Jewish

1975 41. A. D. Svejcer, "Voprosy sociologii jazyka v sovrennoj amerikanskoj lingvistike". Leningrad, Nauka, 1971 (with Y. Alloni-Fainberg). Linguistics, 143, 88-97. 42. Walt Wolfram, "Sociolinguistic Aspects of Assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City". Language, 51, 776-779. 43. Dell Hymes, "Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach". General Linguistics, 15,257-260. 1977 44. M. Fox and B. Skolnick, "Language in Education: Problems and Prospects in Research and Training". New York: Ford Foundation, 1975. Language in Society, 6, 82-84. 45. Foreword to Language Maintenance, Annotated Bibliography. Washington, D. C., Educational Resource Division, National Institute of Education. 1978 46. A Gathering of Vultures, The "Legion of Decency" and Bilingual Education in the USA (about Noel Epstein's "Language, Ethnicity and the Schools"). NABE Journal, 2, No. 2, 13-16. 47. Foreword to Levic Jessel's The Ethnic Process. Mouton, The Hague, 9-10. 1979 48. Bernard Spolsky and Robert L. Cooper, eds., "Case Studies in Bilingual Education". Rowley, Newbury House, 1978. International Migration Review, 1979, 13, 353-354. 49. David D. Laitin, "Politics, Language and Thought". Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977. Language, 55, 471^173. 50. James A. Matisoff, "Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Extensive Expressions in Yiddish", 1979. Library Journal, 104, 1339. 1980 51. Emy M. Pascasio, ed., "The Filipino Bilingual: Studies on Philippine Bilingualism and Bilingual Education". Quezon City, Ataneo de Manila University Press, 1977. Language Problems and Language Planning, 1980, 4, 89-91. 52. T. Hauptfleisch, ed., "Language Loyalty in South Africa, Vol. 1: Bilingual Policy in South Africa - Opinions of White Adults in Urban Areas; Vol. 2: Using and Improving Usage in the Second

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

251

Language - Some Opinions of White Adults in Urban Areas; Vol. 3: Motivations to Language Use: Opinions and Attitudes of White Adults in Urban Areas". Pretoria, Human Sciences Research Council, 1977. English World-Wide, 1, 143-144. 53. S. A. Birnbaum, ed., "Yiddish, A Survey and A Grammar". Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1979. Language Problems and Language Planning, 4, 157-159. 54. Glenn Gilbert and Jacob Omstein, eds., "Problems in Applied Educational Sociolinguistics: Readings on Language and Culture Problems of United States Ethnic Groups". The Hague, Mouton, 1978. International Migration Review, 14, 428—429. 1981 55. William R. Schmalstieg and Thomas F. Magner, eds., "Sociolinguistic Problems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia". Columbus, Slavica, 1978. General Linguistics, 21, 147-148. 56. Howard Giles and Robert St. Clair, eds., "Language and Social Psychology". Baltimore, University Park Press, 1979. Language, 57, 220-222. 57. E. Glyn Lewis, "Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: a Comparative Study". Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1980. Harvard Educational Review, 51, 608-610. 58. E. Allardt, "Implications of the Ethnic Revival in Modern Industrial Society". Helsinki, Societas Scientiarum Finnica, 1979. Language in Society, 10, 288-289. 59. Raymond V. Padilla, ed., "Bilingual Education and Public Policy in the United States" and "Theory in Bilingual Education". Ypsilanti, Bilingual-Bicultural Education Programs, Eastern Michigan University, 1980. International Migration Review, 15, 779-780. 60. Yeshiva University and Yiddish. Jewish Daily Forward (Sunday English Supplement). January 11,B3. 1982 61. Paul Schach, ed., "Languages in Conflict: Linguistic Acculturation on the Great Plains". Lincoln, Universtiy of Nebraska Press, 1980. Journal of American Ethnic History, 1, 114—115. 1983 62. Gilian Sankoff, "The Social Life of Language". Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. Modern Language Journal, 66, 74. 63. Martin Ridge, ed., "The New Bilingualism". Los Angeles, University of Southern California Press, 1981. Language, 59, 676-677. 64. Preface to Istvan Fodor and Claude Hagege, eds., Language Reform: History and Future. Hamburg, Buske. 1984 65. Peter Brong and Monika Zullig (with the assistance of Karin Brong), "Kommentierte Bibliographie zur Slavischen Soziolinguistik" (= Slavica Helvetica, vol. 17). Bern/Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 1981. 2 vols, and index volume. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 46, 147-148. 1985 66. Nancy F. Conklin and Margaret A. Lourie, "A Host of Tongues". New York, Free Press, 1983. American Journal of Education, February, 295-297. 67. Preface to Isabelle Kreindler's Sociolinguistic Perspective on Soviet National Languages. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. 1986 68. John Edwards, ed., "Linguistic Minorities: Policies and Pluralism". London, Academic Press, 1984. Modern Language Review, Spring, 70, 57-58.

252

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

69. Ralph Fasold, "The Sociolinguistics of Society". Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984. Language, 62, No. 1, 188. 70. Kenji Hakuta, "Mirror of Language; The Debate on Bilingualism". New York, Basic Books. Los Angeles Times (book review section), March 23, p. 13. 1987 71. John Edwards, "Language, Society and Identity". Oxford, Basil Blackwell and Andre Deutsch, 1985. International Migration Review, 21, No. 77, 168-169. 72. Yudl Mark, ed., "Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, band iv". New York and Jerusalem, Komitet farn groysen verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, 1980. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, No. 67, 201-203. 73. Braj B. Kachru, "The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native Englishes" ("The Spread of English"). Oxford, Pergamon Institute of English, 1985. World Englishes, 6, No. 2, 169-175. 74. Preface to Lenore Arnberg's Raising Children Bilingually: The Pre-School Years. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, xi-xiii. 75. Preface to Jacques Maurais' Politique et Aménagement Linguistiques. Quebec and Paris, Conseil de la langue française and Le Robert, 3-4. 76. Stacey Churchill, ed., "The Education of Linguistic and Cultural Minorities in the OECD Countries". Avon, Multilingual Matters, 1986. The Modern Language Journal, 72, No. 2, 227-228. 77. Three Brief Talks. Presented on May 26, June 2 and June 6. (In connection with becoming Distinguished University Research Professor of Social Science, Emeritus). Bronx, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, 15 pp. 78. Foreword to Nancy H. Homberger's Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case. Dordrecht, Foris. 79. David Greenslade, "Welsh Fever; Welsh Activities in the United States and Canada Today". Cowbridge (Wales), Brown, 1986. Language in Society. 17, 621. 1989 80. Frederick J. Neumeyer, ed., Language: The Sociocultural Context (vol. 4 of Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. Contemporary Sociology, 18, 260-261. 81. J. A. Laponce, "Languages and Their Territories". Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987. Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 16, 283-285. 82. T. Skutnabb-Kangas and J. Cummins, eds., "Minority Education; From Shame to Struggle". Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1988. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 2, 71-72. 83. Editor's Note: Error in Dov Noy Article. Folklife Center News, 12, No. 2, 3. In press (as of 1990): 84. James Crawford, "Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory and Practice". Trenton, Crane, 1989. International Journal of the Sociolology of Language, 86, 151-152. 85. Wallace E. Lambert and Donald M. Taylor, "Coping with Cultural and Racial Diversity in Urban America". New York, Praeger, 1990. 86. Benjamin Harshav, "The Meaning of Yiddish". Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

253

III. Interviews 1976 1. Success and Failure in Language Education. Melton Research Center Newsletter, 4, 1 - 4 and 6. 2. An Interview with Dr. Joshua Fishman on Bilingual Education. Bilingual Review, Regional Cross-Cultural Training and Research Center, Board of Education, Office of Bilingual Education, 2, No. 2, 4 - 5 . 1979 3. On Going Beyond Kinship, Sex, and the Tribe, Rix Pinxten, ed., Gent, Story-Scientia, 127-144. 1981 4. Shikl un gele fishman dertseyln vi zey zenen gevom religiez. Algemeyner 24. 1982 5. Joshua A. Fishman. De Pompebleden,

zhurnal, September 25,

53, No. 11, 180.

1983 6. In de serie taalwetenschap en moedertaalonderwijs nu een gesprek met een Amerikaan. Moer, 31-39. 1985 7.

Yiddish Alive in Melbourne. Australian Jewish News, July 19, 1985, 12.

1987 8. Joshua Fishman. Zutabe, 15, 85-101. 9.

Fraachpetear mei Joshua A. Fishman. Fryx, 3, No. 8, 113-116.

1989 10. Un judio con vajilla propia en Euskadi. El Correo Espanol (Bilbao), May 18. 11. Joshua Fishman; el estudio de las lenguas minoritarias desde el Bronx. El Pais (Madrid), May 13.

IV. Journal articles (Between 1938 and 1947: several dozen Yiddish articles in journals for children and youngfolks, primarily Ilpik and Yugntruf, on a variety of Jewish topics. These articles are not listed in this bibliography, nor are a few additional articles of a similar nature which continued through 1950. After 1950, all articles are listed regardless of subject matter). 1947 1. Vegn dem proyekt tsu transkribirn af english yidishe nemen. Yidishe shprakh, 7, 36-46. 1948 2. Di shulyugnt: ire shtrikhn un hofenungen. Shul-pinkes-shikago, Institut, 503-515.

Chicago, Sholem Aleichem Folk

1949 3.

Der oytser fun yidishn folklor (review article). Yivo-bleter, 33, 195-204.

1951 4. Tsveyshprakhikeyt in a yidisher shul. Bleterfar

yidisher dertsiung, 4, 32-34.

254 5. 6.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory Testing - Its Relationship to Teaching and Learning. JEC (Jewish Education Committee) 76, 8 - 1 0 . A verterbukh fun folklor, mitologiye un legende. Yivo-bleter, 35, 264—272.

Bulletin,

1952 7. Degree of Bilingualism in a Yiddish School and Leisure Time Activities. Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 155-165. 8. How Safe is Psychoanalysis? Jewish Education, 23, No. 1 , 4 5 ^ 8 . 9. How Long Should the Lesson Be? (Massed vs. Spaced Learning in the Classroom). The Synagogue School, 10, No. 3, 5 - 9 . 1954 10. Evaluation of Results in Current American Jewish Education. Jewish Education, 24, No. 3, 22-28. 11. Patterns of American "Self-Identification" Among Children of an American Minority Group: Preliminary Exploration of Hypotheses via Interview Data. YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 10, 212-266. 12. Sekulere yidishkeyt. Yidisher kemfer, Peysekh issue, 35, No. 1054, 3 5 ^ 0 . 1956 13. An Examination of the Process and Function of Social Stereotyping. Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 27-64. 14. A Note on Jenkins' "Improved Method for Tetrachoric r". Psychometrika, 21, 305. 15. The MTAI in An American Minority-Group School Setting: I. Differences Between Test Characteristics for Norm and Non-Norm Populations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 48, 41-51. 1957 16. The Use of Quantitative Techniques to Predict College Success. Admissions Information, 1, 49-61. 17. New Directions in College Board Research. College Board Review, No. 33, 9-12. 18. Witnesses and Testimony: A Social Problem in Need of Social Research. In "Witnesses and Testimony at Trials and Hearings", J. A. Fishman and R. E. Morris, issue editors. Journal of Social Issues, 13, No. 2, 3 - 5 (with R. E. Morris). 19. Some Current Research Needs in the Psychology of Testimony. In "Witnesses and Testimony at Trials and Hearings", J. A. Fishman and R. E. Morris, issue editors. Journal of Social Issues, 13, No. 2, 60-67. 20. The Use of Tests for Admission to College: The Next 50 Years. Long Range Planning for Education, Arthur Traxler, ed., Washington D. C., American Council for Education, 74—79. 1958 21. Social Science Research Relevant to American Jewish Education: First Annual Bibliographic Review. Jewish Education, 28, No. 2, 49-60. 22. The MTAI in an American Minority-Group School Setting: II. Indirect Validation as a Test of Pupil Directedness. Journal of General Psychology, 59, 219-227. 23. Remarks of the Chairman: "Improving Criteria for Educational and Psychological Measurement". Proceedings of the 1957 Invitational Conference on Testing Problems, 11-12 and 30-32. Princeton, Educational Testing Service. 24. Educational Evaluation in the Context of Minority-Group Dynamics. Jewish Education, 29, No. 1, 17-24. 25. Unsolved Criterion Problems in the Selection of College Students. Harvard Educational Review, 28, 340-349.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

255

1959 26. Social Science Research Relevant to American Jewish Education; Second Annual Bibliographic Review. Jewish Education, 29, 64—71. 27. Separatism and Integrationism: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Editorial Context in New York Newspapers of Three American Minority Groups (with G. S. Fishman). Genetic Psychology Monographs, 59, 219-261. 28. Publicly Subsidized Pluralism: The European and the American Contexts. School and Society, 87, 2154, 246-248. 29. The American Dilemmas of Publicly Subsidized Pluralism. School and Society, 87, 2154, 264-267. 30. The Influence of Judges, Characteristics on Item Judgements and on Thurstone Scaling via the Method of Ranks (with Irving Lorge). Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 187-205. 31. American Jewry as a Field of Social Science Research. YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 12, 70-102. 32. The Bridgeview Study: A Preliminary Report (with E. Leacock and M. Deutsch). Journal of Social Issues, 15, 30-37. 33. Non-Intellective Factors as Predictors, as Criteria, and as Contingencies in Selection and Guidance of College Students. Selection and Educational Differentiation, Field Service Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1959, 55-73. 34. The American Jewish Family Today. The Jewish Family. New York, Anti-Defamation League, 2-6.

1960 35. A Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis. Behavioral Science, 5, 323-339. 36. College Admission-Selection Studies (with A. Passanella). Review of Educational Research, 30, 298-310. 37. American Higher Education in Current Social Perspective. Teachers College Record, 62, 95-105. 38. New York's Non-English Dailies and the Deliverymen's Strike. Journalism Quarterly, 37, 241-254. 39. The Emerging Picture of Modem American Jewry. Journal of Jewish Communal Service, 37, 21-34. 40. Social Change and Student Values (with Philip E. Jacob). Educational Record, 41, 338-346. 41. Home-School Relations as Reciprocal Influences in a Minority Group Context. The Synagogue School, 18, No. 3, 13-20. 1961 42. Social-Psychological Theory for Selecting and Guiding College Students. American Journal of Sociology, 66, 472-484. 43. Childhood Indoctrination for Minority Group Membership. Daedalus, Spring, 329-349. 44. Some Social and Psychological Determinants of Intergroup Relations in Changing Neighborhoods. Social Forces, 40, 42-51. 45. Some Social-Psychological Theory for Selecting and Guiding College Students. The American College, Nevitt Stanford, ed., John Wiley and Sons, 666-689. 46. Flies in the Psychometric Ointment. Teachers College Record, 62, 595-601. 47. Southern City. Midstream, 7, No. 3, 39-56. 1962 48. Higher Education in Megalopolis. Journal of Higher Education, 33, 72-76. 49. Amerikaner yidntum vi an obyekt fun sotsial-visnshaftlekher forshung: dergreykhungen un Problemen. Yivo-bleter, 42, 35-67. 50. Safot zarot b'artsot habrit. Hachinuch, 34, 274-278.

256

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

51. Yiddish in America. Heritage, Fall, 5 - 1 2 . 52. How Have Franco-Americans Fared in Preserving the French Language in the United States? Les Conferences de L'Institut Franco-Américain de Bowdoin College, Deuxième Series, 44—77. 1963 53. Yidn un andere natsionale shprakhn in amerike. Tsukunft, 68, 212-216. 54. The Impact of Testing Programs on College Preparation and Attendance (with Paul. L. Clifford). The Impact and Improvement of School Testing Programs, Warren A. Findley ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 82-102. 55. Change in Emphasis Needed in Schools of Education. GSE Newsletter (Yeshiva University), 11, No. 3, 2. 56. The Administrator in Higher Education as an Educational Leader. School and Society, 91, 304-306. 57. Should Teachers Strike? GSE Newsletter (Yeshiva University), 11, No. 4, 2. 58. Moving to the Suburbs: Its Possible Impact on the Role of the Jewish Minority in American Community Life. Phylon, 24, 146-153. 1964 59. What Can Mass-Testing Programs Do For-and-To the Pursuit of Excellence in American Education? Harvard Educational Review, 34, 63-79. 60. The Academic Social Compact. School and Society, 92, 29-31. 61. The Continuity of Languages in the United States. Freeland, 17, 1 (53), 7 - 9 and 15. 62. Guidelines for Testing Minority Group Children (with Martin Deutsch, Leonard Kogan, Robert North and Martin Whiteman). Journal of Social Issues, 20, No. 2, 129-145. 63. The Ethnic Group School and Mother Tongue Maintenance in the United States (with Vladimir Nahirny). Sociology of Education, 37, 306-317. 64. Language Maintenance and Language Shift as a Field of Inquiry. Linguistics, No. 9, 32-70. 65. The Impact of Exposure to Ethnic Mother Tongues on Foreign Language Teachers in American High Schools and Colleges (with Robert G. Hayden). Modern Language Journal, 48, 262-274. 1965 66. The Status and Prospects of Bilingualism in the United States. Modern Language Journal, 49, 143-155. 67. Bilingualism, Intelligence and Language Learning. Modern Language Journal, 49, 227-237. 68. Language Maintenance and Language Shift: The American Immigrant Case Within a General Theoretical Perspective. Sociologus, 16, 19-38. 69. Varieties of Ethnicity and Language Consciousness. Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics (Georgetown University), 18, 69-79. 70. Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When? Linguistique, 2, 67-88. 71. Language Loyalty: Its Functions and Concomitants in Two Bilingual Communities (with Peter Hesbacher). Lingua, 13, 145-165. 72. American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problem of Generations (with Vladimir Nahirny). Sociological Review, 13, 311-326. 73. Language Maintenance and Language Shift in Certain Urban Immigrant Environments: The Case of Yiddish in the United States. Europa Ethnica, 22, 146-158. 74. U. S. Census Data on Mother Tongues: Review, Extrapolation and Prediction. For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday (L. Davidowicz, E. Ehrlich, S. Ehrlich and J. A. Fishman, eds.). The Hague, Mouton, 51-62. 1966 75. The Historical and Social Context of an Inquiry into Language Maintenance Efforts, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 21-33.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

257

76. Mother Tongue and Nativity in the American Population (with John E. Hofman), in J. A. Fishman, et al. Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 34—50. 77. No. 63, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 92-126. 78. The Non-English and the Ethnic Group Press, 1910-1960 (with Robert G. Hayden and Mary E. Warshauer), in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 51-74. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Organization and Leadership Interest in Language Maintenance (with V. Nahirny), in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 156-189. Ukrainian Language Maintenance Efforts in the United States (with V. Nahirny), in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 318-357. Planned Reinforcement of Language Maintenance in the United States: Suggestions for the Conservation of a Neglected National Resource, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 369-391. Language Maintenance in a Supra-Ethnic Age: Summary and Conclusions, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 392-411. Methodological Notes, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 414—423. No. 64, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Loyalty in the United States. The Hague, Mouton, 424-458. Bilingual Sequence at the Societal Level. On Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2, 139-144. The Implications of Bilingualism for Language Teaching and Language Learning. Trends in Language Teaching, Albert Valdman, ed., New York, McGraw Hill, 121-132. Mayn tatns shir-hashirim. Afn shvel, 1 (170), 5 - 6 . Some Contrasts Between Linguistically Homogeneous and Linguistically Heterogeneous Polities. Sociological Inquiry, 36, 146-158. Italian Language Maintenance Efforts in the United States and the Teacher of Italian in American High Schools and Colleges. The Florida FL Reporter, 4, No. 3, 3, 6, 26.

1967 90. The Breadth and Depth of English in the United States. University Quarterly, (England) March, 133-140. 91. No. 43, reprinted in Minorities in a Changing World, Milton L. Baron, ed., New York, Knopf, 177-200 (Reprinted). 92. Dimensiyes fun yidishkeyt. Kultur un dertsiyung, 3, 5 - 6 . 93. No. 88, reprinted in International Journal of American Linguistics, Publication No. 44, Bloomington Research Center for Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics, Indiana University. 94. The Management of Educational Establishments (with Neal Gross). The Uses of Sociology, Paul Lazarsfeld, William H. Sewell and Harold L. Wilensky, eds., New York, Basic Books, 304-358. 95. Serbish un kroatish. Afn shvel, 3 (178), 6. 96. Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Evaluation of Guided Behavioral Change. The Evaluation of Teaching, Washington, D. C., Pi Lambda Theta, 9 - 1 3 . 97. Ume veloshn. Afn shvel, 4 (179), July-August. 98. Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia; Diglossia With and Without Bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues, 23, No. 2, 1967, 29-38. 99. Tsveyshprakhike dertsiyung in amerike. Afn shvel, 4 (179), 8 - 1 0 . 100. Iz do a veg tsu d e m e n t e m di yidishe shtudimdike yugnt in amerike tsu yidishkeyt? Tsukunft, July-August, 2 7 3 - 2 7 7 . 101. Jewish Students and Yiddishkeit. The Call, 36, No. 5, 13-15.

258

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

1968 102. No. 59, reprinted in Problems and Issues in Contemporary Education. Glenview, Scott Foresman, 150-166. 103. Problems of Research Collaboration and Cooperation. Journal of Social Issues, 24, No. 2, 235-241. 104. No. 90, reprinted in Language and Language Learning (The Dartmouth Seminar Papers). Albert H. Marckwardt, ed„ Champaign, NCTE, 43-53. 105. A bagrisung un a bisl muser. Yugntruf, 1 2 , 4 - 6 . 106. Planirter shprakh-ibemik. Afn shvel, 1 (182), 6 - 7 . 107. Oriyentirtkeyt un organizirtkeyt: dos naye gezets letoyves tsvey-shprakhiker bildung. Afn shvel, 2(183), 3 - 5 . 108. Sociolinguistics and the Language Problems of the Developing Countries, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York, Wiley, 3-16. 109. No. 108, reprinted in International Social Science Journal, 20, 211-225. (Also appeared in the French edition of the same journal). 110. No. 8, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York, Wiley, 53-68. 111. Language Problems and Types of Political and Sociocultural Integration: a Conceptual Summary, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York, Wiley, 491^198. 112. Sociolinguistics and National Development. Language Development (Selected Papers from a Ford Foundation Conference on the State of the Art). New York, Ford Foundation, 3-14. 113. Semantic Independence and Degree of Bilingualism in Two Puerto Rican Communities (with Tomi D. Berney and Robert L. Cooper). Revista Interamericana de Psicologia, 2, 289-294. 114. The Contextualization of School-Children's Bilingualism (with Martin Edelman and Robert L. Cooper). Irish Journal of Education, 2, 106-111. 115. Sociolinguistic Perspective on the Study of Bilingualism. Linguistics, 39, 21-50. 116. No. 68, reprinted in Georgetown University Round Table Selected Papers on Linguistics I96I-I965. Georgetown University Press, 91-101. 117. Shprakh-planirung bay di umes-haoylem. Afn shvel, 185 (4), 11-12. 118. Nationality-Nationalism and Nation-Nationism, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Language Problems of Developing Nations, New York, Wiley, 39-51. 1969 119. Language Maintenance and Language Shift: Yiddish and Other Immigrant Languages in the United States. YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 16, 12-26. 120. National Languages and Languages of Wider Communication in the Developing Nations. Anthropological Linguistics, 1969, 11, 111-135. 121. Puerto Ricans in Our Press (with Heriberto Casiano). Modern Language Journal, 53, 157-163. 122. Word Naming and Usage Scores for a Sample of Yiddish-English Bilinguals (with Judah Ronch and Robert L. Cooper). Modern Language Journal, 53, 232-235. 123. Some Measures of the Interaction Between Language Domain and Semantic Dimension in Bilinguals (with Sheldon Fertig). Modern Language Journal, 53, 244-249. 124. The Multiple Prediction of Phonological Variables in a Bilingual Speech Community (with Eleanor Herasimchuk). American Anthropologist, 1969, 648-657. 125. Alternative Measures of Bilingualism (with Robert L. Cooper). Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1969, 8, 276-282. 126. Bilingual Attitudes and Behaviors. Language Sciences, 5, 5-11. 127. The Description of Societal Bilingualism. The Description and Measurement of Bilingualism, L. G. Kelly, ed., Toronto, Toronto University Press, 275-284.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

259

128. Language Switching and the Intepretation of Conversation (with James Kimple and Robert L. Cooper). Lingua, 21, 127-134. 129. Puerto Rican Intellectuals in New York: Some Intragroup and Intergroup Contrasts. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 1 (4), 215-226. 130. The Validity of Census Data on Bilingualism in a Puerto Rican Neighborhood (with Charles Terry). American Sociological Review, 34 (5), 636-650. 131. A Sociolinguistic Census of a Bilingual Neighborhood. The American Journal of Sociology, 75 (3), 323-339. 132. Some Things Learned: Some Things Yet to Learn. Modern Language Journal, 53, 255-258. 1970 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138. 139.

140.

141. 142. 143. 144.

Max Weinreich 1894-1969. Jewish Book Annual, 27, 76-80. Intellectuals From the Island. La Monda Lingvo-Problemo, 2 (4), 1-16. Language Attitude Studies (with Rebecca Agheyisi). Anthropological Linguistics, 11, 137-157. The Politics of Bilingual Education. Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, (Georgetown University), 23, 47-58. Sociolinguistic Perspective on Internal Linguistic Tensions and Their Impact on External Relations. Transactions of the Sixth World Congress of Sociology. Milan, International Sociological Association, 3, 281-289. Situational Measures of Normative Language Views in Relation to Person, Place and Topic Among Puerto Rican Bilinguals (with L. Greenfield). Anthropos, 65, 602-618. National Languages and Languages of Wider Communication in the Developing Nations. Language Use and Social Change, W. H. Whiteley, ed., London, Oxford University Press, 27-56 (revision of No. 110). The Interrelationships and Utility of Alternative Bilingualism Measures. Language Use and Social Change, W. H. Whiteley, ed., London, Oxford University Press, 126-142 (revision of No. 124). Bilingual Education in Sociolinguistic Perspective (with John Lovas). Tesol Quarterly, 4, 215-222. Derhayntikn, faryidishn, fareynikn. Yugntruf 19, 14—18. Di yidishe svive un di internatsiyonale akademishe svive. Khesed I'avrohom, M. Shtarkman ed., Los Angeles, A. Golumb Jubilee Committee, 741-748. Subsequent written comment by Joshua Fishman (on Haugen's paper). Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics (Georgetown University),.23, 9-11.

1971 145. Sociology of Language. Pensiero e Linguaggio Operazioni, 2, 99-112. 146. Yiddish for the People! Judaism, 20, No. 2, 218-222. 147. Preface (to entire issue on "Migration and Language Shift", J. A. Fishman, ed.). International Migration Review, 5, 121—124. 148. Inter-State Migration and Subsidiary-Language Claiming: An Analysis of Selected Indian Census Data (with Jyotirindra Das Gupta). International Migration Review, 5, 227-249. 149. The Impact of Nationalism on Language Planning. Aspects Sociologiques du Plurilinguisme, Bruxelles, AIMAV, 15-34. 150. Attitudes and Beliefs About Spanish and English Among Puerto Ricans. Bulletin of the School of Education (Indiana University), 47, No. 2, 51-72 151. Life in the Neighborhood (with Gerard Hoffman). International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 12, 85-100. 152. Individual Interview: Puerto Rican Intellectual, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington, Indiana University, 75-104.

260

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

153. How I Talk to My Parents, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington, Indiana University, 253-272. 154. No. 131, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington, Indiana University, 513-518. 155. Jewish Languages and Jewish Identity. The Study of Jewish Identity: Issues and Approaches, Jerusalem, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 18-21. 156. The Uses of Sociolinguistics. Application of Linguistics, G. E. Perren and S. L. M. Trim, eds., Cambridge, University Press, 19-40. 157. No. 149, reprinted and expanded in Can Language be Planned? J. Rubin and B. Jemudd, eds., Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, pp. 3-20. 158. Research Outline for Comparative Studies of Language Planning (with J. Das Gupta, B. Jernudd, and J. Rubin). Can Language be Planned? J. Rubin and B. Jemudd, eds., Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, pp. 293-305. 159. Ein Mehrfaktoren- und Mehrebenenansatz zum Studium von Sprachplanungsprozessen. Zur Soziologie der Sprache, R. Kjolseth and F. Sack, eds., Westdeutscher Verlag, 206-213. 160. Measurement and Description of Societal Bilingualism, in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 3-10. 161. No. 70, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 583-604. 162. No. 98, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 539-555. 163. No. 115, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 557-582. 164. No. 121, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 43-56. 165. No. 124, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 465-482. 166. No. 125, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 483-512. 167. No. 126, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 105-116. 168. No. 127, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 605-611. 169. No. 129, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 57-74. 170. No. 130, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 177-197. 171. No. 131, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 157-197. 172. No. 132, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 513-518. 173. No. 138, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 233-252. 174. No. 151, reprinted and revised in J. A. Fishman, et al., Bilingualism in the Barrio, Bloomington, Indiana University, 13-42 and 198-232. 1972 175. No. 64, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language University Press, 76-134.

in Sociocultural

Change,

Stanford, Stanford

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

261

176. No. 69, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 179-190. 177. No. 81, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 16-47. 178. No. 82, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 48-75. 179. No. 98, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 135-153. 180. No. 120, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 191-223. 181. No. 124, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 162-178. 182. No. 127, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 153-161. 183. No. 145, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1-15. 184. No. 156, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 305-330. 185. No. 194, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 340-355. 186. Bilingual and Bidialectal Education: An Attempt at a Joint Model for Policy Description, in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change. Stanford, Stanford University Press. 331-339. 187. No. 149, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 224-243. 188. No. 192, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 244-267. 189. No. 196, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language in Sociocultural Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 268-285. 190. No. 145, reprinted in Language and Social Context, P. P. Giglioli, ed., Middlesex, Penguin Books, 45-58. 191. No. 138, reprinted in Man, Language and Society, S. K. Gosh, ed., The Hague, Mouton, 4—86. 192. Domains and the Relationship Between Micro- and Macro-Sociolinguistics, in J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, eds., Explorations in Sociolinguistics, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 435^453. 193. No. 141, reprinted in The Language Education of Minority Children, B. Spolsky, ed., Rowley, Newbury House. 194. What Has the Sociology of Language to Say to the Teacher? On Teaching the Standard Variety to Speakers of Dialectal or Sociolectal Varieties (with Erica Lueders-Salmon). Functions of Language in the Classroom, Courtney B. Cazden, Vera P. John, and Dell Hymes, eds., New York, Teachers College Press, 67-83. 195. Di sotsiyologiye fun yidish in amerike, 1960-1970 un vayter. Goldene keyt (Israel), 75, 110-127. 196. Problems and Prospects of the Sociology of Language. Studies for Einar Haugen, The Hague, Mouton, 214-226. 197. Historical Dimensions in the Sociology of Language. Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, Georgetown University, 25, 145-155. 198. Hasotziyologiya shel yidish beartsot habrit. Pirsumey Hug Leyidiot Am Yisroel Batfutsot, 6, No. 3. 1973 199. Lekoved yudl mark. Goldene keyt (Israel), 78, 22-26.

262

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

200. Lib hobn un tsuzogn. Letste nayes (Israel), August 8 - 1 0 - 1 1 . 201. Language Modernization and Planning in Comparison With Other Types of National Modernization and Planning. Language In Society, 2, 2 3 ^ 3 . 202. The Third Century of Non-English Language Maintenance and Non-Anglo Ethnic Maintenance in the United States of America. TESOL Quarterly, 7, 221-223. 203. An amerikaner in yisroyel. Tsukunft, 79, 260-262. 204. Shprakhiker monizm. Yidishe tsaytung (Israel) 205. The Sociolinguistics of Nationalism. Psychology and Race, P. Watson, ed., Chicago, Aldine, 403^114. 206. Bilingual Education: What and Why? Florida Fl Reporter, Spring/Fall, 13-14, and 4 2 - 4 3 . 207. Will Foreign Languages Still be Taught in the Year 2000? Materiales en Marcha, December, 12-15 and 21. 208. The Phenomenological and Linguistic Pilgrimage of Yiddish (Some Examples of Functional and Structural Pidginization and Depidginization). Kansas Journal of Sociology, 9, 127-136. 209. En seignera-t-on encore les langues en l'an 2000? Le Français dans le Monde, 100, 11-14 (French translation of No. 205). 210. No. 145, reprinted in Revista Interamericana Review, 2 , A 6 5 - M 1 . 211. No. 145, reprinted in George A. Miller, ed. Communication, Language and Meaning, New York, Basic Books, 268-279. 212. The Sociology of Language and Second Language Teaching (with Robert L. Cooper). Kritikon Litterarum, 2, 285-292. 213. Natsionalizm un shprakh; sotsyiale protsesn in 19tn un 20tn y"h. Yivo-bleter, 44, 207-216. 214. An amerikaner in yisroyel; ayndrukn un notitsn. Tsukunft, 80, July-August, 260-262. 1974 215. Mit aza korn vet men keyn broyt nit bakn. Yidishe tsaytung (Israel), March 22 and 29, April 5, 12 and 19. 216. Vos ken zayn di funktsiye fun yidish in yisroyel? Yidisher kemfer, April, 40-46. 217. No. 35, reprinted in L. W. Berry and P. R. Dasen, eds. Culture and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology, London, Mathuen, 61-85. 218. Language Planning and Language Planning Research: The State of the Art. Linguistics, 119, 15-34. 219. Vos vet zayn mit dzshudezsmo un mugrabish? Yidishe tsaytung (Israel), March 29. 220. Pluralizm in der efntlekher yisroyeldiker yidishkayt. Yidishe tsaytung (Israel), Sept. 25. 221. The Comparative Dimensionality and Predictability of Attitudinal and Usage Responses to Centralized Language Planning Activity. Preceedings: Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée. Third Congress, Copenhagen, 1972, Volume 11: Applied Sociolinguistics, Heidelberg, Gross, 71-80. 222. No. 145, reprinted in George A. Miller, ed., Psychology and Communication, Washington, D. C. Voice of America Forum Series, 303-314. 223. No. 207, reprinted in part, in New Ideas in Language Teaching, 11, 1-2. 224. Minority Resistance: Some Comparisons Between Interwar Poland and Postwar USA, in J. A. Fishman, ed., Studies on Polish Jewry, ¡919-1939, New York, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 3-11. 225. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language - Why? International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1, 5 - 7 . 226. Introduction: The Sociology of Language in Israel. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1,9-13. 227. Yiddish in Israel: A Case-Study of Efforts to Revise a Monocentric Language Policy (with David E. Fishman). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1, 126-146.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

263

228. No. 227, abbreviated and reprinted, in Yiddish, 1, No. 2, 4 - 2 3 . 229. Discussant. American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 63, 369-378. 230. The Study of Language Attitudes (with Robert L. Cooper). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 3, 5—20. 231. The Use of Hebrew Loanwords in Spoken German in Two Bilingual Communities (with R. H. Kressel). Linguistics, 140, 69-78. 232. The Sociology of Bilingual Education. Estudes de Linguistique Appliquee, 112-124. 233. Some Studies of Language Attitudes in Israel (with Robert L. Cooper). English Teacher's Journal (Israel), No. 12, 38-39. 1975 234. Bilingual Education and the Future of Language Teaching and Language Learning. ADFL, 6, No. 3, 5 - 8 . 235. The "Official Languages" of Israel: Their Status in Law and Police Attitudes and Knowledge Concerning Them (with Haya Fisherman). Multilingual Political Systems: Problems and Solutions, J. G. Savard and R. Vigneault, ed., Quebec, Laval University Press, 497-535. 236. Book No. 23, reprinted in Current Trends in Linguistics, 12, 1629-1784. 237. No. 230, revised and reprinted in Leslie Palmer and Bernard Spolsky, eds., Papers on Language Testing: 1967-1974, Washington, D. C. TESOL, pp. 187-197. 238. No. 62, reprinted in David A. Payne and Robert F. Morrison, eds., Educational and Psychological Measurement, Morristown, General Learning Press, pp. 297-307. 239. No. 227, reprinted in part, in Jewish Digest, 20, No. 9, 37-39. 240. What Do We Know About Language Planning? (A Preliminary Report), in Robert K. Herbert, ed. Patterns in Language, Culture and Society: Sub-Saharan Africa. Columbus, Ohio State University, 1—2. 241. Translation and revision of No. 64, Conservación y desplazamiento del idioma como campo de investigación (reexámen), in Paul L. Garvin and Yolanda Lastra de Suárez, eds., Antología de etnolinguística y sociolinguística. Mexico, UN AM, 3 7 5 ^ 2 3 . 242. The Uses of Diversity, in Gina Cantoni Harvey and M. F. Heiser, eds. Southwest Language and Linguistics in Educational Perspective. San Diego, Institute of Cultural Pluralism (School of Education, San Diego State University), 3 9 3 ^ 2 7 . 1976 243. The Sociology of Language in Israel. Language Sciences, 40, 28-31. 244. The Future of Ethnicity in America. The Scandinavian Presence in North America, Erik Friis, ed., New York, Harpers, pp. 12-32. 245. No. 206, reprinted in Anthony Simoes ed., The Bilingual Child, New York, Academic Press, 229-235. 246. No. 206, reprinted in Sprachen und Staaten, Festschrift Heinz Kloss, Vol. 2, Hamburg, Stiftung Europa, 125-142. 247. No. 232, reprinted in Sprachen und Staaten, Festschrift Heinz Kloss, Vol. 2, Hamburg, Stiftung Europa, 143-165. 248. Yerushelayemer "velt-konferents far yidisher kultur" fun a sotsiyolingvistishn kukvinkl. Yidishe shprakh, 35, 1-3, 16-31. 249. Yudel Mark (1897-1975). Jewish Book Annual, 34, 94-97. 250. Bilingual Education: Hope for Europe's Migrants. Un Nuevo Dia, 2, No. 3, 1,3, 12, 13. 251. The Spread of English as a New Perspective for the Study of Language Maintenance and Language Shift. Studies in Language Learning, 1, No. 2, 59-104. 252. How do Terminological Committees of the Hebrew Language Academy Actually Work? (with Jack Fellman). Comparative Interdisciplinary Studies Section Working Paper 81, Entire Issue.

264

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

253. Yiddish and Loshn Koydesh in Traditional Ashkenaz: The Problem of Societal Allocation of Macro-Functions. Language in Sociology, Albert Verdoodt and Rolf Kjolseth, eds. Louvain, Peeters, 39-47. 254. The International Sociology of Bilingual Secondary Education: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Implications. Linguistic Studies Offered to Joseph Greenberg, Vol. I, Alphonse Juilland, ed., Saratoga, Anma Ligri, 27-42. 255. No. 196, translated into German and reprinted in Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 1972, 39, 1,2-18. 256. Language and Culture in the Global Community, in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 3-10. 257. International Socioeducational Perspective on Some Uncomfortable Questions About Bilingual Education, in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 108-125. 258. Thumbnail Sketches of Ten Bilingual Schools Outside of the United States, in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury, 127-135. 259. Comments on Recent References, in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 136-149. 260. No. 202, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 11-22. 261. No. 206, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 23-31. 262. No. 207, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 47-51. 263. No. 234, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 32-46. 264. No. 254, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective, Rowley, Newbury House, 94—107. 1977 265. Bilingual Education - A Perspective. IRCD Bulletin, 12, No. 2, Entire Issue. 266. The Link Between Language and Ethnicity: Its Importance for the Language Teacher. Language Acquisition, Application, Appreciation, Warren C. Bom, ed., Middlebury, Northwest Conference, 97-101. 267. English in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Study (with Elizabeth Nadel). Anthropological Linguistica, 19, No. 1,27-53. 268. Conference on the Methodology of Sociolinguistic Surveys: A Subjective Summary. Vicus, 1, 161-167. 269. Knowing, Using and Liking English as an Additional Language. TESOL Quarterly, 11, No. 2, 157-171. 270. English the World Over: A Factor in the Creation of Bilingualism Today. Bilingualism: Psychological, Social and Educational Implications, New York, Academic Press, 103-139. 271. Standard vs. Dialect in Bilingual Education: An Old Problem in a New Context. Modern Language Journal, 61, 315-325. 272. The Comparative Study of Language Planning: Introducing a Survey, in Joan Rubin, et al., Language Planning Processes, The Hague, Mouton, 31-39. 273. Selected Dimensions of Language Planning: A Comparative Analysis, in Joan Rubin, et al., Language Planning Processes, The Hague, Mouton, 195-214. 274. Language, Ethnicity and Racism. Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, 297-309. 275. The Bilingual Education Act: High Time for a Change. Bilingual Review, 3, No. 1, 1-2.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

265

276. Language and Ethnicity. Language and Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations, H. Giles, ed. New York, Academic Press, 16-53. 277. Language, Technology and Persuasion: Three Experimental Studies (with R. L. Cooper, et al.). Language and Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations, H. Giles, ed.. New York, Academic Press, 83-98. 278. A Study of Language Attitudes (with Robert L. Cooper). Bilingual Review, 4, No. 1-2, 7-34. 279. Bilingual Education: Ethnic Perspectives and Response to Panelists. Bilingual Education: Ethnic Perspectives, Philadelphia, Nationalities Center, 1-15 and 47-52. 280. Der yivo in amerike: problemen un dergreykhn in shaykhes mit zayn mehus. Goldene keyt (Israel), 93, 111-122. 281. A Model for Bilingual and Bidialectal Education. Bilingualism in Early Childhood, Wm. F. Mackey and Th. Anderson, eds., Rowley, Newbury House, 11-18. 282. No. 232, reprinted in Frontiers of Bilingual Education, Bernard Spolsky and Robert L. Cooper, eds., Rowley, Newbury House, 94—105. 283. The Sociology of Language, Yesterday, Today and Tommorow. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Roger Cole, ed., Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 51-75. 284. Language Planning in Israel: Solving Terminological Problems (with Jack Fellman), in Joan Rubin, et al., Language Planning Processes, The Hague, Mouton, 79-95. 285. Per un educazione bilingue. Lingue et Civilta, 3/4, 19-24. 286. No. 267, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 137-167. 287. No. 269, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 302-328. 288. No. 277, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 197-211. 289. No. 278, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al.. The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 239-277. 290. English as a World Language: The Evidence (with Andrew W. Conrad), in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 3-76. 291. English Around the World (with Robert L. Cooper and Yehudit Rosenbaum), in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 77-107. 292. The Spread of English as a New Perspective for the Study of "Language Maintenance and Language Shift", in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 108-136. 293. English on Keren Kayemet Street (with Yehudit Rosenbaum, Elizabeth Nadel and Robert L. Cooper), in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 179-196. 294. English in the Context of International Societal Bilingualism, in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Spread of English, Rowley, Newbury House, 329-336. 295. No. 212, translated into Hebrew. Min hasadne. No. 3^1, 173-184. 1978 296. Yiddish in Israel; A Case Study of Efforts to Revise a Monocentric Language Policy (with David E. Fishman), in J. A. Fishman, ed., Advances in the Study of Societal Multilingualism, The Hague, Mouton, 185-262. 297. No. 208, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, ed.. Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems, The Hague, Mouton, 293-306. 298. A Graduate Program in the Sociology of Language, in J. A. Fishman, ed., Advances in the Study of Societal Multilingualism, 795-798 and in J. A. Fishman, ed., Advances in the Creation and Revision of Writing Systems, 471^74. 299. No. 234, reprinted in The Bilingual Journal, 2, No. 4, 19-22.

266

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

300. Bilingüismo e insegnamento della lingue (with Robert L. Cooper). Chapter 4 of J. A. Fishman, Bilingual Education (see: Book No. 36, translated into Italian), Quaderni per la Promozione del Bilingualismo, 17/18, 18-32 . 301. The Sociology of Yiddish After the Holocaust: Status, Needs and Possibilities. Gesher, 6, 148-168. 302. No. 280, reprinted as a separate, by Instituto Cientifico Judio, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 303. The Indonesian Language Planning Experience: What Does It Teach Us? A Socio-Historical Reconstruction and Projection. Spectrum Essays Presented to Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana on his Seventieth Birthday, S. Udin ed., Jakarta, Dian Rakyat, 333-339. 304. Language in Society (with H. Giles). Introducing Social Psychology, Henri Tajfel and Colin Fraser eds., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 380-400. 305. Mayn mame, di kishef-makherin. Afn shvel. No. 234, 6 - 7 . 306. No. 206, reprinted in M. A. Lourie and N. F. Conkin, eds., A Pluralistic Nation: The Language Issue in the United States, Rowley, Newbury House, 407-416. 307. The History and Future of Language Policy in the USA. EDC News, No. 12, 3 ^ . 308. The Dimensionality and Predictability of Responses of Language Planning Activities. Language and Society, W. C. McCormack and S. A. Wurm, eds., The Hague, Mouton, 703-723. 309. The Sociolinguistic "Normalization" of the Jewish People. Archibald Hill Festschrift, The Hague, Mouton, 3, 223-231. 310. Positive Bilingualism: Some Overlooked Rationales and Forefathers. Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, Washington, D. C., Georgetown University Press, 42-52. 311. The Spread of English: A Worldwide Factor in the Making and Breaking of Bilingualism. CATESOL Occasional Papers, No. 4, 12pp. (also on ERIC microfiche). 312. "Di arbeter ring heym": nokh a sheferishe pozitsye. Undzer heym/Our Home, L. Silver, ed. New York, Wokmens Circle Home, Hospital and Geriatric Center, 8. 1979 313. Philosophies of Bilingual Education in Societal Perspective. Language Development in a Bilingual Setting, E. J. Brierre, ed., Los Angeles, National Dissemination and Assessment Center, 36-47. 314. No. 206, reprinted in H. Trueba and C. Baraett-Mizrahi, eds., Bilingual Multicultural Education and the Professions, Rowley, Newbury House, 11—19. 315. In above volume (No. 314), "Some Basic Sociolinguistic Concepts" and "Linguistics: The Scientific Study of Languages", reprinted from Book No. 24, 120-130 and 130-138. 316. In above volume (No. 314), No. 271 reprinted, 454-466. 317. In above volume (No. 314), Preface, ix-x. 318. Transition, Maintenance or a Third Alternative. Proceedings of the Fourth National Portuguese Conference, 3-23. 319. The Significance of the Ethnic Community Mother Tongue School: Introduction to a Study. NABE Journal, 3, No. 3, 3 9 ^ 7 . 1980 320. Ethnic Community Mother Tongue Schools in the USA: Dynamics and Distributions. International Migration Review, 14, 235-247. 321. Minority Language Maintenance and the Ethnic Mother Tongue School. Modern Language Journal, 64, 167-172. 322. Bilingual Education, Language Planning and English. English World-Wide, 1, 11-24. 323. Bilingualism and Biculturalism as Individual and as Societal Phenomena. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 3-15.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

267

324. Social Theory and Ethnography: Language and Ethnicity in Eastern Europe. Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe, P. Sugar, ed., Santa Barbara, ABC-Clio, 69-99. 325. The Sociology of Yiddish after the Holocaust: Status, Needs and Possibilities. The Field of Yiddish IV, M. I. Herzog, et al., eds., Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues (ISHI), 4 7 5 ^ 9 8 . 326. Attracting a Following to High-Culture Functions for a Language of Everyday Life: The Role of the Tshernovits Language Conference in the "Rise of Yiddish". International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2 4 , 4 3 - 7 3 . 327. The Whorfian Hypothesis: Varieties of Valuation, Confirmation and Disconfirmation I. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 26, 25—40. 328. Language Maintenance and Ethnicity. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 629-638. 329. New Worlds to Conquer in the Sociology of Language. York Papers in Linguistics, 9, 99-104. 330. The Need for Language Planning in the United States. AFDL Bulletin, 12, No. 2, 1-3. 331. Bilingual Education in the United States Under Ethnic Community Auspices. Georgetown University Round Table, 8-13. 332. Language Spread: Implications of an International Conference for the Southwest. Festschrift for Jacob Ornstein, E. L. Blansitt and R. V. Teschner, eds., Rowley, Newbury House, 114—119. 333. Ethnocultural Dimensions in the Acquisition and Retention of Biliteracy. Basic Writing, 3, 48-61. 334. Theoretical Issues and Problems in the Sociolinguistic Enterprise. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 161—168. 1981 335. On-Reservation Residence and the Survival of Native American Languages. Current Anthropology, 22, 580-582. 336. Treci aspekt vorfove misili: ethnolinguistica raznolikost kao dobrobit drustvenih azjednica sveta. Zbornik Radova Instituía za Strane Jezike i Knjizevnosti, 3, 17—46. 337. Language Maintenance and Ethnicity. Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 8, 229-248. 338. In Defense of Learning English and Maintaining Other Languages (in the United States and Elsewhere Too). English Around the World, 25, 1-3. 339. The Sociology of Jewish Languages from the Perspective of the General Sociology of Language: A Preliminary Formulation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30, 5-16. 340. Language Policy: Past, Present and Future. Language in the USA, Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley B. Heath, eds., New York, Cambridge University Press, 516-526. 341. Tsi iz nokh do a hofenung far yidish in amerike? Davke (Buenos Aires), 82, 62-74. 342. Cultural Pluralism and the American School. Plural Societies, 12, 5 - 1 2 . 343. No. 190, translated into Dutch in G. Geerts and A. Hagen, eds., Sociolinguistiese Studies 2, Groningen, Wolters-Noorhopp. 344. The Sociology of Yiddish: A Foreword, in J. A. Fishman, ed., Never Say Die!. The Hague, Mouton, 1-102. 345. No. 320, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, ed., Never Say Die!, The Hague, Mouton, 369-394. 346. Epilogue: Contributions of the Sociology of Yiddish to the General Sociology of Language, in J. A. Fishman, ed., Never Say Die!, The Hague, Mouton, 739-756. 1982 347. Maintien des langues, "renouveau ethnique" et diglossie aux Etats-Unis (with M. H. Gertner, E. G. Lowy and W. G. Milan). La Linguistique, 18, 45-64. 348. Language Maintenance, the "Ethnic Revival" and Diglossia in the United States (with M. H. Gertner, E. G. Lowy and W. G. Milan). Journal of Intercultural Studies, 3, 5 - 2 4 .

268

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

349. Yidish in yeshive-universitet un a simkhe fun hashoves-aveyde. Algemeyner zhurnal (exact date and pages, unknown). 350. Keynote Address: "Language and Identity". Revista del Colegio Universitario del Turbo, 7, No. 1, 12-24. 351. Whorfianism of the Third Kind: Ethnolinguistic Diversity as a Worldwide Societal Asset (The Whorfian Hypothesis: Varieties of Validation, Confirmation and Disconfirmation 2). Language in Society, 11, 1-14. 352. Bilingual Education. World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. B, 234. 353. Sociolinguistic Foundations of Bilingual Education. Bilingual Review, 9, 1-35. 354. Yidish, modernizatsye un re-etnifikatsye: an ernster un faktndiker tsugang tsu der itstiker Problematik. Afn shvel, 248, 1-6. 355. Der tkhiyes-hameysim fun di frizn. Avn shvel, 249, 8 - 9 . 356. No. 326, reprinted in R. L. Cooper, ed., Language Spread. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 291-320. 357. The Lively Life of a "Dead Language" or Everyone Knows that Yiddish Died Long Ago. Judaica Book News, 13, No. 1,7-11. 358. No. 323, reprinted in Bilingual Education for Hispanic Students in the United States. New York, Teachers College Press, 23-36. 359. Replyk oangeande twataligens. Fryx, 3, No. 8, 117, 120. (Reply to comments by Tony Feitsma in Fryx, 3, No. 7, 102-103). 360. A Critique of Six Papers on the Socialization of the Deaf Child. National Research Conference on the Social Aspects of Deafness, John B. Christian and Richard W. Meisegeiser, eds., Washington, D. C., Gallaudet College, 5-20. 361. The Jewish Daily Forward and Non-English Resources in the U.S.A. Today. The Forward (English Supplement), May 23, 5 & 25. 362. Mother Tongues as Media of Instruction in the United States, in Koen Zondag, ed., Bilingual Education in Friesland. Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, 263-273. 363. The Sociology of English as an Additional Language, in Braj Kachru, ed., The Other Tongue; English Across Cultures. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 15-22. 1983 364. Modeling Rationales in Corpus Planning: Modernity and Traditions in Images of the Good Corpus. Progress in Language Planning, Juan Cobarrubias and J. A. Fishman, eds., Berlin, Mouton, 107-118. 365. Progress in Language Planning: A Few Concluding Sentiments. Progress in Language Planning, Juan Cobarrubias and J. A. Fishman, eds., Berlin, Mouton, 381-383. 366. The Americanness of the Ethnic Community School. Minnesota's Ethnic Language Schools: Potential for the 80's, Betty Ann Burch, ed., St. Paul, Immigration Research Center, University of Minnesota, 5-15. 367. Aménagement et norme linguistiques en milieux linguistiques recemment canscientises. La Norme Linguistique, Edith Bedard and Jacques Maurais, eds., Montreal and Paris, Conseil de la langue française et Le Robert, 383-394. 368. Prefatory Remarks, in Istvan Fodor and Claude Hagege, eds., Language Reform: History and Future, vol. I. Hamburg, Buske Verlag, 1-10. 369. Language and Ethnicity in Bilingual Education. Culture, Ethnicity and Identity: Current Issues and Research, Wm. McCready, ed., New York, Academic Press, 127-137. 370. Ethnic Activists View the Ethnic Revival and its Language Consequences: An Interview Study of Three American Ethnolinguistic Minorities (with E. G. Lowy, M. H. Gertner, I. Gottesman and W. G. Milan). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 4, 237-254.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

269

371. Language and Ethnicity in the Periodical Publications of Four American Ethnic Groups (with M. H. Gertner, E. G. Lowy and W. G. Milan). Multilingua, 2, 83-99. 372. The Rise and Fall of the "Ethnic Revival" in the USA. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 4, No. 3, 5^16. 373. Vos vet vayter zayn? vos vet undz nokh blaybn? Afn shvel, 251, 2-4. 374. Comments on Symmon-Symonolewicz's "Collective Sentiments and Their Social Hierarchies". Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 10, 283-287. 375. Shprakhikayt in hayntikn yisroyel. Afn shvel, 252, 5 - 8 . 376. "Nothing New Under the Sun" (Ecclesiasties 1:9): A Case Study at Early Stages of the "Language and Ethnocultural Identity" Linkage. Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural, Anita Jacobson-Widding, ed„ Uppsala, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 5, 263-287. 377. Spanish Language Resources of the United States: Some Preliminary Findings (with William G. Milan). Spanish in the United States Setting: Beyond the Southwest, Lucia Elias-Olivares, ed., Rosslyn, National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 167-179. 378. Max un moritz un motl un kopl. Afn shvel, 252, 16. 379. Gute nayes vegn yidish. Afn shvel, 253-254, 5 - 8 . 380. D"r nosn bimboyms ershter perek: afn veg tsu yidish un tsum mizrekh-eyropeyishn yidntum. Afn shvel, 255, 13-16. 381. Studies of Language as an Aspect of Ethnicity and Nationalism (a bibliographic introduction). Sociolinguistics, 14, No. 2, 1-6. 382. Reflections of Ten Years of IJSL. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 45, 5 - 7 . 383. Mother-Tongue Claiming in the United States Since 1960. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 50, 21-99. 384. The Use of Minority Mother Tongues in the Education of Children. Prospects, 14, No. 1, 51-61. 385. No. 384, translated into French. French edition of Prospects, 14, No. 1, 53-64. 386. Afile on gefilte fish - tsu di shloyshim fun mayn shvester rukhl, oleho hasholem. Afn shvel, 256, 9-11. 387. No. 384, translated into Spanish. Spanish edition of Prospects, 14, No. 2, 53-64. 388. No. 384, translated into Japanese. Japanese edition of Prospects, 14, No. 3, 43-52. 389. No. 384, translated into Arabic. Arabic edition of Prospects, 14, No. 1, 48-58. 390. Epistemology, Methodology and Ideology in the Sociolinguistic Enterprise. An Epistemology for the Language Sciences, Alexander Z. Guiora, ed., Detroit, Wayne University Press, 33^17. 391. No. 354, reprinted in Shmuel Rozhansky, ed., Memuarn. filosofye, forshung in der yidisher literatur, Buenos Aires, Musterverk (No. 97), 315-330. 392. Afilu b'li gefilte fish. Hashavua (Bet Alfa, Israel), x/8, 3 - 5 . 393. On the Peculiar Problems of Smaller National Languages. Panagani: Essays in Honor of Bonifacio P. Sibayan on his Sixty-Seventh Birthday, Andrew Gonzales, ed., Manila, Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 40-45, simultaneously in Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 1983-1984, 14-15, No. 2 - 1 , 40-45. 394. Umzister agmes-nefesh? Afn shvel, 253-244, 8. 1985 395. Tsulib vos darfn mir nokh yidish? Tsukunft, 91, 1, I 4. 396. No. 357, reprinted, revised and expanded in Nessa Wolfson and Joan Manes, eds., Language Inequality, Berlin, Mouton, 207-222. 397. Yidn, yidishkayt un yidish in melburn, oystraliye. Afn shvel, 260, 11-14. 398. Macro-Sociolinguistics/Sociology of Language in the Early Eighties. Annual Review Sociology, 11, 113-127.

of

of

270

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

399. No. 328, translated into German ("Spracherhalt") in Donata Eischenbroich, ed., Einwanderung, Integration, Etnische Bindung, Basel u. Frankfurt a.M., Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 155-178. 400. Non-English Language Ethnic Community Schools in the U.S.A.: Instruments of More Than Literacy and Less Than Literacy. Working Papers on Migrant and Intercultural Studies, No. 1 (July). 401. Special Issue on Yiddish (with Gella S. Fishman). Bilingual Family Newsletter, Entire Issue (12 pp.). 402. The Ethnic Revival in the United States: Implications for the Mexican-American Community. Mexican-Americans in Comparative Perspective, Walker Conner, ed., Washington, D.C., Urban Institute Press, 309-335. 403. D"r nosn birnboyms tsveyter perek: der kemfer far yidish un yidisher kultur-oytonomye. Afn shvel, 257, 2 - 6 . 404. D"r nosn birnboyms driter perek: di derheybung un fartifung fun yidisher kedushe. Afn shvel, 258, 10-13. 405. Laytish name-loshn. Afn shvel, 259, 1-2. 406. Language and Culture. The Social Science Encyclopedia, Adam and Jessica Kuper, eds., London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 444. 407. The Societal Basis of the Inter-Generational Continuity of Additional Languages. Scientific and Humanistic Dimensions of Language: Festschrift for Robert Lado, Kurt R. Jankowsky, ed., Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 551-558. 408. No. 339, revised and expanded, in J. A. Fishman, ed., Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, Leiden, E . J . Brill, 3-21. 409. Arabic Language-Maintenance Efforts in the United States (with Mohammed Sawaie). Journal of Ethnic Studies, 13, No. 1, 3 3 ^ 9 . 410. No. 341, reprinted in Melburner Bieter, November-December, 13-17. 411. Why did Yiddish Change? Diachronica, 2, No. 1, 67-82. 412. Written Spanish in the United States; An Analysis of the Spanish of the Ethnic Press (with O. Garcia, M. Gertner and S. Burunat). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 56, 85-98. 413. Toward Multilingualism as an International Desideratum in Government, Business and the Professions. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 6, 2-9. 414. Nathan Birnbaum's First Phase: From Zionism to Eastern European Jewry (in Commemoration of his 120th birthday). Shofar, 4, No. 1, 17-27. 415. Demographic and Institutional Indicators of German Language Maintenance in the United States, 1960-1980. America and the Germans; An Assessment of a 300 Year History, Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., Vol. I, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 251-269. 416. 'Am and Goy as Designations for Ethnicity in Selected Books of the Old Testament' (with David E. Fishman and Rena Mayerfeld), in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival in the United States, Berlin, Mouton, 15-38. 417. The Hispanic Press in the United States: Content and Prospects (with Ofelia Garcia, Silvia Burunat and Michael H. Gertner), in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival in the United States, Berlin, Mouton, 343-362. 418. No. 274, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 3-14. 419. No. 310, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 445^156. 420. No. 323, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 39-56. 421. No. 327, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 457^172.

Joshua A. Fishraan: Bibliographical inventory

271

422. No. 337, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 57-76. 423. No. 351, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 473^188. 424. No. 370, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 283-302. 425. No. 371, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 305-342. 426. No. 372, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 489-526. 427. No. 376, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 77-104. 428. No. 383, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 107-194. 429. The Significance of the Ethnic Mother-Community Mother-Tongue School, in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 363-372. 430. Ethnocultural Dimensions in the Acquisition and Retention of Biliteracy: A Comparative Ethnography of Four New York City Schools, in J. A. Fishman, et al., The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival, Berlin, Mouton, 377^442. 1986 431. No. 415, translated into German, in Frank Trommler, ed., Amerika und die Deutschen; Bestandsaufnahme einer 300jährigen Geschichte, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 263-278. 432. "Yiddish Watching": Nit ayndrimlen. Sh'ma, 16, No. 309, 67-68. 433. Nathan Birnbaum's Third Phase: The Activization of Jewish Sanctity. The Fergusonian Impact, Joshua A. Fishman, et al., eds., vol. II. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 325-336. 434. Shprakh-planirung, oysleyg-planirung un yidish. Afn shvel, 261, 6-10. 435. Der gezelshaftiker bazis funem tsvishndoyresdikn hemshekh fun tsveyte shprakhn. Afn shvel, 262, 3-5. 436. Yidish un yidishe sotsiyolingvistik - tsvishn yo un neyn. Afn shvel, 263, 9-12. 437. Bilingualism and Separatism. Annals, American Association of Political and Social Sciences, 487, 168-180. 438. Ivrit v'yidish: yitsug khizuti shel yakhasim sotsiyolingvistim. Hadoar, 66, No. 7, 12-16. 439. Baskn alekho shpanye. Afn shvel, 264, 14-17. 440. Der tsushtayer fun veltlekhkeyt tsum yidishn lebn. Tsukunft, 92, No. 11-12, 201-208. 1987 441. Nosn bimboyms tsugang tsum amerikaner yidntum onheyb 20sten yorhundert. Yediyes fun yivo, 171,6-7. 442. Himl un erd un rus vays. Afn shvel, 265, 2 - 4 and 16. 443. A naye farteydikung fun yidish in di khareydishe krayzn. Afn shvel, 266, 3-6. 444. Bamerkung tsu M. Tsanins briv in der redaktsiye. Afn shvel, 8-9. [Note: this issue is mistakenly numbered 268]. 445. A pekl ksuvem fun a lerer a khoyvev-yidish un yidishkeyt. Afn shvel, 267, 5-8. 446. Nathan Birnbaum's "Second Phase": The Champion of Yiddish and Jewish Cultural Autonomy. Spracherwerb und Mehrsprachigkeit; Festschrift für Els Oksaar zum 60. Geburtstag, Briggitte Narr and Hartwig Wittje, eds., Tubingen, Gunter Narr, 173-180. 447. English: Neutral tool or Ideological Protagonist? A 19th Century East-Central European Intellectual Views English from Afar. English World Wide, 8, 1-10. 448. What is Happening to Spanish on the U.S. Mainland? Ethnic Affairs, 1, 12-23.

272

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

449. Reflections on the Current State of Language Planning. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language Planning, Lome LaForge, ed., Quebec, University of Laval Press, 406-428. 450. Nathan Birnbaum's View of American Jewry. Judaica, 18, No. 1, 10-12 and 68—70. 451. Introduction (to IJSL issue on "Progress in the Sociology of Jewish Languages"). International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 67, 5 - 6 . 452. No. 449, reprinted in U. N. Singh and R. N. Srivastava, eds., Perspectives in Language Planning, Calcutta, Mithila Darshan, 27-59. 453. Shpaltung, shrek un hofnung. Afn shvel, 268, 3^1. 454. Language Spread and Language Policy for Endangered Languages. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D. C., I-15. 455. Post-Exilic Jewish Languages and Pidgins/Creoles: Two Mutually Clarifying Perspectives. Multilingua, 6, 1, 7-24. 456. The Sociolinguist as Biographer: Questions, in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 1-10. 457. Continuity and Change in Nathan Birnbaum's Thought, in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 85-108. 458. Ideology, Society and Language: the Sociolinguist as Biographer; Returning to Initial Questions and Turning to New Ones, in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 109-131. 459. The Sociolinguist as Biographer: Reflections on Taking Leave, in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 132-141. 460. No. 326, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 38-71. 461. No. 414, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, II-25. 462. No. 433, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 72-84. 463. No. 446, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma, 26-37. 464. Translation into English (with Walter Kramer and Michael Gertner) of 15 selected German or Yiddish articles written by Nathan Birnbaum, in J. A. Fishman, Ideology, Society and Language, Ann Arbor, Karoma. 1988 465. Tsi darf amerike an ofitsyele shprakh? Afn shvel, 269, 10-14. 466. Di veyniker banutste shprakhn. Afn shvel, 270, 4—8. 467. Research on National Languages. Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar and Klaus J. Mattheier, eds., Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1, 638-646. 468. Der hebreyisher opruf af der tshemovitser konferents. Afn shvel, 271, 8 - 1 3 . 469. English Only: Its Ghosts, Myths, and Dangers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 74, 125-140. 470. No. 454, translated into Basque. Jakin. No. 48, 5-21. 471. Ethnocultural Issues in the Creation, Substitution and Revision of Writing Systems, in The Social Construction of Written Communication, Bennett A. Rafoth and Donald L. Rubin, eds., Norwood, Ablex, 273-286. 472. The Development and Reform of Writing Systems, in Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar and Klaus J. Mattheier, eds., Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2, 1643-1650. 473. Nosn birnboyms dray tshemovitser konferentsn. Tsukunft, 95, 1, 85-90.

273

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

474. Shoyel gutmans "profit". Afn shvel, 272, 3 - 6 . 1989 475. Mit vos iz yidish andersh? Afn shvel, 273, 7 - 1 1 . 476. What is Ethnicity and How is it Linked to Language?; Phenomenological and Socio-Historical Considerations, in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 5 - 8 . 477. No. 274, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 9-22.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

478. No. 276, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 23-65.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

479. No. 376, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 66-96.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

480. Language Maintenance and Language Shift in Ethnocultural Perspective, J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 177-180. 481. No. 323, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 181-201.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

482. No. 328, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 202-223.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

483. No. 407, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 224-232.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

484. No. 251, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 233-264.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

485. The Ethnic Dimension in Language Planning, in J. A. Fishman, Language Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2 6 5 - 2 6 8 .

and

Ethnicity,

486. No. 393, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 368-375.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

487. No. 364, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 376-388.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

488. No. 454, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 389^102.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

489. No. 340, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 403^118.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

490. Language and Ethnicity in Education: The Bilingual Minority Focus, J. A. Fishman, and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 4 1 9 ^ t 2 4 .

Language

491. No. 232, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 425^38.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

492. No. 313, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 439^151.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

493. No. 320, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 452^64. 494. No. 384, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 465-480.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

495. Elites and Rank-and-File: Contrasts and Contexts in Ethnolinguistic Behavior and Attitudes, in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 4 8 1 - 4 8 4 . 496. No. 129, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 485^t97.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

497. No. 326, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 498-529.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

498. No. 370, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language 530-549.

and Ethnicity,

Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,

274

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

499. No. 450, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 550-560. 500. Ethnolinguistic Homogeneity and Heterogeneity: Worldwide Causes, Consequences and Aspirations, in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 561-563. 501. No. 351, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 564-579. 502. Utilizing Societal Variables to Predict Whether Countries are Linguistically Homogeneous or Heterogeneous, in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, 580-604. 503. Cross-Polity Perspective on the Importance of Linguistic Heterogeneity as a "Contributory Factor" in Civil Strife, in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 605-626. 504. No. 413, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 627-637. 505. No. 469, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 638-654. 506. No. 372, reprinted in J. A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 655-699. 507. Vos hot di yidishe literatur geton far der yidisher shprakh? Der pakn-treger/The Book Peddler. 10-11,55-54. 508. No. 502, revised and reprinted in II Basque World Congress, Conference on the Basque Language., v. 2: Hizkuntza eta GizarteslLengua y sociedad. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Gobierno Vasco, 185-202. 509. No. 508, reprinted in Cultural Dynamics. 1, 414-437. 510. Cross-Polity Linguistic Homogeneity/Heterogeneity and Per-Capita Gross National Product: an Empirical Exploration. Language Problems and Language Planning. 13, 103—118. 511. Comment on Keesing. Current Anthropology. 30, 471 - 4 7 2 . 512. No. 400, reprinted in Literacy in School and Society, Elisabetta Zuanelli Sonino, ed., New York, Plenum, 25-31. 513. Far vos zol undz ongeyn der matsev fun irlendish? Afn shvel. 21 A, 3 - 7 . 514. Ester. Afn shvel. 275, 10-13. 515. Yidish bay di khareydim; frishe koykhes un naye tsores. Afn shvel. 276, 1-5. 516. No. 454, revised and retitled "Status planning for endangered languages", in Language Reform: History and Future, v. 4, Istvan Fodor and Claude Hagege, eds. Hamburg, Buske, 1-11. 1990 517. Limitaciones de la eficacia escolar para invertir el displazamiento lingüístico (IDL). Ponencias Internacionales: Primer Congreso de la Escuela Pública Vasca. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Gobierno Basco, 127-141. 518. No. 517, reprinted in Ponencias y Comunicaciones, Tomo 1: Primer Congreso de la Escuela Pública Vasca. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Gobierno Vasco, 191-196. 519. Tsu maks vaynraykhs 21stn yortsayt. Afn shvel, 277, 10-14. 520. Di farlegnhaytn funem hayntikn yidishizm. Afn shvel. 278. 1-5. In press (as of July, 1990): 521-522. Two additional articles in Afn shvel for 1990. 523. A Methodological Check on Three Cross-Polity Studies of Linguistic Homogeneity/ Heterogeneity, (with G. D. McConnell and F. R. Solano), in In the Interest of Language, Mary E. McGroarty and Christian Faltis, eds. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 15-20. 524. No. 503, (with F. R. Solano), revised and reprinted. Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. 17.

Joshua A. Fishman: Bibliographical inventory

275

525. Yiddish Dictionaries Through the Centuries. Worterbucher, Dictionaries, Dictionnaires, v. 3. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. 526. No. 438, revised, translated into English and reprinted in Languages in Contact and Contrast, V. Ivir and D. Kalogjera, eds. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 179-193. 527. An Empirical Test of Two Popular Assumptions: The Relationship Between Bilingualism, Civil Strife and Per-Capita Gross National Product. 528. The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth About the Relationship Between Language and Culture (With a Note on the Applicability of this Relationship in the Jewish Case) 529. Toward a Theory of Reversing Language Shift. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 11, 5-36. 530-551. Introductory notes to five sections and reprinting 16 papers pertaining to the sociology of Yiddish (in Book No. 65). 552. Efforts on Behalf of Reversing Language Shift in Connection with Frisian and Basque. 553. Efforts on Behalf of Reversing Language Shift in Connection with Australian Aboriginal and Immigrant Languages. 554. My Life From my Work; My Work From my Life (Autobiography). First Person Singular, vol. 2. Konrad Koerner, ed. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. 555. Reversing Language Shift as a Type of Status Change for Threatened Languages, in Ulrich Ammon, ed., Change in Language Status.

Index Aarlsleff, H. 14,34,36 Aasen, Ivar 82 Abag, D. 107, 109 Abraham 166 accommodation 127 theory of 121-122 Africa schoolchildren in 107 African-Americans, students in USA 102 Aikio, M. 114,130 Akutagawa award 239 Akutagawa, M. 117,131 Alberts, S. 122, 134 Alcott, A. Bronson 204-205,215 Alexander, H. G. 16, 17, 24, 36 Allard, R. 118,119,126,130 Alliance Israelite Universelle schools in Palestine 141, 144, 147 alphabetic writing (see also writing systems) 229,232,233, 236,237, 238, 242 Amado, Jorge 188 American Periodical Series I and II 215 American Philosophical Society 207 Anderson, Ned 220, 221, 224 Andrzejewski, B. W. 221, 224 Anglo-Saxon language 91,92-93,94 literature 81 people 88-89,90,91,93-94 Apache writing system 220,221 Applegate, J. L. 117,118,121,131 Arabic language 96, 103, 152 script 221,222 Aramaic 144, 166, 172 Arendt, Hannah 65,66,72 Aristotle 8 , 4 9 , 6 5 Arlington, Virginia 105-106 Aronson, Harry 83 Asch.S. E. 18,36 Asgrimsson, Eysteinn 76-77 Asher ben Yehiel, Rabbi 160 Aslakson, Lidvord 77-78 Atumisi, Afaka 219 Au, T. K. 30,36 Australian aboriginal languages 96

availability of categories 22,27-28, 31,35 Avineri, S. 145 Ayrshire 90-91,93 Azaryahu, Joseph 144,153 Babylonians 223 Bachi, R. 147,153 Bacon, Francis 12, 34 Baehr, Paul 79,83 Bahai 221 Bakhtin, M. 214 Baldinger, K. 178,181 Bamberger, Jeanne 68,70,72 Bamford, K. W. 107, 108, 109 Bantu languages 86 Barlow, M. 184,195 Barnard, F. M. 13,36 Baron,D.E. 215 Banow, G. W. S. 91,98 Basilius, H. 15, 36 Basso, Keith H. 220, 221, 224 Batani, M. R. 188,195 Baugh, Albert C. 87-88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96,98 Baumgardner, R. J. 187, 188, 189, 190, 195 Baym, N. 201,214,215 Bean, S. 183,195 Bechar, Nissim 144 Bedau, H. H. 24,36 Beeman, W. O. 188, 189, 195 behaviorism 49 Beit-Halachmi, B. 28, 35, 39 Belsey, C. 200,215 Bengali 184-185, 186 Benton, Richard A. 148, 149, 151, 153, 154 Ben Yehuda, Eliezer 144 Beowulf 81 Berger, C. 120,131 Berk, L. 71,72 Berkeley, George 11, 36 Berlin, I. 34,36 Berlitz method, see language instruction, direct method Berry, J. W. 118,121,126,129,131 Bertalanffy, L. von 21, 24, 36

278 Bible 78, 82, 89, 153, 158, 159, 173, 178, 179 Book of Esther 168-177 Bible Christian Mission 220 bilingual education cognitive and social correlates of bilingual immersion programs 3, 101-111 in New Zealand 149-151 bilingualism additive 106 level of in contact populations 95 bilinguals 4 7 - 5 0 Billigmeier, Jon-Christian 221, 222, 225 Bilu, Yoram 2 2 4 , 2 2 5 Black, Max 11, 20, 23, 24, 25, 35, 36 Blanck, Anton 8 1 , 8 3 Blank, M. 36 Bleich, D. 214,215 Bloom, A. 30,37 Boas, Franz 15 Bokmäl 82 Bond, M. H. 122,131 Bornstein, M. H. 2 8 , 2 9 , 3 7 Boski, P. 1 2 1 , 1 2 6 , 1 2 9 , 1 3 1 Boston 204,206 Bourbaki group 67 Bourhis, R. Y. 115, 116, 118, 119, 129, 131, 133,135 Bradac, J. 1 1 8 , 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 1 Braun, F. 1 8 3 , 1 9 0 , 1 9 5 Brown, P. 1 8 3 , 1 8 6 , 1 9 5 Brown, R. L. 8 , 1 3 , 1 4 , 3 4 , 3 7 Brown, Roger 16, 21, 22, 26, 27-28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 54, 59, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190, 194, 195 Bruner, J. S. 29, 34, 37, 66, 72 Buddhism 227 Buell, L. 2 0 1 - 2 0 2 , 2 0 9 , 2 1 6 Bulgaria 227 Burma 220 Burns, Robert 3 , 9 0 - 9 3 Burrell, G. 116,131 Busiek, R. D. 29 Byrne, James 34, 37, 115, 123, 133 Byrne, St. G. 186, 195 Byskov, Jens 75, 83 Cable, Thomas 8 8 , 9 8 Caldwell, G. 119,131 California 101, 105 Callan, V. 121-122, 133

Cantonese 122 Cardenas, J. A. 102, 109 Carmichael, L. 2 9 , 3 7 Caro, Rabbi Yosef 1 6 0 - 1 6 1 , 1 8 0 Carroll, John B. 2 1 , 2 8 , 3 7 , 4 5 , 4 6 Casagrande, J. B. 28, 37 Cassidy, Frederic, G. 87, 94, 98 Cassirer, Emst 11, 15, 24, 34, 37 Castillo, V. V. 2 8 , 4 3 Ceara 188 Celtic Celtic-English language contact 3, 87-99 loanwords in Scots 9 0 - 9 3 Celts 9 3 - 9 4 Census Commissioner of India 220, 225 Central America students in the U. S. 106 Chatauqua Club, the 207 Chatterji, S. K. 186, 195 Chaucer 79 Chen, Jianmin 139,154 Chen, V. 116, 122, 129-130, 132 Chen, Zhangtai 139,154 Cherokee syllabary 220 Chiang, Gregory Kuei-ke 232, 243 child language learning 10, 18, 35, 50-53, 57-58 Childs, C. 2 8 , 3 9 Chin script 220 China 2 2 8 , 2 4 0 , 2 4 1 Chinese and computer technology 236-238 characters (writing system) 5, 65, 2 2 7 243 language and thought 24, 30 loanwords 234 Mandarin Chinese 18 plural morphemes, lack of 54 structure of 234 study of as foreign language in the U. S. 103 Chinese Culture Connection, the 123, 131 Chomsky, Noam 46, 57, 58, 59 Christem III 78 Christian, Donna 105,110 Christianity and writing systems 222, 227 Ethiopian 227 Christine, Eleonora 78 Christmann, H. H. 34, 37

279 ChuoKoron 239 Cicero 75 Clark, G. 216 classification 22, 28, 35 Clayton, Peter A. 90, 98 Cleghorn, A. 107, 109 Clément, R. 123,131 Cochran-Smith, M. 215,216 codability 22,27-28,30 cognition cognitive correlates of bilinguality

Cyrillic script 222,227

101-

111

cognitive development 70-71 cognitive pluralism 64-73 Cole, Michael 29, 38, 221, 225 Collier,M.J. 116,122,123,124,131 Collier, V. P. 108, 109 color tasks 26, 27-28, 29, 30, 31, 62-63 Commins, Patrick 148,154 communication strategies 121-124 computational models 31 computer technology and writing systems 236-238,240-241 Comrie, B. 186,196 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 9, 12-13, 14, 34,38 Confucianism 228 Contemporary Club, the 209 conversation 4, 199-218 Cooper, L. A. 69,73 Cooper, R. L. 138-139, 140-141, 151, 154 Corbett, G. G. 186-187,196 core vocabulary 92 Cosmides, L. 69,72 count nouns 2,46-58 Coulmas, Florian 234,241,242 Coupland, J. 121,131 Coupland, N. 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 131, 132, 133, 134 Crandall, Jody A. 104, 105, 109, 110, 111 Crawford, J. 101,109 Cree syllabary 220 Cronen, V. E. 116, 123, 129-130, 132 cryptotypes 25 culture and writing systems 227, 228, 233, 241 core values of 123 language and 11-16,17,18 literary 227,228,233,241 Cummins, J. 129, 132, 147-148, 154

Dalby, David 219,221,223,224,225 d'Anglejan, A. 119,132 Dani 27 Daniel, T. C. 29,38 Danish 7 7 , 7 8 , 8 1 , 8 2 Danish Latin School 81 Dante 76,78,82 Danziger, M. H. 178,181 Darwin, Erasmus 203-204 Daube, Anna 83 David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra 163, 168 Davidson, C. N. 201,214,216 Davidson, D. 49,50,59 Davis, P. 66-67,72 De Francis, John 241,242 Den norske Folkeskole 83 Denny, J. P. 27,38 Devanagari script 227 deVries, J. 114, 115, 116, 127, 132 Diaz, R. M. 71,72,107,109 Dickens, Charles 210 Diderot 14 Dietz, B. 130,135 Dillard, J. L. 97,98 Diringer, David 220,225 Djuka syllabary 219 Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos 188 Dorian, Nancy C. 91, 98, 115, 132, 138, 154 Dorsey-Gaines, C. 201, 217 Drabble, Margaret 68-69 Dravidian 86,97 Dubé-Simard, L. 123, 132 Dummet, Michael 51-53,58,59 Duncan, Archibald A. M. 91, 98 Dutch 76 East Asia 123,228,233,236 Eastern Europe 233 Eastman, C. M. 180,181 Edwards, J. 116,129,132 Edwards, Silas John 220, 221 Egyptians, ancient 223 hieroglyphics 227 Eisenberg, Peter 241,242 Einstein, Albert 24, 35,45 Eliade, Mircea 224,225 Elon, M. 162,179,181

280 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 205-206, 207, 208, 209,216 Encyclopedists 34 England and Halakhah 157 English 19,64,85,86 bilingual education programs 105, 149151 Black English 97 contact with Celtic 87-99 dialects 86,97 forms of address 186, 187 in China 228 in Ireland 86,95, 140-141 in India 86 "English only" policy 3,101 lexicon 18 nouns 22,47,54,57 Old English 93,94 phrase structure 54 pronunciation change 186 spread of 152 Standard 3 , 9 3 , 9 4 , 9 7 verbs 47 Enlightenment, the 8,10,12-13 Epstein, Rabbi Yehiel Michael 175-176 Epstein, Yizhaq 145 Ervin, Susan 32,38 ESCOL 184, 196 Eskimo Yupik syllabaries 220 essays, literary link with conversation 4, 200, 208-211, 212 Ethiopia Christianity 227 Giiz syllabary 227 ethnicity 113,119-120, 121, 122, 148,222 ethnic affirmation 122 ethnic boundary theory 122 ethnolinguistic differentiation 119-120, 121 ethnolinguistic identity theory 119 ethnolinguistic vitality 116, 118-119 ethnocentrism 3, 14,85-99,229 Fa Toro 223 fax-machines 236 Feinstein, Rabbi Moshe 163-164, 171-172, 174-175 Fellman, Jack 138, 141, 144, 145, 153, 154

Ferguson, Charles 137, 154,184, 195, 196 Ferguson, Delancey 90,97 Feuer, L. S. 19, 20,24,25, 38 Finegan, E. 215,216 Finnish 28 Fish, S. 214,216 Fishman, Gella Schweid 214 Fishman, Joshua A. 1-2, 4, 5, 7, 16, 22, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 46, 47, 59, 61, 62, 72, 73, 85, 87, 98, 113, 114, 115, 117, 130, 132, 137, 142, 146, 148, 151, 154, 183, 187, 194, 196, 214, 222, 225, 227, 241, 242, 245-275 Flavell, J. H. 23,32 Florida 101, 105 Flower, L. 201,215,216 Fodor, J. A. 4 8 , 5 7 , 5 9 , 7 3 Forbundet, Gotiska 81 Ford, M. 185, 195 Forgas, J. P. 122,133 forms of address 4,183-197 Foster, C. 116,133 Franklyn-Stokes, A. 118, 119, 121, 133 Frege, Gottlob 9 French 13, 18,24,76,89, 103, 104, 107, 141, 144, 152, 153, 186, 187 Norman dialect 86 Freund, E. 214,216 Freyd, J. 69,73 Fried, R. 28,39 Friedman, M. 178,181 Friedrich, Paul 26-27,38 Frijda, N. H. 28,43 Fuller, Margaret 204 Gabelentz, G. von der 26, 38 Gaelic lexical influence on English 89-99 lexical influence on Scots 90-93 Sutherlandshire Scottish Gaelic 86 Gaeltacht 148 Galda, K. 28,38 Gallois, C. 118, 119, 120-121, 126, 127, 133 Gao Mingkai 234,235,242 Gardner, Howard 66,69,73 Gardner, R. C. 118,123,133 Garrett, P. 118,121,123,133 Gaskill, M. N. 71,72 Ganzfried, Rabbi Shelemo 145, 177 Gaur, Albertine 223,225

281 Geach, Peter T. 54,55,59 Geertz, Clifford 70,73 Geijer, Erik Gustav 81,83 Gelb, I.J. 229,242 Gender, grammatical 18,28, 32, 35 Genesee, F. 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110 genres 5,199,212,213,214 German 18, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 103, 141, 152, 153, 174, 187 Pennsylvania German 86 Germanic 76, 91, 94, 187, 227 Giles, Howard 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134,135 Gillies, W. 114,134 Gilman, A. 183, 186, 187, 190, 194, 195 Gipper, H. 36,38 Glagolica script 227 Glinert, Lewis 145-146, 154, 178, 179, 180, 181 global village 129,228 Glucksberg, S. 29,38 Goethe, J. W. 79 Goldenberg, E. 179,181 Goldman, Alvin 65,67,73 Gombiner, Rabbi Avraham 172 Goody, Jack 233,241,242 Goiter, D. 116,134 Gothic 81 Graff, G. 213,216 Graff, H. 214,216 grammar 18,22,31 grammatical agreement see forms of address grammatical purism, Standard English 97 universal 11, 25, 26, 30-31, 34, 46, 5 3 59 Granet, M. 24,38 Greek 166, 169, 170,203 alphabet 229 source of loanwords 240 Greenberg, Joseph H. 35, 38 Greenfield, P. M. 28, 29, 39 Green movement 130 Grimm, Jacob 78, 83 Grimm, Wilhelm 78,83 Grosz, Edgard 79,83 Grundtvig, N. F. S. 80-81, 82 Gudykunst, W. B. 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 134,

Guibert de Nogent 75,83 Guiora, A. Z. 28,35,39 Gupta, Anil K. 54.60 Gumey, A. R. 212 Gustavus Vasa 78 Haarmann, H. 116,134 'the Hafetz Hayyim' see Kagan, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Hägen, A. 79,83 Haifa 143, 144 Hakuta, K. 101,103,107,109 Halakhah 4, 157-182 Halkin, A. S. 179,181 Hallowell, A. I. 74 Hamann, Georg 13 Hammer, M. R. 118, 119, 127, 134 hanzi see Chinese, characters Hapoel, Hatzair 142 Harris, Roy 229,242 Hashimoto, Mantaro 227, 242 Hashin, A. 143 'the

Hatam Sofer' see Schreiber, Rabbi Moshe Haugen, Einar 15, 23, 39, 77, 78, 81-82, 83, 116, 134 Hay, Marie 83 Head, B. F. 186, 187, 188, 190, 191,196 Heamshaw, L. S. 98 Heath, Shirley B. 201, 202, 213, 215, 216 Hebrew in Halakhic speech acts 4, 157-182 Hebrew-origin words in Yiddish 96 revitalization 4,20,137-155 script 159, 179, 222 Hecht, M. 118,122,134 Heider, E. R. 28,39 Heilman, S. 178,181 Heimskringla 81 Helmriech, W. 178,181 Hendel, Charles W. 13 Henwood, K. 121,131 Herder, Johann Gottfried 12-13, 14, 34, 5 8 59, 60,79 Herman, D.T. 29,39 Herodotus 61 Herrmann, Theo 9 Hersh, R. 66-67,72 Hervey, George Winfred 204, 206

282 Hewstone, M. 118, 119, 121, 123, 128, 133, 134, 135 Heynick, F. 3 5 , 3 9 hieroglyphic writing 227, 229 Hilfsverein schools in Palestine 141, 147, 153 Hill, J. H. 3 0 , 3 5 , 3 9 Hindi 192,227 Hinduism 227 hiragana 2 3 8 , 2 3 9 Hispanics students in USA 102, 104, 106 History of Denmark of Saxo Grammaticus 81 Hobbes, Thomas 9 , 1 1 Hockett, Charles F. 18,21, 39,48, 60 Hodge, C. T. 188,196 H0dneb0, Finn 7 7 , 8 3 Hofstätter, P. R. 3 5 , 3 9 Hofstede, G. 1 1 7 , 1 2 3 , 1 3 5 Hogan, H. P. 2 9 , 3 7 Hoijer, H. 2 1 , 2 3 , 3 9 Holberg, Ludvig 7 8 , 8 2 Holland, N. 2 1 4 , 2 1 7 Hong Kong 122 Hopi 19, 22-23, 25, 4 7 - ^ 8 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 55, 85 Hörmann, H. 15, 39 Howells, William Dean 98 Hsiin-k'uang 228 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 34, 35,40 Hungarian 96 Hungary 145 Huntington, Frederick 207 Hymes, Dell 1 7 , 2 1 , 3 4 , 3 5 , 4 0 Ibibio-Efik 221 Icelandic 7 6 , 7 8 identity (see also ethnicity) 222, 227 Illich, Ivan 2 2 9 , 2 4 2 Illinois 101, 105 Inca 223 India 1 7 8 , 2 2 7 , 2 3 3 , 2 4 1 Indie 86 Indo-European 14, 85, 8 6 , 9 6 , 1 4 6 Indonesian 103 innovation and writing systems 222, 223-224 intercultural communication 120, 121-123 intergroup cognitions 116, 118, 119-120, 123, 124, 128

interpretive competence 121 Iran see Persian Irish plural morphemes 54 revitalization 4, 138, 140-141, 147-148, 151, 152 Irish Free State 147 Iser, W. 214,217 Islam and writing 2 2 2 , 2 2 3 , 2 2 7 Israel (see also Hebrew) and Halakhah 157 North African immigrants to Isserles, Rabbi Moshe 172 Italian 3 2 , 7 6 , 1 8 7 Itsamna 223

224

Jackendorf, Ray 56, 60 Jackson, B. S. 178,181 Jaffa 143, 144 Jahangiri, N. 188,196 Jain, D. 192,196 Jakobson, Roman 95, 98 James, Henry 209 Japan 228, 234, 236-238, 240, 241 Japanese lack of plural morpheme 54 foreign-language study in USA 103 loanwords 234-235 structure of 234 writing systems 233, 236-240 Jensen, J. B. 1 8 8 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 2 , 1 9 6 Jerusalem 143, 144, 151 Jespersen, Otto 8 8 - 8 9 , 9 0 - 9 1 , 9 2 , 9 3 , 9 6 , 9 8 Jewish law, see Halakhah Jews (see also Hebrew) and Halakhah 157-182 and script 2 2 2 , 2 2 7 Johnson,P. 1 1 5 , 1 1 6 , 1 2 0 , 1 2 1 , 1 3 3 John-Steiner, Vera 68, 70, 73 Johnston, W. B. 102, 109 Johnstone, M. 120-121,133 Jonas, Hans 72 Joseph, J. E. 183,196 Joseph ben Me'ir Teomim, Rabbi 176 Judah Halevi 174 Judah the Prince, Rabbi 166 Judezmo 152, 172, 174

283 Kabbalah 158 Kaestle, Carl F. 201,217 Kagan, Rabbi Yisrael Meir 169 Kaiarahi reo 150 Kainz, F. 10,34,35,40 kana syllabaries 238,240 kanji 233,234,236-240 Kant, Immanuel 34 Kany, C. E. 192, 196 katakana 238,239 Katz, Jacob 173,178,180,181 Kaufman, Terrence 86,91,95,99 Kay, P. 28, 30, 36, 40, 62-63, 68, 73 Kempton, W. 28, 30, 36, 62-63, 68, 73 Kennedy, George A. 241, 243 Kennedy, Graeme 148 Khoisan 86 kiddushin, language choice in Halakhah 160-161 Kiel research project 183 Kilbury-Meissner, U. 190, 196 Kim, Y. Y. 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 129, 131,135 Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh 145, 177 Kleist, Heinrich von 9,40 Kluckhohn, C. 40 Kluge, Friedrich 75,76,78, 84 Knudsen, Knud 82 Koen, F. 28,40 kohanga reos 149-151 Köhler, August 79,84 Kohz, A. 183, 195 Korea 228, 233, 239, 240, 242 Korean 234,236,239 Kosslyn, S. M. 65,69,73 Kotei, S. I. A. 222,225 Kristensen, Marius 75, 77, 78, 84 Kruidnier, B. G. 123 Krzak, Miroslav 241,243 Kuhn, Thomas 50,60 Kutschera, F. v. 34,40 Kyoka, Izumi 239 labeling 29 Laberge, S. 196 Labor movement in Palestine Labov, W. 187,197 Ladino, see Judezmo Laing, R. D. 217

142,143

Lakoff, George 7, 26, 27, 29, 35, 40, 62, 64, 68,73 Lambert, Wallace E. 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 120, 135, 187, 197 Landesman, C. 24, 25, 34,40 Landry, R. 118,119,126,130 Langacker, R. W. 10, 20, 30-31, 35,40 language and culture 11-16,17,18,34 and ethnicity 113 and knowledge 10-11 attitudes 3, 118, 119, 120-121, 122, 123 towards language choice in Halakhic speech acts 157-182 change and linguacentrism 85-99 in forms of address 185-187 Chinese loanwords 234 Gaelic loanwords 89-99 Japanese loanwords 234—235 Latin and Greek loanwords 240 Yiddish loanwords 95-96,97 choice 4,213 in Halakhic speech acts 157-182 contact (see also language change) 4, 85-99, 164, 168, 172 death 85-86, 137 of law 157 of thought 20, 35, 48-49, 58 ideology 4,211-214 instruction, direct method 114, 145 learning, as first language see child language learning learning, as second language 49-50, 123 general theory of 139 foreign language proficiency of language-majority students in USA 102— 103 maintenance and shift 3^1, 85-87, 89, 90,91,94,95, 113-136, 137-155 minority, see minority languages planning 101, 113, 114, 129, 138, 240 policy, see language planning revitalization 3^1,115,137-155 role in thinking 8-10, 16-17, 19-23, 2633,34-35,53,61-73 universals (see also grammar, universal) 183 Lantz, D. 27, 40 Lapesa Melgar, E. 187, 192, 197

284 Lapointe, S. G. 184,197 Larsen-Freeman, D. 103,110 Latham, R. E. 7 5 , 8 4 Latin 3, 19, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 88-89, 191, 203 plural morphemes 54 script (see also romanization) 221, 222, 227 source of loanwords 240 Lawless, R. H. 29,39 Lazard, G. 190, 197 least effort, principle of 229-232, 238 Lee, D. 2 4 , 4 0 Leets.L. 113,116,134 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9 leisure link with conversation and reading 209211 Leith, D. 186,197 Lemel school 141 Lenneberg, E. H. 14, 23, 24, 27-28, 32, 34, 40,41 Le Roy E. 24 Leshon Hakodesh 146, 158 Levina, R. E. 71,73 Levinson, S. C. 183,186,195 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 223, 225 Levy, R . I . 26,41 Lévy-Bruhl, L. 26,41 Lewis, I. M. 220,221,225 lexicon 31 lexical influence in language contact 8 6 99, 168 Liberia 219 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 11 Lincoln, Jackson Steward 224, 225 Lindholm, K. J. 105, 110 Linell 241 linguistic determinism, theory of analysis of 16-25, 34, 35, 45-59, 61-65, 68 as research program 31-32 empirical research 26-29 future prospects 32-33 historical antecedents 7 - 1 6 , 4 5 , 6 0 present status 29-32 linguistic parallelism 16-17, 18, 23, 26-27, 31,34 linguistic relativity, see linguistic determinism linguistic universals, see grammar, universal

linguist's fallacy 24 literacy dissemination of 233 functions of 223-224 literary culture, see culture, literary literature link with conversation 200, 201, 202, 203.207,208-211,213 reading of 2 0 0 , 2 0 1 , 2 0 2 , 2 0 3 , 2 0 7 The Literary Companion 202-203 Liu, L.G. 30,41 Liu Zhengtan 234, 235, 242 Locke, John 1 1 , 1 2 , 3 4 , 4 1 Lockridge, K. 214,217 Loewenthal, N. 180,182 Loftus, E. F. 29,41 Loma 219,224 Longacre, R. A. 2 3 , 2 5 , 2 7 , 4 1 Longchamp, William 75 Lovejoy, A. O. 12.41 Lucy, J. A. 2 8 , 3 5 , 4 1 , 6 3 , 7 3 Luiseno 221 Luria, A. R. 29,41 Luther 78,82 Lyceum movement, the 207 Macnamara, John 54, 57, 58, 60, 101, 110, 148, 154 MacQueen, John 9 1 , 9 9 macro- and micro-level analyses, connections 187-188. 194 Madan, T. N. 178,182 'The Magen Avraham', see Gombiner, Rabbi Avraham Maigne d'Amis 75 Maimonides 162, 163, 164-165, 169-170, 180 Malay 96 Malotki, E. 3 6 , 4 1 , 4 8 , 6 0 Maori, revitalization 4, 138, 140, 148-151, 152 Marckwardt, Albert H. 9 5 , 9 9 Marshall, J. C. 35,41 Marshall, R. W. 29,39 Masica, Colin 97,99 Massachusetts 105 Mauthner, Fritz 9 , 1 5 , 4 1 Mayans 223 McClelland, J. L. 20,42 McKeon, R. 8,41

285 McLuhan, Marshall 229,243 McNeill, D. 28,41 McPherson, Leslie 57,60 The Megillah, recital of 168-177,180 memory 29 and Chinese characters 232 Mencius 228 mentalities 50 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50-53,60 Merritt, M. W. 107, 109 Mesopotamia 227 Met, M. 105, 110 Metzer, J. 130,135 Mexican Americans, students 106 Miao syllabary 220 Michaelis, Johann David 34 Michigan 105 Michigan, State University of 203 Middle East 241 Midrash 174, 180 Miller, R. L. 13,14,34,42 Milroy, J. 187,197 Milroy, L. 187, 197 minority languages (see also Celtic, Gaelic, Scots, Yiddish) minority-language students in USA academic achievement 102 demographic changes 101 -102 theory and study of 113-136, 137 Mintum, A. L. 29 Mishnah 158-159,162,164, 166, 169, 172 missionaries 220-221 Miyajima, Tatsuo 239-240,243 Mixtee 64 Mizokawa, D. T. 107, 108,109 Mohan, B. A. 105,110 Molesworth, W. 9 , 1 1 , 4 2 Momulu Duwalu Bukele 219 Montaigne 208,211 Moravcsik, E. 183,197 Morgan, G. 116,131 Moriba 219 Morley, D. 122,135 Morley, L. 28,43 morphology morphological influence in language contact 86 Morton, Agnes 206 Moshe of Brisk 161 mother tongue, history of term 2-3, 75-83

motor behavior 29 Müller, Friedrich Max 9,42 Murison, David 8 9 , 9 0 , 9 1 , 9 9 Murugaian 123 Nabu 223 Nägele, Horst 84 Nahir, Moshe 142, 144, 146, 147, 150, 155 Nahmanides 174 Naro, A. J. 192, 197 nationalism 79, 81-82, 113 national identity 222 Native American languages (see also Eskimo Yupik, Hopi, Navajo, Nootka, Yucatan, Wintu, Zuni) 96 Navajo 24 Nehemiah 166 Neide, P. 115,135 Nerlove 18,36 Nes Ziona 144 Neuburg, V. 214,217 Neville, G. 114,135 New Jersey 97 Newman, S. S. 74 New Mexico 101 New York 101,105 New Zealand, see Maori Nicholson, Ronald 93,99 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14-15, 42 Nigel of Canterbury 75,84 Nishida, T. 116,134 Nissim ben Reuven Gerondi, Rabbenu 171, 172, 173, 176, 179,180 Nitinat 47-48 nominalist school 9 Nootka 47-48 Nord, D. P. 214,217 Nordic languages 97 North African immigrants to Israel 224 Norwegian 77,81-82 nouns 32, 33, 35 count nouns 2,46-58 gender classification 28, 35 noun classes 19, 35 mass nouns 22, 58 proper names 53, 58 Nunberg, G. 101,110 Nynorsk 82

166,

286 Oakes, J. P. 118,119 Oberi Okaime alphabet 221 Old Church Slavonic 227 Old Icelandic 81 Oléron, O. 42 d'Olivet, Fabre 19 Olver, R. R. 29,39 O'Nell, C. W. 224,225 Ong, Walter J. 238,243 ó Riagàin, Pàdraig 147, 148, 155 Oshitelu, Josiah 221 Osman, Yusuf Kenadid 220 Osmaniya script 220, 221 Osserman, Robert 67,73 Oxford, R. 103,110 Paivio, Allan 69,73 Palestine 140-147, 151, 152-153 Pali script 227 Palmer, J. C. 29,41 Paole Zion 142,143 paraphrase 20 Parkinson, D. B. 183,197 Pasierbsky, Fritz 234, 243 Pau Chin Hau 220 PDP Research Group 20,42 Peacock, James L. 98,99 Peal, E. 101,110 Pearce, W. B. 116, 123, 129-130, 132 Penn, J. M. 30,34,35,42 Persian 96 forms of address 4,187,188-190,193 Perso-Arabic script 227 Petuchowski, J. 180,182 Philadelphia 209 Philippines 122 Pilowsky, Arye L. 142, 155 Pines, S. 164,182 pinyin 232,238,240 Pirhi, J. 155 Plato 9, 10 plural morphemes 54 Poincaré, H. 24 politeness phenomena see forms of address Pollard, Samuel 220 Polynesian languages 96 orlàksson, Gudbrandur 78 Port Royal grammarians 34 Porto Alegre 188

Portuguese, forms of address 4, 187, 188, 190-192, 193 Porzig, W. 15,24,42 pragmatics 4 Prague School 214 prelinguistic thinking 10 printing, history of 236-237 effects on ideology 214 pronouns, second-person see forms of address proper name 53,58 protocol analysis of reading 201, 215 Puerto Rican children 107 Pullum, G. K. 184,197 Punetha, G. 122,135 Purim 169 Pyles, Thomas 87, 95-96,99 Pylyshyn, Z. W. 57,65,73 Quebec

122, 129

Rabin, Chaim 138, 151, 155, 179, 182 'The RaDBaZ' see David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra Radway, J. A. 201,214,217 'the RaN', see Nissim ben Reuven Gerondi, Rabbi Ranken, H. B. 29,42 Rashi 170-171, 179 rationalism 11 Ravina 170, 171, 172 readers and the interpretative community 200, 201-202 recognition 27-28,29 Reformation 3 Reform Movement of Judaism 174, 175 Rehovot 144 Reich, L. C. 29,39 Reitan, Anders 82 relativism 24 religion and writing systems 222, 223-224, 227 'the ReMA', see Isserless, Rabbi Moshe Rendon, L. I. 102,110 Repplier, Agnes 209-211,217 representational codes 66-69 Reyes, G. 54,60 Rezeptionstheorie 214 Rhodes, N. C. 103 Ribeau, S. 122,134

287 Richards, I. A. 214,217 Richards, J. C. 103,110 Rigby, K. 130 Rio de Janeiro 188 Rio Grande do Sul 188 Rishon-Le Zion 144, 146 'the RiTBA', see Yom-Tov ben Abraham Ishbili, Rabbi Ritchie, James 149, 155 Richie, Jane 149,155 'the RiVaSH', see Yitzhak ben Sheshet Barfat, Rabbi Roberts, J. M. 28,32,41 Robertson and Cassidy 87, 94 Robledo, M. 102, 109 Rodgers, T. S. 103,110 Roe, Anne 66, 73 Roman alphabet, see Latin, script Romance languages 76, 82, 187 Romanian 76 romanization 232, 238, 240 Roman occupation of Britain 88, 89-90, 94 Romantic Movement 3, 13, 79-82, 83 Rosch, Eleanor 27 Rosenblatt, Louise M. 214,217 'the RoSH', see Asher ben Yehiel, Rabbi Rossi-Landi, Ferrucio 61,73 Roth, J. 178,182 Roth, N. 179,182 Rothschild, Baron Edmund de 144, 153 Rothschild, Evelina de, school 141 Rowland, E. H. 28,42 Ruatoki program 150 Rubin, B. D. 118,120,129,135 Rummelhart, D. E. 20,42 Russell, Bertrand 10, 15, 25, 34, 42 Russian 96, 186 Ryan, E. B. 118, 119, 120, 126, 133, 134, 135 SaadiahGaon 179 Sachdev, I. 118,119,135 Safed 144 Sagi, A. 35,39 St. Augustine 35, 49 St. Thomas Acquinas 49 Salvadore 188 Sampson, D. L. 130,135 Sanders, Barry 229, 242 Sankoff, G. 196 Santa Monica, California

105-106

Sao Paulo 188,192 Sapir, Edward 8, 9, 15-16, 18, 34, 35, 42, 45, 61,70 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, see linguistic determinism Saussure, Ferdinand de 9, 38 Saxo Grammaticus 81 Sayce, Archibald H. 34 Scandinavia 79 Scandinavian 76, 78 Schaff, A. 34,42 Schenkendorf, Max von 79-80, 82, 83, 84 Schiller 79 Schlesinger, I. M. 34, 35,42 Scholem, G. 180,182 Schreiber, Rabbi Moshe 173-174 Schubert, K. 183, 195 Scots 3,89-99 Scribner, Sylvia 29, 38, 221, 225 scripts, see writing systems Sebastian, R. 121,135 Secada, W. G. 107,110 second-language learning, see language, learning, as second language selection 23, 29, 35 semantics 58 Septuagint 170 Sequoyah 220 Serbo-Croatian 222 Seyboldt, Peter J. 232,243 Shakespeare 79,82,97 Shanon, B. 29,43 Shelomo ben Yehiel Luria 179 Shemuel of Furth 161,179 Shepard, R. N. 69,73 Shield, L. 114,135 Shilhav, Y. 180,181 Shimon ben Lakish, Rabbi 167 Shiraz 188 Shockley-Zalabak, P. 122,135 Short, D.J. 105,110 Shulkan Arukh 161,176,180 Shweder, R. 28,35,41 Simard, L. 122,136,188 Sierra Leone 219 Skautrup, Peter 78,84 Slobin, D. 64,74 Smilansky, Ze'ev 155 Smith, D. E. 178,182 Smith, H. P. 130,135

288 Smolicz, J. J. 123,136 Snow, C. E. 106,110 Snow, M. A. 105,110 social distance 121 Soltow, L. 214,217 Somali 221 Somalia 220,221 Sommerfelt, A. 24,43 South China 220 Southern California 221 Spanish 28,76, 103, 105, 107, 172,180,192 The Spectator 207 speech acts 4,157-182,199-218 speech genres 199 Spengler, O. 24,43 Spenser, Edmund 98 Spier, L. 61,74 Spolsky, Bernard 139, 146, 148, 155, 179, 182 sprachliche Zwischenwelt 15 Stampfer, S. 180,182 standard language 79,86,94-95 Stefflre, V. 2 7 , 2 8 , 4 0 , 4 3 Steinsaltz, A. 178,182 Stern, J. 165,174,182 Stevens, E. 214,217 Stewart, W. 137,155 Stokes, G. 209,217 Strassburg 75, 76 Sturluson, Snorri 81 sub-Arabic 221 Suben, J. 107, 109 subject-predicate structure 15, 25 sublinguistic, see grammar, universal Sulzby, E. 215,217 Sumerian 227 cuneiform 227 Sunesen, Andreas 77 Surinam 219 Svennung, J. 186,197 Swahili 103 Swain, M. 107,108,110 Swedish 28,77,78,81 syntax 31 influence in language contact 86 Sypher, H. E. 117,118,121,122,131 Syr, Peder 78 table talk 200,204,205,211 Table Talk 205

Tac, Pablo 221 Taiwan 233 Tajfel, H. 115,136 Talmud 145, 158, 159, 160, 166, 167, 178 Tannen, D. 215,217 Tarahumera 63 The Tatler 207 Tatter, Paul 70,73 Taylor, D. 116, 118, 122, 133, 136 Taylor, Denny 201,217 Teale, W. 215,217 Technion 147 Tegnir, Esaias 15,24,81,84 Tehran 187, 188 Texas 101 Thavenius, Jan 76, 84 Thomas, A. R. 115, 116, 122, 123, 124, 132 Thomason, Sarah Grey 8 6 , 9 1 , 9 5 , 9 9 Thoth 223 Tiberias 144, 151 Ting-Toomey, S. 118, 119, 120, 121, 136 Tinsley, V. S. 29,43 Tishbi, Y. 180,182 Tocqueville, Alexis de 212 Tolleifson, Ame 77-78 Tompkins, J. P. 214,218 Tooby, J. 69,72 Transcendentalists 202,204,207 transformationalist school 30-31 translation 19 translinguification 148 Triandis, H. C. 118,123,136 Trier, J. 15,24,43 Tseng-tsu 228 Tshemovits conference 142 Tucker, A.N. 220,225 Tucker, G. Richard 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 111, 187, 197 Tung-Sun, Chang 24,43 'the Tur', seeYaakov ben Asher, Rabbi Turkish 96 Turner, J. C. 118,119,136 Tur-Sinai, N. H. 145 Tverski, N. 143 typewriters 236

170,

131,

134,

109,

289 Unger, J. M. 237, 238, 242, 243 United States African American students 102 Hispanic students 102, 104, 106 language ideology in nineteenth century 199-218 language-majority students, foreign language proficiency of 102-103 literary canon 214 minority-language students 101-102 universal grammar, see grammar, universal Urbach, E. E. 178,182 Urban, W. M. 10-11,43 Urdu 227 Ussishkin, M. M. 145 Uyakoq 219-220 Vai syllabary 219,223 Van de Geer, J. P. 27,28,43 Vendler, Z. 10,43 verbs 32 Gaelic loans in English 91, 92 Hopi verb system 25 verb categories 35 Verburg, P. A. 14,43 Vico, Giambatista 34 Vietnam 228 Vietnamese 234 Virginia 105 vitality, ethnolinguistic 116, 118-119 Voltaire 210 Vorformen 10, 35 Vossler, K. 24,34-35,43 vows and oaths, language choice in Halakhah 162-168 Vygotsky, L. S. 9, 34, 43, 70, 71, 74, 199 Wacher, John 90,93,99 Waggoner, D. 102, 109 Wahlstrom, Lydia 81,84 Waisman, F. 11,15,43 Waitangi, Treaty of 149 Waitangi Tribunal 149 Walker, Willard 220, 221, 222, 226 Walter, A. A. 29,37 Wande, E. 117,136 Wang, H. S. Y. 29 Washington, D. C. 105 Waters, H. S. 29,43 Watson, Seosamh 152,155

Waxman, M. 180,182 Weiler, G. 9 , 4 3 Weimann, K.-H. 34,43 Weinreich, Max 146,155 Weisberg, R. W. 29,38 Weisgerber, Leo 15, 23, 24, 44, 83, 84 Weiss-Halivni, D. 178,182 Weltbild 24,34 wenyän 228,241 Wergeland, Henrik 81-82,84 Wertsch, J. V. 63,73 West African scripts 219,221 White, A.D. 203,218 Whitehead, Alfred North 67 Whitman, Walt 209 Whitney, W. D. 8, 14, 44 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 2, 7, 16-17, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29-31, 33, 34, 35, 44, 45, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70, 72, 74, 85, 87, 96, 99 and prevailing Zeitgeist 24, 49 and universal grammar 58-59 criticism of his ideas 24—25 his language learning 49-50 reasons for impact of his ideas 23-24 reception of his ideas 23-25 Whorfianism, see linguistic determinism WidoZobo 218,221,222,223,224 Wiemann, J. M. 122,131 Wierzbicka, A. 27,35,44 William of Ockham 49 Williams, G. 116,136 Willig, A.C. 102,111 Wilson, Brent 71,74 Wilson, Marjorie 71, 74 Winter, W. 183,197 Wintu 24 Witherspoon 26, 44 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9, 44,65 Wolof 29,31 women and conversation 199-218 and language choice in Halakhic speech acts 160-161, 170, 171-172, 176, 177 language of 4, 76, 82 Wozniak, R. H. 29 writing reform (see also romanization, pinyin) 241 writing systems (see also Chinese characters) and supernatural assistance 223—224 as gifts of God 219-226

290 history of 229-231 indigenous scripts 220-222 Wycliffe 7 8 , 8 2 Ya'akov, Rabbenu 163,165 Yaakov ben Asher, Rabbi 160, 167, 168, 180 Yasumoto, Biten 239, 240, 243 Yiddish and Halakhic speech acts 172 and Hebrew script 227 and Reform Movement 174 and revitalization of Hebrew 142-144, 146, 147, 151, 152 influence on English 95-96, 97 Yitzhak ben Sheshet Barfat, Rabbi 172-173, 180 Yoder, C. 2 8 , 3 9 Yohanan, Rabbi 163, 179 Yom-Tov ben Abraham Ishbili, Rabbi 165-166

163,

Yoruba holy writing 221 Young, L. 122,135 Ytsma, J. 116,136 Yucatan 28 Yudelevic, David 144 Yukio, Mishima 239 Yum, J. O. 117, 118, 119, 123, 136 Zhitlowsky, Chaim 143 ZhouYouguang 241,243 Zikhron Yaaqov 144, 146-147 Ziolkowsky, Jan 75, 76 Zionism 142-144 Zionist-Hebraicist view 145 Zipf, George K. 229-232, 243 Zohar 166, 174 Zuni 28 Zuta, Chaim 145