Language and Poverty
240
Language and Poverty
240Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847691187 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Channel View Publications |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2008 |
| Series: | Multilingual Matters , #141 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Cornell University, has taught and done research in formal semantics/pragmatics and in language and gender. She is Past President of the Linguistic Society of America.
Amanda Miller, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University, works on the phonetics and phonology of endangered Southern African Khoesan languages. She undertakes linguistic field work in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.
John Whitman, Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Cornell University, works on syntactic variation and language change. His research includes work with endangered minority languages of Japan (Ryûkyûan), Korea (Kyeongsang-do dialect), and the People's Republic of China (Tibetan, Bai).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
WAYNE HARBERT, SALLY MCCONNELL-GINET, AMANDA MILLER and JOHN WHITMAN
This volume explores aspects of the relationships between language and poverty, singling out two central questions from the complex interconnections in that domain and examining them from the perspectives of linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, and language policy and planning.
On the one hand, it addresses the question of how poverty affects language survival. In contexts of competition between languages, shift to the dominant language and abandonment of the minority language are most often determined by factors that are broadly economic. These may include perceived economic advantages for oneself or one's children in switching to the dominant language or changes in local economies which result in the destabilization or dissolution of minority language communities. Language maintenance efforts, too, depend on financial resources for such things as teacher training and employment, materials development and technological support. Government and other funding agencies, even when favorably disposed toward minority languages, are often confronted with difficult questions of priority. How are efforts to maintain indigenous languages to be valued relative to other societal needs such as public education, health, sustainable utilization of resources and economy building? Are these either/or choices or is it possible to promote minority languages indirectly by steering resources toward the economic needs of the communities in which those languages are used? To what extent do indigenous languages count as a part of the wealth of the communities in which they are spoken? Is it possible to assign a value to cultural assets such as indigenous languages and to the cultural impoverishment attendant on their loss? How do – or can – such languages factor into the material economies of the language community?
On the other hand, it examines the role of language in determining the economic status of speakers. Speaking certain languages, or not speaking certain others, often leads to poverty by affecting individuals' access to jobs and education, as well as their ability to participate on an equal footing in the functions of the society. Issues involved here include discrimination in employment based on language, accommodation or nonaccommodation of minority languages in education and public services (such as, e.g. ballots, licensing examinations and the dissemination of information), the question of official languages, and the subsidizing of efforts by minority language speakers to acquire the dominant language.
Questions involving the relationships between language and economics are of practical concern to people in a wide range of disciplines and professions, including politicians, educators, social workers, language planners and others in all situations in which more than a single language is used. The issues encompassed by both of our themes have grown in significance in an era of increasing globalization and accelerating change in economies, technologies, and social, cultural and political traditions. These developments in turn impose a growing obligation on the academic disciplines at whose intersections these questions lie and which should be prepared to offer advice, guidance and advocacy to those responsible for planning and policy. These questions are also increasingly of direct concern to linguists and other field researchers who work with minority languages and minority language communities. Fieldworkers in communities whose languages are highly endangered are often the only individuals, aside from community members themselves, who are aware of the existence, the richness and the imperilment of those languages. Their experience and training, as well as their presence in the community, position them to serve not only as advisors and advocates for the community and its language to the outside world, but as resources within the community who can help shape its response to language endangerment. Beyond this, however, by the nature of their professional activity, fieldworkers become a part of the economies of the languages they study. Increased awareness of the significance of this role has led to ongoing reassessment of the implications, obligations and practical questions it raises.
This volume attempts to explore some aspects of the relationships between language and poverty, in both their scholarly and practical aspects, from a cross-disciplinary perspective appropriate to their scope. It is organized into four sections. The first contains chapters by Herman Batibo (Chapter 2) and Matthias Brenzinger (Chapter 3), addressing the role of poverty as a factor in language maintenance and language death. These chapters make specific reference to the situation in Africa, where linguistic density is particularly high (with approximately one third of the world's languages) and where poverty, with its attendant threats to continued linguistic diversity, is particularly acute (though, as Brenzinger notes, poverty and linguistic diversity do not necessarily co-occur in individual countries). The second section addresses the ways in which access by individuals to resources in multilingual contexts is affected by the languages they do or do not speak. Such effects manifest themselves in a variety of different ways. In nations with a colonial history, for example, the language of former colonizers often continues to exist in a complex relationship with indigenous languages, and the opportunities for advancement in such contexts often depend on the mastery of languages that are native to a very small percentage of the population. Two of the chapters in this section address the problem of linguistic restrictions on opportunity in such situations. Neville Alexander (Chapter 4) discusses the effects of former colonial languages on access to education in Africa, with specific reference to English in South Africa. Ajit Mohanty (Chapter 7) discusses the problem of language policy in education in India and its role in the perpetuation of poverty and inequality. However, the role that language plays in determining prosperity is not limited to postcolonial contexts, nor to developing nations, but is in evidence even in affluent Western democracies – a context on which the remaining chapters in this section focus. John Baugh (Chapter 5) offers an overview of language-based discrimination in the USA, while Ofelia Garci'a and Leah Mason (Chapter 6) look specifically at Spanish in the USA, contrasting a traditional ideology that constructs US Spanish as a language of poverty (thus hindering its speakers) with an alternative ideology that considers the linguistic skill of Spanish_English bilinguals in the USA to be an increasingly valuable potential resource in the global marketplace.
These first two sections are primarily linguistic in their orientation, offering the perspectives on the volume's central themes of those for whom language is the main object of interest – field linguists, sociolinguists and language planners. By contrast, the third section situates this discussion in a wider context, bringing to bear the perspectives of other disciplines. Suzanne Romaine (Chapter 8) discusses global linkages between linguistic diversity, wealth and ecological diversity, and envisions an approach to saving threatened languages, meliorating poverty and maintaining biodiversity which views all of these as a common problem, amenable to a unitary solution. François Vaillancourt (Chapter 9) examines the nature of language-poverty relationships from the perspective of economics, pointing out the challenges of taking language into account in economic models. Peter Whiteley (Chapter 10) addresses the subject of language and poverty as an anthropologist, and develops the concept that indigenous languages are themselves a form of wealth, and that their loss and the loss of the aspects of culture to which they are bound are also forms of impoverishment.
The final section advances yet another perspective. Shifting the focus from languages, their speakers and settings, to the roles and responsibilities of those who make a profession of studying them, it raises the question of the standing of linguists and other field researchers in the local economies of minority or endangered language communities, with particular emphasis on their role as producers of resources for community-based language revival and maintenance activities. Lenore Grenoble, Keren Rice and Norvin Richards (Chapter 11) develop the theme that researchers are unavoidably a part of the local economies of the languages and speakers with which they work, and explore the concept that in carrying out their research, field linguists incur an obligation to the languages and the speakers which requires that they return value to the language community. They then touch on practical ways of discharging this debt, by providing documentation, training and materials development in support of language maintenance and revitalization. The concept of returning value to endangered language communities is developed further by Helen Aristar Dry (Chapter 12), who offers specific examples of how technological resources now available to researchers can be deployed in the service of community language maintenance and revival initiatives (or where priorities do not allow for such initiatives, can at least be used to preserve linguistic wealth for the future).
A word should be said at the outset about how poverty, a major thematic anchor point of the volume, is understood. As will be evident to the reader, the notion of poverty is extremely complex, not only subject to a variety of different measurements, but in fact construed differently in different disciplines. As a first, very narrow approximation, we can take poverty to be the (relative) inability to provide for the basic needs of life. Even so defined, poverty can be measured in a variety of ways. Vaillancourt, for example, enumerates monetary and nonmonetary measures of poverty, each with its own means of assessment. Nonmonetary measures include education poverty, health poverty and nutrition poverty. His own chapter focuses on monetary measures, as those are the ones with which economists have the greatest expertise. As Brenzinger points out, famine and the AIDS epidemic make the non-monetary measures of nutritional poverty and health poverty especially salient components of the problem in Africa.
Grenoble, Rice and Richards observe further that the standards by which these measures are assessed vary from one economic context to another; the standards for poverty are not the same in postindustrial countries as in developing countries. In the extreme case, the resources of a community are not sufficient to provide the basic necessities for the maintenance of life. This condition is labeled extreme poverty by Grenoble, Rice and Richards (following the UN definition) and absolute poverty by Brenzinger. According to Grenoble, Rice and Richards, the World Bank estimates that 1.1 billion people live in extreme poverty.
Brenzinger contrasts absolute poverty with relative poverty, in which one group experiences 'exclusion from symbolic and material markets and denial of access to tangible or intangible resources' enjoyed by neighboring groups. In its extension to symbolic as well as material markets, and in its characterization of poverty as a constraint on the ability to participate in such markets, rather than as simply a matter of quantities of goods or property possessed, this definition departs significantly from our starting point.
Mohanty takes such exclusion from participation as the core notion of poverty, a reconceptualization which, he claims, is essential to understanding its nature and causes. Citing Amartya Sen, he defines poverty as capability deprivation – the denial of opportunities for choice. Related to this, as pointed out by our colleague Magnus Fiskesjö, is the conception of poverty as a manifestation of inequality in power relationships. Numerous instances of such inequalities are treated in the chapters that follow, including, for example, the lack of control by local communities over the language of education, as discussed by Mohanty and others, and the denial to local communities of a voice in decisions about the utilization of the resources on which their livelihood depends, as discussed by Romaine. Thus, poverty is not merely an economic, but also a political concept. Finally, some of the authors in this volume, including Whiteley, as noted, as well as Grenoble, Rice and Richards, put forward the concept that indigenous languages and the cultures whose transmission depends on them are themselves a form of wealth, and that their loss is therefore a form of impoverishment, sometimes leading to material loss when it results in a loss of traditional knowledge of nutritional or medicinal resources, and almost always adversely affecting what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'symbolic capital'. Attendant on such loss is also a loss of the ability to make choices about one's language – hence an instance of capability deprivation, in Mohanty's sense.
We make no attempt here to harmonize these very different views of poverty, but we direct the reader's attention to Romaine's assertion that more is at stake here than mere terminological quibbles or differences in disciplinary perspective. Stating that 'whoever controls the language of poverty controls the agenda on poverty, how it is conceptualized, and how it is to be remedied', she goes on to argue that shortcomings in the efforts of international organizations to address poverty as a global problem have resulted in part from preconceptions built into the discourses in which the problem has been framed.
The points of potential contact between language and poverty are, as Grin (1996b, 1996c) observes, manifold, complex and still largely unexplored. It is thus impossible to address them exhaustively in a single volume. Moreover, these interactions play out in so many different ways in different contexts around the world as to preclude the possibility of comprehensive geographical coverage. The geographic scope of the present volume is, for the most part, limited to the language areas in which the individual contributors have worked, though we are confident that the lessons drawn from the case studies reported here are of relevance in other geographical settings as well. The volume is also selective with respect to the disciplinary lenses through which this complex problem area is viewed and the particular thematic threads it has pulled from that tapestry for particular scrutiny. To a considerable extent, the emphases and the omissions of the book reflect the ways in which questions in this field of inquiry relate to general intellectual concerns of the times. Thus, for example, this volume overlaps very little with another volume published almost 40 years ago under a similar title (Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme; Williams, 1970a). That earlier work focused primarily on how poverty affected the linguistic performance of individuals in the American classroom. The central question was framed by its editor as 'the deficit-difference controversy' – the debate about whether differences in linguistic behavior between children of poor and middle-class families were most appropriately regarded as reflecting 'deficits' or 'developmental lags' in the linguistic preparation of the former, or simply as reflecting linguistic differences. One advocate of the former view was Engelmann (1970), who opened his contribution to the volume with the following striking assertion about 'the poverty child':
The child of poverty has language problems. These are problems far more crippling than mere dialect problems. Too frequently, a four-year-old child of poverty does not understand the meaning of such words as long, full, animal, red, under, first, before, or, if, all and not. Too frequently, he cannot repeat a simple statement such as, "The bread is under the oven", even after he has been given four trials ... Too frequently, he cannot succeed in a task in which he is presented with a picture of two boys and two girls and is asked to "Find the right ones: He is big ... She is not standing on the floor ... She is next to a chair" and so on ... In brief, the child of poverty has not been taught as much about the meaning of language as a middle-class child of the same age. (Englemann, 1970: 102)
The contributions by the linguists Labov and Shuy to that volume, on the other hand, represent an alternative view (shared by the editor), under which
speech variations among groups of people should not be assumed to be variations in degrees of linguistic complexity, sophistication, or development, nor capricious errors. Rather such variations may reflect distinctions among quite normal and well-developed, but different linguistic or dialect systems. This reasoning reflects the theoretical view of most linguists that no natural language or dialect can really be considered more primitive, rudimentary or underdeveloped than another. In brief, as applied to the deficit position on the language of the poor, this group of linguists is arguing that what we are observing are often language differences, and if there is a discrepancy between the demands of the school, for example, and the performance of the child, we are seeing the consequences of forcing a child to perform in a linguistic system other than his primary one. . . They are arguing that the United States is a polycultural society with monocultural schools, and this is the first and perhaps most damaging inequity foisted upon the poverty child. (Williams, 1970b: 5)
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction - Wayne Harbert, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Amanda Miller and John WhitmanSection I: Poverty as a Factor in Language Maintenance and Language Death
Chapter 2. Poverty as a Factor in Language Maintenance and Language Death: Some Case Studies from Africa - Herman Batibo
Chapter 3. Language Diversity and Poverty in Africa - Matthias Brenzinger
Section II: Language as a Determinant of Access to Resources
Chapter 4. The Impact of the Hegemony of English on Access to and Quality of Education with Special Reference to South Africa - Neville Alexander
Chapter 5. Econolinguistics in the USA - John Baugh
Chapter 6. Where in the World is US Spanish? - Ofelia Garcia and Leah Mason
Chapter 7. Perpetuating Inequality: Language Disadvantage and Capability Deprivation of Tribal Mother Tongue Speakers in India - Ajit Mohanty
Section III: Language and Poverty: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective
Chapter 8. Biodiversity, Linguistic Diversity and Poverty: Some Global Patterns and Missing Links - Suzanne Romaine
Chapter 9. Language and Poverty: Measurement, Determinants and Policy Responses - François Vaillancourt
Chapter 10. Losing their Names: Native Languages, Identity and the State - Peter Whiteley
Section IV: Language, Poverty and the Role of the Linguist
Chapter 11. The Role of the Linguist in Language Maintenance and Revitalization: Documentation, Training and Materials Development - Lenore Grenoble, Keren Rice and Norvin Richards
Chapter 12. Preserving Digital Language Materials: Some Considerations - Helen Aristar-Dry
Conclusion