From Rezwan…

Our mother tongue is more than a language, it is the soul that lives inside us. It is an armory of the human mind; an archive of history. We invent our world through language and bring it to life.
 

Mrunalini speaks of her mother tongue Telugu:

“How sweet our languages are, how proud they make us. How much we miss talking in our mother tongue. Especially, when we are away from it.”

Ripon Kumar Biswas of the Bangladesh Watchdog says:

“Our mother tongue is the language of nature, which is intimately related to the individual because it is structured and upheld by local laws of nature, which structure the physiology of the individual.”

But it is even more than that. “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland –and no other;” said E. M. Cioran, the Rumanian-born French Philosopher.

That is why some times we see nationalism sparking in the world based on languages and language matters!

Thousands of local languages from around the world used as the daily means of expression are absent from education systems, the media, publishing and the public domain in general because of state policies.

We learn better in our mother tongue when it is taught in school (Mother tongue Dilemma –UNESCO News letter). But this is not the case of all minority languages. 476 million of world’s illiterate people speak minority languages and live in countries where children are mostly not taught in their mother language.

From Southern Azerbaijan under Iranian rule, BayBak, Voice of a Nation says:

“It’s been more than 80 years since the Iranian authority banned other languages, such as Turkish (the majority in Iran), Arabic, Baluchs, Turkmens and Kurdish dialects. Every year, on the 21st of February, all nationalities celebrate International Mother Language Day; a date chosen by UNESCO. On the day of the celebration, Iranian police will arrest many.”

The Unesco Courier:

Several thousand years old, the Ainu language spoken in northern Japan was dying out due to political pressure from the central government. At the end of the 20th century, this trend was reversed. While Ainu’s future is still not guaranteed because it isn’t taught in schools, the resurgence of interest is undeniable.

Sid writes in Picked Politics:

“International Mother Language Day deserves celebration in Zambia. The country has worked hard to establish and maintain political unity over the years. But as other societies are learning too late, it would be a tragedy if this hard-fought unity should be maintained at the expense of the variety of languages and dialects that have long called these lands home.”

About 27 percent of the world’s languages (about 6000) are threatened with extinction. The Foundation for Endangered Languages says 83 percent of the world’s languages are restricted to single countries, making them more vulnerable to the policies of a single government.

Abhinaba Basu at Geek Gyan says:

“A lot of people speaking English natively forget the importance of mother language due to its predominance. They take their language for granted. However, each year a bunch of languages become extinct, the latest being Eyak, which reached extinction with the death of Marie Smith Jones – the last native Eyak speaking person.

I believe that if we don’t actively try to preserve our mother language, extinction will always be a possibility. One of the most important things to do to preserve a language is to ensure that they are better covered by technology.”

Citizen media is a great tool to promote languages. According to Technorati, there are more than 100 million blogs out there. A previous year’s report show about 37% blogs are in Japanese, followed by 36% in English, then Chinese (8%), Spanish(3%), Italian (3%), Portuguese (2%), and French(2%) among others.

There are ICT based advocacy sites like Bisharat which promote research, advocacy, and networking relating to use of African languages in software and web content.

Global Voices Online also supports and promotes the diversity of languages. Its Lingua project translates the contents of its main English page in a dozen languages. This is one example many international online media may want to follow to secure meaningful transfer of information to global readers.

First posted in Global Voices Online

From Nora Fakim…

I visited Vietnam last year and was amazed how some parts of the country still had a French ‘touche’ to it even though the French language was dying out amongst the Vietnamese people.

My biggest surprise was when I came across the Notre Dame Cathedral in Hoi Chi Min City. It looked completely different to the original one in Paris but it still had the French architectural design to it. Another French influence in this busy city was the Hotel de Ville which I yet again visited in Paris.

It seemed that the French definitely made their mark when entering the country in the 19th century. According to English Teacher Lucy Spars who teaches at a private English school in Hoi Chi Min, ‘the French had a great influence in Vietnam in different aspects including; culture, religion, ethics, economy, politics and government and nationalistic aspirations of the Vietnamese.’

Edward Terry writer for the genocides website believes that the greatest influence in Vietnam was that of religion which was initiated by the French.

For example up until the year 1841, the Société des Missions Étrangeres reported that 450000 Vietnamese had had their religion converted to Christianity. This figure according to some sources is not one-hundred percent reliable and in the process, they might have killed twice as many.

Later in the French occupation the Nguyen government set out to eradicate French missionaries from the country. During the 25 years following the commencement of this government’s rule, 95 missionaries were executed. Notwithstanding all this, Vietnamese society had been permanently changed. This influence is so great that today, Catholicism is the second most practiced religion.

Vietnamese script does not, however, use only 26 letters without accents (as in English), but a whole variety of accents. Almost no Vietnamese words were actually influenced by French. To the untrained ear, Vietnamese would sound exactly like Chinese. Language influence is also exemplified in the fact that many educated Vietnamese can speak French.

In the textbook Contested Spaces by Thomas Cantwell, French colonialism had a negative influence on Vietnamese society but others believe that Vietnam and other former French colonial countries has its modern aspects due to the French.

It seems that colonialism has two sides to it. People have different views on it in the sense whether or not it was beneficial to the colonized people but according to some intellectuals such as the late Aime Cesaire who was the author of Colonial Discourse in The French Caribbean, he wrote,  ‘ The colonized people learnt a new language but their rights as their own people was ruled by somebody else.’

The French left Vietnam in 1954 and the ideas of the people slowly were changing such as the notion of the French language and the re-establishment of the Vietnamese identity.

However one aspect which I have noticed since the decolonisation period and my visit to Vietnam is that the country is slowly rebuilding itself and positive things have come out of this exotic place since independence.

For instance when I was over there the breakfasts had a fusion of French and Vietnamese ingredients which gave the food a unique taste and texture. Also the sites mentioned earlier which had this French influence but the people are still Vietnamese and have their Vietnamese culture which was not expressed during colonialism.

Therefore a mix of two cultures can work together but it goes wrong when one side chooses to have a greater domination over the other like in some businesses where the relationships between partners is determined between the genuine ones and the crooks.

‘At the end of the day nobody wants to be colonised but negative experiences can help rebuild somebody in many ways,’ says Morad Yelles, lecturer in African idenity.

From Lara Matossian Roberts… 

I was having a snack and a drink in a restaurant in Trakai, a town where my husband and I had been staying for a couple of days, when a whole bunch of English speaking tourists arrived with their guide.  Trakai, just outside Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a popular day trip destination for its beautiful lakes and its romantic Island Castle.  It has another attraction though: the Karaites and their much sought after cuisine.

The Karaites are a Judaic sect of Turkic ethnicity, originally from Baghdad, brought over from the Crimea to Trakai in around 1400 as bodyguards.  There are approximately 280 left in Lithuania, an estimated 60 – 80 of which live in Trakai.  They use the Arabic script as opposed to modern Turkey’s Roman one and there were samples of Karaim – their language – on the wall.

The first time my husband and I ate there, I was very excited when I set my eyes on their menu (which had, among other languages, the dishes listed in English).  They had items on their menu that I had grown up eating!  And – they used the exact same name for them!  I was fascinated.  I felt some kind of connection: here was a Judaic sect that followed the Law of Moses, in a small town in Lithuania that made dishes my mother’s always made and called them the same thing!  I went over the menu thoroughly, identifying all the items I was familiar with and when the waiter came to take our order, I scrutinized him; I wanted to trace any tell-tale ‘Turkishness’ in the way he spoke, but I, obviously, couldn’t – what with what little English he spoke and with my not being able to differentiate between the Lithuanian accent, the ethnic Russian Lithuanians and their accent and now the Karaites’.  I also listened very closely as he walked away and called out to his colleague to start preparing our grilled dishes.  Seeing how I had widened my eyes and pricked my ears, my husband asked, “So, did you understand anything?”  And I shook my head, no.  I wasn’t sure if it was Lithuanian or Karaim or a combination of both.

I realized then, that I had another piece to add to my patchwork identity of which I hadn’t necessarily been consciously aware.  My mother’s grandparents had left Armenian provinces in Turkey in 1915 along with many others fleeing the genocide.  My mother’s grandparents had always lived there, so they spoke Turkish as fluently as they spoke Armenian, albeit with that rural region’s dialect.  Many of the dishes they cooked were (modified) Turkish ones that retained their Turkish names.

When the Turkish Armenians settled in Middle Eastern countries, like Lebanon, they still spoke Turkish as much as they did Armenian; they were naturally bilingual.  And although there was opposition to that by nationalistic Armenians who wanted to boycott the language because of the genocide, Turkish language and culture was very much part and parcel of that generation.  So that when they came to identify themselves, they’d connect it to the city, town or village they had come from in Turkey. 

My mother is a third generation Lebanese Armenian.  She is as fluent in Arabic and Turkish as she is in Armenian.  I however, do not speak Turkish myself, but can recognize the language itself when being spoken, understand a word here or there and may be able to get the gist of a conversation – maybe.  However, some of the vocabulary we use at home when we speak in Armenian is actually Turkish.  I find it crazy, but there are actually things I’ve always only used the Turkish words for and don’t really know their Armenian equivalent!  That’s not just it either, I know a lot of expressions and idioms that mix Western Armenian and Turkish and some purely in Turkish.

Purists may argue that we’re tainting the language.  Well, boy do I have news for them!  At home, when my mother and I speak, we may flit from one of the following languages to the other in the scope of a few minutes – seamlessly: Armenian, English, French, Farsi, Turkish and Arabic (with its Lebanese, Egyptian and Gulf dialects) using the vocabulary, idioms and expressions that we see fit for whatever it is that we are saying at that moment, for no one language has all the suitable expressions for everything.  So, although I don’t really speak Farsi and Turkish if I hear an expression I am familiar with, I’d probably be able to guess the context.

I’ve met many people who’ve been fascinated when they’ve find out that I speak four languages, saying that they only speak one language; ‘English, and that’s about it’ they’d say.  And I’d have been able to add Farsi and Turkish to my repertoire if I weren’t lazy.  For, I’ve met people who make my four languages look measly in comparison to the five or six they speak out of sheer dedication to learn them.

And, finally, back to the bunch of tourists.  They had a reservation of two tables that were put next to one another, but the third one they needed was occupied by me.  There were plenty of other outdoor tables with a good view of the lake and the castle, so I moved as they were considering which third table they were going to sit on and how they were going to divide the group.  After they added that third table to the other two, they proceeded to look at the menu.  Their guide was giving them a run through of the popular snacks and the description of some of the traditional Karaite dishes and liaising with the waitress on their availability – and I was JUST itching to butt in and do it myself.  I felt that I was in a better position to give a more comprehensive and accurate description of the items on the menu than their guide, who looked to me to be Lithuanian, and who just seemed like he was not doing justice to it.  I didn’t, though; I just sat there with half a smile on my face, finished my drink and realized that there’s another piece of identity I have that I hadn’t stopped to think about.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” a bold Filipina friend, told me once, out loud in front of others at a party.  I had just arrived in Dubai, fresh off the plane from Chicago, and she was introducing me to a community of my kababayan (fellow Filipinos). 

She was referring to the fact that I couldn’t speak Tagalog – my native tongue.  How I lost it is a journey in itself. 

∞

Soon after the Americans wrested control of the Philippines from the Spaniards, teachers came in hordes to teach English in schools at the start of 1900s.  English gradually supplanted Spanish.  Even as a government commission identified Tagalog as a national language, English never lost its standing – effectively creating a country with “disglossia” (two official major languages). 

With their books, blackboard and chalk, teachers have a power far greater than soldiers with tanks, machine guns and ammunition to re-shape an entire culture.  So the Americans wove their language into the cloth of Philippine life.  Stitched it, even, on the very tongue of the Filipino.  I remember asking another Filipina friend, for example, whether she had lived in the US, because her accent didn’t quite have that Tagalog sound to it.  In fact, I could pick up some familiar American tone.  She said, “No, I just watched ‘Sesame Street.’”

∞

My upwardly mobile parents not only moved the family into a well-to-do Manila suburb, but also enrolled me at the nearby Don Bosco school – where English was actually the primary language.  This was a Filipino school, mind you.  There was a separate class for Tagalog, although I have virtually no memory of it.  I never really learned how to read or write in Tagalog, so I can only conclude that that class ranked quite low on the school’s ladder of priorities. 

So, you see, by the time we left the Philippines in 1968, I was boy with an under-developed tongue for my native language.  A weak tongue is easy to lose.  The fact that I can’t speak it, well, what do I have to ashamed about?  I was simply being swept by my parents in a certain direction, and in turn they were being swept by the American zeitgeist of the 1900s. 

∞

I wrote about the wonderfully mistaken slurs of Jap and Chink directed at me, in my previous article on Relativity Online.  But children at school didn’t stop at this, as they also teased me for my accent. 

The th and the f sounds aren’t easy for a number of Filipinos.  So third and north become tird and nort, and forty and fifty become porty and pifty.  I remember one classmate who laughed at me, when he heard tief come out of my mouth, instead of thief.  Shameful, to say the least, as this sort of teasing happened more than once.   

Sadly, one teacher played into this as well.  As much as I learned English as a little boy, my command wasn’t very good.  So, in 7^th grade, when our English assignment was to read books and write reports, well, my report had run-on sentences; paragraphs with little structure or organization; and patches of spelling errors.  In retrospect, I knew my report was terrible, but did the teacher have to speak about my report to the class as an example of bad writing?  Hell, at least, he could’ve left my name out!  

∞

While a diversity of nationality make up the US as country, Americans in general are known for their can-do spirit.  A writer once described Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, as having the “confidence that seems to come so naturally to Americans.”  To be sure, over many years in the US, I came to adopt that can-do mindset and to walk with an air of confidence about me.     

Enter little Ronnie boy, subjected to quite a bit of teasing, yes, but with a good amount of smarts and nerdish determination, wholly breathing in that American oxygen and poised to strengthen my command of English in a forthright manner. 

My mother loved to read Readers Digest, and had a collection of this magazine in the basement.  There was a regular section called “Word Power” in each issue.  The reader was quizzed on the meaning of 20 words, and then on the next page each word was defined and given a bit of its derivation.  I took every single issue I could find, cut out the “Word Power” section, and organized them into a folder.  I also made lists and lists of such words. 

What’s more, I read the dictionary.  (Yes, I told you I was a nerd, didn’t I.)  And I added more words and definitions to my lists.  I even made myself get into the habit of having a notebook handy, whenever I read a book.  So when I ran into a word I didn’t know, I’d jot it down and later on re-visit my trusted friend, the dictionary, to learn its definition.      

Oh, I didn’t stop there!  I managed to get audiotapes for learning to speak English.  At night, alone in my bedroom, I followed each lesson.  I’d hear the man or woman speak a word or phrase, and then I’d pause the recorder to repeat after him or her.  Night after night, I learned my lessons with a can-do discipline that wasn’t typical of many children.

Still, later on, I fell in love with British literature – that of William Shakespeare, WH Auden, Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen.  There was a series of British programs on “Masterpiece Theatre,” based on high-level literature, which I’d watch without fail.  I’d record some of these programs, then practice speaking like the British actors – for example, Sir Derek Jacobi as Shakespeare’s “Richard II” and “Hamlet.”  I’d memorize passages of Shakespeare, and recite them in the car, in the library, and around the university campus.  Heaven only knows how the British voice re-shaped my English. 

In any event, through my teens, I successfully fortified my command of English and gradually rid myself of my accent. 

∞

We know that many immigrants to a country will collect themselves into neighborhoods or villages, so as to retain the old world in the new world.  They have a great deal of love and respect for their home country, and this remains undiminished even as they pursue opportunities in their new country.  Their children are reared in such a context. 

My parents were not like these immigrants.  They gradually and systematically separated my sisters, brother and me from virtually all things Filipino – the country (absolutely no annual leave back home), the people (away from relatives), the history and culture (no books, art or programs on these).  In effect, what they aimed for, even before we left the Philippines, was an utter, categorical immersion into American life.  It was assimilation into the new country that, for each of us children, surpassed 100%. 

Unfortunately, as a result, we as a family also came to disfavor Filipinos.  This is sometimes called “reverse discrimination” – a certain bias against others of the same nationality or race as ours.  There is the notion that people who’ve been historically disfavored – even oppressed – may identify with the attitudes of the oppressor or in the least hold others of their kind in disregard.  The psychology is this – such people may be attempting to master, even control an experience of powerlessness and disenfranchisement that lies within them.     

I can tell my bold Filipina friend that this reverse discrimination isn’t something I’m proud of – is something I’m ashamed of, in fact.  Thankfully, such an attitude remained at low levels, and I rid myself of this as I began to rediscover my Filipino identity in my 20s and to appreciate my Filipino heritage.  

In the end, I am forever grateful to the years I spent growing up and working in the US.  The negative things that happened to me were, indeed, a positive impetus to learn, to progress, and to become a contributing member of the wider global society.  Yes, I admit that the command of English I gained effectively came as a pyrrhic victory – I lost my native tongue.  Still, I can count on that same can-do spirit as I work to re-learn Tagalog. 

Ron Villejo, Ph.D. . .