Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 13:33:58 -0500
From: Ronald Kephart Subject: Re: better and worse language variation Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu
To: anthro-l@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu
Cc: linganth@cc.rochester.edu
Reply-to: Ronald Kephart Precedence: bulk

In message <22474040602350@interacces.com.mx> writes:

>Language, in itself, seems to be power, and command of a powerful language does seem to impart power to the user. What power is it that often makes one society dominant to another, if not language? Did Cro-Magnons prevail over Neanderthals because, when during the final confrontations, the Neanderthals were not caught still grunting?

I would say that possession of Language may have given a selective advantage to some groups of Homo over others that lacked Language. I don't think you can say the same about languages, now, since all humans at present have Language. If people get power from a language, it is because they share that language with people who have power, which they have gotten via other means: military, political, etc. It is no longer true, as it (perhaps?) was 50 or 100 thousand years ago, that some peoples have more Language than others.

>Certainly there are languages whose greater range of vocabularies present a greater depository of ideas, and whose grammar may more greatly facilitate ideating than those languages/dialects/slangs or whatever of other cultures, much less their own subcultures.

The problem with using "vocabulary" to make broad statements about the adequacy of languages is that it is the most open part of the Language system. Languages, of whatever sort, can borrow or invent new vocabulary to meet new needs or demands of their speakers. Outside of vocabulary different languages, such as Aymara and English, ask their speakers to pay special attention to different aspects of reality in the formation of grammatical senetnces. English speakers have to pay attention to number (singular-plural) and gender (female-male) among other things. Aymara speakers too pay attention to gender, but in their case it's human-nonhuman [Editor's note- systems of noun classifiers may be called "gender" systems for short, though "nonhuman" doesn't name a gender- jmw]. Number, they can ignore. But, they have to pay attention to data-source (personal knowledge vs. other ways of knowing, such as knowledge thru language, etc.), which English speakers don't normally give a rat's ass about. The evidence suggests that even these sorts of differences do not result in pathologically different ways of "thinking" and that what these languages share is greater than the differences between them.

>All children within a given society need to learn not only the more powerful language/dialect/slang/whatever well when it is both available to them and mandatory for successful living, but also to prefer it, or forever languish.

I disagree here. There is no reason for people in whatever society to have to "prefer" the national language over their home language/dialect. Maybe I'm too much of a liberal leftist pinko bleeding heart, but I think the pressure to learn should be on the folks in control and command of the standard language. They need to learn that linguistic diversity is natural and, in fact, unavoidable (dare I say "desirable?), and that it will not go away without speech police assigned to follow and monitor every single person everywhere at all times. This learning on the part of the elite could be far less painful than forcing people to give up their home languages.

>Florentine Italian came to dominate the many Italian dialects because of an original vote of one: Dante. Was it not the same for German with Goethe, and English with Shakespeare? Certainly the Spanish-speaking nations think so with Cervantes. It does seem that those languages or dialects which prevail are those which a single person demonstrated their language's power by harnessing it (when it was there).

I would turn this around. The power harnessed by the person leads to the power of the language. There was nothing in Florentine Italian, nor in the Spanish of Ferdinand and Isabel, that made them intrinsically more powerful than other varieties of "Italian" or "Spanish". Their speakers grabbed political, military, intellectual, or whatever sort of power, and everything else flowed from that.

>What power does Black English offer? What power is there in it that can be harnessed?

A lot more than you give it credit for, I think. Whole books have been written about the influence of Black language and culture on "standard" American.

But, if you doubt the power of African-American language and culture, consider St. Lucia, in the Eastern Caribbean. Originally a French colony, it developed a variety of Creole French alsonside official French. Beginning in the late 18th century it was ceded to Britain, then passed back and forth a couple of times before it finally remained officially English in the early 1800s. It is now 1997. Children born in St. Lucia, to this day, acquire Creole French as their first language. St. Lucians, most of whom are bilingual to at least some degree, "prefer" English in certain contexts, and "prefer" Kweyol in certain other contexts, as do I'm sure bilinguals in Mayan and Spanish in Yucatan. There's nothing pathological about this. Indeed, this is the normal situation for all users of human language, although the differences are not always as great as those between Spanish and Mayan, or English and Kweyol.

Ron Kephart
University of North Florida