#language ideologies

Lingthusiasm Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.)

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez's website

Basque at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign blog (posts in Basque and English)

'Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward' by Evelina Leivada, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez3, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, and Sílvia Perpiñán

Basque music recommendations from Itxaso:

Berri Txarrak 'Libre' on YouTube. This band, mentioned by Itxaso in the episode, was huge in the 90s and 2000s. This song was a big hit, and it is very philosophical about topics also related to Basque politics. This one discusses 'Freedom'.

Su Ta Gar 'Mari' on YouTube. This band was huge during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and key to the revitalization processes - at least for the younger generation that wanted to see themselves as young 'rebels'. 

Gatibu 'Aske Maitte' on YouTube. This band is from Gernika, they became active in 2000s and are one of the leading bands in Basque Country today. Their topics continued with the general theme of freedom, but also tackle lots of issues of feminism in a softer rock way.

Zetak 'Hitzeman' on YouTube. The band has become a biiiig hit in the Basque Country in the past few years. Super romantic and fun.

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Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

I wanted to post this video we watched this semester because it was extremely impactful as I reflected on my own experiences with language in education. When I was writing my autobiography, I felt stuck, at first, because I only speak English and could recall being very catered to in the classroom. I had a lot of privilege. 

But when we watched this video, it made me remember several things. 

First, it reminded me of the “Kill the Indian, save the man” mentality that colonizers used to justify their bigotry, hatred, and abuse towards Indigenous peoples in America. Stereotypes and bigoted judgments against BIPOC and people who speak languages other than English have permeated the history of our education system, and I saw how that mentality easily transformed into bigotry against Latinx people specifically in my elementary school. 

That was the second thing this video reminded me of — how Spanish was replaced in our curriculum when I was in elementary school for an additional science class instead. I talked about this in my autobiography, and how my best friend who was an emergent bilingual student felt a real lack of representation when that class was removed. 

Early in the semester, we read two articles that jumpstarted a huge ideological change in my teaching philosophy. “Not mere abstractions” by Malathi Michelle Iyengar and “Positioning teachers, positioning learners” by Michaela Colombo et al. (full citations at bottom of post) both touched on the ways that language ideologies have been used throughout U.S. history to uphold systemic racism against BIPOC. 

Colombo et al. made a point that really stuck with me about how language = power, and multicultural/multilingual students, spanning across time, have recognized that speaking English is imbued with so much power that some view it as synonymous with “being American,” (Colombo et al. 2018).

Now, I completely agree with the original context that we read these articles in: advocating for equitable, bilingual education programs in schools. However, when I think about how I’ll implement the values of interrogating power in conjunction with language ideologies within my English Language Arts classroom, I feel a strong pull towards a somewhat controversial method of teaching and grading writing assignments.

I plan to focus much of my writing lessons (or at least the preliminary ones) with the idea that one’s audience is just as important as one’s message, for the purpose of allowing my students to write essays in their authentic voice. What I mean by this is that I will not “take off points” for students who translanguage, use slang, or use “improper” grammar in their essays — as long as I’m in the intended audience. I feel there is no reason to assert the ideology of “academic English” (as we learned about in Week 10, the April Baker-Bell article “Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms”) on my students as I see it as antithetical to the creative process that should be supported in language arts! 

I say this is controversial because oftentimes people take issue with not “correcting” or editing a student’s paper for “proper grammar.” That is where I believe that my teachings on audience would come into play. If a student is writing a college admissions essay, then I will teach them how to best prepare for that audience — which is likely going to require them to use “proper grammar” for their best shot at admission. But if I am asking a student to write an expository essay to be read by me, their teacher, I want them to know that my primary goal (apart from meeting state standards, of course) is hearing their voice! I don’t want to receive a paper that reads as if it were written by a robot, or a paper that is “messy” by academic English standards because a student is bilingual. I want to hear my students. I want to see what they have to say, and I don’t want them to feel restricted by arbitrary rules about how one should speak, write, talk, or all three. 

This is just one of the ways that I hope to practice anti-bias/anti-black pedagogy, and interrogate power as an educator. 

---

Baker-Bell, A., (2020). Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 59(1), 8-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1665415

Colombo, M., Leider, C. M., & Tigert, J. M., (2018). Positioning teachers, positioning learners: Why we should stop using the term English learners. TESOL, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.432

November 19, 2014 by Geoffrey Pullum

Disputing Linguistic Myths

I remarked in a recent post that the reason I spend time disputing silly things people say about English grammar is that I take seriously my job description as a professor. But I’ve actually been working to rebut silly claims about language (not just English) since I was an undergraduate.

In the 1956 British edition of The Guinness Book of Records, which I browsed for hours when I was a boy, the section on language (Page 118) has an entry headed MOST PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE. The rosette for “probably the most grammatically primitive” language on earth was pinned on an Australian aboriginal language, “Arunta” (more modern spellings include Aranda and Arrernte). This unfortunate tongue “has no pronouns,” the book reported, and “numbers are only vague expressions of place.” It added: “Words are indeterminate in meaning and form.”

I never found out where this nonsense came from. I can imagine a language with complex verb inflection getting along without pronouns, but as it happens, the Aranda pronoun system is more complex than the English one (see the image of the table from Wikipedia reproduced above). There are at least 36 inflected pronoun forms. For each member of the usual person trio (first, second, third) there are singular, dual, and plural forms; and for each of those nine categories there are nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive case forms. Ilerneke (first-person dual dative) means “(to) the two of us”; itnekenhe (third-person plural genitive) means “of all (three or more) of us”; and so on.

The complexity does not stop there: Reflexivity (to express meanings like “myself” or “yourselves”) involves a separate suffix -lhe, and additionally pronouns can bear markings for subsections in the kinship system, rather as English expresses gender in third-person singular pronouns (masculine he, him, his, himself ; feminine she, her, hers, herself ; neuter it, its, itself  ), but sensitive to membership not in sexes but in sociologically and genealogically relevant subclan groupings known as moieties.

To be fair, one should acknowledge that little scientific information on Australian languages had been widely disseminated by the 1950s, so fact-checking on most such languages would have been hard. But as it happens, there was probably more on Aranda (which has about 2,800 speakers) than on any other: The anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow, intimate enough with the Aranda that they adopted him into the tribe, published important work on Aranda language and culture in the 1940s. (The research was actually done in the 1930s, but he had to wait till all his informants were dead before publishing because they had vouchsafed to him many secret details about ritual language and ceremonies.) There was enough for me as an undergraduate in the 1970s to write a letter to convince the lead editor of the Guinness Book, Norris McWhirter, that Aranda was a proper language with considerable grammatical complexity.

Many field linguists who have mentioned to laypersons that they study the structure of Australian languages face blank incredulity from nonacademic white Australians: “Aborigines? What’s the point of studying their jabbering and grunting? That isn’t proper language, is it?” The pioneers who discovered Australia between 70 and 40 millennia ago brought with them several families of intricate and surprising linguistic systems. The descendants of the colonists who stole the aborigines’ land and crushed their traditional culture are not even aware of the existences of these languages (or of the pace of their extinction).

I began corresponding regularly with McWhirter during the 1970s, proposiong further removals of false claims (sometimes little better than racist traveler’s tales) and suggestions for new well-founded entries. He paid me a few consulting fees for some of the material about language that I supplied. (In later decades the book changed character, and recent editions hardly touch on such topics as languages.)

McWhirter once came back from a visit to South Africa during the apartheid era with a story that the Bushmen of the Kalahari have no real language at all, just a repertoire of a few hundred clicks and grunts. The truth is that the so-called Bushmen speak languages with huge inventories of consonants (among them certain tongue-click sounds), and with intricate grammatical constraints just like any other language. I was persuaded McWhirter not to include the insulting twaddle he had picked up. The indigenous peoples of Africa, Australasia, and the Americas have surely suffered enough at the hands of European colonists without having new calumnies heaped upon them.