{"id":96263,"date":"2016-03-30T12:55:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T16:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96263"},"modified":"2016-03-30T14:10:55","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T18:10:55","slug":"language-leakage-an-interview-with-sarah-thomason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/30\/language-leakage-an-interview-with-sarah-thomason\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason"},"content":{"rendered":"

The linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A uniform for the Spokane Indians in Salish.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first time Sarah \u201cSally\u201d Thomason and I spoke, she\u2019d just completed her annual two-day, eighteen-hundred-mile drive from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she teaches, to rural northwestern Montana, where she spends her summers studying Montana Salish. For thirty-four years, Thomason has been assembling a dictionary of this Native American language, which is spoken fluently by fewer than forty people. Thomason, a linguist, is fascinated by what happens when one language meets another, and how those languages change, or don\u2019t. I had contacted her because I was interested in how certain words\u2014say, <\/em>e-mail, or <\/em>google, or <\/em>tweet\u2014had been exported worldwide by American-born technology. I\u2019d already called several linguists, and they all said I had to speak to Sally. No one, they said, had more insight into how linguistic traits travel, how pidgins and creoles are born, and how languages interact and change over time.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The French government tried very hard to resist American loanwords like <\/em>e-mail, promoting in its place\u00a0<\/em>messagerie \u00e9lectronique\u00a0or\u00a0<\/em>courriel. They\u2019d formed a whole agency for this purpose. Laws were passed and enforced. And yet <\/em>e-mail prevailed\u2014it was simply more efficient. But Sally was especially excited about languages that resist such borrowing, even in the face of extraordinary cultural influence and dominance. Montana Salish was one such language. Our conversations followed a pattern: I arrived expecting one thing and ended up somewhere entirely distinct, thinking differently about language and human culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

Is it fair to say that you study what happens when languages meet? Is meet<\/em> too friendly a word?<\/strong> I suppose there\u2019s a whole range of things that happen, and sometimes it\u2019s friendly and sometimes it\u2019s not.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right, but having a language disappear because all the speakers got massacred is actually really rare. There are a couple of examples where all the speakers of some language got wiped out by a volcanic eruption on an island. And there are a couple of examples, at least one in this country, where almost everybody was wiped out by smallpox and then the remainder was lynched by a mob.<\/p>\n

What languages are those?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see, Susquehannock is the language that died when all the speakers got lynched by a mob. It was an Iroquoian language. First they got devastated by smallpox. And there are cases where languages were almost killed, or at least there was an effort to kill them, out of genocide. You know, as a side effect of genocide in El Salvador, when they had all those wars some years back, the government decided that Indians were dangerous and they should kill them all. And so they actually killed an awful lot of Indians, but I think maybe only one or two languages completely disappeared. The most famous story is in the Bible\u2014the people at the bridge saying shibboleth<\/em>. And that was a case where they were both speaking dialects of Hebrew, I guess it was, and if you couldn\u2019t say shibboleth<\/em> because you didn\u2019t have the sh<\/em> sound, they\u2019d kill you. But that wouldn\u2019t have killed the whole language either, because the people who were trying to cross that bridge were all warriors, all men, and there would have been women and children who weren\u2019t in the battle, I assume.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re living in an era when jargon, especially from the tech world, tends to bleed into the culture at large. Is that something you pay attention to? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, and that\u2019s obviously important for social history, too, right? Things that get to be mainstream used to be very specific to a particular subculture. One aspect of that is what happens to slang. Every generation of teenagers will invent their own words because the whole point of teenage slang is to have in-group vocabulary that outsiders, like old people, can\u2019t understand very well. And a lot of those words are ephemeral. The next generation comes along, gets their own words, the old words disappear. But some of them don\u2019t, some of them hang on\u2014and predicting which ones will hang on is a mug\u2019s game.<\/p>\n

But looking at the ones that did<\/em> hang on is interesting because it tells you that they turned out to be useful. Mob<\/em>\u2014the word mob<\/em> used to be a slang word. It\u2019s a reduced form of a Latin word, mobile<\/em>. But now it\u2019s a really useful word. It\u2019s interesting to see which words turn out to be useful. There must have been a time when a computer mouse was confined to a very small subculture.<\/p>\n

Sure. Although, even now, we have fewer mice. Now we have pads, touch things, screens, styluses. So I guess it\u2019s how long that tool remains in use.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right, and if the tool goes, the words for it might also go, or they might get a new meaning. A hundred years ago you and I would probably have been able to name quite a few parts of a horse\u2019s harness. Nowadays I know what a bridle is, but there isn\u2019t much else. If you were now inventing a term for what we call horsepower you\u2019d never settle on horsepower<\/em>, because horses are not in the public consciousness anymore.<\/p>\n

Are there languages that are better at adapting? When languages meet, does one \u201cwin\u201d? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure. But that comparison has nothing to do with the structure or the vocabulary of the language, it has to do strictly with social factors. It\u2019s not as if people come into contact and one crowd says, Boy, your language is a lot more efficient than ours! It depends on who\u2019s got the power. The world I live in, the world you live in, Western Europe, the United States, highly industrialized countries, the paradigm we\u2019re used to is colonialism\u2014and then the indigenous languages are threatened. A lot of them have disappeared and the ones that haven\u2019t are at great risk, so that seems like the norm.<\/p>\n

But imagine a society\u2014and again, these are mostly hunter-gatherer societies, but there are still a lot of those around\u2014where the people practice exogamy, meaning you have to find a marriage partner outside your own group. Often the criterion is whether they speak the same language as you. If you have a society like that, you\u2019re in contact with at least one other group and typically several relatively small groups\u2014and it\u2019s greatly to your advantage to maintain different languages, right? You don\u2019t want to change your whole culture, you value your culture, exogamy seems like the way the world ought to be, and you certainly want to get married and you have this view that you shouldn\u2019t marry your sister\u2014then you preserve the languages.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one reason languages get preserved. You find another phenomenon\u2014it\u2019s particularly common in and around Papua New Guinea, where there are about a thousand languages. That means that they\u2019re close together, they\u2019re small groups. Some of them are related to one another, so they\u2019re pretty similar, and in that part of the world it\u2019s probably not accidental that there are so many languages in such a relatively small area. It\u2019s fairly common for groups to deliberately change their languages so they\u2019re not so much like the guys next door. And the most spectacular examples are where you\u2019ve got dialects of the same language and oh, we don\u2019t want to be too much like those guys. It\u2019s an identity-preserving thing, it\u2019s a distancing phenomenon.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Road signs in Salish.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How did you get started on Montana Salish? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I was working on language contact, and the Pacific Northwest\u2014Washington, Oregon, neighboring parts of British Columbia, particularly\u2014is one of the best-known linguistic areas in the world. There are languages in that area, some of them totally unrelated as far as we know, that share all sorts of structural features. Not vocabulary, so much, but structural features that they didn\u2019t inherit from their ancestors, that have traveled from one language to another. There\u2019s also a phenomenon where you\u2019ve got three or more languages in the same area trading features through multilingualism.<\/p>\n

My family was already spending summers one mountain range to the east of the easternmost Salish language\u2014most of the Salish languages are on the coast. I thought I could find out about this linguistic area if I started studying this language, and the tribes wanted somebody to come and help them get used to the writing system, a new linguistic device for them, so I was going to be useful. I thought I\u2019d find out about this language and then I would find out about the whole family, and then I would be able to study the histories\u2014how these features got from one family, where they started, how they got from one family to the next. So in 1981, I started trying to learn about this language, and it took about ten years before I realized I need maybe another 150 years for that project, and then I\u2019d only need another century or so to understand the linguistic area.<\/p>\n

But in the meantime, I really got hooked on the language. It\u2019s a wonderful language. I like consonants, and they have thirty-eight consonants. I like big, long, complicated words, and they have huge, long, complicated words.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s, this is a funny way to put it,\u00a0it\u2019s a stubborn language, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They don\u2019t borrow from English or French. French was the other European language they were exposed to, but that stubbornness\u2014it\u2019s not unique, that\u2019s what\u2019s interesting. That is an areal feature, it\u2019s part of the linguistic area. I don\u2019t know if it spreads all the way to the coast but it certainly spreads to the Nez Perce, an unrelated language.<\/p>\n

When you say it doesn\u2019t \u201cborrow,\u201d do you have an example? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The word they use for automobile<\/em>\u00a0means \u201cthat it has wrinkled feet,\u201d which is, incidentally, an example of how the words you have reflect your culture. If you\u2019re a tracker, you\u2019re going to be noticing the tire tracks\u2014the focus of that particular word. And the word for telephone<\/em>\u00a0means\u00a0\u201cyou whisper into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you have an idea of why this language doesn\u2019t borrow? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I know the reasons are cultural because they could easily borrow from other languages. But that\u2019s as far as I can go. I did ask an elder some years ago, he was about ninety. And somebody had asked him what the\u00a0word for television set<\/em> would be and he said, Oh, I don\u2019t know, I guess it would be \u2026 I forget what he said exactly, but something like, You look into it\u2014you see things<\/em>, something like that. And I said, So why do you do that? Why don\u2019t you just use the English word for television set? He said, I don\u2019t know, we just don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Native American Flatheads (Salish) on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, ca. 1900.<\/p><\/div>\n

Are there any language interminglings that are particularly fascinating to you today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s one in Canada\u2014although actually I think it\u2019s now spoken, to the extent it\u2019s still spoken, on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. It was clearly created by bilinguals because there\u2019s no distortion in either half of the language. All the verbs and verb phrases and the basic sentence syntax are from Cree, which is an Algonquian language. All the nouns and noun phrases, including adjectives and articles, are French. There\u2019s a little bit of leakage from the Cree into the French and none in the other direction. The context where this arose was, as you might guess, mixed marriages. You had French trappers who\u00a0were Scots, too, but French was the dominant language among the Europeans, trappers, and traders, and they married Algonquian women or had children with them, and the children were legally as well as socially separate. They formed their own community and they became buffalo hunters instead of, say, traders. They had a rebellion in the nineteenth century and their leader was hanged and then the people kind of dispersed, but the language \u2026<\/p>\n

What was their name?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s called Michif. It\u2019s spelled different ways, but mostly M<\/em>–i<\/em>–c<\/em>–h<\/em>–i<\/em>–f<\/em>. It\u2019s a phonetic distortion of M\u00e9tis\u2014it literally just means \u201cmixed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other spectacular example of this phenomenon is, or was, spoken in the Aleutian Islands. The Aleutians themselves belong to the United States but the westernmost islands in that necklace, just off the coast of Russia, belong to Russia, and they\u2019re called the Commander Islands. One of them is Medny Island, which means \u201ccopper\u201d\u00a0in Russian. It was uninhabited until the early nineteenth century. The Russians were gearing up for their fur-seal-trade operation and they moved a bunch of Aleuts to the island and set them hunting fur seals. They produced children with Aleut women, the Russian traders did. So again, you had a mixed-blood population. And in this case, too, you had bilingualism\u2014they knew Russian, they knew Aleut, but their social and economic positions were definitely separate. They were the middlemen between the Aleuts, who went out and got the fur seals, and the Russians, who brought the fur back to the mainland. So they were richer than the Aleuts, not as rich as the Russians, and socially stigmatized by both for being illegitimate.<\/p>\n

So again, you have this language mixture, but it\u2019s very different from Michif. Whereas Michif is Cree verbs and French nouns, this is mostly Aleut, except the entire finite verb morphology\u2014mostly endings for tense and subject and the like\u2014is just lifted wholesale from Russian. And Russian has a complicated verb morphology, but Aleut has a much more<\/em> complicated verb morphology, like 450 different verb forms, whereas Russian has some dozen, three dozen maybe.<\/p>\n

These are not pidgin languages\u2014the kind you\u2019d need to trade with the other guys\u2014because these groups spoke the root languages, too. These languages occur for in-group purposes. When your group is separate, either willingly or unwillingly, a language turns out to be very useful. I think they must have come about at least in part deliberately. Although it\u2019s hard to prove, because I wasn\u2019t there. But there are examples of changes that are clearly deliberate. I told you about the\u2014stop me if I\u2019m babbling too much.<\/p>\n

No, no, I love this. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I told you about the distancing changes in New Guinea. There\u2019s an island called Bougainville\u2014which is famous if you\u2019ve read a lot about World War II\u2014but it\u2019s a big island and it has a language called Buin. Buin has several dialects, and one of them is Uisai. There are about fifteen thousand Buin speakers in all, and maybe fifteen hundred Uisai speakers. And Buin has, including all its dialects, a very elaborate gender system, sort of like what you find in French or Russian or German but more elaborate because each noun is either masculine or feminine, and then the verb will agree in gender with the noun, and the adjective will agree in gender with the noun, and so on. So in a sentence you\u2019ve got a lot of markers indicating the gender\u2014it\u2019s part of the syntax as well as the lexicon. But in Uisai, all the genders are reversed. Every noun that\u2019s feminine in Uisai is masculine in all<\/em> the other dialects of Buin.<\/p>\n

Now, this just isn\u2019t conceivable as any kind of ordinary, natural, gradual linguistic change. I mean they have to have sat down and said, We\u2019re too much like those guys, we\u2019ve got to do something. How about this? A lot of linguists, maybe most <\/em>linguists, would say this isn\u2019t even a possible linguistic change. My belief, which has gotten more radical the older I get\u2014which is nice, you don\u2019t want to get intellectually fossilized\u2014is that anything you can become aware of in your language, you can change if you\u2019ve got a powerful enough motive. And of course, it\u2019s not going to affect anybody\u2019s language but yours, unless everybody else changes, too.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to do that for a language like English. There\u2019s too much inertia, too many speakers. But if you\u2019ve only got fifteen hundred speakers and you really want to be different \u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sally Thomason in Montana, 2012.<\/p><\/div>\n

Is there a concern that technology has altered language contact\u2014that it\u2019s happening all over the world, all the time, and that the primary language tends to be English?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, for those of us who value linguistic diversity, yeah, it\u2019s a serious concern. On the other hand, it\u2019s offset by the knowledge of language endangerment. There\u2019s been a lot of publicity in the last decade, and if you look on the Internet there are dozens, if not hundreds of websites for revitalizing endangered languages. Then of course there are countries that don\u2019t want English to take over anything\u2014but whether it\u2019s completely successful for any language is an open question. The only totally successful case of language revival is still Hebrew. Having your language serve as a vehicle for a major world religion is very useful if you\u2019re trying to revitalize it.<\/p>\n

Are there others that, to your mind, have a good shot at returning?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two cases that seem promising, although it\u2019s not clear how much further they\u2019ll go. One is M\u0101ori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. I mean, I say \u201cindigenous\u201d\u2014they were only actually there for about three hundred years before the Brits got there, but still, they were there first. The other is Hawaiian. Both used a strategy called Language Nest where you get kids, preschool kids, in a setting where nobody speaks to them in any language but the language they want to revitalize, and because you\u2019re getting them so early you\u2019ve got a good chance of making them fluent. They did it in New Zealand first, and M\u0101ori is now one of the official languages there, but there are doubts about whether the revitalization effort is too late, because in New Zealand, too, everybody needs English. I published a textbook last year on endangered languages and the last chapter was on revitalization. I wanted it to be accessible to people who want to revitalize their language, so I tried to say optimistic things, but it got kind of hard to say optimistic things without lying.<\/p>\n

And there are other programs. There\u2019s a successful one run by a retired professor at Berkeley named Leanne Hinton\u2014it\u2019s called the Master-Apprentice Program. You use it when the language is on its last legs but there are a few fluent speakers left. You pair them with young people who are desperate to learn the language, they get trained to work together,\u00a0and then you have this two-person team. It\u2019s really impressive. But it\u2019s small. You can get depressed thinking too much about this, if, like me, you find English kind of boring. But there are languages that are disappearing and being replaced by languages other than English. Cultures shift, languages change, and there are a lot of things other than force that make people give up their language and start speaking somebody else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Ryan Bradley is a writer and editor. He lives in Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words. The first time Sarah \u201cSally\u201d Thomason and I spoke, she\u2019d just completed her annual two-day, eighteen-hundred-mile drive from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she teaches, to rural northwestern Montana, where she spends her summers studying Montana Salish. For thirty-four years, Thomason has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[21733,21732,21721,21726,21718,21734,16,21731,4511,10414,865,529,2854,687,21730,1277,21717,21728,21729,21724,21723,7522,21714,9712,21735,21722,21720,21725,21713,21716,21715,21719,224,353,21727,2393],"class_list":["post-96263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-aleut","tag-aleutians","tag-bougainville","tag-buin","tag-consonants","tag-cree","tag-culture","tag-dying-languages","tag-el-salvador","tag-email","tag-france","tag-french","tag-hawaii","tag-language","tag-language-nest","tag-linguistics","tag-linguists","tag-maori","tag-master-apprentice-program","tag-metis","tag-michif","tag-montana","tag-montana-salish","tag-new-zealand","tag-north-dakota","tag-pacific-northwest","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-pidgin","tag-salish","tag-sally-thomason","tag-sarah-thomason","tag-susquehannock","tag-technology","tag-teenagers","tag-uisai","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Makes Languages Change? 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