Can a name kill a language?

Obscure languages often need all the publicity they can get. Too often central governments are prone to label a minority language a "dialect" of the official language for political reasons or because they are ignorant about language in question. To promote national unity, Chinese varieties are call "dialects" even though many have less in common with each other than English and German. Similar ideas were promoted with Ryukyuan languages or Low Saxon. Although this information tends to muddy the waters when investigating languages, some things as simple as a language name can make people unaware and unwilling to pursue a language.

Two examples come to mind. The first is Scots, the Anglic language of the lowlands of Scotland. Many people hearing Scots will confuse it with Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language of the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. Although both languages belong to the Indo-European family, they are about as similar as English and Russian. I feel Scots is a great name for the language, much better than the neologism, "Lallans" or "Ullans" or the confusing name of one of its dialects, "Doric" which makes me think of Greek. But the name keeps it in the shadow of Scottish Gaelic. (And yes, there is the whole debate of whether Scots is a dialect or a language, but we'll save that conversation for later."

The second example is Franco-Provençal. People might hear that name and think it is a dialect of French, or that it is a dialect of Provençal (which is itself a dialect of Occitan). Indeed, I passed over it for a long time in thinking it was a transitional dialect on the Langue d'Oc border--I wonder how many have done the same? In actuality, it is none of those things. Franco-Provençal is its own language spoken in the alpine region in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, its use has declined preciptously and will in all likelihood be extinct within a generation. It got its name because the initial linguist who looked at it saw it shared some features with French and some with Occitan. Other suggested names for the language are Romand and Arpitan. Romand comes from Romandy, which is the French part of Switzerland where the language was spoken, and Arpitan is from a native word meaning Alpine. Perhaps if the language had one of those names the outlook wouldn't be so grim.

Constructed languages

Comments on constructed languages are not off limits in this blog. To some extent all languages are decended from constructed languages at some point. "Toki Pona" is one that I've kind of been interested in for a while. Created by Sonja Elen in 2001, Toki Pona is a minimalist language with only 118 words that have to be combined in certain ways to create more complex ideas.

check it out at tokipona.org.

Quenya and Sindarin are nice but really aren't workable as spoken languages. Klingon on the other has many speakers. I'm reminded of this article from the Onion. Of course, Navajo's situation isn't quite that precarious but the truth in article makes it funny.

Technology making things easier

Stephen Hawkins often apologizes half in jest that his computer voice box had an American accent. Now, he may be feeling better because it seems the new iPhone technology has a bit of a problem with non-American accents. In this article, searching for "iPhone" with a Scottish accent will just as likely take you to an adult site as to the Apple home page. The poor Welshman who tried the search had "iPhone" interpreted as "gorilla".

Council in twist over 'wrong' Cornish name

In this article, kids at a school studying the Cornish language developed a street name in Cornish that was found to be incorrect.

Members were asked to formally adopt the name
Telya Tor for an under-construction housing development in Carbis Bay
after a competition at a nearby primary school.
But when asked to confirm the spelling, Cornish language experts ruled the translation of
'family land' as incorrect.
Official keepers of the Cornish tongue, the
Cornish Language Partnership, said the sign should read Tir
Teylu.

This article is a small part of a wider discussion regarding the Cornish language of which I can only touch on a part of now. For people not familiar, the Cornish language disappeared as a spoken vernacular around the beginnning of the nineteenth century. However, Henry Jenner revived the language about a century later. The revival started out robust, but for quite a while it has been mired in factional disputes. There are no less than five standards for spelling and grammar--Unified, Kemmyn, "Modern", Unified Revised, and Standard Written Form.

This creates a discouraging first impression for a potential learner. A person with an interest in learning the language to talk to others is forced to immediately choose teams, often based on some minor grammatical feature or orthographic whim. Sure, the development of the different "dialects" are all well intentioned, but it really has been a tough burden for Cornish to bear.

These squabbles on Standardized forms are not unique to Cornish. They're played out over and over in other languages like Occitan, Breton, and Franco-Provençal. For most major languages the standards were foisted by a central government and it works, but it is appears almost hypocritical for a minor language to ignore dialects even though it is necessary to create a workable standard.

Dalecarlian Runes

Recently, I've been investigating the Dalecarlian language (Also known as Elfdalian). A detailed description can be found here. It is often considered a dialect of Swedish, but is unique enough that many consider it a separate Scandanavian language along with Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faeroese.

Elfdalian, spoken by around 3,000 people, contains many features that have long disappeared from Swedish and Norwegian. Perhaps the most notable was the up until the first part of the last century, Elfdalian was written with a combination of Latin and Runic characters--the last place to use Norse runes.

Like most minority languages the language is in decline, but now there is an attempt to revitalize it. In order to teach it, they had to standardize the orthography--decide how to write Elfdalian. They've done this, but sadly, the standardized alphabet doesn't contain any runes! The alphabet has ogonek (tailed) versions of most vowels to represent nasal vowels--something that isn't found in any other Scandinavian language outside of academic transcriptions of Old Norse.

A language with its own alphabet has a special character all its own (no pun intended!). Tamil written in Roman characters loses some charm, or compare Chinese characters with Pin Yin. Sure, they'd have to create a new keyboard layout, but runes are supported by unicode. From an outsider's perspective, runes were the best part of Elfdalian (Although the name of the language is pretty cool too). Why not perpetuate it?

The "ground rules"

This hob-blog is intended to serve as an outlet for my quirky obsession with languages and scripts. As long as I can remember I have been obsessed with language trivia. Usually when I try to involve others by sharing what I consider to be an interesting fact or connection relating to languages, I either get the polite nod or the quick attempt to change the subject. Hopefully, this blog will attract others with a similar interest.

This blog is not a rigorous academic blog. Though I am familiar with dative vs. accusative case and I know what an ergative-abblative language might be, I won't be posting tons of articles comparing the genitive cases of various Niger B languages. Along the same lines, I may soon post a screed about the age-old debate between language and dialect, a post that will inevitably anger some and so to all, I just want to say, "Lighten up, this is all in good fun. Nothing I write here will ever be backed by any government or endorsed by any religion. So it won't really affect you in real life."