Why should linguists study minority languages?
Language revitalization and maintenance is a crucial part of granting minorities their cultural rights.
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"The denial of cultural rights to minorities is as disruptive of the moral fabric of mainstream society as is the denial of civil rights. Civil rights, however, are focused on the individual, while cultural rights must focus on ethnocultural groups. Such groups have no recognized legal standing in many Western democracies where both establishment capitalist thought and anti-establishment Marxist thought prophesies the eclipse of culturally distinct formations and the arrival of a uniformized, all-inclusive "modern proletarian" culture." (Fishman, 1991) |
"One of the greatest problems that the universal study of human language has had to cope with has indeed been the European bias: most linguists have been speakers of European languages, and the other languages that they have known or had access to information about have more often than not been European. As Bell (1978) notes, even linguists who have an ambition to widen their perspective mostly end up with a European or even Indo-European bias in their data bases. This would of course not be so problematic if it were not the case that European languages are much more like each other than languages are in general." (Dahl 1990) |
Linguistic theory and data are biased towards WEIRD* languages.
* western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic
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WEIRD languages are actually quite weird.
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"From a cross-linguistic perspective, the notion of exceptionality is intricately intertwined with assumptions about normality. A language showing an ‘exceptional’ characteristic is much too often just a language with a different trait as commonly found in the few ‘normal’ European national standard languages widely investigated in current linguistics. Unfortunately, from a worldwide perspective it is these European national standard languages that often turn out to be atypical." (Cysouw 2011) "The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics." (Majid & Levinson 2010) |
Cysouw, Michael (2011). “Quantitative explorations of the worldwide distribution of rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of northwestern European languages”. In: Horst Simon & Heike Wiese (Eds.), Expecting the Unexpected: Exceptions in Grammar. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 411-431. [free PDF]
Dahl, Östen (1990). Standard Average European as an exotic language. In Toward a typology of European languages, ed. by Johannes Bechert, Giuliano Bernini and Claude Buridant, 3-8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [free PDF]
Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 103 [free PDF]
Dahl, Östen (1990). Standard Average European as an exotic language. In Toward a typology of European languages, ed. by Johannes Bechert, Giuliano Bernini and Claude Buridant, 3-8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [free PDF]
Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 103 [free PDF]