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language revitalization

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• Julian Crandall Hollick

  Worlds of Difference

  Occitan Rock

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  Julian Crandall Hollick

  Worlds of Difference

  Occitan Rock

  Since Napoleon declared it the official language of the republic, French has been at the core of national identity. Now some southerners are challenging that notion, using a blend of reggae, Brazilian rhythms, and the musical forms of the medieval troubadors.

  Before 1789, France was a loose community of regions, each with its own languages and dialects: Alsatian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and perhaps 70 more. Occitan was the family of languages from Occitanie, the region that stretched from Bordeaux and the Pyrenées in the southwest to the Alps and northern Italy in the southeast. It and its several variants were linked to a rich creative history, particularly in literature and song.

  Then came the French Revolution, and then Napoleon, and a new constitution that declared France “one people, one nation, one language.” Occitan all but disappeared.

  But not completely. More than 200 years later, Occitan is still spoken in the French countryside and in the north of Italy, where it’s recognized as an official regional language. (A 2001 attempt by the French culture ministry to recognize regional languages was rejected by the country’s constitutional council.) No one really knows how many people use Occitan regularly because the French government has never done a survey. Unofficial estimates suggest that several hundred thousand speak one or another form of Occitan as a private, or “intimate” language, at home and among close friends. Almost nowhere in France is it used in the workplace.

  Even the Occitan accent is effectively banned from public life. If one wants to get ahead in the French civil service, one must drop one’s Occitan or Provençal inflections. (Provençal is perhaps the most widely used variant of Occitan.) Today just a handful of private secondary schools offer classes in Occitan. A few cultural groups, inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning 19th century Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, quietly promote the language and literature.

  The most visible – and audible – proponents of Occitan today are not linguists or history buffs, but contemporary musicians. These are no purists: their music blends modern folk music, the music of the medieval troubadors, Brazilian rhythms and, most notably, Jamaican reggae. The two groups featured in this piece – the Fabulous Trobadors from Toulouse and Massilia Sound System from Marseille – play highly danceable music whose often-humorous (and often-political) lyrics mix French with Occitan, so as not to alienate French-speaking audiences. Other groups add a dose of Beur, the popular Arabic spoken by North Africans all over France.

  The result is a music that borrows cheerfully across centuries and borders – but that signals an increasingly serious disenchantment with the suppression of regional identities, languages and cultures.

  – Julian Crandall Hollick

  Date

  August 21, 2004

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: Occitan, music, France, language revitalization

• Alan Weisman

  Worlds of Difference

  Resurrecting the Zápara

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  Alan Weisman

  Worlds of Difference

  Resurrecting the Zápara

  The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.

  Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador’s Zápara Indians, was terrified. Not of New York’s massive buildings that towered far beyond the tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn’t dream.

  To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It was in a dream that Bartolo’s shaman father saw that his people, down to just a few dozen, weren’t supposed to vanish after all, as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father, now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation’s helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.

  The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash – not a lot, but enough to be tempting and disruptive.

  After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. “In my dream,” he recalled, “there was a man with two faces, one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy. When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul.”

  When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream to wishful thinking.

  After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador’s Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru. All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a new threat hanging over their heads?

  That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the last sector of Ecuador’s jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people’s future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.

  It seems impossible – until you meet them. We came away from the Zápara recalling that there’s a name for those people who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.

  They’re called dreamers.

  – Alan Weisman and Nancy Hand

  Date

  July 30, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Nancy Hand

  Outlets

  Living on Earth

  Tags

  Themes: Culture, Environment

  Regions: South America

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Alan Weisman

  Other Tags: Zápara, UNESCO, indigenous, Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development, language revitalization

• Dmae Roberts

  Worlds of Difference

  Tell Me Wai

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  Dmae Roberts

  Worlds of Difference

  Tell Me Wai

  Musicians Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor learned to speak Maori in college, after the New Zealand government made it an official national language. Now they’re part of a new generation of Maoris who have decided to move their culture forward rather than leave it behind.

  I’ve been interested in Maori culture since I saw my first Tiki jade pendant and wondered about the story behind the symbolic carving. The movie “Whale Rider” further sharpened my desire to visit New Zealand and learn more about the Maoris.

  In 2003, I spent a month in beautiful Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand means “land of the long white cloud”). I toured Maori towns and went to traditional performances and concerts. What stood out was the palpable sense of pride felt by both performers and audiences. It seemed a new pride, fresh and hopeful. And in fact I learned that it was new, having emerged largely after the Maori language became “official” in 1987.

  I was especially impressed by how the revival of the language and the resurgence of interest in Maori traditions had not just boosted the morale of the Maoris, but of white New Zealanders as well. Everywhere in New Zealand, Maori is present alongside English in street signs, in advertising and on television. Every New Zealander I met used the Maori phrase kia ora – an all-purpose greeting, goodbye, and exclamation.

  It is against that backdrop that I discovered WAI. The name means “water” in Maori. Many contemporary New Zealand groups sing in Maori, but WAI does it expressly with the mission of passing on the language on to the young. I heard their CD and knew I had to contact them.

  Mina Ripia and Maaka McGregor welcomed me into their home on Titahi Bay near Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. They told me that they’d only learned to speak Maori in college. They had been part of the English-language music scene before they decided to sing strictly in the language of their ancestors. When I asked Mina to identify herself she launched into a long recitation of the names of those ancestors, ending with her own name as the latest descendant.

  Maaka took a 200-year-old conch shell that had been soaking in the bathtub and played it like a trumpet. As I was to learn when I saw WAI perform in Seattle, they use the shell to begin their shows. Then comes the electronica, which seems to grow organically from beats of the poi – balls on strings that they swing so they hit each other in rhythmic patterns.

  Whenever I heard traditional Maori singing in New Zealand, the music reached deep inside me – the plaintive calls to ancestors, the retelling of old stories that seemed somehow to insist on their continued relevance, even their urgency. WAI’s music has that sense of urgency to me. It seems to say, “Here I am. Remember me. I’m alive.”

   – Dmae Roberts

  Date

  July 26, 2004

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Asia / Oceania

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Tags: language revitalization, Maori, New Zealand, music

• Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Ladino Transformation

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  Sandy Tolan

  Worlds of Difference

  Ladino Transformation

  Bulgaria’s Jews are survivors, but the language they have spoken for centuries is in trouble. Sandy Tolan visits with some of Bulgaria’s last Ladino speakers as they try to keep the tongue from going silent.

  Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit the country you’ll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children and head for – where? You’ve heard that you will be safe in a faraway place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.

  So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria, along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a name of its own: Ladino.

  In 2003, I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in tracing her story I’d come to understand how it was that she came to be born – how most of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised to find that I could communicate in Spanish – not perfectly, as many of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of March, 1943 – how they and their families avoided the trains bound for Treblinka.

  One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino, which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and proverbs, and to teach the next generation – sprightly 60-somethings – what they know. Often they’re joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi, whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations of a long, deep history.

  If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria, where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold. Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the 1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the hope is that the language won’t die there – that the tongue may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.

  – Sandy Tolan

  Date

  July 5, 2004

  Other Contributor(s)

  Melissa Robbins

  Outlets

  All Things Considered

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan

  Other Tags: Jews, bulgaria, language revitalization, Ladino

• Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Welsh Renaissance

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  Jonathan Miller

  Worlds of Difference

  Welsh Renaissance

  Languages around the world are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. But Welsh is making a comeback, and children are leading the way. Now the challenge is to move Welsh from the classroom to the living room. Meet the Steel family of Clydach.

  Along the border between England and Wales stand some of Great Britain’s most imposing castles. They are testimony to centuries of conflict between the two countries. The cannons have long been silent, and motorists cross the frontier today without encountering so much as a sign of welcome or good-bye. But in Wales, pride of place and pride of culture are still very much alive.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in the effort to promote the Welsh language. In the 1890s, at least 70% of the people of Wales spoke Welsh. By the middle of the 20th century, the national language (known as Cymraeg, related to Cornish and Breton) appeared to be dying. It was still dominant in some areas (mainly to the west and north), but virtually everyone in Wales spoke English, and everything from road signs to traffic tickets were written in the imperial language. Students were punished for speaking Welsh in school, and the mass media flooded the country with English pop culture.

  Linguists assumed that Welsh would go the way of Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland – the focus of much nationalist rhetoric, but spoken on a daily basis only in the poorest and most isolated areas.

  Today the revival of Welsh is shaping up to be one of the world’s most impressive linguistic success stories. The census of 2001 showed, for the first time, an increase in Welsh speakers both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. The rise was especially marked among the young, and in traditionally English-speaking areas in the south and east.

  “We can now say, hand on heart, that the language is in the ownership of people throughout Wales,” says John Walter Jones of the Welsh Language Board. “It is not something that is being ghettoized and left in a corner. It is there throughout society.”

  Language activist Heini Gruffudd credits a century of grassroots campaigning for the resurgence of Welsh. As a young man, Gruffudd would dismantle English road signs in the dead of night. Other activists would ride their bicycles down the wrong side of the street, then refuse to pay their fines until the tickets were translated into Cymraeg.

  Over time, the tactics became less symbolic and more practical. In 1971, parents founded the Nursery School Movement (Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin), and began setting up Welsh pre-schools and childcare centers. Today Welsh-medium education is solidly mainstream. About 25% of all primary-age children are enrolled in Welsh immersion schools. Studies show that these schools don’t just provide students with a strong foundation in the national language – graduates also do better in English.

  Government has played its part. Laws enacted by Britain in 1967 gave Welsh official status in the courts. In 1993, parliament passed a much stronger Welsh Language Act, creating the language board and erasing the remaining legal inequities. Today the board supports innovative programs like “Twf” – a word that means “growth” in Welsh, and also stands for “Taking Welsh to Families.” In Twf (pronounced “toove”), parents are encouraged to speak Welsh with their children. That’s a challenge in a country where the great majority of young adults are native English speakers.

  The Language Board claims that in homes in which both parents speak Welsh, there is a 92% chance that the children will also speak the language. Where only one parent speaks Welsh, the rate for the children drops to about 50%. Jones says English-speaking parents must come to believe that raising bilingual children makes educational and – especially – economic sense. Marketing materials produced by the language board tout the intellectual advantages of multilingualism, and point out that more and more companies require Welsh proficiency of their employees. But learning a new language is a serious commitment, and not everyone is sure it’s worth the effort.

  No one in Wales expects Welsh to replace English. Nor does anyone claim that an ability to speak or understand a second language necessarily means that people will use it in everyday life. There may be Welsh classes and plays and poetry readings and road signs, but walk down the street in Cardiff or Swansea and you will rarely hear anything other than English.

  “It’s a gradual thing,” says Jones. “You don’t invest in a language today and see the results tomorrow. Language does take time. We lost it over two or three generations. We’re going to regain it in two or three generations.”

  – Jonathan Miller

  Date

  December 25, 2003

  Outlets

  NPR

  Tags

  Themes: Culture

  Regions: Europe

  Media: Audio, Text

  Other Contributors: Jonathan Miller

  Other Tags: bilingualism, Welsh, Swansea, language revitalization, Wales