Book Review, Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 5:2, May 2001, pp. 279-283
Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas. Linguistic Genocide in Education - or Worldwide
Diversity and Human Rights? London: Erlbaum. 2000.
xxxiii+785 pp.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' contribution to the
survival of minority languages in the world in three decades has been truly
unique. There are few if any who can match her commitment and passion,
dedication and utter humanity in writing about language minorities. To be so
pioneering and original attracts doubts particularly from those who wish to
disassociate academic activity from political action. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas'
deep, heart-felt commitment to language rights for dominated and repressed
minorities is unchallengeable.
Few who read Tove Skutnabb-Kangas can
fail to be moved by her desire to gain justice for the marginalized and
disenfranchised, the neglected and rejected. This is not just born out of
political passion or righteous indignation. There is a remarkable breadth of
scholarship, a range of reading across continents providing novel insights that
makes the call for social justice powerful and compelling.
From her early work in the 1970s to this
challenging and powerful book, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has made a formidable
contribution to international awareness-raising of the plight of language
minorities. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas has been a staunch advocate particularly for
language minority peoples wherever they exist. She has consistently
demonstrated how politics and education reproduce the precarious status of such
minorities. Few can justly claim to have made such an impact or been so
influential in language struggles. Prolific as a writer, her lecturing
campaigns and activity in many minority organisations have provided a powerful
advocate for language minority peoples wherever they exist.
In a short review it is impossible to do
justice to the interdisciplinary width or scholarship of the book. Totalling
785 pages, this magnum opus provides
a synthesis of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' three decades of writing, but also in
itself has new and provocative ideas. Who else in the world could so
successfully combine language theory and research with human rights,
biodiversity, language ecology, linguistic imperialism, bilingual and
multilingual education, anti-racism, cultural diversity, ethnicity and
politics? The book is unique.
Probably everyone who reads this book
will disagree with something Tove Skutnabb-Kangas says. But anybody with a
millimetre of open-mindedness will be challenged by her passionate prose. She
has the ability to stir us all from our favourite viewpoints and vantage
points. She appeals to rationality and logic, but also to conscience and
deep-rooted instincts about equity and social justice. Reading the book is an
uncomfortable experience, irrespective of whether we are students or civil
servants, privileged scholars or politicians. There is argument and analysis,
data and evidence, but also a compassionate plea not just to save the multitude
of dying languages in the world, but moreover to save the people whose very
being is created and encultured, enriched and anchored by such precious
languages. This is an uncomfortable call to arms, a trumpet to muster support
for the struggle to halt linguistic genocide.
In nine chapters plus a substantial
Introduction, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas amasses her three decades of gifted
contribution. One particular feature of the Introduction is that it doesn't
just provide a linguistic consideration of language genocide. Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas also brings in the individual human nature of linguistic
genocide by indicating that, when a child is psychologically and structurally
prohibited from speaking a language, for example in language submersion
education, language death occurs. The Introduction provides guidance on
terminology, but also on the ideological stances that oppose language minority
vitality.
Chapter one considers the number,
condition and future of languages in the world. There is clarity in considering
the problems in identifying what is a language, the insufficiency of our
knowledge about language and languages in the world, the reliability of
information about the number of languages in the world and where they are
sited, and the difficulty of knowing exactly how many speakers of minority
languages remain. The evidence base used for this chapter is impressively
international and informed.
The whole book is aided by the addition
of various text boxes. There is a most valuable use of boxes to provide
definitions, World Wide Web address (and other address), activities, further
information and exemplification. These boxes provide a wealth of ideas,
information and interesting insights. This ploy works engagingly well in
Chapter one where much exemplification portrays the desperate plight of
languages in the world.
The second chapter is central to the
argument of the book. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas provides much persuasive detail
about threatened languages as well as threatened species. Connections are
established between biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity. There
is broad agreement with the stance taken by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine
(2000) in their hauntingly entitled book Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of
the World's Languages’ and by David Crystal (2000) with his stark title of Language
Death’. These authors argue that ecological diversity is essential for
long-term planetary survival. All living organisms, plants, animals, bacteria
and humans survive and prosper through a network of complex and delicate
relationships. Damaging one of the elements in the ecosystem will result in
unforeseen consequences for the whole of the system. Evolution has been aided
by genetic diversity, with species genetically adapting in order to survive in
different environments. Diversity contains the potential for adaptation.
Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and
unadaptability. Linguistic diversity and biological diversity are seen as
inseparable. The range of cross fertilisation becomes less as languages and
cultures die and the testimony of human intellectual achievement is lessened.
In the language of ecology, the strongest
ecosystems are those that are the most diverse. That is, diversity is directly
related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival. Our success
on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different kinds of
environment over thousands of years (atmospheric as well as cultural). Such
ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity
maximises chances of human success and adaptability.
Chapter three considers mother tongues,
cultural diversity, ethnicity, identity, multiple identities, language for
control and domination, resistance and self determination. It is remarkable
feat to that this chapter is so logically organised as it contains such a broad
range of material. A discussion about the definition of mother tongues is
linked creatively with diversity, and the politics of assimilation and
integration are connected thoughtfully to ethnicity and identity. The examples
are taken from around the world providing an over-long chapter of over a
hundred pages. The climax of the chapter is the last section that analyses how
language connects with equal power relationships through glorification of the
dominant group, stigmatisation and devaluation of language minorities and how
this is superficially rationalised. However, the chapter ends by briefly
arguing that language can also be used for resistance and for affirmative
action.
The fourth chapter examines linguistic
diversity, it origins in mythology, the evolution of languages, the role of
missionaries in language life and not least the debate with David Crystal and
other scholars about the role of English in the world. The section on myths
about monolingualism is particularly insightful, as is the following section on
arguments for and against linguistic diversity.
The relationship between State policies
and language genocide forms the substance of chapter five. It is here that Tove
Skutnabb-Kangas reveals the destructive side of politics that creates language
shift and language death. There is strong language, passion, plenty of facts
and contextualization (e.g. the Kurds in Turkey), and moral indignation. There
are a harrowingly large number of individual cases presented of being punished
for speaking a minority language. This is no soft academic treatise but J誕ccuse, an outraged crusader
exposing humiliating scandals. Yet there is a theoretical dimension comparing
linguistic imperialism and linguistic genocide on the one side and language
death and liberalist modernisation on the other side. It is a pity that, for
example, Alan Davies’ (1996) review of linguistic imperialism isn稚
considered in more detail to reveal that there are alternative views. Instead,
the critics of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and husband, Robert Phillipson, are
summarily dismissed in footnote style. While the chapter is moving and graphic,
it could have been stronger by reporting the viewpoints of opposing academics.
Chapter six examines globalisation, power
and control as it relates particularly to language minority education. Unequal
power divisions and relationships are shown to be reproduced by poor quality
language minority education, and that such education is a tool of control of
such minority groups. Emotional and intellectual colonisation are seen as the
outcomes of minority language education. Classism, sexism, racism and
imperialism are all seen to interact to create marginalized language groups.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' solution is to avoid a 素ree market’ scenario in
favour of interventions, positive discrimination and particularly human rights.
The style of argument is black and white, A team and B team, right and wrong,
sinner and saint. This is effectively challenging, but tends to miss those
situations where there are complex colours, and recent decades of change and
slow development from black to grey. We are asked to fill in the gaps in a text
box to reveal if we belong to the A or B team. The A team is White with formal
education, middle class, male and majority language. The B team is non-White,
less educated, working class, female and minority language. Again, the chapter
is dense with powerful and expressive exemplification and argument, and with
remarkable width of topic. Modern politics, economics, demographics, education,
social policy and history are woven into a imaginative, provocative synthesis
that many will not fully agree with, but from which everyone will learn.
Chapter seven concerns linguistic human
rights, a topic that Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and her husband have written on
extensively and studied in detail. Her understanding of human rights and
particularly language rights has much depth and width. The international
understanding of linguistic human rights is exceptional and there are few other
writings that can compare with the scope of this chapter. The central argument
is that linguistic human rights are a necessary corrective to a free market
approach, and also that linguistic rights must be a connected part of general
human rights. There is also value-addedness in this chapter with, for example,
a useful page of World Wide Web addresses, and a discussion of a universal
covenant on linguistic human rights.
The theme of language rights is extended
in Chapter 8 that considers how education can best deliver such basic language
rights. The chapter considers the kind of bilingualism that bilingual education
programs should pursue to this end. The strength of this chapter includes
showing how different forms of bilingual education relate to human rights in
varied ways, the consideration of Deaf children and signing, and a relatively
original consideration of the principles for different bilingual education
models to engage linguistic human rights more thoroughly. This chapter is a
worthy addition to the study of minority language education and bilingual
education.
The final chapter considers alternatives
to language death and language genocide. It engages themes of ethnic identity,
language as a resource as well as a right, linguistic tolerance, the importance
of linguistic and cultural diversity, plus addressing balances of power that
are a prime cause of language shift.
To conclude: the book is a tour de force, an encyclopedic
consideration of minority languages, well informed, geographically and
intellectually global in understanding. Few scholars produce works of such
substance and scope. The book is not presented in standard academic prose. It
is passionate and vigorous, sometimes emotive and polemic. This is a tome of
commitment. It advocates and affirms with intensity and ardour. This is not a
gentle and neutral text but an agitated uncovering of inequity and injustice.
It is uncomfortable and provocative such that it threatens warm and
well-accepted wisdom.
"Only connect" wrote E.M.
Foster "the passion and the prose, and both will be exalted". The
book has both. Both are exalted. But it is the struggle for linguistic
diversity and linguistic human rights that are the most exalted.
REFERENCES
Crystal, David. 2000. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Davies,
Alan. 1996. Review Article: Ironising the Myth of Linguicism. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development 17: 485-496.
Nettle, Daniel and ROMAINE Susan. 2000. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the
World痴 Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
COLIN
BAKER
University
of Wales, Bangor
School
of Education
Safle池
Normal
Holyhead
Road
Bangor
Gwynedd
North
Wales
LL57
2PX
c.r.baker@bangor.ac.uk