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Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael 2011. ‘Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures’, Australian Journal of Linguistics... more

LINK TO THE ARTICLE: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Revival_Linguistics.pdf

Final version:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a932426202~frm=titlelink

DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2011.532859

Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL)
Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2011, pages 111 - 127

Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures

GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN and MICHAEL WALSH

University of Adelaide and University of Sydney

ABSTRACT

The revival of Hebrew is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping tongue and is a language movement that has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements in Australia are in their infancy. This article provides comparative insights and makes information about the Hebrew revival accessible to Australian linguists and Aboriginal revival activists.

Needless to say, the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language reawakening must involve a long period of thoroughly observing, carefully listening to the people, learning, mapping and characterizing the specific indigenous community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.

This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.

Keywords: Revival Linguistics, Language Revival, Aboriginal Studies, Hebrew, Social Empowerment, Hybridity and Multiple Causation, Purism versus Compromise, Language and Identity, Contact Linguistics, Yiddish, Aboriginal English, Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Endangerment, Resilience Linguistics, Revitalization, Renewal.

Dedicated to Professor Michael Clyne z"l

ARTICLE

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)

The main aim of this article is to suggest that there are perspicacious lessons applicable from the relatively successful Hebrew revival to the reclamation, maintenance and empowerment of Aboriginal languages and cultures. 'Language is power; let us have ours', wrote Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway on 26 November 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Previous revival efforts have largely failed (for obvious reasons, we are not going to single out specific failures here). While there have been some good results from several projects since 1992 (e.g. Kaurna, see below), Aboriginal people overall do not see as many positive outcomes from revival programmes as they would like. In large part this is the result of shortage of sufficient (continuity of) funding, lack of technical expertise, and lack of integration of school-based programmes with community language programmes. However, there are purely linguistic reasons too: Many revival efforts were not supported by a sound theoretical understanding of how successful language revival works. As pointed out by Thieberger (2002), decisions about the appropriate target for language maintenance programmes are too often driven by structural linguistics, where the supposed ideal is intergenerational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained, thus creating unrealistic expectations among the Aboriginal community.

This article is the first of its kind as it will innovatively draw crucial insights from 'Modern Hebrew' (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999), so far the most successful known reclamation attempt of a sleeping tongue. Zuckermann's (2008a, 2009, 2010, 2011) research on Israeli demonstrates which language components are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations and connotations. We should encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic, and not to chastise English loanwords and pronunciation, for example, within the emergent language. Applying such precious conclusions from Hebrew will closely assist Australian revivalists in being more efficient, urging them not to waste time and resources on Sisyphean efforts to resuscitate linguistic components that are unlikely to be revivable.

While the results the endeavors we are proposing here have considerable value as a research enterprise, one can also consider them in terms of a cost-benefit analysis (Mühlhäusler and Damania 2004, Walsh 2008): Language revitalization contributes to social reconciliation, cultural tourism (Clark and Kostanski 2005), capacity building, and improved community health for Indigenous peoples (Walsh forthcoming B). In the process of language revival, some Aboriginal people will go from being dysfunctional (cf. Sutton 2009) to well-balanced, positive people. The benefits to the wider community and to Australian society are immense.

Reversing language shift (RLS) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010, Walsh 2005a, Zuckermann 2011) is thus of great social benefit. Language revival does not only do historical justice and address inequality but can also result in the empowerment of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life.

Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name. Consequently, some Indigenous Australians do not find it important to revive their comatose tongue. We, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!'

Background: The Hebrew Revival

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. (Haldane 1963: 464)

'Hebrew' is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.

Hebrew was spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. We believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)

For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was ‘clinically dead’. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.

Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language, identity and politics, and important practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language.

The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic: Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the 'substratum', whilst Hebrew is the 'superstratum' providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). According to Zuckermann's mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, Israeli is not only multi-layered but also multi-parental. A Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybr...