Language Right and Language Standardization

To begin with, it is helpful to go through some theories in regard to ideologies of language rights, which can be reviewed in two intertwined themes: first, on the right of speaking the language; and second, on the right of speakers’ using the language in their own way. It is also useful to look into two terms anthropologists usually employ to define research schemes: speech community and language community.

I would tentatively define the basic notion of speech community in terms of shared knowledge of rules for the interpretation of speech, including rules for the interpretation of at least one common code (Hymes 1984, 18).

We can see that language communities are groups of people by degree evidencing allegiance to norms of denotational (as ‘referential’, ‘propositional’, ‘semantic’) language usage, however much or little such allegiance also encompasses an indigenous cultural consciousness of variation and/or change, or is couched in terms of fixity and stasis (Silverstein 1998, 402).

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To put it in a much simplified way, a language community is a group of people who are expected to, or believe they should stick to one purified language; a speech community is a group of people who can understand each other through speaking or acting, while not necessarily speaking the same language. For example, people in Hong Kong consider their region as a Cantonese-speaking area, and differentiate themselves from people who cannot comprehend Cantonese (the situation is different when they confront foreigners). This is very much approaching the concept of ‘language community’; while in one of my research areas, Regong, which is in the Amdo dialect region of Tibet, people recite Buddha sutras in Amdo Tibetan, while the educated monks in temples use a more conservative pronunciation, closer to classical Tibetan and Sanskrit. Daily communications are carried out inside communities in a mixture of Tibetan and Tu Language, a variant of Mongolian, whereas people communicate with outsiders in standard Mandarin. This could be identified as a speech community. In many multilingual nations and individuals around the world a ‘speech community’ is closer to actual situation; while ‘language community’ is a constructed ideal which populate in most government-oriented ideologies and made possible through institutional standardization processes.

How would a concept of speech community (as opposed to language community) affect the idea of language rights? Or can the very concept of language rights only apply to one type of community - for example, from the state’s point of view, is it more possible to identify one type of community than another, and more possible to assign ‘rights’ to one rather than another; or, are the ‘rights’ pertaining to these two different types of community fundamentally different?

Back to the two types of language rights, one can look into the example of Regong area with these questions in mind. The Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures inside People’s Republic of China are ideologically considered to be a unity with Tibetan as the regional language. And Regong area belongs to the Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Suppose one considers people in this unity as a language community and the national policy is to protect local culture and language; then, according to the policy, only standard Tibetan and the national language (standard

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Mandarin) should be advocated and maintained. This hypothetical situation would be in concord with the first theme: the right to speak “the language”(in this situation, it is Tibetan, not Tu). While the actual situation is that people in Regong area is a speech community, the second theme, that the right to allow people use the language in their own way implies that both Tu language and Amdo Tibetan should be maintained, and the three languages in use should all be advocated. The actual local language policies value all three languages while making differentiations: only Standard Tibetan based on Lhasa dialect and Standard Mandarin are used in governmental or educational institutions, but Tu Language is within the popular propaganda of preserving local culture. This is complicated enough, leaving out the situation of Creole languages (mix languages) which are in everyday use.

Following the basic conceptions are some social ideologies which may influence language rights. A very relevant ideology is language standardization

For language was actually ‘characteristic word of the race, bond of the family, tool of instruction, hero song of the fathers’ deeds, and the voice of these fathers from their graves.’ Language could not possibly, therefore, remain of one kind, and so the same familial feeling that had formed a single language, when it became national hatred, often created difference, complete difference in language (Herder 2002 [1772]).

It is generally believed that language standardization creates ideological hegemony which is contrary to the right of minority languages. The powerful language ideology of ‘one nation, one language’ is conventionally traced to eighteenth-century thinkers on language and history, and most famously to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) who posited a unity among language, national essence and territory (Ahearn 2012, 126). The adoption and spreading of this ideology relate to the formation of modern European nation-states. In the increasing trend of globalization, several factors have possibly strengthened this currently worldwide ideology in various ways.

Then how does this ideology develop and draw its influences on nation state policies?

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Standardization, then, is a phenomenon in a linguistic community in which institutional maintenance of certain valued linguistic practices – in theory, fixed – acquires an explicitly-recognized hegemony over the definition of the community’s norm.

…the existence of Standards is very much a function of having hegemonic institutions, such as those that control writing/printing and reading as channels of exemplary communication with language, the operation of which in a society establishes and maintains the Standard (Silverstein 1996, 285–286).

Much scholarship has been done on the nature of the language standardization process and the reason why it especially correlates to institutional efforts and ideological hegemony. The arguments can roughly be divided into the following three types:

Firstly, standardization is considered to be the extreme of the natural development, and a concrete institutional form, of the denotational optimization. This is a process in which a wider and wider circle of people look for a common agreement of the meaning of words for the sake of, presumably, economical and political convenience (Silverstein 1996, 287–288). There are some contrary situations, however. For example, multilingualism is an integral part of India's national identity and a daily fact of life for many of its residents. (Ahearn 2012, 127) In these multilingual societies, a shift from one language to another usually implies moral judgments and social hierarchies which also index supremacy of dominant/standard official languages (Hill 1995).

Secondly, a standard language refers to a ‘positive locality’ of most communities. Increasingly, for populations of people, locality is and must be precipitated as a positive dimension of cultural being; for each person, it is an identity-relevant dimension of belonging to a particular group that otherwise can be defined only residually or negatively (Appadurai 1996).

Language communities, relatively speaking, are ‘local’ when they are perduringly bounded through cultural means in relation to sociopolitical processes on a global scale (Silverstein 1998, 403).

Language is a powerful index of belonging and locality, and through standardization it achieves this indexical function. Members of a language community

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are expected to take the ‘purism’ of language not as a natural state, but as a means to maintain the created locality in the process of globalization.

Thirdly, within the state or region where it is officially dominant, a standard language claims another source of authority: the universality that comes from supposedly being the property of all citizens, unbiased because it is no one’s in particular, and hence represents a socially neutral, supposedly anonymous voice (Gal 2006, 166). A great deal of contradictions appear when we look into the actual situations of asylum seekers and immigrants in Europe ( Blommaert 2009). This argument can also lead to the discussion of public sphere:

The ubiquity of standard ideology also hides from researchers and elites the emergence of a particular kind of public, a set of cross-linguistic channels for political debates (Gal 2006, 177).

There is another intriguing factor which vaguely promotes the language standardization process: the continuous and increasing concerns on public sphere. After World War II, the elite philosophers and public intellectuals around the world had deep retrospections on the approaches to real democracy. Jürgen Habermas’ recuperation of the concept from English, French and German intellectual debates of the last three centuries provided the impetus to think about rational deliberation as a mode of democratic politics.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor (Habermas 1989, 27).

Habermas considered that the existence and mechanism of public sphere have great influences on modern democratic institution. Inspired by Habermas’ work, linguistic anthropologists endeavor to discuss why and how ‘public’ is constructed through flowing of discourses, which they consider to be the ‘complex event of encountering and interacting with another's word’(Bakhtin 1986, 144). The mechanism of exchanging messages in public sphere also implies feasible

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mutual-understanding of linguistic norms. A vivid example lies in debates on EU democracy process. The effect of standard language ideology is evident in the recurrent debates about Europe's ‘democratic deficit’. Most scholars and political literati agree that a major impediment to democratic governance in the European Union is the lack of a public sphere, made impossible by the lack of a single common language in which issues could be generally discussed (Gal 2006, 175). From this aspect one could see the power of ideologically constructed public and its influence on standard ideology.

The discussion of language right also relates to an understanding of language diversity and endangerment. Linguistic anthropologists have investigated several discourses relating to this topic, such as enumerations of endangered languages, regarding endangered languages as a fading treasure universally owned by all mankind, and equaling endangered languages to incredibly beautiful structure of human mind which is under threat of disappearance(Moore 2006). However, they point out that these are largely illusions: firstly, the census of minority languages implies a process of documentation and refers to standardized criteria, which may not be legitimate according to the intellectual judgments of the actual speakers; secondly, if the beauty of the language derives from its embodiment of diverse structures of human mind, the diversity does not necessarily come from special grammar components which are often emphasized by documenters. The essence of a language always remains in its actual use and the social life where it is enlivened by speakers; and thirdly, speakers of the minority languages in most situations consider the languages their own properties specific to their identity and history, which are certainly not a common wealth of mankind (Hill 2002, 2002).

The public literature summons its readers to an encounter with these languages as monuments in a sculpture garden of human cognitive achievements, objects of wonder and appreciation…these disappearing linguistic structures, once ‘objectualized’ – e.g., by being written – bear all the hallmarks of the Sublime in the European imagination (Moore 2006, 297).

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Specifically referring to the European origin of objectifying languages and other documented social phenomena, Robert Moore cited historians’ work on the medieval origin of the contrasts between ‘Wonder’ and ‘Imitation’.

‘Medieval theorists’, writes Bynum, ‘understood wonder (admiratio) as cognitive, non-appropriative, perspectival, and particular’ (Bynum, 2001, p.39); imitation, which for many medieval authors formed a contrast with admiration, centrally involves a stance of appropriative mimesis (imitatio). Imitation seeks to unite the subject and the object on the basis, perhaps, of shared essences (a state of consubstantiality achieved, perhaps, through ritual practice) (Moore 2006, 299).

Robert Moore compares most people’s understanding of endangered languages to the medieval ‘wonder’ which is both ‘awe-inspiring’ and cannot be substantially reached through actual practices. Thinking in this way also implies that speakers do not have the capacity, firstly, of stabilizing their language through ritual or everyday practices; and secondly, of constructing their own mode to maintain language through historical and current communications with outsiders and struggles with natural forces (Moore 2006, 302). Both implications are belied by reality.