Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

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Cainntear
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jan 28, 2018 10:58 am

My understanding is that Basque is in a similar situation, although there are more true, unbroken-line-of-descent native speakers than of Hawai'ian.

Basque has been hit by a double-whammy. First of all, there was the conscious standardisation efforts of "Euskera Batua" which alienated the local dialects significantly, then there was the issue of non-native teachers unconsciously introducing Spanishisms in immersive classrooms (the majority of children in the Spanish part of the Basque Country get primary education through Basque now, and the a significant portion of Basque-medium education is delivered by non-natives).

Things are pretty disfunctional in Brittany, and along similar lines. The language was "standardised" for easier teaching (shudder) in the Diwan schools and mostly taught in immersive settings by non-natives.

The justifications mentioned (and demolished) in the paper on Hawai'ian hold here too, but there's something particularly insidious about these arguments: they devalue and alienate the remaining native speakers, making them less likely to engage with the learner community (who's going to subject themselves to being told that they have to say "good morrow to you sir" and "how do you do?" because their actual natural language isn't suitable for teaching learners of their language?). The "neo" teachers then use that reluctance of natives to get involved to justify their chosen course of action, ignoring that it's their actions that have alienated the natives to begin with, and the natives get further and further alienated.

And if you question the approach at all, they say "but someone must save the language!!"... erm... why? Why must a language be saved? For me, the best reason it respect for its speakers. Alienating the natives and creating a new language serves no real purpose.
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Sun Jan 28, 2018 2:23 pm

Cainntear wrote:Basque has been hit by a double-whammy. First of all, there was the conscious standardisation efforts of "Euskera Batua" which alienated the local dialects significantly, then there was the issue of non-native teachers unconsciously introducing Spanishisms in immersive classrooms (the majority of children in the Spanish part of the Basque Country get primary education through Basque now, and the a significant portion of Basque-medium education is delivered by non-natives).


If there was alienation of the local dialects, it happened before the standardisation of euskara batua. The dialects were under extreme pressure by Spanish and French.

What happens now is that the new generations who grew up in families that did not speak Basque at all are learning euskara batua as their native language. The situation of the dialects is peculiar, and as far as I can tell, they are not under immediate threat from the standard language. Spanish and French are still the main enemies of Basque. Euskara batua, if it is indeed an 'enemy', is less of an enemy. A standardised language was, as far as I can see, the only way to unify all of the speakers, with the glorious results we see now. We could argue about whether that was done in the best way possible, but the necessity of a standard language is without question, I think.

What needs to happen and what many Basque speakers already know is that Basque speakers should ideally be bidialectical . They should speak their natural dialect as well as the standard. It would be even better for the dialects to gain a hold on the new speakers of Basque, convert them into speakers of the natural dialects. Introducing non standard dialects into schools would be a good way to do this, I actually think it's done in some regions.

Here are what some Basque speakers I asked about dialects said. The first one is a Basque speaker from the French side of the Basque Country, the second is from the Spanish side:

No existe una forma pura de euskAra batua. La frontera entre el dialectal y el estandar es muy floja en euskAra.

Todos los euskaldun (bascoparlantes) que lo han aprendido en casa en territorios donde se habla una forma dialectal del euskara hablan euskara batua con FUERTES rasgos de dialecto.

Hasta en medio urbano en ciudades como Bilbo,Donosti, Irunea, Baiona... la influencia del dialecto es mas que notable.

Por ejemplo en Bilbo,Bizkaia podras oir gente diciendo "nax" en vez de "naiz", "dot" en vez de "dut", "barri" en vez de "berri" cuando hablan en estandar batua erregular de toda la vida.

Todos hablamos una forma de euskara batua adaptada a la provincia, al contexto.

Yo hablo euskara de multiples modos : un modo de dialecto puro paisano Labortano de la cuesta ULTRA-local con la familia, con la gente de mi puebloo de los los pueblos vecinos imediatos, un modo Batua estandar Labortano-BaxeNabar con gente del Baztan, interior de Lapurdi,BaxeNabartar, Xiberotar...
y finalmente un modo «hegoaldeko ez-jakinentzat», o sea, modo imitativo del euskara «batua» a la Gipuzkoana.

El euskara de mi familia + el de mi pueblo + el de mi provincia + estandar interprovincial = Euskara «batua»

El euskara batua dado en Baiona no es el mismo que el de Donibane Garazi o Donibane Lohitzune o Gasteiz.

Hoy en dia los euskalki (dialectos) estan en MUY buena salud pero es inevitable que retrocederan poco a poco con las nuevas generaciones por la educacion, los medios de comunicacion ...

Sí que hay dialectos desaparecidos, como el Erronkariera (Roncalés) cuya última hablante murió en los 90.

Según la wikipedia https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euskalki#Galduak hay otros Euskalkis que han desaparecido.

El de la transmisión de padres a hijos es un tanto peculiar. En los casos que conozco de niños que se han trasladado de pueblo siendo pequeños, llegan hablando el euskalki de su pueblo de origen pero adoptan el euskalki del pueblo nuevo en relativamente poco tiempo, y siguen hablando el euskalki original con su familia y amigos del pueblo original. Tengo amigos que desde pequeño veraneaban el mi pueblo desde pequeños y que hablaban el euskalki de mi pueblo cuando hablaban con nosotros, pero el otro el resto del tiempo. Otros que se fueron de mi pueblo siendo pequeños a otros pueblos vascos ya hablan en el euskera de su nuevo pueblo.

También tengo una amiga que habla en batua porque aunque sus padres sean de Azpeitia ella nació en Bilbao y en su escuela hablaban en batua.

Una vez adultos depende de la persona, conozco gente que mantiene su euskalki tal y como lo tenía después de haberse mudado, otros que tienen su euskalki original pero "más abierto" o parecido al euskalki del sitio de donde están o gente que casi adopta el euskalki del lugar si hablan con gente del lugar.

No soy sociologo ni lingüista, no se si mi experiencia es extrapolable, pero yo creo que aunque el euskera se transmita de padres a hijos, lo que determinará en qué euskalki hablará la persona depende de lo que hablen los de su entorno.
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Cainntear
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jan 28, 2018 3:37 pm

nooj wrote:If there was alienation of the local dialects, it happened before the standardisation of euskara batua. The dialects were under extreme pressure by Spanish and French.

The one is not exclusive of the other. Every language than has needed an active revival was being alienated before the revival. The question is whether the revival supports the existing speaker communities or further alienates them. For example, the revival of Irish involved a unified spelling system invented by non-natives who couldn't actually hear the subtleties of Irish pronunciation and got rid of "silent letters" that did indicate genuine pronunciation features in at least some of the dialects.

What happens now is that the new generations who grew up in families that did not speak Basque at all are learning euskara batua as their native language. The situation of the dialects is peculiar, and as far as I can tell, they are not under immediate threat from the standard language. Spanish and French are still the main enemies of Basque. Euskara batua, if it is indeed an 'enemy', is less of an enemy. A standardised language was, as far as I can see, the only way to unify all of the speakers, with the glorious results we see now. We could argue about whether that was done in the best way possible, but the necessity of a standard language is without question, I think.

Nope. There are plenty of people who actively reject the idea that a "standard language" is a good idea. Scottish Gaelic was quite late in getting any "official" standardisation, and that was only a standardisation of orthography -- there was no attempt to mandate the teaching of any other elements of the language in a standardised way. There is no standard form of "thinking" for example, which can be "smaointinn", "smaoineachadh", "smaoineachainn" or even "smaoineachdainn", depending on where you go, but whichever one of them you use, you should spell it like one of the four in an exam.

Gaelic speakers have learned to understand each other's dialects through exposure, whether face-to-face or via the media.

Hell, look at the common argument about language vs dialect -- "I can understand it, so it's not a different language."

We see that with Scots vs English, Scottish Gaelic vs Irish and Catalan vs Spanish. But the people saying this have learned to understand through exposure (no-one appears from the West Country and understands an Aberdonian on day one) and the same is even true of agreed "different languages" like Italian and Spanish -- people can learn to understand each other without speaking the same language.

While Basque has fairly marked regional differences, it would be easier than many people think for different dialect speakers to learn each other.


Besides, when it comes down to the non-heritage speakers, the "standard" is often an excuse to ignore real language, particularly in phrases and manners of speech (as in the Hawai'ian cute/ugly baby thing). I have heard heritage speakers say that to understand kids coming out of Basque medium, they had to translate everything to Spanish in their heads word-for-word; there is a tendency for many non-heritage speakers to speak with Spanish idiom using Basque grammar and vocabulary, whereas true bilingual heritage speakers have almost completely independent systems for each language.
Even as a non-native speaker of Scottish Gaelic, I've had the same issue -- many other learners (including children put through immersive Gaelic-medium education in primary school) use idiom and phrasing which is calqued straight in from English and I've had to translate the words to English in my head to understand.

No existe una forma pura de euskAra batua. La frontera entre el dialectal y el estandar es muy floja en euskAra.

If the capital As were added by you to correct me, you needn't have bothered. Euskera and euskara are both accepted forms both in Spanish and in Basque (the second source you quoted uses euskEra) due to dialectal differences. I didn't learn more than a few words when I was living in Gipuzkoa, but I always pronounced it as "euskera" so that's the way I write it. I don't know the whys, wheres and whos of how I learned it that way, but given my ideological stance on standardisation vs dialects, I accept either as correct, and use the one I learned unapologetically.
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Mon Jan 29, 2018 6:25 am

Cainntear wrote:The one is not exclusive of the other. Every language than has needed an active revival was being alienated before the revival. The question is whether the revival supports the existing speaker communities or further alienates them.
Does the Basque language revival alienate the existing speaker communities of Basque? Alienation in what sense?
Cainntear wrote:Nope. There are plenty of people who actively reject the idea that a "standard language" is a good idea. Scottish Gaelic was quite late in getting any "official" standardisation, and that was only a standardisation of orthography -- there was no attempt to mandate the teaching of any other elements of the language in a standardised way. There is no standard form of "thinking" for example, which can be "smaointinn", "smaoineachadh", "smaoineachainn" or even "smaoineachdainn", depending on where you go, but whichever one of them you use, you should spell it like one of the four in an exam.


A standard language was attempted ever since Basque first started to be written down, first regional standards and then interregional standards, which euskara batua is. The Navarro/Labourdin standard dialect is a standard, had (has) great popularity and was created by Basque speakers: what makes it any different from euskara batua? Let me point out that these regional standards still exist and have not been annihilated by euskara batua, the Basque language is composed of the various natural dialects, the new euskara batua dialect, the regional standard dialects.

Euskara batua was created by native speakers of Basque and luckily for Basque it was done at a late state enough for it not to be too infected by romanticist nonsense (like Sabino Arani), but by proper linguists, most notably by Koldo Mitxelena. In the beginning there were serious discussions to simply base the standard on one regional standard (Guipuzkoa, the most prestigious at the time in the southern provinces), but euskara batua ended up being a mix of central regional standard dialects with contributions from other regionals standards. and if you fear it being too artificial, one of the most common criticisms of euskara batua is precisely that it is too Guipuzkoan.

Let me state this again: euskara batua is a combination of OTHER standards.

Cainntear wrote:While Basque has fairly marked regional differences, it would be easier than many people think for different dialect speakers to learn each other.
A standard language isn't just a lingua franca meant for interdialectical communication, it is the language that one uses in education, government, media etc. In fact, as far as I can tell, the Basque Language Academy never even envisaged the use of euskara batua as a spoken language, it was meant to be a written standard like every other standard before it, hence why it focused on standardising verb morphology, but left the phonology, intonation, stress (of which there is a dizzying variety) undefined, to be used as Basque speakers saw fit according to their native dialects. I still don't think they've touched on that in their latest grammars.

There are no Basque speakers, not old, not young, that I have talked to or have read about, who deny that there was a need for a standard. Indeed, the cry for a standard came from Basque people themselves in an urban setting, who wanted a language they could use there to fit in all aspects of daily life in heavily urbanised areas.

If we're going to talk about alienation, then prohibiting Basque people from creating a standard language because you yourself like the idea of no standard at all, well, that brings to mind serious issues, like: who are you to say that, as an outsider?

Furthermore, and this is what King is going on about, rural people who saved their language could not save their language beyond their home. It was materially impossible for them to do so. We have over several thousand years of history where the Basque language has undergone relentless retreat and by the 16th century already, Basque was on its way of disappearing from many provinces. By the time of the Francoist dictatorship, what exactly do you think the rural people who held the natural dialects could do to reverse this plunge? In the post-Franco era, what exactly do you think these rural people could have done to spread Basque language to all Basque people?

Why was it young, urban people who spearheaded the revitalisation? They were the only ones with the material wealth, the sheer numbers and political weight to do it, and the facts prove that their decision was the right one. If euskara batua had never been created, I have absolutely no doubt that the introduction of Basque as a medium of education in schools, in the media, in the universities, in the government, in the sciences etc, as a language of literature, would be FAR behind what it is now, and the language would be in far more peril than the already tenuous situation it is in now.

Not because the natural dialects couldn't do the job as well as euskara batua, because all linguistic varieties can end up doing anything, but because the speakers who wanted to use euskara batua were the ones who are socio-economically well placed to actually do it.

Here is the bare bones fact: we have more speakers now. There is actually speaker population growth. That has not happened in decades, if not centuries. By any measure, that is a good thing, even if Basque children coming from non-Basque speaking families end up being monodialectical.

In this respect, King is fundamentally correct. That does not mean that there cannot be a better rapprochement between urban and rural speakers and indeed this is what must be done. I already said that language activists need to work in close collaboration with the native speakers of the dialects. But that is debating about the HOW, not the what.

Finally, euskara batua in no way impedes the learning of the dialects. In fact, the Basque Language Academy carries out linguistic work on the dialects themselves, and they have publicly stated that the point is that euskara batua is complementary to the natural dialects, not a superior version, not meant to replace it. We see that in the anecdotes I posted, which is where native speakers of dialects end up learning both, and even their 'euskara batua' is heavily influenced by their substrate. Euskara batua doesn't actually exist in real life, beyond the new generations who have no family model to follow, and the media.

I have already state that even if euskara batua does not impede the learning of the dialects, it does not encourage it either, and so I said the Basques should put more emphasis on that aspect. Let me reiterate, the natural dialects of Basque are under far more threat from Spanish or French than by the standard dialect. Rail against the standard dialect if you want, it is the bulwark against the Spanish and French languages.

And I'll repeat for the millionth time: a standard dialect does not need to threaten the natural dialects. I will always be a supporter of a standard dialect done RIGHT.

Cainntear wrote:Besides, when it comes down to the non-heritage speakers, the "standard" is often an excuse to ignore real language, particularly in phrases and manners of speech (as in the Hawai'ian cute/ugly baby thing). I have heard heritage speakers say that to understand kids coming out of Basque medium, they had to translate everything to Spanish in their heads word-for-word; there is a tendency for many non-heritage speakers to speak with Spanish idiom using Basque grammar and vocabulary, whereas true bilingual heritage speakers have almost completely independent systems for each language.


Now that is a ridiculous argument.

The fact that language immersion in school is not always the one shot wonder tool is obvious. It is extremely difficult to extirpate the L1 from its influence in L2, but if you have looked at the prescriptive euskara batua as set out in grammars and textbooks, it does not allow for Spanish-lite with Basque words. Thus, if you have witnessed Spanish with Basque words, it is not a failure of euskara batua but a failure of language teaching or language learning, and the SAME THING would have occurred if a natural dialect had been used as a means of language immersion.

I certainly hope you would not say that the standard French dialect is worthless because English learners in the USA often show deep influences from English in their French.

Yes, of course a native speaker is infinitely more skilled and apt with their language than a non native speaker. This is a truism. Should non native speakers not try to learn the language? You do realise that if a Spanish speaker tries to learn an euskalkia, they will also botch that up, and interpret/produce everything through the prism of their L1? Is that a fault of the natural dialect, or is that a 'fault' of the language learner?

The solution is not to not teach language, ever, the solution is to improve language teaching.

I personally have had the exact opposite reaction, Basque native speakers telling me that the youth speak 'perfectly' but that they don't use it. Which is the problem.

Another point I want to argue about is that you seem to have a far too rosy view of native speakers as the keepers of 'real' language, but this idea of the rural, isolated speakers as the repositories of the real language has been seriously criticised in linguistic literature. And a priori it simply doesn't hold: often it is the urban speakers who are the most puristic, excessively so (Sabino again was the worst case of this).

If the capital As were added by you to correct me, you needn't have bothered. Euskera and euskara are both accepted forms both in Spanish and in Basque (the second source you quoted uses euskEra) due to dialectal differences. I didn't learn more than a few words when I was living in Gipuzkoa, but I always pronounced it as "euskera" so that's the way I write it. I don't know the whys, wheres and whos of how I learned it that way, but given my ideological stance on standardisation vs dialects, I accept either as correct, and use the one I learned unapologetically.


No, it was added by the native speaker to correct ME. I wrote euskera, as I wrote the comment in Spanish.

It did cross my mind that you might think I was correcting you, but I was not willing to edit another person's post and replace the capital A with a lower case a, without their permission, so I hoped you would not get offended. Too bad, because you did get offended.
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jan 29, 2018 12:40 pm

It just occurred to me that Yiddish might also be in a similar situation, in that there does appear to be a strong divide between the activists trying to keep it alive as a vehicle of secular Ashkenazic culture and the Orthodox communities where intergenerational transmission remains unbroken. Unfortunately I don't know enough about Yiddish yet to comment on any non-native influences on the language used by the former, but I do recall reading about the concerns expressed about Standard Yiddish as codified by YIVO being so heavily based on the Lithuanian dialect, which is spoken natively by only a minority of the Hasidic communities, not to mention the different approaches to borrowing and coining new words. One grammatical difference I'm aware of is that native speakers tend to only use one definite article די (di), whereas Standard Yiddish retains a system of gendered and declinable definite articles only marginally simpler than that of Standard German. Not sure if external influences have anything to do with that.

Forverts, a prominent publication associated with the secular Yiddish-speaking community, has actually attempted to bridge the divide by hosting a dedicated blog for and by the Hasidim named Yiddish with an Aleph (called so because Orthodox writers tend to spell the name of the language as אידיש with an aleph, rather than the YIVO standard ייִדיש with a yud).
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Fri Apr 20, 2018 4:04 am

I was reminded of the euskalki issue watching this video.

http://www.eitb.eus/es/noticias/socieda ... -ondarroa/

Immigrants end up learning the Bizkayan dialect naturally in a town where the people speak the dialect. And they do it very, very well.
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Tue Jul 17, 2018 6:53 am

I keep saying this to speakers of regional languages in France who sometimes (rightfully so) are worried about mass immigration into their region. With the bleeding of rural areas due to youth flight (rural areas are very poorly served by services which are systematically underfunded, cancelled) and the moving in of rich people who snap up property and raise prices, driving out young people even further, you see massive socio-economic changes. The very fabric of society that once held the language is being torn apart, making any revitalisation of the language impossible. This is why in Corsica, the Corsican nationalists in power are pushing hard against property speculation by trying to mandate that you need to reside at least 5 years on the island before buying up property.

Paris sees this as discriminatory and flatly rejects it. Any revitalisation of the language must pass through resocialisation of the language and that involves broad control over your finances and politics, otherwise you'll have what you see now with a couple of immersion schools of Breton, Basque or Hawaiian in an ocean of French or Spanish or English where speakers of these languages hold all the cards. This is also why I'm very gloomy about the survival of Gascon or Limousin or Gallo in France, following my interactions with native speakers of these languages, yes there are still thousands of native speakers left but they are almost all elderly and over the age of 65 and they have absolutely no ability to change anything. No one pays attention to them. What political party will champion their cause?

It's super isolating and depressing for them. The most they can do is to transmit the language (which most of them have not done) and even if they try, it is INCREDIBLY hard to do so in an environment where literally everything is in French. Parents trying to raise their children in their languages in foreign countries already know how difficult it is, and succeeding is an uphill battle for them, but to do so for a highly endagered language that the rest of society at best ignores is a superhuman, herculean task.

Some people react as best you can expect, by seeing the immigrants as the enemy. I explain to them that immigrants everywhere learn the language that they find of use. If the natives themselves don't valorise the language and use it, why would the immigrants?

Anyway, to emphasise what I said about the complementarity of the standard dialect and the natural dialects, I invite people to look at the Corsican language. Corsican sociolinguists were the ones to have the reasoned and fantastic idea of a pluricentric language. NO Corsican dialect is considered better than the other, all regions are considered the 'centre' and all dialects are taught in their respective regions.

Unfortunately Corsican linguists and activists themselves are unsure the language will survive, they're at a severe tipping point where intergenerational transmission has practically ceased, schools are the only environment where the language is taught in drips and drabs. Last I heard they got the funding for training up to 700 teachers in order to push it as far as it can be pushed.

The Basque country follows a different model, where there is a standard dialect, but the natural dialects are valued at the same time, because the natural Basque is the only one that is transmitted from parent to children. The standard dialect is only taught in schools and used in the media. The project Ahotsak (available online for all to view) is a brilliant example of collecting dialectal information for the usage of people.

Btw Yiddish is an interesting case. Once one of the most widely spoken European languages, the Holocaust murdered not only the speakers but also the socioeconomic life in Jewish towns and quarters of cities. It didn't matter that there were still millions of speakers left alive in postwar Europe when the socio-economic carpet of Yiddish civilisation was ripped away underneath them. When and how were they going to speak it again? And then Israel and Hebrew provided a competing, much more attractive model...

Die-hard Yiddishists scattered across the world can't recreate a speaker community. Hasidic communities can, but in general don't care about Yiddishkeit and secular Yiddish culture...
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby kulaputra » Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:25 pm

nooj wrote:
I've said this before on reddit. You should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER let your language die in the first place. The Hawaiians were dealt an awful deal (see the Wikipedia entry for the sad history of Hawai'i), but even so, it was ultimately the parent's responsibility to teach the language to their children. Unfortunately they thought they were doing something good for their children in raising them as monolinguals, but they were wrong.


How are the Hawaiians to blame if Sanford Dole and Uncle Sam decided Haiwaii was better suited for the cultivation of pineapples then of indigenous cultures and languages? Should the Irish have stayed on their island and spoke Irish to their starving children, instead of fleeing from a (manmade) famine?

Thessaloniki, Greece used to be a majority Ladino speaking city. Anyone wanna guess why there are less then 100,000 Ladino speakers alive today in the entire world, basically none of them in Thessaloniki? What about Yiddish? Eastern Europe once had many Yiddish majority settlements. Can we analyze this as merely a case of parents not speaking to their children?

With respect, your comment represents an attitude that is best naive and at worst straight up colonialist. Generally language communities do not abandon/lose languages for shits and giggles. Sometimes they do so due to natural disasters. In the last 500 years, especially, they do so due to immense violence often including straight up genocide.
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Tue Jul 17, 2018 2:47 pm

kulaputra wrote:
How are the Hawaiians to blame if Sanford Dole and Uncle Sam decided Haiwaii was better suited for the cultivation of pineapples then of indigenous cultures and languages? Should the Irish have stayed on their island and spoke Irish to their starving children, instead of fleeing from a (manmade) famine?

Thessaloniki, Greece used to be a majority Ladino speaking city. Anyone wanna guess why there are less then 100,000 Ladino speakers alive today in the entire world, basically none of them in Thessaloniki? What about Yiddish? Eastern Europe once had many Yiddish majority settlements. Can we analyze this as merely a case of parents not speaking to their children?

With respect, your comment represents an attitude that is best naive and at worst straight up colonialist. Generally language communities do not abandon/lose languages for shits and giggles. Sometimes they do so due to natural disasters. In the last 500 years, especially, they do so due to immense violence often including straight up genocide.


Save me your misplaced outrage, if you've read any of my previous posts, you know I am a opponent of imperialist, colonialist languages like English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese etc and the states behind them. Do we need to have a contest of 'I am more opposed to linguistic imperialism'? I'm sure I'd win.

Hawaiians were actually far more literate in their language than Americans were in English, at a certain stage, that is, before the Americans annexed Hawai'i and persecuted the Hawaiian language. So obviously, we can point to the political reasons behind the loss of the Hawaiian language, because I know of no group of people who voluntarily, in good conditions (e.g. not under duress) gives up their language en masse in the span of a couple of generations.

But persecution, unless it is straight out genocide (read my previous posts on how the British acted towards the peoples of my country), can take many forms, and psychic violence is just as important as physical violence. Parents are to blame for not transmitting their language, in the sense that they accept and regurgitate the same linguistic ideology that they are brainwashed into.

I've heard uncountable accounts from kids (now adults), who relate how their parents refused to teach them the language, because 'it's a useless language, it won't be good for anything'. Certainly they are victims, but brainwashed victims can also be powerful perpetuators of the abuse. Taking the example of France, the best agents that the monolingual state ever had was native speakers of their languages who were convinced that their languages were worth nothing.

If you don't believe me, read actual members from minority language communities. I can cite you Breton language activists who believe in a 'psychic shock' that turned a language community of over a million strong at the start of the century into 150,000 something now. Their argument is that Bretons became convinced and convinced themselves that their language was worth nothing.

Part of language revitalisation must also involve psychological healing and fortification.
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nooj
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Re: Tutu's Hawaiian and the Emergence of a Neo-Hawaiian Language

Postby nooj » Tue Jul 17, 2018 3:11 pm

Have a listen to Rozenn Milin from 3:30 onwards:

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