Seems like a long shot: Tatar Youth Group Seek Official-Language Status in Russia (via Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty).
I wish them the best. Language is a very political thing.
Posts Tagged ‘language’
Decolonising the Mind
April 13th, 2009 by Emily
As I mentioned on Twitter, I just read Ngugi* Wa Thiong’o's Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. I really need more time to digest it (and read more of his work), but I’m extremely glad I read it, and I feel I learned something important from it. I love how he explored the connections between languages, imperialism, literature, and liberation, as well as his accounts of his own experiences and his decision to move from writing in English to writing in Gikuyu, his native language. I’ll probably have more to say about this later, but for now a quote from page 29:
We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spencer, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of human creative endeavors.
My native language is English, a language that’s just exploding with quality (and non-quality) literature. But this quote – and the whole book – helped me understand the importance of writers using in native/minority/indigenous/endangered languages. It’s not for the readership – obviously English would make a work accessible to more readers – but it’s for the country, the community, the people who speak the language.
*Sorry, there should be marks over the vowels here and in Giyuku, but I can’t get them working right on WordPress.
Limits of Language: A Very Fun Book
February 11th, 2009 by Emily
I just noticed a shiny new book – Mikael Parkvall’s Limits of Language – sitting on a professor’s desk and asked if I could borrow it. Bad habit, I know. But he should know by now to hide interesting books before our meetings.
I’ve been flipping through it for the last half hour, reading bits here and there. And it is, as I say in the post title, a Very Fun Book. It’s full of all sorts of random facts and trivia about language, languages, and linguists. It has a Linguist’s Calendar, a (very funny) Linguists’ Guide to the Galaxy, and chapters on everything from written language to language change to tense, mood, and aspect. It’s not a book to be read cover to cover, but a book to be sampled, read at random, jumped around within. I wish I’d had this book when I was teaching Linguistics 102; it would have been a good supplement to our rather dull course reader.
