 Hello, welcome to the Sawas podcast. Each episode we'll be discussing the latest in economics, politics and culture. I'm Isabel Edwards and today I'm talking to Professor Friederika Lubke and we're asking, are all languages created equal? So this discussion was sort of inspired by the fact that this year is the UNESCO year of Indigenous languages. Why do you think that we need to think about Indigenous languages differently from other languages? Well, the clue is really in the notion of Indigenous languages themselves because Indigenous languages only make sense when you think of languages fought in relation to colonial languages or more powerful languages. And so that means there are languages that are not equal because the people do not have equal rights and that goes way beyond language. So because it actually is related to the notion of Indigenous peoples which again you become an Indigenous when you're colonised because otherwise you would just be the completely unremarkable dweller of a place that you call your own. So we're talking about colonisation, imperialism, we're talking about genocide, we're talking about oppression and inequality and that has had an impact on all aspects of Indigenous peoples lives but of course also on their languages. And so in contexts where the impact of colonialism is really felt till today, Indigenous languages are the most marginalised and indeed not equal. And do you think it's the fact that there's this perception from what's been enforced on them that they're almost a secondary language, it almost seems that if there's an area that's been colonised then... They are erased actually. If you look at the US, they're attempts to make English the official language of the country completely erasing the Indigenous history of the United States. If you look at Brazil, Brazil is known as a Lusophone, a Portuguese speaking country that completely erases the fact that there are hundreds of Indigenous languages spoken by people who are still there. They still speak their languages. And the recent policy of Bolsonaro is one to completely annihilate the rights of these people and tell them you live in present-day Brazil, you need to assimilate. And do you think there's almost, I don't know if it's almost a fear of that unknown, that it's almost like if you have a language that we don't understand, you have a sort of power that isn't there, is that linked to it at all as well do you think? I think fear is very much linked to monolingualism. Yes, so monolingual people have a fear of other languages because they cannot control them, they cannot understand them. But this is also related to fears that go beyond language actually, that go, that actually are related to the fact that these languages and these, the groups that speak them, they are related to land, Indigenous land. And if we look at how Indigenous languages came to be endangered in the context where they are endangered, and we see that this is not just caused by language policies, although they play a big role. But it's also fundamentally caused by land grab, by resettling people into reservations, so completely destroying the language ecologies that have developed over time there, and by actually turning them then into speakers of one Indigenous language that can be pitched against the colonial language. And how do you think that affects your experience? If you are somebody that speaks one of these languages and you're in an environment where there is another language that is more widespread or that has that more prestige with it, what do you think that's like as a speaker of those languages? Well there's ample research that shows that speakers of Indigenous languages in these mainly colonial settlement colony settings are affected by mental health problems, depression. They have problems to participate in wider society, in economic life, because the stakes are set up against them. And of course they also suffer from their languages being completely devalorized and not being taught, not being respected, even as a language. Very often we find very pejorative terms, you know, this gibberish, these dialects, people are prevented from speaking these languages at school. That's a recurrent experience that speakers of Indigenous languages make. And on the other hand, then very often they are told you have to speak this language and you have to, you know, preserve this language for humankind. So it's very contradictory what speakers of Indigenous languages are being asked to do. Yeah, and I think we probably, I think in the UK especially there's this quite small minded view of the value of languages and I think often we tend to think of it in terms of that like usefulness, like is it going to be useful to you in business or how many people speak the language and it's almost like the more people that speak it, the more valuable we see this language as being. But I think probably, like you say, it's about having that connection to your roots and it's for humankind almost that we need to preserve these languages. Well, I'd like to get back to that a little bit later. So talking about usefulness and the UK attitude to languages, you can't even say that it's an attitude that is driven by, you know, the perceived usefulness of languages. I just think that in the UK this kind of monolingual fear of languages is extremely pronounced. If we were talking about usefulness, you know, 75% of the world's population doesn't speak English. If it was about economic usefulness and instrumentality of language, then every primary school child in the UK should learn Mandarin. That doesn't happen. What we have seen is, particularly over the last decade, 50% decline in the uptake of languages at school. So although primary school children are now learning languages in primary schools, this is completely under resourced, but in secondary schools, despite the introduction of the eBag, which was actually meant to correct this trend by allowing students to take a language up to the baccalaureate, students can only take one language. They don't need to take a GCSE in a language. Yesterday I talked to a secondary school teacher who is now becoming aware of the beauty of being multilingual. And she said, you know, I feel so terrible. I just completely messed up my friend in my GCSEs because I didn't take languages seriously. I really thought, what's that for? And I see my own students are not taking languages seriously. That is really striking because I think it's also related to a particular worldview of fear. So on the one hand, it entails, of course, linguistic insecurities when you speak with speakers of other languages. And you often hear British people say, oh, I'm rubbish at languages. Brits are just rubbish at languages. So that's a sad state of affairs, don't you think? I mean, that must be painful. And from that pain, then comes this fear, you know, fear of languages. Oh my God, we cannot speak these languages. And then what happens then when you are actually a multilingual country with the colonial history, you know, that brought you in contact abroad, actually, you know, people from your former colonies on to British soil. So there's a lot of linguistic conflict going on here. But I wanted to go back to Indigenous languages and the question whether we need to preserve them all. And I really want to emphasize something that this picture of endangerment and loss is not a universal picture. So we find many Indigenous languages that are endangered. And as I said, that's particularly in former settlement colonies, so North America, Australia, parts of South America, and of course, European countries, where you have actually eradicated Indigenous languages through Indigenous internal colonization or nation-state formation. You know, the UK has its own Indigenous languages, Cornish, Welsh, Greek, etc. But there are other settings that have not been colonized by settlers who actually went and lived there. And so these contexts comprise most of Africa, much of South America, Melanesia. And there we find actually much more vital language equalities. Of course, the colonial languages play an important role because in most countries they are the only official languages and they are the only languages taught in the former school system. But in the shadow of these language policies, there is still a lot of linguistic diversity alive and going on. And so it's really interesting to look at these settings as well when we talk about Indigenous languages. I think it's interesting that there's even that difference within that bracket of Indigenous languages. I think a lot of people kind of, it's like you say it's almost this idea that they're a less sophisticated language or that they're dialects and they're not the true language of the country. I think actually I'm sure that in all the research you've done in this area, you've seen that there's much more to these languages than an outsider might perceive. Yes. So from a linguistic point of view, these languages are fully fledged languages in all aspects. So they are completely able to express anything you would want to express. They have very often extremely complex grammatical structures. They some have complex tonal systems. So there is no way in which these languages are inferior. What many of them don't have is a written standard tradition. And I think that is one of the main reasons why people, including speakers of these languages themselves, see them as interior. Because we have this idea hammered into our heads that a language is a language with a dictionary and a grammar. A language can be written only in a particular way in a standard writing system. And this idea is of course related to the creation of nation-states. What happened in the wake of the creation of nation-states was that the linguistic variation of dialects and variable ways of speaking was erased and standard varieties of languages were created that then everybody was taught in schools. And of course, this ideology was exported in the wake of colonization to other areas. So that now very often speakers of indigenous languages see the only root towards being recognized as like in standardization. And that is actually very sad because very often you have languages that are spoken by small numbers of speakers, actually the higher linguistic diversity in an area. So the more languages you have, the smaller the numbers of speakers are. And so imagine if you have a language that has perhaps 500 speakers, perhaps a thousand speakers, and that then sees that it has to write the language and create a standard writing system. Now that might be really important and successful for symbolic recognition. So, you know, this language is now a language in a box, right? A language that has its book. But at the same time, it turns its speakers into kind of guilty illiterates. Why? Well, first of all, it is extremely costly to maintain standard writing, as I'm sure you know. We all had to learn our so-called native languages at school in a lengthy process. And we have a very developed written environment for these languages. And even in Western societies that are very monolingual and very geared towards maintaining this kind of monolingual standard writing culture, we know that many people actually struggle with literacy. So then imagine you are a speaker of language that has 500 speakers, so you are necessarily multilingual. And that is also going to be a much more powerful language and more widely spoken language present in your environment. And that's a language that you will learn at school, or that's going to be a language that has a pre-colonial writing tradition that you may have learned and still learn. And so then you are told that you need to write your language that has 500 speakers, most of whom you see on a daily basis. Who are you going to write to? What are you going to read? Who is going to create the resources? Of course, it's too that there is a great inequality. So these languages hardly ever receive any resources from this state. But even, I think, with the best intention to government, there is a real practical problem and that is linguistic diversity is related to many, many small languages. So we need to rethink this idea that you are a language when you are written. And if you have a language, the only way you can actually increase its value and visibility is through writing. And I think also that stems very much back to the problems that we do have in our school systems, where people are afraid to speak and they're afraid to give something a go. And it'll be, you know, you learn the language by writing down your verb declensions and you learn it by writing down your vocabulary. And we're obsessed with this. Exactly. And this is so not the way to keep multilingualism alive. And it's really paradoxical where I work in Senegal and there are children that are highly multilingual already when they start school. And then they learn school, which is a very traumatic experience because school is entirely in French, at least officially, which is a language the children have not been exposed to before. So there's a postulant literacy and numeracy in French and learn French at the same time. And French is not a subject of instruction. And so they fail miserably. Oh, not entirely because they're very, very clever. And then they learn other languages as modern foreign languages in schools and they don't do well. That tells you how absurd it is actually, you know, to teach languages in this formal setting. So we should actually look at these other settings where people are effortlessly multilingual and look at how they do this. And it's through speaking, observing, being part of a supportive community that is geared towards, you know, a positive attitude to language learning. And it also means that you shared, you know, all these complexes and insecurities, you know, and people are extremely tolerant, you know, there is not this notion of, you know, the unattainable standard of the native speaker, you know, or writer, you know. No, you know, you're encouraged, you can get away with a lot, you can improvise, you can test the ground. And I think that's ecologies that we nurture multilingualism. And also through that, actually, you know, mutual understanding, cohabitation, connections between people. And so what is that what your experience has been of learning languages? Because obviously your multilingual, you speak lots of different languages, how have you found, I guess you must have gone through a process of learning them by road to school. And then in your sort of working life, you must have had a chance to explore them differently. Yeah, so my experience is actually one of, you know, your standard average monolingual European who learns languages through formal teaching at school. And that was the case until I was in my 20s. And I started going to West Africa. And many of the languages I was interested in, I couldn't actually learn at university, or anywhere, because they were not even described. And so I had to let go of all this and find my own way to learn these languages. And that was actually a quite difficult experience initially. Because we have this perfectionism, you know, you don't want to open your mouth before you've reached a certain level. You can only, you know, be embarrassing, really. And then I also had this experience of doing my PhD in the Netherlands and coming to the Netherlands without speaking Dutch. And that is an experience that still haunts me, because I was doing fieldwork in West Africa. So I started taking Dutch classes. And then I went to Guinea. It worked on, you know, a tiny language that I had to learn at the same time. And my Dutch just went. And then at some point I just gave it up. Since then I have really great sympathies to immigrants who struggle to learn the languages of their host countries. And I think they get so much bad press, you know, you need to assimilate and they need to make the effort. It is so hard when you come to live in a country with zero or with very little knowledge. And you are supposed to function at such a high level. And the expectations post on you are so high. And they're also so politically charged. And the pressure that comes with it will happen if you don't let this language. Exactly. Yes. So, you know, I think they really deserve more respect and support. But so what this all did to me, and then, you know, going to the field with my own son when he was four years old and since then and seeing how he was able to just pick up languages and go with the flow and not worry when he'd forgotten them when we came back next year. That actually kind of set me free a little bit. And since then, you know, I also think I started thinking that the question that we always ask, how many languages do you speak? You know, oh, you know, you're guilty immediately because you learned Russian at school, you've forgotten it, you know, and your Spanish is now completely rusty. I think it's the wrong question, right? It's a question that reflects this ideology that language is something that you have and you have to have them, you know, at utmost perfection. I think much nicer question is how many languages have you learned? Because what I find, what I see more and more as I grow older and I'm exposed to, you know, different languages all over and I can only master very few of them to perfection. So it's like, how many languages have you learned? And I can say I'm not a speaker of so and so many languages, but I have learned how to learn languages and how to communicate. Yeah, I think also like it's a very daunting thing where you're trying to become fluent in something like you say you feel that pressure on you, whereas actually, I mean, my experience is just that learning language and especially in the beginning stages is so much fun because you're exposed to something completely new and it is that doorway into the culture of that language as well. And it's not as simple as, you know, you can only understand that if you understand everything about using the subjunctive and all of this, it's just, it should be something that is fun to do. I completely agree. And what do you think of, so how do you think we could maybe enthuse people about languages more? So I guess the whole the point of this year is to sense raise awareness of Indigenous languages. What do you think the ideal I suppose outcomes of that would be? Well, I think, you know, for me the ideal outcome would really be that we actually look to the people who are multilingual. So that we look at Africa, we look at Papua New Guinea, you know, we look at the Amazon. And we copy some of the strategies, the speakers that are used, this flexibility, this learning language through real communicative needs, communities of practice. So that would mean, for instance, you know, if in your primary school you have many Turkish and Somali immigrants, why not teach Turkish or Somali? I know there's a school in Walthamstow that has a high Polish immigrant population and they started teaching Polish. And I think that's really great because for the children, they there's something they can really connect with and then they can speak Polish and English in the playground and during breaks and they feel they are valorized. And it's that pride, isn't it, that then you can share that? You can share that, you know, at my son's secondary school at the beginning of the year before they were streamed into languages. The teacher invited all the students to give a little taster lesson on the language that they spoke. And for the first time, these students who are very often just classified as deficient in English, you know, could showcase that they have this hidden wealth of languages. And similarly, you know, we realize so much on translation in English. And if you look, what that does is to our horizon, to our knowledge of the world, it's actually pretty terrible. I think translation into English is mainly from nine languages, that 3,000 languages in the world. What does that entail? We have a complete television and so multi-lingual speakers, they have these multiple perspectives on the world. And so how can we achieve that? Clearly not, you know, by translating everything. But there are so many other ways, you know, you can look at films that have subtitles, you can look at poetry performances that are subtitled and then just, you know, listen to the rhythm of Somali that is there in this book of performance and access, the meaning, you know, in English. So I think there are many ways in which we can kind of weave more multi-lingualism into our lives that would enrich us all. And hopefully, yeah, something that will be inspired to do. And I mean, so as such a great place to get that inspiration, because there are so many, so many languages being spoken, and probably, hopefully ones that when you were looking and you couldn't find those ones, you wanted to study, hopefully some of those are available now. Well, a great thing is also that, you know, we have many languages that saw us, but we have so many languages in London. And there are many initiatives actually, also by speakers of languages that are classified into these languages, who are doing things with languages. So for instance, there is a program called Culture Tree that offers Yoruba classes to children and adults so that Nigerians and people who are actually interested in learning Yoruba, you know, can connect with languages that may not play such a big role in their current daily lives, but that allow them to keep these transnational roots alive. Oh, thank you so much for sharing what you've been up to and telling us why this is so important. And I completely, I think that idea of languages, how many languages you learned is such a nice thing to take away from that and think about in terms of, we're not restricted, we don't have to be put in a box of which languages we speak. I think that's really important. And thank you for joining us for the Sirus podcast. If you'd like to hear more from us, you can head over to Sirus blog or you can visit our website.