Which language do you speak?

Many regular readers of this blog know that my "day job" is about languages and communicating with each other. I also like to think languages are being preserved and used where it is realistic to do so. I am proud of the fact my ancestors spoke Gaelic. It's a minority language. Preserving it is difficult and costly. There are many people who think no effort should be made to retain it. 

I was thinking about this yesterday as I read a piece about the problem with finding interpreters for some of the aboriginal people in the more remote parts of this country. The person trying to explain this was saying there are more than a hundred languages spoken in one state alone.  

These languages vary wildly in grammatical structure and vocabulary. There are concepts which simply do not exist in those languages. We are also told there are all sorts of "cultural considerations" which need to be taken into account when any communication is taking place. 

It makes the people who speak these languages sound primitive but their communities have (satellite) television and cars. They live in government supplied housing.

Why aren't these people speaking English as well? What has stopped them from being bilingual? What if I suggest it is government policy which has prevented people from learning English? 

"We need to preserve their culture. They have a right to speak their language of choice, their first language." We are told this without any respect for the fact that languages need to change and grow in order to survive. Unless they do people cannot change and grow too. 

Those intent on preserving the languages and cultures of indigenous people are all too often people who want to preserve them for their own purposes. That it might be holding back full participation in the wider community is of no interest to them. Preservation is everything. We are told it is "disrespectful" and that we are "destroying their culture" if we don't allow them to speak their own language. The preservation of their culture is seen as more important than education and employment even while claims are made to the contrary.

We don't want to see those things lost but languages which have no ability to express modern concepts are going to die out. If they have no written form it is going to be impossible to retain them. Those speaking them will remain isolated from the wider community and they won't have the same ability to be employed -and employment for financial gain is a concept that is lacking in many of those languages. Access to and understanding of health care is much more difficult for people whose languages do not have words for many internal functions. 

Gaelic can be retained. It has changed and grown to accommodate the modern world. It may seem "quaint" to some but it has a written form. There are very few Gaelic speakers, if any, people who speak no English.

Too many indigenous languages have no written form and will never have one. Where attempts are made the language inevitably changes. Claiming to be educating children in these languages is not actually preserving the language or the culture. It is creating something quite different and allowing others an unacceptable degree of control over their lives. It is isolating people.  

If "yes" wins in the upcoming referendum there will be more of this. Some people will still maintain this is a good thing. I am not sure it will work.