In their co-authored introductory chapter, the volume’s co-editors argue persuasively for the need to problematize “the discursive construction of ‘language endangerment’: How is it described, how is it legitimized, and by whom? That is, in whose interest is it to mobilize resources around the defence of languages, and why?” This is an especially compelling set of questions when one realizes that “discourses of language endangerment” are not only invoked for “small” indigenous and/or minority languages but also for such global languages as English and Spanish. Relatively unique in its constructivist reframing of “endangerment” and its inclusion of languages not conventionally appearing in any typology of “threatened languages” (e.g., Fishman Reference Fishman2001), this edited collection of case studies samples a wide range of languages, including Catalan, Swedish, Corsican, First Nations languages in Canada, Ukrainian, and French, and it situates their associated discourses of endangerment within diverse political economies. Since some of the 12 non-introductory chapters treat situations in which “threats” have been manufactured in order to represent state-supported languages as “endangered,” the editors properly conclude that some of these discourses of endangerment emerge from a “moral panic” about the need for and manner of managing diversity within particular nation-states. They appropriately conclude that “part of what is going on here has to do with attempts to maintain the language-culture-nation ideological nexus” (p. 7).
The contributing authors use a variety of methods to examine both the discourses and their agents, who have long been viewed as active in the production and reproduction of nationalist ideologies: lexicographers, grammarians, journalists, anthropologists, educators, and government workers. Joan Pujolar, in “The future of Catalan: Language endangerment and nationalist discourses in Catalonia” (121–48), discusses the circulation of nationalist discourses in the Catalan media. Alexandra Jaffe, in her chapter “Discourses of endangerment: Contexts and consequences of essentializing discourses,” (57–75) and Tony Crowley’s “Language endangerment: War and peace in Ireland and Northern Ireland” (149–68) both discuss schooling as a site of protection from threats. On a related topic, Annette Boudreau & Lisa Dubois’s co-authored chapter, “Francais, accadien, accadjionne: Competing discourses on language preservation along the shores of the Baie Sainte-Marie” (99–120) analyzes the role of both media and schooling in producing discourses of endangerment in a francophone community in eastern Canada. Tommaso M. Milani’s “Voices of endangerment: A language ideological debate on the Swedish language” (169–96), Shaylih Muehlmann’s “Defending diversity: Staking out a common global interest?” (14–34), Raphael Maitre & Marinette Matthey’s “Who wants to save ‘le patois d’Evolene?” (76–98), as well as Jaffe’s aforementioned chapter, all describe the sometimes awkward and often problematic involvement of linguists and anthropologists in language advocacy movements. Donna Patrick’s “Indigenous language endangerment and the unfinished business of nation states” (35–56) examines state discourses regarding the special status of indigenous languages in Canada.
In marked contrast to this treatment of minority languages are three chapters treating dominant national and/or global languages. This set includes Claudine Moise’s “Protecting French: The view from France” (216–41), Jose del Valle’s “Embracing diversity for the sake of unity: Linguistic hegemony and the pursuit of total Spanish,” and Ronald Schmidt, Sr.’s “Defending English in an English-dominant world: the ideology of the ‘official English’ movement in the United States” (197–215), which deftly probes the published rhetoric of “Official English” advocates in the United States in an attempt to deconstruct the trope of a threatening danger to a patently hegemonic language in the U.S. context. Schmidt details the history of the movement and penetratingly explores how the ideological power of English “blinds most Americans to their own privileged position in US society and to the social reality of non-English languages and ethnolinguistic communities” (213). “English-only” advocates can rationalize their “defense” of the most powerful U.S. language by representing it as the only possible medium for promoting “the common good” and as the responsible language choice for immigrants both to ensure their successful adaptation and to properly emulate the exemplary past practices of prior immigrant groups (that are now linguistically assimilated). The author correctly indicates that these rationalizations rest on the faulty assumptions that balanced bilingualism is impossible to achieve, and therefore English offers the only responsible adaptation for immigrants. Though the author does not highlight this erasure as critical, it is indeed a crucial step in representing all bilingual or alternative monolingual alternative adaptations as acts that threaten the national order. Such dismissive ideologies of bilingualism should be viewed, as Dorian Reference Dorian, Grenoble and Whaley1998 has suggested, as especially devastating to minority languages. This is in part because they combine with other, more acknowledged ideologies that both valorize the standard and deprecate subnational languages to create an especially powerful one-two punch that “knocks out” most indigenous, ethnic, and “small languages” (Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green1997) by delegitimizing possible alternative diglossic adaptations on the part of minority language speakers.
Reading this book from an anthropological perspective, I was pleased by the fact that most of the authors were very skilled in reading ideologies from their data, but somewhat disappointed that most researchers’ data were limited to official pronouncements, published policy statements, and the like, rather than including such non-documentary sources of evidence as speech events, interpersonal interaction, or everyday language use and voices from members of speech communities. The lack of ethnography often limits analysts to close readings of relevant texts rather than a contrastive comparison of “official ideologies” and actual practices and precludes the reading of language ideologies “of practice.” However, Jaffe’s chapter on Corsican essentializing discourses provides a welcome examination of the intended and unintended consequences of such language ideologies. She reviews how attempts to legitimate Corsican on the authoritative model of French led to minority language purism and homogeneism. Previously habitual practices, like code-switching between French and Corsican, were now regarded as a threatening type of interference from French, and the model of a singular standard language conflicted with local Corsican ideologies that greatly valorized regional variation. She concludes that attempts of language planners to provide alternative polynomic approaches to Corsican during a period of language shift and linguistic revitalization produced, at best, mixed results, because institutions like schools are not set up to recognize multiple codes and norms of language use. She ultimately calls for a more ethnographically grounded confrontation with essentializing discourses and the ways these are connected to the social and political dimensions of the discourses of endangerment. Arguing for careful analysis of the emergent culture of language and identity produced by the friction between articulated goals and contexted applications, she concludes that attempts to protect or defend an essentialist view “can never just ‘restore’ a language; it will always inevitably create new linguistic, social, and political realities” (74).
The final chapter of the book is Deborah Cameron’s “Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality, and politics” (268–85). This is an insightful and appropriate concluding contribution in which the author observes the inevitable mass media distortion of “language endangerment” as it emerges as newsworthy. Cameron views the “ecologizing idea” that linguistic and cultural diversity represent essential goals as the most dominant ideological image. Thus articles written with an advocacy slant do not cry out for social justice for particular speech communities, but rather for the protection of “our” diverse human heritage – on the analogy of saving “endangered” animal and plant species. She views this preservationist rhetoric as calling attention to the need for outside agents and for expertise in a linguistic “rescue mission,” and as deflecting attention from the struggles for land and/or political rights that are often linked to minority heritage languages. Such representations of the global celebration of diversity thus betray the political interests of states and their neoliberal citizens by decoupling endangered languages from the political economic realities of their speakers, encouraging a limited, sympathetic support that cannot be readily transformed into a subversive alignment on more general issues of social justice.
As a critique of discourses of endangerment, the volume makes significant strides not merely in questioning the rhetorical strategies used to discuss language extinction but also in disclosing conflicts of interest underlying these approaches. Though earlier work, especially that of Jane Hill Reference Hill2002, has challenged the rhetoric of language endangerment, including its widely used trope of “universal ownership,” and has promoted an alternative orientation to “language rights,” this volume takes a major step in offering a language ideological interpretation of how political-economic interests have shaped two very different kinds of threats – one rather real, the other quite imagined. Cameron’s argument that many discourses of endangerment about minority and indigenous languages decouple the linguistic details from their political-economic contexts helps to explain the underlying motivation for fetishizing the cognitive-intellectual side of language while erasing its social meaning and political-economic embeddedness for its speakers. As for the imagined threats, the authors and editors make it abundantly clear in this important and provocative volume that those discourses of endangerment encourage the misrecognition of internal diversity as antagonistic to the conventionally accepted linguistic order of the nation. Though this volume may not appeal to the growing reading public that knows language endangerment in the more conventional sense displayed by such works as Nettle & Romaine’s (Reference Nettle and Romaine2000) Vanishing voices and Harrison’s (Reference Harrison2008) When languages die, it is a critical complement to such works for scholars interested in the language ideological construction of “endangerment.”
