History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

In this interview, we talk to Nick Riemer about how linguistic theory and political ideology can interact. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts References for Episode 40 Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Althusser, Louis 1996 [1965]. Marxism and Humanism. In For Marx (B. Brewtser, tr.), London: Verso, 218–238. Althusser, Louis 2014 [1970]. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) (B. Brewster, tr.). In Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso, 232–272. Althusser, Louis. 2015 [1976]. Être marxiste en philosophie. Paris: PUF. Auroux, Sylvain 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège: Mardaga Barsky Robert F. 2007. The Chomsky Effect. A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower. Cambridge: MIT. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs 2003. Voices of Modernity. Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1991. Language and Symbolic Power (G. Raymond and M. Adamson, tr.). Cambridge: Polity. Calvet, Louis-Jean 2002. Linguistique et colonialisme. Paris : Payot. Canut, Cécile 2021. Provincialiser la langue. Langage et colonialisme. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam Charity Hudley, Anne H., Christine Mallinson, Mary Bucholtz 2020. Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession. Language 96: e200-e235. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2020.0074 Chevalier Jean-Claude, Encrevé Pierre, 2006. Combats pour la linguistique, de Martinet à Kristeva. Essai de dramaturgie épistémologique. Lyon : ENS Éditions. Chomsky, Noam 2004. Language and Politics (C.P. Otero, ed.). Expanded edition. Oakland, AK Press. DeGraff, Michel. 2005. Linguists’ most dangerous myth: the fallacy of creole exceptionalism. Language in Society 34: 533-591. DeGraff, Michel 2020. Toward racial justice in linguistics: The case of Creole Studies (response to Charity Hudley et al.). Language 96: e292-e306. Eagleton, Terry 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Errington, Joseph 2008. Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning, and power. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Flores, Nelson Jonathan Rosa 2015. Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 85: 149-171. Golumbia, David 2009. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Greimas, Algirdas-Julien 1956. L’actualité du saussurisme. Le français moderne 24: 191-203. Heller, Monica and Bonnie McElhinny 2017. Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hirschkop, Ken. 2019. Linguistic Turns, 1890­­–1950. Writing on Language as Social Theory. Oxford: OUP. Honneth, Axel 2008. Reification. A new look at an old idea. New York, Oxford, OUP. Horkheimer, Max. 1992 [1947]. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum. Hutton, Christopher 1999. Linguistics and the Third Reich : mother-tongue fascism, race, and the science of language. London: Routledge. Jones, Peter E. and Chik Collins 2006. Political analysis versus “Critical Discourse Analysis” in the treatment of ideology: some implications for the study of communication. Atlantic Journal of Communication 14: 28-50. Knight, Chris 2016. Decoding Chomsky. Science and Revolutionary Politics. New Haven and London: Yale. Makoni, Sinfree and Alastair Pennycook (eds) 2007. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marcuse, Herbert 2002 [1964].  One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2ed. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl 1976 [1867]. Capital. Volume I (Ben Fowkes, tr.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1976. The German Ideology. 3ed. Moscow: Progress. Mbembe, Achille 2016. Decolonizing the University: New Directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15: 29-45. Mbembe, Achille 2013. Critique de la raison nègre. Paris : La Découverte. Rehmann, Jan 2013: Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection. Leiden: Brill. Riemer, Nick 2019a. Cognitive Linguistics and the public mind : Idealist doctrines, materialist histories. Language and Communication 64: 38-52. Riemer Nick 2019b. Linguistic form : a political epistemology. In James McElvenny (ed.), Form and formalism in linguistics, Berlin: Language Science Press, 225-264, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.2654369 Riemer Nick 2021. L’emprise de la grammaire. Propositions épistémologiques pour une linguistique mineure. Lyon: ENS Éditions. Open access : http://books.openedition.org/enseditions/38952. Riemer Nick 2023. Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Rosa, Jonathan and Nelson Flores 2017. Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46: 621-647. Rudwick, Stephanie and Sinfree Makoni 2021. Southernizing and decolonizing the Sociology of Language: African scholarship matters. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 267-268 : 259–263. Stockhammer Robert 2014. Grammatik. Wissen und Macht in der Geschichte einer sprachlichen Institution. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 1987. Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House. Vološinov ,V. N. 1973 [1929]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, tr.). New York: Seminar Press. Žižek, Slavoj (ed.) 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Nick Riemer, who’s lecturer in linguistics and English at the University of Sydney in Australia, and also associated with the Laboratory History of Linguistic Theories in Paris. [00:35] Nick has a broad range of interests in the study of language, [00:39] most notably in semantics, history and philosophy of linguistics, and the politics of linguistics. [00:45] It’s these political dimensions of linguistic scholarship that Nick is going to talk to us about today. [00:51] His current project is a monograph on the politics of linguistics since Saussure. [00:58] So Nick, what have the politics of linguistics been like since Saussure? [01:02] NR: Thanks a lot for inviting me on the podcast, James, and obviously, there’s no single answer [01:09] to that question. In fact, many linguists since Saussure have denied that there is any [01:16] connection between linguistics and politics. It’s a surprisingly common declaration that [01:22] you come across linguists making throughout the 20th century that these two things actually [01:28] have no connection. And it’s sort of reflected, I think, in the conventional historiography of linguistics. [01:36] I mean, you can tell me whether you agree with this, but it seems to me that the way we usually [01:41] talk about linguistics and politics is by talking about how particular ideas and theories [01:46] and frameworks in linguistics might reflect external trends in society and politics. It’s [01:54] often struck me that that’s a sort of overly passive way of construing the relationship, and it ignores [02:00] the fact that linguistics doesn’t just reflect what’s going on outside. It also contributes [02:06] to it, shapes it, plays an ideological function in reinforcing or challenging it. And that’s what [02:13] I’m interested in, in the period after Saussure. And I think the… to answer, to try and answer, your question a little bit [02:22] because the connections are just so vast and manifold, I think the key is to seeing linguistics [02:27] as a social practice, to seeing it not in idealist terms as a body of doctrine or discoveries [02:36] which unfolds according to its own internal logic, and in which the theorists and the [02:43] participants are these purely disinterested truth-seekers, but to see it as something [02:50] which unfolds largely in the context of higher education, in a social context where the players [02:56] themselves are engaged in political tussles internally within the field, but where the [03:02] discipline also does arguably perform various ideological and political functions. [03:10] JMc: But why focus on linguistics? I mean, it’s a fairly niche discipline, isn’t it, within the university landscape? [03:17] NR: Because I had the misfortune or the folly to become a specialist in part of linguistics, [03:24] and from that got on to taking an interest in the history and the philosophy of the discipline. [03:29] So, you know, to the man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I’m just, in embarking on [03:35] this project, I’m, as we all do, working on what I know and what I feel I can make some [03:40] contribution to. Obviously, you can’t separate the history of linguistics from the wider [03:45] history of the human sciences and from wider intellectual history, even though for much [03:51] of the 20th century, especially its later part, I would say there has been a certain [03:56] isolationism in the discipline. [03:59] And it’s certainly notable, I think, that linguistics in the West was, to a large and surprising [04:08] extent, immune, for instance, from the waves of social critique and political critique [04:15] that swept over the rest of the humanities and the social sciences from the 1960s. [04:19] I mean, there were versions of that that did touch linguistics, but it has been a quite [04:25] sort of technical and scientific and rather sort of isolationist discipline, and I think that [04:32] performs an ideological function in itself, actually. [04:35] JMc: OK, but do you think that that represents linguistics as an entire discipline or just [04:39] particular schools of linguistics? [04:42] Because, I mean, you could argue that linguistics as [04:45] a field has actually served as a model science, as a model to many of the other human sciences, [04:52] especially in the 20th century, and in fact that a lot of post-structuralist theory is a reaction [04:57] to structuralism, a body of doctrines that have come out of linguistics. [05:03] NR: Yeah, absolutely it is, and there’s no doubt that structuralism was a pilot science, as it was [05:09] often called for… and had a massive influence, and there was this sort of linguistification of [05:15] the world that happened in the wake of structural linguistics, where it looked as though for [05:21] a while everything could be treated as though it was a language which operated on structuralist principles. [05:27] I mean, I suppose Lacan is the most celebrated version of that. [05:31] But at one point in the ’60s and ’70s, it looked as though everything had a grammar. [05:37] Music had a grammar, dance had a grammar, urban planning had a grammar—everything had a grammar. [05:42] And I think that’s one of the things that makes asking questions about the politics [05:46] of our ideas about language interesting, that language is a sort of model, as you say, [05:54] for a whole lot of other symbolic and also maybe non-symbolic domains, [06:00] so it’s interesting to inquire into the underlying political assumptions that might drive research into language structure. [06:12] Because if I… Perhaps I can just elaborate on that slightly. [06:15] I mean, you know, when we talk about language and politics and language in society, I think we’re really used to looking [06:21] at the obvious things, so we’re looking, we look often at the contribution of language to, [06:26] of linguistics to colonialism. [06:28] So, you know, its use as part of expert knowledge among, [06:34] among colonizers in the, in the service of control of colonial populations. [06:39] We look at language standardization, which is about a similar dynamic within the West, [06:47] the dispossession, the linguistic dispossession of subaltern classes by particular, you know, [06:54] certified registers of national languages, which were typically not the ones that were [07:01] spoken by, you know, rural and working class populations, but which was imposed on them as part of the project of, you know, universal primary education. [07:12] Language planning, you know, the way that language planning is done to serve particular political ends. [07:17] So that’s all very interesting, and I think in linguistics in general, we do have [07:23] a reasonable understanding of that. [07:24] And it’s certainly very salient, you know, linguistics and racism, linguistics and class exploitation. [07:31] These are well understood, but what we have less of a interest in, I think, [07:35] and which I myself find really worth exploring [07:39] is the way in which our basic structural ideas about the nature of grammar might be the product of, and might also [07:47] reinforce, particular ideological settings, which play a role in, for want of a better word, [07:54] Western European or Anglo-European capitalist modernity, [07:57] and I think there are a lot of interesting things that we can say about that. [08:01] JMc: So if I might just query the specifics of your historiographic scheme, why do you start your discussion of the modern field of linguistics [08:11] with Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics? [08:13] So, I mean, there’s, of course, a tradition of treating Saussure’s Course as the founding scripture of modern synchronic linguistics, [08:20] but there’s also plenty of historical scholarship that shows that this is largely a convenient myth, [08:26] that there’s a great deal of continuity between Saussure and what came before him—and what came immediately before him, that is—namely the Neogrammarians, [08:37] and also that a lot of what is considered Saussurean is, in fact, later interpretation that people have made in setting up [08:48] Saussure’s Course as the scripture that they base, you know, all of their ideas on. [08:54] NR: Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that, you know, there are lots of continuities, as you say, between the [08:59] Course, which of course wasn’t from Saussure’s own pen, but which was a retrospective reconstruction [09:04] by his colleagues on the basis of lecture notes, as we all know. [09:09] There’s an obvious continuity between that and the Mémoire on the vowel system. [09:14] There are similar sort of structuralist, for want of a better term, ideas that you can see in both of them, I think. [09:21] But to the extent that any starting point for any project is arbitrary, as of course it is, [09:28] I still think there are good grounds for starting with Saussure, because [09:33] retrospectively that text was imbued with an enormous weight in the structuralist period. [09:39] You know, maybe not immediately, but, you know, in the ’50s, certainly, people looked back to, [09:45] and earlier as well, people did look back to, you know, Saussure as the sort of founding charter of [09:51] this new intellectual movement, which was by no means just Saussurian, but which did appeal to [09:58] many of the ideas in the Course in General Linguistics as the starting point for this [10:03] exciting new way of thinking about language. [10:06] And I mean, if we just look at two aspects of Saussure, [10:10] I think we can, you know, see that there is a reason to take the Course seriously as a starting point. [10:18] One is the concept of synchrony, you know, the idea that there needs to be a break with the [10:24] predominantly sort of historical mode of investigation of language, which was true of [10:31] the comparative-historical method and then of Neogrammarians, [10:36] and the other is this abstraction that Saussure, you know, really popularized, or that the Course really popularized, [10:44] which is langue, you know, the idea that there is some kind of abstract formal structure at the heart [10:53] of language which can be meaningfully studied out of connection with actual acts of language use, [11:00] actual discourse, actual linguistic interchange. [11:04] And that really set the stage, I think, in important ways for the whole formalization, for the whole abstraction that became such a feature and [11:14] hallmark of ‘linguistic science’, quote-unquote, in the subsequent decades. [11:21] And there’s really interesting things, I think, that we can say about the ideological valency of both of those things, [11:29] this divestment that Saussure accomplished of language from the historical flow, the situated [11:37] historical flow of temporal, you know, human interaction embedded in all of those things which, [11:45] you know, give human interaction its particular characteristics: you know, our gender, [11:50] our ethnic background, our particular position in whatever speech community and society we’re in. [11:56] All of these things, Saussure was seen as providing a licence to ignore, or at least to background, [12:04] and I think we can see in that, you know, a particular, a recognizable move that we see widely, I would say, in bourgeois culture, [12:16] which is just a backgrounding of social conflict and social tensions and the class character of society, [12:23] and also particularly the problems of racialization and the racialization of different linguistic subjects. [12:29] All of that is largely backgrounded by the decision to look at this thing which is called langue, and to take language out of [12:37] the social contexts that it really surely belongs in, in a significant way. [12:43] So that’s one, I think, interesting way in which what became doctrine in linguistics did contribute to this image that [12:50] liberal society, that bourgeois liberal society, has of itself in the West, which is this [12:56] fantasy of a social homogeneity, and this backgrounding of society as this dialectical, [13:03] conflict-ridden, intrinsically contradictory thing, out of which, you know, transformative social [13:09] change could arise if we only let it. [13:13] JMc: OK, but I mean, a counter-argument, or perhaps it’s not a counter-argument, [13:18] but one thing that has been said about this idea of la langue, or as it later became, in generative theory, competence—or at least Chomsky has argued that his notion of competence is a version of la langue (although that, of course, is controversial)—but one argument that has been made in support of that, which you may simply dismiss as bourgeois rationalization, [13:43] is that having this notion that everyone, all people, have exactly the same [13:50] linguistic ability, which manifests itself in competence, or in a langue, means that everyone [13:57] is the same. [13:58] So it’s a radically egalitarian move. [14:01] One way in which this argument has been deployed is in defence of Creole languages. [14:06] So Michel DeGraff, who is a generativist at MIT, [14:10] has argued that all humans have this capacity for language, and that it’s the same, [14:16] means that Creole languages are legitimate languages of the same kind as any standard [14:21] European language that might have lexified them, or any other language in the world. [14:26] So what would you say to an argument like that? [14:29] NR: I mean, I think that’s certainly true. [14:31] It’s certainly true that, you know, the starting hypothesis of the generative enterprise is that [14:37] there is this thing which we have in virtue of our membership of the human species, which is this [14:42] unique uniform language acquisition device, or universal grammar, or whatever we want to call it. [14:48] I mean, some people have interpreted that as a sort of anti-fascist gesture, or anti-racist gesture, and I think it certainly lends itself to that, [14:56] although Chomsky has been very sort of toey about strongly drawing that connection between what he thinks of as his scientific enterprise, [15:06] and any kind of ideological or political conclusions that you could draw from it. [15:10] But I think the connection is there, and it’s obvious, and he doesn’t deny it either. [15:14] It’s also worth saying that it’s not unique to generativism. [15:17] I mean, there are plenty of people you can find in the history of linguistics before Chomsky [15:21] asserting strongly the universality of human language, and challenging the idea that some languages were primitive or less developed than others, so… [15:32] JMc: Sure, but I raised this question at this point because I think that it [15:37] ties into the critique you made of langue, and by extension competence, as a bourgeois rationalization. [15:46] NR: Yeah, the extent to which I think… I mean, it’s interesting to see what [15:51] led Chomsky into his distinctive mode of approach to linguistics. [15:57] And of course, what got him into it in the first place was his connection with Zellig Harris, [16:04] who was strongly identified with socialistic politics in the US in the ’40s. [16:12] So the very impetus for Chomsky’s whole model was a stringently left-wing one, which was about collectivism, and which was an anti-Bolshevik kind of socialism, I think. [16:28] So historically, to tie it to bourgeois politics in that way [16:32] does miss something important about at least the impetus that Chomsky had to get involved with that whole sort of project or to initiate that project in the first place. [16:44] And even if we can recognize that there’s this hypothesis of equality, which is just embedded there in the generative approach, [16:52] there’s another way in which it really does buy in, I think, to a characteristic ideological formation in late capitalism, [17:01] which is just its individualism, right? [17:04] It’s a highly individualistic way of approaching language, to the extent that Chomsky has quite often said, or Chomskyans have quite often, I think, said, that really, [17:14] we all have an individual idiolect. [17:18] So there’s this disavowal of the shared nature of language. [17:22] There’s also this idea that language ultimately isn’t about communication at root; it’s about the expression of thought. [17:28] So these are ideas which really put the focus on the individual and background social determinants of linguistic behavior in a way [17:38] that, for example, conversation analysis, which you’ve discussed on the podcast recently, tried to address in some ways, at least. [17:47] So that sort of hyper-individualism is, I think… it buys into a standard default way of conceiving of society in our kind of world, which is society as an aggregate of individuals. [18:01] I mean, Thatcher famously said there’s no such thing as society, and it’s famous, [18:05] but in a way, linguists have been saying that for decades before it came out of Margaret Thatcher’s mouth. [18:12] And it’s interesting to think of linguists not just saying that, [18:17] but saying that in lectures to very large numbers of undergraduates and saying it with the authority [18:25] or claiming the authority of science for it in the way that Chomsky claims the authority of science. [18:30] And I think it’s interesting to ask what kind of ideological contribution our discipline is [18:37] making to the maintenance of this whole deeply exploitative, deeply ecocidal economic order, [18:45] which is catapulting us into environmental destruction and social upheaval and permanent war. [18:52] What is the contribution of linguists and of the discipline to that ideologically? [18:57] And that’s one of the questions that I want to ask—not blaming linguistics for everything by any means (that would be ludicrous), but just acknowledging that this thing we do, this [19:07] discipline that we’re in is caught up with all of these things in ways that have often been disavowed [19:13] or at least silenced under this claim of scientificity that we like to make. [19:19] JMc: Sure. But I mean, radical individualism of the Chomskyan kind could also be an anarchist move, right? [19:25] It’s not necessarily neoliberal. [19:27] NR: No, no, it’s not. And that is obviously the political affiliation that Chomsky has claimed for it. [19:33] And, you know, he’s said with respect to… I mean, he was a member of the [19:39] Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. [19:41] So, you know, his political affiliations, formally speaking, absolutely aren’t in doubt, [19:46] but, you know, ideology has this nasty way of escaping from you. [19:50] And it is interesting to think about, you know, the… I mean, Chomsky has just been… [19:58] He’s had this schizophrenic split, of course, between his linguistic work and his political activism, which has been, in my view, you know, exemplary in many ways, [20:10] and he has… [20:11] He certainly cannot be accused and shouldn’t be accused of being on the wrong side. [20:15] I mean, you know, he has doggedly fought against, you know, US power, for example, doggedly fought against, [20:25] you know, the abuses of Zionism, to give another example, doggedly fought against, [20:29] you know, interference by the US in the governments of the developing world. [20:34] So, you know, his politics are not in doubt. [20:38] But what is in doubt is the ideological tenor or valency of this model that he contributed to. [20:44] And, you know, if we look at people like George Lakoff or Steven Pinker, for example, you know, they’re perhaps the two neo-Chomskyans or people with Chomskyan linguistics in their background [20:58] who’ve most explicitly contributed to political discourse and have tried to weigh into political debate in the US, [21:06] and it’s interesting to look at how they do that. [21:08] You know, Lakoff has done it in the favour of, in my view, [21:11] completely dead-end Democrat politics of the most sort of counterproductive kind. [21:21] Pinker is a neo-reactionary of a very clear stripe, yet they both have, you know, [21:29] adopted those individualistic, highly intellectualist approaches to politics, [21:34] which I think have their roots in Chomskyan ideas about the nature of the mind. [21:40] JMc: So if I can just ask one more question, do you think these developments in linguistics of having [21:46] an abstract notion of la langue, which is examined synchronically, so separate from any notion of history, are entirely internal to the discipline, [21:55] or do you think that there are external forces [21:57] that might have helped to shape this image of language that linguists support, such as technological developments in the 20th century? [22:05] NR: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting question, and obviously any kind of answer is speculative. [22:11] But one of the things that we can say about the context [22:14] in which, you know, important thinkers in the 20th century developed their ideas about language is [22:18] that it was a context of the progressive and sort of galloping autonomization of language from human speakers. [22:28] So you see that in the development of broadcast technology, of things like the telex, [22:34] of things like the networked computer, and then more recently of, you know, technological [22:40] innovations like, you know, automatic text generation, text translation, you know, AI. [22:48] So there is this sense in which throughout the 20th century language is being increasingly [22:53] separated from its base in live human interaction, and I don’t think we have to be, you know, [23:00] starry-eyed romantics to see that as the natural niche of language. [23:06] It is in embodied, socially situated interaction. [23:11] And ever since Gutenberg, or ever since the invention of writing, [23:13] in fact, linguistics has been in part of this dynamic of this increasing and now, as I said, [23:20] galloping autonomization, you know, the freeing of language from bondage to actual flesh-and-blood speakers, [23:27] you know, the emancipation of language from the spoken word, which has just gathered pace astonishingly. [23:35] And I do think that notions like langue and competence can be seen as part of that dynamic, this idea that language is at root an abstract system. [23:46] And I think it was, no doubt, in complicated ways, reinforced by that, at least. [23:52] And I also think that there’s another interesting angle here, maybe, which is that one of the things that we… [24:00] One of the ways we typically talk about language, we talk about ourselves as using language, [24:06] and this increasing reification of language, this way that linguists increasingly had [24:14] of hauling language out of its interactional basis in interaction between people, and of [24:21] treating it as this, you know, mathematizable formal system, this is reification writ large. [24:27] And what I mean by that is the treatment of something which is fundamentally a social process [24:33] as a thing, which can be, you know, manipulated by a sovereign subject, by a subject who is free [24:41] and rational, and able to just use this system to achieve its own goals and to achieve its own ends, [24:49] in the ideal case, and in the case that’s assumed, in a way that’s pretty much free of social determinants. [24:55] You know, we’ve got the linguistic system out there at the disposal of [25:01] the free linguistic subject, who’s like Homo economicus in the linguistic domain. [25:07] You know, they just make a rational means-end calculation. [25:10] They use whatever words best express whatever ideas they have in their head, which are aimed at achieving their particular interactional ends, [25:18] you know, getting what they want. [25:20] That, I think, has been the sort of model of language that is often not articulated as crassly as that, though sometimes it is. [25:28] But I think it underlies so much of the way we think about language, and it’s particularly not challenged by so much of, you know, scientific linguistics. [25:38] And that reification, I think, participates in this same sort of ideological complex that I’ve been talking about, in that it feeds in and reinforces, [25:47] and does reflect, this view we have of what society is under capitalism, [25:53] which is this collection of rational individuals who are unconstrained in using their intelligences to [26:01] improve their particular individual situations, in competition often with other people. [26:08] And our view of language just buys into that very uncritical, very, you know, unsociological, [26:18] very sort of Pollyannaish conception of the way society works, where society is not something [26:24] which is fundamentally riven with class conflict, but where it’s something where there are [26:29] free agents who, sure, are in competition with each other for various goods, but they’re in [26:34] competition on an individualistic basis, and everything that we need to say about them [26:39] can be understood as rational. [26:41] So, you know, that’s the other really striking thing about linguistics in the 20th century. [26:45] It’s hyper-rationalism, it’s hyper-intellectualism, [26:48] the way that emotions just got screened out, but maybe we can talk about that another day. [26:53] JMc: Yeah, OK. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [26:56] NR: Thanks very much for having me, James.

Ingrid Piller discusses her upcoming book 'Life in a New Language' focusing on migrants' challenges in adapting to a new culture. The interview covers collaborative data projects, struggles of migrants learning English in Australia, impact of migration on identity, and the methodology of ethnographic studies.

Dan Everett, a Professor of Cognitive Sciences and noted for his fieldwork with the Pirahã, discusses the life and philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. The conversation dives into Peirce’s significant impact on modern linguistic theory, including his innovative triadic model of signs. Everett critiques traditional linguistic approaches while emphasizing the complexities of language, meaning, and communication. The dialogue also contrasts Peircean and Chomskyan linguistics, shedding light on differing views of language evolution and purpose.

In this interview, we talk to Michael Lynch about the history of conversation analysis and its connections to ethnomethodology. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 37 Button, Graham, Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock (2022) Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action. London and New York: Routledge. Fitzgerald, Richard (2024) “Drafting A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Human Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09700-7 Garfinkel, Harold (2022) Studies of Work in the Sciences, M. Lynch, ed. London & New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003172611 (open access) Lynch, Michael (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Michael and Oskar Lindwall, eds. (2024) Instructed and Instructive Actions: The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order. London and New York: Routledge. Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth (2016) “Introduction: The epistemics of Epistemics,” Discourse Studies 18(5): 493–499. See also the articles in the special issue. Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation, Vols. 1 & 2, Gail Jefferson, ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey (1970) Aspects of Sequential Organization in Conversation.  Unpublished manuscript, U.C. Irvine. Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974) “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation”, Language 50(4), Part 1: 696–735. Available online Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language [00:14] Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. There you can find links and references to [00:20] all the literature we discuss. Today we’re joined by Michael Lynch, who’s Professor Emeritus [00:26] of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He’s going to talk to us about [00:32] conversation analysis and its links to ethnomethodology. It’s probably fair to say that conversation [00:40] analysis, or CA, is a well-established subfield of linguistics today, which is concerned with [00:47] studying how interaction is achieved between speakers in an oral exchange. On a technical [00:54] level, conversation analysts typically proceed by making an audio or video recording of an [00:59] interaction and then transcribing it in a heavily marked up notation that conveys elements [01:06] of intonation, overlapping speech, gaze, and so on. Using these transcripts as empirical [01:12] evidence, the analysts then put forward theories about how the back-and-forth of conversation [01:18] is structured. The seminal publication introducing conversation analysis was a 1974 article in [01:26] Language with the title, “A Simplest Systematics for the Analysis of Turn-Taking for Conversation”, [01:33] co-authored by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. These three are widely considered [01:41] the founding figures of CA. But crucially, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson had not been trained in [01:48] traditional linguistics programs. They were sociologists by academic upbringing. Moreover, [01:54] they were adherents of ethnomethodology, an approach to sociology pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. [02:02] So the question arises as to how conversation analysis fits into linguistics and this broader [02:09] disciplinary constellation. Mike, can you illuminate this question a bit for us? [02:14] Where did conversation analysis come from, and how is it placed today? [02:19] ML: OK, well, thank you, James, for the opportunity to speak to your podcast. To start, I’d like to [02:26] add that what you said about Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson also applies to me. I’m not trained as a [02:34] linguist, traditional or otherwise. My background is in sociology, but also like them, [02:39] I spent a lot of my career, particularly the last 25 years at Cornell, in interdisciplinary programs [02:46] of which sociology was a part. But my take on sociology through the field of ethnomethodology [02:53] is not normal sociology, as many people would tell you. I don’t want to go into that right now. But [02:59] you asked about the background of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson and where CA came from. I know less [03:06] about Schegloff’s and Jefferson’s background a little bit, but I know more about Sacks, [03:12] partly because I’ve been spending the last year and a half reading and rereading the two-volume [03:19] set of his lectures. A little bit about Schegloff. He wrote an MA thesis on the history of literary [03:26] criticism before pursuing a PhD in sociology at Berkeley at the same time that Sacks did. [03:32] Jefferson had an education and practical experience in dance choreography before she attended Sacks’s [03:40] lectures and switched into a PhD program with him at UC Irvine, and her father was a famous [03:48] radio psychiatrist. Sacks had a law degree from Yale in 1958 and after that decided, [03:55] to the disappointment of his parents, not to pursue a law career. He was in the MIT, Cambridge, Harvard [04:05] area when he decided he wanted to go back to sociology and political science. He had studied [04:13] sociology as an undergraduate and he met Garfinkel and I believe also Goffman, who were on sabbatical [04:20] taking seminars from Talcott Parsons, a famous sociologist and Garfinkel’s mentor. And from there [04:29] he really hit it off with Garfinkel. Garfinkel encouraged him to go to the West Coast [04:34] and he pursued his PhD in sociology at Berkeley, where he did, for a time at least, work with [04:40] Goffman, although Goffman did not sign his PhD. And he stayed in touch with Garfinkel, was part [04:47] of groups that met, kind of forming the basis of ethnomethodology, which, to put a short gloss on [04:55] it, is the study of everyday actions as they are performed, at least preferentially in the case [05:03] of CA, using recordings of interaction naturally occurring (so-called) as a material for study. [05:12] Sacks also was very widely read. I really recommend reading his lectures or at least some of them [05:19] because there – you can still get them online. They’re out of print, I believe. It makes clear [05:26] that he’s drawing from the history of oral languages, the cultures of ancient Greece and [05:33] Rome, the studies of Judeo and biblical culture and language. He also was apprised, to what depth [05:44] I don’t know, of ordinary language philosophy, Austin, Searle to some extent, but mainly Austin [05:51] and Wittgenstein as well. He didn’t mention it much in his writings or in his lectures, [05:58] but his sensibilities were definitely shaped by that background. And he also brings in themes [06:04] from law, which is not really obvious, but when you read the lectures and some of his unpublished [06:09] writings, you find that he has kind of a legal orientation to the organization, the rules, [06:17] the norms, procedures of ordinary conversation. There’s a bit of a legal background into what [06:23] he’s saying. Now, you mentioned the 1974 paper on simplest systematics and turn-taking by [06:30] Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. It’s often taken to be the beginning of conversation, [06:34] but his lectures, starting when he was a graduate student and living in Los Angeles and teaching [06:40] at UCLA, they start in 1964, so 10 years before that, and even the earlier lectures exhibit [06:49] themes about language, about many other things that show up in part in the turn-taking paper, [06:56] although compared to the ground he covers in the lectures, which of course are much more extensive, [07:03] he’s much broader, much more varied in his interests and his analyses than that paper [07:09] gives access to. So one of the things to keep in mind is that paper is treated as a foundation, [07:15] but when you go back to Sacks’s lectures, you see that there’s a lot missing from it, [07:20] and a kind of a restricted way of going about the study of conversation that it represents. [07:26] JMc: You say that the 1974 paper is a bit restricted in terms of the ideas that Sacks had already [07:34] developed in his earlier lectures. Could you elaborate a bit and say in what ways it was [07:39] restricted, and do you think it’s because the paper appeared in Language and was being repackaged [07:45] for linguists? And if that’s the case, then what is the relationship or what was the relationship of [07:52] conversation analysis as Sacks conceived of it to other schools of linguistics at the time? [07:59] ML: It was edited by a linguist at UCLA named William Bright [see Fitzgerald (2024)], and he did an unusual job of [08:09] doing the sole review and advice on the paper, mainly working with Schegloff, who was originally [08:17] not listed on a very early draft of the paper by Sacks and Jefferson. And then he was listed third, [08:25] and then second after his work with Bright, I guess. It was written in a different style than [08:33] some of Sacks’s earlier work, which also was very difficult to fathom, and lectures, [08:38] which are not so difficult to fathom, although very thought-provoking. The main topic of that [08:44] paper is turn-taking issues, that is one person speaking, coming to an end, another person, [08:52] or multiple persons, then vying for next turn, and so on and so forth. And that indeed is a [09:01] major theme in Sacks’s work and in Schegloff’s work, Jefferson’s, but there’s also a broader [09:08] conception of sequential analysis that’s in the lectures and also in unpublished manuscripts [09:15] that went through several drafts that Sacks wrote and which is yet to be published, but [09:22] presents, again, a somewhat different cast of the sequential analysis than you get in [09:29] this more exclusive interest in turn-taking and turn-transition [09:35] and the beginnings of turns in the 1974 paper. So there’s also lots of other themes about [09:44] phenomena that tie together utterances, not just at the beginnings and ends, but which [09:51] show topical continuity and coherence in a very interesting way in Sacks’s lectures. [09:59] Sacks, in occasional remarks in his lectures and in a couple of papers where he talked about [10:05] understanding and organization of talk in a way that he sharply distinguished from [10:11] the orientation of linguistics, and the simplest aspect of this distinction that he emphasized was [10:18] that linguists treat the sentence as the basic unit and structural constituents of sentences [10:24] as embedded in sentences and as individually organized, cognitively or even neurologically, [10:34] to the extent that they could do that. He looks at sentences, parts of sentences, utterances, [10:41] in connection with those of other participants in conversation. And in some cases, you can get [10:48] a very different sense of not only the form, but also the meaning. He generally treats meaning [10:54] sideways in the sense that he doesn’t talk about it directly. He talks about in connection to [11:01] practices and structures of conversation, that you get a different sense of what’s being said [11:07] than when you take a sentence in isolation. Maybe linguists have caught on to this, but [11:14] at that time, and I think predominantly now, that orientation was distinctive of what Sacks and his [11:23] company were doing. [11:25] JMc: I mean, in the mid-20th century in America, there were also schools of linguistic [11:31] anthropology, sort of ethnography of speaking, and so on, that looked at discourse and the use [11:38] of language in a particular cultural context. Do you think that Sacks would have felt that they [11:42] were still stuck with the sort of formal conception of a sentence as the basic unit of language? [11:48] ML: He did know and addressed work by, you know, Gumperz and Hymes, and he actually participated [11:56] in a book they co-edited, and he knew of people in sociolinguistics, and Goffman himself was his [12:08] main contact at Berkeley when he was a student, and Schegloff was a student there too. [12:12] And there were differences. It seemed like a superficial difference, but for Sacks, [12:19] it’s very important, and I think there’s much to say about the difference, that his method of [12:27] working was usually, but not always, but usually he would try to record what he called naturally [12:36] occurring, or Garfinkel called, naturally organized everyday actions. So, bugging a phone or [12:45] recording – one of his favourite examples was some recordings he made behind a one-way mirror [12:53] of a group therapy session involving these mildly delinquent kids in Los Angeles at some point in [13:01] the probably early ’60s. And he goes to these tapes again and again, hears the same sequences, [13:07] discusses them again and again, often with a somewhat different framing in his lectures, [13:14] and finds in those recorded conversations, as he put it, things you would never imagine, [13:22] right, that people would say, and organizations of talk that you just don’t remember when, [13:28] you know, you think of a conversation you might have, or when you imagine an ideal typical [13:34] conversation. And you find in Goffman and in social psychology, and in even some of the [13:44] more linguistically inclined sociolinguists, that they either still work on things like speech acts, [13:52] which are largely the actions of one person. They see the person as the organizational basis of, [14:00] and the person’s psychology or cognition, as the organizational basis of the structure of talk, [14:07] where moving the frame to sequences, and not just pairs of utterances, but more extended [14:15] connections and ties between one’s own and others’ utterances in an ongoing stream. [14:22] It’s not a stream of consciousness. It’s a stream of talk, which we’re recording, at least [14:28] Sacks, but it could be adequate to capture, not necessarily complete, but adequate for starting [14:34] a starting point. It gives you a very different insight. It’s not just that, you know, he’s being [14:38] empiricist, always wanting stuff recorded from the ground. He also used newspaper articles and [14:46] snippets from the Bible and all sorts of stuff. But his main resource was recorded conversation [14:52] that he could play again and again and again. And another aspect of it was he could, [14:56] with transcript, which he didn’t treat as the primary ground, the recording was the primary [15:02] ground as, you know, an adequate record of what people were doing. Assuming they spoke a language [15:09] you spoke and you had enough insight into who they were, what they were talking about and so forth, [15:14] that you could find recognizable structures that required no special skill, no special [15:24] knowledge to recognize and to try to stay with that rather than try to override it with [15:29] an overly technical understanding. That those materials he saw to be a source of insight, [15:36] not just material from which to derive inductive inferences. [15:41] JMc: So what does structure mean to an ethnomethodologist, and specifically to Sacks? [15:49] ML: That’s a very good question. Sacks had a love for machine metaphors. He talks about machinery [15:57] of conversation, the turn-taking machine. Occasionally in his lectures, he acknowledges [16:05] that when he’s talking about machinery, he’s talking about rules, or you could even say [16:09] maxims, or, you know, regularities, even, that occur, but he just loved to talk about machinery. [16:18] And he also loved to invest agency in the machinery, rather than in people’s intentions, [16:27] motives, cognitive organization, right? So it was kind of a gestalt shift from the speaker [16:37] to the speaking in concert with others as the, not ultimate origin necessarily, but as [16:45] an organizational basis for what people are doing, saying, orienting to, and so forth. [16:51] It’s not that he emptied the person. Gail Jefferson once made a joke about, [16:58] “Sacks was somebody who treated people in the same way that you would treat algae.” [17:04] He has a line in his lectures that is really funny where he says he’s got nothing against [17:10] anthropomorphizing humans any more than when physicists anthropomorphize their data. [17:17] He’s got nothing against it, but nothing particularly in favour of it. So there’s this [17:23] kind of strange indifference that he expresses, but it leads to a very unique insight. [17:31] JMc: But at the end of the day, Sacks still talks in terms of rules, maxims, or structures and so on, [17:39] because isn’t it a sort of, would it be reasonable to say that one of the core ideas of [17:45] ethnomethodology is that the ethnomethodologist seeks to discover organization sort of from the [17:51] perspective of the participants in a particular situation? [17:56] ML: Yes, and I think that Sacks held to that. And the perspective of the participants didn’t require [18:05] some sort of magical trip of mind reading. But in his case, not necessarily Garfinkel’s, [18:13] in his case, he used the overt recording materials, the surface, [18:22] as the organization that the members were paying attention to insofar as they would hear what the [18:31] other is saying and react often without hesitation in a way that showed an understanding, or in some [18:39] cases a misunderstanding, of what the other said, and that would be then dealt with downstream in [18:45] the conversation. And so he was treating the surface materials, which sounds very shallow, [18:51] but in this he had some backing by the likes of Wittgenstein. And the skepticism about having [19:01] to always delve into interpretation, reading between the lines and that kind of thing, was [19:08] not his procedure. And he had a deep basis for that in both Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, and to some [19:18] extent Goffman. And so there is this orientation in the analysis to, “What are the parties doing?” [19:27] And it’s very important to know that the term “conversation analysis,” which Sacks didn’t use, [19:34] actually, at least not in his lectures, he talked about the analysis of conversation, [19:41] and he and many of his colleagues for a while talked about conversational analysis, A-L, [19:47] “conversation” with “al” at the end. And it got conventional to talk about CA or conversation [19:55] analysis, and everybody went along with that. But the idea was that the analysis is being done [20:02] on the ground floor by the person’s talking. It’s not something where you take data, you code it, [20:09] you do experiments to try to eliminate the lack of comparability from one occasion to another. [20:18] And for him, the problem was to address how it is that parties hearing what they hear, [20:24] knowing what they know, can continue in the way they continue in a conversation. [20:30] And how do they respond to what another says? Now, it may be they misinterpret it, or it may be [20:36] that they interpret differently than the speaker meant, and the speaker doesn’t indicate that [20:43] that’s the case. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen, but the orientation analytically [20:49] was to try to recover, as Garfinkel would call it, what persons were doing. So that the rules, [20:56] say the rules of turn-taking or the facts of it, as they talk about the turn-taking paper, [21:02] that one speaker speaks at a time, transitions occur without gap or overlap, as both a description [21:09] and in some sense, a basis for normative organization, that these are not strict [21:16] inviolable rules. They are procedures that also have noticeable, regular features that you could [21:24] call structures in the way conversation is organized. And Sacks tried to then delve into [21:30] that to try to answer the question, how do members do it, given that they’re flying by the seats of [21:37] their pants with very limited time constraints on understanding and response, especially in a [21:43] situation where there’s competitive talk, that there’s no timeout. And so how do they do that [21:49] is his big question, and how do they reconcile things like that speaker change recurs in [21:56] conversation, that is, you know, one speaker speaks, another does, etc., etc., [22:00] that with the idea that they can do it without gap or overlap, how do they do that? [22:05] And he had a lot to say about that. I can’t summarize it in a few words, but that was the problem. [22:12] JMc: Just to sort of summarize the picture of how CA came into existence, do you think it’d be [22:17] fair to say that Sacks was the great theoretician and Jefferson provided the sort of technical [22:25] apparatus required through her transcription system? [22:29] ML: Well, I think you have to also mention Schegloff, since he was the major figure in the period of time after ’75 and until he stopped [22:37] working in 2012 or ’10. Jefferson struggled to maintain a career. She never thought of herself [22:44] as a sociologist. I’m not sure what she thought of herself as. She was a conversation analyst. [22:50] And she spent the last roughly 20, 25 years of her career living in the Netherlands as an independent [22:59] scholar, occasionally employed, but mainly working on her own stuff. I was told, I haven’t seen it, [23:07] I’d love to see it actually. She transcribed the Watergate hearings [correction: Watergate tapes recorded in Nixon’s White House office], or at least a good part of [23:13] them. And I don’t know what’s happened to that transcript because she died in, I think it was [23:18] 2007. And I don’t know what’s happened to those records, but she kind of faded out of the scene [23:25] pretty early on, and Schegloff was the major character. And Schegloff and Sacks obviously [23:32] worked closely together. I think Schegloff had a somewhat different, more structured, [23:38] more disciplined orientation than Sacks, which was probably good for maintaining CA as a [23:45] quasi-discipline, sub-discipline, whatever you want to call it. But Sacks was not just a [23:51] theoretician. He was widely read, very creative. During his lifetime, people called him a genius. [23:58] I went to Irvine, somebody told me, “This guy’s a genius.” Not that… That’s not necessarily the reason I went [24:03] there, but… And it’s sort of like, yeah, he was a genius, but I don’t believe in the concept. [24:10] He did more than just theorize. I think, again, if you read the lectures, you get a sense of [24:16] the various things he did. It wasn’t always the same from beginning to end. And there’s [24:21] different threads of his analysis that have been picked up, particularly what he called [24:26] membership category analysis, which has an attraction for some people. [24:33] So he was involved in the production of it. I think, though, he was, in his own words, [24:39] sort of the methodologist of ethnomethodology, and Schegloff worked differently, and Sacks kind of [24:46] went along with that in some of the stuff they collaborated with. To break it down into, yeah, [24:52] there was Jefferson’s transcription system, which, yeah, she developed and deserved credit for it. [24:59] But more than that, she deserved a lot of credit for some of the analyses she did, [25:03] which are brilliant. She was really an amazing character. And Schegloff is also a very formidable [25:11] intellect. And so all three of them had their own shape in what they did, and it didn’t break [25:17] down in terms of theory and technical aspects of it. It was much more varied for all three of them. [25:24] JMc: And what’s Garfinkel’s relationship to conversation analysis? [25:31] ML: Yeah, inconsistent. Informally, he was very disappointed with the direction that CA had [25:38] taken, but at the same time, particularly in public statements to other sociologists, [25:45] he would really defend CA, and he would say, and I think he meant this, [25:49] that it was the crown jewel of ethnomethodology. It was the most developed, most technically [25:55] developed, most procedurally developed area of ethnomethodology. But it also diverged from [26:02] ethnomethodology. And I think people who currently come into CA, particularly from other fields other [26:09] than sociology, just don’t see much connection with Garfinkel. He’s treated as kind of a woolly [26:16] predecessor who spoke incomprehensibly and was besotted with phenomenology, etc., etc. [26:27] And certainly there are differences. Yet you can find in Sacks’s work and also Schegloff’s and some [26:34] of Jefferson’s that they were doing ethnomethodology at the same time they were [26:39] also developing CA as an independent field with its own interdisciplinary links, [26:48] not just to linguistics, but to communication studies, to psychology to some extent, [26:55] anthropology. You know, language, nobody owns language, ordinary language particularly, and [27:02] so it shows up in odd places. [27:06] JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions.

In this brief audio clip, we provide an update on what’s been happening with the podcast – and what’s coming up. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts McElvenny, James. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Entry in the Edinburgh University Press catalogue

In this interview, we talk to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann about language reclamation and revival in Australia and around the world. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 36 The Barngarla trinity: people, language, land. The Barngarla trilogy: (1) Barngarlidhi Manoo (‘Speaking Barngarla Together’): Barngarla Alphabet & Picture Book, 2019; (2) Mangiri Yarda (‘Healthy Country’): Barngarla Wellbeing and Nature, 2021; (3) Wardlada Mardinidhi (‘Bush Healing’): Barngarla Plant Medicines, 2023. Links to the digital versions of these 3 books, as well as to the Barngarla app, can be found at the following website: https://wcclp.com.au/barngarla/ Anubi, Myra, Shania Richards & Ghil‘ad Zuckermann. 2023. ‘Bringing dead languages back to life‘, People Fixing the World. BBC World Service. Schürmann, Clamor Wilhelm. 1844. A Vocabulary of the Parnkalla Language. Adelaide: Dehane. Trove Sivak, Leda, Seth Westhead, Emmalene Richards, Stephen Atkinson, Jenna Richards, Harold Dare, Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, Graham Gee, Michael Wright, Alan Rosen, Michael Walsh, Ngiare Brown & Alex Brown. 2019. ‘“Language Breathes Life”—Barngarla Community Perspectives on the Wellbeing Impacts of Reclaiming a Dormant Australian Aboriginal Language’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, 3918. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph16203918. Sivak, Leda, Seth Westhead, Graham Gee, Michael Wright, Alan Rosen, Stephen Atkinson, Emmalene Richards, Jenna Richards, Harold Dare, Ngiare Brown, Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Michael Walsh, Natasha J. Howard & Alex Brown. 2023. ‘Developing the Indigenous Language and Wellbeing Survey: approaches to integrating qualitative findings into a survey instrument’, AlterNative. DOI: 10.1177/11771801231194650 Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad. 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.  Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad. 2020. Revivalistics: From the genesis of Israeli to language reclamation in Australia and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Publisher’s website. 诸葛漫 (=Ghil’ad Zuckermann). 2021. 多源造词研究 (A Study of Multisourced Neologization). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. Publisher’s website.  Transcript by Luca Dinu [Instrumental tapping] [00:05] [Singing] [00:47] JMc: That was Hazel Cooyou Walgar singing a song in Baiyoongoo. [00:51] The title of the song translates into English as ‘My Country’. [00:56] Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to [00:59] the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, [01:02] online at hiphilangsci.net. [01:05] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [01:10] Today we’re joined by Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, who’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. [01:18] Among other things, Ghil‘ad is an expert on language revival and reclamation, [01:23] a field that he calls ‘revivalistics’. [01:27] In 2020, he published a monograph treating this topic with Oxford University Press under the title [01:34] Revivalistics: From the genesis of Israeli to language reclamation in Australia and beyond. [01:41] So, Ghil‘ad, what is revivalistics? [01:44] Or rather, what does it mean to revive a language? [01:49] GZ: Revivalistics is a new, comparative, global, transdisciplinary field of inquiry [01:59] surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration [02:05] from any angle possible [02:08] — for example, mental health, law, anthropology, [02:14] sociology, politics, colonization studies. [02:20] What is language revival? You see, language revival is on a spectrum. [02:27] The most extreme case of language revival is what I call reclamation. [02:33] Reclamation is when you have no native speakers of the language you are trying to revive. [02:40] This is in the case of a sleeping beauty like Hebrew. [02:43] Hebrew was a sleeping beauty [02:45] — meaning no native speakers — since 135 AD for 1,750 years. [02:52] Or a dreaming beauty [02:54] — so a dreaming beauty alluding to Jukurrpa, the Dreamtime or the Dreaming, [03:00] such as the Barngarla, Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula. [03:05] You had no native speakers of Barngarla for, say, 50 years, 60 years, since the 1960s. [03:13] And reclamation is a severe case because you have nobody to listen to who is a native speaker. [03:22] Now, on this spectrum, in the middle, you have what I call revitalization. [03:27] So revitalization is of a language that is severely endangered, [03:32] but it still has some elders speaking it. [03:35] For example, Adnyamathanha. [03:37] Adnya means ‘rock’ and mathanha means ‘people’, so Adnyamathanha rock people. [03:44] These are the Aboriginal people of the Flinders Ranges, [03:47] not that far from Adelaide. [03:50] And I have a friend called Robert Wilton. He’s in his 80s, and he is a native speaker of Adnyamathanha. [03:59] In the case of Adnyamathanha, [04:02] the percentage of native speakers among children is almost zero. [04:08] And of course, in order to determine whether a language is endangered, I don’t care about numbers. [04:13] I only care about percentage of children within the tribe speaking the language. [04:18] So, for example, Pitjantjatjara is alive and kicking, [04:21] even though it is only spoken by 3,500 people, [04:25] but, say, almost 100% of kids speak it. [04:29] Whereas you might have some languages in Africa with a million speakers, but they’re severely endangered [04:35] because the percentage of children speaking the language is very low. [04:40] JMc: So is your understanding of a native speaker someone who learns language in this critical period [04:45] as it’s understood by generative linguists? [04:47] GZ: Yes, and in fact, I would say he or she does not learn, but rather acquires automatically. [04:52] So, say, I’m a native speaker of Israeli, [04:55] you’re a native speaker of Australian English. [04:59] We both speak many other languages, but we learned them thereafter. [05:06] Now, in the kind of other side from reclamation, so we said reclamation, revitalization, and then you have reinvigoration. [05:17] Reinvigoration is when you have a relatively high percentage of kids speaking the language, but still not 100%. [05:24] The language is endangered. [05:27] Welsh, maybe Irish, still very endangered, but it’s not as bad as Adnyamathanha, definitely not as Barngarla. [05:35] So in the case of revitalization, which is kind of in the middle, and reinvigoration, [05:43] we can, for example, use a technique called master-apprentice because we have a master. [05:50] We have somebody who speaks the language natively. [05:53] This is in diametric opposition to the case of reclamation where we have no masters whatsoever. [05:58] Now, what is the master-apprentice technique? [06:01] You take a master, usually an old person who is a native speaker of the language, who, as you said, [06:06] had acquired the language automatically, say, between the age of zero and puberty, [06:13] and you ask this master to adopt, if you want, an apprentice. [06:19] An apprentice is a young person — can be a child, can be a teenager — who do not speak the language, [06:27] but they would help the master with daily tasks, shopping, etc., [06:34] and the master would speak to them only in language. [06:38] So the idea in the case of revitalization and reinvigoration [06:43] is to reintroduce the language to youngsters [06:47] who will then become native speakers or at least speakers. [06:51] In the case of reclamation, of course, we cannot use the master-apprentice technique, [06:56] but we can use other techniques. [06:59] Like I’m teaching Barngarla… Well, I’ve taught maybe hundreds of workshops in the bush [07:07] to various communities of Barngarla people, and we neologize together. [07:15] So, for example, a word for computer, gaga-bibi waribirga. [07:21] So gaga is ‘head’, bibi is ‘egg’, [07:24] so gaga-bibi is ‘brain’, it’s the egg inside the head, [07:28] and waribirga is ‘lightning’, [07:32] so it’s kind of a lightning or electric brain. [07:35] So lightning or electric brain, a little bit like Chinese, 电脑 (diànnǎo). [07:42] The Māori, te reo Māori, the language Māori, rorohiko, did the same thing. [07:48] You might ask yourself, let’s forget about Chinese, let’s forget about Māori or Kaurna. [07:54] I mean, you ask Barngarla people, [07:57] ‘Okay, how would you like to say “computer”?’ [07:59] And it might well be the case that they will come up with ‘brain’ and ‘lightning’ [08:03] because I guess there are many other possibilities, but it’s a good one. [08:09] So in the case of rorohiko in Māori, I would have to research whether there was somebody [08:16] who was involved in their neologization who had been exposed to Chinese. [08:22] Now, if we talk about Barngarla, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann, [08:26] the German Lutheran missionary, [08:30] who arrived in Australia in 1838, [08:35] he knew five languages, [08:38] which, of course as a revivalist, I must be fluent in, [08:42] because if I’m not, then I cannot analyse his dictionary properly. [08:46] And here you have a historical linguistic angle of revivalistics. [08:52] He knew German, of course. It was his mame-loshen or Muttersprache, [08:58] the mother language, native language. [09:01] He knew Latin, he knew Greek, he knew Hebrew, and he knew English. [09:11] These five languages are reflected [09:15] within his 1844 dictionary of the Barngarla language. [09:20] For example, as a German, he did not have the ‘r’ sound as phonemic, [09:28] in the sense that in German you either say [‘hambuɾk] or [‘hambuək]; [09:34] it’s not the case that if you say [r] and then [ʁ] [09:37] it means something different. [09:40] But in Barngarla, /r/ and /ɹ/ are phonemic, [09:42] so of course he might have well failed to notice the difference between /r/ and /ɹ/. [09:51] Intriguingly, there is a language near Adelaide called Ngarrindjeri. [09:58] In Ngarrindjeri, which is for example in Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Murray Bridge, [10:06] you did have two phonemes: one is /r/ and one is /ɹ/. [10:12] But because of emblematicity, what happens today, [10:16] and I know some Ngarrindjeri people, [10:19] they forgot about their /ɹ/ phoneme, [10:21] and they pronounce everything with /r/ [10:25] in order to other Ngarrindjeri from the English, [10:29] and therefore they say ‘Ngarrindjeri’ with a /r/. [10:34] Which is funny because when I say ‘Nga[r]indje[ɹ]i,’ [10:36] which is the original pronunciation, [10:38] they would correct me and say, [10:39] ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s Ngarrindje[r]i. There is no /ɹ/; it’s /r/.’ [10:43] So this is kind of emblematicity, [10:45] which is a phenomenon that revivalistics would analyse [10:51] and look at, you know, what is language revival. [10:54] Are you trying to reclaim the language as it used to be? [10:59] Of course you might, but you will never get there. [11:03] We will not be able to reclaim a language as it used to be. [11:07] It’s impossible. [11:08] JMc: So it’s not the same thing. And the sources that you’re using for language reclamation, [11:12] so you mentioned an 1844 dictionary, but is that it? Like, are there texts? [11:17] Because I’m sure that there would be all sorts of aspects of a language [11:22] that Schürmann would have simply not recorded. [11:25] So how do you fill in all these gaps if your only source is this 1844 dictionary [11:29] written by a German who wasn’t even a native speaker himself? [11:32] GZ: It’s a wonderful question, and let me surprise you. [11:36] There was a language called Nhawoo. Nhawoo, I write it N-H-A-W-O-O, Nhawoo, [11:44] because the first ‘n’ is with your tongue outside, so it’s kind of interdental, ‘Nhawoo.’ [11:52] But you might find it also as N-A-U-O. [11:56] Nhawoo only has three lexical items remaining, as far as I know. [12:05] So the first one is gardo. Gárdoo means ‘Aboriginal person’. [12:11] The second one is yánmoora. Yánmoora in Nhawoo means ‘white fellow.’ [12:18] And the third one is máldhabi. Máldhabi means ‘devil’. [12:27] Now, you’ll be shocked, but recently they published a dictionary with hundreds of words. [12:34] Now, how did they do it? [12:38] They replicated words from Barngarla, which is a related language, [12:45] from Wirangu, a related language. [12:49] They kind of reconstructed some of the grammatical aspects, [12:54] looking at Barngarla, etc. [12:57] So even with three words, they’re now trying to reclaim their sleeping or their dreaming beauty. [13:06] A fortiori in the case of Barngarla, where I actually managed to extract 3,500 words from Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann’s dictionary. [13:19] Now, let me just give you some details about the Old Testament. [13:23] In the Old Testament, you had 8,000 distinct words, types. [13:29] JMc: So this is the Hebrew Old Testament, you mean? [13:31] GZ: Yes, the Hebrew Bible. [13:33] Out of which 2,000 were hapax legomena, appearing only once, [13:40] which practically means that we are kind of on shaky grounds when it comes to the meaning of a word appearing only once. [13:48] So simplistically speaking, the Hebrew Bible is 6,000 words. [13:55] Now, Barngarla, 3,500 words. [13:59] In order to read a newspaper in Mandarin or Modern Standard Chinese, [14:05] you need something like 3,700 words. [14:08] So we are at the level of a language being alive and kicking. [14:13] Of course, with 3,500 words, you can make up many more words, just like combinations, etc. [14:20] And this is with no borrowings in the sense of phonetic adaptation of English words, [14:27] like say in some, as you know, in some Aboriginal languages, ‘horse’ would be /’wudʒi/ [14:32] because there is no /h/, there is no /s/, so ‘horse’ would be pronounced as /’wudʒi/, [14:37] or, say, ‘swamp’ would be pronounced as /tu’wumba/, [14:43] or /’tuwumba/ as in the town near Brisbane, you know, swamp, Toowoomba. [14:48] So you can also do that, but without that, we already have 3,500 words. [14:53] Now, Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann also wrote a grammar. [14:58] His grammar is not, say, kind of a Chomskyan modern grammar, [15:03] but we actually managed to extract a very big grammar out of it. [15:10] So I would argue that I have all the material needed for a reclamation in the case of Barngarla. [15:19] Of course, I’m not talking about, you know, intonation, in the prosody, in the prosody sense of, you know… Of course we’re not talking about that. [15:30] We do not have videos, you know, for example, gestures are extremely important. [15:36] JMc: So I guess there is a much deeper question about what even is a language. [15:41] So, I mean, you’ve been talking mostly about structural features, so like words in particular that you might have in a dictionary, grammar, [15:49] and then you extended that to prosody and other features of phonology. [15:54] But what about the deep cultural aspects of a language? [15:57] So what the words actually mean [15:59] and the broader cultural context in which they’re embedded. [16:02] So, I mean, the descendants of Ashkenazi Jews living in Israel today [16:05] would be culturally quite different from people at the court of King David, [16:10] and in the same way, there’s perhaps a big difference in culture that’s within certain parts of Aboriginal Australia from before the British invasion, if I can put it that way, to the present day. [16:22] So what exactly is it that you’re reclaiming or reviving in this broader cultural context? [16:27] GZ: That’s a very perspicacious point, because even if we want to go back to the original Weltanschauung, which is very beautifully reflected in language, [16:43] there have been so many changes post-colonization in the case of Australia that might bar us from doing it. [16:51] So, for example, in the case of Barngarla, [16:54] if I speak with you and I want to say ‘we’, of course, I need to use the dual. [16:59] We have a dual in Barngarla as opposed to English. [17:03] In English, we don’t care if ‘we’ it’s two people or three people. It’s still W-E ‘we’. [17:08] In Barngarla, if you are my brother’s son and I want to say ‘we two’, [17:16] I would say ngarrrinyi. [17:19] If you are my sister’s son and I want to say ‘we two’, I cannot say ngarrrinyi. I have to say ngadlaga. [17:28] Languages differ not in what they can say, but, as we know, in what they must say. [17:34] You must say in Old Barngarla ngadlaga if you are my sister’s son, [17:42] and we must say ngarrrinyi if you are my brother’s son. [17:46] So, it’s kind of a matrilineal as opposed to patrilineal dual. [17:51] Now, in English, not only do you not have a dual, [17:54] nobody could care less if you are related to each other through the sister or through the brother. [17:59] Now, why is it important? [18:01] Because in ancient times, I guess it might have meant some kind of taboos when it comes to marriage, weddings. [18:09] Nowadays, of course, we are in different times, so we kind of lost it, [18:15] and by losing the language, we actually lose a lot of our cultural autonomy, spirituality. [18:26] We lose a lot about intellectual sovereignty. [18:30] We lose a lot of our soul, metaphorically speaking. [18:34] And by reconnecting with language, [18:36] of course, we are not going to revive all the cultural traits that used to be, but it gives some kind of pride. [18:47] I think that every nationalist movement or every national movement, for example, in the case of Zionism, [18:55] strives for ancientness. [19:00] You wanted, [19:01] if you were Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Israeli or of the Hebrew revival, [19:07] you wanted to be as ancient as possible. [19:10] Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s dream was to speak like a biblical Jew, [19:17] and therefore he envied the Arabs [19:19] with the /ħa/, with the /qa/, with the /ʔa/, with the /tˤa/. [19:22] My name, Ghil‘ad [gil’ʕad], was like that pronounced in Hebrew. Nowadays, everybody pronounces it /gi’lad/, [19:28] a little bit like Julia Gillard, you know, /gi’lad/. [19:32] And some Aussies write it with an ‘r’, Gilad, as in ‘Gilard.’ [19:38] Look, this was his dream, but of course, [19:42] you cannot ignore your most recent heritage. [19:48] In the case of Jews coming to Israel [19:51] after the Holocaust or before the Holocaust in the fin de siècle, it was Yiddish. [19:58] Even though Eliezer Ben-Yehuda hated Yiddish, his mame-loshen, his mother tongue, [20:03] he could not avoid its shackles. [20:07] So this kind of cultural renewal has its limits and we should not lament it. [20:17] We should embrace the new hybridic language, [20:21] which… we should not chastise the new speakers. [20:27] We should never say, ‘Give us authenticity or give us death’, [20:31] because if we say that, as some elders in the Tiwi Island near Darwin said, [20:39] if you say that to the young people, ‘Give us authenticity or give us death’, [20:43] you will end up with death. [20:46] You will end up with the young people resorting to the colonizer’s language, [20:50] namely English, or Australian, or Strine, [20:54] rather than speaking kind of a different or a hybridic form of Tiwi. [20:59] I have a friend, Tīmoti Kāretu, in Aotearoa. [21:03] Tīmoti is a prescriptivist, a purist, [21:07] and he doesn’t like it when you make mistakes in te reo Māori, [21:10] the language Māori. [21:12] But of course, it’s counterproductive [21:13] because some people would see him and walk to the other side of the pavement, [21:19] not wanting to talk to him because they are afraid. [21:23] It can be counterproductive. [21:24] So I would embrace, champion hybridity. [21:29] JMc: But do you think there’s a danger in this idea of revitalization altogether [21:34] that you could devalue current ways [21:37] that the Jewish people or Aboriginal people in Australia or Māori people [21:41] actually speak now? [21:43] GZ: Absolutely. So David Ben-Gurion, [21:45] who was the first Prime Minister of Israel in 1948, [21:49] but also he was the leader of the Yishuv before the establishment of Israel. [21:56] He listened to Różka Korczak. [21:59] She was a Holocaust survivor. [22:00] This is the beginning of 1945, the end of 1944. [22:05] She spoke in the Histadrut, [22:08] which is an organization in Israel which used to be very important, [22:12] and she spoke in Yiddish, her mame-loshen, her mother tongue. [22:16] And David Ben-Gurion, I cannot forget it. [22:19] I mean, of course, I was not there. I was born in 1971. [22:21] I cannot forget how horrible it was when I read about it first time. [22:27] He said, זה עתה דיברה פה חברה בשפה זרה וצורמת…’ [22:35]‘ (ze atá dibrá po khaverá besafá zará vetsorémet…) ‘We have just heard a comrade [22:38] speaking in a language that is foreign and cacophonous’, [22:45] referring to the Jewish language called Yiddish, which is Judeo-German. [22:51] This is shocking in today’s terms. [22:56] It’s the irony of history. [22:59] Zionism tried to kill Yiddish [23:02] because Yiddish represented the diasporic, persecuted. [23:08] And, of course, Zionism is based on two negations. [23:13] One is the negation of the diaspora, and the other is the negation of religion. [23:17] And you can see the residues of this in today’s Israel. [23:21] It’s fascinating and multifaceted. [23:24] But the irony of history, [23:27] Zionism wanted to cancel Yiddish, but Yiddish survives beneath Israeli. [23:33] So this self-loathing definitely played a part, but it did not succeed. [23:42] And, of course, these days, which is, what, 75 years after the establishment of Israel, [23:49] if we talk about Israeli now, [23:51] I think it’s time to say, ‘Okay, we self-loathed Yiddish.’ [23:56] But actually, Yiddish is a fascinating language. [23:59] So I think that if we get rid of this imprisoning purism prism, [24:08] if you allow me an alliteration, [24:11] and if we kind of get into a more realistic Weltanschauung, you know, worldview, [24:20] then we end up empowering people who have lost everything in their lives. [24:27] JMc: And what is the ultimate aim? [24:29] I mean, you mentioned getting kids to acquire the language [24:32] so that they become native speakers. [24:34] But is there also an institutional element of expanding the domains in which the language is used? [24:40] Because if kids were just speaking at home, like in the family, [24:43] that is a relatively limited domain. [24:46] Like if you look at the example of Israel again, [24:48] Modern Hebrew or Israeli is a language that is used in all domains of life, [24:52] so in education, the government, business, and so on. [24:57] GZ: It’s a wonderful point, and the answer is, [25:01] what do the custodians want? [25:07] The custodians are the language owners. [25:10] We are facilitators. [25:14] We are revivalists, but the custodians are at the wheel. [25:20] They can decide to go the full monty, [25:22] meaning to have their grandchildren native speakers of the Neo-Barngarla, [25:28] or the Neo-Baiyungu, or the neo-language. [25:31] They can also decide, ‘We don’t care about native speech. [25:37] We want a post-vernacular phase’, just like Yiddish in America. [25:45] Most Jews in America would know the word shlep, [25:48] like to take one thing from one place to another, or to take yourself. [25:54] Jews in America would know this, [25:55] but they would not know how to speak Yiddish. [25:58] I’m not talking about the ultra-Orthodox of New York, [26:00] because of course they do speak Yiddish natively, [26:03] but I’m talking about the secular Jews. [26:05] It’s post-vernacular, as my friend Jeffrey Shandler coined, post-vernacular. [26:10] Or, te reo Māori in New Zealand is post-vernacular. [26:13] Every Māori knows whakapapa, ‘heritage’. [26:17] Every Māori knows iwi, which is a canoe or a tribe. [26:23] Every Māori knows whānau. [26:25] Whānau is like the family, or the khamula, the… [26:30] Every Māori would know the Te Taura Whiri, the Māori Language Commission, [26:34] which is like a bundled rope. [26:37] But how many Māori, [26:40] what is the percentage of Māori kids speaking Māori, or speaking Māori natively? [26:45] Very low percentage. It’s a severely endangered language. [26:49] So coming back to the Aboriginal custodians, they can say, ‘Look, we want to know 100 words. [26:56] We don’t need more than that.’ [26:58] They can also say, ‘You know what we want? [27:00] We want our language to be the official language of the region.’ [27:07] Currently in New Zealand you have two official languages, [27:10] Te Reo Māori, the language Māori, [27:12] and, surprise, the New Zealand Sign Language. [27:17] English is not de jure, it’s de facto. [27:22] Australia has no official languages. [27:25] Singapore has four, you know: Mandarin, English, Malay, and Tamil. [27:31] Australia has zero. [27:33] I would argue that Australia must have 401, approximately, official languages, [27:41] one Australian sign language, and 400 Aboriginal languages. [27:45] Of course, English is de facto, but it doesn’t need to be de jure. [27:51] So, Barngarla should be the official language of Galinyala. [27:56] Now, what is Galinyala? Port Lincoln. [27:59] How many people know that Galinyala is Port Lincoln? [28:02] Well, more and more so, [28:03] because now we’ve managed to convince the council, etc., to put signs. [28:10] And there is a sign, ‘Galinyala’. [28:14] And now more and more people know that ‘Galinyala’ means ‘Port Lincoln’. [28:17] But until recently, nobody knew, except us, you know, including Aboriginal people, they didn’t know. [28:24] And Goordnada is Port Augusta. [28:27] So we also need not only to officialize the language, [28:31] but also to change the langscape, the linguistic landscape. [28:35] Don’t forget that in Aboriginal spirituality, there is a trinity: [28:39] not il Padre, il Figlio, e lo Spirito Santo, not that trinity, [28:43] but the land, the language, and the people. [28:49] The land does not belong to the people. Rather, the people belong to the land. [28:57] The language belongs to the land. [28:59] So if you speak to a kangaroo in Galinyala, Port Lincoln, [29:02] you need to speak Barngarla. [29:05] You cannot speak Kaurna. [29:07] The kangaroo, according to that spirituality, would not understand you. [29:12] It would understand Barngarla, because both belong to the land. [29:17] JMc: Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [29:19] GZ: Oh, it’s a pleasure, James. [29:21] It’s always wonderful to talk to you, and keep up the good work. [29:24] JMc: Yeah, and thanks for coming all the way to Hamburg. [29:27] GZ: It’s a pleasure. Meine Großmutter ist in Hamburg geboren. [29:30] My grandmother was born in Hamburg, [29:32] and it’s actually the first time in which I see this beautiful city. [29:37] [Instrumental tapping] [29:40] [Singing]

In this interview, we talk to Nick Thieberger about the value of historical documentation for linguistic research, and how this documentation can be preserved and made accessible today and in the future in digital form. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 35 Crane, Gregory, ed. 1987–. Project Perseus. Web resource: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ Gardner, Helen, Rachel Hendery, Stephen Morey, Patrick McConvell et al. 2020. Howitt and Fison’s Archive. Web resource: https://howittandfison.org/ Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, George Aaron Broadwell, Michel R. Oudijk, Laurie Allen, May Plumb, and Mike Zarafonetis. 2016. Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec, first edition. Web resource: http://ticha.haverford.edu/ Takau, Toukolau. 2011. “Koaiseno”, in Natrauswen nig Efat, Stories from South Efate, ed. Nick Thieberger, pp. 88–90. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Open access: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/28967 Takau, Toukolau. 2017. “Koaiseno”, in recording NT1-20170718. https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/NT1/items/20170718 Thieberger, Nick. 2017. Digital Daisy Bates. Web resource: http://bates.org.au Thieberger, Nick, Linda Barwick, Nick Enfield, Jakelin Troy, Myfany Turpin and Roman Marchant Matus. 2022–. Nyingarn: a platform for primary sources in Australian Indigenous languages. Web resource: https://nyingarn.net/ Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). https://www.paradisec.org.au/ Transcript by Luca Dinu TT [singing]: Koaiseno koaiseno seno, nato wawa nato wawa meremo… [00:13] JMc: That was the late Toukolau Takau from Erakor village, Vanuatu, singing Koaiseno, a song that’s part of the folktale of the same name. [00:24] The recording of the song is stored in the PARADISEC digital archive, which we’ll talk about later in this episode. [00:31] Links to the recording and the complete story are included in the bibliography for this episode. [00:38] I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:47] Today we’re joined by Nick Thieberger, who’s Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. [00:55] Among his many interests, Nick works extensively with archival data, both contemporary and historical. [01:03] We’re going to talk to him about how historical data can inform present-day linguistic research, [01:09] and what we can do in our present to ensure that it becomes the most productive past of the future, if I can put it that way. [01:17] So Nick, you’ve been involved in a number of projects that make historical sources in Australian languages accessible to present-day communities and researchers. [01:27] The most significant of these are perhaps the Howitt and Fison Archive and the Digital Daisy Bates. [01:34] So can you tell us about these projects? What historical materials did you work with, [01:40] how did you make them accessible to people today, and what are the use of these materials today? [01:48] NT: Yeah, so these are a couple of major projects, and in some ways they were testing out a method for how to work with historical manuscripts. [02:01] I was only slightly involved with Howitt and Fison, but I ran the Digital Daisy Bates project, so maybe I’ll talk about that one. [02:09] Daisy Bates recorded on paper lots of information about Australian Indigenous languages in the very early 1900s. [02:18] So in 1904, she sent out a questionnaire, and that was filled out by a number of respondents. [02:23] And so there were in the order of 23,000 pages of questionnaire materials sitting in the National Library of Australia and two other libraries, [02:35] the State Library of Western Australia and South Australia. And so they were fairly inaccessible. [02:39] I’d worked with them, and I realised that they were very valuable, but they were really difficult to work with because they’re just all on paper. [02:48] So I thought it’d be interesting to try all of this methodology that we have with the Text Encoding Initiative and all these ways of dealing with texts and manuscripts. [02:58] So I worked with the National Library of Australia, and that took a bit of time because they’re a big institution and these things take time. [03:05] But it took about eight years, really, of getting the approvals from the National Library and also getting them to digitise these papers. [03:14] And they did that from microfilms, so not going back to the original papers, but… Because it was just much cheaper and easier to run the microfilms through and digitise them. [03:23] So then we had the images, and this was going back a while now, and OCR, optical character recognition, wasn’t very good for these typescripts. [03:33] So I sent them off to an agency to get them typed and then put them online. [03:39] And the idea, the principle behind this too, was that we should have an image of the original manuscript together with the text, [03:46] because, if you like, the warrant for the text is the original manuscript, and separating them, which is something that we’ve done a lot in the past, [03:55] we’ve gone in, found manuscripts, extracted what we think is the important information, reproduced it in some way, but then there’s no link back. [04:04] And so people can’t retrace your steps, [04:07] and if you’ve made some errors or just you’ve made some interpretations that they don’t agree with, there’s no real way for them to correct that. [04:15] So Digital Daisy Bates put the page images online and it put up the text, and you could then search the text, [04:24] and for every text page that you found, you retrieved the page image as well. [04:30] It’s been up online now for quite a while, and it’s had many, many users. [04:35] I think one of the exciting things about doing this sort of work is that once you prepare material in this way, you don’t know what uses people will make of it. [04:45] And one of the big target groups for this was Aboriginal people who wanted access to materials in their own languages, and that was satisfied. [04:55] But I was finding biologists who were finally able to search through 23,000 pages of Bates’ materials for plant and animal names. [05:06] Before, they were having to look through paper, and basically it defeated them, I think. [05:11] They were really not able to do it. [05:13] JMc: And all this material is still up online and available for anyone to use. [05:18] NT: Yeah, it is still up online and available for anyone to use. [05:21] And, you know, one of the issues with a lot of this is, what right do I have to put this online, and what changes digitisation makes, what changes it can make to the nature of the material. [05:36] So while it’s on paper, it’s got its own inherent restrictions. [05:40] You know, you can’t easily get access to it. [05:42] Once it’s online, it’s much more easily accessible. [05:45] So I was a bit worried with Daisy Bates. [05:47] This is mainly Western Australian material, and it represents dozens of languages and a huge geographic area. [05:55] There would be people who would feel perhaps aggrieved that they may feel some ownership of the language and not want it to be put online, [06:05] but I also recognised the value of putting it online. [06:10] So there was a risk. [06:11] And I think we have to take these risks. [06:13] I don’t think it’s very fruitful to say, “Oh, there’s a risk that somebody will be offended, so I won’t do this,” [06:20] because really, my experience with Daisy Bates is that everybody, all the Aboriginal people who’ve used it, have really valued being able to use it and finding materials. [06:29] And they can download this stuff and use it themselves as text. [06:32] So we have to be a bit less cautious. [06:35] I mean, obviously, we have to be cautious and we have to be respectful of the people represented, [06:40] but if I were to try and get permission from every Aboriginal person who’s got an ancestor in those papers, it would be impossible. [06:49] It would just, you know, it would stymie the whole project. [06:52] And on top of that, how can you go to people and say you want permission to do something when they don’t really know what you’re talking about because the papers are in the National Library in Canberra? [07:00] So putting the papers up and using a takedown principle, so saying, “If you’re aggrieved by this, please get in touch with me and we can take it down if necessary,” I think is a much more productive way of dealing with these papers. [07:14] JMc: Yeah, so it’s a very fraught situation in Australia in the moment, isn’t it? Because, I mean, these documents were produced by a member of the colonial settler population, Daisy Bates, who had very strong colonialist views, [07:31] but what she was documenting were the culture and language of Indigenous inhabitants of the country. [07:38] So the question is, yeah, who does it belong to? And what is even contained in these documents? [07:44] Is it Daisy Bates’ image of what she thought was the culture and language of these people, [07:49] or is it something, you know, some actual essential property of their culture and language that has in fact been recorded and belongs to them? [07:58] NT: Yeah, exactly. [07:59] And, I mean, as you say, Daisy Bates is quite a problematic character in Australian history. [08:04] She’s very well known. [08:06] And she did have very strange views, idiosyncratic views, and quite conservative from our perspective today. [08:13] In some way, you know, she would be a candidate for cancelling in the way that other historical figures have been. [08:21] But I think in all of these cases, you really have to weigh up the total person and the total legacy and not just say, “Well, you know, they did one thing that I don’t like, and therefore I won’t use any of the materials.” [08:35] And, as you say, there is a lot of material here which is neutral to some extent, it’s not her interpretation. [08:43] These were questionnaires that she sent out that had in the order of 1,000 prompt words and sentences. [08:48] So this is primary material. [08:50] Of course, it’s handwritten. So we have to interpret the handwriting. [08:54] But it’s not as potentially florid as some of her other recording, which is really it is her interpretation, and she did have some rather peculiar views. [09:05] But even there, knowing her views, you can strain out the essential or potentially the more ethnographic or historical detail from this material. [09:18] So, you know, I do think it’s important to do this and I do think it’s important to take risks in putting this material online. [09:26] Doing it, you know, talking to Indigenous people about it and knowing that they value it. [09:33] So, I mean, obviously, if there’s something that’s really offensive or that encodes some ceremonial event that is clearly not for general consumption, then you wouldn’t put that online, but that’s not the case for most of these materials. [09:49] JMc: You’re also a pioneer of ensuring that more recent materials are properly archived. [09:55] So probably from the mid-20th century up to the present. Your greatest contribution here would be your work at PARADISEC. [10:03] So can you tell us what PARADISEC is all about, and what value do you think the materials that you’ve archived there will have in the future, and can you also tell us what the particular challenges are that you’ve faced with the material that is archived at PARADISEC? [10:19] NT: So PARADISEC is the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures. [10:24] It’s a project that’s been going for 20 years that I’m currently leading, but, you know, had worked on for 20 years and it was established by Linda Barwick and me all that time ago. [10:38] The aim of PARADISEC was to digitize analog recordings. [10:44] So recordings made by field workers in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, mainly in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia and Southeast Asia, that were not being looked after by any other agency in Australia. [10:59] So we have National Film and Sound Archive and National Library and so on, but because these materials were not made in Australia, it wasn’t part of the role of these agencies to look after these recordings. [11:11] So we started digitizing the recordings, and we just kept going and getting bits and pieces of funding from various places, Australian Research Council in particular. [11:21] And now we have in the order of 16,000 hours of digital audio, a few thousand hours of video. [11:30] It’s a huge collection and it represents in the order of 1,355 languages. [11:38] It’s an enormous range of material that’s in there. And this is song, it’s oral tradition, it’s elicitation, it’s all kinds of things. [11:48] So the problem we set ourselves to solve was: how can this get back to the source communities that it came from? [11:56] Because we take it as part of our responsibility when we make these recordings that we will look after them and that they will go back to the communities, and in a lot of ways, the people we work with understand that when we’re working with them. [12:09] They understand that they are talking to the future, they are talking to us as custodians of this material for future generations. [12:17] And I think we’ve fallen down a little bit in our practice as linguists, musicologists, ethnographers, [12:25] in not really making proper provision for looking after this material and ensuring that it does get back, if not to the source communities, [12:34] because these are small villages in remote locations, but nevertheless to perhaps the national cultural agencies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and so on. [12:44] And that’s what we’ve been doing. [12:45] So one of the big challenges then is, well, finding the tapes in the first place. [12:49] Often they’re deceased estates that we’re working with or retired academics who feel the weight of this often. [12:57] They feel the weight of all of these recordings. [12:59] They understand that they should have done something with them, but there was no, to be fair, there usually was nowhere for them to actually deposit these materials. [13:07] So we’re providing that for them. [13:09] In general, the tapes are in pretty good condition, so it doesn’t take a lot of effort to digitize them. [13:14] But in having done this, we’ve established lots of relationships with these cultural agencies in the Pacific, and a lot of them have tapes as well. [13:21] And that’s where our effort is going now as well. [13:25] And that is working with the Solomon Islands National Museum, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, and digitizing tapes for them. [13:31] But in this case, often the tapes have been stored in the tropics. [13:34] They’re mouldy, they’re dirty, and they require quite a lot of work to make them playable, and no one is funding this work, so we have to do that on whatever funding we can put together. [13:45] But it is really valuable because the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, for example, has 5,000 tapes sitting in Port Vila, in a country that’s prone to earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis. [13:59] It’s got the lot. [14:01] And the potential for this stuff to be lost is really, is very real. [14:05] So working with these agencies is important and finding more and more of these tapes. [14:09] We run a project called Lost and Found, where we invite people to tell us about collections of tapes, [14:15] and they put that into our spreadsheet, and then we try and tee up some funding wherever we can, [14:20] through the Endangered Archives Program from the British Library, the Endangered Language Documentation Program, and so on. [14:28] JMc: So I guess there’s also a technical problem that once you’ve digitized these analogue tapes, [14:34] how do you ensure that the data formats don’t become obsolete, and that there isn’t data rot on the archival copies? [14:44] And then when you’re returning things to communities, how do you ensure that people in the communities can actually play back what they’ve recorded? [14:51] I guess there are many greater challenges with audiovisual material than with old archival material that’s on paper, [14:59] because all you have to do with paper is ensure that it is kept dry and out of sunlight. [15:05] NT: Yeah, indeed. So for storing this stuff and making sure that it’s going to last into the future, we adhere to all the necessary standards. [15:13] So this has all been done by others, obviously, so we follow the same standards. [15:18] And one of those standards is that you always digitize to a standard format, the European Broadcast Wave format, which is a WAV file. [15:27] We make MP3 versions, so they’re compressed versions, and MP3 we know is a proprietary format, [15:33] but for the time being it seems to be a format that works, and that’s the format that people can play relatively easily. [15:41] We have backup copies of the whole collection in different locations. [15:45] We have one in Melbourne, and the collection itself is in Sydney, and it’s in two locations in Sydney as well. [15:51] So we make provision for all of that technical backup. [15:57] We do checksum… So, checksums are checking the integrity of each file, and we do a checksum run through random parts of the collection every day, [16:06] and that points to anything that may have bit rot. [16:09] We haven’t actually encountered bit rot yet, but we know that it could be a thing. [16:14] And finally, getting it back to the right place, that’s really a big challenge. [16:18] So we do send hard disks back to these locations when we’ve digitized the tapes, and we have a catalogue, [16:26] and we keep a piece of whatever catalogue entry there is for an item, for a tape or whatever, [16:33] we put that together with the files, and we send that back to the cultural centre so that there’s contextual information with the files. [16:41] Files on their own are very difficult to interpret, so at least having that with them. [16:46] We’ve also experimented using Raspberry Pis, which are small computers that have a Wi-Fi transmitter in them, [16:54] and they cost a couple hundred dollars, and you can put all the material relevant to a particular place on a Raspberry Pi, [17:00] take it there, and then people can access that on their mobile phones, [17:04] and that is probably a better way of them accessing this material, because often they don’t have computers, [17:11] USB sticks and hard disks aren’t that relevant to them. [17:15] So we’ve been experimenting with that, as I say. [17:17] We’ve done it in a few villages. [17:19] We’ve done it in Tahiti, we’ve done it in the Western Desert in Australia, where people can then just access material on their phones, [17:25] and it does look like a good model, and probably the way to do this in future, [17:30] but it requires the local cultural centre to have this running there as well, [17:36] so yes, it sounds great and it does work, but it’s not necessarily going to work for a long time into the future. [17:43] We’ll see. [17:45] JMc: So your latest project is the Nyingarn repository. [17:49] So can you tell us what the purpose of the Nyingarn repository is, and how it builds on your previous work? [17:56] NT: Yes, so when we talked about Daisy Bates and the Howitt and Fison project, [18:00] these were particular projects designed around a set of material, [18:06] and as I said, experimenting with how to put that online and make it accessible, [18:10] and I think what that taught me and the team that I’m working with was that it works very well, [18:17] and it would be great to have a way of just adding more and more manuscripts to that platform, [18:24] and that’s what Nyingarn is. [18:25] So Nyingarn is… It’s a three-year project, we’re currently just at the end of the second year, [18:31] and the idea is that you should be able to take any digitized manuscripts, [18:35] put them into the platform, and it will try to OCR them, [18:41] or you can also put an existing transcript into the system as well, [18:45] and we’ve got a few different pathways in for different kinds of transcripts, [18:49] and the idea is that this will just grow as a platform with more and more manuscripts, [18:55] and it’s working very well. [18:57] We have at the moment about 350 manuscripts in our workspace, [19:03] so we distinguish a workspace, which is where all of the transcription [19:08] and sort of enrichment of the manuscript is, and then the next step is a repository, [19:13] which is where it goes once we have a fairly stable version of it, [19:19] and that’s where we allow people to search and do other things with it. [19:23] We did set ourselves the task also of getting permissions [19:27] from current language authorities for these documents, [19:31] and as we said earlier, it’s quite a sensitive issue in Australia, [19:36] and we recognize these sensitivities, so we don’t want to just be putting manuscripts online, [19:42] even if some of them have been in the public domain for some time. [19:46] We recognize that Aboriginal people have been disempowered for so long [19:50] that we don’t want to compound that, but the exciting thing is that there are a lot [19:55] of young Indigenous people in Australia now who are desperately looking for things to do, [20:00] and especially on the east coast of Australia where languages, [20:04] really the speakers of those languages suffered the initial onslaught [20:09] of the European invasion, and so that’s where the languages have not been spoken [20:14] for the longest, and people are trying to go back to these original sources now [20:17] to recover their languages, and so they recognize the value of Nyingarn [20:22] as a way of doing this transcription and then being able to use the manuscripts, [20:29] the text of the manuscripts. [20:31] So it’s a fairly simple idea. [20:34] You take a manuscript, you get a textual version of it, [20:38] and then you do something else with it, but actually making transcripts [20:43] of manuscripts isn’t that easy if you don’t have a good system for it [20:46] because you very rapidly start losing track of which page is related to which piece of transcript and so on. [20:52] So the simple technology does allow – it facilitates this transcription [20:58] and then further use of the materials. [21:01] So it’s exciting to see it working. [21:04] At the end of the project, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has undertaken to take the repository and host it there, so we hope that it will keep going into the future. [21:16] JMc: Do you see any international application for Nyingarn? [21:20] NT: Well, it’s all in GitHub. [21:22] It’s there if anybody wants to use it. [21:24] We actually – when I was doing this, I was looking at international models, [21:28] so there’s Project Perseus in Europe, which is all the sort of classic [21:32] Greek-Roman texts, and in the United States there’s Ticha, [21:37] which is, it’s working with a particular Zapotec canon of classical materials, [21:43] and it uses a similar sort of approach to what we’ve built up with Nyingarn. [21:49] So, yes, I think it’s very – it’s logical that it should happen. [21:53] I’m sort of – I was a bit astounded that there wasn’t a way [21:58] of looking at these texts up until now, but nevertheless, [22:02] I hope that this will continue into the future. [22:05] JMc: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [22:09] TT [singing]: …koaiseno seno, nato wawa nato wawa meremo, koaiseno seno.

In this episode, we talk to Mary Laughren about research into the languages of Central Australia in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on the contributions of American linguist Ken Hale. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 34 Hale, Kenneth L., and Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi. 1958. Warlpiri elicitation session. archive.org Laughren, Mary, with Kenneth L. Hale, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, Marlurrku Paddy Patrick Jangala, Robert Hoogenraad, David Nash, and Jane Simpson. 2022. Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Publisher’s website Comparative historical reconstruction in Australian languages: Hale, Kenneth L. 1962. Internal relationships in Arandic of Central Australia. In A. Capell Some linguistics types in Australia, 171-83. (Oceanic Linguistic Monograph 7), Sydney: Oceania (The University of Sydney). Hale, Kenneth L. 1964. Claassification of Northern Paman languages, Cape York Peninsula, Australia: a research report. Oceanic Linguistics 3/2:248-64. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Phonological developments in particular Northern Paman languages. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 7-40. Canberra: AIAS. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Phonological develpments in a Northern Paman languages: Uradhi. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 41-50. Canberra: AIAS. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. Wik reflections of Middle Paman phonology. In Peter Sutton, ed. Languages of Cape York, 50-60. Canberra: AIAS. Syntax of Australian languages Hale, Kenneth L. 1973. Deep-surface canonical disparities in relation to analysis and change: an Australian example, 401-458 in Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. by A. Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton. Hale, Kenneth L. 1975. Gaps in grammar and culture, 295-315 in Linguistics and Anthropology, in In Honor of C.F. Voegelin, ed. by M.D. Kinkade et al. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. Hale, Kenneth L. 1976. The adjoined relative clause in Australia, 78-105 in Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, ed. by R.M.W. Dixon. Canberra: A.I.A.S. Hale, Kenneth L. 1981. Preliminary remarks on the grammar of part-whole relations in Warlpiri, pp. 333-344 in Studies in Pacific Languages & Cultures in honour of Bruce Biggs, ed. by Jim Hollyman & Andrew Pawley. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. Hale, Kenneth L. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1.1(January/February):5-47. Universal Grammar and Language diversity Hale, Kenneth L. 1996. Universal Grammar and the root of Linguistic Diversity. In Bobaljik et al. (eds), 137-161. (Originally given as Edward Sapir Lecture at 1995 LSA Linguistic Institute, Albequerque, New Mexico.) Students supervised by Hale with Doctoral Dissertations on Australian languages Klokeid, Terry J. 1976. Topics in Lardil Grammar. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Legate, Julie Anne. 2002. Warlpiri: theoretical implications. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Levin, Beth Carol. 1983. On the Nature of Ergativity. 373pp. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, M.I.T. Chapter 4: ‘Warlpiri’, pp.137-214. Nash, David G. 1980. Topics in Warlpiri Grammar. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Pensalfini, Robert. 1997. Jingulu grammar, dictionary, and texts. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Simpson, Jane Helen. 1983. Aspects of Warlpiri Morphology and Syntax. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. Students from other Universities influenced by Hale’s work on Warlpiri Larson, Richard K. 1982. Restrictive modification: relative clauses and adverbs. Doctoral dissertation, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Madison, Wisconsin. Lexicon Project & Native American language dissertations. Fermino, Jessie Littledoe. 2000.  An introduction to Wampanoag grammar. M.Sc. MIT. LaVerne, M. Jeanne. 1978. Aspects of Hopi Grammar. PhD MI Platero, Paul. 1978.  Missing nouns phrases in Navajo. PhD MIT White Eagle, Josephine Pearl  . 1983. Teaching scientific inquiry and the Winnebago Indian language, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. PhD. Other references: Bobaljik, Jonathan David, Rob Pensalfini and Luciana Storto. 1996. Papers on Language Endangerment and the Maintenance of Linguistic Diversity. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 28). Cambridge Mass. Carnie, Andrew, Eloise Jelinek and Mary Ann Willie. 2000. (eds). Papers in Honor of Ken Hale: Working paper in Endangered and Less Familiar Languages 1. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics). Cambridge Mass. Simpson, Jane, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin and Barry Alpher. (eds). 2001. Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages. Transcript by Luca Dinu KH: The following are utterances in Warlpiri spoken by Kenny from Yuendumu. [00:09] Head. [00:10] KWJ: Jurru, jurru. [00:12] KH: He hit me in the head. [00:14] KWJ: Jurruju pakarnu, jurruju pakarnu. [00:17] KH: Did he hit you in the head? [00:18] KWJ: Pakarnuju, pakarnuju. [00:19] JMc: What you just heard was an excerpt from an elicitation session with the Warlpiri man Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi, speaking Warlpiri, recorded in 1959 by the American linguist Ken Hale. [00:34] I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:43] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:46] In this episode, we embark on a series of interviews in the history of Australian linguistics by looking at the 20th century research into the Central Australian language Warlpiri, and in particular the role played in this research by the American linguist Ken Hale. [01:04] This topic is not only of great historical interest, but also currently quite newsworthy. [01:09] The Warlpiri Encyclopaedic Dictionary, started by Ken Hale and worked on over a period of over 60 years by him and his collaborators, both Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri, appeared just at the end of last year. [01:23] To tell us about all the research initiated by Ken Hale and continued by his students and other associates, we’re joined by Mary Laughren, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. [01:35] So Mary, to get us started, could you perhaps tell us how you got involved with Central Australian languages and Warlpiri in particular? [01:46] ML: Well, I did my undergraduate studies in Australia at the University of Queensland but then went to France, and I did my postgraduate work at the University of Nice. [01:57] The subject of my dissertation was a Senufo language from the Côte d’Ivoire, [02:03] which would have been about 1973, [02:06] I think my doctoral dissertation was presented. And then I got information actually from my mother. She had seen an advertisement for five field linguists to go to the Northern Territory to support the very newly inaugurated bilingual education programs. [02:26] It didn’t say where you would be, apart from some place in the Northern Territory. I’d never visited, I didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded quite an adventure and interesting thing to do. [02:39] So I applied for one of those positions. [02:42] And in 1975, I came back from the Ivory Coast, Côte d’Ivoire, to Australia and went to the head office of the then Northern Territory Division of the Australian Department of Education. [02:55] So it was the Labor government under Whitlam, and particularly his education minister, Kim Beazley Sr., [03:03] who inaugurated these bilingual education programs in communities where people requested to have their own language used in the formal education programs. [03:15] So I found myself in Darwin, and there was a sort of an advisory committee had been set up to advise the government on bilingual education and how it was progressing and how to go about it, etc. [03:30] It just happened that very shortly after my arrival in Darwin, [03:34] there was one of these meetings of this committee, and a linguist, Darrell Tryon, had visited Yuendumu on his way to the meeting and had been very heavily lobbied by Warlpiri people there that they really needed a linguist. [03:48] So I just happened to be this spare linguist that was sitting around Darwin. [03:53] And that’s really how I was sort of sent to Yuendumu, which I liked the idea of a lot, because I didn’t particularly want to be in the sultry tropics, [04:04] and I quite liked the idea of being in a desert community. [04:10] JMc: On a day-to-day basis, what was it that you actually did as a linguist in the community? [04:14] ML: Well, it really depended on what state the linguistic documentation was at and some of the linguists who had similar positions in other places. I mean, their job really was to do sort of really basic research on the language and to devise a writing system. [04:31] Now, fortunately, Ken Hale and other linguists had worked on Warlpiri before me and certainly, you know, Ken’s fantastic work, [04:40] and there was already a practical orthography, and there were already materials being produced to use in school programs. [04:51] So I was sort of ahead of the curve. [04:53] So what I really did, apart from trying to learn the language as best I could, [04:59] was work with young Warlpiri people. Both assistant teachers and special positions had been set up for people as literacy workers, I think they were called, to help produce these materials. [05:13] So they were often recording stories from other people in the community, [05:19] but then writing them down. [05:20] So these were people who were really quite literate in Warlpiri or various degrees of ability, of course. [05:28] And so I worked very carefully with them and also with the teachers to see what they thought was going to be helpful in the classroom, [05:36] and we sort of tried to produce materials and look at the whole range of education that you could do [05:43] in both Warlpiri and English, so whether it was mathematics or the natural sciences, as well as initial literacy. [05:50] It has to be said that this was 1975 when I went to Yuendumu, arrived in Yuendumu. [05:56] The school, I think, had only been set up about 1950. [05:59] In fact, the settlement was the same age as me. [06:02] It was created in 1946. [06:03] So, you know, formal schooling was really, you know, incredibly new. [06:09] And we’re talking about very, very impoverished communities. [06:14] I mean, I had come from West Africa, and I just couldn’t believe the standard of living of Warlpiri people, you know, or people throughout Central Australia in particular. [06:26] I’d never seen, you know, such poverty, such, you know, terrible living conditions. [06:31] You can imagine that formal schooling, in a way, didn’t have a lot of sort of relevance, in some ways, for people’s way of life, which was really a struggle to survive in many ways. [06:45] But before I came to Yuendumu, when I was still hovering around the office in Darwin, another linguist, Velma Leeding, [06:55] who had formerly worked for the Summer Institute of Linguistics but had then become a departmental linguist working on Groote Eylandt in particular, [07:05] She came to me and she said, “Oh, if you’re going to Yuendumu, you need to write to this professor, Ken Hale,” [07:13] which I wisely took her advice, looking back on it. [07:16] And I did, just to say, you know, “Here I am, this random person going to Yuendumu, and, you know, I’ve been advised to write to you,” and he wrote back. [07:26] And that’s how we started sort of a correspondence. [07:30] In those days, of course, there was no email or anything like that. [07:33] So, you know, written correspondence. [07:36] JMc: Okay. So literacy had a function too in connecting linguists. [07:40] ML: It had a function in connecting linguists. That’s right. [07:43] Absolutely. [07:44] And one of the fantastic bodies of materials that I found in Yuendumu was a photocopy of Ken’s field notes from his 1966-’67 field trip to Australia. [08:00] and where he did a lot of work, really in-depth work on Warlpiri with a number of Warlpiri men from different regions, [08:06] so covering different varieties or dialects of Warlpiri. [08:11] And when I found these, I started reading through them and working besides other Warlpiri speakers, including elderly people [08:24] who came in who were just interested in, you know, having a chat and stuff. [08:29] And so I was able to ask where I didn’t understand things, I wasn’t sure of things or whatever. [08:36] And that was a really good way of getting into Warlpiri and learning more about Warlpiri. [08:42] And it’s really his collection from ’66, ’67, and the earlier work he did [08:50] with people like Kenny Jungarrayi Wayne in 1959, ’60, that have really… plus some other materials of his, and as well as a lot of other material as well. [09:02] But his material, in a way, is really the core of the information in the Warlpiri dictionary. [09:09] JMc: OK. So his first trip to Warlpiri country was in ’59–’60. [09:13] Is that correct? [09:14] Ken Hale’s first trip was in ’59–’60. [09:17] LM: Yeah, Ken Hale’s first trip to Australia, I think, was in, yeah, ’59–’60. [09:22] So he had a grant. [09:25] He was at the University of Indiana where he had done his PhD, and he got a grant to come out to Australia, [09:33] I think very much encouraged by the Voegelins. [09:36] Carl Voegelin had been his supervisor, [09:39] and wife Florence was there, and he was encouraged to come to Australia and got this grant, sort of arrived in Sydney and went and met Elkin at the University of Sydney and Arthur Capell, and Arthur Capell was very excited about his coming here. [09:59] Arthur Capell was really a linguist and often called the father of Australian linguistics [10:05] Elkin was, I think, less welcoming. [10:08] There was this sort of idea that different people sort of, you know, had exclusive right to different languages, and really wherever Ken thought that he might go, he was sort of blocked, in a way. [10:20] But in the end, he said, “Well, let’s just… We know that people in Alice Springs speak Aboriginal languages,” [10:26] so he went to Alice Springs and started working [10:30] with people on the Arandic languages, which to my mind are incredibly difficult languages to work on. [10:38] But in almost no time at all, he had gone round to various communities out from Alice Springs and really did some very exciting documentation of different varieties of Arrernte and also was able to see the connection. [10:54] So one of his first interests, I guess, was really historical-comparative work. [10:59] And he did, you know, really interesting work on the relationships between these various varieties of Arrernte. [11:06] But then he met Warlpiri people, of course, the Warlpiri people living in the area of Alice Springs, within Alice Springs. [11:15] And so he started working on Warlpiri at that time as well. [11:19] JMc: And can you just fill us in, [11:20] what is the genetic relationship like between Warlpiri, Arandic languages and Luritja? [11:26] ML: They’re all Pama–Nyungan languages, but they belong really to different sub-families, if you like, of the Pama–Nyungan group. [11:33] So you’ve got the Arandic languages, and Warlpiri is really part of a Yapa, Ngumpin–Yapa group. [11:41] related with languages further west and further to the north. [11:45] Warlpiri is the most southern of that group of languages. [11:48] And then Luritja, to the south of Warlpiri, is one of the Western Desert languages. [11:53] Of course, the Western Desert languages are spread over a very, very large area of Australia, into Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. [12:01] JMc: Now, you mentioned that the documentation that Ken Hale produced became the heart of the Warlpiri Dictionary, [12:08] but could you say a little bit more also about his other connections to the community? [12:13] Was he involved in these 1970s efforts to boost bilingual education, for example? [12:19] And did he have other connections to the community itself? [12:23] ML: Yeah, very much so. [12:25] So he had spent time in Yuendumu, and [12:29] he was asked by the government before these programs were actually officially introduced — so very soon after the Whitlam government got power — [12:40] he and Geoff O’Grady, with whom he had worked and done a very large field trip in 1960, they were asked to write a report for the government about the feasibility of bilingual education and also how it might be implemented, [12:58] which he did. [12:59] So that was actually very, very influential, and they made quite a number of recommendations, very concrete recommendations. [13:07] And I know that that was held as sort of a blueprint really by the NT division of the department, which had the job of implementing these programs. [13:17] So when Yuendumu school got the go-ahead to start doing bilingual education, the local store, which was called the Yuendumu Social Club, raised the money to bring Ken Hale out, and he prepared a number of really useful materials: a syllabary, a basic, what he called an elementary dictionary of Warlpiri. [13:38] He gave classes to a whole lot of young adults who had had some schooling in Warlpiri writing system, etc. [13:48] So that’s why when I arrived in ’75, there were all these people who were quite adept at writing Warlpiri, which was fantastic. [13:55] So, yes, he did things like that. [13:58] And he went to the various Warlpiri communities sort of running these little courses, [14:03] and people were still speaking about that experience, you know, many, many, many years later [14:09] and how they enjoyed that and what they’d got out of it. [14:13] And just when I went back to Yuendumu in March for the launch of the Warlpiri dictionary, a man came up to me and he said, “Yes, I remember Ken Hale.” [14:24] JMc: So what would you say were Ken Hale’s main contributions to the development of linguistics? [14:30] Was he mainly a data collector, or was he also a theorist? [14:34] ML: Well, he was both: his ability to record and to learn languages, and to hear the fine phonetic detail, to work out the phonology of a language. [14:50] And I think some of the languages that he worked on in his first trip, like the Arandic languages and [14:56] languages in North Queensland that have had lots of phonological changes historically compared to more conservative languages like Warlpiri and the Western Desert languages and many others is really quite phenomenal, really, to have that sort of ability. [15:12] So he had that extraordinary ability, and he had sort of worked out a method of initial elicitation, which was not only to get words and basic morphology, certainly to get that, [15:26] but also other, he was interested also in grammar, in syntax. [15:30] So he had a very, very sort of interesting way of proceeding with his elicitations. [15:37] And because he was so good, in very, very short amounts of time, he was able to collect an enormous amount of data, and data which is very reliable, you know, phonetically reliable, phonologically reliable, morphologically and all the rest of it. [15:51] So he… [15:52] Even though he may not have worked, done further work on lots of the languages from which he collected data, other people have certainly been able to work on that language, and you’ll often find in dictionaries and grammars and all sorts of things [16:09] an acknowledgement that a lot of the basic materials actually come from Ken Hale’s field notes, as well as having the best of the training an American university could give at that time in linguistics and linguistic theory, methodology. [16:25] He also had a background in anthropology, [16:28] and that really comes through in his understanding, for example, of the complex kinship systems and kinship terminology, particularly thinking of the Warlpiri tri-relational kinship terms, the way in which even the grammatical parts of a language are manipulated in respect speech registers, etc., is really incredibly good. [16:52] But he was also very, very interested in modern theories of linguistics. [17:00] I think just his knowledge of so many languages, he could appreciate the diversity that you get in languages, but also the sameness that you get. [17:12] Anybody that works on a lot of languages, you keep coming back to the same things, the certain sort of constraints about a system that’s learnable by human beings. [17:22] And I think he contributed quite a lot through his work, [17:27] for example his work on non-configurational languages, looking at languages like Warlpiri with their relatively free word order or phrasal order. [17:38] His work on the Lexicon Project, for example, which he set up with Jay Keyser at MIT in the 1980s, I think was very influential. [17:48] JMc: There’s some key words there, “a system of constraints learnable by humans,” and even the name of the institution, MIT. [17:57] So Ken Hale was, of course, a professor at MIT, [18:01] and that’s the home of generative linguistics. [18:04] And generative linguists are often characterized or perhaps caricatured as being interested only in inventing new theoretical devices on the very thin empirical basis of their intuitions of English, maybe with a few other major European languages in the mix. [18:20] So how did Ken Hale, who was a confirmed field linguist, fit into this scene at MIT? [18:27] Did the data that he brought back from the field feed into the further development of theory, [18:32] and is it inaccurate to say that MIT linguists are not interested in typological diversity and empirical data on the languages of the world? [18:44] ML: Yeah, I think that idea that MIT people are only there [18:50] inventing theories out of some work on English is completely ridiculous. [18:56] It’s just completely wrong. [18:58] I spent quite an amount of time at MIT working with Ken in the 1980s and followed the work of various people and graduate students working on a whole range of languages, from American Indian languages to Asian languages, [19:16] a variety of European languages, languages from all over, including Australian languages. [19:21] So Australian PhD students like David Nash, Jane Simpson, and American students like Julie Anne Legate, for example, worked on Warlpiri with Ken, people working on Leerdil and other Australian languages. [19:34] But yeah, at MIT people were interested in languages generally, you know, and were looking at the similarities and differences across a whole range of languages. [19:45] I mean, I met students from China, from Japan. [19:48] So I think that’s just a ridiculous, as you said, it’s a sort of a caricature, and I think it’s got no evidential basis whatsoever. [19:57] So, Ken actually didn’t go to MIT till after his second field trip to Australia when he was invited by Morris Halle to join the department there. [20:06] So his initial work was really out of University of Indiana. [20:10] JMc: OK. And why did Morris Halle want Ken Hale at MIT? [20:16] ML: Because he’d heard about this very brilliant linguist, and he wanted the best at MIT, [20:23] and so he invited Ken to consider joining the department. [20:30] Ken Hale once said to me that… Actually, he wrote a really interesting paper and he gave it as the Edward Sapir Lecture at the American Linguistic Institute in 1995, [20:42] and I think it’s called something like “Universal Grammar and the Roots of Linguistic Diversity.” [20:48] That paper sort of… I reread it today, and it reminded me of something he once said that you could look at any one language, and you could probably find out most of what there was to be found out about human language. [20:59] Right? [21:01] If you go deep enough into the language. [21:04] But of course, some languages are much more overt in some of the characteristics of human language than others, right? [21:10] So there’s much more sort of surface evidence there for certain characteristics. [21:16] And I personally think that that’s probably very, very true. [21:20] But by looking at a diversity of languages, you can both confirm hypotheses, clearly [21:26] — so one often finds things that are just so similar across languages, even though on the surface they look to be very different; they’re certainly not related historically — [21:38] and the other thing about the diversity, of course, you can find counterexamples. [21:42] So to any theory, you know, [21:43] if it’s not something that you can find some counter-evidence for, [21:46] I mean, the theory, of course, is not tenable. [21:49] So, you know, that’s part of his interest was really both confirming and disconfirming, if you like. [21:55] And I think the work that he did on bringing to prominence languages with very free word order, and not just Warlpiri, but other languages from around the world that had much more freedom of word order, apparently, than English, [22:09] I think led to all sorts of very interesting work that was done on languages by linguists from all over. [22:17] JMc: You mentioned that word order in Warlpiri is a lot freer than in a language like English, for example, [22:23] and I believe one of the parameters of universal grammar that Ken Hale proposed was this non-configurationality parameter. [22:32] ML: Well, I think the w*, that you could put things in any order – although, of course, [22:39] Ken knew very well that even in Warlpiri, there were certain ordering constraints. [22:44] And I think his idea, sort of throwing out these ideas, other people sort of took them up and also looked for explanations for, why are there languages that are like that and languages that aren’t like that, [22:57] and what is the real difference between them? [23:00] How do we characterize one language as opposed to another? [23:04] Where do these differences spring from? [23:08] And various people have come up with various proposals, etc. [23:12] So I think that was really Ken’s sort of ideas, which came out of his fieldwork, but also out of very deep reflection about language and on the basis of knowing lots of different languages very well, was really to throw out ideas, to throw out sometimes sort of initial explanations or characterizations of the problem, if you like, for linguists to solve, for other people to really get their teeth into. [23:41] And I think it was very similar with his work in the Lexicon Project, where he was really interested in that relationship between semantics and syntax, [23:50] where the certain types of meaning, or the explanation of meaning, sort of constrained the syntax and the relationship between levels of languages. [23:59] And that really spawned a lot of really great work by a whole lot of people addressing this question of this interaction between syntax and semantics, [24:09] what constrains what. [24:11] JMc: OK, excellent. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:16] ML: My pleasure. [24:20] JMc: We’ll close now with an excerpt from a recording of a Warlpiri song sung to the melody of “Freight Train”. [24:27] The Warlpiri lyrics are by Ken Hale, and this performance of the song is by Warlpiri teachers in Yuendumu in 2009. [24:35] Wendy Baarda is accompanying them on guitar. [24:37] [music] [24:41] Singers: [singing in Warlpiri] [24:54]

Exploring the formalist aspects of linguistic work by Sapir and Bloomfield, and the evolution of their methods into distributionalism. Focus on abstract systems and patterns in linguistics from Neo-Grammarians to modern linguists.

In this episode, we discuss the leading American linguist Leonard Bloomfield and his connections to the psychological school of behaviourism and the philosophical doctrines of logical positivism. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 32 Primary sources Bloomfield, Leonard (1914), An Introduction to the Study of Language, New York: Henry Holt. archive.org Bloomfield, Leonard (1926), ‘A set of postulates for a science of language’, Language 2, 153–164. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 128–138.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1930 [1929]), ‘Linguistics as a science’, Studies in Philology, 553–557. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 227–230.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1933), Language, New York: Henry Holt. archive.org Bloomfield, Leonard (1936 [1935]), ‘Language or ideas?’, Language 12, 89–95. (Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 322–328.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1938), Linguistic Aspects of Science (= International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 1, no. 4), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carnap, Rudolf (1931a), ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache’, Erkenntnis 2, 219–241. (English translation: Carnap 1959 [1931].) Carnap, Rudolf (1931b), ‘Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft’, Erkenntnis 2, 432–465. (English translation: Carnap 1934 [1931].) Carnap, Rudolf (1934 [1931]), The Unity of Science, trans. Max Black, London: Kegan Paul. (German original: Carnap 1931b.) Carnap, Rudolf (1959 [1931]), ‘The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language’, trans. Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, ed. Alfred Jules Ayer, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, pp. 60–81 (German original: Carnap 1931a). Hockett, Charles F., ed. (1970), A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. archive.org Verein Ernst Mach (2006 [1929]), ‘Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: der Wiener Kreis’, in Wiener Kreis, ed. Michael Stöltzner and Thomas E. Uebel, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, pp. 1–29. Watson, John B. (1913), ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it’, Psychological Review 20, 158–177. Watson, John B. (1926), ‘What is behaviorism?’, Harper’s Magazine 152, 723–729. Watson, John B., and Rosalie Rayner (1920), ‘Conditioned emotional reactions’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 10, 421–428. Weiss, Albert Paul (1925), ‘One set of postulates for a behavioristic psychology’, Psychological Review 32:1, 83–87. Secondary sources Hatfield, Gary (2018), ‘René Descartes’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/descartes/ Hiż, Henry, and Pierre Swiggers (1990), ‘Leonard Bloomfield, the logical positivist’, Semiotica 79:3/4, 257–270. Leahy, Thomas Hardy (2018 [1987]), A History of Psychology: From antiquity to modernity, New York: Routledge. Stadler, Friedrich (2011), Studien zum Wiener Kreis. Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des Logischen Empirismus im Kontext, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (English translation: Stadler 2015 [2011].) Stadler, Friedrich (2015 [2011]), The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism, Vienna: Springer. (German original: Stadler 2011.)