Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason
The French government tried very hard to resist American loanwords like e-mail, promoting in its place messagerie électronique or courriel. They’d formed a whole agency for this purpose. Laws were passed and enforced. And yet e-mail prevailed—it was simply more efficient. But Sally was especially excited about languages that resist such borrowing, even in the face of extraordinary cultural influence and dominance. Montana Salish was one such language. Our conversations followed a pattern: I arrived expecting one thing and ended up somewhere entirely distinct, thinking differently about language and human culture.
.. The most famous story is in the Bible—the people at the bridge saying shibboleth. And that was a case where they were both speaking dialects of Hebrew, I guess it was, and if you couldn’t say shibboleth because you didn’t have the sh sound, they’d kill you.
.. Every generation of teenagers will invent their own words because the whole point of teenage slang is to have in-group vocabulary that outsiders, like old people, can’t understand very well. And a lot of those words are ephemeral. The next generation comes along, gets their own words, the old words disappear.
.. But looking at the ones that did hang on is interesting because it tells you that they turned out to be useful. Mob—the word mob used to be a slang word. It’s a reduced form of a Latin word, mobile. But now it’s a really useful word. It’s interesting to see which words turn out to be useful.
.. But imagine a society—and again, these are mostly hunter-gatherer societies, but there are still a lot of those around—where the people practice exogamy, meaning you have to find a marriage partner outside your own group. Often the criterion is whether they speak the same language as you.
.. It’s a wonderful language. I like consonants, and they have thirty-eight consonants. I like big, long, complicated words, and they have huge, long, complicated words.
.. The word they use for automobile means “that it has wrinkled feet,” which is, incidentally, an example of how the words you have reflect your culture. If you’re a tracker, you’re going to be noticing the tire tracks—the focus of that particular word. And the word for telephone means “you whisper into it.”
.. The only totally successful case of language revival is still Hebrew. Having your language serve as a vehicle for a major world religion is very useful if you’re trying to revitalize it.
.. The other is Hawaiian. Both used a strategy called Language Nest where you get kids, preschool kids, in a setting where nobody speaks to them in any language but the language they want to revitalize, and because you’re getting them so early you’ve got a good chance of making them fluent.