Who speaks Shoshone, and when?

A comment on last Sunday's Weekend Edition radio program inspired me to think about two questions. A participant in the Shoshone/Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program (SYLAP) commented:

Someone will step in. You can even bring in a white man to [run a business]. But there isn't going to be a white man who can speak your language.

I wrote about the first of my two questions on Sunday. (What is a "white man"?) Today I'd like to think more about questions of identity and language, particularly in terms of language preservation and revitalization.

Let me preface this by saying that I applaud SYLAP and programs like it. Native American languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Even those that are not already disappearing because they are not being acquired by young children are shrinking year after year. I in no way mean to downplay the value of the work being done by apprenticeship programs or other projects that help get more young people interested in learning and using Native American languages.

Furthermore, I applaud the young woman who made the comment I quoted above. I am happy and excited to see intelligent young people seeking out ways to serve their communities and the world around them. And every smart and dedicated person coming into a linguistics program is a cause for celebration in my book.

Still, I would like to unpack the notion that "there isn't going to be a white man who can speak your language." I'm going to suggest that such ideas might do as much harm as good to the cause of language preservation. And a good portion of the blame for such thinking may be due to linguistic anthropology, though other fields and practices share in the culpability.

From its earliest days, linguistic anthropology explored the links between the cultural practices of various groups of people and the forms of language that they use. Let me note the differences between early twentieth century views of language and culture in anthropology and those of nineteenth century philosophers such as Herder and von Humboldt. Where the philosophers saw language and culture as essentially and indissolubly linked, the anthropologists suggested merely that, "In the main they [language and culture] have grown up together, constantly influencing each other" (Whorf 1941). In terms of their effect on contemporary thought, this may be a distinction without a difference. The idea that each language reflects a unique worldview, which in turn effects culture, is probably associated more with the linguists Sapir and Whorf than with any other individuals.

A problem for languages like Shoshone, Mohawk, or Lakota - not to mention Corsican, Ainu, Paiwan or literally thousand of others around the world - is that they are not associated with a nation-state. Shoshone is a nationality, but most Shoshone people are citizens of the United States. The idea that it is "natural" for all Americans to speak English (often only English), as well as efforts by the US government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to suppress indigenous languages, have pushed the language to endangered status. It is estimated that perhaps no more than 3,000 people in the entire world speak Shoshone today.

In this marginalized state, many endangered languages continue to exist in specialized "culture" realms. I know very little about contemporary Shoshone cultural practices (Don't let my confident writing style fool you), but in ethnic and linguistic minority communities I do know, people often talk about "our culture" as something distinct from everyday life. In these cases "our language" is too often thought of as something separate from our lives.

Language is an important part of the culture of any community. It is not mistaken or wrong to think of the language practices shared within the group as a special, or in some sense even a sacred part of culture and community life. But by treating language as distinct from other aspects of daily life, don't we promote the idea that it is a specialized activity to be pursued by those with the leisure and the inclination to do so?

I don't have a solution. I don't know how we can come to think of communication in many languages, vitally including Native American languages, as an everyday part of life. But I can't help but think that if somehow we could get all Americans to think of multilingualism as an ordinary part of life, and of Shoshone as an everyday language in Shoshone communities, then preserving the language might be a little easier. And we might even find it unremarkable if a white man who moved in, say to run a business, would learn Shoshone, too.

Eggcorns and Fuzzy Spots

The term eggcorn was coined in 2003 by linguist-bloggers Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman, and has spawned something of a cottage industry of eggcorn-hunters on the Web. An eggcorn is defined as "an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect [which] introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context." The eponymous eggcorn, for example, is used by some speakers in place of acorn. Though not standard, the substitution is easy to understand: acorns are seeds (corns) that are sort of shaped like eggs. On web sites such as The Eggcorn Database and Eggcorn Forum, Wikipedia, and various blogs, scores of amateur lexicographers (including yours truly) track and discuss the production and use of these lexical innovations.

Recently Eggcorn Forum contributor Kem Luther, noting uses of both brute and blunt in place of brunt, wrote

I'm beginning to think that people have large fuzzy spots in their brains where the semantic contents of the words "brute," "blunt," "brunt," and "butt" are stored. Speakers do not have a good handle on the meaning of these terms.

I think he is quite right. Furthermore, Kem's observation about "large fuzzy spots" has lead me to create a half-baked theory about the role of word frequency in eggcorn formation.

If, as some linguists suggest (e.g. Bybee 1995, Clark 1987, Tomasello 2005 inter alia), language acquisition and language change are sensitive to frequency, then it is unsurprising that lower frequency words should be less clearly differentiated even in the minds of adult speakers. In other words, structures that are heard more frequently will be learned faster and "better" in the sense that the hearer can use them in the standard way that other speakers do; words that are heard less frequently will be learned less well. (Such claims can be somewhat controversial for morphology and syntax, but I think much less so for words.)

Add to low frequency a competition with phonologically similar words, and certain forms seem doomed to reside in "large fuzzy spots" of the mental lexicon. Low-frequency near-homonyms are not heard often enough to be remembered clearly, and they shade into one another in the hearer's memory.

None of the words brute, blunt, brunt or butt appear on Kilgarriff's lemmatized BNC word frequency list, which means that none of them occur more than 800 times in the hundred-million word British National Corpus.^* It is therefore unsurprising that this complex is confounded for many speakers.

In comparison, the complex of and, ant, and amp are not confounded despite their phonological similarity, since they are the 4th, 5539th, and 5960th most frequent words in the BNC, respectively. Conversely, I would not expect moan to be part of such a complex even though it is only the 6309th most frequent word, since it has few near homophones. (Of course, having written that, I fully expect someone to find an eggcorn of moan within a few days. Comments are open.)

Bybee, Joan. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10, 425-455.

Clark, Eve. 1987. The principle of contrast: a constraint on language acquisition. In B. MacWhinney (ed) Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, 1-33. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

^* Even if the word butt is relatively common in speech, it probably occurs most frequently in the anatomical sense. A Google search for "butt of" (as in "butt of the joke" etc.) returns more than a million and a half raw hits, but "my butt" returns nearly four and a half million. On the other hand, the conjunction but is the 23rd most frequent word on the Kilgarriff list; I suspect that it is frequent enough to avoid conflation with its homophones. Speaking of homophones, by the way, Meriam Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary lists six separate head words for butt and five for but.