Language and language practices
LANGUAGE IN SITUATION
Both the linguist and the applied linguist concern themselves with so-called language situations. By a language situation is meant an evaluation of the role of language in a social setting: thus language as a medium of instruction in Canada; the maintenance of Welsh since 1960; English spoken by males and females in a middle- and a working-class district of Melbourne; the role of Mandarin in Hong Kong since the Chinese take-over; the interpreting and translating policy of the European Union; the relation of language and religion in Indonesia. The approach of the two scholars is likely to be very different. What the linguist is concerned with, above all, is either the testing of a theory or the careful description of the detailed situation.
In a survey of the use of English in Melbourne, the purpose of the linguist’s research and the subsequent report might be to demonstrate that the theoretical approach of William Labov (1994) has once more been confirmed. In his socio linguistic studies in the USA and those of his students and disciples all over the world the model followed has been that of the very stable yet dynamic social influence on language. In other words, middle and working class, males and females differ in their accent and in particular in very specific phonetic features and yet in all cases over time those accents change. But typically, they change systematically so as to maintain the same social distinction among the groups. Just as groups dress differently, so they speak differently. That seems to be the point. The linguist’s task is to collect the appropriate data needed to test the theory, the argument of course being that the more such studies are carried out and produce significant results, the stronger becomes the likelihood that the theory is well founded. Such studies are very like the kinds of research carried out in the physical and biological sciences, where younger researchers provide evidence of their successful apprenticeship by replicating the same or very similar studies by their elders.
What the linguist is doing in these types of study is applying a research instrument in an applied area, that is taking the theoretical linguistic model and placing it over a social setting. The question asked is does this setting support the theory. Now for the linguist this is not theoretical linguistics; it is twice removed since it involves non-laboratory investigation and it takes into account social factors. This then to the linguist is an example of linguistics applied, a situation in which to apply linguistics.
A second example of the linguist operating in a language in situation type of research is with the census data. Social scientists are typically interested in decennial census data since they provide evidence of stability and change in society. For the linguist the chief interest is in the so-called language question, which in many settings asks such questions as: which language do you speak at home? It may also ask which languages you speak and/or write in other settings and which language you consider to be your mother-tongue. Results of such language survey type questions are then collated to produce tables of frequency and incidence. One such collation of results is found in the work of E. Annamalai (1998). What Annamalai does is to collect survey statistics of the numbers of mother tongue speakers in India and to relate those statistics to linguistic definitions of the various language groupings and families. His process of sifting reduces the number of ‘mother-tongues’ in India from the 4000+ reported names to a more manageable c. 200. He writes:
[T]he people of India have reported 1652 mother tongues (1961 Census) … The census abstracts these mother tongues … into languages on the basis of linguistic distinctiveness [concluding that] there are about 200 languages in India (Govt of India 1964). They belong to four language families, viz Indo-European (54 languages and 27% of the languages), Dravidian (20 and 10%), Austro-Asiatic (20 and 10%) and Sino-Tibetan (84 and 42%); the rest are foreign languages and unclassified languages (22 and 11%). They vary in population size from less than 25 (Andamanese) to more than 250 million (Hindi) as per the 1981 census.
Of these languages, 101 are tribal languages belonging to the above four families (Indo-European 1, Dravidian 9, Austro-Asiatic 19 and Sino-Tibetan 63, unclassified 9) (Govt of India 1964). It may be noted that all of the languages of the last two families are tribal and about half of the Dravidian languages are tribal. They vary in population size from 5 (Andamanese) to 3,130,829 (Santali) according to the 1961 census and in status from being a preliterate language to being a language of state level administration and college level education like Mizo (a Sino-Tibetan language) and Khasi (an Austro-Asiatic language). The number of tribal languages is an abstraction of 304 tribal mother tongues in 1961. There are 613 tribal communities (Govt of India: 1978) speaking these languages. But not all of them have a tribal language as mother tongue. Of the population of tribal communities (29.9 million in 1961 constituting 6.9% of the total population of India), only 57% speak a tribal language as mother tongue (i.e. 12.8 million). For 43% of the tribals, the mother tongue has shifted to a non-tribal language, which is largely the dominant language of the region (Annamalai 1994).
At the national level, no language is a majority language with speakers exceeding 50% of the country’s population and in that sense all languages in India are minority languages. At the state level, however, there are majority languages, whose population may vary from 96% (Kerala) to 63% (Manipur). 18 languages are listed in the Constitution for certain specific purposes, and independent of these specified purposes, they benefit most from the power and resources of the State. These 18 languages constitute 95.8% of the population in 1981. There is thus a collective majority (Annamalai 1994).
Now this is very clearly one type of application of linguistics in that it provides a description of a language situation based on an interaction between the classification of the linguist and the interpretation of the Census of India’s officials, themselves it would appear influenced by the views of linguists. But the account goes further because it also attempts to interpret the data by concluding that there are no ‘majority’ languages in India. All languages enjoy ‘minority’ status at the national level and therefore ‘there is a collective majority’. In other words the language situation in India represents a majority through minorities, a kind of multiculturalism of languages. Notice that this is an interpretation which is put bald on the record. There is no argument and even less no thesis. Nor does it take any account of the other influences on the language situation, in particular the political, the religious, the social class, the level of education, the influence of the media and so on. These are all part of the language situation of India and all have something to say about the definition of ‘a language’. Annamalai uses the term ‘language’ as though it was a given. But that is not the case, even in linguistics. It is less so in sociolinguistics, where the definition of ‘a language’ is seen to be as much political as linguistic. The gross number of 1,652 (or 4,000), which is reduced first to 200 and then to 18, is strictly a political rather than a linguistic categorization. But we are presented with these data as though the status of ‘a language’ was perfectly clear. Such linguistic classification is based on the ‘language family’ tradition of classification and assumes that languages change over time by contact only with other languages, rather like the human genetic descent paradigm.
But this is only part of the story and while for the linguist such philological arguments are understandably sealed off from other factors, this surely cannot be the case for an applied linguistics account of a language situation which must take these other factors into consideration. Indeed it explains the applied linguist’s reaction to such an account as that set out above: what relevance does this have for me?
Such a reaction is of course that of the applied linguist whose interests are also in language situations. For the applied linguist does not approach the language situation of India (or anywhere) with the intention of describing it in order to say what it looks like. That is not the applied linguist’s interest. The applied linguistic interest is not descriptivist but it does have an analogy to the linguistic approach mentioned above, which asks how far this new set of data relates to (tests out) some supposedly overarching theory. Where the applied linguist starts is with a necessary question, necessary in the sense that it arises as a problem demanding action within the language situation. So what sort of question(s) is the applied linguist likely to pose with regard to the language situation of India?
Language situations do not exist in a vacuum or in a laboratory. They exist in nation-states and affect (and are affected by) all the institutions that exist within a modern state: administration, education, law, medicine, religion, business, commerce, media, tourism and hospitality, entertainment, sport and so on.
For the applied linguist working in India the questions have to do with the social facts of the situation:
• communication within and across these institutions
• access to a vehicular language by various groups
• the extent to which linguistic autonomy of the States restricts mobility
• the role of English in the creation and maintenance of an Indian elite
• the extent to which Hindi is increasingly dominant through its control over resources
• the gap between official language policy and the situation in rural and urban schools
• English as a symbolic rather than an instrumental policy
Thus the applied linguist’s approach to the last issue (English as a symbolic rather than an instrumental policy) might be concerned with (at least) two problems:
1. Why is English taught so widely in India when its results are so unsatisfactory?
2. How can the teaching of English be improved?
With regard to the first question, the applied linguist would note that English is taught throughout India, mostly ineffectively. Also that increasingly in those States where Hindi is not the official language (in the southern States, for example) selection of the necessary three languages in the curriculum usually means the mother tongue, the State official language (e.g. Tamil) and then English. This seems to be a reaction to the Constitution requirement that every child should study English and Hindi (the two national languages of India) plus the local language. English is therefore the preferred language. And that in spite of its lack of success for learners. Why so? Is it the triumph of hope over experience (as Dr Johnson described second marriages)? Is it resistance to the spread of Hindi? And why are the results so bad? Is it some kind of inertia because in reality the majority of the needs of India institutionally are served by the substantial private educational sector in which typically the medium of instruction (not simply one of the second languages) is English?
With regard to the second question, the applied linguist would first collect empirical evidence that the teaching of English does indeed need improvement – of course what is meant here is substantial improvement since always and everywhere all teaching can be improved. Then on the reasonable assumption that the teaching of English is in need of considerable improvement, various factors would need to be isolated. The teachers: who are they, what training have they received, how good is their proficiency in English, what is the status of the teacher in this society? Then the resources (including textbooks and so on), the curriculum, the assessment system, the attitudes towards learning English as opposed to (1) being seen to be studying it and (2) knowing it.
These then are the kinds of practical issues the applied linguist would pursue in relation to this question about the symbolic versus instrumental status of English in India. Similar approaches could be made to the other issues set out above which would interest the applied linguist (but not it seems the linguist) in relation to the language situation of India.
What I want to do now is to take the two more specialized examples, those of Language and Gender and of Clinical Linguistics and to examine in some detail what linguists and applied linguists find of interest in these topics, how their purposes differ, what kinds of techniques the two approaches use and what skills they draw on in their pursuit of these topics.
