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Devrim:

It’d be one thing if the cornish or the welsh or lakota all decided one day that they’d rather speak english then their native languages. it’s another thing entirely when the british or american state outlaws their languages and (in the case of indigenous north americans) kidnaps their children and sends them to re-education camps where they’re beaten if they speak their native languages.

I don’t think that Cornish was outlawed. The scenario of speakers of a language all deciding one day ‘that they’d rather speak english then their native languages’, isn’t how it works in reality.

Wiki explains the process:

Wiki wrote:

The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original (or heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population.

What that means is that it is not that they all decide to start speaking English, but that they become bi-lingual, and over a period the balance tips to the dominant language. Generally, this happens because people want the best for their kids, which means them being fluent in the dominant language.

So it comes down to what language you decide to use in the home. Now in our case to teach our children the ‘language of their ancestors’ would be a little difficult. It would be four languages if we only went back to their grandparents (My wife, and my parents). If we went even a little further back, I know that would increase. My great-grandfather, for, example spoke another language. This is within living memory I can just remember him speaking it, but older people in my fasmily would remember it well.

You seem to have a very different view of languages than I do (I speak three fluently, and cope quite well in another). For you it seems to be a means of identity whereas for me it is a means of communication, something to be used when necessary, and useful, and discarded when not.

A girl I know, Seda, who lives in London is a native English speaker, and struggles very badly in the first language of both her parents, Turkish. Her great grandmother, however, who is still alive, is a native Kurmanji speaker, who struggles in Turkish. Now, this is just what I know. It is highly likely that earlier in her family’s history they also swapped languages.

So for many of us there is no such thing as ‘a language our ancestors spoke’. They spoke many languages. What it seems to me is that the posters on this thread advocating these small languages, who live in Paris, and California, are trying to manufacture an identity for themselves.

As for me, I speak Turkish in Ankara, Arabic in Damascus, and English in London, occasionally but not often, I also break into another language when talking with older relatives.

Back to the original point though. Cornish speakers aren’t being sent to re-education camps. In fact their biggest complaint against the government seems to be that they don’t give them quite enough money.

When we talk about forced assimilation you would do well not to destroy your argument by demeaning the real acts of suffering caused to people who were/are being forcibly assimilated to Cornish speakers only getting £80,000 a year off the government.

Devrim

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Saii:

Thanks Devrim that’s well put.

and their culture is a big part of what makes the community cohesive. if you can’t see that you’re blind

It might be, but it might not – and rather than call me blind you might want to consider the potential flaws in such ‘cohesion’.

In Chiapas there are seven or eight major ‘peoples’, and an unknown number of minor ones, each with their own cultures to hold on to. The tendency if left unchecked is for these to compete rather than draw together if an exploitative government, for example, repeatedly offers land or cash to the people of one indigenous group over another – effectively saying ‘if your people support us we’ll back you in climbing a few rungs’.

This isn’t theory, it’s actual practice, going on today. Divide and conquer is one of the oldest and most successful strategies ever implemented by government. And not just in Chiapas – in Iraq, Afghanistan, across Africa, this shit is going on all the time. The working class is most often divided by nationality, or religion, or language, not brought together by it – and it’s that danger which makes cultural protectionism problematic.

What makes a community cohesive is solidarity across race and culture, not solidarity based on whatever historic homeland/musical instrument you happen to share with bob down the road. When it comes to the crunch, and ‘Cornwall’ is being offered billions to host a military base on its coast, a military base it knows is going to be used to service weaponry which is going to bomb the shit out of another country, what is going to matter most, jobs for your country or the lives of innocents in another one?

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and my response:

devrim -

Cornish, welsh, scottish, and irish have all been outlawed at various times in British history. In the now, they are not outlawed and may even benefit from government subsidies, but basic government services aren’t available in any of them and with the exception of a few gaelic schools in the north of scotland, (and possibly some elsh language schools as well? I’m not sure on this) education for children inthose languages isn’t widely available either. the lack of availability is directly traceable to an explicit policy of assimilation by the brittish government, a policy which is not dissimilar to the policies of gocvernements in britaines colonies (canada, autralia, and the usa) towards native peoples. Factors like those have an undeniable impact on the long-term viability of the various languages. Notice I’m not saying that government services should be available only in those languages or even primarily, but i think it’s silly for anarchists to condemn people who want to be able to see their kids educated in their native language or vote as irrational nationalists. the same arguments hold true for any number of indigenous north american nations as well. we could even go a step further and say that largely immigrant groups like latinos in america should have the same rights. after all, why should english speaking immigrant populations be given priority over other immigrant populations in access to social services?

you, like me, are the descendant of immigrants. which is why you’re able to cite the personal experiences you do about swapping languages. i don’t have those kinds of anecdotes because my family has been in the north american settler state for a very long time, i’m a 10th generation american and an 8th generation californian. but as much as this is the only place i can call home, i also know i’ll never be native – which is part of why NA’s with their calls for a white ‘homeland’ in north america piss me off so much. it also means that i have to use something other then my geographical location as the basis for my identity and, since i’m not interested in using my skin color, that means that just about hte only things i’ve got left are my political affiliation (anarchist) and my ethnicity (celt). so am i using my ancestry and the experiences of people in other parts of the world who I’m only remotely tangentially related too as a means of creating identity? sure. I’ll own that. anybody who’s listened to my music knows that about me. I viscerally identify as a celt. maybe it was all the scottish folk music i listened to as a kid or the stories about robert the bruce or going to the local scottish games (scottish american cultural festivals) every year as a kid. doesn’t mean i think celtic identity or scottish american identity are a good basis for organizing, but it’s something that’s important to me and i have every intention of moving to scotland permanently and leaving the north american settler state behind me once and for all as soon as scotland declares its independence. yes, i know, it’s not logical. it’s romantic crap. it’s a lot of things. but 6 years ago I was doing support work for the American Indian Movement and as I stayed up one night talking to one of the elders in the local movement I asked him what I should do, as a person of european descent, to most effectively support native sovereignty. his answer was to move to europe. it shocked me and hurt me and my immediate gut reaction was ‘fuck you old man!’ but I kept my mouth shut and I thought about it. and I’m still thinking about it. i even wrote a song about it (http://beltainesfire.com/music/home). and one of these days I’m going to actually do it.

sorry, bit of a tangent there. but now you know more then you wanted to know about me and where I’m coming at these questions from.

Back to the experience of swapping languages over generations: your wiki quote is right on, except that it leaves out one major factor that as anarchists we cannot afford to ignore: social pressure. your situation and mine is not a good analogy for people who find themselves needing to use a new language not because they or their ancestors changed location but because an imperialist settler state (like america, for instance) landed on top of them or because they were conquered and annexed by their larger more powerful neighbor (as is the case of the scots, welsh, and cornish re: england, the basques and catalans re: the castilians, and a whole long list of other small stateless nations that have been forcibly annexed by larger more powerful nation states over the last few centuries. All I’m saying is those people have the right to maintain their community’s cohesion and cultural integrity by whatever means they determine to be most effective on a community-by-community basis; as long as those means don’t violate the freedom of others around them. most people in most communities will probably end up at least bi-lingual. and there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

for the record, the language question isn’t one that affects me personally, except in the sense that I grew up in a mostly chicano neighborhood and i think it makes sense for my neighbors to expect social services to be available in the languages that are most relevant to them. (incidentally, statements like that have gotten me a lot of hate mail on my blog from NA’s, which is why i thought it was so ironic when people here accused me of covertly being one of them.) of course spanish isn’t the language that my neighbors ancestors spoke, but it’s the language they speak now and the one that is most commonly used in the community. and it bugs me that public schools treat kids who don’t speak english as their primary language as though they were stupid. additionally, as an anarchist trying to organize in this community it behooves me to respect that and not expect everything, or even most things, to be done in english. that doesn’t make me a chicano nationalist, (though I’ve had a lot of friends in MEChA and other chicano nationalist organizations over the years), but it does make me a member of a multilingual community trying to find a respectful way to build where I am.

Saii -

i think we’re talking past each other a bit here. I agree with you that divide and conquer is bad. yes it’s consistently used everywhere to divide people who should be united. yes, class solidarity is one of our most powerful weapons to combat the ‘divide and rule tactics of the ruling class. However, in a place like chiapas, which you brought up, ‘class’ isn’t as relevant since most people are not members of any modern social ‘class’. they’re subsistence farmers whose economy hasn’t been fully integrated with the global capitalist machine. so for them “class” isn’t a particularly usefual form of social identity. so it’s a good thing it’s not the only thing that can provide a valid basis for organizing. incidentally, it’s been a great strength of the anarchist movement historically that we’ve been more flexible then marxists on this issue – marxists in russia denounced peasant organizing because the peasants weren’t part of the ‘proletariate’ – the industrial working class, but makhno and the ukranian militants were less interested in such nitpicking then in organizing and successfully built an army in the ukraine that opposed both the Bolsheviks and the whites. And i’ll bet ya a nickel he didn’t tell the ukranian peasants he was recruiting to speak russian. I’ll even go one further and bet that the fact that it was a ukranian anarchist army and that it opposed efforts by the Bolsheviks to absorb the Ukraine into Russia added to its appeal for the average ukranian peasant.

I’m not saying ukranian anarchism was based on nationalist sentiment, far from; I’m saying that in this context anarchism served as a viable *alternative* to nationalism. a subtle distinction, but a valuable one. so in the ukraine, like in catalonia, anarchism promised to accomplish the same goals that the peasants would have asked of a nationalist movement (the right to be themselves and not be assimilated by a more powerful neighbor), *as well as* providing all of the benefits of a potential anarchist society and none of the drawbacks of statist nationalism. anarchism thus promised the best of all possible worlds and in return won overwhelming support. that’s a relevant analysis for organizing in chicano communities and presenting anarchism as an alternative to chicano nationalism. it’s also relevant for organizing in native american communities, and in stateless nations around the world. its even relevant in african american communities where black nationalism failed but where anarchism could potentially deliver the same community-level self determination and autonomy that the black panthers and others fought for and failed to achieve, without the authoritarian baggage that the panthers brought to the table. that’s (one of) the points that my comrades who organize in APOC have been trying to make for a while now, the core message of post-colonial anarchism.

to return to chiapas: yes chiapas has lots of local groups at can be played off against each other, as is often the case with tribal societies. yes it’s a good thing that the zapatistas have managed to bridge those divides and create a community of communities united in resistance. by doing so they’ve created what is essentially a new ‘nation’ (an “imagined community” based on common identity) out of lots of smaller ones. It’s not a nation that seeks domination or statehood, but one whose only demand is autonomy and the ability for its composite communities to be able to exercise their fundamental right to self determination. if you’re down with what the zapatistas are doing (though perhaps – like me – you’re not thrilled with the hierarchy of the EZLN) then we’re actually in agreement.

one more note…

What makes a community cohesive is solidarity across race and culture, not solidarity based on whatever historic homeland/musical instrument you happen to share with bob down the road.

solidarity across races and culture = good. I’m down. let’s build. I don’t think anything i’ve written here would contradict that. but culture is more then a historical homeland and a musical instrument, it’s an identity. so we should embrace multiple identities, give people room to be themselves and oppose efforts by the corporate behemoth to assimilate them, and build bridges of solidarity and mutual aid between all the different communities of resistance to work together for common goals: an anarchist world, free of capitalism and nation-states, where everyone has the freedom to be themselves and run their own lives however they see best. and play whatever musical instruments they want while they’re at it.