Squandered worlds

I was struck by Joe Lo Bianco’s persuasive description of Australia’s current language education policy as “squandering the gift of home-grown bilingual skills”. It reminded me of a gut-wrenching - and for me unforgettable - moment in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men: “Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.” There is something ultimately repellent in the idea of a bully in self-absorbed fascination, gratuitously ending another’s whole experience of the world, watching a life ebb away, lost beyond recall.

I don’t want to suggest that such psychopathic cruelty is one of the motives for the nihilism of current policy towards foreign language teaching in Australia - and even more in my own country the United Kingdom, where in 2002 any requirement to study a foreign language in secondary school was ended, and where since that fateful decision we have watched actual take-up of language instruction at school level ebb away. Not psychopathy, but quite likely neurosis: Estelle Morris, the minister who took the decision, subsequently resigned from the government, pleading inadequacy in skills of strategic management. Sadly, the management decisions she had taken, stood.

It may be unfair to blame an individual for yielding to a pressure that she did not create - but then again, a minister should be aware of the wide-ranging resonance of any decision they take. We expect our ministers to be made of sterner stuff.

But it is undeniable that foreign languages are the closest thing we provide in our school systems to an approach to alternative worlds, or at least world-views. Declaring them optional - and by implication, given the dynamics of school budgets, unaffordable - is to say that an attempt to understand others in their own terms is a luxury our education system cannot afford; that those other world-views are expendable.

But why pay for them when you can get them free, or at least without having to pay for basic oral instruction? The UK is like Australia in having large numbers of children entering school with a first language that is not English: here is a substantial source of other-world-lings, who given a favourable reception will be able to give all of us an insight of what the view is like from those other perspectives.

Yet when (on April 29) the statistics suggested that the proportion of such children is now more than one in seven, this was decried nation-wide as “a problem”, calling - like all politically-recognised problems, for “increased resources”. For some reason, our politicians - and supposedly, our public - are desperate to be reassured that all these new citizens will have a command of English, but indifferent whether they retain their linguistic links with the cultures of their families.

These alien backgrounds are the special resources - nowadays, you could almost say the selling-point - of these first- and second-generation immigrant children, and they deserve the chance to refine their understanding of them. Hell, everyone speaks English, don’t they?

This myopia, or rather this narcissism, about language skills - the view that our own are the only ones we need - is not original to the English-speaking world, in its fresh-faced dominance of the universe as it knows it. There was a time when Latin likewise was seen as a privileged vessel for knowledge and understanding. In 880 Pope John VIII wrote to Svątopluk, king of the Moravians: “In all the churches of your land the Gospel must be read in Latin because of its greater dignity, and afterwards it should be announced to those who do not understand Latin words in the Slav language.”

In 358 the great theologian Athanasius had claimed that a bishop summoned - by the emperor himself - from Cappadocia to take over the see of Milan was “an intruder rather than a Christian … as yet even ignorant of the Latin language, and unskilful in everything except impiety”.

It is in fact a none-too-subtle form of ethnocentric bullying. Listen to Valerius Maximus in the 1st century AD, congratulating the Roman magistrates who “persistently maintained the practice of replying only in Latin to the Greeks. And so they forced them to speak through interpreters, losing their linguistic fluency, their great strength, not just in our capital city but in Greece and Asia too, evidently to promote the honour of the Latin language throughout the world.”

But Latin had not always had the linguistic whip-hand. It had once had to assert itself over the solipsistic Greek dismissal of anything non-Greek as barbaros. Plato, in his Politicus, had seen the classification of the whole world into either Greek or barbaros as misleading - but he was in a minority.

Even the broad-minded Herodotus predicated his whole life’s work on the opposition Greeks versus barbaroi: and it appears he got his world knowledge through Greek alone, relying on a network of (unsung) Greek bilinguals. The 20th-century Greek Constantine Kavafis probably got it right when (in Waiting for the Barbarians, 1949) he saw the Greeks’ unending self-appointed struggle against the barbaroi as “some sort of a solution” - perhaps for a national neurosis.

Still, their ecumenical regime of Greek-speaking in the Levant had to yield to the next instant world empire - that of the Arabs, who were like all the rest in their immoderate presumption for their language: for them, Indians, Persians, Turks, Greeks, Romans -whoever - were all “ajami”, their languages not worth distinguishing in contrast with Arabic, eternal medium of the Koran.

Traditionally, it has been the underlings - though often quite powerful underlings - who see value in their betters’ or predecessors’ languages, and hence in getting to know them. So after Arab conquest the Persians, besides Persian, respected Arabic (and outclassed its speakers by writing the best grammar of it); and after the Turks muscled into the Islamic world in the 10th century, they respected - besides their own Turkic language, Chagatay - Persian and Arabic. Yet the great Central Asian poet Nava’i, examining the respective the merits of languages in the late 15th century (Muhakamat al-Lughatayn), interestingly thought it counted against Persian that more people knew it than Chagatay. There is such a thing as a classy, boutique language, it appears.

So the memory of Persian and Turkish culture from before their encounters with Islam and Arabic has survived: for example, we know the exploits of their quintessential heroes Rustem, who unknowingly slew his son Sohrab, and Alpamysh, who had twice to win his wife from traitors.

Languages and cultures which have gone down before Latin’s linguistic steamroller have not been so lucky. Consider Gaulish: we can see, from an artefact like the Gundestrup cauldon that the horned god Cernunnos had a complicated myth - but its details, involving stags, snakes, wolves, gryphons and dolphin riding, like all the vast extent of Druid learning, are gone beyond recall, along with the Gaulish language. No one recorded them, much less pursued a struggle to keep them alive.

Or consider Etruscan: Niccolò Machiavelli himself points out (in his Discorsi, II chapter 5) that since Latin replaced this language without a trace, the deeds of its once pre-eminent civilisation have largely been forgotten. (He conjectures that the Roman Empire would have similarly been erased if the Catholic Church had not needed to keep Latin!)

I have travelled far from the pressing need for our education systems to reinforce, rather than replace, the languages which our children bring to school. But the points that I have recalled from a distant past suggest the bleaker, poorer world that results when languages are allowed to wither. Everywhere languages are vulnerable if their speakers are moved into a new setting without community support. Our lives, and our children’s lives, will be the poorer in every sense, if we do not treasure them. To discard them knowingly diminishes all of us.