Everyone of course knows what a "language" is! Some people can even tell us how many languages there are, in a country, in a continent, even in the world - but how many can tell us what a language actually is? Some will hazard, "A means of communication", perhaps. But, living in Wales, and interested in the Welsh Language Movement, the uses of bilingualism, etc., and for many years a languages publisher, an "amateur" in a myriad of different languages - some of which I have learnt enough of to be able to read selected texts! - I feel that the definition of what language is and what it does has to be refined somewhat.
The first contention is that language is not primarily about communication at all. It is a cultural slant which the English-language community awards to itself to imagine that merely conveying information to another person is the adequate purpose of a particular language. It may be almost true of an acquired tongue, a medium of addition, so to speak, but if I am among strangers and hear people speaking my own language, particularly one of my own particular modes of language, it is not what is being said which warms the heart and lets me hope to have conversation with fellow human beings at a more spontaneous level than otherwise: it is the fact of the language itself. It connects to me on the level of poetry or song - poetry and song may have meaning, but the other elements may be just as important, if not more so.
So it may be that though the Welsh speaker and English monoglot from England may hold long conversations and have very much in common, there is a sense in which the Welsh speaker is using language in a different niche, as a different part of the personality. The English monoglot may regard the use of English as an expression of English (or the confused "English-British") national feeling, without consciously stepping outside the cultural predetermination that language is about communication. Because there is scarcely anyone at all in Wales who cannot use English, it is axiomatic to the England monoglot that any use of the Welsh language is not only unnecessary and wasteful of resources, but may even be an evil, a divisive thing. But I would contend that the use of the Welsh language is and should be an essential part of the life of Wales, even when the particular person knows only a little, and essential communication can take place without it. Ask any redblooded Welsh patriot and they will say that this is really missing the point. Far from being obscurantist or reactionary, or living in a romantic past that no longer exists, the supporter of the Welsh language probably has a more finely tuned appreciation of what the question of language is all about.
We need to pass outside these two countries, however, to gain the larger picture and grasp at a deeper truth. True, you can argue for the significance of Latin underlying the vernacular - again, regardless of how many are fluent in it - and the use of this so-called "dead" language as a kind of treasure-chest to find words and concepts in. Without leaving these realms also, you can see in French a surviving special role, as the archetypal "foreign" language, but also as the acceptable and respected accomplishment in a way the other near overseas languages - Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese - fail to be. English awards itself a status somewhere near the top of the hierarchy for language. It has a word, "dialect", to indicate items that have less status. Yorkshire dialect is all very delightful and folksy, and reinforces the self-image that the English have that they are all basically Vikings (with a romantic Celtic undertow). However, other places can't have "dialect" - just a regional "speech". Then we have the problem with the Scots Language. In a sense, it differs from Standard English little more than the acceptable folksy dialects, and, of course, if "it hasn't got a literature" it can't be called "language". Yet Scots does have a literature, and a very rich one. And why should the speech of Northumberland also call itself "Language"? Is there therefore a separate Geordie "nationality?"
Forget all that, and step over the water to Africa. According to the definitions we have at home, scarcely any of the thousands of languages of Africa can be defined as "language" at all: mostly unwritten (with glorious exceptions, such as Classical Ethiopic), even struggling to create orthographies, shading into neighbouring tongues in a confusingly bizarre and diverse manner, some media used in some circumstances, some in others.
By many, nationalism and love of one's own language is branded as "tribalism", and disparate groups are urged to pull together to express a greater solidarity. All written work, as in medieval Europe, has to be performed in an acquired tongue, usually one of the European main languages. One native home speech after another is so low in the hierarchy that it gets no respect at all - in some cases, it doesn't even have a consistent name, or has only been recorded on a single occasion. It has only ethnic and a vaguely cultural-historical interest, and sometimes not even then.
In the traditional European terms, such languages are doomed. But as often as not the awareness of their existence is to be blotted out before or in place of their actual extinction: they die in the heads and curiosity of those who discuss things, without actually ceasing to be, or failing to flourish. But, like the Welsh speaker, the user of such languages is invited to live in a different linguistic territory to other users of the main languages: to a greater or lesser extent, English (or French, etc.) is "borrowed" in part, without necessarily the full nature of what language can offer. This, of course, is not to say that the main language is not often acquired to a very high standard, even to the extent of completely de-Africanizing the speaker, or that poetry or song from the African experience is impossible in it - but the possession of another language or other languages is of a fundamental importance in the definition of the personality, even if that language is practically unrecognised by the rest of humanity.
Just as the person in Wales who is not fluent in Welsh may prefer to give their house a Welsh name, or their children, so on a worldwide scale we accuse others at our peril of perpetuating something which does not serve the "primary" purpose. If we think language is about overcoming the Curse of Babel and feeding information one to another, we need to think again.
Hopefully, more on this next time.
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