The Third Annual Lecture on Language and Human Rights at Essex

Professor Flores Farfán will talk on 'Performing for the future: The power of art and the media in language and cultural revitalization' drawing on the situation of the Nahuatl language.

Professor Flores Farfán is Professor of Linguistics at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, CIESAS) in Mexico City, a leading institution in a number of fields in social anthropology in Mexico, including Indoamerican Sociolinguistics. His research interests include language contact, pragmatics, language ideologies and intervention. is reaeacr interzsts He has been active in the field of Native American Indian Education for a decade, designing and teaching courses for indigenous people at different universities, including the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), University of Arizona, as well as his home institution. He has published widely on the linguistics and sociolinguistics of indigenous languages in Mexico, including the Otomi and the Nahuas. Flores Farfán is a leading expert in Nahuatl, and has done extensive research on sociolinguistics, language ideologies, pragmatics and language revitalization and reversal. His in-depth research has lead to the development of educational programs for both the Nahuas and the general public. Prof Flores Farfán has co-authored numerous materials with and for indigenous people, including a series of materials for children (audio books, tapes, videos, a website, DVDs, CD-Roms) oriented towards the revitalization, maintenance and development of the cultural and linguistic heritage of indigenous groups from Mexico. He is currently working on the production of similar materials for a number of indigenous groups belonging to different linguistic families in Mexico, including the Nahuas, the Maya and the Mixtec, with all materials also aimed towards a general public.

Abstract. In recent years the field of endangered languages has called our attention to the demise of human diversity, especially of linguistic and cultural heritages. It is commonly reckoned that in a couple of generations the vast majority of languages of the world will disappear - unless urgent action is taken to reverse language and cultural shift, reinforcing and empowering language and cultural survival. That is to say that in approximately half a century, 80% to 90% of the world's linguistic and cultural diversity may become a memory. Thus of an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 languages, only about 600 to 800 will constitute the world's linguistic diversity, a figure which of course includes all colonial languages.

We know much more about the causes of language shift, including such common-places as direct demographic genocide, colonial exploitation and discrimination, economic deprivation and social mobility, and processes of migration and urbaniz-ation, than we do of how to effectively maintain and stabilize endangered languages - not to speak of reversing language shift. The call for action to arrest what could be thought as one of the world's coming catastrophes has maybe come all too late. Significantly, most of the current efforts and resources allocated to the field of endangered languages are directed to what is known as 'salvage' or 'documentary linguistics', a museum-like view of languages. Even if it is indeed true that in most cases of moribund languages all we can do is register them, yet the continuum of endangerment encompasses all types of situations, including still viable languages. In this sense, there are very few if any efforts along the lines of what has been termed 'reversing language shift' (Fishman 1991), 'preventive' or even 'peace linguistics' (Crystal 2004), regarding viable languages which are nonetheless endangered, and rapidly experiencing shift.

This address will explore what in our view and experience constitute effective ways to reverse language shift. A number of materials stemming from pilot interventions with Mexican indigenous groups, especially children, will be presented. To empower the use of endangered languages, our approach develops, from the bottom up, a participatory methodology, based on the idea of intercultural co-authorship and interactive workshops. Direct interventions at the community level are modeled on a culturally-sensitive perspective which recasts indigenous oral genres (such as riddles) and their visual means (such as the amate, "painted bark wood paper"), recreating them in high tech media such as 3D videos and DVD animation.

In the first stage of the work, the presentation of videos in attractive formats, on special occasions such as the communities' Patron Saint's festivity. The attractive formats lend status to the indigenous language and culture, triggering interest and opposing well-established stereotypes and practices. In the second stage, people are invited to participate more actively. This allows the distribution of other materials such as audio-books, which are granted to those participants who spontaneously guess or provide new riddles, other tales, or even comments in the indigenous tongue. Disseminating the materials through such an informal and playful model upgrades the value attributed to children's and other participants' own knowledge, thus reinforcing the use of their linguistic and cultural heritage. This runs counter to the received Mexican state's official language policy - historically an assimilationist, top-down approach, which restricts language planning to schooling and writing down indigenous languages.

Sponsors

The primary sponsor of the lecture series at the University of Essex has been the Department of Language and Linguistics, through its seminar series.

Co-sponsors include the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Human Rights Centre.

Additional thanks go to Prof Martin Atkinson, Prof Paul Hunt, Prof Sheldon Leader, Prof Simon Critchley, and Dr Aletta Norval for their assistance.

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