Endangered linguistic and cultural diversities and endangered biodiversity – the role of educational linguistic human rights in diversity maintenance

 

Dr. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

University of Roskilde, Denmark, and Åbo Akademi University, Vasa, Finland

http://www.ruc.dk/~tovesk/;  skutnabb-kangas@mail.dk

 

CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY

Diyarbakir/Amed, 20-25 March 2005

1. Introduction

What do two Prime Ministers think about the desirability of cultural diversity? The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan writes in his foreword to the almost 500-page catalogue for the magnificent exhibition Turks. A journey of a thousand years, 600-1600[1] that he is confident that the exhibition “will further enhance mutual understanding, tolerance and peace”. “Cultural diversity is a source of richness for all nations”, he proclaims (2005: 9). The British Prime Minister Tony Blair joins him in this, claiming that the journey “demonstrates that the interaction of different cultures in our world is crucial if we are to survive” (2005: 9). My first question to Erdogan and the Turkish state is: Is ”cultural diversity”(which includes linguistic diversity) seen as ”a source of richness” which enhances ”mutual understanding, tolerance and peace” in today’s Turkey? Is the existing linguistic and cultural diversity in Turkey being supported, maintained and developed?

In this paper[2] I show that subtractive submersion (sink-or-swim) education where the dominant language is learned at the cost of the child’s mother tongue (instead of in addition to the mother tongue, additively) can and in most cases does cause serious mental harm to the children, cognitively, educationally, linguistically, psychologically, socially, and, in the end, in terms of labour market and political participation. This kind of education fits two of the five definitions of genocide (IIb and IIe) in the United Nations Genocide Convention The paper will elaborate on these issues, with examples from many parts of the world, relate the issues to the situation of Kurds in Turkey, and suggest research-based solutions, anchored in human rights.

2. What is happening to the world's languages and why? The language death paradigm and the language murder / linguistic genocide paradigm

Most of the world’s languages are very small. The median number of users of a spoken language in the world has been estimated by Darrell Posey to be 5.000-6.000 (Posey 1997). Some 5.000 of the world’s almost 7.000 spoken languages[3] and at least 99% of the Sign languages[4] have fewer than 100.000 users.

What is happening today to the world’s languages? Are they being maintained? The answer is NO. Optimistic estimates of what is happening suggest that at least 50% of today’s spoken languages may be extinct or very seriously endangered ("dead" or "moribund", meaning they have only elderly speakers and no children are learning the language) around the year 2100. This estimate, originating with Michael Krauss (1992) is also the one used in some of UNESCO’s publications (see, for instance http://www.unesco.org/endangeredlanguages, the guidelines Education in a Multilingual World (UNESCO 2003c) http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129728e.pdf). Pessimistic but still completely realistic estimates claim that as many as 90-95% of them may be extinct or very seriously endangered in less than a hundred years' time - this is Krauss' estimate today[5] (e.g. Krauss 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997). UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages (see UNESCO 2003a; see also UNESCO 2003b, c) uses this more pessimistic figure in their report, Language Vitality and Endangerment ( http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/file_download.php/1a41d53cf46e10710298d314450b97dfLanguage+Vitality.doc). We may have only 3-600 oral languages left as unthreatened languages, transmitted by the parent generation to children; these would probably be those languages that today have more than one million speakers, and a few others. Still more pessimistic estimates suspect that only those 40-50 languages will remain in which you can, within the next few years, talk to your stove, fridge and coffee pot, i.e. those languages into which Microsoft software, Nokia mobile phone menus, etc., are being translated (Rannut 2003).

 Nobody has made predictions about the future of Sign languages, but the World Federation of the Deaf is worried about more powerful Sign languages in every country (and, especially the American Sign language also internationally) wiping out smaller Sign languages[6]. Table 1 gives the web addresses for some of the lists of endangered languages.

Table 1. Red books for threatened languages

When we try to understand why languages are disappearing today faster than ever before in human history, we find two explanatory paradigms, two ways of attempting to explain it: the language death paradigm, and the language murder or the linguistic genocide paradigm (see Table 2).

 

Table 2. Two paradigms for analysing situations where languages ”the vast libraries of human intangible heritage” (Wurm 2001) disappear

Does it matter theoretically which paradigm we use?

If we believe that languages just disappear naturally, just die, like plants (they are born, they flourish; they have a certain life-span, and now it is over for most small languages), there is no agent. The only ones to blame are the speakers themselves. It is THEIR individual and collective responsibility and they (seem to) have profited by language shift (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2003 for an analysis of this kind of arguments).

If we, on the other hand, believe that languages have been murdered/killed, we can analyse the structural and ideological agents responsible: the world’s economic, techno-military, social and political systems. Even when language shift has happened with what seems like speakers’ “consent”, ideological factors behind this “manufactured consent” (Herman & Chomsky 1988) can be analysed. I claim that the disappearance of most languages today and at least during the last two hundred years or even longer can best be understood by using the genocide paradigm. I shall come back to linguistic genocide in a moment. First we are going to define killer languages and subtractive teaching.

3. Killer languages

What is a killer language? When ”big” languages are learned subtractively (at the cost of the mother tongues) rather than additively (in addition to mother tongues), they become killer languages. ”Being” a killer language is thus NOT a characteristic of a language. It is a relationship. It is a question of how a language functions in relation to other languages. Any language can become a killer language in relation to some other language.

Besides, ”languages” do not kill each other. It is the power relations between the speakers of the languages that are the decisive factors behind the unequal relations between the languages, which then cause people from dominated groups to learn other languages subtractively, at the cost of their own.

English is today the world’s most important killer language, but most dominant languages may function as killer languages vis-à-vis smaller languages. There is a nested hierarchy of languages. Bigger languages ”eat” smaller languages, and are in turn ”eaten” by the even bigger languages. When speakers shift to another language (and their own language disappears), the incoming new language can function as a killer language.

What about Turkish in relation to Kurdish? Has Turkish functioned earlier as a killer language vis-à-vis Kurdish? Have (some/many) Kurdish speakers assimilated into becoming more or less monolingual in Turkish? Does Turkish still function as a killer language in relation to Kurdish? My answer to all three questions is yes.

English may be functioning as a killer language even in relation to Danish, Finnish, Swedish, and other ”big” EU languages in some domains (e.g. in research, higher education etc.). There are several studies about this in the Nordic countries, and the governments are actively planning to maintain the large national languages as “complete” languages that can be used for all purposes. Of course this goes together with language rights for ALL minorities, even immigrated minorities[7]. What about English in relation to Turkish? Are there areas, for instance in research, where Turkish researchers know their area better in English than in Turkish? In that case even Turkish, a very “big” language, may be losing domains because of English. This could possibly give Turkish speakers some understanding for the plight of Kurdish speakers.

4. Subtractive education is genocidal – a look at literacy

Most indigenous and minority children in the world are taught subtractively, instead of additively. What is subtractive teaching (Table 3) and what does it do to indigenous or minority children?

Table 3. Subtractive versus additive teaching

All Kurdish children in Turkey are being taught subtractively, in submersion (sink or swim) programmes. Turkish is the teaching language. They do not get any teaching using Kurdish as the teaching language. Kurdish is not even taught as a subject.

Does this teaching make Kurdish children literate? In most cases the answer is no. Based on many studies, including work by UNESCO, we can claim the following about the number of years of formal education that it takes to become literate to various degrees, provided the teaching language is your own language.

A.   The technical skill to decode text takes minimally 1-2 years to learn, depending on the language, script, and level of teacher training and schools in general.

B.    Lasting ”technical” literacy seems to take at least 4-6 years of formal education - with less, the technical skill is forgotten as soon as the child leaves school. This is often the situation in many African countries.

C.   Using basic literacy for further education and as a member of civil society seems to take at least 8-9 years, i.e. the time that obligatory education lasts in many countries.

D.   Using literacy (including computer literacy) for full participation on labour market and society at large often seems to be a matter of some 12 years of formal schooling, i.e. up to A-levels or graduation. This is what beginning university students are supposed to have.

But all of this is true only of the education is in the student's mother tongue. If the student is taught through the medium of a foreign (often dominant/majority/high status) language, and if we want the student to learn not only literacy but the same content as s/he would have learned in a mother tongue medium school, we have to add another 2 years to A and 4-5 years to B, C and D. This has to do with the fact that even if a minority student may become orally fluent in the foreign teaching language so that s/he can talk about everyday things in a face-to-face situation (BICS, in Cummins’ terms, Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills), in as short a time as 1-2 years, it takes minimally 5-7, often up to 9 years before she has developed cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP) in the foreign language. And this is what is needed for complex content (see references to Cummins and Thomas & Collier in the bibliography). At the point that the minority student has this academic competence, enabling her to handle complex content in intellectually and linguistically demanding de-contextualised situations, s/he has to not only learn what those students who were taught through the medium of their own language, learn, but s/he has to compensate for all the knowledge that s/he lost while she did not yet know the teaching language well enough. Table 4 summarizes the time estimates.

Table 4. How many years of formal education make you literate?

Since most of the world’s indigenous and many minority children are taught subtractively, through the medium of a dominant language, not their mother tongue, most of them do not stay in school long enough to become fully literate.

What about Kurdish children in Turkey?

What does subtractive teaching through the medium of a foreign language do to minority children? Subtractive teaching prevents profound literacy. It prevents students from gaining the knowledge and skills that would correspond to their innate capacities and would be needed for socio-economic mobility and democratic participation. It replaces mother tongues and kills languages. It wastes not only the child’s and her communitiy’s resources but also the country’s resources in a major way. It prevents (sustainable) development. And it is genocidal, according to UN Genocide Convention’s definitions of genocide.

5. Linguistic genocide in education

5.1. Definitions of linguistic genocide

Subtractive teaching leads to forced assimilation. It is genocidal, according to the United Nation’s Genocide Convention’s definitions of genocide. When one mentions the concept of linguistic genocide, many people are shocked. They ask: Genocide? Is the term not too strong? Is it not watering down the concept - after all, genocide is about killing people physically, is it not?

In order to show that what happens in minority education really can be genocide, we have to look at the United Nations Genocide Convention. UN International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948) has five definitions of genocide. Two of them fit today’s indigenous and minority education.

Article II(e): 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'; and

Article II(b): 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group'; (emphasis added).

In order to make what the definitions might means more concrete, I give several examples from various parts of the world. I ask the readers to think, for each example, whether it also applies to Kurdish children in Turkey.

5.2. Examples: Europe

 Pirjo Janulf (1998) conducted a longitudinal large-scale (almost 1200 youngsters in grade 9) study with Finnish immigrant minority children in grade 9 in Sweden as the main informants  (with several types of control groups in Sweden and Finland). All their education was through the medium of Swedish. Janulf went back to as many as she could find, after 15 years.

         Not one of them spoke any Finnish to their own children.  Even if her informants themselves might not have forgotten their Finnish completely, their children were certainly forcibly transferred to the majority group, at least linguistically.

What about Kurdish children in Turkey? Assimilationist education
 is genocidal. It transfers children forcibly from their own group to another group, linguistically and culturally.

5.3. Examples: Africa

Edward Williams (1995) conducted a large-scale study in Zambia and in Malawi, with some 1,500 students, in grades 1-7. The Zambian students had all their education through the medium of English only. Large numbers of Zambian pupils have, according to Williams, “very weak or zero reading competence in two languages”. The Malawi children were taught in local languages (which in most cases were their mother tongues) during the first 4 years, with English as a subject; from grade 5 onwards their education was through the medium of English. These Malawi students had slightly better test results even in the English language than the Zambian students. In addition, they learned to read and write their own languages. Williams’ s conclusion is: “There is a clear risk that the policy of using English as a vehicular language may contribute to stunting, rather than promoting, academic and cognitive growth”.

Surely stunting a child’s academic and cognitive growth is “causing serious mental harm” to the child, i.e. it fits the UN Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide.

What about Kurdish children in Turkey?

5.4. Examples: Canada

Katherine Zozula’s and Simon Ford’s 1985 report Keewatin Perspective on Bilingual Education tells about Canadian Inuit ‘students (taught through the medium of English, not their mother tongue) who are neither fluent nor literate in either language’ and presents statistics showing that the students ‘end up at only Grade 4 level of achievement after 9 years of schooling’[8]. What about Kurdish children in Turkey?

Mick Mallon and Alexina Kublu (1998) tell about “a significant number of young people [who] are not fully fluent in their languages”, and many students who “remain apathetic, often with minimal skills in both languages”. These children also had all their education with English as the teaching language. What about Kurdish children in Turkey?

The Nunavut Language Policy Conference in March 1998 claimed that “in some individuals, neither language is firmly anchored.”  What about Kurdish children in Turkey?

Another report, Kitikmeot struggles to prevent death of Inuktitut (1998) says that “teenagers cannot converse fluently with their grandparents”. What about Kurdish children in Turkey

The subtractive dominant-language-only-medium submersion education has clearly caused serious mental harm to the indigenous, minority and/or dominated group students, and has attempted to forcibly transfer them to another group linguistically (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, 2003, and Magga et al. 2005 for many more examples).
 This is linguistic genocide.

5.5. Has the state had the intention to commit linguistic genocide?

To qualify as genocide, an act has to be intentional. Have states had an intention to

'forcibly transfer children of the group to another group'; and

'cause serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’?

My answer is: yes, unfortunately they have.  Of course few states have themselves put it in those terms (even if some have, especially earlier – see e.g. Milloy 1999 devastating book looking at Canadian indigenous education; see also Churchill 1997).  Instead, we have to reformulate the question: have states knowingly organised their indigenous or minority education so that it would eventually lead to an annihilation of the languages? Have the states known? 

The negative results of subtractive teaching have been known already at the end of the 1800s. States and educational authorities (including churches) have had the knowledge. There are many examples from the Nordic countries (see descriptions and references in, e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1989). The USA Board of Indian Commissioners (quoted from Francis & Reyhner 2002: 45-46) wrote in 1880:

…first teaching the children to read and write in their own language enables them to master English with more ease when they take up that study…a child beginning a four years’ course with the study of Dakota would be further advanced in English at the end of the term than one who had not been instructed in Dakota (p. 77). …it is true that by beginning in the Indian tongue and then putting the students into English studies our missionaries say that after three or four years their English is better than it would have been if they had begun entirely with English (p. 98).  

”Modern” research results about how indigenous and minority education should be organised have been available for at least 50 years, since the UNESCO expert group summed them up in the seminal book The use of the vernacular languages in education (1953), on the basis of research, that the mother tongue was axiomatically the best medium of teaching. In today’s schools, most indigenous and minority children and children from dominated groups are taught subtractively.

 If states, despite this, and despite very positive results from properly conducted additive teaching, have continued and continue to offer subtractive education, with no alternatives, knowing that the results are likely to be negative and thus to 'forcibly transfer children of the group to another group'; and 'cause serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group', this must be seen as intentional.

6. Counteracting linguistic genocide: a Linguistic Human Right to mother tongue medium education in international law?

If we want to counteract the linguistic and cultural genocide, can linguistic human rights play a role? First we have to ask: Do we have such rights? I shall sum up what kind of LHRs exist in international law. I am here too most interested in LHRs in education (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Chapter 7, for an extensive summary).

The right to mother tongue medium (MTM) education is weak in international law today. Having one's education through the medium of one's own language in state schools, paid for through tax moneys, is not a binding legally guaranteed right today, except for some linguistic majority children - and not even for all of them.

Language is one of the most important ones of those human characteristics on the basis of which people are not allowed to be discriminated against. Others are gender, ”race” and religion. Still language often disappears in the educational paragraphs of binding HRs instruments. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): the paragraph on education (26) does not refer to language at all. Similarly, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted in 1966 and in force since 1976), having mentioned language on a par with race, colour, sex, religion, etc. in its general Article (2.2), does explicitly refer to 'racial, ethnic or religious groups' in its educational Article (13.1). However, here it omits reference to language or linguistic groups:

... education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups ... (emphasis added).

Secondly, binding educational clauses of human rights instruments have more opt-outs, modifications, alternatives, etc than other Articles. One example is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, 1992. I have added the emphases, 'obligating' and positive measures in italics, 'opt-outs' in bold). The twp paragraphs about identity (which in itself is a vague concept) make states fairly firm duty-holders whereas the paragraph about language in education is full of opt-outs.

1.1. States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories, and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity.

1.2. States shall adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to achieve those ends.

4.3. States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible, persons belonging to minorities have adequate opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue.

Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities[9] and The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages[10], both in force since 1998, also have many of these modifications, alternatives and opt-outs:. An example is the Framework Convention's education article 11(3):

In areas inhabited by persons belonging to national minorities traditionally or in substantial numbers, if there is sufficient demand, the parties shall endeavour to ensure, as far as possible and within the framework of their education systems, that persons belonging to those minorities have adequate opportunities for being taught in the minority language or for receiving instruction in this language (emphases added).

The following list shows some of these expressions from Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities[11] and The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages:

■ ‘as far as possible’

■ ‘within the framework of [the State's] education systems’,

■ ‘appropriate measures’

■ ‘adequate opportunities’

■ ‘if there is sufficient demand’

■ ‘substantial numbers’

■ ‘pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient’

■ ‘if the number of users of a regional or minority language justifies it’.

Without binding educational linguistic human rights most minorities have to accept subtractive education through the medium of a dominant/majority language. As I wrote earlier, this mostly leads to assimilation and prevents integration. There are, though, some new positive but so far non-binding recommendations; some will be mentioned below.

If the right to MTM education is still relatively weak in binding international law, we have to ask: Why is it not stronger?  Does it mean that it should not be a right? Does it mean that research results say that it is better for minorities and indigenous peoples to be educated through the medium of a dominant language than to have MTM education? Are the states which deny the right to MTM education (like Turkey) in fact acting in a rational way? After all, minorities need to learn the dominant language if they are to get anywhere in life.

My next questions are, therefore: Do states act in a rational way? Are research results being implemented?

7. What are the recommendations about the medium of education for indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities on the basis of research results?

7.1. Contradictions in the non-implementation of bilingual education

Indigenous and minority children have to become minimally bilingual through their formal education. They need to know their mother tongues for reasons of continuity, identity, security, self-esteem, emotional well-being, cognitive development. They need to know the main majority/dominant language of the country where they live for reasons of the labour market, often further education, democratic participation and integration in the larger society.

Bilingual education of all kinds is a very specialized and sensitive area of both research and policy-making. However, detailed knowledge of it is a prerequisite for being able to make sound recommendations for how minority children should be educated in order to become high-level bilingual or multilingual. One cannot expect that ordinary parents or politicians or even teachers know these principles.

One of the difficulties is that some of the scientifically sound and practically proven principles of how to enable children to become high-level multilingual with the support of the educational system are counter-intuitive and go against common sense.

If indigenous or minority children who speak their mother tongue at home, are to become bilingual, and learn the dominant/majority language well, a common sense approach would suggest that (1) early start in and through the medium of the dominant language, and (2) maximum exposure to the dominant language would be good ideas, like they are for learning many other things - practice makes perfect.

In fact, both are false. What we have is an early start fallacy, and a maximum exposure fallacy. In fact, the longer indigenous and minority children in a low-status position have their own language as the main medium of teaching, the better they also become in the dominant language, provided, of course, that they have good teaching in it, preferably given by bilingual teachers.

This is also acknowledged in UNESCO’s new Position Paper on education:

Education in a multilingual world. UNESCO Education Position Paper, 2003
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001297/129728e.pdf. This book may replace UNESCO’s classical book, The use of vernacular languages in education  (Paris, 1953), which has for 50 years been a guiding book for educators. And the 1953 book also recommends mother tongue medium education.

The Big Contradiction is that many politicians and school authorities say that they want minority children to learn their mother tongues and, especially, the dominant language(s)… while in practice preventing it, today as much as earlier ("Despite the reported success of bilingual methods, the federal government reacted negatively and suppressed programs that included the use of an indigenous language in the 1880s", Francis & Reyhner 2002: 46, about USA).

7.2. Research results – summing up some major studies

What exactly do research results say, then? In the following I shall sum up two really large-scale well-controlled studies, Ramirez et al. study, 1991, and Thomas & Collier’s studies. Both are about Spanish-speaking students in the USA.

The Ramirez et al.’s 1991 study, with 2352 students, compared three groups of Spanish-speaking minority students (see Table 5). The first group were taught through the medium of English only (but even these students had bilingual teachers and many were taught Spanish as a subject, something that is very unusual in submersion programmes); the second one, early-exit students, had one or two years of Spanish-medium education and were then transferred to English-medium, and the third group, late-exit students, had 4-6 years of Spanish-medium education before being transferred to English-medium.

Table 5. Ramirez et al. study, 1991, 2,352 students

Now the common sense approach would suggest that the ones who started early and had most exposure to English, the English-only students, would have the best results in English, and in mathematics and in educational achievement in general, and that the late-exit students who started late with English-medium education and consequently had least exposure to English, would do worst in English etc.

In fact the results were exactly the opposite. The late-exit students got the best results, and they were the only ones who had a chance to achieve native levels of English later on, whereas the other two groups were, after an initial boost, falling more and more behind, and were judged as probably never being able to catch up to native English-speaking peers in English or general school achievement.

The Thomas & Collier study (see bibliography under both names), the largest longitudinal study in the world on the education of minority students, with altogether over 210,000 students. It included in-depth studies in both urban and rural settings in the USA. It had full MTM programmes in a minority language, dual-medium or two-way bilingual programmes, where both a minority and majority language (mainly Spanish and English) were used as medium of instruction, transitional bilingual education programmes, ESL (English as a second language) programmes, and so-called mainstream (i.e. English-only submersion) programmes (see Skutnabb-Kangas & García 1995 and Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for characteristics of various programmes).

 Across all the models, those students who reached the highest levels of both bilingualism and school achievement were the ones where the children's mother tongue was the main medium of education for the most extended period of time. This length of education in the L1 (language 1, first language), was the strongest predictor of both the children's competence and gains in L2, English, and of their school achievement.

Thomas & Collier state this as follows themselves (2002: 7): “the strongest predictor of L2 student achievement is the amount of formal L1 schooling. The more L1 grade-level schooling, the higher L2 achievement.”

The length of mother tongue medium education was in both Ramirez' and Thomas & Collier's studies more important than any other factor in predicting the educational success of bilingual students. It was also much more important than socio-economic status, something extremely vital in relation to poor and/or oppressed indigenous and minority students.

The worst results (including high percentages of push-outs[12]) were with students in regular submersion programmes where the students' mother tongues (L1s) were either not supported at all or where they only had some mother-tongue-as-a-subject instruction. This is the subtractive learning situation.

There are hundreds of smaller studies showing similar conclusions, with many different types of groups, and many languages, and from many countries[13].

A typical example would be my own small-scale study among Finnish working class immigrant minorities in metropolitan Stockholm in Sweden (Skutnabb-Kangas 1987). The students in my study were in Finnish-medium classes, and I had Swedish control groups in the parallel classes in the same schools. For their Swedish competence, I used a difficult Swedish language test, of the type where normally middle-class children do better than working class children (see Table 6). After 9 years of mainly Finnish-medium education, and good teaching of Swedish as a second language, these working-class Finnish students got somewhat better results in the Swedish language than the Swedish mainly middle-class control groups. In addition, their Finnish was almost as good as the Finnish of Finnish control groups in Finland.

Table 6. Swedish test results and subjects' own assessment of their Swedish competence

M = mean; sd = standard deviation

Finnish working class immigrant minority youngsters in Sweden, after 9 years of mainly Finnish-medium education; Swedish control group: mainly middle class youngsters in parallel classes in the same schools; Swedish test: decontextualised, CALP-type test where middle-class subjects can be expected to perform better. (Skutnabb-Kangas 1987)

Another extremely well controlled study is Saikia & Mohanty's (2004) study of indigenous/tribal Bodo children in Assam, India. After strong campaigning they have just managed to get mother tongue medium education going. Saikia and Mohanty compared three Grade 4 groups, with 45 children in each group, on a number of measures of language and mathematics achievement. "The three groups were matched in respect of their socio-economic status, the quality of schooling and the ecological conditions of their villages." Group BB, Bodo children, taught through the medium of the Bodo language, performed significantly better on ALL tests than group BA, the indigenous Bodo children taught through the medium of Assamese. Group BA did worst on all the tests. Group AA, Assamese mother tongue children taught through the medium of Assamese, performed best on two of the three mathematics measures. There was no difference between groups BB and AA in the language measures. "The findings are interpreted as showing the positive role of MT medium schooling for the Bodo children."

All these studies show both the positive results of additive mother tongue medium maintenance education, and the mostly negative results of subtractive dominant-language medium education.

Dominant-language-only submersion programmes “are widely attested as
 the least effective educationally for minority language students”. This is the conclusion arrived at in a very large-scale and thorough research summary by Stephen May and Richard Hill (May & Hill 2003: 14, see also May et al. 2003), commissioned by the Maori Section of the Aotearoa/New Zealand Ministry of Education).

I repeat: Dominant-language-only submersion programmes “are widely attested as the least effective educationally for minority language students”. This is the model Turkey is using for Kurdish children.

If the Turkish state wants Kurdish children to learn Turkish well, the best method would be to use Kurdish as the main teaching language, and to teach Turkish as a subject, using bilingual teachers who know both Turkish and Kurdish.

This kind of teaching would obviously also make the children bilingual. They would learn BOTH Turkish AND Kurdish well, and have a chance of achieving academically.

Turkey needs well-educated bilingual people with a strong bilingual bicultural identity. Being able to enjoy all fundamental linguistic and cultural human rights also promotes stability and loyalty.

This kind of teaching would also live up to the recommendations in OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities’ Hague Recommendations Regarding the Educational Rights of National Minorities (1996); see http://www.osce.org/hcnm/) and UNESCO’s Education Position Paper Education in a multilingual world (2003). In The Hague Recommendations, mother tongue medium education is recommended for minorities at all levels of school, also in secondary education. This includes bilingual teachers in the dominant language as a second language (Art. 11-13).  The Explanatory Note, explaining and clarifying the Recommendations, state clearly:

'[S]ubmersion-type approaches whereby the curriculum is taught exclusively through the medium of the State language and minority children are entirely integrated into classes with children of the majority are not in line with international standards' (The Explanatory Note, p. 5).

Teaching Kurdish as a subject only in school (while the rest of the teaching is in Turkish) might be a good start for the children’s identity and self-esteem, but it does not help the children to learn Turkish well, and it does not help them much in learning Kurdish well either.

Today research results are NOT being implemented. Is Turkey implementing research results? NO. States, including Turkey, do NOT act in a rational way. There are very large gaps between theory and practice, research and implementation, and rhetoric and realities.

Educational linguistic human rights, especially the right to mother tongue medium education, are among the most important rights for all indigenous peoples and minorities. Without them, a minority/people whose children attend school usually cannot reproduce itself as a minority/people. It cannot integrate but is forced to assimilate.

Even if many other countries participate in linguistic and cultural genocide in relation to minorities, Turkey is unfortunately one of the worst offenders in the world,
 in several ways THE worst.

My question is, then: When are states going to see that their policies are irrational and work against their own interests?

8. Is Turkey approaching international human rights standards? Could it?

Even if many legal changes have been accepted (at least on paper), Turkey is not even approaching the international human rights standards yet, neither in education nor in other aspects of linguistic rights. 

ALL basic linguistic and cultural human rights are necessary. We can ask: do they exist in Turkey for (Muslim) minorities?  In order to show that it would be perfectly possible for Turkey to grant these rights, I want to make a few comparisons. We start with Finland.

In Finland, with a population of some 5,2 million, there are fewer than 300,000 native Swedish-speakers (5.8% of the population), a total of some 7,000 speakers of 3 different Saami languages, some 5-7,000 Deaf people and speakers of many other languages (Romany, Russian, Tatar, etc). In comparison, how large is the percentage of Kurdish-speakers in Turkey? Certainly more than 5,8% of the population!

Finnish and Swedish are national languages, both with the same rights in ALL official areas (education, media, army, church, courts, communication with authorities, etc).[14] This is what Kurdish could and should have in Turkey.

Even the 3 Saami languages have regional official status[15]. The other languages (including Finnish Sign language) are mentioned in the Constitution and have many more rights than Kurdish in Turkey.

We can now ask: Has the existence of basic linguistic and cultural human rights led to the disintegration of the Finnish state? A threat to unity? These are the ghosts that Turkey always marshals to the fore, even in the latest reform package of laws (for Amendments to the Law on Foreign Language Education and Teaching (2002), see www.abgs.gov.tr/abportal/uploads/files/Analytical%20Note%20on%20Constitutional%20Amendments%20.doc and www.deltur.cec.eu.int/english/e-g-regular2002.html. See also Skutnabb-Kangas 2002a,b).

Of course not! Ethnic Swedish-speakers in Finland identify politically as Finns/Finnish citizens. They have their own language and culture, but feel much closer to their Finnish-speaking compatriots than to ethnic Swedes in Sweden. They do NOT identify with Swedes in Sweden,

Except for a small ultra-nationalistic group of Finns, most Finnish-speakers see it as self-evident that the Swedish-speaking minority should have equal rights with the Finnish-speakers.

But even if one might convince a state that granting full linguistic human rights can prevent disintegration and can act as a bridge to positive relations, better integration and peace (see Eide 1993, 1994, Hettne 1987, 1990, Mohanty, in press), one can still ask: does it not cost too much? Is sustainable education, which leads to profound literacy, creativity, and high levels of multilingualism for the student, and maintenance of the world’s languages possible, and economically viable?
         My example here is Papua New Guinea. The population is around 5 million, and the number of languages is over 850. In fact, Papua New Guinea is the country with the largest number of languages in the world, and many of them have very few speakers. The following information comes from a study by David Klaus, World Bank (2003; see also my contextualisation of the Papua New Guinea example, 2003).
As of 2002, 470 languages are used as the media of education in preschool and the first two grades. Some of the results are as follows:

- Children become literate more quickly and easily;

- They learn English more quickly and easily than their siblings did under the old English-medium system;

- Children, including girls, stay in school;

- Grade 6 exams in the 3 provinces that started mother tongue medium teaching  in 1993 were much higher than in provinces which still teach through the medium of English from Day One.

It is thus perfectly possible to organise both education and other areas where language and culture are involved, so that they do not participate in committing linguistic genocide and so that they support linguistic and cultural diversity.

9. More reasons for maintaining the world’s linguistic diversity?

 But are there reasons for maintaining the world’s  linguistic diversity? Might it not be better if all of us used only a few big languages, and the smaller ones would disappear? All of us would understand each other, we could talk together, and maybe the world would be a more peaceful and prosperous place?

I will only touch very briefly upon three reasons for maintaining all the world’s languages through basic linguistic human rights, including mother tongue medium maintenance education (there are many more):

1. In knowledge societies uniformity is a handicap. Creativity, innovation and investment are results of additive teaching and  multilingualism.

2. English is not enough.

3. Linguistic diversity is a prerequisite for maintaining biodiversity and life on the planet.

9.1. Reason 1: In knowledge societies uniformity is a handicap. Creativity, innovation and investment are results of additive teaching and multilingualism.

In knowledge societies uniformity is a handicap. Creativity and  new ideas are the main assets (cultural capital) in a knowledge society and a prerequisite for humankind to adapt to change and to find solutions to the catastrophes of our own making. Multilingualism enhances creativity, monolingualism and homogenisation kill it.

Some uniformity might have promoted aspects of industrialisation. In post-industrial knowledge societies uniformity will be a definite handicap.

Creativity, invention, investment, multilingualism and additive teaching belong together. Creativity and new ideas are the main assets (cultural capital) in a knowledge society and a prerequisite for humankind to adapt to change and to find solutions to the catastrophes of our own making.

 In an industrial society, the main products are commodities (clothes, food, books, fridges, cars, weapons, etc.). Those (individuals and countries) who control access to raw materials and own the other prerequisites and means of production, do well.

In a knowledge or information society, on the other hand, the main products are, in addition to commodities, knowledge, ideas. In these societies, those (individuals and countries) who have access to diverse knowledges, diverse information, diverse ideas: creativity, do well. In knowledge societies uniformity is a handicap. Some uniformity might have promoted aspects of industrialization. In post-industrial knowledge societies uniformity will be a definite handicap. We know now that creativity, innovation, investment are related, and can be results of additive teaching and multilingualism. Creativity and  new ideas are the main assets (cultural capital) in a knowledge society and a prerequisite for humankind to adapt to change and to find solutions to the catastrophes of our own making.

Creativity, innovation and investment can be results of additive teaching and multilingualism. The causal chain is as follows: 

1.     Creativity precedes innovation, also in commodity production.

2.     Investment follows creativity.

3.     Multilingualism may enhance creativity.

4.     High-level multilinguals as a group have done better than corresponding monolinguals on tests measuring several aspects of 'intelligence', creativity, divergent thinking, cognitive flexibility, etc., and, finally,

5.     Additive teaching can lead to high-level multilingualism.

This means, firstly, that countries should promote maximal LHRs for indigenous and minority children, not only because of ethical concerns but indeed in their own interest. But countries, which want to do well in information societies cannot afford to leave their linguistic majority populations in monolingual stupidity either. Those linguistically rich societies/countries which teach all children, not only indigenous and minority children, additively, are likely to develop most linguistic and cultural capital of a kind that can be converted to other types of capital in information/knowledge societies. Therefore, again, additive teaching of linguistic majority children is necessary, through the medium of indigenous and minority children's mother tongues (or though other minority languages, i.e. second languages, in immersion or two-way-immersion programmes - see Baetens Beardsmore 1995, Dolson & Lindholm 1995, Lindholm 1997, 2001, Skutnabb-Kangas 1996a, ed. 1995, Skutnabb-Kangas & García 1995, for presentations and comparisons of these), is necessary. No North American child would need to be taught through the medium of English - they could be taught mainly through Spanish, Cree, Navajo, Estonian, Armenian, or whichever language. No child in Turkey would need to be taught through the medium of Turkish - they could be taught mainly through the medium of any of the other languages. Indigenous and minority children would be taught through mainly the medium of their own languages, Turkish-speakers through any of the minority languages. This would raise the level of both intelligence and creativity in both North America and in Turkey.

9.2. Reason 2: Everybody needs English; English is enough

Many states and also many indigenous and minority parents seem to reason today along the lines where the goal of the education is, for instance in Russia, "with regard to the small indigenous minorities of the North… to train and shape a generation of leaders, specialists and workers capable of adapting to new life conditions"… meaning "to adapt them to the conditions of a market economy"  (United Nations… Russian Federation. E/C.19/2004/5/Add.3: 12). And since English competence is often seen as central for success in market economies, and indigenous and minority children also need to learn properly the dominant language in the country where they live, the mother tongue is often sacrificed in terms of economic efficiency and rationality. Therefore it is important to look at the arguments for to what extent knowing English is enough.

The Financial Times, 3.12.2001 reports about a survey, undertaken for the Community of European Management Schools, an alliance of academia and multinational corporations. It concludes that a company’s inability to speak a client’s language can lead to failure to win business because it indicates lack of effort. The British newspaper The Independent (31.5.2001) reports that graduates with foreign language skills earn more than those who only know English. Nuffield Languages Enquiry (2000) concludes: "English is not enough. We are fortunate to speak a global language but, in a smart and competitive world, exclusive reliance on English leaves the UK vulnerable and dependent on the linguistic competence and the goodwill of others … Young people from the UK are at a growing disadvantage in the recruitment market". Professor Tariq Rahman, Pakistan (personal communication, 2002; see also references to him in the bibliography), states: ”English-medium schools tend  to produce snobs completely alienated from their culture and languages … We are mentally colonialized and alienated from our cultures if all we know is in English."

'Good’ English will be like literacy yesterday or computer skills today: employers see it as self-evident and necessary but not sufficient for good jobs. We can use ordinary economic theories to illustrate this. Supply and demand theories predict that when many people possess what earlier was a scarce commodity (near-native English), the price goes down. The value of ’perfect’ English skills as a financial incentive decreases substantially when a high proportion of a country’s or a region’s or the world’s population know English well (Grin, 2000). Grin (2003: 26), defines supply "as the willingness by producers to offer a certain quantity of a certain good or service at a certain unit price over a certain period”. Demand is defined “as the willingness by consumers to buy a certain quantity of that good or service at a certain unit price over a certain period. Normally, supply is an increasing function of price, while demand is a decreasing function of price. Hence, the supply curve and the demand curve will intersect in a two-dimensional {price-quantity} space, determining an equilibrium level both for quantity (q*) and price (p*), as shown in Figure [2]." (Grin 2003: 26). I have applied this to high levels of English competence. My estimate is that the supply (i.e. the number of people with near-native competence in English) may still today be lower than the demand; hence this competence still fetches a high price on the labour market; all else equal, people with good English get the nice jobs in many areas. And this is what many parents are thinking of when they are fooled into "investing" in an education that they think leads to "good" English for their children, even when it happens at the cost of their mother tongues. But my prediction is that once the equilibrium is passed so that the supply of people with "good" English is higher than the demand (or when this characteristics has been "naturalised" so that almost everybody has it), the price goes down. I have placed this situation some 15 years from now - this is of course a complete "educated guess". I think both state educational authorities and parents should be aware of this when planning language choices in education.

Already now it pays off better for German-speakers and French-speakers in Switzerland to know each other’s languages really well than to know English well, according to one of Grin’s large-scale studies (e.g. Grin & Sfreddo 1997).

What would the implications for Turkey be? Schools in Turkey should minimally aim at competence in 3 languages:

1.     MOTHER TONGUE (Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, etc) for everybody;

2a. The dominant state language (TURKISH) for all minorities;

2b. A domestic MINORITY LANGUAGE for native Turkish-speakers:;
3. ENGLISH (or some other big international language) for all.

9.3. Reason 3: Linguistic diversity is a prerequisite for maintaining biodiversity and life on the planet because linguistic diversity and biodiversity are correlationally and causally related; because knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in small indigenous languages; and because through killing them we kill the prerequisites for maintaining biodiversity and thus life on our planet 

Today, linguistic diversity is disappearing much faster than biodiversity (Table 7; for more detail, see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, 2002c 2003 in press).

Table 7. Prognoses for extinct or 'moribund' species and languages

A comparison of the estimates for extinct / 'moribund' biological species and languages around the year 2100 is as follows: according to optimistic estimates 2% of the biological species but 50% of the languages will have disappeared or are very seriously endangered. According to more pessimistic but still realistic estimates, the figures are 20% for biological species but 90-95% for languages. Knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in the world's small languages. Through killing them we kill the prerequisites for maintaining biodiversity.

What do we know about the correlation between the various kinds of diversity? Where there are many higher vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians), there are also often many languages: a high correlation. When comparing the lists of the top 25 countries with the highest numbers of endemic (=existing in one country only) languages and the highest numbers of higher vertebrates, we can see that 16 of the 25 countries are on both lists (David Harmon, 2002). We get the same type of correlation between languages and flowering plants: a region often has many of both, or few of both. Languages and butterflies also show a high correlation, and so do languages and birds (see www.terralingua.org for the relationships). Table 8 shows some of the correlations:

Table 8. Endemism in Languages Compared with Rankings of Biodiversity

(source: Skutnabb-Kangas, Maffi & Harmon 2003: 41).

 

Recent research shows mounting evidence for the hypothesis that the correlational relationship may also be causal: the two types of diversities seem to mutually enforce and support each other (see Maffi 2000a,b). UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program), one of the organisers of the world summit on biodiversity in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (see its summary of our knowledge on biodiversity, Heywood, ed., 1995), published in December 1999 a mega-volume called Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. A Complementary Contribution to the Global Biodiversity Assessment, edited by Darrell Posey (1999) summarising some of this evidence of causality. Likewise, articles in Luisa Maffi's (2001) edited volume On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge and the Environment illustrates it. The strong correlation need in my view not indicate a direct causal relationship, in the sense that neither type of diversity should probably be seen directly as an independent variable in relation to the other. But linguistic and cultural diversity may be decisive mediating variables in sustaining biodiversity itself, and vice versa, as long as humans are on the earth. As soon as humans came into existence, we started to influence the rest of nature (see Diamond 1998 for a fascinating account on how, and Diamond 2005 for the devastating consequences). Today it is safe to say that there is no 'pristine nature' left - all landscapes have been and are influenced by human action, even those where untrained observers might not notice it immediately. All landscapes are cultural landscapes. It is interesting that even UNESCO now accepts this - that means that the concept of Terra nullius (= empty land) has finally been invalidated. Humans influence life conditions of animals and plants. The various ways that different peoples influence their environments were and are filtered through their cultural patterns.

Some examples:

lCultural attitudes to meat of cows, pigs, rats, dogs, as food influences the occurrence, spread and life conditions of these animals.

lMore than 40,000 edible plants were known to the Aboriginal inhabitants of South Australia; very few of them have found their way to the plates of the European invaders; the Europeans have neither lexicalised these items of food nor used them; this influences their disappearance (“weeds” etc).

Likewise, local nature and people's detailed knowledge about it and use of it have influenced the cultures, languages and cosmo-visions of the people who have been dependent on it for their sustenance. An example: If the areas where people have lived for a long time have plenty of animal protein but little of plant protein as, for instance, in the Arctic areas, it is unlikely that religions which support vegetarianism could have developed - and they haven't.

This relationship and mutual influence between all kinds of diversities is of course what most indigenous peoples have always known, and they describe their knowledge in several articles in the UNEP volume. The conservation traditions that promote the sustainable use of land and natural resources, expressed in the native languages, are, according to James Nations (2001: 470), “what Hazel Henderson called ‘the cultural DNA’ that can help us create sustainable economies in healthy ecosystems on this, the only planet we have (Gell-Mann 1994: 292)”.

We in Terralingua[16] suggest that if the long-lasting co-evolution which people have had with their environments from time immemorial is abruptly disrupted, without nature (and people) getting enough time to adjust and adapt (see Mühlhäusler, 1996), we can expect a catastrophe. The adjustment needed takes hundreds of years, not only decades (see Mühlhäusler, 1996, 2003). Two examples from different parts of the world: nuances in the knowledge about medicinal plants and their use disappear when indigenous youth in Mexico become bilingual without teaching in and through the medium of their own languages - the knowledge is not transferred to Spanish which does not have the vocabulary for these nuances or the discourses needed (see Luisa Maffi's doctoral dissertation, 1994; see also Nabhan 2001).

I was told a recent example by Pekka Aikio, the President of the Saami Parliament in Finland (29 November 2001). Finnish fish biologists had just "discovered" that salmon can use even extremely small rivulets leading to the river Teno, as spawning ground - earlier this was thought impossible. Pekka said that the Saami have always known this - the traditional Saami names of several of those rivulets often include the Saami word for "salmon spawning-bed". This is ecological knowledge inscribed in indigenous languages. To sum up

Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. Diversity contains the potential for adaptation. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and unadaptability. As languages and cultures die, the testimony of human intellectual achievement is lessened. In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse. Diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different kinds of environment over thousands of years. Such ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity maximises chances of human success and adaptability" (from Colin Baker's (2001: 281) review of Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).

This means that biocultural diversity (= biodiversity + linguistic diversity + cultural diversity) is essential for long-term planetary survival because it enhances creativity and adaptability and thus stability. Today we are killing biocultural diversity faster than ever before in human history.

Most of the world’s mega-biodiversity is in areas under the management or guardianship of indigenous peoples. Most of the world’s linguistic diversity resides in the small languages of indigenous peoples. Much of the detailed knowledge of how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in the languages of indigenous peoples. Thus indigenous peoples are/have the key to our planetary survival. Indigenous self-determination - something that the environmental rogue states like the USA, Canada, Australia, etc. are fighting to reject from the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - is a necessary prerequisite for the survival of the planet.

Linguistic diversity and biodiversity are correlationally and causally related. Knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in small languages. Through killing them the way we are doing today, we kill the prerequisites for maintaining biodiversity.

What about Turkey? Turkish Kurdistan is RICH in biodiversity, in linguistic diversity, and in cultural diversity. Is Turkey acting irrationally and against its own short and long-term interests, by NOT protecting all these diversities maximally?

Maintaining and supporting diversities is a prerequisite for stability. Lack of linguistic and cultural human rights leads to conflict. Conflicts are expensive, also economically. Granting linguistic and cultural human rights generally lead to stable co-existence, and more harmony. 

 

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