Hearing the Unheard IV: Playing Devil’s Advocate – Why Should we Protect Minority Languages?
Publicity design for ABRA, image courtesy of Jamie Rycroft
Hearing the Unheard has so far brought attention to the fight to preserve and reclaim minority languages in cultures across the world. This series has undoubtedly shown how important minority languages are in promoting diversity within cultures and conserving centuries old traditions. However, many believe that this is not the way forward, and in fact we should allow these languages to take their natural course. Some even suggest the formation of new constructed languages which may be spoken across the world, creating a vastly different linguistic profile. This article explores the potential outcomes of this, and ends with a conversation with Jamie Rycroft, a theatre producer whose play – ABRA – is relevant to the discussion.
International auxiliary languages (sometimes abbreviated as IALs) are created to facilitate communication between people from different nations who do not share a first language. The central claim is that they offer a practical solution to potential conflict within politics and economics caused by the dominance of certain existing languages. Famous examples of IALs include Volapük, Esperanto, and Interlingua. While they are not intended to replace anyone’s native language, many place more emphasis on promoting their use than protecting smaller – arguably dying – minority languages. With this argument, minority languages should be allowed to die out in favour of adopting an IAL which could aid these cultures’ communication with their own nation as well as others.
While IALs are often critiqued as useless due to the dominance of English in international business and politics, the benefit of IALs is that, unlike English, they are not culturally biased, and aim to promote equality. Unlike natural languages, IALs are designed to be easy to learn and as a result can usually be learned much quicker than existing languages such as English. This could therefore unite minority cultures in a way that does not stamp out their language as inferior compared to the official language in their nation. Additionally, IALs are created to be simple and logical, and have no irregularities. They are efficient – much more so than any natural language.
However, in a world increasingly reliant on computers and artificial intelligence, the creation of a novel, maximally efficient language would not come without costs. Jamie Rycroft’s play, ABRA, explores the academic battle over the ownership of a constructed language, designed to be maximally efficient. When the language turns out to be especially effective at communicating with machines, the characters soon turn on each other for personal gain. ABRA explores the practical and potentially threatening implications of putting a constructed language to use and highlights the fact that what is at first created for good may have dangerous implications. I spoke with Jamie about his motivations for writing the play, and asked his thoughts on the dangers of constructed languages:
What inspired you to write the play?
“I came across the story of James Cooke Brown, an academic who tried to create what he said was a fully logical language called Loglan. His followers, in a way, tried to change it, and he then became possessive of it and tried to take them to court, to sue them. And I find that really strange – the idea of someone trying to be protective about a language, which is something that inherently has to change by the people who speak it.”
In the play, the characters become possessive of their language in this same way, but do you think there is a way today in which a language can be created for a good purpose, or if personal greed is guaranteed to sabotage this?
“I think I’m pretty cynical about it personally. It is a personal, subjective thing and that’s what broke down with the real example and in the play, of someone believing this is logical and other people disagreeing or changing it and so on. But I also find [creating a universal language] a weird impulse because there’s obviously an idea of trying to create a bridge for universal communication, and we can join up all these cultures, but at the same time, that can cause [language] extinction. It feels like a flattening, and I think that’s a real shame. So, the idea that you should make some grand, universal language for machine communication also feels very wrong.”
ABRA predicts an alarmingly realistic situation in which the creation of a new language is overshadowed by personal greed. However, my interview with Jamie touched upon the most important issue with IALs: cultural and linguistic flattening. IALs provide a way to converse globally, but that is not at all what language is. Language is not just a means of communication; it has cultural ties associated with it which would be stamped out if we were to focus on IALs rather than preserving and promoting the use of existing natural languages. This article highlights the purpose of Hearing the Unheard, which is to emphasise the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity.
ABRA’s Cambridge run has passed, but a recording of the performance can be found here, as well as Jamie’s personal website for more information on his current and upcoming works.