An interesting little text on language ecology

Viri Amaoro   Tue May 02, 2006 1:51 am GMT
(Un)Writing the Margins:
Steps toward an Ecology of Language

Mark Fettes
Esperantic Studies Foundation


Many would say she is a margin-dweller, our Tove: an explorer of tidal pools, perhaps, perched on weathered rock with surf foaming at her feet; or a streetwise fox, prowling backyards where the suburbs meet the forest; or a stubborn cloudlike dandelion, scattering seeds of life on concrete plains. To the city dweller such lifestyles appear irrelevant; annoying; potentially inimical. The imagination of the urban world embraces logical order and enforced civility. Wilderness is to be cherished only at a distance, or behind bars.

The linguistics of the city is our common heritage: it has its place. Yet beyond the Pale its "rage for order", as Paul Friedrich (1985) terms it, is little more than a blueprint for urbanization. To understand the beach (let us adopt it as our central metaphor), we must come to terms with an ecology adapted precisely to the unending struggle between tide and land. What the city perceives as debris and desolation is for others a home. It is, moreover, our home. We are all strand-dwellers by origin and nature, salt water mingled with air and earth, dark currents swirling at the edge of daylit pools. Waves murmur in our poetry and dreams; or sometimes crash and roar, sweeping towns away.

To perceive and foster the specific homeness of both beach and city, we need a linguistics of the margins, an interpretative science that transcends the logical-literal to embrace the ecological-littoral. Let me tell, briefly, of my own sojourns among waves and sand, and my ongoing efforts to integrate them in a panoramic vision of sea and shore.

Take, first, Esperanto, ironically categorized as "planned" or "artificial" within the linguistics of the city. I first encountered it, as many do, in the pages of a textbook -- in the building yard, as it were. But the design is not that of a skyscraper, static and monumental; think rather of a ship (Dasgupta, 1987), or perhaps a fleet of rowboats, in which disaffected urbanites can slip out to reacquaint themselves with the rhythms of the sea. For the exuberant linguistic freedom of which Claude Piron has written so well (1994) is not unique to Esperanto: it is part of our premodern heritage, from before the era of "taught mother tongue" and the disciplines of empire (Illich, 1981). Of course, how far one ventures in such a small, seemingly vulnerable craft is a personal decision: some stay in the harbour (or even the shipyard), others shuttle back and forth to nearby cities, and some discover the sea and shore to be their second home.

More on such homeness in a moment. I want first to locate the little languages of the world in this metaphoric shorescape, for their ecology has much occupied my imagination in the past few years. Think of them as the web of relationships constituting the living world in a particular bay, exquisitely adapted to the tidal pulse and the turning seasons, the dance of earth and moon and sun. To know this ecology one must live it, as few linguists are prepared or equipped to do; the city's laboratories work mostly with snapshots, specimens, classifications, blueprints for development. In their theoretical schemes the future can only be urban. Yet because they take the streetmaps of the city for reality, they misconstrue the very world under their feet, as Marx long ago observed in The German Ideology (Smith, 1990). Indigenous philosophies, lacking the technologies of industrialization, have gone deeper.

Central to this multi-millennial heritage of thought, as I understand it, is the idea of awareness, an active spirit or personhood characterizing all sorts of unities in the world, whether individual beings or their communities or the ecosystems of which they form an integral part (Cajete, 1994). One of the clearest distinctions between this and the modernist tradition is a deep respect for the uniqueness of every member of a family or community, their moral and cognitive autonomy, and thus the specificity of their journey in the world. Urban social science works in terms of structures and categories, fitting individuals into them; indigenous philosophy points to a science of processes and relationships arising from the individual's quest for self-realization. This is the ecology of the shore, where castles crumble at each rising tide but life bobs, burrows, clings, and thereby sustains a system more complex and robust than the city can understand.

Within such a system, each and every person occupies a unique location, a singular node: their experience of language is part and parcel of their participation in particular personal relationships and communal traditions of imagining and acting in the world. Thus the natural ontology of language is not an abstract private competence externalized, but an ecosystem of public acts -- language devices (Millikan, 1984), used by embodied beings to co-order their awareness of and action in the world. Over time, in partially or wholly closed communities, multiple intersecting genres and discourses bring forth "a language", a kind of local currency for communicative trading, the germ of a terrestrial lifestyle. Yet the sea surges around and through such apparently stable, referential systems, because of the need for each individual to make them their own: to walk the tightrope between experience and description, embodied knowledge and discursive knowledge, poetry and prose. In its drive towards Cosmopolis, modernity has tended to idolize the latter half of each pair: the androcentric pole, yang over yin. But idolatry has never been a viable strategy for the long term.

Three alternatives, then, intertwine in my own work. The first is a quest for a theory of language ecology which can integrate naturalist and critical traditions across many disciplines. Beyond the sunlit demesnes of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, I have discovered other realms of gold: Ruth Millikan's naturalist epistemology (1984), Dorothy Smith's feminist sociology of knowledge (1990), Edward Reed's ecological psychology (1996). These and other works point clearly to the possibility of an emancipatory human science that interprets, not legislates; enables, not constrains; discovers homes, not constructs margins. By its nature, such a science will be reflexive and therefore self-limiting and adaptable to local needs. It will also be permanently incomplete, as open to remaking and reshaping as the systems that it studies. But for this to become the accepted way of doing science, much will have to change.

The linear notion of development, for one, must go. If the urban legacy is not sustainable in its present form, it behooves us to learn from the cyclical indigenous vision of life and all that sustains it. There on those developer-ravaged shores, ancient processes of decay, renewal and rebirth are underway. What part in them will language play? I am deeply skeptical of models that call for the reenactment, tribe by tribe and community by community, of the standard development paradigm. This raises, then, the second challenge of language ecology: to engage with the complex, often agonizing realities of contemporary life in indigenous communities, not only to discover how language is implicated in their spiritual and cultural ecology, but to inform and empower the process of linguistic healing as it fits with the myriad alternative therapies now being worked out in such areas as justice, health, and education. Doing so may change both the way we think about language and the linguistic realities themselves.

What will come of this global indigenous renaissance, I cannot say. The cities will surely endure, in one form or another; all futures hang on whether their ecology can be altered. The third challenge, therefore, is to make the city more like the shore. I know of no better technology for this than the Esperanto rowboat: adaptable, economical of resources, personal yet seaworthy. A city of seafarers and marine biologists, a city of Toves, is very different from a civilization that shuts the sea out and thus walls itself in. For the generations raised behind such parapets, Esperanto offers a glimpse of the curving, wave-wrapped world: not an end, but a beginning. The voyage is not the vessel; nor the chart of its journey; nor the tales that are told. In the doing is the knowing. That which cannot be spoken, in the deep ecology of language, is still more precious than that which can.

"Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers."