peer to pier conversations with fellow travelers

8/3/2019 Peer to Pier Conversations With Fellow Travelers

1/12

Peer to Pier:Conversations with fellow travelers

I am pleased to share Novembers Peer to Pier interview with linguist Michael Krauss.

Mike, age 77, joined the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1960 and is now Professoremeritus. He served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center from its inception in 1972 until hisretirement in June 2000.

In his 1991 address to the Linguistic Society of America, Mike was among the first to create an awareness ofthe global problem of endangered languages. In talking with Mike, he made the point that just as we havelearned that our planet needs biodiversity to survive and thrive, so too we of the human condition needintellectual diversity. He remains active in efforts to document Alaskas Native languages and encourageawareness of the global problem of endangered languages.

In our conversation, I learned he and I have more than a few things in common, among those an affinity for thewest coast of Ireland and underdogs. Perhaps there is a connection there? In any event, I hope youll enjoy thisthought-provoking discussion with a charming champion of diversity.

Meg: Could you define linguistics?

Mike: Linguistics everyone would agree is the scientific study of human languages. But there the agreementends because it branches into two rather different concepts. One branch is the study of what all humanlanguages have in common. In 1957 {linguist} Chomsky focused linguistics on the question of what is the basicnature of human languagewhat all languages have in common.
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/michaelkrauss.jpg


2/12

Photo Courtesy of the University of Alaska

The Chomsky view of this can correctly claim that the difference between Zulu and Eskimo and Chinese andEnglish is quite trivial and whats really interesting is what they all have in common. Chomsky would more orless claim that all we really need is English and, say, Japanese for double-checking, as all human languages aremore or less basically the same with differences that are essentially trivial.

Ill compare it with biology. The question ofwhat is life boils down in some sense to the nature of DNA. Themicro view is that what really counts about life is what all organisms have in common. The secrets of DNA andthe difference between me and some fruit fly and some white rat and some panda is still going to be basicallythe double helix. Nobodys going to have a triple helix so the difference between me and a chimpanzee is quitetrivial according to that view of biology.

Some would correctly say heres no point in studying pandas for their DNA because white rats are just so muchcheaper and more convenient to use. Who cares about pandas or some damn stupid spotted owl, which is eithera pest or gets in the way of our logging? Yet current wisdom says that if we wipe out some useless-lookingcentipede, that could wreck the biosphere that we depend on for our ability to breathe and for our organisms tosurvive.

So Im trying to draw the parallel of the differences. In biology we might call them microbiology and macrobiology. In some ways you could say diversity in language is as essential to our humanity as biodiversity isessential to our survival. The interest in micro linguistics or what makes all languages tick was practicallyexclusive, until recently. Ive tried to make some difference in that , to pull the pendulum back to an interest alsoin macro linguistics.

Meg:What prompted your interest in linguistics?

Mike:I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio in the 30s, 40s in a Jewish family where I heard no languageother than English and maybe a little Sunday School Hebrew. I can recall that I made myself late to school onemorning because walking by some work along the road, people were digging a ditch and speaking a languagethat was definitely not like anything Id heard before and I remember my fascination with that. I pretended to beinterested in the work itself but it was the language that fascinated me so much that I made myself late forschool.


3/12


That was the first symptom you might say. Otherwise I was always good at languages in school and for somereason always interested whether it had any actual use or not. Ive always been interested not only in language

but underdog languages and languages of minorities. While it may have been more profitable for me to learn

Russian I was always attracted to languages spoken by the fewer rather than the more people and by the morepowerless rather than more powerful. That has also for some reason defined my life direction.

I went to Columbia and then the University of Paris where I got fascinated with Celtic languages. From France Iwent on to Ireland and ended up on a small Island off the west coast where there were still people not only whospoke Irish, but there were even a few young people my age who did not speak English. Back in the 1950s thiswas still true in the outlying fringes of Ireland and Galway Bay was still in those days relatively isolated. Peoplespoke Irish and lived what was still at that time a 19th century kind of peasant existence.

I became deeply imbued with the Gaelic cause. That turned into a crossroad in my life. I was in my waybecoming very integrated into life on that island and I sometimes wonder how I ever left it. In certain ways it

was very, very formative.

It was a population at that time of 200-something, all stone walls and small patches, basically a subsistence life.At the time there were no gasoline engines and barely horse carts. It was mainly carrying things on your backand no electric lights or running water or anything of that kind. But a very rich life focused on values of 19thcentury Catholic Irelandbut people who had adopted Catholicism very much to their own culture more than theother way around and who were living a very traditional and very intellectual, very rich Gaelic life.

At the time it was still during the period of such poverty that the Britshad hardly coveted the place and had left the Gaelic language and life still vibrantly intact on that island. Therewere wonderful people there living a very different life from that which Id been raised in but to which I took insuch a way that it changed me and never left me.
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gaelic-signs.jpghttp://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/leer-krauss.jpg


4/12

As a result of my experience there, I got a scholarship to Harvard, where I spent one whole year. Harvardbasically rubber-stamped the dissertation that I had basically written in Ireland on the phonology of the Gaelicdialect that I had learned. Im sure there was no one in my committee who ever so much as really read mydissertation at all.

The reason I went to Harvard because it was one of the very few places in this country that had a department ofCeltic languages. Im maybe the only person that ever can say this about my Harvard career that I had more Icould talk about with the custodial staff than the faculty. Certain members of the custodial staff were from

western Ireland and had excellent Gaelic. They were people I could really talk about the subject of mydissertation and enjoy conversing with who were sweeping the floors of the place and not people who werewriting on its blackboards. I never adjusted to academia properly.

Meg: What came next?

Mike:I had a fellowship from Scandinavian American foundation to study Icelandic, which I did, but I didntfeel I had an important contribution to make to Icelandic since Iceland is full of people who appreciate thelanguage and study it and have insights about it. Its one of the best documented and studied languages on earth.

When Norway was unified under a single king you had all these disgruntled lesser aristocrats who moved to

Icelandanybody in Norway who could write left a thousand years ago and immigrated to Iceland. From the daythe first person ever set foot there, a complete record was kept of everything they did and whose sheep wentinto which valley and everything from the very beginning until the very end. They still have thatIceland is byfar had the best recorded history because nothing ever happened that wasnt written down. Of course everybodythere is thrilled about literature. I remember trying to speak to Icelanders about Faroese literature. To anIcelander it must have been grotesque to have a snotty nosed 20-year old telling them about the wonders ofFaroese literature. Retrospectively enough, I cant think of anything more absurd than that.

I picked up some sense from Iceland of the strength a relatively small language can have but I cant say that Igot as much out of that as I did the Faroe Island situation. There too people were very strongly interested in
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Faroe-Island-dancers.jpghttp://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/iceland-saga.jpg


5/12

their own language and its cultivation. The Faroese are a relative underdog, shall we say, when it comes toIcelandic. The Faroe Islands are in between Iceland and the Shetlands where people still do speak Faroese,which is a Scandinavian language but its own independent language with its own newspapers. A flourishinglanguage of then 30,000 some people, now pushing maybe 50,000. You can always tell a Faroe man by the cutof their trousers and by the way they walk too. Because they walk sort of slowly like theyre not really goinganywhere whereas Icelanders are always walking with a purpose.

Icelandic language is in no way endangered nor is Faroese even though they belong to a very outlying fringe of

what I would call safe languages in terms of numbers of people. Under the yoke of the Danish empire well,almost any language could survive.

Meg:Meaning that the yoke of other cultures presents a different scenario?

Mike:I dont think that too many Danes have the impression that Danish is the language of all the earth andthat Jesus Christ spoke Danish unlike certain other cultures assume. Even though the Danes were at the time ofthe foundation of Iceland among the more powerful and most feared people on earth. They were definitely apeople to be reckoned with but they never had the view that we do of the universal importance of theirlanguage. They have always been, therefore, relatively cognizant of the value of other languages. The pointbeing that the Danish did not have the same imperialistic view of their language as Brits and Americansor morerecently the Russians.

Meg: Tell me how you came to the University of Alaska.


Mike: I got a letter from the University of Alaska inviting me to apply for a new visiting professorship that theyhad gotten from the Carnegie Foundation to start a new discipline at that university. When I received theinvitation I was beginning to feel that my time in Europe or exile from my own country was appropriate to end.

I suppose I had a desire to bring myself back to my own country, where there were American languages whichdefinitely needed the support and help of a linguist if they were going to be even documented let alonesupported toward survival. And the University of Alaska, at the time, was something like an ideal, it was like aninvitation from Siberia. And I became, very appropriately for that time, a volunteer to Siberia.

The University of Alaska at the time I got here had about 800 students and there were about 15,000 peopleliving in greater Fairbanks. The university has its own history, which in certain ways begins about 1915, whichis only a dozen years after the establishment of Fairbanks itself as a kind of outpost in a benighted wilderness. Imean the farthest reach of civilization, should we say, the last frontier and all of that. Fairbanks became a cityand was incorporated in 1903. By that time, it had a couple of newspapers and there were some thousands ofpeople living here mostly temporary for the gold rush. The town judge conceived of the idea of the university
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Eskimo-language-workshop.png


6/12

and in 1915 he planted the cornerstone. It opened its doors in 1922. So its not the youngest university in thecountry but it was part of you might say the triumph of American civilization over lesser cultures in a Godforsaken wilderness.


My point is only that the university developed out of this civilization with certain attitudes. Back in the 60s it

could be considered a gentlemanly thing to do to collect curios of inevitably passing or vanishing peoples,maybe even their languages. There were a couple of people who had actually connected that with indigenouslanguages and who encouraged me to do that but I naturally took to it like a duck to water and they couldnthave stopped me. Although there is the issue of developing a fine linguistic department on the basis of thiswonderful resourcethese disappearing languagesin a day when the university was part of the system thatwas expunging those languages and training teachers who were the key figures in educating these people out oftheir language. So, its maybe OK to have somebody here who at the same time was recording what is beingexpungedso long as he brings in his own grants for it, with overhead.

But during the 60s it is true that what I founded was also an underground movement that actually encouragedthe use of these languages in the school. Not just teach them as a curiosity or study them as something that was

bound to be dispatched.

In the 60s I was required to teach French and linguistics. Also I began a course called Special Topics: YupikEskimo, emceeing a group including a native speaker of Yupik, which is the largest single language, population-wise, in Alaska. For that reason in part there were more students around from that language background thanany other.

http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ANLA.jpghttp://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/classroom2.jpg


7/12

That native speaker, Martha Teeluk from the lower Yukon Delta area, and a student by the name of Irene Reed,who was the closest to work with Martha, were the key figures in this first class in demonstrating the nature ofthis language by analyzing it live in class and showing how it worked. Its a very extensive syffixation system.This was a class that was a great success and has continued ever since and has now grown into an undergraduatemajor with new native teachers and about 25 beginners and its a stable part of the university curriculum. It wasthe beginning of the legitimization of teaching of Alaskan native languages in Alaska educational systems. Itwas of course not expandable into the public schooluse of Alaskan native languages from the beginning ofstate education was forbidden. The purpose of the schools was to get rid of those languages and replace themwith English, which wasnow by the 20th century solving the Native American problem by education ratherthan by genocide.

Alaska was spared the entire Wild West. I dont think that there was ever any Alaskan native or white killed inAlaska in the form of wars or even battles between Native and the white population. There were naturallymurders back and forth as there still are but there was never any genocidal campaign in Alaska except in thecultural sense.

Meg: You served as director of the Alaska Native Language Center from its inception in 1972 until your

retirement in June 2000. Can you describe the Center and its mission?

Mike: After 12 years at U of A, the underground developments,and the dramatic social upheavals of the 60s, civil rights, bilingual education, Vietnam etc., we managed in

1972 to lobby through Alaskas legislature a bill to a llow or even mandate the use of Alaska Native Languagesin Alaska public schools, and to establish at UA Fairbanks the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) tostudy Alaska Native Languages and to provide a sound scientific basis for their use in the schools. It furtheradded on to the UAF budget $200,000 1972 dollars for that purpose, not an unfunded mandate! I directed thatCenter from 1972 until I retired in 2000. During that time ANLC, with a star staff of both linguists and Native

speakers produced a vast treasure of language documentation now housed in the Alaska Native LanguageArchive. That along with virtually everything ever written in or on those languages by others, including whathad been done before, mostly by foreigners, hardly by Americans. A surprising amount had been done by theRussians in their time here, which I managed to get copied in the USSR, and later mostly by Scandinavians, andmissionaries.
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lang_mapAlaska.gif


8/12


After I retired, ANLC became much more compliant to academias priorities, producing degrees, respectablylinguistic with more Chomskyan priorities which still reign supreme in most academia, to get back to your firstquestion. The old documentation is now past, and the old staffsome of us were misfitsnow mostly gone.Meanwhile the languages are dying. The last speakers of Eyak died in 2008. Only one language has youngchildren speakers anywhere, and for the majority of Alaskan languages the youngest speakers are all or almostall older than 70 or 80 by now. Yet now its becoming politically incorrect to call too much attention to thisinconvenient reality, so Im not very popular in certain quarters. Knowledge of these languages is becoming

more and more archival, in Alaska, US, and many parts of the world. The Alaska Native Language Archive,now separate from and coordinate with ANLC, is bound to serve a crucial role for the future. Look at Hebrew,as the best-known language that for centuries had no native speakers, now the mother-tongue of millions. Thereare starting to be other examples, less known, e.g. Cornish, Miami Im told.

Meg: You are currently involved in leading a National Science Foundation studycan you describe the project

and its goals?

Mike: In order to continue the very basic documentation role of ANLC, I got a very substantial grant from theNational Science Foundation, which has always been highly sympathetic and understanding of the need fordocumentation of endangered languages, no matter what the reigning fashion in linguistics. NSF is where thatsupport started for Alaska in the 1960s, and thats where its back to now.

http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/classroom1.jpghttp://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Eyak-Marie-Smith.jpg


9/12

This grant, starting in 2007, has so far produced a detailed definitive grammar of Central Yupik, the languagewe started with in 1961, as well as a detailed comprehensive dictionary of that language, Alaskas least severelyendangered. Other products of the grant include the definitive comprehensive dictionary of North Slope InupiaqEskimo, by a native speaker; transcriptions of now extinct Attuan Aleut; and the only major basicdocumentation were likely ever to have of two Athabaskan languages, Han and Upper Kuskokwim.

Other products of the grant include basic documentation of the Russian still spoken by a few elders on KenaiPeninsula and in Kodiak Island, directly descended from colonial Russian and transcriptions of accounts of their

lives here in Alaskan Saami (Lappish) from the last two speakers from the groups sent here to teach reindeerherding 1896-1910.Soon to be completed is a comprehensive definitive dictionary of the Yupik Eskimo (Aleut) of Kodiak andsouth central Alaska, a comparative dictionary of Athabaskan languagesbound to become the basis for allfurther Athabaskan lexical fieldwork, as well as a study of tones in Alaskan and neighboring languagesanimportant part of those languages but which many linguists cant seem to hear. All this by American, Russian,

Canadian, Japanese, and Belgian linguists, and of course Alaskan speakers. So the work goes on.

Meg:At what point does a language becomes extinct?

Mike: If no children are learning the language in the home it will then in a generation or so cease to be themother tongue of any living soul. People ignore this fact all the timenevertheless it is clear as a bell that if youdont speak your language to your children theyre not going to learn to speak it.

Meg: I have heard that if less than one million people speak a language it is on its way to becoming extinct.

Mike: That wasmy figure for defining what languages are safe from extinction and are not safe from extinction,in terms of sheer numbers. However, there are exceptions. For example, physical isolationsuch as that ofIceland and the Faroe Islands. Second, the forces that work on a language both in terms of the power and theattitude that goes along with itbe the approach of that power akin to the Danes or others.

On the other hand, there were certainly more than a million speakers of Breton in France at the beginning of the20th century. At the end there were less than a third of that and now is less than a fifth of it and dwindling allalong. That language had a million speakers in living memory and now has maybe zero children speaking it.The future of the Breton language is very, very questionable.


More importantly one can certainly say that the vast, vast majority of human languages are severely endangeredeven if theyre still spoken by all the children today. When you look at the worldwide situation, there are still

about 7,000 languages and 7 billion people. So the average world language has a million people. But the
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mike-n-willemphoto.jpg


10/12

balance of that figure is extremely skewed given that the worlds median-sized language is by no means spokenby a million people. In fact, the median-sized language is spoken by less than 7,000 peopleput simply, half ourlanguages are spoken by fewer than 7,000. Further, the vast majority of our languages are spoken by a numberof people far too small for that language to be safe in the world of today.

Another favorable factor for a languages survival is being politically an official language, with nationalsupport. Say there are 7,000 languages still on earth. There are now close to 200 independent countries on earth.Out of the 7,000 existing languages, there are far fewer than 200 adopted as official language by the

government of these countries. In fact, out of the manynations with English or Spanish or Arabic as the onlyofficial language, that leaves far fewer than 200 official languages on earth.

Still the vast majority of the worlds languages have no national support at all. You add up the 10 big languagesand you have maybe already 90 percent of the worlds population. The number of languages that are spoken bya million or more are roughly 200, mostly overlapping with the official ones. So that makes 95 percent ofmankinds languages likely to become extinct in this century and the next.

Consider those figures and you begin to realize the scope of language extinction. By the end of the century itwill probably reach a peak and a language a week will disappear. At the rate things are going, unless theressome miracle or vast changes take place that we cant foresee for the good, 95 percent of our languages will begone by the end of the next century, or maybe just 90 perent if were lucky.

At the end of the Neolithic age, in the beginning of agriculture, there were probably 10-20,000 languages onearth. There were just a few million people about 10,000 years ago. Out of 10 or 20,000 languages we still have7,000thats not so bad. But the next couple of centuries in human history will be the end of 95 percent of thoseIf yourelooking at the curve of human language extinction its going to shoot up unmercifully.

The expansion of human population causing our extinction is very important we all recognize. But when itcomes to language, with a massive collapse of linguistic diversity maybe all well lose is our humanity.

Meg:I think that kind of brings us full circle.

Mike: The Tower of Babel storythats what it comes back to. Is it our language diversity which is causing our

current existence to be so sordid? Maybe we will reach such a state of Godliness that we dont need all theselanguages. Maybe mankind will attain such a stage of enlightenment that we only need a few dozen differentinterpretations of our human existence. And perhaps these few dozen surviving languages will more thansuffice for our intellectual diversity. That could be a nice interpretation, I guess.

Meg:In 1991 you addressed the Linguistics Society of America and at that time were one of the first to createan awareness of the global problem of endangered languages.

Mike: Yes, I pointed out that we stand to lose 90 to 95 percent of our linguistic diversity in the next 200 years.Seems like no one had noticed the obvious. But nobodys disputed that. Pretty much accepted in the last 20years. But whats being done about it?
http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/babal.jpg


11/12


Its a pretty big thought in a way and it is also true that when you check into a hotel in Antarctica or whatever,

there will surely be orange juice and the waiter will understand your English. Or you go out into the hills andyou pay 83,000 Euros to get there and the only language youll hear around you is Chinese or English and well,

so what. If were very lucky, there will be a library maybe full of the records and even tapes of all these oldlanguages that were lost.

Somehow or other the snail darter and the spotted owl will still be around and the panda, of course because wehave shown enough wisdom to keep the biosphere just somehow balanced well enough to survive and so wewill still be breathing and eating or taking pills or whatever. But its impossibleto imagine that weregoing towake up and the people will still be speaking these languages that are now spoken by only 7,000 peoplehalfthe languages on earth.

Im trying to be open-minded towards the future because I aint got no crystal ball. All I do know is that thiswill be a fundamental and irreversible change in our existence.

Meg:I had no idea when I embarked on this interview about all the politics involved in language.

Mike: When I lived in Ireland in the 50s, people got their annual 10 pounds or 5 pounds per kid if you wereraising them speaking the language. Now five pounds is really symbolic and it may have made a difference but Ihonestly dont know. Im not so sure that even economic revolutions can save languages. Its got to go deeper.

There are those who claim that money talks and money does. The fact that if youre going to make more moneyyes, its true that in order to get certain kinds of official jobs in Ireland today you have to take a test for yourGaelic but that still hasnt changed the life of the average person in Dublin.

http://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/SusieBoatman.jpghttp://www.viewfromthepier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/students-eldersgathering.jpg


12/12

I dont know what it takes really to assure the survival of an endangered language. People have put a lot ofthought into that in places like Ireland. The last time I visited there I got into conversations where I foundmyself saying maybe the best way to really to save Irish is to outlaw it on pain of public execution for speakinga single word of it. Excuse me for saying that but there are lot of people who agreed with me that the approachwould probably save Irish.

There are big questions about the future of languageeven those that are so-called safe. Bilingualism is amajor answer to that. You really can learn more than one language. You can keep your own language while still

enjoying American shoot em ups or whatever on TV. Traditions of multilingualism can solve that problem butin the case of Gaelic in Ireland or in the case of Native American languages, theres more to it. Were gettinginto a lot of material here that would take more enlightenment than I have for today.

peer to pier conversations with fellow travelers

Documents