Linguistics An Essential Introduction (Version 1.5)

Much of the foundational work in the field of linguistics was carried out by Christian missionaries whose goal was not so much to discover the systematic nature of mental grammar, but rather to learn enough about an indigenous language to translate the Bible into it, in order to convert people to their religion.

Quite apart from the damage that they did to the indigenous cultures by convincing their members (often by force) to adopt a way of life governed by Western, Christian values, these missionaries also did damage to the languages of these communities. First, their analysis of the sounds of these languages was often incomplete and they used the Roman alphabet, ill-suited to the sound systems of these languages, to document the language. They also brought assumptions about the grammar of the languages into their analysis that derived from what they knew about Latin or other European languages, causing them to miss many of the details (and sometimes, the fundamentals) of these languages.

Once they had enough language written down, the missionaries started translating the Christian Bible into the local languages. Since written documents are permanent in a different way from speech and sign, writing a text has the effect of “freezing” that form of the language. So when the Europeans started teaching literacy using their written texts, the result was that some of the variation across languages fell out of use as the written forms took priority. And these effects weren’t accidental or benign. From the missionaries’ own writings we can see that they considered Indigenous languages to be inferior to European languages. They complained, incorrectly, that the languages didn’t have words for soul and belief and angel, and they thought that the complex grammars, which we’ll learn more about in later chapters, were barbaric. In the History of the Language Sciences, Edward Gray writes:

On the one hand, we might point to the work of these European Christian missionaries in documenting Indigenous languages as foundational to the field of linguistics. And in some cases, those written documents have served as source material for work to reawaken sleeping languages like Huron-Wendat. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that the missionary work did real harm: the documentation itself was inaccurate and led to the loss of many features of the languages. As the Christian church gained power, they stopped trying to teach in the local languages and instead imposed English, French or other colonial languages, often violently. In fact, eliminating Indigenous languages and cultures was the stated goal of many colonial governments. For example, in Canada, police, church and government officials forcibly seized Indigenous children, removed them from their families, and sent them to residential schools well into the 20th century. In these schools, children were separated from their siblings and cousins and forbidden to speak their families’ languages. They were starved, physically and sexually abused, and some of them murdered. Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that they stopped using their family languages: using English or French was a matter of sheer survival. In spite of the colonial government’s attempts to assimilate Indigenous people into the majority culture and language. Today, there are attempts all over the world to revive or revivify indigenous languages in order to undo some of the harm that was done, but in many cases, it is too late.

When we’re doing language science, it might be tempting to try to dissociate ourselves from the harm those missionaries did, to say, “they were doing religion, not linguistics.” But linguists are involved in missionary work in two ways: first, they make use of the linguistic documentation that missionaries have produced and continue to produce — thus partaking, as it were, from the fruit of a poisonous tree. Whatever we think of missionaries and their work in theory, we are condoning it in practice by using their linguistic work. Second, some linguists are involved directly in training missionaries or producing training materials — these linguists are at least partially accountable for the negative effects of missionary work. In addition, even field work carried out by linguists rather than missionaries has done harm to Indigenous and other minoritized languages. Linguists rely on language users to provide language data, but those who spend their time and energy answering our questions don’t always get much in return. Sometimes linguists gather data to test a particular scientific hypothesis, and the data ends up existing only in obscure scholarly publications when it could also have been made available to the community of language users themselves, for preserving and teaching their language. Sometimes what is merely data to a linguist is a sacred story or includes sensitive personal information, and publishing it might violate someone’s beliefs or privacy. Even if a linguist is careful to work descriptively, there’s a real risk of linguistic and cultural appropriation if they become the so-called authority on the language without being a member of the language community. And sometimes linguists’ attempts at descriptive statements can turn into prescriptive norms: if a linguist writes “In Language X, A is grammatical and B is ungrammatical” based on what they’ve learned from one set of language users, that observation can become entrenched as the standard variety of Language X, even if there’s another group of language users out there for whom B is perfectly grammatical.

It’s not only colonialism that has harmed — and continues to harm — indigenous languages (and small languages in general). Capitalism, too, offers a strong incentive for people all around the world to speak English so they can participate in the labour market. And the more they use English, the less they use their local languages.

As a field, linguistics is also responsible for harms to disabled people and their language practices. For example, deaf kids are often deprived of language input because of oralism, the view that vocal language is more important than signed language. Oralism is prevalent in the field of linguistics, which often fails, like the first edition of this book did, to study or teach the linguistic structures of sign languages. The practice of observing patterns of language across many users, even from a descriptive point of view, has the tendency to identify norms of language use which then makes it all too easy to describe anything that differs from the norm as disordered. For example, the Canadian Linguist Mackenzie Salt showed that when linguists used standard interview techniques to research autistic people’s conversation, they found “deficits” in their pragmatic abilities. But when the autistic participants were observed in conversation with each other, no such deficits were apparent. Salt concluded that it was the research method itself, namely, the interview, that gave rise to the so-called pragmatic disorders of autism. Similarly, the Canadian sociologist Robert MacKay reported his experience of aphasia resulting from a stroke. His account eloquently illustrates how the standard diagnostic and treatment techniques ignored his communicative adaptations and treated him as incompetent.

Linguists, just like other scientists, must always be aware that while humanity can profit vastly from the application of scientific methods to their domain of knowledge, there is always a risk of harm.

CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Adapted from Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi, Essentials of Linguistics. 2nd ed. with minor edits and additions.