Thanks to all who have responded in this thread. I will follow up offline. Re the question of terminology, and "minority" languages in particular, here are a few quick thoughts (with apologies for taking this off on a tangent):
1. I hadn't thought of minority being offensive, but I guess we need to be attentive to such matters. The main problem with the term I saw was its imprecision. There was not long ago a project to compile information on "minority" languages. To the surprise of a few people asked about it, including me, Hausa was one of them (next to Swahili it supposedly has the highest speakership of all African languages). But when we discussed it further, the criteria indeed seemed to admit it: In "Hausaland" across much of Niger and Nigeria it is the main language, but Hausaphones are minorities elsewhere and it is spoken as a trade language by some people further away. However, by extension, then, just about every other language in Africa is "minority" as well. What capped it was discovering that Chinese also qualiified as a minority language - which it is in fact in many countries, though we wouldn't think to call it, or Spanish or English, etc. As Francis puts it, "situational" minority languages. But that just shows how dependent the term is on context. 2. So people grope for an appropriate term. For more widely spoken languages, "LWC" for "language of wider communication" emerged at some point (rather like lingua francas, but let's not try to sort out the difference between those two here). And at the other extreme there are "endangered languages" about which, although definitions can vary, there is a generally accepted sense of what it means (though even on that I've read references to Igbo, a language spoken by somewhere on the order of 20 million people described as "endangered" - but let's not delve into the issues there either). But in between those two what do you say? "Small" languages as shorthand for "less widely spoken languages" are more appropriately spoken of as the latter - but that's too cumbersome. In Europe there was the term "lesser-used languages" but with uncertain implications - less people speak then or those that do use them less or both? "Local" languages is one that I've tried to avoid lately because it seems to me to be used in a way that reduces the languages status, and is applied only in some parts of the world (and what of "local" when you have, say, Wolof-speaking merchants in New York and Paris, for instance?). In Francophone countries the term "langue partenaire" has been coined, but that raises questions of what kind of partnership, and who's partner with whom and why and so on 3. A lot depends of course on context. "Under-resourced languages" is very descriptive for ICT contexts and even some traditional technologies (e.g., no textbooks in so many less-widely-spoken-languages for the better part of the past century - now that's under-resourced). But maybe not in demographic or sociolinguistic contexts. Just for an example, Fula definitely is "under resourced" in the technical and monetary sense, but definitely not linguistically (e.g., its lexicon is staggering - there's a large dictionary of the roots alone). "Less commonly taught languages" (LCTLs) is purely an academic reference. "Pi-language" is a new one on me but seems to be mainly a technical reference (pi=poorly informatisées or what?). 4. I ran into this problem personally when I wanted a way to refer to a very wide class of languages not counting the LWCs as LWCs, and came up with an acronym that I think covers the intended field and is in itself "constructively ambiguous": MINEL - where M is maternal (which is every language, but here the emphasis is on this role as opposed to the 2nd language role) or minority (sorry!); I is indigenous (which also can mean anything, but here meant in the sense of languages of "indigenous peoples"; N is "national" which is an appellation more common in Francophone countries especially in Africa and is *not* the same as official; E is "endangered," or "ethnic" which one will hear with regard to languages in some parts of the world (funny that a language might be referred to as ethnic and not indigenous or vice-vera, but the criteria for the distinction are arguable); and L could be "less-widely-spoken" or even "local" or, well, language. That about runs the gamut, from what I have. Hope all have a good weekend (some of you are in the midst of it and others just starting, and some of us will work through it either way!). Don Osborn _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list
