Our Ancestors Are Happy

This chapter explores the correlation between language revival and wellbeing. It suggests that there is an urgent need to systematically assess quantitatively the mental health impact of language reclamation on indigenous communities. The primary hypothesis is that there will be significant improvements in mental health during the language revival process, reduced suicide ideation (i.e. people would be less likely to come up with the idea of suicide as a possibility), reduced self-harm, and reduced instances of suicide. Language is postulated as core to a people’s wellbeing and mental health. The link between poor mental health and suicide has been clearly demonstrated. But it is one thing to have a statement about the importance of language and mental health; it is another to have the statistical evidence that governments often require to implement policies that will affect personal, community and social wellbeing. Hallett, Chandler, and Lalonde (2007) report a clear correlation between youth suicide and lack of conversational knowledge in the native language in British Columbia, Canada. However, there has been no systematic study of the impact of language revival on mental health and suicide, partly because language reclamation is still rare. This chapter suggests that just as language loss increases suicidal ideation and depression, language gain reduces ill mental health.

Talknology in the Service of the Barngarla Language Reclamation

This chapter introduces the fascinating and multifaceted reclamation of the Barngarla Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. In 2012, the Barngarla community and I launched the reclamation of this sleeping beauty. The presence of three Barngarla populations, several hours drive apart, presents the revival linguist with a need for a sophisticated reclamation involving talknological innovations such as online chatting, newsgroups, as well as photo and resource sharing. The chapter provides a brief description of our activities so far and describes the Barngarla Dictionary App. The Barngarla reclamation demonstrates two examples of righting the wrong of the past: (1) A book written in 1844 in order to assist a German Lutheran missionary to introduce the Christian light to Aboriginal people (and thus to weaken their own spirituality), is used 170 years later (by a secular Jew) to assist the Barngarla Aboriginal people, who have been linguicided by Anglo-Australians, to reconnect with their very heritage. (2) Technology, used for invasion (ships), colonization (weapons), and stolen generations (governmental black cars kidnapping Aboriginal children from their mothers), is employed (in the form of an app) to assist the Barngarla to reconnect with their cultural autonomy, intellectual sovereignty, and spirituality.

Defying Religion and Deifying Nationhood

This chapter explores the widespread phenomenon of semantic secularization. An example of an ideologically-neutral semantic secularization is visible in the transition of the meaning for the English word cell from ‘monk’s living place’ to become instead ‘autonomous self-replicating unit from which tissues of the body are formed’. The main focus of this chapter, however, is on secularizations involving ideological what I call ‘lexical engineering’, as exemplified by deliberate, subversive processes of extreme semantic shifting, pejoration, amelioration, trivialization, and allusion. An example of such transvaluation, the transition of semantic value, is [bəloˈri:t]. In Mishnaic Hebrew this term means ‘Mohawk, an upright strip of hair that runs across the crown of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck’, a distinctive of the abominable pagan and not to be touched by the Jewish barber. But, defying religious values as well as negating the Diaspora (where Jews by and large had tidy hair), secular Socialist Zionists use blorít with the meaning ‘forelock, hair above the forehead’, which becomes one of the defining characteristics of the ‘Sabra’ (‘prickly pear’ a metaphor for a native Israeli)—as if proposing that the ‘new Jew’ is a pagan. In line with the prediction made by Gershom Scholem in his famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, 1926), some ultra-orthodox Jews have tried to launch a ‘lexical vendetta’: using secularized terms as dormant agents, as a shortcut to religious concepts, thus trying to convince secular Jews to go back to their religious roots.

Native Tongue Title

This chapter proposes the enactment of an ex gratia compensation scheme for the loss of Indigenous languages in Australia. Although some Australian states have enacted ex gratia compensation schemes for the victims of the Stolen Generation policies, the victims of linguicide are largely overlooked by the Australian Government. Existing competitive grant schemes to support Aboriginal languages should be complemented with compensation schemes, which are based on a claim of right. The chapter first outlines the history of linguicide during colonization in Australia. It then puts a case for reviving lost Aboriginal languages by highlighting the deontological, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival. After evaluating the limits of existing Australian law in supporting language revival efforts, I propose ‘Native Tongue Title’, compensation for language loss—modelled upon Native Title, compensation for land loss.

‘Stop, Revive, Survive’

This chapter introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry, and explores lessons from Israeli that are applicable to the reclamation and empowerment of Aboriginal languages in Australia and elsewhere. Any language reawakening should involve a long period of thoroughly observing, carefully listening to the language custodians, and learning, mapping and characterizing the specific Indigenous community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, this chapter proposes that there are linguistic constraints (as seen in the Hebrew reclamation) applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be useful to endangered languages, particularly to Indigenous linguistic revival. The chapter introduces a practical tool: the quadrilateral Language Revival Diamond (LARD), featuring language owners, linguistics, education, and the public sphere. Each of these four core quadrants is necessary in reviving any language.

Shift Happens

This chapter explores, for the first time, culturomics in Israeli. Culturomics is a trans-disciplinary form of computational lexicology that studies human behaviour, language, and cultural and historical trends through the quantitative analysis of texts. My term tarbutomics is based on תרבות‎ tarbút, Israeli for ‘culture’, thus calquing (loan-translating) the term culturomics. Tarbutomics ought to be a new tool for evaluating the linguistic, cultural, and social trends occurring throughout a historical period. To see how Hebrew lexis has changed from 1500 until 2009, the chapter analyses data from Google Books. To do this, the Google Books database was downloaded. Tarbutomics takes the raw Hebrew 1-gram data and puts it in a relational database, allowing us to ask more sophisticated questions. It can shed light on questions about Israeli culture, Hebrew language reclamation, and about the development of the Israeli language throughout the twentieth century.

Realistic Prescriptivism

This chapter explores the futile lexpionage (lexical + espionage) of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. During the past century, Israeli has become the primary mode of communication in all domains of Israel’s public and private life. Issues of language are so sensitive in Israel that politicians are often involved. For example, in an article in Ha’aretz (21 June 2004), the late left-wing politician Yossi Sarid attacked the (most widespread) ‘common language of éser shékel’ as inarticulate and monstrous, and urged civilians to fight it and protect ‘Hebrew’. However, most Israelis say éser shékel ‘ten shekels’ rather than asar-á shkal-ím (original Hebrew pronunciation: [ʕǎśåˈrå ʃəqåˈli:m]), the former literally meaning ‘ten (masculine singular) shekel (masculine singular)’, the latter ‘ten (feminine singular) shekels (masculine plural)’, and thus having a ‘polarity-of-gender agreement’—with a feminine numeral and a masculine plural noun, which is a Biblical Hebrew norm, not so in Israeli. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for Hebrew, the Academy of the Hebrew Language prescribes standards for Israeli grammar, lexis (vocabulary), orthography, transcription, and vocalization (vowel marking) ‘based upon the study of Hebrew’s historical development’. This chapter critically analyses the Academy’s mission, as intriguingly—and in my view oxymoronically—defined in its constitution: ‘to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature’. It throws light on the dynamics within the committees’ meetings, and exposes some U-turn decisions made by the Academy.

’Nother Tongue

This chapter analyses salient phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features in the fully fledged Israeli language. It illustrates the difficulty in determining a single source for the grammar of Israeli. The European impact in these features is apparent inter alia in structure, semantics, or productivity. The chapter demonstrates the ubiquitous multiple causation in Israeli and that the revival of a no-longer spoken language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, one should expect revival efforts to result in a language with a hybridic genetic and typological character.

The Hebrew Reclamation

This chapter introduces an original analysis of the Hebrew reclamation, resulting in ‘Israeli’, a term first used by Zuckermann (1999). A language is a col-lect-ion, an abstract ensemble of lects (idiolects, sociolects, dialects, and other lects) rather than an entity per se. It is more like a species than an organism. Still, the genetic classification of Israeli as a consistent entity has preoccupied linguists since the language emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, Israeli affords insights into the politics and evolution not only of language, but also of linguistics and revivalistics. The chapter proposes that the languages spoken in Israel today is a semi-engineered, Semito-European hybrid language. Its complexity should be acknowledged and celebrated, regardless of what one chooses to call it. The chapter also introduces two useful principles to the analysis of revival languages: The Founder Principle and the Congruence Principle. In revivalistics, the Founder Principle proposes that the impact of the mother tongues of the revivalists—in the critical period of the emergence of the revival language—is much greater than that of following generations. The Congruence Principle in revivalistics proposes that the more contributing languages a feature exists in, the more likely it is to persist in the emerging revival language.