Bringing a Language Back from the Dead

by Simon Griver

Languages may disappear, but they are not necessarily dead. From Azerbaijan to Wales and from Catalonia to New Zealand, many of the world's smaller nations are attempting to give renewed life to languages which have seemingly been abandoned due to time and circumstance.

In Israel, the phenomenon of resuscitating a language is far from unknown. After all, Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, had not been used as a spoken tongue for nearly two millennia before it was revived and transformed into the language of both literature and everyday life. Today, as other nations try to reclaim their lost languages, the Israeli experience is found to be helpful. The Israeli model of teaching the language is now being adopted in other places around the world, and Israeli experts are consulted by language revivalists from places as diverse as Wales and Uzbekistan.

"Welsh is the language most influenced by the Hebrew experience," explains Amnon Schapiro, a researcher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. "In the 1960s a national network of Welsh language classes was set up based on the Hebrew model." In fact, the Welsh even refer to a Welsh class as an ulpan, taken from the Hebrew, meaning classes which are especially designed for new immigrants to learn the language. "The Welsh are confronted by a different problem than Israel," explains Schapiro. "The number of native Welsh speakers was eroded by the influence of English. With the help of ulpanim the trend has been reversed."

Each nation must deal with the unique problems presented by the language it wishes to restore. Hebrew, for example, posed a particular challenge because of its non-Latin alphabet, which, like Arabic, is written from right to left. Ultimately, Israel's great advantage has been that immigrants coming from over 100 different countries found Hebrew to be the only language that they could use to communicate. Immigrants thus had no alternative but to learn and speak Hebrew. Elsewhere in the world, whether in Wales or New Zealand, people do have a common language even without their ancestral tongue, making the revival of a language much more difficult.

In addition to the Welsh, the Academy has also had contact with other Celtic cultures, though attempts to revive both Gaelic in Scotland and Erse in Ireland have been less successful than the Welsh experience. In the former Soviet Union, Jewish Agency officials in such locations as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Georgia, who teach Hebrew to potential Jewish immigrants, have helped advise these newly independent peoples on reviving their national languages. "Here the problem," observes Schapiro, "is not so much teaching the language. Many millions of people are already fluent in it. But more effort must be given to reviving the written language. In Azerbaijan people who only read the Russian Cyrillic alphabet must learn the Latin alphabet."

There has also been a similar revival of local languages in Spain, where Catalonian and Basque have made great inroads since the death of Franco, who tried to suppress these languages. Catalonians too visited Israel in the 1980s to learn from the Hebrew experience. Dr. Gabriel Birnbaum, academic secretary of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, recently met with a delegation from New Zealand who are hoping to revive the Maori tongue.

How, then, does an ancient tongue become a modern spoken language? Scholarly efforts such as the production of a modern dictionary must be coupled with the schooling of the young exclusively in the old/new language. Tremendous popular determination is also required. Zionists in the early twentieth century would speak to each other only in Hebrew, although they still found it necessary to converse in Russian or Yiddish about crucial issues. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, renowned as the man who dedicated himself to adapting the biblical language for modern everyday use, insisted on speaking to both his mother and his wife in Hebrew, even though neither understood the language. In another place or another time, Ben Yehuda would have been deemed mad; but perhaps a dose of madness is required in order to revive a language.