[BRIEF NOTE] On the noble, if likely failed, Istro-Romanian revival in Croatia

Sep. 21st, 2010 09:19 pm
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Richard Solash' Radio Free Europe report describes the vissicitudes of the Istro-Romanian language, one of the Romance dialects connecting the main body of Romance languages in western and southern Europe with the isolated Romance language of Romanian. Not surprisingly, as a small minority, the speakers of Istro-Romanian--the Vlashki--are dwindling in their homeland in Istria, the peninsula that marks the westernmost point of Croatia.

Unlike Croatian, which is Slavic, Vlashki is Romance -- a descendant of the language spoken by the Vlachs, nomadic shepherds who migrated from the area around present-day Romania.

The Vlachs settled in Istria in the 16th century, and over the years their language borrowed heavily from Croatian but always remained distinct.

Known to linguists as "Istro-Romanian," it is both unintelligible and unknown to the vast majority of Croatia's population.

And today, with a mere 150 native speakers remaining in the traditional home villages of Vlashki, and a few hundred more in surrounding towns, the language is well on its way to extinction.

Its demise began after World War II, when a major wave of emigration diluted the community. The building of a tunnel in 1981 that connected villages to urban centers further removed the language's protective isolation.


The wave of emigration, it should be noted, occurred after the Second World War when all the Romance-speakers of Istria--Italian-speaking, Venetian-speaking, and Istro-Romanian-speaking alike--fled Communist Yugoslavia, which had taken the peninsula over from Italy. In all, something like a quarter-million people left the peninsula starting towards the end of the Second World War, fleeing hostile Slavs (Slovene and Croat alike) who resented the Italianization imposed on them under fascism, Communism, and poverty. The entire western coastline was once populated by Romance-speakers, but no more.

Despite this catastrophic dispersion of the Istro-Romanian language communist, a New York City-based linguist wants to try to reverse the tendency towards the adoption of Croatian, and does in fact seem to have made some achievements.

Croatia native Zvjezdana Vrzic grew up in a household with Vlashki roots. Her grandmother was a native Vlashki speaker from Zankovci, a hamlet near one of the six northeast Istrian towns that form the language's epicenter.

After becoming an adjunct professor at New York University, Vrzic again found herself in a Vlashki setting of sorts: New York City, and specifically, the borough of Queens, which is home to the largest community of Vlashki speakers outside Croatia.

The setting, along with her family history and profession, was enough motivation for Vrzic to initiate an ambitious project that's now in its fifth year.

"I want to create a digital archive -- a regional digital archive -- where all the materials available on the language, including those that I'm collecting myself, will be deposited," Vrzic says. "[I want to create] an archive that will become available to the community members. And I'm kind of bringing a different angle to it by making it very technologically-inspired."

Vrzic's website launched in June and is now the focal point for her project's many parts. It features audio and videos of Vlashki speakers, collected by Vrzic as well as Brkaric, who assists her, and other helpers.

There are also language lessons, a Vlashki-Croatian dictionary, digitized versions of the few printed Vlashki-language stories, maps, historical information, and photographs. In total, it's the start of an ethno-linguistic corpus.

Next on Vrzic's agenda is to complete linguistic analyses of her language samples. She also intends to add to the online dictionary, which is based on work done in the 1960s by another linguist, create a Croatian-to-Vlashki version, and eventually translate it into English.


Other achievements that article cites are performances of Istro-Romanian-language plays, language workshops, heritage centres, and music groups.

But. These achievements are all well and good, but I'm skeptical about their long-term value. Much larger minorities, with populations numbering in the tens of thousands like the Sorbs of Germany, the Romansh-speakers of Switzerland, even the Ainu of Japan, are facing serious threat of assimilation. Can such a small population, isolated from other Romance language-speakers but intermixed with a much larger language community, survive much longer? I hae ma doots.
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[BRIEF NOTE] On the Ainu cultural revival

Mar. 11th, 2010 03:09 pm
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In the Wall Street Journal, writer Lucy Birmingham wrote an article about how Ainu artists are making Ainu culture living, combining Ainu cultural elements with modern artistic forms: literature, pop music, graphic and plastic arts.

Koji Yuki was 20 years old when he turned against his father and buried his Ainu identity. That was the year Shoji Yuki died; a radical activist, he had long fought to win legal rights for the Ainu, Japan's underclass, and have them recognized as an indigenous people. More than a century of government-backed racial and social discrimination and forced assimilation had stripped the once-proud hunter-gatherers and tradesmen of their identity and livelihood.

The Ainu cause had torn apart the Yuki family. "My father divorced my mother when I was young and devoted himself to the Ainu liberation movement," says Mr. Yuki. "I couldn't understand the way he lived his life."

Years later, Mr. Yuki changed his mind about his father's efforts, and today the son is himself a powerful voice for the Ainu. But he speaks through culture rather than politics, as one of the leaders of a remarkable revival of Ainu arts, dance and music -- with a cool, contemporary edge.

[. . .]

The Ainu eventually settled in Japan's north, and for centuries their villages dotted Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. (These were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, though Japan has disputed the claim for four of the Kuril Islands.) The Ainu culture fell victim to Japanese expansion in the 1800s, and most Ainu now live in Hokkaido, the second-largest of Japan's four main islands. In 2006 the Hokkaido government put the number of people of Ainu ancestry there at about 24,000; the national census doesn't include such a count, but after generations of intermarriage the total is far larger. Many hide their Ainu identity, still fearful of discrimination.

Handsome with a powerful gait, Mr. Yuki, 45, reveals a shyness as he explains his work as a hanga (wood block print) artist. "Hanga is not part of the Ainu traditional arts, but woodcarving is," he says. "So I asked my favorite Japanese hanga artists to teach me. I might be the only Ainu doing this professionally." His prints are mainly of animals native to his Hokkaido homeland, such as the deer, fox, bear, owl and magnificent red-crowned crane. The island, known for its severe snowy winters (it's a popular ski destination), is the site of breathtaking mountain ranges, volcanoes, lush forests and crystal lakes, and unique flora and fauna. It's easy to understand the Ainu reverence for nature and the animistic belief in spirits.

"My prints are based on traditional Ainu legends, mainly animal spirits," says Mr. Yuki at a one-man exhibition in Tokyo. "The bear is especially important." Among the Ainu, the bear is considered the most sacred of animals; one of the works in the exhibition is "Hepere Cinita," or Dream of the Baby Bear. (All the works in the exhibition carry titles in the Ainu language.) His "Sarorun Kamuy," or Crane God, he says, "represents the Ainu's desire to return to their roots, like the great cranes that migrate back to Hokkaido every winter."

He created the work in 2008, after the Ainu won official indigenous status from the Japanese government. That followed the U.N. General Assembly's passage in 2007 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and came just before a 2008 Group of Eight wealthy nations summit in Hokkaido.

Mr. Yuki the hanga artist and carver is also a musician, founder and leader of the Ainu Arts Project, a decade-old community-based music group. "We're a native rock band based on traditional Ainu music," says Mr. Yuki, explaining that he was inspired by the aboriginal Australian band Yothu Yindi and Native American bands. The 25 members, from kids to seniors, perform 50 to 60 times a year. They sing mainly in the Ainu language and dress in the splendid Ainu attusi robe. Along with the guitar, drums and bass, they play the Ainu tonkori (like a zither) and mukkuri (similar to a jew's harp).

"We've chosen a rock sound because we don't want people to associate the Ainu with just old tradition," Mr. Yuki explained. "With hanga, music and singing I can convey the traditional Ainu culture and spirit with new expressions, just like Oki and Mina Sakai."


I'm pessimistic about the long-term prospects for the survival of the Ainu of Japan, for the same reasons that I'm pessimistic about the survival of the Sorbs of Germany: there are too few members of the group, too many have assimilated, the language that defines Ainu identity is spoken regularly by hundreds of people at most, and there's little identification with Ainu culture by ethnic Japanese. There's just far too much of a discontinuity between modern Hokkaidō, so overwhelmingly Japanese, and the pre-Meiji Ainu island whether as a Matsumae clan protectorate or as the ephemeral Republic of Ezo. One might as well expect Ontarians or New Yorkers to identify themselves as descendants of the Iroquois.

Still, the Ainu are present, are increasingly visible, and are--as the above article demonstrates--making an impact on wider Japan, producing new innovative Ainu cultural forms that are becoming popular among a wider Japanese audience. Who knows? Maybe the Ainu could take on something like the importance of the Livonians of western Latvia, recognized as having contributed to the formation of modern Japan's territory and culture even as it faded itself.
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[BRIEF NOTE] The last gasp of Romansh?

Jan. 6th, 2009 03:27 pm
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Yesterday's post about the push by German conservatives to make the German language Germany's official language touches on the interesting subject of language conflict and the different kinds--and realities--of threats to a spoken language that members of different language communities can perceive. While the German language, owing in part to the depletion of mother-tongue speakers of German outside of the German-speaking states part, in part because of the language's negative associations with Imperial and especially Nazi Germany, might no longer be a plausible contender with English as a vehicular language in Europe, it's still the official language of three very wealthy countries with a combined population of one hundred million. German might not travel well, but by many of the same standards Japanese doesn't either, but who's afraid that Japanese will become extinct?

Inside German-speaking Europe, however, there are two small language minorities whose languages--with their associated cultures--are facing existential threats. I've blogged in the past about the Sorbs, a Slavic people living in the eastern German region of Lusatia who are facing a variety of economic and social pressures making the preservation of Sorb into the 22nd century. The other threatened language is Romansh, a Romance language spoken in the Swiss Alps and that, as Qatar's The Peninsula reports, isn't faring well at all.

Schoolteacher Andrea Urech admits that he sometimes feels very lonely in his fight to keep alive the Romansh language spoken by less than one percent of people in Switzerland.

"I have written letters to all the hotels here offering my services to translate documents into Romansch, but I didn't get one single answer," he said.

Depending on who you talk to in eastern Switzerland's Graubuenden canton where most Romansh speakers are found, there is either fervent support or strong resistance to the language spoken by only 60,000 people across the country.

For every Urech who says "gea" to Romansh, there is someone else who says "na" or has an anecdote about how Romansh was being saved at an economic cost to the region.

The head of Graubuenden canton�s tourism and economic bureau, Eugen Arpagaus, has one such example of an employee who quit because the town where he lives switched from German to Romansh language teaching in school.

"He did not want his children to be taught in Romansh, so he left and I had to find someone else to replace him. We are losing talent because of this.

"Theirs (Romansh proponents\) is a romantic view. In reality, the language is a real handicap," he said.

A board member of Engadin St Moritz region's mountain rail, Dieter Bogner, pointed to an example of a Romansh-speaking employee who never fails to make mistakes when writing German even though the latter is the official language at work.

"Romansh speakers may tell you it is not a problem, but it is a problem. I receive CVs sometimes from Romansh speakers who just cannot write in German," said Bogner, highlighting the fact that much of Switzerland's industrial powerhouses are concentrated in German-speaking regions Zurich and Basel.

Indeed, the Romance language that shares the same Latin roots as French, Italian or Portuguese sparks very different responses here.

First developed from a fusion of vulgar Latin spoken by Roman conquerors and local languages in 15 BC, Romansh developed into a written language in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It became an official language in Switzerland only in 1996, but with limited status compared to German, French and Italian.

The government now spends about four million Swiss francs (2.5m euros, $3.3m) a year to promote the language, which is printed on bank notes and passports, but regulations do not require official documents to be translated into the language.

More often than not, Romansh is invisible in a country dominated by German and French speakers.

Even in Samedan, a town which was traditionally Romansh, inhabitants now speak German in the streets, the town's vice-mayor Otto Morell said over lunch at a restaurant where the menu was printed in German.

"In this room, I speak Romansh only to them," he said, pointing to Urech and the headmaster of the local school Robert Cantieni.

The encroachment of the German language in Samedan meant that by 2000, those who cited Romansh as their "best known language" had tumbled to 17 percent from some 33 percent in 1960.

Alarmed by the trend, Urech and other teachers at the local school reacted.

Their efforts led to Samedan adopting a local constitution that recognises both Romansh and German as official languages in the community in 2004.

The same article also recognised Romansh and German as teaching languages in the classroom.

As a result, classes are now taught in both Romansh and German for the first two years, and in one or the other language in the following years.

Despite the small victory for the language, Romansh speakers are, among themselves, locked in bitter discord over which of the five main so-called idioms of Romansh should be taught in school.

Urs Cadruvi, Secretary General of Lia Rumantscha, an organisation charged with promoting the language, is pushing for a 'standard' version of written Romansh, known as Rumantsch Grischun, to be rolled out across primary schools in the canton by 2010.

But Samedan's school is among those that insist on teaching their own local type of Romansh known as Puter.

Lia Rumantscha argues that the language stands a better chance of survival if speakers rally behind one version rather than insisting on five different strains.

"It's a very, very emotional issue," said Cadruvi.


I'm particularly struck by the ongoing competition between speakers of each of the five Romansh dialects, with each other and with the standardized form of Romansh: This does not seem like the sort of struggle that would help an endangered language community.
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[BRIEF NOTE] On the Ainu

Jul. 16th, 2008 07:18 pm
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From The Economist's 10 July issue, filed from Sapporo, the article "A people, at last" takes a look at the new recognition lent to the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the northernmost, traditionally most isolated and most recently and intensively settled of Japan's four major islands.

The Ainu’s traditional heartland is Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, on which the G8 summit has just been held. Not long ago, they were also found in Sakhalin and the Kurile islands. Although there had been a Japanese presence in south-west Hokkaido since the Middle Ages, it was only in the 19th century that it was annexed to become what the West was for America: a new frontier to be opened by persecuting the hunter-gatherers already there. While the Ainu called their place Ainu Mosir, "the land of human beings", Hokkaido means "the road to the northern sea", and the Japanese settling of their new frontier was every bit as brutal as America’s.

Today only 24,000 call themselves Ainu, most of them of mixed blood. Only ten native Ainu speakers remain, while a solitary century-old woman is thought to have a tattooed lip. The Ainu’s origins are vague. Certainly, they are related to ethnic groups in Russia’s far east. But one genetic marker is shared only by people in Tibet and the Andaman Islands. Jared Diamond, a biogeographer, says their mystery makes the Ainu the world’s most studied indigenous group. One thing is increasingly clear: they are more obviously the descendants of Japan’s original inhabitants, the Jomon, inventors of the world’s earliest pottery, than are modern Japanese, who are descended from later settlers from Korea. This infuriates Japan’s racial chauvinists.

So only now—and partly because of the spotlight from hosting the G8—has Japan’s parliament passed a resolution recognising the Ainu as a people in their own right. The first law about the Ainu that was passed, in 1899, defined them as aborigines in need of assimilation. But until the law’s repeal in 1997, Japan officially denied having any indigenous minorities.

The recognition, says Tadashi Kato, head of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, comes dangerously late. But it may encourage more Ainu to admit to their identity, having concealed it because of discrimination at school and work, and in the marriage market. Mr Kato thinks that maybe ten times more than the official number think of themselves as Ainu, even if many are of mixed blood. He argues that the parliamentary resolution is just a first step. It offers no legal protection, and carries no obligations for the state. There is little talk yet of an apology for Japan’s past treatment of the Ainu, let alone a restitution of lands or hunting rights.


As noted here and elsewhere, the long-term prospects for the Ainu people aren't that good. The Sorbs of Germany certainly have their own issues, but they not only have a well-established tradition of government recognition but a fairly elaborate system of educational, media and even governmental institutions that they can draw upon. The Ainu so far lack all of these things, and on top of this have experienced significantly more assimilation than the Sorbs, with mother-tongue speakers of Ainu being countable in the dozens. (Not, I hasten to note, that Canada is much better in this regard.) Prospects for Ainu cultural survival aside, this recognition appeals to me if only as a matter of principle. Besides, it isn't as if a population of fifteen thousand people can overburden, financially or otherwise, a nation counting a bit more than 127 million in total.
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[NEWS] A Monday Miscellany

Jun. 30th, 2008 08:10 pm
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  • Radio Netherlands has a brief report on identity issues among the "East Indies Dutch," perhaps more widely known as Dutch Eurasians (in the Anglophone world) or Indos. Descended from centuries of Dutch-Indonesian intermarriage, the hundreds of thousands of Dutch Eurasians were relocated to their nominal homeland after independence.

  • Michael Tutton, writing for the Canadian Press, warns of the major economic problems facing Atlantic Canada as the population ages more rapidly than the Canadian average, not least because of economically-motivated out migration. How will the Atlantic Canadian economy and public services fare?

  • The Payvand takes a look at the various statistical indicators of Canada's growing Iranian-Canadian community.

  • Reuters covers the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil. This immigration has produced a community of a million Japanese-Brazilians, many of whom have since emigrated to Japan in search of work.

  • AFP reports on East Timor's exceptionally high birth rate, with a reported TFR of 7.7 that's one of the highest in the world.

  • The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee writes about the various challenges imposed on women in the Japanese workforce, even though the demographic impact of excluding or marginalizing women would be severe.

  • The Financial Times's Bertrand Benoit writes about the problems faced by Germany in integrating immigrants that it nver expected to have. The extended conversations with a Ghanaian and a Vietnamese are worth reading.

  • Finally, the Economist seems to be uncommonly hopeful about the fate of the Sorbs, Slavs living in what was once East Germany.
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[BRIEF NOTE] The Sorbs

Dec. 13th, 2007 11:50 pm
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Television New Zealand recently carried a story about the Sorbs, a West Slavic people related to the Czechs and Poles who reside in the region of Lusatia, which straddles the borders of the eastern German states of Brandenburg and Saxony. The Sorbs are like the Ruthenians or Rusyns in being a small Slavic nation that never quite managed to break through into nationhood but the Sorbs, unlike the Ruthenians, lack any one sizable territroy where they predominate. Sorbs form a minority throughout Lusatia, with a population distribution akin to that of a diaspora, the closest thing to a Sorb homeland being certain rural villages where Sorb traditions are strongest. Many of these villages are now face physical destruction.

Germany's Sorbs, one of Europe's oldest and smallest minorities, are mounting a last-ditch campaign to preserve a rural way of life that survived Nazi persecution and decades of communist rule.

Energy group Vattenfall Europe wants to uproot thousands of people from their homes to expand its open cast brown coal mines in Lusatia, the watery flatlands in the south eastern corner of Germany which are home to the 60,000-strong Slav community.

"We are fighting against Vattenfall and local politicians - this is about the environment and about keeping our way of life," said Rene Schuster, a Sorb environmental campaigner.

Sorbs have lived in Germany for more than 1,000 years and their language has similarities to Czech and Polish.

Lusatian street signs are in two languages and local radio airs a few hours of Sorb programmes each week.

Sorbs marry in black, play bagpipes and stage a pig-slaughtering festival in January.

They are famous for their intricately painted Easter eggs and colourful processions.

Open cast mining has forced 30,000 people and 136 Lusatian villages to move since 1924 and much of the upheaval happened during and shortly after East German Communist rule.

Vattenfall has recently submitted plans to extend its open cast mining in five areas which would mean moving another 3,000 to 4,000 people.

The community blames the brown coal industry, one of the most highly polluting forms of power generation, for the decline of the Sorb, or Wendish, culture.

"We get more consultation and better compensation now but that does not help preserve Sorb traditions," said Schuster, pointing to a water pump in the former village of Lakoma where his house used to stand.


If history in Lusatia had gone differently--if they had remainder under the Bohemian Crown from the mid-17th century on, say--there might well be a coherent Sorb homeland. It hasn't, of course, and it's difficult to avoid pessimism. Outnumbered at least ten-to-one in their traditional districts in Brandenburg and in Saxony, lacking even a compact majority-Sorb enclave, with universal fluency in German, no foreign sponsorship like that enjoyed by the Danish minority of Schleswig-Holstein, and no taboos regarding intermarriage with Germans and no demographic advantage over Germans, it's difficult to imagine that an actively lived Sorb identity will outlast the 21st century. Vattenfall's planned coal mining project certainly will be culturally destructive, and the idea of burning coal as fuel does strike me as a s[pectacularly bad decision, but even if Vattenfall has its way the effect will be only that of a coup de grace.
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