Traveling Through Minority Languages

Our theme this time is so-called "minority languages." Daigakushorin is well known as a valuable publisher of language books that handles many languages unfamiliar to Japanese people.

Daigakushorin is my family business, founded by my grandfather in 1929. My father currently serves as president, and thanks to everyone's support, we are in our 89th year. As a specialized language publisher that has published works in 130 languages from around the world, I grew up watching my father and grandfather work. Therefore, I was in an environment where I was exposed to books on minority languages even inside my home.

Since our founding, we have published dictionaries, grammar books, conversation books, vocabulary lists, and bilingual editions related to world languages, focusing consistently and exclusively on language books. As you pointed out, it feels like I am surrounded by unfamiliar languages such as Yiddish, Urdu, Slovenian, Romansh, Kazakh, Armenian, Hausa, and Shughni.

Professor Fujita, your specialty is the languages of the Andean region, isn't it?

Yes, I have specialized in regional studies of countries such as Peru and Bolivia. I have been studying Spanish since halfway through university, and I currently work at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) as a Spanish instructor.

In regional studies, you must first become able to speak the language that people in that society speak. In the Andean countries of South America in particular, these are regions where many indigenous people originally live, speaking languages like Quechua or Aymara. Even among Spanish speakers, a significant number speak a second language like Quechua or Aymara. Therefore, if you cannot speak those languages, you cannot enter the world of the people. Researchers targeting Peru and Bolivia from around my generation have started studying Quechua and Aymara in quite large numbers.

You are also learning the Ainu language, aren't you?

When I returned to Japan, I learned about Professor Hiroshi Nakagawa of Chiba University, who researches the Ainu language. While going there to study Ainu, I referred to the research of the graduate students there and began my own Andean research in the Doctoral Programs.

My specialty is English linguistics and sociolinguistics. Regarding involvement with minority languages, for example, in the United States, English has completely caused the small indigenous languages within the country to disappear. I think the relationship between Japanese and the Ainu language is similar. On the other hand, in places like Africa, English has become the so-called official language, and small languages are, in a sense, preserved. I am interested in how English interacts with various other languages around the world.

Professor Inoue, you also serve as the chairperson of the "Global Language Village / World Language Museum," don't you?

This is an NPO. Professor Toru Kaneko of Chiba University was a senior colleague of Professor Nakagawa, from whom Professor Fujita learned Ainu. He has passed away, but the website is one where the materials he left behind carry a lot of weight.

Because it has the name "Museum," around the end of summer vacation, children often inquire, saying, "I want to go there, where is it located?" But this is a virtual museum that only exists on the internet (laughs).

I didn't create the site directly myself; it is made up of things written by Professor Kaneko and people specializing in various languages. Every month, we hold what we call a "salon" at the Mita Campus, where we invite researchers of various languages and young people at the graduate level to hear their stories.

What were your first impressions when you first encountered Aymara and Quechua, Professor Fujita?

At first, I had my hands full just becoming able to speak Spanish.

When conducting research locally, we do it in a way where we almost live together with the local people. When talking to people in town during the day, Spanish is sufficient for communication. However, in the village, after the day's farm work is finished and the family returns home, when it gets pitch dark, they light a kerosene lamp in the area that serves as both the kitchen and dining room. Everyone in the family talks for a while in the dim light. This was my experience in Peru, but at those times, they weren't using Spanish; they were all talking in Quechua.

Feeling that people were talking about important things using another language within the intimate space of the family was a major motivation for me to feel that I had to study that language.

What kind of languages did they feel like?

At first, of course, no matter what I heard, it was nothing more than a string of sounds whose meaning I didn't understand at all. However, while Quechua often has a vowel following a consonant, Aymara sometimes has consecutive consonants—at most, four or five in a row. Therefore, local people often say that Quechua sounds softer and Aymara sounds sharper. I myself haven't really thought of it that way, though.

Are there many other languages in the Andean region besides those two?

I usually visit towns and villages in the Andean mountains at altitudes exceeding 3,000 meters, and the number of languages spoken there now is not that large.

Originally, linguistic diversity was concentrated in the low-altitude tropical areas centered on Amazonia. However, for example, it is now considered that Quechua itself is not a single language. All those various Quechua languages combined have about 9 million speakers.

How many speakers does Aymara have?

About 2 million, which is also on the higher side for the number of speakers on the South American continent.

There is a language called Jaqaru, which is considered to belong to the same family as Aymara but retains an older form. This is spoken in the mountains near Lima, the capital of Peru, and has fewer than 1,000 speakers.

It is thought that Aymara and Quechua speakers spread throughout the Andes quite recently, but the Uru-Chipaya language of Bolivia, spoken by people called the Uru who have lived in the Andean highlands since much earlier, also has about 1,500 speakers.

So there are many languages with that number of speakers.

It was thought that those languages with very few speakers would simply go extinct, but since around the end of the 20th century, they have actually been recovering. People began to feel an identity with the language, and transmission from parents to children has started again. Depending on the language, villagers have even come to have their own specialized radio stations, and they are regaining vitality once more.

In the period just before the arrival of the Spaniards, Quechua was used as a common language in the Andean region. During the era of Spanish colonial rule, it was convenient to have a common language, so they sometimes tried to use a common language for the spread of Catholicism, for example. Now, there is a gradual movement where speakers of languages with fewer speakers are switching to Quechua, which is a stronger adjacent indigenous language.

Spanish is not the only official language of Bolivia, is it?

Now, including the Amazonian lowlands, all 35 languages are considered official languages.

Is the level of government and politics in Spanish?

Basically, Spanish is dominant in practice, but it is stipulated that various documents should be translated into indigenous languages as much as possible, and public servants are also required to be able to use both Spanish and the indigenous language of the region where they work.

I see. The concept of a "national language" is quite difficult. Sometimes it is called a national language in a sense equivalent to an official language, and sometimes all the languages spoken in the country are called national languages.

Professor Toshiharu Abe, the previous chairperson of the NPO I run, was a researcher of African anthropology, and I heard that there are many such places in Africa as well. There are tribal languages, then a common language, and on top of that, official languages such as English or French. It seems there are quite a few places with a three-layered structure.

How many people are researching Aymara in Japan?

Quechua has more speakers, and there are linguists researching it in Japan as well. When it comes to Aymara, it is quite difficult; it's at the level where you wonder how many researchers there are in the entire world.

Even in the United States, there is one researcher of my generation in the sociolinguistics of Aymara. Also, there is a Dutch person who recently wrote a doctoral thesis on Aymara grammar. It's a number where you can keep track of almost everyone.

Since we are a publisher, we are in a position of helping to bring books into the world as a supporting player, but finding researchers who can write about such various languages is actually the hardest job. I believe that whether or not we can find excellent, trustworthy researchers is a major key in publishing language books.

You mentioned that you currently publish works in 130 languages, but compared to the number of languages in the world, is that still a small number?

Yes, it's just a handful. The number of languages varies depending on how you count them, but in any case, the 113 that our company publishes is truly a tiny fraction, and I think there is an endless amount of work for our company to do in publishing languages we haven't covered yet.

In 2016, we published the first Dzongkha vocabulary list in Japan, which is the national language of Bhutan, a multilingual state in the Eastern Himalayas. This is a case where the name of the country and the language do not match.

A few years ago, the King and Queen of Bhutan also visited here at Mita.

That's right. They proposed the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), and one of the pillars of that concept was to promote Dzongkha, their own unique language. Bhutan itself was originally a British territory, and English is commonly understood, but there seems to be a movement to use Dzongkha as an identity to unite the country of Bhutan.

Regarding the number of languages, a site called Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com/) states there are about 7,000.

But if it's 130, that means there are many languages that don't have many people learning them, right?

Yes. There are truly many languages in the world, and I want people to first know that such diverse languages exist. It is said that language is equal to culture, or that it is a major element constituting culture, and a major focus of our company is to have people encounter various cultures of the world by studying languages.

Doing the kind of publishing we do, I am often asked, "Is it profitable?" To be honest, as a business, it is quite tough.

But it has continued for three generations down to you, Mr. Sato (laughs).

Of course, we also publish books for languages with many learners, such as English, German, and French, so we are managing to get by with those combined. It is very difficult to make a profit only with specialized languages. But I believe it is something that some publisher has to do.

I think that's wonderful.

Thank you. This is a recent story, but Professor Norikazu Tahara, the author of our "Introduction to Luxembourgish," was invited to a court banquet welcoming Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, who visited Japan as a state guest. He said he realized the great influence of this book. Luxembourgish is the national language of the small country of Luxembourg with a population of about 600,000, but it is a minority language with a low practical range. Having a researcher of such a language be recognized is very gratifying and encouraging for us as a publisher.

Also, the year before last, when President Poroshenko of Ukraine visited Japan, the country's Order of Princess Olga was awarded to Professor Etsuko Fujii, the author of our Ukrainian bilingual edition "Selected Poems of Shevchenko." It was said that her publishing the works of Shevchenko, the father of modern Ukrainian literature, in Japan through the Ukrainian language was highly valued. The fact that these languages even exist is not well known in Japan, so I would be happy if people could learn about them through our publications.

Professor Fujita, what kind of teaching materials do you use for studying Aymara?

Basically, it takes the form of being taught locally through Spanish. However, whether it's Quechua or Aymara, several important teaching materials have recently started to appear in English as well. In the 1960s and 70s, several universities in the United States received large research grants and ran quite large-scale projects to invite native speakers and create grammar books, textbooks, workbooks, and guidebooks for teachers.

Recently, young linguists in Japan have also started going out to do fieldwork on indigenous languages in South and Central America, but studying the languages of this region in Japan may still be a high hurdle.

Regarding Aymara, there is an NGO in Tokyo called PARC (Pacific Asia Resource Center), and at its "Freedom School," we held a public course on Aymara for two years, the year before last and last year.

When we did that, around 10 students gathered. It's the bare minimum, but enough people gathered to open the course. I didn't expect that at all and thought it wouldn't happen anyway, but to my surprise, it happened for two consecutive years.

That's amazing. What kind of motivations do people have for coming to learn?

For example, folklore music from the Andean region has many fans in Japan, so there is interest in wanting to know the meaning of the lyrics they are singing.

Or people who have been stationed or lived there. Also, there were people who were interested in the language itself to begin with. Discovering that even in Tokyo alone, about 10 students come constantly every year was a fresh discovery, and I felt it was worth trying.

That's a pleasant surprise. It's a story that gives hope to a language publisher as well (laughs).

Foreign language learning in the world is dominated by English for business, but it means there are also people trying to look at languages that are a bit different from that. They want to learn what they are interested in, not for business purposes.

Reading "For Indigenous Languages" (Sofu-kan) written by Toru Kaneko, who was at Chiba University and whose name came up earlier, I think we can think about "multilingualism" on multiple levels. A common language in a global sense, and a language required when living in a certain nation. And separately from those, there are also languages that people cherish within a region.

I think it means there are several layers, and the required language changes there. Living while using multiple languages is by no means special in the world; it is something that ordinary people do every day. I hope this is understood and that the number of people—not just researchers but general people—who think of connecting with others through multiple languages in that way will increase.

Aymara is very similar to Japanese, which uses auxiliary verbs and particles, in the sense that it simply attaches suffixes to the end of words. However, it does not have the means like Japanese to express various things in compound words by combining kanji; it expresses everything through suffixes alone. Therefore, it is a language where the combination of suffixes has developed much more complexly than in Japanese. Since it has aspects very similar to Japanese, Aymara may be a good match for Japanese people to learn.

It might be closer to Japanese than to Spanish.

That's true. On the other hand, in addition to the first, second, and third persons, Aymara makes a strict distinction regarding the first-person plural "we" based on whether the person being spoken to is included or not. In Aymara grammar, the "we that includes the listener" is traditionally called the fourth person.

In English, we use the terms "exclusive we" and "inclusive we." Since English doesn't make a grammatical distinction regarding whether the listener is included, it's very interesting.

In Ainu, this fourth-person system also exists grammatically.

Actually, an Aymara teacher once told me, "Since Aymara has a fourth person, Japanese must have a fourth person too." When I replied, "No, it doesn't," he gave me a strange homework assignment, saying, "That's not possible, go look for it carefully" (laughs). So when I replied, "I heard that Ainu seems to have it," he told me, "Good, you study that and teach me." This was back when I first started studying Ainu.

Do they use the Latin alphabet for Aymara?

Since the colonial era—that is, the 16th century—when Spaniards began attempts to describe indigenous languages, there has been a history of trying to write it using the alphabet for over 500 years.

Also, recently, there has been a movement to expand the concept of "writing" in a broad sense. For example, in the Andes, people used to make knots like abacus beads on ropes, expressing things through the color, shape, and position of those knots.

Originally, these were for recording statistics, but it is said that they might have also been able to record history and myths.

In other words, research is being conducted in the Andes to consider those knots as a form of writing—"something written" in a broad sense—and by clarifying what kind of system they have, to apply that to language education in elementary and junior high schools.

According to David Crystal, a British linguist, about two-thirds of the people in the world use two languages. Japan is not quite like that, but there are many examples worldwide of countries where local languages and English are used together. In such situations, English takes on a so-called indigenous flavor.

For example, in a place like Singapore, highly educated people speak English that is quite close to British or American English. On the other hand, if you go to the local markets, it's very simple English. I think this kind of thing is happening in many parts of the world.

After Brexit, when the UK left the EU, there was quite a bit of talk about whether English would remain a language of the EU. Meanwhile, research is being done on "Euro-English," showing that the English used in EU meeting halls is becoming idiomatic and moving away from so-called standard English. Therefore, it might not matter much whether the UK is there or not. In a sense, this might be one aspect of globalization as a phenomenon.

What Professor Inoue just mentioned is also happening with Spanish.

Spanish and the indigenous languages of the Americas have been in contact for over 500 years. While people who originally spoke only Spanish have incorporated indigenous words as vocabulary, bilingual speakers of indigenous languages and Spanish use a form of Spanish that has become grammatically closer to indigenous languages, such as changing word order or using verb conjugations differently from textbook Spanish.

A movement is emerging, alongside the revitalization of indigenous languages, to recognize the study of Spanish that has changed through contact with indigenous languages as a field of Spanish linguistics, and to actively acknowledge the existence of such Spanish. Rather, I think such Spanish can serve as an entry point when one wants to study or understand indigenous languages.

I see, Spanish serves as a bridge.

However, Spanish is still very dominant, so the number of monolinguals (people who speak only an indigenous language) is rapidly decreasing. Today in the Andes, monolinguals are almost only found in the generation of grandfathers and grandmothers in their 80s or older. Furthermore, the bilingual population of indigenous languages and Spanish is gradually shifting toward Spanish monolingualism.

Since the population in the Andes is still continuing to increase significantly, the absolute number of Aymara speakers is also continuing to grow, but the reality remains that the proportion of Spanish speakers is gradually increasing.

In this context, it remains unpredictable whether so-called "Andean Spanish" will continue as a stable language or whether indigenous languages will be able to maintain their number of speakers.

To begin with, among languages in the lower lands, there are several languages with only 10 or 15 speakers. Many experts say those languages are likely to go extinct.

It depends on the scholar, but some say a language cannot be maintained without a million speakers, while others say it can be maintained with about 300,000 to 500,000. But 15 people is a situation that can certainly be called a crisis.

It is generally said that there are about 7,000 languages in the world, and on average, the number of speakers per language is probably about 800,000. However, the median is around 7,000. In other words, there are many languages with fewer than 100,000 speakers. Currently, in terms of speaker numbers, the order is Chinese, English, Hindi, and Spanish, with Japanese at about 9th, but the top eight languages account for about 40% of the world's population. An overwhelming majority speak the world's top 10 languages, and within that top 10, there are about three Indian languages. Also, the grouping of "Chinese" is quite difficult linguistically. "Chinese" is a single common language and an official language.

Among Indian languages, besides Hindi, Marathi also has many speakers. It is a language spoken mainly around Mumbai. Also, about three years ago, our company published a book on Telugu for the first time; it has about 85 million speakers and definitely ranks in the top 15. But I think few Japanese people even know that a language called Telugu exists.

However, people from India speak English fluently, and many native Telugu speakers work in IT-related fields and come to Japan in large numbers.

Daigakushorin has also published "Basics of Ainu Grammar" by Professor Tomomi Sato, hasn't it?

Yes, from Hokkaido University.

This book is a grammar book based on the Ainu language of an elderly woman from Chitose named Nabe Shirasawa. Ainu, at least within the scope understood by researchers, is almost no longer used in daily life. However, there are still a number of people, mostly in the generation slightly older than me, who remember the time when people around them had conversations in Ainu. Also, among those in my generation or slightly older who studied and acquired Ainu themselves later on, there are some who want to make sure they teach Ainu to their children.

If you can speak it to some extent, you can speak it to your children, and attempts are being made to see how much of a life can be led in Ainu today. Or, among the elderly women, even if they don't have fluent conversations in Ainu, some can read Ainu with perfect pronunciation just by seeing Ainu words written in incomplete notation. As long as they feel that it is their language, or the language that was meant to be theirs, I think they can make efforts to continue that language in various forms.

For example, someone like Tasaku Tsunoda from the University of Tokyo has been researching Australian Aborigines. Although the speakers of that language disappeared, a movement to revive the language arose in the region, and Professor Tsunoda went there with various materials to contribute to the revitalization activities.

Therefore, the work of Daigakushorin is also extremely valuable. By having various researchers leave behind materials and books, there may be unforeseen needs in the future, and I think such things are actually happening now.

Currently, English is the world's global language, and the world revolves around an English-centric worldview, but we don't know how that will change. For example, hundreds of years from now, the Quechua worldview might save humanity. I believe such things could happen. In that sense, I think it is important to preserve various languages as a form of risk hedging for humanity as a whole.

Exactly. Our company's work is directly connected to that, and I believe we must create a society where researchers of various languages can firmly leave their research for the future and for the next generation.

Professor Emeritus Takao Suzuki often says that the era of English is coming to an end, and that concepts that don't exist in English, like "mottainai," will become meaningful in the next era.

You also teach Ainu classes at SFC, don't you?

Yes, along with a research group on the Spanish-speaking world, I created a research group to learn about worldviews from Ainu language and Ainu oral literature.

I was worried about whether students would come, but this is the interesting thing about SFC: in some years, the number of students exceeds that of the Spanish-speaking world research group. Even in Tokyo, there aren't many universities where you can study Ainu, and there aren't that many people who can teach it. Overlapping with the story of the Aymara free school, I'm a bit surprised that there are so many people with this much interest.

What kind of interests do the students have when they come?

Some are interested in the Ainu language and Ainu oral literature itself, while others have more folkloric interests—for example, wanting to record and think about the traditions of elderly people in the dialect of their home region. Students with various interests gather.

By the way, this isn't from Daigakushorin, but there is a textbook called "New Express Ainu" written by Hiroshi Nakagawa published by Hakusuisha. When I designated it as the textbook, I recently received a message from someone at Hakusuisha saying, "We were surprised because a large number of copies suddenly sold at SFC and wondered what happened, but so that was it."

I know that feeling well (laughs).

It's a wonderful environment to be able to learn such languages.

At SFC, another colleague who teaches Spanish is actually a native speaker of Basque. Also, among the English teachers, there is a native speaker of Finnish. We are currently thinking about whether we can do some classes together with those people.

Nowadays, small universities are rapidly reducing the number of foreign language subjects, and there are many universities that only have English and Chinese. Since Keio has a tradition of linguistic research dating back to Junzaburo Nishiwaki and Toshihiko Izutsu, I want to continue to actively engage with such diverse languages of the world.