Chiang Rai is the northernmost province of Thailand, and its eponymous capital is only 60 kilometres from the borders with Burma (Myanmar) and Laos. A great sprawl of shops offering everything from new Volvos to durian fruit line the road north as far as the newly created Mae Fah Lung University, named in honour of the much-loved mother of the present King of Thailand. Beyond the campus area, the shops give way to padi and tobacco fields, and the road begins to climb up through the hills. To an outsider the villages along the road all look much the same, but there are some telltale signs that point to the complex ethnic and historical forces at play here. The occasional flash of a traditional headdress or colourful fabric amid the sea of ubiquitous jeans and T-shirts mark out the Hmong from the Lisu, the Lahu, the Shan or the Wa. These are the main tribes that live in these highlands, which extend north up to Yunnan in China, east across Laos as far as the Annamite range in Vietnam and west to the Salween river in Burma. They all have their own languages and customs, and none of them owes any deep-rooted allegiance to the parent state of which they, by accident of history, find themselves part. It’s a rich ethnographic smorgasbord. The mountains offer both protection and isolation, allowing fascinating and discrete cultures, and of course languages, to develop.
Traditional bamboo houses line the hills
The road finally reaches Kuay Huak Paso, a straggly line of bamboo and concrete houses that line the ridge that separates Thailand from Burma. It is home to one of the many hill tribes of Thailand, the Akha.
Aju is an Akha but he speaks good English, having studied at language school in Oxford. He stayed with the poet James Fenton for a couple of years before returning to Thailand to fight for Akha rights. The Akha are one of the poorest and least developed hill tribes in Thailand, looked down upon by the Thais, and often refused IDs, which means they have little or no access to health and welfare programmes. Aju set up an Akha institute to lobby for these rights and has begun to record the oral traditions of his tribe before they die out. He wants the government to acknowledge that the Akha language, along with other minority hill-tribe languages, has a right to exist and should be helped to survive.
Today, Aju is visiting the village blacksmith’s, where a very rare and important event is about to start, a ritual that even Aju, video recorder of his tribe’s culture, has never witnessed. As the blacksmith begins to fashion a blade from a solid rectangular lump of steel, ably helped by his wiry assistant working a most efficient and excellent bamboo bellows, Aju explains the significance. The elders of the village are about to embark on a three-day verbal marathon, relating the entire Akha genealogy to one of the younger men. Traditionally the Akha have had a purely oral culture – preserving family histories, children’s songs, games and stories by remembering and repeating them from generation to generation. Aju can recite fifty-three generations of his family tree. Not bad. Most of us would be hard pushed to remember four. We have the advantage of history books, diaries, literature to remember both our personal history and that of our culture. For the Akha to lose their language would effectively erase a thousand years of history and render them mute.
Aju isn’t convinced the Akha language will survive
Although Akha does not have an established writing system, various missionary sects have created nine alternatives. There’s a Catholic one, a Baptist one, a Lutheran one, a Methodist one, all tinged with the underlying premise that the Akha should convert to Christianity. Aju doesn’t approve of missionaries. He explains that the Akha have not yet decided on a system for writing their language, but it will be a new one, created for and by Akha and based on the Roman alphabet with some special ways to signify the tonal nature of their language.
Oddly, the Akha, for so long in contact with the dominant cultures that do have writing, have never had a system for recording, be it alphabet or ideogram. Aju says, ‘In the old days, I don’t know how many years ago, they say Un Ma, the first spirit, gave an alphabet to all people and, because he’d run out of paper, he presented the Akha tribe with a water buffalo’s hide on which the Akha letters were written. The Akha took the skin home and it was fine. But then one day there was a great storm, and it got wet. So they took the skin near the fire to dry it out. But the smell got so nice that they couldn’t resist eating it, and since then the Akha have had no alphabet. We ate it!’
The blacksmith hammers away, and before long a blade that will be used to kill an ox and finish the ceremony takes shape. It’s all very relaxed, and a lot of rice wine is consumed as the elders begin their recitation, which is nothing less than the history of the tribe. The sixty generations that the initiate will have to learn tell of the Akha’s migration through southern Yunnan, Burma and Laos to their present place high on this saddleback in the Golden Triangle. It seems not dissimilar to those biblical passages where begat is a much overused verb.
It’s old men doing their old men’s stuff (no women take part). Aju confesses his own daughters are more interested in their Facebook friends, Twitter and watching YouTube. And therein lies the rub. To communicate with the larger world the Akha must learn either Thai or English.
The village primary school is new, a well-built block of five classrooms, adorned with various pictures of the King of Thailand and more Thai flags than the national airline. A football pitch takes centre stage with the dramatic hills behind that define the border with Burma. Money has obviously been spent on it. The village is only 5 miles from the border with Burma, and the Thai government is keen to instil a sense of national identity in these hill tribes whose allegiance is, at best, fluid. The key to this is language. Thai is the compulsory medium of all instruction, and even if a universal Akha script existed it probably would not be taught even as a second language, English being given preference. But Aju is adamant that the Akha, along with the million plus other hill-tribe people, need to have their written language to maintain their identity and at least give them a chance to maintain their rich culture and heritage. Linguicide leads to cultural genocide within a generation.
Aju is not convinced that the Akha language will survive for many more generations, but he is determined to do his best to preserve it. He explains how he recently went to a meeting of hill-tribe people in Yunnan in southern China, and they agreed on the style of the new Akha script. But it may be too late. Aju’s daughters don’t even speak Akha at home that much, preferring to speak Thai. Wistfully Aju laments: ‘At my home I speak Akha language, my wife and I speak Akha to them, but they reply to me all in Thai. But they understand Akha. Most of the Akha, especially the younger generation who moved to the city, they don’t show to the outsider that they are Akha because we used to be looked down on by the majority of the Thai people, and they said the Akha people were dirty and lived in the forest, and didn’t have a proper language. And this memory transfers to the kids; that’s why the kids want to hide it. They don’t want to be Akha.’ Like so many minorities, they feel slightly ashamed of their own language with its perceived ‘primitiveness’. So they do their best, like all children, to fit into the dominant culture.
Thai and English are taught in Akha schools
To lose a language is to lose a culture and its history. Homogenization of both language and culture seems inevitable in this part of the world, but, while it might seem cleaner, easier and safer, it diminishes us. It may not seem as bad as the extinction of a whole species, but it is as great a loss.
Irish: Famine and Revival
The west coast of Ireland on a bitterly cold December morning is one of the most unusual – certainly the most beautiful – places to play a round of winter golf. The Connemara Isles golf club is on the westernmost tip of Europe and Connemara in County Galway is part of what is called the ‘Gaeltacht’, one of the central areas for the speaking of the ancient language of Ireland – Irish. ‘Everybody here thinks in Irish,’ one of the golfers explains. ‘You can get through your lifetime here without speaking English.’
The thatched club house is a reminder of
a catastrophic event which helped to shape the story of the Irish language. It was built by the great grandfather of the current owners in 1850. He was one of a handful of survivors from the wreckage of the famine ship Brig St John, which foundered on rocks near Boston Harbour in October 1849.
The Brig St John was a so-called coffin ship, one of the many ill-equipped, overcrowded vessels which carried hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants across the Atlantic to the east coast of America between 1845 and 1851. This was the time of An Gorta Mór – the Great Hunger – better known outside Ireland as the Potato Famine. Around a million people – one in eight of Ireland’s population – are thought to have died from starvation or disease; another million emigrated from Ireland to the States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. The Irish potato famine was probably the worst human disaster in nineteenth-century Europe and a watershed for Ireland, politically and culturally; it sounded the death knell for the Irish language.
It’s difficult to get your head round just how catastrophic An Gorta Mór was. There aren’t many written accounts from survivors; a bit like people who lived through the horrors of the Battle of the Somme or the Nazi concentration camps, they simply didn’t or couldn’t talk about it. There was extensive newspaper coverage at the time, however. One of the worst-affected areas was County Cork in south-west Ireland; the town of Skibbereen – where one in four of the population is thought to have died – became the focus for press and outsider interest. The Illustrated London News hired its own special correspondent, illustrator James Mahony, to report from Skibbereen. And, in a world before printed photographs, the illustrations accompanying Mahony’s graphic two-part series became synonymous with the famine.
We next reached Skibbereen … and there I saw the dying, the living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as all were in the same state; and, not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of three or four, even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last resting place.
People in Skibbereen died in such huge numbers and so fast that there weren’t enough people alive to bury them. Pits were dug near the ruins of the old Abbeystrewery Franciscan friary, and up to 10,000 coffin-less bodies were buried in the mass grave.
Heated debate is still in full swing over whether the Great Hunger was the result of a natural catastrophe worsened by the British government’s inaction or a form of genocide. It’s a historically and politically charged issue. What is without question is that the famine was a huge turning point for Ireland. Indeed, historians talk about Irish history in terms of the pre-famine and post-famine years.
The famine hit rural areas hardest and in particular the Irish-speaking areas of western Ireland. In 1835 there were an estimated 4 million native Irish speakers. This number had fallen to 2 million by 1851 and to 680,000 by 1891. Those who hadn’t been killed by the famine emigrated or chose to speak English in preparation for finding employment abroad or in the cities.
We need to delve a bit further back into history here. The Irish language grew out of the Proto-Celtic language which was spoken all over western mainland Europe from around the fifth century BC. Groups of Celtic-speakers migrated to Ireland around the fourth century BC, where a form of Celtic known as Goidelic (or Gaelic) developed; fragments of primitive Irish are known from inscriptions in the Ogham alphabet, etched into stone monuments in southern Ireland around the fourth century AD. After Ireland’s conversion to Christianity and the introduction of the Roman alphabet in the sixth century, the Golden Age of Old Irish began. This evolved into Middle Irish, which then spread through Ireland and into Scotland and the Isle of Man. Modern Irish, with the assimilation of Old Irish, Norse, Norman and Old English, emerged around the twelfth century. In Scotland it became Scottish Gaelic; in the Isle of Man, the Manx language.
James Mahony’s drawings recorded the desperation of the Irish during An Gorta Mór
Another group of early Celtic-speakers migrated to the British mainland around the same time as Goidelic was developing in Ireland. The language of this group, which settled in southern England and Wales, grew into a type of Celtic known as Brythonic (or British); this provided the basis for Cornish, Welsh and the now extinct Cumbric; and a movement of some of these settlers from southern England across the Channel to Brittany around AD 600 led to the development of Breton there. As Old and Middle English developed from the languages of the invading Anglo-Saxons and then the Normans, the Brythonic Celtic languages were driven into Wales and the south-west.
Thus we have Modern Irish being spoken by almost the entire population of Ireland in the twelfth century. Over the next few centuries there were attempts by the Normans and then by the English to control the territories of the Irish lords, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century there was an English-controlled territory on the east coast, with Dublin as its centre, known as the Pale. Here the English language predominated. Outside this area – beyond the Pale – were the Gaelic Irish, who maintained their own language and laws. The English called them ‘His Majesty’s Irish enemies’.
The assault on the Irish and their language began in earnest in the mid sixteenth century when Henry VIII and subsequent monarchs confiscated land and replaced the Irish Catholic landowners with settlers from England and Scotland. The Plantations, as it came to be known, was a ruthless policy of colonization. The Crown took over large swathes of land in the south-west province of Munster and in the northern province of Ulster – the most remote and Gaelic of all the Irish territories. As the Irish tongue shrank westwards and the Irish-speaking ruling classes disappeared, Gaelic Irish culture was sidelined, and a new English-speaking elite dominated the politics of the country. English was the language of parliament, law and trade and, after the introduction of the National Schools system in the 1830s, the language of the classroom as well.
Jonathan Swift recommended the Irish sell their children for food
It’s easy to forget that some of the English language’s most famous writers were from this Anglo-Irish elite. The satirist and essayist Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. His Modest Proposal (for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public) recommends that Ireland’s poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich: ‘I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food …’ Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, at the end of the Great Hunger. As was George Bernard Shaw, two years later.
The Great Hunger virtually killed off the already struggling native language, but it hardened resentment towards the British and became a rallying point for nationalist movements. The spearheading of a Gaelic revival came from the very section of Ireland’s society which nationalists blamed for killing off the language in the first place – English-speaking Protestants. Douglas Hyde, academic, passionate supporter of the Irish language and future President of Ireland, was the Anglo-Irish son of a Church of Ireland rector. He taught himself to speak and write Irish, joined the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language and penned dozens of Irish verses. In 1889, he wrote: ‘If we allow one of the finest and richest languages in Europe, which, fifty years ago, was spoken by nearly four millions of Irishmen, to die without a struggle, it will be an everlasting disgrace and a blighting stigma upon our nationality.’
Hyde helped set up the Irish National Literary Society with W. B. Yeats in 1892 and at one of its first meetings concluded a lecture entitled ‘The Necessity for De-anglicising the Irish People’ with a literary call to arms:
I would earnestly appeal to everyo
ne, whether Unionist or Nationalist … to set his face against the constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions and ideas. I appeal to everyone … to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines … because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore – one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming people of Europe.
In 1893, Hyde helped to found the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge). Its aims were to preserve spoken Irish, restore it as the country’s first language and encourage the revival and creation of literature in Gaelic.
The League faced an uphill battle to convince Ireland’s dwindling number of native speakers that there was any point in saving the language. It was helped by the growing strength of the nationalist movement, which saw the speaking of Irish as a statement of national pride and an act of defiance against the English. Although the League was non-political, it attracted future nationalist leaders. Patrick Pearse, one of the Easter Uprising leaders, joined when he was sixteen and became editor of its newspaper. The Irish Republic’s founding father, Eamonn de Valera, met his wife Sinead at the League, where she was teaching Irish. The Irish-speaking parents of Michael Collins, the Sinn Féin leader, had insisted on speaking English to their children so they would ‘get on’ and find good jobs in an English-speaking world. Michael Collins was passionate about the League.
The Gaelic League restored the language to its place in the reverence of the people. It revived Gaelic culture. While being non-political, it was by its very nature intensely national. Within its folds were nurtured the men and women who were to win for Ireland the power to achieve national freedom. Irish history will recognise in the birth of the Gaelic League in 1893 the most important event of the nineteenth century. I may go further and say, not only the nineteenth century, but in the whole history of our nation. (Michael Collins, The Path To Freedom)
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