Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

That all these writers just kept on writing, whatever their circumstances, never ceased to amaze me.

WRITERS WRITING IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

Yet there was something else that never ceased to amaze me — something that actually seemed more amazing as the days went by. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes, they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. Nonetheless, what intrigued me most as I continued to live with the IWP writers was that all of us, each and every one, were writing in our own language. Not only there in Iowa but everywhere on Earth, all kinds of writers were writing in their own language . It made no difference whether a writer’s language had hundreds of millions of potential readers or a few hundred thousand; either way, they wrote in their own language, as if to do so were the most natural act imaginable — as if people had always done so, ever since the human race came into being. Of course, that is far from the truth. If one looks at human history, only in the modern era did the act of writing come to mean writing in one’s own language. While the length of the history of writing varies from language to language, it is often a matter of a few hundred years or even a few decades. And yet, today, writers everywhere are writing in their own language as if people have always done so.

Moreover, at the IWP, for each writer, how deeply this notion of one ’ s own language seemed to be connected to our feelings for our own country! When the gentle-faced Dashnyam talked in front of an audience, he projected an image of the expansive Mongolian steppe on the big screen from his laptop, played Mongolian music, and described Mongolia’s natural beauty and the way people live in harmony with nature. (His computer skills were impressive.) He spoke less about his country’s literature than about his country. His spirit of rebellion against the Soviet Union seemed alive and well, for he was writing about Genghis Khan, the Mongolian hero who was made the object of criticism in his own country at the height of Soviet influence. He also preferred using the Roman alphabet to the Cyrillic, not only because it was easier to use on his computer, but because the latter symbolized his country’s former oppressor. There was even a movement to resurrect traditional Mongolian script, he told me.

Or take Yevgeniya’s Ukrainian, which is one of the languages that have been tragically tampered with in modern times. In imperial Russia, publishing in Ukrainian was basically banned. The founding of the Soviet Union initially brought about a lift on the ban; to uproot pro-Russian antirevolutionary feelings, the Soviets welcomed the rise of Ukrainian ethnic consciousness and promoted education and publication in the Ukrainian language. Stalin reversed course in the 1930s. The Russian language was reimposed to uproot any anti-Soviet feelings. Language control loosened under Khrushchev, but the fate of the Ukrainian language since then depended on the whims of successive Soviet politicians, leading to a steady decrease in the number of users. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Ukrainian users were already outnumbered by Russian-language users. But the new Ukraine government decreed Ukrainian to be its sole official language. Today, even among citizens who use Russian as their mother tongue, the majority consider Ukrainian their “real” language. Russian is still often used in the media and in official documents, and writers writing in Russian still outnumber those writing in Ukrainian, but all this is likely to change in the future as more writers choose to write in Ukrainian, like Yevgeniya. The recent turmoil can only strengthen national identity among ethnic Ukrainians.

Or take Hebrew, the language of the vegetarian Shimon. People’s passion for their country resurrected this ancient language. It has a remarkably long history as a written language; some even claim that it dates back more than three thousand years. Jews, like so many others, were victims of the turmoil of history, and the failed insurrection against the Roman Empire in the second century C.E. resulted in the Jewish diaspora. Written Hebrew was preserved in scripture, but the spoken language remained virtually unused for nearly seventeen hundred years. The Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century began its renaissance, secularizing the language. Then Hebrew even became one of the official languages, along with Arabic and English, when the British created Mandatory Palestine in 1920. When the state of Israel was created in Palestine in 1948, Jews who gathered there from all over the world began learning Hebrew, which the new generation now sees as its mother tongue. And so a language that had mainly been used in religious rituals was transformed into a modern language; a language that had virtually no speakers less than a hundred years ago now boasts over six million. Today Hebrew and Arabic remain the official languages of Israel, but for the Jewish population, Hebrew is their own language .

Or take Norwegian, the language my friend the red-headed, freckled Brit was writing in. Starting in the late fourteenth century, Norway was under Danish rule for over four hundred years. During that time, Danish was the written language. After the country was liberated from Danish rule in 1814, a movement arose to come up with a national written language; much debate and experimentation followed for over a century until Norwegians eventually settled on two official languages. One is called Bokmål, or “book language,” based on the Danish that was already familiar to Norwegians. When foreigners now study Norwegian, they learn Bokmål. The other is called Nynorsk, or “New Norwegian,” a language with less Danish influence, single-handedly created in the mid-nineteenth century by a linguist named Ivar Aasen, who collected regional dialects from all over the country in his quest for a true national identity. As I understand it, Nynorsk can more vividly portray the traditional, rural life of the people who endure long battles with the severe climate, both by the ocean and in the mountains, away from the cities. It is also far richer in vocabulary.

Brit, who grew up in a fishing village, writes in Nynorsk even though she often uses the language in an urban context. That she chooses to do so means that she is deliberately limiting the number of her readers, for, though both Bokmål and Nynorsk are taught in school, Norwegians who actually read and write Nynorsk make up only about 12 percent of the population. The population of Norway is five million—12 percent of that is about six hundred thousand. This figure is not much different from the population of Suginami Ward — one of twenty-three wards in the city of Tokyo, where I live. For a Japanese writer like me, it would seem as if you were writing for your neighbors. According to Brit, though, many Norwegian writers choose to write in Nynorsk because the language is more colorful and they feel more deeply connected to it. It’s a very poetic language, almost too poetic, she told me. People like Brit are writing in a language they feel is their own language , even if that language was artificially created only a century and a half ago and has only several hundred thousand readers.

All writers are writing in their own language, as if to do so was their mission in life. Walking down the hotel’s empty hallway at night, I could sense the writers’ presence on the other side of either wall as they sat facing their computer screens and writing, each in his or her own language. I could feel not only their presence but their passion and commitment. For every one of them, there were surely thousands of others similarly tapping on a keyboard or scribbling in a notebook, writing in their own language. Even as I acutely felt the dedication of those IWP writers on the other side of the wall, or rather, because I felt it so acutely, I could not help thinking about a major change that history is making us go through: English is becoming a universal language such as humans have never known before.