WALSERSPRACHE - The four main objectives of the Alpine Space ...

treatises, we must have a much more sharply tuned idiom to express the
rest of our individual selves and our respective cultures. If one happens
to speak English as a mother tongue, that “different” language may still
be English, but with a range of words, terms of endearment, idiomatic
expressions, highly local references, as to make it nearly unintelligible to
those who dealt with that same person but a moment before. If one
instead is a speaker of a minority language, that different language will
truly be different. It will be made of different sounds, different words,
conveying different semantic fields, different scopes of individual roaming
and of collective commitment. The contention that we are what we
do truly falls short of its mark here, since private and ancestral languages
confer on us a depth of identity that by far outstrips and exceeds that of
our professional jargon, whichever that happens to be. Under no circumstances
a professional language can fill the hinterland of our private
selves, which begins with childhood and unfurls through our entire lives.
If we supply millions of individuals nothing but an adopted, working language,
stripping them of whatever ancestral heritage they still had, we
create the ideal conditions for collective alienation: immigrant countries
like Canada and the U.S.A. know too well what that amounts to. Europe
is following close up of late, and it is not only “non EU-citizens” enlarging
its hosts, but Europeans themselves, way too eager to get rid of identities
they wrongly thought to be obsolete or cumbersome.
If the myth of Babel comes down to a confusion of all languages for
lack of spiritual or fideistic values to keep them meaningful and supportive
of human efforts, the abolition of all languages may be equally devastating
in its sole aspiration to materialistic goals, devoid of any consideration
for the unworldly side of Man. There is nothing new in humanity
loosing ancestral languages to adopt the idiom of a dominant nation.
In the days of the Roman empire hundreds of languages were wiped out
by the relentless advance of Roman legions. But in those days adopting
Latin meant also adopting a superior form of civilisation. Today adopting
English does not necessarily translate into adopting a superior culture.
More often than not, it amounts to loosing it and regretting it ever after.
Its adoption bows to practicality, not to spirituality. In this connection the
best example that comes to mind as a model for adopting worldly languages
while preserving one’s own is the one set by Saint Paul, who
wrote Hebrew and spoke flawless Greek and Latin. Yet, for all of these
“official” languages, his true language was a dialect, the same spoken by
most Jews in those days, Aramaic. Had he given up Greek or Latin he
would loose his uphill fight to bring Christianity to the gentiles, had he
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