Revivalistics : From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond

by Ghil'ad Zuckermann

In this book, Ghil'ad Zuckermann introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration. Applying lessons from the Hebrew revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary endangered languages, Zuckermann takes readers along a fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival and provides new insights into language genesis.

Beginning with a critical analysis of Israeli-the language resulting from the Hebrew revival-Zuckermann's radical theory contradicts conventional accounts of the Hebrew revival and challenges the family tree model of historical linguistics. Revivalistics demonstrates how grammatical cross-fertilization with the revivalists' mother tongues is inevitable in the case of successful "revival languages." The second part of the book then applies these lessons from the Israeli language to revival movements in Australia and globally, describing the "why" and "how" of revivalistics. With examples from the Barngarla Aboriginal language of South Australia, Zuckermann proposes ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian reasons for language revival and offers practical methods for reviving languages.

Based on years of the author's research, fieldwork, and personal experience with language revivals all over the globe, Revivalistics offers ground-breaking theoretical and pragmatic contributions to the field of language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2020

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking and disquieting book. Ghil'ad Zuckermann is a linguist who originally comes from Israel, where he made a deep study of Israeli Hebrew. For some time now, he has been living in Adelaide. Here, a large part of his work is concerned with a program that is trying to revive the Australian aboriginal language Barngarla, which had not been spoken since the 1960s. In Revivalistics, he puts his accumulated experience together and asks some searching questions. What does it mean to "revive a language"? Is it even possible? If it is possible, how should you do it? Why would we want to do it? What are we likely to achieve? The answers are interesting and paradoxical.

In the first part, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text, Ghil'ad puts Israeli Hebrew under the microscope. When I started I had no Hebrew at all, and the first couple of chapters were slow as I painfully got up to speed with the alphabet - it's all about the details, and every page has dozens of Hebrew words on it. But the details are there to serve a clear purpose. The official line is that Israeli Hebrew is the direct descendent of the language spoken two and a half thousand years ago: this is sometimes dramatised by saying that if the Prophet Isaiah were to come back today, people would with a little effort be able to understand him. A bold claim, and Ghil'ad goes to great lengths to show just how shaky it is. Officially, Israeli Hebrew's one and only parent is classical Hebrew. But in actual fact, a large part of the language seems to have come from the many languages spoken by the people who created Modern Hebrew.

The most important of these languages is Yiddish. A good proportion of the Jews of the Diaspora spoke Yiddish as their everyday language, treating Hebrew as a sacred tongue. If this is what they were used to speaking, it is hardly strange that it rubbed off on their creation. Ghil'ad argues that, while the words of Israeli Hebrew are mostly Hebrew, the sounds are much more like those of Yiddish. And when you look more closely at the words, it's not so clear there either. The meanings are often very different from the original ones, and can have very different associations: so for example תוֹרָה (torah) traditionally means the body of sacred knowledge handed down from God, but in Israeli Hebrew has been extended to mean "theory". עָמָל (amál) is traditionally a negative word which can mean "toil" and sometimes "mischief"; the socialists who started the kibbutzim turned it into a positive word which means "work".

Ghil'ad has hundreds more things like this, documenting the often surreptious influence of Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Polish and other languages on Israeli Hebrew. (He is comfortable with an impressive number of languages). His overall conclusion is that the official story of Hebrew's miraculous revival is full of holes. Although this was the unquestionably the most successful language revival project of all time, Israeli Hebrew is not truly the successor to the language spoken in the sixth century BCE. It borrows a good deal from that language; but it doesn't have the same sounds, it doesn't have the same grammar, and it doesn't have the same soul. Ghil'ad makes no apology for using this term. Everyone who works with language knows that a language has a soul. Maybe you can't measure it, but it's there.

So if you aren't really reviving the original language, is this a worthwhile thing to be doing? And here's the paradox: Ghil'ad says the answer is yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Even if you can't really get back what you lost, an imperfect, partial solution is so much better than nothing. This becomes increasingly clear in the second part of the book, which is about Australian aboriginal languages and Ghil'ad's program of attempting to revive Barngarla. It's the other end of the spectrum from Hebrew. There is very little written data available after the Australian colonists killed the Barngarla culture and stopped children from learning their own language. There is no big, well-funded team of expert linguists working on the problem, just a few enthusiasts on shoestring budgets. But this is vitally important. The statistics presented on mental illness, suicide and substance abuse in Australian aboriginal populations are horrifying. These are people who in many cases feel they have nothing left, who have no reason to carry on living. But studies show that if they learn to recover even a bit of their ancestral language, they start to feel better. It's not possible to give back to the original Australians what was taken from them. But that is no excuse. If we can't help them get back their whole language, we should see if an imperfect reconstruction is possible. We are obliged to do the best job we can.

I feel personally involved here. We may be able to use LARA, the language learning platform we've been developing over the last couple of years, to help Ghil'ad and other language revivalists. We've done a couple of preliminary exercises: we made a LARA version of the Barngarla alphabet book that Ghil'ad published last year, and a LARA version of a few pages from this book. It's a start. But so far it's not useful in practice; in particular, it needs to be made available on mobile devices, a piece of functionality that Ghil'ad has asked for several times and which we so far haven't got around to. I read this book and I feel bad about our slackness. We need to raise our game.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is informative, but a bit of a mess, and in my opinion another sign of declining quality at one of the world’s most eminent academic publishers. Ghil’ad Zuckermann is an Israeli linguist who made his career in Australia. Initially interested in the revival of Hebrew in Israel, he came to view the revival of Australian Aboriginal languages through the same lens.

Zuckermann underscores how modern Israeli Hebrew is not a simple restoration of Biblical-era Hebrew. Rather, it can plainly be viewed as an offspring of the Yiddish spoken by the early Zionists, who began using Hebrew lexical material and grammar yet kept thinking in the same old patterns common to their former language. The first half or so of this book is a demonstration of this. Zuckermann gives plenty of examples of Hebrew words and constructions in the revived language that are very different from the language we know from ancient texts, but can be understood through Yiddish. He also describes how the challenges of forging the new Israeli state and the need to express modern political positions through the revived language led to old Hebrew words being repurposed away from their old religious meanings.

For Zuckermann, the fact that the genesis of the Israeli language (he prefers to avoid using the term “Hebrew” for the modern revived language) involved hybridization is not a source of shame at all. Zuckermann is no purist. This is where his background finds its connection with the indigenous languages of his adopted country: he says it is inevitable that revived Australian Aboriginal languages will be heavily influenced by English phonetics, syntax, etc., but people should simply accept that. One main reason he advocates such acceptance is because he believes an indigenous community being restored its own language has social benefits (sense of purpose, lower suicide rate, and so forth), and purists and pedants only risk impeding successful revitalization efforts.

As I said, this book has problems, in spite of a great deal of interesting facts on Hebrew that will appeal to a wide readership of linguists. Zuckermann organizes his material badly, which leads to a great deal of repetition; the text feels slapdash. Moreover, he indulges in an appalling number of jokes, most of which are very corny and, in my opinion, inappropriate. Why was there no intervention from an editor to better arrange the text and remove the excesses of humor?

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant! 4 stars only because the first few chapters on Hebrew/Israeli took too long. They were excellently written, and essential for the points Zuckermann goes on to make, but I would have preferred more hints to AU/NZ stuff earlier on! I was really interested in the formation of Israeli, and learnt heaps, but I tended to skim the detail.

Otherwise, an insightful, interesting, and highly enjoyable book about language & society & colonialism.

Would recommend this review.

[T P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revivalistics is Zuckermann's ode to reviving dead and dying languages ('sleeping beauties'). His goal is to defend indigenous language revival and propose a model for moving ahead.

In the first half of the book, he makes a fascinating example of the revival of modern Hebrew to lay a foundation for his argument. In the second half, Zuckermann applies these lessons to 'sleeping beauties' around the world, with special focus on Australian Aboriginal tongues.

While I came for the Aussie section (as I live in Aus), I ended up loving the Hebrew section so much more.

For the general public, perhaps the most interesting bit of the book is how the early Zionist re-deployed sacred terms from the Bible for statist and secular concepts in Israeli Hebrew. The most dramatic example is that the holiest part of the Tabernacle became the Parliament building! More mundane, one type of offering became the weekend pullout section of the newspaper, a type of evening prayer became the name of an evening edition paper (when such existed), another type of prayer became the matinee performance of a play, and special utensils became standard utensils in the home (like the offering fork becoming the table fork, etc).

I found all these details eye-opening, and the Hebrew section is definitely worth a read. Zuckermann also brilliantly uses it to de-mythologise the language revival process. From the example of Israeli Hebrew, he takes an anti-purisitic stance which I believe leads to hope — if any amount of language revival has value, that dramatically lowers the hurdle for getting started, and removes the shame of 'failure.'

The second half of the book however is more scattered. Especially where it attempts to show why language revival is a politically good move for governments (because of the positive mental health and community outcomes). The last two chapters were an absolute chore to read — I was hoping for something rousing and with punch to close us out, rather than something dry which felt rushed.

My advice: unless you're getting involved in language revival yourself, you could skip the last third of the book and take home the same point.

Last thought - some reviewers have commented negatively on Zuckermann's jokes. I actually quite enjoyed them. I'd welcome more in academic lit, which is way too often stodgy, self-important, and fails to connect. No reason an academic work can't be both thorough and approachable. But your tastes may differ.

[Harvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Hebrew / Israeli section was interesting but mostly over my head.

I was most interested in the Australian part of the book. With 400 Australian languages the challenge of reviving them seems enormous. It was interesting to compare with New Zealand, where it must be much easier to just focus on one language. And interesting how there are so many more languages in Australia - is this connected with the relative length of time people have been living in Australia as compared to New Zealand?

Related to the above, I was also intrigued to learn that the major group of Australian languages was estimated to be only 8,000 years old. I would have expected much older. How did a new language suddenly emerge in a 40-60,000 year old culture and then come to dominate most of the continent? I will ask Professor Zuckermann next time I see him!

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting book though not without its flaws. It was really two books packaged as one since the first half was very technical and focused on the author’s argument why the Hebrew spoken now should be renamed Israeli, while the second half was about the political and social aspects of reviving indigenous languages gutted by colonialism. Each was good in its own right, but the author did little to tie the halves together. The book also needed substantial editing, especially in the first half, where entire paragraphs were sometimes repeated near word for word in the same chapter or section.

[Nava · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book because, unlike many academic books, the thesis is really clear and the author is very persuasive in convincing us of the legitimacy of the thesis. You feel like you're being spoken to by someone who really does know his subject matter backwards and forwards, and so is able to make strong assertive arguments because of his breadth of knowledge on the topic. It left me thinking about the Hebrew language in a totally new way. Highly recommend.

[Morgan Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too hippy