Linguists often rely on missionaries and translations of the Bible into obscure languages to fund their work. Is that relationship getting too close for comfort?
One Sunday in mid-May, in a damp little church in a working-class neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, Paul Lewis (left), a linguist and a missionary visiting from Texas, stood at the pulpit with two books, and from the more familiar one launched into his guest sermon by reading a story. “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech,” begins the Babel story in the Book of Genesis, which ends with God’s multiplication of languages: “That is why it is called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.”
Often read as depicting a punishment from God, the Babel story has another interpretation, said Lewis, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University. It’s a creation story. God created diverse tribes and tongues because he wanted “a whole orchestra of voices.” Why? To worship and glorify him more completely, Lewis explained. “That person who speaks a different language is an expression of God’s glory.”
The implication was clear: God doesn’t want everyone on the planet speaking the same language, even if that same diversity of languages creates a bottleneck for access to the Bible. Of 6,900 languages on the planet, Lewis said, only 2,749 have some portion of Scripture. Under 1,200 have a complete New Testament, and around 800 languages have only portions. Only about one-third of the world’s languages are written down. Lewis tracks statistics like these for SIL International, a Christian language-research organization in Dallas, Texas, where he oversees and edits a huge 1,400-page reference guide to the world’s languages, called the Ethnologue. At the end of his sermon, he hoisted the book. “We focus on collecting statistics to update the numbers of languages to help us stay abreast of changes, so that we can plan as an organization and so that we can serve others.”
Lewis was in Lowell pleading for money. He and his wife, Adalee, are headed to Malaysia next fall, where she’ll give mental health counseling to missionaries, and he’ll consult with teams of Bible translators and oversee Ethnologue remotely. The congregation knew that Lewis doesn’t translate Bibles himself—members of SIL survey languages, record them, analyze grammars, and design technologies, all in support of Wycliffe Bible Translators, SIL’s sister organization. He didn’t tell the congregation that the linguistic bottleneck to the Bible will resolve itself over the next century, when half the world’s languages are poised to become extinct. Secular linguists do have a criticism that SIL has been undertaking a triage on languages, ignoring the most moribund ones slated to die soon, a charge that is hard to assess. However, SIL is trying to track the vitality of languages as a part of strategic planning. In Lowell, Lewis promoted the science. “It’s important for us to know [linguistic diversity] in a scientific and academic way and use the best skills God has given to us,” he said. And he promoted evangelism. “It’s not enough to have a Bible in your language,” he said. “It needs to move to the stage where you fall in love with the word of God and the God of the word.”
The audience was sparse—nineteen adults, nine teenagers, and a half-dozen children. During the offertory, the ushers had to ferry the golden collection plates around two or three empty pews at a time. After the service, the missionaries and the congregation ate roast beef sandwiches and pudding parfait at folding tables in the church basement. This time-worn ritual of church life seemed divorced from any kind of scientific pursuit. The truth is, in the last seventy years, damp little evangelical churches like this one have poured money into SIL and Wycliffe. In 2004, SIL reported income of $38 million dollars and assets of $122 million. In 2005, it reported income of over $41 million, and in 2006, $39 million.
After decades of pulling in this kind of money, American evangelicals have built an extensive language-research infrastructure that extends far beyond the mission world and dwarfs anything governments, academia, or industry has been able to assemble. SIL has achieved this in large part by persuading ordinary American Christians that little, far-off languages matter. Those Christians probably speak only English, and will never meet the people who speak those exotic languages. Yet they’ll pay to dispatch scientists to record and analyze them, as long as the ultimate goal is establishing churches.
SIL was founded in 1934 by Cameron Townshend, an Oklahoma missionary who wanted to offer linguistics training to Bible translators during summer-long sessions (SIL stands for “Summer Institute of Linguistics”). On trips to Mexico, Townshend had realized the ludicrousness of giving Spanish Bibles to Indians who didn’t speak or read Spanish. Early on, he was joined by some serious linguistic scholars, Kenneth Pike and Eugene Nida, who had credentials and ties to a world of academic respectability.
“Early on, this fledgling program was greeted with a lot of respect from the linguistics world,” says William Svelmoe, a historian at St. Mary’s College in Indiana and Cameron Townshend’s biographer. “Pike was getting connected with all these big names in linguistics, who were fascinated by the project and just interested in the fact that here we had a bunch of people who were actually going to get out and do the grunt work.”
Since then, thousands of trained missionary linguists have been dispatched around the world (left) to survey and document languages, write grammars, design alphabets, and build literacy. Others train and manage local translation teams. Still others design linguistic analysis software and computer fonts for languages too small for commercial developers to bother with. SIL and Wycliffe have spin-off companies, such as the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, which had annual revenue of nearly $11 million in recent years. All SIL members pitch to churches for financial support.
What drives ordinary folks to give money is no less complex than what drives missionary linguists. Where they connect to each other is the Great Commission, where Jesus charged his disciples to preach to every nation. Another point of connection is from accounts of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit allowed each person in a polyglot assembly to understand the preaching in his or her own language. Wycliffe has long argued that people need to hear preaching in their mother tongue, deemed the “heart language.” Conversion deals with “heart concepts,” which need to be communicated in the “heart language.”
Another motivation was the millennial notion that when the gospel message had been preached to every tribe and tongue, then Christ would return for a thousand-year reign. This was more relevant a century ago, Svelmoe says, “but it would be vastly overstating things to say that current missionaries are motivated by such goals.” Svelmoe grew up in the Philippines, the child of SIL linguists, Gordon and Thelma, who translated the Bible into the Mansaka language. “Even in their private lives, such a goal would be way down the list. Saving people from hell would rank much higher, even with old-time missionaries. Obeying what they feel is God’s call on their lives would probably be uppermost in their minds.”
Paul Lewis said he’s motivated by the notion that God created the world, which accounts for the order in the universe (which can be studied scientifically) and which helps us understand where we are going, which the Bible calls “a new creation.” Because history is the unfolding of a plan that has an endpoint, the sort of science that he does isn’t “an endless re-description of what can be observed.” Rather, the science is both a tool for realizing that new creation, as well as measuring how much distance remains to it.
Along with the Babel story, the focus on “heart language” translates most easily into scientific projects. How many “heart” languages are there? Since Ethnologue’s first edition in 1951, which was ten mimeographed pages listing forty languages, the number of known languages has jumped as more linguists took to the field. “At first, the idea was to say where languages don’t have a Bible translation,” said Barbara Grimes, who edited the atlas from 1967 to 2000. “But we thought we had to say what languages have something. If you heard of a language and looked it up in Ethnologue (left) and it wasn’t there, you didn’t know why it wasn’t there.”
In 1971, Grimes and her husband, Joseph Grimes, a linguistics professor at Cornell University, extended the survey from small languages to all languages in the world. What emerged was just how daunting the linguistic bottleneck was. “In 1950, when we joined SIL, we were telling each other, maybe there are about a thousand languages, but nobody really knew,” Grimes said. In 1969, Ethnologue listed 4,493 languages; in 1992, the number had risen to 6,528 and by 2000 it stood at 6,809. The sixteenth edition lists 6,909 languages. The true number is like a horizon; the more sophisticated the surveys become, the more languages they turn up. For instance, Ethnologue now lists 121 deaf sign languages, as well as eighteen previously undescribed languages from Yunnan Province in China.
Because of its global scope, Ethnologue has emerged as the authoritative source for language information for academics, policy makers, governments, and technology designers. Critics still point out numerous errors, a legacy of having a massive project run by only two people. Now, Ethnologue editors incorporate corrections from non-SIL linguists; Lewis said the sixteenth edition, which was published in the spring of 2009, required 70,000 editorial changes.
But Ethnologue wasn’t the only secularly relevant enterprise to emerge from SIL’s evangelical roots. Each language in the Ethnologue receives a unique three-letter ID code (English is “eng”). In 2006, the International Standards Organization adopted these codes as metadata tags used in information storage and retrieval systems and software. (Without an ISO code, it’s impossible for a language to get its own Wikipedia version.) The codes also form the backbone of the Open Language Archive Community, a set of technical standards that allow linguists to collect and swap language data via the Internet; it, too, has been architected with significant SIL input.
The list of SIL contributions goes on and on: software tools for fieldworkers, fonts and keyboard schemes; fieldwork procedures and standards for documenting languages; 13,000 books, articles, and dissertations; theoretical discoveries on pronoun systems and syntax; not to mention playing an indirect role in other developments. By 1978, there were ninety-five SIL linguists with PhDs. In 2007, three of fourteen fellowships from the National Science Foundation for documenting endangered languages went to linguists from SIL.
For decades, the partnership between SIL and academic linguists seems to have gone smoothly. (Among anthropologists the ride was rougher, but that’s a different story.) SIL got access to academic legitimacy; linguists bracketed the evangelical engine that drives SIL because they got access to data and tools. As James Matisoff, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “I have very mixed feelings about missionaries, but you have to admit that some of them are very good scholars.”
However, a younger generation of linguists are beginning to feel uncomfortable with that bracketing. They’re noting how much SIL’s faith-based science has gotten woven into the DNA of their discipline. The big question isn’t whether or not faith and science are compatible. It’s whether science can ever produce as much knowledge as faith—and make it as meaningful.
Until the late 1950s, living among indigenous groups, collecting their stories, and describing their languages was perfectly acceptable work for linguistic scholars. All this changed in the 1960s, when the study of languages became more about brains and computation, not cultural groups. Establishing the new field of generative grammar, Noam Chomsky and his disciples revolted against the scientific assumptions of their elders, many of whom were fieldworkers. In the process, fieldwork became less legitimate.
Fewer people went into the field because real language data wasn’t really necessary. Chomsky postulated an innate, uniquely human endowment called the “universal grammar” which could be dissected via a few languages—maybe only one. This didn’t last long, though. By the 1970s, information about exotic languages became relevant again, because it became clear that other languages possessed structures and patterns that the theory had to account for. Where did this data come from? SIL.
Struggling to find real-world relevance, secular linguists arrived at their moral cause in the early 1990s: endangered languages. Sounding the alarm, University of Alaska at Fairbanks professor Michael Krauss, who studied Alaskan indigenous languages, made the well-known prediction that over half the world’s languages wouldn’t survive the twenty-first century. Some linguists embraced language documentation, then championed community-based projects of revitalizing languages. By the late 1990s, many linguistics departments offered field-methods courses and even allowed graduate students to write descriptive grammars as doctoral dissertations, while governments (the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Japan among them) began to fund endangered-language projects.
Out in the field, though, linguists had some surprises. In 1997, Dobrin (now an assistant professor at the University of Virginia) went to a village in Papua New Guinea to study a grammatical construction in Arapesh, a language that Ethnologue reports has 4,335 speakers. Dobrin quickly discovered that people weren’t using the language, and she became more fluent in the vernacular than local children, “and not because I’m a good language learner, by the way,” she says. She realized that she should try to document some of Arapesh, even though she hadn’t been trained in those practices. After returning to the United States in 1999, she began to think about her role as a documenter, “and how it was being construed by the people themselves and how what I had done was helpful to them and the world in any way,” she says. What were linguists working in endangered languages trying to gain for themselves? Were they commodifying languages?
She also began to consider how much the presence of SIL saturated her years in Papua New Guinea. Her trip to Wautogik was arranged through an SIL linguist, Bob Conrad, an Arapesh expert; on her initial arrival in Wautogik, she stayed at an SIL guesthouse. All the published sources on Arapesh to that point were SIL publications. Back in the United States she used Shoebox, SIL data-analysis software, as well as SIL-produced fonts.
An epiphany came at a 2005 conference on language documentation and values that she attended. She recalls that the linguistic records of Spanish priests in New Spain (the collective historical name for Spanish colonies in the Americas) were being praised, which was a notable departure from the usual anti-colonial critique of Spanish destruction of indigenous cultures. Dobrin says she noticed SIL members in the audience, which went unremarked upon. “It’s this weird dissonance,” she says. “If we’re talking about values, why can’t we talk about how SIL is doing all these things?” In Papua New Guinea, she had seen how Christian beliefs infused everything that SIL linguists did. “Before they would do anything, they would have to stop and pray. It’s their world, and it suffuses everything they do, so the idea that you could be SIL and not be wearing your Christianity and your hopes for other people on your sleeve—I don’t believe that, given what I’ve seen.”
At the end of the conference, she talked to a colleague, Jeff Good, who admitted to the same misgivings. He pointed out that linguistics was the only scientific discipline that relies on missionaries for data and infrastructure. “And I said, oh my god, we have to do something about that,” Dobrin says. “We have to actually say it out loud, and not just to each other in a whisper.”
The result was a panel discussion at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual conference, titled “Missionaries and scholars: The overlapping agendas of linguists in the field.” Speakers had a variety of perspectives on SIL, including historian Svelmoe and linguists Patience Epps, Courtney Handman, Ken Olson (who is a member of SIL), Dan Everett (a former member of SIL, now a critic), Good, and Dobrin. A collection of essays from the panel will be published in the field’s flagship journal, Language, in September of 2009.
As the new moral imperative to help small communities save their languages evolves, the easy partnership between missionaries and linguists is probably over. Dobrin says that the older generation’s accommodation of SIL is no longer acceptable. “I’d rather be debating SIL’s role than pretending that it doesn’t exist,” she says. She acknowledges that academic linguists have made themselves dependent on SIL—and on damp little evangelical churches across America—because they’ve ceded jobs they consider beneath them.
Academic linguists are beginning to develop resources of their own, but these efforts are scattered, underfunded, and vulnerable to shifts in the economy. In 2005 and 2006, the partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities gave $9.4 million to help document dozens of languages, about half of them in the Americas. In 2007, this money became a permanent line item in NSF’s budget. But a range of other projects have been scaled back or postponed given the current economic climate.
And academic linguists won’t succeed until they figure out a good answer to the question, Why should ordinary people who speak English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Mandarin Chinese, or any other majority language of the world care about languages they’ve never heard of?
Though secular linguists say that Christianization of non-Western cultures is far from ethical, evangelical churches have the more productive answer for endangered languages. As Paul Lewis told his audience that morning in Lowell, 2,300 more language projects need to be started, “but that’s not the only thing that needs to happen.” He thanked them for their prayers and financial support, and it was as if those people had personally helped bring Jesus to those places. In September, he’ll be off to Malaysia, helping a Christian vision of history unfold. If secular linguists want to build a research agenda that can compete with SIL’s, they’re going to have to do a better job of arguing the same.
Michael Erard writes about language at the intersection of technology, policy, law, and science. He is the author of Um ... : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Science, Wired, The Atlantic, New Scientist, Lingua Franca, Legal Affairs, and the Texas Observer, where he is a contributing writer.
