>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Hello there everyone.
I want to welcome you
to what is the first
in our 2015 series
of Botkin Lectures.
My name is Betsy Peterson,
I'm the Director
of the American Folklife Center
here at the Library of Congress,
and I want to tell you a little bit
about the Botkin Series
in case you don't know.
The Botkin Series is an opportunity
for the American Folklife Center
to highlight the latest scholarship
in folklore, oral history,
ethnomusicology, linguistics
and cultural heritage.
It also allows us to enhance our
collections and we very much see it
as an acquisition strategy for
the American Folklife Center.
We videotape all of these
lectures and they are accessioned
and become a part of our archive
and eventually make their way
onto the internet as a webcast
on the library's website.
So with that said I want to ask
you to turn off your telephone
or any other electronic
devices you may have on you
or else you will be in that webcast.
But today I have the honor of
introducing Dr. Alexandra Jaffe.
She hails or comes from California
State University at Long Beach
and Professor Jaffe is a linguistic
anthropologist whose primary
research involves the
French Island of Corsica
where she has studied language
shift and revitalization since 1988.
She is a graduate of the
University of Delaware
and Professor Jaffe
received her MA and PhD
in Linguistic Anthropology
from Indiana University.
Professor Jaffe's research focuses
on issues of ideology and identity
and bilingual education, minority
language literacy in literature,
the Corsica media and
language policy.
In addition to her work on
bilingualism, multilingualism
and minority languages,
she has written extensively
on the sociolinguistics
of orthographic choice
and on the politics of
non-standard orthographies
in social linguistic
transcripts and other texts.
She is particularly interested in
the uses of language in the media
with a particular focus
on the representation
of sociolinguistic
variation in documentaries,
mainstream broadcasts
and other online fora.
In addition to all of
this and in addition
to a very busy teaching
schedule at her university,
she is also the incoming
Editor and Chief of the Journal
of Linguistic Anthropology.
Today Professor Jaffe will be
speaking on Corsican language
and expressive cultures,
so please join me
in welcoming Professor Jaffe.
>> Dr. Alexandra Jaffe: Well thank
you very much for that nice welcome
and I'm very, very glad to be here.
I'm going to talk about kind of a
variety of things and if afterwards
if you have questions about
things I haven't, I've just kind
of skimmed over, please
don't hesitate to ask,
and I'm going to start out, I'm
showing you where Corsica is just
in case and then here
I'm going to start this
by giving you a little
kind of musical
and geographic overview of Corsica.
So this is from a YouTube video
posted by somebody on the internet
so the choices of images
are not mine.
It's a song by [foreign language
spoken] who we'll be talking
about a little bit later,
and it'll give you a sense
of the landscape hopefully.
It seems to be doing something here.
[ Music ]
Somebody's vacation.
[ Music ]
Vacation.
[ Music ]
That has nothing to
do with anything.
The last image there [inaudible]
me, but my purpose here was
to let you hear a little
bit of the music and also
to emphasize the point when
you choose a place to go
to do fieldwork, pick a nice place
which is what I did, so very,
very beautiful mountains and sea.
Just a little bit of history
that we need and that is
that Corsica is part of France.
It only became French in the
late 1800's after centuries
of relatively [inaudible] rule
and then a brief interesting
14 year period of independence
under Pascale Paoli who's credited
with writing the first
democratic constitution,
so before the French Revolution.
So during the 19th century Corsica
suffered from sort of benign neglect
under France so the sort
of the presence of France
on the islands was very small.
They worked through the
Corsican elite, the notables,
the clan as they call it, that
they used as intermediaries
so that every day people's
lives were not really touched
by being part of France.
A first wave of immigration
took place at this time
and it took Corsicans to places
like South America and Puerto Rico
so there's a large number
of Corsican ancestry
in Puerto Rico even today.
And in fact if we look at that
Corsican French relationship
and we're thinking about
language, the presence of France
on the island was so weak early
on that most people
didn't learn French.
So we had elites and those
were very small in numbers,
they actually continued to send
their sons to Pisa for example
to study, so Italy was
really the stronger cultural
and linguistic influence
than France.
Now that all changed in the
late 19th and early 20th century
and the advent of free
and secular education.
And so the French, French
school teachers went
out into the countryside
to bring French language,
poetry and civilization
to the masses and that's
where we start to see
language shift.
So for example, if we went back
to about 1890 the first language
of all Corsicans would
have been Corsican,
very few people spoke French,
and then in the late 1800's,
very late 1800's, early 1900's,
Corsicans began to go to school,
and when they went to school
the language of the school,
the language of the
republic was French.
But in school they didn't
just learn the language;
they also learned French
language ideologies
and those ideologies were
very clearly hierarchical.
So French was the language of
civilization and reason and thought
and aesthetic beauty,
and they were taught
that Corsican was not just
not French but backward,
just a useless [foreign
language spoken]
that they would be better off
leaving outside the school door
and leaving and abandoning forever.
And in fact we have reports
in Corsica of things that went
on in other minority
speaking regions of France
and that is the use of the
symbol, so that a child
who was caught speaking
Corsican would get either,
it would either be a dunce's cap
or it could be a little thing
that they put around their neck
or little object put on the desk,
right, that was meant to shame them
and the only way you could get rid
of it was to catch another child.
So if you could rat out your
neighbor you could pass the symbol
along to them right?
So what we see then is that we see,
we see school obviously contributing
to language shift and by language
shift we mean the adoption
of French over Corsican.
And parents of course who
were now sending their kids
to school played a part in that as
well and this is a familiar story
in minority language context,
it's also a familiar story
in immigration context where parents
say here's the language of success,
this is my child's future,
I need to help them.
The teacher is telling me that
Corsican is holding them back.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to stop speaking Corsican to them
so that families also tried
to shift over to French.
More and less successfully because
some of them didn't know a lot
of French, so we got
a whole generation
of kids whose parents spoke to
each other in Corsican and spoke
to their generation in Corsican
and addressed them in French,
so there is a generation that
had a lot of passive competence,
but over time, over time that
passive competence also declines.
The other factor that contributed
to language shift from Corsican
to French was immigration
so immigration out.
Lots of Corsicans left the islands
so education actually did
provide the means for them
to escape what was largely a
difficult agro pastoral life
and economy and they left.
They got educated, they went
to the French continent,
they joined the colonial service and
in fact in the 1930's Corsicans made
up almost 30% of the colonial
service even though they represented
a very tiny fraction of
the population of France.
So they were very, very avid,
they took part very avidly
in the opportunities
that were offered to them
through mostly French government
work and through French.
So they moved away, they
moved off the island,
they lived in non-Corsican
speaking places,
they married other non-Corsican
speaking people, right,
and so then we have the mixed
marriages and the languages
of those households inevitably
shifted, went to French.
So French was both
ideologically imposed and dominant
and it was a very real ticket
to advancement and status.
So in World War, if we look at what
happens as we go forward in time,
one of the things that is not
happening is we're not seeing any
really any economic development.
There is sort of no industrial
revolution on Corsica.
There is no large scale farming.
The population, the active
population was very heavily affected
by losses in the First World War.
Migration out, migration
intensifies so we start
to see the mountainous interior
becoming increasingly depopulated
because people are no
longer wanting to do
that small scale farming
and shepherding.
This accelerates after World War
II, we have the Italian occupation,
of course it's a sight of
fierce resistance movement,
it's the first French
department to be liberated,
but it's also as we move to the
post-war period, we continue to see
that depopulation and
economic stagnation.
And now anybody who
wants to do anything,
if they want to get an
education there's no university,
they go to France, they go,
and now I'm using the terminology
people talk about, going to France,
even though Corsica
is part of France.
So if we fast forward a little
bit into more contemporary history
by the 1960's the population
had decreased from highs
of about 400,000 to
about half of that.
The first language of many children
had become French and what we see
in the 60's and 70's is sort
of following the general
social movements across Europe;
young Corsican intellectuals
mostly living in Paris
and some other places
on mainland France.
They contest the status of Corsica,
Corsican culture, Corsican language
on all levels, so political,
economic, cultural and linguistic.
So in the 70's we see the beginning
of the Corsican nationalist
movement, again you know in contact
with drawing inspiration from
other western European minority
nationalist movements,
the [inaudible]
and so forth, the Irish
and so forth.
So some of the outcomes of that,
1980 the University of Corsica opens
with 500 students, so now
it's about 4,000 to 5,000
so that makes it possible for
people to stay on the island
for a university education.
In 1982 Corsica becomes one
of the first regions of France
to enjoy a kind of
limited regional autonomy.
You know that French is a very
centralized place, with the election
of the first regional assembly
which got converted in 1991
to a regional collectivity
which is what it is today.
So when we look at this period and
we think about what's happening
in terms of language and
culture, this is a period
where people are now beginning
to understand language shift
which they had just taken for
granted, right, nobody was thinking
about these things, they accepted
that French was the
language you needed to learn.
They started to think about
Corsican language shift
as being experienced as loss.
It's something that we
had and we've lost it.
Even more, it's been
taken away from us.
So we have this kind of analysis,
again it's this kind of analysis
that we see in other regional
movements in France and elsewhere
in Europe of looking at the
French state as exercising a kind
of internal colonialism, saying
we are like the colonial subjects.
These are Corsicans whom many were
there when Algeria was liberated
and they're saying these
situations resemble each other;
these are post-colonial
after effects so we are
like the colonial subjects.
And in fact when I first went to
Corsica people that I talked to,
most sort of academics,
said if you want
to understand the Corsican
psyche you need
to read [foreign language
spoken]who wrote the book Black Skin
White Masks.
So they're saying we are alike
that kind of racialized minority.
This period then, the 70's
is this kind of key period
and Corsican people they refer
to it in Corsican but also
when speaking French, they call it,
talk about it as [foreign
language spoken] the 70's right,
but also as the [foreign
language spoken]
and [foreign language spoken] means
to reacquire obviously, right,
so it's this movement
that we see of cultural
and linguistic re-appropriation.
And it's a movement
that is intimately tied,
we see the intimate link
between linguistic, cultural
and political mobilization.
These are all tied together
and that's very important
for what happens next.
So what happens with language in the
[foreign language spoken] is we see,
we see activists turning their
attention to the Corsican language
and doing various kinds
of language planning.
So status planning,
incorporating Corsican into domains
that had previously been
occupied only by French,
so we're thinking the public,
the official education, right?
Corpus planning, corpus planning,
a codification of the language,
writing grammars, writing, there's
the first spelling manual that comes
out in 1971 and then
acquisition planning
which is teaching the
language to children.
So essentially we have planning
that is stepping in, right,
a sort of programmatic
action stepping in to teach,
to pick up where the
families have left off.
So the families no longer assuring
the transmission of Corsican
from one generation to the next,
so they're looking to policy
and education to do that.
So in, if we look at education,
you know, education is working both
on acquisition planning, so teaching
kids Corsican, but it's also working
at the level of status planning
because having the language
in education is a form of status.
It's a way of raising the
status and then the value
of Corsican among Corsican speakers.
It's starts out, the
sort of the history
of Corsican language education
begins more or less in 1975
when Corsican successfully
campaigned for the inclusion
of Corsican in the [foreign
language spoken], and this was a law
that in 1951 had permitted
the teaching
of [foreign language spoken]
and [foreign language spoken]
and [foreign language spoken] in
the schools an hour a week, right,
so very nominal but those had all
been called the regional languages
of France, so they were
allowed to be incorporated
into the national school system.
Corsican had been excluded
on the basis
that it was not a regional
language of France;
it was a dialect of Italian.
So 1975 they managed to get it
included and so Corsican starts
to be taught on this kind
of small scale basis.
The 80's and 90's see the
progressive institutionalization
and spread the generalization
of Corsican language education,
and in fact by the 90's Corsican
language education is an obligation
for the state which is very
interesting if you look
at French language policy.
That is all Corsican
schools are obligated
to provide Corsican language
instruction to all students;
however, students are not
obligated to take those courses.
So they can opt out.
In practice very few people opt out.
So essentially by the
90's we have mandatory
or institutionalized
Corsican language education.
In 1996 we begin a process of
having bilingual schools and tracks,
which again is significant
if you look
at the very monolingual
bias of French education.
And so the bilingual schools
and tracks that have now existed
for almost 20 years, they
started out in about four sites.
I spent a year in one of those
sites in the year 2000 with some
of the sort of first adopters
of the bilingual program
and in those bilingual schools and
tracks we have not just teaching
of Corsican but teaching through
Corsican so that children are taught
up to half the curriculum
through the Corsican language.
So they could learn math through
Corsican, they could learn history
through Corsican and
so forth and so on.
The other thing that starts
to happen when people talk
about the [foreign language
spoken] they're really also talking
about this kind of flourishing
of Corsican cultural production.
It's for a tiny place, you
know, so it's an island that has
about 300,000 people, so for a tiny
place there's a great deal that's
produced there; literary,
poetic, music that we're going
to be talking about, lots
of theater, storytellers,
and we start to see
sort of the emphasis
in the 70's is using Corsican
in genres that people recognize
as being valuable and high status.
So there was a big emphasis on
writing novels in Corsican, right,
to say here's this
formal kind of writing,
the recognized genre
we need to be in there.
We need to get Corsican
into the newspapers.
We need Corsican in the media.
So there's a bilingual radio station
called RCFM that's been broadcasting
with a great deal of Corsican
language programming ever
since 1982.
Small but interesting filmmaking
and theatrical production and all
of those things sort of started then
and have continued into the present.
So Corsica is a place that
one of the things that I guess
when I first went there the first
time I ever went was in the summer,
and there's an extraordinary amount
of cultural activity
that you can go to.
You can go to a concert, a
theater, a film, a debate,
you could go every single night,
every single day you could be
in a different part of
the arts, so it's a very,
very vibrant cultural scene.
So you've heard a little bit in the
first song you've heard a little bit
of the language and I just
want to take a little detour
to make an important point which
is that Corsican, you know,
as you've heard from the [foreign
language spoken] it's not mutually
comprehensible with French and
it's on a dialect continuum
with the varieties of Italian.
And I say varieties
because if we, you know,
Italian as a language
is extremely diverse
and has a very short
history of standardization.
So if you go to different
parts of Italy,
if you go [foreign language spoken]
or Sicily or Tuscany or Napoli,
you're going to hear lots of
different varieties of Italian.
And so if we, if we look
at it in that light,
Corsican is no more different
from standard Italian
than let's say Sicilian
or Neapolitan.
And in fact lots of, you know,
clearly if Corsica had remained part
of Italy, Corsican wouldn't
be considered a language,
it would be considered
a dialect of Italian,
so its language status is
essentially sort of dependent
on it having become part of France.
So I'll just read a couple
here, a few things here.
So what I've done is I've
put the Italian in red
and I've put the Corsican in green.
So there's this sentence that says
Father was this great, likable guy,
right, so I'll say it in Corsican,
[foreign language spoken].
And then in Italian it's
[foreign language spoken].
And you'll hear, and then
French, [foreign language spoken].
You'll see between the
Corsican and the Italian
that in Italian you hear
the consonants pretty much
as you see them on the page right,
whereas in Corsican you have
this process of softening
or consonant lenition, so that
when you get a consonant like ba,
in between two vowels, so [foreign
language spoken] you see the first
three words here, I'm pointing to it
but you can't see me
pointing to it, right?
So right there so now we have
this b is in between two vowels
so the ba becomes a wa, so
it's [foreign language spoken].
And then this ba here, which is
after a vowel and before an R,
which is sort of semi-vocalic,
it just drops out altogether.
So this was [foreign language
spoken], the va becomes a wa right?
So you have a phonological
process there which makes it,
if we're thinking about
how does it sound,
it does sound different
from Italian.
Can Italians understand Corsican?
Yes, quite a bit so when we try
to evaluate what is the mutual
inter-comprehensibility I don't
know, 60%, it's really hard to say.
A Corsican and an Italian
who are trying hard
to understand each other
are going to do very well.
Pretty much.
If they're not trying hard they
can pretend they don't understand.
I mean it's that kind of situation.
And so let's see, here we go, okay.
So here I want to talk about another
kind of relationship with French
and that has to do with domains
of use and status and attitudes.
So by the 1960's and that was
that turning point before the
[foreign language spoken], Corsican
and French existed in what we
call a diglossic relationship.
So you have the two
languages associated
with these compartmentalized,
they're separated,
they're opposed domains of use
and they're also opposed
domains of value.
So we can think about diglossia as
being a sort of real phenomenon.
It's on the ground, it's what people
are using those languages to do,
but it's also a symbolic,
ideological, ideation phenomenon
because then those
languages become associated
with the values of those domains.
So if you think about that scale or
the side of intimacy and solidarity,
so if you look at Corsican we
see these sort of intimacy thing,
the private right, the language
of the heart, the we code,
it's about us, it's the home,
it's informal, non-official,
voluntary right, so all of those
things have to do with solidarity.
Corsican has the higher value on the
solidarity scale, but with respect
to power, if we look over
on the French side there's a
clear hierarchy.
So French is the high language,
Corsican is the low language.
French is viewed as a language,
it's public, it's the language
of the head or the brain, it's the
they code, it's what people speak
in France, in school, in formal
official context, it's standardized
and it's also understood to
be imposed, it is imposed,
so we have all of these positions.
And those oppositions had a number
of significant consequences.
So first on the kind of psychosocial
level many Corsicans internalized
the stigma that was
attributed to the language.
So when I first arrived in
Corsica people said well why
on earth would you want to learn
a [foreign language spoken]?
That was one.
Why would you bother?
It's not worth anything.
Number two they said well
you can't really learn it
because it's not a language,
it doesn't have any grammar,
so it's just stuff, it's
just stuff that we do
and you can't learn
just stuff that we do.
Now these attitudes were significant
obstacles for language activists
because what they're trying
to do is they're trying
to teach the language right,
and so they in fact encountered,
when we think about minority
language movements we think
about this being grass roots or
popular, not really, not really,
certainly not in Corsica.
So for the most part the language
activism was relatively top
down pushed by a more academic sort
of elite and there was a lot of,
and there continues to be some
resistance to the promotion,
the planning of Corsican.
So I'm going to be talking about
this again in a moment but one,
you know, people would say how can
you, and this goes back to this sort
of imposed versus voluntary
distinction,
so at one point there were motions
that were brought to the assembly
of Corsica to make Corsican an
official language in the schools,
to make it obligatory, and
that motion never passed,
it failed, this was 1983.
It fails again in 1988.
And in the opposition you get
people saying how can you force me
to learn my mother tongue?
So we have this, you know, if
Corsica occupies that place,
it's the mother, it's the home, it's
the heart, then you can't put it
into an institution which
obliges people, an institution
which imposes anything right?
So we have this sort of
interesting resistance
to Corsican language planning,
but at the same time diglossia
also kind of protected Corsican.
It protected it in those social,
intimate domains and it also gave,
because we're going to be
thinking about artistic production,
it gave artistic production
in the language a boost.
So for example, people who very
seldom spoke Corsican would tell me
they could never write a
poem or a song in French.
It just wouldn't speak from the
heart, so they had to use Corsican.
And in fact, one storyteller
that I know,
who actually speaks a lot more
Corsican, but 20 years ago
when I first met her she didn't
very much, and she published a book
and she hired somebody
to translate her book,
which was Corsican folk tales that
she illustrated, she hired somebody
to do the Corsican translation.
So she wrote it in French
and she said the translation
reflects how I really feel.
This is how I got these stories.
I got them from my mother.
I can't produce them but they have
to be in Corsican to be authentic.
So you have this notion of
the language being the vehicle
for the authentic cultural self.
And the other thing is
that diglossia also gave,
that sort of opposition gave
Corsicans a certain amount
of distance from the
authority of French.
So, on the one hand they're
accepting it but if you think
about this set of binaries they
are mixed in their implications,
and this little song
which was composed
in the 1930's reflects some
of those mixed feelings.
And the song is written
about a returning son,
so the boy is coming
back from France, right,
and he's learned French and this
is your classic success story.
My boy comes home, right,
so he's coming home,
he's going to be dressed
nicely, he's succeeded,
he's got a good job somewhere.
The song is sung in the
voice of the mother,
so it's the mother telling other
people about her son coming back.
And what you end up seeing then is
you know the song satirizing the
pretentions of grandeur via
French that the mother expressed.
And I tried to find a recording
of this and you know how it is,
I spent about an hour on
YouTube, not out there okay.
So I will sing it to you.
So it goes
[ Singing in Foreign Language ]
Right so sort of, there you go.
That's my one contribution
to Corsican let's see,
cultural continuity of song.
So what we see then
in the revitalization movement is we
see tensions, right, we see tensions
at the level of identity.
There's an existential tension.
People are now with the
revitalization movement they are
highly valuing Corsican language
and culture but they've lost it.
So they feel, now they're feeling
alienated from forms of cultural
and linguistic heritage, and
so there's this question,
how do I reacquire, how
do it reacquire ownership
if I don't have full
linguistic competence?
How am I supposed to learn a
language that I'm supposed to have?
It ought to be my mother tongue.
So people are saying I'm
learning a mother tongue.
How do you do that?
Is the act of learning
itself de-authenticating?
And some of the results of that are
linguistic insecurity in Corsican,
so people who are afraid to
speak Corsican because they feel
that they won't speak well enough
that they'll be judged as coming
up short, and then
the other thing is
that if they don't speak Corsican
there's a kind of double bind here,
there's cultural insecurity.
That is if this is a key
component of cultural identity
and I can't speak it then I am then
rendered culturally potentially
inauthentic or lacking right?
So it's a difficult kind
of subject position.
And learning, if we look at
this, it's one of the things
that I've looked at over time,
is the way that learning
can be a problem of identity
and this is just a little lesson.
This is a language learning method
that was put out in the 1980's
and this was the lesson number
six so we're supposed to start it.
And so you can see it says
six lesson, lesson number six,
so you're supposed to repeat.
This is one of your audio,
visual things that
you're supposed to repeat.
Right after they say that
there's a space on the tape
and then you're supposed to say it.
Lesson number six, [foreign
language spoken], good Paul learn,
[foreign language spoken], and
soon you will know how to speak.
[Foreign language spoken] Good Paul,
learn and soon you
will know how to speak.
And here's the key thing,
[foreign language spoken].
It's not enough to be Corsican,
[foreign language spoken],
to know how to speak.
So the language learning method
is addressing head on right,
the notion that being
Corsican you sort
of have this natural
acquisition of language.
They're saying no, it's not enough
to be Corsican, you've got to go
through a language learning process,
but by making that explicit
they're showing that it's a problem,
they're trying to get those learners
over that hump, over
that difficulty.
So then some other tensions, once
language revitalization is under way
and you're teaching
it in the schools,
how do you reconcile these ideas
about the authentic speaker
with authority, with having Corsican
in a school where, you know,
you have homework, you have
papers, you have tests,
you get grades, it's
wrong, it's right.
That's a domain that nobody
had experienced Corsican.
So all the parents, parents
who sent their children
to school had never
experienced Corsican as something
that had rules, regulations,
norms, standards,
any kind of gatekeeping
associated with it,
and that's where you get the
relevance of that comment,
how can you force me to
learn my mother tongue.
And then how do you reconcile
tradition with new circumstances,
and the new circumstances are that
in the past, you know when we think
about Corsican speakers they
were largely monolingual
and then they learned French second.
They became bilingual
from a Corsican basis.
Today, right, we have
new bilinguals,
they're not mother tongue
speakers of Corsican,
and they are French dominant
speakers, so every child, yes,
every child on Corsica, whether
they're bilingual or not,
French is going to be
their strongest language.
That's the way it is.
Tradition, so traditional modes
of transmission, traditional modes
of expression with new media,
with new genres and new context
for understanding of identity, so
that's what we'll try to take a look
at as we look at some of
the expressive traditions
that we can find in Corsica today.
So one very big thing
I want to start talking
about is the musical [foreign
language spoken] and its past
and continuing importance as a
practice that played a huge role
in recruiting young
people as language learners
who might not have
otherwise taken that step.
So music, the music and language
are intimately connected.
And it's also been extraordinarily
important as a site of artistic
and cultural expression and as
well as political expression,
so Corsican music has also
been very politicized.
And here I need to say there's
a great deal more expertise
in ethnomusicology in the audience
than there is on this podium.
I am not an ethnomusicologist and
so I will not, you can tell me more
about the musical dimension of
this, and if you want to know more
about Corsican music, I do
highly recommend this book
by Caroline Bithell, Transported
by Song, very nice book,
which looks at Corsican music both
from an ethnomusicological
perspective and also
from a social historical
perspective.
She spent a lot of, she did
a lot of ethnographic work,
a lot of interviews with many,
many people, so very nice book.
So if you are disappointed with what
you learn from me, go to Caroline.
And what I've listed here is some
of the main traditional genres,
so [inaudible], lullabies
and folk songs,
and I'm going to focus a little bit
more on the polyphonic tradition
because of its importance
as a practice.
There are probably over
50 groups singing today
and again just remember the
small size of this island,
so it's very large, and not just
as a kind of practice but also
because of its importance as
a symbol of Corsican cultural.
Bithell notes in her book
and she's absolutely right.
She says especially in
the summer not a day goes
by when you can't open the newspaper
and read something about polyphony.
There's either a concert or a
report on a concert or a conference
or something like that, so
it's very, very prominent
in the Corsican cultural scene.
So the polyphonic tradition
includes a variety
of genres including
sacred and religious songs.
There is a sung Corsican mass, for
example, there are funeral songs.
There's the [foreign
language spoken].
Those were kind of exchanges of
verses between men and women,
a practice which is
largely, I haven't found much
of that happening anymore
and nor had Bithell,
but it's the [foreign language
spoken] particular style
of polyphony that you'll see
in a number of guises in some
of the following clips that
is the most prominent today.
So what is it as a form?
So it's based on a
group of three voices.
There's [foreign language spoken]
which means literally the second,
but the second voice is this sort
of middle range in terms of pitch
but the second is the person
who is actually first.
They initiate the musical phrase.
They're followed by [foreign
language spoken] the bass,
with the higher [foreign
language spoken] providing,
I guess decoration.
I don't have the right
language, you know,
you can provide that for yourself.
So what you see is
then you have this kind
of staggering of the voices.
So the [foreign language spoken]
and the [foreign language
spoken] lag behind,
and this is important
for a number of reasons.
One of them is that it's something
that permits improvisation.
So there's a kind of loose, large,
shared repertoire of poetry,
if you will, of lines, right,
of phrases that singers share.
But they can also, but
using those materials
from that repertoire
they can also improvise.
This allows the improvisation
because when the [foreign language
spoken] starts then people go oh,
okay, now I know what he's
doing and then they come in,
so it makes improvisation possible.
And it's also, I think,
really from my perspective key
because it also permits learning.
In other words you have, you
have a practice in which,
if you have just three voices but
you have other people in the group,
they are chiming in in a way that
allows, I'm not sure quite how
to express again, I'm probably
missing a musical vocabulary here,
but there's a kind of
apprenticeship that you have here
in the very structure of the
song, and that's important
because these groups form and they
recruit lots of initially young men.
And those young men become
apprentices, musical apprentices.
They are now using Corsican to
sing, and over time they become more
and more comfortable with Corsican
and that was a root for many
of these young men
to become speakers.
So they were not speakers before
they started this practice
and this gave them the base,
this set, this repertoire
of things you know how to pronounce.
You can just say them.
They're yours right?
Now we think about how do
you make something yours.
They sing it to be theirs,
right, which is less problematic
than speaking it to be theirs.
So the groups are also,
they can range,
they're very flexible in size.
They range from very
small to very large
and I'll just play you a fairly
just sort of traditional exemplar
of the [foreign language spoken].
So there's the [foreign
language spoken].
[ Music ]
And you'll see them here doing
this cupping the hand over the ear
which is sort of explained
as you know not listening
to the person next to you
so you can do your part,
but the guy on the other, I mean
he's got the wrong ear right?
So it is a very, very sort of,
it's a very cultural gestures
to the extent that I've been in
schools where kids sing songs
and they're just singing,
they're not singing the
[foreign language spoken]
and they'll stand there
and they'll go like that.
That's what you do when
you sing right, so yeah.
So this was a practice that
was largely extinguished
by the late 50's.
People weren't going it
anymore, it was considered,
it was just considered, it was
denigrated cultural capital.
People didn't want to say that
hey were singers and it was,
had a lot of strong serious content,
so when it was revitalized it was
partly that that made it attractive,
right, so that it's culturally
anchored, it's about serious things,
it became used then to both
express traditional content and also
to sing sort of engaged
political songs, right,
so the genre lent itself to that.
And the last little point there,
the last bullet point is the thing
that I really already
talked about is
that these groups then became
communities of practice
with a shared, when we think
about the notion of a community
of practice as saying people who
come together around a shared focus,
goal or practice, so you're united
in something that they want to do
and produce and create, which is
something other than language,
so the goal is this other activity
and language follows along with it,
right, so that was again
as I mentioned very important
especially for young men.
This is one of the founding groups,
it's called [foreign language
spoken] the Corsican People Sings
and they began in the 70's.
This group which had a very
large and fluid membership,
lots of contemporary groups
are sort of off shoots from it,
so that people broke off and
then founded other groups.
So this is sort of the
ancestral group, if you will,
so you can almost draw
a genealogy chart
down from this group called [foreign
language spoken], and they're still
out there, they're still on
the scene and performing.
And they have a dual focus on
very traditional themes as well
as some highly politicized ones
and here's where that connection
between language, politics
and music is there.
Most of the members of [foreign
language spoken] would be Corsican
nationalists, some of them
have been in imprisoned
for nationalist political
activities,
but politics also includes
cultural politics and that's
like this particular song, which is
about saving the Corsican language.
And so you can see in the lyrics
some of the things I've mentioned.
There's the references to stigma and
shame as well as the central role
of language in the nationalist
imagination of what it means
to belong to the Corsican people,
so I'll give you a
little taste of this one.
So this song is called
Speak, To Speak.
[ Music ]
So what's interesting about this
is again, I think this is a sort
of interesting genre
in its own right,
which is the YouTube compilations of
the PowerPoint compilations of songs
and what people set them too,
what imagery they set them to.
So the first one you
saw was, you know,
had somebody's vacation
pictures in it right?
This one is taking this song,
which is a relatively old song,
and the images behind it
are images that relate
to contemporary language
planning activities.
So for example, right here, so
here we see kids being taught.
This one right here, the
woman who is featured
on that poster is a Romanian
weather presenter who,
so she does the weather, she's
the meteorologist in Corsica
on the regional channel
and the poster says what
level are you at in Corsican?
So she's taking the Corsican
language test which is the levels
of the European framework,
James what is it?
European framework, European
reference, anyway it's, yeah,
so you can get from A1, there
are levels, there are six levels.
And Marina Riebaldy [assumed
spelling] is her name and she's
at level B1, right, so
she's kind of the face
of you know saying you can learn,
you too can learn Corsican.
And this is a sticker that the
Corsican regional assembly's
language office has distributed
widely and it says here,
speak Corsican; go ahead
and speak Corsican.
So you're supposed to put that on
your window or your business to say
that you're a Corsican
speaking place,
so these are modern forms
of language planning.
Polyphony is very largely,
almost exclusively a male genre
so traditionally it was only men.
When people first started renewing
the tradition it was exclusively
male, but very soon after that
it was, been taken up by women,
starting in the 70's, and
actually two women in particular
so these are the founding mothers
if you will of female women
and polyphony, [foreign language
spoken], those who are figures,
so one of them is in
that album cover there.
So they were, they're currently,
they're now in their 50's,
they were the first
apprentices of that generation
of the [foreign language spoken],
the [foreign language spoken] people
who came, the sort of intellectuals
who started the movement
in the 70's, so they were high
school students at the time
and as very young women they formed
a group called [foreign language
spoken], the Two Patricia's.
In the late 1980's they
collaborated with a number
of international artists, [foreign
language spoken] from Cameroon,
[foreign language spoken]
from India,
[foreign language spoken]
Algerian French arranger,
in a group that they called
the New Corsican Polyphonies
and that's what you see there,
that's a kind of album cover
to that, where they
were blending Corsican,
Indian and North African sounds,
so I'll give you a
little listen to that.
[ Music ]
Okay, oh sorry, I've skipped ahead.
And so what we see there, they also
formed another all women group,
[foreign language spoken],
and another one,
[foreign language spoken],
which means,
the first one means Island
Women and the Sun Women,
and so the genre has been a space
for cultural innovation as well
as a movement away from a
solely kind of insular approach
to musical tradition and this
movement toward a more Mediterranean
and global framework.
And that global framework,
this sort of world music stage,
is epitomized by the work
of [foreign language spoken]
that you heard right
at the beginning.
They're the most exported Corsican
group, they tour all over the world,
they have a devoted international
fan base, and they were the sons
of one of the last remaining singers
of the [foreign language
spoken] in the 50's and 60's.
Started out with a very
traditional repertoire but moved
into this new musical
terrain in the 1980's.
And in the first clip I'm going
to show you here you'll
see them participate,
at least I hope you'll see them;
this doesn't seem to
be, ah, okay, gosh.
So this looks like I am a victim
of having sound files removed
from my PowerPoint and maybe
I didn't get this one back in.
The top one I was going to
show you was, I'll try and see
if I can retrieve it, but it's
the group participating in a kind
of minority language song circuit,
so they're at a Celtic festival,
and so they're doing something
relatively traditional.
And then the bottom one is a video
that they produced with Sting
in the 1980's and it's
[foreign language spoken],
who's the lead singer, singing with
Sting in his song Fields of Gold
so there's a Corsican
version of that.
Let me just see if I can find
that for you really quickly.
Sorry about this.
All of my files were stripped
off and so we'll go here.
Okay. So you see [foreign
language spoken] doing a very long,
dramatic kind of, he's resonating.
[ Foreign Language Spoken ]
Okay so he evokes his village roots
and then he says we
have shared experiences,
our music is doing
the same thing right?
[ Foreign Language Spoken ]
And he says we're going to
sit down at the same table.
Okay sorry, it's kind of long.
[ Music ]
So there they're very much
doing, being Corsican right?
[ Music ]
See a very different kind
of thing going on there.
So lyrics and visuals completely
disconnected from anything to do
with Corsica so they're
positioning Corsican music as,
and Corsican voices as
being international.
Okay. So I'm a little mindful, I
guess we started a couple minutes,
how much time do I have left?
Okay, so I'm just going to
talk about one other thing.
I'm going to turn a
little bit more to an area
in which I have more expertise,
which is looking at what happens
in schools, so I've done a lot
of work inside bilingual schools.
And looking at in particular
how elements
from the oral tradition are being
taught to new speakers, to children,
and the extent to which
they're treating them
as potentially poets,
right, as creators.
And so we're thinking about some
of these same questions which is,
you know, what happens when
you take old forms of cultural
and linguistic creative practice,
what happens when you
put them in a new space.
What happens when they're
re-contextualized
as forms of school learning?
And then to what extent do these
new uses of Corsican language
and expressive culture change
people's ideas about what it means
to be a legitimate speaker.
So we're thinking, you know,
when a minority language is taught
it's no longer the same thing
as it used to be.
The speakers are different
kinds of speakers,
so how do these practices
make that happen.
And potentially what kinds of
new meanings attach to Corsican,
what kinds of new ways of
thinking about a Corsican community
of practice might be brought into
play by these kinds of activities?
So what I want to talk to you
about then is another genre,
it's another oral genre called the
[foreign language spoken], the call
and response, and it's a traditional
improvisation poetic joust.
So what happens is is that
you have the first poet
and he launches a verse, he
sings a verse, and it has these,
you can see on the left hand side
it has six lines with eight feet
and a variety of allowable
rhyme schemes.
These are song poems and
you'll hear them in a moment.
The melody or the [foreign language
spoken] varies by region or poet
so people can listen to
the sounds and say I know
where that guy is from, he's
from the [foreign language
spoken] region for example.
So the first person sings
and the second person has
to respond immediately.
Now the best, the very best is if
you can actually take the last line
that the person just sang to
you, pick it up, repeat it,
use that rhyme and then continue
on responding to the theme.
And the idea is this is a kind of,
it's joking, it's one upsmanship,
you're trying to be clever, you're
trying to put the other person down
and be clever with language right?
So the key is very humorous and they
call it [foreign language spoken],
a [foreign language
spoken] is the way
that they talk about it in Corsican.
So here is, when we think about how
the [foreign language spoken] were
traditionally sung, usually in
places very kind of informal,
it could happen spontaneously,
this is in fact a very
traditional context, it's a cafe,
bar at a festival something, or
something, and the person you see
on the right is a teacher [foreign
language spoken] who I worked
with in 2011, 2012 who's one
of the youngest practitioners
of this genre.
So here he is doing
this kind of singing
in a traditional kind of location.
[ Singing ]
Okay, so you can see how it works.
He's challenging the other guy, the
older guy, that guy's coming back
at him so it'll be that pair,
and then at a given moment
when they're kind of
out of things to say
to each other then someone else,
the man in the front there he's a
blind poet, and so he may jump in
and address one of those two
or somebody else who's there.
So it's a kind of loosely structured
set of challenges and responses.
Because the [foreign language
spoken] have also become a target
for revitalization
they've also moved
into non-traditional context
more formalized gatherings
with performers and
a paying audience,
and this was actually an outgrowth
of what happened in the 1980's,
and again like the
[foreign language spoken],
the [foreign language
spoken] almost died out.
There were very few practitioners,
they were scattered all
over the place, and so when Tony
[foreign language spoken] kind
of key cultural activist decided
to try and bring this back he had
to assemble people all in one place.
So he sort of, he basically
brought a bunch of old guys
to one spot right, and said okay
we're going to learn how to do this.
So these are the kinds of events
that we still have taking place.
This was an event that I attended
and you can see it's a pretty
big venue and all the guys
around the table are
poets and they're singing
and you've got the audience in
the back and around the side.
[ Singing ]
You can see the same
gesture on the ear.
[ Singing ]
And a lot of these
poets have nicknames.
That guy's called [foreign language
spoken], the Nightingale, right.
The genres also moved
into new media.
So originally it was all
oral improvisational and so
in the 90's it moved
online and into writing.
So you can see discussion boards
like the one at the bottom here
where we've got, this
is a screen shot.
These discussion boards, Corsican
language discussion boards,
have been new sites
for apprenticeship.
So this guy in the picture, a
senior member, you can see him,
he puts up some versus in
the [foreign language spoken]
and then he engages in a
kind of pedagogical discourse
and he says oh, this is [foreign
language spoken] with simple things
and then he says now it's
your turn to respond,
and see he'll be required to look
for new words to respond back.
It's beautiful work right?
So he's encouraging
people to take part.
And this was in fact how
that young man that you say,
[foreign language spoken], learned.
So he was participating
on these discussion boards
and he started doing this written
[foreign language spoken] right?
As he got better at it, he, okay.
As he got better at it, he and other
people online began to shorten;
they sort of set each
other time limits
so that it would be more quick.
So they'd say okay somebody's
going to do it, you've got a minute
to come back or you've got
five minutes to come back.
They progressively
shortened the time.
So they got to the point where
they were doing very quick back
and forth written [foreign
language spoken].
Then one day, so this tells
the story of going to one
of these big events and one
of the older guys turns to him
and says hey, [foreign
language spoken], his last name,
I hear you've been doing a lot of
[foreign language spoken] online.
Let's see if you've got the stuff.
Come on up.
And so that was, so he says I wasn't
very good but that was the start,
so now he participates
fully in this practice.
I've got very little time left and
I'll just give you a little glimpse
of the project that
[foreign language spoken]
and I participated in, and he
had been wanting for a long time
to set up, he's a bilingual
teacher so he had this classroom,
and he wanted to set up a
relationship between his school
and another school in the south
of the island because,
here's the, let's see.
I'll show you the two places.
So his school was right
here in a very,
you can see it's a very
remote, mountainous village,
and he knew a woman called
Sonya [foreign language spoken]
who was teaching in
[foreign language spoken],
the city to the south, and
her husband was also a poet,
so they were interested
in doing a kind
of [foreign language
spoken] exchange.
So when I got there, they had never
managed to set this up and so I sort
of served as the go between, and
I was living in the middle there
so I'd drive over here, I
would record their work,
I would then drive to [foreign
language spoken] the next week,
I'd play it to the kids down there,
those kids would record a response,
I'd drive back over
here, so I was sort
of doing a lot of driving right?
And so let's see what can we, so
one of the things that we can see is
that the work that the,
okay, go back to this;
sorry I'm jumping around here.
Okay. And here you can take
a look at your handout.
And what we see is that the
process, the old process
where people were learning
as oral apprentices has been
replaced by a written process.
And the teacher what he would
do is he would launch a call,
he would sing one of
those first versus
and then he would have the students
collaboratively improvise a response
to it that would get written on
the board, it would get adjusted
and then when they were finished
with it they would
then sing it out loud.
So we're saying this is kind
of a pedagogical process,
it's not like the [foreign
language spoken] in place
but it retains a number
of important features,
and one is it retains the kind
of spirit of the joust right?
I'm going to show you
just one example here.
It's not the example that
they did with the other school
but it's one that he did with them.
And what had happened was is that
their English language teacher,
who came once a week to the school,
had gotten there and she found
that the children had not,
they weren't prepared.
They hadn't done their homework.
So she got pretty annoyed.
She was pretty mild mannered but
she got pretty annoyed that time,
and after she left he turned to
them and that's what he sang,
he sang that verse, and he said
for what you've done today
you have no reason to be proud
because you forgot to do
your homework and I've come
to the conclusion that
you're donkeys right?
So it's a real criticism but
it's also in a humorous key.
And then what you see on the back
of your, or what you see well
on the front or the
back, the back of your,
where you have a transcript,
is you see the process
where the kids engage, they're going
back and forth with him to come
up with a verse in response.
And they're favorite verse
was this one and they said,
and that's what you see them
working on in that transcript.
You're the teacher,
we're the students.
If there's too much homework
our brains will explode.
They love that, the exploding
brains, and we're going
to change schools, we'll go down
to [foreign language spoken].
And then he comes back and says
well if you go down there I'm going
to have me a big old party on top
of that mountain over there right?
So there's that back and forth.
And I'll just give you one
little glimpse of the kids
and then we'll stop and
we'll talk a little bit,
I'll leave some room for questions.
So here's his little classroom
and this is essentially the
transcript you see on the back.
And so that's [foreign language
spoken] and she's got an idea.
And now he's counting out
the syllables, do, do, do.
You have the right one?
He says oh it's the
brain, that's a good idea.
They're counting the
syllables on their fingers
to make sure they get
the right ones.
[ Foreign Language Spoken ]
Then she says we're going
to close the windows.
He says well, that's
not really that great,
but he says now I heard something
that [foreign language spoken] said,
it was funny and it worked.
[ Foreign Language Spoken ]
Okay now we'll skip
ahead and just hear,
let you here the children
singing it.
Let's see.
I'll just go ahead to another event.
[ Singing ]
Okay so that was the, that
was kind of the culmination
of the project between
the two classes.
So they exchanged poetry over
a period of a couple of months
and then we set up a meeting at the
Museum of Corsica and then that was,
they sang their verses
to each other.
So one school would
sing their verse,
the other school would sing
their verse back and forth.
And so some of the
things that I said
about the [foreign language
spoken] also apply here,
which is that by going through
this practice these children were
incorporated, pedagogically
into a kind
of expert community of practice.
Their teacher, his connections
with other poets, this encounter,
they also had some, the museum we
also brought in some of the poets
that were on this sort of circuit
and they did a live performance.
They followed up, they
participated in a poetry festival,
both of these schools
in different places
and in the poetry festival
they were really,
they were very attentive
listeners, they visited some houses
of previous poets and they said we
liked it because we're poets too.
So there's a way in which I think
this particular kind of practice,
because it provides them a very
structured, heavily scaffolded venue
for real creation and real exchange,
and so then that makes Corsican
into not just a language that they
learn at school, but a language
that they use to participate
in something meaningful
out in the society.
Okay so I'll stop there,
thanks for your attention
and I'll answer any questions.
[ Applause ]
>> We're a little tight on time
but maybe take one or two questions
and then if people want to stay.
>> Dr. Alexandra Jaffe: Sure.
>> I'm curious about how it
was and why it was from the end
of the very centralized [inaudible]
that they allowed [inaudible].
And also how do all the
legislation and [inaudible].
>> Dr. Alexandra Jaffe: That
has, okay, so and by the,
it happened you're
talking about the schools.
Stand behind the microphone, yeah,
yeah, so your question is how,
well some dimensions of revival
are not, you don't need the state
to either do it or not do it.
The most important one
is really the school.
And so you see, you know, you
have a kind of conjuncture
of gestures towards decentralization
of various kinds, right?
It is the fact that we have, that
they allowed bilingual schooling
for example starting in 1996;
I'm still asking that question.
You know how, and to answer
that question you'd have to,
you'd have to be able to trace
through the kinds of arguments
that took place within
the ministry of education
which I don't have access to.
The cynical, the cynical perspective
that some Corsicans would have is
that this was a way of
managing diversity and that,
and of containing it and saying okay
yes you can do this in the school
and then maybe you'll stop blowing
things up and making trouble.
And then the European Union, yes,
because the Council of Europe
and the Council of Europe and
the language portion of that,
a lot of the language of the Council
of Europe regarding plural lingual
citizenship, regarding and that sort
of European citizenship being based
on being a plural lingual person,
has worked its way into the
most recent Corsican language
planning legislation.
The last two, the last five
year plan is there's a lot
of direct language from that.
So that's also shifting the way
that Corsican is conceptualized.
It's not just being a minority
language that matters here
but as being a minority language
that makes us better European
citizens because we are bi
or plural lingual citizens and
with our Corsican we are able
to connect with, we are able to
have, sort of have links with other,
with Italians, with Portuguese,
with Catalonians and so forth.
So that has shifted, has
been an interesting shift.
>> Okay one more quick question
and then I'm afraid I'll have to.
>> Are there any initiatives [low
audio] reach out with [low audio].
So that they can learn Corsican
through bilingual that is Spanish
to Corsican or [inaudible].
>> Dr. Alexandra Jaffe:
That would be,
I mean that would be a
really interesting thing.
The language learning part
of that has not happened.
The reaching out has happened
primarily through, they've brought
in student in particular
architectural students
from Puerto Rico of Corsican
origin and there have been a number
of masters and PhD level
studies of Corsican architecture,
in particular on the cape,
the peninsula of Corsica
where there's a lot of, it's sort
of the architecture that comes
from out and return migration so.
Yes absolutely and that's
where a lot of people came
from that went to Puerto Rico.
Ah okay, yeah, but I
don't think that those,
I mean that would be a really
interesting idea because looking
at Spanish Corsican
inter-comprehension it's completely
doable, but I haven't
seen any of that.
I haven't seen any of that.
You'll have to initiate it.
>> I'm sorry to cut off
questions but I wanted
to thank Professor Jaffe for
coming and for a great talk.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.