[Intro music]
Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello, and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Patrick Heinrich. Patrick Heinrich is a professor at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He received his Masters degree in Linguistics and Japanese Studies in 1998 from Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. He completed his PhD in Japanese Studies in 2002 at Duisburg University. He is a sociolinguist who has worked extensively in the Ryukyuan archipelago, and has written many publications on language ideology, language shift, language reclamation, language planning and policy, and language and well-being. Along with Shinsho Miyara and Michinori Shimoji, he is the co-editor of the Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages (2015). He is also co-editor of Language Crisis in the Ryukyus (2014), along with Mark Anderson.
For listeners who are not familiar with Ryukyuan languages, they are the languages spoken in the Ryukyuan archipelago. The largest Ryukyuan island is Okinawa, which most people are familiar with. Ryukyuan languages are distinct languages from Japanese, and it is unknown how many Ryukyuan languages there are, but there are at least six: Amami, the language I work with; Kunigami; Uchinaguchi, which is spoken in Okinawa; Miyako; Dunan, or Yonaguni; and Yaeyama. Within these six, there are many dialects, but all Ryukyuan varieties are endangered, and the majority of speakers are elderly. Further, the current documentation is considered fragmentary at best, according to UNESCO’s 2003 Language Endangerment and Vitality Assessment Tool. There are, however, several revitalization efforts and some new speakers who are reclaiming their heritage languages. Madoka Hammine, friend of the pod from Episode 6, has done a lot of work with new speakers, and I’ll link her ResearchGate in the show notes if you want to learn more about Madoka’s work. Patrick is a longtime mentor of mine. I greatly look up to him, and I’m so thrilled to have him on the pod today to share some of his expertise and his stories from the field.
In this interview, Patrick shares his thoughts on language revitalization in the Ryukyus and why Ryukyuan languages should be unmarked and used in all domains. Patrick also discusses his work on the connection between language and well-being, and how maintaining a language is not just something that is hip or fashionable, but rather maintaining a minority language can have far-reaching benefits on community welfare.
MTB: Hi, Patrick, how are you?
Patrick Heinrich: Hi, Martha. I’m fine. How are you?
MTB: Yeah, really good. Thank you. Thank you for taking time for Field Notes. So, to start, the first thing I’d like to ask you is, how did you first become interested in linguistics?
Patrick Heinrich: Well, it was never really planned, I guess, but there were lots of events that resulted in me becoming a linguist. The first thing is that I actually grew up being bilingual. So, my mother’s French, my father’s German, and we spoke French in the family. And I grew up in the early ’70s, so that was not a big thing, being bilingual. Nobody really knew it because it was in the family. But I guess because I was always often going to France on summer vacation, and everything was different there, right? Speaking French. So, there was some interest, I think, in language early on. And then I actually traveled for two years before I went to university. So, I went to China, I went to Japan, I worked in Hong Kong for a while, and started speaking English with friends, and picked up a few Chinese phrases, a bit of Japanese back then. And when I decided that I should finally enroll in university, I enrolled in a course which was called English Philology, and we studied literature, language history, and also linguistics for the first two years. And after two years, we had to specialize. And, you know, in these first two years, all these introductory courses, I actually liked linguistics best, to my surprise, because I thought, you know, “Oh, maybe literature is something that you’re interested in.”
And I had also started to teach German to Japanese back then as a student job. And I thought, “Oh, it would be helpful if you knew a bit more about language than just being able to speak German and, you know, sort of correct them on that basis. It would be good if I would understand why they make this mistake or how you could explain certain things.”
MTB: So, your first degree was in philology, is that right?
Patrick Heinrich: Yes. I’m actually not a scholar of Japanese studies. So, I’m trained in English philology, and I specialized early on in pragmatics and English as a student. But I studied as another subject, Japanese history, and they made me study Japanese there. So, I never wanted to learn Japanese. They just said, “Well, if you’re there, you have to learn Japanese.” And since I learned Japanese by accident, the linguistics professors got interested in me. They would also point out, “Patrick, how’s that in Japanese?” And so, I started doing little contrastive papers, assignments, where I would look at, I remember, like Middle English relative clauses and Japanese ren’youkei constructions was one thing I looked at. So, yeah, by chance, really.
MTB: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that before, that you started with philology. That’s really interesting. So, then how did you end up in the Ryukyus, working in Ryukyus?
Patrick Heinrich: That took… actually, rather late. So, I guess, from my work, the work on the Ryukyus is most commonly known, maybe, also because I’ve written a lot on the Ryukyus, but I actually entered the field quite late. That is, I had done a PhD thesis, which had nothing on the Ryukyus, and I was defending that thesis, and on my committee was Professor Kreiner. Professor Kreiner is an Austrian ethnographer who has done very, very important work on Amami. So, he’s been to Koniya and Kakeroma and all these places. I did not know that. He was just in the commission, and we were discussing language modernization, standardization, these kind of things on which I had worked. And he asked me, “How about the Ryukyus?” And I had no idea about the Ryukyus. I just gave some vague answer saying, “Yeah, you know, the peripheries, usually standardization,” and so on and so forth. But when it was over… And he was happy with that answer, but when it was over, I thought, “Oh, my God. You don’t know anything about the Ryukyus.” And since I had a PhD degree in my pocket, the first thing I did is apply for funds to go to the Ryukyus and to learn something about it. So, that was the first little project after my dissertation. So I got a grant, and I went for three months to the University of the Ryukyus and Okinawa University. And what I did is just sit in the library, and I’ve read everything on the Ryukyuan languages in that summer. That was really excellent preparation. And back then, there was much less information than there is out today, so you could actually do it in three months. And as an effect of reading for three months, I figured out that some things don’t go together very nicely, and that they require a better explanation.
MTB: Wow. So, really, just because of this one person who was at your PhD defense, and one comment that he made, it’s affected the entire trajectory of your research life.
Patrick Heinrich: Yes. And I must take credit that the question… You know, I mean, I could have brushed it off and said, “Oh, that was that old ethnographer coming with his Ryukyus stuff.”
MTB: Yeah.
Patrick Heinrich: I generally thought, “You should know something about the Ryukyus. You should not brush it off that easily.” And so, I’m very proud of myself that this one question — which, it was like a 45-second thing; it was no big deal in the discussion, and Professor Kreiner himself does not remember it anymore — that I thought like, “Look, you should know stuff. You have a PhD. There is a question there. You fooled the good old man, right? You just said something, but actually, you were ignorant.” And I thought, “This should not go. You’re privileged now,” and I was employed at the university. I was working in Germany. There’s really enough research funds there. So, I thought, “Ask for research funds. Go there and learn to give the proper answer.”
MTB: Okay. So, you went to University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa University, and you studied for one summer, read everything. And then from there, did you start working with Uchinaguchi speakers? What was the first language that you did fieldwork on in that area?
Patrick Heinrich: No, in the first year, I only read. And I learned about the existence of these languages. I had just a vague idea that there’s Ryukyuan, and I thought it’s just one language and a few dialects. So, I learned how complex the situation is. And I also remember that in that first summer — I was there for three full months — I did not hear a single word of Ryukyuan. So, since I read something, of course, I came across data and transcriptions, and there were already some textbooks out then, but I’ve never heard anyone utter a word. And the second last day of my stay at Ryukyu University, Professor Karimata, who was looking after me at the University of the Ryukyus, said, “Oh, you should actually speak to Professor Miyara because he’s trying to revitalize the language.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So, I knocked at his door, I talked to him, and we talked for many hours. And I found it so interesting that… because there was, of course, no literature on language revitalization. There basically was no language revitalization happening back then. And Professor Miyara actually scolded me for having just sat in the library and having just studied for three months. And he says, “You know, that’s not what you should do. You should do a research project. You’re a sociolinguist, and we do not have sociolinguists here,” because he figured out while we were talking that I knew a few things about language endangerment, language revitalization. And since he… He really scolded me, and I said, “Look, I’ll write a second application, and I’ll come back next year, and we’ll do a project together.” And so, in 2004, I returned, and I did research into the language vitality of Okinawa and of Miyako-jima at that point. And the results we obtained were so promising. Then the following year, I went to Amami, to Ishigaki, and to Yonaguni. And that data then found its entry in the UNESCO atlas of the languages in danger of disappearance. So, it was somehow a missing piece that I could provide to say, “Look, there’s at least five languages, and this is the state of endangerment.” So, it’s more serious than people have thought.
MTB: Can we talk a bit about your fieldwork biography? You’ve worked with so many in the Ryukyus. You’ve worked with so many different languages. So, lately, I think you’ve been working a lot with Yonaguni.
Patrick Heinrich: Yes.
MTB: I’m wondering, where was the starting point, and what have you been focusing on? Like, what was the evolution of your fieldwork in Ryukyus?
Patrick Heinrich: Well, to start with, that little project that I started with Professor Miyara brought me across the entire Ryukyus, which I think was very unusual. Because usually people would do, or nowadays, would do a PhD project, they would zoom in on one language, one variety, which already is difficult enough. So, I had the chance of traveling the Ryukyus various times, because after questionnaire surveys, I returned again the next year and did interviews with people about language endangerment, language in the family. And as an effect of that, I understood that the weakest language, the most endangered language is that of Yonaguni. And so, I developed, naturally, an interest in Yonaguni. And I then wrote a larger project for which I went to the University of the Ryukyus for two years from 2008 to 2010, where I looked into the language ecology of Yonaguni. So, I was interested there, not just in Dunan, the language of Yonaguni, but in the fact that this is a bilingual society and that people have different command of different languages. So, I was not happy to pretend that here we have an endangered language speaker and assuming that he doesn’t speak the dominant language or that the dominant language would not interfere into their Dunan. So, I did not want to be part of this data cleaning, really, what it is. Right? And it also has an essentialist bias to present them as the true, as the authentic Yonaguni people. I thought this would be a disservice for the people themselves to be presented with such an image of themselves that they could themselves never fulfill. So, I thought it would be much better to be realistic, like, you know, saying, “Okay, they have… even so-called non-speakers, they know words, they know tokens, they know fixed expressions, and they use them, and these expressions do something in interaction.” And I had also learned that on Yonaguni Island — which is very small; it’s just 14 kilometers on 6, 7 kilometers, and there’s only 1,500 people living there — that there’s a third language there, namely Okinawan. So, they had, in one of the settlements, they had migrants from Okinawa who engaged in fishing. And I worked, for instance, with one guy called Tamashiro, who had been a fisherman for all his life, and he spoke three languages, but he was not aware of that. He spoke Japanese, Okinawan, and Dunan, but he thought he’s just like a fisherman from Yonaguni who switches from one way of speaking between one friend to another. Yeah, this was a bit… the things that I looked in. And I’m still trying to work on Yonaguni. It’s just, you know, time is always the problem.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I like the inclusion of the non-speakers — or, like, “non-speakers,” quote-unquote — and semi-speakers in the community. This is something I also did in my project, probably inspired by you, actually. And Mark Anderson used this phrase that I’ve since adopted in my research called “lexical touchstones.”
Patrick Heinrich: Yes.
MTB: And I think that’s a really important piece of the community in the Ryukyus, where even people who would say that they don’t speak the local language, they still use these lexical touchstones, and they tie them to their community, and they use them to express solidarity or localness or intimacy. And it’s a really important piece of their repertoire. And also that part about people not realizing that they speak multiple languages, this is something I’ve also heard from Madoka Hammine, that when she went to university in Tokyo, she realized, “Oh, my family has their own language that I just never noticed.” So I think it’s a really common experience.
Patrick Heinrich: One thing that I’ve learned, and I think I’ve learned it from John Maher, the sociolinguist from Christian University in Tokyo, is that we as researchers should not discourage people whom we study. We should not say, “Oh, that’s very little Okinawan,” or, “That’s very little Amamian,” or whatever it is, but to say, “Oh, there’s something there.” And, for instance, something which is vastly under-evaluated is the passive bilingualness of an entire generation in the Ryukyus. Hundreds of thousands of people are able to understand the language, and this is already such a skill on which one can so easily build if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement, and if somebody actually tells them, “That’s not little. That is not little…”
MTB: And it has value.
Patrick Heinrich: It has value, yes. And I know personally people who’ve been told that and who then learned the language. Arakaki Tomoko is very open about that, so I can give her name. There’s my friend Tsukahara, Professor Tsukahara from Kyoto University, who said exactly these words. “Oh, my God, but you understand. That’s not little.” And then she finally took the courage, after years, to say, “I should learn it. I should sit down and learn it. And I should confront also my limits.” Because having been told that she knows something made it easier for her to say, “But this, I don’t know yet.” And otherwise, I mean, we very often do that even if we learn a second language. Right? One tries to come across as more fluent than one really is. And so, language learning requires, to some extent, also to stop that and to say, “Can you repeat it? Can you explain that? I didn’t understand that.” And so, she was able to take that step, and today she speaks Okinawan now.
MTB: I think this is something I’ve seen with you a lot in terms of like mentorship, language revitalization. Like, people need to be empowered to really feel like, “Okay, actually, I have something to contribute. I do have relevant skills, and I can do it.” Even if I thought like, “Oh, well, my language skills are not that good,” or “I can only understand. I can’t speak.” I think sometimes it just takes that little push for one person to say, “No, actually this is important,” and then people can act on it. What work in terms of revitalization is happening in the Ryukyus, and what major obstacles are there, in your opinion?
Patrick Heinrich: Well, the problem is, I think, generally always the same, that we’ve all come to learn that one should not oppress languages. Right? One should not discourage people to speak a language. So, in most countries, this is already a fact. And also that we say something like, “Oh, language diversity is a good thing.” But there’s a huge gap between what we say, what we state, and what we do. I think that language revitalization and multilingualism is not properly understood, and it’s not properly understood also by lots of specialists, lots of professors, lots of policymakers. If you want to… If we take the Ryukyuan languages and you want to restrict them to specific functions and to specific roles, you need to ask the question, “Why? Why is that only good in the family? Why would that not be written on a street sign? Why would that not enter the school education?” And then you always arrive to the question that people think it’s not valuable enough. That is really what is behind it. So, you have to understand that a true evaluation is not in words. It’s not to say, you know… In Okinawa, they would always say, shimakutuba o daiji ni suru, “Let’s take it seriously.” You have to do that with your actions. You have to do that implicitly. That’s not happening in many places in the world. You usually need a microphone and a podest and an occasion to speak that language, and that’s not very good because it means it’s marked. It’s marked for something. You know, it’s like, “Oh my God, that guy has this skill,” or “She sings that song,” kind of thing. But it should be unmarked. It should be really part of you. I don’t think that this is properly understood in most places. And it’s certainly not understood in the Ryukyus at the moment by people who would have the possibility to create policies to support language. So, Okinawa Prefecture, of course, is the first that comes to mind, but also universities come to mind there. Municipalities come to mind here. Some are obviously better than others. But if you want to revitalize a language, you have to strengthen that language, and that means you have to take something away from the dominant language. You have to take some away, some function, some space. And people are not ready for that. Right? If you were to take it in that direction and say, “Okay, we need more room for Ryukyuan. Where can Japanese go?” you know, people say, “Oh, no, but Japanese is important,” right? That’s what they would answer And so, there is no genuine understanding that whatever Japanese does, does not mean that there are other functions, does not mean that there could be a second language, doesn’t mean that there could be a language that does some things better than Japanese. And as a matter of fact, we know that Ryukyuan languages do some things better than Japanese. And we are not tapping on these resources, on these possibilities. I think it’s the work of us linguists, right, to raise this awareness and to show which benefits languages have.
But as it stands at the moment, difference is usually, it’s fine as long as it’s entertaining. But when it comes to like, “Now I have some rights, so somebody takes my problem seriously with that,” then usually the interest already stops, right? And in the Ryukyus in particular, another problem is — I mean, I don’t want to go too much into these details because it’s been discussed a lot — is that it’s not properly recognized as a language. So, it’s so easy to explain a language away as either being archaic or having few speakers or being a variation of something else. And so, this is a problem in the Ryukyus. Also, their local terminology of community language, Shimakutuba or Shimamuni…
MTB: Shimaguchi.
Patrick Heinrich: … you know, just puts it on the extreme local level, which in one way is nice. But on the other hand, you have Shimakutuba, community language, and then you have Japanese, which is like state language, national language, right? So, you need something equivalent conceptually to Japanese, and that would be, you know, gengo, a language. And Okinawa Prefecture is obviously hiding behind Shimakutuba because Shimakutuba is actually, you know, it’s the equivalent of a dialect of Ryukyuan languages. So, they’re fine with “dialect” because that does not empower people to ask for like, “Oh, shouldn’t we have a sign at the airport? Should we not have the announcement in Ryukyuan?” Right? “Should we not have like bilingual radio programs? Should we not have more space on local television? Should we not have bilingual columns?” Right? Because it’s dialect, right?
MTB: Yeah, that’s true. It’s true in Amami as well. People say “Shimaguchi” for their language, and they mean like the variety of their community, their small, immediate community. It’s not so much like “Amami language.” It’s more like “dialect of our town.”
Patrick Heinrich: And my friend Fija Byron, he’s also open about that, so I can say that, he stopped teaching… And he’s one of the best speakers, if not the best speaker of Okinawan today. He stopped teaching Okinawan at the prefecture because they insisted that it would be, you know, a course in Shimakutuba, in community language. And he says, “I’m not teaching community language. I’m teaching Okinawan language. So, either you change the name of the course, or I go.” And they said, “Go.”
MTB: Wow.
Patrick Heinrich: You see, when it comes to that, there are limits, right? Because nobody wants to give real space, meaningful space, to the endangered language, right? It’s all good when you say, “Oh, it’s a festival, and old people, they have the wisdom, and we do an event, and we publish a book, and we make a leaflet,” and I don’t know. You know, on that level, it’s good. As soon as it is threatening to take something away from the dominant language, from Japanese, you know, their support stops.
MTB: It’s a real scarcity mindset, isn’t it? Because, you know, of course, as you know, people can be bilingual, communities can be thriving and bilingual, but this idea that, like, “Oh, Japanese will somehow be weakened. Japanese, which has, you know, millions of speakers, will be weakened if there’s some space given to local languages.”
Patrick Heinrich: It’s so easy. Look, I mean, it has nothing to do with the Ryukyus, but on Saturday, I competed in a trail run in the Alps. So, I went to a very isolated valley in the Alps, and it’s difficult to go there. It’s far away from everything, and there’s not much there. You know, there’s no big cities there, there’s no big industries there. There’s a bit of tourism there. Everyone in that valley spoke four languages. Everyone. Everyone. They all spoke Italian because, you know, their nationality is Italian. They all spoke German because, you know, it’s the German-speaking part. It was part of Austria. They all spoke ladino, which is their community language. And they all spoke English because you learn that in school. So, everybody. You know, you didn’t have to be, like, a university professor or, you know, some language freak. Whoever you want to… You know, professional runners were there. They spoke four languages. You know, waiters, four languages. Everybody spoke four languages there. So, there is nothing elitist about it. In the Ryukyus, once I’ve heard, when we discussed language revitalization, that somebody said, “Well, yes, but Ryukyuans are still lagging behind in the Japanese curriculum to, you know, mainland Japanese.” So, they said, “They should first properly become Japanese, and once they’ve done that, then they can become Ryukyus.” You see, there’s this mindset that this is only for the brave people, you know, for those who pass all, you know, assessments, who pass all the gatekeepers. You know, if you’re taught, educated, if you have a PhD, then you can engage in that. But if you look at that little valley, where wherever you went, you could negotiate whatever language you wanted, you know, and they all spoke four languages, and they moved easily from one language to another. So, you know, something like that could be easily restored around the world. There’s nothing particular about these north Italians. You know, there’s nothing in their DNA which makes, which allows them to do that. Everyone can do it.
MTB: Yeah. I’ve been reading a bit about bilingual education here in the United States, because now I’m teaching linguistic anthropology, and I have a module on bilingual education. And the data is actually very strong that if children learn their local language first, then they do so much better in school and excel so much more in the majority language — in this case, English, in the United States. Even though the, you know, the fluency in Ryukyus depends on, you know, who you are speaking to and what generation, I think there could be something there.
Patrick Heinrich: I also think there’s something there. If we return to the Ryukyus and the Okinawa Prefecture, ever since students have academic assessment tests, and they have them every year in Japan, Okinawa routinely comes last nationwide. And every year when these results are published, you know, again, disappointment is big. “Oh, my God, we’re last again. We should, you know, try harder.” And then people always start thinking, like, “Why is it that Okinawa comes last in the school assessment tests?” And then they think, “Oh, because they don’t do homework.” Right? As if that was the explanation. I think instead of thinking, like, you know, that they would need more Japanese stuff and more homework, they would need to catch up, I think there is a lack of interest in school and the stuff that is in school that we see in Okinawa which is behind the weak performance. Because Ryukyus, before they were part of Japan, they were doing extremely well. You know, it’s not that they are, like, not good in learning, not interested in learning. It’s not true that they would be lazy or something like that, that they would not have aspirations. You know, it’s the situation in which they find themselves in a state that does not acknowledge their presence and their culture, and it’s not in the curriculum. Even if children are not able to put that in word, I think there is some sort of resistance against the stuff that is presented at school. And I think somebody should look into that direction instead of always seeing them as somehow deficient, somehow not good in doing homework. Or another explanation is, they don’t eat breakfast. They look for everything but for the fact that, as a matter of fact, there’s different languages, a different history, a different culture there, which is not acknowledged in the education system. I mean, it’s the most obvious place to look at for these performances is there and not, you know, at their breakfast habits.
MTB: I would have… Not the breakfast thing, but I would also wonder if maybe there was some kind of socioeconomic element to it, in addition to the fact that your culture and your language are unacknowledged, and maybe that makes it more difficult to connect and be motivated to the curriculum.
Patrick Heinrich: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, economic factors are always important. And even those who are interested in Ryukyuan languages, even those who learn Ryukyuan language, even those who start speaking Ryukyuan languages, they will usually not have any economic benefits from that. While there’s, of course, vast economic benefits in being a good speaker of Japanese, there’s vast benefits in being a good speaker of Chinese, of English, you name it. But there’s nothing natural in that, right? That is something that has been, you know, a situation that has been created. Because we know it from, you know, just from other countries, from other states, that you can create economic incentives to be an endangered language speaker. You know, public service is something that all Okinawans want to work in, right? It’s considered a really good, secure job, and there’s not that many there. And so one could easily link that to a Ryukyuan proficiency test and say, “Oh, you want to work in…” And it would be very good because, you know, public administration works for the public, and the public is Ryukyuan. And, you know, Ryukyuan has its language and its culture. It would make them better administrators. It would make them…you know, there’s benefits without an end. But one needs to create these benefits because the benefits that once existed have been destroyed, and they’ve never been restored. And you don’t restore that by nice political speeches where you’re saying, you know, shimakutuba o daiji ni suru, “Let’s take the language serious.” You have to make it valuable. That is not something natural that these languages serve no economic purpose. They’ve been made that way.
MTB: Yeah, definitely. That’s a good reminder. Can we discuss your work on language revitalization and well-being? Can you tell us more about this work and how revitalization and well-being intersect?
Patrick Heinrich: Yes. This is, I think, a very good case to remind maybe listeners and even, like, you know, if there’s young academics out there, that when we do research, we always start with speculation. And, you know, if we’re good in our job, our speculations are very good. So it’s not wild, random speculation. But we’ve read something, we’ve observed something, or I think there might be something there. And this is how the idea of language and well-being came into existence. There is data that shows that there is a correlation between maintaining an endangered language and physical health. Right? We know from Canada that, you know, communities that maintain their language have lower rates of suicide. Suicide, right? Endangered language communities very often have lower rates of life expectancy, higher rates of suicide. They have higher rates of everything that is bad. They have higher rates of alcoholism, higher rates of drug abuse, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, higher rates of domestic violence, lower rates… Right? Everything that is good is lower. Education, income, safe employment kind of thing. And one thinks, what could be the cause of that? And people think of a lot of things, and language can be an obvious cause of that. So that’s where speculation starts, that we always think, “Well, you know, they’re not disconnected, they don’t study well,” and so on and so forth.
But even if you go back — and that’s why I say you need to speculate and you need to be knowledgeable in order to speculate well — if you go back to the early writings in language endangerment, the work of Joshua Fishman, so he speaks of social-cultural dislocation, right? He says migrants are, you know, like physically dislocated, and they lose their language. And they said, endangered minorities, it is as if they had migrated. They stayed in the same place, but whatever was familiar with them went away. So it’s even harsher on them than for migrants, right? Migrants, you know, migrant life too is very hard (right?) because it involves a status drop, you have to learn new skills, you’re very often a lesser version of what you were in your own community. So this happens to these communities, and this is why if they maintain their language, you know, they can maintain a sense of self-worth, of being competent, of closing out to the outside world and defining their own values. So excluding people sounds so negative in our mind, but, you know, if you exclude people who dominate you, that is a very good thing. And we all exclude people in our lives all the time. I mean, this is why we live in houses, you know, it gives us shelter, it gives us protection. And language works exactly the same thing, because once we are at home — and your language is a home — you can define who you really are, and what you really value, and what you really want to do, and what you really look up to. If you’re dominated, you know, if you’re at school and your teacher says, “Well, you know, this is not really interesting; what matters is that and that,” you know, you want to have this room where you can, you know, close in, re-find yourself, and from there comes the idea that this is good on you on all aspects, whether that is physical health, or whether that is also mental health, right? So there’s some people who look into this mental health thing, like, you know, self-depreciation, depression, which is at a higher level in many endangered language communities around the world.
But you can also frame it differently, which is what I’m doing, namely, look at the positive aspects. Well, if you speak the language, if you maintain it, if you are able, you know, to close other people out, to define what you and your friends, your circle, really want to do, will you be happier? Right? Fortunately, there is a lot of work on happiness, and so what you really have to do is just take this work and their insights and link them to language. So there’s, for instance, life evaluation. You can ask people, like, you know, looking back, “Are you happy with your life?” You know, “Did you fulfill your expectations?” You know, “Is there something that you regret?” And you can correlate that with the degree to which they have retained their language, to which they use the language, and see whether there is correlation there. You can ask them about their subjective well-being. You can ask them, you know, “From 0 to 10, how happy are you?” And most people, which is very interesting, are able to answer that question. They would say, “I’m 7.” Some people say, “I’m 3.” And you can look in these kinds of correlation. Technically, it’s, of course, more difficult, this kind of research, because there’s also, like, mediating variables, like, you know, decolonization of the mind, social capital comes to mind, social mobility, aspiration for social mobility. But what I’m doing right now is, or have gathered data, some of which also in Koniya, in which we’re trying to see whether there is a correlation there.
MTB: That’s really interesting. I can definitely see how there would be, especially, like, if you have your culture and have your language, then not only are you maybe perhaps happier and more confident in yourself, but you may also feel, like, more connected to your community, your ancestors. Like, I can imagine that that would definitely tie into life satisfaction and happiness.
Patrick Heinrich: Also, you know, the habits and the knowledge. I mean, if we look at these Canadian communities where we see, like, you know, less obesity with people who maintain their language well, less diabetes with people who maintain their language well, it’s just because they know what’s good for them, and they know how to get their hands on this kind of stuff, whereas if you don’t speak the language, if you don’t know the culture, if you don’t know your environment anymore, and you are poor, that just forces you to buy, like, the cheapest, unhealthiest, you know, fabricated food that you found. You know, language is good for something. It’s good for your health. And then once you have that idea in your head, and think about the Ryukyus again, the Ryukyus are known for, you know, longevity. But longevity, those who live long are the speakers of Ryukyuan languages. And we know that longevity in the Ryukyus is dropping, right? So, you see that we have usually, like, two stories going on. People talk about longevity in the Ryukyus, and it’s not as good as it used to be because the young are not healthy anymore. And us linguists, we cannot help but know that, you know what? The old people actually speak a different language, and they have different knowledge, and they have different habits, and they know much more about the environment. They know much more about seasons. They know much more about cultivating stuff, and gardening, and all these kind of things. And the young people, also through not speaking the language, have no idea about that. So, it just screams that there’s correlation between, you know, health, well-being, life satisfaction, also living a fulfilled life. Right? So, and I’m using various set of questions to currently look into this. And as always, when we don’t know very well how the connection is, we always use first quantitative approaches. So, to really see, like, where is the nexus? How does this stuff connect?
MTB: That’s really interesting. Do we want to say anything else about that, or should we move on?
Patrick Heinrich: Well, maybe a last thing, that language and well-being, I think, is not just a new field of study, and that, you know, I think anybody doing fieldwork and listening to these ideas would, like, confirm, like, “Yeah, I’ve seen something similar. I also think there’s something there. I think Patrick is speculating in the right direction. I think it’s a good idea to go after this empirically and to see whether it’s true or not.” You know, but that is not the entire story. If there is a connection between language and well-being, and if we find that across various endangered communities, not just the Ryukyus where I’m doing research right now, then we have an entire new way of looking into language endangerment. Namely, if endangered language communities, as we know, have shorter life expectancies usually, have higher rates of depression, unemployment, all kinds of things, all of this costs the state money. It’s expensive, right? You could say, “Look, the cheaper way to address this, instead of sending them to rehab and I don’t know what and, you know, running employment programs and so on and so forth, is to help them to maintain their language and their culture,” right? You would have a real sea change in that, that you’d say, “The way to deal with this problem is not more majority stuff, it’s less, and it’s more minority things.” And I think this is not only true for endangered language communities, but also for migrant communities. Maintaining a language is not just something that is hip that you can say, “I’m bilingual and, I don’t know, you know, I know how to cook this dish or that dish,” something like that. It is really meaningful for individual and collective lives. It’s vastly under-evaluated as a resource for a good life.
MTB: I agree. Let’s talk about your approach to mentoring. So, there’s a story I’ve told on another episode of the podcast, I think, where you were the first person who I spoke to who was studying the Ryukyus, and I wanted to do an MA degree at SOAS and I just sent you an email not expecting you to reply back. I was like, “Oh, okay, like, I’ll just try.” And you emailed me back right away, and then we Skyped and you invited me to the session in Helsinki, I don’t know if you remember.
Patrick Heinrich: Yes.
MTB: That experience was very life-changing for me, and it really set me on the trajectory that I am on now. I think if you hadn’t replied to my email, maybe I would be doing something totally different. So, I feel a lot of gratitude to you, honestly, for that. But I’ve seen you work with lots of other young linguists or just new researchers, and I’m wondering if you have a philosophy when it comes to mentoring.
Patrick Heinrich: Well, in large part, I think that’s just how I am. I like engaging with people. I like people who take a genuine interest in something. What is also particular about me, probably, is that I don’t like hierarchies. I passionately hate hierarchies and status difference. So, many students write me, and very often not even on the Ryukyus. Right now, I’m just communicating with somebody in Ethiopia who wants to publish papers. And it is a huge privilege to be able to help people. And anybody who would write me, anyhow, is doing something that I myself am interested in. Right? I mean, your thesis. I would have loved to write your thesis, but I could not. I had no time, I had no resources, maybe not even the skills and endurance that it took. So, I’m so happy that you did that because now I can use your thesis. Right?
MTB: [laughs]
Patrick Heinrich: And now you are there. Now we have another Ryukyuanist, and we have somebody who now takes up anthropology, which I think is very, very important, because it’s treated way too lightly in the Ryukyus. It’s good to have a contact in California. It’s good to have a new friend. So, it’s wonderful. I usually reply immediately when these mails come in. I don’t recall that I said to anyone, “No, I don’t have time,” or, “This is too much.” I think it’s fun. And it has probably to do that we are studying a very particular field. It’s very hard to think that somebody dedicates years of their lives for endangered languages, endangered language community, very often at the other end of the world, and that they are total jerks. That’s not very likely. Anybody choosing to do something in that direction is probably a very, very likable person. You know, and I like likable persons. I’m happy if they write me and I can expand my network. I profit as much as it… I profited more from your thesis and from your work than you would ever profit from the 30 minutes’ time that I took and talked to you on Skype back then.
MTB: That’s really nice. Wow, I never thought about it that way. I think the other thing I’ve noticed with you and your attitude is, and it’s so true, like, there is enough work for everyone to do. There is so much research that can be done in Ryukyus. So really, we need more people to come and do language documentation and language revitalization. Yeah, I think it’s really nice, especially when you’re like, you know, a scared master’s student, like just starting out, not sure what direction to go to. It really makes a difference, I think, to have one person give you that encouragement, especially when it is Patrick Heinrich, godfather of Ryukyu sociolinguistics.
Patrick Heinrich: It’s, you know, another thing that, I thought about it, before that podcast, another thing that I enjoy is that usually the people who write me initially have, you know, vague idea and interests. And initially, somehow, maybe I have this godfather role because, you know, not because I’m terribly talented or whatever, just because I’ve been around forever. I’ve been doing that for 20 years. And at a certain point, you know, those who write me the first mail, and I would insist, “Look, but you better read this, you know. Otherwise, you know, we’re wasting our time here.” After a while, they all overtake me. So Madoka Hammine knows much more about this stuff that I’ve written about that I have ever known. You know. I was always interested in politeness and its function in, you know, language endangerment. Well, guess what? You know so much more about this than I do. Mark Anderson, who started reading my things, you know, and then he got interested into Okinawan Japanese and language mixtures, knows vastly more than I do about that, and that is wonderful. So I really like that. And very often, you know, the last guy who contacted me was an Uchinanchu who was in Stanford into Persian studies, and then he thought, “Well, I’m doing Persian studies; I should be doing Okinawan studies.” And he contacted me, and we had, you know, just as the two of us had at one point, a conversation over Meet. And then I said, “You know what? But the real expert is not me. You know, you should talk to Madoka.” And now he’s studying with Madoka. So that’s something very, you know, it makes me happy that everybody is so successful and goes so far, and that there is — you know, after you and Madoka, you were both in Helsinki, right; you came when I gave these lectures on Ryukyuan languages — that you’re now, you know, yourself teaching at university, that you have yourself students, and that I can say if, you know, now the next generation comes, and say, “Look, you know, in that case, talk to Madoka. In that case, you know, talk to Martha.” It’s great. I see myself more as, you know, the madoguchi of Ryukyuan linguistics. You know, like the receptionist, “Oh, this, you know, talk to Shimoji-san. This, you know, talk to Ishihara-san. You know, this, talk to Gijs [van der Lubbe],” and so on.
MTB: That’s funny. [laughs] Okay. Thank you so much, Patrick, for coming on Field Notes. Where can our listeners find you online if they want to read your publications or learn more about your work? Where can they do that?
Patrick Heinrich: The only page that I really maintain well is my page at ResearchGate. So there, you could also find, like, all sorts of papers, and I think, you know, you can, I think there’s more than 80 papers uploaded there. So if you’re interested in something particular, you can look there. And it also maybe reflects a bit, you know, the different things that I’m doing, because I do not work full-time on endangered languages. I have, you know, also other interests. And so probably ResearchGate is the best page to look at.
MTB: Great. Thank you so much.
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You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Claire Gawne is our editor, and Luca Dinu is our transcriptionist. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have fieldwork experience to share, email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, consider becoming our patron on Patreon to help keep our content ad-free. Thanks for listening!
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