On Saturday I found out that Alan Hudson died. Alan was my doctoral advisor at the University of New Mexico until his retirement in 2005, and a source of support after that.
I first met Alan when I visited the UNM Linguistics Department in 1997. Alan welcomed me into his office with a broad smile, and asked, “So Angus, have you made up your mind about whether you want to come here?”
“Well…” I said. I had been accepted into the PhD program, but had just come from a very discouraging encounter with another professor, and was ready to give up and go home. Before I could continue, Alan said, “Is there anything I can say to convince you?” I replied, “Well, I guess you just did.”
Alan was not a big name in linguistics; he never published a book. I regularly had to tell people that my advisor was not Dick Hudson. But Alan had a profound insight about the sociology of language that changed my career trajectory and my thinking about language and social justice.
In a seminar on Societal Bilingualism the next year, Alan led us through the case studies laid out by Joshua Fishman, his own advisor, in his book Reversing Language Shift. Fishman’s book is of interest to anyone concerned with language “death” (a problematic metaphor unless the language users themselves are being killed). As a Dubliner who had become fluent in Irish through compulsory government schooling, Alan cared deeply about his national language, but he did not have high hopes for it recovering its status as the primary language of Ireland.
Fishman argues that we can prevent large numbers of people abandoning a language by establishing “diglossia” – arrangements where language H is used for some functions and language L is used for others. Charles Ferguson had shown in 1949 that diglossic arrangements tend to be stable over time. Fishman believed that if language users can establish similar functional separations, they can stop language shift.
Drawing in part on his own research in Ireland and Switzerland, Alan observed that the cases Fishman categorized as diglossia did not fit with Ferguson’s examples. The key factor in Ferguson’s cases was that there were no children in the speech community who are native speakers of H: no child speakers of High German in Switzerland, no child speakers of Metropolitan French in Haiti, etc. In Ireland, by contrast, there are millions of English-speaking children, and in the Netherlands Frisian-speaking children go to school with Dutch-speaking peers.
The result of this contact is that most of these children eventually shift to the higher-prestige, better-paying language, and will not pass their native languages on to their children. There are only two ways to stop it: reverse the power dynamic (as happened in Finland when Russia conquered it from Sweden, I discovered in a term paper that semester) or isolate the children (as Kamal Sridhar observed in her Thanjavur Marathi community).
This was an important insight, with major implications for linguistics. None of us in the course were interested in segregating language groups from each other, and as linguists we were not positioned to shift the socioeconomic power differentials between groups. If the prescription for reversing language shift can be captured in a single sentence, that leaves no ongoing role for linguists.
Since then I have not been terribly surprised that Alan’s insight has not been enthusiastically embraced by other linguists. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Alan published two articles describing his definition of diglossia, but framed it in theoretical terms, downplaying the implications for efforts at language maintenance and revitalization.
Alan Hudson supervised my studies and my comprehensive exams, but retired before I was ready to begin my dissertation. He continued to provide valuable advice, and attended my dissertation defense. He will be remembered as an insightful linguist and a supportive teacher.
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