Why learn ancient Greek when minority languages are dying? A response
Again at the recently held TCLS2026 I heard my friend and colleague in language teaching, Carla Hurt, address almost the above topic. Her topic was slightly different, because it focused on the question of Australian Aboriginal Languages. I thoroughly enjoyed Hurt's presentation, and appreciated how she sought to address and answer the question. In that vein, I will outline some of her key points, before I move on to a response. My response is not a rebuttal or critique, but seeks to genuinely further conversation about these delicate and difficult issues.
The 'problem' such as it presents
The phrasing of the problem, especially in the form that Hurt presented it, is the "why classical languages when indigenous languages all around us are dying?" That question immediately conflates two questions or issues which I believe we should hold as distinct before we put them in relation.
The first of these is "why learn a classical language?" Every teacher of classical Greek and/or Latin in a classroom setting has to face this question because they must face reality of convincing students, parents, and school administrations of the value of doing so. Most of the traditional reasons given so are problematic: teaching you to think critically, improving your English, making you better at 'grammar', equipping you for science or law, etc. etc.. Either the claim is specious at best, or it applies equally well to any other language in its place. Still, a case must be made positively for why, and individual reasons may vary. For my part, the simplest and broadest reason to learn a language is that it provides entry to a language's culture-of-communication. In the case of Latin, you are provided entry to the ongoing predominantly literary conversation of over 2000 years. If that's a communicative-culture you want entry to, to read its literary products of any sort, then learn Latin.
The second question is completely different, "should you care about minority language death?" And even there, there is a bundle of issues bound up in it. I think that Hurt is right in that language diversity is feature not bug, though the history of thinking "if only we all spoke the same language" persists in more enlightened (please let us all learn Esperanto) and more vicious (monoculturalist racism and linguistic prejudice) forms. It is, to my mind, a great tragedy and a moral one at that, to witness the death of indigenous languages in Australia, most of which are in tremendous peril and whose deaths can be placed directly at the feet of Australian's colonial legacy (and present).
And yet what is the connection between these two? Is it of the order "How can you say you love chickens while eating KFC?" or more of the non-sequitur of "Do you care about the destruction of the rainforest and yet you are playing basketball?"
The other problem
There is a second problem that Hurt attempted to address in her paper. The demands of the Australian Curriculum, particularly in its latest versions, imposes a requirement that virtually all subjects seek to make relevant connections to Australian Aboriginal culture, history, and content. It has been very difficult for classical languages to do so. In Latin, there are scarcely any pieces of Latin content that directly engage Australia, let alone indigenous issues. Teachers in schools in Australia have this demand imposed from on-high, and have to find a way to respond to it.
This isn't a problem I can fix for teachers in school settings. Instead I want to suggest that it's misguided and wrong.
When we talk about learning a language we are also inevitably talking about learning a culture, because language and culture are intertwined. And in becoming a user of a language, every learner co-constructs a new social identity in that language. Whether we conceive of this as an additional added identity, or the emergence of a multiplex identity, or whatever, and the sociological and psychological dimensions of this idea are not to be underestimated, to become a speaker is to become some kind of person in that language's speaking-community.
Doing so is an act of cross-cultural communication and translation, because you bring with you points of contact from your already-acquired languages and their speaker-community cultures: who you are. And you are entering into a new speaker-community. For those students who are indigenous Australians, that cross-cultural connection and negotiation already involves the kind of 'content' and 'contact' the curriculum is asking for. For those students who aren't, to insert it there is an act of tokenism and a bizarre intrusion.
Although Latin has had a continuous active spoken tradition, it does not have a living community with native-speaker transmission. Moreso, ancient Greek does not have a living speaker-community with parent-child transmission. That means there are specific issues about 'becoming' a speaker that do not apply in other contexts. Learners are co-constructing their speaker-identity in a community where (99.99%) of other speakers are also L2 speakers. This point will become important as I will return to it later.
Fixed pies
I return now to the question that I raised in part one, of what kind of connection there is between minority language death and classical languages. The contention often is if you are putting time into 'dead' languages, you are taking resources away from living ones.
Hurt addressed this in part by discussing the 'fixed pie mentality'. I.e, there's only so much pie, and so pie for Latin and Greek means less pie for other languages. Aboriginal languages are, for the most part, starving.
Furthermore, Hurt contests that this is a fallacy, or at least we should adopt a less fixed mindset. E.g., someone who learns one L2, often gets the taste for languages and linguistics, and can go on and will often go on to learn other languages. Learning/Teaching/Promoting Latin and ancient Greek doesn't have to be a zero-sum game and we shouldn't think of it that way.
I want to affirm partial agreement and resounding sympathy for this position. Yet, at the end of the day we also have to reckon with various forms of scarcity and competition. Funding resources are a fixed pie, as school-based teachers well know.
More importantly, languages compete for speakers/users and for the time and domains they utilise a language in. To truly see competent users of Latin and Greek means those learners are not 'available' or at least 'not as available' to be learners or speakers of Aboriginal languages, or other minority language users. That is a stark reality.
Yet, a far more important question is this how many of these potential students are actually potential students of Australian Aboriginal languages and contributors to language revitalisation efforts?
Language, culture, identity, and revitalisation
I am fortunately blessed in my life to have learn two minority languages with living speaker continuity: Mongolian and Scottish Gaelic. I learnt the former by living in Mongolia and learning in situ, and co-creating a social identity as a foreigner there accepted and welcomed as a teacher within a sub-community; I learnt the latter through long, ongoing study via distance, and I have a distinct social identity as a Gael and Gaelic-user. Through my studies of Gaelic, I have also pursued higher education through the medium of Gaelic, including issues related to post-colonialism, minority language politics and policy, language revitalisation, and so on. These inform my perspective on the following.
Who gets to determine who gets to learn a language? With Latin and ancient Greek I do not believe there are or should be any meaningful gatekeepers, but it is more complicated with indigenous languages. I don't presume that any and all comers are entitled to learn an indigenous language and 'make it their own'. There are questions of cultural ownership, legitimacy, and identity bound up in Australian Aboriginal languages that should not be ignored.
Furthermore, language revitalisation, or even revival, is bloody hard. Read accounts of language revitalisation efforts and you'll soon see how hard it is. I don't think we should at all underestimate this, because genuine language revitalisation requires some hardy language activists to go pretty all-in in their efforts, and take a community along with them for the journey.
So we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can somehow address this in a meaningful way by either 'helping' divert some resources from classical language teaching, or inspiring learners to go on and learn yet another language, or providing a tokenistic appropriation of indigenous cultural identity and artefacts within the classical languages curriculum.
To return to my question at the end of part one, whether you play basketball has little to no effect on deforestation of the world's rainforests. But you should care about the latter regardless. I propose that this might work itself out in three primary ways for teachers of historical languages.
Firstly, there are important histories of imperialism, culturalism, language shift and language death woven through the classical and not-so-classical histories of Latin, ancient Greek, and other major historical languages. These are points of cross-cultural contact, to discuss with students what linguistic imperialism looks like, why languages die and how they are killed, and what resistance to this might look like. It can be done in your target language and using your target language texts. Romans had plenty of things to say about doing their version of anthropology.
Secondly, you can actively draw some teaching methodologies from language revitalisation workers, including the famous WAYK. In doing so, you can draw student attention to these endeavours. You might also, nobly, seek to fund some of these efforts out of the goodness of your hearts.
Thirdly, you can raise issues around language, identity, culture, revitalisation, and world languages more broadly, and discuss with students how those issues intersect with their languages, both L1s, heritage languages, other L2s, and the language you teach. That can be, and should be, a bridge to making them aware of these and related issues pertaining to the Aboriginal Australian languages.
Hurt finished her presentation by arguing that a proper 'liberal humanities' underpinning to classical language education, that is critical thinking, engagement with texts, pursuit of justice, and so on forms the kind of people that are also committed to the foundations of Reconciliation (as understood in the Australian context), and that this ultimately is the 'point of connection'. I share Hurt's commitment to that kind of liberal humanities education, and virtue formation, and how it undergirds minority language revitalisation.
And so I have little interest in appeasing the Australian Curriculum's tokenistic efforts to make sure every subject has some bit of Australian Aboriginal cultural and historical connection. I think it's a pedagogical sham. We can do better than that, by engaging the substance of these questions and pursuing a fuller vision of Reconciliation in our society, including reparations, and a part of that may be supporting and enabling genuine efforts towards language revitalisation.
