News server Romea.cz. Everything about Roma in one place

News server Romea.cz. Everything about Roma in one place

Opinion

Commentary: Czech Senator says Romanes language lacks future tense

06 December 2013
6 minute read

Edward Said, the renowned post-colonial critical theorist, once said that the Roma are the only group about which anything can be said "without challenge or demurral". Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern linguistics, noted that few other subjects have sparked as much fantasy, illusion or prejudice as language.  

Czech Senator František Bublan (Social Democrats) recently decided to illustrate both of these observations in practice. On the first day of the 16th session of the upper chamber of the Parliament of the Czech Republic (27 November 2013), he said the following about the "Romani topic":

"They [i.e., the Roma] don’t have the future in their vocabulary. They literally do not have a future tense. It is incomprehensible to us, but they truly live from day to day and perceive the world that way."

I read this remarkable statement as saying the following:  1. Romani people’s language does not express a future tense. 2. Because Romani people’s language does not express a future tense, the Roma are not capable of cognitively representing (perceiving) the future. 3. Because the Roma are not cognitively capable of representing the future, they are incapable of planning (especially economic) activities (they live from one day to the next).

In other words, through his remarks, Bublan is advocating a radical version of what is known as linguistic relativism – the notion that language determines thinking and that thinking determines behavior – and applying it to Romani people. Let’s start with the first part of Bublan’s remarks, i.e., the claim that the language of Romani people does not express a future tense.

This starting point is factually incorrect in the context of the Czech Republic (to which it obviously refers). Most varieties of Romanes, including all the varieties spoken in the Czech Republic, ordinarily use the grammatical category of future tense.

The future tense in Romanes is created, in Czech Romanes (for both the Central and Olah Romanes varieties) by adding a suffix to the present tense, for example:  kerel (third person – "does") becomes kerela (third person – "will do"). When it comes to the Czech language as used by Romani speakers, which Bublan might also have been talking about, there are no recorded instances in the so-called Romani ethnolect of Czech (and here we must recall that far from all Czech Roma speak an ethnolect of Czech) of any variation in the formation and use of the future tense. 

In the best-case scenario, therefore, Bublan has just demonstrated his incompetence in Romani studies (which raises the question of why he is making public statements on the topic) – but in the worst-case scenario, the senator has consciously constructed a false starting point in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. Even though multifaceted, rich connections between culture, language and thinking definitely do exist, it has been repeatedly proven that naive, short-sighted conclusions such as those presented to the public by Bublan are more a projection of our own fantasies and prejudices than anything else. 

If we were to take Bublan’s thesis as valid for a moment – that Romanes does not express a future tense and that this structural feature of that language somehow relates to the "way of life" of Romani people – then we must necessarily ask what this means about other groups who speak languages without a future tense. I would be interested in Bublan’s observations about the culture, lifestyle and thinking, for example, of the Finns (Finnish, unlike Romanes, really does not grammatically differentiate between the future and present tenses). 

What is amusing in this context is that rather recently, this past March, there was a report in the media (including the Czech media) about research by the American economist Keith Chen which has arrived at exactly the opposite conclusion to the one Bublan draws. Chen believes speakers of languages without clear grammatical indications of the future tense are far less likely to be at risk not only for indebtedness and low income at retirement age, but are far less likely to be at risk of alcoholism, nicotinism and obesity.

If this is the case, then it seems a clear grammatical distinction between the future and the present encumbers the perception of the continuity of these two temporal domains and makes it impossible for the speakers of such languages to efficiently plan their lives. Of course, there is probably no need to add that the conclusions drawn by Chen are considered controversial among linguists, even though – unlike the remarks from Bublan’s wonderland of fantasy and ignorance – they have been supported by extensive, statistically-tested empirical research.   

Compared to what some of Senator Bublan’s colleagues were spewing that same day in the Senate, the sum total of his remarks could be considered accommodating, if paternalistic (as when he said "our approach is sometimes a bit limited, one-sided, this is work that will take decades before we really succeed in understanding what integration is and to integrate the Romani population into our society in such a way as to not violate their fundamental humanity"). Bublan’s exercise in linguistic relativism pales in comparison to the racist fantasies of Senator Stanislav Juránek, who moments before Bublan spoke insisted, among other things, that the "Romani brain" (literally, "what they have in them and what is simply natural for them") can immediately calculate complex multiples like 376 x 4 312, but is incapable of handling a simple equation containing an abstract variable, such as 3 + x = 5. 

However, even Bublan’s remarks repeated here are, in my opinion, dangerous to society and definitely do not have any potential for contributing toward the integration of this politically weak, socially marginalized minority. Instead of a grounded recognition of the difference of Romani culture, his remarks contribute to an artificial exoticization of Romani people as an immutably different, incomprehensible "them".  

What I am most disturbed by is that Senator Bublan explicitly contrasts the Romani "them" with the ethnic-majority "us" – when he says "it is incomprehensible to us", he logically cannot mean all citizens of this country including Romani ones, and he certainly does not mean only the members of the Senate to whom he is speaking on the floor of that constitutionally-established institution of our civil (!) state. Does he really represent only ethnic Czechs in Parliament?

It is evident that in a society where even essentially "accommodating" members of the political elite veer into such divisive, prejudiced and uninformed remarks, Romani people have no reason to see a rosy future for themselves.

The author is a research assistant at the Institute of Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies at the Philosophy Department of Charles University in Prague. He specializes in contact linguistics, historical linguistics, the linguistics of Romani studies, linguistic typology and morphology. He has worked on a project for a lexical database of Romanes containing words from 25 Romani dialects translated into English, German, and other contact languages. 

This article was first published in Deník referendum. 

Help us share the news about Romas
Trending now icon