The Language in Which the Question Was Asked

At the customs station at Velset, on the inner bay, I watched a woman lose her native language between one end of a table and the other. She had come to declare the occupants of her house, and had brought her youngest child because there was nobody with whom she could leave him. The clerk asked, in Sudermarkish, whether she understood Sudermarkish. She answered that she did. He entered five persons in the Sudermarkish column and reached for the next paper. I asked when he proposed to enquire what they spoke at home. He replied that the language question had already been answered. I requested the form, which he withheld until I explained that I wished to examine its wording and possessed no ambition to become its sixth inhabitant.

The printed instruction was precise: Ascertain whether the householder can receive questions in the national language; where this is established, enter the household accordingly. The clerk had obeyed it exactly. When I pointed out that his return would count a household of Caldric visitors as Sudermarkish-speaking, provided I answered for them, he said that foreigners had a separate schedule. A resident might therefore know Sudermarkish without being assigned to it only by possessing the advantage of foreign birth. The woman, who had been following us with increasing impatience, asked whether she could now go back to her washing. I obtained her leave to visit that afternoon, and insisted that the clerk leave her entry unfinished. This was my first mistake. An unfinished entry required the district supervisor’s attention; I had secured an official visit for a woman who had asked for neither my assistance nor his.

She corrected me handsomely when I arrived. Her husband worked at the railway coal stage, she said, and a doubtful household return could delay the renewal of his employment paper. Would the Royal Collegium pay his wages while I improved the census? I said that I had acted without understanding the consequences, and that I would put the matter right before asking her another question. At the office I withdrew my objection to her particular entry and submitted a signed objection to the method, with my own name prominently attached. The supervisor expressed surprise that a professor should prefer to place himself in difficulty. I explained that professors were salaried partly for this purpose, although several of my colleagues had contrived to evade the duty. Only after the household paper had been released did I return to her kitchen.

There I heard the child ask for the skin from the cooling milk in a language which the morning’s proceedings had rendered statistically absent. His mother answered him in it, then turned to me in Sudermarkish. She called the former “our speech”; when pressed for a geographical designation, she supplied the name of her shore district. At the next inlet the same question elicited a different district name. These answers had encouraged an earlier surveyor to distribute the speakers among several “corrupt local varieties” of Sudermarkish. I borrowed his vocabulary sheets and found that he had collected chiefly railway terms, tax terms and the names of manufactured articles. His method would establish the ancestry of a house by examining the parcels delivered to its door.

My own first word lists were scarcely more satisfactory. The resemblance to Sudermarkish is substantial, and I initially took several differences for the effects of careless transcription. A retired harbour pilot, hearing me repeat one of these judgements, asked whether I supposed his grandmother had learnt to speak incorrectly from a customs officer. I invited him to demonstrate the distinction; he obliged until my wrist ached. Across four settlements, speakers retained the same differences in familiar verbs and the same changes of consonant in corresponding words, including words seldom required at a government counter. A continuous civil register would have been convenient; the evidence actually available lay in temple marriage registers and old harbour depositions. These showed several of the disputed forms in use under Drenne. Taken together, the records and living speech support Drennish as descending beside Sudermarkish from a common ancestor, though they do not support descent from the modern national language. I cannot yet establish the limits of the language inland.

The written language employed for these inhabitants by the district offices presents a further embarrassment. A petition drafted in it was read aloud to my hostess, who recognised most of the words and objected to nearly every sentence. The pilot described it as the speech of a man who had never needed an answer. Its constructions combined usages from separated districts with conventions preserved by the former royal chancery. No community I visited spoke in this fashion. Yet the supervisor offered its unfamiliarity as evidence that the inhabitants had forgotten their ancestral tongue and naturally adopted Sudermarkish. His administration first addressed them in a form nobody used in conversation, then counted their resort to the language of the counter as voluntary abandonment. I told him that the conclusion had been purchased by the procedure, and at an extravagant cost in useful information.

The annexation survives here in the handling of a living speaker: her competence in the conqueror’s language cancels the language in which she brings up her child. This procedure also conceals the smaller surviving branches of Human speech, some unrelated to either Central language closely enough to justify the survey’s convenient headings. Their classification requires separate enquiry. I proposed that the next return ask what each person first spoke and what was ordinarily spoken at home, allowing more than one answer. The supervisor objected that this would produce untidy totals. It would; I offered to help design the columns. He then asked what practical benefit justified the expense. I put before him a harbour warning which two boatmen had independently misunderstood in its official translation, and requested permission to test the wording locally. He authorised the test, though he declined to alter the census. We spent the following morning on the quay discovering precisely how much his tidy figures had failed to tell him.