S5E10 Language is About People - A Conversation with Paul Frank

“People don’t want to abandon who they are in order to have a better future. Language gives them options—and dignity—to be both rooted and reaching.”

– Paul Frank

In this powerful episode, Norah Jones is joined by Paul Frank, Associate Director for Language Solutions at SIL International. With more than four decades of experience in the field, Paul shares his journey from rural Mexico to the mountains of Colombia to international leadership roles supporting minority language communities.

His message is rooted in lived experience: language is not just about communication—it’s about connection, identity, and opportunity.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Paul’s early experiences in Tzeltal-speaking communities shaped his career
• Insights from his linguistic and community development work in Colombia
• The founding of SIL LEAD and the global impact of the Bloom book creation software
• Why multilingualism is the global norm—and why honoring it matters in education and policy
• What it means to support language choice, not language loss

Paul has worked in over a dozen countries, trained educators and linguists around the world, and helped launch a platform—Bloom—that now supports book creation in nearly 1,000 languages.

Contact Norah :
fluencyconsulting@gmail.com

Website: https://fluency.consulting
Your journey to discover the richness of language starts here. Join us on the website and embark on a learning adventure like never before!

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Transcript

0:00:00.2 Paul Frank: Most people in the world are multilingual. Let's live in that reality and help them explore how they want to use languages, because they have multiple.

0:00:20.2 S2 : Welcome to Season 5, Episode 10 of It's About Language, with your host, Nora Lulich-Jones. Before we jump into today's conversation, here's a quick preview. In this episode, Nora speaks with Paul Frank, Associate Director at SIL International, who has spent over 40 years supporting language communities around the world. From fieldwork in Colombia to international advocacy in Washington, Paul brings a unique perspective on why language is at the heart of identity, education, and opportunity. Together, they explore how multilingualism is the global norm, not the exception, and how empowering people to use the languages they value most can transform futures. Let's get started.

0:01:04.1 Norah Jones: Welcome to my podcast conversation with my guest, Paul Frank of SIL, S-I-L. You've already heard the reference in that excerpt to the choices that language speakers have, the opportunity for multilingual people to move between languages, to move between the scenarios in which they use different tools, and he calls it rich and complex. I was fascinated by this long conversation with such an in-depth understanding of language, culture, and the human approach to understanding ourselves and each other through language. Because of his background, Paul Frank brings an understanding that I wanted you to hear. So we're going to start this podcast conversation diving right into the moments where Paul was telling me about his background and how he came to know the things that he knows about language, and to serve in language and in culture around the world.

0:02:26.2 Paul Frank: How I got connected to language due to the fact that as a mid-career change, my parents decided to join this mission and go a completely different direction with their lives. They were florists, had been for probably 20 years, and my paternal grandparents before them. So, it was a totally different line of work for them. But as a result of that, at that time, SIL was doing pre-service training in Mexico, in Chiapas, middle of mowhere, and in a Mayan language speaking area. So, the specific language there is Seltong. And, we went through our training there, you know, it's kind of rustic living, cross-cultural experience, language learning, a bunch of stuff they do there. Then they ended up asking us to come back on staff. So, I spent almost all of my high school in Mexico surrounded by communities of Seltong speaking and Spanish speaking people. And did my high school by correspondence and became language aware in a way that I had not been living in Decatur, Georgia. So, came to appreciate here's people, they got their own language, I can learn how to speak it conversationally, you know, sing hymns that they had in their language and visit in their homes and whatnot.

0:03:56.7 Paul Frank: So, that's really where the spark came from to be involved in matters involving language. So, my next oldest brother had gone to University of Georgia and had studied linguistics. They didn't have a degree, so he was able to put together kind of a custom program. So, I decided to do the same thing. So, a couple of years after him, I went to University of Georgia and I took an upper level introduction linguistics course my very first quarter in school and kind of went on from there. So, you know, I was able to write a couple of short papers about the Celto language and how it works and whatnot, and begin tracking toward a career in language related matters. I took two summers of SIL's, their coursework that at that time was being facilitated through the University of Oklahoma. And so, I went to Oklahoma a couple of summers, took, you know, introduction to phonetics, phonology, grammar, and so forth. And that counted that as part of my undergraduate degree. So, by the time I finished university and my wife and I were getting married, we were tracking towards a career or service with SIL. It took several years to get there.

0:05:23.8 Paul Frank: The main reason being that as a result of those two summers, of course, work out at University of Oklahoma, they recommended that I go for an advanced degree. So, before going into service someplace. So, I ended up getting a full ride scholarship to University of Pennsylvania for a PhD program there. They had an excellent linguistics program, linguistics, sociolinguistics. And I applied to another place that offered no financial help. So, Penn won. But that was a very rich experience. We spent two and a half years in residence in Philadelphia. William Lubov, who a lot of people may have heard of in the sociolinguistics world, was one of the professors there. I learned a lot from him and from other... Del Himes was still there at that time. So, I had at least one course with Himes. And Gillian Sankoff, a very capable sociolinguist herself, was my dissertation advisor. So, I had a really interesting experience at Penn, learning more about language, especially sociolinguistics. And we decided rather than just choosing some random topic and doing a dissertation, that we would inquire of SIL. Did they have a need for linguistic research in the field someplace? Probably in Latin America.

0:06:51.9 Paul Frank: We would go do this research, come back to the U.S., and then decide what to do next. So, they offered us several opportunities, all of which were quite interesting, in South America. Ultimately, we opted to go to Colombia and had colleagues that had worked quite a few years with the Arawak or Ika language and were somewhat baffled by the grammar, which I can appreciate having studied it. I'm still baffled by some aspects of Arawak grammar. So, that's where I did my dissertation research. It was basically a descriptive grammar of the language. And, you know, this was one of the, it was the first full length kind of monograph on the language. And so, that was a good experience. It's been published by SIL in a paper series. I still to this day occasionally get emails from people. We're talking 1985 here. I still get emails from people occasionally asking something about Arawak. But, before we went back home and then considered what to do next, we were asked if we would stay on. So, ultimately we did. In fact, I sent my dissertation to a colleague, a friend of mine back in Philadelphia who turned it in, got the signatures, turned it in for me.

0:08:20.3 Paul Frank: So, we just stayed on in Colombia and worked there. Initially, it was continued work with the Arawak people group. They live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a very tall mountain complex right on the Caribbean coast. And so, we continued working with that community for a couple of years. But it seemed more fruitful for me to spend time assisting my fellow linguists and Bible translators in matters of understanding and documenting the languages they work with. So, I had opportunities to co-author a dictionary, a volume covering another language, kind of phonology, grammar, dictionary, several different projects like that, where then I worked alongside other people to help bring to publication their insights about Colombian indigenous languages, of which there's 60 some odd, depends on how you count. And SIL had worked with 45 more or less of those communities. So, we spent 17 years in Colombia and became thoroughly acquainted with the country. We worked alongside the government, some with academia, community development kinds of activities, quite a few different things. And, I wasn't a linguistic advisor to colleagues. Over time, I tracked more towards general administrative work, ultimately being the country director at the end of our time there, and came back to the U.S. then. We transitioned back to the U.S. permanently in year 2000. And from that point, I was involved with the international operations and rarely got a chance to do much linguistics, but was involved with our academic work and the coordinators at an international level of various disciplines, whether anthropology, linguistics, literacy, so forth.

0:10:38.0 Paul Frank: So, we were in Dallas for seven years. And then, we're asked to go to Washington, D.C., which was not at all on our radar. And reluctantly at first went there to be involved in representing the organization, U.S. government, foreign governments. And at that time, there was a growing but small group of people that were interested in languages and multilingual education. And a multilingual education working group began meeting in those years. So, when would that have been? Around 2008 or so, and began to get to know with other players in the minority or low resource language community and some really excellent people. And we did have that group for a number of years. But it also helped draw SIL from its kind of almost exclusively community focus, somebody goes into a particular community and works with them relatively long term, to being engaged with other partners, whether it's donor governments or other NGOs or just individuals, and figuring out how to leverage what we knew how to do to the benefit of what other people were trying to get done. And along in here is where I met Joy Payton.

0:12:13.5 Paul Frank: She was a friend. In fact, we found out she had also studied at University of Oklahoma. I don't remember, I think we finally concluded. We weren't there exactly the same summers, but we were in parallel worlds. And we began to get much more involved in networking and offering our services. And the organization then was exploring how else other than just kind of privately funded community based activities, how else could we serve? And the decision was made to create a spinoff organization that we called SIL LEAD. The LEAD, it wasn't kind of technically legally, it was just a word, but for us informally, it was language education and development. So, how do we link together issues of language and education and broader aspects of development? And we started that, I was director for 10 years and have stepped down from that about three years ago, three, four years ago. But providentially, we formed the organization right at the time when USAID, along with other donors, UK Aid and so forth, were beginning to take local languages seriously. And they had a big reading push. They formed this all children reading consortium and that we're supporting a lot of stuff.

0:13:45.3 Paul Frank: And when this first happened in 2011, basically, none of the other major players had language expertise, but they were being told, you're going to have to do programming around reading. And reading is normally best if it starts in the language of the home, the language the child brings with them to school, things that we take for granted now that were simply not the practice back then. And I remember being at a meeting that USAID held and they read, it was in the days when they actually sent cables. So, there's cable from Hillary Clinton at all USAID mission directors saying, we've got this new strategy. Here's what we're going to focus on. Now you're going to change your programming to align with this new strategy. And I had this sensation of everybody looking at each other saying, I wonder, when are we going to do that? We don't know how to do that. So, we were very popular early along in terms of the, you know, we didn't know a lot of stuff about doing development in this larger scale and so forth. But we did have many opportunities then over a number of years to provide our language expertise, particularly in matters of local language curriculum development and teaching methodologies for local languages and bridging to other languages and so forth.

0:15:13.0 Paul Frank: First project we had was Uganda, 12 Ugandan languages, grades one to four textbooks, teachers guides. It was 96 books ultimately over the project that were done in those languages. And so, that was a very demanding and rich experience. RTI International was the first organization that wanted to recruit us to participate in projects. But ultimately, there was Uganda, Ethiopia, ultimately Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Madagascar. That's just in Africa and, you know, projects Afghanistan, Nepal, Indonesia, stuff in Indonesia, Philippines. And so, we had many, many opportunities to rub shoulders with other very fascinating and capable people and organizations over those years. And so, that was a very rich experience. I enjoyed it very much. I believe we made ourselves useful, figured out what we knew and didn't know and how to work with other partners. And the Bloom Software that I've had a lot to do with for book creation in any language kind of developed during the same period. And we entered it into all children reading competitions and it was surprise winner and had other, it kind of caught on. So, that was one contribution, a very concrete way we were making to both communities, organizations, governments.

0:16:59.6 Paul Frank: Bloom has been used to create particularly supplementary reading materials and projects with quite a bit of that were Indonesia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Philippines, Guatemala, a bunch of places that people adopted this tool, and we were able to provide training and have seen thousands of books created in low resource languages that are on our platform. Very nice quality things. And it's one of those things where we didn't create all these books, we created some stuff, but it was really about empowering other people, whether it be an NGO or a government or simply people in their community to create local language literature. And that's been a very rewarding experience. I still have a kind of a step removed involvement with that. It went from like a very beginning platform eight years or something ago, and now there's more than 20,000 books on the platform. I should look and find out. We're inching up on 1,000 languages. So, I'll look at today's statistics, we have 973 languages represented on the platform today. And yeah, so, it's amazing. I still tell people it's the most multilingual platform in the world. So, until somebody tells me otherwise, that's my claim that in terms of content in languages that you can go to one place and find content in that many languages.

0:18:46.0 Paul Frank: And I'm proud of that and of what we've been able to facilitate. There's also a long way to go. The languages with most of the books are typically world languages, but Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, it's fifth in the book count. And so, that has been another kind of contribution we've made. I loved it because I became a master trainer, and I got to train people. I used Bloom at Guatemala and Honduras and a bunch of different places, Indonesia. And that was the closest I think I came to really just hands on with people that speak these other languages that were really eager to begin creating their own literature. And so, personally, that's one of the most rewarding things I've gotten to do. And I don't get to do it so much anymore. So, that's kind of brought me today, I've handed off certain responsibilities in the last few years of my career. I anticipate making kind of fixed term contributions, whether it's in with Bloom or, in right now I'm spending time in the grants office, seeing how we can get more resources for this work, support in other programs like Bloom, that where SIL is really trying to invest and make a bigger contribution.

0:20:14.6 Paul Frank: So, that's kind of what's gotten me to today. Some of the motivation started out of missionary work years ago, we're talking 100 years ago now, and realizing, wait, if we're going to go communicate with these people, they don't speak Spanish. They don't speak English. And so, language became evidently something like, if I'm going to connect with people, I got to figure out how to talk their language. And so, that idea of people's identity and how they engage with the world through language was right at the very beginning. And I think, over the years, maybe sometimes we've been on about language more abstractly. And I think in the last decade or so, we've kind of pulled ourselves back to think, let's make sure we let people know that language is about people, and about how they experience the world. And the research that SIL has done over the years with like the ethnologue, which is our catalog of the world's living languages, finding out what language is spoken where by how many people. And sometimes we're talking about hundreds, you know, language and vigorous use, but just a few hundred people to language is spoken by millions.

0:21:38.0 Paul Frank: And so, an interesting thing that came out of that research was trying to understand what is the situation that people find themselves in. There's been a lot of talk since early 90s about language loss, language shift. And so, we were having a look at that ourselves saying, okay, all these languages we know about, what do we know about their sociolinguistic status? Are they in fact still using their language? And put together, there was a scale of language vitality, Joshua Fishman started called, now I can't remember what it means, it was GIDS, I think, Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, something like that. So, we began to apply that kind of lens and saying, okay, there are a lot of languages where only the grandparents speak the language, or maybe parents and grandparents, but the kids have shifted languages. So, we began to take a good look at languages all around the world to understand where were they in a continuum of language use? And engaging with them kind of where they were, what do you want to do with your language? And in some cases, they may want to recover their language, they may want to just preserve some heritage.

0:23:08.5 Paul Frank: So, there are communities where they want to revitalize their language. That's really hard to do, it turns out. But to feed into, okay, let's document your language, let's make recordings, let's get the vocabulary and so forth. And then, people trying to take charge of what's going to happen with the next generation. Are these kids going to learn the language? So, we've seen that in some of the Native American peoples, both in the U.S. and elsewhere through the Americas. In my work with the Arawak community, I kind of saw that as well, very vigorous use of the language. In fact, on a number of occasions, went up into the mountains when they were having meetings, and like, I was totally lost, because that's all they do, only talk Arawak in their meetings, and they knew how to talk, because they could meet all day, all night, they could meet several days. And their language is how they did business. That's, it wasn't... And then some of them would talk in Spanish, you know, you could talk to them in Spanish. But it was very clear that their language was just intertwined with their whole way of life, extremely meaningful to them, the point where they were pushing back on outside intrusion into their community.

0:24:31.2 Paul Frank: And, they wanted... They did more other people coming in there and telling them what to do, what language to speak, and so forth. And so, I really get that picture of people who are really holding on to that language, and the way of life it's associated with. And kind of vicariously through other colleagues and seeing a similar thing, that there's this intermixture of language and way of life is normal. And where there is language shift, there's a complex dynamics of economic opportunity and pressure from the outside of the dominant society. And I think what I began to appreciate was people maybe pushing their own children towards the dominant language, because they want their kids have a better life than they had. And so, they want their kids, it turns out, okay, if they were going to have a better life, they got to speak a different language. And so, that's another way in which language and life come together has to do with economic opportunities, educational opportunities. And we begin to appreciate that too many people in these sorts of communities felt they had kind of a binary choice, do I keep the language and way of life? Or do I choose the future and better life?

0:26:08.0 Paul Frank: And it was a kind of a false dichotomy. Or maybe it was reality in many cases, because there wasn't any other option. And I think one of the things SIL has really advocated for is, we all carry multiple identities. It could be as simple as, you know, husband or wife, father, child, but we operate in our world. I'm in a church, I have an identity with my church, I may be in a community organization, the homeowners. So, I got a lot of different identities, I carry, and everybody is that way. And the same thing can apply in a community where they value being themselves, but they also value connecting with a wider society. If nothing else, government services, you know, if I wanted access services, I've got to talk to somebody beside my own family. And so, health is an issue, and language can be a barrier. So we're looking at how can more multilingual approach to life and to engaging with communities, give them options they didn't know they had to maintain an identity and utilization of a language in the way of life it embodies, while also additionally learning other languages, that in some ways may be vehicular languages.

0:27:35.3 Paul Frank: If I speak Spanish, I can go to the clinic and get help. I can market my goods, but it also may be, well, I want to be part of that wider society. And people do want to participate, they do want their voices to be heard. And so, we feel like, and our experience says that people do want to have those types of options. They don't want to have to abandon who they are in order to have a better future. And I think, a lot of what SIL has tried to do is saying, yeah, you can do that. Let's look at it together. Let's not look at it of either this language or that language, either this way of life or that way of life. And, as we have done research in languages around the world, you know what, most people are multilingual, except for the other people in America or whatever. Most people in the world are multilingual. Let's live in that reality and help them explore how they want to use languages because they have multiple, typically, very, very common. And they'll use different languages for different purposes. So, as I say, my Arawak friends, when it was time to do community business, it was Arawak.

0:28:56.1 Paul Frank: That was the only thing that worked. When it comes time to talk to the government, well yeah, they have to talk in Spanish and so forth. So, I think we've moved into a world where people can make choices about what languages they'll use and when they'll use which one. And sociolinguistics have known this for years, maybe the rest of the world is waking up to that, where people are then moving between languages depending on context, interlocutor, what the domain of discussion is. It becomes, you know, it's very rich and complex patterns. But we as an institution then want to make it so people have those options. You want education for your children in that language? We can do that. We're not talking about exclusive of the national language or whatever. We're talking about starting from where the child is and helping them utilize their language to begin learning, to begin reading, to begin understanding what education is, and then to systematically bring in those additional languages. There's far too many stories of kids going to school, no clue what the teacher's saying. And there were times we might talk to a consular officer or even an ambassador in Washington.

0:30:25.8 Paul Frank: You know, I've got my education in French. Like, well, how many other kids dropped out of school because they couldn't make the cut in a dominant language? And how many kids even today talk about dropouts mid-primary, grade three, grade two? And we've got to make a better world than that, where their language enables them to begin obtaining education. And then you can layer on top of their own language, another, maybe a national, international language, and kids can then continue learning without having to feel bad about the language of the home, and feel embarrassed about that, but be proud of it and to use it where they want to use it.

0:31:20.7 Norah Jones: There's so many stories, I'm sure. And the thing is, the more that you are expressing this ongoing tendency to feel that one has to choose one or the other, or situations that you've just described where a child goes into a government, or at least public, in some way classroom and can't understand the teacher and things begin to fall apart there, having those understandings happen, every single one time you mentioned that, it seems so important to have a local presence, a local story about how languages do happen naturally for humans. It's possible for your child to be in the case I'm talking here of the children that you've been referring to, for your child to be a member of this cultural heritage and also be in the midst of the mainstream thing, to not presume to choose for a community what language they should be focusing on. You even mentioned that most of the world is multilingual. What kind of statistics do you have for that? And going from that larger statistical concept to back to that intimacy, how do we continue to help people to understand that it doesn't have to be a choice one or the other, at least see what options are available for you? How do we do that?

0:32:56.7 Paul Frank: Well, everybody's concerned about language loss, but if you just think about the communities that are struggling with that, and we've got thousands of languages where within one household you're going to have language differences. The kids are learning Spanish, the parents know Arawak, whatever. So, that's where you see that multilingualism big time is when language shift begins to take place. There undoubtedly are some languages where they're pretty much monolingual on their own, but I'm convinced there's not many places like that anymore. And that people are living within a broader environment that exposes them to other languages. It's really interesting. If you look at a chart of population and language, you see those handful of languages with millions and millions of people that speak them. And then, a relatively modest number of people who speak a whole bunch of other languages. But if you look at the number of languages, you see a very few of these dominant languages and you see thousands. My... If I remember correctly, there's a couple of thousand languages that are very actively used. We're not talking about language shift. We're talking about everyday use of the language, all generations.

0:34:24.2 Paul Frank: We're talking about several thousand languages. Maybe, as many as a billion people in the world today who use that language every day, and their kids are learning them. And yet, in the vast majority of those situations, their language is not a valid language of education. Most of the time, it's understood to be an oral language, just used for oral communication, but not validated by governments. In many cases, it actually might make sense for people to primarily use their language in an oral form, in conversation and interaction, while using another language for written things. That's not necessarily bad. That can be a stable, it's kind of like a diglossic situation, talking about sociolinguistic terminology, where you have a high language and a low language. That was originally for things like Arabic or German or whatever, but in many ways, many communities operate that way, where French or English or Spanish or whatever is the high language, and it dominates education in the written world, and their language is used more in everyday interaction with their fellow community members. And that can be a very stable and satisfactory situation. But if people do want to move their language into the written realm, and many do, that's a long, difficult process.

0:35:56.5 Paul Frank: We're talking about language standardization, about generating literature, experimenting with orthographies, educational materials, trying to advocate that their language should be an acceptable language used in the classroom. There's a whole bunch of stuff that it takes to be a written language that kind of stands on its own. And so, one of the things our research has found out is that when you move a language into the written realm, it actually puts them in a less stable position, because now, their language in written form is trying to compete with some dominant language in written form, almost guaranteed it's going to lose out. And so, it's a fascinating dynamic, and even some of the stuff we've done over the years may have contributed towards a language being sidelined in some ways, kind of globally, because it couldn't really compete in the educational or written realm. And so, it has made us mindful of the fact that getting the language written isn't the be-all and end-all of serving a community. They have to think about what it takes for their language to be used. If they want to speak it, that's fine, but what if they want to write it?

0:37:23.2 Paul Frank: And if they want to write it, they have to think, okay, in what domains is it going to be? In education? Maybe yes, maybe no. A lot of places where we've worked, it might be in church. Maybe they've got a translation of the Bible in their own language and one in a dominant language. Well, maybe reading and writing their language might have to do more with community life and church and religion than it does with education. So there's all kinds of ways that can play out.

0:37:54.4 Norah Jones: The importance of some of the aspects that you have been listening to in this podcast, I want to reflect on before we finish today. Recognize that we are at a turning point, where understanding that language's tool for humanity is critical for our safety, our well-being, indeed our existence. I'm going to leave you then with an encouragement to turn and understand how important it is that all are allowed to speak, use, and add to languages in their own lives as tools. And I'm going to end then with one more excerpt from Paul Frank and an invitation for you to go out and change the world through language.

0:38:47.8 Paul Frank: If I'm going to connect with people, I got to figure out how to talk their language. And so, that idea of people's identity and how they engage with the world through language was right at the very beginning. And I think, over the years, maybe sometimes we've been known about language more abstractly. And I think, in the last decade or so, we've kind of pulled ourselves back to think, let's make sure we let people know that language is about people and about how they experience the world.