Endangered languages
Babel runs backwards
The Economist |Dec 29th 2004
http://www.clta-gny.org/article/endangered_language.html
The world's languages are disappearing at the rate of one a fortnight.
What to do? AND they said one to another, go to, let us build us a
city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a
name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole
Earth...And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have
all one language; and this they begin to do...let us go down, and
there confound their language, that they may not understand one
another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon
the face of all the Earth." That ended the building of the tower of
Babel, and started the confusion of tongues.
The usual way to read this passage from Genesis is that God
punished his people for getting too uppity. Multilingualism was a
curse to bring them down to Earthan expulsion from the paradise of
effortless communication. If that is what happened, the Lord certainly
made a thorough job of it. The single language that may have been
spoken at the dawn of modern mankind, perhaps 60,000 years ago,
gradually diversified into huge numbers. Perhaps tens, possibly
hundreds of thousands of languages may have evolved and then died as
the people who spoke them first flourished, then perished. The vast
majority left no written trace, and so no trace at all. A few, such as
Sumerian, Etruscan and Mayan, survived in writing but became extinct
in daily life. Others, such as Latin, Sanskrit and ancient Greek, were
preserved in written form but also evolved into live new tongues.
Languages have been coming and going for millennia, but in recent
times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world
was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit groups
developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some
linguists reckon that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just 5m-10m
people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.
Soon afterwards many of those people started settling down to become
farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in
number. In recent centuries, colonisation, trade, industrialisation,
the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal
compulsory education, among other things, have helped to extirpate
many languages that had previously prospered in isolation. And in the
past few decades, thanks to globalisation and better communications,
the rate of attrition has greatly accelerated, and dominant languages
such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.
At present the world has about 6,800 distinct languages (and many more
dialects), according to Ethnologue, a database maintained by the
Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas. The distribution of these
languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that temperate zones
have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, whereas
hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has
only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and
Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone
accounts for well over 800. The median number of speakers is a mere
6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer
people than that.
Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to
extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left. The list makes
melancholy reading. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight
remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the
United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a
question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.
Worse, probably 3,000 or so others are also endangered. Linguists
classify languages on a scale ranging from "safe" (learnt by all
children in the group, and spoken by all its members) to "critically
endangered" (only a few old speakers). On that scale, "endangered"
comes in the middle, meaning that children no longer learn the
language and only adults speak it.
Dying asand becausewe speak
All the experts agree that by the end of this century the number of
languages in use will be much smaller than it is now, but they
disagree on how much smaller. The optimists think that, with care and
effort, the decline can be managed so that about half will survive.
The pessimists reckon that in 100 years' time 90% of the world's
languages will be gone, and that a couple of centuries from now the
world may be left with only 200 tongues.
When the British were linguists
It is tempting to think that life could be simpler, better and perhaps
more peaceful if everybody could settle on one, or just a few,
languages, leaving less room for misunderstanding. But there is little
evidence that monolingualism promotes peace. In Northern Ireland,
Protestants and Catholics speak the same language. Vietnam and Somalia
are both predominantly monolingual. When Yugoslavia fell into civil
war, most of its people were speaking Serbo-Croat. A shared language
may even make people more bellicose. According to a legend of the
Acoma tribe in New Mexico, the goddess Iatiku caused languages to
multiply so that people would quarrel less.
Certainly, attempts to enforce a single language tend to provoke
strong reactions. James Crawford, an American writer on the subject,
points to the conclusion of an 1868 federal commission on making peace
with the Plains Indians: "In the difference of language today lie
two-thirds of our troubles...
Schools should be established which children should be required to
attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English
language substituted." The extermination happened in the endmost
Native American languages are now dead or dyingbut not without a
struggle. For the Kurds in Turkey, and for some other minorities,
efforts to suppress their language have not succeeded yet.
But minority languages disappear for many reasons. It could be because
their speakers are beset by some calamity: droughts, floods,
earthquakes, or imported epidemics such as swept through the
indigenous populations of Latin America when the Europeans arrived.
Today HIV/AIDS in some African countries is wiping out entire
generations, and sometimes their language with them.
However, most languages disappear because their speakers voluntarily
abandon them, says Matthias Brenzinger, of Dartmouth College, New
Hampshire. Where a dominant language is associated with progress and
economic success, speakers of minority languages come under pressure
to learn it in order to get on. The most obvious example in the modern
world is English, which is advancing by leaps and boundsencouraged by
the internet. According to Global Reach, a communications consultancy,
English accounts for two-thirds of all web content.
A small number of dominant languages already rule the globe. Of the
world's 6 billion-odd people, nearly a sixth speak Mandarin Chinese as
a first language. If you add the rest of the top 11English, Hindi,
Spanish, Arabic and so onplus people who speak one of these as a
second language, your list already covers well over half of mankind
(see table).
As the big languages advance, the minority ones retreat. They come to
be seen as backward and embarrassing. As children stop learning them
and fewer people speak them, they become ever less useful. In the end,
the last speakers die, taking their languages to the grave with them.
Good riddance, say some. Throughout human history, languages have been
born, evolved and died; why not let nature take its course? If
speakers of minority languages really wanted to hang on to them, they
would make strenuous efforts to keep them alive. If they do not, it
means they no longer have a use for them. Trying to save moribund
languages is pointless
Misguided cultural Darwinism, cry the linguists. Endangered languages
were perfectly suited to their speakers' way of life until their
habitat changed through the intervention of other humans. There is a
close parallel with man's encroachment on the natural environment, but
the environmentalists have made faster progress..
Greenery has become mainstream, and preserving some rare butterfly,
wildflower or ecosystem is considered a worthy goal. In the same way,
languages should be preserved to safeguard diversity, say these
linguists: a widespread loss of languages is the equivalent of an
ecological disaster.
The analogy can be pushed too far. As it happens, the parts of the
world with the greatest linguistic variety, such as southern Asia,
Africa and Central America, are also home to the greatest variety of
species. In an article in Nature in 2003, William Sutherland, of
Britain's University of East Anglia, showed that language density
increases with lower latitude and a proportionally larger area of
forest and mountain. The same is true for birds. Countries with many
endangered languages also have many endangered birds. But the numbers
of endangered animal species increase with human density, whereas the
numbers of endangered languages do not. Mr Sutherland concludes that
despite the similar distribution of diversity, "the reasons for
extinction risk differ between cultural and biological diversity."
It seems, then, that the disappearance of a few, or even many,
languages will not threaten the survival of the human race. But that
does not mean it is unimportant. A 2003 UNESCO paper, "Language
Vitality and Endangerment", summed up the reasons why people should
care:The extinction of each language results in the irrecoverable loss
of unique cultural, historical and ecological knowledge. Each language
is a unique expression of the human experience of the world...Every
time a language dies, we have less evidence for understanding patterns
in the structure and function of human language, human prehistory, and
the maintenance of the world's diverse ecosystems. Above all, speakers
of these languages may experience the loss of their language as a loss
of their original ethnic and cultural identity.
The late Kenneth Hale, who taught linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), put it more passionately: "When you
lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of
art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum."
Full of sound and significance
Such museums contain many treasures. One of the excitements for
linguists is the sheer variety of human languages. They cover a large
range of sounds, including clicks (heard only in Africa's Khoisan
languages, and a few borrowers from them), and a wealth of different
kinds of syntax, grammar and vocabulary. Each has its own intricate
rules. There are wonderful oddities such as Ubykh, from the Caucasus,
which has 81 consonants but only three vowels (and became extinct in
1992); and Rotokas, from Papua New Guinea with only six consonants and
five vowels.
When it comes to vocabulary, the story about the Eskimos' many words
for snow, to match the many varieties they encounter, is well known.
It is also wrong, according to Andrew Dalby in his book "Language in
Danger". Inuit does have quite a range of different words for snow,
but so, for example, does English: snow, sleet, slush and so on. The
total is about the same, but the Inuit words make different
distinctions from the English ones, such as "snow on the ground",
"falling snow" or "drifting snow". However, the point of the story
remains valid: each language reflects its users' particular needs and
concerns.
The Haunoo in the Philippines do not need to know about snow, but as
farmers they need to know about earth, and their language enables them
to distinguish between ten basic and 30 derivative types of soil. Many
languages reflect a detailed knowledge of the natural world: weather,
animals, plantsparticularly their medical uses. If such languages are
lost, the knowledge embedded in them may be lost too.
Windows on the world
But languages do not just carry practical knowledge. As Daniel Nettle
and Suzanne Romaine put it in "Vanishing Voices", each language "has
its own window on the world", often incorporating subtle distinctions
that resist translation. For example, the language of the Hopi Indians
has many more verb forms than most European languages, which allow its
speakers to differentiate much more intricately between different
kinds of past, present and future. In Algonquian languages spoken in
parts of Canada, such as Cree and Innu, the first person is not "I" or
"we", but "you", reflecting their view of the importance of the
individual vis-à-vis the group. In fact, anyone who speaks more than
one language knows that some terms are untranslatable, which is why
English-speakers borrow words and phrases such as Schadenfreude or je
ne sais quoi.
The idea that different languages reflect different views of the world
was developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s.
Their hypothesis comes in two parts: first, that different languages
embody different world views and, second, that this predisposes their
speakers towards different ways of thought. The second part has always
been controversial, but the first is hard to argue with. In the past
few decades the dominant influence in linguistics has been that of
Noam Chomsky at MIT, whose doctrine of universal grammar is somewhat
at variance with Sapir-Whorf. It holds that all languages, despite
their superficial differences, share underlying structures. But the
differences are still of great interest, so, whichever theorist you
believe, the loss of a language is not to be taken lightly.
Bridgeman
Learning French a century agoone more tongue for multilingual Africans
Oddly, the world has woken up to this only fairly recently, though
over the past 15 years or so a rash of books, articles and initiatives
has been raising the alarm. The top priority, says David Crystal in
his book, "Language Death", is information-gathering. With so many
languages at risk, the effort has to be concentrated on the most
pressing cases.
Perhaps two-thirds of the world's languages have never been written
down, so there is an urgent need to record what may be about to
vanish. Audio and video recordings can help, but the main need is for
basic grammars and dictionaries, which are expensive to produce. Mr
Crystal calculates that, assuming an average cost of $192,000 per
language over three years, the cost of recording 3,000 endangered
languages might run to $575m. But that is one guess among many.
Another big constraint is the shortage of researchers undertaking such
work, says Peter Austin, of London University's School of Oriental and
African Studies. His programme is helping to train more. It forms part
of an endangered-languages project financed, to the tune of £20m
($39m) over ten years, by the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund. The
Volkswagen Foundation is also paying for some documentation work, and
other organisations, including UNESCO, are helping. The sums involved
are mostly modest, but the fact that money is being spent at all helps
to raise awareness, says Akira Yamamoto, of the University of Kansas.
He argues that the best and cheapest way of documenting endangered
languages is to work with the communities concerned and train their
own people in research techniques.
Clearly, there is no point in trying to save a language unless the
speakers wish it, but most seem to be increasingly interested. In
recent decades several moribund languages, including Hawaiian, Maori
and Welsh, have been successfully revived. Nicholas Ostler, of the
British-based Foundation for Endangered Languages, draws a parallel
with fine art: though people do not need their ancient mother tongue
for physical survival, it makes life far richer.
Hebrew provides an unusual example. It was brought back from the
embalmed state of being used only for religious purposes to become the
official, and universally used, language of the state of Israel. But
that required extraordinary circumstances and effortsand more or less
killed off another Jewish lingua franca, Yiddish.
Sharper minds, better understanding
Everybody agrees that endangered languages can be saved only if their
speakers are prepared to become bi- or multilingual. That way, they
can use the dominant language for work and official purposes, and
their own language among family and friends. Monolingual Anglo-Saxons
shudder at the thought, but linguists point out that, for most of
humanity most of the time, bi- or multilingualism has been the natural
state of affairs. Children can easily pick up several languages if
they are exposed to them early. Indeed, there is evidence that people
who speak more than one language are mentally more flexible and more
creative than monoglots. Swedish children learn English in primary
school, which seems to do no harm to their Swedish (or to the rest of
their education).
In his book "Spoken Here", Mark Abley, tongue slightly in cheek,
argues that the story of Babel may have been misunderstood. The Lord
urged Noah and his people "to be fruitful, multiply and replenish the
Earth". They duly multiplied, but stayed put and became overcrowded.
Mixing up their language was a way of getting them to spread out. It
was a blessing in disguise.
The demise of any language is a loss for all mankind, but most of all
a loss for its speakers. As one Navajo elder, quoted by Mr Yamamoto,
told his grandson:
"If you don't breathe,
There is no air.
If you don't walk,
There is no earth.
If you don't speak,
There is no world."
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