Today, we travel far and wide to learn about some of the world’s rarest languages. According to experts, over half of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. In fact, one language disappears every two weeks.
As the last speakers of a language pass away, the valuable information that language contains also disappears. Join us as we explore the cultural significance of language and the importance of protecting endangered languages.
What would happen if you were the last person left who spoke your language? Who would you share stories with? Who would you sing songs to? Who would you exchange jokes with? Who would understand your names for local plants, animals, and traditions? David Harrison and Gregory Anderson use this example to illustrate the situation faced by many people around the world whose local languages are disappearing. Mr Harrison and Mr Anderson head Living Tongues, an organisation that studies and protects endangered languages.
Sometimes a language disappears immediately when the last person who speaks it dies. Alternatively, a local language might disappear more slowly. This occurs when an official language becomes more prevalent and children stop learning the local language of their parents. This is not a new phenomenon. Official languages often represent a form of control over a group of people.
Throughout history, the language spoken by a dominant group has spread across civilisations. The more powerful culture rarely respects the language and culture of smaller ethnic groups. Consequently, smaller cultures lose their local language as the language of the dominant culture becomes the stronger influence.
Many native languages in the Russian region of Siberia, for example, are under threat. This is largely due to the former Soviet Union’s hostile language policies that forced the use of Russian as the official language.
The internet could be considered a new form of language control. According to UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organisation, ninety percent of the world’s languages are not represented on the Internet.
Experts say that protecting languages is important for many reasons. Languages contain the histories, ideas and knowledge of a culture. They also contain valuable information about local medicines, plants and animals.
David Harrison and Gregory Anderson of Living Tongues claim that many endangered languages are spoken by indigenous peoples who have close contact with the natural world. These ancient languages contain a great deal of information about environmental systems and species of plants and animals that are unknown to scientists.
Each language also reflects how a culture organises information. For instance, in the Carrier language spoken in British Columbia, one word means ‘he gives me an object like the fruit blueberries’. In the Nivkh language of Siberia, each number can be expressed in twenty-six different ways depending on the object being counted. In one language in Botswana, there are three main categories of plants and animals: edible ‘eat-things’, harmful ‘bite-things’, and ‘useless things’.
Here, Gregory Anderson talks about why languages are important:
GREGORY ANDERSON: ‘Language is, in many ways, a window to the mind. These languages contain all kinds of ways in which we structure the world. Language is a way of storing the history of a people. They reflect different historical contacts with other groups, for example in the form of loan words borrowed from one language into another. For people with no written history, language can be a way of accessing that history simply by examining the different layers of the language.’
The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has partnered with National Geographic to create the Enduring Voices Project. The project aims to raise public awareness of endangered languages and study and document them. It also aims to prevent languages from dying out by identifying the areas most at risk of losing their languages. These ‘hotspot’ areas include northern Australia, central South America, eastern Siberia, and parts of the United States and Canada.
Enduring Voices recently travelled to Paraguay, a country where Spanish is the main language, but many other languages are also spoken. Very few of these languages have been recorded or scientifically documented. The Enduring Voices team studied three rare languages: Ishir, Toba Qom and Maka. They made sound recordings of the languages and took extensive photographs. This documentation could be used in future as a study tool and for language protection efforts. They also provided a member of the Ybytso Ishir community with training and a Language Technology Kit. Armed with a computer, recorder and camera, this language activist can now work towards creating an Ishir dictionary.
Many languages are also disappearing from northwestern United States. Languages spoken by native tribes are increasingly endangered as younger generations learn and speak English instead. One of the most endangered languages is Siletz Dee-ni. It was spoken on the Siletz Reservation, where the tribe lives in a protected area of land in the state of Oregon. The reservation was established in the nineteenth century to accommodate people from twenty-seven different Native American groups.
As the groups spoke different languages, they developed Chinook Jargon to communicate with each other. As Chinook Jargon and English became more widely used, fewer people spoke their native languages.
Currently, only one person on the reservation speaks Siletz Dee-ni, but others are learning the language. With the help of Living Tongues, the tribal members have created a Siletz dictionary to preserve knowledge of the language. Below is a recording of several words from the dictionary.
Below is an example of the secret mixed language of the Kallawaya people, who are male traditional healers from a small community in southern Bolivia.
Kallawaya is a mixed language. It contains grammatical structures and words from several other languages that are either unknown or have disappeared. Kallawaya is an ancient language.
Traditional healers have spoken it since at least the fifteenth century, during the height of the Inca civilisation. Why is it a secret language? It is passed down within families from father to son as a way of protecting the healers’ special knowledge.
Experts say that reviving endangered languages is challenging, but important. One example of this can be seen in the US state of Hawaii. The United States first claimed Hawaii as a territory in 1898. Two years earlier, the use of the Hawaiian language had been banned in both private and public schools. English became the official language of Hawaii. Gradually, fewer and fewer young Hawaiians became fluent in Hawaiian. The language began to disappear.
William Wilson is a professor at the University of Hawaii. In 1986, he says, fewer than fifty children in Hawaii could speak their native language fluently. That same year, after extended protests by native groups, the language ban was lifted. The Hawaiian language began to be taught in schools again. Mr Wilson says that around two thousand children now speak Hawaiian. More importantly, he says, many families now speak Hawaiian at home.
This past summer, the Voice of America held an expert discussion called ‘Endangered Languages: Saving Voices Before They Are Lost’. Portland State University language expert Tucker Childs attended the event. Mr Childs is currently working on documenting Bom and Kim, two endangered languages spoken in Sierra Leone. His brother, Bart Childs, is a VOA reporter.
He made a series of videos showing Tucker and his research team trying to save these endangered African languages. The videos demonstrate that the key to protecting languages lies in children and their eagerness to learn. It is these young people who can preserve this cultural tradition for future generations.
