Applied Languages

    Posted by Jaiken Struck on March 2nd, 2010

When Doctor Gregory Anderson and Doctor K. David Harrison set off in 2003 to a few remote villages in Russia’s eastern Tomsk Oblast, they took only the bare essentials: toothbrushes, socks, soap, plus their microphones, video cameras, audio recorders, and linguistics textbooks. What brought them to this isolated corner of central Siberia was a business conference — of sorts: a series of meetings with the less than 25 remaining speakers of Middle Chulym, or Os.

Anderson and Harrison are the two linguists behind the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. A U.S.-based nonprofit, it is one of a handful of initiatives spearheaded by linguists who are scrambling to save the world’s endangered tongues. Experts predict that by the end of the century, half of the world’s 6,700 languages will be extinct.

Language endangerment, a global phenomenon, has likely never before been so pervasive. As small, minority languages give way to socioeconomic and cultural pressures, they also yield to languages that replace them. In the process, unique linguistic and anthropological information is lost forever.

“Can it [language loss] be stopped or slowed? It’s very difficult to know how that could happen,” says Doctor Nicholas Ostler, chairman of the UK-based Foundation for Endangered Languages. “It’s a social fact about the way the world is developing at the moment which puts pressure on small language groups, and only if there’s a radical change in the way the world is, the pressures that the world puts on things, [and] people’s consciousness, is it likely to change.”

Ostler’s organization, like Anderson’s and Harrison’s, is fighting the trend. That involves research trips to some of the world’s remotest spots — from Siberia to Bolivia to Australia — and working with locals to preserve rare languages through recordings, transcriptions, and videos. Then comes detailed analyses of the samples — most offering new insight into the grammar and sound system of a language — and sometimes even a rare glimpse into history.

It has been established, for example, that Yaghnobi, a minority language of Tajikistan, is a descendant of the ancient language Sogdian, spoken up and down the Silk Road in medieval times. After documentation comes the hard part — revitalization and maintenance of a dying language. But it’s work that linguists cannot do alone. “No matter what linguists think, say, or do, they can’t do anything to maintain a language. All they can do is provide adequate documentation for it,” says Anderson.

“The people themselves have to choose to maintain it. That requires a lot of effort, both in producing materials that will be suitable for schooling, for example, and a lot of personal effort that the people themselves require to make real the desire that they have to maintain their language.”

With enough effort, disappearing languages can flourish again. One of the great success stories of recent times is Welsh, the language of Wales in Great Britain. It was well on its way to extinction only two decades ago, but now has hundreds of thousands of speakers.

But Welsh had something that most endangered languages do not: vigorous government support. And that support assured the Welsh revival included another crucial element: enough money to make the dreams of reviving the language a reality.

Read more: Radio Free Europe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Endangered Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.