Applied Languages

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

Inuit languages — and how to preserve them in a culture increasingly dominated by English — are the focus of a Nunavut summit this week drawing experts from several circumpolar nations.

About 200 delegates from Canada, Greenland and the United States are in Iqaluit for the Nunavut Language Summit, which began Tuesday and runs through Friday. The Nunavut government organized the conference because it wants to implement new laws aimed at making Inuit languages, including Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun, more prominent in the daily lives of Nunavummiut.

While about 90 per cent of Inuit in Canada still speak Inuktitut, its use has been slowly declining, according to Statistics Canada. Inuit make up 84 per cent of Nunavut’s population of about 30,000. “Language is very important because it defines who you are,” Louis Tapardjuk, Nunavut’s minister of languages, told CBC News before the summit began.

“[The] Inuktitut language, there’s no other such language throughout the world. It’s only spoken by those that live in the circumpolar region, so it is something to be proud of, something that you can call your own.”

The summit began with a “healing gathering” in which Inuit speakers from a wide range of ages and backgrounds spoke about their own experiences, often as students forbidden from speaking their native tongue at school. “My father, when he was asked or told by the schooling authorities to speak English to us, did not,” Edna MacLean, an Inupiat delegate from Alaska, told delegates. “He claimed that English was not his language, so he refused to speak English. And since Inupiaq was his language, he would speak with us.”

Raymond Ningeocheak of the Nunavut land claims organization Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. said Inuit in Nunavut must not work in isolation to preserve their languages. Speaking in Inuktitut, he said Inuit must stop arguing over each other’s regional dialects and work together to keep the language alive.

In 2008, the Nunavut government passed a revamped Official Languages Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act, with the latter offering Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun the most powerful protection among Canada’s aboriginal languages.

A series of roundtable discussions about the laws have been held in several Nunavut regions, but this week’s summit also includes delegates from outside Nunavut. Tapardjuk said the discussions will guide the government’s implementation of the new laws. The topics to be discussed include:

•Language development in children and youth.
•Language leadership, or how people can be good language role models.
•Standardizing the Inuit language.
•The Inuit languages in workplaces, media, culture and government.

Read more: CBC News

In the remote Northern Territory community of Wadeye linguists say four languages will be gone in the next decade.

Patrick Palibu Nudjulu is a Magati Ke elder, custodian of the Rak Naniny clan and is one of two remaining speakers of the Magati Ke language. His sick and elderly sister can speak Magati Ke, but not to the point where she can help in the documentation of the language.

Maree Klesch works closely with Mr Nudjulu through her job at the Endangered Languages Centre at Batchelor Institute for Indigenous tertiary education. Ms Klesch said languages are dying in the community at the hands of the dominant Murrinhpatha language, which is used at the local school.

“Within 10 years certainly four of the languages we are currently working on with Wadeye probably won’t be there and there are several reasons for that,” she said. “Languages may not be spoken in the home as much because of the lingua franca of the community.”

In August last year, the Federal Government acknowledged a report which found 110 Indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing and committed $9.3 million towards saving them.

Ms Klesch said the money has made a slight difference, but does not go anywhere near far enough. “There is just not enough speakers left to document and record these languages,” she said.

“Although there is Commonwealth support for this, it is not really nearly enough to be able to achieve the goals necessary to retrieve these languages and maintain them in a timeframe of those elders staying alive as first language speakers,” she said.

Ms Klesch wants bilingual programs to continue in Northern Territory schools as a way of ensuring the preservation of languages and Indigenous culture. “You only have to look at those languages that are already extinct, and those languages that people are trying to retrieve to find out that without the language you just don’t have the cultural knowledge.

“You don’t have the scientific knowledge of medicine, the weather, how to manage the environment, all of that is lost in translation.”

The outgoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma put the preservation of Indigenous high on his list of issues of concern in his last address in January.

Read more: ABC News

The last speaker of Bo, which is one of the world’s oldest languages, has died at the age of 85 in India’s Andaman Islands, according to the Chinese Xinhua News Agency on Friday.

Bo is now an extinct Great Andamanese language. According to some linguists, it may have been related to languages spoken in Neolithic times and was one of the world’s oldest languages.

Tribal Health Deputy Director R.C. Kar said Boa Sr, who died on January 28 this year, had been suffering from old age and health ailments for some time. He said she was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe.

According to leading linguist Professor Anvita Abbi, the death of Boa Sr from a unique tribe in the Andamans also led to the tragic demise of the world’s oldest languages — Bo.

“After the death of her parents, Boa Sr was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Adamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people,” Prof Abbi said.

“But throughout Boa Sr’s life, she had a very good sense of humor and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious,” said Abbi.

Professor Abbi said that Boa Sr’s death was a loss to intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages because they had lost “a vital piece of the jigsaw”.

“The Andamanese are believed to be among our earliest ancestors,” she explained. Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa, with some estimated to be even 70,000 years old. The islands are often called an “anthropologist’s dream” and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

Read more: Bernama

 An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?

In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist. According to Ethnologue, a US organisation owned by Christian group SIL International that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says prominent French linguist Claude Hagege. “It’s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?
One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages. “We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population,” he says.

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Maori in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life. But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable. “We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

Read more: BBC Today