Fwd: "The global cost of language murder"

Mon May 14 14:20:36 UTC 2001

>Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 05:57:40 -1000
>From: Leilani Akwai <islandgyrl at hawaii.rr.com>
>Subject: "The global cost of language murder"
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>[From the London-based "Guardian Weekly" newspaper, issue
>of March 22-28, 2001; special section: "Learning English",
>page LE-3:]
>
>- Biodiversity cannot be protected unless language genocide
>   is halted, argues *Tove Skutnabb-Kangas*
>
>- MURDER THAT IS A THREAT TO SURVIVAL
>
>- Global English debate
>
>Habitat destruction through logging, the spread of agricul-
>ture and use of pesticides, and the economic and political
>vulnerability of the people who live in the world's most
>diverse ecoregions are recognised as the main causes of the
>disappearance of biodiversity. What is less widely under-
>stood is the link between diminishing global biodiversity
>and the disappearance of languages.
>
>While new trees can be planted and habitats restored, it
>is much more difficult to restore languages once they have
>been murdered. And languages are being murdered today
>faster than ever before in human history. Even the most
>optimistic prognoses claim that only half of today's 6,000-
>7,000 spoken languages will exist by 2100. The media and
>educational systems are the most important direct agents in
>language murder today.
>
>Most of the world's languages are spoken by relatively few
>people; the median number of speakers of a language is
>probably 5,000-6,000. There are fewer than 300 languages
>with more than 1 million native users; half of all
>languages have fewer than 10,000 users, and a quarter of
>the world's spoken languages and most of the sign languages
>have fewer than 1,000 users. More than 80% of the world's
>languages exist in one country only.
>
>A simple comparison, based on numbers and extinction rates,
>shows that linguistic diversity (LD) is disappearing
>relatively much faster than biodiversity (BD). Optimistic
>estimates claim that 2% of biological species but 50% of
>languages may be dead or moribund -- no longer learned by
>children -- in 100 years' time. According to pessimistic
>but realistic estimates, 20% of biological species but 90%
>of languages may be dead or moribund in 100 years.
>
>People might say, so what? It might be better for world
>peace if we all speak a few big languages and understand
>each other. But language diversity is decisive for the
>future of the planet. LD and BD are correlated: where one
>type is high, the other one is too, and vice versa, even
>if there are exceptions. David Harmon of Terralingua, an
>international non-profit organisation devoted to preserving
>the world's linguistic diversity, has compared the 25
>countries that have the most endemic languages with the 25
>that have the most higher vertebrates. Sixteen countries
>(64%) are on both lists. According to Harmon, "it is very
>unlikely that this would only be accidental". He gets the
>same results with flowering plants and languages,
>butterflies and languages -- a high correlation between
>countries with biological and linguistic megadiversity.
>
>New research shows mounting evidence that the relationship
>may also be causal: the two types of diversity seem to
>enforce and support each other. According to a recent
>United Nations environmental programme report, threatened
>languages store the knowledge about how to maintain and use
>sustainably some of the most vulnerable and most biologi-
>cally diverse environments in the world. It has taken
>centuries for people to learn about their environments and
>to name the complex ecological relationships that are
>decisive for maintenance of biodiversity. When indigenous
>peoples lose their languages, much of this knowledge also
>disappears: the dominant languages do not have the ethno-
>biological and ethno-medical vocabulary, and the stories
>will not be translated.
>
>If the long-lasting co-evolution that people have had with
>their environments is suddenly disrupted, without nature
>(and people) having enough time to adjust and adapt, we
>can expect a catastrophe. If during the next 100 years we
>murder up to 90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly
>also the cultural) diversity that is our treasury of this
>historically developed ecological knowledge, we are also
>seriously undermining our chances of life on Earth.
>
>Like the loss of BD, the loss of LD is dangerous
>reductionism. As we see in increasingly dramatic ways,
>such as the spread of species that are more resistant to
>antibiotics and herbicides, monocultures are vulnerable.
>The potential for the new lateral thinking that might save
>us from ourselves in time lies in having as many and as
>diverse languages and cultures as possible. We do not know
>which ones have the right medicine. For this,
>multilingualism is necessary. Indigenous and minority
>people need to have a chance to maintain their own
>languages and learn dominant languages.
>
>But instead of fostering and supporting multilingualism
>through the education system, schools participate in
>linguistic genocide, as it has been defined in the United
>Nations Genocide Convention (Articles IIb and IIe and its
>Final Draft Article IIIl). Pirjo Janulf shows in a recent
>study that of those Finnish immigrant minority members in
>Sweden who had had Swedish-medium education, not one spoke
>any Finnish to his or her own children. Even if these
>adults might not have forgotten their Finnish completely,
>their children were forcibly transferred to the majority
>group, at least linguistically.
>
>This is what happens to millions of speakers of threatened
>languages all over the world. There are no schools or
>classes teaching through the medium of the threatened
>indigenous or minority languages. The transfer to the
>majority language group is not voluntary: alternatives do
>not exist, and parents do not have enough reliable
>information about the long-term consequences of the
>various choices. There is also a wealth of research and
>statistics about the mental harm that forced assimilation
>causes in education and other areas.
>
>To stop linguistic genocide, linguistic human rights in
>education need to be respected. The most important
>linguistic human right for maintenance of LD is the right
>to mother-tongue medium education. But the existing and
>draft human rights instruments are completely insufficient
>in protecting linguistic human rights in education. When
>speakers of small languages learn other, necessary
>languages in addition to their native languages, they
>become multilingual, and the maintenance of LD, necessary
>for the planet, is supported. When dominant languages such
>as English are learned subtractively, at the cost of the
>mother tongues, they become killer languages. The task for
>users of English is to stop it being a killer language and
>change it to an additive asset.
>
>--
>
>Dr Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is associate professor at Roskilde
>University, Denmark, and vice-president of Terralingua
>(<www.terralingua.org>). Her latest book is "Linguistic
>Genocide in Education -- or Worldwide Diversity and Human
>Rights?" (Lawrence Erlbaum)
>
>- 30 -
>
>Copyright (c) 2001 The Guardian Weekly
>                    75 Farrington Road
>                    London, EC1M 3HQ, U.K.
>                    <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>
>
>


David Gene Lewis                        Department of Anthropology
Graduate student                        University of Oregon
         cell 541-510-0217                               Eugene, OR 97403

coyotez at oregon.uoregon.edu                      talapus at kalapuya.com
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~coyotez           http://www.kalapuya.com

Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde,  Kalapuya Tribe