"Save languages..." link

[Derksen Jacob]

>From the Victoria Times-Colonist, Sept 20/07
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=35b8d9fe-2079-4fe9-bb0f-b5671a9815cd

Save languages before it's too late
B.C. a hot spot in global effort to document histories and knowledge of ancient cultures

Times ColonistPublished: Thursday, September 20, 2007
For some 5,000 years, people living in what is today northwest B.C. have been speaking Tsimishian.
Before the Great Pyramids were built, three millennia before the emergence of the Roman Empire, the Tsimishian lived in villages along the Skeena and other North Coast rivers.
Now, only one person can speak South Tsimishian.
Inevitable, some say. The world changes and some people and cultures are left behind.
But there is a price. And it is high enough that efforts to save thousands of threatened languages deserve support.
The Enduring Voices project reported this week that one-fifth of the almost 7,000 languages in use around the world are in imminent danger of extinction. More than half the at-risk languages have no written form.
In B.C., one of five "hot spots" identified by the project, three native languages have already been lost. Of the 36 remaining, 13 are spoken by fewer than 50 people. Their survival will be determined by what we do now.
Languages die for many reasons. Communities dwindle, pushed aside or emptied by the search for economic opportunity. Minorities are forced to use the dominant language, as Canadian governments attempted with residential schools. When people use the main language for most transactions, children aren't interested in learning their traditional tongue.
The loss is significant. The communities are cut off from their past, but often still not part of the society around them.
And the loss of a language often means the loss of centuries of thought and knowledge, says David Harrison, co-director of the Enduring Voices project. "Eighty per cent of species have been undiscovered by science, but ... the people who live in those ecosystems know the species intimately," he notes. "We're throwing away centuries' worth of knowledge and discoveries that they have been making all along." In Bolivia, a language used to describe thousands of medicinal plants, some unknown to science, is in danger.
It's a great struggle to save these languages. In B.C., the University of Victoria offers a program in aboriginal language revitalization; the government has provided $2 million this year to support traditional language instruction for First Nations children.
Yes, languages have been lost throughout history. But those losses have left gaps in our knowledge of our world and ourselves that we have struggled to fill.
Better to save them now than struggle when it is too late.
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