LL-L "Language survival" 2004.03.18 (10) [E]

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Thu Mar 18 22:43:25 UTC 2004


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L O W L A N D S - L * 18.MAR.2004 (10) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language survival

Below is a newspaper article that may be of interest to many of you.

While I agree with what is being said about Siberian and North American
languages, it needs to be stressed that this occurs *everywhere*, and not
only with "exotic" languages but also with European and European-based
languages that happened to end up considered second- or third-rate,
relegated to what almost amounts the underground.  In other words, it
applies to Lowlands varieties also.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

***


The Seattle Times, Thursday, March 18, 2004, p. A6:



LINGUISTS IN RACE TO SAVE LANGUAGES


THEIR TASK is to record and document endangered tongues and to develop
written forms to help preserve them.

by earl lane

Newsday



WASHINGTON — In half a dozen fishing villages in a remote part of central
Siberia, the Middle Chulym people are losing their language, one of hundreds
of tongues likely to vanish around the world during the next half century.

Among the Middle Chulym, who survive by ancestral ways of hunting, gathering
and fishing, only about 40 of 426 people continue to speak the native
language, according to K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College
who traveled to the region last year to document two Turkic languages in
imminent danger. He found that no one younger than 52 can speak Middle
Chulym fluently, and the rest speak only Russian.

"Each language that vanishes without being documented leaves an enormous gap
in our understanding of some of the many complex structures the human mind
is capable of producing," Harrison said.

Number systems, grammatical structures and classification systems can be
lost, along with knowledge about medicinal plants, animal behavior, weather
signs and hunting techniques.

Siberian language in peril

Another Siberian language called Tofa also is threatened, with 35 of 600 in
the community able to speak it. When such native languages die, Harrison
said recently at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, villagers lose an oral history as well as detailed knowledge of
the local environment.

The Tofa people are reindeer herders, Harrison said, and their language has
special ways of describing reindeer by sex, age, fertility, color and ease
of riding. Such descriptions do not translate easily into Russian, he said.

Human languages are vanishing as we speak,” said Harrison, who argues that
the rate of loss is every bit as disturbing as the extinction of animal
species.

Stephen Anderson, a Yale University linguist, estimates that "probably 40
percent or more of the world's languages will cease to be spoken within the
next 50 to 100 years."

Ethnologue, a database maintained by SIL International of Dallas, lists
6,809 languages worldwide. That number is subject to debate, say Anderson
and others.

Laurence Horn, a Yale linguist, said the number of languages sometimes is
influenced by politics as much as linguistics. Cantonese and Mandarin are
distinct languages, he said, but the Chinese government prefers to consider
them dialects. Horn cited the oft-quoted comment, attributed to Yiddish
linguist Max Weinreich, that a language is "a dialect with an army and a
navy."

Harrison said languages begin to decline when native speakers view them as
less prestigious or not accepted as widely as the dominant language in a
region. That has been the case with Middle Chulym, Harrison said.

Native languages

Of the indigenous languages of North America, Anderson said, only eight have
as many as 10,000 speakers. Navajo is the largest, with about 160,000
speakers, he said. But many young Navajos no longer are learning the
language as their first tongue, he said.

"Once young children don't learn it as a first language," Anderson said,
"then it has only as many years to go as the life expectancy of its current
native speakers."

Language-maintenance efforts are under way in American Indian communities,
he said, but studying the language for a few hours a week in school is not
sufficient to rescue a threatened language.

Some elementaries, including one on the Mohawk reservation in northern New
York, teach the traditional tongue as a first language in immersion programs
aimed at preserving language and culture.

The loss of languages is not inevitable, Anderson said. Linguists such as
Harrison have been trying to record and document endangered languages, help
foster interest in them among local populations and develop written forms to
help preserve them.

Whenever a language dies, Anderson said, "it's a human tragedy and one of
the few tragedies that linguists can do something about."

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