Babylon and on

[Andre Cramblit]

Lost in translation

By Leigh Dayton
11mar04
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8928176%5E28737,00.html

IT'S a modern parable. While the box office take from Mel Gibson's
controversial film The Passion of the Christ skyrockets into the
multi-millions, the number of people speaking the language of Jesus is
dwindling into insignificance.

Aramaic, the 2500-year-old tongue of the Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians, Egyptians and Palestinians, is used as one of the languages
in Gibson's film, yet today it is spoken in only three Syrian villages.
Its probable fate as a spoken language? Extinction, say concerned
linguists.

It's all part of a language crisis heralding the emergence of a new
linguistic world order, according to scholar David Graddol of Britain's
aptly named The English Company.

"We will experience some decades of rapid and perhaps disorienting
change," he predicts ominously. In other words, Aramaic is not the only
language facing an uncertain future.

Surprisingly, as Graddol says, English is sliding down the "league
table" of dominant languages.

Why? To borrow from Treasurer Peter Costello, "demography is destiny".
The number of people born into English-speaking communities is falling
when compared with those born to parents whose native language is
Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic and Hindi or Urdu, which many linguists
class as a single language.

While English will power on as the language of science and politics,
Graddol spots a business trend which may unsettle monolingual English
speakers. "Employers in parts of Asia are already looking beyond
English," he argues. "In the next decade, the new must-learn language
is likely to be Mandarin."

Graddol is not the only expert flagging enormous changes in what they
call the world's language system, one that has evolved over centuries.
David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania,
estimates that as we speak -- literally -- we do so in between 6000 and
7000 languages worldwide, but not for long.

"Linguistic diversity is undergoing a precipitous and unprecedented
decline," he said at the recent American Association for the
Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

"This state of affairs has given rise to the dire, but not entirely
preposterous prediction, that fully one half of extant human languages
might well vanish in the course of this century."

Graddol, a linguist, went further last month in the journal Science.

"We may now be losing a language every day," he wrote, adding that 90
per cent of all languages will perish this century.

While Aramaic is the language of concern now, authorities such as
Harrison and Graddol claim it is unlikely to be the next language to
fade into nothingness. They predict that dubious honour will go to even
more obscure tongues such as Middle Chulym, a language Harrison
"discovered" last year in remote central Siberia. Out of a community of
426 people, he says only 35 speak it fluently. When those elders die,
so too will Middle Chulym.

Clearly, indigenous languages worldwide are at greatest risk of serious
decline or extinction. After all, speakers experience the combined
impact of declining populations, technological advances and often
overwhelming economic and cultural pressure to join the global
community. Case in point: Australia's Aboriginal languages.

The statistics are rubbery, yet they suggest that roughly 250 indigenous
languages were spoken in 1788. Today, possibly one-third of those
first-contact languages are gone. Of those remaining, only about 20
have any hope of surviving.

"It's undeniable that we're losing speakers," notes Faith Baisden,
projects manager with the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Languages, a national body advising the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commission. Although she's studying it, Baisden doesn't
yet speak her own ancestral tongue, Yugambeh. There are only a handful
of people who do, she claims.

Still, it's not all gloom and doom for so-called minority languages.
Speakers of such languages and advocates such as Baisden are fighting
back with some success. Hebrew was brought back from near extinction.
In the US, Mohawk has undergone a revival, and ever more New Zealand
kindergarteners are learning Maori.

In Australia, Baisden claims that growing numbers of Aboriginal
communities are working with elders, applied linguists and groups such
as FATSIL and ATSIC to shore up endangered languages.

They're developing dictionaries, web-based resources and other learning
materials, as well as pushing for native language instruction.

It's all part of an international trend to bolster ancient rural and
indigenous languages, or at least to document them before they vanish.
For native speakers, this is a matter of urgency. Language epitomises
group identity and carries important cultural meanings, ones they hope
to pass on to the next generation.

Moreover, Harrison points out that collectively the world's languages
embody the diverse possibilities of human speech. They embody
underlying mental structures that both shape and are shaped by the way
different peoples speak of their world, for instance number systems,
grammatical structures and ways of classifying kinship or natural
events.

"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 says.

University of Sydney linguistics specialist Jane Simpson, who is working
to save threatened languages, agrees.

"What does it matter if you lose a particular frog species or if you
lose Michelangelo's David," she says.

"Think of languages as works of human creativity."

Simpson has teamed up with colleagues at the University of Melbourne and
the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies in Canberra. Along with four doctoral students, the group is
following pre-school children in three Aboriginal communities in the
Kimberley and Northern Territory.

Over the four-year project the team hopes to learn how the youngsters
manage the different languages they hear, from their native language to
varieties of English. They want to know how the children shift between
languages with such ease and hope to find out if the linguistic
flip-flops affect language learning and use.

"There are implications for how kids learn at school and what kind of
teaching strategies to use," she says.

But Simpson and company are particularly interested in the dynamics of
hybrid languages known as creoles. Such languages develop spontaneously
when -- usually -- children listen to a pidgin language cobbled
together as a lingua franca by adults who speak different languages.

"The Lajamanu and Kalkaringi kids are either acquiring a weird variety
of a local creole, called Kriol, or they are developing a new mixed
language based on Kriol," says Simpson, who explains that children
everywhere are master language builders. Indeed, youngsters are on the
job around the globe, especially in cities where languages mingle and
change rapidly. The question is, are they creating enough new languages
to counter the startling rate of language extinction?

Yes, no, maybe, replies Yale University linguist Laurence Horn. Speaking
at the AAAS meeting, he suggested the answer may well be a matter of
definitions. "What counts as a language, a mere dialect or jargon?" he
asked in rhetorical mode.

According to Horn, non-linguist factors affect the answer. Power, money,
literary tradition, the nature of a writing system and even whether or
not a community needs a new language are all involved in separating
true languages from linguistic wannabes such as Esperanto, which
lingers in the conversational backwaters.

Although Esperanto was devised deliberately by Ludwig Zamenhof, Eubonics
is a version of English popularised by young African Americans. Is it
non-standard English, a dialect, a language, or a street vernacular?
Some linguists agree with the Oakland, California's 1997 school board
decree that Eubonics is "a genetically-based language", while others
disagree vehemently.

And what about Scots, spoken in the film Trainspotting, the Slinglish of
Singapore, the Japlish of Japan or any of the other Englishes of the
world? Debates rage as to whether they're shiny new languages or
jumped-up dialects destined for the linguistic scrap heap.

At the broadest level, the definitional debates may be irrelevant if one
of Graddol's predictions comes true. He argues that although a handful
of languages will dominate, people will continue speaking other tongues
at home.

The bilingual - even multilingual - world of tomorrow may well resemble
the one in which Jesus walked. After all, like his contemporaries, he
probably spoke Greek, Aramaic and maybe even a touch of Latin.

--


André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations
Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC
(http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs
of American Indians

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