Socotra, Yemen: disappearance of Socotri

Tue Apr 13 12:24:34 UTC 2010

You may be interested in this article from the _Daily Star_ of Lebanon, on 
the disappearance of the 'singing language', Socotri, of the Yemeni island 
of Socotra. It isn't highly linguistic, but it does reflect people's 
concern about yet another disappearing language.

http://j.mp/Socotri

13 April 2010:  The Island that No Longer Sings

HADIBU, Yemen: Lovers of Fairuz will be familiar with the nostalgia that 
pervades many of her songs for a past that has been slowly evolving and 
hybridizing, eventually to disappear. Although the nostalgia peddled by 
Fairuz revolves around Lebanese village life, the elderly people of Socotra 
might be feeling a similar emotion.

However, theirs is not just a longing for an older way of life, but also 
great fear for the future of their endangered language and cultural 
heritage.

“[Socotri] is endangered because it’s not written,” says ethnographer and 
linguist Miranda Morris, who’s been visiting the island since 1989.

The Socotri people speak a language, Socotri, or Saqatari as they call it, 
which has no written form.

It’s of a family of six languages known as the Modern South Arabian 
languages (MSA) that were widely spoken in southern Arabia for centuries, 
perhaps even for millennia, and have managed to survive in isolated areas 
in southern Yemen and southern Oman. These include Mahri, spoken in parts 
of Yemen’s Mahra governorate, near the Omani border, and a now-dead 
language called Bat’hari in Oman’s coastal Dhofar area.

Other languages in southern Arabia disappeared as Islam was gradually 
adopted along with the language of the Koran, Arabic.

The MSA are part of the larger group of Semitic languages that includes 
Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is the 
second-largest Semitic language after Arabic.

Socotri is one of several thousand oral languages that exist around the 
world without a script, which makes them vulnerable to extinction if their 
speakers adopt more dominant languages and cultures, as is happening in 
Socotra.

“Less than 20 percent of languages are written even today,” says Gregory 
Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered 
Languages. According to Anderson, all languages were oral before the 
development of writing four or five millennia ago.

The Living Tongues Institute recently launched the Enduring Voices Project 
with National Geographic to preserve the world’s threatened languages

Little known outside of Yemen, Socotra Archipelago was granted World 
Heritage Status by UNESCO in 2008 for its biodiversity, particularly its 
“threatened species of outstanding universal value,” including species 
still unknown to scientists.

Socotra lies 350 kilometers south of the Yemeni coast. It has been called 
“The Galapagos of the Indian Ocean” for its high level of endemism – 42 
percent of the flora of the Galapagos Islands, famous for inspiring Charles 
Darwin’s theory of natural selection, is endemic, compared to Socotra’s 
nearly 35 percent. Its inhabitants number only around 70,000 of Yemen’s 
total population of 23 million.

Although Arabic and Socotri share many phonetic sounds, Socotri has letters 
that are unique to it, and which are difficult for beginners to learn. Each 
of the two languages is incomprehensible to speakers of the other unless it 
is learned, despite some similarities.

In a town east of Hadibu, the island’s capital, an elderly Socotri woman 
claims she never interacts with native Arabic speakers: She doesn’t speak 
or understand the language.

But the picture is rather different only 45 minutes away here in Hadibu, 
where Socotris speak a mix of Arabic and Socotri, with Arabic usually 
dominating conversations.

“Our children do not know Socotri now,” says Ahmad Abdallah, 50, a Socotri 
poet. “If I give them an old word from our grandparents’ [time], something 
related to goat herding, for example, they don’t know what it means. 
Sometimes they can’t pronounce the right Socotri, so they use Arabic.”

Even the island’s main artistic expression, poetry, has been 
inter-penetrated with Arabic. Socotri poetry is usually sung and sometimes 
improvised. It was once a part of everyday life, but the spread of a 
conservative form of Islam has reduced its use. It’s said that in the past 
if poetry wasn’t heard from a house when someone passed it, they tried to 
find out what ill had befallen its residents. Now the island appears to 
have stopped singing.

“Singing was widespread,” says Fahd Kfayin, secretary general of The 
Heritage and History Association of Socotra. “When people fished they sang, 
when they herded, when they rode camels for long distances. There’s a song 
in every situation that fits with the environment and with the movements of 
the activity.”

A Socotri living in the city says that his young daughter replaces the 
Socotri-specific letters with closely-related Arabic ones. He attributes 
this to the fact that she spends the majority of her days studying Arabic 
in school.

The daughter is emblematic of a significant and worrisome transformation, 
in one person’s lifetime, of a language that has survived the centuries. 
Many believe that the rapid development of the island, while mostly 
beneficial, has had a direct impact on its language.

This is especially true here in the capital, where all business is carried 
out in Arabic. Many business owners are from the Yemeni mainland and do not 
speak Socotri. The language of instruction in schools is Arabic, with no 
Socotri component.

“It became necessary for Socotris to use Arabic to communicate with 
others.” explains Kfayin. “The doctor, the teacher, the salesman, the 
police chief are not from Socotra, so Socotris are forced to use it 
[Arabic], and therefore have had to learn it.”

The problem is more widespread among those who are 30-years-old or younger. 
As more and more Socotris go to school or move from the mountainous areas 
to the capital, they increasingly speak Arabic as a sign of progress and 
prestige, abandoning Socotri altogether.

“Once the group in power is solidified and their written language 
enfranchised … [other smaller groups] may be devalued as dialects or 
unworthy of being written,” writes Anderson. “If such negative valuation 
from the socially dominant language group takes root, the language will 
likely be abandoned before it can be written. This is a typical scenario.”

Morris believes that, due to the absence of a state-led program to preserve 
Socotri, it’s at great risk of extinction. Socotri individuals who are 
aware of the danger are eagerly trying to create an alphabet to record the 
language in the face of the growing trend of the use of Arabic. But little 
else is being done.

International researchers, who arrive regularly on the island, are more 
interested in Socotra’s stunning natural resources. In the meantime, the 
Socotri language may be slowly disappearing, taking with it its unknown 
cultural wealth.

Read more: 
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=4&article_id=113692#ixzz0kywKlDuU 
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

==========================

-- 
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
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http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm