Mind your tongue (fwd)

[Phil Cash Cash]

Mind your tongue
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_1406287,00.html#

Paris - "Vel ny partanyn snaue, Joe?," says the ghostly voice from the
archives.

"'Cha nel monney, cha nel monney,' dooyrt Joe. 'T'ad feer ghoan'."

The voice belonged to Ned Maddrell, the very last native speaker of
Manx, the Celtic language once spoken on the Isle of Man - the small
island located between Britain and Ireland.

Maddrell died in 1974, leaving behind recordings of his fishing
anecdotes and daily chat (translation of this snippet: "Are the crabs
crawling, Joe? 'Not much, not much,' said Joe. 'They're very
scarce'.").

Casual, almost banal as they seemed at the time, Mandrell's utterances
are now precious beyond price.

Carefully stored and pored over by phonetics experts, his words are the
linguistic equivalent of a gene bank for dead species.

More than 300 languages have already become extinct, and "thousands"
more are hurtling down the same road, say Daniel Abrams and Steven
Strogatz of New York's Cornell University.

"Ninety percent of languages are expected to disappear with the current
generation."

It is a linguistic loss whose equivalent in biodiversity is the mass
extinction 65 million years ago which wiped out innumerable species,
including the dinosaurs.

The most authoritative database on languages lists 6 809 languages that
are spoken in the world today, of which 357 have fewer than 50
speakers.

In the case of Abaga, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea's Eastern
Highlands Province, just five people still speak it. That estimate was
made in 1994, and Abaga may already have vanished.

If language extinction is acknowledged as one of the greatest threats to
human heritage, only now are scientific tools emerging that help to
explain how a language erodes and dies, and what can be done to defend
it.

Evolutionary biologists are struck by similar patterns between
threatened tongues and threatened biodiversity.

A language, like species, can head for oblivion if it is threatened by a
powerful invader; if it no longer has a large enough, or young enough,
or economically viable population to speak it; and if its habitat is
destroyed or displaced by war.

Invasive languages are promoted by national governments as a unifying
political force or for bureaucracy; or they are essential for work or
economic activity, used in television, the radio or movies; or they are
fashionable, especially among the young.

In poor or remote communities, these newcomers work like an insidious
virus, able to sicken the local language quickly and put it on its
deathbed within two or three generations.

"The present 'killers' of languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese,
Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese and Indonesia/Malay," according to a
study written by Margit Waas for the US journal Applied Linguistics
Forum.

"About 45% of all the people in the world speak at least one of the five
main languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi and Mandarin Chinese.
Approximately 100 languages are spoken by 95% of the world's people,
and the remaining thousands by only five percent."

Language death can be charted by numbers.

Under this "de-acquisition" process, the entire community initially
speaks the native tongue daily. As the invader takes root, the number
of only-native speakers falls and the number of bilingual speakers
rises.

Then comes a tipping point at which the native speakers become a
minority with a middle-aged demographic profile. As they age, the
language becomes more and more isolated socially, less useful
economically and less prestigious, and eventually dies with its last
few speakers.

Hauling a language away from the maw of extinction is rare, and the few
successes have been in rich countries with the awareness and resources
to combat the problem.

Abrams and Strogatz, in a study published last Thursday in Nature,
charted the numbers of speakers of Welsh; of Scottish Gaelic, in the
remote region of Sutherland; and of Quechua, the most common surviving
indigenous language in Latin America, as spoken in Peru.

The decline in Welsh speakers will bottom out by 2020; Gaelic speakers
in Sutherland are less than a tenth of what they were 120 years ago;
and Quechua in Peru will be wiped out by 2030, they suggest.

The key to Welsh's survivability lies in government help: street signs
in Welsh, TV and radio programming, language courses for adults and the
compulsory learning of Welsh for all children up to the age of 16.

In other words, prestige is vital.

"The example of Quebec French demonstrates that language decline can be
slowed by strategies such as policy-making, education and advertising,
in essence increasing an endangered language's status," say Abrams and
Strogatz. - SAPA/AFP