Honduran island risks losing a language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Los Angeles Daily News

Honduran island risks losing a language

By Wilson Ring
Associated Press
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2194846,00.html#

Saturday, June 05, 2004 -

PUNTA GORDA, Honduras -- When Reina Martinez speaks to her 14-year-old
granddaughter she uses Garifuna, the language of her youth in this
colorful island village.

But when Cassandra Ballesteros answers, it's not in Garifuna.

"I understand, but I don't speak it," she said. "I can't."

Instead, she responds in Honduran Spanish, the language she learns in
school, and the one she's more likely to hear on the dirt roads that
run through her centuries-old village tucked between dense mangroves
and vast coral reefs on the island of Roatan.

Martinez, 52, and her companion Celso Zapata, 59, are two of the older
residents of Punta Gorda. Over the years, the couple has watched their
Garifuna traditions fade into memory as the world has reached into
their community of about 1,000.

Now they are watching their language disappear, too.

Children "don't want to speak Garifuna anymore," said Zapata, who runs
Punta Gorda's public water system. "You've got to blame the parents. We
parents, we've got to teach the kids."

When he wanders through the community on the north side of the
40-mile-long island, Zapata is as likely to speak Spanish or even a
dialect of English Creole to his neighbors as he is Garifuna
(pronounced gah-RHEE-foo-nah).

"Even the old people, you find many of them who don't want to speak
Garifuna," he said.

Linguist Genevieve Escure laments what is happening to "a complicated
and beautiful language," with roots in the Amazonian tongues of Arawak
and Carib still spoken in parts of northeastern South America. So she
is recording the Garifuna, hoping to spark their interest so they will
work to keep their language alive.

Still, some of Roatan's leaders argue it isn't the language that is in
danger.

"It's not disappearing," said Arad Rochez, a Garifuna who is vice mayor
of Santos Guardiola, including Punta Gorda. "What is disappearing is
how we used to live in the past."

When Martinez and Zapata were young the Garifuna lived in mud houses
with thatched roofs. Men fished from dugout canoes and steamed, rather
than fried, their catch. Traditional folk dances were set to the rhythm
of African-styled drums.

Slowly Garifuna men started leaving Roatan to find jobs on the Honduran
mainland or to work on freighters and cruise ships.

Dugout canoes that once sustained the community were abandoned on shore.
The Garifuna are no longer dependent on the fish, lobster and conch
that are plentiful in the coral reefs.

In the late 1980s, the Honduran government started developing the
island, bringing tourists, retirees and developers attracted by the
balmy temperatures year-round. A main road now runs across the spine of
the island, from the western end of Roatan, with its luxury beach
hotels and exclusive waterfront homes, past Punta Gorda to the still,
nearly pristine east end.

The hurricanes that belt the island every generation or so -- Fifi in
1974 and Mitch in 1998 -- also brought change, blowing away the
thatched-roof homes of the Garifuna. The villagers rebuilt, first with
wood and then cement blocks with tin roofs.

Thousands of Central American Garifuna now live in the United States and
the money they send home helps their families buy luxuries like
televisions and refrigerators that would otherwise be beyond reach.

"We don't hardly live how we used to live," Martinez said.

And their language is receding along with their old lifestyle. Linguists
estimate 190,000 people across the western Caribbean speak Garifuna.
But when a language isn't being used by young people, the numbers can
drop fast.

"Everybody agrees we are going to lose half of the world's languages.
Some say 90 percent," said Lenore Grenoble, a Dartmouth College
professor and chairwoman of the Linguistic Society of America's
Committee for Endangered Languages and their Preservation.

Linguists estimate the world at one time had about 10,000 languages.
Today, there are about 6,800, Grenoble said.

Four years ago, Escure gave tape recorders to some Punta Gorda residents
and asked them to record family and friends as they spoke Garifuna.
Most of her work is with older people because few Garifuna under 40
speak the language. Even when they do, more and more English and
Spanish words find their way into the conversation.

"Spanish is dominant. It is the language you need to be successful in
life," said Escure, who is based at the University of Minnesota.
"That's how a language disappears. The speaker doesn't see any benefit
in speaking it. They'd rather switch to Spanish or English Creole."

One afternoon earlier this year Escure and Martinez had a discussion
about the Garifuna word for cassava, the root crop that is a dietary
staple throughout Latin America and much of the developing world.

" 'The pot with which I cooked cassava,' OK, how do you say that...?"'
Escure asked.

"O-yay lay idabway nobowa yucca," Martinez answered.

The hard Bs, Gs, Us and Ps make it easy to distinguish Garifuna from
Spanish, English and even the lyrical sweetness of French, all of which
make up significant elements of Garifuna.

Escure repeats and dissects every phrase, looking for the origins of the
words, the way the verbs are conjugated and how the sentences are put
together. She's also trying to assemble a vocabulary, get a better
understanding of the way the Garifuna use prefixes and suffixes, the
way plurals and possessives are formed and how it all fits together.

These are ancient sounds. The Garifuna are an extraordinary mix of
Arawak Indians who migrated from the Amazon to the Caribbean 1,500
years ago, and Africans who escaped when two Spanish slave ships
wrecked off the island of St. Vincent in 1635. Their language is a kind
of living history, studded with relics of their encounters with other
peoples.

Now, it seems to be slipping away. Escure says she alone cannot keep
Garifuna alive.

"I am trying to describe the language as it is now," she said. "You
cannot impose a language. It has to come from the community."