Across the world, native languages dying out (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Posted on Sat, Mar. 05, 2005

Across the world, native languages dying out

By Terry Leonard
The Associated Press
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/11059795.htm

MAPUTO, Mozambique - Along a boulevard lined with flowering acacia
trees, young people in designer clothes and high-heeled shoes chatter
on the sidewalk, struggling to be heard over the driving Latin rhythms
spilling from a nightclub.

Maputo's vibrant night life lets people forget that it is the capital of
one of the world's poorest countries. Here you can eat Italian food,
dance like a Brazilian and flirt in Portuguese.

One thing that's in ever shorter supply and perhaps even less demand:
Mozambique's indigenous languages, the storehouse for the accumulated
knowledge of generations.

"Sons no longer speak the language of their fathers ... our culture is
dying," laments Paulo Chihale, director of a project that seeks to
train Mozambican youths in traditional crafts.

While Mozambique has 23 native languages, the official one is
Portuguese, a hand-me-down tongue from colonial times that both unifies
a linguistically diverse country and undermines the African traditions
that help make it unique.

The United Nations estimates that half of the world's 6,000 languages
will disappear in less than a century. Roughly a third of those are
spoken in Africa, and about 200 already have fewer than 500 speakers.
Experts estimate that half the world's people now use one of just eight
languages: Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese
and French.

A U.N. Conference on Trade and Development report on protecting
traditional knowledge argues that beyond a devastating effect on
culture, the death of a language wipes out centuries of know-how in
preserving ecosystems, leading to grave consequences for biodiversity.

Villagers in Indonesia's Kayan Mentarang national park, for example,
have for centuries practiced a system of forest management called Tanah
Ulen, or "forbidden land." On a rotating basis, elders declare parcels
of the forest protected, prohibiting hunting and gathering.

In Maputo, Chihale looks up from his cluttered desk at MozArte, the
U.N.- and government-funded crafts project, and complains bitterly
about how his nation's memory is fading away.

"Our culture has a rich oral tradition, oral history, stories told from
one generation to another. But it is an oral literature our kids will
never hear," said Chihale, who speaks the Chopi language at home.

Anthropologists speculate that tribal people whose ancestors have lived
for tens of thousands of years on India's Andaman and Nicobar islands
survived Asia's tsunami catastrophe because of ancient knowledge. They
think signs in the wind, the sea and the flight of birds let the tribes
know to get to higher ground ahead of the waves.

But finding economic reasons to keep tradition alive can be a challenge.

In Mozambique, cheap foreign imports have destroyed the market for local
crafts beyond what little can be sold to tourists. Horacio Arab, the son
of a basket weaver who learned his father's trade, said he improved his
skills at MozArte but then abandoned weaving because he could not make
a living.

Mozambican linguist Rafael Shambela said the pressures from
globalization are often too great to resist. To conserve native
languages and culture will require societies to find ways to cast them
with an inherent value, he argued.

On a small campus along a dirt road south of Maputo, Shambela has joined
a government effort to write textbooks and curriculums that will allow
public school students to learn in 16 of the country's 23 languages.
But the program is limited by Mozambique's poverty.

"A language is a culture," said Shambela, who works for Mozambique's
National Institute for the Development of Education. "It contains the
history of a people and all the knowledge they have passed down for
generations."

The trade-off in settling on Portuguese as a unifying force after
independence in 1975 has been an erosion of the rites and rhythms of
traditional life.

"From dating to mourning, the rules are becoming less clear," Shambela
says.