Losing the gift of tongues (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Losing the gift of tongues

C.J. Moore
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/18/opinion/edmoore.php

LONDON On Sept. 20 last year, the news went round the world of the death
of Yang Huan-yi, a resident of Jiangyong district in China's Hunan
province. She was in her 90's. She had acquired fame, and not merely
with a few academic linguists, as the last surviving woman who
practiced from childhood in the Nushu system of writing.

Nushu is not a language, but a recently discovered script developed over
centuries by women in that remote provincial area as a means of sharing
thoughts and feelings between close friends. It emerged from a long
oral tradition of women's storytelling and performance.

Fortunately, enough academic ink has been spent on the subject of Nushu
to ensure a record survives of its 1,000 or so graphs and their
phonetic relationship to local Chinese dialect. "Nushu country" has
even become a tourist attraction, heightened by the misleading
portrayal of Nushu as a "secret women's code" unreadable by men.

But the case of Yang Huan-yi and Nushu evokes the wider troubling issue
of language erosion and death. According to Unesco global studies, one
language disappears on average every two weeks.

Where, as with 80 percent of African tongues, there is no writing system
at all, the survival of a language or dialect literally depends on the
life of the speakers.

Barbara F. Grimes, editor of the Ethnologue linguistic database, writing
in 2001, reported there were around 450 tongues then in the last stages
of extinction, dependent on a few elderly survivors for their
existence.
Some 50 or more languages may currently exist with only a single
speaker. Unesco estimates that over 50 percent of the world's 6,000 or
so documented tongues fall into the category of "endangered."

Reasons for this linguistic decline range from natural disasters that
severely reduce a population, to social neglect or downvaluing of a
tongue or dialect. Attitudes play a role here, sometimes the simple
fear of appearing unlettered.

Even well-meaning literacy and education programs can be significant
factors in the disappearance of a tongue. Where children are removed
from their ethnic background to study elsewhere, as happened with rural
communities of Scotland and Wales, and with indigenous peoples in the
United States, Canada and Russia, they may grow to perceive their
mother tongue as "backward" and disadvantaged.

If parents, too, join in this shift of cultural perception, transmission
from parent to child, the most vital factor of all in language survival,
can be suspended or stopped forever.

The question is often heard: But don't world relations and communication
benefit if we all move toward global languages?

Even if the march of globalization is unstoppable with its parallel
homogenising effect on language, we still feel a strong sense of loss
as linguistic variety diminishes.

Why is that? A clue appears in the Unesco report, which says languages
are not only "vehicles of value systems and of cultural expressions"
but "constitute a determining factor in the identity of groups and
individuals."

The sacrifice of identity is a price too high to pay, and an unnecessary
one. It has been shown that languages can be saved even from the brink
of extinction. Speakers can be recorded, dictionaries and grammars
compiled and educational means established for a new generation to
revive a dying tongue.

In Europe, we find effective strategies for the promotion of Basque,
Catalan, Breton, Cornish, Gaelic, Irish and Romansch, to scratch only
the linguistic surface of the continent.

Elsewhere, Hawaiian, Maori, indigenous Mexican and other Latin American
tongues have all prospered with the right attitudes and support with
English or Spanish as a main language.

Without language, there can be no understanding of ourselves, let alone
of
the world around us. So surely endangered languages merit at least the
same attention and outcry as endangered species.