Indigenous Languages in Final Throes (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Indigenous Languages in Final Throes
  Diego Cevallos*  
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32884

                              MEXICO CITY, APR 13 (TIERRAMéRICA) - HUNDREDS OF
LANGUAGES DISAPPEARED FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN OVER THE PAST 500
YEARS, AND MANY OF THE MORE THAN 600 THAT HAVE SURVIVED COULD FACE THE SAME
FATE IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT FUTURE.  

 United Nations agencies and many experts maintain that it is an avoidable
tragedy, but there are those who see it as the inherent fate of all but a few
languages. 
Faced with Western culture and the dominant presence of Spanish, Portuguese and
English in the Americas, indigenous languages like Kiliwua in Mexico, Ona and
Puelche in Argentina, Amanayé in Brazil, Záparo in Ecuador and Mashco-Piro in
Peru, are just barely surviving, the result of their continued use by small
groups of people -- most of whom are elderly. 
But there are others like Quichua, Aymara, Guaraní, Maya and Náhuatl whose
future looks a bit rosier, because overall these languages are spoken by more
than 10 million people and governments support their survival through various
educational, cultural and social programmes. 
Around the globe there are some 7,000 languages in use, but each year 20
disappear. Furthermore, half of the existing languages are threatened,
according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO). 
This agency, which promotes the preservation and diversity of the world's
languages, maintains that the disappearance of even one language is a tragedy,
because with it go a unique culture and cosmovision. 
But not everyone sees it that way. "The extinction of languages is a phenomenon
inherent in their very existence, and it has been happening since humans emitted
their first sound with a linguistic meaning," José Luis Moure, a University of
Buenos Aires philologist and member of the Argentine Academy of Letters, told
Tierramérica. 
In contrast, Gustavo Solís, a Peruvian linguist with expertise in vernacular
and author of language studies of the Amazon region, says "there is nothing in
the languages that says one should disappear and another should continue." 
"Every disappearance of language and culture is a great tragedy to humanity.
When it occurs, a unique and irreplaceable human experience is extinguished,"
Solís said in a conversation with Tierramérica. 
There are cases, says this expert, that show it is possible to plan the
revitalisation of languages so they won't die, but such efforts in Latin
America and the Caribbean fall short. 
When the Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, there were 600
to 800 languages in South America alone, but with the colonisation process "the
vast majority disappeared. Today there are languages on their way to extinction
because of the unequal contact between Western society and some indigenous
societies," Solís said. 
Fernando Nava, director of Mexico's National Institute of Indigenous Languages
(INALI), said languages disappear through natural evolution, which is
understandable, or through cultural pressure and discrimination against its
speakers, which is preventable.. 
It is the second cause that many governments, international agencies and
academics are fighting, because it is considered an unacceptable phenomenon,
Nava told Tierramérica. In this area, Latin America and the Caribbean are just
in the stage of raising awareness, he added. 
According to UNESCO, half of the languages existing in the world today could be
lost within "a few generations", due to their marginalisation from the Internet,
cultural and economic pressures, and the development of new technologies that
favour homogeneity. 
In May, the UN agency will publish an extensive study about the languages of
the Amazon region, many of them spoken by very few individuals. The study is a
bid to draw international attention to their plight. 
Surviving in the Amazon jungles are isolated indigenous groups, who refuse to
have contact with the Western world and its "progress". They total around 5,000
people belonging to various groups of the Amazon Basin, among them the Tagaeri
in Ecuador, Ayoreo in Paraguay, Korubo in Brazil and the Mashco-Piro and
Ashaninka in Peru. 
According to Rodolfo Stavenhagen, UN special rapporteur on the situation of
human rights and basic freedoms of indigenous peoples, these groups are facing
"a true cultural genocide". 
"I fear that under current circumstances it will be difficult for them to
survive many more years, because so-called development denies the right of
these peoples to continue being peoples," he said. 
Although the list of languages and dialects in use worldwide is very long, the
vast majority of the population speaks only a handful of languages, like
English, Chinese, and Spanish. 
To ensure that linguistic diversity is maintained, the international community
agreed in recent years on a series of legal instruments, and experts hold
regular meetings to discuss the issues. 
One such meet took place Mar. 31 to Apr. 2 in the western U.S. state of Utah,
where officials and academics from across the Americas studied ways to prevent
the disappearance of dozens of languages in this hemisphere. 
Since 1999, through a UNESCO initiative, Feb. 21 is celebrated as International
Mother Language Day. There are also agreements in the UN system, like the
Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and its Action Plan, from 2001, and
the Convention on Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, signed in 2003. 
Also dating from 2003 is the Recommendation on the Promotion and Use of
Multingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace, and from 2005 the Convention
on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions. 
The Argentine expert Moure says it is important to work towards preserving
languages, even when the number of speakers is small, because "they are markers
of identity that merit maximum respect and scientific attention." 
But "I am not so sure that the death of a language necessarily means the
disappearance of the associated cosmovision, because its speakers never stop
talking (unless they themselves disappear through disease or genocide), but
rather, after a period of bilingualism, they adopt another language that is
more useful to them because of its greater insertion in the world," he said 

"This a fact of reality, and I believe it should be recognised without turning
to excessive conspiracy theories," said Moure. 
(*Diego Cevallos is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Apr. 8 by Latin
American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica
is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United
Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.) 

 (END/2006)  

   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20060414/38e96762/attachment.htm>