Speaking up for languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Speaking up for languages 
By Christopher Scanlon February 20, 2006 
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/speaking-up-for-languages/2006/02/19/1140283943941.html#
There is a crisis washing over the world's estimated 6000 languages. At present
rates of extinction, it is predicted that 90 per cent of the world's languages
will be gone by the turn of next century. That's some 5400 languages gone. 
Declining linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon. Throughout history,
languages have died out and been replaced by other languages, meaning the
overall number of languages tended to remain reasonably stable. 
This is no longer the case. The rate of language death has been steadily
accelerating to the point where the rate of extinction is now outpacing the
rate at which languages are replaced. Depending on how "language" and
"dialects" are defined, the number of languages is half of what it was 500
years ago. 
Should we be concerned about the loss of diversity of the world's languages?
After all, minority languages are, by definition, spoken by relatively few
people. It might even be argued that fewer languages would be a good thing, an
opportunity to cast off the curse and confusion of Babel. If we all spoke the
same language, there would potentially be less chance of confusion and greater
understanding between the world's different cultures. 
And when considered against the backdrop of social and political strife -
terrorism, war, political persecution and oppression, global poverty and the
environmental crisis - concern with the loss of languages might seem a luxury,
of interest only to a handful of linguists and language specialists.
Matters are, however, more complex. The loss of languages is not separate from,
but reflects larger shifts in power and inequality. 
Take something as basic as access to health services, for instance.
Anthropologist Luisa Maffi tells a story about visiting a group of indigenous
people in South America in the early 1990s who were receiving health care from
the Mexican health services. The people presenting themselves for care were
suffering from a variety of common complaints such as coughs and colds -
ailments that they would have had to have dealt with before the arrival of
state health services. 
When asked how they had dealt with these complaints in the past, the people
replied that they'd used plant medicines. But when prompted, they were no
longer able to recall which plants were appropriate for what symptoms. They had
lost the knowledge of such medicines, and could barely summon up the words for
them. 
The destruction of language has been a tool of assimilation, a means by which
colonial powers forcibly broke down communities and imposed their rule. In
1887, the United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs, J. D. Atkins,
identified linguistic difference as the root of tribal affiliation and
therefore a barrier to integrating native Americans into the national
community. 
"The difference in language," Atkinson claimed, "barred intercourse and a
proper understanding each of the other's motives and intentions." He advocated
the establishment of compulsory schooling for children to ensure that their
"barbarous dialects be blotted out and the English language substituted". 
In other cases, languages have been casualties of less direct, but no less
disastrous processes. Over the past 10 to 15 years, for example, the attention
of some linguists has turned to the impact of environmental degradation in the
destruction of the world's languages. Where people are forced off their land
because of logging activities, over-fishing, pollution, or the construction of
a dam, and move into larger urban centres, their communities often get broken
up and their distinctive culture and language lost. 
The loss of such languages can compound the environmental problems. Displaced
communities often built up deep reservoirs of knowledge about the land and
ecosystem within which they lived and worked, developing names for plant and
animal species along with intimate understandings of how ecosystems work. 
With the loss of language, that knowledge is lost, making it more difficult to
manage natural ecosystems. A vicious circle is thereby set in train:
environmental degradation destroys languages and the knowledge they contain. 
Bringing back threatened languages from the brink of extinction is not always a
straightforward process. In most cases, efforts to bring languages back from
extinction are starved of resources and lack official support or
infrastructure. 
Furthermore, it should not be automatically assumed that speakers of minority
languages necessarily want to speak their mother tongue. In some cases,
speakers of minority languages actively choose to forgo their mother tongue
because other languages - particularly so-called global languages such as
Mandarin and English - offer social and economic mobility and promises of a
higher standard of living. This is understandable. Putting the burden of
persevering languages onto the poor and marginal is as unfair as it is
unrealistic. Unless linguistic diversity is valued and nurtured as part of
broader efforts to redress social and economic inequalities, the outlook for
the majority of the world's languages is bleak. 
UNESCO's International Mother Tongue Day, which seeks to promote and raise
awareness about the value of language diversity and to invite reflection on the
dangers of declining linguistic diversity, is held tomorrow. 
Christopher Scanlon is a co-editor of Arena magazine (www.arena.org.au) and a
researcher in University's Globalism Institute.
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