MSU professor aims to save at-risk language (fwd)

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MSU professor aims to save at-risk language

By Matthew Miller, Lansing State Journal

Grant to enable linguist's task in Tanzania
http://www.wzzm13.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=60681

Deogratias Ngonyani does not speak Kikisi.

His only exposure to the language, spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in
Tanzania, is a list of about 1,000 words from the early 1970s.

But his work over the next nine months could be what keeps Kikisi from
slipping into the linguistic boneyard.

"There are indications that the number of speakers is declining very
rapidly," said Ngonyani, a linguist and a professor of Swahili at
Michigan State University.

The reason, he said, is pressure from "more dominant languages" such as
Swahili, the official language of Tanzania, and regional languages,
such as Kinyakyusa.

Experts estimate that about half of the 7,000 human languages used today
will be extinct within a century. When they go, the culture and the
worldviews of their speakers could disappear too, said Joan Maling,
linguistics program director of the National Science Foundation. It
sponsors a program that gave a $40,000 grant to Ngonyan.

"Language preserves all kinds of really unique cultural information,"
Maling said.

For example, in some East Asian languages, such as Japanese, social
hierarchies are encoded into language.

"You can't even decide sometimes what verb to use without knowing
whether the person you're talking to is higher or lower on the social
hierarchy than you are," she said. "In that sense, language is kind of
a window into the human mind and how different groups, different
cultures organize themselves."

The foundation's program also works to learn more about humans' capacity
for language, she said - more about the possibilities.

Ngonyani will create a record of Kikisi and, in doing so, preserve both
the words and the culture of the people who speak it.

He is a native speaker of Kindendeule, another Tanzanian language. He
turned to Kikisi, he said, because it was unfamiliar, because he wanted
to get "new light" on the Bantu family of languages and because it is
endangered.

He'll travel to the northeastern shore of Lake Malawi later this month.
It's an area that has a traditional lifestyle and communication
methods, he said. There are no paved roads, no infrastructure for
telephones.

There, he will observe how the Kikisi language is used, document its
vocabulary, describe its grammar, and make audio and video recordings
of conversations, poems, stories, songs and rituals. His work will add
data to the field of Bantu linguistics, clarifying the relationship of
Kikisi to neighboring languages.

It will say something about Kikisi's speakers as well.

"Understanding the different languages helps us to understand not only
ourselves," Ngonyani said, "but also different people, their history,
their worldview and so on. That's why it's very important that we
safeguard linguistic diversity."

Contact Matthew Miller at 377-1046 or mrmiller @lsj.com.