Oklahoma language-loss hotspot

[McCone, Gary]

Vanishing Languages Identified
Oklahoma Is Among Places Where Tongues Are Disappearing

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; A12

Oklahoma has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the five
worst "language-loss hotspots" in the world -- places where native
languages are going extinct the fastest -- according to an analysis
released yesterday.

The Sooner State's inclusion in the global top five is a reminder,
researchers said, that the United States has a long history of
linguistic diversity and that the problem of language extinctions is not
limited to distant lands.

Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken, about half are expected to
disappear in this century, said K. David Harrison, a Swarthmore College
linguist and co-director of the Enduring Voices project. That
collaboration between the National Geographic Society
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/National+Geographic+Soc
iety?tid=informline>  and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered
Languages of Salem
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Salem?tid=informline> ,
Ore., assembled the latest statistics on global language loss.

While previous analyses have focused on individual languages that have
just one or a few surviving speakers, Harrison
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Harrison?tid=informline
>  and his colleagues took a geographic approach, identifying where in
the world languages are disappearing fastest. Oklahoma
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Oklahoma?tid=informline
>  and nearby areas of the American Southwest, it turns out, have an
extremely rich linguistic fabric because of the many Native American
tribes that were corralled there in the 1800s.

Today those languages are disappearing by the month, and with them a
treasure trove of ecological insights, culinary and medicinal secrets
and complex cultural histories, including mythologies that can teach a
lot about universal human fears and aspirations, Harrison said.

"It may seem frivolous, but mythological traditions are attempts to make
sense of the universe, and the different ways that the human mind has
tried to grapple with the unknown and the unknowable are of scientific
interest," he said.

Following in the footsteps of early colonialists, but carrying
high-quality digital video and audio equipment instead of guns and
trinkets, the Enduring Voices project has launched a number of
expeditions to document dying languages, about half of which have no
written form. Where there is interest in preserving those tongues, it
has helped create teaching materials for use in local classrooms.

The venture's analysis, based in part on scholarly research and
presented in a telephone news conference yesterday, took three factors
into account in identifying the "hotspots": The diversity of languages
spoken, the number of living speakers and how old they are, and the
extent to which the languages have been documented.

Among those on the brink of extinction in Oklahoma is Yuchi, a language
native to the same-named tribe from Tennessee
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Tennessee?tid=informlin
e>  and believed to be unrelated to any other in the world. It is spoken
by just a handful of elders because youngsters in government boarding
schools were punished if they veered from English. Yuchi tales tell of
Earth's creation from water with the help of a crawfish and the
emergence of the tribe's forebears from a drop of menstrual blood in the
sky.

The other four hotspots are:

1. Northern Australia
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Australia?tid=informlin
e> , where project members recorded the last known speaker of Amurdag --
a man who remembers about 100 words that he last heard spoken by his
now-deceased father.

2. Central South America
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/South+America?tid=infor
mline> , where the Kallawaya of Bolivia
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Bolivia?tid=informline>
have for at least 400 years maintained a secret language about medicinal
plants.

3. The Northwest Pacific Plateau, where there is but a single woman who
can still speak Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on
Oregon
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Oregon?tid=informline>
's Siletz reservation.

4. Eastern Siberia
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Siberia?tid=informline>
, where a high proportion of the 23 known tongues are unrelated to any
other languages in the world.

Language can reveal a lot about how a culture organizes information. In
the Paraguayan Lengua language, for example, the word "11" means
literally "arrived at the foot, one," meaning "counted 10 fingers plus
one toe." The word for "20" means "finished the feet."

In Siberia's Nivkh language, each number can be said 26 ways, depending
on what is being counted.

About 80 percent of the world's people speak 83 languages, while about
3,500 languages are spoken by just 0.2 percent of the world's
population. Attempts to commune with those minorities can turn
unintentionally comedic, said Gregory Anderson, co-director of the
Enduring Voices project.

Talking to a woman who is one of the 20 remaining Bardi speakers in
Australia, Anderson once mispronounced an "r," which resulted in him
asking, "What kangaroo are you from?" instead of "What country are you
from?"

No interpreter was needed to understand the Bardi laughter that
followed.

 

 

Gary K. McCone
Associate Director, Information Systems
National Agricultural Library
10301 Baltimore Avenue
Beltsville, Maryland  20705-2351 
(301) 504-5018
Fax.  (301) 504-6968 

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we
begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."  -- R.
D. Laing

 

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