Endangered Languages again

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From  the Baltimore Sun.

http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.language14jul14,0,4570027.story


Ancient tongues fade away

Languages: As roads, technology and the global economy reach
once-isolated areas, old ways of communicating are dying off.

By Dennis O'Brien
Sun Staff

July 14, 2003

Marie Smith knows that her language - the Alaskan tongue of Eyak - will
die with her. And she mourns its passing. "If you were expecting a little
baby, and it went back to its home so that it wasn't born alive, how would
you feel?" says Smith, 85, who moved to Anchorage from her tribal home on
Prince William Sound in 1973.

A fisherman's daughter, Smith grew up with Eyak, a branch of the
Athabaskan-Tlingit family of languages spoken for 3,000 years in Cordova,
along the Copper River. But she stopped speaking Eyak when she attended
government schools. Neither her children nor grandchildren know the
language. "I should have made them learn it, but they just weren't
interested," she said.

Eyak is among thousands of languages expected to disappear in the next 100
years, a mortality rate that has linguists rushing to document and save
the world's endangered tongues.  "We're losing a part of our cultural
history," said Michael Krauss, a University of Alaska linguistics
professor and founder of the Alaska Native Language Center, established in
the 1970s to save the state's 20 native tongues. Krauss and other
linguists blame the losses on economic and social trends, politics,
improved transportation and the global reach of telecommunications.
Whatever the reason, they predict that up to half of the world's 6,800
tongues could die over the next century - and hundreds more will disappear
in the century after that.

"I'd be the happiest guy in the world if I were wrong," Krauss said. But
he noted that only 500 to 600 languages are spoken by at least two
generations, making them relatively safe from extinction. According to
experts, half the people on the planet use just 15 languages to
communicate, while 10 percent of the population speak in one of about
6,800 distinct tongues. Half the world's languages are spoken by fewer
than 2,500 people, mostly in remote areas that are becoming less remote
every day.

Global economics are prompting the young to leave isolated villages in
India, Mexico and South America. They're headed for cities in search of
better lives, leaving native tongues behind. Meanwhile, satellite TV and
the Internet are reaching into isolated areas of Papua New Guinea, a South
Pacific island nation with 832 languages, more than any other country. "If
you go to Papua New Guinea and go out in the most remote areas you can
find and you'll see grass huts, and alongside one of them you'll see a
satellite dish, and of course the TV that's coming in is coming in
English," said Anthony Aristar, a linguistics professor at Wayne State
University in Detroit who studies dying languages. He is creating a $2
million database listing the world's tongues.

Words come, languages go

The death of a language is nothing new. The spoken word, developed tens of
thousands of years ago, is in constant motion. Inventions inspire word
creation, wars transform nations, poverty prompts waves of immigration,
and other historic events - such as the opening of the American West to
European settlers - create conditions where one tongue comes to dominate
others. For example, linguists note that the Norman Conquest transformed
early English, which has its roots in German. Latin, the language of the
Roman Empire, replaced Etruscan and Punic before it diversified and
influenced 30 other languages, including English.

Sometimes, government policies kill a language. Many Native American
languages are near extinction - the Lipon Apache have two or three
speakers left - in part because government-run boarding schools punished
students for speaking native languages until the 1960s. Krauss says that
about half of the 200 languages native to North America will probably die
out over the next century because so few children are picking up them up.

Alan Caldwell, director of the Culture Center at the College of the
Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, remembers his father telling of having his
hand slapped with a ruler and his mouth washed out with soap for speaking
Menominee at the reservation school, which has closed. The experience left
the elder Caldwell, who died in 1972, reluctant to speak the native
tongue, or pass it on. "We'd be at the dinner table and we would ask him,
'How do you count to 10? How do you say salt and pepper?' And depending on
his mood, most often his response was, 'You don't have a need to know
that, it won't do you any good,'" Caldwell said.

As a result, only 40 of the tribe's 8,800 members speak the original
language. That's one reason why Monica McCauley, a University of Wisconsin
researcher, drives three hours to the reservation each week. Macaulay
recently won a National Science Foundation grant to compile the first
complete Menominee dictionary. The project includes taping the tribe's
elders and transcribing conversations to capture the nuances of the
language.

Tribal elders agree that without such help, the language may disappear.
And Caldwell, 55, is in a "beginners" class taught by the elders. In
Guatemala, parents encourage their children to forsake native Mayan
dialects and learn Spanish to get ahead in life. "They go to school and
they see that success depends on learning Spanish," said Nora England, a
linguistics professor at the University of Texas.

Some languages saved

Efforts to save languages are as varied as the languages. Nora England
spends her summers in Guatemala training local linguists to preserve four
endangered Mayan languages.  Guatemala's villages have been hotbeds of
language diversity for centuries because of poor roads and mountainous
terrain. The result is 21 distinct Mayan tongues in Guatemala alone and
nine in Mexico. "Some of them are as different from each other as English
is from Russian," England said.

Success stories exist. Hebrew, once nearly dead as an everyday spoken
language, was redeemed from ancient texts after 2,000 years and is spoken
by about 5 million people, mostly in Israel. Hebrew's resurgence was aided
by its role in the effort to establish a national identity for Israel
after World War I. The fight to save other dying languages is more of an
uphill battle.  Critics argue that it's a waste of time and money if
cultural trends dictate their eventual demise.

Neil Seeman, an associate editor at the National Review who operates a
Canadian think tank, said that while dying languages should be recorded
for historical study, governments are responding to political pressure
with a kind of "cultural protectionism" by forcing languages on people who
no longer have use for them. "I have nostalgia for the electronic
typewriter, but I don't see a need for subsidies to protect it, or
continue its use," Seeman said. But linguists say that a society's culture
and history die out when its language expires. "Part of the world is lost
when you can't name it," said Stephen Batalden, a linguist at Arizona
State University.

In Alaska, Smith says she hopes for a resurgence in Eyak, now that Krauss
has recorded her language on tapes and in writing. "I have this feeling in
my heart that the Eyak language is going to come back, and usually I'm not
wrong about these feelings," she said. And if it happens she will respond
with a one-word prayer: awa'ahdah. That's Eyak for "thank you."