Linguist: Local languages in peril in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Linguist: Local languages in peril in the GMS

  A Georgetown University linguist recently noted that rapid economic
development and political integration in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region
(GMS) are threatening local languages....

6 July 2006

A Georgetown University linguist recently noted that rapid economic
development and political integration in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region
(GMS) are threatening local languages as well as local forms of culture
and knowledge. Local knowledges are inextricably bound up with local
languages--and languages are in trouble, wrote Dr Peter Vail, Faculty of
Liberal Arts, Ubon Ratchathani University and Department of Linguistics,
Georgetown University in the latest issue of Mekong Today, a quarterly
newsletter published by Thai-based Mekong Sub-Region Social Research
Center. The typical pattern, he says, is for younger speakers of minority
languages to shift to a politically dominant language. Part of the
underlying problem that such minority languages face stems from the
pernicious implications of nation-state ideology: that it is somehow
natural to ascribe to a person one nationality and one language, he
observes.

Accordingly, each countrys language policy and state institutions will
ensure that its citizens, regardless of their origins and at the expense
of their mother tongues, speak the official language. The biggest threats
to smaller languages are roads, schools, television (what linguist Michael
Krauss calls cultural nerve gas) and aggressive language policies that
seek as a goal linguistic and cultural homogenization, he says, urging
that GMS social research projects address the status and role of language.
It is paradoxical to think we can embrace local knowledge and wisdom, and
yet disregard the language in which such knowledge was conceived. Krauss,
he adds, has calculated that over the course of the next hundred years,
fully 90% of the worlds languages will irrecoverably disappear.
According to Time, 26 May 2003, there are 6,809 languages in the world.

The text of Dr Vail's article can be read at www.mssrc.la.ubu.ac.th.

http://www.shanland.org/articles/general/2006/News06060706