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[Harold F. Schiffman]

 Language: a toolkit for life on earth
 Ehsan Masood
22 - 3 - 2006


The intimate link between linguistic and biological diversity makes the
struggle to defend both essential to a sustainable human and planetary
future, says Ehsan Masood.

I am an occasional reader of Global Science, a mass-circulation monthly in
Urdu published out of Karachi. It provides news and commentary on the
world of science to a Pakistani readership, most of them college students
often from households where books and magazines are in short supply. The
current edition is devoted to developments in biotechnology. As with most
issues of the magazine, just about every page is peppered with words
written in English, or transliterated from English into Urdu. There is
good reason for this. The bulk of scientific research these days is
reported in specialist journals published in Europe and the United States
and in the English language. Unless scientists in other parts of the world
take more of a lead in innovation, languages such as Urdu will continue to
need to "borrow" words such as "gene", "fertiliser", "biological",
"pesticide" and "steroids".

When faced with this dilemma, many languages opt to devise their own words
and phrases, in order to avoid using the English (or in some cases French)
original. But I can see why Global Science's founder and editor-in-chief
Aleem Ahmed is not going down that route. He expects that more of his
readers will embark on research careers, for which they will need to be
familiar with English-language scientific terminology. At the very least,
he wants them to become better-informed and articulate citizens, who can
contribute with confidence to global as well as national debates on issues
such as evolution, or the ethics of gene technology.

But looking at the sheer density of transliterated words in Global Science
also gives me cause to worry: that in borrowing more and more words from
English, the language of international scientific discourse, minority
languages outside the global top-ten (such as Bahasa, Swahili and Urdu)
could one day morph into a much smaller number of global, meta-languages.
The example of Global Science suggests that the semi-automatic use or
transliteration of English words may reflect a fraying of inner resources,
of confidence, and - ultimately - of awareness that the very existence of
a language makes an invaluable contribution to the world.

The world's garden

The issue of language depletion or (at the extreme) language loss is far
from abstract. Unesco's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of
Disappearing, for example, tells us that half of the world's approximately
7,000 spoken languages are endangered to varying degrees. 5,000 of the
total number of languages are spoken by groups comprising fewer than
100,000 people; 1,500 have fewer than 1,000 (mostly elderly) speakers.
Should that be a problem for science? There are, after all, many who argue
that science is a universal way of understanding the world and that the
answers to questions such as "what is a gene?", "why is our climate
changing?", and "is the universe expanding?" will not be any different if
the person trying to answer the question speaks Swahili rather than
English or French as a first language.

It may be true that the search for answers to asking some of life's big
questions can in principle be conducted through the medium of any
language. But there are many ways in which the existence of multiple
languages (each one intrinsically rich and world-encompassing on its own
terms) makes this search and an exploration of its practical, social and
scientific subsets more enlightening. Just one of these ways is the quest
for environmentally-sustainable development.

>>From 20-31 March 2006, the world's ministers of science and environment
are meeting in Curitiba, Brazil for the eighth meeting of the Conference
of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 8), a United
Nations agreement that came into force in December 1993). Biological
diversity (or biodiversity) means the totality and the variety of living
things. In the present era of human history, we are losing this diversity
at an unprecedented rate: more species have become extinct in the past 500
years than at any time since the last mass extinction some 65 million
years ago. Then, a meteor is believed to have rammed into the earth,
leaving behind just a few species, from which we can trace the lineage of
present-day life on earth. Today, industrialisation, fossil fuels and
intensive farming are among the causes of what many believe to be a
potential new mass extinction (the sixth in geological history).

A rich diversity of species has more than aesthetic value: it is needed
for many of the ecological services that we take for granted, or which are
provided to us free of cost: such as clean water from forests,
pollination, and nutritious soils in which to grow our food. The urgency
over species loss has persuaded the signatories to the convention to set
themselves a very ambitious target: slowing down the rate of species
decline by 2010. Fulfilling this pledge will need Herculean efforts. At
the minimum, it will require less use of polluting fuels, chemical-free
agriculture, a slowing down of deforestation, and over-fishing and all
within four years from now.

The task is enormous enough in terms of policy, coordination and
implementation. But to come even close to achieving it in each particular
case, and in the round - an additional problem must be faced. To save a
species, you need knowledge of its existence: yet at present we don't even
know how many species exist, and the working estimates are not even close
to what the actual number might be. Scientists have been able to identify
some 1.75 million species (the vast majority are invertebrates, i.e.
animals without backbones). But the final total could be as high as 30
million. There is access to information about the existence of some
species that have not been recorded by biologists. Thanks to the stellar
work of researchers such as Catherine Potvin of McGill University (Canada)
and Fatima Nassif of the National Institute for Research in Agronomy
(Morocco), we know that indigenous communities in Africa, Asia, Latin
America and the Pacific possess often very detailed knowledge of their
surrounding biodiversity, which has been passed from generation to
generation across many centuries.

This is where the link with languages is so important. Knowledge of
biological diversity exists indeed, may be particularly rich - inside
communities who speak languages that are facing extinction. A book
published by Unesco, Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth's
Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity (2003), suggests that many
areas of the world where biodiversity is richest are also places where
many languages are spoken. A quarter of the world's spoken languages are
in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, for example; both are also on a list of
twelve "megadiverse" countries. At the Curitiba meeting, a consortium of
conservation groups, governments, UN agencies and indigenous peoples' are
unveiling a $1.7 million project to conserve a network of ancient sacred
sites - as a step towards protecting indigenous knowledge of biodiversity.

One of the groups involved is the Rigoberta Mench Tum Foundation, set up
by Rigoberta Menchu, the human-rights activist from the Quiche (Maya)
community in Guatemala who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1992. "It
may seem accidental, but it is not", she says. "Where indigenous peoples
live is where the greatest biological diversity, the diversity of nature,
exists. Our complex systems are founded on the values which indigenous
peoples have built." She is right. Every effort must be made to preserve,
encourage and record the world's threatened languages, and to cultivate
diversity in the use of a wide range of languages in the world's
conversation. If this is not done, the knowledge they embody, including
life-sustaining resources that could be the key to our collective future,
will die with them.


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