'It's like bombing the Louvre'

[Harold Schiffman]

'It's like bombing the Louvre'

Marie Smith Jones was the world's last Eyak speaker - by the time she
died last week, she could use her mother tongue only in her dreams.
But the loss of a language is not just a personal tragedy, says Mark
Abley, it is a cultural disaster

Mark Abley
Monday January 28, 2008

Guardian

Some deaths come as a shock. The death last Monday of Marie Smith
Jones did not. She was 89, blind, a heavy smoker and a recovering
alcoholic, who had borne nine children and buried two of them. People
had been expecting her death for years.
By "people", I mean linguists. Most residents of Anchorage, the
Alaskan city where she spent her final decades, had never heard of
her. Even after she addressed a UN conference on indigenous rights,
she managed to maintain her privacy. Yet among the advocates for
minority languages, Jones was famous. A few of them knew her by a
different name: Udach' Kuqax'a'a'ch', a name that belonged to the Eyak
language and means "a sound that calls people from far away".

Jones is thought to have been the last full-blooded member of the
Eyak, a saltwater people of southern Alaska. When the Exxon Valdez ran
aground in 1989, it spilled 240,000 barrels of crude oil into their
traditional fishing grounds. More important, Jones was the last person
to speak Eyak fluently. She had held that melancholy distinction since
her sister's death in the early 90s. Her passing means that nobody in
the world can effortlessly distinguish a demex'ch (a soft, rotten spot
in the ice) from a demex'ch'lda'luw (a large, treacherous hole in the
ice). It means that siniik'adach'uuch' - the vertical groove between
the nose and upper lip, literally a "nose crumple" - has fled the
minds of the living.

Are such arcane details significant? Jones thought so. Asked by
Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker how she felt about her language
dying with her, she replied: "How would you feel if your baby died? If
someone asked you, 'What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?'"
Jones added that she hated reporters. A fisherman's daughter, who had
worked in a cannery from the age of 12, she could not then have
imagined how many journalists she would meet in old age.

The Eyak language has no offspring - no close relatives of any kind.
Kolbert wittily described it as "the spinster aunt of the Athabascan
language group". Linguistic evidence suggests the Eyak people split
off to become a separate culture roughly 3,000 years ago, travelling
downriver to a salmon-busy coast. In verbal terms, Eyak's nephews and
nieces include the Apaches of the dry south-west, familiar to us from
westerns.

The Eyak may never have had a large population, and in recent
centuries they suffered badly from the ravages of smallpox, measles,
influenza and colonisation. A larger Indian group, the Tlingit, began
to encroach on their territory. Today, powerless and divided, the Eyak
scarcely survive as a cohesive people.

Yet even after Jones's death, their language will enjoy an academic
half-life. Unlike hundreds of other tribal tongues in the world which
fell silent before the linguists arrived, Eyak is richly documented.
Video and audio recordings, transcriptions of ancient stories, a
hand-typed dictionary that runs to well over 3,000 pages: all this now
exists in DVD format. Future scholars who set out to explore Eyak's
grammar, or its exact relationship to other languages, will have
plenty of material to draw on.

The dictionary's compiler, Michael Krauss, founded the Alaska Native
Languages Center in 1972 to record, preserve and (if possible)
strengthen the 20 indigenous languages in the state. He is an informed
and eloquent spokesman for minority tongues. But despite his work,
most Alaskan languages are in feeble health.

They were weakened by terrifying epidemics in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, by the economic and social destruction of their
communities, and by the unsparing malice of an education system that
promoted the silencing of all indigenous tongues. Can they now survive
a force that Krauss has described as "cultural nerve gas"? To minority
languages, he famously predicted, the mass media will prove
"insidious, painless and fatal".

As in Alaska, so it is in much of the world. The statistics have
become routine; their shock value has faded. Even so, it may be worth
repeating that if a child who is born today survives the century,
three-quarters of all human languages are likely to vanish during his
or her lifetime.

Thanks to Jones's feisty presence, Eyak became something of a poster
child for the cause of language preservation. The notion of a "last
speaker" carries a powerful mystique. But perhaps Eyak was an unwise
choice. Now the poster is out of date, what happens to the cause?

Linguists and cultural activists were not the only ones to seize on
the solitary example of Jones. In a famous essay published a few years
ago in Prospect, Kenan Malik did the same. He used her to illustrate a
trend he saw as both inevitable and desirable: the concentration of
human intelligence among fewer and fewer languages. "The reason that
Eyak will soon be extinct," Malik wrote, "is not because Marie Smith
Jones has been denied her rights, but because no one else wants to, or
is capable of, speaking the language. This might be tragic for Marie
Smith Jones - and frustrating for professional linguists - but it is
not a question of rights. Neither a culture, nor a way of life, nor
yet a language, has a God-given 'right to exist'."

Fair enough. But Eyak's death comes as a result less of personal
choice than of longstanding government policy. For most of a century,
indigenous children in Alaska suffered physical punishment if they
were caught speaking their mother tongue in the classroom or the
playground. In Wales and Ireland, Canada and South Africa, the same
held true. There are many countries, including China and Russia, where
language loss should still be a human-rights issue.

Official policy in Alaska centred on "reclaiming the natives from
improvident habits," on convincing them to "abandon their old
customs," and on "transforming them into ambitious and self-helpful
citizens". Small wonder that after several generations of reclaiming
and transforming, the remaining handful of Eyak were unable to speak
their ancestral tongue.

Jones married a white man, and did not pass on her language to her
children - a decision she came to regret. But she made it to spare
them the pain she had endured. As a girl, she had learned to see
bilingualism not as an asset but an impediment. Eyak, she had been
told, was a useless language.

Or perhaps her teachers didn't deign to call it a language. In 1887, a
federal commissioner for Indian affairs had made the prevailing wisdom
clear: "Teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a
positive detriment to him." The word "barbarous" betrays obvious
contempt; the use of "dialect" is more subtle and insidious. But any
language can seem barbarous to its speakers' enemies, and no language
is primitive.

So the cause of language preservation carries on, as it must. In
Krauss's words, "Every language is a treasury of human experience."
His fellow linguist Ken Hale put it more bluntly: "Languages embody
the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one
of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre."

How best to avoid that fate? For a minority language to flourish, its
speakers need a sort of bullheaded confidence. Such stubborn
self-belief emerges from a sense of cultural power and feeds back into
it. The classic example is the astonishing rebirth of Hebrew a century
ago in what would become Israel. In our own time the Basques and the
Catalans, the Welsh and the Maoris display a similar faith.

These are the groups who should now act as poster children for
minority languages: the Maori boys and girls in pre-school "language
nests", the artists and producers who mutate the mass media in Welsh,
the Catalan activists who have peacefully forced Spain to rethink its
identity. The vigour in these cultures, and many others, belies the
easy notion that all minority languages are doomed.

It was sadly different for Jones. During the last 15 years of her
life, she could use her mother tongue only with a visiting linguist or
in her dreams. She had, as Krauss said this week, "a tragic mantle" to
bear, and she did so "with great dignity, grace and spirit". Perhaps
last week she was called from far away under her Eyak name.

We can say "thank you" as a tribute. There is no one to say awa'ahdah.

Lost in translation

Words you'll never hear again

The following words are all from languages which no longer have a
single native speaker

Unrihtwillnung: improper love (Old English)

Istamaasdu: Listen, you in the plural! (Hittite, Turkey)

Ebauthoo: water (Beothuk, Newfoundland)

Kälymentwam: path to heaven (Tocharian, central Asia)

Moíthgnatha: famously smooth (Old Irish)

Qeto: wine jars (Linear B Minoan, Crete)

Tehonannonronkwanniontak: they greeted him with respect; literally,
they greased his scalp many times (Huron, Ontario)

Molatuendalaas: God's curse in your stomach (Cornish)

Tpochgo: night (Mohican, New York and New England)

Ngangki: sun (Yaralde, South Australia)

Mun*s: mouth - the fourth letter, here substituted with an asterisk,
is the Runic thorn (Gothic, eastern Europe)

Xuqu'liilx'aax'ch'kk'sh: Are you going to keep tickling me in the face
in the same spot repeatedly? (Eyak, Alaska)

· Mark Abley's book The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of
English will be published by William Heinemann in June.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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