[lg policy] Say what? To find new subjects of study, some linguists simply open their front doors

[Harold Schiffman]

Say what? To find new subjects of study, some linguists simply open
their front doors

Sep 10th 2011 | NEW YORK | from the print edition

WHERE in the world is the largest number of different languages
spoken? Most linguists would probably plump for New Guinea, an island
that has 830 recognised tongues scattered around its isolated,
jungle-covered valleys. But a place on the other side of the world
runs it close. The five boroughs of New York City are reckoned to be
home to speakers of around 800 languages, many of them close to
extinction.

New York is also home, of course, to a lot of academic linguists, and
three of them have got together to create an organisation called the
Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), which is ferreting out speakers of
unusual tongues from the city’s huddled immigrant masses. The ELA,
which was set up last year by Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins and Bob
Holman, has worked in detail on 12 languages since its inception. It
has codified their grammars, their pronunciations and their
word-formation patterns, as well as their songs and legends. Among the
specimens in its collection are Garifuna, which is spoken by
descendants of African slaves who made their homes on St Vincent after
a shipwreck unexpectedly liberated them; Mamuju, from Sulawesi in
Indonesia; Mahongwe, a language from Gabon; Shughni, from the Pamirian
region of Tajikistan; and an unusual variant of a Mexican language
called Totonac.

Each volunteer speaker of a language of interest is first tested with
what is known as a Swadesh list. This is a set of 207 high-frequency,
slow-to-change words such as parts of the body, colours and basic
verbs like eat, drink, sleep and kill. The Swadesh list is intended to
ascertain an individual’s fluency before he is taken on. Once he has
been accepted, Dr Kaufman and his colleagues start chipping away at
the language’s phonology (the sounds of which it is composed) and its
syntax (how its meaning is changed by the order of words and phrases).
This sort of analysis is the bread and butter of linguistics.

Every so often, though, the researchers come across a bit of jam. The
Mahongwe word manono, for example, means “I like” when spoken soft and
flat, and “I don’t like” when the first syllable is a tad sharper in
tone. Similarly, mbaza could be either “chest” or “council house”. In
both cases, the two words are nearly indistinguishable to an English
speaker, but yield starkly different patterns when run through a
spectrograph. Manono is a particular linguistic oddity, since it uses
only tone to differentiate an affirmative from a negative—a phenomenon
the ELA has since discovered applies to all verbs in Mahongwe.

Such niceties are interesting to experts. But the ELA is attempting to
understand more than just the nuts and bolts of languages. It is
collecting stories and other verbal material specific to the cultures
of the participants. One volunteer, for example, wants to write a
storybook for children in her language (Shughni), and also a recipe
book. That means creating a written form of the language, which the
researchers do using what is known as the International Phonetic
Alphabet.

Many of Dr Kaufman’s better finds, he says, have come from “hanging
out at street corners with a clipboard on Roosevelt Avenue”—a street
(pictured above) in the borough of Queens that he describes as the
“epicentre of the epicentre” of linguistic New York. How long it will
remain so is moot. The world’s languages, which number about 6,900,
are reckoned to be dying out at the rate of one a fortnight. The
reason is precisely the sort of cultural mixing that New York
epitomises. The value of learning any particular language is increased
by the number of people who already speak it. Conversely, the value of
a minority language is diminished as people abandon it. To those
languages that hath, in other words, shall be given. From those that
hath not, shall the last speakers soon be taken away.

http://www.economist.com/node/21528592

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