Linguists work to save dying languages

Documenting endangered voices: In 2006 José Tonko and his team traveled to Chile to document the Kawesqar langauge. Used with permission from AILLA (www.ailla.utexas.org.)There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world today. Half will be extinct by the end of this century, experts say. For decades, linguists have trekked the globe from Mesoamerica to Siberia documenting these languages before the last respective speakers die. 

There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world today. Half will be extinct by the end of this century, experts say. For decades, linguists have trekked the globe from Mesoamerica to Siberia documenting these languages before the last respective speakers die.

Why dying languages matter

The first answer experts typically give is the connection between indigenous communities and their environments, such as knowledge of natural medicines. Every group made careful observations about their surroundings over time, said Brian Stross, a linguistic anthropologist. They learned how to use their environment for food, medicine, beauty, construction, all manners of things. It was a matter of survival. All of this knowledge is encoded in their respective languages.

“When those languages are gone, it often means that those environments, and the knowledge of them, are gone too,” Stross said.

When a community is conquered, either by politics or by force, many cultural practices are not adopted by the new dominant group. And most groups cannot learn the new dominant language and incorporate it into their indigenous culture without something being lost. Some things simply cannot be translated, Stross said.

“We try to translate all the time but we always lose something when we move from one language to another,” he said. “The whole natural environment and how it works is often best understood by the people living in that environment.” 

A human rights issue

Why should people care? The connection between language and the natural world is the easy answer, said K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, a team of linguists. It is not an invalid answer — one of Harrison’s interests is the environmental connection — but it is the answer most often given because it describes something tangible.

“It may be the easiest example because people grasp the importance of it. Medicine has a tangible economic value to it,” said Harrison.

The other answer as to why people should care is harder to quantify because it is intangible — it is about diversity and discrimination. Languages become extinct because they fall out of use. This language shift, according to Anderson, is always connected to discrimination.

“People do not shift their language unless they are forced to or discriminated against for using a language that has become devalued,” Anderson said.

A language becomes devalued when its speakers are dominated by another group and pressured to adopt the dominant group's language. In some ways, experts say, language shift is a human rights issue.

“Language is one of the most important ways in which we identify ourselves," Stross said. "From a human rights perspective, if you take away someone’s language you take away half their humanity."

What is language?

Stories from the field

Experts note a sense of sadness that comes with the loss of one's language. “I think it’s part of that general package of despair you sometimes run into in small indigenous communities that face a lot of cultural suppression,” said linguist Jane Hill. 

While working in Mexico, Hill would often come across children who couldn’t speak to their grandparents. The older generation could speak only their native Nahuatl while the younger generation could only speak Spanish. It was a big family divide, Hill said.

Linguist Joel Sherzer trains and lectures students at the University of Panama. On several occasions students in his class have realized, “that recording you just played was my grandmother, or grandfather or uncle,” Sherzer said. One of those students is now using the recording of his grandfather from the 1970s to earn his Ph.D. in linguistics.

Johnny Hill Jr. is the last speaker of Chinahuave, a Native American Language in Arizona. He told Harrison, “I have to talk to myself, all the others have passed on. There’s nobody left for me to talk to. I talk to myself in my language.”

Beyond the linguist “rhetoric”

Jane Hill admitted, “it’s hard for me not to revert to the rhetoric of a linguist but people should care because the world needs diversity.” Since there is no way to know what the world is going to throw at us, having a lot of different theories and world views to draw from is probably a really good idea, she said.

Culture is encoded in language. The Whorfian theory states that language shapes the way the human mind works, creating or at least contributing to the development of a person’s worldview. The link between diversity of thought and diversity of linguistic expression is what makes language documentation urgent for Sherzer.

“We’re talking about the remarkable diversity of languages and cultures, and animals and plants, because it’s all related,” he said. “Whole environments are under threat and if we don’t record the languages, if we don’t document them, archive them and promote the use of them, we aren’t going to know the diversity of human kind. And to know the diversity of human kind is to know the diversity of who we ourselves are.”