Symposium: Rare and Endangered Languages
Up to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no documentation. This Symposium will look at the reasons for this and address some of the issues.
Professor Tim Connell provides an introduction to the field, with special focus on language policy, language ecology and language revival.
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15 June 2011
Symposium:
Rare and Endangered Languages
Professor Tim Connell
Arguably, languages are as old as man, as central to the development of civilisation as the discovery of how to make fire or the move from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Archaeologists study everything from dry bones to the ruins of great cities; different branches of archaeology have sprung up ranging from dendrochronology to palaeoclimatology in order to reach back and find out about the earliest origins of the earth and mankind.[i] Their findings appear regularly on popular TV programmes, and the whole country goes wild at regular intervals over exhibitions at the British Museum.
It is odd therefore (and slightly discouraging) that the same level of interest is not shown towards languages, whether ancient or modern; very remote, like Koro, recently discovered in a Himalayan valley, or for that matter in our own education system.[ii] However, I hope we will discover today that the study of languages great and small, new, old or extinct is of particular importance for a whole variety of good reasons.
Language Ecology
It is not just a question of us teaching languages, so much as what languages have to teach us and although the theme of language death and language loss are now reported more widely, there is not the sense of urgency that we perhaps ought to feel when we realise that half the world’s 6000 – 7000 languages are so endangered that they are unlikely to survive into the next century.[iii] The loss of language is actually heavily linked to biological diversity, the irony being that they are disappearing along with the rainforest and other natural habitats, not to mention the flora and fauna that might contain the medicine to cure a whole range of diseases. The question of sustainability and ecological inter-dependence is as valid for language as it is for other aspects of permanent damage to the environment. The sheer diversity found in different languages, even those located in some proximity to each other, provide us with insights into the human brain and how it works, how the brain responds to its environment, to different social structures, and indeed how human beings react to each other.
The study of a wide range of languages also provides insights into human thought processes. Consider the Amerindian tribe that has no concept of time, as in the case of the Amondawa people of Brazil (first located in 1986) who have no concept of weeks, months or years. This demonstrates that humans do not (as you might imagine) have an in-built concept of the passage of time, which in turn will affect the way in which people refer to the present, past and future. It also suggests that the Amondawa have no need for phrases like burn-out, time-poor or rat race.[iv] They almost certainly don’t use a term like 24/7, but then in our frenetic world even that is changing. I recently heard someone use 7/24 on the radio, which shows how fast our language can move.[v] By contrast we will probably discover that the Amondawa do have words and phrases that reflect their own particular environment and daily lives. If we look around the world, we can see that people make up words to meet their own particular needs. But what do we make of terms such as gagrom, meaning “to search for something underwater by trampling” or gobray “to fall into a well unknowingly”?[vi]
Language hegemony, death and extinction
It may well be true, as the hymn reminds us, that “Crowns and Thrones May Perish, Kingdoms Wax and Wane”[vii] and there are certainly examples of languages, ranging from Hittite to Quechua, which owed their expansion and apparent success to being the imposed language of empire. Indeed, Arabic, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese have all spread well beyond their original borders in modern historical times for that reason.[viii] Lesser known languages in this category include Nahuatl (the languages of the Aztecs in Mexico) and Quechua, spoken by the Incas in Peru. Both languages are still with us today, though very much as languages of the vanquished. The case of Akkadian and Hittite from ancient times is interesting, as they indeed waxed and waned over a long period of time, about 4000 years in the case of Akkadian (up to the 2nd Century AD) and from about 1800 BC to 1300 BC in the case of Hittite. Interestingly enough, Akkadian (the official language of Babylon and Assyria) was widely used at diplomatic levels in places as far apart as Egypt and Persia and so outlived its time as a hegemonic language. It was eventually replaced by Aramaic[ix], as its cursive script made it so much easier to write than the cuneiform writing of Akkadian.[x] And Hittite has left us one of the first peace treaties in the world, between Egypt and the Hittite Empire in parts of modern-day Turkey. It also left a significant literature.[xi]
Writing, as we shall see, is an important element in the survival of a language. The Aztecs, of course, were rather limited with their pictograms and the Incas got tied up in knots quite literally with their pieces of coloured string, used essentially as a mnemonic.[xii] It is said that a dialect is a language with an army and navy. Rather more, a language really needs to be a dialect with a library, able to leave a record if it is to be maintained or even revived; the many oral languages now in decline leave a challenge to linguists in the field (as we shall hear).
There are various grades of language in decline, ranging from endangered, to dead, to extinct. “Endangered” is taken to mean that the number of people who use a particular language regularly in daily life, is not only falling but (like different species of animal) has reached a point where it is not self-sustaining. This can be caused by a number of factors, including ecological change (rivers dry up); natural disaster (displacement by tsunami or earthquake); war and genocide; or everyday migration, as younger people leave and older people begin to pass away. A significant proportion of the endangered languages today have gone way below the level of sustainability, as some kind of hinterland is probably necessary to ensure that people have enough contacts to speak to on a regular basis. In the most extreme cases, the surviving speakers number less than a dozen, and this is where so much work is being done to preserve their knowledge before it is too late (something else we shall be hearing about). Even so, it has been argued that one language is being lost on average every two weeks.[xiii] A language may then be classified as either dead or extinct. The former, in the case of Latin or Ancient Greek, is where the language is not in normal use but is widely studied for a range of purposes, or has survived as a liturgical language, like Coptic in Egypt. “Extinct” means that it is as dead as a parrot and can only be excavated by whatever means.
Language Policy
Official policy can have a major impact on whether or not a language survives, and at the other, more positive end, whether it can be revived – we must not be entirely negative in all this. Ter Sami is a case in point. Today it is spoken by only two elderly people in the Kola peninsula in the north-west of Russia. Yet it still had about 450 speakers at the end of the 19th century only to be prohibited in schools in the 1930s by Stalin and is now virtually lost. In almost the same period, General Franco (first cousin to Stalin...) banned all regional languages in Spain following his victory in the Civil War. Children were punished for speaking Catalan in the playground, and telephone boxes had signs forbidding people to make calls in anything other than Castilian. This, of course, had the effect of driving the language underground, even though newspapers did not re-appear in Catalan until 1978 and book publishing was also banned for a time, whereas Barcelona is, of course, a major centre for the printing industry. Both Basque and Catalan have had the advantage of a revival, or renaissance in the Nineteenth Century, and both had the advantage of being spoken over a large area, which in the case of Catalan spreads into France and even to Sardinia. Catalan had the additional benefit of having a major literature dating from mediaeval times so that it was relatively easy to maintain a level of standardisation in the revived language.[xiv] With the death of Franco, language and language policy became intertwined with the development of regionalist sentiment, with the Normalisation Laws in Catalonia, for example, in the early 1980s, which re-introduced Catalan into the mainstream of public life, to the extent that museums in Barcelona tend to label exhibits in two languages – Catalan and English. Galicia in North-Western Spain has Gallego, which is closely related to Portuguese, and has its own lengthy history. Other regions which do not have a language as such, but who do possess their own linguistic idiosyncracies, like Asturias on the Bay of Biscay, are trying to emphasise their own particular differences, for example with Bable, which is fairly close to a variety of mediaeval Spanish.
The EU provides for mutual recognition and respect for all the languages of Europe however small, although this does raise the inevitable question not only of the increasing cost of translating and interpreting services, but also the practical question of finding people who are fluent in, for example, Maltese or Estonian and another European language other than English. In practice this tends to reinforce English, French and German as the working languages of everyday life.
Of course, language policy might actually be restrictive, as in the case of the Académie Française and the Spanish Real Academia. In the case of the former, it spends a lot of time creating new words with a Gallic flavour, attempting (with little success) to stem the tide of franglais which is steadily sweeping across the language. The area spawning the most novel terms, unsurprisingly is computing and the internet. Some choices, like baladeur for walkman (from balader – to go for a stroll) are a neat, if rather impractical solution. But ardoise for the iPad has met with little success, given that ardoise is the slate that some of us (a hundred years ago) learnt to write on with a piece of chalk. And cédérom for CD-ROM is frankly cheating.[xv]
Language Policy and Revival
Language policy can also have unintended impacts: there is the case of Ayapaneco in the Mexican state of Tabasco[1]. Government policy in the 1980s was to combat the social isolation and economic disadvantages of indigenous communities and draw them into the mainstream of national life, which they tried to do by teaching everybody Spanish, with the result that the local indigenous language became isolated and then began the slow process of disintegration to the point where there are now only two speakers left, and they are not on speaking terms with each other! Younger people have left the area in search of work or a better life. Radio and television are widely accessible and broadcast in Spanish. Classes are now being offered in Ayapaneco to encourage people to revive their ancestral tongue, but there is little incentive if there is no longer a hard core of regular users. It is therefore likely to die out, but at least not before it has been recorded.
Languages need to be nurtured. There are, of course, success stories close to home, like Welsh and there is growing interest in Manx and Cornish, but even in this country the study of languages is under threat as a result of misguided government policy that made languages optional in secondary schools at the age of 14. This has been offset by the introduction of foreign language learning at primary level (as is customary in most European countries now) but enormous damage has been done, especially at university level, where dozens of language departments have been cut or drastically reduced in size in the last decade, which indicates that constant vigilance is needed if languages are to be recognised and understood for the important aspect of personal and professional life that they are.
Concluding points
Language is in a constant state of flux. New languages, in the sense of languages not previously known or identified, emerge at odd intervals in the same way as rare species of plant or animal life are discovered in Papua New Guinea (which can count 850 languages) or Cameroon with a mere 210.[xvi].
Greater interest is being shown in regional languages, such that the French government (which enshrined the French language in its Constitution in 1992) is now recognising the range of languages actually in use within the Hexagon.
Patois, Pidgins and Creoles may well be in the process of emerging, reviving or being identified, even though these face some significant disadvantages such as the general lack of a written form or regular written sources such as newspapers or even a literature; they may be spoken in areas undergoing rapid social change; and they may be considered as an inferior form of communication by government and education agencies. A case in point is Ebonics, the non-standard variety of English spoken by black communities in the United States,[xvii] a phenomenon that reflects current interest in the possibility of forms of Creole English emerging in London schools as children mix from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds and come to grips in a short space of time with the complexities of English grammar.[xviii]
Language also has to adapt to current circumstances. I bet none of the people who speak Spanish here today will understand any of the following: 15-M, Acampada, Indignados. This is because all three terms refer to political events which began on the 15th May this year (hence 15-M) when demonstrators (known as the indignados because they are indignant about government policy and the current economic situation) set up a protest camp (la acampada) in Madrid's Peurta del Sol. All three terms may be forgotten within six months as political life moves on. But they do serve a particular purpose - if you are following current affairs in Spain.
Can we blame English?
We must actually recognise that even English comes under pressure at times (though whether it really survived the American War of Independence is another matter). George Washington and General Cornwallis probably spoke in a similar fashion, as did the troops on either side (excluding the mercenaries from Brunswick, of course.) Bill Bryson gleefully reminds us that base Americanisms like “talented” or “jeopardy”, or ghastly words like “normalcy” that set English teeth on edge, do in fact have their roots in England.[xix] In recent weeks, however, with the e.coli outbreak, I have heard “to-mayto” twice on television from EU officials, so it is only a matter of time before we will be hearing about the dreaded Euro po-tahto.
We may of course have to accept that English itself is an endangered language. It seems unlikely given the speed of telecommunications and the pace of inter-connectivity that the language will fragment, as Robert Birchfield feared in the 1980s, and as Nicholas himself argues in a recent book.[xx] But we will have to accept that the Queen’s English, BBC English, Proper English even, will be spoken by fewer and fewer people, as the number of people for whom English is a form of communication rather than a foreign language greatly exceeds those who have spoken it from birth. But language, despite our concerns today, is a living entity, and whereas Jane Austen would have come up with a phrase like. “But I did do that, did I not Mr Darcy?” in the streets of South London today you are more likely to hear, “Yeah well, I dunnit, din’t I?” or even the dreaded, “I dunnit, innit?” which is, after all, little different from the French n’est-ce pas, or the Spanish ¿verdad?- simply an interrogative affirmative.
The march of English at international level, even so, seems to be all-pervading, and some might even say insidious. Thirty years ago, my brother was driving across Greece and commented on the fact that all road signs were in Greek. Ten years later, when I was there, I noticed that all the road signs from Athens to Glifada (a popular tourist route) were only in Roman script. But then areas such as road safety might well call for easy recognition, and preferably using international symbols rather than words. I recall steering round a corner once in Haifa harbour (I was in a car, not a boat) when I saw a road sign in Hebrew. I had no idea what it meant, but found out about two seconds later as I came round the bend – and nearly went straight into thirty feet of water.
So for maritime as well as air communications safety needs to be paramount. New versions of English have had to be devised to ensure mutual communication both at sea and in the air, often via poor quality signals and quite possibly in the face of an impending emergency.[xxi] Hybrid artificial forms of English, such as Airspeak and Seaspeak, designed to ease communications in what can be critical situations, have been around for thirty years and more. And of course it is probable that neither speaker of Airspeak nor Seaspeak will have a native command of English. However, it is the second language most likely to have been studied, and its position is reinforced by the fact that international conferences are inevitably in English (though the local language may also be accepted) and any ensuing publications will be in English too.
Does this mean that the march of English is unstoppable, and will that weaken far larger and more important languages than many of the ones we have mentioned today? A widely-held body of opinion is that this is unlikely to be the case and that the hegemony of English may not be as clear-cut and certain as we might fondly imagine. What perhaps makes us stand out in the UK is the monolingual nature of our society, in marked contrast to many countries where bi-lingualism is the norm. Some countries such as South Africa far exceed this situation, with no fewer than eleven official languages. Multi-lingual websites, electronic information screens and telephone interpreting services mean that people can in fact access data more easily and even communicate in any variety of languages. As the world gets smaller, this may in fact become a positive process for languages, and the dominance of a single language may not be the long-term outcome.
For smaller language communities, threatened by the impact of migration, increased access to telecommunications and the decline of local populations, the long-term perspective is not positive. But as we have heard, efforts are being made increasingly to ensure that the linguistic wealth of the world’s population will not be entirely lost, and that could be one positive story in global ecology.[xxii]
[1]See The Guardian for 13.4.2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/13/mexico-language-ayapaneco-dying-out
[i]Dendrochronology is used to establish dates by the study of tree ring patterns.
[ii]Metro 7 October 2010.
[iii]David Crystal (2000) Language Death – and countless articles and lectures.
[iv]www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711. It was also reported in The Times.
[v] Heard on Radio 4 5/6/11 (not 6/5/11!) Putting the month first is standard American practice, reinforced by the default settings on Microsoft products, and embedded in the language with 9/11 for the 11th September 2001. 7/7 by contrast (the London bombings of 2005) left the language in a neutral position.
[vi]Quoted in Mark Abley (2003) Spoken here: travels among threatened languages,Heinemann.
The Meaning of Tingoand other extraordinary words from around the worldby Adam Jacot de Boinard provides many curious examples. Penguin 2005.
[vii] “Onward Christian Soldiers”, of course.
[viii]It is often forgotten that Portuguese is widely spoken in Africa and the Atlantic islands as well as Brazil, making it the sixth largest language in the world with in excess of 250 million speakers.
[ix]Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ, is still in use today in small communities in Turkey and Syria. See Kenneth Kratzner (1995) The Languages of the World, Routledge, page 165.
[x] See Peter Austin (2008) 1000 Languages (Thames & Hudson). Highly informative, it makes for very good browsing!
[xi]See Austin (2008) page 248.
[xii]For more on the quipu see http://archaeology.about.com/od/qterms/qt/quipu.htm
[xiii]See Andrew Dalby (2002) Endangered Languages, Penguin.
[xiv] Despite that, of course, there are significant regional differences even in a fairly small geographical area, especially if one includes Valenciano and the languages of the Balearic Islands, not to mention the Vall d’Aran which you will only find on a large-scale map.
[xv]The Times February 26 2011.
[xvi]Jacot de Boinard 2005 page 184
[xvii]Also known as African American Vernacular English, it is a prime example of language related to identity politics. See http://linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/
[xviii]See http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/multilingual/creole.shtml for more on this.
[xix]Bill Bryson (1990) Mother Tongue chapter 11.
[xx] Nicholas Ostler (2010) The Last Lingua Franca: English until the return of Babel. Allen Lane.
[xxi]The fatal rail crash at Pécrot in Belgium in 2001 is a case in point – where one French-speaking railwayman could not understand a Flemish-speaking one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9crot_rail_crash.
[xxii]And thanks to the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at SOAS, (http://www.hrelp.org/) the Foundation for Endangered Languages (http://www.ogmios.org/) and the World Oral Literature Project at Cambridge (http://www.oralliterature.org/) for their contribution today.
Dr Nicholas Ostler argues for the preservation of the world's endangered languages, considering historical examples of threatened languages that have been wiped out (like Gaulish) and those that have been rescued from extinction (such as Basque).
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Why Should We Protect Endangered Languages?
Nicholas Ostler
nicholas@ostler.net
Author of Empires of the Word, Ad Infinitum and The Last Lingua Franca
Chair, Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org)
According to our Manifesto
The Foundation for Endangered Languages exists to support, enable and assist the documentation, protection and promotion of endangered languages.
Some thought went into this formulation. It shows that our concerns extend to the past, present and future of endangered languages.
Documentation is the attempt to fix a language’s substance, what may be called its corpus, in order that it will never be lost to memory: this makes it available for scientific study in perpetuity, as well as (potentially) providing a basis for re-building competence in the language, should there be a new access of enthusiasm for it after natural transmission of the language has ceased. I am sure you will be well informed about the issues that arise in documentation by my learned successors today –Mark Turin and Peter Austin.
Promotion concerns attempts to raise the profile of a language, whether to non-speakers through the world’s information media, or – probably more importantly – to its own speakers and potential speakers through surveys and projects within communities, and also concrete efforts at language re-vitalization, if the natural transmission of a language is endangered or impaired. This is about the long-term future of a language, even if it can only be built up one generation at a time.
Protection, however, is what I shall be talking about. This is very much about the present of a language: is it to be sheltered from forces which would threaten its future? In the extreme case, might its use be abolished, and if not why not? This is likely to concern politics within the community, and also the surrounding communities or state, whose needs may be put before its own continuation.
I shall not be talking about the tactics and strategy of language protection, however. Rather, I stick to my brief, and answer the question: “Why Should We Protect Endnangered Languages?” The issue is an ethical one, and that is how I shall approach it.
Thinking of ethics brings up considerations of moral philosophy. Evidently, priorities differ here, and it is difficult to find firm ground on which to base an argument, especially when different parties have different interests, and different preconceptions. Immanel Kant attempted to get round this, by deriving some ethivcal content from the very concept of an ethical issue. If his argument goes through, it should transcend particular arguments for particular interests. Within his concept of the Categorical Imperative, he finds the content:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
Furthermore, he holds it intrinsic to an ethical agent that he or she should
“… treat others as ends in themselves and not as means to an end.”
These sentiments sit very naturally with the world-view that sees the protection of endangered languages as worthwhile, indeed an important priority.
It is eminently possible that all languages should be protected, hence the value of language protection can easily be made into a universal, moral law. Languages are often presumed (by the monolingual) to be involved in a kind of land war for people’s minds, so that – for example – if I speak English I must renounce Welsh, or Gaelic, or Jersey French – or indeed Navajo in Arizona or Pitjantjatjara in Northern Territory Australia (since English these last three or four centuries has been projected into contact with languages in every continent of the world). But, if the traditional, local, soon-to-be minority language is still respected (and indeed treasured), there is no reason why the acquisition of other languages should make it unfit for use, or unlearnable.
Furthermore, the idea of others as ends in themselves leads toward a valuing of others’ subjective experience of their own language, and away from the sense that languages should seen as means of communicating with others at one’s own convenience. As the slogan of the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Programme puts it, “every last word is another lost world”: languages are the basis for distinctive world-views, and certainly distinctly world-experiences, within a particular language community.
Contrast this with a tough-minded view of life as, in the immediate term, a zero-sum game: within this, some people’s gain (in reducing communication and transaction costs) has to be paid for by your loss, even if (in the last analysis) we all move to a higher – almost communist! – level where all can share the the information fruits which are on the table. On the way to this paradise of monolinguality, we have to accept a transitional period of dog-eat-dog, or what ancient Indian sages termed matsya-nyāya ( ‘fish-logic’ in Sanskrit), where the smaller ones are eaten by the bigger ones, all the way up.
I have already suggested that this view of language competition is flawed. It may have a certain sense of the dynamics of international power politics and global business, but it is clearly undesirable within any particular society, where considerations of equity and universal welfare have an indisputable place, and are indeed backed up by legal precept. Instead, let us consider an ethico-legal framework which values good-neighbourliness where others’ rights are to be respected – and indeed protected. It is the duty of the landlord (enforceable at law) to allow undisturbed enjoyment of his premises to the tenant. The law also respects the maxim
SIC VTERE TVO VT ALIENVM NON LAEDAS
So use your own that you do not hurt what belongs to another.
In practice, members of an endangered speech community don’t (all) want to speak their language less (even if some of them – notoriously – may[1]). It is often dear to them, and they are distressed at the thought that they will lose contact with their past traditions – and indeed older members of their own community, whether or not that community can continue through the medium of a new, outsiders’ language.
Nevertheless, they may be constrained, or bullied, or urged, or cajoled to do so, in order to fulfil some greater goal, either for themselves individually, or for the wider community. They are promised that, by abandoning use of their traditional tongue, they can be part of a greater empire (or nowadays, more likely, of a greater economy, in which they stand to be richer). They are urged ‘not to stand in the way of progress’.[2] Governments themselves will be reluctant to permit or support the continued variety of languages in their realm. Greater diversity is likely, at least, to increase the administrative cost of welfare. Traditionally, too, the different communities which are created by distinct languages have been a source of division within a state: how much simpler to encourage all citizens to content themselves with a national language, or at least one of a number of majority tongues.
In essence, the speakers of the endangered languages are being asked to pay the full price to accommodate a major change, and to build a new relationship between themselves and the authorities, but also among themselves as a community.
But an intellectual insult is added to this injury: to justify this added responsibility for the language-speakers, the reasoning which is adduced is often bogus, or based on false premisses.
Will the speakers, after all, have equal access to the empire or economy? Experience suggests that they don’t; so that for at least one generation, and probably more, they continue to suffer adverse discrimination. The discrimination which had been attached to their language is then converted to a slur on their poverty, their lack of education, their religion, or their personal appearance. And whose ‘progress’ is being promoted? When society becomes more linguistically integrated, the greater gainers – perhaps the only gainers – may be the existing elite who now have a bigger game of domination to play. The future may even have been misunderstood, and the plans go nowhere. Maybe the minority community holds some of the answers. Is there only one path to a desirable future? Certainly, an autonomous community with its own language may gain little when it comes to dependence on welfare support.
In fact, political ‘divisions’ – although potentially an embarrassment for a national government – are very likely essential to the future identity of a community. A surviving minority language is a convenient way of marking and defending this, and tying it up with a massive cultural tradition. Its loss leads simply to oblivion.
The loss of a language community does not, in itself, give other gains, even if it is seen as part of a process which leads to (beneficial) higher level integration: all the gains from that integration, however, are compatible with retention of a language (and hence the distinct identity of the community which speaks it). The only clear gainers from the loss are administrators, who may admittedly have an easier task when their communications no longer have to be bilingual or multilingual.
Even if it undercuts language discrimination in the long run, loss of a minority language doesn’t prevent discrimination as such (e.g. by accent, lineage, district, colour or any other useful attribute). By definition, loss of variety in a state or a society must impoverish it culturally – even if some such impoverishments have actively been sought by governments, occasionally, one may feel with good reason.[3]
What can be asserted with good reason is that loss of a minority language reliably finishes off a cultural identity and the cultural goods that have come with it. This can be seen in a variety of historical examples.
In what follows, I very briefly review the cases of three losers; the Gauls in the Roman Empire (1st-5th AD); Tupi-speaking Indians in Brazil (16th-18th centuries AD); and the Ubykh in Tsarist Russia (19th-20th AD). I contrast these with three (sometime) winners, despite apparently adverse conditions: the Basques on the Atlantic coast of Europe; Syriac-speaking Christians in Asia; and Pipil-speakers in Central America.
The Conquest of Gaul effected by Julius Caesar over Vercingetorix in 49 BC led – after some three centuries of linguistic change-over, presumably spreading from the cities and villas to the countryside – to the extinction of the Gaulish language (which had previously dominated northern Europe). We know from external testimony (such as Caesar’s own) that the Gauls’ spiritual leaders, the Druids, underwent a lengthy training which lasted about 20 years, and had the crucial weakness that it was all passed on orally and through memory. Nothing of it remains, except what can be deduced from the fragments of a single Druidical calendar which was inscribed on copper, discovered at Coligny. But we can see something of the complexity that was lost by looking at the Gundestrup cauldron, an art work found in Denmark (once part of the Gaulish-speaking area) which evidently illustrates the myth of the antler-horned god Cernunnos. There were clearly incidents with stags, snakes, other beasts, and also dolphin-riding. Since – as usual – no-one thought it worthwhile to translate and record into other literate languages the material that was distinctive to a language that was fast losing its transmission to rising generations, these stories, and their meaning, have all been lost.[4]
Gaulish is not alone among the lost languages of Europe. In the five centuries from 100 BC to 400 AD, known languages in lands under Roman administration fell from 60 to 12, and outside Africa and the Greek-dominant east, from 30 to just 5: these were Latin, Welsh, Basque, Albanian and Gaulish. By this time Gaulish, which had previously been the most widespread language in northern Europe, was already marginal, and doomed. The names of the lost languages, as far as we know them, toll out a sad litany crossing south Europe from west to east:- Lusitanian, Celtiberian, Tartessian, Iberian, Ligurian, Lepontic, Rhaetic, Venetic, Etruscan, Picene, Oscan, Messapian, Sicel, Sardinian, Dacian, Getic, Paeonian.
A millennium later, Tupi-speaking Indians in Brazil were soon encountered by explorers, as the Portuguese gradually established themselves along the coasts, often against direct competition from the French. The Tupi tribes were not noted for their peaceable ways, being confirmed cannibals, sustaining mutual eating relations with neighbouring tribes down the Atlantic coast. Nevertheless the Portuguese were able to subdue some of them, and settled them in reduções, ‘reductions’, where sedentary societies were set up under ecclesiastical control, notably under the Jesuits. The cannibalism was eliminated, and a sustainable Christianized modus vivendi was achieved (monolingually in Tupi), which lasted for over two centuries.
However, it proved vulnerable to political developments, not in Brazil itself, but in metropolitan Portugal. The Jesuit regime proved vulnerable to a two-pronged attack, from the growing Enlightenment in Europe which increasingly rejected Catholic authority (and hence temporal power for the Jesuits), and from commercial intolerance of these self-contained economic units maintained by them. Curiously, the first attack came as a prohibition against the Tupi language itself, which had always been the lingua franca in the Jesuit domains. In 1757, a Provisão Real (royal decree) was passed against any further use of the language. This was followed by a direct royal interdict two years later, which completely suppressed the Jesuit order in all parts of the Portuguese empire. The Jesuits withdrew without a struggle, and from that time the Tupi language declined as Portuguese language progressively took over, creating the linguistic situation seen in Brazil today. With the Tupi language (which survives today only in a small pocket in the north-western corner of the country), went any separate identity for the Tupi indigenes: although there had been widespread mixed marriages of Portuguese and Tupi over those two centuries, the use of Tupi had kept the sense of a cultural identity live over that period.
Thirdly, and most recently, we can instance the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, which actually took place over a full century, 1763–1864. At the end of this period, the Russians finally defeated the Ubykh people, a Circassian tribe, and expelled them from the north-eastern corner of the Black Sea littoral. They ended up, like many expelled at this time, in the territory of the Ottoman empire: the Ubykh settled on the coast of Marmara, not far from Istanbul. There they made a deliberate decision not to continue speaking their language, but rather to attempt to fit in with the local (Turkish-speaking) population.
There were, of course, a few families who did not comply, at least at first. And Tevfik Esenç, who was to end up as the last speaker of Ubykh, had been brought up largely by his grandparents, and so acquired the language a generation after his parents’ and their contemporaries had largely lost it. He was of a scholarly disposition, able to describe vast tracts of their traditional culture, including the romantic Nart sagas, to the French linguist Georges Dumézil; but he died in 1992, and with him went the life of the Ubykh way.
These have all been been negative examples, showing what is lost when a language goes, and by implication, why anyone should be concerned to protect a language that seems to be endangered. On the positive side, it is possible to cite languages which have survived in use despite terrible odds against them. These would naturally include the Basque language spoken, as it has been for at least 2,500 years, on the Biscayan coast of France and Spain - which still occupies much the same territory today, despite the varying overloardhips in Spain of Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Arabs and Castilians; the Syriac language, co-eval with the Christian Churches of the east which still survive in Iraq and Palestine, but which in their time (a long time ago) once spread as far as Kerala in the south, and Mongolia and Beijing to the east. In a very different context again, the Pipil – a community of Nahuatl speakers of the south (in modern El Salvador) – have retained a distinct identity along with their language since long before the Spanish conquest of Central America, though once surrounded by speakers of Xinca, Lenca and Mayan Cholti, and now by speakers of Spanish..
So, in a nutshell, the answer to the question, ‘Why Should We Protect Endangered Languages?’, is that, if we don’t, the communities that speak those languages will vanish, (along with features that make their life distinctive), almost as if they had never been. This is a loss of something valued by its speakers, and hence valuable. And in the general case, there is no corresponding automatic gain. In the general case, such a loss is to be avoided, if at all possible. This is because it makes the world a poorer place, certainly; but above all it is to be be avoided for the sake of the speakers, who stand to lose – in the long term – their very identities, their treasured sense of who they are and where they come from.
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[1] Peter Ladefoged, a phonetician with a good record in recording endangered languages, once remarked that he was not entitled to query the judgement of speakers of Dahalo, in choosing not to pass their language on to the next generation. Dahalo is a rapidly dying Cushitic language of east Africa.
[2] So for example, the last generation of Chinese in Singapore were urged by the Lee Kwan Yew government, to use only English, as being the language of world business. They complied, but with the current rise of the People’s Republic of China in the global economy, this abandonment of their own tradition is beginning already to look like a short-sighted choice.
[3] Consider the 19th-century abolition of satī (widow burning) or thagī (sacred wayside robbery and murder) in British India, or widespread cannibalism among the Tupi population of Brazil before its 16th-century take-over by the Portuguese.
[4] An important exception to this failure to transmit Gaulish culture comes in a vignette by the Greek essayist Lucian, who describes, in his Herakles, a picture of the Gaulish god of eloquence Ogmios, strong as the Greco-Roman demigod Hercules but able to draw his followers by the amber strings of his eloquence.
Dr Mark Turin discusses his own experience of preserving and revitalising the Thangmi language in Nepal.
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Collect, Protect, Connect:
Documenting the Voices of Vanishing Worlds
Dr Mark Turin
For today’s talk, I have opted for an approach that borrows unashamedly from the US Declaration of Independence: namely that in this gathering, we hold certain truths to be self-evident (that linguistic and cultural diversity is to be celebrated and protected, and concomitantly that language endangerment is a serious and important problem). I say this because often these fundamental tenets are not a common ground, as I discovered to my peril when speaking to public audiences who see the inexorable advance of English and the decline of minority speech and cultural forms around the world as natural processes, and who apply a modified Darwinian phraseology of natural selection to social forms and cultural life.
Today, I want to address issues of field methods, collaboration, ethics and the ownership of the cultural and linguistic data that is collected in the field. I believe that these issues are best explained and understood through specific, concrete examples — starting from the local and only then zooming out to the global —in the hope that the tendencies and issues that I reflect on will strike a chord and that the overlap will be apparent.
collect - protect - connect. These three verbs - borrowed from the wonderful New Zealand Film Archive - that has a mission to collect, protect and connect New Zealanders with their moving image heritage, summarise the points I want to make to you this afternoon. Collection is the gathering and documentation of cultural and linguistic data in the field, not in an extractive or acquisitive manner, but in a way that is responsible, collaborative and predicated on trust and increasingly collaborative with not only participation but leadership from local communities. Protection is its archiving and curation – doing the best we can to ensure that these unique cultural and linguistic materials are maintained, migrated and refreshed as new technologies become available. The Connection is made when collections are returned to source communities and when they reach a wider public in print and online.
Landscape slide: Thangmi
Since 1996, my wife Sara Shneiderman (who took many of these photographs) and I have been working with members of the Thangmi community as anthropologist and linguist respectively. With a population of approximately 40,000 dispersed across Himalayan border areas of Nepal (Dolakha and Sindhupalchok districts) and India (the Darjeeling district of West Bengal and a little in Sikkim), the Thangmi speak a distinct, endangered Tibeto-Burman language and maintain an indigenous system of shamanic ritual practice. Aside from some cursory studies in the 1970s, the language and culture of the Thangmi had not received much sustained or serious attention until we started our work in the mid 1990s.
The primary ritual practitioners in the Thangmi cultural world are shamans, known as guru, who transmit their knowledge of myth and ritual through the recitation of oral texts. Chanted in various forms at major life cycle rituals (primarily weddings and funerals) and calendrical rituals, these oral texts are a primary marker of Thangmi group belonging and identity, as well as an increasingly important resource in ethnic campaigns for political recognition. The shamans also act as traditional healers, village doctor and therapist and living Wikipedias of clan affiliation and remembered history.
Children
While education is compulsory, many Thangmi children do not regularly go to school because (a) they are productively useful and necessary for their families and (b) because the parents have decided that nothing that is taught at school is worth knowing. Rote learning, supercilious teachers and an alienating curriculum almost entirely disconnected from the realities of rural life in Nepal, have historically excluded the children of marginalised communities from education. The situation is changing for the better, and my wife and I have been working with a local charity to ensure that for those children and parents who want to study, but who do not have the resources to do so, the minimal costs should be no obstacle.
Two slides of text about Thangmi
Why is Thangmi endangered?
Intergenerational transmission is breaking down.
Schools have historically - as in Europe - disparaged local languages in the interest of regional integration and nation building.
Thangmi has had no written form, so could not be ported to new environments of use
Dissertation
Having worked for many years with Thangmi shamans, I incorporated a number of their oral texts into my dissertation, as part of the textual corpus, which when bundled together with a grammar and trilingual lexicon created what I now refer to as - and only partly in jest - the 'useless' dissertation.
This 900 page manuscript - while much anticipated and fetishised by members of the community (perhaps in part because it was so long overdue) - was not received altogether well by all members of the Thangmi population. As many here today will know, the 1990s and early years of the 21st century were for Nepal one of massive political and social upheaval, with a violent civil war and a level of disturbance like the country had not before seen in its recent history. Through this period of unrest which coincided with my research, the Thangmi community were finding an assertive ethnic voice, or perhaps more correctly, different parts of different Thangmi communities were finding a number of different voices, which when strung together amounted to a loud chorus proclaiming ethnic pride, a traditional homeland, a unique language and positioned the group as both visible and wanting attention from a fast changing nation state. So while some people in the community were still interested in the more abstract idea - and then the product - of a descriptive grammar of their language, others were beginning to ask what it was for, who owned it, why it was in English and how it was going to help them.
Dictionary slide
In part response to these serious and understandable questions, I had already put together what came to be called a Nepali - Thami - English Dictionary two years before the dissertation was completed in 2004. While I thought that this book might have forestalled some of the criticism, in fact, in some ways it heightened it. At least five interesting questions were raised in the course of producing this booklet.
First, authorship. How to credit the person or persons with whom one has written a word list? Has it been co written, is a word list not simply compiled, thus without authors? We resolved, my long term assistant and language teacher (I find the term informant so unfortunate and consultant so terribly World Bank sounding) and I, to list me as the principal author and Bir Bahadur as 'with'. This would also deflect from him some of the heat should there be negative fall out about the text.
Second, there was considerable pressure on us to call our product a dictionary - when really it was nothing of the sort, it was a perfunctory word list, with no context or examples provided. As this was after all a publication to be locally used rather than internationally acclaimed, it made sense to provide, to the extent possible, a product that might be used and desired in Thangmi villages. The compromise was to use the word Dictionary on the cover, but refer to the text as a word list in the introduction, both in English and Nepali (there were introductions in both).
Third was the issue of script and ordering: in which orthography should the Thami words be given? We chose Devanagari, with entries leading from Nepali, in the Nepali alphabetical ordering, believing that most potential users would be comfortable or fluent in Nepali and be searching for Thangmi terms, and also because we did not want to impose an alphabetical ordering on Thangmi at this stage (would we follow the Nepali KA KHA GA etc or the English A B C).
Fourth, the thorny issues of which words to include. At what point does a word become Thangmi. Take the term guru, for example, which is obviously an Indo-Aryan loan is now so hard wired into the Thangmi psyche that to suggest that it has an outside origin would be very disparaging and tantamount to ethnic treason. How about other words, such as Thangmi dese, village, from Nepali desh 'country' (Bangla-desh, Himachal Pra-desh) and ispan for mattress. How and where should such terms be indicated as possible loans, even if to all intents and purposes they are now vernacular Thangmi and have been indigenised, incorporated and accepted?
Last but not least was the question of which ethnonym to choose for the language. The endonym or autonym Thangmi - while more correct - was less well recognised by wider Nepali society, while the strictly less correct exonym Thami was more visible and becoming known. We opted for Thami, but with a long and carefully worded disclaimer to the effect that we knew that many Thangmi would feel this was a missed opportunity to stake a claim for a correct representation. It was, as is so often the case in such collaborations, we opted for a model based on a discussion, compromise, consensus and mediation.
Three dictionaries
And then look what happened! After centuries of silence and orthographical invisibility, two further dictionaries popped up in response to ours, both were larger, bigger and more complete. Dictionaries were suddenly becoming the new unit of value, a kind of competitive and productive display of local lexicography. Almost like an archetypical nursery rhyme or fairly tale, the dictionaries just kept on getting bigger: small (ours), medium (a different dialect, but with Thami first), and large (Nepali first, English second and Thangmi - not Thami - third, from Darjeeling).
The aspiration was for a brhat, or great, comprehensive, complete Thami dictionary, for which our humble undertaking was just an early appetizer. The gold standard and ultimate objects for comparison were large, heavy monolingual Nepali dictionaries, the OEDs of Nepal, and indigenous lexicographers were working towards this process through Thangmifying Nepali words, by including every possible verbal conjugation in their dictionaries to bolster the numbers and engorge the number of pages. Dictionary making was, for the first time in Thangmi history, flavour of the month.
Dissertation vs dictionary
But a question remained, how could the massive differential between the size of my dissertation and the size of the tiny dictionary be explained: what was in the English (foreign) book that was not in the Nepali (local) one? What was I leaving out? Were the community being short changed? I don't want to spend much more time on these issues for now, because there is a lot of ground to cover, but as I am sure you can imagine that these discussions continue.
What are the main points here? Two really, first that such collaborations are always contested, and that the simple refrain of 'giving back to the community' is much more problematic than it might first seem: there are many communities and what appears at first glance to be the right thing to do can set off a chain of consequences which can be quite unexpected. Second, that in these contestations, discussions and negotiations lie very interesting research questions that only bubble up when one starts to connect and engage with indigenous demands. The process is intellectually fulfilling, and not just a mechanical process of cultural repatriation or a moral imperative to give back.
Thangmi novels
Having been standardised - with some agreement across the speech community - the challenge now was that Thangmi was a written language with nothing to read. There was no literature, nothing had ever really been written in Thangmi. Through an organisation in Kathmandu, we organised for two young, literature members of the community to attend a workshop and write a short novella each, one of them was my long-term research assistant who visited Cambridge this summer and whose novel was about a fateful trek that he and undertook to cross into a high alpine valley on the border of Tibet. The character in front with the hat on rolling down the mountain is unfortunately - and quite accurately - me. It’s hard to convey the symbolic importance and power of having your own language in print. Hardened village elders and wizened shamans - almost always illiterate - would dissolve into tears as they watched their grandchildren read aloud from a book, and then in Thangmi, as until that point, books, learning, script and power were all bundled together to effectively exclude them and their culture. They had - as it were - joined the club.
Latte Apa
Let me now move on from the dictionaries and school books, and return to the documentation of Thangmi oral and ritual texts which Sara and I have been involved in for some years now. This photo shows the late Latte Apa, in Darjeeling, India, so named on account of the massive head knot on his head, a powerful shaman, a compelling storyteller and a master of symbolic manipulation - whose magnetic appeal was not lost on our 2-year old son, with whom he developed a strong bond and whom he named Itihas Thami - History Thami - as it was for this coming generation, of our son and his grandchildren, that he was working with us to intensively to record his oral texts and cultural knowledge.
Next photo of Latte Apa
I show these photos of Latte Apa both to acknowledge his massive contribution to our work, but also to underscore the impermanent nature of the holders of such traditions - he died tragically in a monsoon landslide in Darjeeling last year - his was the only house that was entirely washed destroyed, and he was the only victim. The first topic of discussion among the Thangmi community of Darjeeling, on waking up to discover his death, was who would conduct his funeral ritual - as he had for so long been by far the most visible and expert shaman in helping the souls of the dead come to rest. His violent and untimely death underscores the fragility of such knowledge - and the urgency involved in the documentation thereof.
Origins of WOLP
Grew out of the Digital Himalaya Project and also an appreciation of the large amount of innovative work in and considerable funding for linguistics, and a sense that a comparable groundswell had not yet started in anthropology. Linguistics are not always able, trained or interested to document cultural content (e.g. kinship terminology) so its essential that the cultural matter gets collected by professionals who are committed to its rigorous analysis and documentation
Why oral literature? It’s a term that is due for some rehabilitation, even though it sounds to an Anglo-Saxon ear as an oxymoron. It underscores both the method of transmission and the sense that these traditions are on a par with the western literature traditions that make up our oeuvre of inherited knowledge and learning.
Why now? For many communities around the world, the transmission of oral literature from one generation to the next lies at the heart of cultural practice. Performances of such creative works are increasingly endangered. Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert complex pressures on smaller communities, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. As vehicles for the transmission of unique cultural knowledge, local languages encode oral traditions that become threatened when elders die and livelihoods are disrupted.
Research Triangle: How does one work in such partnerships, and how are technology and globalisation changing these relationships. There is something that I call the paradox of globalisation: the very process which is eroding diversity is also bringing people into closer contact with one another and providing tools to document these vanishing worlds in an ever more nuanced way. Let me address this issue by way of this picture, taken by Marion Wettstein of her husband Alban von Stockhausen, and The shaman Dirga Bahadur Dumi reciting for the ethnographers. Baksila, Khotang district, Nepal, 2006. A research triad - a triangulation of research interest - between local knowledge holder, outside researcher and, most vitally, a community researcher - to whom the shaman is speaking.
Changing role of archives
One of the changes that is going hand in hand with such documentation projects is the transformation of the role and position of archives and museums. They are no longer physical places where collections go to die, curated exclusively by western universities and institutions, but increasingly online virtual environments that hold living traditions and access conditions are minimal if at all present.
Our university museum of anthropology in Cambridge is at the forefront of debates about cultural ownership, physical or digital repatriation, access and preservation - and it’s a tribute to the flexibility and energy of many curators that communities are increasingly choosing for partnerships, where the physical object may remain in a Western holding but that digital rights, avatars and access are controlled by the descendants of the communities whose cultural heritage we are privileged to protect.
In fact, the very rhetoric of archives has changed enormously. Part of this relates to a democratisation of the archival space - community archives - self-archiving, anyone can be an archivist, pushing open a concept that was previously a protected category. While much of the impetus for this is technological, I don't believe it to be the only one.
The same opening up has been happening in libraries also. A recent report shows that the majority of scholars now start their research online. We have ever fewer of places and people like this (slide old library). With this, I think we have also seen what I am calling the return or renaissance of the librarian (Google), as a partner in the research exercise, a specialist who has enormous knowledge and skill in strategies of dissemination, and an understanding of the backend of the publishing process which many scholars would do well to listen to.
So, realising that the landscape was fast changing and that there were new opportunities opening up, in January 2009 I established the WOLP to supportlocal communities and committed fieldworkers engaged in the collection and preservation of all forms of oral literature by providing funding for original research, storage facilities at the University of Cambridge and a digital and print dissemination platform.
How we work
You can read, download, watch everything that we do online since we realise that most people cannot afford to come to Cambridge for our events.
Publishing: The Occasional Paper series was established to support the immediate dissemination of research findings and methodological considerations in the collection of oral literature. A longer paper which will serve as a practical introduction to ethnographic film making is in production and other contributions are under review. Hosted online as a free download in PDF format, and available through a print-on-demand service, these papers will allow scholars and local researchers to disseminate data sets and analyses through a streamlined peer-review process. Published by the World Oral Literature Project, the series is broad in scope and not limited to grantees & Open Book Publishers
To end, I return to the phrase collect - protect - connect. We have a unique opportunity and challenge before us. There are more professionally trained linguists and anthropologists than there are languages and cultures, and while we know the most unusually detailed things about aspects of English, French, Latin and Sanskrit, we still know next to nothing about a large number of the world’s speech forms. 389 (or nearly 6%) of the world’s languages have at least one million speakers and account for 94% of the world’s population. By contrast, the remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people.
We need modest resources to fund urgent anthropology in the field and to support the digitisation of legacy historical materials so that they are future proofed and do not become orphaned collections stuck in a shoebox in someone’s attic.
We need partnerships, open standards, knowledge networks and communities of practice so that we can act in a coordinated way to document these oral cultures before they disappear without record.
In short, we need people to know this story and we need your support.
©Mark Turin, Gresham College 2011
Professor Peter Austin outlines a number of projects aimed at documenting the world's endangered languages.
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15 June 2011
Rare and Endangered Languages
Language, Documentation and Revitalisation
Where are we now?
Peter Austin
[Introduction in Gamilaraay]
The language you have just heard me speaking is a language that almost disappeared from the face of the Earth, and I shall tell you the story of that language in a few moments. First, I want to give you a little bit of background and a more global perspective, after which I shall zoom in on a couple of local instances, one of which will be the language you just heard.
So far in this symposium, we have looked at global and linguistic diversity. Tim Connell, Nicholas Ostler and Mark Turin have all outlined some of the threats to that diversity. Mark has given us a vision of one way of responding to these threats, and I want to tell you about some other responses, particularly in the area of linguistic research.
The second part of my discussion is going to look at language revitalisation and support. Mark mentioned revitalisation as an ongoing issue. I will outline some of the models that people have been thinking with, and then give you a couple of case studies and draw some conclusions.
In the world today, there are a handful of enormously huge languages, and a huge number of small languages. The top nine or ten languages in the world are spoken by 40% of the world’s population. In fact, the top twenty languages are spoken by more than half the world’s population. What you have is a tiny handful of languages – about twenty languages - that half the world speaks. 96% of the world’s languages are maintained by only 4% of the world’s population, and in fact, 50% of those have fewer than 10,000 speakers, and 25% of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers, so they are very small communities.
Furthermore, there has been a radical reduction in speaker numbers, particularly since the time of the Second World War, and increasing age profiles, which means that although they may be languages still spoken, it is only middle-aged or older people who continue to speak them. This was the situation, for example, in Welsh, up until the 1950s, where older people spoke Welsh but younger people were increasingly speaking English. The linguist Michael Krauss has argued that something like half of the world’s languages – he says 90% - could disappear.
The distribution of the languages around the world is skewed, geographically. The bulk of language diversity is in Asia and Africa, while Europe is comparatively not very diverse at all.
We can also look at languages from the point of view of their diversity and how they are related to one another. Mark mentioned, for example, that Nepali belongs to the Indo-European language family; Thangmi belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language group – it is ultimately related to Tibetan and to Chinese. If we look at language families, we see that South America has 90 families, North America has about 45, and Papua New Guinea, an island of just three million people, has 35 different language families. There is close to 800 languages spoken on that one island that belong to 35 totally different language families. Again, you can see how skewed this distribution is.
Languages can be categorised or typologised into several groups. There are languages that are safe, strong or viable, spoken by all age groups, actively supported and learnt by children. The population of such a language might be large, like English, with maybe 500 million speakers, or it may be small. A village in Vanuatu, with 300 people, has a strong, viable, safe language – in that village, everybody speaks the language and it is used on all occasions. In these situations, people are typically multilingual, rather than monolingual.
The second category is languages that are under social and economic pressure - usually from a bigger language - and spoken by a reducing population. Actually, in the bulk of cases, in Asia and Africa, it is not languages like French or English or German or Portuguese that are the problem. It is local, big languages, like Swahili in East Africa or Hausa or Yoroba or Wolof in West Africa, which are the languages that have the political and social dominance.
The third category is languages that are moribund, no longer being learnt by children, with fewer older speakers and little social function.
Of course there are also extinct languages, with no native speakers. Picene that used to be spoken on the Italian peninsula is such a language.
So, what can we do about this situation? What has been happening, inexorably and increasingly over the last 50 years, is that languages are moving from being strong to becoming endangered, to becoming moribund, and, in many cases, finally extinct.
There are several things that we can do. Mark’s aphorism sums it up well: documentation, protection and support/revitalisation. This three imperatives should be followed in a respectful and collaborative manner, working together with members of language communities at a grassroots level.
It is really important for us to understand language patterns and language attitudes. Many communities have, because of the social and political and cultural dominance of their neighbours, developed a negative attitude towards their own language. They will say, for example, that it is just a dialect, you cannot write it down, it is not a ‘real language’ like Nepali or Chinese. We need to understand these kinds of attitudes in order to address the situation.
One of the things we can do is to provide reliable and comprehensible information. Many communities believe that their language has negative characteristics, that it is not strong because it cannot be written, but we can actually show them that that is not the case. You can easily write it down, whether you use Roman script or Devanagari script or Tibetan script and so on.
Another important role in our work is to inform relevant stakeholders, including international organisations, governments and the general public. This is partly the reason for this lecture, information-sharing.
I will now discuss language documentation. What we do is collect and analyse linguistic, socio-linguistic and cultural data, including audio, video and text materials, with the goal of creating a corpus of material or data, representing different aspects of the language in use. We collect and analyse data about the social, cultural and political environment of the community, so that the language shift processes - whereby people change from one language to another - can be understood and interpreted. Why is it that communities are choosing not to speak one language and preferring to speak another to their children? We need to understand that, as part of the documentation, and to archive these materials and the associated metadata for current and future use. Metadata is a fancy word that simply means data about data, which can mean information about when the recording was made, who was speaking, who was involved, what language was being used, and so on. We do this now, increasingly, in a digital format and framework.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Mark pointed out that there are several documentation projects going on around the world. The DoBeS project (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES) – this stands for Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen, literally, the Documentation of Endangered Languages, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung – so far has distributed €60 million to support a range of projects around the world, and has set up a major archive at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. They currently fund 50 teams of researchers around the world, documenting languages and cultures in a very wide variety of different community contexts. The archive that was set up in the Netherlands has developed a range of new software tools that allow us to document languages in ways that we have never been able to do before.
Here is a map, on the DoBeS website, showing these 50 projects. It has a global reach – they are doing research on every continent, except Antarctica, on the languages spoken all around the world.
I am associated with the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at SOAS. You probably interact with Hans Rausing’s legacy every day. Every time you open a cardboard box that contains liquid, you are dealing with Hans Rausing’s invention, which is called Tetra Pak, the ability to put liquids inside boxes – such as milk or orange juice cartons. Hans Rausing is an exceptionally wealthy man, who gives away huge amounts of money to support humanities and other projects.
Arcadia Trust has funded a project at SOAS, with a benefaction of £20 million, to research languages around the world, and we currently distribute £1.5 million in research grants each year in three different types of grants. We have funded 230 teams of researchers around the world. The grant selection committee met last week, and is going to be funding another 40 projects of people who have applied for this work. We have a major digital archive at SOAS, and an academic programme, which I am responsible for, where we train Masters, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers in language documentation. So far, we have trained 80 Masters’ students and graduated about a dozen PhDs from the programme. We also publish books, newsletters, CD-ROMs and we have a website. We also publish a series called Language, Documentation and Description.
Let me give you an example of the work that some of our people do. A young man called Stuart McGill is currently finishing a postdoctoral fellowship; he has been working for the last six years in north-west Nigeria, documenting a language called Cicipu. This language was never recorded until he went to north-west Nigeria. It is one of 50 languages that belong to a close group. The other 49 have not yet been worked on, so this is ground-breaking new work. The outcome is that he has created a corpus of materials: a 2,000 item dictionary (with opportunities for the community to expand on it); 50gb of archive material; a grammar; an analysis of the language; and a website that includes some of his materials (http://www.cicipu.org/). He has done a primer for readers, translated stories, folk tales, and produced a keyboard that allows you to type in the language, because it needs extra characters than what is on the regular keyboard.
What is the kind of thing that we collect or record? Let me play you a video, from his collected corpus.
[Video plays]
This is part of a long conversation that these two people are having, talking about the fact that younger people these days are not speaking their language, Cicipu, but are in fact speaking Hausa, which is the language of their next-door neighbours. This group has an animistic religion. The Hausas are coming in with a jihad, the spread of Islam and their language, and basically forcing people to switch to speaking Hausa.
It is striking for us, as English speakers, to observe how these two people have no eye contact when speaking to one another. The lady is sitting there, and the man is in front of her, and they never look at each other, completely avoid any possibility of eye contact. This is because she is his mother-in-law, and in this community there is a taboo relationship between a man and his mother-in-law. They can speak, but they must never look face-to-face and must never have any eye contact. By just watching the video, you can see that the social relationships between them are represented by the way that they place themselves in the world – their body language, their interpretation. You will notice that she is moving her arms about when talking. He is quietly sitting there, not moving. So, by doing this kind of documentation, we can represent and show the social and cultural dimensions of language, language in context, the use of language to express social and cultural and other identities.
We use computer software in order to analyse this kind of material. You can do a transcription, using whatever alphabet, phonetic or otherwise, and also produce a translation. From this kind of material, you can produce, for instance, subtitle videos that are available to play. That is the kind of work that Stuart has been doing.
We also have an archive. At the moment, we have 70 deposits that are available, so if you would like to see more videos like that or Sami reindeer herders, they are all available and accessible through our website. We currently have something like seven terabytes of data – that is 7,000gb of material – available, and it is growing at a very rapid rate.
Another dimension of our work is the dissemination of information about aspects of language diversity, both within communities and more broadly, with the idea that we should be raising awareness about endangered languages, through all available channels. One of the things we have been trying to do is use the arts and exhibitions to promote awareness. We have produced books and publications for general display, and we are using things like blogs and Facebook and YouTube, new media to engage younger people. We have been running in situ training courses in London, Tokyo and Ghana. This kind of outreach, involving talking to the general community, particularly to language-speakers, can be very challenging for academics, who would perhaps prefer to talk about how many angels there are on the head of a pin than try and engage with the general public, but hopefully we can do this and spread the word.
One of the things I have been doing is to bring together a group of scholars, including Nicholas Ostler, to publish a book called 1000 Languages - the Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues. This has now been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Polish, Dutch, Estonian and, earlier this year, Icelandic.
We have been doing exhibitions. We organised one called Endangered Voices, where we worked with a sound artist, and another one called Living Languages, and one called Hearing Voices. We are trying to work with the artistic community to get the message across– this is not a dry, academic field, this is something to really engage people in.
Every year, we have been running Endangered Languages Week. Earlier this year, some 600 people came to the event at SOAS, to see what it is that we are doing and how things are developing.
A group of students are working on London’s Language Landscape, a project to map the diversity of London. So far, they have recorded 60 different languages and they have developed an interactive display using Google Maps that will be up on the web very soon.
The city of London, as you know, is an incredibly diverse place where many languages are spoken, including many endangered languages. We simply do not know how many languages are spoken in this city. Various surveys have been done, and estimates of 450 languages have been given, but that is certainly incorrect. For example, there is a language called Talishi, spoken on the border between Iran and Azerbaijan, which is impossible for us to do first-hand research on; as outside researchers, we simply cannot get to Iran. There is a man who lives in Edgware Road who speaks Talishi fluently, as a native language – a highly endangered language, spoken right here on the streets of London, but never identified because he would be classified as Iranian. A million Londoners speak a language other than English at home – one million people in this city. The top ten languages are French, Spanish, Polish, Hindi, Italian, Urdu, German, Russian, Bengali and Portuguese, but there are hundreds and hundreds of other languages, spoken right around us here today. Many of them are languages where people have moved here and are endangered in their homelands. Interestingly, there is a Regional Language Network, which is actually sponsored by businesses here in London, promoting and supporting languages.
We have also been working with local communities, helping to educate and train them, developing teacher training opportunities and supporting the communities in developing materials and the use of the language in a wide range of contexts.
This is all part of what could be called language revitalisation: the principles and practices for developing language use and reversing the shift that some communities seem to think is inevitable, increasing the numbers of speakers and the number of places and domains where languages can be used. Linguists around the world are involved in working together with communities to strengthen languages, develop orthographies, school curricular, materials, training and media.
There are several models for language revitalisation. One that is very prominent in North America is called the ‘master-apprentice’ programme, where a speaker of a language, usually an older person, works together with a younger ‘apprentice’. The apprentice lives with the master and they speak the language as much as possible. The way that carpenters and electricians used to pass on their trade is now the model for passing on languages.
The second model is called ‘language nest’. This is a direct translation of the Maori term, kohanga reo. ‘Kohanga’ means nest; ‘reo’ is language. This was pioneered in New Zealand, and has been extended around the world, to Hawaii, to the Sami reindeer herders from the north of Scandinavia, and also to the Isle of Man. There is a language nest of Manx, where Manx languages are spoken.
A third possibility is immersion schooling, where children are taught languages and content – Mathematics, Science, Culture, Geography, History, Music – through the second language. At home, they might speak one language - perhaps English - and they go to school and are immersed in the second language. This is what has happened in the case of Welsh, the result being that, today, there are more children who speak Welsh than there have been for 100 years.
Bilingual schooling is teaching language and content in two languages - in the first language of the child, the mother tongue, and in the second language. This is the case in somewhere like Quebec, where people are taught in French and English. These kinds of models, unfortunately, tend to be transitional in nature – that is, the child enters the school system with their own first language and is introduced to the second one, and after several years, the first language disappears from the curriculum and only the second or dominant language is used.
Finally, we have language awareness, which is teaching about the language - usually to learn some routines, some iconic expressions or usages - but not in order to achieve full fluency in the language.
Let me give you two case studies - first, involving Maori. In the 1970s, Maori people realised that the Maori language was contracting. It was a language that was increasingly being used just by older people, and in restricted contexts. The marae, which is the ceremonial house where various ceremonies and cultural activities are carried out, was a typical location for the speaking of Maori; however, English rather than Maori was spoken at home or down the pub. So they decided, in the 1970s, to introduce kohanga reo. They realised that the chain of communication was being broken as parents were speaking English and not Maori to their children. They created pre-schools in which children were brought together with grandparents, and the single instruction was ‘no English to be spoken inside these walls’. In the nest, the kids were only exposed to Maori, and when they went home after the pre-school, they spoke English to their parents and to their friends. As a result, we now have a whole generation of children who have grown up bilingually, speaking Maori and English. Maori was introduced at all levels of education – primary, secondary and tertiary – and the Government recognised it as a co-official language, along with English. The Maori developed terminology for objects like computer and iPad and so on, and the first university-educated students are now leaving the Maori education system. I recently met a person who teaches at the University of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, whose daughter has just written her dissertation in Maori, the language. You can now go to the University of Technology and you can study all your subjects in Maori. The language has been revitalised, from a position in the 1970s where it was struggling, to a situation now where it is used in higher education and people are writing dissertations in the language.
The first dissertation written fully in Hawaiian was defended at the University of Hawaii last year. Hawaiian was a literary language 100 years ago, but was under huge pressure from English, and is now coming back through a similar arrangement. At the Sami University College, in northern Norway, teaching is available in Sami languages.
New contexts of use have become available. There is a full set of programmes on Maori television which you can now watch, and which can be viewed online. Maori is used on Facebook and many people are now ‘tweeting’ in Maori on Twitter. It is not the only language – there are dozens of endangered languages that are being used on Facebook and Twitter.
I shall finish by giving you another case study, from south-eastern Australia and centred on the language that I spoke in at the start of this lecture. In 1788, there were about 70 languages spoken in what is now New South Wales and Victoria, and we have some early, but really quite insufficient, documentation materials from the 18th and 19th Centuries. By 1900, most of the languages in this region were moribund, and by 1950, most were extinct or reduced to the last single speakers. Modern linguistic research really only began in the 1950s, and in the 1970s and ‘80s, we got documentation of the last remaining linguistic and cultural knowledge, and with the death of the last speakers, that knowledge has now disappeared.
This map of New South Wales shows you some of the languages. The language that I spoke to you in is called Gamilaraay, and it is from that shaded area in the north-west of New South Wales, about 350km from the city of Sydney.
In the 19th Century, the Gamilaraay were forced off their land by settlers, and we have some missionary materials, such as those of William Ridley from the 1850s. Unfortunately, he was not a trained linguist, so he was not able to hear subtle differences.
In the 1930s, some anthropologists visited the area and realised that it was the private language of a very few old people. In ’55, a linguist called Stefan Wurm introduced the last fluent speaker, and we have his notes and a tape which he made on a wind-up clockwork tape recorder, with thirteen minutes of recordings.
I started work in this area and I was able to find people who could remember their parents and grandparents speaking the language, but all they could remember were a few words and expressions. They knew how to say things like water and fire and so on, but they could not put whole sentences together. One old lady remembered her grandmother calling out ‘I am hungry – where’s my bread?!’ She did not know what the Gamilaraay word for bread was, but it was there somewhere.
Using the missionary materials and Wurm’s documents, we were able to analyse these findings and combine them with some grammatical studies done with two half-speakers of the language encountered in the 1980s. The result is that we published a dictionary and uploaded it online. It is still there on the internet, launched in 1995.
In 1998, a revivalist movement began. They decided to start working together as a community and, in the year 2000, got approval to teach the language in school. Languages other than English are required of all primary school students, and the aboriginal people in this region said, instead of studying Indonesian or French, why can our kids not study our language? After receiving approval in 2000, we started producing materials – language CD-ROMs, school textbooks and CDs – and we started training teachers. We produced bilingual merchandise, like t-shirts: ‘Let’s talk Gamilaraay to one another.’ A dictionary was created, in collaboration with linguists, school teachers, information technology specialists and local language and culture custodians. The state government introduced a language programme across the state in 2003. A language that was almost extinct has been brought back to a point where children are able to write it, speak it and use it in the classroom. In 2006, the University of Sydney started teaching language classes in this language, so that anyone could go and learn it and study it. There has been a huge cultural revival as well, with children being taught traditional dances and so on.
There are many challenges facing the world today in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity, both from a global perspective and more locally, within the city of London, within New Zealand, within Australia. Researchers and communities are responding to these challenges to understand language use, attitudes and ideologies, and to try and understand the dynamics of change. What I hope to have shown you is that efforts are going on around the world to document, revitalise and support threatened languages and to extend their domains of use, to move into new media areas and take advantage of the internet. These are efforts to foster the languages to help turn the tide of language shift that we have seen globally.
Everyone in this audience can do some good things to support us and to help us in our tasks. First, we all need to understand and appreciate language diversity – though I am sure I do not have to repeat this to people who have come to a symposium on endangered languages! Language diversity is an amazing, wonderful thing and we should appreciate it.
We also need to combat the ideology of monolingualism, which has probably never existed anywhere in the world, and definitely not in the UK. Going back thousands of years, there was never one language ever spoken on these islands. There was Roman, there was Britannic, there was Pictish, and many, many more. English is not the only language of the United Kingdom – there are over 400 languages spoken here in London! There have always been multiple languages spoken in the United Kingdom. Please repeat this to your friends, repeat this to politicians, repeat this to Mr Cameron - tell the people who need to hear it. Please help to disseminate accurate information about the state of languages and cultures across the world, supporting communities in their struggles to maintain and develop them.
Thank you.
©Peter Austin, Gresham College 2011
Professor Michael Mainelli chairs a panel discussion with Dr Nicholas Ostler, Dr Mark Turin and Professor Peter Austin
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An honorary life fellow of Gresham College, Professor Tim Connell was Director of Language Studies at City University London and became an emeritus professor in 2009. He is a...
Professor Michael Mainelli is Emeritus Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College,...
Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in descriptive linguistics from Leiden...
Professor Peter K. Austin is Märit Rausing Chair in Field Linguistics and Director of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at the School of...
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