The efforts to keep endangered languages alive
Of the current 7,000 languages, around 43% are endangered, and many others will become so in the near future. While many ‘rememberers’ are dying, some languages are being resurrected…
Reading time: 7 minutes
Yanten Gomez, who is from Chile, uses the tribal name Keyuk. As his mother was mocked at school for her mestizo looks, she did not initially tell her children about their ancestry. They were descended from the Selk’nam, a nomadic tribe of unknown origin that settled in the archipelago Tierra del Fuego.
In the Selk’nam Genocide, a population of about 4,000 was reduced to around 300 and resettled on missionary-run reservations. Ángela Loji, the language’s last known fluent speaker, died in 1974.
An avid reader and an A-student, Keyuk quickly became fluent in Selk’nam. A school research project piqued his curiosity about indigenous peoples. When his mother informed him of their heritage, he vowed that he would master both Selk’nam and another indigenous language, Yagán. At 14, he travelled far south with his dad to meet Cristina Calderón, the last native speaker of Yagán. She tutored him by phone.
Linguists refer to people like Calderón as rememberers. She died in 2022.
Since his teens, Keyuk has written songs in Selk’nam, performing in an ‘ethno-electronic’ band. To master the language, which is harsher and more percussive than Spanish, he studied a lexicon published in 1915 and recordings made decades ago by Anne Chapman, an anthropologist and early activist for endangered languages in Middle and South America. Calderón was one of her subjects. Having heard of Keyuk’s projects, Chapman sought him out while in her eighties. She died in 2010.
Keyuk talks about Selk’nam with feeling. He considers its mythology “rich… Everything in our world – plants and animals, the sun and stars – has a voice… We had a Paleolithic skill set yet a boundless imagination… Long after we dispersed, we preserved our beliefs… One precious thing… is its vocabulary of words for love. They change according to the age, sex, and kinship of the speakers and the nature of the emotion. There are things you can’t say in Spanish” (cited in Thurman).
While he continues to work on a Selk’nam lexicon, he has given up his formal studies of linguistics, telling Thurman that “I can reach more people through music than I could have as an academic” (cited in Thurman).
Daniel Kaufman heads the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organisation that supports the more than 800 endangered languages of the New York area, which may have a higher concentration of them than any city in the world. In his view, “the loss of these languages doesn’t matter much to the bulk of humanity, but… It’s an issue of the speakers’ perceived self-worth” (cited in Thurman).
Kaufman suggested that Thurman meet members of the Mohawk nation. An attendee of the annual two-week language immersion programme in New York state told her he was learning Mohawk because the tribe had saved the lives of his German ancestors. According to the centre’s founder, Tom Porter (his English name), Mohawk “isn’t just a form of speech… It’s a holistic relationship to the cosmos… When you deprive a kid of his language at the sponge time of life, the most precious learning years, a bond is broken” (cited in Thurman).
Marie Wilcox, of the Wukchumni, compiled a dictionary of the tribe’s unwritten language and recorded its creation myths. She died in 2021. Mohawk is reportedly hard to learn. While about 25,000 North Americans self-identify as Mohawk, only about 15% speak it well enough to conduct their daily lives in it. Fluency in Navajo, which is used in daily life by two-thirds of the nation’s 250,000 citizens, is declining.
A few years ago, the election of a new tribe president was suspended owing to a dispute over the requirement that they speak Navajo fluently. Chris Deschene – a state representative from Arizona and the grandson of a code-talker – was disqualified on these grounds. Asked why he couldn’t speak Navajo, he said, “I’m the product of cultural destruction” (cited in Thurman). Yet he’s also a retired Marine Corps major, and has degrees in both engineering and law.
Several First Nations communities offer immersion classes (language-nests). The trend has been gaining momentum since the institution of the Esther Martínez Native American Language Preservation Act in 2006. The Maori of New Zealand were the first to develop the language-nest concept. The nest movement in the U.S. began in Hawaii. Hawaiian was banned in public schools from 1896 to 1986.
Research has found that students also taught in Hawaiian perform as well, if not better, than their monolingually-educated peers. At Hawaii’s best nest, 90% of the class proceeds to college. And graduate students at the University of Hawaii at Hilo can now earn a doctorate in their native tongue.
K. David Harrison is a director at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, based in Salem, Oregon, and heads National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project. He is thrilled to see Mohawk kids texting in Mohawk. The tribe also has its own radio and TV stations. The Yurok are one of many tribes with a website. And smartphone users can download apps to study Nishnaabe, Salteaux, Potawatomi, Arikara or Mi’kmaq. Living Tongues has a YouTube channel.
But an app cannot replace the live transmission of a language to children. Endangered languages’ fates may ultimately rest on extraordinarily committed individuals, couples and language organisations.
Language revitalisation is a crucial transdisciplinary field that investigates among others the causes of language endangerment, language policy and planning, educational policy, multicultural education, reversing language shift, language documentation, language reclamation or restoration, language loss, and globalisation’s impacts.
Further, political activism “has been a catalyst in nearly every narrative of a language rescued from the brink” (Thurman), with Welsh as the most famous example. The struggle to preserve a language often creates what Judith Thurman calls “an atmosphere of siege”. If peripheral languages are to survive, they must find a way to coexist with so-called “bully” languages. Harrison: “The ideal of stable bilingualism is a given. Nobody wants these communities to remain isolated” (cited in Thurman).
According to Harrison, even when there is persecution, the challenge is to increase a language’s prestige so that young people embrace it. A small number of extinct languages have been resurrected. Jessie Little Doe Baird, of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, received a MacArthur grant for her efforts to revive her people’s extinct language – Wôpanâak.
Daryl Baldwin, a member of the Miami tribe of Oklahoma, has a linguistics degree. He and his wife home-schooled their children in the Miami language, and founded the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Ohio to provide the community with cultural resources. Miami is now a growing language.
The well-known linguist Luis Rojas-Berscia’s doctoral thesis was on the Shawi, hunter-gatherers of the upper Amazon. While the Shawi number only around 20,000, he gives their language “better odds than Quechua, which has ten million speakers” (cited in Thurman).
In Rojas-Berscia’s view, every language “has its ecology. If it isn’t useful, the community will be forced to abandon it. Indigenous people in Latin America face all kinds of discrimination, and necessity dictates that, sooner or later, they adopt Spanish. Once that happens, the attrition is fast. Where a group is isolated from external pressures, they aren’t forced to accept the dominant language. So you can’t just go by the demographics” (cited in Thurman).
As the Endangered Languages Project points out, language extinction is not new. Languages have been dying since time immemorial. But, nowadays, languages are becoming extinct rapidly. Of the nearly 7,000 languages in the world today, around 3,000 (43%) are endangered, while many others will become so in the near future.
The languages belonging to more than 100 of the world’s 420 independent language families are extinct. That’s 25% of the world’s linguistic diversity, gone. According to the Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat), 227 languages have disappeared since 1960.
Some experts predict that, in the worst case scenario, 90% of all languages will be extinct within 100 years. In the best case, in the same timeframe, only 50% will survive, and only 10% are considered safe. Languages not being learned by children are considered doomed.
Of the Native American languages in the U.S., 90% are not being passed on to a new generation, while 90% of Australia’s aboriginal languages and more than 50% of minority languages of Russia are in a similar situation. Russia and China consider ethnic languages a threat to their hegemony and take measures to suppress or destroy them.
While the disappearance of a language involves a monumental loss of knowledge, comparable to the loss of a species, the extinction of language families is comparable to the loss of entire classes, orders or families of the animal kingdom.
Why should we care? First, languages are treasure troves of information on literature, art, worldviews, history and philosophy. Their stories, ideas and words help us to make sense of our lives and the world. Second, lost knowledge. Specific knowledge is often held in small speech communities. This includes knowledge of medicinal plants and cures, identification of as yet unknown plants and animals, and so on. Third, language extinction is a disaster to the scientific understanding of language and languages.
Fourth, human rights. Language loss often involves the oppression of speakers of minority languages, or at least strong societal prejudices. Fifth, there is the personal loss associated with the death of one’s heritage language, which tends to be experienced as a crisis of social identity and well-being. Sixth, linguistic diversity is an enormous storehouse of spirituality, expressive power, and profound understanding of humanity and the universe.
About Johan
If you’re a client, you’ll know my name (Johan Emerson Grobler) and e-mail addresses (ink@johangrobler.com, jegrobler1@gmail.com). While I trained as a copywriter, I’ve been line editing, copyediting and proofreading academic papers, dissertations and related work since 2007, and have helped authors to successfully submit to at least 94 journals.
Almost everything that has value in the world is the result of writing. Great writing can be the difference between approval or rejection, resources allocated or denied, and a cum laude or a summa cum laude. I assemble hard-working sentences that can be inhaled like ice cream.
For more, visit johangrobler.com
This is my monthly missive about all things English.
Much pleasure awaits…
Sources
Judith Thurman (23 March 2015): A loss for words: Can a dying language be saved?
Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé and Serafín M. Coronel-Molina (14 October 2020): What does language revitalisation in the twenty-first century look like? New trends and frameworks. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 42(10), 897-904.
The Endangered Languages Project (n.d.): Endangered languages: Why so important?
National Science Foundation: Collaborative research: Endangered Languages Catalog (ELCat). Award Abstract # 1058096.
