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In the Native American Navajo
nation which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the
native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-age or elderly.
Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in
English. Street sign, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are
all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers
of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.
Navajo is far from alone. Half
the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations -
that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic
diversity shrunk at such a pace. “At the moment, we are heading for about
three or four languages dominating the world”, says Mark Pagel, an
evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. “It’s a mass
extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to
know.’
Isolation breeds linguistic diversity as a
result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people.
Only 250 languages have more than a million speaker, and at least 3,000
have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are
about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000
speakers. What makes a language endangered is not that the number of
speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is
relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are
only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director o the
Alaska Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.
Why do people reject the
language of their parent? It begins with a crisis of confidence when a
small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says
Nicholas Ostler of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath.
‘People lose faith in their culture’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches
their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old tradition.’
The change is not always
voluntary. Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by
banning its use in public or discouraging its use in school, all to promote
national unity. The former US policy of running Indian reservation in
English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the
danger list. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics Department at
the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not
government policy but economic globalisation. ‘Native Americans have not
lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic
pressures’ he says. ‘They can not refuse to speak English if most
commercial activity is in English". But are languages worth saving? At
the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and
their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living
and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost
to science.
Language is also intimately
bond up with culture, so it may be difficult to reserve one without the
other. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something'
Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of
different ways of looking at the world’, says Pagel. There is mounting
evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in brain.
‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone, who speaks
French, for instance’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and
perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts
may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’
So despite linguists’ best
efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century. But a growing
interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from
coming true. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their
ancestral tongue, as well as the dominant language’ says Doug Whalen, founder
and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of
bilingualism’ he says. In New Zealand, classes for children have slowed the
erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the language. A similar approach
in Hawaii has produced about 8000 new speakers of Polynesian languages in
the past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes have provided
life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer 'apprentices' pair
up with one of the last living speakers of Native American tongue to learn
a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in
the endangered language. After about 300 hours of training, they are
generally sufficiently fluent to transmit the language to the next
generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a language dying out is not
the same as giving it new life by using every day. ‘Preserving a language
is more likely preserving fruits in a jar’ he says.
However, preservation can
bring a language back from the dead. There are examples of languages that
have survived in written form and then been revived by latter generations.
But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of
revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of
writing where none existed before.
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