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Indiana Alumni Magazine

Researchers speculate that 90 percent of the world’s languages will be gone by 2100. Can they be saved?

By Daniel S. Comiskey

Somewhere in the jungle of 19th century Venezuela, the story goes, the German explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt came face to face with the last speaker of the language of the Atures people.

Having carved his way through the undergrowth of South America, Humboldt had made many other discoveries — the electric eel, an ocean current, and the Brazil nut — but had failed to produce even a word from the Atures Indians. Only while visiting with the neighboring tribe of the Maypures did he finally find out why. Led by torchlight through their isolated village, Humboldt was taken to the cage of a talking parrot — captured long ago, the Maypures explained, from the now-extinct Atures people. As the creature recited its limited vocabulary, the scholar must have been stupefied by his own bad luck. The last speaker of the Atures language was a bird.

Such is the frustration of saving endangered tongues.

"Many of these endangered languages have only one or two speakers," says Samuel Obeng, who teaches linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. "In some cases, we're talking about languages that are probably gone as we speak."

In fact, a language needn't be nearly that rare to be considered endangered. While isolated languages used to survive for centuries with just a few thousand speakers, the encroachment of civilization now makes this impossible.

In today's interconnected world, linguists generally agree that no vocabulary can survive unless it has at least 100,000 speakers. Of the world's more than 6,000 languages, only a dozen or two fit that description. These are the so-called "predator" languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, and Swahili among others. Often spoken by hundreds of millions of people, these giants are invading the last unspoiled regions on earth — places such as Papua New Guinea, smaller than the state of Texas but containing as many as 800 indigenous languages.

"The explanation can be summed up in one word: 'Roads,'" says Paul Newman, JD'03, professor of linguistics at IUB. "Roads open up an area to immigration from a majority population. Build a road into an isolated part of Tanzania, for example, and the tribal group quickly becomes Swahili speaking."

Roads, as Newman points out, can also lead to the destruction of the local ecosystem. And a growing body of research suggests that biological extinction may be more than a metaphor for language loss.

"There's an intrinsic link between biological diversity and linguistic diversity," Obeng says. "Many of the same political and social factors that cause the destruction of one cause the destruction of the other."

What alarms most linguists is not that languages die. In the same way that one species dies out to make room for another, so too do some languages. In fact, it's fair to say that most languages naturally have a short life span. Only a few, such as Hebrew and Greek, have lasted more than 2,000 years. In the morgue of linguistic history, there are hundreds of languages that have died perfectly natural deaths from floods, fires, and disease. What worries linguists is the current rate of language extinction, at least one dying each month, and rarely from anything you would call natural.

"In a very subtle way, the electronic media is responsible," Obeng explains. "Growing up in Ghana, I was watching CNN in English."

With the advent of the Internet, relatively undeveloped countries such as Ghana began absorbing Western culture even more voraciously. Traditional languages became stigmatized. And the kind of cultural coercion made famous by 19th century colonialism — the English imposing their language using superior firepower, for example — was no longer necessary to destroy native tongues.

"What the British did with guns," Obeng says, "the Americans did with the World Wide Web."

Violence and political pressure still have their hand in language destruction, of course. Ethnic Kurds in Turkey are forbidden to write or formally teach their vocabulary. But it is more often by choice that people now abandon their traditional language, usually in favor of one they see as more worldly or practical.

"You can't blame someone for pursuing what they see as a means to a better life," says Dov-Ber Kerler, a professor of Yiddish Studies at IUB.

The practical concerns of livelihood and integration coming before all others, many indigenous groups have chosen the predator language in their area not only for themselves, but also for their children. Lakota Indians of North Dakota, for example, believe that the Lakota language has become a liability, that English alone will be required to get jobs.

"There's a feeling among indigenous people that their language won't help their kids succeed in life," says Douglas Parks, a professor of Native American Studies at IUB. "Young people relate stories about having their mouths washed out with soap for speaking Lakota." When speaking about predator languages, however, linguists aren't just talking about English. Experts say that Chinese, already the most widely spoken language on earth, will have three times as many speakers as English by 2050. Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, and Arabic are not far behind. And occasionally a predator language's proximity to smaller languages can be more dangerous than its size. Swahili, for example, is not even in the top 10 in terms of number of speakers, but is cutting a deadly path across Africa, where one-third of the world's languages exist.

"It's the language of wider communication," Obeng says. "As a linguist, I see it as a very sad situation. But in reality, people have to survive."

So instead of adopting one language, the world seems to be dividing itself among several. And just as some IU scholars feel compelled to study these predators, others are drawn to the prey — languages such as Lakota, Efutu, and Yiddish.

Lakota (Sioux Indians)

In the high plains of North Dakota, perhaps as recently as 150 years ago, the Sioux Indian tribe was a force more terrifying than God. General Custer learned that when he made his infamous "last stand." Countless thousands of Lakota speakers inhabited the region, constituting one of the largest tribes in North America.

And then came the reservations, industrialization, and television.

"Thirty years ago, it was so isolated," Parks says. "Now there's this feeling that if you're going to get ahead in a white man's world, you're going to have to speak the white man's language."

Even today, however, to hear Lakota is to respect it. The language has a serious, almost severe quality that makes everyday conversations sound wise or warlike. But it's the modern world that has declared war on Lakota. Parks estimates that only a few thousand people now speak the language, though it has not gone without a fight.

"Some of the Lakota are genuinely concerned with cultural revival," he says. "There's a group that believes you can't communicate with the Creator in English. But the question with any endangered language is: How motivated are the people themselves about saving it? In this case, I think it's lip service."

Although most Lakota reservations have passed a law that schools have to teach the language, many have found it diffi cult to implement. So few speakers exist that capable teachers are hard to find. And money to fund the Lakota revival programs is an even rarer commodity.

"Sure, they see Lakota as a big part of who they are, something to be proud of," Parks says. "But when they apply for grants, what are the first priorities? Jobs and hospitals. Language falls through the cracks."

As a result, a dramatic language — one with dozens of words for horses and grain that have no English equivalent — is dying fast. There may, however, be cause for some optimism. Due in part to its proximity to universities and its place in American history, Lakota has been exhaustively studied and documented. When it goes, some fossil of its existence will remain. Other languages will not be so lucky.

Efutu

On the windswept central coast of Ghana, you can hear, if only for the moment, a close relative of one of the oldest languages on Earth.

A single language called Proto united Africa some 14,000 years ago. It is the grandfather of all languages there, the least of which might be considered Efutu, which is spoken by just 6,000 people. Efutu is in trouble. You won't fi nd much about it on the Internet. Less than half a dozen articles have ever mentioned it. In a word, it is obscure. And unless something dramatic happens to save it, Efutu will disappear into just that — obscurity.

"Not many people know about it," Obeng says. "It's an important language because of its history, but then, it's not like watching a species disappear. People complain about what they see."

Unlike Lakota, Efutu has not been thoroughly studied. In that way, it's more typical of the world's endangered languages. In another way, however, it's atypical. Efutu is dying not from a predator language that threatens diversity, but from diversity itself.

"Ghana is the size of Indiana and has 44 languages," Obeng explains. "The languages are fighting one another and Efutu is losing."

Spoken mainly in the fishing town of Winneba, Efutu is considered a blue-collar language. Like many in Africa, it relies on tone, giving conversations all the high notes and low notes of a Paul Simon song. Its prestige, however, is in question. Fishermen will talk among themselves in Efutu, but sell their goods using a more respected local language called Fante. So even in this fairly isolated part of the world, the language is restricted to a particular group of people in a particular social situation.

"It's such an ancient language," says Atto Commey, JD'03, a native speaker of Efutu living in Indianapolis. "Even people in Ghana think it sounds somewhat foreign when they hear it."

Obeng gives Efutu less than 100 years to live.

"The people care that it survives," he says. "But once the children stop learning a language, it becomes a candidate for death.

"There's a school of thought that says: If a language is dying, let it die. But you feel somewhat differently when it's yours."

Yiddish

Less obscure than Efutu, but disappearing more rapidly, is Yiddish. It's a language — like the Jewish people who speak it — waiting impatiently for a savior.

Originating about 1,000 years ago in what is now Germany, Yiddish sounds so guttural that it could only be mistaken for German itself. It is a vernacular, invented by the Jews of Europe as an everyday retreat from the more formal Hebrew spoken in temple. With more than 100,000 speakers, it might not even qualify as an endangered language — except that it had 11 million speakers just 60 years ago.

"It was one of the world's major languages," Yiddish Studies Professor Dov-Ber Kerler says. "Then there was the Holocaust."

The vast majority of Jews killed in the concentration camps during World War II, an estimated 6 million people, spoke Yiddish. Those speakers who survived spread far and wide, many settling in the United States. Yiddish culture thrived there, even as the language was slowly assimilated. Yiddish words such as "klutz" and "schlock" found their way into the American vernacular. Yiddish theater and literature assumed their places at the top of their fields.

"Yiddish culture is not religious, it's secular," Kerler says. "It heavily influenced American humor."

Self-deprecating and sarcastic, Yiddish humor is the schtick of comedians such as Woody Allen and Jon Stewart (who grew up with the last name Leibowitz). Its spirit can be found in the pages of Heeb magazine, a young Jewish publication with a name that speaks for itself.

"You don't take yourself seriously," Kerler says. "You see human foibles. There are really only two groups of people in the world that laugh much at themselves: the English and the Jews."

In an ironic twist that Yiddish speakers must find particularly hilarious, the very people who once regarded the language as secular and profane — orthodox Hasidic Jews — now are considered its greatest hope.

"They've adopted it as a way to isolate themselves from the outside world," Kerler says. "It just might preserve the language."

Many of the softer aspects of Yiddish language may be lost on the orthodox persuasion, however, as Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer commented in his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

"Yiddish is a language of exile, without a country or borders," he said. "It's a language that doesn't possess words for weapons, ammunition, or military tactics."

Another Yiddish writer, Chava Rosenfarb, has written, "The proverb says that hope is the mother of fools. But who knows, perhaps the fate of the Yiddish language is like the fate of the Jewish people. Defying annihilation, Yiddish might still rise from the ashes like a phoenix."

Less seriously, Kerler reflected on the cause of saving his language.

"A friend of mine asked me, 'Why should non-Jews care about Yiddish?" Kerler laughed. "I said, 'Why not?' It's the classic Yiddish practice of answering a question with a question."

Every language has its partisans, of course, and there are good reasons for saving them all. But exactly what it means to "save" a language is the subject of debate.

Some argue that simply documenting a language isn't good enough, that dead languages — even when they've been documented — are little more than fossils. People of this persuasion favor language revitalization programs such as the one taking place in southern India, where the ancient language of Sanskrit is being taught to children as young as 4 years old.

Others are hesitant to be too idealistic. According to Obeng, documenting a language enjoys a much higher success rate, costs less — about $200,000 — and could mean saving more than words.

"When you lose a language, you lose science," he says.

Remedies for an untold number of diseases, Obeng explained, are known only in certain languages.

"My father, like many Africans, had very dry, red eyes," he says. "He would cut a particular vine from the trees and the juice inside would remove the redness. Knowledge like that is often language specific."

In such cases, saving the knowledge is as important as saving the plant. But the rewards of preserving a language are often less concrete. The loss of a language means the loss of a culture, and with it a unique perspective on the human experience. Socrates said that a man who speaks two languages sees with two souls. In other words, languages are not simply different sets of words for the same things. Each one has distinct phrases — descriptions of nature and the spiritual world — many of them found in the culture's proverbs.

"The worst thing for me is watching the disappearance of proverbs," Obeng says. "In traditional societies, proverbs are cited in court."

Efforts are being made by IU scholars to document endangered languages, of course, and like efforts to save species of plants and animals on the brink of extinction, they are occasionally successful. Actually, linguists have an advantage over biologists in that languages can be brought back long after they've officially died. Cornish, for example, a Celtic language that disappeared from the British Isles some 200 years ago, is being revived by descendants of the original speakers using written manuscripts. As many as 2,000 people are now fluent.

These cases are the exception, however, rather than the rule. The "save the languages" cause is sometimes considered a lost one by the preservationist scholars themselves. Languages are disappearing at a faster rate than they can possibly be recorded and speakers are making the conscious decision to abandon them.

"What's usually overlooked by scholars," Newman says, "is the enormous economic cost to these countries of speaking large numbers of tiny languages."

"Here we are being paternal," Obeng says. "We're telling these people, 'Keep speaking your language,' and they're telling us, 'We don't need it.'"

As linguists, Obeng, Newman, and Parks are sad to see the richness of diversity go. As realists, they are not surprised. Many indigenous people seem eager to participate in the larger world — in its religions, material trappings, mobility, and communications. Those groups that resist are being overwhelmed by majority populations. Linguists no longer find a parrot at the end of their long search for a language, they find nothing at all. And while a wealth of information about who we are is being lost forever, most scholars have a hard time faulting anyone for it.

"The truth is," Parks says, "it's difficult to be traditional in the modern world."

Daniel S. Comiskey, BGS’98, BA’00, is arts and culture editor for the magazine. He can be reached at dcomiskeindiana.edu.

RESOURCES

Book: Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, by Mark Abley, adventurous romp through the world's most exotic places. Each chapter focuses threatened language, the efforts to save it, and its probable fate. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Online: Check out www.terralingua.org. This Web site offers updated information endangered languages and the regions in which they exist. Conference and seminar listings, as well as more hands-on opportunities for action, also are provided.

Other: Vanishing Voices, a documentary film, will appear on PBS later this year. It promises an accessible introduction to the subject of endangered languages. For a preview of the program, visit www.ironboundfilms.com/ironsinthefire.html.

 

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