IN THE Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the American
Southwest, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-aged or
elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in
English. Street signs are in English, food on the supermarket shelves is
labelled in English, and the reservation’s newspaper, the Navajo Times,
is printed 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 6800 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.
English is the third most widely spoken language in the world, with more than
320 million people speaking it as their first language, but its closest
relatives— the three Frisian languages spoken on the coast of Holland and
Germany—are all on the danger list.
“At the moment, we’re aiming for about three or four languages dominating the
world,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading
who has studied language diversity. “It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will
ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.” At the end of September,
linguists will meet to discuss the problem at the Foundation for Endangered
Languages in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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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 speakers, and at least 3000 have fewer than 2500
(see Graph).
It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Most
of the 250 languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo have fewer
speakers than Navajo, yet they are not in trouble. But Navajo is considered
endangered despite having 150 000 speakers, according to Ethnologue, a
catalogue of world languages and their speakers compiled by Dallas-based
research organisation SIL International.
What makes a language endangered is not just 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 of the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks.
Why do people reject the language of their parents? 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
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Danger list
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
schools, all to promote national unity. The former US policy of running Indian
reservation schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as
Navajo on the danger list. But it can also backfire by inspiring resistance
among speakers: Agaw, the language of the Ethiopian Jews known as Falasha,
survived in Africa despite centuries of persecution by Christian rulers.
Ironically, among the 70 000 Falashas who emigrated to Israel between 1984 and
1991, the language is now losing ground to Hebrew.
Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the linguistics department at the University of
Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic
globalisation. He says it is not realistic to expect a minority language to
survive if no business is conducted in it. “Native Americans have not lost pride
in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,” he
says. “They cannot refuse to speak English if the majority economy is run in
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Look at Europe and Africa, he says. Europe has 9 per cent of the world
population, but only 3 per cent of the world’s languages. While Africa, with its
largely local economies, has 15 per cent of the world’s population speaking
nearly a third of all languages.
But are languages worth saving? At the very least, linguists say, 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 bound up with the practices and rituals unique to
a culture, so it may be difficult to preserve one without the other. “If a
person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,” Mufwene says. “Do
they also lose Navajo culture? We don’t really know. But can they preserve the
Navajo culture if they are surrounded by people that practise another culture?
Probably not.”
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 the brain. “Your brain and mine are different from the
French-speaking person’s,” Pagel says, and this could affect the way we think.
“The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured
by the linguistic habits of our community.”
Despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages are likely to 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 California, volunteers have provided life support to several indigenous
languages on the verge of extinction. These apprentices pair up with one of the
last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn traditional skills
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. 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.
But Mufwene says that preventing a language dying out is not the same as
giving it new life by using it every day. “We must always remember the
distinction between preserving a language and revitalising it,” Mufwene says.
“Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in a jar.”
However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. The best-known
example is Hebrew, which existed only in written form for hundreds of years
until the late 1800s, when Jews living in Palestine decided to revive it. They
spoke it crudely at first, with no guide to rhythm, intonation or idiomatic
speech. The language that has emerged would probably be difficult for an ancient
Hebrew speaker to understand, but the mere possibility of revival raised by the
story of Hebrew has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems
of writing where none existed before.
For many ordinary speakers of endangered languages life is a constant battle
against linguistic imperialism. That may be what one Navajo woman had in mind
recently when she took a marking pen to her local supermarket. Beneath the
English words on each sign, she wrote the translation in Navajo.