Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out â as Alexandra Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her. Tariana is in danger of dying. With each such disappearance we risk losing insights into different ways of thinking. Aikhenvald told Adrian Barnett about the race to record languages.
When Alexandra Aikhenvald was 11 she told her parents â using the Estonian she had learned on holiday â that she didnât want to go to her Moscow school. Then she taught herself how to say âI donât want to go to schoolâ in 50 more languages. Warned that the possession of a Jewish family name would exclude her from mainstream Soviet academia, she did a masterâs degree in ancient Hittite and a PhD in the Berber languages of north Africa. Then she set out for the most remote corner of the Amazon in search of endangered languages. She is now associate director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Tell us about recording a dying languageâŠ
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A student of mine found an old man who said, âYes, I speak BarĂ©â â an Amazonian language that we thought was extinct. I checked that he knew the few BarĂ© words I knew, then I sat down and talked with him for two months. Senhor CandelĂĄrio was a great man. He would tell hunting stories, and stories about his life.
His mother had been the only person he could speak BarĂ© with. After she died he kept it alive by talking to himself when he was drunk. So the language had been almost literally pickled in alcohol until I recorded it. When I left we both said: âSee you againâ. Six months later I got newsthat he had died.
So Baré died with him?
A language doesnât fall over a precipice, it sort of slides into oblivion. A few people know five BarĂ© words here, 20 there. Some become ârememberersâ, that is, they can proudly recite poems or stories at length, but have no idea what they mean. At that stage all the concepts, the elegance and the embodied world view have gone. You just have shards. So functionally, yes, BarĂ© is gone.
Isnât it dangerous, travelling to these remote places?
I suppose it is, but because I am a woman and alone, people trust me and I can get information that would probably be impossible otherwise. I did once have to run away from a drunken miner. But that was in a town. In the more remote villages they like me, I have respect and I am safe. I have also been adopted into families.
And the environment?
I have seen snakes. People think that if you go to these places you must be some kind of Indiana Jones character but I am not. I grew up in a big city. I canât swim. I canât even ride a bicycle.
That makes you sound braver still, canoeing on jungle riversâŠ
Maybe just lightheaded. I donât think about it. I canât possibly learn to swim. But itâs incredibly fascinating to discover a whole language. Of course, when I come back I usually have some sort of infection or stomach disease. But eventually I get better and then I want to go back.
How do you explain what you are doing?
When I was preparing a bilingual dictionary of Tariana â another Amazonian language â and Portuguese I gave a workshop and about 300 people came. I showed them this very poor, very old Tariana grammar book and explained that I wanted to do a more truthful one â I said, âYour names will be on it because it is a community bookâ. And they said, âOh yes, then we can teach our children better. This old book has many mistakes. Our language will be like Portuguese, itâll be a proper language.â
And what does that mean to them?
In that area you are identified with your fatherâs language, and if you speak a borrowed language like Portuguese instead, you are a lesser person. But with a dictionary they can say, âNow, I am learning my fatherâs language backâ and this gives them some security and confidence. They start to speak it with pride and not apologetically. I find that very rewarding.
What happens then? You can hardly say to most people, âSo, tell me about your transitive verbsâŠâ
I always do whatever the people in the village are doing. If I didnât join in they would treat me differently. When I hear something interesting I either ask a direct question or I get them to tell me stories. I ask questions and people say, âOh, how did you know that? OK, we will talk to you moreâ.
Once I asked, âCan I use this word this way?â and the response was, âOf course, youâre foreign, you can say a wrong thing. But I canât say that.â
Whatâs the most difficult language youâve come across?
It took me 10 years to get the grammar of Tariana. Of course, Finnish is probably harder.
How did you become fascinated by languages?
I grew up in Moscow, in what was supposed to be a monolingual society, but in the street Iâd hear all sorts of different accents and speech patterns. Then we used to go to Estonia for our summer holidays. If you spoke Russian to an Estonian they ignored you but if you learned some Estonian they were very nice.
Also my great-uncles and great-aunts were Jewish, educated people originally from Ukraine, and I was intrigued by the consistent language mistakes they made.
And at school?
When I was 11 and I was rebelling, I collected the phrase âI donât want to go to schoolâ in as many languages as I could find. I had it in 52.
What languages did you study formally?
At university I started on Balto-Finnic languages, as I already knew Estonian. Then my supervisor said, âWith your name, the authorities will never let you be a mainstream scholar in the USSRâ. I should study something obscure. I had a Jewish name and Russia was very anti-Semitic. I looked around, became fascinated by Hittite and the Anatolian family of languages, and that became my masterâs.
A colleague recommended Berber for my PhD. It was the classic colonial situation: the French linguists had dismissed these languages as âjust dialectsâ, so there were some 14 languages that no one was studying.
How did you get from north Africa to the Amazon?
Perestroika started, thankfully, and I saw this job in southern Brazil. I got it, then found that many Brazilian linguists are extremely possessive of âtheirâ languages. But there is this huge Arawak language family, spanning South America, whose members are as different from each other as English is from German and are as different from members of other language families as these are from Hungarian.
So few linguists study Arawak languages that you can just pick and choose. I decided to go to the least explored part, which is where Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia meet. I arrived at this tiny border town and within a few days of just walking around I heard two languages that were supposed to be extinct.
How do you reach the more remote groups?
I arrive in the town, some people will pick me up and we go upriver in one of their canoes. I think they cooperate partly because I am not Brazilian. There is a lot of institutionalised racism in Brazil and as a foreigner I am seen as being outside that. It helps immensely. And these people are trying to protect their cultural traditions and languages against encroaching linguistic dominance â this international monolingualism.
Why is it important to preserve these languages?
First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to express them in their languages?
If these so-called âexoticâ languages die, weâll be left with just one world view. This wonât be very interesting, and weâll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world.
Second, without their language and its structure, people are rootless. In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If those are lost a huge part of a peopleâs history goes. These stories often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.
Whatâs your favourite example of a big difference between languages?
In English I can tell my son: âToday I talked to Adrianâ, and he wonât ask: âHow do you know you talked to Adrian?â But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something â we call it âevidentialityâ. I would have to say: âI talked to Adrian, non-visual,â if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: âShe talked to Adrian, visual, reported.â In that language, if you donât say how you know things, they think you are a liar.
This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath.
And what about different types of vocabulary?
The story about Inuit words for snow is completely wrong. That language group uses multiple suffixes, so you can derive not 50, but 150 words for snow. But the Tariana do have a lot of terms for ants. It is important to know that some bite and others are edible, for instance.
Do languages hold any surprises for you?
I had been working with Tariana for nine years before I came across the word for âpurpleâ. I was astounded. I did not realise there could be a word for purple in a language that does not distinguish between green and blue.
Such things get languages described as âprimitiveââŠ
There is no such thing as a primitive language. Many tribal people now speak several languages. They can often learn English or Portuguese much more easily than incomers can learn their language.
People complain about irregular verbs in Portuguese, but thatâs nothing compared to the irregular verb structure in Navaho, for example. Iâve known missionaries say, âThese Indians, they are just making it up ad hoc. They are just doing it to be difficult and to keep us out.â Such people do not appreciate the level of sophistication and complexity some of these languages have reached.
How do you decide when to stop gathering information?
With Tariana I stopped when I was not finding any new verbs. There were still more names for birds and ants. But I could not identify all of them anyway. And there are so many languages to work on. A dictionary means that the language is not completely lost and it empowers those who speak the language to preserve their cultural identity. Thatâs good.
How many languages have disappeared in the last century?
About 60 or 70 per cent of linguistic diversity in the north-western region of Brazil has gone in the last 100 years. On the Atlantic coast of Brazil itâs worse â about 99 per cent â and around the world the figure is 60 to 70 per cent. It has been very rapid.
Is there a lost language that you would love to have spoken?
Oh, yes. So many, so manyâŠ
What language do you dream in?
If I dream of Tariana, they speak Tariana. Sometimes I dream of Estonia, and they speak Estonian. In my nightmares, people speak to me and I understand, but I canât answerâŠ