Languages, Tygers, and Extinctions
Close your eyes. Now imagine that you are
chatting with a friend. You are chatting about simple things, about a mutual
acquaintance that you saw the day before or about a special holiday with your family.
The words come easily to you, not singly, but in graceful phrases, in concert
with your breathing, with your smiles, your laughter. Your emotions, your
speech, and the meanings that you share with your friend are like music or
dance, perfectly harmonized, inseparable and indivisible. Your speech is as natural
and fluid as breathing itself. The language you speak, your mother tongue, is
indeed every much a part of you as is your own mother and your own tongue!
How would you feel, then, knowing that you
were the very last living speaker of your language?
It is not easy for me to imagine how I would
feel as the last speaker of English, my mother tongue. Certainly I would feel a
deep sense of loss and despair, both personally and in terms of the larger
picture—the loss of centuries of cultural know-how and folk wisdom, the loss of
the vast literature (Shakespeare would never again be performed in English!). But
the very idea seems so far from reality, so abstract.
And yet, thousands
of individuals across the planet are today facing this tragic eventuality. For
these people, the proposition is not abstract. It is reality. Here are but two
examples taken from recent press reports in January 2013: The last surviving
speaker of Kusunda, a language of Nepal, Gyani Maiya Sen (pictured to the left) spoke about her
situation.1 Now aged 76, she
laments the passing of her language. “How can I forget the language I grew up
learning? I used to speak it when I was a child. Even now, I wish I could talk
to someone who understands my language." Sen was speaking in Nepali, not
her mother tongue. In another part of the world, Taiwanese linguist Sung Li-may
is working with one of the last Kanakanavu speakers in an effort to document this
language before it dies.2 Her 80-year old speaker-informant (Mu'u Ka'angena, pictured below) exclaimed,
"Every day I think: Can our language be passed down to the next
generation? It is the deepest wish in my heart that it can be."
Several hundred languages are presently faced
with certain extinction, and a further three thousand languages are likely to
disappear within this century. Scholars agree that at a minimum, half of the
present-day languages will not survive into the next century. In the most
recent instance of imminent extinction, the oldest speaker of a the N/uu
language died just three weeks ago on January 7th.3 Akeni
Kassi was one of the three remaining speakers of this language of the Khomani
people who had thrived for generations in the Kalahari desert, the Khomani homeland.
Why should we care? To me, the loss of a
language is just as tragic and senseless as the loss of a biological species.
We may soon live in a world without leopards, tigers, and cheetahs, without
gorillas and rhinoceroses—these are all critically endangered mammals. Inspired
by the tiger, the great 18th century poet and artist William Blake
penned The Tyger which begins:
Tyger!
Tyger! burning bright
In the
forests of the night,
What
immortal hand or eye
Could frame
thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake asks us to consider the powers
that could have created this magnificent creature. In the same way that
nature’s potency manifests its creative powers in a creature such as a tiger,
humans demonstrate with every generation the depths and breadths of their
creative potential in the inventiveness of their languages. Ultimately, the
same potent “hand or eye” that inspired Blake’s The Tyger also brought forth the glorious diversity of human speech
forms—these dynamic and variegated solutions to human life on this earth.
Just as on the days the news reports that yet
another biological species has passed into oblivion, on the days the last
speaker of a language passes on, our world is in significant ways diminished and
impoverished. Someone once said that ‘Language is cultural DNA,’ and there is a
lot of truth in this. A language embodies the way of life of a people. Their perspectives
on the environment and the spiritual world, their social relationships, their
beliefs and values are, in a very real sense, encoded within their expressions,
and their vocabulary and grammar. A language represents the accumulated wisdom
of generations, one possible peak of human creativity and invention in a forest
of alpine peaks. So the loss of a language is not only an individual and
personal loss for the many last speakers, it represents a loss to the whole of
humanity. And not to care about the mass extinction of languages represents a
deeply troubling failure in the human imagination.
The reasons for language endangerment and extinction are complex and cannot be addressed with
any one solution or approach. Avoiding the difficult questions and issues, some
writers have explained that languages die because all the speakers simply grew
old and died, or that the speakers have, over time, abandoned their language in
favor of another language that offered greater opportunities for education and employment,
or that, in a cynical Darwinian turn, the disappearing language was somehow less ‘fit’
and failed to adapt to changing circumstances.4 But these
explanations are disingenuous and ignore the outright cutting down of a people
or the successive marginalizations of the speakers of these languages. They
avoid addressing the power differentials existing between speakers of different
languages that overwhelmingly account for the vast majority of language
extinctions. Languages are indeed natural products, but we should never forget
that, at the same time, languages are also products of history that have been
forged in the furnaces of environmental, social, and political conflict and contingency.
People ask, What can be done? There are some
things that we, as individuals, can do right away—actions and attitudes that we
can adopt that will contribute to more positive outcomes for small languages in
the years ahead. Become aware of the great diversity of human languages across
the planet and take note when you hear about the extinction of a language.
Consider in each case what the underlying causes are for the loss and further
consider what steps might be taken that other languages can avoid the same fate. Encourage multilingual solutions in
circumstances where governments or institutions are pressuring a people to
abandon their mother tongue. And always, without exception, support a people’s
right to speak their own language in private and in public, to pass on their
language to their children, and to have their language used as a medium of instruction
in education.
Notes
1 Last of Nepal’s Kusunda mourns loss of dying
language. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gFBmr9THN1RO4sxLUvH_Uxt0kNvw?docId=CNG.8e2278b1b59c3f4139dd3762f3d8ff89.6b1&index=2
2 Taiwanese Linguist Races To
Save Dying Language. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/09/taiwan-language-kanakanavu-linguistics/1819613/
3 Speaker of
Oldest San Language Dies
http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/speaker-of-oldest-san-language-dies-1.1454601
4 See for example: Let Them Die, by Kevin Malik, Prospect magazine, (November
2000); Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways, by David Berreby, New York
Times, May 23, 2003.
