Book recommendation: Language Death by David Crystal

Tags

books, endangered languages, language death, language diversity, language policy, language revitalization, languages

Here is a quick little book review I put together for one of my favorite language books:

Language Death, by David Crystal, is at once a practical handbook, a scholarly analysis of a sociolinguistic phenomenon, and a call to action, all in a thoughtful and highly readable 166 pages. Crystal starts by quickly covering topics such as how linguists count languages and how languages come to be classified as “endangered,” before examining causes of language endangerment. His main thrust, though, is pragmatic; his largest chapters cover the topics of “Why should we care?,” “Where do we begin?” and “What can be done?”

As someone very much interested in language preservation and revitalization, I found this book to be a remarkable primer on the subject. It is an excellent introductory text, suitable for non-specialists but detailed enough for budding linguists. The bibliography itself is a goldmine for anyone interested in further research within this field, and Crystal also includes an extensive (if perhaps somewhat out-of-date) list of organizations who are working on language documentation and revitalization all over the world as an Appendix. What I really appreciated about it was Crystal’s demand for action, which is both sensible and passionate. After firmly establishing the reasons we should care about this crisis, he provides specific, tangible steps that can be taken to prevent and even reverse the forces of linguistic extinction, everything from public awareness to fundraising to technical documentation. Every concerned citizen, linguist or not, has a role to play.

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Interested in more book recommendations for language lovers?  Check out the list I put together on Goodreads!  Find some new recommendations, and vote to add your own!

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Pop Quiz! Endangered language projects

Tags

endangered languages, language death, language revitalization, languages, Native American

The Endangered Language Fund was founded in 1996 and has been providing grants to individual researchers, tribes, and museums, with the goal of supporting language documentation and preservation projects.  Looking through their list of “Language Legacies Project” grants awarded over the years demonstrates not only how geographically diverse (and numerically daunting) critically endangered languages are, but also how intelligently and creatively individuals can be when confronting the problem of language loss.

In honor of the fine work of the Fund and its grantees, today’s Pop Quiz focuses on the grants awarded in 2013.  (Try not to click over and cheat!)

Question – In which countries will the work of these grants be conducted?

1. “The Hupa Language Materials Project”, which will help digitize existing documentation and produce new digital media productions in the Hupa language, which has fewer than five native speakers remaining?
2. A project to generate a trilingual ethnobotanical database in French, English, and Ménik, the language of the Bedik people?
3. A project to build a vocabulary corpus and audio recordings in the understudied Zihuateutla Totonac language?
4. A project to record naturally-occurring speech patterns in conversation in the Cahuilla language, a member of the Uto-Aztecan family?
5. A study of the current status of the severely endangered Bantu language known as Dhaiso?
6. “An Introduction to Linguistics for Community Members of Valley Zapotec”?
7. A project to document the Xikrin dialect of a language (sometimes called Kayapó), which will include interviewing speakers who were born before contact with Western civilization?

BONUS: The project titled “Phonetic Features of Hatkoy” will be conducted with speakers of a dialect of the East Circassian language.  Originally native to the North Caucasus region, this dialect is now only spoken in diaspora, and is under pressure from which dominant language?

 

Answers:

1. The US.  The Hupa (or Hoopa) tribe lives in northern California.
2. Senegal, near the Senegal-Guinea border.
3. The Puebla State of Mexico.
4. The US, in the mountains and valleys of southern California.
5. This study will be conducted by visiting five villages in northeastern Tanzania.
6. This work will be the culmination of a five week field trip to Oaxaca State, Mexico.
7. Mato Grosso state in central Brazil.

BONUS: Turkish.  Due to the large number of diaspora Circassians in Turkey, the Turkish state broadcasting company has aired programs in a dialect of Circassian for ten years.

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Take a look at the descriptions for each of the 2013 grantees – if you’re anything like me you’ll find them pretty inspirational!  And if you do feel inspired, maybe consider supporting the fund!

 

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Monday Inspiration: Lost Words documentary

Tags

endangered languages, inspiration, language death, language revitalization, languages, Lost Words, Native American

Filmmaker Brian McDermott is currently putting the finishing touches on a documentary called Lost Words.

 

<goosebumps>

The filmmaker is still seeking small donations to complete the production, so please check out the film’s website and consider supporting this very worthy project!

P.S. I also wrote about the role of boarding schools and Native American language extinction in my guest post for the Living Tongues Institute.  Please check it out, and then keep your eyes peeled for this full-length documentary which will cover the topic in much more depth!

What’s in a name?

Tags

endangered languages, language death, languages, linguists

I remember when I was a kid we were taking a family road trip to New Mexico, and I was looking through a book about the history of Santa Fe, when it suddenly occurred to me that these Spanish names were equivalent to English names.  Suddenly it all made sense!  Juan is John.  Jorge is George.  Pedro is Peter.  Yes yes yes, it all makes sense.  Maria is Mary.  Diego is….

“Mom, what’s ‘Diego’?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean in English, what’s ‘Diego’?”

“Diego is just…Diego.”

I think that was the first time I began to understand that some things just don’t translate.  This was rather frustrating to me at the time.  I wanted everything to make sense, and something that didn’t have an English equivalent fell too far outside my concept of the world.

But of course, when a Spanish-speaking person calls his friend “Pedro,” he’s not really just saying “Peter.”  He’s saying his friend’s name, and a friend’s name is more than just a word, in any language.

Most of us can look up our names in a baby name book and get the etymology and the ‘meaning’ of the name.  I think Allison means something like “noble and truthful” in Old Germanic.  But when my friends or my husband or my brother or my boss says, “Hey, Allison,” they’re not literally saying “Oh, Noble and Truthful One.”  Names signify much more than can be translated.

Most words in a language are like that, actually.  One of my favorite examples comes from K. David Harrison, who has spent a lot of time with reindeer herders in central Siberia.  The Tofa people have a word: döngür.  It means “a male domesticated reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not ready for mating.”[1]  Of course, that is the explicit information encoded in that word, but when a Tofa speaker says the word döngür, they’re not really saying all of that.  That word maps to a memory, an intuition, an understanding of their world that includes but is not limited to any dictionary definition.

The Tofa language is dying; perhaps only a dozen people remember it now.  When it goes away forever, we don’t just lose a few entries in a dictionary.  Words are never just words.  Döngür is “just” döngür, in the same way that Diego is “just” Diego.

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[1] Pg. 57.  Harrison, K.D. (2007).  When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

The day Bo died

Tags

anthropology, endangered languages, language death, languages, linguists

Researchers who work on endangered languages aren’t often able to pinpoint the exact date of a language’s death.  Sometimes linguists discover a previously unknown language in the remote corner of the world, and by the time they come back for another field season, it’s already gone.  Sometimes linguists show up in places and hear stories of a language that has already been lost; sometimes there are little clues, scraps of writing from an intrepid missionary, words borrowed by a nearby tribe, that testify to something that was once there and is now gone forever.  But on rare occasions, we can actually name the day when a language was lost.

On January 26, 2010, a language known as Bo, or Aka-Bo, died.  An ancient language of the Andaman Islands, Bo belonged to a family of languages that were thought to have arrived from Africa as many as 70,000 years ago.

The death of a language is the beginning of a tragedy for us all, the tragedy that it is lost to us, we must live in a Bo-less world, that our planet become just slightly less polychromatic.  But the death of a language is also, in a way, the end of a tragedy for one person.

This is Boa Senior, who passed away on January 26, 2010.  She was the last speaker of her language.  Before she died, Boa Sr. was visited by anthropologists and linguists, who researched her language and recorded her story, as best they could.  One researcher said that the two of them had become “firm friends.”  She was said to have had a warm smile and a contagious laugh.

Still, it must have been a lonely life.  Both of her parents had passed away some decades before, leaving Boa Senior without a single other person who spoke her language.  She learned some Hindi just so she could get to talk to people.  One obituary says that she “was often sighted talking to birds in her language as she maintained that birds were her ancestors and understood her.”

I think that whether we speak Bo or Hindi, Comanche or English, language death affects us.  The great British linguist David Crystal once suggested that if we care about languages, maybe we should make official holidays about them, like the green movement and Earth Day.  I would like to nominate January 26 as language diversity day, in honor of Boa Senior.

Monday inspiration: Truganini

Tags

aboriginal, aborigine, Australian, language death, Tasmanian

Of all the music I’ve stumbled upon in the past few years, my very favorite is Australian political rock band Midnight Oil.  I am officially obsessed with Midnight Oil.  My fascination with all things Australian led me to them, and my love of them makes me more fascinated with Australia, and around and around we go.  If any of you readers are from that part of the world, I’m sure you realize I’m about 20 years behind the times on this one, but you probably also realize that not much pop culture makes it from there to here, so I hope I’ll be forgiven.

Always critical of Australian racial and environmental politics, Midnight Oil’s songs increasingly focused on indigenous issues, and in 1993 they wrote this song:

I love this song.

The title of the song is the name of a woman reported to be the last full-blood aboriginal speaker of Tasmanian, a now-extinct language.  She and Albert Namatjira stand as symbols for the plight of aboriginal peoples in the wake of European colonization (and “What for?” the band asks).  The song generated some controversy when it first came out, partially because the band announced in their liner notes that Truganini was “the sole surviving Tasmanian aborigine,” which was news to the 7,000 other surviving Tasmanian aborigines.  And appropriating a person as a symbol to make a political point, especially a member of an ethnic community traditionally dominated by the ethnic community the band members belong to, was deeply controversial and hurtful to some.  In fact, it’s kind of an example of exactly the kinds of treatment the song is protesting.

I can imagine some people brushing off this kind of criticism as mere cultural hypersensitivity, but it seems that Midnight Oil, to their credit, reacted to the backlash by attempting to become more deeply, and sensitively, connected to the aboriginal communities they had offended.  I think that’s the best we can hope for sometimes; try as we might, we don’t know enough about each other or understand enough to always avoid offense, but hopefully our missteps at least lead to conversation and clarity.  That’s one of the reasons I love this song.  Plus the line about “I see Namatjira with dignity” gets me all choked up.  Plus the heroine is a last speaker.

Plus it’s a damn good song.

A polychromatic world of diversity

Tags

anthropology, diversity, endangered languages, ethnosphere, language death, National Geographic, Wade Davis

When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices.

Wade Davis, in addition to being an author, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnobotanist, and National Geographic superhero, is without a doubt the most eloquent advocate for cultural diversity I have come across.  I’ve watched this video countless times over the years and it always leaves me breathless.

In the video he speaks generally about diversity in the “ethnosphere,” but he also specifically mentions language death and linguistic diversity.  After all, he says, “A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules.  A language is a flash of the human spirit.”

He certainly has a way with language himself.  Describing a particular hallucinogen used in the Amazon, he says “…to have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.”  Grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical!  He’s either a bit of a linguist himself or a bit of a poet.

He’s a profound speaker, and I always have to pause several times to think or to furiously scribble quotes, but what is most profound I think is his obvious love for all of the different ways of being human.

“It shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art,” he says, “but what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture.”