The Last Speakers (14 page)

Having confirmed that Koro was indeed unique, our next task was to map its current known locations and the number and identity of speakers. We would also try to assess its vitality and discover whether it was being used by young people. A local schoolboy, Sunil Yame, was our expert guide here. Though he was not shy about using the language, he often found himself at a loss for words, being more comfortable conversing in Aka, Hindi, or even English. Sunil was a living example of language shift. He invited us to accompany him to his village, located ten miles away along winding roads, where we could interview his father and village elders.

The village of Kadeyã was set on a high embankment over a river gorge, surrounded by steep slopes and elevated orange groves. Our arrival caused a sensation, and the youth of the village took a break from building a volleyball court to watch us work. On the veranda of Sunil's bamboo house, we interviewed one of the very oldest inhabitants, Nuklu. A diminutive, wiry man, he spoke fast and with gusto about techniques for hunting tigers and monkeys. Nuklu's stories were made believable by the fact that he was decked out with a fur-covered machete, an arrow-filled quiver, and a bow. At one point in his story, he jumped up and loaded a bamboo arrow,
ba,
into his bow,
le,
poised to shoot an invisible tiger.

Sunil's father, Katia Yame, spoke Koro fluently, but within the family, usage fell off dramatically. Sunil and his sister did not regularly speak the language with their parents, and never spoke it with their peers. Koro must be considered endangered because very few people under the age of 20 speak it. Speakers we interviewed admitted they tend to use it only in private, personal encounters with another person who speaks it, and never in the presence of nonspeakers. This behavior contributes to the somewhat hidden nature of Koro and maintains its secrecy within the community.

Having collected several thousand words and hundreds of sentences, our next task was to try to identify the language-family affiliations of Koro. Most languages have siblings, languages that descend from a common ancestor and are related. Italian and Catalan and Romanian are sister languages and daughters of Latin, for example. A few outlier languages, like Japanese and Basque, have no known relatives, and we call these “isolates.” Languages are constantly changing, as populations disperse, and what once was a single ancestor language can split up into daughter languages. If this took place a very long time ago, say more than 5,000 years, the resemblances among the daughter languages are faint and hard to discern. If the split happened more recently, say 1,000 years ago, as with the Romance or Slavic languages, then the sibling resemblances are clear even to an untrained observer.

Whenever I give public lectures, a member of the audience always stands up and asks, “What's the difference between a language and a dialect?” I am surprised, not at the question itself, which is an old conundrum in my field, but by the degree to which members of the public seem vexed by this issue and want to know the answer. The answer I give them rarely satisfies, because I have to say, “Nothing,” and then, “It depends.” I say nothing because linguists believe that every language is simply a language; whatever comes out of a person's mouth and is understood, is language. We make no distinction between “proper” and “incorrect” speech. Most languages do have at least one variety that is abitrarily recognized as better, purer, or more sophisticated (for French, this is the 14th Arrondissement variety of French).

But even this distinction is a fiction. Everyone has an accent; everyone's speech conforms to and differs from some imaginary standard. Even if we imagine that the correct way of speaking English is that of the Queen herself, we might be amused to learn that even Her Majesty Elizabeth II has abandoned her own queenly English in favor of an inflection distinctly more working class. Linguists analyzed the Queen's vowels by listening to recordings of her annual Christmas Day address delivered annually since she ascended the throne in 1952.
3
To their surprise, they found that the Queen's vowels had shifted from a royal cast to a more common variety. If even the Queen does not stick to one accent over her lifetime, then there can be no such thing as standard or “correct” pronunciation. We all have an accent, and it can change dynamically over our life span.

Koro—as we have analyzed it thus far—seems to have no close sister languages, nor does it seem to be a dialect of any other language. The larger family affiliation for Koro is Tibeto-Burman, a vast family that stretches from across a wide swath of Asia and has more than 400 known members belonging to many different sub-branches. We do not yet know exactly how Koro fits into the Tibeto-Burman family tree, or what tongues may turn out to be its cousins. This will require careful analysis, comparing as many words as we can from Koro to words from many other different potential siblings.

For example, let's take the Koro words for moon, star, cloud, and monkey. Comparing them to words from four nearby (and potentially related) languages, as shown in the accompanying table, we find that “moon” is shared (of course, they all have slightly different pronunciations, but we can recognize them as basically the same word). “Monkey,” by contrast, is unique in Koro, not obviously related to any of the other five words (though some of those five do seem to be related among themselves).

In the table, an asterisk indicates a clear relationship to Koro. For “moon,” four out of five candidate forms closely resemble the Koro word, with just minor changes. We call such words “cognates.” For “star,” the changes are more radical and require a trained eye to spot, but the identified cognates are still solid. “Cloud” represents more of a stretch, and there's no certainty any are related, though some could plausibly be. For “monkey,” the Koro word stands alone, perhaps unrelated to all the others, possibly an ancient relic of an earlier state of the language, or a specific name that came to mean monkey in general.
4

Expanding this comparative spreadsheet into a much larger one yields a matrix of relatedness that tells us a revealing fact about Koro's lineage. But for any set of words that look alike, we must also ask if cognate relationships are due to common ancestry or to borrowing. Languages borrow words promiscuously, but if a large percentage of words in two different languages sound similar, we reasonably assume that they spring from a common ancestor tongue.

As a small and struggling culture, what is the value of this recognition to the speech community itself? Does Koro
need
to be “discovered” by science? Will it benefit from being written about, publicized, and known to outsiders? There's no clear answer, but some thorny ethical dilemmas. Part of the uniqueness of very small languages is that their speakers may feel a sense of ownership over them. In the case of the Koro, even though they seem to be gradually giving up their language, it remains the most powerful trait that identifies them as a distinct people. Without it, they are merely part of a larger group, within India's population of a billion-plus.

SILENT IN SIBERIA

While Koro was “hidden” by being overlooked and unnoticed, Chulym, or Ös, one of the smallest of Siberian tongues, must be considered a language that was intentionally hidden. Yet over the past few years, it has emerged from near invisibility to become one of the best known endangered languages in the world, thanks to the medium of film.

In 2003, five years before the Koro trip, documentary filmmakers Dan Miller and Seth Kramer called me and asked if they could accompany me on one of my field expeditions. They had been inspired—in part by the loss of Yiddish as a heritage language in their own families—to make a film about dying languages. In researching the topic and speaking to many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, they realized that Yiddish was not alone (in fact, some varieties of Yiddish are now gaining new speakers, while others remain endangered). They came to me because I specialize in this work, and they thought I might be a potential documentary film subject. At the time, I had just finished up a five-year project in Siberia, along with working in Mongolia, and I wanted to go back to both places. I offered Dan and Seth the option of traveling to a field site where I had an established network of people, so that the filming would be easier. They declined, preferring a reality TV vibe in which everything would unfold spontaneously, and we might or might not find what we were looking for. In short, they wanted me to go somewhere I had never been and track down the last speakers of a language.

After consulting with my research partner Greg Anderson, who's an expert on Siberia, we settled on Chulym, one of the most obscure, smallest, and least known languages of Siberia. All we knew about Chulym was taken from a 1970s report that put the numbers at less than a few hundred speakers, and we anticipated that the number would be much smaller now. We also knew that little documentation had been done—only a few obscure publications in Russian, with no known recordings. Chulym seemed like a good bet for a language in the last stages of its existence. Fortunately, we also knew that native Siberian people are welcoming and fairly relaxed about being filmed.

With film crew in tow, Greg and I set off for a remote village that was not even shown on local maps. We had no idea at the time that this humble journey to hear last whispers would find a global audience in the celebrated documentary film
The Linguists,
which would bring this nearly extinct language to the ears of thousands of listeners around the world.

After many hours on dusty unpaved roads, our taxi driver deposited us in the sleepy village of Tegul'det. Poking around, we managed to rouse someone at the post office (it was “postal workers' day,” and the post office ladies were enjoying a celebratory vodka lunch). They brought us to see the mayor, and that's when our adventure began.

A gruff, burly Russian, the mayor lost no time in telling us how worthless the local natives were. Those Chulym get drunk after just a couple of shots of vodka, he announced with a superior smirk. “The Russians are stronger, they don't get drunk as fast.” He then summoned a Chulym to be our driver and guide. Vasya Gabov, an imposingly stout and affable man of 52, came along in his bright red Lada. We immediately felt we were in good company, and he took us to his house, where his wife prepared tea and made us feel welcome.

The next day, we attended a special meeting of the Chulym tribal council. Many of the Chulym, due to intermarriage, are indistinguishable from Russians, though some tend to be slightly darker skinned and have dark hair. The tribal council had seven members, none of whom spoke Chulym. But they were very receptive to our proposal that we make recordings of the last speakers. They drew up a letter of permission and made just two requests: one, don't film any drunk people, and two, make a Chulym storybook for the community.

Now, if we could only locate some actual speakers, we could get to work! Vasya proved to be an ideal guide: he was warmly received everywhere and always had a laugh and a funny story to tell. One of the first speakers he took us to visit was, quite literally, incoherent. Varvara was about 70 years old, was possibly inebriated, and might have had Tourette's syndrome, as she was given to profane outbursts. Between swearing jags, she told us how glad she was we had come to visit her, and she sang a Chulym wool-spinning song. We had never heard the language sung before, and we strained to catch the words in her raspy voice.

Just up the path from Varvara's house, we met Max, who was nearly deaf. When we shouted into his ear, he managed to string together a few sentences of Chulym. I was born in “New Village,” he told us, struggling to recall Chulym words he seldom used.

By the end of the day, we were discouraged, because neither Varvara nor Max was able to produce anything like coherent speech or a conversation. If we were to document the language, we would need speakers who could focus and answer questions, who were sober and thoughtful and patient.

Our run of poor luck continued when we met two of the oldest members of the Chulym nation, both ladies in their 90s. The first one, also named Varvara, was tiny and wizened, with a floral headscarf and large walking stick. Sitting down with us on a log, she warbled and gestured, clearly intending to say something, but neither we nor Vasya could grasp her meaning. The second, Anna, was almost completely deaf and could only nod and smile as her granddaughter shouted at her, “Say something in Chulym to them! Speak Chulym to them!”