The Last Speakers (26 page)

The contrarian ranks have been joined by several prominent public intellectuals. Recently Dr. John McWhorter, a linguist who has written well-regarded books about language history, including
The Power of Babel,
has jumped on the “let them die” bandwagon. In a stunningly obtuse article he published in
World Affairs,
he dismisses polylingualism as so much nuisance, and the efforts of people trying to save languages as frivolous and ill-conceived.
3
McWhorter's article bears quoting at length, to point out some of the fallacies, but also to underscore that legitimate questions about the value of languages can be asked and should be answered.

McWhorter argues that differences among languages are simply the result of random drift, of chance and minor differences in meaning and pronunciation that emerge over time. As accent and dialect features accumulate over time, the two tongues may eventually be considered two distinct languages. Such differences, McWhorter argues, reveal nothing interestingly different about our “souls.” He claims that “a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation.”

If so, then Stonehenge and Machu Picchu differ only because of different randomly evolved building methods, but tell us nothing interesting about the ancient Neolithic and 14th-century Inca cultures. It's hard to imagine a lesser regard for the products of human genius and their great diversity that arises differently under different conditions. As people have spread out and populated the planet, they have continually adapted, applying their ingenuity to solve unique survival problems in each location, and inventing unique ways of conceptualizing ideas. Geographic isolation and the struggle for survival have been the catalyst for immense creativity. All cultures encode their genius in their spoken languages, while many fewer do so in writing or in built monuments. They encode this knowledge in a way that is complex, not easily translated, and certainly not equivalent across time and space. We might as well say the study of human history has no value to our survival.

Going even further, McWhorter suggests that some languages are not suited for the modern world because of their complexity, citing the difficult counting system of Russian and the oddity of Berik, a language of Papua New Guinea in which anytime you use a verb, you must choose a form that specifies the sex of the person you are affecting, the size of the object, and whether it is daylight or dark outside. A similar example from Ket, a nearly extinct Siberian language, was shown in chapter 2, where the verb “stand” has four different forms depending on what is standing.

Such forms may indeed seem perverse, hard to learn, and mal-adapted to the computer age—from the point of view of English. Since they are so arcane and complex, we might think them unnecessary and worthy of being swept into the dustbin of history. Once again, however, this undervalues the wonder of human cognition. Languages are the way they are because brains are wondrously complex. Each language reveals different pathways of information, different packagings of knowledge that have arisen from the interactions of human brains through the medium of talk. Losing them, we will never have a full picture of what kinds of complexity the brain can produce.

A final argument is that people would all be better off (and might prefer) being monolingual, since language learning seems hard, especially as an adult, and bilingualism a burden. This viewpoint is likely widely held in our largely monolingual society where we have to laboriously learn language in classrooms. But our modern monolingualism should be seen as a historical anomaly, not the normal order of human affairs.

Let's get some perspective on what the human brain is capable of and the fact that humans may have been multilingual for most of their history. Anyone interested in this question should take the effort to visit a truly polylingual society and to ask anyone who lives there if they perceive any benefits or detriments of such a state. (I'll leave aside the examples of Switzerland or Belgium, where most people are comfortably trilingual.) I once saw a news clip of then senator Joe Biden saying he had never seen a country “that was successful that used more than one official language” (perhaps he hasn't been to Switzerland). To educate themselves on polylingualism, such doubters might visit Nauiyu Nambiyu, Australia, where Mayor Patricia McTaggert told me, somewhat apologetically, “Only nine languages are spoken in our town,” and proceeded to say how this enriches them all intellectually and culturally.

Or they might talk with Aboriginal Australian elder Charlie Mangulda, who speaks at least 12 languages (English is number 12 or 13), and thus has access to multiple domains of knowledge, not just 12 different ways of saying the same thing. Or visit Papua New Guinea, where I met dozens of men and women who casually speak six or eight languages. None of these people have giant distended crania from too much information, nor do they appear to be mentally impaired by languages crowding out other knowledge. I would suggest they are smarter, more mentally acute, and more aware of different perspectives on the world than most of us.

Daily use of two languages helps build up what scientists call the “cognitive reserve,” brainpower and mental agility, which gives tangible health benefits. Bilingual people are found to be better at what psychologists call “conflict tasks”—when a person is required to filter out irrelevant information to make a correct choice—and this benefit was found to be strongest for children and the elderly.
4
A study on nearly 200 Canadian subjects showed that active bilingualism sustained over the life span delayed the onset of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia by an average of four years.
5
Just as sudoku and other brain exercises keep the brain sharp, so does the use of multiple languages. And if it's true for the most elderly, it must also be true for people of all ages. This may explain Jared Diamond's assertion, in
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
that New Guinea highlanders are smarter than us.
6
He makes the point that they absorb, process, and retain information much as we do, but more of the information is relevant to the natural world around them and to their survival. Papuan peoples' practice of polylingualism might also contribute to their enhanced intelligence.

Benefits aside, we still live in a largely monolingual society, in which bilingualism is viewed as a social deficit, not a cognitive advantage. These ideologies give rise to conflicting sentiments found in blog comments all across the Internet. In reaction to a recent BBC feature, “The Death of Language?”
7
one Web posting opined:

This comment is exactly the kind of cultural triumphalism (believing we are the apex of civilization) that will lead to the demise of global language diversity. The very next commenter offered a sensible reply: “I grew up speaking a German dialect, and didn't speak English until I went to school. My father always asked us if we were richer having two dollars or one dollar. He said the same was true of language.”

A further argument, stemming directly from the biblical Babel tale, is that multilingualism divides humanity: “The utility of a single global language, spoken by everyone as their mother tongue, would surely outweigh any loss of cultural heritage. Let languages die their natural deaths—there are plenty left.”

One blogger wrote: “I think that the reduction in the number of languages spoken is also a great way to help unify the world and the human race in general. How can we expect cultures to keep peace between each other when they cannot understand each other? Having one, or a few global languages will make things much more convenient and seamless.”

An even more extreme view followed: “Most of the problems in the world stem from a lack of communications. If we all spoke English then these problems might disappear. It may be sad to lose other languages, but we must strive for one universal language.”

It seems easy for speakers of major world languages to proffer arguments about why small languages must be swept into the dustbin of history, about how this represents progress, modernity, and is not to be lamented. But in listening to the last speakers themselves, I find an entirely different set of viewpoints. They value their languages and the deep knowledge these contain. They do not willingly give them up, and do not wish to be coerced or shamed into doing so. They are perfectly willing to become multilingual in order to access the global economy, and they are generous in sharing their knowledge with others.

Working on endangered languages can be a depressing business, especially because last speakers are often elderly, downtrodden, oppressed, and in poor health. In this chapter, we have witnessed a world in decline. But many of the last speakers also possess a calm self-confidence that comes from being connected to their own ancient traditions. It is not inevitable, nor is it any kind of progress for these traditions to vanish. We have much to learn from them, if we are still willing to listen.

MANY PEOPLE
have compared languages to species in terms of the extinction threat. I think of these as parallel processes, yet interlinked in several ways. First, languages are more endangered than species, vanishing at a much faster rate. Second, we are at a similar state of scientific knowledge for both species and languages. According to the eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, over 80 percent of plant and animal species are not yet known to science or identified within a Western scientific paradigm. Similarly, at least 80 percent of languages are not yet adequately documented for scientific purposes, so we don't even know exactly what it is we are losing.

Third, many species and their habitats not yet identified in science are well known to local people, who have a sophisticated understanding of them. Much of what science does not yet know about the environment is known by speakers of endangered languages. Much (if not most) of humankind's accumulated knowledge of the natural world is encoded solely in languages that have never been written down or documented and are now facing extinction.

Species endangerment rates compared to language endangerment rates

With language extinction, we lose human knowledge about the natural world. As we have seen, languages uniquely encode in their grammars and lexicons specific information about topography, endemic species, and other environmental factors such as weather patterns and vegetation cycles. What the Kallawaya know about plants, how the Yupik describe sea ice and weather, how the Tofa name reindeer—all these domains of knowledge, only scantily documented, are eroding. Linguistic encoding allows for efficient transfer not only of names for things but also of complex and hierarchal taxonomic relations among species and other ecosystem elements. Most of this information is packaged such that it cannot be directly translated. Such knowledge erodes or dissipates when a community shifts over to speaking a global language, whether Russian, English, or Spanish.

TOWARD A DEEP ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

We borrow many metaphors from ecology and biology to talk about languages—for example, “healthy habitat,” “sustainability,” “extinction,” or “endangerment.” We could even extend this to include metaphors like “invasive species,” and so forth, applied to big colonial languages.

Borrowing metaphors is useful, since they provide fundamental building blocks for how we visualize and imagine and understand the world. Biological metaphors for language are common, in scholarly and popular usage. Nevertheless, the term “endangerment,” typically applied to biological species under threat of extinction, may, when applied to languages, suggest a false analogy or similarity between species on the one hand and cultures and languages on the other.

Linguist Nora England suggests that use of such metaphors can contribute to a sense of marginalization or “otherness” on the part of a small speech community, and that some people may find it demeaning to be “analogously linked to plants and insects and lower-order animals.” Though “endangered languages” is now a widely used and efficiently descriptive term, and one that some small language communities have also embraced, England advocates further reflection about a “way of speaking about disappearing, shrinking or threatened languages that avoids a false biological analogy, and…places the discussion in a readily understood context of universal human social action and existence, both individual and collective.”
1

I believe there can be no right or wrong metaphor. I prefer to rely on what last speakers themselves tell me and the metaphors they choose to talk about the process of language death. They often express sadness, nostalgia, regret, and hopelessness. The mood can feel like being at a funeral. Common metaphors that speakers themselves use include death, erasure, forgetting, neglect, abandonment, and extinction. A 20-year-old speaker of Aka in India told me, “In 50 years, I think our language will be removed.”

Aunt Marta, the 70-year-old last speaker of Tofa, told me, “Soon I'll go berry-picking, and when I do, I'll take the language with me.” With “berry-picking,” a Tofa metaphor for death, Marta directly linked her own mortality to the demise of her language. While she supported our efforts to study it, she admonished us: “You've come too late to learn our language. Nowadays we are a people whose days are numbered.”

Speakers often express hope the situation could improve, that a language could be reclaimed or revived. Yet in many cases this is not realistic, so there is a sense of resignation. “Of course it would be difficult,” Vasya Gabov remarked about the potential for revitalizing his native Ös/Chulym tongue, “but I think it could be doable.” Within a single community, and even within a single person, I've found wildly divergent attitudes toward the fate of a language: shame, rejection, denial, sadness, hope, optimism, resignation. Speakers' own attitudes are the intangible forces that exert the most influence—more than scholars or governments—over that fate.

DO LAST SPEAKERS EXIST?

Is it possible to identify an ultimate, final speaker of a language? The answer depends partly on where you think language resides. If it is primarily a set of words and rules encoded in the brain (or a brain), then we can think of a language as still existing even if only one speaker knows it. It might even be able exist without humans, perhaps in an artificial brain, digital archive, or computer program. If, on the other hand, language is primarily a set of social interactions, made possible by shared and socially distributed knowledge, then it requires at least two to talk. The question of where language resides will not be solved here, but it will allow us to be more precise about what we mean by “extinction.”

Consider some famous “last speakers” who have captured the popular imagination. In 2010, the death of Boa Sr, the last speaker of the Bo language of India's Andaman Islands, caused a flurry of press reports. Boa had been identified as the very last of her people for decades, and she had worked patiently with linguists to record her knowledge. Having lived in obscurity, the scion of an ancient lineage, Boa's haunting voice and a photo of her face suddenly reached millions through news websites and Facebook postings when she passed.

Another famous last speaker was Marie Smith Jones of the Eyak tribe of Alaska. Marie was widely heralded as the very last to speak this ancient tongue, which she learned as a little girl from her parents. After the death of an older sister in the 1990s, Marie had no one left to talk to. A renowned linguist, Dr. Michael Krauss, who was one of the first scholars to call attention to the global language extinction crisis, had begun working with Marie back in the 1960s. Their decades of joint effort left behind a rich archive of Eyak songs, stories, words, and sentences. These live on, in a kind of twilight existence, in the archives of the Alaska Native Languages Center in Anchorage, and portions of the language have been published. But that is a far cry from a living community of speakers. Language is not just a body of knowledge, but a form of social interaction. So when only a single speaker is left, it in one sense no longer exists, since there can be no conversation.

It has been my privilege to get to know a true last speaker of a language, Johnny Hill Jr. of the Chemehuevi tribe of Arizona. Johnny is a big, imposing man, but he has a gentleness and humility that instantly win people over. Johnny is regarded by many as the definitive “last speaker” of Chemehuevi, but even here the picture is a bit more complicated. As Johnny explains, there are in fact a few other elderly individuals who at one point in their life were fluent speakers, and would certainly be expected to know the language. The problem is, according to Johnny, that they no longer use it, because they either live at a distance from other speakers or choose not to speak it—or even if they wanted to, may not be on good speaking terms with the others. So, of the tiny set of all possible speakers, Johnny is the only one who actively uses the language. He has worked with linguists, including Dr. Susan Penfield, to make recordings of the language, patiently translating sentences into English. He does this in his free time when he is not working construction (his day job for many years) or serving on the tribal council (his current elected position in the tribe, now that he's retired).

More recently, since his cameo appearance in the film
The Linguists,
Johnny has become a celebrity. Although he had never traveled far from his reservation in Arizona or flown on an airplane, when the film was premiered, Johnny traveled to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. He also opened the All Roads Film Festivals in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Johnny mesmerized audiences there with his life story, his account of the feeling of despair and helplessness, and the burden that comes with being a last speaker. Johnny also provided fascinating details of his biography, such as how he was taken from his parents, when they weren't getting along too well, and raised by a grandmother who spoke no English, only Chemehuevi. This makes Johnny a skipped-generation speaker, decades younger than anyone else who knows the language. He told how when he was first sent off to school, he spoke no English, and he sat in the back of the classroom and uttered not a sound. He noticed that some of the other little boys were pointing and talking about him, so when recess time came, he had to beat up on them a bit. Later, he reports, they all became friends, and with the boys' help, he learned English. Learning English was Johnny's exodus from isolation; no longer did he have to be the only child in school who spoke just Chemehuevi.

At the other end of his life span, as all the elders have died off, Johnny finds himself linguistically isolated once again. “I have to talk to myself,” he explains. “There's nobody left for me to talk to. All the elders have passed on, so I talk to myself…. That's just how it is.” Johnny brought tears to the eyes of the Sundance audiences with his story, and he has become a highly visible and eloquent spokesman for dying Native American languages. “Sometimes I cry,” he says. “It's not just the language that's dying, it's the Chemehuevi people themselves.” Johnny has made efforts to pass the language on to his own children and others in the tribe. “Trouble is,” he explains, “they say they want to learn it, but when it comes time to do the work, nobody comes around.”

FROM FIRST CONTACT TO WAL-MART

The Washoe people of Nevada live just a short drive from heavily touristed Lake Tahoe, a body of water they consider sacred, called in their language
Da ow a ga
, “Giver of Life.” Washoe ancestors cared for these lands for millennia in a sustainable manner, harvesting acorns and elderberries, cutting willow shoots to weave baskets, using controlled burning techniques to refresh grazing lands for animals, setting willow-branch fish traps in the streams. In a Washoe origin myth, cattails turned into people: some became Miwok, others Paiute, and still others Washoe. The myth reveals a belief in relations not only among kindred tribes but also between plants and people.
2

I visited the Washoe in 2007, invited by linguist Dr. Alan Yu, who has devoted years to cultivating a close collaboration with the Washoe elders and documenting their language. In a double-wide trailer that served as the Washoe cultural center, we sat down with tribal elder Ramona Dick.
3
With the camera rolling, Ramona enthralled us with the story of her grandmother, who witnessed the arrival of the first white people in Nevada, coming over the mountains. She reminisced about a childhood when Lake Tahoe was pristine, and when the local monster “Tahoe Tessie” was seen to trouble the waters. She explained why pine nuts are sacred to her people, and how they have become com-modified and ruined, now sold at the local Wal-Mart but lacking in flavor. Tribal youngster Danny, a younger speaker in his 20s, joined the dialogue to talk about his efforts to keep and teach the language, and how it is connected to nature and basket-weaving and other aspects of life.

Ramona's story of first contact with white people—told in the style of a typical Washoe oral narrative—went like this: