The Last Speakers (30 page)
Authors: K. David Harrison
Clearly the forces of localization are powerful in languages, so perhaps we should not worry about globalization at all. In an imaginary future, English will continue to expand, as will Chinese and Arabic, yielding a trilingual world. But at the same time, English, Chinese, and Arabic will branch into hundreds of local varieties, perhaps only connected by a kind of newscaster-speak or written form that is comprehensible across the dialects. We would live in a world of new and superficial language diversity, having lost deep bodies of knowledge when the other 6,997 languages vanished.
The push-back against globalization in the form of language revitalization will be one of the most interesting social trends to observe over the coming decades. Its outcome will have profound consequences for the intellectual capacity of our species, and for the state of human knowledge. As I have followed the lives and stories of the last speakers described in this book, I hear their message loud and clear: We value our knowledge, we value our languages, we have something to contribute. It would be incredibly shortsighted for us, in our Western industrialized societies, to think that because we have put men on the moon and split the atom, we have nothing to learn from people who just a generation ago were hunter-gatherers in a remote wilderness. What they knowâwhich we've forgotten or never knewâmay someday save us. We need to hear this message, over and over, in 7,000 different ways of speaking. Let's listen, while we still can.
THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of years of research that was generously supported, mentored, and assisted by many people. I thank Dr. Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages for years of inspiring collaboration in diverse locales.
The Enduring Voices Projectâa joint effort of the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languagesâmade possible the expeditions and research described in this book. The project was initiated at National Geographic by Terry Garcia, Dr. Wade Davis, and Chris Ranier, and funding was generously provided by Lucy Billingsley, Lisa Duke, Joanie Nasher, and the estate of Michael O'Donnell.
Funding for my research was granted by the National Science Foundation, Swarthmore College, Yale University, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, IREX, the Genographic Legacy Fund, and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to people who helped me in various ways during the writing: Garrett Brown, John Paine, Dr. Stephen Gluckman, Jeremy Fahringer, and John Williams.
A portion of the proceeds from this book will support language revitalization.
Dialect
Any spoken variety of a language, of no less interest or value than any other variety. As a language changes, its dialects may diverge and eventually become separate languages (e.g., Spanish and French evolved from dialects of Latin). The point at which a dialect becomes a language cannot be determined precisely. Linguists use the criterion of mutual intelligibility (see below) to determine whether two language varieties are dialects of a single language or are distinct languages. But social factors and ethnic identity must also be recognized as partly determining the boundaries among languages.
Endangered Language
A language at risk of extinction. Signs that a language is endangered include a relatively small number of speakers, declining numbers of speakers, and speakers all above a certain age (that is, children are not learning the language).
Grammar
The patterns by which language is formed. For linguists, what is grammatical is based on real-world use. If a group of people use and understand a phrase, it is grammatical for their dialect. This differs from the traditional idea that there is only one “correct” way to speak. In linguistics, only sentences that no native speaker would use (e.g., “John to went my over house”) are judged as ungrammatical.
Language Archive
A repository that safeguards recordings of languages in various media and makes them available to users.
Language Death
A popular metaphor describing the situation when a community gradually stops using its heritage language and no longer passes it on to the children. A “dead” language that has been documented and recorded is sometimes termed a “sleeping” language. These languages may be awakened or revived through revitalization efforts.
Language Documentation
Recording of the linguistic and cultural information found in a language.
Language Prestige
Positive value placed on a language or features of a language. Often a language or a language variety is considered prestigious when it is spoken by those in power.
Language Revitalization
Actions and policies to promote and increase the use of a language, with the goal of stopping or reversing its decline.
Language Revival (or Reclamation)
An attempt to bring back a language that has already lost all its speakers, by teaching it to people who will become new speakers.
Language Shift
The most common process in a language's ceasing to be spoken. Speakers almost invariably shift from a small, local, indigenous language to a national or global language. As speakers use the language of prestige (see
language prestige
) more often, they stop passing on the indigenous language to children. This leads to its death.
Linguistics
The scientific study of language, and an academic discipline taught at universities.
Moribund Language
A language that will almost certainly become extinct in the near future because no children speak it as their first language. Such languages as Ãs and Chemehuevi, with only a few elderly speakers, are moribund.
Mutual Intelligibility
If speakers of two different language varieties can understand one another, their tongues are mutually intelligible and they are probably speaking different dialects of a single language. If two speakers are mutually unintelligible, then they are speaking two different languages.
Native Language
The language or languages learned naturally in early childhood, also called “first language.” This is not always the same as an ancestral language or heritage language, terms which refer to a language that was spoken by a person's ancestors. For example, the heritage
The epigraph is a portion of a longer poem circulated in 2009, written by Prof. John Goulet in memory of Prof. Michael Noonan.
INTRODUCTION
1.
Chemehuevi and Johnny Hill Jr., www.chemehuevi.net and www.crit-nsn.gov/crit_contents/government/johnny_hill.shtml.
2.
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
American Economic Review
XXXV, no. 4. (1945): 519-30 (American Economic Association).
3.
E. Müllhäusler,
Linguistic Ecology
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 166.
CHAPTER 1: BECOMING A LINGUIST
1.
Iris Smorodinsky, “Schwas in French: An Articulatory Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996); Scott F. Kiesling, “Dude,”
American Speech
79, no. 3 (2004): 281â305.
2.
The institute is now called SIL International (see www.SIL.org).
3.
Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli.
The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity.
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).
CHAPTER 2: SIBERIA CALLING
1.
“Castrén,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
11th ed. (1910â11). See also Anna Stammler-Gossmann, “A Life for an Idea: Matthias Alexander Castrén,”
Polar Record
 45, no. 234 (2009): 193â206.
2.
Mendel's original paper on genetics appeared in 1866; a translation appears in Gregor Mendel,
Experiments in Plant Hybridisation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).
3.
This section is adapted from my book
When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). A similarly complex system of genetic engineering of cattle according to pattern and color is practiced by the Bodi people of Ethiopia; see Katsuyoshi Fukui, “Co-evolution between Humans and Domesticates: The Cultural Selection of Animal Coat-Colour Diversity among the Bodi,” in
Redefining Nature,
ed. Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi Fukui (Oxford, England: Berg, 1996), 319â85.
CHAPTER 3: THE POWER OF WORDS
1.
United Nations Environment Program, press release, February 8, 2001, “Globalization Threat to World's Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Diversity.” Viewable at http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=192&ArticleID=2765. This section adapted from my book
When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2.
Knut J. Olawsky, “Urarina: Evidence for OVS Constituent Order,”
Leiden Papers in Linguistics
2, no. 2 (2005): 43â68.
3.
On the hooded seal, see D. M. Lavigne and K. M. Kovacs,
Harps and Hoods: Ice Breeding Seals of the Northwest Atlantic
(Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, 1988).
4.
Brendon Larson,
The Metaphoric Web: Environmental Metaphors and Sustainability
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
5.
Benjamin Lee Whorf,
Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings
. Edited by John Carroll. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 213â14.
6.
For recent papers on the debate, see D. Genter and S. Goldwin-Meadow, eds.,
Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
7.
The author acknowledges Dr. Stephen R. Anderson as the source of this apt formulation.
8.
Steven Pinker,
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
(New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 64.
9.
Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly, eds.,
The Earth Is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change
(Fairbanks, AK: Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, 2002), 175.
10.
Ibid., 177â78 and following.
11.
Conrad Oozeva et al.,
Watching Ice and Weather Our Way,
ed. Igor Krupnik et al. (Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution, 2004).
12.
Ibid.
13.
Joseph W. Bastien,
Healers of the Andes: Kallawaya Herbalists and Their Medicinal Plants
(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 103â4.
14.
Mapuche letter to Bill Gates, full text available at http://www.mapuche.info/mapu/ctt050812.html.
15.
Bloggers' comments accessed at http://digg.com/tech_news/Microsoft_Sued_by_Indians_for_Translating_without_Tribal_Elder_Permission?t=3972668 and at http://www.jacobandreas.net/2006/mapuche-indians-sue-microsoft-for-language-piracy. I thank Claire Shelden (Swarthmore College class of 2010) and acknowledge her excellent senior thesis “Linguistic Ownership,” written under my direction, as the source of some of the ideas in this section.
16.
Peter Whiteley, “Do âLanguage Rights' Serve Indigenous Interests? Some Hopi and Other Queries,”
American Anthropologist
105 (2003): 712â22.
CHAPTER 4: WHERE THE HOTSPOTS ARE
1.
R. A. Mittermeier, N. Myers, and C. G. Mittermeier, eds.,
Hotspots: Earth's Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions
(Mexico City: CEMAX, 1999). The term is also defined in an essay by Ralph and Cristina Mittermeier in Colin Prior,
The World's Wild Places
(Richmond Hill, Ontario: Firefly Books, 2006), 126â27.
2.
Conservation International, “Impact of Hotspots,” http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/xp/Hotspots/hotspotsScience/pages/impact_of_hotspots.aspx.
3.
V. H. Heywood, ed.,
Global Biodiversity Assessment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Edward O. Wilson,
The Future of Life
(New York: Random House, 2002).
4.
Einar Haugen,
The Ecology of Language
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972); E. Müllhäusler,
Linguistic Ecology
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 166; Salikoko Mufwene,
The Ecology of Language Evolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5.
R. Gillespie, “Dating the First Australians,”
Radiocarbon
44 (2002): 455â72.
6.
The Enduring Voices Australia expedition team was Greg Anderson, Sam Anderson, Chris Rainier, and myself. We were welcomed and accompanied at every location by local experts and elders to ensure that the work was carried out in accordance with local cultural and ethical standards. Data presented in this book was freely shared, and informed consent was granted to us by the speakers for its recording and wider dissemination.
7.
These were Mary Magdalene Dungoi, in her 80s, reportedly the oldest speaker of Magati Ke; and Elizabeth Cumanyi and Lucy Tcherna, both in their 70s.
8.
Although Amurdag had been reported in some of the scientific literature as extinct about 25 years prior, in fact it was not, and Australian linguists Robert Handelsmann, Nick Evans, Bruce Birch, and others had been with working with Charlie Mangulda and another remaining speaker over the years.
9.
Charlie Mangulda narrated these first to our local guide Freddie Bush, and then he helped Freddie retell the Rainbow Serpent story to us.
10.
We had with us a copy of Robert Handelsmann's thesis
Towards a Description of Amurdak: A Language of Northern Australia
(University of Melbourne, Honors Thesis, 1991). This invaluable monograph reflects a fuller state of the language that is likely no longer in existence, or at any rate not fully recalled by its last speaker(s).
11.
R. D. Lambert and B. F. Freed, eds.,
The Loss of Language Skills
(Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1982). See also B. Köpke, M. S. Schmid, M. Keijzer, and S. Dostert, eds.,
Language Attrition: Theoretical Perspectives
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007).
12.
An example of recent press about Charlie Mangulda and the efforts of linguists and musicologists to document his knowledge is “The Song Remains Unbroken” by Nicholas Rothwell in the
Australian,
September 21, 2009.
13.
Recorded field interview with Neil MacKenzie, July 2007, file L: 00:01:00-8:00.
14.
Greg Anderson and I also interviewed Yawuru elders Susan Edgar, her mother Elsie Edgar, and Thelma Sadler, who was 97 when we met her and likely the oldest living speaker of Yawuru.
15.
The Enduring Voices team in Paraguay consisted of linguists Greg Anderson and myself, photographer Chris Rainier, anthropologist Anna-Luisa Daigneault, and photographer and videographer Alejandro Chaskielberg.
16.
Puerto Diana, Paraguay, May 22â23, 2009. Field recordings by K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson. Field notes, interview, and translation by Anna Luisa Daigneault. All linguistic and cultural content is to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Chamacoco people.
CHAPTER 5: FINDING HIDDEN LANGUAGES
1.
Recordings of the Aka, Koro, and Miji were made mainly in Palizi and Siwu villages in West Kameng District, and in Yangse, Kadeyang, and Kaching villages in East Kameng District, Arunachal Pradesh, India. The fieldwork team consisted of Greg Anderson, Ganesh Murmu, and myself. Many thanks to language consultants Sange Degio, Khandu Degio, Katia Yame, Sange Chopel Nimasow, Anil Sangchozu, Kachim, Gujupi, Sunil Yame, Pario Nimasow, Lupa Sangcho, and Serbu Aka.
The Aka-Miji language cluster includes Aka-Hruso (ca 2,000 speakers), Miji (ca 2500), Koro (less than 800), Bugun/Khowa (less than 800), and Sulung/Puroik (less than 3,000). All these languages are either threatened or endangered. All of them are also poorly known to science. Much of what exists is of varying reliability and usefulness or in secondary sources, often appearing in publications that are obscure and/or of considerable age. See, for example, the following sources: C. R. MacGregor, “Notes on Akas and Akaland,”
Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal
(1884); J. D. Anderson,
A Short Vocabulary of the Aka Language
(Shillong, India, 1896); S. Konow, “Note on the Languages Spoken between the Assam Valley and Tibet,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(London) (1902): 127â37; S. Konow, “North Assam Group,” in
Linguistic Survey of India,
ed. G. A. Grierson, 3:568â72 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909); J. Schubert, “Hrusso-Vokabular,”
Mittelungen des Institüt für Orientforschung
(Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin) 10 (1964): 295â350; R. Shafer, “Hruso,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
12, no. 1 (1947): 184â96; R. Sinha,
The Akas
(Shillong, India: Research Dept., Adviser's Secretariat, 1962); I. M. Simon,
Aka Language Guide
(Shillong, India: North-East Frontier Agency Administration, 1970), reprint, 1993, Itanagar; I. M. Simon,
Miji Language Guide
(Shillong, India: Govt. of Arunachal Pradesh, 1979/1974), 198â212; G. van Driem,
Languages of the Himalayas
, 2 vols. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001).
Additional Aka data from K. David Harrison, Aka field notes, 2008, pp. 61â64.
2.
Dalvinder Singh Grewal,
Tribes of Arunachal Pradesh: Identity, Culture, and Languages
, 2 vols. (Delhi: South Asia Publications, 1997).
3.
Queen Elizabeth II vowel study: Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson, “Monophthongal Vowel Changes in Received Pronunciation: An Acoustic Analysis of the Queen's Christmas Broadcasts,”
Journal of the International Phonetic Association
30 (2000): 63â78 (Cambridge University Press).
4.
The Koro work was first presented publicly by Gregory Anderson in 2009 in two talks at scientific conferences: “The Aka Miji Language Cluster of Arunachal Pradesh” at South Asian Linguistic Analysis (SALA), University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, October 2009; and “The Aka Miji Cluster of the Kameng Region, Arunachal Pradesh” at the Himalayan Languages Symposium, University of Oregon, Eugene, August 2009. Both talks were co-authored by Gregory D. S. Anderson, K. David Harrison, and Ganesh Murmu.
5.
The original text of this story is from the archives of the Laboratory of Siberian Languages, Tomsk State Pedagogical University, which were accessed by us courtesy of Dr. Andrei Filtchenko. The author interviewed the storyteller in person in July 2003 but did not reelicit the story, due to her advanced age and deafness. The story was translated into English by the author, Greg Anderson, and members of the Ãs community. Copyright herein pertains solely to the English translation; ownership of the original text resides with the Ãs community.
