The Last Speakers (31 page)

6.
This story is to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Chulym (Ös) people. A set of original field notes recording this story is archived in the Tomsk Laboratory for Siberian Languages. According to the field notes, the storyteller was Maria Alekseevna Skoblina, who was born 1911 in Tjulapsax village. It was transcribed by R. M. Birjukovich, in Pasechnoe village, Krasnoyarsk Kray, in 1971 (Tomsk archive notebooks tom. VI, supranumbered pp. 573–629). The text was typed up from notebooks in June 2008 by Greg Anderson and myself. We added complete interlinear glossing and translation in July 2008.

CHAPTER 6: SIX DEGREES OF LANGUAGE

1.
The Enduring Voices research expedition to Papua New Guinea included Greg Anderson, Sam Anderson, Chris Rainier, and myself, and we were accompanied for portions of the trip by Joanie Nasher. Danielle Mathieu-Reeves went to Matugar village in 2010 to continue the Enduring Voices project activities there, under the guidance of Matugar consultant Rudolf Raward. Yokoim song lyrics transcribed by Alexandra Israel.

2.
William A. Foley,
The Yimas Language of New Guinea
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Yimas 1 village: S 04° 40.871' E 143° 33.011', Elevation 106 feet at the Spirit House; Konmei village: S 04° 34.6888' E 143 ° 33.077', Elevation 66 feet.

3.
Thanks to Jared Diamond (personal communication of January 25, 2010) for this formulation, a variation of the famous saying by Max Weinreich, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

4.
Jadran Mimica,
Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems
(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988).

5.
Julius Sungulmari, Ambonwari Village: S 04° 36.824' E 143° 36.737', Elevation 42 feet. For an ethnographic study of this Ambonwari village, see Borut Telban,
Dancing Through Time: A Sepik Cosmology,
Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

6.
Field interviews by the author with Oruncho Gamango and with Opino Gamango, Gajapati District, Orissa State, India, March 2, 2007.

CHAPTER 7: HOW DO STORIES SURVIVE?

1.
Barbara Tuchman,
The Book
(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1980).

2.
Pablo Neruda, in
The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems,
ed. Mark Eisner (City Lights Publishers, 2004).

3.
The Wikimedia foundation, in its 2007–2008 annual report, also makes the claim that its Wiktionary is “A dictionary and thesaurus in all languages.”

4.
K. David Harrison, “A Tuvan Hero Tale, with Commentary, Morphemic Analysis and Translation,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
125, no. 1 (2005): 1–30. Cited extract on pp. 20–21.

5.
Small languages, and even not so small ones like Ho, can find it difficult to break into the computer age if they use a non-Latin alphabet or writing system that differs from those used by economically important world languages. For the sake of language revitalization and access to computers by speakers of endangered languages, we hope to see greater progress in ushering the writing systems of small and endangered languages into the worldwide Unicode standard.

6.
John Deeney,
Ho–English Dictionary,
rev. ed. (Ranchi, India: Xavier Publications, Catholic Press, 2005), 192–93.

7.
Ibid.
,
1.

8.
The Ho origin myth was told by K. C. Naik Biruli (born 1957), resident in Mayurbanj district, Bhubaneshwar, India, on September 13,2005. It was recorded in audio and video by Greg Anderson and myself. This is an abridged version of a yet unpublished translation by Biruli, Anderson, and Harrison. The “ten months” of pregnancy are lunar months. A version of this Ho origin story appeared in K. David Harrison,
When Languages Die: The Extinction of Human Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202–3.

CHAPTER 8: BREAKING OUT IN SONG

1.
Colleagues who accompanied me on the various expeditions include linguist Greg Anderson, anthropologist Brian Donahoe, phonetician Sven Grawunder, sound engineer Joel Gordon, musician Katherine Vincent, mechanical engineer Afanasij Myldyk, Mongolian specialist Peter Marsh, musicologist Valentina Süzükei, practicing Buddhist lama and shaman Chechen Kuular, and many others.

2.
“Greenhouse Gas Bubbling from Siberian  Permafrost,”
Seed,
September 13, 2006, http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/greenhouse_gas_bubbling_from_siberian_permafrost/.

3.
Theodore Levin, with Valentina Süzükei,
Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

4.
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939).

CHAPTER 9: WHEN A WORLD IS RUNNING DOWN

1.
The uniqueness and antiquity of the Tofa bear lexicon represents a working hypothesis, and certainly merits further comparative and historical study. See Gregory D. S. Anderson and K. David Harrison, “Hunter-Gatherers Speaking the Language of Pastoral Nomads,” in
The Languages of Hunter-Gatherers: Global and Historical Perspectives,
ed. R. Rhodes et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

2.
This section adapted from my 2007 book
When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

3.
John McWhorter, “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English,”
World Affairs
(Fall 2009). Accessed at www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html.

4.
Albert Costa, Mireia Hernández, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, “Bilingualism Aids Conflict Resolution: Evidence from the ANT Task,”
Cognition
106, no. 1 (January 2008): 59–86.

5.
Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Morris Freedman, “Bilingualism as a Protection Against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,”
Neuropsychologia
45, no. 2 (February 2007): 459–64.

6.
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

7.
Tom Colls, “The Death of Language?”
Today,
BBC4, October 19, 2009, transcript available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm.

8.
This and the following comments were posted in response to Colls, “The Death of Language?” at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm.

CHAPTER 10: SAVING LANGUAGES

1.
Nora C. England, “Commentary: Further Rhetorical Concerns,”
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
12, no. 2 (2002): 142–43.

2.
See M. Kat Anderson,
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

3.
Washoe interviews with Ramona Dick, elicited by Alan C. L. Yu, filmed by K. David Harrison, July 2007. See also http://www.kumeyaay.com/2007/09/a-final-say-they-hope-not-tribal-elders-are-helping-a-linguist-compile-an-online-dictionary-of-washo-a-language-close-to-extinction-more-than-just-words-are-at-stake.

4.
The preceding sections are based on Washoe interviews with Ramona Dick, elicited by Alan C. L. Yu, filmed by K. David Harrison, July 2007. All Washoe materials are used with informed consent of the speakers and are to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Washoe people. For more information on the Washoe people and Washo language, see www.washoetribe.us.

5.
Terrie Winson,
Lenni Lenape,
http://www.anthro4n6.net/lenape.

6.
Lenape language classes at Swarthmore College were organized by Dr. Theodore Fernald and Shelley DePaul in 2009 and 2010, funded by grants from the Lang Center for Social Change and from the National Science Foundation, under the guidance of NSF program officer Dr. Susan Penfield.

7.
Thanks to Dr. Margaret Noori for assistance with this section.

8.
Bernard C. Perley, “Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death,” in
The Anthropology of Extinction,
ed. Genese Sodikoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

9.
Tyler Cowen,
Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

K. DAVID HARRISON is associate professor and chair of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic fellow. He received his doctorate from Yale University. He is widely recognized and consulted as a leading spokesman for endangered languages. He makes frequent appearances before college, high school, and other public audiences and in media outlets such as NPR, BBC,
Good Morning America,
and
The Colbert Report
. He co-starred in the documentary film
The Linguists
(http://www.thelinguists.com), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. The film documents his travels around the world to track down and interview last speakers of nearly extinct tongues. As a linguist and specialist in Siberian Turkic languages, Harrison has spent many months in Siberia and Mongolia working with nomadic herders and studying their languages and traditions. He has also worked in India, the Philippines, Lithuania, Bolivia, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, and the United States with members of the last generations of speakers of endangered languages. Harrison's work includes not only scientific descriptions of languages but also storybooks, translations, and digital archives for the use of the native speaker communities. He is the author of
When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge
. He lives in Philadelphia.