BY the end of this century, half, and possibly as many as 90 per cent, of all the world’s languages will have disappeared. No trace will be left of ancestral tongues spoken today in remote valleys of Papua New Guinea or in isolated settlements in Siberia. No Syrian villages will still speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Christ. No West African troubadours will enchant their listeners with hours of oral history.
Of the world’s 6,500 languages, at least 4,000 will be swept away by the advancing tide of Mandarin, English, Spanish and other mainstream languages that now dominate global commerce and communication. Today some 96 per cent of all languages still extant are spoken by only 4 per cent of the world’s population. But every month more disappear. And as elderly aboriginal villagers in Australia, Africa and on native American reservations die, so too do the myths, insights, expressions and cultural assumptions that underpin their languages.
Global alarm at this loss of cultural diversity has increased. Like those environmentalists a generation ago who warned the world that its birds, plants, animals and habitats were being lost, scholars, linguists and historians are racing to document and sustain languages now on the danger list.
At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, a massive £20 million project is beginning the second year of an ambitious research and teaching programme to identify, record and, if possible, save some of the rarer and more esoteric languages. The names alone suggest the colour and variety: Archi, an unwritten language spoken by fewer than 800 people in one village of the southern Caucasus; Iquito, a language of the endangered Zaparoan family of the Peruvian Amazon with only 25 elderly speakers; Aleut, spoken still by about 70 people in the Aleutian and Pribliof islands; Jawoyn, spoken only by three elderly Aboriginal speakers in South Arnhem land, Australia; and a dozen others.
Professor Peter Austin, an Australian heading the programme, has himself worked on 12 Aboriginal languages that have all vanished. They disappeared, as most do, for two reasons. External factors, such as war, pestilence and now HIV, kill the elderly or force survivors to accept the language of the conquerors. And, more importantly, languages lose their validity among their speakers when they come into contact with others seen to offer better social and economic opportunities to a younger generation. Welsh — until its revival — was a classic example.
It is not just a question of numbers. “Some languages in Papua are spoken by only 1,000 people, but they are strong and healthy and will last 100 years. Young and old all accept them as a vehicle of communication,” Professor Austin said. “By contrast Balinese is spoken by some three million people in Bali but is endangered because increasing numbers of children speak Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language.”
With its extraordinarily generous grant from the Lisbet Rausching Charitable Fund, SOAS has set itself three aims: to train researchers in linguistic fieldwork and document as many threatened languages as possible; to offer a postgraduate programme and public lectures and seminars; and to set up a digital archive which will be catalogued on the web, giving access to scholars anywhere.
Researchers go to families and houses, filming and recording conversations, stories and folk talks. They then transcribe and document the endangered language, drawing up reference grammars, dictionaries or collecting texts that illustrate the embedded culture. The outlook is not all black. Several languages, even at a late stage, have been resuscitated by community support. The key step is to have the language used and accepted by the younger generation. Two of the most striking examples are Welsh and Maori.
In Wales, the number of Welsh-speakers is now greater than it has been for many years. In New Zealand, a programme to create “language nests”, where grandmothers could talk to their grandchildren in Maori to foster an early understanding, has meant that there are now Maori speakers able to use the language at university level.
Irish Gaelic has been less successful. Although the Irish Government made intensive efforts after independence to foster the language, there are too many variants spoken, too small a concentration of speakers in any single region and too little support outside schools to get the language accepted across the country.
London is an appropriate centre for this rescue mission. Some 350 languages are spoken in the capital. But persuading foreign governments to spend money preserving local languages is not easy. In many Third World countries, the cacophony of tongues is seen as an economic hindrance to development and a real factor in maintaining ethnic and tribal division. In Nigeria, for example, where 250 languages are spoken, there is strong resistance at federal level to programmes that perpetuate linguistic division.
But linguists and communities won a big victory recently, when the United Nations adopted an international declaration of linguistic and cultural rights. This specifically recognised the place of minority languages in national heritage.
Professor Austin argues that an endangered language need not be seen as the enemy of a lingua franca. The dominance of mainstream languages is impossible to resist — and in the future more and more of the world will be covered by about a dozen languages.
But in former days, he says, bilingualism or trilingualism was far more common; people spoke different languages in different contexts. Indeed, research has shown that those brought up bilingual often have greater learning skills and adaptability than monolingual children.
No academic researcher alone can save a language, however. “That must ultimately be a decision of the community itself,” Professor Austin said. What SOAS can do is preserve as much of a language’s context as possible, so that the inherited culture and knowledge embedded in it is available for those who are interested, and not lost when the last speaker dies.
