Can threatened or dying languages be revived?
01 December 2005
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There's a difference, of course, between a language that's extinct and one that's threatened. Hittite, once the language of a great empire, is as dead as the sabre-toothed tiger. Many of the world's languages today are like the rare and beautiful whooping cranes--hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
Take Cherokee: in the past three or four decades, the number of children speaking it as a first language has declined so sharply that Cherokee could disappear in just another generation. But here's a scene that provides hope: In a preschool classroom in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, three- and four-year old children are sitting with their teachers on a colorful carpet in a corner of the room, reading together from a picture book. It looks like what preschoolers everywhere do. What's unique in this scene, is that the book they're reading is in Cherokee, and it’s the only language used in the classroom.
If a language is to live, it's critical that the children learn it. The hope is that, by the time these kids reach third grade, they'll be fluent enough in their ancestral tongue to become a new generation of Cherokee speakers. There are similar programs --- from infant day care through high school classes -- among the Mohawk people in New York State and Canada, the Blackfoot in Montana, Arapaho in Wyoming, and other native American communities. It takes a lot of effort, but the programs are succeeding.
In the U.S., the Native American Languages Acts of 1990 and 1992, have put a priority on saving languages that may die if nothing is done to keep them alive. Indigenous languages are being taught in colleges and universities in Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Some communities have set up summer language camps for children and adults, or online language courses. Linguists are working to preserve not only native American languages, but others such as Gullah, a creole from Africa, spoken on the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
And it's not just in the U.S. Think of Gaelic, which was revitalized in Ireland. Or Hebrew, which was used only for religious purposes until it was revived to become the official language of Israel.
It's taken us a long time to realize the value of sustaining languages, but now it's happening. Within the past twenty years, language revitalization has become an international movement. The United Nations -- through UNESCO -- and multinational companies like Volkswagen have embraced the idea. In Africa, literature on AIDS is being used to teach literacy in African languages. In the Amazon rain forest, Yanomami people are learning about hygiene through literature printed in their tribal language. Teachers in Siberia are being trained by linguists from Russia and the Netherlands to teach local languages to children. And where there are only a few elderly speakers left in a community, young language learners are spending time with them, doing everyday chores in the language so they too can become speakers.
Where there's a population of speakers and a willingness to keep the language alive, people are working to document and describe endangered languages. In places where the languages haven't been spoken for years, they're using archives, oral histories and notes from missionaries, anthropologists, and historians to revive languages, just as Hebrew was revived from the written form. It's a growing effort, and it may be our best hope to stem the loss of languages that are otherwise doomed.
Linguist Ken Hale has compared the loss of a language to "dropping a bomb on a museum," destroying a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's a sobering thought that most of the languages that ever existed have already gone the way of the sabre-toothed tiger. Which is why we need to care for the ones that are threatened... as if they were whooping cranes.
That's the language thought for today, which comes from linguists Akira Yamamoto, Marcellino Berardo, Tracy Hirata-Edds, Mary Linn, Lizette Peter, and Kimiko Yamamoto at the Universities of Kansas and Oklahoma. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit our website at www.coFc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, language makes a difference.