The Language Revolution (7 page)

It is the size of the problem which is so dramatic. There is of course nothing unusual about a single language dying. Communities have come and gone throughout history, and with them their language. Hittite, for example, died out when its civilization disappeared in Old Testament times, and some sixty languages known from biblical times shared the same fate. That is understandable. But what is happening today is extraordinary, judged by the standards of the past. Half the world's languages dying out within a century is language extinction on a massive and unprecedented scale. How do we know that so many languages will be lost? In the course of the past two or three decades, linguists all over the world have spent a great deal of time gathering comparative data. There have been several major surveys. And when people survey a language, they do not just make notes about its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, they also look at the number of people who speak it, and how old they are. Obviously, if they find a language with just a few speakers left, and nobody is bothering to pass the language on to the children, that language is bound to die out soon. And we have to draw the same conclusion if a language has fewer than 100 or 1,000 speakers. It is not likely to last very long.

In a survey which was published in 1999 by the US Summer Institute of Linguistics organization, Ethnologue, there were fifty-one languages with just one speaker left – twenty-eight of them in Australia alone. There were nearly 500 languages in the world with fewer than 100 speakers; 1,500 with fewer than 1000; over 3,000 with fewer than 10,000 speakers; and a staggering 5,000 languages with fewer than 100,000. It turns out that 96 per cent of the world's languages are spoken by just 4 per cent of the people. It is perhaps no wonder that so many are in danger.

The figure of 100,000, in the context of endangered languages, sometimes takes people by surprise. Surely a language with 100,000 speakers is safe? The evidence is to the contrary. Such a language is not going to die next week or next year; but there is no guarantee that it will still be surviving in a couple of generations. It all depends on the pressures being imposed upon it – in particular, whether it is at risk from the dominance of another language. It also depends on the attitudes of the people who speak it – do they care if it lives or dies? Breton, in North-west France, is a classic case of a language reducing dramatically in numbers. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was spoken by as many as a million people, but it is now down to less than a quarter of that total. Breton could be saved if enough effort is made – the kind of effort that has already helped Welsh to recover its growth – and there are signs of this happening. If not, the downward trend will just continue, and it could be gone in fifty years. This scenario has already happened, in recent times, to two other Celtic languages in North-western Europe – Cornish, formerly spoken in Cornwall, and Manx, in the Isle of Man. Both are currently attracting support, in an effort to restore what has been lost; but once a language has lost its last community of native speakers, the task of resurrecting it – although not impossible, as has been seen with some of the Aboriginal languages of Australia – is hugely difficult.

It does not take a language long to disappear, once the will to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research. An example is Aleut, the language of the Aleutian Islands west of Alaska, surviving mainly in just one village, Atka. In 1990 there were sixty fluent speakers left; by 1994 there were just forty-four. If that rate of decline continues, Aleut will effectively be gone
by 2010. Given the age of the youngest speakers, still in their twenties, it will probably live on until the middle of the century, spoken sporadically, until eventually those last few speakers, isolated from each other and lacking the opportunities to renew their language through daily interaction, find they have no-one to talk to. This is a scenario that can be encountered anywhere in the world, but especially in the regions close to the Equator – in Brazil, West Africa, India and South-east Asia (especially Papua New Guinea) – where the majority of the world's languages are spoken.

Why are so many languages dying? The reasons range from natural disasters, through different forms of cultural assimilation, to genocide. Consider the first factor. Though accurate figures are virtually impossible to come by, it is evident that small communities in isolated areas can easily be decimated or wiped out by earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and other cataclysms. On 17 July 1998, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of East Saundaun Province, Papua New Guinea, killed over 2,200 and displaced over 10,000: the villages of Sissano, Warupu, Arop and Malol were destroyed; some 30 per cent of the Arop and Warupu villagers were killed. The people in these villages had already been identified by Summer Institute of Linguistics researchers as being sufficiently different from each other in their speech to justify the recognition of four separate languages, but the matter was unresolved: according to Ethnologue (1996), surveys were needed in three cases; some work was in progress in the fourth. The numbers were already small: Sissano had only 4,776 inhabitants in the 1990 census; Malol was estimated to have 3,330; Arop 1,700 in 1981; and Warupu 1,602 in 1983. The totals for Arop and Warupu will now each be at least 500 fewer. But as the villages were destroyed, and the survivors moved away to care centres and other locations,
there must now be a real question-mark over whether these communities (and thus their languages) will survive the trauma of displacement.

The historical effect of imported disease on indigenous peoples is well established, though the extraordinary scale of the effects in the early colonial period is still not widely appreciated. Within 200 years of the arrival of the first Europeans in the Americas, it is thought that over 90 per cent of the indigenous population was killed by the diseases which accompanied them, brought in by both animals and humans. To take just one area: the Central Mexico population is believed to have been something over 25 million in 1518, when the Spanish arrived, but it had dropped to 1.6 million by 1620. Some estimates suggest that the population of the New World may have been as high as 100 million before European contact. Within 200 years this had dropped to fewer than 1 million. The scale of this disaster can only be appreciated by comparing it with others: it far exceeds the 25 million thought to have died from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe; it even well exceeds the combined total of deaths in the two World Wars (some 30–40 million). Smallpox then; AIDS today. But diseases such as influenza and measles can just as easily be killers in a community that has no immunity to them, as has been repeatedly seen among the Amerindian languages of South America.

In parts of the world where indigenous natural resources have been subject to outside exploitation, the effect on the local people has been devastating, as is regularly documented by human rights organizations. The treatment of the communities of the Amazonian rainforest continues to provide cause for international condemnation. Despite decades of effort to secure land rights for the indigenous peoples, and to give them protection against the aggression of ranchers, miners and loggers, reports of ethnic murder
and displacement are still common. In other parts of the world, it is the political, rather than the economic, situation in a country which is the immediate cause of the decimation or disappearance of a community. The damage may be the result of civil war, or of conflict on an international scale. Long-standing ethnic or religious enmities may be implicated, as in parts of Africa. Claims about genocide are common.

In many places, it is difficult to disentangle political and economic factors. The disappearance of several languages in Colombia, for example, has been attributed to a mixture of aggressive circumstances. One strand highlights a history of military conflict, in which several indigenous communities have been exterminated. The conflict is complex, involving regular, paramilitary, guerrilla and criminal (drug-related) forces operating in rural areas; members of ethnic communities find themselves embroiled in the conflicts, often suspected by one of these forces as acting as collaborators with the other(s). Another strand highlights the exploitation of small communities by organizations both from within the country and from outside, with reported instances of slave labour (for rubber production along the Amazon) and of forced migrations from rural areas to the cities. Whatever the balance of causes, the result has been the same – significant mortality of the people, and short-term community disintegration.

The people may live, but the language may still die. The remaining cluster of factors causing language loss has nothing directly to do with the physical safety of a people. The members of the community remain alive and well, often continuing to inhabit their traditional territory; but their language nonetheless goes into decline, and eventually disappears, to be replaced by some other language. The term most often encountered in this connection is
cultural assimilation:
one culture is influenced by a more
dominant culture, and begins to lose its character as a result of its members adopting new behaviour and mores. Much of the present crisis stems from the major cultural movements which began 500 years ago, as colonialism spread a small number of dominant languages around the world. The point hardly needs to be stressed in such places as North America and Australia, where English has displaced so many aboriginal languages – but, as already mentioned, we must not forget that English is by no means the only language which has dominated in this way. In South America, it was Spanish and Portuguese. In northern Asia, it was Russian. Nor has European colonialism been the only cause. Arabic has steamrollered many languages in northern Africa. And in sub-Saharan Africa, local tribal empire-building has always been a critical factor.

Today, the factors which foster cultural assimilation are well known. Urbanization has produced cities which act as magnets to rural communities, and developments in transport and communications have made it easier for country people to reach them. Within these cities they have immediate access to the consumer society, with its specifically American biases, and the homogenization which contact of this kind inevitably brings. The learning of a dominant language – such as Spanish or Portuguese in South America, Swahili in much of East Africa, Arabic in North Africa, and English virtually everywhere – immensely facilitates this process. Even if people stay in their rural setting, there is no escape (except for the most isolated communities), because the same transport systems which carry country people into the cities are used to convey consumer products and the associated advertising back to their communities. The centralization of power within the metropolis invariably results in a loss of autonomy for local communities, and often a sense of alienation as they realize that
they are no longer in control over their own destinies, and that local needs are being disregarded by distant decisionmakers. The language of the dominant culture infiltrates everywhere, reinforced by the relentless daily pressure of the media, and especially of television. Traditional knowledge and practices are quickly eroded.

When one culture assimilates to another, the sequence of events affecting the endangered language seems to be the same everywhere. There are three broad stages. The first is immense pressure on the people to speak the dominant language – pressure that can come from political, social or economic sources. It might be ‘top-down', in the form of incentives, recommendations or laws introduced by a government or national body; or it might be ‘bottom-up', in the form of fashionable trends or peer group pressures from within the society of which they form a part; or again, it might have no clear direction, emerging as the result of an interaction between sociopolitical and socioeconomic factors that are only partly recognized and understood. But wherever the pressure has come from, the result – stage two – is a period of emerging bilingualism, as people become increasingly efficient in their new language while still retaining competence in their old. Then, often quite quickly, this bilingualism starts to decline, with the old language giving way to the new. This leads to the third stage, in which the younger generation becomes increasingly proficient in the new language, identifying more with it, and finding their first language less relevant to their new needs. This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old language, on the part of the parents as well as their children. Parents use the old language less and less to their children, or in front of their children; and when more children come to be born within the new society, they find fewer opportunities to use that language to them. Those families which do continue
to use the language find there are fewer other families to talk to, and their own usage becomes inward-looking and idiosyncratic, resulting in ‘family dialects'. Outside the home, the children stop talking to each other in the language. Within a generation – sometimes even within a decade – a healthy bilingualism within a family can slip into a self-conscious semilingualism, and thence into a monolingualism which places that language one step nearer to extinction.

The twenty-first-century challenge: documentation and revitalization

Can anything be done? Obviously it is too late to do anything to help many languages, where the speakers are too few or too old, and where the community is too busy just trying to survive to care about its language. But many other languages are not in such a serious position. Often, where languages are endangered, there are things that can be done to give new life to them. The term is
revitalization.
A community, once it realizes that its language is in danger, can get its act together, and introduce measures which can genuinely revitalize it. There are successful and well-publicized examples in Australia and North America. Within the British Isles, the most successful instance of a revitalized language is Welsh. Everything has to be right, of course, for there to be a likelihood of success. The community itself must want to save its language. The culture of which it is a part must need to have a respect for minority languages. There needs to be funding, to enable courses, materials and teachers to be introduced. And, in a huge number of cases, there need to be linguists, to get on with the basic task of putting the language down on paper, or in its digital equivalent.