The Last Speakers (13 page)

Happily, many of the Chaco tongues, though small, are still being spoken across all generations. Like the country itself, these ancient tongues hold many layers of secrets. We visited one such hidden community in Asunción. One moment we were whizzing along on an urban streetscape, with gas stations and shopping malls, and the next we turned down a deeply rutted, unmarked, and unpaved dirt road and found ourselves in “Communidad Maka.” The Maka people, numbering 1,200, are known both for their elaborate feather costumes and for selling trinkets on the streets of the capital city. They survive by being insular. Though they live right in metropolitan Asunción, their women speak only Maka, no Spanish or Guaraní, and their children attend school only within the community. The men while away the time playing games of chance with sticks. They welcome outsiders, albeit with a great deal of dignified reserve, and are thoroughly proud to be different.

We sat down with Señor Tso Fai (he also has a Spanish name, we learned later) to investigate the enigma that was the Maka language. We did not get far, as he was pressed for time, though he was happy to provide many words and sentences and even read to us from a storybook. Like any first encounter with a “new” language, as linguists we found it thrilling, and we tried to absorb the unfamiliar sounds and rhythms.

Though small and spoken only in a single community, Maka shows remarkable resilience. We do not know why some languages persist against all odds, in situations where others would have long ago yielded to the dominant tongue. Maka attitudes—perhaps confidence in their cultural superiority, perhaps simply deep reverence for their history—sustain their tiny language. I predict it will be spoken for generations to come. The Maka are true linguistic survivors, on a continent where the twin bulldozers of Spanish and Portuguese, fueled by governments and schools, have already swept hundreds of larger tongues into oblivion.

A true hotspot—such as Paraguay—is one where high diversity, high endangerment, and low scientific knowledge all converge. These are the areas we must prioritize for research and revitalization. In our survey of the world's language hotspots, we find both alarming and hopeful signs. Often, we find the number of speakers is far less than what has been reported in the scientific literature, as we found in Australia and South America. Similarly, the level of endangerment may be higher than previously estimated, with few children learning it natively. Third, the degree of scientific documentation is often quite low. Though a few books, grammars, or even dictionaries may exist, for many tongues we encounter there are no known recordings. We are aware that the recordings we make are sometimes the first, and in some cases may be the last. Because the elders have shared knowledge with us, we feel a sense of responsibility to care for it, to disseminate if the community agrees, and to safeguard it for the future. In the years to come, there may be a shift in attitudes both within and beyond the community, and descendants may wish to reclaim lost knowledge. When they do, we will be able to provide it.

OUR FIRST ENCOUNTER
with a hidden language took place in India.

What is a “hidden language,” how do we become aware of it, and what happens when it comes to light? I use the term “hidden” because it's not appropriate to say “discover” in relation to languages. All language communities are aware of their own existence, so “discovery” represents an outsider's bias. However, some communities are known only locally and have managed by chance or design to avoid being identified in official records, censuses, and surveys and by scientists. I propose to refer to languages that have eluded prior notice by outsiders as “hidden languages.” By focusing attention on the hotspots, the Enduring Voices project is working to fill in the blank areas on the linguistic map.

Language communities may intentionally hide. They may deny their own existence to maintain identity, to subvert it, or indeed to suppress it due to discriminatory pressures. Official government minority policy may be responsible for a hidden language being overlooked.

In the People's Republic of China, official government policy recognizes a maximum of 55 minorities—all ethnic groups must be subsumed under one of these 55 labels. Modern official ethnic minorities are defined in terms of how or to what degree they differ
culturally
(not linguistically) from the majority Han Chinese. In southern China, especially Yunnan province, a number of hidden languages have come to light lately, and others likely remain hidden and certainly are underdocumented in the interior Southeast Asia language hotspot. On the fringes of the Plateau of Tibet, from Yunnan down to India's Arunachal Pradesh (claimed by China) and westward into Bhutan and Nepal, many dozens of small communities inhabit a single valley, a small cluster of villages, or in the extreme case, only a portion of a single village. Some of these have been hidden by ethnic shame, difficult geography, government policy, or a combination of these factors. A thorough linguistic survey of the entire pan-Himalayan region should be a matter of urgent priority, especially since the locally dominant powers, China and India, continue to foster economic and cultural assimilation of minority peoples.

An example of official administrative undercounting occurs in northeastern India. Most of the region's ethnolinguistic groups numbering less than 10,000 are simply excluded or amalgamated into other groups for administrative convenience. The official census of India does not distinguish these groups. And some groups just above the 10,000-person threshold hide other even smaller groups, with shared cultural similarities but distinct languages.

Arunachal Pradesh state is a mysterious place that lies on the extreme edge of India. It borders China, Myanmar, Assam, and Bhutan. Arunachal is poorly known because outsiders, even Indian citizens, must have special “inner line” permits to travel there—permits that are only issued for short visits. Our Enduring Voices team determined to go to Arunachal because it is essentially a black hole on the linguistic map. Few linguists have worked there, and no one has drawn up a complete or reliable listing of the languages spoken there, their locations, or numbers of speakers. We did not know what we would find, but out hotspots model predicted extreme diversity with many small languages, some perhaps previously hidden to science.

We went searching in the far western part of Arunachal for two poorly known languages—Aka and Miji—known to be spoken in one small district. The Aka and Miji people share many cultural similarities: living in bamboo houses raised on stilts; raising pigs; cultivating rice and barley in terraced fields; and wearing distinctive and colorful woven shawls. The women also wear enormous colored beads and many silver bangles and earrings. The very oldest men maintain one of the world's most distinctive head ornaments: the hair is grown very long and bunched up into a topknot in front, held in place by wooden stakes, while an enormous bird's bill and feathers ornament the top and back of the head. The impression is that of a birdlike creature.

Both Miji and Aka are little-studied languages, and Aka in particular did not disappoint us, for it is a fabulously complex language full of wicked tongue twisters. The simple task of training our ears to decide on the correct phonetic symbols to transcribe it was exhausting and exhilarating. We worked late into the night by candlelight, marveling over forms we had recorded earlier in the day. Our team members amused the locals by attempting to say things like the number eight, pronounced “sgzhi,” or the word for ginger,
tkshing
(each just a single, tongue-twisting syllable). Aka abounds in what linguists call “consonant clusters”: it stacks up sequences of sounds that, at least for English speakers, are unutterable. Perhaps the most laughter was generated by our discovery that the sentence “Three laughing fish drink rice wine” consists of words that all sound almost identical, something like
dzi
“three” and
tsi
“fish,” with only very subtle differences. This was a formidable tongue twister even for native speakers, who could scarcely get through it without pausing and erupting in laughter. And so, day after day, we delved into Aka and marveled at its complexity.

Katia Yame and his son Sunil Yame, speakers of the “hidden” Koro language of India.

Upon going door to door in the villages and talking to speakers of all ages, we were surprised to find not only Aka and Miji speakers but also, hidden among them, a
third
group, speaking a language called Koro. None of the scientific literature we'd studied reported the existence of a third and utterly distinct language in this region.
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UNCOVERING A HIDDEN LANGUAGE

This is the story of Koro, how it was hidden in plain sight, and how it came to light. There are still unknown numbers of hidden languages out there, and I believe that many of them, like Koro, lie within language hotspots. On a scientist's tally sheet, Koro adds just one entry to the list of nearly 7,000 world languages, increasing known diversity by just 1/7,000. But Koro's contribution is much greater than that tiny fraction would suggest. Koro brings an entirely different perspective, history, mythology, technology, and grammar to what was known before.

We've only just begun exploring Koro, so we have only the vaguest idea about its speakers' creation myth, their knowledge of forest ecology and rice growing, their calendar, their humor, or their songs. All these areas are potentially rich sources of useful knowledge. And many Koro people, once we asked them to speak, were not shy.

To reach the tiniest Koro village, we crossed a rushing mountain river, pulled across by a bamboo raft. Called Kichang, the village contains just four long bamboo houses set upon stilts. A notched log, an
ibi,
provides steps up to a shaded veranda, where you can glimpse the dark and cool interior of the house, with its small fire pit and cooking and sleeping areas. Despite the tiny demographic, the village was religiously segregated. Two houses were “Christian” and two were not. The Christian villagers refused to sit on their non-Christian neighbors' verandas, which were festooned with fertility shrines woven of rice stalks. But the non-Christians gladly agreed to sit on the Christian verandas, where a portrait of Mary and the infant Jesus (with markedly Indian-looking features) peered serenely out at the orange groves that surrounded the entire village.

As we munched on oranges on one family's veranda, we were treated to the life story of a young woman named Kachim, told entirely in Koro. This session was, as far as we know, the first time that anyone had recorded Koro as its own distinct language. Our team of linguists—myself, Greg Anderson, and Dr. Ganesh Murmu of Ranchi University—sat transfixed, even without understanding. We were mesmerized by Kachim's delivery and somber tone. Greg sat with his hand frozen in an outstretched position, holding the microphone, and I listened over my headphones and watched through the video camera viewfinder to faithfully record each gesture and expression. Many hours later and after multiple listenings and with translation help, we were able to piece together and partially translate the story—a young woman's sad tale of being sold unwilling as a child bride, overcoming hardships, and eventually making peace with her new life in an adopted village.

Ironically, our India-based film crew, as soon as they heard an unknown language (neither Hindi nor English) being spoken, switched off their camera to save batteries. After the story was finished, the crew switched on their camera and said to Kachim, “Can you tell it again in Hindi?” She obliged, and they recorded that version. We would have missed the Koro story entirely, but fortunately our own camera—which we used to record scientific video data—was rolling the entire time, so the story was recorded. On the way back to base camp, I sealed the videotape in plastic and stored the precious recording in an inner pocket. It would never leave my side until I arrived home and my lab processed it.

Who are the mysterious Koro? Can we avoid exoticizing them and simply understand them on their own terms, as they wish to describe themselves? The Koro are indeed a hidden people, perhaps by choice or by negligence. They are thoroughly mixed in with other local peoples and number perhaps no more than 800. The Koro do not dominate a single village or even an extended family. This leads to curious speech patterns not commonly found in a stable state elsewhere.

Many people who grow up in bilingual households know about “accommodation.” If your grandmother speaks to you in Italian, you can answer her back in Italian (if you speak it) as a way to accommodate her. Or, if you feel less confident about speaking Italian, even though you understand what she asked, you can answer in English, without accommodating her choice of language but still successfully communicating. In most cases, this is not a stable situation, but one in which a language shift is occurring. Your grandmother may have grown up as a monolingual Italian girl in Italy. When she immigrated to the United States, she may have learned English, while her children spoke mainly English with only a limited command of Italian. Her grandchildren are more likely to be monolingual English speakers, leading to a complete shift. In the case of Italian, this is no great tragedy, since millions of speakers remain in the old country. But for a small language like Koro, language shift means the end of existence.

The Koro have strategically chosen to be bilingual, but to do so in a stable, long-term way. This means that sometimes they do not accommodate or at least they do not shift. So, among the Koro, along with intermarriage patterns, you find sons who speak it when their mothers do not, siblings who speak it when their older or younger siblings don't, spouses who marry a Koro speaker but never learn it, and other spouses who do learn it. None of this is surprising, but it's unusual to find this existing as a stable condition for such a small language over such a long time.

Nearly all Koro speakers live in mixed families and households where some members do not speak Koro but Aka or another tongue. This means Koro speakers must make a strategic effort in deciding with whom, when, where, and under what circumstances to speak Koro. They perform a constant, proactive exercise in linguistic choice, not simply choosing the laziest method of speaking the local majority tongue that everyone knows. This attitude may account for the vitality of Koro. Simply put, its speakers have linguistic pride; they value their ancestral tongue enough to make an effort to speak it.

The Koro are not recognized as a distinct ethnic group, since they are thoroughly intermixed with the Aka. As such, they were previously misidentified by missionaries, hobbyists, or travelers who encountered them. Until our National Geographic expedition in 2008, Koro was essentially undocumented, unrecorded, and unknown outside of local villages. It is not listed in the standard international registries, or indeed even in the
Linguistic Survey of India
commissioned by the Indian government itself, nor in the census of India. One obscure published source we found was written by a Colonel Grewal of the Indian Army, who had been stationed in the region and collected lists of local words as a hobby.
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His book contains a grand total of 250 Koro words and five sentences (the longest containing just four words), but he did not recognize its status as a distinct tongue nor give the local name for it.

Even locals participate in hiding the language. Sursun, a village shopkeeper in Palizi, told us about another village: “In Bana,” she remarked, “the other Aka people live. We can't understand them.” Her comment suggests that while a linguistic difference is noticed, it does not correlate with an ethnic or cultural one. Local people consider the Koro people to be essentially the same, but speaking differently, and even that difference tends to be downplayed. This minimization of difference is shocking, because even to the untrained ear, Koro could hardly sound more different from Aka. They differ as much as, say, English and Japanese. Where Aka loves to cluster its consonants, Koro prefers minimal, easily pronounceable syllables as in
kapa,
meaning “good”
ubu,
“stone” and
sebe,
“goat.”