This book focuses on the essential questions: What is lost when a language dies? The book spans the glo The book spans the globe from Siberia to North America to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look at the human knowledge that is slowly being lost as the languages which express it fade from sight. It uses fascinating anecdotes and portraits of some of these languages' last remaining speakers, in order to demonstrate that this knowledge about ourselves and the world is inherently precious, and once gone, will be lost forever.
This knowledge is not only our cultural heritage oral histories, poetry, stories, etc. Keywords: linguists , anthropologists , extinction of languages , poetry , Siberia , North America , language death.
Forgot password? Don't have an account? How about your town? Your country? How many languages do you think there are in the entire world?
Altogether, people around the world speak about 7, languages. Does that surprise you? There used to be many more! Experts say that another language becomes extinct every two weeks. You may have used them in school.
Usually, these words describe plants and animals that are in danger of dying out. But linguists also use them to describe dying languages. How do languages die? They die when people stop using them. One example is when people move to a different country.
This leads many immigrants to stop using their native language. They might not even teach it to their children. Slowly, the native language dies out. In other cases, people are forced to stop speaking their language.
For many years, the United States, Canada, and Australia forced children from Indigenous cultures to live in residential schools. At these schools, the children had to learn English.
Adults punished the children when they spoke their native languages. This traumatized the children. That trauma still affects Indigenous peoples today, and many indigenous languages are extinct because of these actions. Sometimes, languages shift or evolve instead of becoming extinct. Have you ever heard that Latin is a dead language?
In a way, it is. No one today speaks Latin as their native language. People still use Latin in many ways. Scientists use it to name plants and animals. The language is also common in religions, especially Catholicism. In fact, Latin is the official language of Vatican City.
Latin was the language of the Roman Empire. People wanted to be different from their neighbors, and the way they made themselves different was to diverge linguistically. Neighboring peoples hunt the same pigs and cassowaries that inhabit the rainforest; and they all eat sago, or taro or sweet potato—whichever of those staples their land is capable of growing.
In terms of the languages they speak, though, Papua New Guineans are very different from one another. No one can explain why Tayap is an isolate. But until the end of World War II, when the villagers began to grow cash crops and relocated their village closer to the mangrove lagoon to try unsuccessfully to entice buyers to come buy the rice and, later, the peanuts that they grew so hopefully, Gapun used to lie on top of the highest mountain in the entire lower Sepik basin.
Whatever its origin, and despite its minuscule size, the fact that Tayap is as fully formed a language as English, Russian, Navajo, or Zulu means that it must have developed and remained stable for a very long time, for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. All those years of efflorescence came to an end, though, suddenly and decisively, in the s. By the middle of that decade, children who grew up in the village, for the first time in history, were no longer learning Tayap as their first language.
What they were learning, instead, was a language called Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin has an estimated four million speakers in Papua New Guinea, and it is the most widely spoken language in the country. Like most of the other pidgin languages that still exist today, such as Jamaican Creole in the Caribbean, or Cameroon Pidgin English in Africa, Tok Pisin arose in the late s as a plantation language.
In the Pacific, European colonialists brought together large numbers of men from very different language groups to labor on their plantations; the laborers processed copra the smoked and dried meat of coconuts, pressed for oil or collected sea cucumber, a culinary delicacy in Asian cooking, which fueled a massive industry throughout the south Pacific during the mid- to late s. What did the thousands of men—who had no common language but had to work together, following orders given by their European overseers—do?
They invented a new language. From its genesis in the late s, Tok Pisin was an object of ridicule for many Europeans and Australians. The prevalence and, to their mind, the distortion of English-based words fooled English speakers into thinking and many still think that the language was simply a baby-talk version of English. From the perspective of the Papua New Guinean men who spoke the language among themselves, what white people spoke to them was baby talk.
For all of these reasons, linguists are scrambling to document and archive the diversity of quickly disappearing languages. Their efforts include making dictionaries, recording histories and traditions, and translating oral stories.
After learning that his language was poised to disappear, Belt and other concerned Cherokee speakers in the Eastern Band began discussing how to save the language. Belt volunteered to teach Cherokee lessons at a local school, for example, and eventually the tribe decided to create a language immersion school for children, where core classes —including science and math — are taught in Cherokee. Cherokee language is now also offered at the local university, where Belt teaches.
There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away.
Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. What if the language is only sleeping, and we can awaken it? To an extent, technology can help these efforts. A multitude of sites devoted to single languages or languages of a specific region unite speakers and provide multimedia teaching tools, too, including the Digital Himalayas project , the Diyari blog , the Arctic Languages Vitality project and the Enduring Voices Project.
Belt, along with countless other speakers of rare and endangered languages, is not ready to let his language fade into history — even if the journey toward revitalisation is an uphill one.
Last Place on Earth Language. Languages: Why we must save dying tongues. Share using Email. By Rachel Nuwer 6th June Hundreds of our languages are teetering on the brink of extinction, and as Rachel Nuwer discovers, we may lose more than just words if we allow them to die out.
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