By now, it is well documented that languages are vanishing at a rate that has never been seen before. In just the last few decades, dozens of American Indian languages have died and the same story is being played out in Australia, South America, New Guinea, and Africa.
PUBLISH OR PERISH: THIS TIME IT'S FOR REAL
THE PROBLEM
And it’s not just the little languages that are dying. A hundred years ago, Breton had a million speakers, but is now down to about 200,000.
We recognize the danger in losing biodiversity, but is finding out about loss of language – and thus cultural – diversity really a problem? For all we know, one language and one culture might be just fine. Why not, say, have English or Chinese for everyone?
For 40,000 years, since the beginning of modern Homo Sapiens, we humans have been a great evolutionary success story. From perhaps half a million of us, living in just a few spots, we have expanded to about 8 billion people, occupying deserts, tundra, tropical forests, and high mountains. During this spectacular expansion, we acquired a stock of knowledge about survival in all these environments, and that knowledge was stored in all the languages that developed along the way. And now those languages are vanishing.
Let’s be really clear about this. Language diversity did not cause the evolutionary success of humans. But the knowledge generated by all those successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in the languages now spoken around the world and that knowledge base is under siege. Of the 7000 languages spoken today, just 10 are spoken by 5 billion speakers and just 3% of the people in the world speak over 95% of the world’s languages In other words: 95% of the cultural heterogeneity of the planet – 95% of the differences in ways of seeing the world – is vested in under 3% of the people, and the problem gets worse each year.
One take on this, I suppose, is that language die-off is just part of natural evolution, and nothing to worry about. Neither the language of Jesus nor the language of Caesar are spoken by many people today and nothing catastrophic seems to have happened. Why worry now?
This is a high-risk game. I wouldn’t be worried if we had 20 or 30 Earth-like planets, unlimited time, and god-like power to test whether language diversity was really good for human evolutionary success. On some planets we could ordain that language diversity remain high, while on others it would decline toward zero. Then, over a few hundred years, we’d see whether the decline in diversity placed the survival of humanity on any planet at risk.
What we’re doing now is an experiment to find out if eliminating language diversity is harmful to our survival as a species. With no planets to fall back on, it’s truly a reckless experiment. It should be stopped now.
THE SOLUTION
Fortunately, there are a lot of really interesting things going on. Linguists are recording texts by the last speakers of languages across the world. Linguists are also helping indigenous peoples from the Amazon to New Guinea to write dictionaries and grammar books so that school children who are participating in bilingual education programs will have basic tools for learning their languages. Native speakers of Mayan and other indigenous languages are getting degrees in linguistics and joining the effort to document those languages.
Until a few years ago, Maori, and native Hawaiian children were no longer learning their ancestral languages. Now those children in New Zealand and Hawaii are in total immersion programs, called language nests, and coming out as fully fluent young speakers of those languages. In California, some American Indian groups have set up what are known as master-apprentice programs so that older, fluent speakers of Indian languages can teach younger people in their tribes to become fluent too.
There is one more thing that works. The major languages of the world have great literary traditions. Most languages have no literary tradition. In today’s world, no books means language death. Combating this loss of language is the goal of CELIAC. the Centro Editorial de Literatura Indígena, Asociación Civil, or the Center for Indigenous Language Publishing, in Oaxaca, Mexico (Asociación Civil means ‘not-for-profit corporation’.)
How to rescue indigenous languages from extinction?
H. Russell Bernard, Arizona State University
23rd Annual Otopames Conference, October 25, 2021
From 1994 through 2005, indigenous authors from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America learned to use computers to write books in their native languages. A total of 121 people from Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and other countries went through the program. Books written by CELIAC authors are published and are available for sale. Many speakers of Mexican Indian languages cannot afford to purchase these books. Our goal is to develop sales to libraries and to individuals around the world that will allow the distribution of books at no cost to speakers of indigenous languages in towns and villages, halting a loss of language.
Study after study shows that when children learn to read and write in their mother tongue, they become enthusiastic about reading and transfer those skills to English or Spanish or whatever national language they need in order to participate as full citizens in the economy and politics of their country. But when children learn to read their native language and then have nothing to read beyond the texts they learned from in school, they often come to resent reading.
CELIAC has published several books and more are awaiting publication. We seek donors who want to support the publication of a book or the training of an Indian author or school teacher.
The CELIAC building was damaged in the earthquake of 2020. We need support to repair the building and to train the next generation of Indigenous school teachers to take over CELIAC and turn it into a center of community development. If you are considering making a donation to CELIAC, please contact H. Russell Bernard.
