My PWR paper about language death and why we should care

Before posting my final paper for the introsem, I wanted to share my PWR paper here. I took PWR 1: World in Crisis? Current Feature Article Writing this quarter, and I wrote my TIC and RBA on the problem of language death. Here is my RBA. I hope you enjoy reading it, and I would love to have some feedback!

REGRETTING THE LOSS

What Do Languages Have to Tell Us?

Pretty Bird, Kimimila and Lakota

“I think it’s nice, it’s a beautiful language,” Biridjianna Pretty Bird said, without raising her head from the little puddle she had been looking at for a long time, as if she were ashamed. Sitting on the pavement, the 14-year-old girl kept rolling the stones under her pink, worn-out sneakers, and mumbled her favorite word in Lakota, her native language. “Kimimila,” she said, which means butterfly. She was sweating (Gahagan).

As Kayla Gahagan narrates in her article called “Vanishing Words, Vanishing World: Generation gap strains efforts to save Lakota language,” for Pretty Bird, life at home, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, has never been easy. Despite her love for her native language, her friends do not share the enthusiasm for learning the language of their ancestors, and feel embarrassed about being associated with Lakota. They see the ability to speak the language as a sign of being uneducated and inferior, and thus have no interest in learning it. Only Pretty Bird’s grandparents and older members of the community, can speak Lakota fluently, but they struggle with the idea of how to teach the language to their grandchildren. The language is not being passed down (Gahagan).

Most importantly, the speakers of the language are afraid of speaking it. Many of them still remember, in horror, the Catholic boarding schools where they were robbed of practicing their religion and speaking their language. They recall the pain of being forbidden to speak their mother tongue, and how this pain brought them to the resolution never to let their children suffer from the same burden of wishing to speak Lakota instead of a dominant language. “It was a violent, horrible era,” said Charles Spotted Thunder, a 90-year-old elder of the reservation, his eyes fixed on the wooden floor, shaking his head, as if to dispel the bad memories of the past years (Gahagan).
Today, around 20,000 people live in Pretty Bird’s reservation, and only five percent of the population, most of whom are the elderly, has the ability to speak the language fluently – the single key to the preservation of Lakota. They still feel “a paralyzing fear to speak the language” (Gahagan). Lakota is slipping away from their fingertips, a little bit more every day.

Do We Regret?

People of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation lament the loss, not only of their mother tongue but also of their cultural inheritance. The people are losing their connection to their past, ancestors and history, but are unable to do anything about it, and “the regret is hard to swallow” (Gahagan).

They may regret the loss, but do we regret the impending loss of the Lakota language? Does it mean anything to us or change anything in our lives? Can we do anything to save the language? Why should we be concerned? The question is a discomforting one, especially for us as speakers of the English language – a language with such great dominance that is estimated to have 450 million speakers all around the world, and that will continue to spread even faster in the near future. It is, indeed very difficult for us, and for most other people, to imagine English being in the situation of Lakota – on the verge of disappearance. English, like other dominant languages such as Spanish, Chinese or Arabic, is highly unlikely to wind up in such a tragic story of abandonment and disappearance. The idea that these languages may disappear is unimaginable, and that is exactly what makes the question troubling for us. In her research about “Western language ideologies and small-language prospects,” Nancy C. Dorian, a renowned anthropologist in Bryn Mawr College, testifies to the challenge we are faced with, and notes that:

The phenomenon of ancestral-language abandonment is worth looking at, then, precisely because a good many people, especially those who speak unthreatened languages, are likely to have trouble imagining that they themselves could ever be brought to the point of giving up on their own ancestral language and encouraging their children to use some other language instead. (3)

The gap between speakers of minority languages and us, as Dorian puts it, creates our distant and detached attitude towards the issue of language abandonment and disappearance. We read Pretty Bird’s story, and may feel sorry about her loss. “It’s too bad,” we might say, but we probably do not think it is any of our concern, because, as Dorian suggests, it is almost inconceivable for us to put ourselves in Pretty Bird’s shoes when our reality is that all over the world, half a billion people speak our language. In her research, Dorian goes on to argue that we, the speakers of dominant languages, cannot recognize any personal stake in the matter (3). This distance makes us fail to notice the consequences of language disappearance, and what all languages, from Lakota to English, Tlingit to Chinese, mean to us, and why we should be regretting the loss of every language.

The question only becomes more discomforting in light of a recent study by Kenneth L. Hale, a renowned linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a dedicated activist on behalf of endangered languages. The study shows that Lakota is far from being the only language in peril: It is predicted that during the 21st century, 3,000 of the existing 6,000 languages will disappear, and another 2,400 will come near to extinction (Hale 192). Thus, in less than 90 years, 90 percent of the world’s languages will be endangered, and as Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, two prominent linguists, note, “one might expect it to be a topic of keen interest for anyone concerned with the nature of social interaction in the not so distant future” (8). What happens to those languages today will have irreversible and drastic global consequences in the future (Dorian 3). As Tasaku Tsunoda, a renowned linguist, points out, “when a language is lost, it is lost,” and there is no turning back (162).

Why Regret the Loss?

Grenoble and Whaley emphasize this sense of urgency by stating that “the rapid loss of languages promises to reweave the social fabric of the world completely” (8). But, how exactly do languages, dominant or minority, “reweave the social fabric of the world” (8)? Other than the shock at the sheer number of languages on their way to extinction, is there anything about languages that should make us regret the loss of each and every one of them? In one of his studies, called “On Endangered Languages and the Importance of Linguistic Diversity,” Hale explains why “language loss is a serious matter,” not only for the speakers of the lost language but for everyone who cares about human intellect (155). He argues that with every language that is lost, “the enabling condition for the maximal production of intellectual wealth of all kinds and in all fields,” that is, linguistic and cultural diversity, gradually withers away (Hale 193). To illustrate how even minority languages that most of us have never heard of encompass a miraculous display of human intellect and creation, Hale analyzes the linguistic structure of a local language, Damin – “the treasure of a small group of Australian Aboriginal people” (205). The ancestors of this small group of people invented the Damin language many centuries ago. What makes the language so interesting and indicative of the unlimited human intellect is that “it is constructed in such a way that, in principle, it can be learned in one day” (Hale 207). Damin uses abstract names for “logically cohesive families of concepts” (Hale 207). Difficult enough for us to imagine, the language uses “a small inventory (less than 200 items) to accommodate the same concepts as does the much larger ordinary vocabulary of unknown size” (Hale 207). Yet, breathtaking enough for Hale, by using abstract names Damin can be used to express any idea just as any other language:
Suppose a Damin speaker saw a sandpiper in flight. “Sandpiper” was not in Damin’s lexicon. But the watcher could evoke the bird by saying ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu: literally, “person-burning creature.” The phrase harks back to a creation story in which Sandpiper starts a lethal fire – a familiar tale to all speakers of Damin. Likewise an ax was “honey-affecting wood:” a wooden object used to obtain wild honey. (Abley 10)

Who would have thought that the human intellect is, in fact, capable of inventing a language that can be learned in one day, yet still functions like languages that we spend years to learn? Without minority languages like Damin, we could miss out on such amazing phenomena. Although most of us may assume a correlation between a language’s spread and its capacity, such a phenomenon, as Hale points out, is not observed in major languages such as English: “If English were the only language available as a basis for the study of general human competence, we would miss a great amount” (155). After his analysis of the Damin language, Hale then asks: “How can a lexicon be small enough to learn in one day and, at the same time, be rich enough to express all ideas? A moment’s reflection on this question can only inspire admiration, in my judgment” (207).

We, as thinking people in a modern society, are often amazed by and in constant search of the intellectual wealth and work that surround us in today’s world. We read innumerable books, skim through newspapers and magazines whenever we have a minute to spare, and go to movies and exhibitions, because we strive to learn more about everything that the human intellect has to offer. We greatly value intellectual wealth, but we fail to recognize languages as one of the precious resources and treasures of knowledge. In fact, languages are no less valuable than the other sources of intellectual wealth that we surround ourselves with, and may even be the most precious of all. The last fluent speaker of Damin, and of many other unique languages, died several years ago, taking “an intellectual treasure of enormous worth” out of our reach (Hale 211).

While Hale frames the gravity of language loss in terms of intellectual wealth, Tasaku Tsunoda, a renowned researcher and linguistics professor at University of Tokyo, urges us to look at the issue from a different angle. To him, languages embody valuable information regarding the human condition and even hold solutions to the problems that we have been endeavoring to address. Tsunoda argues that “a given language represents the people’s beliefs, values, world-view, and ways of comprehending, understanding or perceiving the world” (149). As Tsunoda quotes his colleague, Andrew Pawley, most languages, regardless of their scope and spread, are shaped by “generations of experience” and “countless intelligences applied to problems of human condition” (qtd. in Tsunoda 149). In this sense, our language reflects the way we cope with our problems and experience our lives, and the same is true for every other language. One of the best examples in support of this argument is a group of localized African languages. African cultures and languages tend to encompass unique traditions and wealth of knowledge on topics such as various agricultural practices. Since agriculture and farming constitute an important part of the life in many parts of the continent, the people of these cultures and languages have a wider understanding of these issues than people of other cultures (Dhewa). Their remarkable knowledge of drought-resistant crop varieties, for instance, which still remains largely unknown to us today, is “embedded in the diverse local languages and cultures found in Africa” (Dhewa). In order to retain the wealth of knowledge in agriculture, these local languages have certain terms and expressions that many languages, such as English, do not possess in their lexicons. The knowledge embedded in these languages has recently been found to be “crucial in helping small farmers across the continent adapt to climate change” (Dhewa). The source indicates that the loss of these local African languages would take away a wealth of vast knowledge, which may, in fact, provide a solution to a major global problem such as climate change, which concern not only speakers of African languages, but all of us.

Tsunoda further strengthens his argument that languages encompass unique knowledge and experience by taking note of the Jaru language, the language of the Halls Creek people in Western Australia. These people have passed on their culture and extensive knowledge of stonework from one generation to the next through long-standing oral traditions, so this information has remained largely unwritten. Over years, the Jaru expertise in stonework became an integrated part of their culture and language. Tsunoda recounts that a group of English-speaking archeologists, having noticed this expertise, went to Western Australia with a linguist to work with Jaru-speaking people and to learn about the production of different stone tools:

They were asking the Jaru teachers for Jaru words to refer to the materials, to the various stages of the production, to particular techniques, even to the flakes that came off and were discarded. After the research was completed, the archeologists remarked that, by recording these Jaru terms, they obtained (i) far more information than could be obtained by means of English and (ii) the kind of information that could not have been obtained through English. (Tsunoda 149)

What the English-speaking archeologists were looking for, to our surprise, was embedded in the intricacies of the Jaru language.

Besides Hale’s and Tsunoda’s analytic and research-based arguments, Beth Ann Fennelly, a professor of English at Knox College in Illinois, presents a more poetic and aesthetic reason as to why we should regret the loss of languages. In her article called “Fruits We’ll Never Taste,” she suggests that we should regret the language loss because language diversity is important for the sake of diversity, and there is no need for any other reason. This diversity, according to Fennelly, embodies a sense of “fecundity, abundance, and escape hatch for our imaginations.“ She even goes on to dismiss the analytical arguments such as those Hale and Tsunoda present, and suggests that we in fact have ”a need for needless diversity” (Fennelly). The language loss leaves behind a world with less flavor, less vitality, less color; and every language that is lost takes away more poems, more stories, more letters, more memories from what we – all humans – have accumulated and inherited from our ancestors over centuries (Fennelly). The beauty of languages embeds itself in the countless facets that they have to offer to us.

Poet Wendell Berry urges us to care for “the unseeable animal,” even if it means we never see it. So, I would argue, must we care for the untastable vegetable, the unhearable language, which add their link, as we add ours, to nature’s still-unfolding tale. They deepen nature’s mystery even as they provide clues to help us comprehend that mystery. (Fennelly)

Fennelly concludes that it is truly impossible to know every language that exists in the world, yet all languages enrich our world and human life not only because they serve a purpose, “but also because they are.”

What Can We Do?

Hale, Tsunoda and Fennelly want to make us think about Pretty Bird’s story. They ask us, again, to think more carefully this time. They want us to realize that when Lakota disappears, not only Pretty Bird, but also we, all of us, will lose irreplaceable assets. We have to regret the loss, according to Hale, because with every language slipping away from human reach, we lose a great wealth of unique human intellect. Tsunoda, on the other hand, reminds us that every language embodies an extraordinary amount of knowledge – knowledge that we cannot afford to lose and that may not come back to our reach again once a language is lost. Finally, Fennelly offers a whole new perspective to us: With every language disappearing, the world is losing another flavor, another color. The complex beauty of the world, the diversity that it holds and the unaccountability of our choices fade away (Fennelly).

Let us say then that we do begin to regret the loss of languages. We regret what we are missing out on: human intellect, a treasure of knowledge, and a world of complexity and diversity. Even then, at the end of the day, another question remains to be answered: Even if we choose to regret the loss of languages, will regretting help to change anything? Is it going to get any better if we regret? Or is regretting only the first step of a struggle?

It is troubling to think about whether someday we will be able to save Lakota, Damin, Jaru and many other languages that have already disappeared, or are on the verge of vanishing. Is it really possible for us to save these languages without speaking them ourselves? Even though we may genuinely regret the loss of Lakota, Damin or Jaru, the first step in the struggle to save a language and help the speakers of minority languages seems to be the ability to speak it and be an inextricable part of that language. As David Crystal, a prominent professor of linguistics and author, known for his research about language death, points out in his book called Language Death, “many people would accept that there is little outsiders can or should do” (107). Regretting the loss of minority languages, then, does not seem to help us save them. We think that it is Pretty Bird’s and her community’s task to save the Lakota language, and the only thing we, as “others,” could do is to hear their stories now and then, and regret the loss of the language, of human intellect, of diversity, of the irreplaceable wealth of knowledge – and regret them all with nothing in return.

If reviving a disappearing language is in the hands of its speakers and nobody else, then why cannot Pretty Bird and her community in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation save their own language Lakota? Even though they know that their language is dying, they are unable to save it, because they are either haunted by the memories of Catholic boarding schools where they were punished for speaking Lakota, or they do not know how to save their language. They are simply afraid and distraught.

Looking back at a few examples, it is easy to recognize that the speakers of Lakota are not alone: most minority language speakers are afraid to speak and try to save their own language “after several hundred years of cultural domination” (Crystal 126). Like the speakers of Lakota, minority language speakers may still be haunted by their memories of being forced to speak another language instead of their mother tongue. Like the speakers of Nahuatl, Aztec and Quechua, they may still remember the stories of how their ancestors were forced to integrate themselves into the culture and language of the colonial powers that invaded their land (Tsunoda 4). Or, like the speakers of Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish, they may still feel forced to speak English or another dominant language (Tsunoda 4). Even though the speakers of these minority languages do want to speak their own language and strengthen ties to their culture, such cultural domination, over time, crushes their belief in their own language. They feel that their language is not worth continuing with because other languages will eventually suppress it (Crystal 111). Thus, “the decision to abandon one’s own language always derives from a change in the self-esteem of the speech community” (Crystal 111). Without hope and belief in their own language, the communities of minority language speakers do not know where to start and how to bring back a language that has been subdued by dominant languages and cultures for many years:

Within the community, the size of the task can be enough to put people off. They know they don’t know enough. They know they haven’t the resources. They therefore delay making decisions, or pick at the problem, instead of approaching it systematically. They look for quick returns, and then, when they find these do not work, they are put off once again. (Crystal 126)

There is, then, something we can do for the speakers of minority languages. Even though we do not speak the language that we would like to save, there is still something very crucial for us to do: restore the self-confidence, hope and belief of minority language speakers in their language, provide them with necessary resources, help them release the burden of the memories of cultural domination and encourage them to take action for their own language. We need to make them realize their power and potential in reviving and saving their own language. Our “positive support for an indigenous language can give its speakers a feeling of worth, and boost their efforts to maintain it” (Crystal 119). Ultimately, it is the minority language speakers’ task to save their language, as “language reversal can’t be done to you [speakers of minority languages] or for you by others” (N. M. Dauenhauer and R. Dauenhauer 97). However, we have to take an active role in starting the process and assure them that their language is worth fighting for, because it is a unique embodiment of human intellect, knowledge and complexity as well as that of their heritage, identity and culture. Even though we cannot be responsible for the transmission of the language, we “can do much to encourage positive attitudes towards it” (Tsunoda 186). Maybe we cannot save their language for them, but we can, and we should, annihilate “linguistic despair“ and act as a catalyst for saving the language (Crystal 111).

How can we help a minority language community increase its confidence and make them believe in the future of their own language? It sounds like a very challenging and intimidating task to rebuild such confidence after many years of cultural domination, but as David Crystal points out, “arising out of the experience of working with several communities, linguists have developed a sense of which issues can be persuasive” (111). First, we need to believe, and make people like us believe in the worth of each and every language. To be able to do this, we have to regret the loss of minority languages and remember what we are missing out on when Lakota, Damin or Jaru dies away. As “knowledgeable outsiders,” we need to fulfill the role of “information-disseminator and consciousness-raiser, helping to make a wider public aware of the looming threats of to a local language survival” and the wealth, though often undiscovered, every language embodies (Dorian 21). We need to help the presence of the minority languages and their speakers felt within the wider community through cultural celebrations, festivals, awareness-raising educational programs on radio or television, or, perhaps a column in a daily newspaper (Crystal 130). These things are exactly what we do for any other crisis – for people dying from AIDS, for climate change, for world hunger. There is “no essential difference in educational programmes designed to remove ignorance about, say, water-management or pest-control, and awareness-raising designed to remove ignorance about language” (Crystal 107). As more and more people hear about what each language is worth to all of us and the dangers minority languages face, the minority language speakers will hold on to their own language – they will speak it with confidence and teach it to their children without fear but with pride.

As utopian as they may sound, cultural celebrations, public festivals, writings and educational programs did help in the past, and are likely to help in our future endeavors. The revival of the Gaelic language in Irish communities was fired by famous poems and writings that praised the language and the Irish culture (Dorian 44). In Scotland, people organized festivals called “the Mod festivals” to raise awareness about Gaelic (Crystal 113). Today, the Gaelic language has been saved and is spoken by numerous Scottish and Irish communities. Likewise, Sami people have saved their language, Sami. These people live in a territory divided by Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and thus, over may years the Sami language has been heavily influenced by Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian (Tsunoda 25). A couple of decades ago, it was an endangered language, but through the efforts of knowledgeable outsiders, today there are websites, film festivals and cultural celebrations for the Sami culture and language. Thus, “in many villages, the Sami ethnic consciousness has recently been revitalized, so that people are eager to learn the Sami language” (Tsunoda 25). As Trond Trosterud, a linguist at University of Helsinki, points out in the following anecdote, all of these endeavors gave the speakers of Sami great optimism and confidence which was lacking a decade ago:

Attending a meeting of Sami and Norwegian officials, one of the Sámi participants was asked: do you need an interpreter? No, she answered, I don’t. But I will give my talk in Sami, so it might be that you will need one. (Crystal 126)

Such belief and confidence in speaking the Sami language eventually revived the language that was once on the verge of disappearing.

Time to Take Action

Now, we know what we are missing out on with every language dying away. Languages create a world of complexity, embody human intellect and knowledge, and thus they are all too precious to lose. Initially, it may seem like regretting the loss of such treasures is not enough to save them simply because we do not speak those languages and so do not have the power to maintain them. It is true that we cannot save a language for its speakers, but we can surely inform and encourage them to do so, and restore their belief and hope in their language, which they may have lost a long time ago.

Nevertheless, we could question whether all minority language speaking communities will gain the optimism and confidence that Gaelic speaking communities and Sami people did in their language. “There is never, of course, a guarantee that the next community will be swayed” by cultural festivals, celebrations and other awareness-raising activities (Crystal 111). It may never be possible to make a community believe in their power and encourage them to save their language. The language may vanish, and we may not be able to do anything. But, it is still worth trying – and it will always be. We could either believe that, after all, regretting the loss may not help and watch 90 percent of the world’s languages die away in less than 90 years – or, we could strive for helping other minority languages and their speakers succeed in their struggle and create new stories of success like Sami and Gaelic did.