Endangered Languages: Loss, Evolution and Academia

Whether a language is considered endangered is not determined by the number of speakers. Limousin, spoken mostly in south-central France, is considered Severely Endangered with 400,000 speakers, whereas Tai Daeng - spoken in northwestern Vietnam and northeastern Laos - has only 80,000 speakers, but is classed as Vulnerable; a less extreme classification. Instead the classification, created by UNESCO, considers such matters as which generation still speaks the language. A language enters the Vulnerable category when children still speak the language but mainly only in certain domains (such as within the home). Then we follow the classification through Definitely Endangered (where children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home) and Severely Endangered (the language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves) to Critically Endangered where the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently. Finally we reach Extinct, when there are no speakers left.

This language shift usually happens in a country where there's a dominant standard language, ie. a language that is used for education and in the media. Parents often perpetuate this by actively choosing not to pass their language (whether that be a minority or indigenous language) onto their children as they wish to give them the best start in life and that means speaking what they perceive to be the most ‘useful’ language. As Dr Diane Nelson from the University of Leeds in the UK says: ‘you can trace almost all of [language loss] back to colonialism’. First settlers arrive in a community and bring with them diseases that kill off some of the local population. Then there is settler violence, where more people are killed off; this time to assert power, seize land and establish hierarchies. Then these new powers force the colonised people to speak the language of the coloniser, often with brutal punishments if they don’t. And this wasn’t new in the 16th Century either. Latin was used as the language of administration by the Roman Empire, replacing many Celtic and Germanic languages across the Middle East and North Africa and forming languages such as Spanish and Portuguese which are still spoken today (though there is some argument as to how enforced this language shift was). 

We can see examples of this cultural genocide across the world. In 1482, The Valencia Bible, the first bible in the Catalan language, is burned. 250 years later, Philip IV of Spain decrees that Roma people do not exist, effectively banning the Romani language and traditional culture. In the 1830s residential schools open in Canada that tear children from their parents and enforce English, while in Northern India, Urdu replaces Persian. Ezo Island (present-day Hokkaido) is colonised by the Japanese who force the native Ainu to attend Japanese schools where their language is banned. Kurdish is still banned in schools in Turkey today. This top-down enforcement means that languages are systematically stamped out and replaced with the coloniser’s languages. Look at English as an example: between 900 million and 1.5 billion people speak English today, but the population of England stands at just 53 million. 

As a by-product of colonialism, when nations became independent they adopted the idea of a single language for their country, thus continuing the suppression of minority languages. Today it is estimated that one language dies every single month. But there is good news. There are cases around the world of people working to preserve or reclaim their languages and even examples of new languages emerging. Dr Nelson cited a fascinating case of the emergence of a new signed language in Nicaragua: 

“After the revolution in Nicaragua [in the 1980s] there were no deaf schools so they set up a deaf school in Managua and they gathered all these deaf kids from around the country together into the school. There's something called home sign which is what happens when you have a family where some members are deaf and some members are not deaf and very often they just come up with their own system that's not exactly a sign language. It's more like a sort of pidgin system but everybody gets by and communicates with each other. So what happened is all these kids brought their home signs to the school and within just a couple of years the young kids had created a complex sign language with grammar and all new signs and… I don't want to use the word invented because that suggests that somebody consciously decided to create a language, but a language just emerged out of nothing. And now there is this language in Nicaragua called Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN).”

In terms of classifying something as a new language, as opposed to a dialect, this seems to fall to linguists. In the case above, a US linguist called Judy Shepard-Kegl happened to hear about the school and was able to study the language and its evolution. In terms of new spoken languages emerging, this seems to be quite rare, though new varieties (the preferred word of linguists to describe dialects) emerge much more frequently when people from different areas merge in one place. Think of Multicultural London English, which is a melting-pot of all the communities and accents that make London home, or Polari, a dialect spoken by gay men in the first half of the twentieth century to communicate with each other. Of course, the idea of nation-building also comes into effect here. Take Scandinavia as an example. If you speak Danish and I speak Norwegian, we can basically understand each other. Essentially they’re dialects of the same language. But this is where politics comes into play and we see Governments and those in power emphasising the differences to say that they are distinct languages. 

As opposed to Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, some languages are much more consciously brought to life. Dr Nelson gave another example, this time in Brazil, of a community fighting to bring back an extinct language. In 1873, after the Portuguese had arrived in northeastern Brazil and forced their language on the local population through mission schools, the government declared the indigenous people of the area extinct. Fast forward approximately 130 years and the descendants of these people have decided to reclaim their rights, their land and their language. In the town of Porto Real do Colégio a new identity emerges: the Kariri-Xocó. This is a mixture of several different indigenous groups, one the Kariri, another the Xocó and then some smaller additional groups. Their languages were extinct, but that didn’t stop one of the elders from the community, Nhenety - The Guardian of Traditions - from implementing the reclamation process. 

Nhenety visited the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and studied missionary records of languages from the area. He found a couple of very elderly speakers who still knew a few words of their indigenous languages and also studied some of the other languages from the area. From there he started writing down word lists and putting them on a blog. He then went on to create a WhatsApp group where he shared these words with the community. His niece decided to take this a step further, setting up a language school in her husband’s hair dressing salon and bringing up her children speaking the language. She went on to build a school and there are now around 170 students of all ages speaking the language and new words are being added all the time. Sometimes words are coined by Nhenety, particularly where there weren’t any previous records; words like city, drone, eyeglasses. In other cases, words are gifted to them by their ancestors when they perform rituals. This language, Dzubukuá Kipeá, has been a completely indigenous-led revitalisation process. A decolonisation effort. A protest. 

And it is not just language that is being preserved. It is a whole culture. Janet Watson, a Professor also based at the University of Leeds, spoke about Southern Oman and the loss of cultural knowledge that comes with the loss of language. In the past, men would have a śaysəb, a goatskin satchel that they would use to carry a knife, a razor, a bit of food, basically any essentials they would need for a few days of travel. Now that the community is more sedentary and often more urban, this bag is no longer needed. When she asked a young man to read the word ‘śaysəb’, he didn’t know what it meant. Not only had they lost the word, they’d also lost that history; the idea that men often travelled on their own or in pairs, carrying enough for their journey. To help combat this loss, Watson and Abdullah al-Mahri, a Mehri colleague, have worked on a series of children’s books that tell these stories and preserve the language. 

As we saw in the case of Dzubukuá Kipeá, technology (such as WhatsApp) doesn’t always have to be responsible for wiping out languages. It can also help bring them back or preserve them. Dr Catriona Malau, a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, spoke about how technology has also held linguists much more accountable: 

“Audio cassettes is what I started with and it's basically: you make these recordings, you do your analysis and then the recordings get shoved in a filing cabinet and in most cases are just ignored. So I guess there was quite a big move around the turn of the Millennium to a new area of linguistics. So not language description, but language documentation, which came hand in hand with thinking about endangered languages. There's two strands to that. So when people are talking about this idea of archiving and making things publicly available it's partly to help preserve the languages and record as much as we can and make it available for future generations. So there's that angle to it, but then there's also making linguists really accountable. You would find that in some publications in the second half of the 20th century it was ‘here's my analysis’ and nobody could really argue. They could show how they’ve analysed this construction, with examples to illustrate it, but maybe they just chose to ignore another example which contradicts what they said. And because all of it was written, people couldn’t go back and listen to it. But that has changed now.”

Who gets to tell the story?

Within linguistics, there is a clear awareness of the uncomfortable aspects of the research. While back in the 1700s people were arriving in lands to extract natural resources and gain power (which, don’t get me wrong, is very much still happening today), academics in the field are conscious of the way in which their work could be considered an extraction of local knowledge for the gain of mostly white, Western academics. As Dr Nelson puts it: 

“At the beginning [of language loss] it's colonisation which is why we have this inequality, but the inequalities are still going on with who is doing research on these languages, who is writing the dictionaries and who's benefiting from all of this research. It tends to be white linguists from Western countries. So there's still a sense of we're extracting resources, we’re extracting languages, we're extracting cultural knowledge from indigenous people.” 

Some countries clearly foresaw this and implemented laws that forbade foreign researchers entering the country. Dr Malau was lucky to be able to carry out her research in Vanuatu as, at the time, the country was newly independent and had been closed to foreign researchers. Close relationships between the Australian National University and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre meant that Dr Malau was one of the first group of researchers able to go in and begin the documentation of the - at the current count - 138 languages. Of course, one of the ways to somewhat offset the issue of cultural extraction is to work with and, crucially, credit local and indigenous people. This is something strongly felt by Professor Watson:

“In the past papers and books tended to have been published by a single Western researcher. Which strikes me as really wrong because how can it just be your work? If you don't speak the language, how can it be your work? It has to have been the people that you were working with; if it weren't for them you'd never have been able to produce what you were able to produce.”

Working collaboratively also helps to uncover connections between different fields and leads to new discoveries. For example, Dr Malau worked with a marine biologist, ethnomusicologist, botanist and anthropologist on one particular project that studied the variations between men and women’s work when it came to gathering the fruits of the sea in Vanuatu. One thing that surprised me when researching this article was the amount of crossover between academics working in linguistics and language loss and those studying biodiversity and bio-degradation. But, as Dr Nelson points out: 

“If you draw a map of the world and you put a dot for every language that's spoken and you look at which parts of the world have the most languages spoken, it's in the tropics. It's across the equator. Now look at the same map for biodiversity ie. where the most species live. It's the same parts of the world. It's Southeast Asia, Central Africa, the Amazon. So there's these areas that seem to be hot spots for languages and they're the same parts of the world that are hot spots for biodiversity. And they're also the parts of the world where these things are under the most threat.” 

So it makes sense that there would be a lot of crossover in these fields. This sentiment was echoed by Professor Sender Dovchin from Curtin University in Australia. She spoke about Mongolian nomadic heritage and how their lifestyle of living on the Steppes in harmony with nature created a wealth of language and indigenous knowledge that will be lost if the languages are not preserved. 

Dr Nelson also understands the importance of making her research accessible to the general public. She worked with the poet Neelam Saredia Brayley to ‘translate’ her - in her words - somewhat clinical research into something that would resonate with the audience. Brayley explored the lived experience of language loss and watching your heritage and ancestors slowly fade from your life.   

How to feel about the future?

It is reassuring to find so many incredible people working in the field of linguistics and language documentation and preservation. From compiling dictionaries to writing children’s books, the women I spoke with are all helping to drive (or should that be quell?) change. It didn’t matter the language - whether it was Aanaar Sámi (also called Inari Sámi) with only around 250 speakers left, to Vurës in Vanuatu which has 2,000 to the definitely endangered Mehri with 100,000 speakers - people are working to save these languages for future generations. Yes, unfortunately languages are still dying out every year, but we can feel positive that a large number of people around the world are working passionately to slow this process.