Extinguished Languages

Globalization and Language
In addition to animals, plants, ecosystems, clean water, clean air, and fossil fuels, globalization and industrialization threaten languages. Linguists and anthropologists predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s ~6000 languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Not surprisingly, it is the marginal that are most in danger—languages spoken by small numbers of relatively poor people. There has been some outcry, mostly on the part of academics and missionaries, about the infinite value of what we stand to lose: any and all record of thousands of societies, whose myths, origins, histories, practices, relationships, beliefs, songs, and poems are the winding paths of entire cities on the grand map we are trying to transcribe of the Mind.

Mass production, mass communication, and mass transit, offering so much opportunity for travel and so much information about the places we cannot travel to, bring us together by collapsing differences along with distances. The benefits of grapes in winter, cheap flights all over Europe, and hand-held access to virtually any imaginable piece of data are checked by the narrowing of our escape routes from the known to the far-flung. Every fall we harvest a greater amount of a decreasing variety. The forces of mass tolerate only the most familiar of crops, and so cultivate conformity.

The View from the Other Side
The articles mourning the loss of all these languages generally consider the situation from the majority standpoint, trying to project impact on linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, sociology, history, and on the vast abstraction of the global community we all belong to. However, few really explore the view from the other side, that of the native speaker and the finite reality of their local community.

Consider being a member of a language community of 30—the size of a grade-school class. Or 11, enough for a soccer team. Or 3, the barest love triangle. Or 2, an endless dialog. Imagine being one of the few guardians of something as intricate as a language, how stunning would seem its fragility. If the broad idea of cultural history is too vague to elicit much empathy, think of losing your personal language, the one you swear in, the one you swear love in, the one you dream in, the one that fills in the melodies you sing absentmindedly to yourself while running errands or folding laundry with words. Feel the breeze as your way of seeing and being in the world rises off your skin like cool water and loses itself in the air.

Then appreciate for an instant the expansive—the practically speaking infinite—body of documents and recordings in the ten languages that together are native to approximately 3 billion people: Mandarin, English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. All the thought, all the thriving and struggling that takes place in these tongues in the space of a single day would take several lifetimes to conceive of. These languages are institutions; they are monuments.

Paris Nightmare
Long ago, on a Paris metro, I nightmared falling out of who I was. A few feet away from me, a couple sat speaking English of which I could not understand a word. Waves poured in around the sandbar of French I had found to stand on, separating me from understanding’s soft shore. Like sand, I thought, fluency seems stable but is not. I spent several minutes in a state of semi-panic before realizing the couple was speaking Dutch; the tides receded.

For a long time, I considered this vision to be a raucous fantasy, a dark flirtation with the impossible. How could you lose your native tongue? Even if your actual tongue fell right out of your mouth, don’t you practice every minute of every day by unwinding an internal monologue that, laid end to end, would reach the moon? And then I read this, from an article by Daniel Everett, a professor of linguistics at Illinois State University. It describes the Oro Win, a people from the Brazilian Amazon enslaved by Portuguese rubber traders until a half-century ago when the several dozen survivors escaped and went to live with another Amazonian people, the Wari’, who speak a different but related language.

“I also noticed that the Oro Win had forgotten much of their language, since their circumstances over the years had forced them to rely on Portuguese and Wari', rather than Oro Win, in order to survive. Yet they speak neither of these foreign languages well. The five remaining speakers of Oro Win now find that they are not only unable to fully recall their own language, they are unable to speak any other language as native speakers.”

One aspect of the definition of an endangered language (in addition to the number of speakers, their average age, and the percentage of youth who learn the language) is that there are no more monolingual speakers, i.e., no one who speaks only Oro-Win. It would be practically impossible for most people to survive unable to communicate with the larger dominant community—one of the reasons why some languages disappear is that they cease to be useful tools in things like finding employment or engaging in trade (sometimes minority languages are banned by a more powerful majority; that is another matter entirely). However, just because you can communicate in another language doesn’t mean you are fluent, and for the Oro Win, it’s not the nightmare of falling through the looking glass but that of getting trapped between the mirror and its silver backing that has become a reality.

For more on this topic, as well as recordings from the 1930s of now extinct Khoisan languages, see: http://www.yourdictionary.com/elr/whatis.html.

Prepositions: Excerpt from a Personal Dictionary

Marion: prep.;

1. the shape one word takes when it approaches another

2. a character in "The Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders

3. a trapeze artist who loses her job when the circus closes and falls in love with an angel who has become a man

4. narrative arcing over the heads of the crowd

5. the rung seized

6. the hand that seizes the rung

7. a French woman living in a German city

8. a nasty fall taken between languages

9. a weightless thing

10. flung up

Etymology: When I moved out to San Francisco, fall started and I decided to learn German. I could never remember where to put each word. It was always windy on the way to class and I used to warm up my brain by thinking in French, hoping this would help with the German. It never did, except for words like "restaurant" and "parfum" that they share. Most borrowed nouns are neuter in German, but looking for meaning in the gender of a word is like trying to climb a Jacob's ladder. It was around this time I became fascinated by the figure of Marion.

Preposition: n.;

1. a weightless thing

2. concrete

3. a hinge between the moving and the still

4. a way of traveling

5. the shape one word takes when evading another; the slither of a word in retreat

6. something that cannot be touched

7. something necessary to the touch

Etymology: I struggled most with prepositions. Misled by the false cognates between English and German, I expected them to be straightforward. I thought the relationships they describe -- in time, in space -- would be the same in any language: how much disagreement can there be that the cat is on the mat? But soon they came to represent for me everything irreducibly different in the different ways there are to view the world and, more than that, my own dislocation as I moved between them.

Concrete: adj.; a metaphorical way of describing that which is solid, real, and can be touched or walked upon

Auf: prep.; German

1. at, as in " at your own risk"

2. in, as in "in German"

3. on, as in "to be bent on something"

4. to, as in "to nail something down to something else"

5. up, as in "to be up to something"

Etymology: This is an example of a German preposition. As you can see, it maps onto many different English prepositions, depending on the situation. Some of this must be the fault of our own overlapping prepositions, but not all of it.

At: prep.; English

1. am

2. an

3. auf

4. bei

5. im

6. uber

7. um

8. zu

Etymology: It's just as bad in the other direction.

Jacob's Ladder: noun;

1. a ladder that Jacob dreamed connecting heaven to Earth

2. a toy made of wooden squares connected with ribbon

3. a metaphor for Jesus

4. a figure of string looped around the fingers

5. a ladder that is difficult or impossible to climb, that slips and sways when stepped on; an unstable ladder

6. in nautical usage, a ladder whose outside edges are rope

7. a plant of the Polemonium family with variegated leaves

8. the path that moonlight weeps onto the ocean

Etymology: Approaching the world is difficult; it shies, it slips. Prepositions remind us of our separation from the world: Marion becomes the path we follow towards it. She is both the flinger and the flung, the hand and the rung. Climbing up she carves out a way between languages, between a preposition and its object, between a speaker and her tongue.