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.