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Tribal languages dying could later be resurrected
2005-07-23 07:12:55
By InterPress Correspondent
Very few of us worry that one day our tribal language may die.
On September 20th 2004, China’s last woman proficient in probably the world’s only single-sex (female-specific) language, ”Nushu”, died.
Linguists believe Yang Huanyi’s death put an end to a tradition that was at least 400 years old in which women shared their innermost feelings through a set of codes that were incomprehensible to men.
Why should we all care?
What effect will their loss have on those of us who speak English? Afterall, replacing a minor language with a more widespread one allows easier communication amongst people.
Well actually, language diversity is as important as biological diversity.
The Pacific linguist Stephen Wurm, once told the story of a medical cure that depended on knowing a traditional language.
Northern Australia had an outbreak of severe skin ulcers that resisted conventional treatment.
Aborigines acquainted with the nurse told her about a lotion derived from a local medicinal plant that would cure the ulcers.
The nurse applied the lotion and it healed the ulcers.
Similar incidents have happened in other parts of the world.
As a result, searches are being carried out for medicinal plants known to people through their languages and traditional cultures.
When the languages die, the medical knowledge stored in them will go too.
Sadly, language extinction is accelerating today due to population pressures and the spread of industrialization.
Small, unindustrialized communities have to choose between their traditional language and participation in the larger world.
East Africans need to speak Swahili for success; Central Europeans Russian; and lately, the whole world seems to need to speak English.
Many times, these languages eventually replace other languages as older speakers die and younger ones adopt the more-useful tongue.
No one knows exactly how many languages exist in the world today. Western linguistics estimate around 6,800.
Roughly 2,400 are spoken in Africa (35%), 28% in Asia, 19% in the Pacific, 15% in the Americas, and 3% in Europe.
Bear in mind, only about a quarter of the languages and few dialects have writing systems and not all languages have even been ”discovered” by Western linguistics.
Most linguists however, agree that half of the world’s languages are headed for extinction; many fear that 90% will disappear by the end of this century.
More than 750 languages are already extinct or nearly extinct (according to data from ”Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 14th Edition”).
Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center, suggests that 20% to 40% of languages are already dying, and only 5% to l0% are ”safe” in the sense of being widely spoken or having official status.
Tanzania has 135 spoken living languages as said by ethnologues, and two extinct languages, namely Aasax and Kw’adza, the latter found in Mbulu district.
The former, found in northern Tanzania and dependant on the Maasai, became linguistically extinct in 1976.
All is not lost though.
Languages can be revived, infact even after they have died.
The Celtic language, Cornish, once spoken in southwestern England, expired in 1777 when its last living speaker died.
Using surviving written documents, descendants of Cornish speakers began to learn their language and speak it to their children.
Now, about 2,000 people speak Cornish. Another example is modern Hebrew.
Hebrew survived for centuries as a religious and scholarly language.
In the late nineteenth century, a movement led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda reintroduced Hebrew into Palestine as a spoken language.
After the founding of Israel, Hebrew was taught in schools and is now the common language of Israeli citizens. Other languages have also risen to new life.
Welsh and Navajo speakers revitalized their dying languages through ”immersion” schools where children used their ancestral language every day.
Both languages have grown in numbers of speakers over the past few decades.
A healthy language is one that acquires new speakers. No matter how many adults use the language, if it is not passed to the next generation, its fate is already sealed.
Some of our tribal languages do not have monolingual speakers (people who speak only that language), and when they are spoken by a minority of people in the nation, they are held in low esteem causing their speakers to avoid using them or passing them on to their children.
For some, 20 years ago, all of the children spoke that language; now the youngest speakers are in their 20’s.
Speaking the majority language better equips children for success in the majority culture than speaking a less prestigious language and as a result some of our tribal languages are dying.
It is very unfortunate that this is the case, as a language is the most efficient means of transmitting a culture.
Should we let our minority cultures and their languages get swept away in the oncoming tide of standardization? The accumulated knowledge of millennia will disappear, leaving the world a poorer place.
Or should minorities keep their cultural integrity, and minor languages continue to exist alongside larger ones? The scenario that comes to pass depends to a large extent on our actions now.
(AllAfrica.com)
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