Last year, when 89-year-old Marie Smith Jones died, a language died with her.
Jones was the last speaker of a south-central Alaskan language called Eyak. Once used extensively along 350 miles of the Gulf of Alaska, Eyak had begun to die even before Jones’s childhood, crowded out by other Alaska Native languages. During her lifetime, English-speaking settlers suppressed indigenous languages. After her sister died, in the early 1990s, Jones no longer had anyone to speak to in her native tongue.
Now, Eyak exists only in documentation, much of it compiled (with the help of Jones and other last speakers) by Michael E. Krauss, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Preserving Eyak, at least in the form of a grammar, a dictionary, and other records, has occupied a large part of his career.
Krauss is not the only linguist to mourn the loss of a language he devoted himself to preserving. As he and a handful of others have loudly warned their colleagues for more than 30 years, almost all the world’s languages are approaching extinction. Linguists, Krauss and others complain, are blithely presiding over the disappearance of most of their raw data.
They date that attitude to 1957, when Noam Chomsky published his landmark Syntactic Structures, arguing that all languages exhibit certain universal grammatical features, encoded in the human mind. The field has focused largely on theoretical concerns ever since. American linguists, in particular, have largely turned away from documentary linguistics —the Linguistic Society of America’s standing committee on language endangerment notwithstanding.
It is all very well to generate ideas about how languages work, Krauss and his fellow critics say, but those ideas will be next to useless without primary material to test them against.
That loss affects more than just linguists. The world of our languages is a “very fragile membrane that humanity depends on, that we evolved in, that makes us human,” Krauss says. When languages disappear, cultures do, too —ways of thinking and describing, and of adapting to the globe’s varied environments.
Recently, advocates of preserving dying languages can point to some signs of hope. Master’s and doctoral programs emphasizing documentary linguistics have grown in number and enrollments in several countries. Collaborations with native speakers are on the rise (see related article). And at linguistics meetings in the United States, “suddenly everyone is talking about endangered language issues,” says Peter Austin, director of the endangered-languages program at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Many of his colleagues, he says, hope that the advent of digital recording and storage, along with Internet capabilities, will usher in a time when linguists and language speakers alike will have access to archives that will help them maintain fading languages.
But the discipline as a whole is still divided, not only over its proper relation to dying languages, but also over whether the scholars who are working to preserve them are approaching the problem in the right way.
Of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world —about one-half of the number used 10,000 years ago —at least one-half will almost certainly be dead by midcentury, while another 40 percent will most likely become too diminished to survive much beyond 2100. The causes are largely agreed upon: colonization and other demographic shifts, government neglect or outright suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the influence of mass media.
With the rise of new technologies, however, mass media may actually be a tool to help preserve dying languages. Some 1,500 languages are used on the Internet, including many endangered ones. Chat rooms, blogs, social networks, and Internet-based telephone services like Skype are helping to disseminate recorded speech and video footage of traditional ceremonies. Global cellphone coverage, too, is creating virtual communities of people who speak threatened languages.
One sign of linguists’ increasing interest in preserving languages is that they are calling on colleagues from other fields, such as specialists in signal processing, speech synthesis, and geographic information systems.
But digital data and other technological fixes are at best partial. Digital data are vulnerable to the obsolescence of machinery and software programs. “In this regard, Sumerian clay tablets still remain unsurpassed for archival stability and long-term interpretability,” observes Nicholas Evans, a professor of linguistics at Australian National University and a specialist in Aboriginal languages, in his Dying Words: What Fragile Languages Can Tell Us (Blackwell), published this month.
The National Science Foundation, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution, has for several years financed linguistics fieldwork. The European Union and governments in Brazil, China, and Russia have also financed documentation efforts, as have the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany and the Marit and Hans Rausing Charitable Foundation in England. In Australia, a major, publicly financed push that began in the 1970s has resulted in at least basic documentation of most of the 130 remaining Aboriginal languages, almost all of which are at risk of extinction.
Documentation alone is not enough to keep a language alive, of course. Some linguists worry that a sort of “archivism” is taking over, with talk of international standards for “best practices” for how much to record and how to store it, with what formal archiving properties.
That archivism, they add, has encouraged a “commando style” of recording trip: Fly in, turn on the digital recorder, fly out, download to archives —and check boxes to satisfy funding agencies’ requirement that the material be available to speaker communities.
With the commando approach, “too much is up to blind luck,” says Richard A. Rhodes, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who is president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of America. The nuances that are at the core of language are captured only through long, patient transmission among actual human beings —linguists on the ground attuned to social, historical, and political factors at play locally. “You don’t know what you missed, if you’re not analyzing as you go,” he says.
While largely agreeing that languages tend toward similar features, they are in many respects singular and irreducible, say Austin and other field linguists. Learning them well enough to produce a dictionary and a grammar can be done only little by little. “Even with recording devices, computers, and the like, adequate documentation of a language is still measured in man-decades, not man-years,” says Austin.
Exactly, says Alaska’s Michael Krauss: “You learn a language by sitting there with people. You ask an old lady what she calls various kinds of bushes.”
Moreover, the work must often be done in harsh and even hazardous settings. And though plenty of students are drawn by the lure of living by their wits in the field, critics like Austin and Krauss say the culture of academic linguistics has dampened their enthusiasm by the time they earn their doctoral degrees.
“We’ve had 50 years of that kind of reductionist view of language: as a thing in the brain, where the structures are universal across a whole range of languages, and if we study one language, we can understand how all languages operate,” says Austin.
Chomsky, who spawned the theoretical turn in the field, says it’s not the problem. In fact, the loss of a language “is much more of a tragedy for linguists whose interests are mostly theoretical, like me, than for descriptive linguists who focus on specific languages,” he says, “since it means the permanent loss of the most relevant data for general theoretical work.” In that sense, a descriptive linguist working in, say, Africa, is far less affected by the death of a language in New Guinea than a theoretical linguist.
But Chomsky says that his sympathy for endangered-language communities does not mean that MIT, or any other department, should award Ph.D.'s for descriptive work alone. In linguistics, “just as in every other field, you can’t do descriptive work without a theoretical understanding,” he says.
That’s precisely the point, objects Nicholas Evans, of Australian National University. To compile a grammar is to live and breathe theory. The process of immersion, extraction, analysis, and summation of a language is, he argues, “the most demanding intellectual task a linguist can engage in.”
While some linguists worry that helping communities shore up their languages saps too much time from research, Evans believes that linguists who document languages in the field should take an active role in such activities. Working with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia, Evans often acts as an interpreter or expert witness in legal proceedings relating to land and sea rights; he also contributes to educational programs that strengthen local languages. All the while, aided by these activities, he prepares dictionaries and grammars, devises orthographies, and transcribes and translates documents and old texts. He says Aboriginal communities expect that give-and-take with outsiders, and the result is what some linguists refer to as “sustainable linguistics.”
Not that getting speakers to reciprocate is always easy. Communities may be ambivalent about or even hostile to efforts to preserve their languages. They may doubt that linguists will follow through, or that funds will keep coming for immersion schools. Speakers may have ceased bothering to use their languages in everyday activities, such as speaking with their children. Without that transmission, of course, no language can survive.
Indeed, says Evans, losing one’s language, often without fully acquiring another, will demoralize a community. “There are times when what people speak is like seeing the world through very badly made, thick glasses,” he says. “You can avoid bumping into objects, but you don’t see all the beautiful detail.
“Just to take an example in northern Australia. Say a community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to speaking a creole. Well, let’s just use talking about the natural world as an example. You leave behind a language where there are all sorts of clues about the ecological relations of one species to another. There’s very fine vocabulary for the landscape. Inside the language there’s a whole manual for maintaining the integrity of the landscape, for managing it, for using it, for looking for stuff. All that is gone in a creole; you’ve just got a few words like ‘gum tree,’ or whatever.”
When the knowledge that has imbued life with meaning is wiped out, what community would not be demoralized? he asks.
But much can be achieved even with language-revitalization programs that do not succeed in completely reviving a language, he says: “There’s a whole lifetime’s accumulation of stories, observations, understandings inside the head of some people which can now start coming out, and people feel enormously proud of that, as employment.”
And when their language is committed to print, “people suddenly see their language as something immensely valuable, as something to be proud of, and to learn,” he says.
Conversely, when not rehearsed, languages tens of thousands of years in the making vanish within a generation or two. With the loss of raw data and the damage to communities of speakers so great, Evans asks, is it not worth the expense to at least document the languages?
He has done the math: It costs about half a million dollars to train one qualified graduate student to glean and record enough of a language that it might be recoverable. That $500,000 covers a doctorate and two or three years of postdoctoral work. “Multiply that by, say, 4,000 languages,” says Evans. “That’s two billion dollars. That’s almost just a cut off the edge of a budget, in a lot of places.”
The social benefits, aside, says Evans, “the scientific expense isn’t really exorbitant and the scientific payoffs are enormous. How much did sequencing the human genome cost? A fair bit more than that, I’d think.”
