The Dallas Morning News, February 22, 2004
Languishing languages carry whole worlds of ideas: Experts lament that native tongues of many are on the way out

Alexandra Witze

SEATTLE — A fisherman from Cornwall and an accountant from Houston may have trouble understanding each other, but the English tongue itself is in no danger of disappearing.

The same can't be said for many of the world's native languages.

"Human languages are vanishing as we speak," says K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The rate of loss, he adds, "makes the extinction of species look trivial by comparison."

Roughly 40 percent of the world's estimated 6,800 languages may disappear within the next century, linguist Stephen Anderson said this month in Seattle at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic will probably maintain their lock as some of the languages with the most speakers. So why should it matter if a few obscure languages, spoken by a few people in remote corners of the world, vanish forever?

"What is lost when a language is lost is a world," said Dr. Anderson, of Yale University.

Native languages, he said, often convey cultural and sociological information that cannot be articulated in the same way in a different language. A tribe that loses its language may also lose a storehouse of knowledge about its members' history and their environment.

Two newly described languages in the Turkic family, documented in Siberia by Dr. Harrison, illuminate the challenges facing those who speak an obscure tongue.

Last July, Dr. Harrison traveled to Siberia to meet with the Chulym people, who live in six isolated villages using traditional means of hunting, gathering and fishing. Only 35 people in the community of 426 — and no one under the age of 52 — could speak the Middle Chulym language fluently, Dr. Harrison found. The rest spoke mainly Russian.

Middle Chulym is a "moribund" language, destined to disappear soon after its last speaker dies, Dr. Harrison reported at the Seattle meeting. "Passive" speakers may continue to use some of the words for a while, but they, too, will inevitably die out, he said.

Villagers consider Middle Chulym to be a low-prestige language, so there's no compelling reason for them to preserve it, Dr. Harrison said. Attempts to transliterate it into the Cyrillic alphabet, used in Russian, haven't worked for the same reason.

"People don't feel good about speaking these languages," he said.

When Middle Chulym goes, the villagers will have lost a rich oral history as well as specific environmental knowledge, such as what plants to harvest, what animals to hunt, and how to read local weather, Dr. Harrison said. He is working on a new transliteration to create a children's storybook in Middle Chulym that the villagers can be proud of.

In similar straits is another Siberian language called Tofa, spoken by just 40 people in a community of 600. Tofa speakers have a detailed language for their reindeer herds, with specific ways of describing animals on the basis of sex, age, fertility, ridability and color.

That kind of information just doesn't translate in the same fashion into Russian, Dr. Harrison said.

Sometimes languages vanish by choice.

In the Caucasus, for instance, the relatively complex Ubykh language disappeared partly because of a tradition that a couple, upon marrying, should adopt the more phonetically simple language of the pair, Dr. Anderson said. For example, every time an Ubykh-speaking man married a woman who spoke a simpler language, he stopped speaking Ubykh.

Several linguistic, conservation and religious groups have devoted themselves to documenting as many of the world's vanishing languages as possible. But working against them is the fact that nobody knows exactly how many languages exist.

The Ethnologue database, sponsored by Dallas-based SIL International, catalogs 6,809 languages worldwide. That number represents a "best guess" but is essentially meaningless, linguists argued at the Seattle meeting.

For starters, there's the oft-blurred distinction between what constitutes a dialect and what constitutes a language.

Languages are sometimes defined by political power rather than by linguistic definitions, said Laurence Horn of Yale. Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects of Chinese when they are really distinct languages. Meanwhile, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are more like dialects than separate languages, he said.

In the end, perhaps it's best to regard all the world's languages as manifestations of a single language, said David Lightfoot of Georgetown University.

And that, he said, could be called simply Human.

RESOURCES

For a survey of the world's estimated 6,800 languages, see www.ethnologue.com.

For photos from a documentary about the Middle Chulym, visit www.ironboundfilms.com/ironsfire.html.

For a book-length treatment, see "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages," by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine (Oxford University Press, 2000).