New lease of life for languages

Fancy learning some holiday Ainu? Or becoming fluent in Gangte? Languages on the brink of extinction may have a new chance of survival as their last native speakers are recruited for a series of educational courses.

Speakers of rare languages including Ainu, which is used by about 12 people on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, have agreed to talk to students over the internet using Skype as part of a course offered by Tribalingual.

The language company was founded 10 months ago by Inky Gibbens, 31, a sociolinguist with Mongolian parentage who was inspired because her grandparents’ dialect of Buryat is considered endangered.

Languages offered include Greko, an ancient form of Greek spoken by 300 in southern Italy that features a dazzling array of adjectives for goats.

Kasbopo, for example, means a goat that has hair of one colour on its body and of another on its feet as if it is wearing shorts.

There is also Gangte, a ChineseTibetan language spoken by 15,000 people in north-east India and Quechua, the language of the Incan empire, still used by about 10 million people.

Gibbens, whose grandparents were from Siberia and spoke Buryat, said that she studied language endangerment and wanted to do something about the 2465 languages listed by the United Nations as being at risk.

‘‘I wanted to become an academic and do something about it, but it was a bit too slow, so I decided to start this company.’’

She said that recruiting native speakers has proven tricky because they tended to be old, unfamiliar with technology and live in remote places.

‘‘One of the languages we tried to put on our platform is Mara - an Australian aboriginal language. There are about two speakers left and they’re elderly. They tried to teach their language to a new generation but it’s difficult to pick it up especially if it’s not the lingua franca.’’

There were similar problems with a man from the Democratic Republic of Congo who offered to teach Kihunde.

‘‘He lives on a hill and doesn’t really have an internet connection so that’s impossible. We have fourweek courses which don’t involve Skype, so we could have a course based on that.’’

She and her team are planning to announce new courses, for Yoruba, from Nigeria, Sakha, from Siberia, and Torwali, from northwest Pakistan.

There has also been demand for Ijibwe, spoken in remote parts of Canada.

Gibbens said they had made contact with someone whose grandmother was one of the last remaining speakers but there was limited time to record her knowledge. ‘‘She became ill,’’ she said. She said that despite the difficulties there was a lot of enthusiasm to take part, even among the few Ainu speakers.

‘‘They’re fascinated that other people want to speak their language. It raises their profile.’’ Gibbens does not speak Buryat. ‘‘It’s a dialect of Mongolian. People visit Mongolia and they want to connect with the people. It’s not so much the language as the culture of these places.’’

She said that the 10-week course for Mongolian would not only instruct students how to conduct a simple conversation, but teach them not to make faux pas.

‘‘If you go to the countryside you mustn’t receive a drink with just one hand. You shouldn’t step into a yurt with your left foot. It’s considered rude. If somebody offers you a drink you have to take it with both hands and you have to take a sip. You can’t say, ‘I don’t really feel like it’.’’ How do you save a language? It’s going to take a long time but I think it’s possible.’’

The Times, London