Preserving Lost Languages
When a language dies, a culture goes extinct with it. And while the death of a language can occur naturally, it may also be caused by cultural imposition, prohibition, criminalisation and even pure neglect
Every two weeks, a language dies. Of the 7000 languages spoken today, around 40 per cent are in danger of extinction in the years to come. In a sometimes desperate race to save these languages, activists from around the world are organising in various ways, often using social media, to preserve – as well as teach – minority languages to the younger generation.
From activists with the agenda of preservation, to simple people singing and speaking in their own language, they rely on social media to ‘go viral’ and connect with their target audience. Even if some of these languages vanish, the internet will keep them alive for future generations – not only to know they exist, but to experience the way they once sounded.
“Speaking a minority language makes me feel proud. I know the root words which can’t be translated exactly into other languages,” says Sanjib Chaudhary, a social activist from Nepal who works with indigenous development .
APPS SUCH AS DUOLINGO (which offers lessons in languages such as Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Hawaiian and Navajo) or Tusaalanga (which teaches Inuktitut) are of great help for speakers of minority languages. YouTube channels dedicated to preserving and teaching minority languages are also part of a global effort to prevent a mass language extinction in the following years and decades.
Throughout 2019, a rotating roster
A (market) in southern Nepal where the minority language of Eastern Tharu is spoken
THERE ARE THOSE WHO SEE NO POINT IN PASSING ON ‘ USELESS’ LANGUAGES
of indigenous digital activists from Latin America, Asia and Africa took control of the @ActLenguas, @DigiAfricanLang and @AsiaLangsOnline Twitter accounts in an effort to provide a space for diverse voices from across the region to tell stories of their experiences with language revitalisation. To support this effort, the UN announced the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032, where activities will be planned globally in support of minority languages and communities.
IT’S A TOUGH FIGHT against external and even internal enemies. There are those who see no point in passing on ‘useless’ languages that will not help their children and grandchildren to get good jobs. Some young people see no value in the languages of their ancestors in a world where English is the lingua franca.
On the other hand, there are many young people who seek to keep their languages alive. They either come from families of activists or simply have a genuine interest in their own culture. That’s the case for Sanjib Chaudhary. He’s a native Eastern Tharu speaker, a language which is spoken exclusively in southern Nepal by about 1.6 million people.
Chaudhary, who grew up in the country’s capital, Khatmandu, says, “Had it not been that my family used to take me to my homeland every year and used to speak the language, I would have forgotten it completely. It’s sad to say that I spoke Nepali with my sisters and brothers as we grew up in Kathmandu. My daughter struggles to understand Eastern Tharu at all.”
HÉCTOR FLORES’ story couldn’t be more different. His grandparents were native speakers of Nawat (also known as Náhuat or Pipil) in El Salvador, but he didn’t learn the language until he was in college.
“In 2016 while I was at a diploma course for pedagogy, someone shared the terrible data that according to a population census in El Salvador in 2007, there were only about 200 Nawat speakers. I was saddened to learn that my grandparents’ language would soon die and that no one was doing anything to revitalise or document it. So, I began to learn, visiting the community of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, two hours from my place of origin. It took me four years to learn the language fluently.”
FLORES AND CHAUDHARY decided to act. “Seeing all this, and being a contributor to the blog, ‘ Voice of Tharus’, I decided to work towards reinstating the interest of the younger generat ion in this language,” explained Chaudhary, adding that he has been “gathering proverbs, phrases and idioms, folk stories and folk songs of Eastern Tharu”. He says that it is a difficult task since most speakers are either old or live in the villages. “As I live and work in Kathmandu, I can collect them only once or twice a year when I get to the rural villages to talk with old and knowledgeable people.” He has formed a group of “young enthusiastic people who want to revive the language” to compile a dictionary of their language and to promote it online.
Flores also had to look for innovative ways to revitalise his language. He coordinated courses at universities and colleges in San Salvador – the capital of the country – to develop the language and decided to create a YouTube channel called Timumachtikan
Nawat, which means ‘let’s learn Nawat’ to attract the attention of children, young people and adults in order to create a new generation of speakers. He hopes that when there are no more native speakers left, the information that he had been documenting will remain for future generations interested in studying the language.
THE USE OF MINORITY languages in technological contexts can also help fight linguistic prejudice, increase the prestige of a language, and show that all tongues have their place in today’s digital world, according to
Héctor Flores (right) champions the endangered language of Nawat in El Salvador
IT'S IMPORTANT FOR MINORITIES TO BE ABLE TO NATURALISE THE INTERNET AS THEIR OWN SPACE
Albert Ventayol-Boada from the University of California, who’s a member of the GLiDi (Group of Linguists for Diversity).
Tajëëw Beatriz Díaz Robles, an activist for the use of the Mixe language in Mexico, agrees. “You have to be on every platform,” she says. “I come from a family of activists for the rights of indigenous peoples. My father was a tireless fighter until his death – his generation believed that the defence of community life was upheld through their own education, the regional economy and, above all, the defence of the territory. Language was a fundamental element for them,” she explains.
She also adds that Mixe activists promote “efforts to disseminate, promote and research their language from an interdisciplinary perspective,” and through creating Colmix, the Mixe Collective, with colleagues and other language enthusiasts to promote their language.
Nicki Benson studies indigenous language revitalisation at the University of Victoria in Canada, and is a research assistant for the NETOLNEW (‘one mind, one people’ in SENCOTEN language) Indigenous
A village shop in Oaxaca, Mexico, where people speak Mixe
“SOCIAL MEDIA IS A GREAT TOOL FOR CREATING AWARENESS OF ENDANGERED LANGUAGES”
Language Research Partnership. For her, recording endangered languages is essential for revitalising and strengthening them. Miguel Angel Oxlaj Cúmez, professor at the Maya Kaqchikel University, in Guatemala, and promoter of the Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, agrees, but notes that the internet “is a space that is also hegemonised by “dominant” languages, which have “naturalised” it as their own space.
He says that “it is important for the internet to be increasingly diverse and inclusive, and, in this case, multilingual, because that is what the people who use it are like.” It is important, he adds, that minorities are able to also naturalise the internet as their own space and give prestige to indigenous languages.
“Most minority languages, especially those from the developing countries, are spoken by communities that have access to very little financial, educational or technical resources to develop their own independent media. Social media, on the other hand, provides a great platform for individuals to express themselves in a decentralised manner and makes it easier to reach out
to a wider audience in a short span of time,” says Subhashish Panigrahi, documentary filmmaker and speaker of Baleswari, a dialect “hardly documented and represented in mainstream media” of the Odia language in India.
Even though it is an underrepresented dialect, Odia is far from a minority or endangered language, therefore Panigrahi decided to “work towards contributing to minority languages and underrepresented dialects using digital activism as a tool.”
JEROME HARRERA IS A NATIVE Chabacano speaker from the Philippines, a Spanish-based Creole with some 600,000 to 700,000 speakers particularly in the city of Zamboanga.
“Social media is a great tool for creating awareness of endangered languages as well as preserving them. It helps us to reach a wider audience globally,” he says, adding that in the Chabacano case, it has helped spark a debate among its speakers on several topics such as orthography and the relevance of their language in the present time.
There are several online initiatives which aim to prevent hundreds or even thousands of indigenous tongues from vanishing in the next few years. Some believe it’s impossible to save every language, but the least we could do is try to slow down the death of the most vulnerable and honour the rich cultural history that precedes us.