Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages

Citation preview

Vanishing Voices

This page intentionally left blank

Vanishing Voices

The Extinction of the World's Languages

Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine

OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2.000

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 2000 by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nettle, Daniel. Vanishing voices : the extinction of the world's languages / Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513624-1 1. Language obsolescence. 2. Language maintenance. I. Romaine, Suzanne. II. Title. P40.5.L33N48 2000 417'.7—dc21 99-16979 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

ix

one

Where Have All the Languages Gone? Why and how are languages dying? Where and when are languages at risk? Why worry about languages dying? What can be done?

i 5 7 10 2,3

two

A World of Diversity How many languages are there and where are they spoken? Hotbeds of linguistic diversity Endangerment: the extent of the threat Biolinguistic diversity: some correlations between the linguistic and biological worlds

z6 2,7

three

four

33 39 41

Lost Words/Lost Worlds Sudden versus gradual death What happens in gradual death? What is being lost 1: a rose by any other name? What is being lost 2: what's mine is mine? What is being lost 3: women, fire, and dangerous things Lost languages, lost knowledge

50 51 53 56 6z 66

The Ecology of Language Babel in paradise: Papua New Guinea Why are there so many languages? The ways languages die What has changed

78 80 84 90 97

69

vi

Content*

five

The Biological Wave The Paleolithic world system The Neolithic revolution Different trajectories after the Neolithic The Neolithic aftershock The untouched world

six

The Economic Wave The rise to dominance Economic takeoff First casualties: the Celtic languages The spread to the developing world Double dangers

seven

Why Something Should Be Done Why bother? Making choices Language, development, and sustainability Indigenous knowledge systems Language rights and human rights

eight

Sustainable Futures Bottom-up approaches to language maintenance: some case studies Settling for less, but getting more? Who's afraid of bilingualism? Living without a heart Planning for survival: languages as natural resources Some top-down strategies

99 101 104 111 114 1 2,4

12.6 iz8 131 133 143 147

150 153 154 155 166

176 177 1 86 190 193 199 2,00

References and Further Reading

205

Bibliography

215

Index

2,25

List of Illustrations

Figure i. i Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4 Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Table 2.1 Figure 2.1 Table 2.2 Figure 2.2 Table 2.3 Figure Figure Figure Figure

2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2

Table 3.1 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2

Tefvik Esenc, last speaker of Ubykh Red Thundercloud, last speaker of Catawba Sioux and Laura Somersal, one of the last fluent speakers of Wappo Ned Madrell, last speaker of Manx Marie Smith, last speaker of Eyak Welsh Language Society protest against sale of houses Trilingual signs in Jerusalem Top fifteen languages in terms of number of speakers Map of the world showing the relative language density of the major countries An example of genetic relationship Global distribution of languages and stocks Percentages of languages according to continent having fewer than indicated number of speakers Distribution of world biodiversity Penan tribesmen in the Sarawak rain forest Ishi, the last Yahi Indian Hawaiian fisherman using traditional method for catching ulua with pole made from 'ohi'a set between rocks, and eel for bait Counting with numeral classifiers in Pohnpeian Noun classification in traditional Dyirbal Noun classification in young people's Dyribal Some traditional fish hooks used on Tobi, Palau Some important Hawaiian fish with their names at different stages in their lifecycle A typical village scene in the interior of Papua New Guinea Language families in New Guinea

viii

Figures and Tables

Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.z Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2, Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5

Figure 8.6

A Papua New Guinean villager harvests his yams Villagers exchange produce at a local market Centers of agricultural origin, and some associated language families Estimates of world population by continent, 400 BC-AD 1800 Colonists land in Virginia, early seventeenth century The wave of advance of European settlement in the USA Luiseno women in a government-run (English language) school in California, 1904 The last pureblood Tasmanians Map of the Celtic countries The grave of Dolly Pentreath, last speaker of Cornish The gradual retreat of two Celtic languages: Cornish and Breton The Welsh "Not" The area under European control in 1914 Yonggom villagers inspecting damage caused by mine tailings from Ok Tedi mine Women supplying timber for a village-run sawmill in Papua New Guinea Women fishing with handnets in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, following the lifting of a closure placed on the reef Map of the Hawaiian islands Replanting of Waipi'o valley, island of Hawai'i, with traditional wet and dry taro Students in Maori immersion program Poster from Welsh language Board: Why choose "Welsh education for your children? Papua New Guinea's education authorities have now recognized the value of introducing vernacular language education in a number of primary schools around the country Sovereignty demonstration in Honolulu on the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy

Prefaa

-w—i ew people seem to know or care that most of Australia's 250 abot—4 riginal languages have already vanished and few are likely to surJvive over the long term. No young children are learning any of the nearly 100 native languages spoken in what is now the state of California. The last Manx speaker died in 1974. The same gloomy story can be told for many other languages all over the world: At least half the world's languages could be extinct in the next century. What has happened to extinguish these diverse voices? The extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of worldwide near total ecosystem collapse. Our research shows quite striking correlations between areas of biodiversity and areas of highest linguistic diversity, allowing us to talk about a common repository of what we will call "biolinguistic diversity": the rich spectrum of life encompassing all the earth's species of plants and animals along with human cultures and their languages. The greatest biolinguistic diversity is found in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4 percent of the world's population, but speak at least 60 percent of the world's languages. Despite the increasing attention given to endangered species and the environment, there has been little awareness that peoples can also be endangered. More has been said about the plight of pandas and spotted owls than about the disappearance of human language diversity. The main purpose of this book is to inform the wider scientific community and the public of the threat facing the world's languages and, by extent, its cultures. Although our story is a largely depressing one of cultural and linguistic meltdown in progress, we think this new millennium also offers hope. In May 1992. about 500 native delegates gathered in Kari-Oca on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to attend the First World Conference of Indigenous Peoples and declare their desire for self-determination, to educate their children and preserve their cultural identity. The last decades of the twentieth century have seen a resurgence of indigenous activism from the

x

Prefac

grassroots level all the way to international pressure groups. Ironically, the same forces of globalization fostering cultural and linguistic homogenization, and the spread of English in particular, are being marshalled as tools of resistance. Many native peoples and their organizations have websites in English on the internet capable of reaching millions of people all over the world. Delegates to the 1999 World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education in Hilo, Hawai'i, were encouraged to address the meeting in their native languages. We would like to dedicate the book to the many people whose diverse voices have already vanished and to speakers of endangered languages everywhere still engaged in the struggle to preserve and strengthen theirs. This book began as a series of lectures on "Endangered Languages: Causes and Consequences" that we presented at the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, 1998. Our collaboration revealed we were both planning books on the topic with somewhat different emphases reflecting our interests and training: Daniel Nettle, with an academic background in anthropology and fieldwork experience in Africa, and Suzanne Romaine with a background in linguistics and fieldwork experience in the UK and Pacific islands. The resulting book is naturally somewhat different than the separate ones we had each originally envisioned, but we hope the resulting whole is greater than the sum of the respective parts. In order to make the book easily accessible to the widest possible audience, we have avoided in-text references and footnotes. At the end of the book we have included a bibliography and further reading for each chapter indicating the sources we have drawn on. We would like to thank Leanne Hinton for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript, and Deborah Clarke and Rachel Rendall for discussions of the topic. We are also grateful to a number of people who helped with illustrative material and bibliographical matters: Colin Baker, Lily Cregeen, Nancy C. Dorian, Ed Greevy, George Hewitt, Stuart Kirsch, Charles Langlas, Ellen Okuma, Leialoha Apo Perkins, Kevin Roddy, and Craig Severance. Oxford January 1999

Daniel Nettle Suzanne Romaine

Vanishing Voices

This page intentionally left blank

On

Where Have All the Languages Gone?

Most of us feel that we could never become extinct. The Dodo felt that way too. —William Cuppy

A

few years ago, linguists raced to the Turkish farm village of Haci Osman to record Tefvik Esenc, a frail farmer believed to be the last knowrt speaker of the Ubykh language once spoken in the northwestern Caucasus. At that time only four or five elder tribesmen remembered some phrases of the language, but only Esenc knew it flu-

i

Vanishing Voices

ently. Even his own three sons were unable to converse with their father in his native language because they had become Turkish speakers. In 1984 Esenc had already written the inscription he wanted on his gravestone: "This is the grave of Tefvik Esenc. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh." With Esenc's death in 199 z, Ubykh too joined the ever increasing number of extinct languages. Four years later in South Carolina a native American named Red Thundercloud died, the last voice of a dying tongue. No longer able to converse in his native language with the remaining members of his community, he took the language of his tribe to the grave with him. Red Thundercloud was alone among his people, but not alone among native Americans. Roscinda Nolasquez of Pala, California, the last speaker of Cupeno, died in 1987 at the age of 94, and Laura Somersal, one of the last speakers of Wappo, died in 1990. In another part of the world on the Isle of Man, Ned Maddrell passed away in 1974. With his death, the ancient Manx language left the community of the world's living tongues. Just a hundred years earlier, not long before his birth, I2,,ooo people (nearly a third of the island's population) still spoke Manx, but when Maddrell died, he was the only fluent speaker left. Two years before his death, Arthur Bennett died in north Queensland, Australia, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram, a language he had not used himself since his mother died twenty some years before. Tefvik Esenc, Red Thundercloud, Roscinda Nolasquez, Laura Somersal, Ned Maddrell, and Arthur Bennett lived and died thousands of miles apart, in radically different cultural and economic circumstances. Although the precise factors that destroyed their communities and left them as the last representatives of dying languages were quite different, their stories are remarkably similar in other ways. Unfortunately, their fates reveal a common pattern, which is but the tip of the iceberg: the world's languages are dying at an alarming rate. This book tells the story of how and why languages are disappearing. About half the known languages of the world have vanished in the last five hundred years. Some languages of ancient empires, such as Etruscan, Sumerian, and Egyptian, disappeared centuries ago. Their inscriptions are but faint reminders of mostly forgotten peoples, whose cultures and languages are long since dead. Meroitic, a language which between the eighth century BC and the fourth century AD was the official language of an empire with the same name in the Sudan, survives only in inscriptions which have not been deciphered to this day. Only three words survive of Cumbria, an ancient language of Britain. Of the many more people who left no written records we know nothing. A brief look around the world today reveals that the trickle of extinctions of the last few centuries is now turning into a flood. Our opening

Where Have All the Languages

one?

figure i.i Tefvik Esenc, last speaker of Ubykh. [Courtesy of Okan Iscanl George Hewitt]

Figure 1.2 Red Thundercloud, last speaker of Catawba Sioux and Laura Somersal, one of the last fluent speakers of Wappo. [Thundercloud reprinted from Bernard Cotnrie, Stephen Matthews and Maria Polinsky eds. 1996. The Atlas of Languages, Quarto Publishing pic; Somersal photograph by Scott M. Patterson; courtesy of Vtcki Patterson]

3

4

Vanishing Vo ces

Figure 1.3 Ned Maddrell, last speaker of Manx [Courtesy of the Cregeen and Manx Museum, Douglas, Isle of Man]

examples show that language death is not an isolated phenomenon confined to ancient empires and remote backwaters. It is going on before our very eyes in all parts of the world. Manx, for instance, is not alone among the languages in western Europe in being near extinction. Two hundred years before Manx died, Dolly Pentreath, the last known native speaker of Cornish, passed away at the age of 102. in 1777. The few remaining modern Celtic languages such as Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton are in great danger. Though few speakers of English know it, until around AD 1000 Irish was a militantly expanding language; it has the oldest literature in Europe after Latin and Greek. Yet, despite the fact that virtually every child studies Irish extensively in school, it is little used at home. Thus, Irish has continued to die as the language of a rural peasantry in a few remaining pockets along the west coast of the country. Scholars believe the long-term future of the language is not any more secure now than it was sixty years ago. According to one estimate, in 1990 there were just under 9,000 speakers with sufficient attachment to Irish to transmit it to their children. Languages not passed on to the younger generation will eventually die out. A brief look at other parts of the world confirms the same dismal picture. Australian Aboriginal languages are dying at the rate of one or more per year. Although there may have been more than Z5O languages

Where Have All the Languages (-one?

5

before European contact, some linguists predict that if nothing is done, almost all Aboriginal languages will be dead by the time this book is published. The United States alone is a graveyard for hundreds of languages. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the area of the presentday US when Columbus arrived in 1492., only 175 are spoken today. Most, however, are barely hanging on, possibly only a generation away from extinction. A survey of the North American continent done some time ago in i