Blog 7: Moribund Languages

If I forget my native speech,
And the songs that my people sing
What use are my eyes and ears?
What use is my mouth?

If I forget the smell of the earth
And do not serve it well
What use are my hands?
Why am I living in the world?

How can I believe the foolish idea
That my language is weak and poor
If my mother’s last words
Were in Evenki?

Evenki poet, Alitet Nemtushkin

According to K. David Harrison, author of “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages”, a moribund language is, “A language that will most certainly become extinct in the near future because no children speak it as their first language.”

 

David, and fellow curator, Marjorie Hunt can be seen in this video from the 2013 Smithsonian Institute's "One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage" Festival.

One World, Many Voices

It is estimated that two languages die out every month and of the 7,000 languages in the world today, more than half are expected to die within the next century.  Languages become extinct most commonly because bilingual speakers shift from using one language to the socially dominant language.  However, we lose languages in other ways as well;

·       Genocide causes a radical language death - when a large ethnic group is massacred, the remaining language speakers stop using the language for fear of also being killed.

·       Disease

·       Natural disaster

·       Gradually through neglect

·       Displacement

·       Education – schools insist that the children of immigrants learn to speak the official language of the country

·       Geographic isolation

·       Urbanization

·       Globalization

·       Technology

·       No written form of the language

Click here to view more information about the festival and to see an endangered languages story map.

One World, Many Voices: Endangered Languages and Cultural Heritage Festival 2013

Linguist and professor at MIT, Kenneth Hale, who is reported to have been able to converse in 50 languages, eloquently expressed the damage done to all of us when a language is lost;

"When you lose a language, a large part of the culture goes, too, because much of that culture is encoded in the language. Language is much more than grammar and is often inseparable from the intellectual productions of its speakers, such as some forms of verbal art (e.g., verse, song, and chant).  When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre.”

Additional resources used

http://cr.middlebury.edu/public/usoltan/intd0111a-f06-html/content/language_death.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/hale.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/language_ecology2.shtml
http://www.gial.edu/images/theses/Chang_Debbie-thesis.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/pov/tailenders/special_languages.php