In 1978 Peter Austin was introduced to Jack Butler, a 77-year-old man from the mountainous iron mining district of Maroonah Station, 1 000km north of Perth in western Australia. Butler was the last speaker of the aboriginal language Jiwarli. None of his children had any interest in Jiwarli, having long since abandoned it in favour of English, and Butler was anxious it should not die with him.
Over the next eight years before his death, Butler and Austin recorded tapes of the Jiwarli language, history and culture and created a Jiwarli dictionary. Austin, an Australian professor of linguistics based at the University of Melbourne, is now the world’s only Jiwarli speaker, and but for his and Butler’s intervention yet another language would have disappeared, unnoticed.
There are about 6 000 languages in the world, yet 95% of the population speaks just 15 of them. Economic imperialism has gone hand-in-glove with linguistic imperialism, as people abandon their mother tongues in favour of the globally dominant English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. As a result hundreds of languages have disappeared in the past 50 years, and experts predict there will be fewer than 3 000 languages left by the turn of the next century.
While most of the endangered languages originate from the developing world, they are by no means its exclusive preserve. In Europe, for instance, Breton, Romany, Irish and Scots Gaelic are all under threat. Sorbian is now restricted to two villages in the former East Germany, and Karaim, a Turkic language of Lithuania, has just 30 speakers left.
”It is a tragedy even more spectacular than the loss of plant and animal species,” says Professor Graham Furniss, dean of faculty of languages and cultures at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). ”Whole cultures are being wiped out. Language is the oldest part of human history — the original human capacity that differentiates us from animals. We set great store by maintaining our heritage in libraries and museums, but we’re seemingly happy to lose track of our human assets.”
Some countries have recognised that whatever economic benefits may be gained from speaking a dominant language have to be balanced against the perceived threat to their identity. Vanuatu has just passed a law saying all education must take place in one of the 100 mother tongues spoken on the island, rather than in French or English as had become the norm.
But a concerted effort is needed, which is why the Lisbet Rausing Foundation has provided $31-million over the next 10 years to study and document endangered languages. Its programmes — both academic research and fieldwork — will be administered by Soas.
Austin will be in charge of the academic programme. ”In the 30 years that I have been studying the subject, I have worked on 12 different Australian and aboriginal languages,” he says. ”Today there is no one who speaks any of them. When the Europeans first arrived in Australia there were more than 250 different languages. Today there are only about 15 that are learned as mother tongue. Our masters and PhD courses will train students how to record and document languages in the field.”
No one is precisely sure when language began — though some reckon we have been nattering to one another for more than 200 000 years — but we do know that languages have changed significantly over the years through both accretion and migration.
Before the Romans stamped their presence over Italy, there were more than 20 languages spoken, all of which have long since been consigned to the historical dustbin, save for a few surviving fragments and inscriptions. Islam did the same for many indigenous languages in North Africa, where Arabic is now spoken, and the colonial expansion of European countries in the 19th and 20th centuries finished off most of the rest of the world.
So is there not an argument that all languages have a natural shelf-life and that what is culturally important will survive, through assimilation and integration, into the language that supersedes it? Austin is horrified by the suggestion.
”The notion that people only speak one language has only become a normal state of affairs in the past 50 years or so,” he says. ”Before then many people were multilingual, speaking two or three languages.
”Besides, every language encapsulates its cultural knowledge with its own unique structures of grammar and vocabulary. To lose the beauty of the linguistic system is to inevitably lose some of the culture.
”Take the Jiwarli word for camera, mangarn manaji. Mangar is a person’s living essence that, when a person dies, enters the spirit world and returns as a child; manaji literally means ‘it grabs’. So a camera is something that takes a person’s spirit. Lose the language and you lose all the cultural and spiritual associations.”
Most languages exist solely in spoken form and its traditions are passed on through folktales and storytelling. Yet creating a written version of a language is not as complicated as one might imagine. The only reason why written English varies so markedly from modern spoken English is because its orthography derives from the time when it was spoken very differently.
There are only about 100 different sounds that linguists have been able to distinguish, and academics have an established international phonetic alphabet for each sound. So the orthography of Somali, which was created in the 1970s, reflects the way the language was spoken 30 years ago.
Just how long it takes to accurately document a language depends entirely on how much work has already been completed, and Soas is inviting applications for field studies for any length of time between six months and four years.
”The work is not just about the preservation of culture and history,” says Monik Charette, senior lecturer in linguistics at Soas. ”It’s also about understanding how the grammar of different languages are connected and how the brain works when it comes to language. If we are left with just 15 languages we will never have any of the answers, so we must document them to see the similarities and differences.
”Imagine a botanist who could only study a few old favourites in the local flower shop and was denied the diversity of the Amazon rainforest. That is the situation we are facing.”
Some languages, though, remain a mystery. Michael Ventris may have unravelled the glyphs of Linear B, but the ancient script of Linear A lies undeciphered. Similarly, the Indus Valley script and the Easter Island inscriptions have continued to defy the best attentions of academics. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002