The loneliness of the last native speaker

Dozens are on the verge of taking to their graves a system of communication that will vanish forever

The Economist

Dec 21, 2008

Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith Jones before she died this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother tongue.

Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974 – he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic.

Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, at least some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew that something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue.

In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are at the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.

Does it matter? Plenty of languages – among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha – have gone the way of the dodo without causing much trouble to posterity.

Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues – from Manchu (spoken in China) to Hua (Botswana) and Gwich'in (Alaska) – are in danger of suffering a similar fate?

Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicize an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing.

Of the 6,912 known languages spoken today, 50 to 90 per cent could be gone by the end of the century.

In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger; 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and Southeast Asia.

Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realizes that, whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian is the key to success; citizens of China, including Tibetan ones, face similar pressure to focus on Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect.

Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules.

In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles, there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.

But in an age of mass communication, the threats to linguistic diversity are less draconian and more spontaneous.

Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language (such as Swahili in East Africa) or a global one (such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by the influence of films and computer games.

The result is a growing list of tongues spoken only by white-haired elders.

One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered and Lost, a book edited by Peter K. Austin, an Australian linguist, gives some examples: Njerep, one of 31 endangered languages counted in Cameroon, reportedly has only four speakers left, all of them over 60.

The valleys of the Caucasus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region's baffling tongues, whose last known speaker died in 1992.

The effort to keep languages alive can lead to hard arguments, especially where limited funds are available to spend on education and official communications. In America and Britain, some feel that, whatever people speak at home, priority should go to making sure that children know English well.

But supporters of linguistic diversity make strong arguments, too. Nicholas Ostler, a scholar who heads the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a non-profit group based in Britain, says multilingual children do better academically than monolingual ones. He rejects the notion that a common tongue helps to avoid war: Think of Rwanda, Bosnia and Vietnam.

Thanks to the Internet, saviours of languages have better tools than ever before. Words and sounds, for example, can easily be posted online.

Educational techniques are improving, too. In New Zealand, Maori-speakers have formed "language nests," in which grandparents coach toddlers in the old tongue. Australia's dying Kamilaroi language was boosted by pop songs aimed at teens.

But whatever tricks or technology are used, the only test of a language's viability is everyday life.

"The way to save languages is to speak them," says Austin. "People have to talk to people."