From Down to Earth, December 31, 2002
When metaphors die, ideas pass
away and a way of thinking is buried,” says
Sakar Khan. He is not a linguist. He
is a musician. He plays the khamaicha — a four-string instrument. Somewhere in
his eighties, he is arguably the most revered of the musicians in his tribe —
the langas of Rajasthan. Reticently he shares his feelings, “I see today’s
generation ignore the khamaicha. I can’t help it. Music, like language, can
provide only a metaphor for a way of life. When people lose a way of life,
their language struggles to survive.”
In a similar vein, linguists
remember Tefvik Esenc, the last speaker of Ubykh, a language once spoken in the
northwestern Caucasus. Some years ago they scampered to his village of Haci
Osman in Turkey to meet him. He had three sons, all of them unable to understand
his tongue, preferring Turkish instead. He had already decided upon his
epitaph. “This is the grave of Tefvik Esenc. He was the last person able to
speak the language they called Ubykh.” He died in 1992. The language passed
away with him.
Then there is what linguist
Bruce Connel recorded in a newsletter of the UK Foundation for Endangered
Languages, under the heading ‘obituaries’. “During fieldwork in the Mambila
region of Cameroon’s Adawawa region in 1994-95,1 came across a number of
moribund languages. . . one of these, Kasabe.. .had only one remaining speaker,
Bogon. In November 1996 I returned to the Mambila region. Bogon had died on
November 5, 1995 taking Kasabe with him. He is survived by a sister, who
reportedly could understand Kasabe, but not speak it, and several children and
grandchi1dren none of whom know the language.”
Exactly what is lost when a
language dies? Do we also lose what can be called a biotic world-view, the
local knowledge and wisdom of which a language is a repository?
The Tower of Babel Lies in the
Tropics
Most linguists agree that
about 6,000 languages are spoken today. Not all languages spoken in the world
have been ‘discovered’. Reports occasionally come in of new languages and
communities being found in the islands of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the
South American or Central African rainforests. In 1998 two such nomadic
communities (the Vahudate and the Aukedate, comprising 20 and 33 families
respectively) were found living near the Mamberamo river, 2,400 miles east of
Jakarta. David Crystal, author of the book Language Death and a
linguist, says it is quite likely their speech is sufficiently different to
count as a new language. Even in parts of the world where linguistic surveys
have been carried out, the data remains incomplete and provides partial
information. Perhaps this is why, of the 6,703 languages it lists, the Ethnologue
marks 3,074 as those that require surveys.
The world’s languages are
highly unevenly distributed. Four per cent of the 6,000 odd languages are
spoken in Europe; about 15 per cent in the Americas, 31 per cent in Africa and
50 per cent in the Pacific and Asia. Just two countries put together, Papua
New Guinea and Indonesia, account for 25 per cent of all languages worldwide
(about 1,500). India is home to about 380 languages.
It’s clear that the current
geographical spread of languages surviving today is skewed. But so is the
number of people that speak each respective language. Out of the full bouquet
of 6,700 surviving languages, most are spoken by very small groups of
communities and people. The world’s top 10 languages, in terms of the number
of speakers, are spoken by approximately half the world’s population.
As Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a
Sweden-based linguist and professor at Roskilde University, points out, “When
we are talking about the world’s languages, even the biggest ones, we do not
really know what we are talking about. Some of the variations are due to
changes in classification systems. Of the others, some are results of real
changes, but many are results of guesswork. The problem is that we don’t know
which is which. We do not have even the basic information needed for efficient
language planning and language policies. Even when speaking about millions of
people, our figures are all but reliable. We know more about pigs than
people.”
In fact relatively few people
speak most of the world’s languages. The average number of speakers of one
language is probably around 5,000 to 6,000. Communities of one million speakers
and above speak fewer than 300 languages, meaning that over 95 per cent of the
world’s spoken languages have fewer than one million native users. The point is
that some 83-84 per cent of languages spoken are endemic (local to the space in
which they are prevalent). They are spoken only in a particular country and not
shared between boundaries. In fact about 4,000-5,000 out of the 6,000 odd
languages are spoken by indigenous tribes of the world. These can be as
disparate as the 10-million strong Quechua descendents of the Inca civilisation,
or fewer than 10 people in the Gurumulum band of Papua New Guinea.
Is there, therefore, a pattern
to the geographical spread of languages? Where should we look to find that
pattern, if any?
Most of the world’s languages
are spoken in the tropical countries. There are two great belts of high density
of languages. One belt runs from the West African coast through the
Congo basin to East Africa, and the other runs from India and peninsular
Southeast Asia into the islands of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the
Pacific. The seventeen major countries of these two belts (including India)
contain about 60 per cent of the world’s languages and only nine per cent of
the geographical land area.
Noticeably, quite a few of
these countries are some of the poorest in the world. They also harbour a great
many of the world’s species. Just a casual glance at the biodiversity hotspots
of the world and the geographical spread of languages shows a remarkable
similarity.
Terralingua (a Washington-based
non governmental organisation that campaigns for linguistic rights) along with
WWF carried out a cross mapping of indigenous peoples’ locations onto a map of
the globally two hundred most fragile and important biological regions. WWF
mapped out nearly 900 ecoregions of the world and found 238 of them to be of
the utmost importance for biological diversity. These were termed the ‘global
200 ecoregions’. (An ecoregion was defined as a relatively large unit land or
water containing a geographically distinct assemblage of species, natural
communities, and environmental conditions.)
They then used the concept of
‘ethnolinguistic groups’, used to define a social unit that shares the same
language and culture and uses the same criteria to differentiate itself from
other social groups. In the mapping 4,635 distinct ethnolinguistic groups were
found to inhabit 225 ecoregions, representing 67 per cent of an approximate
world total of 6,867 ethnolinguistic groups.
Tropical rainforests, the
world’s most biodiversity~rich areas, covering just seven per cent of the
planet’s land surface, are home to at least 50 per cent, and perhaps as many as
90 per cent, of the world’s species. These ecosystems were also found to be the
most culturally diverse regions, harbouring at least 1,400 distinct indigenous
and traditional peoples. The total figure for all tropical forest ecoregions,
including mangroves, amounts to 2,880 communities, which represents 62 per cent
of all ecoregions in the global 200, and 42 per cent of all ecoregions in the
world.
In sum, the correlation
between the global 200 ecoregions as reservoirs of high biodiversity and also
as areas of concentration of human diversity is clearly very significant.
Mere coincidence?
Is there more to this overlap?
Eric A Smith, professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of
Washington, USA, studied the relationship between linguistic and cultural
diversity in native North America and the biodiversity of the region. He
recorded more than 275 languages spread in the domains of the native North
American spoken at the time of contact with the Europeans. For measuring
cultural diversity, Smith used the standard measure — ethnolinguistic groups
—among other parameters. He measured biodiversity using a rather primary
parameter, that of species richness in an area. He used maps to superimpose
diversity of one kind over linguistic and cultural diversity maps of the same
area.
The results were quite
revealing. Says Smith, “Four of the regions with the lowest tree-species
diversity overlapped with the four of the least linguistically diverse areas.”
Two of the three regions with the highest tree species also had the highest
linguistic diversity. Analysis of the non-linguistic measures of cultural
diversity also showed similar results when correlated with biodiverse regions.
Smith concluded that linguistic diversity seems to be driven by environmental
reasons as well as socio-political ones. Tove agrees: “There is definitely a
casual relationship between the two types of diversity.” While the same forces
may be at work to influence diversity of languages and biological wealth, the
way they work and influence are definitely regarded by experts to vary.
The foundation of such studies
has been laid down very recently. Yet many anthropologists and experts have
some ideas that are generally agreed upon today. David Harmon, co-founder of
Terralingua, and author of In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in
Nature and Culture Makes Us Human, points out that several large-scale
biogeographical factors that affect both biological and linguistic diversity.
These factors include the existence of large landmasses with varying terrains
and ecosystems; island territories, especially with internal geophysical
barriers; tropical climates, fostering higher numbers and densities. All these
factors may increase linguistic diversity by increasing mutual isolation among
human populations.
He also suggests a simple
phenomenon. When people begin to live close to nature and modify it as they
adapt to it, they develop a specialised knowledge about their environment. In
order to convey this vital knowledge they develop lingual tools specific to
their ecological regions and contexts. Over time these tools would have
distilled into their lingual and cultural maps.
Says Tove, “Recent research
shows mounting evidence for the hypothesis that the relationship may also be
causal. Linguistic and cultural diversity may be decisive mediating variables
in sustaining biodiversity itself, and vice versa, as long as humans are on the
earth.” All landscapes are cultural landscapes. Likewise, local nature and its
use have influenced the languages and visions of the people dependent on it for
their sustenance. This relationship between all kinds of diversities is what
most indigenous peoples have always known.
Face Death Now – Some
Languages Are Murdered
Says the renowned Alaska
Native Languages Centre-based linguist Michael Krauss, “It is a plausible
calculation that-at the rate things are going — the coming century will witness
the death of 90 per cent of the human languages.” Others put it at 50 per cent.
Krauss estimates that in the US and Canada 80 per cent of the native Indian
languages (149 out of the 187) are no longer taught to children. Sixty
languages were spoken in Canada. Now only four remain stable. But the real
Armageddon is turning out to be Australia. Ninety per cent of the 250
aboriginal languages are near extinction. Daniel Nettle, co-author of the book Vanishing
Voices, believes only on or two of these will survive the end of the
century. Africa isn’t far behind. Adds Nettle, “A recent survey has shown that
virtually all African nations are affected to some degree”. The survey showed
54 documented languages were extinct and another 116 were on the verge of
extinction.
Most obviously, a language
dies if all the people who speak it are dead, or killed. Then there is the
State with its ‘national’ agenda, a centralising imperative that scythes
through linguistic multi-expressivity. Crystal says the third and probably
largest factor in language death is globalisation. The invasion of technology
into every corner of the world is exposing once-protected pockets of unique
cultures to the dominant languages in that area. In Canada, that is English.
In South America, it is Spanish and Portuguese. In India, suggests Anvita Abbi,
Professor of Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, it is
English.
Tove doesn’t like the phrase
‘language death’. She prefers ‘genocide’. The choice between the two words, she
believes, has political connotations. “The most important direct agents in
language murder are the media and the educational systems. Behind them are the
real culprits, the global economic, military and political systems. The
persistence of language is about power and autonomy.”
Today, as formal education
reaches more and more people, schools can kill in one generation languages
maintained for hundreds of years. Likewise, most minority education is guilty
of linguistic genocide, points out Tove. Assimilative submersion through
education — where indigenous and minority children are taught through the
medium of dominant languages — often leads to the students using the dominant
language with their own children later on. Over a generation or two, the
linguistic transfer is complete.
While the number of speakers
of a language may help keep the language alive, it is not a guarantee. Neither
is official support. The Hawaiian languages have been co-official with English
in the state of Hawaii since 1978 but is still in a precarious condition. A
continent away, in India, the story is not different. In India’s Living
Languages, Sumi Krishnan points out that the 1961 census recorded 165
mother tongues in India, only 200 being spoken by more than 10,000 or more
speakers. More than a fourth of all languages recorded had five or fewer
speakers each. One-third of the Kurukhs (Oraons) of central India had abandoned
their language by -1979, the rate of decline being about 30 to 40 per cent
every decade; it is the same for the Gonds of central India whose language is
also slowly tumbling into oblivion.
Life’s Data: Repositories of
Knowledge
Languages are like oysters
holding pearls of wisdom. Tove shares one such: “Pekka Aikio, the President of
the Saami Parliament told me this in 2001. Finnish fish biologists have just
‘discovered’ that salmon can use even extremely small rivulets leading to the
river Teno as spawning ground - earlier this was thought impossible. Pekka told
me that the Saami have always known this — the traditional Saami names of
several of those rivulets often include the Saami word for ‘salmon
spawning-bed’.”
This is ecological knowledge
inscribed in indigenous languages. Languages are repositories of knowledge.
When the languages vanish these treasure troves are also lost. This largely
undocumented knowledge base is humanity’s lifeline. Over the ages, indigenous
peoples have developed innumerable technologies. They have devised ways to
farm deserts without irrigation and produce abundance from the rain forest
without destroying the delicate balance that maintains the ecosystem. They have
explored the medicinal properties of plants; and they have acquired an
understanding of the basic ecology of flora and fauna.
Language captures these values
in numerous ways, as cultural values, as oral myths and folklore. Even more
intrinsically, in the very way the language structures are formed. If this
knowledge had to be duplicated from scratch, it would beggar the scientific
imagination. Much of this expertise and wisdom has already disappeared, and if
neglected, most of the remainder could be gone within the next generation.
N K Bohra, from the Arid
Research Centre, Jodhpur, narrates Rajasthan’s folk songs and verses that
announce the severity of impeding famine or drought on the basis of ecological
indicators. M D Muthukumaraswamy, editor of the journal Indian Folk life, tells
of therukoothu — the traditional theatre form. In it the clown often
challenges the hero to a verbal feat. For example, the challenge could be to
name all the flowers in the surrounding valley, or birds of a certain kind.
These are records of folk classification systems. This feat is also ‘performed’
in the textual form. In the anthology Patthupaatu, one travelling bard
describes to another all the places he has been to. In the process, of course,
the landscape is sketched out in detail. In one particular song, called the Kurincipaatu,
the bard lists 99 flower varieties that he saw in the valley.
In some cases the
classification is clear even today. In others, we can only guess as to why
certain objects are clubbed together. For example, many oral epics list 80
indigenous grass varieties. But we can no longer distinguish between some of
these, and nor do we know what some of them refer to. When ecological values
and codifications get lost with the languages, very often people left behind
are mere shadows of what they once were. The price they pay directly, and the
world pays indirectly, is psychological as well as material.
Reinventing the wheel
Such loss of valuable
knowledge is not only the indigenous people’s loss but that of the entire
humankind. Michael Balick, director of the New York Botanical Garden’s
Institute of Economic Botany, notes that only 1,100 of the earth’s 265,000
species of plants have been thoroughly studied by Western scientists, but as
many as 40,000 may have medicinal or undiscovered nutritional value for humans.
Many are already used by tribal healers. Theodore Bhaskaran, a Chennai-based
linguist, narrates the following: In Tamil the local dialects and vocabulary
is being lost. So environmentalists re-invent the wheel. One example: there was
a conservation effort in the Gulf of Munnar to save the dugong (sea-cow). There
is a local word for the sea cow, but environmentalists, not knowing this, distributed
pamphlets among farmers and fisherfolk that said save the ‘kadal pashu’ — a
literal translation of ‘sea cow’. The result was that the locals thought the
idea was to prevent cows from falling into the sea.
The point is there is a
problem if local dialect is not conserved. Embedded in the language is some
feeling of the role the animal plays in the environment.
Bhaskaran talks of another
case, “I met a farming tribal community called the Kadaar. Now in the same area
there is the mouse deer, which looks like a miniature deer, but is an animal
that is actually a relative of the pig. The Kadaar people identify the animal
as a ‘marra panni’ or ‘tree pig’.” Now if conservationists don’t make a record
of this, we end up imposing some ridiculous translation.
The thespian, Komal Kothari,
and director of Rupayan, a Jodhpur-based non-government organisation working on
Rajasthani folk traditions, says people have found out a million things that
modern science rediscovers, repackages and gives it back to them, albeit with a
price. “I was working with All India Radio travelling through Rajasthan when I
came to know that very often people here pay a premium for seeds of some plants
regurgitated out of the goats guts. I was intrigued. Asked some scientists to
work on it. They came back and told me that the seeds got enzyme-coated which
helped them germinate better.”
The markets and the governments
in the developing world are getting wiser to the great economic potential of
traditional knowledge. It is now a healthy business. The trade can rake in
millions of dollars. But it is all locked in the languages and traditions of
the people who have nurtured it for ages.
Eugene S Hunn, professor of
Anthropology at the University of Washington, USA, studied the Zapotec people,
more specifically the Mixtepec Zapotec for how the traditional inventory of the
people in the language fared against that developed in the dominant Spanish or
English languages. He worked in San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxacathe. He says the 1300
names categorised so far by the researchers in local Zapotec language are
easily translatable in Latin but it is more difficult to find their Spanish or
English equivalents. He asks: “What is the value of the local Zapotec to the
programme of inventorying?” He answers: “They are the ones who point out
distinctions between many flowers and their subspecies I miss out on. They are
obsessed with flowers. They have far greater refined classification of
marigolds than the usual botanical system.” He details how their classification
of oak trees and century plants or magueys is so well done. They classify them
by characteristic habits and primary uses, whether for fibre, medicinal use or
habitat for some animal. He says, “Its clear that if Zapotec, or another
comparable indigenous language were to be replaced by Spanish in rural Oaxacan
communities, the result would not simply be lexical replacement but substantial
lexical simplification.” In other words the treasure of knowledge collected by
people over years of shared experience would be lost and would perhaps need to
be rediscovered.
Language rights
Such small endeavours must be
matched by more sensitive nations states. Take the case of India — a country of
more than 300 languages — with only 16 state-recognised languages. Devi says,
“While it is not essential that all languages be recognised as state languages,
a state conscious of the existence of these languages is the first step in the
right direction.”
Tove agrees and says, “The
human rights system should protect people in the globalisation process rather
than giving market forces free range.” She and many other linguists and experts
advise that multilingualism is the only way out of the impasse. Suggests
Crystal, “The two way relation (of languages) to ecology needs to be
developed. While discussing ecological issues languages need to become part of
the agenda.” He does point out that when basic needs are unmet even thinking of
language maintenance or revival seems like an irrelevant luxury. But as Abbi
says, “We will have to realise that in a place where these basic necessities
are available to the resource-rich people as their right and not as a dole, the
languages of these people will thrive automatically.”
What are the tools to fight a
battle against the ‘killer languages’? Are these battles at all worthwhile? At
a macro level the survival of languages is intricately linked with the sociocultural
policies of the state. Says Abbi, “Where will the languages survive if we cut
down the entire forest of the Onges in the Little Andaman islands, turn them
into refugees on their own homeland. The Gonds of central India, the Gaddis in
Himachal Pradesh, the Penan tribe of Indondesia. . .all face a question of
livelihoods.” But small steps at the ground level help change the cataclysmic
direction in which humanity moves now. Devi’s organisation Bhasha is taking
such small steps in Gujarat, reaching out to Bhils and other numerous tribal
people, turning them into anthropologists who define their own terms of
development
The Angami Nagas believe in
the beauty of multitude of languages. They have a myth that tells of people
constructing a tower to heaven. As they build it, the goddess gets afraid that
if they reach her abode, she will not have enough gifts to shower on them and
that will create disharmony. So she bestows upon them the gift of languages.
Unable to understand themselves they are unable to build the tower and live in
peace. Question is: can the iconic Tower of Babel be turned on its head?.
With inputs from Anushka
Meenakshi, Chennai and Proteek Dey, New Delhi