Threatened societies

Now you're talking
Do you know what a wanaskaodemek is? Does it matter that there is a tribe
that can't say 'I'? Mark Abley believes that when languages become extinct,
we are lost for more than just words
This month we learnt with dismay that a quarter of all land-based species of
plants and animals face extinction within the next 50 years. A million
species: a figure difficult even for biologists to comprehend.
Yet it is not only the biological richness of the Earth that’s threatened;
the proportion of languages at risk of extinction remains far higher than
the percentage of species in danger. Some linguists believe that of the
6,000 or so languages still in daily use, a mere 600 are secure. Ninety per
cent of languages are now at some risk of disappearing.
Statistics such as these are becoming grimly familiar. They may also have a
numbing effect. Instead of inspiring us to action, they may be herding us
toward apathy. If lemurs, leopards and languages are destined alike to
vanish, why should anyone care?
Looked at from a great height, as it were, the plight of threatened
languages is dire indeed. But looked at from ground level, the situation is
very different. In many places where languages are under siege, local people
are resisting as best they can.
They understand the magnetism of powerful languages: English, Chinese,
Spanish and a handful of others. Except in rare cases, they don’t want to
turn their backs on English, nor to prevent their children from mastering
the world’s most alluring tongue. But they do want to safeguard their own
language, not to see it swept away like ash.
It would be helpful, especially for language activists in poor countries, if
more money and resources were available. But money is not the heart of the
issue. What is needed is for people to take whatever action they can — and
that’s what is happening in some communities around the world.
If your mental image of a North American Indian reserve involves ugliness
and squalor, Odanak might well make you think again. It is a charming
village of 300 or so people, set high above the banks of the St François
River an hour’s drive northeast of Montreal. I visited the place one
afternoon in the late autumn a few years ago. The birches and maples had
already lost their leaves. Ignoring the library and the swimming pool, the
multimedia training centre and the century-old stone church, I was looking
for the Wanaskaodemek Cultural Centre.
In the Abenaki language, once widely spoken across northern New England and
southern Quebec, wanaskaodemek means “meeting place”. Abenaki people have
been living in Odanak since around 1670 — surviving, among other things, a
massacre by British and American frontiersmen during the Seven Years’ War.
The village has produced a good number of artists, musicians, even a
well-known film-maker. What it lacks are people who can invent sentences
using wanaskaodemek — and every other word in Abenaki.
Cécile Wawanolett, one of the language’s last fluent speakers, had been
waiting for me in the cultural centre. Her voice was strong, with a distinct
American twang, and behind her large spectacles her eyes were bright.
Despite her scraggly grey hair, I found it hard to believe she was 85 years
old.
We walked over to the local museum, formerly a girls’ school. In one of its
three classrooms Cécile had learnt to read and write in French. There, as we
sat at a table overlooking the still unfrozen river, she showed me a
French-Abenaki dictionary that had been compiled by a Jesuit missionary in
1715.
The Jesuits were long gone by Cécile’s childhood, and teaching lay in the
hands of the Soeurs de la Sainte Croix. It would be better for the children,
the nuns thought, if the Abenaki language were suppressed.
“I spoke Abenaki at home,” Cécile explained. “But at school we had to use
French. The nuns would not allow us to speak Abenaki, even at recess.” And
so by the late 1980s the traditional language was nearly extinct. No
teaching materials existed in it. No children or teenagers spoke it.
So Cécile began to teach the language. Undeterred by the lack of a
curriculum, she made up her own. The day I was there, like every other
Tuesday evening, she stood beside a blackboard in the cultural centre and
laboured to instil the complex syntax of Abenaki in the minds of five or six
middle-aged students. “I’ve developed a big passion for the language,” said
one of those students, a former TV researcher named Monique Nolett-Ille.
“It’s opened up so much for me: the history, the culture.”
Like many other aboriginal languages, Abenaki is dominated by verbs. It has
26 verb forms — forms that require an immense precision if the language is
to be spoken properly. Verbs of fast action belong in a separate category
from verbs of slow action. Verbs of hard work stand apart from verbs of easy
work. Some terms are animate, others inanimate.
Yet, in its grammar, Abenaki — unlike English, French and other big European
languages — makes no simple distinctions by sex. W’kezossa, “he walks fast”,
can also mean “she walks fast”. Native speakers of Abenaki and native
speakers of European languages have grown up without a shared sense of which
qualities, or perceptions, are the most essential to human life.
It would be easy to dismiss Cécile’s efforts as quixotic; easy to paint the
Abenaki language as doomed. And in fact it may not survive much longer. But
the further from Quebec I travelled in the past few years, and the more
endangered languages I came across, the more I tried to refuse the
temptation to indulge in pathos. In its battle for survival Abenaki is far
from alone. As I’ve found in journeys to places as diverse as southern
France and northern Australia, Baffin Island and the Isle of Man, the fate
of Abenaki is akin to the fate of many other languages around the world.
And so I found myself in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a town just off the celebrated
Highway 66 and the last stronghold of a remarkable, linguistically isolated
tongue called Yuchi. Greg Bigler, sipping coffee across a table from me in
the Mission Street Café, is a middle-aged Yuchi with a long ponytail that
hung over his yellow sweatshirt. He’s also a lawyer educated at Harvard
University.
“The only wrong thing,” he insisted, “is not to do anything. So if you’re 25
or 35 now, stop blaming your parents for not speaking the language. Stop
blaming the Government or the schools. Go ask your grandmother to speak to
you. Do something. Do whatever you can.”
In his own case, that means spending more time with his mother and his aunt
— Yuchi has as few speakers as Abenaki, and fewer dictionaries. But for many
rare languages the options are greater, and the chances of resistance more
widespread.
A practical desire to revive Yiddish culture, for instance, has inspired the
birth of “klez kamps” across the United States, Canada and Europe. These
summer camps give musicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, a chance to master the
subtleties of klezmer music; they also give the Yiddish language an
opportunity to flourish.
Likewise, it’s practical desire that has fostered the rebirth of Maori in
New Zealand. Thanks to the Kohanga Reo or “language nest” movement, whereby
infants and pre-school children are immersed in Maori, nearly half of all
Maori speakers are now under 25. Since 1987, Maori has been an official
language of New Zealand. But its survival owes less to government decree
than to popular will.
It is practical desire that continues to make the Welsh language a going
concern, more than 700 years after Wales lost its independence. On the face
of it, the language’s survival is miraculous. Given the location of Wales
and the smallness of its population, common sense suggests that Welsh should
be extinct.
Yet, as the 2001 census revealed, the language has more fluent speakers
today than it did a generation ago. The job of preserving and strengthening
Welsh remains a difficult one — but nearly 600,000 people evidently find it
rewarding.
It is not that British governments in the past encouraged Welsh or any other
Celtic language. In 1866 a leader in this newspaper, deploring the
popularity of the Eisteddfod, defined the Welsh language as “the curse of
Wales. Its prevalence and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even
now exclude, the Welsh people from the civilisation, the improvement and the
material prosperity of their English neighbours . . . Their antiquated
semi-barbarous language, in short, shrouds them in darkness.”
Welsh people do not invariably obey The Times, nor do they always follow
what the English might deem common sense. Contrary to some expectations, the
National Eisteddfod still thrives. This year’s Eisteddfod, to be held in
early August in Newport — in Casnewydd, I mean — will feature competitions
not just in music and verse but also in film-making, science and technology.
Entries must be submitted in Welsh. An antiquated language? Apparently not,
even though its first great poet, Taliesin, was probably at work eight
centuries before Chaucer. Semi-barbarous? Only in the eyes of the beholder.
There’s a tendency, I’ve noticed, to assume that multilingualism goes hand
in hand with misunderstanding. Phrases such as “he speaks my language” show
more than just an ability to tell the time of day; they suggest the pleasure
of shared communication. Perhaps if everyone spoke my language, peace and
goodwill would reign? Don’t believe it for a moment. Serbs, Croats and
Bosnians all used the same language when they were part of Yugoslavia. Only
now, as a postlude to civil war, has that language split apart.
In Rwanda, likewise, Hutus and Tutsis share a common language, Kinyarwanda.
That didn’t prevent the genocide of 1994; it may even have made the
slaughtering easier and more efficient. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost every
country has a greater degree of language diversity than Rwanda and Somalia —
models for nobody to follow.
Yet, in the end, why does it matter if minority languages die out?
Start with the vocabulary. Its focus differs from language to language,
according to what speakers have felt to be significant. Abenaki, unlike
English, distinguishes walagáskw (bark in general) from maskwá (smooth bark
in particular), and pezákholigán (inner bark in general) from wigebí (inner
bark suitable for cordage) and manhákwegán (the inner bark of conifers,
usable for food or medicine). Its word for moon, naníbehsád, means “the
all-night walker”.
South and east of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British
Columbia, lies the territory once covered by the endangered Halkomelem
language. Its word for a type of wild ginger, th’alátel, means “a device for
the heart”. And, indeed, ginger has lately been shown to reduce cholesterol
levels and to help hardened arteries. If Halkomelem dies, who knows what
other medicinal knowledge might vanish with it?
When I visited northern Australia, I found that scientists had recently
“discovered” a species of reptile: the Arnhem Land long-necked turtle. But
the Aboriginal people who have lived in Arnhem Land for thousands of years
always knew that burrungandji was not the same creature as almangiyi (the
more familiar kind, known in English as the northern long-necked turtle).
That knowledge is embedded in Gagudju — one of several dozen Australian
languages on the brink of extinction.
Despite such examples, it is by no means self-evident that languages deserve
to be saved on the basis of practical, biological or medicinal benefits. How
much is Halkomelem worth? Does it have a higher value than Gagudju? Such
questions are both absurd and offensive.
But I am reminded of a remark Greg Bigler made over coffee in Oklahoma, as
country music blared from speakers above our heads. Each language is a gift,
he said, and: “I don’t think you can quantify it in terms of dollars or
knowledge — it’s just like saying, ‘Why do we care about art or music? Why
do we care about our children?’ It’s part of us.
“If we lost all of the literature that was written before 1900, it wouldn’t
stop us eating or breathing. But there would be some intangible loss that
could never be recovered.”
In the languages of the Algonquian family — Abenaki being one — the
grammatical first person is not “I” or “me”, “we” or “us”. The first person
is “you”. You see me. But I do not see you; in Algonquian languages, you are
seen by me.
It’s not just a question of vocabulary, then, nor even of specialised
knowledge. It’s also that on some level, every language embodies a unique
understanding of life, a singular vision of the world. When a language is
lost, the vision fades. In short, every language is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If Abenaki be washed away, North America is
the less. Any language’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
mankind.


Mark Abley lives in Montreal. His new book Spoken Here: Travels Among
Threatened Languages was published this week by William Heinemann, £14.99.
Offer price £11.99, plus £2.25 p&p (0870-160 8080)

The things they say . . .

NAVIGATING NUANCE
Lokele (eastern Congo). If you want to say “I’m watching the riverbank” in
Lokele — “aSOolaMBA boili” —- correct tone is the only thing that will stop
you from saying “aSOoLAMBA boIli” by mistake: “I’m boiling my
mother-in-law.”

CREATING MEANING
Damin (Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia). A Damin speaker can evoke almost
anything using its invented lexicon of just a couple of hundred basic words.
For example, a sandpiper becomes “ngaajpu wiiiwi-n wuujpu”: literally,
“person-burning creature”, harking back to a Creation story in which
Sandpiper starts a fire.

STRANGELY FAMILIAR
Kriol (Barunga, Australia). Kriol was a communication between Aborigines and
missionaries. Its vocabulary is predominantly English but it is
unintelligible at a normal rate of speech. On the page it is a little easier
to unravel: “Imbin shown wi det plen blanga im . . . Nobodi bin sabi det
plen basdam, bat wi sabi na.” Literally: “He showed us the plan of his.
Nobody understood that plan before but we understood it now.” It’s another
short step back to the English of Paul: “He has made known to us . . . the
mystery of his will.” What began as an expedient method of communication can
be adapted to express even the abstract verses of the scriptures.

LIP SERVICE
Choctaw and Chickasaw (North America). A young man was surprised when, on a
first date, his companion announced: “I want a cigarette.” He was speaking
Chickasaw; she was speaking Choctaw, a closely related tongue. But the
Choctaw word for “cigarette” has a different sense in Chickasaw: it means
“kiss”. Flattered, he granted her request.

ENGLISH TIDE
Russian. One of the first things Vladimir Putin did after becoming President
was to create a language committee to preserve the purity of Russian. It has
not been easy. Many of the impure words are from the brave new Moscow:
biznismeni, defolt, keeleri. The last one means contract killers. Moscow
slang is riddled with English. If a hip young businessman wants to reassure
his girlfriend, he may tell her: “Alscool, bebi” or “Don’ t voori, be
khepi.”