Obstacles to keeping 6,000 languages alive

It has been said that once there is a revival movement, the language is already dead. This may be too pessimistic, but it is grounded in sad truths.

A. Status. Often, people who speak a “top 20” language alongside an indigenous one do not think of their native language as “real,” because it is not written or used in wider communications. Thus, linguists and anthropologists are often more interested in preserving a community’s language than its members are.

B. Urbanization. The general trend for indigenous people to relocate to cities (or be forced there) helps exterminate indigenous languages. If parents speaking different languages have children in the city, the parents are unlikely to pass both, or even one, of the languages on to their children, and even if they try, the city’s lingua franca will likely be their children’s main language. And whatever they learn of their parents’ language, these children certainly will not pass this on to their own children.

C. Tainted goods. By the time a language is dying, often most of the people speaking it are no longer using the full vocabulary or grammar. Unless the language has been exceptionally well documented already, much of what the actual language consisted of may already be lost to history.

D. Difficulty.

1. Another obstacle to reviving languages is that languages under threat are usually spoken by small numbers of people and were rarely learned by outsiders. As we have learned in this series, these languages tend to be extremely complex. Rare is the threatened language whose grammar requires only the effort that Spanish or Dutch would to master.

2. Threatened languages also tend to be from groups other than the Romance and Germanic ones that we are most familiar with, such that in the threatened language, the very basics of putting words to thoughts are vastly different from ours. The problem is that speakers of the dying language have become most comfortable in Romance and Germanic languages. In Mohawk, for example, Suddenly, she heard someone give a yell from across the street is Tha’kié:ro’k iá:ken’ ísi’ na’oháhati iakothón:te’ ónhka’k khe tontahohén:rehte’. Literally, this is “Suddenly, by what you could hear, there, it’s beyond the street, the ear went to who just then made-shouted back towards her.”