The Manila Times

Endangered languages

FILIPINIANA CORNER JORGE MOJARRO

FOR many years I have been reading books about endangered languages. In fact, I think the first books in English that I ever read from cover to cover were linguistics books that dealt with endangered languages. (Academic English uses many more Latin-derived words, so for me, as a Spaniard, they were curiously easier to understand than a Stephen King novel.) The idea that a linguistic code, transmitted through generations, with all its peculiarities, with all its implicit ancestral knowledge, could disappear, saddened and fascinated me at the same time.

I learned later that there were young linguists who traveled to remote places in Papua New Guinea (the most linguistically diverse place in the world), Brazil, Siberia, Australia, India or the Caucasus to record and codify a language that sometimes was no longer spoken, or was used by just a handful of speakers. I imagined this task as heroic work, in which the linguist had to try to survive in a completely alien culture, far from material comfort, while trying to codify and record in a handbook and a dictionary a language whose last speakers, generally of advanced age, had not bothered to pass on to their children.

For a few months, as soon as I arrived in Manila, I fantasized about quitting my job if I got a scholarship to describe a language from Southeast Asia, preferably from the Philippines, as part of the Language and Culture Research Center in Cairns (Australia), specializing in the description of dying languages. I must confess that I lacked the courage to take the step.

At the university, in those days when I had to lock myself in the library to study, my eyes often used to be distracted by looking at the hundreds of volumes around me and reading books that had nothing to do with the subject of the exam I had the next morning. I accuse myself of suffering from uncontrollable curiosity. In one of those manuals the linguist Bernard Comrie spoke of the Kamassian language. Kamassian was a Uralic language — from the same family as Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian — whose last speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989. One of the linguists who spent a few months in her town, Abalakovo, spoke to this old woman almost daily with the aim of registering the language and expanding the known vocabulary. When he finally had to say goodbye to her, the linguist explained that her language, Kamassian, had actually been dead for several decades, since at least two people are needed for a language to be active.

The good woman replied: “You are wrong. My tongue is alive. I talk to God every day.” She actually had been keeping her native language alive by praying.

We do not know if the speakers of endangered languages in the Philippines speak to God every day — I would bet they do — but what is clear is that in the coming decades many of these languages, an intangible heritage of the archipelago, will disappear forever, probably without even a linguist having dared to carry out the necessary field work to save their knowledge for posterity. Many Philippine languages today have fewer than 20 speakers.

As I have explained in previous articles, today’s hyper-connected world favors the expansion of major languages and the abandonment of minority languages. Contrary to popular belief, the last speakers of a language are often unaware of the treasure they possess and tend to think that their uniqueness, the fact that they have inherited a language of relatively little use outside their small community, constitutes an obstacle to the prosperity of their children. As the beautiful documentary “The Linguists” (2008) shows, sometimes it is the very presence of linguists, eager to collect information about their languages, that for the first time allows their speakers to recognize that their language has true value.

The rescue of these languages is an almost impossible goal, unless the community has a strong sense of identity, has at least a few thousand speakers and, above all,

a strong collective will. What would be highly desirable is for all those languages that are about to disappear to be worthily collected and studied by experts, before their complete disappearance, as a testimony of the wonderful linguistic diversity that this archipelago managed to achieve. How many of them might possess absolutely unique traits or words not to be found in any language of the world?

Opinion

en-ph

2023-01-24T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-24T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://manilatimes.pressreader.com/article/281784223218541

The Manila Times