The Last Speakers

by K. David Harrison

  Few defended the Mapuche. Some sympathetic voices noted that the Mapudungun translation mangled the language and that Microsoft had never approached the Mapuche leaders to ask for collaboration. Some observed that a Windows version would introduce drastic changes, including a new orthography (a writing system that represented all the sounds). These commenters were generally dismissed or insulted outright.

  While the blogosphere evinced no sympathy for the idea that a language could be owned, we readily accept the notion that a simple phrase like “Just do it” can be trademarked by Nike or that an author can copyright a work of fiction. For the Mapuche, as for many traditional societies, language is knowledge, and is indistinguishable from it. Therefore it follows that if knowledge can be owned, so can language. True, not all communities try to assert ownership or control, but some do so quite vigorously.

  In my experiences with some of the world’s smallest speech communities, I find a heightened sense of linguistic ownership in reverse proportion to the size of the community. But ownership has two distinct faces. For many communities, ownership means responsibility to share freely with all who may be interested, so that the language has every possible opportunity to be passed along in any form once the last speakers fall silent. The Tofa and Chulym of Siberia are excellent examples of language sharing. They value the fact that their words can be “immortalized” in video and audio recordings, so that even if the languages were not written down or published in books, they have enhanced survival odds by being recorded. Speakers who are language sharers feel a custodial responsibility to ensure that their last utterances are not the end of the line. By sharing their words, they widen the world’s knowledge of lesser-known subjects, such as the characteristics of reindeer.

  Another face of linguistic ownership, commonly found among some Native American groups, is language secrecy. Dr. Richard Grounds, one of the most eloquent activists working to revitalize the nearly extinct Euchee language of Oklahoma (also spelled Yuchi), has stated quite clearly that the only viable way his language can survive is to create new speakers, who will continue to own and use it. He believes that if the fate of Euchee were to end up existing only on dusty 3×5 cards in a museum or on audio recordings in an archive, then it would be better if the language did not exist at all. It would, he notes, be the “ultimate triumph of colonialism” for Euchee to exist only in an archive. Richard is right, of course. Only a spoken language is alive. How and where Euchee will survive must be decided by the owners of the language. Of course, many native speakers do actively pursue preservation technologies (e.g., databases, online dictionaries) as a means to use technology to save languages.

  The Hopi of Arizona, who number just under 7,000, are also known for their very strong position on linguistic ownership. According to tribal policy and practice, the Hopi reportedly regard their language as strictly for the use of the Hopi people. In the 1990s, a Hopi day school located on the Hopi reservation began an initiative to create a Hopi language program. “The school board (composed entirely of Hopis) had reached the last hurdle of approval when someone pointed out there were four or five Navajo children attending the school. The possibility that some Navajo children might learn to speak Hopi was perceived as a worse threat than the fact that Hopi children otherwise would not learn it. The plans were scotched.”16

  While canceling a language program simply because some non-Hopi may learn it may seem extreme, this is an entirely logical position of exclusive linguistic ownership. The Hopi language is for Hopi only, and this may contribute to its survival if they continue to choose to speak it.

  Technology should not be seen as a threat to language, but rather as an enabler. The lowly text message may lift obscure tongues to new levels of prestige; translated software may help them cross the digital divide. Fortunately, Microsoft was not discouraged by the Mapuche reaction and has continued to translate its software into local languages: Inuktitut, Irish, Maori, and more. With nearly 100 local language packs available, it’s off to a good start. But with 6,900 yet to go, the technology has much room to grow. Many languages—even those not yet using writing—will someday soon be spoken, heard, and stored in innovative computer programs. They will be texted and blogged. They will have established a foothold in cyberspace.

  From sheep guts to ice floes to medicinal plants, languages encode the infinite range of topics that humans care to talk about. Many of these topics, once relegated to “folklore,” are now seen to have growing relevance in a world strained by human industry. As knowledge is valued, debates about who owns it, and who can share it, will surely continue. Above all, the value of the knowledge serves as an argument for sustaining language diversity. Because of the way knowledge is packaged into words, it resists direct translation. All of us benefit from maintaining the human knowledge base, and therefore we all benefit from a multitudinous Babel of tongues.

  {CHAPTER FOUR}

  WHERE THE HOTSPOTS ARE

  In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

  —Baba Dioum

  SINCE I COINED THE TERM “language hotspot” in 2006, it has become a leading metaphor for understanding the worldwide distribution of language diversity and the global trend of language extinction. The hotspot concept itself is not original: we have biodiversity hotspots, wi-fi hotspots, volcano hotspots, and many others. But no one had previously applied the idea to languages.

  In introducing the term, I had two goals in mind. First, it serves as a promotional metaphor by allowing us to visualize and understand a complex global trend. Second, I hoped and expected that it would be a predictive model. If correct, it could reveal previously unnoticed concentrations of diversity that is both highly fragile and threatened. This could lead to new additions to the linguistic map, by helping us locate “hidden languages” previously unknown to science. Using the analogy of heat (or perhaps fire) as destruction, we consider hotspots warm if the languages spoken there are safe and thriving, hot if threatened by extinction.

  The hotspots model, though only a few years old, has been moderately successful already. The term “language hotspots,” which yielded no Google hits when I first coined it, now gets more than 5,000. And the model itself has grown, from an original selection of 13 hotspots published in National Geographic magazine in 2007 to over two dozen now. We define language hotspots as those regions of the world having the greatest linguistic diversity, the greatest language endangerment, and the least-studied languages.

  The lion’s share of language hotspots research has been done by Greg Anderson, my close collaborator. Greg is a walking encyclopedia of linguistic facts and a skilled fieldworker. Together, we’ve been fortunate to be able to visit six of the hotspots, where we interviewed hundreds of speakers. We plan to visit them all.

  I was inspired by the concept of a “biodiversity hotspot,” defined by Conservation International as a concentrated zone that meets two criteria.1 First, to be a biodiversity hotspot, a zone must have at least 1,500 vascular plant species native to it (more than 0.5 percent of the world’s total). Second, a zone must have already lost 70 percent or more of its original vegetation and thus be severely degraded, like parts of Amazonia. Using this simple two-dimensional metric of diversity and degradation, ecologists have identified 25 hotspots. Added together, biodiversity hotspots cover just 1.4 percent of the Earth’s surface. Yet they are vital to the planet’s health, being home to fully 35 percent of our world’s land-dwelling vertebrates and 44 percent of plants. The biodiversity hotspots model perfectly captures the extremely skewed distribution of species diversity across space and highlights its fragility. It illustrates how very small areas, if threatened, could yield disproportionately large losses of the planet’s biodiversity.

  The biodiversity hotspot, with its metaphor of concentrated heat as destruction, lent a new energy and perspective to the conservation movement. As evidence of its scientific influence, in 2
003, just 15 years after the model was launched, 30 scientific papers devoted to the topic were published, with a further 200 citations of the original paper.2 The model helped focus research and set priorities in conserving endangered species and in identifying the estimated 83 percent of plant and animal species that remain unidentified and unclassified by Western science.3 By focusing on specific ecoregions with high levels of endemic species (i.e., those found nowhere else on Earth), high species diversity, and severe degradation, the biodiversity hotspots model illustrates the rich interrelatedness of species and ecosystems, rather than studying individual species in isolation. It has also advanced efforts to quantify and map distribution and density of biodiversity, allowing us to formulate a better picture of extinction rates and trajectories.

  Languages, though not precisely analogous to species, also have an ecology.4 “Ecology” derives from the Greek word oikos, meaning “home,” and is used in English to indicate the total environment—organic and inorganic, whether helpful or hostile—that an organism faces in its struggle for survival. Languages, like species, have a home or habitat. They exist in a complex social and ecological matrix, they show uneven global distribution, they have unequal threat levels of extinction, and they can thrive or fail. Languages rely on both internal (social) and external (political) factors for their survival. Their natural habitat is the speech community. They are dynamic, constantly changing, interacting with and coming into contact with other languages. They can exist in a healthy or a degraded habitat, and their transmission from one generation to the next can be threatened, reduced, or even fully interrupted. Efforts at preservation must look at the entire habitat.

  While we can preserve some of a language’s information in dictionaries, grammars, and recordings, these are artificial environments, like a stuffed dodo bird in a museum, not a living being in its natural habitat. Languages must be spoken to thrive. Each tongue is unique, and smaller ones exist only in a single location or community on Earth, so they can never be replaced or reintroduced from elsewhere. If speakers—or anyone else, scientists, governments, societies—wish to maintain languages, the languages must be allowed to thrive, to evolve, to change in a natural setting. New kinds of discourse, new uses, new words, and new speakers must be allowed to emerge freely and organically. These are the hallmarks of a healthy language.

  Unlike species, languages are not bounded entities, unable to intermingle. A traditional boundary line among species is that two animals of different species cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Yet languages can and do constantly intermingle and change. What biologists call “horizontal transfer” of genes has an analogy in languages, which may freely borrow not only words but also grammatical structures from other languages that are unrelated to them. Creoles, and languages of mixed parentage like Kallawaya, can and do arise. There are really no limits on what elements of one language may mix with or be borrowed into another. But unlike the gene transfer experiments of laboratory geneticists that take, for example, a gene for florescence and add it to mice and monkeys, causing them to glow, the transfer of linguistic features is a wholly natural phenomenon and can give rise endlessly to new ways of building words and sentences.

  Being separate but parallel domains, languages and species do have deep and still poorly understood interactions and effects upon each other. All landscapes that are inhabited by humans are modified by them, whether by hunting, foraging, path-making, or modern technologies we impose on the earth. Interactions between humans and ecosystems are mediated and shaped by language in both directions. For example, many language hotspots are populated by traditional hunter-gatherer or other subsistence societies and thus contain knowledge about intense human interaction with the environment. Hotspots by definition have a high level of language diversity, and they give a rich picture of the long-term coexistence and mutual influence of languages over long periods of time.

  AUSTRALIA: WISDOM IN PLANTS

  Aboriginal Australian cultures are among the world’s most ancient, dating back perhaps 48,000 years, before humans inhabited Europe or the Americas.5 Their unique languages and traditions are primarily oral, not written down or recorded, and in many cases they are still relatively poorly documented by scientists. At least a hundred indigenous languages of Australia are now in danger of extinction.

  In 2007, as we launched the Enduring Voices project at National Geographic, we chose Australia as the destination for our first expedition.6 Northern Australia comprises the top-ranked language hotspot, ranking very high on both the diversity and endangerment scales. Though they have been the focus of intense work by linguists for decades, the languages there still have much to reveal to science. It is also, we would learn, one of the leading places in the world for language revitalization. We went there to observe that work, and to especially take note of what the local indigenous communities were doing to preserve their languages.

  The elders (and youngsters) we met generously shared with us some of their vast knowledge about language, mythology, plants, animals, climate, and human adaptation to a harsh environment. It was a rare privilege to have a glimpse into these amazingly complex and ancient cultures, as well as their efforts to ensure continuity of the traditions.

  Our exercise in taking the pulse of languages was to observe the current state of language endangerment and revitalization in several remote communities and to interview elders and other local experts. And we got an earful! Elder William Brady of the Night Owl clan, a speaker of the Gugu-Yaway language and expert hunter, explained how his native tongue connected him to his outback countryside. A hunter must have skills in reading footprints and in using the spear and boomerang, he explained, but beyond that, must be able to communicate with animals. “Whistles and animal sounds,” he insisted, “are a part of our language. If you can’t speak the language to that animal, you’re not a good hunter.” He concluded, “If you can’t speak the language of the bush, you’d better not go into it!” William believes that language can be taught only in its natural setting. “You can’t learn language in a box like this,” he noted, gesturing to the classroom where we were sitting. “Go out and feel, smell, touch, be on country.”

  At the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, a leading center for Aboriginal language revitalization efforts near Darwin, Northern Territory, we sat down with the experts. Jeannie Bell, who works on languages spoken on her homeland, Fraser Island, noted how difficult it was to get government funding for language revitalization. Nazareth Alfred, of the Masi Island Kolpa tribe, who studies the Kulkalgowya tongue, said her language “is deteriorating rapidly” as the youth prefer to speak Kriol. She pointed to some very practical social benefits of saving the language: “The youths who are taught traditional culture have more connectedness and are less angry and violent.”

  Lynette Cockatoo told how she is trying to “retrieve” the traditional Nigarakudi language, faced with very low retention rates of less than 10 percent of the population. Leonora Adidi, a speaker and activist for her native Kalaw Kawaw Ya tongue (also called “KKY”), spoke of the urgent need for more government support and more enlightened policies. Each of these experts expressed a desire and aspiration to help revitalize and document their language. It was impossible to walk out of that meeting and conclude that saving languages doesn’t matter, or that the effort is a lost cause.

  After a day at Batchelor Institute, we took William Brady’s advice and headed out to be “on country.” Our first stop—after several hours of driving along dusty roads—was Nauiyu Nambiyu, a tiny but neat village of single-story houses, surrounded by dense green woods. Aboriginal scholar Patricia McTaggart, a speaker and expert of the Nangikurrunggurr language, told us she had just completed a dictionary, coauthored with linguist Nick Reed, after many years of work. Nangikurrunggurr, she explained, may be literally interpreted as “language of the swamp people.” Another language Patricia speaks, Ngengiwumerri, means “language of the sun and cloud people.”
She invited us to come along and meet some of the swamp, sun, and cloud people.

  Sitting on their lawn, elders Molly Yawalminy and Kitty Kamarrama gave us our first formal “welcome to country” ceremony. They took us down to a nearby river and, standing on the sandy bank, anointed us with river water. Raising their voices in a song, they announced our presence so the local spirits would not harm us. The ceremony, which they allowed us to film, was performed in the Nangikurrunggurr language, with surprisingly loud singing, considering the frail appearance of the two elderly ladies.

  The elders then sat down for an extended conversation about traditional ecological knowledge. They rely on “calendar plants” to tell the best time for food-gathering activities. When the bark peels easily from the gum tree, for example, sharks in the river are fat and may be hunted. When the kapok tree blooms, its seed pods disgorge fluff into the air, indicating the time to gather crocodile eggs along the riverbanks. The ladies’ eyes sparkled at the mention of traditional delicacies like turtle and crocodile eggs, nowadays a rarity.

  Elders Molly and Kitty, full of stories and laughter, were clearly more comfortable sitting outdoors on the bare ground than in their small bungalows. They represented a direct link between the human past of hunter-gatherers and the human present of global technologies. They were amused, and quite patient, to bestow their ancient wisdom upon our modern ignorance. An immense knowledge gap yawned between us. Our team had the latest in digital technology and an ability to upload our recorded conversation to a website to share it with people around the globe. Yet for all this technological reach, I felt unbelievably shallow. The elders were narrow, to be sure—they had never traveled more than 50 miles from their birthplace and had not met many nonlocal people in their lifetimes, nor mastered most modern technologies. Yet they were grounded in this place, Nauiyu Nambiyu, this obscure backwater, by the deepest possible intellectual and cultural roots, far surpassing any connection I had to anyplace I had ever lived. Their exhaustive knowledge of this one small place put to shame the superficial and scattered knowledge of the most peripatetic world traveler.