The Last Speakers

by K. David Harrison

3. V. H. Heywood, ed., Global Biodiversity Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Random House, 2002).

  4. Einar Haugen, The Ecology of Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972); E. Müllhäusler, Linguistic Ecology (New York: Routledge, 1996), 166; Salikoko Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  5. R. Gillespie, “Dating the First Australians,” Radiocarbon 44 (2002): 455–72.

  6. The Enduring Voices Australia expedition team was Greg Anderson, Sam Anderson, Chris Rainier, and myself. We were welcomed and accompanied at every location by local experts and elders to ensure that the work was carried out in accordance with local cultural and ethical standards. Data presented in this book was freely shared, and informed consent was granted to us by the speakers for its recording and wider dissemination.

  7. These were Mary Magdalene Dungoi, in her 80s, reportedly the oldest speaker of Magati Ke; and Elizabeth Cumanyi and Lucy Tcherna, both in their 70s.

  8. Although Amurdag had been reported in some of the scientific literature as extinct about 25 years prior, in fact it was not, and Australian linguists Robert Handelsmann, Nick Evans, Bruce Birch, and others had been with working with Charlie Mangulda and another remaining speaker over the years.

  9. Charlie Mangulda narrated these first to our local guide Freddie Bush, and then he helped Freddie retell the Rainbow Serpent story to us.

  10. We had with us a copy of Robert Handelsmann’s thesis Towards a Description of Amurdak: A Language of Northern Australia (University of Melbourne, Honors Thesis, 1991). This invaluable monograph reflects a fuller state of the language that is likely no longer in existence, or at any rate not fully recalled by its last speaker(s).

  11. R. D. Lambert and B. F. Freed, eds., The Loss of Language Skills (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1982). See also B. Köpke, M. S. Schmid, M. Keijzer, and S. Dostert, eds., Language Attrition: Theoretical Perspectives (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007).

  12. An example of recent press about Charlie Mangulda and the efforts of linguists and musicologists to document his knowledge is “The Song Remains Unbroken” by Nicholas Rothwell in the Australian, September 21, 2009.

  13. Recorded field interview with Neil MacKenzie, July 2007, file L: 00:01:00-8:00.

  14. Greg Anderson and I also interviewed Yawuru elders Susan Edgar, her mother Elsie Edgar, and Thelma Sadler, who was 97 when we met her and likely the oldest living speaker of Yawuru.

  15. The Enduring Voices team in Paraguay consisted of linguists Greg Anderson and myself, photographer Chris Rainier, anthropologist Anna-Luisa Daigneault, and photographer and videographer Alejandro Chaskielberg.

  16. Puerto Diana, Paraguay, May 22–23, 2009. Field recordings by K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson. Field notes, interview, and translation by Anna Luisa Daigneault. All linguistic and cultural content is to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Chamacoco people.

  CHAPTER 5: FINDING HIDDEN LANGUAGES

  1. Recordings of the Aka, Koro, and Miji were made mainly in Palizi and Siwu villages in West Kameng District, and in Yangse, Kadeyang, and Kaching villages in East Kameng District, Arunachal Pradesh, India. The fieldwork team consisted of Greg Anderson, Ganesh Murmu, and myself. Many thanks to language consultants Sange Degio, Khandu Degio, Katia Yame, Sange Chopel Nimasow, Anil Sangchozu, Kachim, Gujupi, Sunil Yame, Pario Nimasow, Lupa Sangcho, and Serbu Aka.

  The Aka-Miji language cluster includes Aka-Hruso (ca 2,000 speakers), Miji (ca 2500), Koro (less than 800), Bugun/Khowa (less than 800), and Sulung/Puroik (less than 3,000). All these languages are either threatened or endangered. All of them are also poorly known to science. Much of what exists is of varying reliability and usefulness or in secondary sources, often appearing in publications that are obscure and/or of considerable age. See, for example, the following sources: C. R. MacGregor, “Notes on Akas and Akaland,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1884); J. D. Anderson, A Short Vocabulary of the Aka Language (Shillong, India, 1896); S. Konow, “Note on the Languages Spoken between the Assam Valley and Tibet,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (London) (1902): 127–37; S. Konow, “North Assam Group,” in Linguistic Survey of India, ed. G. A. Grierson, 3:568–72 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909); J. Schubert, “Hrusso-Vokabular,” Mittelungen des Institüt für Orientforschung (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin) 10 (1964): 295–350; R. Shafer, “Hruso,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12, no. 1 (1947): 184–96; R. Sinha, The Akas (Shillong, India: Research Dept., Adviser’s Secretariat, 1962); I. M. Simon, Aka Language Guide (Shillong, India: North-East Frontier Agency Administration, 1970), reprint, 1993, Itanagar; I. M. Simon, Miji Language Guide (Shillong, India: Govt. of Arunachal Pradesh, 1979/1974), 198–212; G. van Driem, Languages of the Himalayas, 2 vols. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001).

  Additional Aka data from K. David Harrison, Aka field notes, 2008, pp. 61–64.

  2. Dalvinder Singh Grewal, Tribes of Arunachal Pradesh: Identity, Culture, and Languages, 2 vols. (Delhi: South Asia Publications, 1997).

  3. Queen Elizabeth II vowel study: Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson, “Monophthongal Vowel Changes in Received Pronunciation: An Acoustic Analysis of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcasts,” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 30 (2000): 63–78 (Cambridge University Press).

  4. The Koro work was first presented publicly by Gregory Anderson in 2009 in two talks at scientific conferences: “The Aka Miji Language Cluster of Arunachal Pradesh” at South Asian Linguistic Analysis (SALA), University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, October 2009; and “The Aka Miji Cluster of the Kameng Region, Arunachal Pradesh” at the Himalayan Languages Symposium, University of Oregon, Eugene, August 2009. Both talks were co-authored by Gregory D. S. Anderson, K. David Harrison, and Ganesh Murmu.

  5. The original text of this story is from the archives of the Laboratory of Siberian Languages, Tomsk State Pedagogical University, which were accessed by us courtesy of Dr. Andrei Filtchenko. The author interviewed the storyteller in person in July 2003 but did not reelicit the story, due to her advanced age and deafness. The story was translated into English by the author, Greg Anderson, and members of the Ös community. Copyright herein pertains solely to the English translation; ownership of the original text resides with the Ös community.

  6. This story is to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Chulym (Ös) people. A set of original field notes recording this story is archived in the Tomsk Laboratory for Siberian Languages. According to the field notes, the storyteller was Maria Alekseevna Skoblina, who was born 1911 in Tjulapsax village. It was transcribed by R. M. Birjukovich, in Pasechnoe village, Krasnoyarsk Kray, in 1971 (Tomsk archive notebooks tom. VI, supranumbered pp. 573–629). The text was typed up from notebooks in June 2008 by Greg Anderson and myself. We added complete interlinear glossing and translation in July 2008.

  CHAPTER 6: SIX DEGREES OF LANGUAGE

  1. The Enduring Voices research expedition to Papua New Guinea included Greg Anderson, Sam Anderson, Chris Rainier, and myself, and we were accompanied for portions of the trip by Joanie Nasher. Danielle Mathieu-Reeves went to Matugar village in 2010 to continue the Enduring Voices project activities there, under the guidance of Matugar consultant Rudolf Raward. Yokoim song lyrics transcribed by Alexandra Israel.

  2. William A. Foley, The Yimas Language of New Guinea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Yimas 1 village: S 04° 40.871’ E 143° 33.011’, Elevation 106 feet at the Spirit House; Konmei village: S 04° 34.6888’ E 143 ° 33.077’, Elevation 66 feet.

  3. Thanks to Jared Diamond (personal communication of January 25, 2010) for this formulation, a variation of the famous saying by Max Weinreich, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

  4. Jadran Mimica, Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number System
s (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988).

  5. Julius Sungulmari, Ambonwari Village: S 04° 36.824’ E 143° 36.737’, Elevation 42 feet. For an ethnographic study of this Ambonwari village, see Borut Telban, Dancing Through Time: A Sepik Cosmology, Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

  6. Field interviews by the author with Oruncho Gamango and with Opino Gamango, Gajapati District, Orissa State, India, March 2, 2007.

  CHAPTER 7: HOW DO STORIES SURVIVE?

  1. Barbara Tuchman, The Book (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1980).

  2. Pablo Neruda, in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, ed. Mark Eisner (City Lights Publishers, 2004).

  3. The Wikimedia foundation, in its 2007–2008 annual report, also makes the claim that its Wiktionary is “A dictionary and thesaurus in all languages.”

  4. K. David Harrison, “A Tuvan Hero Tale, with Commentary, Morphemic Analysis and Translation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 125, no. 1 (2005): 1–30. Cited extract on pp. 20–21.

  5. Small languages, and even not so small ones like Ho, can find it difficult to break into the computer age if they use a non-Latin alphabet or writing system that differs from those used by economically important world languages. For the sake of language revitalization and access to computers by speakers of endangered languages, we hope to see greater progress in ushering the writing systems of small and endangered languages into the worldwide Unicode standard.

  6. John Deeney, Ho–English Dictionary, rev. ed. (Ranchi, India: Xavier Publications, Catholic Press, 2005), 192–93.

  7. Ibid., 1.

  8. The Ho origin myth was told by K. C. Naik Biruli (born 1957), resident in Mayurbanj district, Bhubaneshwar, India, on September 13,2005. It was recorded in audio and video by Greg Anderson and myself. This is an abridged version of a yet unpublished translation by Biruli, Anderson, and Harrison. The “ten months” of pregnancy are lunar months. A version of this Ho origin story appeared in K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of Human Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202–3.

  CHAPTER 8: BREAKING OUT IN SONG

  1. Colleagues who accompanied me on the various expeditions include linguist Greg Anderson, anthropologist Brian Donahoe, phonetician Sven Grawunder, sound engineer Joel Gordon, musician Katherine Vincent, mechanical engineer Afanasij Myldyk, Mongolian specialist Peter Marsh, musicologist Valentina Süzükei, practicing Buddhist lama and shaman Chechen Kuular, and many others.

  2. “Greenhouse Gas Bubbling from Siberian Permafrost,” Seed, September 13, 2006, http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/greenhouse_gas_bubbling_from_siberian_permafrost/.

  3. Theodore Levin, with Valentina Süzükei, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

  4. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939).

  CHAPTER 9: WHEN A WORLD IS RUNNING DOWN

  1. The uniqueness and antiquity of the Tofa bear lexicon represents a working hypothesis, and certainly merits further comparative and historical study. See Gregory D. S. Anderson and K. David Harrison, “Hunter-Gatherers Speaking the Language of Pastoral Nomads,” in The Languages of Hunter-Gatherers: Global and Historical Perspectives, ed. R. Rhodes et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

  2. This section adapted from my 2007 book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  3. John McWhorter, “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English,” World Affairs (Fall 2009). Accessed at www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html.

  4. Albert Costa, Mireia Hernández, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, “Bilingualism Aids Conflict Resolution: Evidence from the ANT Task,” Cognition 106, no. 1 (January 2008): 59–86.

  5. Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Morris Freedman, “Bilingualism as a Protection Against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 2 (February 2007): 459–64.

  6. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

  7. Tom Colls, “The Death of Language?” Today, BBC4, October 19, 2009, transcript available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm.

  8. This and the following comments were posted in response to Colls, “The Death of Language?” at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm.

  CHAPTER 10: SAVING LANGUAGES

  1. Nora C. England, “Commentary: Further Rhetorical Concerns,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12, no. 2 (2002): 142–43.

  2. See M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

  3. Washoe interviews with Ramona Dick, elicited by Alan C. L. Yu, filmed by K. David Harrison, July 2007. See also http://www.kumeyaay.com/2007/09/a-final-say-they-hope-not-tribal-elders-are-helping-a-linguist-compile-an-online-dictionary-of-washo-a-language-close-to-extinction-more-than-just-words-are-at-stake.

  4. The preceding sections are based on Washoe interviews with Ramona Dick, elicited by Alan C. L. Yu, filmed by K. David Harrison, July 2007. All Washoe materials are used with informed consent of the speakers and are to be regarded as the intellectual property of the Washoe people. For more information on the Washoe people and Washo language, see www.washoetribe.us.

  5. Terrie Winson, Lenni Lenape, http://www.anthro4n6.net/lenape.

  6. Lenape language classes at Swarthmore College were organized by Dr. Theodore Fernald and Shelley DePaul in 2009 and 2010, funded by grants from the Lang Center for Social Change and from the National Science Foundation, under the guidance of NSF program officer Dr. Susan Penfield.

  7. Thanks to Dr. Margaret Noori for assistance with this section.

  8. Bernard C. Perley, “Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death,” in The Anthropology of Extinction, ed. Genese Sodikoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

  9. Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  K. DAVID HARRISON is associate professor and chair of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic fellow. He received his doctorate from Yale University. He is widely recognized and consulted as a leading spokesman for endangered languages. He makes frequent appearances before college, high school, and other public audiences and in media outlets such as NPR, BBC, Good Morning America, and The Colbert Report. He co-starred in the documentary film The Linguists (http://www.thelinguists.com), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. The film documents his travels around the world to track down and interview last speakers of nearly extinct tongues. As a linguist and specialist in Siberian Turkic languages, Harrison has spent many months in Siberia and Mongolia working with nomadic herders and studying their languages and traditions. He has also worked in India, the Philippines, Lithuania, Bolivia, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, and the United States with members of the last generations of speakers of endangered languages. Harrison’s work includes not only scientific descriptions of languages but also storybooks, translations, and digital archives for the use of the native speaker communities. He is the author of When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. He lives in Philadelphia.

  ABOUT NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S ENDURING VOICES

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S Enduring Voices project is a partnership with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The project works to identify language hotspots, those regions of the world having the greatest linguistic diversity, the greatest language endangerment, and the least studied languages. The language hotspots model is a new way to view the distribut
ion of global linguistic diversity, to assess the threat of language extinction, and to prioritize research.

  Within the language hotspots, the project team works to document vanishing languages and cultures. Enduring Voices also provides training, technology, and resources to support grassroots, community-led efforts at language revitalization.

  For more information, and to learn how you can support the work of revitalization, visit www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices.

  Photographic Insert

  The Language Hotspots map. Visit the interactive version at www.languagehotspots.org

  David Harrison and Greg Anderson with Charlie Mangulda, the last known Amurdag speaker, in Mount Borradaile, Australia.

  Cyril Ninnal, of the Yek Nangu clan, relates the Murrinh-Patha dreaming story of the headless man depicted here in ancient rock art near Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia.

  Songe Nimasow and two other members of Aka tribal group in ceremonial dress, Palizi Village, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

  Songe Nimasow, shown in his everyday dress.

  Monchaks of western Mongolia sing to goats while milking them.

  Nergu, a young man of the Monchak community in western Mongolia.

  Kachim (left) and two other women of the Koro group, Kichang Village, West Kameng, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

  Greg Anderson (right) and Ganesh Murmu (center) interview Sange Degio, a speaker of the “hidden” Koro language of India.

  Illarion Ramos Condori, a Kallawaya healer, discussed medicinal plant knowledge with the author, Chary, Bolivia, 2007.

  Críspulo Martínez (Kafote) a leader of the Ybytoso Ishir (Chamacoco) people of upper Paraguay, with his son in Puerto Diana, 2009.

  Christina Yimasinant, of the Yimas people, a speaker of the endangered Karim language, Karawari region, Papua New Guinea.