Why protect dying languages? Because every language is precious however many men and women speak it. With every language that disappears ways of living, thinking, perceiving the world and stories disappear too. A society that is tolerant, united and democratic must safeguard diversity – biological, cultural, linguistic – and the social identity and dignity of everyone associated with it.
Global civilization could never be anything other than the coalition at global levels of cultures, each of them retaining its originality (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
The loss of languages is not only a crisis for many communities, but also presents a major challenge for researchers intent on analyzing the structure of languages and how they convey meaning. Just as biologists study species to understand evolution, so linguists scrutinize grammars and vocabularies to understand what aspects of language are innate and what are learned. "We're losing our natural laboratory of variation, our Galápagos," says Steve Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. (Learning the World's Languages - Before They Vanish, Science, Vol. 288, Issue 5469, 1156-1159, 19 May 2000) As each language dies, science, in linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology, loses one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure and vocabulary. (Foundation for Endangered Languages Manifesto)
In the words of David Crystal (Language Death, Cambridge University Press, 2000), for a culture the death of a language is the closest thing to a heart attack. But people can survive heart attacks and so can cultures. There are examples of resurrected languages: Hebrew which for hundreds of years existed only as a written language, Maori, Gaelic…And there’s more: even though the last person who used Manx as mother tongue died in 1974, the residents of Man Island (off the north-west coast of England) continue to study Manx as well as English. There are many people who see bilingualism (the learning of both the “dominant” language and the mother tongue) as a solution to safeguarding languages at risk.
There are a large number of subjects involved in the work of saving a language: the mother tongue speakers of the endangered language, researchers, international organizations (you need only to think of Unesco’s important role), governments, schools and the media.
What to do
• Promote the use of mother tongues in school systems • Encourage meetings between old people who still speak the endangered language and young people • Give written forms to oral languages • Compile grammar, syntax and dictionaries • Make and distribute audio and video recordings and images that inform about the culture • Internet as a tool to preserve cultural diversity
Below is a selection of current projects working on protection and recuperation. The list will grow over time.
