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Saving Words and Memories
About 6000 languages face the danger of perishing forever, depriving humanity of a valuable historical and cultural source
Languages are the product of a long evolutionary process of systematisation, where emotions, intentions and necessities are translated to have verbal meanings in order to promote communication between the members of a community. Humankind has developed a plethora of dialects and languages, each of which bear upon them the identifying markers of an area’s physiognomy. Unfortunately, this vast legacy is squashed at an increasingly alarming pace under the pressures of globalisation, assimilation and economic hardships. This process of entering a gradual linguistic oblivion leads to the classification of endangered languages.
Emerging out of practical necessity, linguistic continuation is inherently connected to its use, which guarantees its longevity. Any language is quintessentially founded on the presence of a group of people that opts to employ it as a medium of communication. Spreading the word from one generation to the other is thus critical for a language facing the possibility of being lost.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) places approximately 6000 languages around the globe in the category of endangered. The already high figure may not even be fully representative of the facts on the ground, as the loss of just a single person could theoretically drive a language to the trash bin of history. The lack of a common ground between scientists on the definition of a language further puts into question the accuracy of the UNESCO presented number. This is only exacerbated by the politics that tend to play a role in the classification of language as a matter of freedom or civic rights for a minority that feels marginalised.
Yet despite the political dimension of linguistics, preserving a language is primarily a cultural and emotional matter. Words act as stimuli that mobilise a deluge of memories and feelings. Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure said that “a language is a complete system of signs” denoting specific sets of ideas and images.
Aramaic, though certainly an endangered language, is a historically rich example. As one of the most culturally significant Northwest Semitic languages spoken for nearly 3,000 years, including the biblical epoch, it is strongly linked to the great Mesopotamian civilizations and the birth of Christianity. Aramaic can still be heard today in some disperse villages of Syria and Iraq, but it loses numbers year by year, burying with its demise a linguistic archaeology of the centuries.
Aramaic and other endangered languages also reflect geographical, social and economic specificities revealing instances of a community’s idiosyncrasies. To a large extent a language is a part of identity and vice versa. This sort of identity differentiates one group from another, simultaneously making a strong appeal to a collective consciousness.
Apart from significance on the strictly communitarian level, salvaging endangered languages is a contribution to the values of universality, which defend heterogeneity as a token of progress and peaceful coexistence. From a holistic point of view, a language can be considered a part of the world’s patrimony that deserves to be saved. Exiting figures, however, depict a rather bleak picture - 97% of the world’s population speaks a meagre 4% of the world’s languages. Additionally, half of the world’s endangered languages lose speakers so precipitously that UNESCO forecasts that about 90% of them will be replaced by dominant languages by the end of the 21st century.
Geographically speaking, moribund languages are almost evenly dispersed to all continents. Nevertheless, Ethnologue - a website registering and classifying endangered and nearly extinct languages - suggests that the Americas are more severely threatened by language extinction. The development is closely tied to the hundreds of tribal communities residing on the continents. As environmental degradation and urbanisation run their course, local tribes find themselves displaces at the altar of development and modernisation. This forces a move to the more ‘organised’ and homogenous settings of urban centres where the dominant culture has a clear upper hand.
Abandoning the ancestral hearth implies that a language will be forgotten, but perhaps even more worrisome from the anthropological perspective is that it also implies the deprivation of the community’s dynamic elements. Once these are lost so is the possibility of reinvigorating the chances of generational renewal and linguistic revitalisation. Poor social conditions, including impoverishment, are other leading factors that reinforce exodus from the local setting to urban conglomerates or abroad.
Impoverishment, illiteracy and displacement appear frequently when state policies reflect objectives related to the galvanisation of a national identity that is desired by the ruling elite. Since language is a central component of identity, embracing culture, history and collective memory, it is also crucial for reaching the goal of a uniform national identity. Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ underscore the role language plays as the glue of a nation, reflected in the dominant language used in, for example, the media.
In conjunction to the externally imposed conditions that favour linguistic endangerment, members of the community are sometimes overcome by inferiority complexes or syndromes of self-victimisation. These instances create a scenario where the language, instead of being a token of identification, becomes a symbol of backwardness that must be brushed aside. The phenomenon explains part of the reason behind the expansion of a lingua franca in any given historical period. The present day universality of English, often expanded through popular media outlets, creates a new normative setting that is then internalised by vulnerable collectives.
Linguistic revitalisation appears to be irreversible in some instances. Educational policies politicise the issue by promoting a single dominant language in favour of any others, with the common man unable to stop the process. Documentation thus becomes what is likely the only viable means of salvaging cultural patrimony that foremost belongs not to politicians, but to humankind, even as it follows a rapid march towards uniformity.