Can we save the world’s dying languages?

[Jazzy]

After witnessing how one of our earliest languages is in danger of disappearing, Gaia Vince looks at efforts to preserve our oral culture.



I've travelled four hours west from the city of Arusha to meet this ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers, and join them in a bow-and-arrow hunt for prey among the thorn bushes. The Hadza people may have nothing – no animals, land or possessions aside from the clothes on their backs – but they are rich in the skills and resourcefulness they need to produce everything from their environment.



That’s not all that sets them apart from most societies. The Hadza are thought to be the most ancient modern humans, the first surviving peoples to have split off from our ancestral family tree, and are not closely related genetically to any other peoples. Their language – a clicking tongue, also called Hadza – is unique and unrelated even to other clicking languages. Some linguists believe Hadza may be close to humankind's first ancestral language.



Dying out



However the language may not be around for long. The Hadza bushmen, who live in groups of around 15 people, are believed to have been living in this remote area for at least 10,000 years, but there are now less than 1,000 Hadza left. Fewer than 400 of them continue to live a stone-age lifestyle – they are among the last hunter-gatherers in a continent of farmers and pastoralists. The numbers will continue to drop, as their land is swallowed up by farmers, government-designated conservation areas and private game reserves. And their sing-song tongue, punctuated with clicks and glottal stops, and which has no words for numbers past four, is no longer being learned by all Hadza children. As the modern world encroaches, the language is in danger of being lost as Hadza make greater use of the widely spoken Swahili tongue.



What is at risk is not simply the vocabulary and grammar of this unique language, but the Hadza's – and by extension, part of humanity's – cultural heritage and expression.



The Hadza are not alone in facing the loss of their native tongue. Every 14 days a language dies. Over half of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken on the planet may disappear by the end of the century. In the age of the Anthropocene, language extinction is happening faster than species extinction. Eighty percent of the endangered languages are African, including Hadza, and the majority have no written form. Once the last speaker dies, so does the language. And for an oral culture, preserving language becomes even more important for maintaining the identity and heritage of a community.

Full article



Interesting article. Perhaps we all need to start learning different languages!



How many languages do you speak and what are they?

 

[McConnaughay]

I speak as many as I need to, saving languages is only important for historical documentation, it doesn't make you smart, sophisticated, or skilled by learning archaic languages, however, I'm all for people learning languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish, in other-words, languages that can actually come in-handy.

 

[Evil Eye]

Languages should definitely be properly recorded and documented. If only to make future linguistic and cultural research easier. Preserving them as actual spoken languages, on the other hand, isn't exactly worthwhile when there're only a thousand or so speakers in the first place. Speech and writing it meant to be understood. Learning 50 languages when 5 will suffice is a waste of time and effort mostly. Even if it does stimulate your brain or some such.



Anyway, for those who didn't know yet, I speak a grand total of two languages.

Perhaps we all need to start learning different languages!

Don't particularly wanna