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Commentary: The value of preserving languages
Commentary by Caezer Ng
for Smoky River Express
When a language loses its speakers, all its knowledge and history disappears along with it. Preserving the ones that are still around is worthwhile.
The spark for the topic of this article came about one day in March when the The Leader office got into a conversation about indigenous cultures who took part in the Arctic Winter Games 2010 in Grande Prairie.
Two of the The Leader staff consulted the quick and dirty source of Wikipedia to read a bit more about the Sami people of Scandinavia and Nenets of Russia – participants of the Games.
Like many other indigenous cultures of the world, the Sami and Nenets struggled against cultural assimilation by a dominant culture. Major powers wanted to slowly whittle the minority groups’ understanding of the native vernacular, to the point where it would no longer exist (luckily, this no longer occurs).
Once a language disappears, it is lost forever, says Stephen Anderson of the Linguistic Society of America. Hebrew is an exception to the rule – abandoned, then recovered – because it has been thoroughly used, studied, and researched by Jewish scholars for centuries. This is not the case with most languages.
There are approximately 6,800 unique tongues around the world, but this number dwindles with each month, Anderson says. A world of knowledge disappears when the last of a language’s speaker passes away.
Languages that receive a lot of attention from academics are less likely to die out due to the vast amount of resources available. It is the minority languages that are often in danger.
A single language, no matter how minor, is a treasure cove – it is rich in knowledge. A unique tongue contains a great deal of wonders. Those who are fluently bilingual understand the subtleties and value each language offers. The arts, for example, is the most obvious beneficiary of diversity. It is elegantly exhibited through poetry, music, visual arts, amongst others.
The Linguistic Society of America suggests that almost half of 160 Native North American languages have disappeared since their first contact with Europeans. In modern times, indigenous languages in Canada are on the road to recover or fading away.
It can be preserved if people and children are in an environment that encourages communication in their native tongue, along with English. A language lasts as long as speakers’ children continue to use it and if people want to learn it.
Most youngsters only care for English because of influences from modern entertainment; it is ‘cool’ to talk like television icons.
Hope is never lost on communities who try hard to preserve the language of their ancestors. In Nunavut, for example, newspapers come in English as well as Inuktitut. Although Inuits traditionally pass stories and knowledge through spoken words, they have adopted reading and writing. The radio station in the capital of Iqaluit has both English and Inuktitut programs.
It writing about preservation, there is always room for new languages, and they have been created – like the American Sign Language – because it allows a certain group to use it more efficiently. Leave it up to human ingenuity to come up with new things, but the greater challenge may be to save something old.
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