Vanishing Voices

Quechua woman and child,
Andes, Peru

The International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples is the 9th of August. A version of this post also appears in the August 2023 issue of the Azim Premji University newsletter Forests of Life.

The Esperanto version of the essay is called "Made-to-disappear voices" ("Malaperigataj voĉoj"). The Esperanto title makes clear that these Indigenous languages are not vanishing  "voluntarily" - they are being made to disappear! Read on....

Imagine that you speak the following languages:

• You can have 13 consonants in a row! The Salishian language Nuxalk (pron. nuhalk), spoken in British Columbia in Canada, has the word clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts', which means "then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". Do tell us: how do you pronounce that word?! ("Nuxalk", Wikipedia)

• You don't say "my left arm". Instead, you say "my north / south / east / or west arm", depending on your actual orientation! Speakers Warlpiri in Central Australia use the cardinal directions; an absolute frame of reference. (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006)

• You must use one of 10 genders! The Yuchi in Oklahoma, USA, use "six [genders] for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relationships to the speaker), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical and round )"! (The Guardian, 2008)

Those are just three of the strange and wonderful (for me!) world-descriptions from the approximately 7000 languages ​​of the world. And these are vanishing voices - we are making these Indigenous languages disappear! This article explores why this is happening, what we are losing, and one definite "must-do".

Half of the world speaks
these 25 languages.
Source: Terralingua.org

Half of the world speaks one of 25 major languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali.... The other 50% speak all the other 6975 or so languages! So, there are a lot of small languages in the world. For example, Aiton (1500 speakers), Muot (930), Zangskari (12,000) - all three are Indigenous languages ​​from India. (Do also remember that we only have approximate numbers for many Indigenous languages - they just aren't important enough!)

All over the world, these small languages ​​have been in contact with the larger ones around them. However, historically, rarely has this contact been peaceful. Speakers of big languages ​​have come with modern weapons in search of slaves, natural resources, and land. Indigenous peoples who survived (many, many were killed) have had to abandon their language and culture (along with their land). This continues. Their children are forbidden to speak their languages ​​in school, and the government and the courts do not speak their languages ​​either. With no alternative, speakers of Indigenous languages shift to dominant languages. This is why the shift is not "voluntary". It is no wonder that of the 424 languages ​​spoken in India (according to Ethnologue), 131 are "Endangered", that is, "it is no longer the norm for children to learn and use this language".

Places of high biodiversity are also
places of high linguistic diversity.
Source: Terralingua.org

What do we lose when we lose a language? As our initial examples show, each language is a unique way of looking at the world. But here's another thing: look at the places of high biodiversity in the world; for example, Papua New Guinea (839), Indonesia (704), Arunachal Pradesh (90). The figures in parentheses are the number of languages ​​spoken there. Biodiversity diversity correlates with linguistic diversity! The biocultural link is that the knowledge to sustainably take care of this biodiversity is encoded in these Indigenous languages. So, even for purely "selfish" reasons, the world must ensure that Indigenous languages ​​flourish.

It's also an ethical question, is it not? Linguistic human rights are as important as other rights. And the freedom to practice one's own culture includes its languages. Plus it is also about education. Tons of research (as well as common sense!) tells us that children learn best in the language they know best. Depriving a child of that is cognitive violence! For society, the cost is twofold. One, repeated years, dropping out of school, and low economic productivity - a massive waste of resources! And two, poorly prepared citizens for democratic participation - perhaps an even more serious cost!

So what should we do? Many things need to be done, but clearly education has to be one of our starting points. Bringing mother tongues ​​into education will make all education more effective. This will revitalize Indigenous languages ​​as languages ​​of modern knowledge. Meanwhile, their speakers will continue to take pride in their cultural heritage. However, in addition to learning in their own languages, children also need high-quality teaching in the other languages ​​they need to know - the regional language and English, for example. This idea is at the core of Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (Mohanty et al., 2009).

In itself, that proposal is not enough. The rights of Indigenous peoples need to be strengthened in many other domains as well. But whatever strategy society adopts, education should be among its main components. Only then will there be generations who will continue to marvel at these diverse ways of being human!

References

Levinson, S. C. and Wilkins, D. P. (eds.) 2006. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486753

Mohanty, A. K., Panda, M., Phillipson, R., Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (eds.) 2009. Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9788125036982

The Guardian, “Peter K Austin's top 10 endangered languages”. 27 August. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/27/endangered.languages

Wikipedia. “Nuxalk”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language#Syllables.

Myaamia revitalization and well-being

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas drew our attention to an inspiring story of language "resurrection": that of Myaamia, the language of the Miami tribe in USA. As  Lorraine Boissoneault says in the Smithsonian Magazine article, "Despite the threat of language extinction, despite the brutal history of genocide and forced removals, this is a story of hope. It’s about reversing time and making that which has sunk below the surface visible once more. This is the story of how a disappearing language came back to life—and how it’s bringing other lost languages with it".

But it takes time, as linguists David Costa and Daryl Baldwin know. Costa has already spent 30 years on reviving Myaamia, and we're told that he "anticipates it’ll be another 30 or 40 before the puzzle is complete and all the historical records of the language are translated, digitally assembled, and made available to members of the tribe". As a project that will probably outlive its initiators, the focus has to be on youth. One result of their work has been wide institutional collaboration: "From this initiative came National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. The workshop has been held in 2011, 2013, 2015 and is slated once again for 2017.... The workshop has hosted community members from 60 different languages already".

And the benefits of this revitalization are startlingly tangible!

To emphasize the importance of indigenous languages, Baldwin and others researched the health impact of speaking a native language. They found that for indigenous bands in British Columbia, those who had at least 50 percent of the population fluent in the language saw 1/6 the rate of youth suicides compared to those with lower rates of spoken language. In the Southwestern U.S., tribes where the native language was spoken widely only had around 14 percent of the population that smoked, while that rate was 50 percent in the Northern Plains tribes, which have much lower language usage. Then there are the results they saw at Miami University: while graduation rates for tribal students were 44 percent in the 1990s, since the implementation of the language study program that rate has jumped to 77 percent.

As the website of Healing Through Language summarizes: "One tool for improving health has become apparent in recent years: language. Communities that maintain their Native language have lower suicide rates. Elders often find renewed vitality when called upon to help the younger generations recover a language. Youths in language programs graduate from high school at higher rates than those who take a mainstream language like Spanish."

2019 UN Year of Indigenous Languages

In November 2016, the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly:

13. [Proclaimed] the year beginning on 1 January 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, to draw attention to the critical loss of indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote indigenous languages and to take further urgent steps at the national and international levels, and invites the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to serve as the lead agency for the Year, in collaboration with other relevant agencies, within existing resources.

The session also '5. [Reaffirmed] the decision to convene a high-level event to mark the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to be held during the seventy-first session of the General Assembly, in 2017'.

Further, the Assembly '12. [Decided] to continue to observe in New York, Geneva and other United Nations offices every year on 9 August the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, requests the Secretary-General to support the observance of the Day from within existing resources, and encourages Governments to observe the Day at the national level'.

Earlier in the document, the Assembly noted that it was:

Deeply concerned at the vast number of endangered languages, in particular indigenous languages, and stressing that, despite the continuing efforts, there is an urgent need to preserve, promote and revitalize endangered languages,
[Recognized] the importance to indigenous peoples of revitalizing, using, developing and transmitting their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literature to future generations,

Let us hope that the annual observance, the high-level event in 2017, and the UN year in 2019 will raise awareness and result in more effective action.

Odisha promotes multilingual education

The government of Odisha has just issued orders (JPGs, six pages) on implementing mother-tongue based multilingual education (MLE) for Indigenous (Tribal) children.

"In order to address the language gap faced by the tribal children in the educational process...", Odisha is making the following provisions:

- MLE will be extended to all Indigenous children in Odisha
- the mother-tongue will be the medium for the first 5 years (list of languages)
- Odia in class 2 and English in class 3 as language subjects
- teachers fluent in the children's language will get priority in recruitment
- a long-term plan to attract Indigenous people into teaching jobs
- intensive teacher-training for MLE pedagogy.

There's more. Until the orders are available online on the NMRC or OPEPA websites (see below), see the government orders here as JPGs.

"I am happy that years of persistent effort finally materialized. With this notification, Odisha is the first state in India to have a clear set of policy proclamations for MLE for tribal children", says Prof Ajit Mohanty, Chairperson of the committee that made the recommendations. The National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC) collaborated with Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA) to prepare the policy document, "MLE Policy Implementation and Guidelines for Odisha" (DOCX, 37 pages).

The policy document is itself worth reading for the wealth of evidence it gives in support of MLE from studies worldwide. It is also notable for the care with which it suggests measures to make MLE work in Odisha. The document concludes: "The question is not whether Odisha can afford MLE, rather it is WHETHER ODISHA CAN AFFORD NOT TO IMPLEMENT MLE."

Let us hope that this Odisha government initiative serves as a template, and inspires other governments in India and elsewhere.

Species and languages - WWF report

Jonathan Loh and David Harmon, in their new report, Biocultural Diversity: threatened species, endangered languages (PDF), develop analogies between biodiversity and linguistic diversity:

we have chosen two fundamental units or classifiers of nature and culture: species and languages. Species are the basic units of biodiversity; languages are a useful proxy to stand for the world’s diverse cultures. Other elements of biodiversity such as ecosystems or genes, and other aspects of culture such as religions, arts, or livelihood and subsistence strategies, are much harder to define and very much harder to measure. There are striking parallels between species and languages (p. 2).

In a brief 60 pages, they take us through Biocultural Diversity; Evolution of Species and Language; Decline of Biocultural Diversity; and Status of Species and Languages. Among their conclusions are:

Two results are immediately apparent when comparing the status and trends in biodiversity and linguistic diversity. Firstly, at the global level, the trends are very similar, both the LPI (species) and ILD (languages) declined by about 30% since 1970, which suggests that biodiversity and linguistic diversity are being lost at similar rates. This supports the conclusion of the Red List analysis comparing the conservation status of languages and species: globally, linguistic diversity is at least as threatened as biodiversity.

The second result is that, while both biodiversity and linguistic diversity are threatened globally, they are declining at different rates in different regions of the world. By far the most rapid losses in linguistic diversity have occurred in the Americas where, according to the Red List analysis, 60% of languages are threatened or have gone extinct since 1970.

[...] Habitat loss and over-exploitation of species remain the greatest threats for most of the world’s biodiversity. [...]

The decline in linguistic diversity is normally a result of the process of language shift away from small indigenous languages toward larger, national or regional languages. Language shift is driven by a number of social, political and economic factors including migration, urbanization, national unification, colonization, and the globalization of trade and communications. Migrant communities often undergo a process of language shift, whether moving from one country to another, or from a rural to an urban area within the same country. Governments in many developed and developing countries actively promote a single national language at the expense of other, usually minority, languages for political reasons. (p. 44-45)

In their "Epilogue" the authors sum up the vision underlying the vision as follows:

Maintaining diversity is not just a question of protecting endangered languages and species in remote hotspots of biocultural diversity such as the Amazon or New Guinea, vitally important though that is, conservation is also a matter of allowing diversity to thrive in those parts of the world where humans have already had a profound impact on the biological and cultural landscape, in the more densely populated parts of the planet. Recognizing and exploring the parallels between nature and culture, and understanding the processes that underlie their evolution, ecology and extinction, is a first step towards ensuring that we can continue to inhabit a world of incredible diversity. (p. 49)

Loh, J. and D. Harmon. 2014. Biocultural Diversity: threatened species, endangered languages. WWF Netherlands, Zeist, The Netherlands. http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/biocultural_report__june_2014.pdf

Language and environment - a response to Madhav Gadgil

Professor Madhav Gadgil gave a talk at IIIT Hyderabad today. Among other things, he stressed the need to empower local communities with information on and knowledge of how various decisions by governments and corporations will impact their environment. Government-generated environmental information is poor, not-transparent, and frequently manipulated, he said. The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill, 2013 came in for special castigation (see also this analysis of the bill by PRS Legislative Research).

He was tremendously optimistic about citizen-science initiatives (like the Australian WaterWatch) and using the Right to Information Act to generate knowledge for informed debate. He was equally optimistic that machine translation "within about 30-40 years" will make this knowledge available in any language.

In the Q&A that followed, I took the following line (spelt out here in greater detail than I had time for in the session):

(a) biodiversity hotspots are also hotspots of linguistic diversity -- researchers in fact speak of "biocultural diversity";

(b) knowledge of biodiversity maintenance is typically encoded in indigenous languages, and many of these are very small languages indeed -- the median number of speakers of the world's languages is a mere 7000 (compare it to the mean -- 878 thousand);

(c) thus, even from a purely instrumental point of view (setting aside any ethical arguments), there is a good case for the flourishing of these languages;

(d) but this linguistic diversity is disappearing very fast -- "between 1970 and 2005 the number of languages spoken globally has decreased by 20%";

(e) among the most effective mechanisms to ensure that a language disappears is an assimilationist language policy in education -- specifically, the use of  a non-mother-tongue as medium of instruction -- what we have elsewhere called "silent ethnocide -- a low-intensity warfare through formal education";

(f) thus, if information and knowledge are to benefit the environmentally most vulnerable in society, a mother-tongue-based multilingual education is necessary -- machine-translation technologies, while welcome, will not by themselves be enough.

Indian survey records 630 languages so far

The People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) has already listed and described 630 languages in 27 states of the country. The Survey's Chairperson, Ganesh Devy, reported this at a workshop held here in Hyderabad on 31 May 2012. We have met Dr Devy and PLSI before in this blog.

In the workshop there were about 10 speakers of various indigenous (tribal) languages of Andhra Pradesh. They have been working with the state wing of the national universal elementary education program, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Working with indigenous communities, these resource-persons and their colleagues have collected information on 16 indigenous languages, which they have rendered into Telugu. The task of the 10-or-so English-speaking Telugus in the workshop is to translate the Telugu information into English. The PLSI team will later translate into Hindi as well. Thus PLSI envisages diverse information on Indian languages in the language itself, the dominant regional language, Hindi, and English. (The PLSI website lists publishers in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Odia.)

The SSA resource-persons raised many issues regarding multilingual education (MLE). Several spoke of the apathy in the bureaucracy, once one leaves the village-level and goes upwards through the education department: unfulfilled promises to develop learning materials in the mother tongue; warehouses filled with textbooks which have not been distributed to the schools; primary schools teaching in Gondi side-by-side with schools teaching in Telugu -- but the examinations are only in Telugu!

They said that the range of official attitudes to MLE ranged from ignorance to indifference to hostility. Indeed, Dr Devy remarked that "even in the highest circles of bureaucracy in Delhi" he has heard MLE being described as "mother language education"! But Dr Devy also announced that for the first time, the Government of India has set up a committee specifically for education of indigenous peoples.

He said that the PLSI data will help policy-makers a great deal.

Barasana revitalization

In the August number of Scientific American, Wade Davis reports that "the once endangered Barasana are experiencing a powerful rebirth". He attributes this directly to a 1991 decision of the Colombian government which "granted the Indian peoples of the Northwest Amazon legal land rights to an area the size of the U.K."

In an otherwise grim recounting of the "last of their kind" (the title of the photo-essay), the Barasana are a lone ray of hope. Curiously enough, Davis concludes with hope:

"That cultures do not always fade away but rather may be casualities of other societies' priorities is actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if humans are the agents of cultural decline, we can foster cultural survival.... Our goal should not be to freeze people in time. Instead we must find ways to ensure that in a pluralistic, interconnected world all peoples may benefit from modernity without that engagement demanding the sacrifice of their ethnicity."

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (2009) is his new book. In January 2010 Davis gave a talk based on that book at the Long Now Foundation. That talk is now archived on ABC's Big Ideas site.

People's Linguistic Survey of India

Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, the Baroda-based organization for indigenous peoples, has launched a People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). In the words of G N Devy, who is the founder of the Bhasha trust, and who is leading the initiative:

"Bhasha... convened a national meet of language representatives in March 2010 in which representatives of 320 languages had participated. [Among those invited to speak was Probal Dasgupta, President of the World Esperanto Association - Giri.] It was decided during the concluding session that a People's Linguistic Survey of India be attempted by networking linguists, cultural organisations and NGOs working with language issues.

"Bhasha Centre has already commenced the work and has completed the mapping of three Himalayan states, and has initiated work in three other states."

One of those three states is Andhra Pradesh. On 9 August - appropriately, the International day of the world's indigenous peoples - Bhasha and Osmania University Centre for International Programmes (OUCIP), got together at OUCIP some 30 interested individuals from academia, government and civil society to brainstorm. At the end of the session, participants agreed to write entries for the PLSI on 16 languages spoken in Andhra Pradesh. Other languages spoken in the state will be taken up in the next phase of the project.

Prof Devy emphasized that this was a people's survey; the idea was to get as complete a "snapshot" as possible of the language as it exists today, and to do so using speakers of these languages to write the entry.

The proposed format for each entry is also interesting. Apart from a basic, linguistic description, the survey will also record a brief (1000-word) history of the language; a short bibliography; four or five songs or poems and tales (translating them into English and Hindi); kinship terms; proverbs; colour terms; time and space concepts, and so on - a people's linguistic anthropology, in fact.

As many participants affirmed, a massive project such as this promised new knowledge and new understanding of the consequences of our development models. One participant spoke of the need to "re-invent knowledge categories", so that they serve the Indian reality.

It is to be hoped that such a project will also improve the quality of conversation between India and Bharat.

Linguistic human rights in India: policy and practice

Last month EFLU's new journal Languaging published my article "Linguistic human rights in India: policy and practice".

The issue is not (yet?) available online. But the link above will take you to the PDF version of the manuscript that I submitted to the journal.

Comments, as ever, welcome!

Languages on Worldmapper

Spent a happy hour in the Languages section of the visually remarkable Worldmapper site. (The maps, or "cartograms" on that site "re-size each territory according to the variable being mapped".)

The Indigenous living languages map presents a pretty good picture of the world's linguistic diversity (the uncertainty about numbers notwithstanding).

One surprise was the map of Languages not mapped: "The languages that we have not mapped tend to be confined to just a few often neighbouring countries; many are spoken by members of just one tribe." And then adds:

"Some of the largest of the languages included here are Telugu and Marathi, both have high numbers in speakers in certain regions of India...."

Hmm. The geographical boundedness of Telugu (74 m speakers) and Marathi (72 m) had not struck me until now.

The native-speaker numbers in brackets are from the Indian government's 2001 census. Other sources give other figures. UCLA's Language Materials Project, for instance, draws upon other sources to give Marathi "90 million people in India, 70 million of whom speak the language natively. The remaining 20 million people speak Marathi as a second language."

For Telugu, the profile says, "There are about 69,634,000 speakers of Telugu in India (1997 IMA). The total population in all countries is 69,666,000 or more. The total population of speakers including second language speakers is about 75,000,000 (1999 WA)."