RECORDING DYING LANGUAGES: ABOUT 3000 OF THEM *** Jai Maharaj posts
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Recording dying languages: about 3000 of them.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Rana Bahadur, Origin song in Thangmi language:
http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/thangmiarchive/thangmifilmviewer.php?filmNum=2&bandwidth=1
The beckoning silence: Why half of the world's languages are in
serious danger of dying out
By Paul Bignell
The Independent
December 13, 2009
Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die
out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those
voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity.
High up, perched among the remote hilltops of eastern Nepal, sits a
shaman, resting on his haunches in long grass. He is dressed simply,
in a dark waistcoat and traditional kurta tunic with a Nepalese cap
sitting snugly on his head. To his left and right, two men hold
recording devices several feet from his face, listening patiently to
his precious words. His tongue elicits sounds alien to all but a few
people in the world, unfamiliar even to those who inhabit his
country. His eyes flicker with all the intensity of a man reciting
for the first time to a western audience his tribe's version of the
Book of Genesis, its myth of origins.
The shaman's story is centuries old, passed down from one generation
to the next through chants, poems, songs, proverbs and plain story-
telling. Yet this narrative and, indeed, his entire language have
never been recorded in text. And, faced with the onslaught of rapid
globalisation and social change, they are dying. Whether it be
through well-intentioned national education programmes in Nepalese,
the younger generation leaving for bigger Asian cities or simply the
death of elders, the day when no one will speak the ancient tongue of
the Rai tribe is fast approaching.
The plight of the shaman's language and that of his community is by
no means confined to this small, but beautiful area of Nepal; it is
the apparent fate of thousands of ' communities, societies and
indigenous groups all around the world. But not if Dr Mark Turin can
help it.
The University of Cambridge academic is leading a project that aims
to pull thousands of languages back from the brink of extinction by
recording and archiving words, poems, chants -- anything that can be
committed to tape -- in a bid to halt their destruction. Languages
the majority of us will never know anything about.
Of the world's 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to
die out by the end of this century, according to Unesco. Just 11 are
spoken by more than half the earth's population, so it is little
wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we
become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 per cent of
the world's languages are spoken by only five per cent of its
population -- a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in
tiny pockets of speakers around the world.
In a small office room in the back of Cambridge's Museum of
Archaeology & Anthropology -- a place in which you almost expect
Harrison Ford to walk around the corner at any moment, fedora on
head, whip in hand -- Turin looks over the contents of a box that
arrived earlier in the morning from India. "[The receptionists] are
quite used to getting these boxes now," says the 36-year-old
anthropologist, who is based at the university. Inside the box, which
is covered in dozens of rupee postage stamps, are DVDs representing
hours of chants, songs, poems and literature from a tiny Indian
community that is desperate for its language to have a voice and be
included in Turin's venture.
For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of
their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as
communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written
traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few
indigenous communities -- from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the
Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India's
Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal
Amurdag community -- have recorded their own languages or ever had
them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature
Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible
endangered languages before they disappear without trace.
He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with
anthropologists around the world to record what he calls "oral
literature" through video cameras, voice recorders and other
multimedia tools by awarding grants from a UKP 30,000 pot that the
project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature
in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the
nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available. As useful as this
archive will be for Western academic study -- the World Oral
Literature Project is convening for its first international workshop
in Cambridge this week -- Turin believes it is of vital importance
that the scheme also be used by the communities he and his
researchers are working with.
The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He
wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while
discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the
Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor's wall. The map was full
of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world's
languages that were completely undocumented. At random, Turin chose a
"pin" to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an
indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of
Nepal. "Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on
these traditional field-work projects take are quite random," he
admits. "There's a lot of serendipity involved."
Continuing his work with the Thangmi community in the 1990s, Turin
began to record the language he was hearing, realising that not only
was this language and its culture entirely undocumented, it was known
to few outside the tiny community. He set about trying to record
their language and myth of origins (see box, page 17). "I wrote 1,000
pages of grammar in English that nobody could use -- but I realised
that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough for me, it wasn't enough for
them. It simply wasn't going to work as something for the community.
So then I produced this trilingual word list in Thangmi, Nepali and
English."
In short, it was the first ever publication of that language. That
small dictionary is still sold in local schools for a modest 20
rupees, and used as part of a wider cultural regeneration process to
educate children about their heritage ' and language. The task is no
small undertaking: Nepal itself is a country of massive ethnic and
linguistic diversity, home to 100 languages from four different
language families. What's more, ever fewer ethnic Thangmi speak the
Thangmi language. Many of the community members have taken to
speaking Nepali, the national language taught in schools and spread
through the media, and community elders are dying without passing on
their knowledge.
Since the project got under way, along with similar ventures by the
National Geographic initiative Enduring Voices, the Hans Rausing
Endangered Languages Project and the Arcadia Fund, many more
communities around the world have similarly either requested
inclusion or responded to the suggestion that their language is in
need of recording. (One task involved making recordings of ceremonial
chants of the Barasana language, spoken by just 1,890 people in the
Vaup�s region of Columbia.)
The lexicographer Dr Sarah Ogilvie worked with the Umagico Aboriginal
community at Cape York Peninsula in northern Australia, for example.
Like Turin, she developed an entire dictionary of the community's
language, Morrobalama -- the first time their purely oral language
had ever been written and recorded. Living with the community for a
year-and-a-half in difficult conditions and being the only non-native
person in the group, she began learning the language from scratch, as
no one spoke English.
"As a lexicographer, I wanted to look at how we could write better
dictionaries of languages that are dying -- that not only preserve
the language, but can be used as practical tools themselves," says
Ogilvie.
After learning Morrobalama orally, she started her dictionary by
writing the words down in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Then,
by looking for patterns in the sounds, she was able to come up with a
unique writing system. "I was lucky in the sense that no one else had
tried to record the language before; often for linguists, the
situation is made more complex if someone has already attempted to
record the language before them -- it may have been written badly,
yet you can't erase it and the community might have actually become
quite attached to it."
Despite Turin's enthusiasm for his subject, he is baffled by many
linguists' refusal to engage in the issue he is working on. "Of the
6,500 languages spoken on Earth, many do not have written traditions
and many of these spoken forms are endangered," he says. "There are
more linguists in universities around the world than there are spoken
languages -- but most of them aren't working on this issue. To me
it's amazing that in this day and age, we still have an entirely
incomplete image of the world's linguistic diversity. People do PhDs
on the apostrophe in French, yet we still don't know how many
languages are spoken.
"When a language becomes endangered, so too does a cultural world
view. We want to engage with indigenous people to document their
myths and folklore, which can be harder to find funding for if you
are based outside Western universities. If you are a Himalayan
tribesman, you might not have access to a video camera to record your
shaman and elders."
While these languages may seem remote and distant, it is worth
remembering that British languages such as Welsh and Gaelic were in
danger of becoming extinct not so long ' ago. In fact, Turin admits
that these languages, too, including Cornish, need considerable
effort to keep them going. "People often think it's only tribal
cultures that are under threat. But all over Europe there are pockets
of traditional communities and speech forms that have become extinct.
It is the domain of stronger nation states with better resources to
look after their own indigenous tongues, through Welsh-language TV,
for example, and for those from north-western France, Breton
literature."
Similar to the introduction of the Welsh Language Act in 1993, the
Scottish Government is moving to protect and promote Gaelic. A new
agreement means that Gaelic can now be used formally in meetings
between Scottish government ministers and EU officials. An extra UKP
800,000 was also pledged for a project promoting Gaelic in schools,
taking the level of funding to UKP 2.15m. Nevertheless, Scottish
Gaelic is not one of the EU's list of 23 "official" languages.
Yet, despite the struggles facing initiatives such as the World Oral
Literature Project, there are historical examples that point to the
possibility that language restoration is no mere academic pipe dream.
The revival of a modern form of Hebrew in the 19th century is often
cited as one of the best proofs that languages long dead, belonging
to small communities, can be resurrected and embraced by a large
number of people. By the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to
becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman
and British Palestine. It is now spoken by more than seven million
people in Israel.
Turin's projects receive a tiny fraction of the amounts spent in the
UK on promoting language, but he believes there is much more at stake
than even language and culture in the communities he works with:
their extinction hints at dangers for the very biodiversity of their
homelands, too. Experts now agree that there is a correlation between
areas of cultural, linguistic and biological diversity. The mountain
ranges, rivers and gorges that might isolate a human community and
lead to the development of their specific native tongue are often the
same geographical features that give rise to specialised ecosystems.
"The more flora and fauna you have, the more you can eat, therefore
the less people have to trade, minimising the effects of interaction
with other outside influences," he says. "In parts of Papua New
Guinea, for example, five minutes away from your house you have
everything you need to survive. Places that are diverse in species
are diverse in languages and cultures." In other words, if the locals
start speaking other languages, it is indicative of a growing outside
influence -- and that can be bad news for the ecology.
Yet, despite the difficulties these communities face in saving their
languages, Dr Turin believes that the fate of the world's endangered
languages is not sealed, and globalisation is not necessarily the
nefarious perpetrator of evil it is often presented to be. "I call it
the globalisation paradox: on the one hand globalisation and rapid
socio-economic change are the things that are eroding and challenging
diversity. But on the other, globalisation is providing us with new
and very exciting tools and facilities to get to places to document
those things that globalisation is eroding. Also, the communities at
the coal-face of change are excited by what globalisation has to
offer."
In the meantime, the race is on to collect and protect as many of the
languages as possible, so that the Rai Shaman in eastern Nepal and
those in the generations that follow him, can continue their
traditions and have a sense of identity. And it certainly is a race:
Turin knows his project's limits and believes it inevitable that a
large number of those languages will disappear. "We have to be wholly
realistic. A project like ours is in no position, and was not
designed, to keep languages alive. The only people who can help
languages survive are the people in those communities themselves.
They need to be reminded that it's good to speak their own language
and I think we can help them do that -- becoming modern doesn't mean
you have to lose your language."
To see and hear recordings of the Thangmi in Nepal:
www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/thangmiarchive/thangmifilm.php
For more on National Geographic's Enduring Voices project:
nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices
[http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices ]
For more information visit the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages
Project, www.hrelp.org and the World Oral Literature Project,
www.oralliterature.org
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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