Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine on Vanishing VoicesDaniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine clear a path through the widespread confusion about minority languages, advocating the true importance of indigenous languages and cultures.
Primitive traditions v modern science?
Cornish and Manx have all but gone from the British Isles, as have most of the native languages of America and Australia from their respective homes. We all feel sad when we hear that a language or a culture has disappeared. But then we tell ourselves that our sadness is sentimental. After all, those languages just were not suited to modern life, and it would be unfair of us to wish a primitive language on people who need jobs and development as much as any one else. Primitive traditions must eventually give way to modern rationality and scientific knowledge.
Small can be subtle
Ideas such as these represent the widespread confusion there is about minority languages. We often hear that small languages are inadequate to subtle communication. Scholars have tended to damn them one way or another. Sometimes they are seen as impoverished in vocabulary and lacking in complex grammar, thus needing to be eked out with gestures, grunts, and pictures, and ultimately bound to give way to English. Other times they are ridiculed for having far too many quaint distinctions, such as 14 different words for washing, and no useful abstract terms. Thus minority languages will be intellectually belittled either way.
“there is no such thing as a conceptually primitive language”
The truth is that there is no such thing as a conceptually primitive language. No known language that is the primary means of communication of a human community is incapable of generating endless new meanings, or has to be eked with gestures or pictures. It is true that languages differ in the distinctions that they encode. Tuyuca, spoken in Brazil, distinguishes on the verb between five different degrees of evidentiality; things the speaker has seen with his own eyes, those he has heard but not seen, things which are apparently the case, hearsay, and reasonable assumption. This might seem somewhat quaint, but then imagine the extraordinary conciseness which could be achieved in law courts and scientific articles if English made such precise distinctions in every case, with a single extra syllable on the verb. Fyem, spoken in Nigeria, has, as well as a past tense, tenses for precisely yesterday and precisely earlier today. Over-elaborate? The economy of narrative in stories is striking, as the listener can track the action perfectly without the need for, 'And then the next day...'.
“All languages have ways of making new words”
Of course, many languages lack words for television and computer, but then, so did English until it coined them. All languages have ways of making new words, and so in this sense any language can grow to encompass any function. It is true that many languages achieve this by simply borrowing words from a majority language, but to see this as a sign of primitiveness would be a bit rich coming from a language whose entire scientific and medical vocabulary is Greek and Latin, and legal and even culinary terminology French.
Untapped richness
In fact, it is in vocabulary that much of the untapped richness of smaller languages lies. Every language has adaptated to the way of life of its people, and people living close to nature in tropical environments have a knowledge and understanding of their ecosystem which often far exceeds that of Western science. Pacific islanders have terms to distinguish more species of fish than are currently described by Western science, as well as terms for their growth and spawning cycles. The Haunoo people of the Philipines distinguish more than 450 types of animal and 1500 plants. This exceeds those described botanically by around 400. Around 1,000 of them are gathered by the Haunoo and used for one purpose or another, a treasure house of medicinal and nutritional knowledge that would take generations to replace.
Losing linguistic and cultural disversity
Yet such knowledge is disappearing. Indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea distinguish hundreds of types of birds, whereas the rapidly spreading pidgin language lumps them all into the categories of pisin bilong de (birds seen by day) and pisin bilong nait (birds seen by night). Across the globe, uneven, unsustainable development means a rapid loss of cultural and linguistic diversity as well as biodiversity. Indeed the two go hand in hand, for indigenous peoples live in the most fragile, diverse ecosystems on earth. If the ecosystems go, their way of life will go, and as their relationship with the land goes, so does the biodiversity. English, Spanish, French and so on are the monoculture crops of the cultural domain, and they balance just as their biological equivalents, wheat, rice and cattle do. Naturally they will spread further as an increased human population demands higher living standards, but, for the good of our communities and our ecosystems, this encounter should not be allowed to become a complete domination. Where local people retain control over their own environments and communities, bilingualism in local and wider languages is entirely sustainable. A mixed, locally-adapted, locally-controlled ecosystem delivers better returns to people than large-scale schemes of monoculture or logging, as countless examples show.
So we must learn the true importance of indigenous languages and cultures, just as we are learning to appreciate the importance of the world's biological riches.
Buy Your Copy
Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices is available now from Oxford University Press.
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