Sunday, 28 November 2004
Losing Languages
When I was in Cambodia in 2001, I was staying in a guesthouse on the beach in a town called Sihanoukville. It was late at night, probably around midnight or so, and I got to talking with one of the kids who worked as a waiter there. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably around 18 years old.
He told me that he was from Phnom Penh, and his uncle knew the owner of the guesthouse. He told me how lucky he felt that he was able to get this job where he worked from 6 AM until 12 midnight every day of the week. When he went home at night, he stayed in a room with five other Cambodians who all worked for the same guesthouse.
The most incredible thing though, was what he said when I asked him how much he made working at his job. His salary was 0. He made no money at his job. He told me that his payment was the moments he could steal every day when he got a chance to speak English to tourists. In this way, he hoped to learn enough English to find a different job someday.
Obviously, the drive to learn English is strong all over the world. The internet and the global economy have positioned English as the international language. But at what price? Is it worth the effort to preserve languages? Are languages and culture intristically linked?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but here's an article illustrating some of the repercussions of linguistic homogenization.
However, in the years following their first contact with the outside world, in the early 80s, they have begun to commit suicide, drinking their own curare. Out of a population of only a couple of hundred, just this past summer eight adults and teenagers committed suicide in the same day. No one fully understands why this people is beginning to kill itself. But the answer seems to be related to their sense of fragility and smallness as a people, the idea that their language, culture, and values cannot compete with those from the outside. It is as though they take the death of their community literally.
For many people, like these Amazonian groups, the loss of language brings loss of identity and sense of community, loss of traditional spirituality, and even loss of the will to live. To save languages like Banawá, Pirahã, Suruwahá, Oro Win, and hundreds of other endangered languages around the world will require a massive effort by linguists, anthropologists, and other interested individuals. We need, as a minimum, to identify which languages are endangered around the world, to learn enough about each of them to produce a dictionary, a grammar, and a written form of the language, to train native speakers of these languages as teachers and linguists, and to secure government support for protecting and respecting these languages and their speakers. A daunting task. But a vital one for all of us.
If you find this stuff interesting, here's another article on the subject from the NYT.
Posted by flow Frazao on November 28, 2004 at 04:04 PM in Culture | Permalink
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