Saving Endangered Languages

Last week, there were two articles in the news that drew my attention: the first one appeared in “the Guardian”, about a Canadian film that will be present in a festival in London. The name of the film is “SGaawaay K’uuna” (Edge of the Knife), and its script is mainly in the Haida language, an indigenous language from British Columbia, a language that only about 20 people in the world can speak fluently. The second article appeared on the BBC  and it was about the efforts of prof. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, an Israeli expert who is trying to revive Australian endangered and dead languages, in this case, he is working with the Barngarla language, an aboriginal language from the south of Australia. Here is a link to his personal website. 

Both articles have in common, not only that they were published in the British media, but they both talk about specific cases of endangered languages.    

According to the UNESCO, a language is endangered when its speakers cease to use it, use it in fewer domains or stops passing it on to the next generation. When a language is no longer the first tongue that a child learns in his home and the last native speaker dies, then we can talk about an extinct language.

It is estimated that approximately 43% of the languages spoken today are endangered according to the statistic provided by UNESCO. But this topic is gaining more attention. A quick look to Google regarding this subject shows that most of the most important magazines and newspapers around the world have articles regarding endangered languages. More and more people from different professions are now working in the process of language revival applied to those endangered languages.

So far, the world’s most successful example of language revival is Hebrew. After being extinct for almost 2000 years, this language was revived in the 19^th century CE. Now, there are 9 million Hebrew speakers, of which 5 million are native speakers. The revival of Hebrew left us with some valuable lessons that can be used in the process of reviving other languages: It is possible to revive a dead language as far it is properly documented and we do not need to revive a language as it used to be.  

Today revivalists have an additional tool: Technology.  Organizations who research and document endangered languages have found in the IT a powerful tool to develop their work. Organizations like the Living Tongues are using technology to research about endangered languages and to create online talking dictionaries. They also train local activist on how to record and edit phrases in the languages they are studying.

  

Google itself is involved in a project to save endangered languages through documentation. Through the Endangered Languages Project, this American company has put technology at the service of organizations and individuals working in those languages using the world wide web tools to document, preserve and teach them. Users of this website can not only access information about their language of interest but also they can post a video, audio or text files with samples of phrases and real-life conversations.

Another example of the use of technology to save endangered languages is the Rosetta Project, with the creation of the Rosetta disk, a small disk with the capacity to store over 13.000 pages of information on over 1500 human languages. This information includes vocabulary, descriptions of speech, grammar, writing systems, and sample texts.

National Geographic has been working in the development of “Talking Dictionaries” in several endangered languages. The main page of the project shows dictionaries in languages such as Tuvan (A Turkic language spoken in Siberia), Siletz Dee-Ni (An Athabascan language similar to Navajo), Chamococo (an indigenous language from Paraguay) and others. They are currently working in the development of talking dictionaries in different indigenous languages from Latin America, including Wayuunaiki, an indigenous language spoken in areas of NE Colombia and Western Venezuela, a language that we can still listen in my city of birth, Maracaibo.

The free language learning platform Duolingo it's now offering free courses to learn Hawaiian and Navajo, two endangered languages still spoken in the USA. Those courses are available for English speakers.

If technology by itself is not enough, today revivalists have more support from local governments for their work in terms of legislation, founding and logistic. In the past, most of the most powerful countries had governments who actively fought against multilingualism. Today, most of the developed countries have programs that actively support the revival of local endangered languages.

Technology and support from a government are 2 elements that were not present when Hebrew started its process of revival. Perhaps it is too soon to talk about results, but….Are we going to see more languages saved from extinction and actively used? How many languages, that today are extinct or endangered, will be able to be seen as success stories of revitalization?

In my opinion, it is good news to see such important initiatives to revive endangered languages using the tools provided by Technology. However, the success of those initiatives will also depend on how many people are going to use those tools. I am not only speaking about those prospective speakers who might have family connections with earlier speakers of the languages to be studied, but I would say that those initiatives should be open to whoever wants to learn them and create communities where those languages are used.

I would suggest a similar approach like the one showed by Esperanto speakers. For years, Esperantists had faced many obstacles to keep this language alive, with no government support and using tools that were far from being the tools offered by today’s technology. Many have also faced criticism for speak this conlang and use different resources to support it. Despite those issues, Esperanto speakers have kept a community with its own culture, literature, activities and even their own yearly celebrations. Today, the tools of technology just made easier to keep Esperanto alive and expanding.

The tools needed already exist. More ideas to revive endangered languages are still yet to come.