Field linguist David Harrison affirms that 85 percent of languages have yet to be documented. If languages are to be preserved, they must be reduced to written records that include a dictionary. That may seem like a daunting prospect for the many languages that remain only spoken and not written, but it is vital if these languages going extinct are to persist.
Fluent speakers are those who can best define and diagnose their own language and help linguists understand it, record it, and translate it for others to discover and use. Linguists agree that for any language to be salvaged, the drive and effort must come from among the people speaking it.
Pride in their language and culture—and a passion to preserve it—will be the deciding factor in whether or not we add it to the lists of living languages or extinct languages. At International Language Services , our team includes highly experienced native language translators who are also subject matter experts.
We are dedicated to the preservation, progression, and proliferation of human language for all your business or organization needs. Previous Next. Access to healthcare is one example. Many communities around the world have ancestral means to stay healthy, but sometimes they need to seek outside health services. It happens here, in the U.
If a person who uses sign language goes to a hospital and there is no American Sign Language interpreter available, that person has difficulty communicating. That difficulty in and of itself constitutes a restriction to the access of a critical service, and is a human rights issue. As a linguist I focus on documentation and analysis by collecting data on a language. For example, I record stories spoken in a language so I can hear the subtleties of how words are pronounced, which elements of a word or phrase are emphasized and how sentences are formed.
Although language loss may be voluntary or involuntary, it always involves pressure of some kind, and it is often felt as a loss of social identity or as a symbol of defeat. That doesn't mean that a group's social identity is always lost when its language is lost; for example, both the Chumash in California and the Manx on the Isle of Man have lost their native languages, but not their identity as Chumash or Manx.
But language is a powerful symbol of a group's identity. Much of the cultural, spiritual, and intellectual life of a people is experienced through language. This ranges from prayers, myths, ceremonies, poetry, oratory, and technical vocabulary to everyday greetings, leave- takings, conversational styles, humor, ways of speaking to children, and terms for habits, behaviors, and emotions.
When a language is lost, all of this must be refashioned in the new language-with different words, sounds, and grammar- if it is to be kept at all. Frequently traditions are abruptly lost in the process and replaced by the cultural habits of the more powerful group.
For these reasons, among others, it is often very important to the community itself that its language survive. Much is lost from a scientific point of view as well when a language disappears. A people's history is passed down through its language, so when the language disappears, it may take with it important information about the early history of the community. The loss of human languages also severely limits what linguists can learn about human cognition.
By studying what all of the world's languages have in common, we can find out what is and isn't possible in a human language. This in turn tells us important things about the human mind and how it is that children are able to learn a complex system like language so quickly and easily. The fewer languages there are to study, the less we will be able to learn about the human mind.
Although for many people it's important to know a major national or international language, that doesn't mean they must abandon their mother tongue. Children who grow up speaking two or more languages learn those languages just as well as children who grow up speaking only one language.
A community that wants to preserve or revive its language has a number of options. Perhaps the most dramatic story is that of Modern Hebrew, which was revived as a mother tongue after centuries of being learned and studied only in its ancient written form. Irish has had considerable institutional and political support as the national language of Ireland, despite major inroads by English.
In New Zealand, Maori communities established nursery schools staffed by elders and conducted entirely in Maori, called kohanga reo, 'language nests'. There, and in Alaska, Hawaii, and elsewhere, this model is being extended to primary and in some cases secondary school. And in California, younger adults have become language apprentices to older adult speakers in communities where only a few older speakers are still living.
A growing number of conferences, workshops, and publications now offer support for individuals, schools, and communities trying to preserve languages. Because so many languages are in danger of disappearing, linguists are trying to learn as much about them as possible, so that even if the language disappears, all knowledge of the language won't disappear at the same time.
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