I'm kind of continuing with the topic I touched on in the first post, but this time I've researched it, and the focus isn't only on Korean.
I was watching the Colbert Report last week, and Colbert had invited a guy who wrote a book titled "When Languages Die" and talked about endangered languages. I was excited because it was the day after we had started the seminar, and it was so closely related to our class! There was mention of how there are unique words in certain languages and that's why we should preserve them. A couple of the examples I remember are: "castrated reindeer" and "I'm going to stab you in the gut with a knife," both of which are (each) one word in a language that is dying out. Colbert was saying that we don't need such words and that if we do want to say something like that, we can just say it in a longer phrase.
I partly agree with him, but there is more to these languages than that. There is a whole culture and identity that binds people together. And there are some words whose meanings can't be exactly expressed in another language; the slight nuances are different or the object/emotion/situation doesn't really exist in the other culture for there to be a word for it.
There are about 6000 to 7000 languages in the world right now, and apparently, one language is disappearing every two weeks. There are many with only one speaker left. One article I read was about an old woman who is the last surviving speaker of Elem Pomo, a dialect of a North Californian Native American tribe. (link below)
According to NVTC (National Virtual Translation Center), a language is considered "endangered" when they are "on the brink of extinction, much like endangered species of plants or animals." It goes on to say: "Languages are considered to be endangered when parents are no longer teaching the language to their children and are not using it actively in everyday life. A language is considered to be nearly extinct when it is spoken by only a few elderly native speakers."
K. David Harrison, the professor who was on the Colbert Report, said that languages die out mostly because kids don't carry it on. They don't learn it because they don't need it. It's a Darwinian "survival of the fittest." I understand this, but I am also deeply saddened that this is fact. I think this applies to Korea too. Korean isn't anywhere near endangered, but as I said before, Koreans are crazy about learning English because their knowledge and fluency of it determines their future success. English is key to survival in Korea, so it's no surprise that it is hard to keep minority languages alive elsewhere. Colonization, economic progress, increased global communication are all responsible for the gradual disappearance of languages.
According to an article in 2003 by the Independent/UK, "of the 176 living languages spoken by the tribes of North America, 52 have become extinct since 1600. Of the 235 languages spoken by the Aboriginal Australians, 31 have disappeared." This is all due to colonization. In more modern terms of "colonization," English is taking over the world. My roommate and I were talking about this the other day, and she thought it was unavoidable that English become the dominant language (not that she is a proponent of it). According to EnglishEnglish.com, 80% of the webpages on the World Wide Web is in English, and as the internet is essential to our lives these days, this mere fact shows that we need English to have access to the world.
However, many people are working to preserve the "small" languages. There are organizations like the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, who work to educate the next generation in a particular language so that they will carry it on into the future. There have been success stories too; Hawaiian, Hebrew, and Irish Gaelic are three of them. We actually talked a little about these language resurrections in class. So it's not impossible to bring a language back to life. You just need a committed group of people.
So this blog entry ends on a hopeful note. Languages need to preserved for the richness of meaning, culture, and history that they contain. We, especially the students of this class, can play a role in this, by continuing to speak the languages that aren't necessarily the "fittest."
Here are some links that I used to write this blog entry:
"Only living Elem Pomo speaker teaches so she won't be the last"
Elem Pomo audio (you can listen to the lady speak Elem Pomo!)
Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival
Alarm Raised on World's Disappearing Languages (Independent/UK)
Language Death (BBC)
Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words (The NY Times)
As languages die away, so do pieces of history (The Seattle Times)
NVTC
How Languages Die
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3 comments:
Really great post! One thing I find interesting is the metaphor that we use for languages; that is, the LANGUAGE is A LIVING THING metaphor. For example, we describe languages as "dying" or "going extinct" just as we would describe plants and dinosaurs. Why might we conceptualize languages as living things? does this reflect the structure of languages, our thoughts and feelings about languages, both, or something else? What are the parallel consequences between languages going extinct and , say, tigers and rhinos going extinct? what are the differences?
Why do we need to preserve cultures and heritages through language? As the world globalizes, many native cultures and traditions are obviously going to be lost, so why try to prevent this? It's not like this hasn't happened before: cultures redefine themselves all the time, so what we're trying to preserve now is probably just an adaptation or evolution of what people couldn't preserve before. Just a thought.
Nikola - I agree that culture changes, and maybe it's not always for the worse, but I still feel like it's a huge loss for mankind when it gradually disappears and is dominated by the more "mainstream" cultures.
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