Archives

2010
June
April
February

2009
November
September
July
May
March
January

2008
November
September
July
May
March
January

2007
November
September
June
March
January

2006
November
June
March
January

2005
November
September
July
May
March
January

2004
November
September
July

"Good news, America, we are winning!" That’s how satirical TV news commentator Stephen Colbert greeted the news that over half of the world’s 7,000 languages may disappear by 2100. Colbert’s interview subject that night, linguist K. David Harrison, strongly disagrees. He says that "there is a significant knowledge base that’s eroding, that’s going extinct with these languages." We interviewed Harrison recently about his work.

Harrison is the research director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages as well as an associate professor at Swarthmore College. He has spent his entire career studying, and trying to help preserve, endangered languages, most of which are not written. His appearance on The Colbert Report was in connection with the publication of his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford University Press 2007).

Harrison has been busy since 2007. The Linguists, a film in which he co-stars with Living Tongues director Gregory Anderson, was an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and is up for an Emmy Award. His next book, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, is scheduled for publication by Random House in September. And the Institute’s collaborative project with National Geographic, Enduring Voices, has provided other outlets and means of support for his work.

Lost Languages, Lost Knowledge
So, what does it matter if some obscure language that we’ve never heard of becomes extinct? According to Harrison we are losing a chunk of the knowledge that is our human heritage - knowledge that may turn out to be very important. He gives the example of the Yupik people of Alaska who have lived above the Arctic Circle for thousands of years and know more about Arctic Sea ice than climatologists. They have 99 different terms for Arctic Sea ice, each one of which "encodes very detailed knowledge about the color of the ice, the texture of the ice, the meteorological conditions under which it forms, what it’s good for, what kind of animals are found on it, can it be walked on…." This is knowledge that could be very useful in the study of climate change.

	Harrison with the Kallawaya

Or, to take another example from Harrison’s own work: The Kallawaya people of Bolivia, who are featured in the film, The Linguists. "They know the uses of thousands of plants for medicinal purposes that they have developed through a process of experimentation, and this again is an oral knowledge base, it’s not written down." "Something like 75% of all the drugs currently used to treat cancer are derived from plants," Harrison notes, "and who is it that discovered those plants? It wasn't only pharmaceutical companies, it was the indigenous people who have been experimenting with those plants for a long time and naming them and classifying them and understanding them." We have benefited whether we were aware of it or not.

The Institute’s Work

Harrison in Matugar

The Linguists deals with the Institute’s work in recording dying languages for posterity. But the Institute also helps communities who want to revitalize their own languages. The Institute works with local communities to carry out their wishes – helping develop a writing system; producing the first books in a language; training local language activists. Harrison gets particularly excited when he talks about projects that bring these languages to the internet in the form of things like talking dictionaries. He calls this "helping languages to cross the digital divide." In a new departure, he just launched an iPhone application - a talking dictionary of the Tuvan language of central Siberia.

Last year, the Institute began working with the Matugar community in Papua, New Guinea. They produced the first book in the language - which had not previously been written - and have launched a talking dictionary. The Institute also bought the village, which has only had electricity for about 6 months, its first computer. Harrison says

My dream is that as soon as they get internet – sometime within the next 12 months or so - the little children in that village, who are really right on the cusp of making a crucial decision – are they going to keep their heritage language or are they going to abandon it - the first time they go on the internet they’re going to see the talking dictionary in their language, they’re going to hear recordings, they’re going to see that their own language is basically a viable player in the information age in the internet; that it has a presence; that it is just as suited for internet as any other language – even though it only has 300 or so speakers.

Not so long ago, English dominated the internet, but that has been changing rapidly. The recent addition of totally non-Latin domain names may accelerate this trend. Now, linguists like K. David Harrison are using the web to help save endangered languages and preserve linguistic diversity and the knowledge that comes with it.

At MTM LinguaSoft, we understand the value of language diversity and applaud the work of The Living Tongues Institute in helping to keep alive and record these irreplaceable resources.