To paraphrase a character in the Brian Friel play “Translations,” if you impose a language on people, one day you may find that their speech “no longer fits the contours of the land.” Language is critical to identity. People can always learn the language of the power group later, once they have learned how to learn.
That is the rationale behind a new effort in Haiti.
“When Michel DeGraff was a young boy in Haiti, his older brother brought home a notice from school reminding students and parents of certain classroom rules. At the top of the list was ‘no weapons.’ And right below it, DeGraff still remembers: ‘No Creole.’ Students were supposed to use French, and French only. …
“DeGraff is now an associate professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is using his influence to try to destroy the barrier that essentially fences off most of Haiti’s children from a real education.” Read the Boston Globe report here.
The dominance of a few languages was one of the concerns behind creating Esperanto as a bridge. With a bridge language, Esperantists hoped, less common languages would not die. It hasn’t turned out that way.
“There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and if statistics hold, two weeks from now, there will be one less. That’s the rate at which languages disappear. And each time a language disappears, a part of history — a subtle way of thinking — vanishes too.
“A new documentary called The Linguists, [which aired August 4] on PBS, follows ethnographers David Harrison and Greg Anderson as they race to document endangered languages in some of the most remote corners of the world.
“From the plains of Siberia to the mountains of Bolivia to the tribal lands of India, Harrison and Anderson have hopscotched the globe, but they sat down for a moment with NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss their race to capture the world’s endangered languages.
“Harrison, a linguistics professor at Swarthmore College, specializes in sounds and words; Anderson, who directs Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, is the verb expert. Together, they speak 25 languages.” Read more here.
Is there any way of seeing the documentary if you missed it when it aired, I wonder. I’ll have to click on your “read more here” link.
This is something I care a lot about too–cultural survival. It’s something, in some small way, that I’m trying to talk about in the Pen Pal story-turned-novel.
I’m hoping it will be shown again.
It was interesting to read about how people are perceiving each other and oneself depending upon the culture norms of what language to speak or how. Coming from a small country and language I have been lucky to follow my grand- children how they use several different languages depending upon situation. The question I raise is which language will be the emotional language?
That’s an interesting question, Margareta. Maybe it will be a combination of languages, something uniquely their own. Because they know that certain thoughts can be expressed only in (or best in) a particular language. For myself, I wish I spoke more languages. But one thing I find fascinating is hearing how speakers of other languages use English. I feel like that gives me an insight into how their culture looks at things.
But one thing I find fascinating is hearing how speakers of other languages use English. I feel like that gives me an insight into how their culture looks at things.
–I very much agree with this
One thing I find fascinating is this impression that Esperanto ‘has died out’ or ‘lost momentum’. looking online, it seems clear to me that this isn’t the case! As you mentioned in another post, there are hundreds of thousands of Esperanto speakers around the world, and they seem only too happy to share knowledge and cultural perspectives with one another. Esperanto strikes me as a global melting pot.
I often find myself in the middle on this. Esperanto and other invented languages work for those who use them, but having a bridge language hasn’t caught on with the majority of people. Meanwhile, native languages are disappearing because everyone thinks they have to be proficient in English or Chinese or something, and they focus on that.
True. I just find it sad that so many languages are dying out! It seems to me that you lose whole cultures, and ways of knowledge.