The Last Speakers (2 page)

This notion of universality has a detrimental flip side, because it leads many linguists to view languages as essentially interchangeable, all equally expressive, each simply a different way of saying the same thing.
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Linguists have also focused on the
structure
of languages, elements like suffixes and prefixes, word order and case marking. The fixation on grammatical structures has eclipsed our view of what people have to say and has prevented us from fully seeing how each tongue is adapted to a unique society and habitat. In my work, I try to shift from possible universal properties shared by all tongues to focus on the deep differences among them. Rather than
how
people speak (how their languages build words and sentences), I concentrate on
what
they say, and on the very diverse bodies of knowledge held by different societies. Once focused on difference instead of what is shared in common, and on the what instead of the how, we see each individual language as having inestimable value that cannot be replaced.

As I travel the globe, working always as part of a team, I seek to learn more about the deeper connection between landscapes and languages. Many elders I meet are determined to recall and pass on remnants of knowledge. By sharing, they bestow on me the responsibility to care about it and to care for it. Many of these voices, and the stories they share, have never been heard outside of remote villages and backwaters where the speakers live. I take this opportunity to give their voices, now fading, a global megaphone, a rapt audience, an attentive hearing.

Though many small tongues will cease to be spoken and the knowledge they contain erased, the situation is not all dire. I see hope in a vibrant global movement to reclaim and enliven small tongues. A determined push-back against the steamroller of globalization is happening right now. I hear it in Mohawk-language kindergartens, Navajo pop music, and Ojibwe Facebook postings. These familiar media present new and powerful platforms for many of the world's smallest languages. Their speakers, also wired global citizens, cleverly apply new media to sustain ancient words. Rather than viewing technology and globalization as threats, they dive into the information sea, using it to buoy their languages to new heights.

I have been dismayed to find indifference in the very communities where languages are most threatened, but also heartened to see individuals undertaking heroic efforts to sustain heritage languages. An elderly Aboriginal lady, Thelma Sadler, teaches youngsters in western Australia the names for local plants in her Yawuru language. Young men in a mountain village in India perform hip-hop in Aka, a language spoken by barely a thousand people. These language warriors reject the false choice of globalization that says people have to give up small languages and speak only big ones. Their resistance gives hope for language revitalization efforts worldwide.

Along the way, I've met many mentors, role models, and heroes who have been doing this kind of work for ages. My heroes are the elders, last speakers like Johnny Hill Jr. in Arizona and Vasya Gabov in Siberia. These guardians of unique knowledge possess the wisdom and generosity of spirit to share some of that knowledge with us, and by their generosity, they reach out through us to touch a global audience with their words.

This is a story of survival and awakening. My personal encounters with last speakers inspired me to write this book. What they taught me far surpassed what I was able to learn while earning a doctorate in linguistics at Yale. What they know about the natural world often exceeds information accumulated by scientists. The speakers' own stories and passions cry out before an ominous shadow of extinction. At the same time, they may signal a global reawakening to the value of languages and thus portend that all we have learned about our world will inform how we wish to live here.

WHO EXACTLY IS A LINGUIST?
The general public has little idea of what we do or why it matters. Some think a linguist is a word pundit or grammar maven, doling out advice about correct usage or obscure word origins. The U.S. government uses the term to refer to translators or experts, as in “Arabic linguist.” Many people think it means a polyglot who can order beer in any of 25 vernaculars.

The reality is both more banal and more exciting. Banal because a linguist is simply a scientist of language. He has tools just as a biologist has a microscope, or a physicist a particle accelerator. For linguists, the basic tools are a trained ear (able to hear and transcribe exotic sounds); an ability to analyze a language by breaking it down into meaningful bits (often with the help of computer programs that turn audible speech into a visual representation of the sound wave); a thorough knowledge of many hundreds, if not thousands, of scholarly works on the topic; and often a Ph.D.

With these tools, acquired by long study, a linguist can be dropped into a village anywhere in the world, with no more than a notebook and pencil and a good recording device, and begin work. Chances are, whichever of the 7,000 dots on a world map one of us might land on, the language will not yet have been adequately documented or described, and perhaps never before recorded. Though the tools are minimal and the preparation intense, we thrive on the exciting possibility of encountering words entirely new and unknown to science.

Unlike an entomologist who collects butterflies, the linguist always has an abundance of speech to study at any location and need not chase it down. But like the butterfly collector, if the linguist just sits in one place studying whatever is at hand, he will never discover the full range of possibilities.

Linguists strive to see both forest and tree. Language is the element in which we—and much of our conscious thought—exists, and since we can't really step outside of it, we can sometimes more easily make sense of a foreign language than our own. The tiniest elements may be scrutinized. An entire dissertation may explore the vowel sound that appears in the French word
de
as in “pas de deux,” or a lengthy scholarly article be devoted to the English “dude,” as in “Dude, where's my car?”
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But the forest also matters, and linguists like to tackle big questions such as how and when language arose in our human species. Can apes be taught symbolic communication systems akin to language, or does that set us apart from the apes? What are the origins of diversity—if not the biblical tower of Babel, how and when did all the world's languages diverge along their very different trajectories? Are there basic building blocks that all human languages, whether spoken by the mouth or signed with one's hands, share—and if so, what are they and what can they reveal about human cognition?

Becoming a linguist can take many pathways. Mine started early and wended its way through Siberia, Yale University, and other locales around the globe. Some people show unusual prowess at a young age, and may even be linguistic savants. I was not one of those, but according to my mother, my career path may have begun in the womb. I was still four months from being born when my parents attended the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which trains missionary-linguists.
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Missionaries have done much of the basic work on undescribed languages, typically by spending many years living in communities to produce a dictionary and Bible translation. This mission is part of a larger agenda to convert people to a particular sect, and missionaries from all types of churches may be found around the world. Though disdained by many academic linguists, missionary work often provides the first or only existing description for many of the world's languages.

My early years were filled with heroic tales told by missionaries on furlough from their field sites. I had missionary aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Belgian Congo (later Zaire), missionary friends in the Philippines, and fellow “MKs” (missionary kids) in Haiti and Ghana as pen pals. Our refrigerator at home was covered with “prayer cards”—photos of missionaries and their families, with little maps showing where they were serving. So, my early exposure to languages and linguistics was through the prism of missionary work.

Of course, missionaries do more than learn languages. They may provide basic medical and educational services, proselytize new converts to the faith, and over the long term, translate portions of the Bible into obscure tongues. My first role models as linguists were missionary Bible translators. I used to collect little pamphlets like the Gospel of John in Sinhala and marvel at the ability to translate. I also pondered some of the classic dilemmas in missionary translation, such as how to render important theological concepts like the “lamb of God” into a culture that possessed no obvious equivalent (for Arctic cultures, I learned “lamb of God” is sometimes rendered as “God's seal pup”).

My parents attended the Summer Institute, where my mother recalls struggling with a course in phonetics, learning to pronounce strange sounds, clicks, and trills. Other courses taught them how to analyze the grammar and begin Bible translation. The language they studied was Cree, a difficult Algonquian language that is spread widely across Canada with an estimated 34,000 speakers. My parents were assigned by their mission organization to work with the Ermineskin Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, a small First Nation community. I was born there, and so I heard plenty of Cree from a young age, from everyday talk to gospel hymns. I was dubbed
napasis,
meaning “little boy.” But none of the vocabulary stuck once Cree vanished from my life at age three, when my family moved back to the United States. Though I listened to those Cree gospel songs for years afterward, playing them on a hand-cranked record player, I never picked up any more Cree.

I did not become a missionary, either, mainly because I did not find answers to my deepest questions in dogmatic religion. Unlike many of my colleagues, however, I do not regard missionary work with hostility or as necessarily detrimental to indigenous cultures. Cultures are strong and resilient, perfectly capable of choosing to believe or disbelieve salvation stories brought by missionaries. No one can really force anyone to believe anything they don't want to. But religion can exert a strong appeal to certain individuals, and I've visited villages where all the inhabitants have fervently converted to a religion that was brought to them recently by outsiders.

My own goals are very different, and some have described my work as being a “reverse missionary.” I visit indigenous cultures not to bring them an alien ideology, to convert, or to advocate that they abandon their beliefs and adopt others. Rather, I go to celebrate, promote, and soak up their knowledge and beliefs. I've been converted, quite willingly, to
their
worldview.

John and Mina Currie, of the Ermineskin Cree Nation near Hobbema, Alberta, Canada, shown here in traditional dress in 1967.

I'm often asked in rural villages, especially in places like rural India where it is common for an entire village to have adopted evangelical Christianity en masse, if I am a Christian. When I reply no, they are surprised, even shocked. Since these villages adopted Christianity from white (often European or Australian) missionaries, they have a notion that all white people must be Christians. They identify Christianity with progress and civilization. Of course, multiple agendas are at work here. One strategic reason the indigenous people of India adopt Christianity is that it allows them to signal a stark difference between themselves and the Hindus who dominate them and, indeed, most political discourse in India. They would never consider converting to Hinduism, since that would mean the end of their distinct cultural identity.

My next early attempt at learning a language was American Sign Language. ASL has nothing in common with English; its grammar is as foreign as Japanese. The language is spoken with gestures of the hands and face instead of the vocal tract. Deaf people in the United States can be either Deaf (written with a capital
D
), meaning they share a common culture and speak ASL as their primary language, or deaf (small
d
), meaning they cannot hear but have been mainstreamed or are outside of Deaf culture and do not speak ASL fluently.

My father is considered deaf with a small
d
. He had severe hearing loss at birth, but rejected deaf boarding school at an early age and chose to mainstream in hearing society. With the help of hearing aids and expert lip-reading skills, his deafness often passes unnoticed, and he has become an accomplished preacher and public motivational speaker. Still, my family found itself connected to the Deaf/deaf community through my father, and we spent hours learning ASL.

This language, spoken with the hands, is as expressive and beautiful as any spoken language. As a child I experienced ASL as a mysterious power, one that allowed people to communicate across a crowded room, yet at the same time separated them from the society at large. Because deaf people are considered “handicapped,” signing also has negative connotations. I was somewhat embarrassed by my father's deafness, which hindered my learning of ASL. I also forgot most of what I had learned of ASL as I grew older. Ironically, at my first real field site as a young professional linguist, I was placed with a mixed deaf and hearing family that used signs to communicate.

How many languages do I speak? This is a frequent question people ask, and one many linguists detest. I don't mind it, but the answer may surprise some. Depending on what “speak” means, I can handle five or six and can understand and read another half dozen. That total is not impressive at all if compared with a famous linguistic savant, a young man identified by the pseudonym Christopher. Studied by linguists, Christopher is described as being able to communicate in 15 to 20 languages, though developmentally disabled in other respects.
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Nor does my polylingualism come close to the abilities of the many indigenous elders I've met over the years who command nine or ten. I am not a polyglot, though I can mimic sounds and break down words into grammatical structures.

I grew up monolingual, a language bumpkin—a fact I will always regret. Besides hearing Cree as a toddler and learning a few songs in German class in third grade, I had no formal training until high school French class. That was a dreary affair, and I continued to flail ineffectively in college. All I really learned was that I cannot learn in a classroom environment. I wish I was a language whiz, but the most I can say is that I love listening to languages and trying to make sense of them.

I discovered my language aptitude only during my senior year in college, when I ended up as an exchange student in Poland by sheer chance. Poland had communist chic then—in 1988, it was gray and cold, free of any advertising or color, and quite poor. People stood in line to buy toilet paper or, rarely, small oranges that arrived on ships from Cuba. Meat was rationed.

The Poles didn't know what to make of our group of six American students who showed up one winter day in the city of Poznan, unable to communicate. I used hand gestures to talk to my roommate, who had no English. The reception desk ladies chuckled at my attempts to ask for my room key. I was in 916, so at least twice a day I had to approach the desk, clear my throat, and say “
dziewiecset szesnascie”
(je-vyen-set-shesh-nash-che). They nicknamed me “Smurf” due to my funny pronunciation. But over three months, an amazing transformation occurred. I managed to find a circle of Polish friends who had almost no English and who were patient enough to include me in their activities and talk to me. I began to absorb the language day by day, mastering the crazy sibilants, the nasal vowels, and the odd way of saying “it fell me” instead of “I dropped it.”

Once I learned Polish, I traveled the Eastern Bloc and realized it was home to many related languages—Czech, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian, Lemko. I could understand between 40 and 70 percent of these, based on their similarities to Polish. The notion of a language “family” was a major epiphany for me: once you learn one member, you have a big head start on the others, and you can see interesting historical connections. I should mention, though, how pitfalls and false cognates can lead you astray:
zhygat'
in Russian means to light a fire, while a word that sounds alike in Polish means to vomit.

Still, even Slavic languages, for all their complexities, represent a sister branch on the expansive Indo-European family language tree, related to English, German, Greek, Latin, Spanish, and even Hindi. Indo-European is a family (linguists call it a “stock”) of several hundred related tongues. It is vast in terms of both geographic spread (from India to Iran to Russia to England to Canada to Argentina) and population (with as many as three billion speakers). Nevertheless, it is but one branch on the tree of human languages, with only a small fraction of the diversity.