The Last Speakers (25 page)

In switching over to speaking exclusively Russian, Marta's grandchildren have shut themselves off from much of the knowledge of nature, plants, animals, weather, and geography that their grandmother would have been able to pass on to them. This knowledge is not easily expressed in Marta's less-than-fluent Russian. We might go a step further and say that the knowledge Marta has cannot be expressed in as intact or efficient a way in the Russian language. Russian lacks unique words for Tofa concepts like “smelling of reindeer milk” or “a three-year-old male uncastrated rideable reindeer.”

Though the basic ideas can be expressed in any language (as I just expressed them in English), the concepts are packaged in such a way that much is lost when people shift from speaking one language to another. Newcomers to an ecological niche, speaking a language that has not yet developed specialized terms for its plants and animals, can quickly invent or borrow names as needed. But much of this is done by metaphorical extension, and it often obscures or overlooks important connections that people previously living there had forged over time. Anybody can make up new names for newly encountered creatures (or imaginary ones, like Dr. Seuss's “sneetches” or A. A. Milne's “heffalump”). But discerning the subtle connections, similarities, and behavioral traits linking animals, plants, and humans demands careful observation over generations. This process of observation and testing is what we, in our culture, would call science. It is this science, encoded in languages like Tofa, that is now eroding.

LOST IN THE LANDSCAPE

After trekking 12 hours in deep Siberian forests, I felt certain we were lost. We had set out, our party of three linguists—myself, Greg, and Sven—plus a native Tofa guide, early that morning on foot from the tiny village of Nersa. We had been brought to Nersa by helicopter and were now attempting to return to Alygdzher, the village where we had begun our work.

Set high in the Sayan Mountains, Nersa is the smallest of three Tofa villages and is accessible only by helicopter, on reindeer-back, or on foot. The Tofa we met there subsisted on small vegetable plots, hunting, gathering berries and other forest edibles, and a few supplies (flour, sugar, vodka) flown in biweekly on rickety Russian helicopters. Their domestic reindeer herds, they told us, had long since turned wild and run off. As herding ceased to be a viable livelihood, many villagers sank into despair and drunkenness. Despite the bleak circumstances, our party was warmly welcomed, and we found people eager to share their stories. Perhaps this was because no one else ever asked to hear stories in the Tofa language. Indeed, no one under age 55 spoke Tofa anymore. “We were all sent away to boarding school,” explained 35-year-old Valentina, “and that's why we don't know our language.”

Two houses down, Constantine, a hale and deep-voiced 56-year-old, told us a Tofa story of three brothers turned into mountains as punishment after a quarrel over land inheritance. Pointing toward the Sayan range, he indicated the exact three peaks that had formerly been the three brothers. He also told us how he had been punished as a child for speaking his language, beaten with a switch and held back in the first grade for five years because he could not answer his teacher in Russian. His story of shame and abandonment of the ancestral language turned out to be a typical Tofa tale.

Just across the way, we found Svetlana, a cheery lady of 62 and former elementary school teacher, tending her potato garden. She, too, was of the generation that had been pressured to become Russian. “I lived in the boarding school dormitory for ten years,” she told us. “During that time…I never even heard Tofa and wasn't aware that I knew the language. I guess it was forbidden to talk Tofa then—everybody spoke Russian. Such a beautiful, difficult language! Now it's all been forgotten. Everyone's become Russian.”

You can only live in a place like this if you embrace solitude, and the themes of isolation and wandering come up again and again in the stories the elders tell. Svetlana told us a poignant tale of a man and woman so isolated in the forest that they came to believe themselves to be only people left in the world. One day, their dog's barking attracted a wandering hunter, who offered to guide them back to a human settlement. But the hunter needed to depart at once, and the husband was too ill to ride on reindeer-back. He sent his wife on to live with people and stayed behind alone to die. Svetlana framed this for us as a story of true love. Reading between the lines, though, we gathered that her story was also about her double solitude. Not only did she live in a tiny village far from everywhere, but increasingly she found no one to talk to in her native language.

Saddened, we departed Nersa, village of mostly forgotten stories. Loaded down with gifts of bread and berries, and our precious videotapes of Tofa stories, we set out with a native guide to return to Alygdzher, situated just 15 miles upstream as the crow flies. The villagers assured us it was a five-hour trek. Our guide, a young man of 25, led us on foot into the mountain forest at 8 a.m. Eight hours later, as dusk fell, our guide seemed confused. We grew impatient, but our guide seemed unsure as we crossed yet another river. Balancing our clothing on our heads, we formed a human chain to wade across in the frigid chest-high currents. We did finally reach the main village—at 2 a.m., shivering and dehydrated.

We found ourselves the object of sympathy and considerable village gossip. “How could you hire such a guide?” people marveled. Elders shook their heads in dismay. “Our young people don't know their own forests nowadays,” Aunt Marta opined. She had spent decades hunting squirrels in the forests and herding reindeer and knew by name every tributary and ridge, cave and hollow. The very idea that a local could get lost in the woods meant that her world had turned upside-down. For her, this was not only a mental but a spiritual decay.

There is a misconception, dating all the way back to early encounters between Native Americans and the Pilgrims arriving on American shores, that hunter-gatherers do not
own
land, but merely
use
it freely. The Tofa, with their detailed geographic knowledge, are proof that this is not always the case. In Marta's younger years, the entire Tofa territory was divided into ancestral hunting grounds for exclusive use by individual clans. Boundaries existed solely in memory, passed down from father to daughter and son, and were strictly observed. Though one could roam freely anywhere, every important stream, rock outcropping, or distinctive landscape feature had a name, a legend, a resident local spirit, and a human owner. Territory was strictly enforced, and no Tofa hunter would think of poaching on the territory of another clan, out of fear both of angering that clan and of arousing local spirits who might do harm. When hunting on their own clan territory, the Tofa offered tea, meat, and reindeer milk to local gods to repay them for success in hunting and the use of the land. The land was to be venerated, and it bestowed blessings in return.

Once our guide sobered up, fully three days after our trek, I forced him to admit that he had never traveled between the two villages on his own and had last made the journey four years earlier. Trails between these two villages—the only two human habitations for hundreds of miles—had become overgrown from lack of use. Marta and the elders had once trodden these paths regularly. They knew every spring and mountain ridge intimately and remembered a time when success in hunting and reindeer herding, indeed survival itself, depended on applying such knowledge. As their language vanishes, so the mental map they once possessed is fading away, and they are detached from the land that once nourished their people.
2

A FOOT IN BOTH WORLDS

The problem of knowledge erosion gained more attention in November 2007, when I was invited to appear on the comedy show
The Colbert Report
. Stephen Colbert wanted to discuss my book
When Languages Die
. I agreed, though I wondered how I was going to cram a decade of research into a four-minute spoof interview. Stephen began the segment by saying, “Friends, I have some good news for you, English is winning!” Then he began talking pig latin and challenged me to study his unusual idiolect. He followed with a few zingers about the word for reindeer in Tofa, and I was pleased to see an actual bit of data from my fieldwork displayed to millions of viewers.

Stephen then asked what the weirdest word I knew was, so I pulled out a word from Sora, one that I have often used to illustrate a process called “noun incorporation.” The verb
poo-pung-kun-tam
, in Sora, translates as “I will stab you in the gut with a knife,” which in Sora is a single verb that, vacuum-cleaner-like, has swallowed up all the nouns in the sentence—“I,” “you,” “gut,” and “knife”—and glommed them all together into single weighty verb.

Finally, the “gotcha” moment arrived, a question I'd never anticipated. Stephen asked if I was planning to translate my own book into a dying language.

I had not anticipated the aftermath of appearing on a nationally televised show. Our website, www.livingtongues.org, got so many hits it crashed, and I received a flurry of emails, calls, and letters as well. While most were encouraging and laudatory, I was most impressed by some of the extreme points of view, ranging from cranky to downright farcical.

One day, a typewritten letter arrived in my mailbox with the mysterious return address “Latin Department, NYU, New York, NY.” I pictured an elderly professor laboring away on an old-fashioned typewriter. I read it aloud to my research assistant:

In the closing lines, I envisioned a curmudgeonly old academic, with a rumpled tweed coat and a pipe, rising up from his cluttered desk and typewriter to pick up a broom and sweep away all languages except the chosen few, English and Latin. Even his own (presumably native) tongue (which I presumed Bulgarian or the like, based on some of his grammatical quirks) might get swept away in the furor.

Though easy to dismiss as a crank, Yama's “let them all die” manifesto makes some intriguing arguments. Many are ones I hear raised by audiences when I give public lectures, though often more cogently expressed. For example, people often ask, “Isn't Latin a more logical [or regular] language than English?” (Not knowing Latin, I will defer to the experts, but all living languages have regularities and irregularities, and if Latin were still spoken on a daily basis by children, it might look very different than it looks in classical texts and textbooks.) Yama asserts that the problem of Babel (e.g., multilingualism) was “solved” with the classical languages and presumably would like to see everyone convert to speaking Latin.

It's not surprising that a Latinist would equate real language with literacy, and indeed we see the literacy bias clearly displayed in his comments about “ignorant tribalism” vs. “civilization” and reference to “illiteratess [
sic
] in our midst.” I like to remind people that writing is a very useful technology, but also a very recent one, having emerged just around 6,000 years ago, and that for most of human history languages and people thrived without it.

Regarding “untold numbers,” I am often asked by people if we know, or even have any inkling of how many languages existed in the past, both cumulatively in the history of mankind up to the present day, or in any one historical period. Of course we do not. We lack even an accurate count for how many exist today, so extrapolating backward into the past is impossible. Only a select few languages left any trace in the archaeological record (clay tablets, papyrus, runes, etchings in stone), and the vast majority left no trace whatsoever. What we do know is that the distribution of language
diversity
is very uneven. By “diversity,” I mean the number of distinct language
families
that are found in an area. There are very large areas (e.g., Europe) that have relatively low diversity (18 families), and quite small areas like Paraguay or the Caucasus that have multiple families and many languages.

People often ask me about Esperanto, or to a lesser extent other known “conlangs” (constructed languages), such as Klingon, designed by Mark Okrand for
Star Trek,
or J. R. R. Tolkien's Elvish languages in
Lord of the Rings
. Though Wikipedia reports, “A small number of people, mostly dedicated
Star Trek
fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon,” Esperanto is perhaps the granddaddy among conlangs in that it has made the leap from artifice to mother tongue. This came about by the efforts of parents who, due to lack of another common tongue or by strategy, raised their children as native Esperanto speakers from birth.

My critic Yama notes that we should not lament the loss of languages because new ones continually arise—for example, creoles (such as Jamaican Creole). This, too, echoes a frequent question I get from public audiences, who want to know how new languages emerge and whether this process can offset or keep pace with language extinction. The answer is that, while languages continue to diverge, creoles arise only under special circumstances, and we no longer have in place on Earth the conditions for many new languages to emerge. This could only happen if many small populations diverged and lived in relative isolation. In our crowded, urbanized world, the pressures tend in the opposite direction, and so the pace of new language emergence cannot offset the pace of extinction.