Honolulu Weekly

On March 12, linguists from across the globe will descend on Hawaii to discuss the loss of language around the world, and how to prevent it. Professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Nick Thieberger is one of the conference’s organizers and took time to chat with the Weekly about what languages we’re losing and what it will take to preserve entire cultures, one word at a time.

I understand Nikolaus Himmelmann, who has really been a pioneer in language documentation, is among those making the trek to Hawaii for this conference.

Right. Language documentation is a newer sort of approach which recognizes that we need to be more responsive to the people we work with. Nikolaus Himmelmann is the person who really articulated this and wrote the paper 10 years ago that really set this out. He’s since published a textbook about this and is using new technology and realizing that we can do much better in the way we record languages. Part of the motivation is the recognition that lots of languages are in their last generation so there’s a lot of urgency. We don’t know what’s in them and what structures there may be. Also, just storing that information for those people and their descendents. Kids are going to be looking for this in the future.

Tell me more about the loss of language across the world. We hear a lot about the concept of the world getting smaller as our technological capabilities grow. How does this contribute to the rate of loss?

Yeah, well, what’s happened is you’re getting more and more urbanization and we get people moving away from their traditional land or maybe they’re getting forced off there traditional land, which means their not practicing traditional lifestyles. What goes along with that is they aren’t speaking their language. They may get television, but then that’s not in their language. So there are a lot of small languages and speakers of small languages who shift to bigger language as a result. Part of the problem is that for a lot of the big languages, especially English, people don’t have the concept that you can have more than one language in your head. Most of the world is multilingual but English speakers tend to be monolingual. And there’s this idea that you have to speak English that you want to get ahead. I think we need to encourage people that if they need to speak English, that’s good, but that doesn’t mean that you need to give up your traditional language.

How many languages are there in the world anyway?

It’s a bit difficult to count but somewhere around 7,000.

And, per capita, is English the most-spoken language in the world?

It’s something like 10 percent of the world’s population speak 90 percent of the world’s languages.

I saw on the conference roster some participants from Chuuk, and that’s an island that I recently focused on for another story. I came across a figure that only something like 45,000 people in the world speak Chuukese. How does that compare to languages with even fewer speakers?

There are languages that only have maybe five speakers. There’s a whole range. A lot of small indigenous languages in places like Australia, you get to that point where there are only a handful of people left and they aren’t even talking to each other, they might not live in the same town. One of the estimates is that we lose a language in that way every two weeks.

That’s depressing.

I mean, it is depressing and I suppose you just have to face up to the fact that that’s happening. We are trying to train students to go out and do these recording and also train speakers of these languages to do this kind of work. There are so many languages, there’s so much work to be done. But you know there are some initiatives. There’s a big program out of London, and they are funding teams to do this kind of research and there’s some funding in the U.S. through the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. But the two in Europe are both private, so there isn’t an equivalent in the States.

Is that lack of funding a product of the monolingual attitude we have stateside?

Well, there are a lot of good things happening in the states, all kinds of work with revitalization of Native American languages and, here in Hawaii, this quite famous revitalization project with what’s going on in Hawaiian.

I wanted to ask you about that. Talk to me a bit about the trajectory of that revitalization if you would.

It’s quite sensitive and you’d be better talking to people from UH-Hilo. There’s been quite a lot of activity. There are immersion schools for kids to learn Hawaiian. There’s lots going on but really I’m not involved with it.

What’s your main area of interest?

I’ve worked in Australia with Australian aboriginal languages. And in Vanuatu, I wrote grammar. What linguists can do is live in a village and learn the grammar. You collect stories and write a dictionary of the languages, and develop a writing system if there wasn’t one before. When you write the grammar, you try to find out how the language works, how it fits into other languages in the world, and what that tells us about the local environment and the people who live there.

I was recently speaking to a friend about the amazing crossover there is between linguistics and other fields of study—its applications in science, philosophy and so many areas of academics.

Yes, and you know each of these cultures has a complete story of the world. They’ve got their own idea of how the world came into being, they’ve got creation stories, they’ve got religions, philosophical systems, scientific knowledge, all of that within a society. All kinds of things, beliefs and world views are encoded in the language and every time a language is lost, that whole world is lost with it. That’s all going to be lost with the language. Some of those things you can talk about in other languages, and some of those things are quite unique. There’s a lot of cross over. People have lots of knowledge of heavens, plants, animals, all kinds of things. So when you go into this line of work, you need to try and find out as much as you can because, really, you’re trying to record their whole world theory within a different language.

On March 12, linguists from across the globe will descend on Hawaii to discuss the loss of language around the world, and how to prevent it. Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Nick Thieberger is one of the conference’s organizers and took time to chat with the Weekly about what languages we’re losing and what it will take to preserve entire cultures, one word at a time.