Lost for words

In the Native American Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the
American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-
aged or elderly Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in
English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in
English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain
in a hundred years’ time.

Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within
two generations - that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the
planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. At the moment, we are heading for
about three or four languages dominating the world,’ says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever
rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with languages
spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers,
and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages
that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000
speakers. What makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers,
but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically
endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to
Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.

Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of
confidence, when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society,
says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath.
‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their
teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

The change is not always voluntary. Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority
language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools, all to promote
national unity.
The former US policy of running Indian reservation schools in English, for example,
effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list. But Salikoko Mufwene,
who chairs the Linguistics department at the University of Chicago, argues that the
deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalisation. ‘Native
Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-
economic pressures,’ he says. ‘They cannot refuse to speak English if most
commercial activity is in English.’ But are languages worth saving? At the very least,
there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on
comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and
unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science.
Language is also intimately bound up with culture, so it may be difficult to preserve
one without the other. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’
Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways
of looking at the world,’ says Pagel. There is mounting evidence that learning a
language produces physiological changes in the brain. ‘Your brain and mine are
different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance,’ Pagel says, and
this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make
among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’
So despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century.
But a growing interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from
coming true. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue,
as well as the dominant language,’ says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the
Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. ‘Most of these languages
will not survive without a large degree of bilingualism,’ he says. In New Zealand,
classes for children have slowed the erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the
language. A similar approach in Hawaii has produced about 8,000 new speakers of
Polynesian languages in the past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes
have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer ‘apprentices’
pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a
traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered
language. After about 300 hours of training they are generally sufficiently fluent to
transmit the language to the next generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a
language dying out is not the same as giving it new life by using it every day.
‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in a jar,’ he says.

However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. There are examples
of languages that have survived in written form and then been revived by later
generations. But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of revival
has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of writing where
none existed before.

Questions 1-4
Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

There are currently approximately 6,800 languages in the world. This great variety of
languages came about largely as a result of geographical 1_____________ . But in
today’s world, factors such as government initiatives and 2_____________ are
contributing to a huge decrease in the number of languages. One factor which may
help to ensure that some endangered languages do not die out completely is people’s
increasing appreciation of their 3_____________ . This has been encouraged
through programmes of language classes for children and through ‘apprentice’
schemes, in which the endangered language is used as the medium of instruction to
teach people a 4_____________ . Some speakers of endangered languages have
even produced writing systems in order to help secure the survival of their mother
tongue.

Questions 5-9

Look at the following statements (Questions 5-9) and the list of people in the box
below.

Match each statement with the correct person A-E.

Write the appropriate letter A-E in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

A Michael Krauss

B Salikoko Mufwene

C Nicholas Ostler

D Mark Pagel

E Doug Whalen

5. ____Endangered languages cannot be saved unless people learn to speak more

than one language.

6. ____ Saving languages from extinction is not in itself a satisfactory goal.

7. ____The way we think may be determined by our language.

8. ____Young people often reject the established way of life in their community.

9. ____A change of language may mean a loss of traditional culture.

Questions 10-13

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet write

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

10.______ The Navajo language will die out because it currently has too few speakers.
11.______ A large number of native speakers fails to guarantee the survival of a
language.

12.______ National governments could do more to protect endangered languages.

13.______ The loss of linguistic diversity is inevitable.