You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the

Reading Passage below.

Endangered Languages

‘Nevermind whales, save the languages’, says Peter Monaghan, graduate of the
Australian National University

Worried about the loss of rainforests and the ozone At linguistics meetings in the US,
where the layer? Well, neither of those is doing any worse than
endangered-language issue has of late been a large majority of the 6,000 to 7,000
languages that something of a flavour of the month, there is remain in use on Earth.
One half of the survivors will growing evidence that not all approaches to the almost
certainly be gone by 2050, while 40% more preservation of languages will be
particularly will probably be well on their way out. In their place, helpful. Some
linguists are boasting, for example, almost all humans will speak one of a handful of
of more and more sophisticated means of capturing megalanguages – Mandarin,
English, Spanish.

Linguists know what causes languages to disappear, but less often remarked is what
happens on the way to disappearance: languages’ vocabularies, grammars and
expressive potential all diminish as one language is replaced by another. ‘Say a
community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to speaking a
creole*,’ says Australian Nick Evans, a leading authority on Aboriginal languages,
‘you leave behind a language where there’s very fine vocabulary for the landscape.
All that is gone in a creole. You’ve just got a few words like ‘gum tree’ or whatever. As
speakers become less able to express the wealth of knowledge that has filled
ancestors’ lives with meaning over millennia, it’s no wonder that communities tend to
become demoralised.’
If the losses are so huge, why are relatively few linguists combating the situation?
Australian linguists, at least, have achieved a great deal in terms of preserving
traditional languages. Australian governments began in the 1970s to support an
initiative that has resulted in good documentation of most of the 130 remaining
Aboriginal languages. In England, another Australian, Peter Austin, has directed one
of the world’s most active efforts to limit language loss, at the University of London.
Austin heads a programme that has trained many documentary linguists in England
as well as in language-loss hotspots such as West Africa and South America.

At linguistics meetings in the US, where the endangered-language issue has of late
been something of a flavour of the month, there is growing evidence that not all
approaches to the preservation of languages will be particularly helpful. Some
linguists are boasting, for example, of more and more sophisticated means of
capturing languages: digital recording and storage, and internet and mobile phone
technologies. But these are encouraging the ‘quick dash’ style of recording trip: fly in,
switch on digital recorder, fly home, download to hard drive, and store gathered
material for future research. That’s not quite what some endangered-language
specialists have been seeking for more than 30 years. Most loud and untiring has
been Michael Krauss, of the University of Alaska. He has often complained that
linguists are playing with non-essentials while most of their raw data is disappearing.

Who is to blame? That prominent linguist Noam Chomsky, say Krauss and many
others. Or, more precisely, they blame those linguists who have been obsessed with
his approaches. Linguists who go out into communities to study, document and
describe languages, argue that theoretical linguists, who draw conclusions about
how languages work, have had so much influence that linguistics has largely ignored
the continuing disappearance of languages. Chomsky, from his post at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the great man of theoretical
linguistics for far longer than he has been known as a political commentator. His
landmark work of 1957 argues that all languages exhibit certain universal
grammatical features, encoded in the human mind. American linguists, in particular,
have focused largely on theoretical concerns ever since, even while doubts have
mounted about Chomsky’s universals.

Austin and Co. are in no doubt that because languages are unique, even if they do
tend to have common underlying features, creating dictionaries and grammars
requires prolonged and dedicated work. This requires that documentary linguists
observe not only languages’ structural subtleties, but also related social, historical
and political factors. Such work calls for persistent funding of field scientists who may
sometimes have to venture into harsh and even hazardous places. Once there, they
may face difficulties such as community suspicion. As Nick Evans says, a community
who speak an endangered language may have reasons to doubt or even oppose
efforts to preserve it. They may have seen support and funding for such work come
and go. They may have given up using the language with their children, believing
they will benefit from speaking a more widely understood one. Plenty of students
continue to be drawn to the intellectual thrill of linguistics field work. That’s all the
more reason to clear away barriers, contend Evans, Austin and others. The highest
barrier, they agree, is that the linguistics profession’s emphasis on theory gradually
wears down the enthusiasm of linguists who work in communities. Chomsky
disagrees. He has recently begun to speak in support of language preservation. But
his linguistic, as opposed to humanitarian, argument is, let’s say, unsentimental: the
loss of a language, he states, ‘is much more of a tragedy for linguists whose interests
are mostly theoretical, like me, than for linguists who focus on describing specific
languages, since it means the permanent loss of the most relevant data for general
theoretical work’. At the moment, few institutions award doctorates for such work,
and that’s the way it should be, he reasons. In linguistics, as in every other discipline,
he believes that good descriptive work requires thorough theoretical understanding
and should also contribute to building new theory. But that’s precisely what
documentation does, objects Evans. The process of immersion in a language, to
extract, analyse and sum it up, deserves a PhD because it is ‘the most demanding
intellectual task a linguist can engage in’.