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Finally kids get the blame for things they do to their parents—and languages
Ideas sprout like mushrooms after the rain; one of these good ideas, that has finally generated quite a few mushrooms in the last several years, is the awareness that at least 50% (some say 90%) of the world's 7,000 or so languages are about to die in the course of our century and the realization that we should do something to save them. Check out this recent article in the rainmaker New York Times and this much more entertaining Colbert report to get a perspective on what's going on. Centuries are getting shorter as we speak (we keep talking about it in this office—weeks just fly by and it's the Monday-morning editorial meeting again), so linguists have been quite busy in the last fifteen or so years getting the word out about this imminent loss to our humanity. They are also grouping together to "save" as many of those dying languages as they can, which mostly means painstaking documentation, digital archiving and description, and much more rarely, actual revitalization, which of course takes more than a digital recorder and a notebook. But why and how do languages die? Of course, when we talk about languages, we are really talking about their speakers, about what they do or what happens to them. Since most endangered linguistic communities are small in number, as well as not literate in their native languages, it is quite possible for some terrible natural disaster, such as the tsunami to simply wipe out whole communities and take their languages with it. More often, though, a language dies a much slower death: gradually, over generations, its speakers abandon its use for another local language spoken by the majority, in order to get more respect, rights, access to education, and an overall better chance for everyday survival. (Of course, this must ring the bell; a similar shift to English happens over and over, very fast--in the span of just a few generations--in this country. Luckily, most of the languages left behind by immigrant children and teenagers, often to the disappointment of their parents, are not endangered and have hundreds of thousands of speakers in other places. Others are, like the Istro-Romanian language I've been working on, which is spoken by a few hundred aging speakers in this country, more than the number which speaks the language in Croatia.) While, as a parent, I enthusiastically agree with David Harrison, interviewed by Stephen Colbert, that kids and teenagers should get the principal blame for such language abandonment (or just anything at all), I must admit here that parents, again, sadly, have a reason to feel guilty. As Don Kulick showed in his fascinating ethnography, bilingual parents rarely realize that the shift which eventually makes a language endangered really starts with the language choices they themselves make when speaking to their children. (ZVIEZDANA)
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