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Every two weeks, one of the 7,000 languages in the world disappears forever. By the end of this century, it’s projected that at least half of them will be gone.
This trend was the focus of a recent showing of the movie “The Linguists” on Tuesday in the Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium in Barrows Hall, sponsored by the University of Maine’s Department of Modern Languages and Classics. The movie was followed by a panel discussion centering on the topic of obscure and dying languages in Maine.
The movie focuses on the trials and trepidations of two men, Gregory Anderson and David Harrison, linguists who traveled to various remote areas across the world to document languages on the verge of disappearance.
The pair traveled to Siberia, India and Bolivia to document and film what may be the last speakers of remote languages that have been nearly wiped out by imperialistic practices in those countries.
The main motivation for studying these languages is not just to be able to speak it but also understand the surrounding cultures and ways of thinking.
“A linguist is a scientist who studies languages,” Anderson said in the film. “Not just to learn the languages, but to figure out the impossible way the human mind can make sense of the world around it.”
Chulym, one of the endangered languages in the movie, is spoken by a remote tribe in Siberia. Anderson and Harrison found only nine speakers of the language at the time of filming — by 2008, four of them were dead.
They also studied Callawaya, which is spoken in Bolivia and was believed to have been extinct by scholars in their country. Callawaya is spoken by only a few individuals who are typically medicine men in remote communities.
After the film, a panel of linguists working with languages in New England met to discuss both the film and their own efforts.
The panel included Constanza Ocampo-Raeder, a professor of anthropology at UMaine; Jane Smith, chair of the Modern Languages and Classics department; Cynthia Fox, a professor at the University at Albany; Pauleena Macdougall of the Maine Folklife Center; and Julia Schulz representing the Language Keepers, an organization dedicated to the preservation and revival of dying tongues.
Fox and Smith are studying Franco-Americans and how the French language has evolved in the United States. Much of their research has focused on nuances of the language found in different regions.
“What are the limits of what a language can be and still be the same language?” Fox asked.
Schulz is embarking on a similar project, aiming at preserving the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet dialects of the Algonquian language Native Americans have spoken in Maine for hundreds of years. The program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, has taken great steps to digitize and preserve the language.
UMaine recently published a Passamaquoddy-Maliseet-to-English dictionary that includes more than 18,000 words in the language. In addition, a website has been created that features an archive of recorded conversations between native speakers.
“They can hear people who sound like their parents or grandparents,” Schulz said.
The efforts to help people preserve their language are not always as simple as asking them to talk. Often people have grown up feeling ashamed of their native language due to social pressures and have chosen not to speak it.
“One thing you have to be sensitive to is not to make people feel bad, like it is their fault that the language is dying,” Fox said.
“It has to come from the community,” Smith said.
The movie featured a pair of researchers going into homes and setting meetings where people would be asked to speak, a process the panel disagreed with. They feel it is the property of the people themselves and not researchers, and that they should be the ones to preserve their culture.
The overall goal of the lecture “primarily to raise the awareness that languages are dying out at a fairly quick pace,” Smith said. “And one doesn’t need to go to great distances to find one.”
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