NY Times: "Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages"

[xocet]

Here is an excerpt from an article in the NY Times. It is on rare and endangered languages.

"...
The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and experts there as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.
..."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?src=me&ref=general)

[Betty Karlson]

1. Thank you for linking this.

Languages are a treasury of intangible heritage. I have a soft spot for researchers like those of the Endangered Language Alliance. Their work is less glamorous (but equally important as) the efforts of Mona Lisa's conservators.

[Igel]

2. They know they should be careful.

They're advocates and won't be.

I wish I could remember the name of the language in the case that comes to mind. There was a rather significant work documenting the language. For a few years linguists mined it for data to support their theories and help refine them.

Somebody finally went to do field research in the language, and ran into a buzz saw: The data collected was greatly at odds with the previously published description and undermined more than one Big Name paper. The assumption was that the "somebody" had to be wrong.

In the end, it turned out that all of the informants for the first work were bilingual in their first language and English, with English often their dominant language. They'd lived in the US for years. They didn't much use their first language. And relying on them was bad field methodology. First, they had their own idiolect and had picked and chosen which traits of the language to make most common--often at odds with most speakers. Second, they often "fixed" very un-English-like grammar in similar ways. Third, since they were given instruction in their native language they often relied on the rules they'd been taught, not on how they actually spoke the language. The rules were intended to continue an old, conservative, literary norm that had actually never been spoken by any group as a native language. And crushingly, since linguists often ask about stuff at the boundaries of what's grammatical and allowed instead of just going on what's produced in spontaneous speak, they're often indecisive but don't want to admit that they don't know. So you get a lot of, "Well, you can say it that way" when usually you can't say it that way at all.

Polinskaia at UCSD, I believe, has documented language decay in Russian immigrants. Even adults convinced they've maintained their language perfectly well and speak Russian with other native speakers on a regular basis show systematic changes to their language after a year. It only gets worse with time, and after 5 or 10 years you simply can't trust their judgments on how "real" Russian's spoken unless they often returned home for extended periods. Now, their Russian is still native--it's just that their system, their norms, have shifted in some respects and unless you've investigated which traits have shifted you'd be flying blind. That is, you don't know what is really Russian and what is American Russian.

The same problems arise with nearly extinct languages. You wind up with a few older speakers whose recall of the language is faulty, who can't come up with a lot of vocabulary, who may never have known a lot of the vocabulary in daily use. Even their grammar and pronunciation often go a bit off.