Speaking in endangered tongues
On endangered languages, fading faiths, and the need for anthropologists to start writing advice books
A project is underway to revive the Dakota language of the Santee Sioux by teaching it to volunteer adult learners. It is a story we hear periodically about someone working earnestly to teach people a rare language before it goes extinct, one that usually begins as a bittersweet tale about someone's labor of love to honor a parent or a grandparent.
■ Languages matter as a vital form of cultural expression. There's no doubt that the survival of a language is vital to preserving cultural history -- not just a code to translate it, but real, live speakers who recognize things like idioms and nuances, and who are able to translate, knowing the difference between poetry and prose. Lots of languages are known only by speakers numbering in the dozens or hundreds, and they are vulnerable to withering away altogether.
■ Some of the information carried in languages is self-rewarding; that is, the speaker or reader gains something directly from the original that cannot be obtained from a translation. Prayers and hymns can be a great example. But, generally, those artifacts will either be preserved or lost on the basis of their relevance to the people within the culture, and little can be done to prod their protection from the outside. Many religions have gone extinct.
■ But if learning a language can be hard (especially if the speaker has no particular emotional compulsion to learn it), then something else may need to be done to preserve and disseminate some of the other cultural information that defines cultures whose populations may be in decline.
■ People generally learn best when they can recognize an element of self-interest to what they are learning. (You can't blame our genes for rewarding the learning processes that raise the odds of them jumping to the next generation.) So how do you make that cultural transmission process more friendly to individual self-interest?
■ The answer likely lies in recognizing that the real blueprint for a culture is found in how it reaches decisions: At the individual, family, and social levels. In essence, anthropologists and historians could do a great deal of good for extinct and endangered cultures by recording and publishing their decision-making processes.
■ While it may seem casual or even superficial, the world would likely see a lot more transmission about these cultures if thoughtful people would write books like "The ___ Approach to Leadership" or "The ___ Way of Making Choices" than by packing academic libraries with dry, unread journal articles and graduate theses. In return, perhaps some of the many "stateless nations" of the world might at least stand a chance of being remembered, even as much of the world converges on globally-shared cultures.
