Language Life Story
paired with “Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
Hashtags
#research, #annotation, #writing project, #context, #120 minutes
Inviting students to examine the more general topic of language reclamation brought up through a specific case study in the podcast, this activity could be used as either an in-class research activity or as a research writing prompt.
Introduction
ET: Unlike other pieces in this reader, “Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak” is perhaps more interesting for the topic it discusses than the language of the podcast itself. It provides a specific example of one indigenous language, the historical context for how it became endangered, and the contemporary efforts to reclaim that language.
In the course of the episode, Keiki Kawaiʻaeʻa, Director of the College of Hawaiian Language, says, “If we don’t really pay attention, we will have nothing in our language to pass to our children, and with that is a tumbling domino effect of our songs, our way, our practices, our arts, and our culture because a language holds all of that intact.” (9:58-10:16). This quote alone spurred many lines of thought for us as teachers of writing. How much more does your language carry than you think at face value? What loss would you feel most heavily if no one else spoke your language?
Language loss happens around the world for many reasons even though colonialism, globalization, and migration are often sizable factors. Language reclamation projects around the world exist to save or preserve languages that are losing speakers with each generation and thus a community or culture around that language. A language has a life not just in that it evolves with its speakers as they add and change the meaning of words through usage but also in how power dynamics are exacted over time in specific places to privilege or disprivilege languages and thus communities. Knowing the stories of the languages of our own geographic location or cultural heritage and reflecting on our connection or estrangement from that process would be its own compelling research process.
Guide
Read to Connect: Language Preservation and Reclamation
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak” gives an example of one endangered language that a community is working to reclaim, but there are thousands of such languages with The Guardian saying another language dies every 40 days, with global warming aggravating the language extinction problem. The resurrection of Hawaiian is a hesitant success story, but other languages have different stories.
Read the selections below and annotate them with connections to your own thoughts on language loss and to ideas in “Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak.” Include questions in your annotations too that would require more thought and research to answer.
from “Vanishing Voice” by Russ Rymer
National Geographic, July 2012
When I ask university students in Kyzyl what Tuvan words are untranslatable into English or Russian, they suggest khöömei, because the singing is so connected with the Tuvan environment that only a native can understand it, and also khoj özeeri, the Tuvan method of killing a sheep. If slaughtering livestock can be seen as part of humans’ closeness to animals, khoj özeeri represents an unusually intimate version. Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead. In the language of the Tuvan people, khoj özeeri means not only slaughter but also kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat and making sausage with the saved blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole thing can be accomplished in two hours (as the Mongushes did this morning) in one’s good clothes without spilling a drop of blood. Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character. As one of the students explained, “If a Tuvan killed an animal the way they do in other places” — by means of a gun or knife –“they’d be arrested for brutality.”
Tuvan is one of the many small languages of the world. The Earth’s population of eight billion people speak roughly 7,000 languages, a statistic that would seem to offer each living language a healthy one million speakers if things were equitable. In language, as in life, things aren’t. Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers. Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear. More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered– teetering on the edge of oblivion.
* * *
The cataloging of vocabulary and pronunciation and syntax that field linguists do in remote outposts helps keep a language alive. But saving a language is not something linguists can accomplish because salvation must come from within. The answer may lie in something Harrison and Anderson witnessed in Palizi one day, when a villager in his early 20s came with a friend to perform a song for them. Palizi is far removed from pervasive U.S. culture, so it was something of a surprise to the two linguists when the teenagers launched into a full-bore, L.A.-style rap song complete with gang hand gestures and head bobbing and attitude, a pitch-perfect rendition of an American street art, with one refinement: They were rapping in Aka.
Were the linguists dismayed? I asked. To the contrary, Harrison said. “These kids were fluent in Hindi and English, but they chose to rap in a language they share with only a couple thousand people.” Linguistic co-optation and absorption can work both ways, with the small language sometimes acting as the imperialist. “The one thing that’s necessary for the revival of a language,” Father D’Souza told me one day, “is pride.”
Against the erosion of language stands an ineffable quality that can’t be instilled from without: someone’s insistence on rapping in Aka, on singing in Tuvan, on writing in the recently orthographized Cmiique Iitom.
Research and Write: Tracing the Life Story of a Language
Choose one of the research and writing prompts below
- Go to NEXT’s “Disappearing Languages,” a visualization of UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages data and scroll down to the interactive map to locate an endangered language in an area of interest to you. You might also look at “The Endangered Languages of New York City” and/or “Marie’s Dictionary.” Spend 30 minutes researching that language and its community, taking note of interesting features of the language, reasons for its decline, and any reclamation projects that exist. Write a biography of that language: its ancestors, its development, its decline, and, if applicable, its resurrection.
- Talk to people from at least two different generations in your family about the languages they spoke or heard spoken in their family and community. Focus on the motives, feelings, gains, and losses that family members had about their language history. Write a two-page essay that enfolds your thoughts on your family’s heritage languages and blends in the thoughts and voices of your family members in that essay.
activity that includes information-gathering steps to pursue interests and inquiries related to a topic of discussion
See:
Building an Opinion (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
Music Trails (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
activity that asks students to take notes or annotate a text
See:
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
activity that presents guide and prompts for extended writing assignments, variable lengths and adaptable to in-class or outside work
See:
Building an Opinion (exploration)
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Self Reflection, Collective Change (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Transculturation, Language and South-South Migration (exploration)
Work Culture Reexamined (exploration)
analysis that connects to relevant background and bigger issues
Set:
Music Trails (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Work Culture Reexamined (exploration)
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
activity designed to take about two hours to complete
See:
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Building an Opinion (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
