According to the New York Times, over half of the languages spoken across the world today are likely to die out within the next one hundred years. Why is that? What do we lose when we lose a language? And what can we do to stop it?
To find out, we spoke with Becky Butler, an English Language Specialist in the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Butler is a theoretical linguistic who holds a PhD in linguistics from Cornell University. She studies phonetics (the physical properties and speech and sounds) and phonology (how those sounds come together to make words), and her focus is on languages spoken in Southeast Asia. In particular, she works on Bunong, a language spoken by the Bunong people of Vietnam and Cambodia.
We asked Butler about why languages are important and how linguists go about preserving them.
Why does the language you speak matter? Does it change the way you think?
That’s a really huge question in the field of linguistics. How does language structure or influence the way you think? That goes back to something that’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong version of the hypothesis says that language very much influences the way you think in a deterministic way—like, you can’t even over come it, in a sense.
Nowadays, theoretical linguists don’t really buy in to the strong version of that hypothesis, but there have been tons of studies about this, actually. I think everybody would agree that there is at least some kind of cultural or societal knowledge that becomes embedded in the language over time. If a language dies out, there’s an important part of a culture that dies out too, and it’s really not recoverable.
Can you give us an example?
One simple example is the way status is encoded in some languages. So in English, we like to think of ourselves as very equitable, so we only have one second person pronoun: you. So I can call my kid you and I could call a professor you. So somebody I really respect or somebody that’s definitely below me in status, I use the same pronoun.
But in other languages, you have to chose a different second person pronoun depending on who you’re talking to. A lot of people are familiar with the tu versus usted distinction in Spanish. In a language like Javanese, which is spoken in Indonesia, there’s almost a whole separate grammar for talking to somebody of a different status than you.
Why is it important to save these kinds of distinctions that are part of languages that are in danger of dying out?
I feel like this is the hardest question that people often ask. Why does it matter? Wouldn’t it be better if we all just spoke one language? Then we could communicate better. So it’s sort of asking a bigger question, like why does any diversity matter? What is the value to society or to humans when we have racial diversity or any kind of diversity? Linguistic diversity matters for the same reason.
And it’s tough. Language is tied up in to all those different kinds of identities, because language is the way that we express different types of identity. Languages are encoded with different ethnicities. But even within English, you have different dialects that are representative: African-American English or Appalachian English or Chicano English—all these different dialects are symbols of other types of peoples’ identities, which they’re very strongly tied to. They’re used to say, You’re part of my group, you’re my people, we’re together.
You’re working with the Bunong community in North Carolina to help preserve their language. Can you tell us about that?
A lot of the work I’m doing is language documentation work and analyzing the viability of this language. Should we be documenting it? Should we be trying to revitalize it? Because it’s unclear how many Bunong speakers there are—estimates range between thirty-five thousand and seventy-five thousand worldwide, so it’s not a huge number.
And the linguist should be doing whatever the community wants them to do, right? The linguist should not just decide, I think this is what we should do. So I’m also thinking about the ways, as a linguist, that I can support the community, because there is a big movement within the young people in the Bunong community to stand up for their rights. I’m thinking about how I can draw visibility to the community, or say, This is a different ethnic group. These people aren’t Vietnamese people. They’re not Khmer people. They’re Bunong people, and they have a different history and different mythology and different desires.
So most of my work as a linguist is documentation work, because a lot of the elders in the community are not going to be alive forever. Those histories are going to be lost, and there are a lot of poetic ways and ways of story telling and things like that, that young people, for lots of different reasons, aren’t maintaining. So documenting those things is really important just for the cultural perspective.
What exactly do you document?
Some of it is just capturing stories—just recording those sorts of histories, writing them down, maintaining them.
And then as a theoretical linguist, from a scientific perspective, I also want to make very targeted recordings. So there’s a very specific phenomenon in Bunong, which is a little complicated to explain. But the way it’s expressed is something that we haven’t seen, as far as I know, in any other language, ever. So, it involves just making very tedious recordings of very specific words and seeing how those words are pronounced.
To the casual observer, it seems like, Wow, this is kind of pointless—like, why are you recording these random words? But it actually says something about the way that language can be organized chronologically that we didn’t know before. So, that’s actually my main interest in it as a linguist.
If a language is dying out, how do you revitalize it?
In this sense, linguists are pretty useless. But that’s a good thing.
In terms of maintenance and revitalization, that’s really contingent on the community of speakers. There’s very little that a single linguist can do. Linguists are really good at documenting things and bringing attention to things, but for a language to thrive, it really takes a community of speakers that want that to happen and have the means to make that happen. And, honestly, it’s generally contingent on the young people. If the young people stop speaking it, it’s going to stop being spoken.
One of the most effective models is a thing called a language nest. It’s essentially like a daycare, in which you put the little-bitty kids with a bunch of old people, because little kids are natural language learners and old people love little kids.
They’ve done that with Hawaiian. There’s been a big movement to revitalize Hawaiian that’s been really effective. There’s a Cherokee school in Eastern North Carolina, too. So starting language instruction when kids are young and making it something that kids use, not just in a formal language classroom, but as part of their daily life—that’s how you make it viable. You have to figure out how to make it cool. And also economically viable, because a huge reason that languages die out is because youth realize, If I’m 20 years old and I have a young family, there’s no way for me to support them unless I’m speaking a higher prestige language [like English].
What’s the state of Bunong in the United States?
It’s hard to say for sure. I would say it’s kind of dying out. I’m not really optimistic about it.
I think there’s a really awesome group of young people who are trying very hard to maintain their language and culture and they’re doing an awesome job, but there’s a lot of pressure and economic incentive for the kids to leave Bunong behind and just be monolingual in English. And that’s true of languages in a lot of refugee communities. They say it usually takes three generations: the first generation is fluent in whatever language, the next generation can understand it but can’t speak it, and then by the third generation it’s gone. So it happens really fast.
For many people, it looks like that’s the way Bunong is headed. I hope not. I hope that there are enough people that are passionate enough about it that they can maintain it and speak it to their kids and that the kids actually speak it. But it’s one of those things that only time will tell. There are still old people that use it as their primary language. I think pretty much all the youth understand it, but not all of them speak it. But in twenty years? I don’t know.
You can learn more about Bunong in this VOA article, which also includes a clip of a Bunong speaker discussing the village he grew up in. You can also visit the Bunong Indigenous Community Association website, which includes a link to donate to the community. And for more about endangered languages, visit the Endangered Languages Project, which includes a ton of interesting examples.