More than words: what is lost when a language dies
Language diversity image: Jan-Joseph Stok / DoBeS Yurakare
When languages die, more is lost than words alone: knowledge, traditions and community also come under pressure. In his inaugural lecture, Professor by Special Appointment Rik van Gijn explains why linguistic diversity matters and what language tells us about the past.
Van Gijn spent years in the Bolivian interior searching for a ritual mourning language. The grandparents of the people he spoke to had still used this language, but they no longer did. Then, one day, a Yurakaré man suddenly said to him: ‘Sit down and get your recording equipment ready.’
‘For five minutes I listened spellbound to what was believed to be a lost ritual language.
I didn’t understand a word of it because it was so different from the everyday language’, Van Gijn recalls of a memorable moment during his fieldwork. ‘I’d gained their trust, and it was an incredibly emotional moment.’
‘People don’t give up their language for the fun of it’
The disappearing language of the Yurakaré
For over 20 years, Van Gijn has studied the disappearing language of the Yurakaré, an indigenous group of a few thousand people living in small communities across an area the size of Belgium. They live along the Isiboro and Sécure rivers and in Chapare Province in central Bolivia, and make their living from agriculture, fishing, hunting and seasonal work. In many of these small communities, Spanish has become the common language, placing Yurakaré under increasing pressure. And that has consequences.
Language loss is closely linked to the breakdown of communities, says Van Gijn. ‘People don’t give up their language for the fun of it’, he says. People hope that another language will give them a better life or shield them from racism. But relinquishing a language comes at the expense of cultural heritage and social cohesion, to the point where a grandfather can no longer speak with his grandchild.
Knowledge disappears with language
As a language disappears, so does knowledge, for example about traditional medicine. Among the Tsimane, neighbours of the Yurakaré, treatment of a disease was less effective in a village where traditional knowledge of medicinal plants had been lost than in a village where it had been maintained.
Languages, says Van Gijn, contain small, efficient units of information about the environment in which they originated, which children naturally absorb as they learn the language. When people switch to Spanish, these distinctions disappear. The same applies to ritual language and the knowledge needed to weave traditional Yurakaré tunics.
Your own language is a human right
Van Gijn does not want to dictate which language people should speak. ‘If I were Yurakaré, I would also learn Spanish. The question is: should you give up your own language or can you continue to use it alongside Spanish?’
More countries are recognising that the right to your own language, and to education in that language, is a human right. According to Van Gijn, it helps if children are taught all their subjects in Yurakaré at primary school. ‘It’s a valuable language, and that in turn boosts cultural self-confidence.’
He does not see it as a problem that traditions change. The problem is that ‘there’s a hard break’, and that people, often out of necessity, distance themselves from those traditions.
Traces of the past
Language also tells us about the past. Anyone who migrates or comes into contact with other groups leaves traces in the language, such as loanwords and grammatical changes. Van Gijn compares that with what genetics and archaeology reveal.
A workshop on the history of Bolivia, involving anthropologists, archaeologists and geneticists, highlighted the deep history of both cultural diversity and contact in the region. In languages, this is reflected in the many small language families that share grammatical features.
Sometimes disciplines contradict one another. Genetics and archaeology place the first human crossing from Siberia to Alaska and the Americas at around 20,000 years ago, while some linguists argue that so many language families could not have emerged in such a relatively short time. ‘Then you have a mismatch, and that makes it all the more interesting because you have to resolve that paradox.’ To unravel that early human history, he believes further collaboration between disciplines is needed.
Influence on research
Van Gijn also wants to break down the barrier that still exists between researchers and the linguistic communities they study. ‘We come from a tradition where the professor goes into the field, collects data, returns home and then publishes in academic journals. That is changing.’ Speaker communities are gradually gaining more influence over research agendas. ‘More research based on co-creation and collaboration, so that it also benefits them, seems like a positive development to me.’
Rik van Gijn gave his inaugural lecture, ‘Linguistic Diversity Forever!’ in the Academy Building on Friday 23 October at 16.00.