Here today, gone tomorrow?

A report in The Pioneer suggests that the discovery of a new language in Arunachel Pradesh might not be such a brilliant thing after all. The problem is that the new language, called Koro, is spoken by less than a thousand people and is in danger of imminent extinction. The language was discovered by the National Geographic Enduring Voices project, which strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots and documenting the languages and cultures within them.

It's always exciting to discover a new language (see previous post - Lost language found), especially one that is still extant but suitably obscure, although it is important to make a record of it before it disappears; especially so for those that are purely spoken languages. Koro is a Tibeto-Burman language (related to Tibetan and Burmese), and was discovered while researchers were studying two other languages from this little-known region: Aka and Miji.

What is particularly unusual about the Koro speakers is that they live as a sub-group of the Aka tribe, but their languages have almost nothing in common. It is very rare for separate languages to co-exist among integrated groups where there is no acknowledged ethnic difference. Because of an absence of written records it is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to determine how and when the Koro speakers became attached to the Aka speakers, and what therefore is the prognosis for their language.

Lost language found

A report in American Anthologist (behind a paywall) documents the discovery of a letter in the ruins of a church near Trujillo in northern Peru. The significance of the letter is that on the reverse it has a list of numbers in Spanish, and alongside them a translation into an unknown language. The language appears to be similar to Quechua, an old language that is still spoken in the Andes, and scholars have speculated that it could be either Quingnam or Pescadora. Both are now extinct languages, possibly even the same language, and the latter was spoken by fisherman (hence the name, presumably) on the northern coast of Peru. The letter is thought to be about 400 years old

This is just one of many languages spoken in the region before the Spanish (and French and Dutch and English and Portuguese) colonised the area, leading to the eradication of much local culture (and people, come to that). Most of these languages were never written, and therefore have been lost to us forever, unless there are more hidden pieces of paper lying around in abandoned buildings. Our breath remains unheld.

Not Norn Iron, but Northern Scotland

At the weekend the BBC broadcast a programme about the dialect used in the Shetland Islands, derived from the extinct language Norn. Many words still used on the islands are Norn words, which speakers mix effortlessly with English. Although the dialect appears to be thriving, a group called Shetland ForWirds has been formed with the aim of keeping the dialect extant.

Sorry for the lack of updates, and for such a short post this time. Normal service will, with a bit of luck, be resumed once the kids return to school next week.

Hang on for Hangeul

There is an interesting article in the Korean Times about the origins of Hangeul, the script in which Korean is written. Korean evolved from Classical Chinese, and in the early centuries it was written using Chinese characters. But, because written Chinese was so difficult to learn, Hangeul was invented during the 15th Century. However, like all innovations, it took a while to catch on and initially it wasn't used for serious texts. In fact, it wasn't until the final decade of the 19th Century that the use of Hangeul became widespread in Korea.

Major languages under threat?

Two recent news items have been published about locals fearing for the futures of their language as a result of the rapid spread of stronger languages. Indonesians are worried that the spread of English is having a negative affect on Bahasa Indonesia, according to The New York Times. Part of the problem is that new wealth is leading to an increase in middle-class families who send their children to private schools where lessons are taught in English, as opposed to the state schools where Indonesian is the main language and the quality of English teaching is poor. The reason for this is that the ability to speak English is something of a status symbol. Indonesia is a large country where many local languages and dialects are spoken, and the official language of Bahasa Indonesia is considered essential to maintain some sort of unity. The undermining of the official language is of great concern, therefore, to the government.

Meanwhile, the Montreal Gazette informs us that in Guangzhou, Cantonese is facing a threat from Mandarin. This comes after local officials proposed that Mandarin, called Putonghua locally, become more widespread because it is the country's main language and speakers of it often find Cantonese incomprehensible. Cantonese is unlikely to die out anytime soon, there being 70 million speakers around the world, and there are about seven millions, or 50 per cent of the population, who speak it in Guangzhou. However, this pales into insignificance when you consider that Putonghua is spoken by an estimated 900 million people. Some Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou claim that there is a deliberate attempt to suppress their language in favour of Putonghua, although this is naturally denied by government officials.

Undecipherable language of Easter Island

Helium is a rather excellent web site where budding (and established) writers can self-publish articles on a variety of different subjects. Today the site has published an interesting article about Rongorongo, a glyph language believed to belong to the Rapa Nui people and that has remained largely undeciphered.

Rongorongo is interesting because it is a language that appears to have no known origins, and is apparently unrelated to any other known language. It has been speculated that the language and script was invented on the island, based on the influence of the early Spanish explorers who landed on Easter Island in the 1770s (some 50 years after the Dutch became the first Europeans to discover it). This is supported by the evidence of the earliest known examples of Rongorongo, which are post-1680.

Today the islanders speak mostly Spanish and write in the Latin script, and Rongorongo is no longer spoken or written. The small amounts of the language that have been deciphered relate largely to calendars and rituals, while the strange semantics and the lack of knowledge as to what the glyphs represent have hindered researchers. In the 1950s Thomas Barthel made an inventory of the script, which consists of 120 main symbols and between 1200 and 2000 compound glyphs.

Although Rongorongo isn't officially designated as a language, as researchers manage to decipher more of the script it is getting closer to being recognised as such.

Dictionary reprinted 149 years later

Kannada is the language of Bangalore in India. In 1861 the Reverend Etienne Louis Charbonnaux compiled a dictionary for translating Latin into Kannada, called Dictionarium Latino-Canarense, building on an earlier Kannada-Latin dictionary (Dictionarium Canarense-Latinum) produced six years earlier by Jean-Marie Auguste Bouteloup. Now, 149 years after the Reverend Charbonnaux's dictionary was first produced (it currently resides in St. Mary's Basilica in Bangalore), it has been reprinted by Akhila Karnataka Catholic Christara Kannada Sangha, and will be released in August.

The report, in The Hindu (link updated, behind a paywall), says that the compilers of the dictionaries didn't have their names printed, but that the editorial board of the reprint managed to deduce who they were from church records. The dictionaries were produced at a time before local languages replaced Latin as the language of liturgy, and they are important for students of theology, language and history. Unfortunately, the reprints are not second editions, but rather reproductions of the originals, with their hard-to-read fonts and archaic language. It is possible that the lexicons, recently discovered in the archives of St. Mary's Basilica, the oldest church in Bangalore, may be updated in the future.

Going native

There is some good news concerning minority languages, as reported in Indian Country Today, which publishes articles relevant to the Indigenous people of the Americas. A group of Indian educators claim that native languages are alive and well, but they need Federal support in order to help them to flourish.

The international charity Cultural Survival recently reported that "unless dramatic action is taken now, more than 70 Native American languages will become extinct within the next 10 years". The group called for a White House initiative to revitalise native languages, with many Congress members finding their arguments compelling. However, whatever acts Congress may pass, the root of the problem remains finding sufficient funding for them to be implemented, with as much as $5 million possibly required to help schools provide the necessary resources. Small beer when compared to the money spent on far less important government initiatives.

Igbo to go?

The Nigerian newspaper Next reveals today that a UNESCO report has claimed that the Igbo language could die out in the next 50 years. Chukwuemeka Wogu, the Minister of Labour and Productivity, blamed Igbo parents for not talking to their children in their native tongue. A group called 'Ndi Igbo' is attempting to reverse the decline, and Mr Wogu has called upon speakers of other languages in Nigeria to emulate them in an attempt to prevent other native tongues from going extinct. If they fail, President Goodluck Jonathan may have to consider a name change.

New dictionary helps immigrants in Blackbird Leys

My very own local paper, the Oxford Mail, reports today on the efforts of Jim Hewitt, a community worker who is helping immigrants from East Timor to settle in Blackbird Leys, a suburb of Oxford. To help some of the newcomers he is compiling his own Fataluku-English dictionary because a proportion of the East Timorese have been struggling. Fataluku is very different from Tetun, East Timor's main language, and as a result the Fataluku speakers feel additionally marginalised from the local community.

Mr Hewitt's efforts have been published on the internet and is being used by the Fataluku Language Project, in conjunction with Leiden University Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands. They are trying to create a written version for the language, which currently only exists in spoken form.

Azeris in Iran - no language problem really

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is an organisation dedicated to reporting the news in 21 countries where a free press is banned by the government or has yet to be fully established. They started 60 years ago by dropping balloons into Communist Eastern Europe, and now broadcast in 28 languages in Europe and Asia.

On their website today is a commentary from Iran, where millions of ethnic Azeris are unable to receive an education in their native tongue. Surprisingly, the journalist who compiled the report says that he found little evidence that the Azeri community in Iran were particularly perturbed by this, many stating that it would weaken their acquisition of the Persian language. Because Iranian censuses don't include information about foreign languages, it is difficult to determine the number of Azeri speakers in the country, although there are four Azeri provinces whose population totals about 10 million. These people mainly speak Azeri Turkish, heavily influenced by the local Persian tongue, as you'd expect, especially written communications.

Before 1925 there was no official language in Iran, with Persian the language of government and literature, Arabic the language of religion, and Azeri Turkish spoken in the court of the Shah and among Iranian Azeris. In 1925 Reza Shah Pahlavi imposed Persian as the country's official language, banning all others from official use and from education. In 1979 there was the Islamic Revolution, when the new government introduced an article into the constitution confirming that the "official and educational language is Persian, but the languages of other ethnic groups may also be used". However, this article has never been put into practice.

The reasons why the Iranian Azeris are not particularly exercised by this apparent injustice are partly because they have largely adapted to the situation, and partly because, as an ethnic group, they do not feel particularly discriminated against, sharing their Shi'ite religion with the Persian majority. However, because they do not speak Persian as a native language, they do have difficulties in both education and social standing. This may change if liberalisation in Iran continues to increase.

Who do Urdu?

Which language is the most influential in the world? The obvious answer would be English, although Chinese, Arabic, French, and Spanish could also lay claim to that honour. However, in an article in Pakistani paper The International News, Dr Farman Fatehpuri believes that the title should belong to Urdu, due to its widespread presence in many countries around the world. Dr Fatehpuri was speaking at the Arts auditorium of the University of Karachi in an event organised by the Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB), which has just completed the 22nd volume of the Urdu dictionary.

The Chairman of the Pakistani Urdu Authority (Muqtadra), Iftikhar Arif, was slightly more modest about Urdu's place in the world, claiming that the language had a prominent role in Pakistan, but needed to take words from other regional languages in order to increase its range of expression. Talking about the origin of Urdu, Prof Malahat Kaleem Sherwani claimed that the language was formed in the camps and spoken by the commoners before the elite of society adopted it.

Patois kyaan vank English, no true?

Jamaican patois is a rich and vibrant language, but it remains non-standard, partly because it is still in a stage of rapid development, and partly because standard English remains the nation's lingua franca. A report in The Gleaner today looks at the problems faced by patois in the face of Jamaica's need to attract visitors, the vast majority of whom speak English and not patois, and the impact this has on the development of the language.

One of the problems that the article identifies is that pervasive illiteracy in Jamaica means that many locals only speak patois, which in turn leads to social problems, all exacerbated by a lack of education. The conclusion of the article is that Jamaicans need to learn standard English if the country is to succeed on the global stage, and this won't happen until the issue of illiteracy on the island is addressed.

Jamaican language resources on the internet include How to Learn Jamaican Patois Language, Rasta/Patois Jamaica Dictionary, and Talk Jamaican.

India's languages to be protected

A sub-committee of India's Human Resources Development ministry has been set up to work on protecting India's non-scheduled languages, according to yesterday's Times of India. Non-scheduled languages are those mainly tribal and border languages that are not included officially in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India; in other words they are not one of the 22 official languages recognised by the Indian government.

In 2007 the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) formulated the Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana (BBVY) with the objective of protecting India's minority languages, and this project will soon be implemented. The project was initiated due to the large numbers of endangered languages on the sub-continent.

Manx alive

A report today on the BBC suggests that Manx Gaelic is not just extant, but is growing in importance. Local expert Dr Brian Stowell claims that Manx gives the islanders a sense of identity, although curiously some older speakers of the language are resentful of strangers coming over and learning to speak it.

An indication of Manx's growing importance is the appearance of more signs in the language. Dr Stowell recently received the Tynwald Honour for his work in helping to propagate the Manx language.

Manx was declared extinct by UNESCO in February last year, but following protests from islanders who still spoke the language the global cultural body revised their classification. Although Manx was thought to have disappeared in the 19th Century, it has undergone a revival and there are now estimated to be about 600 active speakers.

When is a war not a war? When it's much ado about nothing

The Canadian newspaper the National Post reported yesterday about a proposed bye-law in the city of Moncton, which is officially bilingual, to compel businesses to make their signage in both English and French. Apparently this has so outraged anglophone residents that they are campaigning against the proposal and threatening court appeals and to move out of the city should the bye-law be passed. There is an English-speaking group called "Canadians Against Forced Bilingualism" who are opposed to le Front commun pour l’affichage bilingue au Nouveau-Brunswick, which successfully proposed a similar bye-law in neighbouring Dieppe, and the whole thing is threatening to escalate into "all-out war" between Anglophones and Francophones.

It is difficult to establish why the English-speaking population, a majority in Moncton but a minority in Dieppe, are so opposed to bilingual signs. They argue that the English speakers are being forced out of New Brunswick and that the requirement to have bilingual signs is a threat to free expression. It is difficult, admittedly at a distance, to understand why an apparently reasonable rule in what is, after all, an officially bilingual province, should provoke such ire. Indeed, language such as "all-out war", "friction", and "emotionally charged", while rather hyperbolic, does make it seem like there are some irrational people around and that opponents are being somewhat over-sensitive and a bit precious.

I think that possibly the most telling argument in favour of the proposal comes right at the end of the article. Michel Carrier, the province’s Commissioner of Official Languages, alleges that he has "never come across an anglophone that can no longer speak his language", but he has "met a number of francophones who have lost theirs".

More languages under threat?

The country of Taiwan is officially known as the Republic of China (ROC) and it has a population of 22.56 million (in August 2003), all bar 433,524 indigenous peoples (in 2002) Han Chinese. The majority language is Mandarin, imposed after the Chinese government in exile arrived in Taipei in 1949, and this is the island's official language, although increasingly Taiwanese is being spoken.

However, minority languages such as Hakka and indigenous languages have been suppressed and are being spoken by fewer people, and many who do speak them are bilingual. A report on the BBC outlines the problem, with half of the island's 14 indigenous languages on UNESCO's endangered list as a result of a continual onslaught from outside influences.

The Taiwanese government is beginning to take action to address the problem, with tribal languages taught in schools if enough members of the tribe are present, and other facilities available to teach the languages. However, there is a serious danger that the erosion has already reached tipping point and cannot be undone, and it's possible that education alone may not be enough to save these disappearing languages. As always, the solution lies with the younger generation and how necessary it will be for them to speak in their tribal tongues.

Oldest writing from Jerusalem

The oldest written document to be found in Jerusalem has been discovered by researchers from the Hebrew University. The tiny clay fragment dates from the 14th Century BCE and contains cuneiform script in the Akkadian language, which was the lingua franca of that era.


Prof. Wayne Horowitz, a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, claims to have deciphered symbols meaning "you", "you were", "later", "to do", and "them", although the words are less important than the style of the writing, which apparently is of a very high level, meaning that it was written by a highly skilled scribe, almost certainly working for the royal household. This proves that Jerusalem was at that time an important settlement.

The previous oldest writing found in the city dates from the reign of King Hezekiah, some 600 years more recent than this latest find, which predates King David's reign by 400 years. To put the date into further context, it is contemporary with the reign of Akhenaten in Egypt.

Salaam/Shalom

A brief article in the Times of India reports on a study conducted in Israel among bilingual Arabs. The study, published in Psychological Science concluded that when the subjects were in an Arab-speaking environment their responses towards Arabs and Jews were different to when they were in a Hebrew-speaking environment.

It's possible that it was the environment and people who they were with that affected their responses, rather than the language they were speaking, but it is clear that the language one speaks does have an affect on how one thinks. This is further explored in Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass. This is probably as well-written a book as you are likely to find on the subject, and comes highly recommended, like his previous book, The Unfolding of Language.

Is a dictionary all it takes?

Today's ABC News reports that Desert Channels Queensland (DCQ) of Australia is to produce 14 pictorial dictionaries to help preserve Aboriginal languages in part of the State. The report quotes a DCQ spokesperson saying that the dictionaries will help to revive the languages, which are spoken by only a small number of people, and that they should help to ensure that the languages won't die out.

This seems to me highly questionable. A dictionary will certainly help people to understand the language and will assist in translation, but I can't help but feel that it takes more than that to prevent the extinction of a little-spoken language, never mind encourage more people to speak it. A language dies because it no longer needs to be spoken, either because another more-widely spoken language supplants it, or because the speakers of the language are too small a group for it to survive naturally. A dictionary, however well produced and widely distributed, is unlikely to prevent either of these occurrences.

However, we wish DCQ luck in their endeavour, but we would point them in the direction of our post from December 2005 about attempts to revive the Irish language, which outlines the criteria for a language to be successful and sustainable.

Good news for Creole

Many of the creole languages are facing extinction, but this report in the New York Times reveals that on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba a Portuguese and Spanish-influenced Creole called Papiamentu is thriving.

The language was granted official status in 2007, and there are newspapers, books, and CDs published in Papiamentu, as well as radio broadcasts and television programmes. Roughly 250,000 people speak Papiamentu, which isn't a huge amount but is enough to ensure that the likelihood of the language dying out anytime soon is remote.

The origins of Papiamentu are disputed, as are the reasons for its vibrancy, but it is heartening to read of a language that appears to be gaining in strength rather than declining in usage in the face of stronger tongues.

Rhyming slang in a right two and eight

An average of one post every two years is probably not too brilliant, so here at spaceLetter we'll try to do better in future.

However, we felt that we couldn't let this report from the East London Advertiser pass without comment. The paper comments that "language experts", whoever they are, allege that cockney rhyming slang is dying out, to be replaced by a multilingual dialect popular among da yoot. So, in order to preserve the heritage of the pearly kings and queens, researchers from Lancaster University are keen to record poetry and dialect from in and around Walford. Better than getting into an how's yer father about it all, I guess.