Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

According to the most recent edition of Ethnologue, 417 of the world’s
languages are threatened with extinction. Aggressive government
policies, dwindling numbers of native speakers, and economic
disadvantages all wield enormous pressure on minorities to abandon their
own endangered languages in favour of the more dominant ones.

Mark Abley, an acclaimed journalist with the Montreal Gazette, has
travelled the globe to explore the dilemmas faced by such people. He
writes of Patrick, an Australian Aborigine who watches television in
English, speaks to his wife in Murrinh-Patha, and longs for meaningful
conversation in Mati Ke. Until he meets another native speaker, that
wish will never be fulfilled. Then there’s Bernard. In his school
days, the teacher rapped Bernard’s knuckles every time he spoke
Occitan instead of French. Bernard now teaches Occitan to adult
beginners, encouraging cultural pride.

Through the stories of Patrick, Bernard, and countless others, Abley
effectively personalizes the destruction of minority languages. When
people abandon their languages, they become increasingly isolated from
their roots, even contemptuous of their origins. At the same time, they
are not considered part of mainstream society. In short, when they lose
their language, they lose themselves.

For this very reason, some speakers of endangered languages are doing
everything in their power to fight extinction. On the Kahnawake Reserve
in Quebec, a language law ensures that Mohawk remains the primary
language of business and government. The Welsh have developed their own
unilingual television channel, and its programs are quite popular all
over the country. On the Faeroe Islands, residents have found authentic
ways to express modern concepts like “computer”; as a result, they
have prevented English and Danish from slipping into their language.
Therefore, linguistic diversity can be maintained: it just takes effort.

Abley is to be commended for attempting to put the brakes on the
English-language bulldozer. As provoking as it is humane, Spoken Here
makes a successful case for the need to respect all languages, even the
most obscure.