Goodbye to languages

Maria Isabel Garcia

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[Science Solitaire] The soul is not just mute without language. It dies, not just a little, when a language goes.

“Speak, so that I can see you.”  That was what Socrates supposedly told a young man whom the philosopher was supposed to assess in terms of character.  He did not simply say “Give me your CV.”

Language reveals who we are to others. It is the currency of our souls – the ones we exchange with each other in “bills” of joy and frustrations, anger and delight, victories and follies and in clanging linguistic coins to negotiate the daily run of our lives. It is at the heart of culture, expressing a melding of our past, present and what we hope for. It is also the fabric that weaves for us the history of our ideas as well as the one that spells out the music and literature of the eras. 

No language is perfectly translatable to another. Shades of not just grey, color a language. There are nuances that could not be the same in another language. So when we lose a language, we die and mourn, we should.

And if language is at the animated core of every culture, what does it mean that 25% of the almost 7000 existing languages are now at risk of disappearing altogether?

A new study published last September 3 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B came up with this percentage, saying that languages are disappearing faster than species. This risk is seen in the small language range, small speaker population sizes and in the fast decline in the number of those speaking those languages. They found that those in the tropics and in the arctic have small language ranges and small speaker population sizes. These places also have high rainfall, high diversity of populations across many kinds of landscapes, as well as rapidly growing populations and economic spur. If this description sounds like the Philippines belongs to this category, it’s because it does, at least in some parts of our country.

High-latitude places seem to suffer the most in terms of decline in the number of speakers and this seems to be strongly connected to their high level of economic development. In sum, the study found that languages that have small language range and speaker population and those with diminishing speakers of those languages in the tropics, in North America and in the Himalayas are the ones that are seriously threatened.

The study also specifically mentioned that the preference to use only the language of the ruling class in order to gain socio-economic mobility is a powerful force in driving a language to oblivion. Reading that, I heard the trained American accents of call center agents and radio DJs in my head, joined by memories of my early schooling when we were penalized in school for speaking in Pilipino.

My thoughts were knotted in the end with what I once heard musical artist, Joey Ayala, say: there is something off about a job (or school) that asks you to forget who you are.  I felt a pang of shame and a sense of helplessness knowing that our archipelago’s tongue has slowly been retreating from the collective shores of our own psyche.

The soul is not just mute without language. It dies, not just a little, when a language goes. In economics, the concept of “shadow pricing” represents the value of nature lost when resources are extracted.  And since it seems that language is disappearing even faster than species are, perhaps we should also consider the shadow cost of our shared collective identity, a product of both past and present, in not just losing a language but burying it.

The Enduring Voices Project of the National Geographic is trying to record near-extinction voices so that they will not be lost forever.  Maybe you could help them by scratching off our language from their “rescue list”. All you have to do is speak it. Then, in Socrates’ mirror, others could really see you, and more, you could, perhaps, see yourself. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books,Science Solitaire and Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire. Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.

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