How to save a language from extinction Daniel Bgre Udell
Languages don’t just die naturally.
People abandon mother tongues,
because they’re forced to.
Often, the pressure is political.
In 1892,
the US Army general Richard Henry Pratt
argued that killing indigenous cultures
was the only alternative
to killing indigenous people.
“Kill the Indian,” he said,
“but save the man.”
And until 1978,
the government did just that,
removing indigenous children
from their families
and forcing them into boarding schools
where they were given English names
and punished for speaking their languages.
Assimilation was a complement to genocide.
Seven thousand languages are alive today,
but few are recognized
by their own governments
or supported online.
So for people from the vast
majority of cultures,
globalization remains
profoundly alienating.
It means giving up your language
for someone else’s.
And if nothing changes,
as many as 3,000 languages
could disappear in 80 years.
But things are changing.
Around the world,
people are reviving ancestral languages
and rebuilding their cultures.
As far as we know,
language reclamation began in the 1800s
when, at a time of rising antisemitism,
Jewish communities looked
to their ancestral language, Hebrew,
as a means of cultural revival.
And though it had been dormant
for over 1,000 years,
it was well preserved in books
of Jewish religion and philosophy.
So Jewish activists studied
and taught it to their children,
raising the first native speakers
in nearly 100 generations.
Today, it’s the mother tongue
of five million Jews.
And at least for me,
an assimilated English-speaking member
of the Jewish diaspora,
a pillar of cultural sovereignty.
Two thousand years later,
we’re still here.
Now, until recently,
Hebrew’s reawakening was an anomaly.
Few languages are
as well preserved as ours was,
and the creation of Israel,
the first Jewish state
in over 1,000 years,
provided a space for Hebrew’s daily use.
In other words, most cultures
just weren’t given a chance.
(Video) Good evening, I’m Elizabeth
and I live in Cornwall.
That was Cornish,
the ancestral language of Cornwall,
which today is technically
a county in southern England.
In the 1900s, Cornish activists
fought for their culture.
The language had been dormant
for over 100 years,
but they used old books and plays
to teach it to their children.
However, this new generation
of Cornish speakers
was scattered across Cornwall
and unable to use the language freely.
By the 1990s, Cornish had reawakened,
but it wasn’t thriving.
Then, in the early 2000s,
Cornish speakers found one another online
and leveraged digital spaces
to speak on a daily basis.
From there, they organized
weekly or monthly events
where they could gather
and speak in public.
Today, some schools teach Cornish.
There are Cornish language signs,
ice-cream commercials,
Wikipedia, and even memes.
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
And with their language once again intact,
the people of Cornwall
have secured recognition
as a Celtic nation alongside
Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
They stared down centuries
of forced assimilation
and said, “We’re not a county in England.
We’re a people in our own right.
And we’re still here.”
And they’re not the only ones.
The Tunica-Biloxi tribe of Louisiana
is reviving their ancestral language.
(Video) My name is Teyanna.
My friends, they call me “Quiet Storm.”
It started in the 1980s,
when Donna Pierite and her family
started taking trips
to Baton Rouge and New Orleans
to photocopy old dictionaries
stored away in university archives.
The goal was to study Tunica
and teach it to the children
and share it with the community.
Today, they’re leading
a Tunica renaissance.
Since 2014, there are nearly 100 speakers
in language immersion classes,
and according to a 2017 census,
32 new fluent speakers,
some of whom,
like Donna’s daughter Elisabeth,
are teaching Tunica to their children.
These new speakers are creating content,
Facebook videos and also memes.
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
And the more they publish,
the more they inspire other
Tunica people to get involved.
Recently, a tribal member living in Texas
wrote Elisabeth on Facebook,
asking how to say “bless these lands.”
It was for a yard sign,
so she could show her neighbors
that her culture is alive
and thriving today.
Now, Hebrew, Cornish and Tunica
are just three examples from a groundswell
of language activism on every continent.
And whether they’re Jèrriais speakers
from the Channel Isles,
or Kenyan sign language
speakers from Nairobi,
all communities working
to preserve or reclaim a language
have one thing in common: media,
so their language
can be shared and taught.
And as the internet grows,
expanding media access and creation,
preserving and reclaiming
ancestral languages
is now more possible than ever.
So what are your ancestral languages?
Mine are Hebrew, Yiddish,
Hungarian and Scottish Gaelic,
even though I was raised in English.
And luckily for me, each of these
languages is available online.
Hebrew in particular –
it came installed on my iPhone,
it’s supported by Google Translate,
it even has autocorrect.
And while your language
may not be as widely supported,
I encourage you to investigate,
because chances are, someone, somewhere,
has started getting it online.
Reclaiming your language
and embracing your culture
is a powerful way to be yourself
in the age of globalization,
because as I recently learned
to say in Hebrew,
“‘nḥnw ‘dyyn k’n” –
we’re still here.
Thank you.
(Applause)