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Endangered Language Alliance finds home in New York City
A trio of poet, professor, and field linguist have combined forces in the heart of New York City to document, support, and protect one of the most precious stores of cultural, scientific, and creative human knowledge: living languages. The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA, pronounced ay-la) is a new organization whose goal is “is to further the documentation, description, maintenance, and revitalization of threatened and endangered languages, and to educate the public about the causes and consequences of language extinction.” In a small office on West 18th Street known as the Urban Fieldstation, endangered languages are being spoken, recorded, and translated before they possibly recede further into the margins.
The Endangered Language Crisis
Though most New Yorkers are unaware of it, a global language crisis is looming. Of the approximate 6,500 languages spoken on the planet, as many as 90% may be gone by the end of the 21st century. While languages have come and gone over the course of human history, the present rate of extinction is unprecedented. On average, one language dies every two weeks. The globalization of finance, communication and culture has had a profound effect on the type and rate of language change. The most obvious effects of globalization are the spread of world languages and national languages at the expense of minority languages. Right now, the top 10 languages in terms of number of speakers (Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German) are spoken by over 50% of all humanity. Though multilingualism has been the natural linguistic state of many groups around the world for thousands of years, the dominance of world languages is resulting in more cases of language endangerment, language shift, and language death than ever before. Language obituaries dot the news. Just over a month ago, the AP wire carried news of the death of Boa Sr. of the Andaman Islands, last speaker of Aka-Bo, an almost unknown language of a stone-age tribe. What language will go next? Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego, with only a single speaker? Yurok of Northwest California with 2-3 native speakers? Yawuru of Western Australia with fewer than 5 speakers? As languages die, thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge, experience, creativity and evolution goes with them. Ken Hale, an MIT professor and language activist once said that losing any one language “is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre”. Given the depth of botanical, ecological, biological, geological, historical and cultural information each language carries, language loss has more of a cluster bomb effect, like knocking out the Louvre, The British Museum, The Smithsonian, The Museum of Natural History, The Met, and large sections of the Library of Congress in one go.
New York City as a Hot Spot for Endangered Languages
With so many of the world’s languages threatened, linguists are trying to document languages before they disappear. While many of the global documentation efforts are taking place in remote field sites in distant lands, the newly formed Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in NYC includes an Urban Fieldstation that will focus on endangered languages in the metro area. With more than half of the world’s 6,500 languages endangered, and with about 700 different languages spoken in NYC alone, ELA estimates that there may be as many as 400 endangered languages spoken in the metro area. If this is true, New York City could be the most diverse linguistic area of the planet, and have the highest density of endangered languages per square mile on earth. Over the next year, the team will be undertaking an independent language census on the community level to get a clearer picture of NYC’s actual linguistic diversity. At the same time, we have initiated a range of language documentation and description efforts, including work on Garifuna, an Arawakan language of Central America, Zaghawa, a Nilo-Saharan language of Darfur, and Mamuju, an Austronesian language of Indonesia. The goal is to record and describe endangered languages through audio, video, film, and print; to create teaching materials; promote linguistic research on endangered languages; and sponsor public and media events dedicated to issues surrounding the endangered language crisis.
The Endangered Language Alliance
The organization’s acronym, ELA, attempts to draw attention to the endangered language crisis. ELA is inspired by the sound and meaning of a Yahgan word aiala /aiawala/ [eɑala] ‘visible; light; knowledge; wise, intelligent; to know, to learn, to understand, to be conscious, to take in the meaning’. Yahgan is an endangered language of Tierra del Fuego – the southernmost human language on Earth – and famous for its complex and surprising word meanings. Yahgan is one of the few languages to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for “the most succinct word”, mamihlapinatapai, which means ‘a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start’. However, since there is at present, only one known speaker of Yahgan, it is unlikely that mamihlapinatapai and thousands of other words will ever be used again.
A unique aspect of ELA is its dual focus on language as an expression of human culture and creativity, and language as a unique feature of human cognition with complex structure and function. Co-directors are Bob Holman, poet, and Juliette Blevins and Dan Kaufman, linguists. Holman is dedicated to keeping the poetry of endangered languages alive and to saving the spoken word. He is currently working on two Endangered Language Projects: the Endangered Cento, a 100-line poem with each line from a different endangered tongue; and “On the Road with Bob Holman,” a series of half-hour documentaries for LinkTV. His central focus is the poetry of endangered languages and saving the spoken word. Blevins, a specialist in sound patterns of the world’s languages, will take up a position as professor in the Linguistics program of CUNY Graduate Center in September, and was hired by CUNY in part to spearhead an Endangered Language initiative there. She has worked with last speakers of Australian Aboriginal and North American Indian languages, and is currently co-organizer of a conference on the phonology of endangered languages that will take place at CUNY in 2011. Kaufman, a linguist who also teaches at CUNY, is a native New Yorker who does fieldwork on languages of Indonesia and the Philippines. Focusing now on his home turf, the inauguration of the Urban Fieldstation embodies Kaufman’s belief that real fieldwork can and should be done anywhere. Though Holman, Blevins and Kaufman each bring unique skills and sensitivity to their work, they share a dream: to see most of the world’s languages outlive the people who speak them today.
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