(Running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08.  For more posts and the latest release of talks, see the Pop!Tech blog.) 

 photo: Kris Krug

At first glance, David Harrison looks more like a Marine than a linguist. With his carefully cropped crew cut, impeccably tailored shirt and serious, straightforward attitude, he looks like he should be saving combat missions, not cultures.  But perhaps his physical persona is in fact fitting with his life’s mission: to protect and save the endangered languages of the world.  It’s a task that has taken him to some of the most remote corners of the planet, making him an unlikely hero: a protector of languages, a guardian of the spoken word.

Harrison is an author, professor of linguistics at Swathmore College and director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He says there are some 7000 languages spoken in the world today, which may seem like a lot until we consider that globally linguistic diversity is incredibly uneven. In fact, 83 of the most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world’s population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people.

In an increasingly culturally homogenous world, why should we care?  Because languages, Harrison says, are more than just a collection of sounds and words; they are “entire conceptual universes of thought.” Collectively, he says, languages represent the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled. Every language reveals some of the secrets of how humans have survived on the planet.

Every 14 days a language disappears.  Languages are much more endangered than species, and are going extinct at a much faster rate.  While 5% of the world’s fish are extinct, 8% of plants; 11% of birds, 18% of mammals - with languages the figure closer to 40%. By 2100 more than half of the world’s languages will become extinct.

from When Languages Die

What’s lost when a language goes extinct?  Harrison says when a language dies the history of a culture vanishes: we lose vital information about the natural world, plants, animals, ecosystems, and cultural traditions. For instance, the Yulik of Alaska have over 99 complex descriptive terms for describing different formations of sea ice, a technology that has aided them in hunting and in surviving in one of the world’s harshest climates, and attuning their culture to be one of the most sensitive instruments to detect the signs of climate change and global warming. We’re facing the “triple threat of extinction“: species and ecosystems are in collapse globally; but knowledge systems about those ecosystems are also in collapse because they’re often contained in small languages that are purely transmitted orally.  

Harrison’s Enduring Voices project focuses on identifying “language hotspots” to prioritize research and save endangered languages (see this previous post).  There are 24 hotspots today, including eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest.   The goal of Enduring Voices is to support indigenous community efforts at language revitalization and maintenance worldwide. Together with colleagues Greg Anderson and National Geographic photographer Chris Rainer, Harrison visits “last speakers” to document their dying languages, sometimes creating the first-ever written records.

The process can be deeply personal. He recalls a quote from one of the last speakers of the Tofa language in Siberia, an aged woman, who reflecting on her mortality, told him: “Soon I will go berry picking. And when I do, I will take my language with me.”

Note: David Harrison’s talk at Pop!Tech has been translated into 33 languages on dotSub.

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