Can a dying language be saved?

AOf the roughly seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, a substantial proportion are considered endangered, and linguists expect many of them to fall silent within the present century. When a language disappears, the loss is not merely one of vocabulary and grammar. Languages carry songs, stories, place names and detailed knowledge of local plants, animals and landscapes, much of which has never been written down. Language death is rarely sudden. More often, it happens gradually across several generations: grandparents speak the language fluently, their children understand it but prefer to speak something else, and their grandchildren grow up hearing it only occasionally, if at all.

BThe reasons why parents stop passing on a language are rarely a matter of simple choice. In many cases, families have come to associate their ancestral language with poverty or backwardness, often because schools, employers and governments have treated it that way. Children who were punished for speaking it at school may grow into adults determined to spare their own children the same experience. According to the sociolinguist Tomas Lindqvist, the decisive factor is prestige. “People are not sentimental about language when they are trying to make a living,” he says. “A language survives when speaking it opens doors rather than closes them.”

CCan the process be reversed? The case most often cited is Hebrew. For well over a thousand years, Hebrew had not been used as an everyday spoken language, although it survived in religious practice and in writing. From the late nineteenth century onwards, it was deliberately revived as a language of daily life, and today it is the first language of millions of people. Most linguists, however, are careful not to treat Hebrew as a model that others can easily follow. Its revival depended on an unusual combination of circumstances, including a large body of written texts, a community of highly motivated speakers from many different backgrounds who needed a common language, and eventually the support of a state.

DMost revitalisation efforts today are on a much smaller scale, and many focus on the youngest members of a community. In New Zealand in the early 1980s, Māori communities established “language nests”, pre-school centres in which elders who still spoke the language fluently looked after young children entirely in Māori. The model was later adopted in Hawaii and elsewhere. The linguist Ana Ruiz, who has studied immersion programmes in several countries, regards early childhood as the most promising point at which to intervene, because young children acquire languages with little conscious effort. She warns, however, that the benefits can fade quickly. “If those children then enter a school system where everything happens in the majority language,” she says, “much of what they have gained may be lost within a few years.”

EIn recent years, digital technology has opened new possibilities. Dictionaries and recordings can now be made available online, learners can practise with smartphone apps, and young people can use their heritage language on social media. Rachel Osei, who works with communities developing such resources, believes they are valuable, particularly for adults who want to learn a language their parents never taught them, and for keeping learners motivated. But she is wary of overestimating their impact. “An app can teach you words,” she says. “It cannot give you someone to talk to at breakfast. A language that lives only on a screen is not really alive.”

FRevitalisation can also produce tensions within communities. People who learn a language as adults, often in classrooms, may speak it differently from elders who learned it at home: their pronunciation may be influenced by the majority language, and they may use newly created words for modern concepts. Some older speakers regard these differences as errors. David Kerr, who has written about several revival movements, argues that such attitudes, however understandable, can do real harm. In his view, every living language changes, and the new forms used by learners are a sign of life rather than decay. Insisting on a single correct form, he suggests, risks discouraging the very people on whom the language's future depends.

GEven where revival seems unlikely, many linguists argue that documenting a language is worthwhile. Hiroshi Tanabe, who has spent much of his career recording the speech of elderly speakers, points out that a well-documented language is never entirely lost, because future generations may choose to learn it again. History offers some support for this view. Manx, the traditional language of the Isle of Man, lost its last native speaker in 1974, but recordings of elderly speakers made decades earlier have since helped a small community of learners to bring it back into use, and some children are now being raised with it as one of their languages.