Language Endangerment Is a Moral Issue

This weekend UF hosted the 38^th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL). About 160 scholars and students from around the world attended, with about 200 talks being presented. I was the main scheduler for the conference, so I was running around for much of it, but I didn’t manage to enjoy one particular aspects of the fruits of my labor.

When I was offered the job at UF and negotiating my contract, I asked the Dean for $2000 in seed money to hold a symposium on documenting endangered languages in Africa to take place during ACAL. I tried to get the project fully funded by NSF, but failed. To my surprise, however, all of the speakers agreed to come anyway, so on Saturday all eight invited speakers presented talks on various aspects of language documentation, revitalization, endangerment, and description. Now, I do not work with many endangered languages, I am not a descriptivist, and I probably will never get my bread and butter from language documentation. But I organized the symposium because I believe that language endangerment, like species endangerment, is a moral issue. When we deny a people the ability to take part in social structures in their native language, we marginalize them - often in ways that directly affect their quality of life and may even deny them basic human rights. I think all linguists (as well as others) should be aware of the major issues involved in language endangerment and have an opinion about them. Where we can, we are obligated to take action.

The symposium as well as other talks at the conference cemented some conclusions I’ve been slowly coming to over the past couple of years about the value of the whole language documentation enterprise. You see language endangerment has been on the radar for some time now (it is estimated that half of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will be gone in 100 years or less), and the general reaction has been to provide lots of funding for the documentation of some dying languages as well as the ‘revitalization of others.’ The reaction has been rather swift and forceful, indicating people are taking the urgency of the problem seriously. However, in running to save the world’s languages, not much thought has been given to why they are dying in the first place. I think the result has been that, in the end, a lot of money is being spent on projects that are doing nothing to preserve or revitalize languages.

This view was shared by a few at the conference this weekend, in particular U of Chicago professor Salikoko Mufwene. Mufwene has a book detailing his thoughts on the matter, but his basic thesis is this: the chief reason for language endangerment and death has almost nothing to do with language. Whether a language thrives or dies has to do with population structures which are themselves chiefly the results of economic, social, environmental, and political factors. Therefore, purely linguistic approaches to language revitalization are doomed to fail since they have very little power to change these structures.

If Mufwene is right, and I think he is, then the majority response to language endangerment (documentation) is seriously flawed and linguists can do very little to alter the fate of a language by working solely with the language and its community. The implication, I think, is that linguists need to stop worrying about description and documentation as primary goals and we need to start working with organizations and institutions that have the power to change the population structures of a community to make sure that they take local languages seriously. We must do our best to ensure that development work carried out by international, NGO, or government organizations at the local level is being done in the local language. We need to help them understand that when such work does not take local languages into account, it is actively killing these languages and denying the very people they are serving the full benefit of their services.

On the final day of the conference I attended another talk which drove all of this home: a woman who works with health care workers in West Africa was presenting her work. The problem is that there are well-defined names for certain common illnesses in the local language Diallo which aren’t easily translatable into French or English (the languages used by the health care workers), leading to problems of diagnosis. The presenter had come up with a method whereby patients would use symptoms that translate better rather than talking about diseases by their local names. At the end of her talk, I applauded the practicality of her efforts, but asked, “Isn’t this just a small part of a much larger problem that can only be solved if the health care (or agriculture, or economic, etc.) workers start carrying out their work using only Diallo? And isn’t their refusal to learn Diallo equivalent to denying patients a certain degree of care they could otherwise provide?” Unfortunately, she didn’t quite understand the question. See, her English isn’t so great. Someone in the audience translated into French for me, but I'm still not sure she quite understood what I meant.