Disappearing Dialects

Elizabeth Hart
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In the past 500 years, nearly half of the world’s known languages have disappeared, in much the same way that plant diversity has dwindled. In the September/October issue of Resurgence Magazine, Maurice Carder examines the decline of the world’s endemic languages and the planet’s biodiversity.

Urbanization and colonization contribute to both of these extinction patterns. Writer and researcher Tove Skutnabb-Kangas states that, “the prerequisite for making a living from Nature for the hunter is to have an intimate knowledge of the landscape, and in order for this to be passed on to future generations the language has to have exact expressions and precise terms for concepts which are important to support life. Similarly a large vocabulary makes it possible to describe and remember landscapes and places in rivers and lakes when conversing about hunting and fishing.”

Carder also reports on the absurdly poetic correlation between surviving native languages and flowering plants and butterflies, all three of which are abundant in the same regions, and equally scarce in others.

In the United States, native populations have organized to save linguistic traditions, as well as to preserve the landscapes they describe.

Creative Commons image "Butterflies and You" by donttouchmapeyote on Flickr.

 

Comments

Hello

Submitted by Carl on Tue, 11/11/2008 - 21:03.
Thank you, On Haida Gwaii the community is in struggle. There are only a hand full of fluent Haida speakers around. You could count them on one hand. There are people who have been and are currently interviewing the speakers and documenting it. Even the dialect is different from the north and south end of the island. Each death of an elder is a enormous loss in every native community. They hold the knowledge about our land and hunting and gathering to our language and traditions. Thank you and everyone for there contributions to this website. Good luck and take care!

importance of localized systems of phonetics

Submitted by vivifidal on Sat, 11/15/2008 - 03:47.
Sequoia sought to preserve the Cherokee language through an alphabet but did not go far enough in making the alphabet culturally significant. It is my belief that projects to produce rich orthography which references the culture of individual language groups would do much to preserve both the language and culture of these groups. The Latin alphabet continues to suck the life out of the American-English dialect and how much more so does it to others and the International Phonetic Alphabet is sterile and flawed in some ways as to make its usage inaccurate in some cases and arcane and soulless at best.