Technology key in rush to save dying languages

DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor, in Vancouver

AMERICAN SCIENCE CONFERENCE: SOCIAL MEDIA is proving an unlikely ally in the struggle to protect the world’s most endangered languages.

So, too, are “talking dictionaries”, a digitised audible record of words and their meanings that tries to preserve little-used languages before they disappear.

The loss of languages spoken by only a few hundred people may not seem an issue when there are plenty more languages to replace them. Yet languages are a unique repository not just of words but also of cultural identity, linguists stressed during a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting under way in Vancouver.

Languages become a repository of information on plant and animal species, cultural practices, traditional medicine and much more, said Prof David Harrison of Swarthmore college in Pennsylvania.

The digital world in which we live has given language preservation a powerful impetus, he said. It is a grassroots movement where people on the ground and using a language only spoken by a few hundred people can have a global impact via new technologies, he said. “Through the digital technologies these languages can talk to the world,” he said. “Language extinction is not an inevitability.

Alfred “Bud” Lane, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in Oregon, explained how new media helped to renew and support interest in the “Siletz Dee-ni” language.

“Like most small groups of people, our pool of speakers is very small.” The language was about to become “moribund”, he said. “Our council decided that was not going to happen.”

He began relearning the language himself from elders who were fluent speakers. He linked with a National Geographic programme called “Enduring Voices” that had begun to use advanced technology to develop “talking dictionaries”. These provided words and their meanings, spoken by native speakers along with pictures documenting the speakers’ culture. “The technology has greatly helped us,” he said.

Dr Margaret Noori of the Native American studies programme at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, explained how the internet was helping to keep 200 diffuse nations across Canada and the US in touch with one another. It was helping to preserve the language but also the Ojibwe nation’s cultural identity, she said. “They use the technology to connect them and to keep the language alive.”

Of the world’s 7,000 distinct tongues, almost half may vanish by the end of this century.

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