雅思阅读真题题源-人文1.12 The Impassioned Fight to Save Dying Languages

The Impassioned Fight to Save Dying Languages

More and more voices are speaking up to keep them from being overwhelmed by English and global pressures.

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, Times Science Writer

LOSING CALIFORNIA'S LANGUAGES Of 100 Native American languages once spoken in California, 50 have been wiped out completely. An additional 17 have no fluent speakers. The remainder are spoken by only a few people. An enlarged version of the map below shows the surviving languages, the areas in which they are spoken and the number of native speakers.

HILO, HAWAII--It was not the teachers bearing baskets of feather leis, the fanfares played on conch shells or the beating of the sacred sharkskin drum that made Hulilauakea Wilson's high school graduation so memorable.

It was this: For the first time in a century, a child of the islands had been educated exclusively in his native Hawaiian language, immersed from birth in a special way of speaking his mind like a tropical fish steeped in the salt waters of its nativity.

It was a language being reborn.

More than an academic rite of passage, the graduation last May of Wilson and four other students at the Nawahiokalani'opu'u School on the Big Island of Hawaii signaled a coming of age for one of the world's most ambitious efforts to bring an endangered language back from the brink of extinction.

The world has become a hospice for dying languages, which are succumbing to the pressure of global commerce, telecommunications, tourism, and the inescapable influence of English. By the most reliable estimates, more than half of the world's 6,500 languages may be extinct by the end of this century.

"The number of languages is plummeting, imploding downward in an altogether unprecedented rate, just as human population is shooting straight upward," said University of Alaska linguist Michael Krauss.

But scattered across the globe, many ethnic groups are struggling to find their own voice, even at the risk of making their dealings with the broader world they inhabit more fractious.

From the Hoklo and Hakka in Hong Kong to the Euskara in Spain's Basque country, thousands of minority languages are clinging precariously to existence. A few, like Hebrew and Gaelic, have been rejuvenated as part of resurgent nationalism. Indeed, so important is language to political and personal self-determination that a people's right to speak its mind in the language of its choice is becoming an international human right.

California once had the densest concentration of indigenous languages in North America. Today, almost every one of its 50 or so surviving native languages is on its deathbed. Indeed, the last fluent speaker of Chumash, a family of six languages once heard throughout Southern California and the West, is a professional linguist at UC Santa Barbara.

More people in California speak Mongolian at home than speak any of the state's most endangered indigenous languages.

"Not one of them is spoken by children at home," said UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton.

None of this happened by accident.

All Native American languages, as well as Hawaiian, were for a century the target of government policies designed to eradicate them in public and in private, to ensure that they were not passed from parent to child.

Until 1987, it was illegal to teach Hawaiian in the islands' public schools except as a foreign language. The language that once claimed the highest literacy rate in the world was banned even from the islands' private schools.

Indeed, there may be no more powerful testimony to the visceral importance of language than the government's systematic efforts to destroy all the indigenous languages in the United States and replace them with English.

No language in memory, except Spanish, has sought so forcefully to colonize the mind. Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the territorial United States when Columbus made landfall in 1492, only 175 are still spoken. Of those, only 20 are being passed on to children.

In 1868, a federal commission on Indian affairs concluded: "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. . . . Their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted." The commission reasoned that "through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment, and thought. . . . In process of time the differences producing trouble would have been gradually obliterated."

Not until 1990 did the federal government reverse its official hostility to indigenous languages, when the Native American Languages Act made it a policy to preserve native tongues.

Policies against indigineous languages were once in effect in many developed nations. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended that government's efforts to force its ethnic minorities to adopt Russian. Policies in other nations aimed at eliminating minority languages such as Catalan in Spain, Kurdish in Turkey, Inuktitut in Canada and Lardio in Australia, to name just a few.