Short Wave - How Do You Preserve An Endangered Language?

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

By the end of the century, more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Those include indigenous languages in the Amazon. The United Nations also estimates that an Indigenous language dies every two weeks. Today, we focus on two endangered languages spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia: Desano and Siriano. Linguist Wilson de Lima Silva at the University of Arizona has been working with the community for a decade in an effort to document the language for future generations. Check out the book Global Language Justice, co-edited by Professor Lydia Liu.Editor's note: We have updated the headline to more accurately reflect the liguists' efforts.Want to hear more Indigenous or linguistics stories? Make your opinion heard by emailing us at [e-mail]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Across the world, the places with the greatest biodiversity are also the places with the greatest language diversity. Researchers don't fully know why, but it's a phenomenon seen again and again, in the Amazon and in the Pacific Islands. For instance, Pablo, New Guinea is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. And it is also the most linguistic. linguistically diverse places in the world.

This is Dr. Lydia Liu, a professor at Columbia University and co-editor of a book called Global Language Justice, which calls attention to the fact that in a time of mass extinction and climate change, we are also living in a time of rapid language loss. Why is that a loss? Well, different people will give different answers. There's the human reason, of course. people are attached to their languages emotionally. They attach to their families and to their community.

So the human element here specifically involves people's breaths, right? Are they able to articulate, utter their own sounds? And this language loss is happening disproportionately within indigenous communities in the tropics. The United Nations estimates that one indigenous language dies every two weeks. We know that more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of the century. So we have a real crisis here. Because if the climate changes drastically from the norm for, say, a small farming community, chances are animal and plant survival will decline. and people dependent on those resources will be forced to consider other options.

People begin to move because they cannot live there anymore. You destroy their environment, they move to the city where their languages become homogenized. Or maybe they have to learn a more commonly spoken language in order to find work and survive. As people are pushed to migrate, there might be less of a community to speak this native tongue with. so people forget or elders who are language bearers pass away. And when no one speaks the language anymore, that is when a language dies. Oftentimes quietly, with no recordings of its existence, more than 3,000 languages are at risk of going in this direction.

They're called endangered languages. But there are efforts to reverse course. So today on the show, we meet one researcher who is trying to halt the language. loss of endangered languages. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Our story starts in Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon. It's one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. And Wilson Delima Silva grew up around there in the city of Manaus. He trained as a linguist, studying the structure and function of languages. Usually people tend to think that linguists speak several languages

and about that. Yeah. I like to say, speak only three or maybe three and a half or four. Oh, so the rumors are true. You do speak a lot of languages. No, I know some colleagues who speak way more. Wilson speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and De Sano. And De Sano is the language he does the most research on.

He started working with the language in 2007 when another Brazilian linguist approached him as a graduate student with an idea. He knew I was from Manaos and Amazonas in the Amazon region of Brazil, and that I was interested in documented languages. And he told me about a few languages that linguists still need to document and study. And one of the languages was Jasano, a Tukanoan language, spoken by only a few hundred people in a region of the Amazon at the border of Brazil and Colombia. When Wilson took his first journey to visit the community,

called San Jose de Vinya, it was really hard to get there. It's a two-hour flight from Manaus to San Gabriel, the Cacchewa. And from San Gabriel, I ran a motorboat. I need to buy about 800 liters of gasoline to go up the river. And that took three days. When Wilson finally arrived in San Jose de Vina, he got to meet the community. There were nine families living there, 21 DeSano speakers, and 17 people who spoke the sister language, Sireano.

One of the norms in the community is that people must marry someone who speaks a different language. So this makes San Jose de Vina a really multilingual community. They are often surprised if you say, oh, I only speak two. Or if you say you only speak one language, it's almost like, wow, how do you survive in society? And Wilson considers DeSano and Sireano, quote, severely endangered languages. because of the small number of speakers and because the community is so close to where people speak more widely used languages,

like Portuguese or Spanish. It's not really a conscious choice. It's not that the speakers that say, oh, I'm not going to speak this language. They want to speak this language, but they also need to survive, right? And it goes back to, I would say, external colonial pressures.

That led to modern disparities. For example, a lot of these remote communities don't have robust access to specialty health care. And in a lot of cases, they have to go to the nearest city. The same with education. So when I visit some Hazade de Vina, for example, they had a building for a school, but there was no schooling happening in the community because there was no teachers, there was no resources. That was just like this empty building. But during those early visits, Wilson had an opportunity to talk to people who,

who had not left yet. So he set a goal, to record and understand how Desano and Sariano are spoken by those who use it daily. And one of the ways he did that was a board game. You know the game Mastermind? Mastermind, yes, I do. Mastermind is a simple logic game where someone creates a code of four colors

in a particular order and other people try to guess it. Usually when you play Mastermind, you make logical reasonings on what they code is. and you might say things like, oh, it could be the red piece, it could be the green, and they record them using language playing. Yeah, because when they're playing a board game, they're going to use natural discourse. They're not going to be in interview mode. Yeah.

I'm just trying to beat you at this game mode. Yeah. The game gave Wilson a ton of insight into the language. He also pursued traditional research methods, recording conversations, and asking people what they wanted recorded for the future. Often would be like, oh, my uncle or my aunt know how to do this type of food or basketry. Or they know certain plants that people don't know about. And the more comfortable the community felt with him, the more people stepped forward to share their language and their stories.

Sometimes I remember people coming to talk to me like either very early in the morning. or late at night after like we're going to sleep, people would come like, hey Wilson, I'll love to tell you a story tomorrow. Can you be willing to record me? And I would say, of course. That's why I'm here. Over time, Wilson got invited to watch people plant. To spend time with elders, he learned some incredible and unique mechanics of the language this way,

like how the physical shape of things in nature influenced the language. Like the word for spider, for example. And to thunder and the branch of a tree, they all are pronounced very similarly. If you think about how a tree has all the branches, the spider has legs, right? And when you hear thunder that in the Amazon, you often see also lightning. And if you look at the lightning, it's like all those zigzag ways. So they all see this shape. Wilson also learned about unique grammatical markers in the language.

For example, evidentials. That's where a speaker in DeSano has to indicate how they know what they know, almost like attribute the information to another person or even their senses. So during a rainstorm, you can't just say it's raining. If you're inside, but I hear the noise of rain outside of water, I can say I hear the sound of rain. Documentation is a crucial part of language preservation. So after recording people speaking DeSano as naturally as possible, Wilson then transcribes the interviews with the help of some DeSano-speaking collaborators.

We translate and we check for accuracy on some of the translations. And that way, they have written materials in DeSano that can be analyzed, broken down, and published. Like right now I'm focusing on writing more. descriptive studies on the language. That's more a kind of technical linguistic aspect of the language. But there is another step to Wilson's language work that's become just as important to him. Revitalization. A language is not stagnant.

It grows and changes with use. Documentation can take a snapshot of how the language operates at one point in time, which is important. But revitalization tries to ensure that the language will stay alive. in a community. Revitalization can look like getting the community what it needs, or encouraging young people speak the language, or creating educational materials for the future. Wilson says this part of the work has become the thing he cares most about.

The focus was like, I need this data for analysis, etc. And then the idea of giving back to the community is some sort of a pedagogical material. But then I kind of switched the paradigm of like, I feel like now, working with the community and thinking about what they want and then I think about giving back to linguistics. He and his team have even published

some of their recordings. In this one, a community member is telling a story in DeSano, but it's now accompanied by animations and subtitles. It's been about to put it. 10 years since Wilson's first trip to San Jose de Vina. And in that time, the people from the community that Wilson met as children are now grown up, some are in college. And more people have moved away indefinitely, looking for jobs and better health care access. But other members

of the community continue to work with Wilson and build on these materials for the future. The language is going to be alive. Even if people cease to speak it, it's going to be there for them in those records. I do hope it doesn't get there. But at least now we have a rich corpus of materials that whenever people want to revisit the language, it's there. This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.

Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong, and thanks as always for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.