Imagine a world without the English language. It may be harder to do than imagining one without war or religion.
Language is the means by which we experience our world, whether we use it to interact with other people or as a function of memory. There is not a single thing you can do or think without language right there at your heels, ready to give you the ability to express yourself.
Imagine a world where no one speaks your native language, or where you have to become bilingual and translate for the elders in your community as they pass away and take their native tongue with them due to its lack of economic value.
According to a 2005 publication of the SIL Ethnologue, a worldwide manifest of language, 170 endangered languages in the Americas are forced to not just imagine this, but accept it as reality.
This is why it’s so important that ASU’s Center for Indian Education is working to preserve endangered Native American languages. According to the co-director of the Center for Indian Education at ASU, only about 20 of the 170 Native American languages in the U.S. are still being passed on to the next generation.
Sure, there’s no biological necessity to learn an extinct language, especially since most of the people who still use endangered languages are over 65 and beyond the childbearing ages. But understanding the tongue of your ancestors is certainly the first step to understanding how you got to where you are.
Have you ever proudly picked up an Italian flag just because you were told you had a great-grandfather from Napoli?
Now imagine having no ability to connect to your roots. The language is dead, and there may be a written language, but there is no way to know how words are pronounced or how stories are told. It’s frightening. It puts the roots of an entire culture in danger. That is to say that if language truly can provide a different outlook, like the different lenses on a camera, then losing touch with a language is like losing touch with the possibility to experience.
But there’s hope. With the help of programs like those facilitated by the Center for Indian Education at ASU and even the National Public Radio, endangered languages can be preserved and maybe even revived.
The movement to preserve is a worldwide effort, but in our own backyard, it has been happening since the ’80s. The Mojave tribe has about 22 elders that teach their language once a week to learners. Although it is traditional for the language to be taught from elder to student, modern technology will make this effort an infinite one — stem cells for syllables, if you will.
Who knows, maybe if we can get sci-fi kings James Cameron or Steven Spielberg onto this, we’ll have movie fanatics everywhere trying to pick up on the ancient dialects. If it can work for cultish fictional languages like Klingon or Tengwar, then why not at least give it a tried and true run? It’s nice to think of us all living as one with a universal language, but it’s not worth allowing our rich heritages to slip away by means of a commercialized culture.
