Linguistics: When the Taliban proceeded to destroy the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, outrage was widespread and justified. The act seemed to be the epitome of a deranged philistinism, writes Michael Cronin.
Among the countries that rushed to condemn the Taliban iconoclasts were the US and Australia. Yet, as Mark Abley shows in his illuminating new book, Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages, Australia and the US have been and are host to a cultural destruction that has few precedents in human history. Of the 417 languages listed as nearly extinct in the Ethnologue, a directory of the world's languages, a third of the total are to be found in Australia. In the US, of the 154 Native American languages that survived the institutionalised brutality of early colonisation and the later Residential School system, 118 languages or 77 per cent of the total are spoken by less than a thousand speakers.
In a comment on the linguistic diversity of the Kimberley region in Western Australia, Abley tries to give voice to the scale of the calamity besetting our planet. "Some of the Kimberley languages may well be cultural artifacts of unimaginable antiquity. Their voices already echoed among these riverbeds, boab trees, and desiccated hills when the Sphinx was under construction in a far-off desert; and, like the Sphinx, they have outlived the ages." But, Abley notes, of the 30 surviving languages in the Kimberley region, "only three are spoken by children. It's as though 27 sphinxes are crumbling away before our eyes". Some linguistic commentators have gone so far as to predict that by the end of this century, 90 per cent of the world's languages will have become moribund or extinct.
Abley knows the statistics but wants to see the reality behind the figures. As a Canadian Anglophone living in predominantly Francophone Montreal, he is aware that languages have contexts, which are almost invariably political and economic. His travels take him to Australia, France, the Isle of Man, Wales, the US and the Canadian Arctic. He speaks to the remaining speakers of Mati Ke, Yuchi, Mohawk, Inuktitut, Manx and Yiddish.
Abley is no sentimentalist and is ever alert to the capacity for self-deception and self-aggrandisement that can take hold of communities under siege. He is withering on what Seán Ó Tuama used to refer to, in the Irish context, as the blight of benevolent indifference.
Discussing the fate of Yiddish, the Canadian writer observes: "While the language now benefits from lashings of sympathy, what it needs is less compassion and more everyday use. For the sake of Yiddish (or Manx), one irascible, bloody-minded, language-speaking son of a bitch is worth a few dozen well-meaning language hobbyists."
The problem for many minority languages is that there may well be a general wish on the part of the speakers that the languages endure but a lack of willingness to make the sacrifices that such a desire entails.
Readers expecting a Redmond O'Hanlonesque romp through a comedy of particulars with chappies doing odd things in their inexplicable tongues will be disappointed. Abley is deadly serious about what he believes to be a defining moment in human history. This does not prevent him, however, from taking delight in the expressive richness of the languages he encounters. Describing the verbs of Boro, a language of northeastern India, he singles out a group that sketches love's varieties: onguboy (to love from the heart), onsay (to pretend to love) and finally onsra (to love for the last time). Nor is he blind to the terminal ironies of an endangered language's predicament. One elderly speaker of an Australian aboriginal language cannot talk to the last remaining fluent speaker of his language in the world because a tribal taboo does not permit him to speak to his sister after puberty.
Languages are not particularly cuddly nor are they especially photogenic. It is easier to mobilise public sympathy for an endangered northern, hairy-nosed wombat than it is to get people excited about the imminent disappearance of the six positional classes of the Mohawk verb or the 31 separate pronouns and 35 verb classes of Murrinh-Patha. Environmentalists can offer sound economic arguments as to why it makes bad business sense to poison water supplies, foul up the air and strip forests (losses trying to undo the damage far outweigh gains creating it). The assets of language are generally more intangible - a connection with place, time, memory, community, a way of seeing the world, a way of articulating the world - and ironically the fate of the priceless (languages are by definition unique) is to be deemed worthless in the market economy.
When Abley informs us that Korean toddlers are now being taken to plastic surgeons to have their tongues lengthened so as to be able to say "right" rather than "light" in English, there is good reason to be pessimistic about the fate of the world's languages. Abley, however, disagrees. In this stimulating, richly informed guide to the linguistic state of the planet, the Canadian commentator points to Faroese, Welsh and Hebrew and shows that there is nothing inevitable about the extinction of languages. The choice is ours. The time for choosing? Now.
Michael Cronin is director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University. Among his recent publications are The Languages of Ireland (Four Courts Press), co-edited with Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and Irish Tourism: Image, Culture, Identity (Channel View), co-edited with Barbara O'Connor
Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. By Mark Abley
Heinemann, 322 pp. £ 14.99