How Do You Preserve An Endangered Language?

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 https://www.un.org/en/desa/protecting-languages-preserving-cultures-0Indigenous language dies every two weeks https://www.un.org/en/desa/protecting-languages-preserving-cultures-0. Today, we focus on two endangered languages spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia: Desano and Siriano. Linguist Wilson de Lima Silva https://linguistics.arizona.edu/person/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 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/global-language-justice/9780231210393, 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 [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ atplus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://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 https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Emily Kwong?

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• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  For instance, Papua New Guinea is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, and it is also the most linguistically diverse places in the world.

• 0:51Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Why is that a loss? Well, different people will give different answers. And 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 breath, right? Are they able to articulate, utter their own sounds?

• 1:37Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  People begin to move because they cannot live there anymore. You destroy their environment, they move to the city, where their languages become homogenized.

• 2:29Emily Kwong?

  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 loss of endangered languages. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shore Wave,

• 3:14Emily Kwong?

  a science podcast from NPR.

• 3:22Speaker 02

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• 4:45Emily Kwong?

  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 de Lima Silva grew up around there, in the city of Manaus. He trained as a linguist, studying the structure and function of languages.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Usually, people tend to think that linguists speak several languages and all that.

• 5:05Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  I like to say I speak only three, maybe three and a half or four.

• 5:11Emily Kwong?

  Oh, so the rumors are true. You do speak a lot of languages.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  No, I know some colleagues who speak way more.

• 5:18Emily Kwong?

  Wilson speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dasano. And Dasano 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.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  He knew I was from Manaus and Amazonas, the Amazon region of Brazil, and that I was interested in documenting languages. And he told me about a few languages that linguists still need to document and study.

• 5:48Emily Kwong?

  And one of the languages was Dasano, a Tuquanoan 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 José de Vina, it was really hard to get there.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  It's a two-hour flight from Manaus to São Gabriel da Cachoeira.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  And from San Gabriel, I rent a motorboat. I need to buy about 800 liters of gasoline to go up the river.

• 6:20Emily Kwong?

  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 De Sano speakers, and 17 people who spoke the sister language, Siriano. 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.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  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?

• 6:52Emily Kwong?

  And Wilson considers De Sano and Siriano, 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.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  It's not really a conscious choice. Like, it's not that the speakers say, oh, I'm now 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.

• 7:24Emily Kwong?

  That led to modern disparities. For example, a lot of these remote communities don't have robust access to specialty healthcare. And in a lot of cases, they have to go to the nearest city. The same with education.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  So when I visit San Jose 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.

• 7:53Emily Kwong?

  But during those early visits, Wilson had an opportunity to talk to people who had not left yet. So he set a goal to record and understand how De Sano and Siriano are spoken by those who use it daily. And one of the ways he did that was a board game.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  You know the game Mastermind?

• 8:12Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Usually, when you play Mastermind, you make logical reasoning on like what the 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.

• 8:37Emily Kwong?

  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. They're going to be in like, I'm just trying to beat you at this game mode.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:46Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:12Emily Kwong?

  And the more comfortable the community felt with him, the more people stepped forward to share their language and their stories.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  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 would love to tell you a story tomorrow. Can we, would you be willing to record me? And I would say, of course, that's why I'm here.

• 9:41Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Like the word for spider, for example, and thunder and the branch of a tree, they all are pronounced very similarly. If you think about how the, a tree has all the branches, the spider has legs, right? And when you hear thunder, 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.

• 10:25Emily Kwong?

  Wilson also learned about unique grammatical markers in the language. For example, evidentials. That's where a speaker in the Sano 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."

• 10:44Speaker 04

  If we sighed, but I hear the noise of rain outside of water, I can say, "I hear the sound of rain."

• 10:54Emily Kwong?

  Documentation is a crucial part of language preservation. So after recording people speaking Dassano as naturally as possible, Wilson then transcribes the interviews with the help of some Dassano-speaking collaborators.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  We translate and then we check for accuracy on some of the translations.

• 11:13Emily Kwong?

  And that way, they have written materials in Dassano that can be analyzed, broken down, and published.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Like, right now, I'm focusing on writing more descriptive studies on the language. That's more the kind of technical linguistics aspect of the language.

• 11:31Emily Kwong?

  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 to 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.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  The focus was like, I need this data for analysis, et cetera. 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 I'm working with the community and thinking about what they want. And then I think about giving back to linguistics.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  Why more than a poor event?

• 12:37Emily Kwong?

  He and his team have even published some of their recordings. In this one, a community member is telling a story in Dasano, but it's now accompanied by animations and subtitles.

• 12:53Emily Kwong?

  It's been about 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 healthcare access. But other members of the community continue to work with Wilson and build on these materials for the future.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  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 like a rich corpus of materials that whenever people want to revisit the language, it's there.

• 13:49Emily Kwong?

  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 Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 14:49Emily Kwong?

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