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Are we selfish? | ||
Tags: Endangered Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 26 10 December 2012 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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On my language list I have things like Latin, Old French, Old Occitan, Low German and Irish (at very different competence levels). Low German is a special case because I learnt it as a passive spoken language by watching TV from NDR, but I have never used it for communication with people in Northern Germany, and I'm not even sure it would be taken positively if I tried. So I see no positive effect for the native language users from my efforts to learn it, except that some authors and editing houses have earned money from the books I have bought. I have learnt the other partly from books, partly from free sources on the internet, so again the main beneficiaries of my efforts are authors and publishing houses, but also the thinly distributed transnational community of learners of those languages. The same thing of course applies to Esperanto, where you could say that I have supported the movement by paying a membership of the international organization and some conference fees. And as you know I also write in those languages in my log thread. So in essence my conscience is clean - I have done something to keep some dead or semidead languages alive.
The trouble is that I don't think my efforts have any impact on the future use of those languages. There may be some enthousiastic speakers of languages like Irish and Low German around who would be glad to see foreigners trying to learn them, but most native speakers would probably feel it condescending if I spoke to them in a dying language - as if they lived in some kind of cultural backwater and really should be sitting in the local moor cutting peat. In a situation where the native speakers have lost all hope and themselves see their inherited language as a burden I really can't see how the arrival of somebody like me would change their perspective. The first condition for appreciating that others learn your language must be that you take some pride in it yourself. Some endangered or dead or even invented languages have the kind of enthousiasts I mentioned above, and they might appreciate that outsiders take an interest in their language. For the rest of the native speakers it will be usefulness, stigma or no stigma and educational policies that decide whether they decide to pass their language on to their kids. Not whether some outsider in another country has learned to speak it. Edited by Iversen on 10 December 2012 at 1:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 26 10 December 2012 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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How would a polyglot learning an endangered language help to keep it alive? Unless you start a community in which the language is spoken, having one woman in Norway speaking a tiny African language doesn't really seem to help it survive in any meaningful way.
Also, I'm learning Cantonese, which is not endangered in any way, but it's on the decline. I can tell you this much: It's super depressing! I keep seeing native speakers saying the language is useless, not teaching their kids to speak it, even people who do speak it have a limited vocabulary as they're not reading any literature in the language and don't have access to dictionaries. For me, learning this language and falling in love with it only to watch it slowly wither is really taking a toll on me sometimes. I can only imagine what it'd be like to fall in love with a language on the verge of extinction. It's like buying a puppy with cancer. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6620 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 11 of 26 10 December 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know, Iversen. You might just have an obligation to go and teach those poor people in Rome their long forgotten native language :-)
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 26 10 December 2012 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Speaking a language well demands a incredible amount of time and effort—anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 hours, depending on how distant the language is and how close you want to get to native-level skills. To put that in perspective, there are only 2,000 working hours per year in the US, so this is anywhere 6 months to 5 years of full-time work. (These numbers are based on things like the FSI instruction hours, and how long it seems to take Westerns to get really good at Mandarin or Korean and treat them almost as a native language. Take them with a grain of salt.)
You can't do that without a good reason. In fact, if you learn a language out of guilt, if you never interact with native speakers, and if you don't write grammars, you've just wasted a huge amount of time and energy. Who's going to benefit? It's different if you love a language. It's OK to be crazy and impractical if it brings you joy. The world needs people who learn Greenlandic just for the hell of it. I really believe this. It's part of what makes us human. But the joy is important, if you're going to be impractical. It's like somebody who collects, say, small pottery figurines of birds—it's only dignified if they're madly in love with pottery and birds and art, if they're preserving this obscure joy for the rest of us. But if they're only collecting figurines out of a miserable, guilty obligation to art history, then it's just plain sad. I agree with Maïwenn—if you really want to help an endangered language, there are ways to do it. You can record native speakers and get them to help you transcribe those recordings. You can do field linguistics. You can fight back against all those outsiders who try to shame native speakers. You can even join the Peace Corps, and spend your time helping those speakers with the necessities of life. And there's another way polyglots can help: They can tell people that learning languages is a lot of work, but that it's also a lot of fun, and just about anybody can do it if they put in some time. The world needs role models: People who speak multiple languages, people who learn languages long after childhood, people who show what's possible. Edited by emk on 10 December 2012 at 1:40pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 26 10 December 2012 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
In the unlikely case I ever have to have a conversation with the pope I'll speak to him in Latin just for the fun of it - it is said that he is fairly good at it. I doubt it would be possible with the average ticket seller in the Vatican Museums. For them Latin is stone dead. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 14 of 26 10 December 2012 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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In response to the title, I could say on our behalf in (the endangered) Inari Saami, Mij ep lah "We are not".
I learn because the language fascinates me or holds some connection. Trying to turn it into some crusade or make myself bigger than what I am is not something that I'm comfortable with. I don't believe it to be right that I should try to impose guilt on those who don't work on a pursuit in the same way as I. With all due respect to glossika and his abilities, this extra-linguistic attitude reminds me of the rather irritating trend among big shots to "give back" and/or make a show of it (Oprah and her ilk of attention whores). I always like to think that there's joy in discovery and that's plenty for me seeing that I put enough stress on myself to get the necessities. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4369 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 15 of 26 10 December 2012 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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No, I don't think it's selfish to decide against learning an endangered language. It takes a great amount of time and effort to learn a language, and if one is truly endangered, it may be difficult if not impossible to find resources outside of actually living among the community. Also, usually we just see the numbers and recognize a language as being endangered or dying. What we don't see is the perception of the language, even among the remaining speakers. For social, cultural, or political reasons, it may not even be seen as desirable to try and continue it. I'm sure there are some groups who think of their language as a reflection of a particular class which they do not want to be part of.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6454 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 16 of 26 10 December 2012 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
Amen to that. ;) Inari Saami is on my hit list, too. I am currently studying Northern Saami which is also considered an endangered language. The main reason for it is that I find the language beautiful and very interesting in itself, and the other motives are the fact that it is related to my native language and thus represents part of our common Finno-Ugric cultural heritage and that I want to do everything I can to preserve it to future generations. If I reach fluency and gain an understanding of how the speakers of that language see the world around them, I'd love to write a book on it (in English) in order to help others learn it. Why would I want to do that? Simply because (to my knowledge) all grammar books in Northern Saami (most of which are in Norwegian or Swedish) have been written by native speakers who may or may not understand the difficulties and challenges involved in the learning process. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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