PRESERVE LATIN, DITCH THE REST:

Languages on Life Support: Linguists debate their role in saving the world's endangered tongues (PETER MONAGHAN, June 5, 2009, The Chronicle Review)

Last year, when 89-year-old Marie Smith Jones died, a language died with her.

Jones was the last speaker of a south-central Alaskan language called Eyak. Once used extensively along 350 miles of the Gulf of Alaska, Eyak had begun to die even before Jones's childhood, crowded out by other Alaska Native languages. During her lifetime, English-speaking settlers suppressed indigenous languages. After her sister died, in the early 1990s, Jones no longer had anyone to speak to in her native tongue.

Now, Eyak exists only in documentation, much of it compiled (with the help of Jones and other last speakers) by Michael E. Krauss, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Preserving Eyak, at least in the form of a grammar, a dictionary, and other records, has occupied a large part of his career.

Krauss is not the only linguist to mourn the loss of a language he devoted himself to preserving. As he and a handful of others have loudly warned their colleagues for more than 30 years, almost all the world's languages are approaching extinction. Linguists, Krauss and others complain, are blithely presiding over the disappearance of most of their raw data.

What is the point of preserving a language in which nothing of any enduring value was ever spoken--much less written?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2009 2:40 PM