This reminded me of a video I saw once, many years ago. It was told by the last speaker of a language - from a tribe in El Salvador, iirc (Central America, for sure). Most of his tribe had been wiped out during civil war. He and his parents were the last living speakers of their language. When his parents died, he was the last. The video was a long, tearful poem, telling the story of his people and their destruction. Of course, no one could understand a word of it but him, but the emotion was unmistakable.
It's interesting that the same technologies we use to preserve language (audio/film/text) are also largely the reason for their destruction. If you just have two people talking with each other in the woods there aren't any economies of scale, no 'best' version of Wikipedia, no Hollywood movies to watch, etc.
I don't know, languages have been dying out for a lot longer than those technologies have been around. Languages die when the cultures who speak them either get assimilated or eradicated; I am not sure what technology has to do with that?
Before the printing press, there was dramatic variation in regional dialects of European nations. After the printing press, standardization and state centralization have been grinding these regional dialects into the ground. Even traditional regional languages like Irish or Scots Gaelic are going extinct.
I live in a city with tens of thousands of east African immigrants (mostly Somali). It's fascinating to me, to hear the difference between how the adult Somalis speak, and how their children speak. The teenagers, having grown up here, speak in perfect, accent-free English. Will their children even speak Somali at all?
(As an aside, I totally love my little window into Somali teenage girl culture, just from riding the train and sharing a neighborhood with them. Their fashions are incredible, and they're so energetic and happy. Somali teenage boys, on the other hand, are just as glum and faux-cool as teenage boys everywhere.)
This is how integration works, when it does. The parents might stick to their own country-men, but over time the children will be raised in the local-schools, speak the local language, watch the local TV, etc, etc.
This is a myth. You mean they speak your local accent of English.
> (As an aside, I totally love my little window into Somali teenage girl culture, just from riding the train and sharing a neighborhood with them. Their fashions are incredible, and they're so energetic and happy. Somali teenage boys, on the other hand, are just as glum and faux-cool as teenage boys everywhere.)
Please don't be racist. Appreciate people without making convoluted assumptions about how their race and gender causes their behavior
It seems more likely to me that compulsory education conducted entirely in a "national language" is the culprit here. How many of these stories involve "we were beaten for talking in $LANGUAGE at school"?
Thanks to a college professor long ago, I'm firmly convinced that technological advancement is the main reason cultures get assimilated/eradicated. Or more to the point, new cultures rise with new technologies, and wipe out the previous ones.
Along the same lines as my original comment and the source of this story, one of the most educational nights of my life was a lecture by a visiting professor from India. His research took him to the most remote villages, villages that had never experienced electricity before. He recorded their music, because the moment radios and tape players arrived, the local music was basically obliterated. And he felt guilt and shame, because while he was preserving it, he was also the nose in the tent - the first time they ever experienced recorded music.
When you say "obliterated", doesn't it really mean that people in these villages liked the music from the radio more than their local stuff? Why label people's preferences with such dramatic words?
>> people in these villages liked the music from the radio
It could also be because
(a) the low cost and availability of music on the radio (portable, on demand etc) was much higher than the availability of their native music which had to be played live by an artist.
(b) the novelty of the 'outside' music or its sophistication due to the electronic instruments used etc could have temporarily make the local people to like the outside music long enough to stop making their own.
Even in India - the few members of animist religions in the nort east often feel poorly when having to deal with the more advanced religions like Christianity/Hinduism/Islam - there’s a level of outreach, funding, polish, prep, conversion techniques and arguments - essentially human pleasing sophistication, that other religions just have not had the time or resources to develop.
You see similar things happen with food and fruits.
Along the same vein, worth checking out the archives of Alan Lomax. He spent 70 years collecting oral and folk music recordings across America, the Caribbean and the UK. Now in the Library of Congress[0]. Some of his recordings are famously sampled on Moby's Play album.
There are many stories similar to this one; wikipedia's list of last speakers of languages[1] is a good starting point for those interested in dying languages and the attempts at their preservation.
