The world boasts some 6,000 languages, but many - including Arapaho, Wichita and other American Indian languages - are rapidly disappearing as new generations of speakers move into urban areas and adopt the globe's dominant tongues, say University of Colorado at Boulder linguistics experts.
Words and syntax carry important clues about a community's history, culture, values and way of life. When a language disappears, humanity loses beneficial or insightful information about plants and their medicinal applications, geography, history, literature, technologies and other human records, say CU-Boulder linguists, who discuss their work in three new CU podcasts.
"Language is the most complex intellectual product of any community," said Professor Zygmunt Frajzyngier, chair of the CU-Boulder linguistics department. "It is a product of evolution lasting many thousands of years."
CU-Boulder researchers have been studying endangered languages for dozens of years, but new research has renewed interest in the subject. In a recent study, a coalition of U.S. researchers identified five global hot spots where languages are disappearing rapidly, including Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, central South America, eastern Siberia and northern Australia. According to the study, a language dies somewhere in the world every two weeks.
"A complete description of any language consists of the discovery of all forms and functions coded in the language. This goal hasn't been met yet for any language, including the best-described languages such as English, Russian, German and French," said Frajzyngier, who has written several books on endangered African languages, including the recently published "A Grammar of Gidar."
Wichita is indigenous to Oklahoma and once was spoken by thousands of members of the Wichita tribe. The tribe's ancestors were the people first contacted in 1540 by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the Spanish explorer who searched North America in vain for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, including Quivira and Cíbola. Records of that early encounter are said to still exist, said CU-Boulder Professor David Rood.
Rood has studied Wichita for more than 40 years, and has worked with tribal members to record the language. In the 1960s he took handwritten notes and used reel-to-reel tape recorders to amass his data. Today, he is using digital technology to archive audio recordings and transcripts. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands has stored annotated videos of his work and scholars and others can access them via the Internet, he said.
Despite these technological advantages, Rood has watched the language's speakers dwindle from 200 in 1965 to just one living fluent speaker today, 80-year-old Doris Jean Lamar McLemore. Rood and doctoral student Armik Mirzayan are gathering as much information as possible from Lamar before it's too late. When she dies, so will the language and all of the history and culture that goes with it.
"She speaks the language fluently because she was raised by grandparents and her grandmother did not speak English," Rood said. "She's managed to keep that particular knowledge alive and maintain it."
Like many other American Indian languages, Wichita is fading because adults are not passing it on to their children for multiple, complex reasons. Rood said the language started falling out of use when tribes merged and intermarried and adopted English as a common language, and when members acquired English for work, the military and to avoid punishment in boarding schools.
"You had to speak English to get a job and make a living," he said. "And many parents felt that the Wichita language was just not a useful thing to pass on to their children."
In Colorado, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute once were the region's dominant indigenous languages. Today, most Arapaho tribal members live in Wyoming, but many consider Colorado their ancestral homeland and preserve stories handed down by their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, said CU-Boulder associate linguistics Professor Andrew Cowell.
"The Arapaho people themselves still feel a very strong tie to Colorado, and I think it's important to recognize that," said Cowell, author of "The Arapaho Language," a scholarly book the University of Colorado Press published in October.
In fact, many Colorado place names carry vestiges of Arapaho and other indigenous languages spoken by the people who were the state's earliest inhabitants. One example is Rocky Mountain National Park's Kawuneeche Valley, whose name stems from the Arapaho word for "Coyote River," Cowell said.
"In a certain sense, there is still a connection between those of us who live here now and the people who lived here before us," Cowell said.
To listen to podcasts featuring the voices of CU-Boulder linguistics professors go to www.colorado.edu/news/podcasts.
To learn more about the CU-Boulder linguistics department and faculty research go to www.colorado.edu/linguistics/.