Language Matters

On February 18, I went to a screening of the film Language Matters at City Lore, a gallery on East 1st Street on New York City. The film focused on three places in the world with dying languages: the top end of Australia, Wales, and Hawaii. In all these places, English has taken over and the original languages are at risk. There are over 6,000 languages in the world, and about half of them are expected to die out by the end of this century. Watching Language Matters inspired me to learn more languages.

Flyer from the event

English, Spanish, and other world-dominant languages began to replace other languages during the era of colonization. The schools established in colonized areas were generally taught in English only, and children were often forbidden or even punished for speaking their first language. The prohibition against speaking indigenous languages resulted in people speaking more and more English.

In Wales, any child caught speaking Welsh in school was forced to wear a sign called a "Welsh Not" around their neck, and at the end of the day, the child would be punished by a whipping. In Hawaii and Australia, similar efforts were made to force students to speak only English, and most of the time the efforts worked. Children stopped speaking their first language and stopped passing it down to their own children. The language then died a slow death, and the set of knowledge that went along with it disappeared too.

Now the era of colonization is essentially over, and people are starting to make efforts to preserve their languages. In Wales and Hawaii, there are schools for children that are taught only in Welsh or Hawaiian respectively. In Australia, schools are still taught in English, but the elders of many villages where the original languages are still spoken are making sure the languages will be passed on by teaching them to all the children. In all three areas covered in Language Matters, song was used to pass on language and culture.

Another valuable way to preserve a language is by writing it down and making a record of it, and that is the job of ethnographers and linguists. Having a written record of a language is both helpful to science and to the people who speak the language. In the past, scientists often took from cultures without giving back, as in the case of Minik and Robert Peary, but today scientists try to create mutually-beneficial relationships.

Mono-linguistic society is a new concept. In the past, people were generally multilingual.  Each language offers its own unique way of viewing the world, and in losing languages, we lose diversity of thought.

The words of a language provide windows for us to see the world through.