Last Tuesday I watched almost the entire Oakland City Council meeting on TV while adding every single country as a category on what will hopefully become a version of Global Voices in Spanish. I started watching the meetings to catch glimpses of Mari. I still do. But in all honesty, I’ve sorta gotten sucked into the character plot along the way. Watching the different council members interact is like the best of bad reality TV. Only it’s realistic.

The last meeting centered around a flower. This flower as a matter of fact:

Speaker after speaker after speaker came up to orate indignantly on behalf of the endangered petals. I’m pretty sure that 80% of Oakland’s Caucasian population spoke that night in defense of the flower.

Don’t get me wrong, I love flowers. We even have them stitched on our pillowcases. But I don’t understand why plants and trees and sea bacteria have so many representatives speaking on their behalf while languages die out left and right.

Most linguists estimate that around 3,000 of the world’s 7,000 languages will likely be lost forever by the year 2100. According to this National Geographic interview with linguist David Harrison, a language is lost forever roughly once every two weeks. Harrison described how languages tend to die out:

Children are like little barometers of social standing and they understand – if there are two languages spoken in their community – they understand that one of them is viewed by the community as being better or more useful and so children will make this decision to switch over to speaking the dominant language and once the children in a community make that decision, it tends to be irreversible and so they will grow up speaking the dominant language and their children will not speak the ancestral language any more.

…

It doesn’t have to be a trade off. The human brain is completely capable of speaking two languages or even three languages. In fact, that’s the norm – most of the world’s population is bilingual and so it’s not true that you have to give up one language to learn another.

He does bring up bring up, however, the possibility of “language revitalization” and this is what I was most interested in:

There are some great examples now of what we call language revitalization, like the Mohawk case you mentioned, where transmission of the language was interrupted for a generation but now the very youngest generation has expressed an interest again and so they have to go not to their parents to learn a language, but to their grandparent’s generation.

I’ve seen this myself. When I was studying at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, a lot of Navajo students took college level classes to learn an ancestral language their parents did not speak. But how will that revitalization take place if all the native speakers die out?

Enter Podcasts

I was listening to the National Geographic podcast interview with David Harrison during the first half of my run around Lake Merritt. Next in the queue was Georgia Popplewell’s incredible Global Voices Show podcast #4 (have a listen when you can). I really liked this fourth one even more than the previous three because it featured so many different languages. I forget how intimate audio can be until I listen to a properly produced podcast. Listening to the Global Voices Show, you really feel like you’re in Bolivia one minute, Zimbabwe the next, and then off to Senegal.

And it got me thinking, we need a lot more audio in a lot more places before we lose record of so many beautiful languages and the knowledge they contain. Just imagine how grateful HP’s great grandchildren will be when they’re able to hear audio recording of their great-great-great-grandma. Assuming, of course, that he loses his virginity one of these days.