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them to be studied after the relevant language has died. But, since many endangered languages do not have a writing system, their canons are at risk of being lost forever. 76 Finally, the endangerment of languages also threatens the work of natural scientists. Many indigenous cultures, particularly in the regions with the highest level of biodiversity, have a unique knowledge of the local climate and flora and fauna, and this knowledge is encoded in their language. A uNeSCO study of the language of the Anuesha people of the Peruvian Amazon, which is severely endangered, for example, revealed a number of terms for plants that had previously not been recorded and studied. 77 Some claim that the loss of local knowledge is not caused by language endangerment but by the devaluation and erosion of indigenous cultures. 78 Since this sociopolitical force is also a cause of language endangerment, however, it is clear that the abandonment of local language and the loss of indigenous knowledge of nature are related. thus, without the protection of endangered languages, numerous academic disciplines will be hurt, and the history and knowledge of indigenous populations will be lost forever. Perhaps the strongest, and also most controversial, motivation for action to protect endangered languages is the claim of an inherent connection between language and culture. While everyone concedes that there is a link between language and culture, the nature of this connection is controversial. Some anthropologists take an extreme view of this relationship, claiming that different languages represent different ways of looking at the world, or worldviews. This idea is a modern adaptation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, which maintains that the structure and lexicon of a language affect the way that its speakers perceive the world. Whorf’s most famous example for linguistic relativity was his understanding of the ways of speaking about time in Hopi, an indigenous language of the American Southwest. He believed that the Hopi people had a different conception of time than English speakers because the Hopi language did not have words for distinct units of time, like English’s “day” and “year.” A few experiments have shown linguistic relativity to be applicable to certain ideas, like shape and color; in one, researchers provided evidence that speakers of Yucatec, a language that refers to concrete nouns by units of their material, were more likely to pay attention to objects’ materials than forms, in contrast to speakers of English, which makes the form of the object more salient than its material. 79 Overall, however, linguistic relativity has been essentially disproven over the past fifty years, with no experimental evidence showing significant differences in the conceptions of numbers and time among speakers of various languages. 80 Some activists, linguists, and anthropologists rely on a variation of linguistic relativity as an argument for protecting endangered languages. they argue that language death suppresses the distinct worldviews that different cultures possess. As linguistic relativity has been largely discredited, however, most defenders of indigenous languages rely on the reverse connection between language and culture, that a society’s language is vital for the full representation of its culture. Joshua Fishman goes as far as saying of the language-culture connection: “Such a huge part of every ethnoculture is linguistically expressed that it is not wrong to say that most ethnocultural behaviors would be impossible without their expression via the particular language with which these behaviors have been traditionally associated.” 81 While this position may be too extreme, it explicates the intrinsic value that indigenous languages have for the maintenance of the culture of their speakers. Starting with the most observable link, each language has its own set of myths, literature, songs and poetry, as stated 24 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
above. 82 While these works can be read in translation, it is clear that one loses some aspects of the author’s original intent in a foreign language; in order to fully understand the cultural significance of these works, it is necessary to maintain them in their original languages. 83 Languages also encode what their respective cultures know or value about a number of other aspects of society, including religion, justice, education, kinship, medicine, and nature, collectively known as intangible cultural heritage. 84 As much of this heritage is inherited through language, language death and endangerment has the risk of eliminating countless indigenous cultures. 85 While a few cultures have survived language endangerment, most notably those of the irish and Jewish peoples86 , the threat of language death to local cultures is undeniably strong. Possible Solutions Although the situation is grim for many endangered languages, there are a number of steps the international community can take to prevent these languages from becoming extinct. The undeniable first step is to increase information-gathering efforts about the status of endangered and non-endangered languages across the world. the Ethnologue represents a positive start in this direction, but much more information is needed before informed policy decisions can be made, including the age of speakers, the attitudes of speakers toward their mother tongue, and the specific causes of language endangerment in each case. 87 Additionally, by maintaining a core set of speakers over the past century, some languages appear immune to the forces of language endangerment, and it is vital to understand what has prevented the decay of these respective languages. 88 Beyond this type of information gathering, there are two main categories of solutions to the problem of language endangerment: documentation and revitalization. These two categories can be applied separately or together, depending on how seriously endangered a language is, its prognosis for survival, and the priorities of those funding the efforts are. in cases of extreme language endangerment, the primary goal is usually documentation so that linguists can study the language, and future generations can have access, through translation, to their culture’s oral traditions. When a language is less seriously endangered, and more funding is available, the community might initiate revitalization efforts to rebuild a strong base of speakers. Documentation, also known as corpus planning, aims to ensure that a language persists in records after the death of the last speaker. These efforts usually involve the codification of the language in a standard form and the development of an orthography, or written form, if such a system does not already exist. documentation also includes the production of dictionaries and other types of written and oral archives. 89 in recent years, these archives have been undergoing a slow transition to the internet, which has made them much more easily accessible to the general population. On 21 June 2012, Google announced that it was launching the Endangered Languages Project with a number of organizations involved in language preservation in order to collect online samples of the thousands of dying languages across the world. 90 In one remarkable case involving a digital archive, a group of speakers of Arapesh, an endangered language on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, found an archive of their language through Facebook and have since reached out to the linguist responsible for assistance with their revitalization efforts. 91 this example reinforces the importance that linguists play in documentation efforts and shows that documentation can in itself be a method of revitalization, as indigenous populations often do not attempt to maintain their language until the work of linguists makes them understand the value of their own tongue. 92 25 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
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