Podcast #119: PRI's The World in Words on Endangered Languages

The World in Words is a PRI podcast about languages and the people who speak them, addressing topics ranging from the bilingual brain to Icelandic swearwords. Hosted by Patrick Cox and Nina Porzucki, the show has explored the meaning of the word Daesh and the punk-pop accent of Blink-182's Tom DeLonge. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library, we're proud to present The World in Words on what works and doesn't to preserve endangered languages.
Cox spoke about the efforts to bring back to prominence the Irish language. The story is familiar to him because his father studied Irish for ten years in school:

"The endangered languages movement has been around for a few decades, and it is helping. Language activists are more networked. They exchange ideas. They learn what works. They learn what doesn't work. The poster child for what doesn't work may be, and it pains me to say this, is Irish. The Irish have been trying to bring back their language for more than a century, most of the time with the active support of their government... The language was already in rapid decline. The colonial Brits had tried to wipe it out, but by the time my dad was studying it, Ireland was a newly independent country, and the people who ran the question, they were nostalgic patriots who treated the Irish language as a symbol of ancient Irishness. It stood for everything that used to be good about Ireland before the Brits came, and so, the language wasn't allowed to evolve. Every schoolkid had to study it, which meant that they didn't really speak it. It was like you were learning Latin or ancient Greek to read old texts."

Porzucki spoke with a woman who decided to institute a rule in her family. Everyone would speak Hawaiian to revitalize the language. It wasn't always easy:

"This's getting really personal, my sister actually saying it's really rude for you to speak Hawaiian in front of me. I said, 'But I'm talking to my children in Hawaiian. You're just going to have to learn to live with that. English is really powerful, and people's attitudes about English. When you're trying to revitalize a language, you don't use your safe, default language that everyone can hear because otherwise I'm really canting a little message that says, 'Their Hawaiian is second rate.' So all of those tiny little things that people take for granted, you have to think about when you're revitalizing a language."

Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken primarily in Central America. James Lovell, a musician, is using his craft to help teach children the language.

"She speaks to me in Garifuna, but mostly in the streets, it was Creole that was being spoken, and when we go to school, they teach you English. They teach you in English, so I end up speaking more Creole to my friends and English in school. Then when my parents speak to me in Garifuna, I would answer them in English or in Creole... Anywhere you go in the Garifuna culture, we play a lot of music, so it's naturally for you to see a little kid pick up drums and playing it, getting the guitar and playing it, singing. Even before UNESCO proclaimed Garifuna culture as oral and intangible heritage of humanity, I realized that the language was being lost because they're not teaching it in the schools. It's not being used. I took it upon myself to use the music to teach."

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