By the end of the century, more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Those include indigenous languages in the Amazon. The United Nations also estimates that an Indigenous language dies every two weeks. Today, we focus on two endangered languages spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia: Desano and Siriano. Linguist Wilson de Lima Silva at the University of Arizona has been working with the community for a decade in an effort to document the language for future generations. Check out the book Global Language Justice, co-edited by Professor Lydia Liu.Editor's note: We have updated the headline to more accurately reflect the liguists' efforts.Want to hear more Indigenous or linguistics stories? Make your opinion heard by emailing us at [email protected]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Why are languages disappearing at an alarming rate?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Across the world, the places with the greatest biodiversity are also the places with the greatest language diversity. Researchers don't fully know why, but it's a phenomenon seen again and again in the Amazon and in the Pacific Islands.
Chapter 2: What is the connection between biodiversity and language diversity?
For instance, Papua New Guinea is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. And it is also the most linguistically diverse places in the world.
This is Dr. Lydia Liu, a professor at Columbia University and co-editor of a book called Global Language Justice. which calls attention to the fact that in a time of mass extinction and climate change, we are also living in a time of rapid language loss.
Why is that a loss? Well, different people will give different answers. There's the human reason, of course. People are attached to their languages emotionally. They attach to their families and to their communities. So the human element here specifically involves people's breaths, right? Are they able to articulate, utter their own sounds?
Chapter 3: How are Indigenous communities affected by language loss?
And this language loss is happening disproportionately within Indigenous communities in the tropics. The United Nations estimates that one Indigenous language dies every two weeks.
We know that more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of the century. So we have a real crisis here.
Because if the climate changes drastically from the norm for, say, a small farming community, chances are animal and plant survival will decline. And people dependent on those resources will be forced to consider other options.
People begin to move because they cannot live there anymore. You destroy their environment, they move to the city where their languages become homogenized.
Chapter 4: What efforts are being made to preserve endangered languages?
Or maybe they have to learn a more commonly spoken language in order to find work and survive. As people are pushed to migrate, there might be less of a community to speak this native tongue with. So people forget, or elders who are language bearers pass away. And when no one speaks the language anymore, that is when a language dies. oftentimes quietly, with no recordings of its existence.
Chapter 5: Who is Wilson de Lima Silva and what does he do?
More than 3,000 languages are at risk of going in this direction. They're called endangered languages. But there are efforts to reverse course. So today on the show, we meet one researcher who is trying to halt the loss of endangered languages. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to ShoreWave, a science podcast from NPR. Our story starts in Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon.
It's one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. And Wilson de Lima Silva grew up around there, in the city of Manaus. He trained as a linguist, studying the structure and function of languages.
Chapter 6: What challenges do linguists face in documenting endangered languages?
Usually, people tend to think that linguists speak several languages and all that. I like to say I speak only three languages. Oh, so the rumors are true.
You do speak a lot of languages. Wilson speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Desano. And Desano is the language he does the most research on. He started working with the language in 2007 when another Brazilian linguist approached him as a graduate student with an idea.
He knew I was from Manaus and Amazonas in the Amazon region of Brazil and that I was interested in Documentary Languages and he told me about A few languages that linguists still need to document and study.
And one of the languages was Dasano, a Tucanoan language spoken by only a few hundred people in a region of the Amazon at the border of Brazil and Colombia. When Wilson took his first journey to visit the community, called San Jose de Viña, it was really hard to get there.
It's a two-hour flight from Manaus to San Gabriel da Cachoeira. And from San Gabriel, I rent a motorboat. I need to buy about 800 liters of gasoline to go up the river.
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Chapter 7: How does colonial pressure contribute to language endangerment?
And that took three days. When Wilson finally arrived in San Jose de Viña, he got to meet the community. There were nine families living there, 21 Desano speakers, and 17 people who spoke the sister language, Siriano. One of the norms in the community is that people must marry someone who speaks a different language. So this makes San Jose de Viña a really multilingual community.
They are often surprised if you say, oh, I only speak two. Or if you say you only speak one language, it's almost like, wow, how do you survive in society?
And Wilson considers Dasano and Siriano different. quote, severely endangered languages. Because of the small number of speakers and because the community is so close to where people speak more widely used languages, like Portuguese or Spanish.
Chapter 8: What innovative methods are being used to preserve languages?
It's not really a conscious choice. Like, it's not that the speakers say, oh, I'm not going to speak this language. They want to speak this language, but they also need to survive, right? And it goes back to, I would say, external colonial pressures.
that led to modern disparities. For example, a lot of these remote communities don't have robust access to specialty health care. And in a lot of cases, they have to go to the nearest city. The same with education.
So when I visit San Jose de Vina, for example, they had a building for a school, but there was no schooling happening in the community because there was no teachers, there was no resources. That was just like this empty building.
But during those early visits, Wilson had an opportunity to talk to people who had not left yet. So he set a goal to record and understand how Dasano and Siriano are spoken by those who use it daily. And one of the ways he did that was a board game.
You know the game Mastermind?
Mastermind, yes, I do. Mastermind is a simple logic game where someone creates a code of four colors in a particular order and other people try to guess it.
Usually when you play Mastermind, you make logical reasonings on like what the code is. And you might say things like, oh, it could be the red piece. It could be the green. And then record them using language playing.
Yeah, because when they're playing a board game, they're going to use natural discourse. They're not going to be in interview mode. They're going to be in like, I'm just trying to beat you at this game mode.
Yeah.
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