Preserving the World's Linguistic Diversity | Ivan Ozbolt | TEDxShekou Intl School
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOY_-QN7_To Video ID: HOY_-QN7_To ============================================================ [Music] about 6,000 languages are spoken in the world today but we hear a lot more about some than others this map of the world shows us the size of the countries proportional to the number of languages spoken within their National boundaries and we can see among others that Indonesia Papa guini and Nigeria are very big if in this room we all collaborated to list as many world languages As We Know by name we might still not get to a very high percentage of all those that exist linguists estimate that about half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today might Disappear by the end of the 21st century and as much as we care about preserving the biodiversity of our world we should care about preserving in our cultural diversity languages hold a lot of information about the culture of people speaking them knowledge about the environment that they have known for Generations hundreds of years and practices to preserve the environment for example American journalist Flora leis said that learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things but learning another way to think about things so this is not a new topic there are some excellent tedex that I've already made about the issue of language loss and preservation but it is an important topic so we need to continue talking about it we need to consider the value and importance of all languages let me tell you about this topic from my perspective I am originally from France but I also live in the United States where I study linguistic anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and this is where I devop my interest in this topic since then I have also taught English as a second language and French in the United States and in China One area where we can see World languages being unequally valued is through the fact that we often here people refer to languages as dialects and there is nothing wrong with the word dialects according to the Cambridge Dictionary a dialect is a form of a language that is spoken in a particular part of a country or by a particular group of people and that contains some words grammar or pronunciations that are different from the forms used in other parts or by other groups so examples of dialects of English could be Indian English British English Australian English Singaporean English despite their differences people should be able to understand each other because they speak variations of the same language if we now consider French and Italian a majority of the words have the same origin but they are not dialects they are distinct languages because they are not similar to the point of being mutually intelligible and mutually intelligible would mean that people should be able to understand each other while having a conversation while speaking their respective ways of speaking and their differences so according to this definition we all speak languages but more precisely dialects of languages even Standard English is a dialect of English it does not mean that because it is the standard form or the official form that it is superior it is simply the form that people have used have agreed to use as the norm as the standard but where the use of the word dialect becomes questionable in my opinion is when it is used to refer to marginalized or minoritized languages and we see this happening in different countries of the world for example in my home country of France the government has won it since the late 19th century that everybody speaks standard French which in fact is Parisian French um and the bias here is uh that the words dialect and pwa have been used to refer to Regional languages giving them a negative connotation the Prejudice is that if you do not speak standard Parian French what you speak is linguistically inferior it is is only a dialect not a language it cannot express thoughts as advanced and complex as standard par in French and we still find remnants of this ideology today in the 21st century one of my colleagues at this school teaching French with me is from the French island of guad Loop and she shared with me that while growing up her mother did not want to speak to her in guadalupian Creole because it was seen as um inferior and not important so as a result she only learned to speak it with her friends and today she wishes she could speak it better because she sees it as an important part of her identity and where she is from I also remember that when I taught English as a second language at a high school in Oklahoma City Oklahoma I had a lot of students from guala and um Mayan languages are spoken in Guatemala but I remember hearing of students on several occasions saying that Mayan languages are dialects and not languages and my interpretation of what they were saying is that they had internalized the bias assumption that only Spanish the official language of their country could be qualified as a language because it is the language of power economic power political power the most used Language by the institutions the schools the media but the fact that one Lang language holds more Powers than others in a country is the result of History it has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of languages so again there's nothing wrong with the word dialect we all speak dialects of languages uh but we should be careful with the way it is used because historically it has been used to refer to marginalized and minoritized languages and it has pressure people speaking these languages towards shifting towards speaking majority languages so language diversity is important because there is so much human knowledge contained in languages and also people who shift towards speaking uh majority languages often feel a great sense of loss to their identity to their cultural knowledge but because language is so important there are people from these communities who fight back and try to preserve them against all ODS here is an example for the from the famous language learning application du lingual I selected five languages that I think are relevant to this presentation Irish Hawaiian Welsh Scottish gik and a these languages are still spoken by good numbers of people which does not suggest they will disappear anytime soon however they are all relevant to this presentation because they are facing the encouragment of English for example the Hawaiians and Welsh people are known for their incredible efforts to to preserve their languages and their accomplishments but even then there are many Hawaiian and Welsh people who do not speak the ancestral languages which is perfectly their choice and to be not interesting let's now look at another part of uh the world the state of Oklahoma in the United States where many indigenous languages are spoken there and as I mentioned earlier I live there for a long time before coming to China so the difference with these communities and these languages there is that they are generally much smaller in size than the five languages I mentioned earlier so it has been very difficult for the these communities to preserve their languages most of the land that we can see on this map uh was U assigned to these tries as they were REM relocated to op but they later they lost most of this land so uh today 7.22% of the population of Oklahoma is Native American but only 35% of households in Oklahoma report speaking Native American language at home only three tribes can report having speakers in Count Their speakers in the thousands but many of them are very few speakers left if any but because these languages are still very important to them they consider themselves as an important part of their identity people from these communities are engaged in important efforts to try to revive them and I've spoken to a few people from this community who are doing incredible work but the challenges they are facing are tremendous first of all learning a language that has no linguistic connection to the language you grew up speaking requires a tremendous numbers of hours of study and learning which you know if you are a foreigner living in China and our learning manding but additionally these languages have very few speakers and left so it's very complicated to have access to people teaching them and if the remaining speakers are elderly they may not be trained as language teachers or being available to teach the language another difficulty is the scarcity of resources to learn these languages uh if you search some of these languages on YouTube for example you will find some videos and some uh materials but it will be considerably less than what you will sign if you are learning English or French Spanish Russian Mandarin or Arabic the Practical motivation to learn a language also matter if you can learn one of the six official languages of the United Nations that I just mentioned it will probably greatly improve your job opportunities learning a Native American language from Oklahoma might give you a few job opportunities but considerably less and finally people from this communities attempting to relearn their marginalized ancestral languages are facing the burden that the survival of these languages depend on them as a comparison if you are a foreigner learning mine in China you have nothing to lose people are not expecting you to be able to speak it and if you give up in your attempts the language will certainly continue to live without you so language diversity matters it matters to preserve the cultural diversity of our of our world including knowledge about the environment and how to care for the environment if you are convinced that language diversity matters like me you might want to support it by learning more about it you could for example learn about the history of the language history of the country where you live or the country where you are from you could also learn about the language policy of the country where you live or the country where you are from and think about the extent to which these policies help to preserve or not language diversity if you like learning languages you might consider learning a lesser known language the next time you start learning a new one and if you consider that a marginalized language is part of your identity but you do not speak it you might want to look into the inspiring stories of people who have successfully reclaimed and relearned them to thank you everyone