Problems that endangered languages face

I hate the dictionary. And I hate literacy for what it has done for endangered languages.

These may seem like wildly erratic and unfounded statements. Let me assure you they are not. If you are so inclined, search the authors Grenoble and Whaley, and you will find a most damning article that explains efficiently and with strong evidence how the campaign for literacy damaged many Siberian languages.

I have a direct example from our language sessions with Baba Anya. Baba Anya grew up speaking Evenki, indeed she didn't speak Russian until she went to school. So there is no doubting that Evenki is her first language. Baba Anya, still speaks Evenki with people sometimes, but it is by no means part of her every day life. Her native language has fallen to a certain level of disuse in her own life. 

There are many reasons why people lose their language, but monolingualism is a big one. Monolingualism is the belief that people only speak one language as a rule, and really only need one language. Therefore if a language does not fulfill every need in life, then it is redundant. Multilingualism on the other hand says that people have needs for different languages in their lives, each language fulfilling different functions.

I have attempted to elicit from Baba Anya the various colours in Evenki. From our previous work with Katya, we know that there are five colours, plus black and white. (Although as previously mentioned, we failed to record those colours.) Baba has struggled to remember the colours. (I could guarantee you she has known them in her life.) As soon as she forgets something she wants to look in the picture dictionary. She wants to look up the "official" word.

I have multiple problems with this. There are three main dialect groupings in Evenki, made up of a total of 51 sub dialects. In Evenkiya there is a major dialect boundary between the northern and southern dialect groupings. This is not to mention that there is still variation even within the southern group. I am most interested in what a speaker knows, not least as it is possible to pin point where the speaker comes from and adjust language use accordingly. 

So when Baba Anya wants to go to the dictionary, she could easily garner a word that is not from her linguistic experience. In fact I have some evidence of this. She did remember three of the colours, and they varied from the dictionary. If the dictionary did not exist, I have no doubt that she would recall the words at some point. The dictionary, creates a false sense of security that words are some how safely stored there, in the mean time preventing the speaker from trying to recall them.

Secondly, I know that the development of the alphabet for Evenki is incorrect. I won't bore you with the linguistic details here except to say that Soviet linguists were cut off from the rest of the scientific world back in the 1930s, modern linguistics was no more than 40 years old at the time anyway. They were in a hurry for ideological reasons to put Siberian languages into writing. This was done with little consultation with native speakers. Their decisions were heavily influenced by Russian phonology. Therefore when a speaker reads a word they do not know, say a colour from a different dialect, it is very easy to pronounce that word in ways which are influenced by Russian phonology due to an alphabet incapable of representing the sounds involved.

These factors mean that even now a dictionary is not encouraging people to speak their language. It has had no influence in young people taking up the language. This I believe was surely one of its major goals.

A language is something that is lived and breathed. Unless that breath is passed on to the next generation, it will die out, no matter how many books it is stored in.