We have no names for what we cannot see. The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis holds that language shapes the way we think about reality; thought is shaped by the language one speaks. There are some debates about how strict the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis should be interpreted, with some believing that language shapes thought in a strict sense, and others believing that language shapes thought in a looser sense. In the strict sense, a person who didn’t know any language well, would not be able to think well, while the looser sense holds that a person without a strong grasp of language can think but may not be able to express those thoughts in a complex or intelligible manner.
If this is true, the death of a language represents not only the death of a culture, but also the death of a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world. One of the moments in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World that stuck with me was the scene where Herzog interviews a linguist who studies dying languages. At the end of the interview, Herzog notes: “It is the sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.”
National Geographic reports that every two weeks, a language dies. One third of all the languages in the world have fewer than one thousand remaining speakers.
When a language dies, culture dies. And when language is preserved, culture is likewise preserved. We don’t often talk about the collateral damage that follows from the death of a language. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her stunning collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom and the Teachings of Plants explores the various losses that accumulate when we lose touch with indigenous wisdom—the loss of language being among the most tragic.
“Learning the Grammar of Animacy” is one of the most beautiful and fascinating essays in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer explains that her native language is Bodewadmimwin, or Potawatomi. Before contact, there were 350 indigenous languages in the Americas. But now, many of these languages are threatened.
Just a few generations ago, indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in missionary boarding schools where they were taught English and punished for speaking their native languages and practicing the old ways. Of the many crimes committed against indigenous societies by missionaries, I think this was probably the greatest. As if the removal of people from their land wasn’t enough, the missionaries wanted wholesale annihilation—they wanted to erase languages, culture, religion, art, and a way of being in the world.
How many fluent speakers of Potawatomi exist?
Nine.
What is lost when a language dies?
Wisdom. Jokes. Medicine. Stories. Art. An understanding of the world that can only be captured by fluency.
Kimmerer describes her experience of taking a language class with the last speakers of her family’s ancient language. During the class, a native speaker becomes animated as he tells a joke. Kimmerer explains that in Potawatomi, “a small slip of the tongue can convert ‘We need more firewood’ to ‘take off your clothes.’” The anecdote struck me, not just for its humor, but for how much it revealed about the life of the speakers. I found myself imagining the dying embers of a fire from a party that had maybe lingered well into the night. A man turns to a woman, and asks for more firewood…or did he?
In English, words are divided into verbs and nouns, with nouns making up the majority of English words. “Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent.” In English, something is either a person, place, or thing. In Potawatomi, verbs and nouns are either animate or inanimate. What is unique about Potawatomi is that things traditionally seen as inanimate in English are seen as having life or having being in Potawatomi.
What does it mean to imbue life into things? What does it mean to imbue life into the natural world in this way?
“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word.” In English, natural things are represented as objects, while in Potawatomi, natural things are beings.
About English speakers, Kimmerer explains, “When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’”
Moral responsibility can be built into the language and its speakers. If birds are whos and not its we may be more inclined to treat birds better. If water is perceived as a being, as having a life outside our sinks and toilet bowls, we might be more inclined to think about where our water has come from and where it goes once it passes over our skin or through our bodies.
The death of indigenous languages is the death of a way of thinking about the world, a way of thinking that is incredibly crucial given the global emergency of climate change. In order to survive, our society will need more than band-aids, more than technology. We will need to rethink our relationship to the world.
Are these languages doomed to die? There is one case study that offers hope—that helps us understand what can happen when people come together to save a language from extinction.
One year after I was born, in 1985, there were only 32 children in Hawai’i who spoke native Hawaiian. According to NPR, in the 1970s, there were only about 2000 people alive who had spoken Hawaiian since birth. In 1896, after the overthrow of the monarchy in Hawai’i, Hawaiian was no longer taught in schools and in fact, was banned, according to the University of Hawai’i Foundation. It only takes one generation to lose a language, but it takes three generations to recover a language.
During the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, there was a movement to reclaim the language. In the 1980s, Hawaiian immersion schools were created. Now 2000 students are served by these programs. The University of Hawai’i now offers a bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. programs in Hawaiian languages.
Do I hear people speaking Hawaiian in public places in Honolulu, where I now live? No. But I do hear Hawaiian words used in place of English. My boyfriend and I are trying to learn the Hawaiian names for common things. Duolingo includes Hawaiian as one of the languages you can learn in the app. Given that Hawaiian words are often used in everyday conversation in Hawai’i, I found myself pleased to take a few of the early lessons without having to look up unfamiliar words.
Kimmerer believes that to understand a place, you need to speak its language. Kimmerer talks of elders who tell her that the plants and animals love to hear the old languages spoken.
I can say that my life has indeed been enriched by understanding that nalu is the word for wave. That kai is the sea. And honu is sea turtle.
And yet, Hawaiian remains an endangered language.
Werner Herzog drew a distinction between tree huggers and those who embraced the speakers of a dying language. Perhaps we don’t need a distinction. What if by embracing the speakers of a dying language, and their way of being, we could rebuild our relationship to the world?
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.