Unit 9 Enduring Voices

Narrator They’ve been traveling the world, searching for words and ideas at risk
of being lost forever. David Harrison and Greg Anderson—linguists with
the Living Tongues Institute—and photographer Chris Rainier of the
National Geographic Society were recently in northern Australia, where
they interviewed a man who may be the last speaker of his language.

Man That’s like “my father”.

Greg Anderson My father.

Narrator There are seven thousand known languages in the world, but more than
half of these languages are expected to die out in the coming decades.
And when a language disappears, so does valuable information. That’s
why Harrison, Anderson, and Rainier helped create National
Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project.

Chris Rainier Every two weeks around the planet, a language disappears. Completely
disappears forever and ever. So what we’re doing with the Enduring
Voices Project is really kind of trying to bring awareness to this whole
issue of language loss around the planet.

Narrator After Australia, the team continues the search for disappearing
languages. This time, they are in the extreme northeast of India, a remote
area bordering Bhutan, Myanmar, and China. It's considered a language
“hot spot”—a region with great linguistic diversity and great risk of
linguistic extinction.

Most of these local languages have never been written down. Many of
them have never been recorded. This time, the researchers hope to
collect more information on them than ever before.

The team arrives in a large village called Hong. After speaking to several
villagers, it seems that the local Apatani language is widely spoken
among the older generation. But the survival of a language, like many
aspects of culture, depends on young people.

David Harrison It’s very easy in these communities to find young people who are
speaking English and Hindi and not speaking the traditional languages.
They are neglecting them, they’re perhaps even abandoning them.

Narrator The team meets a young man named Vijay who speaks English and
Apatani. Vijay invites them into his home. Here, with the help from
 Indian scholar Dr. Ganesh Murmu, the researchers record the basics of
the local language.

Dr. Murmu How do you count one, two, three…

Narrator Each member of the family contributes some more valuable words. In
addition to conducting their own research, the team trains local people to
use special language technology kits. Each kit contains a laptop
computer, digital video and still cameras, and basic digital recorders.
The goal is to help communities document the last speakers of old
languages, using new technologies. Apatani is a good example of the
issue of language extinction.

David Harrison Not only are these languages very small, with just a few thousand
speakers in some cases, but their numbers may be decreasing as people
shift over to global languages.

Narrator The Enduring Voices team must leave Hong. But they leave behind the
technology kits so that the community can continue to preserve this vital
part of their heritage.

They hope the kits will help inspire younger people to take an interest in
the words of their elders, perhaps encouraging them to keep a language
alive by speaking it themselves. But no matter what happens, the
recordings they make will ensure that, even if the last speakers of a
native language die, we will still be able to hear them.