Saving Endangered Languages: An Interview with Dr.Mandana Seyfeddinipur
Dr.Mandana Seyfeddinipur speaking at a TEDx event in 2015
Dr. Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a professor at the SOAS University of London and Director of the SOAS Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP). Dr.Seyfeddinipur grew up in Mainz, Germany as the daughter of Iranian parents who migrated to Germany as teenagers. Dr.Seyfeddinipur obtained degrees from The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Freie Universität in Berlin, and as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in California. Dr.Seyfeddinipur is dedicated to fighting the process of language endangerment and educating the public on the issue at-large.
I was lucky enough to secure some of Dr.Seyfeddinipur’s time to ask a few questions regarding language endangerment. During the interview, we discuss language endangerment as a whole, field work being done to prevent it, and why it is such an important issue even though it is seldom discussed.
How would you explain language endangerment and the scope of the problem presented by it, to our readers?
What we can observe today is that there is globalization going on and climate change and urbanization, and what that means is the way people live is changing at a really dramatic speed. People move from villages to cities in order to have a better life, to have access to healthcare, to have access to better education and to gain social and economic mobility. These developments lead to people giving up their home language, ensuring that their children speak the majority language of the new place where they live so they have access to better resources and a better life.
The size of the problem is actually quite drastic. We estimate today that there are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, and by the end of this very century, half of these languages will have fallen silent, which means 3,000 languages will be gone. I think it is really important to realize that speakers give up these languages for very good reasons; they want to have a better life, and so it’s a major problem that all these languages aren't all written. Some are only oral, so they’re in the minds of people and they only live through people talking to each other and through parents teaching their children. We are losing the knowledge that is encoded in these languages, the wisdom acquired over centuries is going away without ever being written down, without ever being recorded. It's not just different languages that go, but the knowledge, and cosmologies, and worldviews that they contain
Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, has seen large numbers of Tibetans give up their native language in recent years for the politically dominant Standard Chinese.
How did you first learn about endangered languages? Were you inspired immediately do something about it, or was it an issue you connected to over time?
I did my PhD at the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. This was one of the places where linguists, in the 1990’s came together and realized what was happening in the world. Ken Hale gave some quite important talks, he said, “We are a discipline that is watching ourselves become obsolete, so we need to do something about losing all these languages, and what we’re losing is not only languages, but also our linguistic and our cognitive diversity.”
It’s really an interesting question if you think about it - why are there so many different languages? Why in a small place like Papua New Guinea are there an estimated 800 different languages spoken? You have two villages right next to each other, and they speak completely different languages. How does that evolve and come about? It’s just amazingly interesting, humanity’s diversity. Also, the languages we speak make us perceive and think in different ways about the world. This is going away without us even having a record. If you think about it, millions of people run into the Smithsonian in the US, or into the British Museum in the UK to understand human history. We look at objects that have been taken away from places to understand where we come from, to understand how these people live/lived while creating boats, building these things — but we never hear their voices. A British Empire administrator for instance, who was a traveler, took that vase, or that tube ,or that boat and brought it to the UK, but the people are still there.
Further to this question, Dr.Seyfeddinipur stated…
When I did my PhD, one of my large projects was based on this subject. There were often conversations about how one should document a language, what kind of tools are needed, how to transcribe and translate them. Most of this was taking place there [Max Planck Institute]. It felt as if I was raised with this issue as a student.
What is ELDP and how do you approach combatting the problem?
The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme is a grant-making agency, and we are based on a donation from Arcadia who gave SOAS, our university, £20mil in 2002 to document these endangered languages and at least keep a record of the diversity. We are not engaged in revitalization. We are engaged in the documentation and preservation, so we have a record of these languages that are living.
There are three arms to ELDP. The first is the grant that gives linguists, anthropologists and community members money to be able to go to the places, and get recordings, and to transcribe and translate the languages. From there they put them into our digital archives which are the second arm, ELR. The third arm is the endangered languages academic program. This is a program that allows you to obtain a master’s degree in language documentation here at SOAS. The general approach is documenting the languages, then preserving them in our digital archive which makes them available to the world. This builds capacity because we linguists are just a tiny group of people given the scale of the problem. To achieve this, we have an annual grant round and anyone from around the world can apply to document an endangered language. If they’re successful, we bring them out to London and train them for a week and then give them grants to do a PhD or a post-doc. However, the main component is to conduct field work.
Do you need to speak another language to be able to help?
Well, I’m constantly asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if we all spoke one language? Wouldn’t we then understand each other much better? Then all of these misunderstandings wouldn’t come about.” My first response to that is always, “Are you married?” In marriage, you can speak the same language, but never understand each other. There is so much more to communicating and understanding each other than just the language. Number two response is, “Ok, if we take that premise, what language would we all speak? How would we choose a language that would be a good fit?” Let’s go for Chinese. It’s the biggest language in the world and it’s really cool because it has an alphabet which reads top down, and it is also a tonal language, so it is very interesting to listen to. So why not Chinese? Then of course, the person asking is usually an English speaker who then says, “Ohhh” when they realize how hard it would be for them. I tell them to go home and ask their spouse what they’re having for dinner in Chinese, switch it up. It’s then that they realize that the language you speak can give you a feeling of home. To support us (or our mission), one of the things people can do is become multilinguals; functioning in different languages may allow someone to understand what “home” is for someone from somewhere else.
Most of our readers are from the US, does that affect their ability to help in any way?
This is a country full of immigrants. ELA [Endangered Languages Association located in New York] believes there are 800 languages spoken just in New York within the diaspora communities. There are strong variations between the English that is spoken in the U.S. The Native American languages that are still spoken by a few are almost eradicated and they’re really going away. They are fighting really hard to revitalize their languages, to bring them back, to continue speaking them.
Daryl Baldwin, who received the MacArthur Award, brought back Myaamia and [his work] is fascinating. When he was young he was very interested in his roots and he found a bible and some religious texts written in Myaamia, and he used them. He started speaking the language to his wife and his children at home and he has revitalized a language, a language that was actually dead.
For those of us with a love of linguistics, history or culture, there is a call to action found within language endangerment, and it is our duty to do what we can to protect our human heritage.