The death of tongues

The great mime, Marcel Marceau, said that nature is not silent. Silence is something you have to create so he grabbed the chance to make beautiful art out of it his entire life. And we are ever so grateful that he did. “To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. And to mime a fish, you have to throw yourself into the sea.” That was what Marceau said and indeed he was the tempest and the fish, the breathing drama of moving silence made alive and real by his gestures for most of his 84 years. Marceau made us plumb and appreciate the silent undulated version of the human river of talk. With Marceau’s recent passing, I feel that the silences and pauses that are part of human expression, have further deepened.

But as I write this, I am also mindful of mourning the passing of what has been uttered and heard. I am talking about the death of languages, mostly oral. Every two weeks, a language falls by the wayside of history, with no one to remember and utter it ever again. Before they are all extinguished, the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages have embarked on a long-term project around the world to identify and record endangered languages. They interview and record the “last speakers” of the identified languages so that they will not totally be forgotten. Their findings so far, can be found in www.languagehotspots.org. There you will see that the Northern Philippines is among those identified as shedding the ancient tongues of our ancestors. We are about to lose them forever.

Some may ask, why preserve a language when not many people use them any longer? Language is not just about a conglomeration of words and phonetics that could move us along in our daily lives. It is an expression of who we are. Language is how people in a certain place are able to make sense of where they are, of whom they were with, of how they chose to live, love and die. Knowing a language of a certain culture means having a particular chapter on the evolving story of what makes us human. To lose any kind of language means to lose the language of nature as it challenged, inspired, beguiled or enriched human souls everywhere across the breadth of history.

In a complementing program on the loss of languages, the National Geographic Channel has been airing some if not yet all the parts of a series called Light at the Edge of the World by one of its explorers-in-residence, Wade Davis, who is an anthropologist and ethnobotanist. He visits four cultures: the Buddhists at a Nepali Buddhist monastery of Thupten Choling, the Inuits at Nunavut in the Arctic, the Wayfinders in the Polynesian Islands, and the rural high-altitude Andean cultures. These are cultures whose languages are intricately tied to their environment and because of the changes brought about by the imposition or dominance of an overwhelming culture or environmental phenomenon like climate change, their languages, their identities — beyond the rituals of bells and feathers — are also vanishing. The memory of how a people carved out their own humanity is lost and forgotten. For the Nepali Buddhist monks, the challenge is preserving Tibetan Buddhist thought after fleeing Tibet in the 50s. For the Inuits, with fast-melting ice brought about by climate change, how do you keep alive a treasure chest of words for “snow” and “ice”? For the Polynesian Wayfinders, how do you hold on to a fading map kept and passed only through gestures and utterances — a map you know has kept your people from getting lost as they navigated the seas? For the Andean rural cultures, how do they preserve a way of life intricately tied to the powerful geography of mountains that has so far effectively melded pre-Catholic practices and Catholic doctrine?

I was struck by how Wade Davis defined culture. He said it was “our way of finding meaning in a universe that may have none.” I like that because it implies that there is no one meaning to be imposed on us all. Thus, a very essential feature of our humanity is the diversity of cultures — the many different ways we find meaning in our lives, wherever and whenever we live. If we allowed ourselves to learn more about other languages, then we would learn so much more about how other people find meaning in their lives. If we do, we may begin to think that the better human is the one who would sit humbly at the table of another and respect the meaning that others have cultivated in their lives. We would acknowledge the vast range of nature’s revelations to different people and just pocket our own agenda for sharing what we thought was the better agenda for meaning (some even go as far as to say theirs is the ONLY agenda). The missionary zeal of some groups, religious or political, to suppress other cultures to conform to their version of the “divine plan” or “policy” are responsible for these vanishing languages and cultures. In this light, maybe to become better humans means to be less of missionaries of any one set of agenda for living, for meaning. Maybe the lesson here is that our humanity allows for not just one set of meaning but a layered mosaic of all the accumulated languages and meaning we humans have built up over the course of human history.

Technology could also be responsible for the vanishing of languages. Instead of a verse lyrically crafted to woo or simply delight, various emoticons or ringtones take their place. If we allowed current technology to wholly define and dictate our humanity, we would all be uniformly defined by preset polyphonic ringtones or pre-drawn emoticons. I do not know about you but I automatically escape from anything that could define me with one or two strokes of a command.

The National Geographic Society says there are 7,000 languages being spoken today and half of those are in danger of disappearing. If we allow them to go silent forever, we are saying that how humans before us have lived, loved and died, in various places around this one planet that holds us all, is of no consequence to how we now live, love and die. It is as if to say that cultures we are not familiar with are only peripheral to the ”larger” culture which most of us are part of — this overwhelming culture whose language of deep humanity is now often drowned out in emoticons and ringtones. If so, I think that is a most impoverished sense of our humanity — reason enough for a certain sadness. And an even deeper sadness because there will be no more Marcel Marceau to trail our passing.

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