We speak a dangerous language. Globalization has turned English into a linguistical monster, squashing indigenous languages untiltill the cultural knowledge that is embedded and transmitted through language quietly peters out. It used to be colonialism, now it’s globalization in the form of a rapidly increasing Western influence. And it’s not only English, but also Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Thai to name a few—; national languages are unfailingly the culprits. Of the world’s estimated 6,909 languages, half of these are endangered, and of the endangered, 473 languages are nearly extinct, with only a few elderly speakers still alive.
David Bradley, born in the U.S., educated in London, specialist in Asian minority languages, and now based in Australia, has a personal accent that sounds part English and Australian and part completely foreign. It is the speech of someone who is knowledgeable in English, Burmese, Thai, Chinese, French, Italian and a variety of Asian minority languages including Lahu, Gong, Lisu “and so on” and has written numerous dictionaries and phrasebooks. His guest lecture, “Resilience Linguistics: Revitalizing Indigenous Languages” on April 6th,” highlighted an almost-extinct language, Gong, with only 50 fluent speakers in Thailand, all over the age of 60.
Gong is swiftly breaking down in what Bradley calls the “release phase” of his four-phase system for indigenous languages: growth, conservation, release, and reorganization. Many other languages are also found in this precarious situation of losing their linguistic heritage. Pursuing such needs such as land, health, education, and economic and social progress almost always necessitates an indigenous community to operate in the national language.
Other unique factors have also played into Gong’s endangered status. The ethnic Gong were largely uprooted by the government and resettled from western Thailand to two villages in the more easterly Uthai Thani and Suphanburi provinces. Yet many ethnic Gong in various other villages have been submerged and the language was lost there there. Moreover, in the construction of a Gong writing system, Thai government policies again came into play, as minority scripts must be based on Thai script to be officially recognized. The lack of /g/ in Thai phonology marks a problem of orthography for the /g/ rich Gong phonology. Also, changing verb intonations do not exist in Thai as in Gong, and Gong accent markers are often omitted in the Thai script. The influence that Thai has had on Gong speakers has changed the way that younger speakers now pronounce their language, with a convergence toward Thai phonology.
Bradley created a Gong Thai-based script in 1982, in conjunction with Gong elders and Mahidol University, in Bangkok. But because of the convergence toward Thai phonology, maintaining a maximally traditional phonology within the writing system has become unrealistic. It is this type of bittersweet problem linguists must face as they catalogue indigenous languages. Can they alter a language’s probable path to extinction? Would it be unethical to not to try?
But now we segue back to the idea of “dangerous languages” and add another language to this group, Lisu, a surprising addition since it is an indigenous language that is replacing other indigenous languages. The Lisu are a 1 million-strong ethnic group spread across southwest China, northern parts of Burma and Thailand, and northwest India. Lisu assimilates outsiders easily, often through marriage—; Bradley gave the example of a number of Lisu having Mandarin names due to the intermarriage of Han Chinese men and Lisu women.
The Lisu language may be stable, but there are several aspects of traditional Lisu culture that are currently endangered. Literacy in Lisu is associated with Christianity in many areas, and so Lisu is losing traditional religious oral texts, medical knowledge, and other aspects that are often considered inappropriate by literate Lisu.
But the term “literate Lisu” can be confusing since Lisu live in four countries, use four different national languages in education, and have more than four different writing systems. The Lisu prefer a 1914 script introduced by Protestant missionaries, which accurately represents Lisu phonology but looks somewhat unusual with upside-down and quasi-latin symbols and punctuation marks. Other Lisu orthographies use Chinese, Chinese Pinyin, and Thai scripts.
As a linguist in South Asia, Bradley deals with both thriving and dying languages. What his work comes down to is cultural preservation, whether describing a Gong man basket-weaving, or recording oral Lisu religious stories, giving an ethnic group a living identity even when the traditional language is gone. Globalization has many victims. Languages may not be high on the list when we think of things endangered by modernity. Whether or not we should actively try to save these languages can be debated—but what therse is no question of is that the world will have lost something special when they are gone.
