Spare me the fear of the possible extinction of the snail darter. There are more important threats facing mankind. Tribal extinction is one of them.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story on tribal languages.
. . . by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today's 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and "real," while those that are only spoken--that is, all but a couple hundred of them today--can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something "a language." Consider that Yiddish is often described as a "dying" language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it--just not writing it much--every day in the U.S. and Israel.
It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.
In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn't fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.
What the story did not say is this: with the extinction of the language, the culture goes with it. We're not just talking about the extinction of something like 5,500 languages. We are talking about the extinction of 5,500 tribal cultures.
A SOLUTION
Christians are not generally recognized as being the best in any field. It's unfortunate, but this is reality. Christian education is third rate, and the vast majority of people are not trained in Christian schools. So, academically speaking, the Christian world has been playing catch-up since the late 19th century. This is happening all over the world.
But there is an exception. As far as I know, there is only one exception. There is one organization that is universally regarded by experts in the field as the best organization on earth. It is the best organization in history. There is no other organization that is even remotely on a par with it. That organization is the Wycliffe Bible translators.
The Wycliffe organization takes simple people, very often without any advanced formal education, and teaches them how to go into a primitive society, work with the people in such a way that they are willing to cooperate, listen to the language, make an alphabet for the language, and begin preaching. Furthermore, they begin preliminary translations of the New Testament into this language.
No other organization has the motivation to do this. No other organization has developed the training to make skilled linguists out of average people. No other organization has the opportunity to train people who have the same degree of commitment to the years that it takes to go into a primitive society and do this work. So, there is no other organization like it.
Wycliffe Bible translators go into Indonesia and do translation work with tribes. The Indonesian government is officially Muslim. Why would the Indonesian government allow Wycliffe to send missionaries into these tribal areas? It does this for a very simple reason: it cannot send bureaucrats in to supervise the tribes, because the tribes don't have an alphabet. They are illiterate. The bureaucrats who are sent in find it almost impossible to gain control over the tribes, or even monitor the tribes, because nobody in the tribe can do the paperwork. The bureaucrats have to have paperwork.
Muslim linguists in the universities also don't know how to speak these languages. Even if they do, they don't have grammar books, dictionaries, and even a written alphabet for these tribal languages. So, they recommend that the government invite Wycliffe missionaries into these tribal areas, on this basis: the translators provide grammars, dictionaries, and an alphabet for these tribes, and then they send these materials to the linguists in the state universities. It's a quid pro quo arrangement, and the politicians in Indonesia go along with it.
Let us return to those 6,000 tribal languages. The old people in the villages will not train their grandchildren to speak these languages, and whole segments of the social order will disappear, along with the languages.
If I were a senior official with Wycliffe, I would recommend focusing the organization's efforts on providing digital translation programs. If they want to get the maximum bang from their donated bucks, they should concentrate on the technology of translation. This is moving at a rapid rate. Microsoft will have a program by the end of this year that will enable people who use Skype to talk with other people in major European languages. The program will translate the spoken word in real time.
Once this technology is available, we can be certain that Google is going to imitate it and offer it for free. Once Google imitates it, it will be possible for the people at Wycliffe to begin to concentrate on making these programs work with obscure tribal languages. It is simply a matter of organization. It is a matter of economic resources.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN A SMART PHONE
What will soon be possible is for the basics of Western civilization to be transferred to tribal cultures within two generations. Much of this culture is going to be negative. Pornography is cheap. But technology is going to enable those aspects of Western society that are online to become available to these cultures before their languages die off. When the languages are gone, the cultures are gone. They're going to go, one way or the other. They are either going to die or else they're going to adapt rapidly to Western culture.
Translation software is going to enable tribal cultures to move into the 21st century with more of their institutions intact. They're going to have to change at the margin, but that is preferable to dying off at the margin. The digital revolution is moving so fast that I think it will be possible to enable these cultures to make the transition without completely abandoning the existing local social orders. Their children are going to change, one way or the other. They are probably going to move out of tribal societies and into great urban areas, where depersonalization is universal. This ends the old culture in one generation.
What linguists in Muslim universities in Indonesia recognize should also be recognized by everybody else. Nobody except Wycliffe missionaries is going to do the grunt work necessary to create dictionaries and grammars for these tribal societies. There is a race against time. These societies are literally dying out. If somebody doesn't get in there and make dictionaries and grammars, and then work with translation software to open these societies to the West by way of the Internet, then these societies are simply going to die off. There will be few traces of them in 2115. The children will go to the cities, and their children will have no recollection of any aspect of these tribal societies.
The technology is here. Anyway, it is almost here. It is going to be here within five years. The only way to train linguists and motivate them to go into the field to do the grunt work that is required, is to persuade them that it is part of an evangelistic effort. Wycliffe is the only organization that does this effectively. I really hope Wycliffe will pursue this, because the clock is ticking on these cultures.
Are they worth saving? Do they offer anything to the rest of us? Yes. No culture survives if it offers nothing of value.
Consider how societies treat old people.
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