Having spent so many precious childhood hours struggling to learn Latin and Afrikaans, with shamefully pathetic results, it has taken me many years to appreciate the cultural heritage and importance of language.
Rare Tongues underlines this point, and provides a valuable and diverse insight into a vast array of languages — some spoken, others whistled — and even some that use smoke signals or signing to communicate.
As the author explains: “Rare Tongues is a journey through some of the more esoteric languages of our planet and what they can tell us about ourselves and our more familiar languages…. A few of them are under threat, their continued existence in question, because of creeping linguistic homogeneity, moving like a silencing killer across our landscapes, rendering words unspoken and forgotten.”
Lorna Gibb suggests that every language is unique and has something important to tell us about the world in which we live. She suggests that language plays a role in defining and enriching society, in enabling diverse communities to share knowledge and histories.
She goes even further, however, suggesting that some of the knowledge encoded within language may assist in combating climate change.
“While our environment can shape language, those same words often carry information about the land and all that live in it. The loss of a language, therefore, can mean the disappearance of unique ecological knowledge. By revitalising and promoting a multitude of tongues, linguistic activists are preventing rich and important knowledge about our world from being lost forever,” she argues.
She gives the example of Hawaii. “For Hawaiians, vocabulary is not just a set of labels but a bridge to their ancestral understanding of the ecosystem. In addition to tangible objects, words and phrases in Hawaiian can describe subtle natural phenomena, seasonal cycles, and even what Hawaiians perceive to be sacred connections between land and sea…. Losing an ecologically significant language is far more than a loss of vocabulary: it’s a severing of an age-old bond between a community and its natural habitat, a disconnection from a wellspring of ecological knowledge.”
Starting with ancient Greek and Latin, Gibb covers a geographically and linguistically diverse landscape — including a rare tongue, called !Xóõ, which is used by the indigenous people of Southern Africa.
Gibb writes that this Khoisan language is believed to have the most phonemes (distinct sounds) of any language in the world, “a staggering 112 different sounds that can be used to contrast the meaning of words”.
“The name of the language itself includes the symbol for an alveolar click, the very first symbol /!/, which sounds a bit like a cork being pulled from a bottle, while the /X/ that follows it is the sound you hear at the end of the word ‘loch’ when it is pronounced by a Scottish person.”
The Khoisan languages are believed to be among the oldest language groups in Southern Africa, with roots dating back thousands of years. Gibb says they were once widely spoken across Southern Africa, “including [in] present-day Namibia, Botswana, Angola, SA, and parts of Zimbabwe.
“But colonisation and numerous attempts to destroy indigenous culture and language have meant that this is no longer the case. In SA, the story of Khoikhoi is still one blighted by the lingering effects of colonisation, and a language that was once spoken by thousands has just a handful of speakers left in the Northern Cape.”
Gibb suggests that deliberate efforts to eradicate a language are also a way of destroying a culture, and she notes that linguistic genocide is regarded by the UN, with physical and cultural genocide, as a crime against humanity.
“From the suppression of the indigenous languages of Australia and North America, Kurdish in Turkey, and Ainu in Japan, forbidding a language, or restricting it, is a means of retaining control. Enforced homogeneity enables unification and domination; diversity is the enemy of dictators. In a monolingual country, you always know what someone is saying about you.”
Spin a globe and insert a pin where it stops, and you are likely to land on a territory where there are languages under threat or dying.
For instance, Gibb refers to Australia, where about 93% of the Aboriginal languages are extinct or soon will be.
She further notes that “while Australia may be dubbed the linguicide capital of the world, Unesco reports that India now has the highest number of endangered languages in the world. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, some of these languages are the official tongues of the states they are spoken in.”
Gibb notes that not all languages are spoken, and she writes of the Great Plains Indian Sign Language of North America, which is sometimes referred to as Plains Sign Talk (PST).
Then there is the whistling language of Gomera in the Canary Islands, known as El Silbo, “which has been used on Gomera since the 15th century, but which was beginning to fall into decline.
“Whistled languages are much less common now; those that survive have far fewer speakers than even just 50 years ago. Yet, it remains a global phenomenon; there are still people who whistle to share complex messages in Ethiopia, just as there are in China, Brazil, the Himalayas, and Europe.”
The Amazon forests contain one of the world’s highest levels of language diversity, and the area also has one of the greatest numbers of whistled languages.
Rare Tongues gives an important insight into the value of language as a marker of culture and identity.
In Europe, strong separatist languages include Sicilian, Corsican, and Catalan, “the language of a region with a strong sense of identity and a history of striving for political autonomy”.
“These languages … carry the weight of entire communities who have fought for their preservation and legitimacy.”
She further argues that the resurgence in New Zealand of Maori — the indigenous language of the Maori people — is a testament to the resilience of an indigenous culture that is successfully finding a place in a modern society.
While this book became challenging at times, with detailed and complex discussion of some languages, it was still a worthwhile read, making a convincing case for the value of a world with great diversity of language — and respect for that diversity.
As Gibb concludes: “The preservation of linguistic variety is intrinsically linked to the continued existence of human diversity, but it requires effort and awareness.”
While I will never be able to claim linguistic talent, it is good to know that there are people such as Gibb who do have the ability to learn, speak and help to stem the decline of so many of these rare tongues.
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