I read a BBC article a while back about the last two speakers of a dialect of Zoque living in a small village in Mexico. Or, rather, they were the last two speakers.
No one in the village knows why the two have 'drifted apart' and cannot point to any single dispute that may have triggered what appears to be a mutual decision. It seems they simply decided they don't have anything and common and are not talking to each other, as old men in small towns are wont to do occasionally.
I'll spare everyone the familiar rant about endangered languages, however important that may be. Personally, I'm curious as to what this anecdote can tell us about language death.
When has a language disappeared from the human dialog? Is it when the native intuitions of its last speakers are extinguished? Or when its unique cadence is no longer heard on the street? Or in the home? Despite the volumes (nay, libraries) of written Latin, dusty grammars of Old Turkic dialects and the waxy recordings of vanished Native American languages- most everyone agrees that these languages are indeed dead. You cannot ask a philological tome its opinion of a new word, nor will any new sentences in these languages be added to the corpus, unless some archaeologists dig them out of the ground. Perhaps most importantly, these tongues will not continue to change and mutate as they once did.
Language, like a virus, is a thing which can only exist within living beings. Of course, the fact that all these living beings are humans doesn't make our job any easier. The case of the Ayapan Zoque speakers should be a reminder that in a social science the smallest unit of analysis is two people.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment