Bringing a language back to life
ALinguists estimate that a language falls silent somewhere in the world every few months, usually when its last fluent speakers die and their grandchildren have grown up speaking a more dominant language. The causes are rarely a single event. Schooling in a national language, migration to cities for work and the spread of broadcast media all make it more useful, and sometimes more prestigious, for young people to switch.
BRevitalisation projects attempt to reverse this process. Among the best known are ‘language nests’, early-childhood centres in which elders speak only the endangered language to very young children. The approach was pioneered in New Zealand in the early 1980s and has since been adapted by communities from Hawaii to Scandinavia. Its logic is simple: children acquire languages most easily before school age, and a nest creates an environment in which the language is the normal means of communication rather than a school subject.
CSuccess depends on what happens after the nest. Children who move on to schools that teach only in the dominant language often stop using the heritage language within a few years. Communities that have built immersion schools, in which most subjects are taught in the heritage language, report far better results, although such schools are expensive and depend on a supply of teachers who are both fluent and qualified.
DTechnology now offers additional tools. Recordings of elders, online dictionaries and messaging apps with local-language keyboards can help, particularly for young people living far from their community. But researchers stress that apps cannot replace the everyday use of a language in families. As one project leader put it, a language survives not because it is recorded but because it is spoken at the dinner table.