Death of a Language

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm

So, apparently, the fact that language which has had exactly one speaker for the last thirty years has now died with that speaker is news worthy of the BBC's full attention.

Cry me a river.

I grew up in Alaska, a state where the languages of the native population die out at an alarmingly predictable rate.

The reason is laughably simple-

English has been made the language of government by State Constitution.

"Big deal," you say.

"After all, latino kids in the Southwest may have to learn English if they want to get ahead in the world, but they can chatter away in Spanish all they want."

Perhaps.

But those kids can get TV from Mexico. They can cross the border, if they want. We, as a nation, have decided that like it or hate it (I love it) Spanish is here to stay. My University had a "Latin-American Cultural Center." We also had an Asian Student Union.

Back home, that simply doesn't happen.

Yu'pik kids in the Yupiit School District speak very poor English. The problem is, they also speak very poor Yu'pik, as their parents, long-since marginalized, let their vocabulary trickle away to practically nothing.

There are no Yu'pik-language television stations. The market is simply too small. There are no Yu'pik language advertisements, because it's a language with no written form, and Yu'pik people form such a small commercial block it's laughable.

And Yu'pik is FAR from being a dead language. It has a population that COULD learn their mother tongue- but more and more, it's being shown as a language that no one wants them to know.

So while intellectuals whine and snivel about the death of the last speaker of a language, we, as a culture, merrily go on setting up conditions to kill off languages we find "inconveient."

Spanish in the United States has a future. There are simply too many Spanish-speakers in this country for their concerns to be ignored. Good for them.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, we're choking off the linguistic heritage of people who were, in fact, born in this country.

One wonders what the BBC will say then.