"Killer languages" strengthen their grip

Pessimists believe 90% of the currently extant tongues could disappear from the world map in the next 100 years

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By Kirsikka Moring in Tallinn
     
      Professor János Pusztay of the University of Szombathely in Hungary tossed a fizzing firecracker into the midst of the 4th World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples, held last week in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
      Pusztay claimed that the number of speakers of Finno-Ugric and Uralic languages will halve by 2093, if not before before then.
      The Hungarian scholar believes that the Ob-Ugrian mother-tongues of the indigenous Khanty and Mansi peoples, scattered across of the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia, along the Ob River and its tributaries, will be the first to go under. He predicts these languages will die out completely in the next few decades.
      Pusztay charges that the ethnic policies pursued by the Russian Federation are consciously geared to wiping out linguistic diversity.
     
Then again, on the global scale, the development is even more dramatic. According to statistics prepared by UNESCO, a few percent of the world’s more than 6,000 languages die out each year.
      In 50 to 100 years from now, perhaps only be 10-20% of the languages now spoken will still be in existence.
     
National indigenous minorities are being reduced to folklore curiosities, and national languages will in Pusztay’s view become increasingly “kitchen languages”, without any scope for communication in the realms of high culture or science.
      Pusztay goes on to assert that the international basic rights associated with using one’s native language, such as the right to go to school and read and write in one’s mother-tongue, or the right to media in the native language, are being threatened by the Russian Federation’s increasingly strong leaning towards linguistic and national harmonisation.
      In the republics that make up the Federation there are laws in effect concerning a second official language, but in practice these are not observed in a single case.
     
“Quite the opposite is true”, asserts Pusztay. For example in the Mari El Republic, located to the east of Nizhny-Novgorod (formerly known as Gor’kiy), the Finno-Ugric Mari language was turned into a voluntary subject in schools, with disastrous consequences. The few weekly lessons in the local tongue were placed at the bottom of the pile in the curriculum.
      There have been several initiatives to start “total immersion” language groups in the Finno-Ugric and related languages found across Russia, but thus far not one group is in existence.
      “The worst thing is that the ethnic nihilism has also spread among the intelligentsia in these national minorities.”
      Prof. Pusztay says that it is increasingly difficult to uphold the linguistic and other rights of minorities in Russia, because the administrative reforms enacted in the spring of this year sharply reduced the number of ministries. The Environment desk was one to lose its cabinet status, and another was Nationalities Policy, the ministry that dealt with ethnic policy issues.
      The Nationalities Policy Minister Vladimir Zorin lost his portfolio, and right now it is hard to find the right address for matters relating to language problems.
      This fact has also been noted by the Council of Europe’s Secretariat of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM), says Antti Korkeakivi, who works for the Secretariat in Strasbourg. He notes that when the FCNM report on Russia was completed and follow-up work should have got under way, Zorin’s ministry had vanished.
      In fairness to the Russians, Korkeakivi points out that as far as Finno-Ugric languages are concerned, matters are in no better shape in Sweden, in the Tornio River Valley, or among the people of Finnish origin living in Northern Norway.
     
Late in 2002, the Russian Duma passed an amendment to the Law on the Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation. This came into effect in March of this year and mandates that the Cyrillic alphabet should serve as the basis for the written languages of all peoples in the Federation. The use of any other alphabet would require approval by a special federal law.
      Anatoli Grigoriev, a delegate from the Karelian Republic, asked whether the Karelian language could even exist in such a climate.
     
There has been resistance: the State Council of Tatarstan has appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court to review the new language law, arguing that republics have the constitutional right to adopt their own state languages. The case will be heard in October.
      As Seppo Kuusisto of the Tuglas Society for Finno-Estonian Cultural Relationships observed drily in Tallinn, the speakers of the small languages would have some hope if Europe’s linguistic minorities were nurtured and protected with as strict directives as are applied to endangered species of flora and fauna.
      Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a Finnish linguistics researcher at the University of Roskilde in Denmark, describes the world’s major tongues as “killer languages”, which act like carnivorous plants or natural killer cells and are laying waste the world’s linguistic variety at an ever-faster rate.
      She sees the deaths of languages in this way as directly comparable to the impoverishment of the planet’s biodiversity as plant and animal species become extinct.
     
Russia has been mentioned extensively here, for obvious reasons - it is the home for so many of the Finno-Ugric languages. However, the Russian language-map pales alongside a country like Papua New Guinea, which boasts more than 850 spoken languages. There are around 230 languages in Europe, but they represent only around 3% of the world’s total, while Africa can claim 30% and Asia 32%.
      According to optimistic forecasts, roughly 50% of the world’s current languages will still be being spoken by 2100, while the most pessimistic prediction is that 90% of the world’s languages will be history by then.
      The most toxic “killer language” is the one you are reading now: English, the language of new technology. For example, statistics of web pages record that more than 68% are in English.
      Skutnabb-Kangas speaks of language murders in the same breath as language deaths. Her remedy against the impoverishment of the dots on the linguistic map is clear. Bilingual rights offer a lifeline to small languages if their position can be guaranteed alongside the mainstream language.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 21.8.2004
     
Translator’s Note: Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, a group comprising more than 20 languages spoken by over 20 million people in communities from Norway to Siberia and down as far as the Carpathians in the south. The largest members of the family are Finnish and Hungarian. Finnish is not an Indo-European language, and contrary to the popular expectation, it has few similarities with any of the Scandinavian languages, including the country’s second national language, Swedish.
      A second misconception is that Hungarians and Finns understand one another fluently. The two languages are indisputably related, but that is as far as it goes. Even the far more closely-linked pairing of Finnish and Estonian presents problems to the untrained ear. A comprehensive overview of the language family can be found from the Virtual Finland site linked below.


Links:
  The Origin of Finnish and related languages (Virtual Finland)
  A map of the distribution of Uralic languages (Virtual Finland)
  4th World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples

KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi