Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages - Hardcover

Abley, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 061823649X ISBN 13: 9780618236497

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2003

Synopsis

Explores the linguistic characteristics and oddities of some of the world's threatened languages--including Max, Mohaw, Yiddish, Boro, and more--and the diverse forces, from pop culture to global politics that threaten to destroy many languages and the cultures that spawned them.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Abley, an award-winning journalist, writes for the Montreal Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. He speaks English, French, and a little Welsh. His previous book, Spoken Here, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Discover magazine. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 for work on language change and the future.

Reviews

There are roughly 6,000 languages in use in the world today, most of them spoken by a tiny number of people-further proof of humanity's ability to generate intoxicating variety. Sadly, the processes of linguistic imperialism may still be as strong as they have ever been; expansion of the major world languages, particularly English, is, according to Abley, likely to bring about the elimination of most of these languages by century's end. Canadian journalist Abley shrewdly frontloads his book with some of the most exotic languages before moving on to better-known cases (which are also considerably less at risk) such as Proven‡al, Yiddish and Welsh. Readers who think they "get" how languages work may be startled by the considerable deviation from Western norms: for instance, Murrinh-Patha, spoken in Australia, boasts a bewilderingly complex system of pronouns; Mi'kmaq, from eastern Canada and Maine, and Boro, a northern Indian tongue, all but eschew nouns. To read these accounts of dwindling languages-and their often forlorn, marginalized speakers-is to gain insight into the powerful colonial forces still in play. Abley's informal approach makes this more a travel book than a language book; while describing the people and places in affecting detail, he sometimes stints in depicting the languages. Abley also sometimes conflates the extinction of a language with that of the people who speak it; however, his contention rings true that the disappearance of these languages represents "a loss beyond estimation." This generous, sorrow-tinged book is an informative and eloquent reminder of a richness that may not exist much longer.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Of the six thousand or so languages that exist today, more than ninety per cent are endangered. Abley has travelled as far afield as arctic Canada and the Timor Sea documenting the survival strategies or last gasps of some of these languages. The state of Israel resurrected Hebrew, albeit at the expense of Yiddish and Ladino. Faroese, a descendant of Old Norse, is a source of pride to the inhabitants of the Faeroe Islands, but the young "see Faroese as embodying the past, Danish the present, and English the future." English, the language of the marketplace, is spoken by more people than any other language in history, and Abley seems resigned to the judgment of Li Yang, who claims "to have taught English to more than twenty million Chinese": "Chinese people don't learn English because they love it, but because Coca-Cola and Microsoft rule the world."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Just as biologists work hard to raise awareness of the drastic consequences of the loss of biodiversity, linguists and ethnographers, most notably Wade Davis, are calling attention to the endangered status of hundreds of languages. Canadian journalist Abley presents a lively, well-informed, and truly illuminating discussion of why languages, each "a full and rich expression of a way of life, a culture, an identity," matter, and how their demise diminishes the sum of human intelligence, the web of culture Wade Davis calls the ethnosphere. Abley reports on a fascinating array of threatened languages, marveling at their syntactical complexities, nuanced vocabularies, and crystallizations of perceptions of reality radically different from those of English speakers. From his explications of the vulnerability of Yuchi in Oklahoma, Manx on the Isle of Man, Boro in northeastern India, Provencal in France, and Yiddish (here Abley's otherwise casual expertise and enlivening exuberance turn distressingly patronizing), Abley both catalogs an urgent state of affairs and celebrates the glory and diversity of language, humanity's "first great achievement." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
Patrick"s Language
An old man watches a milky ocean roll in to the shore. High above the
waterline, two children are skipping barefoot along an otherwise empty
beach, its contours defined and guarded by a pair of mangrove swamps. A
long, low island nudges the western horizon. This could be an afternoon
scene on almost any tropical coast: the heat rising off the sand, a hawk
scouring the sky. In fact, the surf is brushing a remote edge of northern
Australia — remote, that is, except to the old man"s people, the Mati Ke,
who may have lived in the area for tens of thousands of years.
One of the children pauses in her game. Among the fragments of
driftwood and corrugated iron, the rusted fishing traps and crushed plastic
bottles, she has found something different: a shell as long as her forearm.
She looks up from the beach to the few scattered houses in the hamlet of
Kuy. Then she calls to her grandmother, Mona, who is sitting as usual on a
yellow foam mattress. Laid out on a verandah, the mattress gives a view of
the sea.
The child uses her grandmother"s language, Murrinh-Patha. It"s
also her own, and the daily language of a few thousand other people in the
region. Most of its speakers live an hour"s rough ride away, in a town called
Wadeye. The trip is possible only in a four-wheel-drive vehicle down a dirt
trail that slithers inland through the silver-green bush, passing the corpse of a
small airplane and fording the same creek twice before it links up with a
gravel road that ends or begins in town.
Somewhere along that trail, as you skirt the treacherous pools of
deep red sand or disturb a loud gathering of cockatoos, you pass a border.
The border is no less real for its lack of fences, checkpoints, and customs
officers. It marks the ancient division between the Murrinh-Patha land that
includes the town of Wadeye and the Mati Ke land that includes the small
outstation here at Kuy. In Aboriginal Australia, land and language are
intimately related. Traditionally, the continent was de- fined and divided not
only by its hills, creeks, and water holes but also by its hundreds of
languages. Wadeye grew up in the 1930s as a Catholic mission, and the
Mati Ke were one of several peoples who moved off their land and switched
over — out of a mixture of respect, convenience, and necessity — to a daily
use of Murrinh-Patha. They also learned English, so as to comprehend the
noise of authority. At first, nobody realized that the Mati Ke language was
slipping away.
From her home above a calm shore of the Timor Sea, Mona gives
her granddaughter an encouraging shout. Then she turns to her husband,
Patrick Nudjulu, to explain. Unless he is wearing his hearing aid, words are
lost on Patrick. But as the old man of Kuy, he likes to know what"s going
on. Besides, this is his land. Its stories belong to him. Standing there on his
verandah, his beard and flowing hair the color of the snow he has never
seen, his skin as dark as wild grapes, Patrick has the gravitas of a biblical
patriarch — a tall one, with a sly sense of humor. Some days he doesn"t
bother to put on a shirt. But if there"s any chance that strangers might be
present, he always wears long pants and shoes. That way, it won"t be
obvious that one of his legs is false — the aftermath of leprosy in his youth.
A slight film over his eyes betrays the arrival of cataracts. But he can still
see down to the beach; he can dream; he can remember.
"I remember all," he says in English, his fourth or fifth language. "I
was born in my own bush here. Therefore I can"t forget." He sips from a tin
mug of tea that Mona has brewed up on the open fire pit at the far end of
the verandah. "I dream in Mati Ke. See all the past."
And maybe the future, too? "Yeah." The old man is grinning. A few
of his teeth are left. "Old future, and new future."
In his dreams, the fruit of the peanut tree whose seeds are eaten
raw in the wet season is mi warzu. That"s the name of the fruit in Mati Ke.
But if he mentions the dream to Mona, he reverts to her more powerful
language, Murrinh-Patha, and talks about mi kurl. The saltwater prawns that
his grandchildren find among the mangroves are a dhan gi in his own
tongue. But to Mona and the grandchildren, they are ku tha-pulinh. The
delicious goanna lizard that roams the bush all year is a wayelh in Mati Ke.
But to speak of it and make himself understood, Patrick has to call the lizard
ku yagurr.
A wide-eyed boy about a year in age totters over from the
mattress where Mona is sitting. Children no more than five or seven years
old take turns looking after him, hauling him back to his grandmother for
comfort if he falls. Patrick peels a mandarin orange and hands it, chunk by
chunk, to the little boy. Conch shell in hand, the boy"s sister arrives beaming
from the beach. Slumped beside Patrick"s bamboo fishing spear farther along
the verandah, an older grandchild on the brink of adolescence looks on. He
and his mother are visiting from their home in Wadeye. His shirt is army
fatigue; his hair displays streaks of blond dye; his gaze is sullen.
Patrick too spent many years in town. His family began to give up
the bush when he was a boy. Over the decades, he watched Wadeye
evolve from a resting place of hunters and foragers to a sit-down community,
dependent on the welfare subsidies that Australia"s government, possibly
with noble intentions, has chosen to give Aboriginal people. Deprived of the
old habits of life, unable to embrace the new, a host of men and women
forfeited their pride. Patrick did not. Twelve or fifteen years ago, when the
government was promoting the growth of outstations as a way for Aboriginal
people to regain a spirit of independence and self-control, he led his wife
and some of their extended family away from the frustrations of town and
back to his own land, the place he knew by heart. Not that they were
returning to the bark-and-bough shelters of his childhood. The government
built bungalows at Kuy, and erected a small water tower, and hooked up
electricity. Patrick"s house has solar panels in its corrugated roof. One of the
other houses is equipped with a satellite dish, and the children of the
outstation go there to watch TV.
The TV pours a quick, bubbling stream of English into their ears
and minds; but primary school and family life take place in Murrinh-Patha.
Sometimes Patrick speaks to his grandchildren in Mati Ke, and he claims
they understand. Yet whether they grasp more than a few commands, a
familiar phrase or two, is open to doubt. They answer him in Murrinh-Patha:
the language of their parents, their friends, their doting grandmother. Words
in their grandfather"s tongue trip haltingly, if at all, off their lips. What
Patrick Nudjulu hears only in his dreams is another fluent speaker of Mati Ke.
The lone elder, the half-comprehending family, the stealthy
invasion of other languages — this scene is not unique to Kuy, or Australia,
or the Southern Hemisphere. It is happening all over the planet, from the
snow-peaks of the Himalayas to the humid rivers of West Africa and the
shantytowns of great cities in South America. The phenomenon is not new,
for languages have always been in flux; languages have always died. No
one alive today can hold a conversation in Hittite or Nubian. But the sheer
pace of change is unprecedented. On every inhabited continent, languages
keep falling silent. New replacements are rare. Linguists believe that about
six thousand languages still flow into human ears: the exact total is a matter
of debate. By some estimates, a maximum of three thousand are likely to be
heard at the century"s end, and fewer than six hundred of those appear
secure. Within our children"s lifetimes, thousands of human languages
seem fated to dwindle away.
They are vanishing under similar pressures. A few languages of
high prestige — English is the prime but not the sole example — dominate
the media and the marketplace, school systems and bureaucracies.
Almost anywhere you care to go — the Cayman Islands, the Andaman
Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Galápagos Islands — young people are
absorbing the same music and watching the same movies, most of them
from Hollywood. Local cultures, less forceful, less alluring, are swept aside.
At the same time, economic patterns of migration and displacement mean
that fewer and fewer small languages still have a vibrant local base, a spoken
homeland they can call their own. Cities provide new opportunities; they also
blur and erase old identities. A minority language can quickly come to seem
a hobby for the old — a quaint refuge from ambition, knowledge, progress. A
minority language always depends on popular will. It dies as its voices fade in
the midst of Palm Pilots, cell phones, and Walkmans. It dies as its
remaining speakers find they have less and less to talk about.
The price of that loss is beyond estimation. We have grown used
to giving cultural artifacts a dollar figure: so many thousand for a Yeats
manuscript, so many million for a Ming porcelain. But a language is more
than any artifact. You can"t slap a price tag on a language, no matter how
small and obscure, any more than you can pin down the financial value of
an ivory-billed woodpecker or a bill of rights. Mati Ke lacks the ever
burgeoning scientific terminology of English and Japanese, nor does it enjoy
a written literature. But like all other human languages, it is a full and rich
expression of a way of life, a culture, an identity. Whether or not it ever
makes sense to use the term "primitive society," the phrase "primitive
language" is an absurdity.
Mati Ke, for example, arranges all the objects and beings in the
world by means of a system of noun classes. You can"t speak of an object
without also classifying it. There are ten of these classes, and they reveal
an enormous amount about how Patrick Nudjulu understands his daily
experience. A kind of red-flowering tree, for instance, is thawurr
babarlthang — thawurr being the noun class for trees, wooden items, and
long rigid objects. The string made from the inner bark of that tree is
nhanjdji babarlthang. You use nhanjdji in front of a broad range of substances
both manufactured, like the bark string, and natural: the wind, the sand, the
sun. The tree"s edible seeds are mi babarlthang; all vegetable foods are
prefaced by mi. And so on. Weapons go in the same class as lightning.
Places go in the same class as times (Mati Ke, you might say, anticipated
Einstein by several thousand years). Speech and language deserve a
separate noun class of their own. This is how Mati Ke interprets the world.
Murrinh-Patha"s vocabulary is very different from Mati Ke"s, but
the underlying syntax is similar. Its arithmetic stops at the number five. Yet
without counting, a fluent speaker of Murrinh-Patha knows thirty-one
different pronouns and thirty-five verb classes. The grammar and syntax of
Mati Ke and Murrinh-Patha are just as elaborate, just as complex and
intellectually demanding, as the grammar and syntax of any well-known
European tongue. Being widely spoken does not make a language any
better, more intelligent, or more perceptive than a language that has never
spread beyond its birthplace. As the literary critic George Steiner once
observed, "We have no sound basis on which to argue that extinct languages
failed their speakers, that only the most comprehensive or those with the
greatest wealth of grammatical means have endured. On the contrary: a
number of dead languages are among the most obvious splendours of human
intelligence."
In Aboriginal culture, human life and the rest of the natural world
are bound together by a system of totems — a child grows up in the
knowledge that she belongs to the totem of the bush yam, say, or the
female kangaroo. The language reflects and embodies this understanding. In
Mati Ke, nhanjdji marri is the name for the cycad — an ancient plant whose
tall, palmlike fronds are a familiar sight in the northern Australian bush. The
cycad"s seeds, poisonous straight off the plant, can be made into a kind of
flour after prolonged washing; those seeds, being eventually edible, are mi
marri. But a defines the class for animals (and people, if you mean to insult
them). So what are we to make of a marri? That"s the word, it turns out, for
a kind of bush cockroach that inhabits dead cycad fronds. The class for
higher beings — spirits and also people, if you"re referring to them with
respect — is expressed by me. And me marri de.nes those people whose
totems are the cycad and the bush cockroach. Aboriginal languages have
fewer words in them than English does. But those words are held and
balanced in an intricate web of relationships. Lose the vocabulary, and you
lose the relationships too.

Back in town, in a windowless room of the local museum, a ginger-haired,
Queensland-born electrician named Mark Crocombe works part time as
coordinator of the Wadeye Aboriginal Languages Centre. He spends most
of his time on Mati Ke and a few other local languages whose numbers are
severely depleted. High above the bark paintings and black-and-white
photographs on the museum"s walls, a gecko awaits mosquitoes. slayer as
god reads a piece of graffiti inscribed in neat capital letters outside the front
door — TV shows like Buffy having permeated most of the human world.
Once in a while, when his other jobs allow, Mark Crocombe leaves the
office, fetches a camcorder from his house, puts it on the passenger seat of
his beat-up minivan, and drives out to Kuy. His aim is to record Patrick
speaking Mati Ke.
Thanks to their sporadic efforts, Mati Ke will experience a kind of
afterlife: a partial, disembodied future. Elsewhere in Australia and in dozens
of other countries, too, anthropologists, linguists, graduate students, tribal
insiders, and well-meaning outsiders are hastening to record the voices of
elders. Every captured story is a small victory over time. Through the
electronic power of CD-ROMs or the slightly older magic of cassette tapes
and the printed page, students in decades to come will be able to gain a
limited knowledge of a vanished tongue. But a CD-ROM of an extinct
language bears an uneasy resemblance to a stuffed dodo. A museum
specimen, lovingly preserved, can give scientists all sorts of useful
information except, perhaps, what is most essential: how the extinct bird
behaved in the wild. Likewise, languages are social creations, constantly
being tested and renewed in the mouths of their speakers. They require
use, not just study. You can no more restore a vanished language from a
scholarly monograph and a software program than you can restore a
population of cheetahs from a vial of frozen sperm and a National
Geographic film.
Hence the loneliness of Patrick Nudjulu: the gathering silence
behind the old man"s eyes. Speaking to his wife, his children, and his
grandchildren, he employs a language that does not come as naturally to
him as breath. The grandchildren jostle around him on the verandah facing
the milky sea. But occasionally he brushes them aside, looking out on the
water and the powdery beach without saying a word.
The coastal outstation at Kuy was, from my perspective as a
North American, the most remote place I would visit between the years
2000 and 2002. Likewise, Mati Ke and Murrinh-Patha were among the most
distant languages from my own that I would hear: among the most foreign
ways of exercising the mind. Living in Montreal, a city where English, French,
and other languages are in daily contact — usually friendly, sometimes
bitter — I had seen a good many statistics about language loss. But the
statistics told little of the passions and arguments that arise from a
language"s disappearance. And it was the emotions, not the numbers, that I
cared about: the figures of speech, not the figures on a chart. I wasn"t sure I
could imagine what it meant for men and women to feel the language of their
childhood melting away. I wasn"t sure how much sense it made for them to
fight back.
Eventually I embarked on a series of journeys, investigating the
fate of linguistic diversity in places as discrepant as a village in the
Canadian Arctic and an island off the Australian coast, a scrub farm in
Oklahoma and a medieval city in Provence. In a few of these places, minority
languages appear to be settling down into a comfortable oblivion; in others,
the speakers of lesser-used languages are battling, not just to preserve a
language but to strengthen and extend it. The tongues I heard are by no
means a representative sample of the world"s endangered languages —
working without the help of researchers, secretaries, or graduate students, I
did not have the resources to explore countries like Papua New Guinea and
Cameroon, where hundreds of small languages survive. Still, I believe that
the challenges facing hundreds, even thousands of minority languages are
mirrored in these pages.
In Oklahoma, for example, I spent some time among the few
remaining speakers of the Yuchi language. Yuchi is what linguists call an
isolate: it bears a clear relation to no other living tongue. I wanted to
discover what knowledge and understanding may die with Yuchi if it does
indeed disappear. In the south of France, I hoped to see whether Provençal
— one of the great literary languages of Europe — has a future as well as a
past. Meeting speakers of Yiddish in several places would allow me to
investigate the fate of a diaspora language. In Wales, the country where my
parents were born, I was keen to discover how a Celtic language has, against
all odds, remained vibrant beside the homeland of English. And so on.
Wherever I traveled, I tried to listen to the actual speakers of
languages under threat — the loyalists of minority cultures. How do people
who know their language is endangered bear the weight of such knowledge?
I wanted to see how far their defiance could stretch, and how easily
resignation could take hold. I wanted to learn what steps can be taken to
sustain and strengthen a threatened tongue. Above all, I wanted to test my
own hunch that the looming extinction of so many languages marks a
decisive moment in human history — a turning away from vocal diversity in
favor of what optimists see as a global soul and others as a soulless
monoculture. In the end, should anybody care that thousands of languages
are at risk?
That"s the central question I will attempt to answer in this book.
But I have a confession to make. I work as a journalist, poet, and editor; I
am not a professional linguist. Indeed, my knowledge of the entire discipline
of linguistics is patchy and often cursory. These pages do not touch on
constructional homonymity and depth-first parsers; such matters lie beyond
my frame of reference. My defense is one of analogy. You don"t have to be
a theologian to talk of God; you don"t have to be a veterinarian to describe
cats. Besides, this book is not just about threatened languages but about the
people who speak them. I beg the forgiveness of linguists for trespassing on
their territory and perpetrating whatever blunders have found a home in
these pages — and I would gently remind them that their own voices are
unlikely to be heard on the subject unless they speak out in terms that are
lucid, intelligible, and free from jargon.
What will we lose if our abundance of languages shrinks to a
fraction of what now survives? A speaker of English or Chinese might
answer differently from a speaker of Mati Ke. The simplest response,
perhaps, is this: we will lose languages that are astonishingly unlike any
widespread tongue. Languages employ sounds and organize the mental
world in ways that are natural to their speakers but can seem downright weird
to other people. Nootka, one of the languages of Vancouver Island, is a case
in point. As the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once noted, to express the
idea "He invites people to a feast" Nootka requires but a single word:
tl"imshya"isita"itlma. Literally, "Boiling result eating those go to get
somebody." Not quite so literally, "He, or somebody, goes to get eaters of
cooked food." The Nootka would alter their speech — adding hissing noises
or extra consonants for effect — when they were talking to or about
children, fat people, short people, left-handed people, circumcised males,
lame and hunchbacked people, greedy people (also ravens), and people with
eye defects.
Or take Kakardian, also known as Circassian, which arises from
that great hotbed of linguistic diversity, the Caucasus Mountains. It boasts
forty-eight consonants — more than double the number in English — but
two vowels at most. In linguistic circles, a few experts have doubted those
vowels" existence, suggesting that the language has no regular vowels. Can
this be possible? To speak Ubykh, a language that originated in the same
region, you"d need to get your tongue around eighty-one consonants.
Abkhaz, which also belongs to the northwestern slopes of the Caucasus,
had a special "hunting language" spoken by the local nobility on their
journeys into the forests. The verbs would stay the same as in everyday
Abkhaz. But to ensure good luck in finding and killing animals, hunters were
forbidden to call objects by their workaday names. Therefore the hunting
language contained an entirely distinct array of nouns, unknown to Abkhaz
peasants and tradesmen.
Even more remarkable was an Australian language called Damin,
spoken only by initiated men on three small islands in the Gulf of
Carpentaria, due south of New Guinea. The daily language used by most of
those men was called Lardil. After puberty, boys were circumcised (without
anesthetic, of course) and taught Marlda Kangka — a sign language. For a
year, it alone enabled them to communicate with anyone who had attended
their circumcision. Marlda Kangka was more than just a basic code: its
signs allowed a boy to convey information like "Last night I saw my mother"s
brother and father fighting in the bush." The most succulent food around the
islands was the dugong, or sea cow. And Marlda Kangka had separate
signs for "large young female dugong," "small female dugong," "old male
dugong," and so on.
Marlda Kangka was just the beginning. After a year or more,
young men who were brave enough moved on to the second stage of
initiation: penile subincision. (Don"t ask.) The reward for enduring the pain
was a second auxiliary language, Damin. Unlike Marlda Kangka, it was
spoken. But like Marlda Kangka — or Klingon or Elvish — Damin was a
deliberate invention. Its sound system enforced a contrast with the parent
language, Lardil. M, l, r, and a few other Lardil consonants were absent
from Damin, yet Damin speakers employed eleven sounds not found in Lardil.
Four of them were click consonants, otherwise used only in southern and
eastern Africa. That"s not all. Damin also demanded a "bilabial ejective,"
an "ingressive lateral fricative," and a "duplicated bilabial trill" (very roughly,
pr-pr, with a roll for each r) — consonants that are found nowhere else in the
world. Damin had five types of "phonetic initiation" — five ways for the vocal
organs to produce sound — more than any other known language.
Ken Hale, one of the few linguists to study Damin, called it
an "intellectual tour de force," for its structure was as amazing as its sound
system. The language winnowed pronouns down to their essence. For any
set of people including the speaker (that is, for the English
terms "I," "me," "we," and "us"), Damin speakers said n!aa — ! representing
a nasal click. For anyone and everyone else
("you," "they," "them," "he," "she," "him," "her"), Damin speakers said n!uu.
The language"s lexicon was small: just a couple of hundred basic words.
But by ingeniously manipulating those words, initiated men could express
almost anything they needed to say. Suppose a Damin speaker saw a
sandpiper in flight. "Sandpiper" was not in Damin"s lexicon. But the watcher
could evoke the bird by saying ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu: literally, "person-
burning creature." The phrase harks back to a creation story in which
Sandpiper starts a lethal fire — a familiar tale to all speakers of Damin.
Likewise an ax was "honey-affecting wood": a wooden object used to obtain
wild honey. Because it imposed this rigorous, semi-abstract vocabulary on
the familiar syntax of Lardil, Damin could be learned in a few days. Initiated
men would speak it at ceremonial gatherings, but also while searching for
food or just sitting around gossiping. Extreme suffering had brought a gift of
sacred knowledge.
No ritual initiations have been carried out in the Gulf of Carpentaria
for half a century. As a result, Marlda Kangka and Damin are extinct. Their
parent language, Lardil, is endangered. Abkhaz continues to be spoken,
although its hunting language does not. Nootka survives, barely, as does
Kakardian. But the last fluent speaker of Ubykh died in 1992.Multiply this
paragraph a few hundred times over. Such is the fate of our languages.
Mati Ke may never have had more than a thousand speakers. For
millennia, that was enough. Then, under the accumulated pressures facing
Aboriginal people in the late twentieth century, the language collapsed. A
1983 study found it had about thirty fluent speakers left. Now, all evidence
suggests, there are three. And one of the three — an oldtimer living in
Wadeye — might be annoyed to find himself on the list. For Johnny Chula
knows his language not as Mati Ke but as "Magati Ge." Words have a
different ring when he utters them. His dialect is heavier than Patrick"s —
the terms are mostly the same, but they arrive with extra syllables, chunkier
in the mouth. "Johnny"s the only speaker of Magati Ge," Mark Crocombe told
me. "But he"s too old now to work on the language."
Most of the time, whether on the sandy paths of Kuy or in the
streets of some burgeoning city, a language ends with a long sequence of
whimpers. Even if the language has just one fluent speaker, that speaker
will often keep in touch with some younger men or women who know how to
produce a few sentences, or who remember a smattering of words, or who
cherish some traditional songs. So it is with Patrick"s language. Near the
pale waves of the Timor Sea, in lands where Mati Ke and its forerunners
were probably spoken before the foundations of Sumer and Babylon were
dug — and before the great myth of Babel first entered anyone"s mind — not
all knowledge of the language will vanish with his generation; Wadeye has a
few middle-aged people who can stumble a short distance along the trails of
Mati Ke. If the old man speaks with extra care, they can understand some of
what he says.
Aloysius Kungul, one of Patrick"s nephews, knows more than any
of these other partial speakers. "Aloy, he"s learning," Patrick insists. "He"s
learning, bit by bit." But the confidence soon dwindles from his voice. "It"s
difficult. I talk to him real slow." Aloysius is Mati Ke by inheritance: his
totem animals are the masked plover, the mud crab, and the magpie goose,
which distinguish the land around Kuy. Meeting him in Wadeye, I found him
reluctant to say much about Mati Ke. It was his father"s language;
therefore, in Aboriginal society, it became his language too. But his father did
not pass it on. One day when Aloysius was approaching puberty, he
overheard his father speaking Mati Ke. "What"s that language?" he
asked. "It"s ours," his father replied, offhand.
Flash forward a few decades: by Aloysius"s own account, "I can
hear the language, but I don"t speak it, just a bit." He pointed at his own
head, where black hair drooped toward his eyes in unruly bangs. "I got it
there. But it"s the speaking." If he were to spend months with his uncle, the
speaking would come. But Patrick lives at the outstation, and Aloysius in
town. With every succeeding year, his chances of fluency recede.
Which leaves just one other speaker of Mati Ke: an old woman
called Agatha Perdjert. "And she"s not real good at it," in Mark Crocombe"s
frank opinion, "because she left the Mati Ke country when she was fifteen."
More than half a century has elapsed since Agatha married a Murrinh-Patha
man and moved to Wadeye.
The red dirt track between Kuy and Wadeye is rough even in the
dry season; in the wet, it can become impassable. A whole section of road
is liable to vanish beneath the spillover creek. But on occasion Patrick still
makes it into town, riding high in someone else"s juddering machine down
the straight road past the airstrip. In Wadeye, you might think, he could
look up Agatha, so that they"d have a chance to revel in a language now
almost unique to them. Maybe after all these years, Agatha has forgotten
certain words. The salty billy-goat plum that ripens in the rainless months, mi
kulurduk in Murrinh-Patha: what do you call that fruit in Mati Ke? Maybe
Patrick has lost a phrase in a particular song, or Agatha no longer recalls
the name of a headland where she camped as a girl . . .Ah yes, the plumis
mi bakulin, of course.
But this is a fantasy, nothing more. Agatha is Patrick"s sister.
The culture by which they live prohibits a brother and sister from conversing
after puberty. They will never forage for missing words, never share their
memories of childhood; any such conversation would be taboo. They must
not even pronounce each other"s names. When they die, the soul of a
language will die with them.

Copyright © 2003 by Mark Abley. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 061823649X
• ISBN 13: 9780618236497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322