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Associated Press, February 6, 2004 Joann Loviglio PHILADELPHIA — It is estimated that half the 6,800 human languages spoken worldwide could be extinct within 100 years, and a Swarthmore College linguist's work documenting endangered tongues led him to one that was largely unknown to the outside world. K. David Harrison spent two weeks in the summer in central Siberia in search of a language that he wasn't sure still existed. The last words of Middle Chulym might have been uttered long before, but there was no way to know without finding the small hunter-gatherer community last visited by scientists more than 30 years earlier and whose language was never documented. A two-person camera crew accompanied Harrison and fellow researcher Gregory Anderson on their trek into deep Siberia, where they found the Middle Chulym living in a half-dozen villages that are interspersed among a larger Russian population, Harrison said. They were living in much the same way as their ancestors have for centuries, but their ancestral language is dying. "Of the 426 members of the community, our best estimate was that only 35 to 40 are fluent speakers of the language and the youngest fluent speaker we found was 52 years old," Harrison said. Harrison, who will present his findings on the Middle Chulym at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting on Feb. 15 in Seattle, stresses that he hasn't "discovered" a "new" language. It may be new to science but it has lived and breathed for centuries. Harrison's work with the Middle Chulym will appear in an upcoming PBS documentary "Vanishing Voices." "We're also heading to the Southwest, where indigenous people are trying to save their own languages here in the States as well," said filmmaker Seth Kramer at Ironbound Films Inc., who traveled to Siberia with Harrison. "There are parallels between the Native American community and the Chulym community ... losing their autonomy and losing their language." The Middle Chulym language echoes their way of life, with an abundance of words related to hunting and fishing, plants and flowers, weather and family relations. But for many reasons, most have made Russian their sole spoken language. As the Russian empire spread east in the 16th and 17th centuries, tribes along their path were subjugated. In Soviet times, they had to join collective farms and abandon traditions; they weren't educated in their native tongue; they weren't recognized as a distinct ethnic group; and their language was incorrectly lumped with others. Social, political and economic pressures led many Middle Chulym to conclude that their ancestral language was inferior — even embarrassing. It is now considered a "moribund" language, meaning children no longer speak it and it likely will become extinct. Middle Chulym also wasn't a written language. However, the community's 52-year-old speaker created a writing system he used for two years in a hunting journal — the first and only book ever written in the language. He destroyed the journal after being ridiculed by fellow villagers, but he recreated the script for Harrison. "It was stunning," Harrison said. The writing system was "so clever, so perfect" that Harrison is producing a grammar of the language and plans to return to Siberia next year to develop a children's storybook with the Middle Chulym — as a source of community pride and as a way of documenting the language for posterity before it vanishes. "There is a catastrophic decline in the number and diversity of languages spoken in the world," Harrison said. "Every time we lose a language without documenting it, it leaves a huge gap in our understanding of the complex structures the human mind is capable of producing." Ethnologue.org has more information on Chulym, as does UNESCO Red Book entry.
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