You should spend about 20 minutes on
Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3
below. Endangered languages "Never mind whales, save the
languages. says Peter Monaghan, graduate of the Australian
National University Worried about the loss of
rainforests and the ozone layer Well, neither of those is doing any worse than
a large majority of the 6,000 to 7,000 languages that remain in use on Earth.
One half of the survivors will almost certainly be gone by 2050, while 40% more
will probably be well on their way out. In their place, almost all humans will
speak one of a handful of megalanguages - Mandarin, English, Spanish. Linguists
know what causes languages to disappear, but less often remarked is what happens
on the way to disappearance: languages’ vocabularies, grammars and expressive
potential all diminish as one language is replaced by another. ’Say a community
goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to speaking a
creole*,’ says Australian Nick Evans, a leading authority on Aboriginal
languages, ’you leave behind a language where there’s very fine vocabulary for
the landscape. All that is gone in a creole. You’ve just got a few words like
’gum tree’ or whatever. As speakers become less able to express the wealth of
knowledge that has filled ancestors’ lives with meaning over millennia, it’s no
wonder that communities tend to become demoralised.’ If the losses are so huge,
why are relatively few linguists combating the situation Australian linguists,
at least, have achieved a great deal in terms of preserving traditional
languages. Australian governments began in the 1970s to support an initiative
that has resulted in good documentation of most of the 130 remaining Aboriginal
languages. In England, another Australian, Peter Austin, has directed one of the
world’s most active efforts to limit language loss, at the University of London.
Austin heads a programme that has trained many documentary linguists in England
as well as in language-loss hotspots such as West Africa and South
America. At linguistics meetings in the US, where the
endangered-language issue has of late been something of a flavour of the month,
there is growing evidence that not all approaches to the preservation of
languages will be particularly helpful. Some linguists are boasting, for
example, of more and more sophisticated means of capturing languages: digital
recording and storage, and internet and mobile phone technologies. But these are
encouraging the ’quick dash’ style of recording trip: fly in, switch on digital
recorder, fly home, download to hard drive, and store gathered material for
future research. That’s not quite what some endangered-language specialists have
been seeking for more than 30 years. Most loud and untiring has been Michael
Krauss, of the University of Alaska. He has often complained that linguists are
playing with non-essentials while most of their raw data is
disappearing. Who is to blame That prominent linguist Noam
Chomsky, say Krauss and many others. Or, more precisely, they blame those
linguists who have been obsessed with his approaches. Linguists who go out into
communities to study, document and describe languages, argue that theoretical
linguists, who draw conclusions about how languages work, have had so much
influence that linguistics has largely ignored the continuing disappearance of
languages. Chomsky, from his post at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, has been the great man of theoretical linguistics for
far longer than he has been known as a political commentator. His landmark work
of 1957 argues that all languages exhibit certain universal grammatical
features, encoded in the human mind. American linguists, in particular, have
focused largely on theoretical concerns ever since, even while doubts have
mounted about Chomsky’s universals. Austin and Co. are in no doubt that because
languages are unique, even if they do tend to have common underlying features,
creating dictionaries and grammars requires prolonged and dedicated work. This
requires that documentary linguists observe not only languages’ structural
subtleties, but also related social, historical and political factors. Such work
calls for persistent funding of field scientists who may sometimes have to
venture into harsh and even hazardous places. Once there, they may face
difficulties such as community suspicion. As Nick Evans says, a community who
speak an endangered language may have reasons to doubt or even oppose efforts to
preserve it. They may have seen support and funding for such work come and go.
They may have given up using the language with their children, believing they
will benefit from speaking a more widely understood one. Plenty
of students continue to be drawn to the intellectual thrill of linguistics field
work. That’s all the more reason to clear away barriers, contend Evans, Austin
and others. The highest barrier, they agree, is that the linguistics
profession’s emphasis on theory gradually wears down the enthusiasm of linguists
who work in communities. Chomsky disagrees. He has recently begun to speak in
support of language preservation. But his linguistic, as opposed to
humanitarian, argument is, let’s say, unsentimental: the loss of a language, he
states, ’is much more of a tragedy for linguists whose interests are mostly
theoretical, like me, than for linguists who focus on describing specific
languages, since it means the permanent loss of the most relevant data for
general theoretical work’. At the moment, few institutions award doctorates for
such work, and that’s the way it should be, he reasons. In linguistics, as in
every other discipline, he believes that good descriptive work requires thorough
theoretical understanding and should also contribute to building new theory. But
that’s precisely what documentation does, objects Evans. The process of
immersion in a language, to extract, analyse and sum it up, deserves a PhD
because it is ’the most demanding intellectual task a linguist can engage
in’. Do the following statements agree with the views of the
writer in Reading Passage 3 In boxes 27-32 on your answer
sheet, write YES
if the statement agrees with the views of the
writer NO
if the statement contradicts the views of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the
writer thinks about this Chomsky’s attitude to disappearing languages is too emotional.