"Is it worth saving and what are we actually saving?"

The couple sitting at my kitchen table yesterday were telling me about their attempts to save and revive one of this country's indigenous languages. There are less than ten speakers of it but someone has the idea that it is "worth saving". 

It was another visitor who asked the question. He comes from an area where around a hundred people speak another indigenous language. It is the language of his parents and his grandparents and he sees it as a dying language. "Ours is full of white words now. You can't live without them."

He is right and that is a problem. Indigenous languages did not have the words for many of the most ordinary things - ordinary from our perspective. There was no need for words like "shirt" or "socks" or, more recently, "car" or "television". Those things, and hundreds of others, simply did not exist. 

Close to where I live there is an indigenous language which around fifty people claim to speak. It is the language of the "plains" people - or so we are told. The reality is that nobody speaks it as their first language any more and those who do claim to speak it are not fluent or even speaking the language used when white settlers arrived. It simply does not exist any more. The idea that is has been "saved" is simply wrong. Even if it did exist in the original form it would be of very little use now because the ideas and the words people need to express those ideas do not exist in that language. Forty or more different words for direction are not much use in an urban area where most people cannot tell north from west or south from east but do know the name of the road they are standing on. 

I know I have said elsewhere in this blog that if we lose a language we lose a way of thinking, of viewing the world, of understanding it. To me that is important but there is also a need to be realistic. We are not going to save every language. Saving them might even do harm. It would be good to think that all children could be fully educated in their mother tongue but the reality is that this cannot be done. If we try to do that we may actually be doing harm because it can limit learning. The teaching of maths and science involves not just words but concepts that do not exist in all languages. The teaching of language should be accompanied by rich and varied resources and a plentiful amount of them. English has that. A language spoken by just a handful of people cannot compete with that. 

Those who claim their young students have a greater chance of success if taught in their indigenous language need to look more closely at what they are really basing those claims on. They need to acknowledge what is actually being taught and how it is taught. They need to look at long term results, not short term achievements relating to school attendance.

Yes, we are losing languages and ideas about the world which, given endless funding, would be worth keeping. The reality however is that funds are limited and we do not have the right to deny the next generation the opportunity to succeed because of language barriers.