NSF funds UD study of endangered language

Peter Cole, director of the cognitive science program, and Gabriella Hermon, professor of linguistics

4:29 p.m., Jan. 5, 2005--Peter Cole, director of the cognitive science program, and Gabriella Hermon, professor of linguistics, both at the University of Delaware, have received a grant of $185,585 from the National Science Foundation to document and study an endangered language on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Cole and Hermon will work on the project in collaboration with Uri Tadmor, an expert on the languages of Indonesia at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, with the help of Yanti Jotika, an Indonesian doctoral student in linguistics and a native speaker of Jambi Malay, an historically and linguistically important Malay dialect spoken in southeastern Sumatra, Indonesia. The project is expected to take at least three years.

The recent Asian tsunami disaster will not affect the project, but Tadmor has been raising money via donations from the U.S. and from members of the Max Planck Institute in Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and has sent supplies on a chartered plane to Aceh province, north of Sumatra, Hermon said.

“We will interview native speakers of Jambi Malay and record many folk stories and life experiences of people in the villages,” Cole said. “We also will ask them how to say many things in their language. What the native speakers tell us will be recorded and then transcribed, as well as translated to English and Indonesian. The data will be used as the basis for scientific studies of the language, and it also will be used to create books in Jambi Malay recording their cultural heritage.”

Jambi Malay is especially important because, unlike standard Malay and Indonesian, it developed naturally from parent to child, generation to generation, without the artificial intervention of schools and government, Cole said. Jambi Malay is spoken in the area where Malay first developed so it represents the direct continuation of early varieties of Malay, but the traditional forms of the language spoken in the villages are being wiped out by the spread of an urban version spoken in Jambi City.

Hermon said that, as a side effect of globalization, a great majority of the languages spoken around the globe today are about to vanish. There are about 6,500 known living languages, and population figures are available for slightly more than 6,000 of them. About 52 percent of those languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 persons, and 28 percent are spoken by fewer than 1,000.

“At the other end of the scale, 10 major languages, each spoken by over 109 million people, are the mother tongues of almost half of the world's population,” Hermon said. “Most linguists agree that half of the world's languages are endangered and many fear that most of them will disappear by the end of this century”.

“As each language dies, scientific study in the areas of linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology loses one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure and vocabulary,” she said. “It is a sad fact that traditional Jambi Malay will cease to exist within a short time. The purpose of the project is to describe the language fully before that happens.”

Cole said the loss of language is evident in the U.S. when children of immigrants refuse to learn their parents' language.

“Later in life they often regret it,” Cole said. “How many Italian-Americans here at UD know Italian? Many feel sorry about that because it means that they are losing the inherited culture of their family. Think of how much more is lost when people lose their language without ever leaving their own country. Sometimes the older generation speaks only the group's original language, the younger adults speak both the new language and the old language, and the kids only speak the new language. Imagine what it is like not to be able to speak to your grandchildren. All the knowledge from generations and generations can be lost.”

Sometimes it is possible to turn back the tide and save a language, Cole said. Linguists can help with that by assisting native speakers in preparing books and other material to make the native language more prestigious and valued by speakers, especially by the younger generation, he said.

“Many times, though, it is too late and the language cannot be saved,” he said. “In those cases, the linguist can only help to record and describe the language in detail so that people can know what their language was like.”

Cole has lived in Peru and Ecuador studying Quechua, a family of languages spoken by the descendants of the Inca population in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. He also lived in Israel for four years and studied Chinese and Malay/Indonesian as well as other languages of Indonesia while living in Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia.

Before he joined UD in 1988, Cole taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 17 years. Many of his research projects have received support from the National Science Foundation, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where he conducts research every year.

Hermon received her bachelor’s degree in English literature and linguistics from Tel-Aviv University in Israel and received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation was based on nine months of fieldwork in Peru, studying Ancash Quechua. She published a book on Quechua in 1982.

Hermon, who is married to Cole, previously taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the National University of Singapore. She has been a faculty member in UD’s Department of Linguistics and in the School of Education since 1988.

Article by Martin Mbugua
Photo by Kevin Quinlan

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