Waxhaw Resident David Frank Speaks on Misunderstood and Endangered Creole Languages at National Museum of Language
The Gullah Language is Addressed
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Arthur Lightbody
JAARS Media Relations Officer
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — March 26, 2007 — David Frank, of Waxhaw, N.C., addressed a Symposium on Endangered Languages along with other panelists on March 25. Frank is a linguistics consultant with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and a creole language expert. The symposium was presented by the National Museum of Language in the College Park City Hall Council Chambers in College Park, Maryland. Frank’s topic was entitled “Creole Languages as Misunderstood and Endangered Languages.”
In response to a “Frequently asked Question” (FAQ) on the SIL web site (www.sil.org), SIL’s Michael Cahill, Ph.D, says: “Of the more than 6,900 languages in the world, half may be in danger of disappearing in the next several decades.
Frank, who has a Ph.D in linguistics, served as a consultant with the Sea Island (Gullah) Translation Team that completed the Gullah New Testament in November of 2005. David and Lynn Frank joined the Gullah translation team in 2002—having previously helped translate the New Testament into St. Lucian Creole—and guided the Gullah translation team through to the final editing of the entire New Testament.
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the descendants of West African slaves brought to America from the late 1600s until the mid 1800s to work on rice plantations along the sea coast in South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida. The Gullah language is derived from an older form of English and West African language forms.
Frank noted in his symposium presentation that creole languages are mother tongues that arise out of pidgin languages, which in turn are formed when mother-tongue speakers of different languages have to come up with a way of communicating with each other. This was the case with Gullah and St. Lucian Creole. He pointed out that “A remarkable feature of creole languages is that they tend to have certain identifiable characteristics regardless of where, and what language mix, they developed out of.”
Frank said, “One significant thing about creole languages is that they have arisen out of a context of colonial expansion and domination,” and, that “a typical starting point for many of the world’s creole language is the context of slavery.”
He pointed out that creole languages have two particular handicaps among languages in general, both of which contribute to their being misunderstood and endangered. One problem is a problem of historicity.
Other languages are based on older forms going back generations and even millennia, whereas creole languages have a definite starting point.
The other is a problem of “indeterminacy” which Frank says involves a continuum on how much of the European language is borrowed in the creole languages. When it absorbs more of that European language, the creole language might become a dialect of that language, and then eventually no longer be considered a separate language.
So Frank asked, “What can be done, if we don’t want to see these languages die out? Documenting the language is part of the answer, illustrating that the grammar of the creole is not the same as the majority language that creole languages are compared with, and working with mother tongue speakers to produce dictionaries.”
Frank closed his talk by telling the audience what Lucilla Edwards, a St. Lucian Creole speaker said, “As a teacher, I see the Creole language spoken and read with understanding, and I see that is the most beautiful thing I can ever see in this life.”
The three hour Symposium on Endangered Languages on Sunday afternoon also featured panelists Michael Horlick, linguist at the Language Research Center, who gave an overview of endangered languages; Gregory Nedved, National Security Agency, who presented an award-winning video cartoon in Mi’kmaq, the language of a First Nations People in Nova Scotia, Canada; Douglas H. Whalen, Ph.D, of the National Science Foundation, who spoke on “Loss of Languages in the Americas”; and R. David Zorc, Ph.D., program manager at the Language Research Center, McNeil Technologies, whose topic was “Loss of Languages in Australia, Africa and Oceania.”
Background Information
Michael Cahill, SIL’s international linguistics coordinator and chairman of the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation in 2003, says in response to the FAQ on the SIL website: “Why care about endangered languages?” that, there are many causes for language endangerment, among them “warfare, disease, and parents teaching their children a dominant language for economic reasons.”
Size of the population still speaking the language is certainly a significant factor in considering a language endangered, but it is not the only factor.
Cahill says, “SIL has worked in languages of fewer than 100 speakers. At the time, those languages looked like they were dying, but today they are thriving.”
SIL cares about languages dying, according to Cahill, “because a people’s identity and culture are intimately tied to their language.” He recounted how when SIL’s first president, Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, asked a Danish linguist why all Danes didn’t give up Danish and switch to English, the man replied, ‘If you lose your language, you’ve lost your moral substance. Your language is... you.’”
Frank’s office is at the JAARS center. JAARS is affiliated with SIL and offers practical logistic support such as office space to SIL personnel focusing on language work. The main focus of JAARS, however, is provision of quality technical services to assist in the language development and translation process. More information on JAARS can be found at www.jaars.org.
SIL International is a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world’s lesser-known languages. This language development involves planned action taken to ensure that a language continues to serve the changing social, cultural, political, economic and spiritual needs and goals of its speakers.
SIL has conducted linguistic analysis in over 1,800 languages spoken by 1.2 billion people. Information on endangered languages written by SIL scholars and links to articles on endangered languages written by non-SIL scholars can be found at www.sil.org.
A complete listing of languages, The Ethnologue, an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages, can also be found on SIL’s site.
The National Museum of Language, according to its web site (www.languagemuseum.org), brings together diverse language circles—academic, governmental, social, business, scientific, literary, technological—and provides a forum through which they can communicate effectively, focusing attention on language as it relates to all aspects of life, human development and human history.
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