The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (71 page)

If you now at last agree that linguistic diversity isn’t harmful and might even be good, what can be done to slow the present trend of dwindling linguistic diversity? Are we helpless in the face of the seemingly overwhelming forces tending to eradicate all but a few big languages from the modern world?

No, we’re not helpless. First, professional linguists themselves could do a lot more than most of them are now doing. The great majority of linguists assign low priority to the study of vanishing languages. Only recently have more linguists been calling attention to our impending loss. It’s ironic that so many linguists have remained uninvolved at a time when languages, the subject of their discipline, are disappearing. Governments and society could train and support more linguists to study and tape-record the last speakers of dying languages, so as to preserve the option that surviving members of the population can revive the language even after the last aged speaker dies—as happened with the Cornish language in Britain, and as may now be happening with the Eyak language in Alaska. A notable success story of language revival is the modern reestablishment of Hebrew as a vernacular language, now spoken by 5,000,000 people.

Second, governments can support minority languages by policies and by allotting money. Examples include the support that the Dutch govern
ment gives to the Frisian language (spoken by about 5% of the Netherlands’ population), and that the New Zealand government gives to the Maori language (spoken by under 2% of New Zealand’s population). After two centuries of opposing Native American languages, the U.S. government in 1990 passed an act to encourage their use, and then allocated a small amount of money (about $2,000,000 per year) to Native American language studies. As that number illustrates, though, governmental support for endangered languages has a long way to go. The money that the U.S. government spends to preserve endangered animal and plant species dwarfs its expenditures to preserve endangered languages, and the money spent on one bird species alone (the California condor) exceeds that spent on all of our 100-plus endangered Native American languages combined. As a passionate ornithologist, I’m all in favor of spending money for condors, and I wouldn’t want to see money transferred from condor programs to Eyak language programs. Instead, I mention this comparison to illustrate what seems to me a gross inconsistency in our priorities. If we value endangered birds, why don’t we assign at least as much value to endangered languages, whose importance one might think would be easier for us humans to understand?

Third, there’s a lot that minority speakers themselves can do to promote their languages, as the Welsh, Quebec French, and various Native American groups have been doing recently with some success. They are the living custodians of their language—the people in by far the best position to pass the language on to their children and to other members of the group, and to lobby their government for support.

But such minority efforts will continue to face an uphill struggle if strongly opposed by the majority, as has happened all too often. Those of us majority-speakers and our governmental representatives who don’t choose actively to promote minority languages can at least remain neutral and avoid crushing them. Our motives for doing so include ultimately selfish motives as well as the interests of minority groups themselves: to pass on a rich and strong world, rather than a drastically impoverished and chronically sapped world, to our children.

Non-communicable diseases
Our salt intake
Salt and blood pressure
Causes of hypertension
Dietary sources of salt
Diabetes
Types of diabetes
Genes, environment, and diabetes
Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders
Diabetes in India
Benefits of genes for diabetes
Why is diabetes low in Europeans?
The future of non-communicable diseases

When I began working in Papua New Guinea in 1964, the vast majority of New Guineans still lived largely traditional lifestyles in their villages, growing their own food and consuming a low-salt, low-sugar diet. The dietary staples in the Highlands were root crops (sweet potato, taro, and yams) providing about 90% of Highlanders’ caloric intake, while the lowland staple was starch grains from the heart of sago palm trees. People with some cash bought small quantities of trade store foods as luxury items: crackers, tinned fish, and a little salt and sugar.

Among the many things that impressed me about New Guineans was their physical condition: lean, muscular, physically active, all of them resembling slim Western bodybuilders. When not carrying loads, they ran along steep mountain trails at a trot, and when carrying heavy loads they walked all day at my own unencumbered walking pace. I recall a small woman who appeared to weigh no more than 100 pounds, carrying a 70-pound rice bag resting on her back and suspended by a strap around her forehead, up boulder-strewn river beds and mountains. During those early years in New Guinea I never saw a single obese or even overweight New Guinean.

New Guinea hospital records, and medical examinations of New Guineans by physicians, confirmed this appearance of good health—at least in
part. The non-communicable diseases that kill most First World citizens today—diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases in general, and cancers—were rare or unknown among traditional New Guineans living in rural areas. The absence of those diseases wasn’t just because of a short average lifespan: they still didn’t appear even among those New Guineans who did live into their 60s, 70s, and 80s. An early-1960s review of 2,000 admissions to the medical ward of the general hospital of Port Moresby (the capital and largest city) detected not a single case of coronary artery disease, and only four cases of hypertension, all four in patients of mixed racial origins rather than unmixed New Guineans.