The View from a Drawbridge

The written and spoken word has always been dear to me. That’s why I got a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies. I wanted to be able to express myself in more than one language and really get into another culture. I wanted to see how communication differed in another tongue. After living in Mexico for a few months I even started dreaming in Spanish, which was very disconcerting because my dreams, by necessity, became quite rudimentary.

I also discovered that body language differs from one culture to the next. I never got used to my Germanic sense of personal space being constantly invaded in Mexico. What I would have interpreted as aggression in America had to be reformulated in my mind. And another thing that I quickly found out was that I’m a different person when I speak Spanish. This was totally unexpected. The Spanish me is more outgoing, bubbly, flirty and confident.

As a society, we also seem to attribute different qualities to people who speak different languages. French sounds romantic. German sounds authoritarian. But did the language develop based on the national trait or vice versa? Hard to say. But I can conclude that languages are the keepers of culture. If a language is lost, a great deal more than just the words will be lost. Much of that culture will die as well. We lose that group’s songs, jokes, poetry…so much disappears. And it’s amazing how quickly it happens, too. For example, in one single generation, my father’s side of the family went from speaking French to speaking English, and because of this, there are cousins that I can no longer communicate with. I also found out that I apparently spoke Danish before I spoke English, because my maternal grandmother used to babysit me. Once she passed away, though, poof! I went right back to English, and didn’t even remember that I spoke anything else.

According to the Endangered Languages Project (http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ ), only half the approximately 7000 languages that are spoken today will still be around by the year 2100. I find this very disheartening. It is up to us to record and preserve as many languages as possible for future generations. If you or someone you know speaks a dying language, go to the Endangered Languages Project to find out what you can do to archive a record of that language before it’s too late.  Like the endangered species of this world, once a language is gone, it’s gone for good.