Wednesday 5 April 2023 9:54am
Preserving a language is crucial because it’s not just language, but the preservation of a culture as well, says PhD candidate Eleanor Scoon.
Scoon is completing her PhD in the English and Linguistics Department.
She will travel to Peru in the not too distant future to record Awajún people telling their stories, to help preserve their indigenous language.
“Language encodes a unique cultural world view. So, when a language is lost, it’s not just the speakers who are at a great loss, the world is impoverished because of that.”
Language is a human invention, which takes effort, intellectual activity, and ingenuity to create over generations, she says.
“It’s actually quite incredible: the human capability to do that.”
Scoon’s recordings will be added to an archive which was started by her supervisor.
Previous recordings have been made of predominantly male Awajún speakers, so Scoon hopes to record stories told by women.
“Traditional storytelling is a term that I use quite often, which is just like a significant way of expressing knowledge and culture through oral tradition.”
The stories are examples of socially appropriate behaviours, ecological and spiritual knowledge and the reinforcement of gender and social roles in society.
“The stories I look at consist of mythological accounts told in such a way that makes them relevant to the audience.“
Speakers are the ones best placed to preserve their language, and they do this by speaking their language to their children, and their children’s children. Society needs to encourage this, she says.
If there hasn’t been a strong period of transmission of language, it stops being a natural learning process for children.
“That’s when education becomes really important.”
Linguists can play a crucial role in helping preserve a language because of their “deep understanding” of language, their ability to develop educational material, as well as being able to document and archive information.
“We need linguists because there’s always a danger of nuance being lost in translation,” she says.
Focusing on cultures that got less attention than some in the Western world, where a lot of money and effort can be put into preserving culture was important, Scoon says.
She noted examples of lots of money going towards the repair of Notre Dame Cathedral after it caught fire in 2019, compared with a fire that gutted the National Museum of Brazil around the same time that received considerably less media coverage, and subsequently fewer monetary donations.
-Kōrero by internal communications adviser, Koren Allpress