Uvatiarru

Half of the world speaks one of only 20 languages as a native tongue. With the dominance of English in the digital realm, we're on track to even more language concentration.

I have always thought of language diversity as important for transmitting unique ways of viewing the world. For example, Canadian Inuit use the same word for "past" and "future": uvatiarru. This raises many interesting philosophical questions. (I learned that it the book New Slow City (2014) by William Powers.) But after reading the piece "A Loss for Words" by Judith Thurman in the March 30th issue of the New Yorker, I began to think of language diversity as a rights issue.

Thurman discusses forced assimilation of First Nation and native American school children - depriving them of the possibility to learn in their native languages - as a violation of rights. This was widespread practice in the U.S. and Canada, even after Mohawk Indians built Manhattan's skyscrapers, and the Navajo language - impossible for the Germans to decode - helped to decide the outcome of the Second World War.

There are 800 endangered languages in the world according to Thurman  - and NYC has a higher concentration of them than any other place in the world. What can we do to right past wrongs?

Thurman tells an inspiring story of Keyuk, a young man who taught himself Selk'nam, the language of his mother's ancestors, of which there were no know speakers. (He used recordings by anthropologist Anne Chapman from 40 years ago and written records - mainly translations of scripture - from missionaries.) Once he mastered the language, he found an elderly woman in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America who understood him and in fact did know Selk'nam, but had deactivated her knowledge of it. A few days after their encounter, she passed away, as if she had been waiting for that final, authentic connection to her past.

Uvatiarru. The past is the future.