First touching moment in Edinburgh

I created this blog to document my days in Edinburgh, thinking that I would start with an entry about the day before I left for Scotland. There were many things which I could have blogged about since I arrived in this beautiful city on 11th Sept 2010 but things just got held up as I busied myself with the new environment and settling in.

Finally, this short entry is something which I cannot missed. My heart is still wrenching from the effects of the film. I call it "The first intellectual feed of the day." on my facebook.

"When the kids decide to abandon their ancestors' language, the language dies when the kids grow up." - Dr David Harrison


I watched a documentary at an event hosted by the Language Society. It was the best decision of the day. The Linguists was produced in 2007 and premiered in 2008, showcasing Dr K.David Harrison and his colleague Dr Gregory Anderson going around the world to document vanishing languages. Audiences were taken on a journey from Arizona to Siberia, then from Bolivia to India, where stories of some vanishing languages unfolded right before our eyes. It told tales of suppression, shame, struggle, strength and hope in the short span of an hour, serving as a tool of documentation and awareness increase. It brought about reflections to language policies and how people give up their ancestors' languages for supposedly economic reasons or how people were suppressed by their politics oppressors and felt ashamed to speak their language. I nearly cried towards the end of the film.

The audience were very privileged to be able to converse with David Harrison on Skype for half an hour. Intelligent questions were asked and it gave me an insight of how things are in the world of linguistics. Basically, his view is languages hold a lot of knowledge in them and they shape the structure of human knowledge. For eg, we saw in the film that the Kallawaya of Bolivia has hundreds or maybe thousands of words for medicinal plants and floral and fauna species which are not known to the western world and western language yet. It is not just a simple case of language and culture. It is language and knowledge, language and our historic knowledge of mother earth and her civilisations.

Why did I nearly cry? It's been a long while since I was really moved by a film. Perhaps it was because by 2008, 4 of the 9 Chulym speakers ( and they found only 9) they interviewed had died. Perhaps it was because the last speaker of the Chemehuevi language had to speak to himself and his lingual CD because there was no one else left to speak to.

It reminded me of Professor Guo Xi's comment when he spoke at an in-house lecture at SCCL in late August. His field studies in Singapore showed how Singapore's young Chinese speakers have lost a considerable amount of vocabulary in their usage of the language. The takeaway from that studies was, if the parents do not use that vocabulary when speaking to their children, if the society continues to simplify and narrow our choice of vocabulary, then those words which were "obsoleted" by our choice would certainly grow into extinction in that society. I am not even considering about choice of vocabulary. It pains me these days as I observe the choice of language when young parents, who are definitely bilingual by international standards, make decisions which can well push our younger generations to the brink of monolingualism. This might be an overstatement for now. However, considering how those featured in the film had lost their languages over the decades and spoke only adopted languages, it is a future we should really work to prevent.