By Dingyan Zhou
Guillem Belmar Viernes, a doctorate student and a Linguistics instructor at UC Santa Barbara, recently spoke on the importance of preserving indigenous languages.
Guillem Belmar Viernes, who is doing his doctorate in Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara, told a compelling story in his course “Language and Power,” about how language barriers lead to discrimination.
He recounted that when COVID-19 took hold globally in March 2020, Yudha Hidayat, a graduate student of applied linguistics in Australia, was worried about his parents, who live in a village in West Nusa Tenggara (WNT) province, Indonesia. He asked his parents what they were doing to protect themselves during the pandemic, and their answer shocked him: they had no idea what to do. He immediately explained basic health tips and sent money to support them. Hidayat at first could not figure out why the pandemic information was inaccessible to his parents. Although they don’t have cell phones, they do watch a lot of TV.
It turned out the information gap is caused by a language barrier. Hidayat found that most local government websites and social media posts are written in the Indonesian language. But the WNT province is far from the capital and consists of at least three ethnic groups and nine indigenous languages, including Bajo, Javanese, and Melayu. Many residents, including Hidayat’s parents, can’t read the official notices, mainly because they have never learned the official language used by the government.
Guillem Belmar Viernes explained how COVID-19 infographics written in Indonesian exclude people who speak one of the nine indigenous Indonesian languages.
In “Language and Power,” instructor Viernes said the failure to communicate pandemic information is one of the consequences of our failure to preserve indigenous languages. The languages used by the native people in a certain region—such as Bajo in Indonesia, Cherokee in North Carolina, and Shanghainese in Southeast China—are suffering from fewer and fewer speakers and face the threat of extinction. Experts estimate that in the past century alone, more than 400 languages have gone extinct —one language every three months —and that anywhere from 50% to 90% of the world’s remaining languages will be gone by the end of this century.
The result of a language disappearing is that we can never recover the culture that it carries with it, say linguistics scholars. “Culture vanishes along with the language,” said Zhongming Chen, a linguist at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Shanghai’s Hu Opera can only be sung in Shanghainese. If the Shanghainese language dies out, Hu Opera will also die out, and so does the culture and tradition of the city embed in it. But most young people in Shanghai can only speak Mandarin now. The troupe of Hu Opera has to seek players from outside Shanghai now.”
UCSB’s Viernes says more and more people are realizing the problem and are trying to fix it, namely by setting up indigenous courses and departments in universities and colleges. Universities in Hawaii have set up Hawaiian language departments, for example, and this will greatly enhance research on the language and local culture.
On top of teaching is course “Language and Power,” UCSB doctorate student Guillem Belmar Viernes makes illustration books and videos to help promote and preserve indigenous languages.
As well, people are starting to make podcasts, books, and videos in indigenous languages. Viernes has been working on promoting Mixtec, an indigenous language in Southeast Mexico, by composing illustration books and posting Mixtec language videos on Facebook and Instagram. He believes that what he is doing will make the language known to more young people, and this can certainly slow down the pace of language’s extinction.
“I guess the main interest for doing what I am doing is trying to understand how we can reverse language change, how we can contest language extinction, and how we can help the communities to reclaim their own languages,” Viernes said. “It’s not always an easy situation, but I would say it’s always possible.”
Dingyan Zhou is an international student at UC Santa Barbara who is in her third year of studying Linguistics at Fudan University in Shanghai. She wrote this for her Writing Program class Digital Journalism.