{"id":107,"date":"2018-06-27T18:22:49","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T01:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/?p=107"},"modified":"2022-09-26T13:00:44","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T20:00:44","slug":"fighting-linguistic-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/2018\/06\/27\/fighting-linguistic-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Linguistic Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you browse a university\u2019s language courses, you\u2019re bound to find \u201cChinese\u201d somewhere on their list. And while they may not specify this upfront, \u201cChinese\u201d generally refers to Mandarin Chinese. What you probably won\u2019t find is Cantonese, which usually refers to the standard Cantonese spoken in cities like Hong Kong by over 60 million people. And what you <\/span>definitely<\/span><\/i> won\u2019t find is Toisanese\u2014my family\u2019s language.<\/span><\/p>\n

Toisanese is a dialect of Cantonese spoken in the greater Toisan area or Sze Yap region of Guangdong, and it\u2019s a dying language. In fact, it\u2019s become a relatable Toisanese thing <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> to know Toisanese. After all, it\u2019s not uncommon for diaspora in America to not know the language of their country of origin. What\u2019s somewhat less common\u2014but still all <\/span>too<\/span><\/i> common\u2014is for these people to be unable to learn their language due to a lack of resources. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tutors and classes for Toisanese are scarce if not nonexistent. There are no Toisanese courses offered at the institutional level through universities. There is one Toisanese-learning app. With so few options, learning the language is much more challenging than it should be. Standard Cantonese, the closest practical option, has far more resources but still remains difficult. Few universities offer Cantonese, so I\u2019d have to have concurrent enrollment at a nearby college to take it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond my own experiences, I also spoke with friends about some of the many other languages that face this problem. Linguistic extinction is a major issue among Indigenous communities due to colonialism, forced assimilation into white culture, and other factors. My friend Sofia of the Comanche Nation said, \u201cWhen I was reading about the language, it said that some elders in the tribe could speak it, but younger people were trying to keep their language alive. There aren\u2019t many resources or ways that I see to really, actually learn most of the language.\u201d It\u2019s been estimated that around one hundred people\u2014less than 1% of the Comanche population\u2014speak the language.<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t just with parents not passing down their language to their kids, or kids just really sucking at their language. It runs deeper than that. The root of linguistic extinction is at the societal level: some languages are valued higher than others.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you ask someone whether you should learn Mandarin or Cantonese, chances are they\u2019ll advise you to choose the former\u2014I\u2019ve asked a lot of people. The reasoning is that Mandarin is more \u201cuseful\u201d because more people speak it. It would help me with business, open new doors, allow me to communicate with more people. Some even cite that it\u2019s a prettier language. Cantonese is less ubiquitous and supposedly less sophisticated, and Toisanese is straight-up considered a lower, obscure \u201cpeasant\u201d dialect. When I asked my Toisanese grandpa about the language, even he unfortunately viewed standard Cantonese as nicer and expressed that I should learn standard Cantonese rather than Toisanese. In Toisan, the language is institutionally undervalued, and schools teach only Mandarin. Outside Toisan, the negative associations are even more powerful. When a language isn\u2019t deemed worth learning, learning and teaching it become an unfortunate challenge.<\/span><\/p>\n

Language, however, isn\u2019t just about usefulness. Language is part of our culture, history, and community. And usefulness also varies with the person: although Mandarin is prevalent in the professional world, I think being able to talk to my grandparents would be pretty useful. And I think communicating with other Toisanese Americans would be pretty useful, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

Linguistic hierarchies therefore only erase the importance of languages like Toisanese and Comanche, contributing to their unfortunate crawl towards extinction. Our society must recognize that all languages are valuable in their own way, are significant to their people, and deserve to be preserved.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you browse a university\u2019s language courses, you\u2019re bound to find \u201cChinese\u201d somewhere on their list. And while they may not specify this upfront, \u201cChinese\u201d generally refers to Mandarin Chinese. What you probably won\u2019t find is Cantonese, which usually refers to the standard Cantonese spoken in cities like Hong Kong by over 60 million people. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceruleanchameleon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}