I have long described myself as the only Jewish girl ever to be resurrected. Four times, in fact. Back in high school, my father and I had a screaming fight each summer when he would insist that I take another year of Latin. Each year, I yelled back, “Over my dead body!” My father won the argument every time, promising that I’d thank him some day.
Latin was a dead language, as dead as dead can be (as the rhyme ends: First, it killed the Romans. And now it’s killing me.) I figured it still existed for only two reasons: as the language of the Catholic mass, where it sounded quite resonant, and to drive me crazy. I was also aware of some other dead or dying languages such as classical Greek and Yiddish, the language of my grandparents, which my parents spoke when they didn’t want me to understand the conversation. And then there was Hebrew, revived in Israel, a small country far from us of which I knew little.
Don Kulick was much more curious and open-minded than the younger I. As a graduate student in anthropology in the mid-1980s, he travelled to Gapun, “a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in a swamp in the middle of a tropical rainforest” in the Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea. According to Kulick, Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world: “In an area the size of the state of California, and with just over eight million people, there are almost one thousand separate languages … not just separate dialects or variants … many of them spoken by groups of five hundred people or fewer.” The language of Gapun was Tayap which “for all we know … may be as old as Greek, Chinese, or Latin. But the coming decades will see Tayap die: currently, the language has fewer than fifty active speakers.” Over the next 30 years, Kulick, a professor of anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden, would return to Gapun several times to live among its people and study the changes in its culture and the complicated reasons for the decline of its language.
Most of us are aware of the consequences of the extinction of animals, insects, and plant life. Fewer realize that more than 6,000 endangered languages are expected to die out within the next century. According to Kulick, more than 96% of the world’s population now exclusively speaks major languages such as Mandarin Chinese and English, and as speakers of the remaining 4% of languages die off, their offspring often switch to a major one.
Kulick cautions against comparing the death of a language to the extinction of a species, emphasizing that language-death is a social phenomenon, not a natural one. The contemporary death of languages like Tayap is a result of commercial colonialism, which leads to an inevitable and irreversible loss of cultural continuity and diversity:
“Like a gigantic, implacable bulldozer, the twentieth century caused the life out of everything that people in Gapun — and almost everywhere else in Papua New Guinea — had ever believed or accomplished … villagers have been exploited, deceived, lied to, humiliated, cheated, and robbed by practically every outside person, entity, or organization with whom they have had contact. They haven’t just been passive pawns in this process — they have actively and enthusiastically sought those contacts, and they have wanted to change.”
As a result, the villagers have “effectively reached back retroactively and erased much of their collective life. It has left them bereft of their culture, ignorant of their traditions, impaired in their ability to control violence — and it will ultimately render them speechless in their ancestral tongue.” Indeed, he warns, “soon all that will be heard of Tayap ever again are the recordings that I have made over the years.”
This is a point worth reiterating: in spite of the continual exploitation of their homeland by outsiders, the residents of Gapun remain enthusiastic about the perceived advantages of modernity that are eradicating their language and culture. Although “all young people in the village over age eighteen have some active competence in the vernacular, and some of them have excellent active competence … they never use it.” They are, in fact, routinely discouraged from speaking their native language. Instead, “fluent speakers of Tayap … criticize them whenever they try to do so. The minute those older speakers hear a stumbled pronunciation or a wrong word, they pounce.” Kulick identifies the “social and cultural factors [that] make it unnecessary or undesirable” for younger people to speak the language as “the associations that the Tayap language has come to take on in the village: connotations of infantile stubborn willfulness, feminine hotheadness, and the old, heathen ways of the ancestors.”
As Kulick notes, “The very idea of language death is misguided. A language never just dies; it isn’t here one minute and gone the next. Instead, languages dissolve, they waste away.” This observation made me think of the death of Yiddish among the American-born children of my parents’ generation. For example, although my father was born in the United States, his first language was Yiddish. As his generation was encouraged to assimilate into “normative” American society, the language became something of an embarrassment, a remnant of a cultural and ethnic past. And it was also a source of humor; think of all the comedians whose shtick included Yiddish expressions, words that simultaneously created and mocked an in-group. Similarly, Kulick describes a speech by a young man named Debid who “stood up drunkenly in the men’s house and began speaking in solemn Tayap …The young men sitting around Debid started to giggle … [and] responded to Debid’s speech with whoops of laughter … Debid played Tayap for laughs. And everyone laughed.” Jackie Mason and Mel Brooks would understand.
Scholars will appreciate Kulick’s book, but the author has intentionally addressed it to the lay reader. Its tone is candid, his perspective often personal. He spent a great deal of time with children, allowing him to peer directly into how language is taught. He gives us a feel for Tayap itself. Although he was welcomed as a visitor, his presence could create tension at times; at one point, word spreads through the community that Kulick has been hiding a pile of money in his hut (seen here), which leads to a the shooting of a villager by thieves as they fled the village having failed to rob Kulick. Perhaps one notable weakness of the book is its lack of maps that would position both Papua New Guinea and the village of Gapun in the minds of the general reader, and photographs that might help us better understand the organization and complexity of village life. Kulick does present an overview of the historical and current political life of Papua New Guinea. Unschooled in anthropology, I was fascinated by new provocative views of the “imperious hubris” of an earlier generation of anthropologists, including the iconic Margaret Mead, and questions about the legitimacy of an outsider reporting on the lives and culture of a group of people to which s/he does not belong.
A Death in the Rainforest made me appreciate the work of anthropologists like Don Kulick, whose persistence will help us record — if not restore — dying languages. In spite of the negative impact of modernity on the survival of linguistic diversity, our latest recording technologies will help ensure that records of these tongues are maintained. Perhaps in the future men and women will work to revive Tayap, much as Aaron Lansky of the Yiddish Book Center and others have worked to revive the study of Yiddish.
We lose a living language at our peril. Eventually, I understood that my father was right about the value of studying Latin, as he was about so many things. But I did draw the line about his recommendation that I study classical Greek in college.
[Published by Algonquin Books on June 18, 2019, 288 pages, $26.95 hardcover]