Na'vi ascendant as Cambodia's languages face extinction (Feature)

By Robert Carmichael Jan 12, 2010, 6:04 GMT

Phnom Penh - The world's rich array of languages is shrinking, UNESCO said, with one language becoming extinct every two weeks. By the end of the century, the UN's cultural body said it expected today's 6,700 languages to be halved. With them will go untold cultural diversity.

It is a bleak tale and seemingly unstoppable although not every endangered language is on UNESCO's list. One called Na'vi even has its own listing on Wikipedia, where its 23-page entry covers pronunciation and grammar to frustrate the most talented linguist.

But Na'vi, whose name will be familiar to many moviegoers, is a fiction: It was invented for James Cameron's blockbuster movie Avatar, and even the US language professor who created Na'vi cannot speak it fluently. Technically, that makes Na'vi extinct, although its inventor has high hopes it would catch on.

At the other end of the spectrum is S'aoch, an ethnic minority language spoken in southern Cambodia that experts said predates Na'vi by 6,000 years. S'aoch is at least a working language with 10 fluent speakers.

But there is no Wikipedia page for S'aoch, which is on the verge of extinction. Given that there are people who speak Klingon, a language invented for the Star Trek films, and that Avatar is now the second-highest-grossing movie in history, there is a good chance Na'vi would be spoken long after S'aoch is gone.

Jean-Michel Filippi, a linguistics professor based in Cambodia, is S'aoch's most passionate supporter, having studied the language for 10 years and transcribed more than 4,000 words, which incidentally is four times the vocabulary of the Na'vi language.

He is the first to admit S'aoch has no chance. The village of Samrong Loeu, where the last speakers live, has 110 inhabitants. Just 10 are fluent, but none uses the language. Filippi stressed the lack of speakers is not solely to blame.

'Survival depends on one thing: Does the minority want to protect and save its own culture?' he said.

In the case of S'aoch, the answer is that they do not. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the S'aoch-speaking people were unable to return to their original village, so they ended up in Samrong Loeu with no land and are consequently poor. They see around them Khmer-speaking people with land and relative wealth and, not surprisingly, aspire to be like them.

'When you are put in a position of economic inferiority, you tend to reject your own culture,' Filippi said.

S'aoch is an ancient tongue and is related to minority tongues in India and Malaysia as well as to modern Khmer. It predates the famous temples of Angkor Wat in the country's west and is also one of 19 Cambodian languages UNESCO said are at risk of extinction.

Filippi explained why the number of speakers matters less to a language's survival than one might think. Another endangered language, Somray, which is spoken by a few hundred people in western Cambodia, stands a much better chance because the villagers need the language for prayers used in their animist religious services.

'If the prayers are pronounced badly, then they won't work, so they want their children to learn the language,' he said.

Blaise Kilian, UNESCO's joint programme coordinator in Phnom Penh, said an array of factors conspire to kill languages, the most obvious being too few people fluent in the tongue.

'You also have the environment and the way people themselves, especially the new generation, react to the changing environment and how much they are interested in preserving and transmitting their own language,' Kilian said.

The imminent demise of S'aoch raises the question of what can be done about Cambodia's other endangered languages. Kilian said the outlook is bleak for many.

In the case of S'aoch, the only option is to do what Filippi is doing: write down and record as much of the language as possible while its remaining speakers are alive.

Some of Cambodia's languages are more widely spoken, and steps such as broadcasting radio programmes in minority languages do help - something UNESCO and the government do in the north-eastern provinces of Ratanakkiri and Mondolkiri.

Bilingual education in schools is also important, which is what the international charity Care has done in Cambodia's north-east in conjunction with the Education Ministry. Ron Watt, Care's education adviser, said the 7-year-old programme covers almost 1,900 pupils in 25 schools and incorporates four languages.

Watt said children in first grade use their own language for 80 per cent of classes with the rest undertaken in Khmer, but the proportion of minority language used drops over the following two years and, by the time fourth grade begins, all instruction is in Khmer.

'People with a language-development bent would say this isn't a classic language maintenance model, let alone a language development model,' Watt said, 'but it is much, much better than nothing.'

It is too early to say whether efforts such as Care's as well as adult literacy classes in minority languages run by other non-governmental organizations would succeed. But S'aoch is certainly finished, and when it slips away in the next decade, the chances are that only Filippi and a few others would even notice.

Many - perhaps most - of the other 18 endangered Cambodian languages are also doomed. With their extinction will go unique customs and cultures stretching back into Cambodia's pre-history.