Dying Language

...as much as they analyse how vowels are spoken and sentences are put together, they are also looking for stories, dances, songs, a culture of a people, which will disappear when the language does. A language is more than vocabulary and grammar, it is a way of thinking about the world that ties people together. It is a currency they can exchange, an identity, a community and roots...

Crossroads on RFI today aired a story on the dying language of Kim and Bom in Sierra Leone. Tucker Childs, a field linguist attempts to preserve language by first documenting it and then turning it into material of interest and therefore of use.

But Childs, almost Don Quixote style, works to save a language its speakers aren't interested in saving.

Kim and Bom die as they become socio-economically irrelevant, stigmatised and to the children, what they like to call "the monkey language."

War and peace threaten the continuance of language and traditions, they say. War destroys and isolates communities and peace prioritises one language over another in the effort to unify people with a common tongue.

But we can only hope and carry on like Childs does to save that piece of history that will help us to understand (if later on) ourselves that little bit more. Even if it takes recording the last 20 speakers where the last of a language and culture live only in anecdotes or socialising.