Jared Diamond, in his studies of traditional societies, has learned that multi-lingualism is common among them. Large areas dominated by one language (and inhabited by monolinguals) just did not exist before the burgeoning of big states. There remain some examples of highly-linguistically-diverse areas that may have been what all the world used to look like (or sound like), Diamond says.
[I]n the northwest Amazon Basin [live the] Vaupes River Indians [who] are linguistically exogamous [that is, when they marry, they make sure to marry someone who does not speak their language] … While boys remain as adults in their parents’ longhouse … girls from other longhouses and language groups move to their husband’s longhouse at the time of marriage. A given longhouse contains women marrying in from several different language groups … All children learn both their father’s and their mother’s languages … from infancy, then learn the languages of other women of the longhouse. Hence everyone in the longhouse knows [all] the longhouse languages (that of the [local] men, and those of the … women), and most also learn some other languages from visitors.
Only after Vaupes River Indians have come to know a language well by hearing and passively acquiring vocabulary and pronunciation do they start speaking it. They carefully keep languages separate and work hard to pronounce each language correctly. [It tends to take] them one or two years to learn a new language fluently. High value is placed on speaking correctly, and letting words from other languages creep into one’s conversation is considered shameful.
Each Amerindian his or her own French Academy.
source: The World Until Yesterday: what can we learn from traditional societies?
by Jared Diamond
2012. Viking / Penguin, New York
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