What’s your favorite flower?
“You might say, ‘Well, I love red roses,’’ says Peter Constantine, a professor in UConn’s Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. “Great. So, imagine all the plants dying, and you only have red roses. That’s a catastrophe.”
But Constantine’s question isn’t about flowers.
It’s about the world’s languages, many belonging to Indigenous communities, languages no less culturally rich than English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic – the world’s five most spoken languages – but are far less widely spoken.
Many of those other spoken languages are going away, and rapidly so, raising concerns for linguists and scholars like Constantine, as well as heritage speakers and Indigenous communities that are facing a massive potential cultural loss.
“We’re facing a worldwide linguistic ecological disaster in the sense that languages are dying faster and faster,” says Constantine, a literary translator and editor who serves as the director of UConn’s literary translation program.
While the exact number of languages spoken isn’t known, estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 distinct languages still in use around the world. Studies have found that at least 40% are endangered, and on average, a language disappears every two weeks, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Only a few hundred languages have a place in educational systems, and fewer than a hundred are used in digital spaces.
By some predictions, 90% of the world’s languages could be lost by the end of the century – a catastrophe, according to Constantine, just like a world full of only red roses, or a future for humanity that’s based on a world with only one language.
“I think English is a beautiful language,” he says. “I mean, it’s the language of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Dickens. It’s a rich language. When you have a language that’s spoken throughout the world in so many different places, it becomes very wealthy, because it absorbs so many regional subtexts and nuances.
“But the fact that English is so wonderful doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about other languages disappearing.”
A Personal Matter
The loss of these languages isn’t just a scholarly interest for Constantine. It’s quite personal.
Constantine, who grew up between Attica outside Athens and a village in southern Greece, belongs to one of the last generations of speakers of Corinthian Arvanitika, a language linguists consider moribund, or on the brink of dormancy.
“Meaning that people of my age and older are the last who are either speakers or semi-speakers,” he says. “If you don’t speak a language for 50 years, it will atrophy and fall away.”
When a language atrophies, linguists refer to it as dormant – largely choosing not to use the word “extinct,” because extinction, Constantine explains, is irreversible.
“Whereas when it’s dormant, the language is still there,” he says. “It just has to be brought back.”
And for some languages, efforts are underway to bring them back, usually through one of two methods: revitalization or reclamation.
Revitalization focuses on saving endangered languages by increasing the number of speakers, typically through immersion schools, classes, and community programs in which elders who still speak the language help teach and engage younger generations.
But Constantine’s focus is on language reclamation, where languages that no longer have mother-tongue speakers – languages that have gone completely dormant – are reconstructed and reclaimed from historical records, with a goal of restoring a cultural identity that was lost or stolen alongside the language.
Reclaiming a Local Lost Language
A current faculty fellow with UConn’s Humanities Institute, Constantine is working on what might be the first book focused specifically on the reclamation of Indigenous languages around the world, where he investigates the strategies used by communities to revive their lost heritage languages.
And there are many such efforts underway in various communities around the world, he says, including places close to UConn.
“Let’s take the quite a successful case of Wôpanâak, which is a language of New England, Massachusetts,” says Constantine. “That quite fascinatingly is being reclaimed for the community through document materials, including the Eliot Bible from 1663.”
Lost hundreds of years ago in the wake of colonization, efforts to reclaim the Indigenous language of the Wampanoag people began in the 1990s, fueled by the dedication of members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, with assistance from linguists.
In the decades following the start of the effort, Wôpanâak educational programs, language classes, and cultural initiatives have all worked to help reintroduce and normalize the use of the language amongst tribal members.
Young children are now learning Wôpanâak as a mother tongue because of the reclamation work, Constantine notes.
“Hopefully we will soon have some of those students at UConn, who will be bilingual in Wôpanâak and English,” he says.
For many reclamation efforts, documents like treaties, handwritten deeds and wills, Bibles, and materials produced by mostly Christian missionaries and colonizers are important components of the work.
In their attempts to spread doctrine, Constantine explains, missionaries needed to produce their materials using languages that Indigenous people could understand.
“So many times those who were the great perpetrators, the eradicators of Indigenous culture are the ones whose materials are now being used to reclaim the language,” he says. “It’s almost invariably this way, because missionaries and early settlers said, ‘Let’s make wordlists, let’s translate the Bible so that these people can become Christians.’
“And so they were the ones who tried to stamp out the Indigenous culture, but it had to be done in the language itself, and that has become a kind of saving grace for languages that have been dormant.”
‘This is Our Identity’
Groups all have different reasons for working to reclaim languages. The last speakers of Norn, a Viking language in Orkney and Shetland, passed away in the mid-19th century, and efforts to restore the language have been an intellectual exercise – restoring mathematical language, the language of sciences, and even translating children’s books.
“It’s a very vital and interestingly vibrant idea,” says Constantine, but he notes that it differs from the Wôpanâak reclamation, as well as from reclamation efforts of the Tasmanian Aboriginal language of palawa kani and the Indigenous Celtic language of Cornwall.
“With those, the community wants its language back,” he says. “’It’s ours, we want it back. It was taken away, and this is our identity. This is who we are.’”
All of those efforts – the reasons, the methods, the successes, the strategies – are what Constantine hopes to document through his fellowship and book project, not only for the overall effort of reclaiming languages that will surely be lost over the coming decades, but also for the one that’s most personal to him: Corinthian Arvanitika.
In the case of Constantine’s own language, there isn’t a full Bible to help guide a reclamation, only bits and pieces, he says. It’s not a language that easily translates modern concepts and cultural contexts.
But through his work, what he hopes he can leave future generations is a roadmap for the reclamation of Corinthian Arvanitika, should a community endeavor to revive it from its own dormancy someday.
“What made me want to do this project is also the quest of documenting some of my language, which is very under-documented, in the hope that if somebody wants to reclaim it in 50 or 100 years, there will be recordings, writings, and other materials they can use,” he says.
“So, that’s my personal quest.”
