Saving an Endangered Language
Through USC Dornsife’s Problems Without Passports, students travel to the mountains of Taiwan to document and preserve the fast-fading language and culture of the Atayal tribe of Taiwanese aborigines.
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Saving an Endangered Language
As part of the Problems without Passports program, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Khalil Iskarous traveled with a group of undergraduates to the mountains of Taiwan. Here they…Video by Mira Zimet
As the old school bus wound its way through the steep mountain passes, the students gazed out the windows at the lush, tropical topography unfolding before them. At the outskirts of the village, the bus shuddered to a halt at a beautiful spot alongside a creek spanned by a couple of bridges.
The students, who were in northern Taiwan as part of USC Dornsife’s Problems Without Passports (PWP) program, quickly dispersed to take photographs and look around. USC Dornsife senior and linguistics major Jackie Kim wandered with several classmates to where a few aboriginal Taiwanese were selling fruit.
Adjacent to their stands was a little faucet where fruit could be rinsed and immediately consumed. The students recognized some special plums that had been given to them by a native Atayal speaker earlier that week, and they stood admiring the fruit.
“I just randomly said the Atayal word for plum and they were surprised,” Kim recounted. “Their response in Mandarin was, ‘You know the Atayal word for plum?’ Then we asked them in Atayal, ‘What’s your name?’ and we started a short conversation and suddenly the bus driver chimed in. It turned out he was pretty fluent in Atayal and he translated for us a bit.”
Atayal, an Austronesian language, is spoken fluently by only a few hundred people in northern Taiwan today. Mandarin is Taiwan’s official language.
“The [fruit sellers] were definitely excited,” Kim said. “They thought it was awesome that we even had an interest in learning the language because even many Atayal children don’t know how to speak the language.”
Khalil Iskarous, assistant professor of linguistics in USC Dornsife, taught the six-week course in Taiwan focusing on the endangered Atayal language and culture. In keeping with PWP’s goal of combining problem-based research with study in a foreign country, the course was designed to allow graduate and undergraduate students substantive experience doing work in the field, while learning about a global problem.
We’re all familiar with endangered species. But endangered languages? According to linguists and other cultural preservationists, this phenomenon is a serious problem, hastened over the last few generations by globalization. Just this summer Google launched an endangered language documentation project to help address this issue.
“When languages and cultures die, an important part of our human heritage and culture is lost,” Iskarous said. “This is especially the case when these languages and cultures have the potential to teach us an enormous amount about the human mind and human society.”
Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant, Peter Guekguezian, a second-year doctoral student in linguistics in USC Dornsife, accompanied the group to Taiwan along with one other graduate student. Guekguezian was eager to take advantage of the rare opportunity to do linguistic field research.
“Sometimes sitting down in front of a computer can be tedious, even boring,” Guekguezian said. “But when you’re out there talking with someone and really getting to know their language on a firsthand basis it’s just wonderful. You really get to see why language is such a human science . . . the human experience is really captured through language.”
The course, which took place from May 16 to July 6, was open to all majors and areas of study. Students worked with native Atayal speakers to document the language using largely acoustic data recorded from conversations and their recounting of cultural folklore. For the first two weeks of the program, students studied at USC, learning the basic Atayal vocabulary, grammar and the p