Linguist races to save a dying language spoken in Cambodia

Rich Clabaugh/Staff

With no more than 10 speakers remaining of S'aoch, a language spoken on Cambodia's sea shore, French linguist Jean-Michel Filippi is in a race against time to preserve a disappearing culture.

April 27, 2010
By Jared Ferrie, Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
Samrong Loeu Village, Cambodia

In halting, creaky tones, the elderly chief of this tiny community spoke in his indigenous language, S'aoch, an ancient tongue linguists predict will be extinct within a generation.

Noi, who goes by a single name, is one of 10 still fluent in S'aoch, and this village of 110 people is the last vestige of a disappearing culture.

S'aoch is one of about 3,000 languages endangered worldwide, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: One of them disappears about every two weeks. In Cambodia alone, 19 languages face extinction this century.

In this impoverished country where one-third of the population lives on less than $1 a day, saving a dying language is a low priority. One of the S'aoch's few allies is Jean-Michel Filippi, a French linguist who has learned their language and transcribed about 4,000 of its words over the past nine years.

"Once a language disappears, a vision of the world disappears," says Mr. Filippi, explaining his commitment to preserving S'aoch.

His task is made harder by the fact that the S'aoch do not share his fascination. They associate their language with poverty and exclusion from Cambodian society, which is ethnically and linguistically Khmer.

"We don't use our language, because we S'aoch are taowk," said Tuen, the chief's son, using the Khmer word meaning "without value."

Khmer Rouge dealt fatal blow
Perhaps the fatal blow to the S'aoch was the Khmer Rouge, whose policies caused the deaths of up to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. The communist regime uprooted Cambodians from their homes and forced them into labor camps. The S'aoch were pushed from their land and prohibited from using their native tongue. "They said we couldn't speak our language or we would be killed," says Noi, drawing his finger across his neck, during an interview in his wooden house perched on stilts about five feet above the ground.

The S'aoch who survived settled here, near the coast, where some of them had been taken by the regime.

The loss of their land signaled the death of their culture because the S'aoch were no longer self-sufficient and instead survived by selling their labor, which plunged them into poverty. Since their animist beliefs were intrinsically linked to the land, Filippi says the S'aoch also lost the core of their cultural identity.

Two nongovernmental organizations, International Cooperation Cambodia and Care, are working to preserve minority culture by incorporating four minority languages into 25 schools in rural, indigenous communities. The Education Ministry cooperates with those programs, though they do not include S'aoch.

Filippi says there are at least five indigenous groups in Cambodia with 500 members or fewer. With only minimal support for preserving their languages, they are likely to follow the S'aoch into obscurity, their "unique view" of the world forever cast into the void of undocumented history.

"The fact is [the S'aoch] lost everything," Filippi says. "And the language is going to be lost in a few years as well. They might just remain a mystery forever."

Cambodia's Minority Languages Face Bleak Future

Two S'aoch children in their village in Cambodia. Neither of them speaks S'aoch, 19 Jan 2010 (Photo: VOA's R.Carmichael)

The United Nations' cultural agency UNESCO warns that 19 Cambodian languages are at risk of extinction

Phnom Penh 21 January 2010
Robert Carmichael, VOA

More than 20 languages are spoken in Cambodia, but most are minority languages and face extinction in the coming decades. Robert Carmichael has this report from Phnom Penh.

Jean-Michel Filippi is in a race. As the foremost scholar of S'aoch, the language of one of Cambodia's minority tribes, he has only a few years to record the language before it may be lost forever. To date he has recorded 4,000 words in S'aoch. His next step is to write a grammar book on the language.

Filippi says just 10 people are fluent in S'aoch and none uses the language in their daily life. That makes S'aoch the most endangered language in Cambodia. In a decade it will likely be extinct.

For him, recording the language is one way to preserve a cultural view of the world.

"Culturally speaking a language is a unique vision of the world," Filippi said. "You can take two languages which may appear to be - if not similar then very close to each other, like French for instance and English - in fact the vision of the world which implies in French language and English language are totally, totally different. If a language disappears, a whole vision of the world disappears as well at the same time."

Cambodia's dominant language is Khmer but small ethnic groups have other languages.

The United Nations' cultural agency UNESCO warns that 19 Cambodian languages are at risk of extinction. It is not a rare problem: half of the world's 6,700 languages will likely die out by the end of the century. Most are spoken by small ethnic communities in developing nations or by groups such as Native American tribes in North America.

Blaise Kilian is UNESCO's joint program coordinator in Phnom Penh. He says there are many reasons languages die.

"When you have only a very few people speaking a language of course it is in danger of being extinct," Kilian said. "But besides this you have the environment. You have the way people, themselves, and especially the new generation, react to the changing environment. How much they are interested themselves in preserving and transmitting their own languages. So I would say it is a number of internal and external factors which play an important role besides the number of speakers."

Filippi says the S'aoch people have rejected their own language because they are extremely poor. They have decided their best bet is to adopt the Khmer language.

"In the case of the S'aoch they apparently want to get rid of their language and their cultural institution because it is linked to their poverty, to I would say their economic situation, which compared to the Khmers is a very poor one, and so on and so on," Filippi said.

The imminent extinction of S'aoch raises the question of what can be done about Cambodia's other endangered languages. With S'aoch, the only option is to write down and record as much as possible while the speakers are alive.

The situation is less dire for some languages spoken in other parts of the country. In the northeastern provinces of Ratanakkiri, Mondolkiri and Stung Treng a number of organizations are involved with youth and adult education for minority people.

One of those is Care International, which for seven years has worked with the Ministry of Education on a program teaching schoolchildren in two languages.

Care's education adviser, Ron Watt, says almost 2,000 primary school children in the three provinces last year received instruction both in their ethnic community's language and in Khmer. The program is now in 25 schools.

"Bilingual education is really spreading - people are very enthusiastic about it," Watt said.

Watt says that before the program started, the government and aid organizations had misconceptions about education for minority people. One of those misconceptions was that minority groups did not want to send their children to school.

"What we have found that that is just not the case at all - that the moment you start providing relevant education that kids can access and that kids can learn, parents are more than enthusiastic to send their kids, and kids are enthusiastic to go," Watt said.

The positive response from minority communities toward language learning programs highlights something Jean-Michel Filippi insists is essential to keeping languages alive.

"If a community wants its language to be saved and is strong enough to express the will to have its language saved, it may very well work. But you will never save a language if the community doesn't want to," Filippi said.

Cambodia's poverty does not augur well for the language survival chances of its minority peoples, many of whom are struggling to keep hold of their community land.

Language and development experts say that unless Cambodia's economic situation improves, it seems likely that it will lose far more than the S'aoch language by the end of this century.

A 5,000-year-old language in Cambodia on extinction list

January 21, 2010
ABC Radio Australia

The United Nations cultural organisation UNESCO says one language becomes extinct every fortnight. By the end of this century, the world will likely lose half of its 6,700 languages. Cambodia has 19 languages listed as endangered, and it is unlikely that many of them will survive the next 90 years.

Presenter: Robert Carmichael
Speakers: Dr Jean-Michel Filippi, linguist; Mr Noi, S'aoch villager; Blaise Kilian, UNESCO; Ron Watt, CARE International

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

CAMBODIAN VILLAGER: (S'aoch)

CARMICHAEL: You might have guessed that those words are the numbers from one to ten in someone else's language - in this case, that language is known as S'aoch and it is found in one small village in southern Cambodia. The S'aoch word for ten is LOP. And that is also the total number of people who are fluent in the 5,000-year-old language. In short S'aoch is dying. Language experts reckon it has perhaps 10 years before it disappears for ever. That is because the 110 S'aoch people prefer to speak Khmer, the language of the majority of Cambodians, rather than their own tongue. Dr Jean-Michel Filippi is a linguist who speaks more than a dozen languages. Filippi is studying S'aoch and has transcribed around 4,000 S'aoch words to date. His target, once the dictionary is completed, is a grammar book. Transcribing is a laborious process - here is Filippi using the Khmer language to transcribe the S'aoch word for durian, the pungent fruit common to Southeast Asia, with Mr Noi, the village chief, and his 40-year-old son, Tuem.

FILIPPI, NOI AND TUEM: (KHMER AND S'AOCH)

CARMICHAEL: And what does that mean?

FILIPPI: Durian.

CARMICHAEL: The durian fruit.

FILIPPI: Absolutely, absolutely.

CARMICHAEL: It is painstaking stuff, and even Filippi acknowledges S'aoch has no chance of survival. So why bother?

FILIPPI: Culturally-speaking a language is a unique vision of the world. You can take two languages which may appear to be - if not similar [then] very close to each other, like French for instance and English - in fact the vision of the world which applies in the French language or the English language are totally, totally different. If language disappears, a whole vision of the world disappears as well at the same time.

CARMICHAEL: Filippi explains that the S'aoch suffered such extreme poverty that they have rejected their own language and culture in favour of Khmer, hoping things will improve.

FILIPPI: In the case of the S'aoch they apparently want to get rid of their language and their cultural institution because it is linked to their poverty, to I would say to their economic situation, which compared to the Khmers is a very poor one, and so on and so on.

CARMICHAEL: But the S'aoch people are not alone in facing language extinction. The UN cultural body UNESCO says at least 19 languages spoken in Cambodia are at risk. Blaise Kilian is UNESCO's joint programme coordinator in Phnom Penh. He says the obvious factor in the demise of any language is having too few people who are fluent.

KILIAN: But besides this you have the environment. You have the way people themselves - especially the new generation - react to the change of environment. How much they are interested in preserving and transmitting their own languages. It's a number of I would say internal and external factors which play an important role besides the number of speakers.

CARMICHAEL: Kilian says the outlook for many of Cambodia's languages is bleak. But measures are being taken to revitalise some minority languages in the country's north and north-east. One step is bilingual education for schoolchildren. CARE International, an NGO, started a bilingual school programme seven years ago - it is now used in 25 schools and last year benefited 1,900 children. Ron Watt, CARE's education adviser, says the programme has gone from strength to strength.

WATT: Bilingual education is really spreading - people are very enthusiastic about it.

CARMICHAEL: Ron Watt explains that children in the first year of school use their own language for 80 per cent of classes with the rest of instruction in Khmer. The proportion of minority language used drops over the following two years, and by the time Grade 4 begins, all instruction is in Khmer. It's not ideal, but it is better than nothing. Good though that is, the lessons from the S'aoch are instructive and worrying. Their descent into poverty started when they lost their land 30 years ago. In today's Cambodia land-grabbing is rife, particularly in the north-east where many minority peoples live. With 19 local languages endangered, it is anyone's guess as to just how many Cambodia will have lost by the end of the century. This is Robert Carmichael in Phnom Penh. (S'aoch)

CAMBODIA: Minority Languages Face Extinction

Ron Watt, the education adviser at Care Cambodia, holds a bilingual dictionary used in Care's school programme to revitalise minority languages. (Credit:Robert Carmichael/IPS)

By Robert Carmichael

PHNOM PENH, Jan 13, 2010 (IPS) - One of Cambodia’s oldest languages – S’aoch – appears headed for extinction in the next decade. Other languages spoken by its minority people are lining up to take the place of the 6,000-year-old language in the most endangered category.

Dr Jean-Michel Filippi, a linguist who has studied the S’aoch language for a decade, has recorded 4,000 words of S’aoch and is preparing to write a grammar for the language. But even he holds out no hope for it. That is because just 10 people in a small village in southern Cambodia speak S’aoch fluently, and none of them uses it in daily conversation.

Filippi says the imminent extinction of S’aoch means his efforts to preserve something of it are critical. "That is because a language is a unique vision of the world," he says. "It’s very specific and a very peculiar classification of reality."

According to the United Nations’ cultural body the world’s remarkable diversity of 6,700 languages is dying out at the rate of one every fortnight. By the end of this century just half will remain, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) warns on its website.

The work done by linguists like Filippi to document dying languages is important for a number of reasons. Filippi says that long after it is gone, a language could have uses in diverse areas such as commerce, psychology or artificial intelligence. A case in point, he says, is Navajo, the Native American language that was used by U.S. forces in World War II in the Pacific to encrypt radio transmissions, and whose story was popularised in the film ‘Windtalkers’.

Blaise Kilian, joint programme coordinator of UNESCO in Phnom Penh, says there is inevitably more than one reason for language death. The most obvious is that too few people are fluent.

"But you also have the environment and the way people themselves – especially the new generation – react to the changing environment," says Kilian. "And how much they are interested in preserving and transmitting their own language."

Filippi says the imminent demise of S’aoch has less to do with the low numbers of people who speak it, and much more to do with the attitude of the people themselves.

"Survival depends on one thing: Does the minority want to protect and save its own culture?" he asks. In the case of the S’aoch, he adds, that desire is lacking.

That is because after the murderous Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power in Cambodia in 1979, the S’aoch people found themselves unable to return to their original village. Instead they settled in a village called Samrong Loeu near the port town of Sihanoukville in the country’s south.

But without fields to work, they faced enormous difficulties. Filippi says the impoverished S’aoch now aspire to the lifestyles enjoyed by their relatively wealthy Khmer neighbours, who have fields, motorbikes and houses. And so they have put their own language and customs behind them and adopted the language of the majority Khmer population.

"When you are put in a position of economic inferiority, you tend to reject your own culture," Filippi says. That rejection has gone so far that Filippi struggles to get the surviving S’aoch even to recall their folk tales or religious ceremonies.

The case of S’aoch is not unique to Cambodia, which UNESCO estimates has 19 endangered languages. Others in trouble include Somray and Poa, with around 300 speakers each, Samre, with 400 speakers, and So’ong, with 500 speakers.

But even minority languages with just a few hundred speakers face distinctly different outcomes. Filippi says the Somray language of south-western Cambodia is likely to survive several more decades at least even though it has just a few hundred speakers.

That is because the animist religion of the Somray requires that prayers are accurately rendered in their own language to be effective, a compelling reason for the villagers to ensure their children grow up fluent.

Some languages are much more widely spoken, such as Tampuon, P’nong, Kuong and Jarai, each of which has up to 30,000 speakers living in the country’s north and north-east. Provided their communities back the effort, the chances of language survival are much higher.

Kilian says the first step to revitalizing a language is to determine its chances of being saved, and then create an orthography – a specific writing system – for educational materials. Those materials can then be used in education programmes.

In the case of Cambodia, some of that educational work is carried out by non-government organisations such as International Cooperation Cambodia (ICC) and Care International.

ICC has produced highly regarded books in minority languages, some of which Care uses in a bilingual school programme that was started in 2003. ICC also runs adult literacy programmes and records folk tales and other cultural aspects of minority life in the country’s long-neglected north-east.

Ron Watt, Care’s education adviser, says the bilingual schools education programme now has 128 teachers using four languages and teaching in 25 schools. Last year around 1,900 children were enrolled, almost half of them girls.

"The education ministry is very keen on this and now they are replicating it, with three more schools set to open next year," he says.

Under the bilingual education system, children in Grade 1 use their own language for 80 percent of classes, with the rest of instruction undertaken in Khmer. The proportion of minority languages used drops over the following two years, and by the time Grade 4 begins, all teaching is in Khmer.

Watt admits that the programme is not perfect.

"People with a language development bent would say that this isn’t a classic language maintenance model, let alone a language development model," he says, explaining that he would prefer to see instruction in minority languages continue after Grade 3. But the current programme is "much, much better than doing nothing."

UNESCO’s Kilian says the Cambodian government seems broadly receptive to preserving cultural aspects of the country’s heritage, likely in part because of their tourism value. He points out that Cambodia is known to tourists for Angkor Wat and the Khmer Rouge, but little else. That means ensuring its cultural diversity is sensible.

But no matter what efforts are taken, Cambodia will certainly have lost some of its languages by the end of the century. For the doomed languages there is little that linguists can do other than record as much as possible of the language, folk tales and customs so that when tongues like S’aoch eventually die, something of what they represented still remains.

Na'vi ascendant as Cambodia's languages face extinction

Tue, 12 Jan 2010
DPA

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.

Researchers Warn of a Loss of Languages

By Men Kimseng, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
11 June 2009

The world is losing one language every two weeks, linguistics experts warned on Tuesday, estimating that half of the 7,000 different languages spoken today will be lost by 2100.

“The loss of a single language is really a loss for all of us,” Susan Penfield, program director of the National Science Foundation, said during a talk at the Voice of America in Washington. “It is not just a loss for the speakers. It is something that we all have to think about, and I think take some responsibility for.”

Endangered languages range from Africa to America and Asia. The mobility of one group or another can contribute to the death of a language, and a younger generation’s refusal to learn a native language is one sign of danger.

“When a language dies, certain aspects of culture die with it. Some of these languages are very unique,” said Hayib Sosseh, a linguistics expert at Northern Virginia Community College.

Cambodia has a national policy to protect its indigenous languages, Tun Sa Im, a secretary of state for the Ministry of Education, told VOA Khmer ahead of the talk.

"Our policy clearly provides for their access to education, radio [programs] to promote their languages, and the use of their language for communication,” she said.

According to a 1998 census by the Ministry of Planning, there are 17 different groups of indigenous people in Cambodia. They belong to two different linguistic families: the Austronesian-speaking Jarai and the Mon-Khmer-speaking Brao, Kreung, Tampuan, Punong, Stieng, Kui and Poar.

Yun Mane, who is Phnong and works in Phnom Penh, said she always tries to speak her native language when she visits her home province of Mondolkiri.

“I am not the only person fearing the loss of our language,” she told VOA Khmer. “The majority of indigenous people and young people now living in Phnom Penh are also worried.”

Some indigenous students in Phnom Penh have created an association to safeguard their tradition and culture.

And since 2003 the Ministry of Education has developed written forms of these languages based on the Cambodian alphabet. The ministry hopes this will help indigenous people document their history and culture and have better access to national education.

Language experts recommend the recording of a language and the collection of other data to preserve a dying language. And training and teachers can play a crucial role in bringing a language back to life.