Dr. Harrison was recently interviewed for an article entitled “Saving Vanishing Tongues” by Stephen Ornes in which Harrison discussed his research and approach to endangered languages preservation. Here is an excerpt, below.
Alyssa and Lena Montana with a children’s book in English and Hualapai. By encouraging young children to read daily in their native language, such books promote early reading skills. This one was developed in cooperation with Arizona’s Hualapai Tribe, the Hualapai Cultural Resources Department and First Things First.
“Ong uyan madongo?
You probably don’t know how to answer that question — unless you happen to be one of the roughly 430 people in the world who speak a language called Matukar Panau. Then you would know it means, “How are you?”
Matukar Panau is one of the world’s rarest languages. It is spoken in just two small coastal villages in Papua New Guinea. This tropical island nation lies in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Until five years ago, David Harrison, a language expert at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania didn’t know much about Matukar Panau either. No one had ever recorded or even studied its words and rules. With so few speakers, the language risked vanishing without a blip. It was endangered.
An animal is endangered when its population becomes so rare that it faces a serious risk of going extinct. An endangered language has so few speakers that its words soon may never be spoken or heard again. Harrison didn’t want that to happen to Matukar Panau. So in 2009, he set out for Papua New Guinea. His goal: use modern technology to help the remaining speakers preserve their native tongue.”
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