Some Try Raising Languages From the Dead

April 8, 2002 — -- Nigel Crawhall was charged with the seemingly impossible task of finding a N|u language speaker to support a land claim by the group's descendants.

After all, just months earlier the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had tagged N|u as a dead language when it released a CD that included a 1930s-vintage recording of the native language, which is marked by popping and clicking tones.

"All of the adults in the 1940s just turned the language off," dispersed, and started speaking Afrikaans, or other African languages, said Crawhall, a sociolinguist who works with the South African San Institute, a nongovernmental organization that provides development services to native communities.

So Crawhall was doubtful when a man named Petrus Vaalbooi came forward, claiming his mother, Elsie, spoke N|u. He had heard false claims before. "It was a pretty bold claim, but she was obviously a pretty old woman," said Crawhall.

But, to his surprise, when Crawhall played the old recording for his aged listener, she was able to translate it.

That discovery prompted him to locate an additional 25 speakers over the next two years, although five of them have died since.

"During the apartheid years, their identity was stripped completely. They were reclassified as being of mixed ethnicity and so they basically ceased to exist," Crawhall said.

Now, he said, "They have their history back — a sense of identity."

With half of the world's roughly 6,000 languages at risk or dying, those at the brink rarely rebound, although they sometimes they put up a fight.

Linguists say some American Indian tribes are seeking to revive languages that mostly have slipped into history — with only recordings left behind. And Ainu speakers on the Japanese island of Hokkaido are trying to recover their language from the brink of extinction, after only eight native speakers survived in the early 1980s, according to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.