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.
Rich Clabaugh/Staff
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.
READ: The world's 18 most endangered languages
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.
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."
2 comments:
Saving dying language in Cambodia?
What - will those people become muted?
We have too many languages, let them go extinct. You know at one time in human history we all spake the same language. True! For about one thousand years, we all spoke the same language until we were about to get ourselves into A BIG trouble then our brains went wacky and every one just Babble like baby talks.
Just imagine that - we were in this biggest building project on earth building a tower to reach the moon, as we got higher and higher, our brain just quit functioning like it should. I bet because of lack of oxygen due to higher altitude. There were many brick carriers going up and coming down. As we ascending higher and higher, the people going up with the bricks normally chit chat with those coming down asking how the weather up there and how far yet to the moon; next thing you know - some were responding in Chinese, some in Vietnamese (back then they call them "youn") some in Khmer, Thai... and so on. In was just a confusion to continue on with the project, so we abandoned the tower.
But that was not the end of the story of our efforts. Since we got this idea of reaching the moon, we decided to have a contest by using sign language to see who could reach the moon first. When we finally understood one another what we were trying to convey by pointing toward the moon and then we parted from there. Some going north, south, east and west respectively.
Five thousand years later, the Russians shot a man to the moon. Followed by United States of America. Maybe it was the other way around, I forgot my history.
Well, I hope you enjoy my history of the human language adapted with a rusty imagination. I'm trying to learn two languages and I'm not good at neither one of them as you can tell.
O, I almost forgot, one day we will able to speak the same language again.
I wish we all can speak the same language. That makes communication become better and therefore would lead to less misunderstanding which will definitely lead to less conflict. However, it is good to preserve any languages that have been created and spoken by some ethnic groups already. History and culture plus languages must be preserved to identify each particular ethnic groups. Dr. Filippi has done a good job on this issue.
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