Emily Curtis: The Wonderful World of Languages

Archive: Takeaway regarding lecture by Dr. Emily Curtis. Dr. Curtis is a linguist who helped us "situate" knowledge of language in terms of measuring language, considering factors that propel its diversity, and acknowledging multilingualism in the world today. Image is the front page of a piece the UW Chorale started to learn in the nearly-extinct Livonian last quarter (it was hard!!).

Dr. Emily Curtis' lecture today encouraged me to adopt a much broader view regarding the scope and use of the thousands of world languages in use today, and has helped me narrow some of my interests in studying heritage languages for this quarter. My first lesson including using the term "dialect" much more carefully; I need to consider how the term actually categorizes sister languages that may serve as inter-communicable languages in conversation, versus languages that must be shared by all participants in order to achieve effective communication, and are thus unique languages in their own right. I was also very interested in the idea of considering "minority languages" and "immigrant languages" in relative terms, conceptualizing the scope and influence of their use in majority-speaker countries versus their influence/cultural impact as a smaller ("minority") demographic.

Some themes I clung to the most included language attrition and loss; I would like to study further what cultural/social/political push-factors lead to a loss of heritage language, and similarly, what efforts are successful/not successful in helping young people retain heritage language. I know that once I started kindergarten, my English speaking ability quickly grew, at the expense of my Russian speaking skill, though my ability to UNDERSTAND both has never really changed, and my exposure to the Russian language has remained constant. What caused this shift, and how did I allow one language to dominate another?

Finally, I am interested in examining further the concept of the many endangered languages (which constitute around 55% of the world's current languages, as Dr. Curtis mentioned). In UW Chorale, we had planned to sing a piece by Veljo Tormis, an Estonian composer who worked specifically to preserve the folk songs of a Livonian community, of whom only slightly less than 100 people remained to share the language (they saw devastation during/following WWII that drastically reduced the size of the community). Unfortunately we did not have time to learn the whole piece and perform it, but seeing a nearly-extinct language being made available halfway around the world for a bunch of singers in a Washington school was inspiring in that it had the potential for revitalization, if not in everyday use, at least in cultural awareness and recognition on an (inter)national level. I would like to potentially study other efforts in language preservation that have been facilitated in a variety of mediums, outlets, and with a variety of goals (cultural preservation vs. regaining/retaining the languages' communicational value in society, or both).

Research food for thought: Who was the professor who taught us the pronunciation? Would be nice to refer to him for more information regarding Livonian language/folk culture.