The Need For Language Preservation

We, Ethiopians, often swear in an Amharic idiom: “May the birthed perish before the spoken word vanishes!” Ethiopian culture is deeply familial, so the idiom does not literally suggest that one could endure the loss of a child. Its linguistic and literary power lies in expressing a deeper spiritual culture—one that values honesty and is willing to vanish for the sake of one’s word, a communal code that governs the community. 

 

As an Ethiopian and cultural researcher, I am intrigued by how a word can weigh as much as a human life. What does that mean? Why do Ethiopians equate life and language?

 

One answer is that everything we know about existence comes from language. To carry a word is to carry one’s culture as well as a code of existence. A society lives in its language which upholds the responsibility to preserve one' s history and identity to the next generation. 

 

This, of course, is a heavy task with a multitude of internal and external challenges. In the hope of inspiring all of us to look within and without at the languages that made us, the Ethiopian saying calls for us to heed the need to preserve a language as though it were already on the verge of extinction.

 

The first case to consider is the birth of language. Regardless of the starting point—be it in a forest, an island, or a cave—language has been with us for most, if not all, of human existence. It has witnessed our progress and contributed to the rise and fall of civilizations. The co‑existence of language and humanity means that today’s languages, if traced back, would lead us to the earliest beginnings of civilization and perhaps even suggest our origins. Yet the genesis of humanity remains as great a riddle as the origin of language.

 

According to Britannica’s entry on the Tower of Babel: “Genesis 11:9: Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.” As an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, I believe God could have easily fashioned languages immediately after creating humankind. However, it is more interesting to place this creationist account in conversation with scientific theories that echo its essence. 

 

Pioneering the field of linguistics in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky argued that children are born with an innate apparatus that helps them learn language, and that acquisition and development follow a process similar to other human organs, managed by pre‑existing coding that determines the child’s capacity and capabilities (Chomsky 1955, as cited in Bruhn de Garavito & Schwieter, 2021). Likewise, in her 2018 TED Talk, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky presented neurological evidence showing that languages are closely tied to their speakers’ environments and serve as tools to perceive and organize one’s surroundings (Boroditsky, 2018). While Chomsky’s innate capacity corresponds with the divine nature of language, Boroditsky’s discovery materializes it, suggesting how divinity might have manifested—the answer pointing to language as evidence of the inseparable tie between humans and nature. 

 

In other words, modern discoveries of neurological patterns have stretched Chomsky’s abstract conception into tangible mechanisms that illustrate how language is processed in mysterious yet structured pathways. More importantly, all these theories are time‑oriented, reminding us that languages exist before they change, evolve, morph, or perish. Linguists continue to wonder not only how language functions but how it moves—always with the possibility of a new one emerging from divine call, innate capacity, or the need to understand the world in a fresh way.

 

In 1989, journalist Lawrence Osborn published an article on the invention of a new sign language created by deaf children in Nicaragua. The article sensationalized this as the first language to emerge in modern times, drawing linguists to study the phenomenon. While it is unfair to assume languages are not being created elsewhere, the fascination remains: these children produced a language out of desperation. Placed in an isolated school under Spanish instruction, they collaborated to build syntax from pantomimes. Their invention did not resemble Spanish grammar or syntax, but it was fully functional, filling the void of self‑expression in a foreign environment. 

 

Conceptually, Paul Garrett (2012) “addresses how inequality, power, and linguistic differences converge on socialization into patterns of use or nonuse of marginalized language varieties” (Black, 2013, p. 275). What the Nicaraguan children achieved was an act of defiance and the resurrection of agency in an environment that marginalized their capacity to speak from their original selves. This is a recent phenomenon of communal language created due to a need to preserve identity.

Thousands of years after Babel, the Nicaraguan children inspire us to consider how global economies and power systems shape which languages matter and which do not. 

 

As the voice of colonialism, English has flourished worldwide and persists as a necessary language. But we must ask: if every language arises from innate human capacity and is nurtured through centuries of collaboration, what is the moral stance in allowing one language of economic dominance to override another? 

 

In studying her Indigenous heritage in 

North Alberta, Canada, J. M. Iseke‑Barnes laments the loss of Cree among the Métis people:

 

“My grandmother did not teach her children or grandchildren to speak or hear Cree although she continued to understand and have the capacity to speak it. I struggle now to learn a few words in Cree because for me it is a part of my heritage and healing. Although I have been denied it by a society that holds it in contempt, my children and I are beginning to learn it. The importance of learning this Indigenous language is not because I hold to the often held belief that multiple languages in the world are important because of some misapplied need for diversity but because learning the language is part of healing the wounds of the colonial past and reconnecting to an Indigenous past and future” (Iske-Barnes, 2004, p. 50).

 

Iske-Barnes’s fear and frustration should be shared by all of us. We have to heed the danger and slippery slope way a language dies or gives itself to another one. We have to be alert of what is coming in, going out, and what is transpiring. Otherwise, one day, we, Ethiopians, will also forget that there was a time we valued a word/a promise more than a human life. 

 

A language is never lost on its own. It bags the history, the legends, and the centuries-old traditions, and ships it to a linguistic black hole. The best way to preserve a language is when it is alive and breathing, and we care for it as if it is dying!

 

Works Cited

 

2023 G.C

Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States of America

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