807 Islands of Portugal; Easter Island; Endangered Languages

26:38No, I mean, it's still very much all of the people in high positions are all Rapa Nui. They've now actually changed the rules that mean that Chileans can no longer settle on Easter Island, which has been quite a contentious political change. I bet. But the idea was to try and prevent this dilution of the culture to a point where it almost vanished. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're speaking with James Grant Peterkin. And we're looking at the myths and the mysteries of Easter Island, which is his adopted home now for 20 years. James is the author of A Companion to Easter Island. You can find out more about James and his recent work as a history lecturer on cruise ships and his study of Easter Island in the notes to this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio.

27:23Hey, James, this is so interesting, this story of this community over the centuries. Now, of course, a big part of the economy is tourism. Tell us just very, very briefly, what's the best way to visit? And when you get there, what do you do? So I think without a doubt, the best way if you really want to see Easter Island is to fly there. There are now pretty much daily flights from Santiago in Chile. Yes, it takes over five hours to get there, but that is the only real way to get to the island and to therefore begin an exploration of this incredible island. So you settle into the main town of 8 ,000 people or so, and it's a small island, 64 square miles.

28:06And I would imagine you've got a checklist of sites, natural wonders, the flora, the fauna, the archaeological dimensions, the thousand-year-old statues, and the contemporary culture. What kind of contemporary culture would you see if you wanted to get into the Rapa Nui people? So this is what sometimes surprises people, because they go to Easter Island expecting to see a few heads, as they call them, and think that that's pretty much all that the island offers. What people forget is that there is this vibrant, very much living society there, and therefore you can see the traditional dances, for example, that are performed there.

28:41You can listen to the music. It's all very much, as with any island in Polynesia, this is a very important part of the culture today. And so, yes, of course, you want to go and see the statues, but this is why I always say to people, you know, go for at least three or four days because what you really want to do is to get into this fascinating society that's on this extremely isolated island. Now, I understand, according to your book, there's just six or eight dockings of cruise ships a year. So the cruise ships don't inundate the place like you might expect. No, they don't. And this is really because there's no port on Easter Island, meaning that it's a tender port and conditions sometimes aren't particularly good on the island.

29:23And so it's why it's a big risk if you go by cruise ship that you could sail for five days and not actually be able to set foot on Easter Island, which is why I always tell people to. Right. I've been in the Caribbean when there's just a little chop and they can't send the tenders in. Yes. And so people never expect it. So you sail for five days and you get there and the captain says, sorry, you can't go ashore. I've been on ships where that happens and you almost get a mutiny on board. OK, I'm going to fly there. You then have to sail for three or four more days to get to your next island. Crazy.

29:52Yeah. Would you say it's as expensive as Chile or as expensive as Scotland when you visit? It's even more expensive than Chile. And it's getting to European prices, if not more for some things, because everything has to be flown into Easter Island. And so food's expensive. Anything that's not produced locally is expensive. But that said, you get wonderful fish, you know, that's been in the water that morning and you're eating it that evening. So it's a wonderful experience. And when I fly in and catch a cab and go to my hotel and then decide to walk in through the town, am I going to get a warm welcome or what are people going to think of when they see me walking down the street of their little town?

30:32It's a very welcoming community. I mean, thousands of miles from anywhere. So anyone that comes to Easter Island and is respectful of the culture, respectful of the archaeology, gets an extremely warm welcome. And I always say to people, if you can learn a few words of Rapa Nui, even better. I was going to say, if I was in Hawaii, I would know to say aloha. What would I say? In Rapa Nui. So you would greet everyone by saying, Eorana, and that would be a general greeting to say both hello and goodbye. And you could perhaps say to someone, Pehe Koe, and that's how are you? And they would be bowled over by the fact that you spoke a few words of Rapa Nui because most people arrive there without a single word.

31:09Pehe Koe. That's very good. Eorana. Eorana, yeah. I could do it. All right. Hey, well, James Grant Peterkin, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like I've had a little quick visit to Easter Island. Thanks for writing your book, A Companion to Easter Island, and good luck with your guiding and your teaching. Thank you for having me. Iorana. It's not often that we get two linguists in on one hour of Travel with Rick Steves. But joining us next from the middle of a completely different island, Ross Perlin of the Endangered Language Alliance in Manhattan tells us why having many languages in a city like New York is good for all of us and how learning to understand a language other than English or Spanish can open you up to new ways of looking at the world around you.

31:56That's just ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. Mina Soraya, we come from Suriname and I crys with Rick Steves. I'm Soraya from Suriname and that was Surinameese for I travel with Rick Steves. Mina Soraya, I crys with Rick Steves. Thank you. Grand tangy. Bon day! It's amazing to think that there are over 7 ,000 languages spoken on this planet. I've long heard that about half of them are endangered, expected to die out by the end of the century. And I've wondered, why does this matter? Up next, we're joined by Dr. Ross Perlin. He's a linguist who teaches at Columbia University and who spearheads the nonprofit Endangered Languages Alliance to help document, map, and preserve these dying languages.

32:48He joins us now for a look at the linguistic diversity on our planet, the troubling trends, why it matters, and what the future holds. Ross, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Rick. Now, your fascinating book, Language City, is all about the linguistic situation in New York, past, present, and future. But it's also about the state of languages more broadly. Give us an overview about the current state of human languages globally. Broadly speaking, the 7 ,000 plus languages in the world are in trouble. As many as half are considered by linguists to be endangered, have fewer than 10 ,000 speakers, and are not being passed on or very barely being passed on to children, which is the sort of key thing, intergenerational transmission for any language.

33:35Now, it's happening for a variety of reasons. Some of these trend lines go back for centuries. We could talk about that. There's fewer than 200 nation states in the world. They tend to have their one official language in many cases. Most of those are pretty new, those nation states, as, you know, in their current form, whereas these languages stretch back thousands of years historically. So we could talk about all those causes, but the net effect is that, you know, linguistic diversity is very much threatened. But there are some hopeful signs that I think need to be kind of mentioned in counterbalance.

34:05One is what I discuss in my book, Language City, which is that endangered language speakers are on the move and they're coming to cities like New York and new creative possibilities, working with linguists, working with artists, policies, all kinds of things are happening through that as people come to cities and are in new environments and can sort of find ways to kind of modernize their languages and also revive their languages as well. We're in a bit of a golden era for language revitalization. So just because languages are endangered and are kind of begin to dwindle doesn't mean that a concerted effort by a community and usually some bold activists can't sort of bring it back to a new generation.

34:43So we're seeing now hundreds of those programs as well. You know, you're a linguist. You've dedicated your career and so much study to the value of linguistic diversity. But a lot of people could really care less. They just kind of wish everybody spoke English. What would you tell somebody like that? Why do endangered languages matter? Why should we care if one dies? You sometimes hear people think that if we all spoke, you know, English or one single language, there would be peace on earth and everything would be fine. I think there's a lot of evidence to show that that would not be the case, right?

35:17Think of so many civil wars, think of so many conflicts between people who speak the same language. So that's, it's no guarantee. And actually think of all the sort of good relations and peaceful relations between people who have, you know, their different languages, but are able to sort of meet in the middle. They have through interpretation, translation, or just, you know, a lingua franca are able to get along just fine. So I don't think one language would bring peace on earth. Would it bring some efficiencies? Perhaps in some cases, in some ways, but at what cost? The 7 ,000 plus languages that we have in the world are a repository of the history of human cultures and of every kind of knowledge, artistic, scientific, linguistic, the sort of expressions, the grammar, what we understand about the nature of human communication.

36:03There's just sort of so much in there that you can't just try to sort of translate or flatten out, but that, you know, has to be sort of living and breathing. And from a linguistic point of view, they're all equal, cognitively speaking. What do you mean by equal, cognitively speaking? Well, there's sometimes a perception that just because a language is oral, primarily oral, or it's spoken by less powerful people, or maybe fading out, that it somehow is broken or can't express complex thoughts just because it doesn't have a word for iPhone. Well, none of us had a word for iPhone 20 years ago. What I mean is really that if you look at it from the perspective of linguistic structure and the grammar and what the languages can do, every language learned by a native speaker, I'm not talking about something you learn as a second, you know, if you learn it as a second or third language, of course, you might lack some aptitude in it and not be able to express certain things.

36:53But native languages as spoken by native speakers are fully sophisticated vehicles for the expression of all the things people need to talk about in daily life. and they can borrow words if they need to. That's something I've often wondered. I'm sort of proud of English, you know, and I've been raised, and it's an ethnocentric or linguistocentric way of looking at it, but I've been raised to think that my language is really good if you're a poet and you want to describe something. You wrote that English adds like 8 ,000 words a year to our language, and that in itself is a bigger vocabulary than some aboriginal languages have in total.

37:30It just seems like there must be a qualitative difference from one language to the other to share thoughts as people become more sophisticated, but that's probably an ethnocentric viewpoint. Well, I love English as well. It's my mother tongue. I think actually its greatest characteristic is perhaps that it is sort of accommodating and kind of welcoming to words from all over. Now, those words still are coming from somewhere, so actually we're drawing in that richness from elsewhere. I think some have estimated that actually the sort of core vocabulary of English that actually stretches back to the Anglo-Saxons is only like, you know, 30 percent of what we use or something like that.

38:07So, but of course, the words we use most commonly and the actual words most people are using most of the time are still kind of those core words. And most people, you know, hear or speaking English or speaking another language, they're still using kind of the same number of words in many cases. So the number of words that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, that might reflect some theoretical thing, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the competence of the average speaker. You know, we understand the value of diversity when it comes to ecosystems and biodiversity. As a linguist, do you see a relation between a healthy environment in an ecosystem kind of way in that world of linguistics?

38:45There are striking parallels. And many have talked about linguistic diversity in terms of biodiversity and linguistic ecologies. Similarly, where having a monoculture is not healthy, but actually having variety makes the whole system stronger. And indeed, the linguistic hotspots around the world closely correspond to the biodiversity hotspots. And there are reasons for that in those environments. and those languages also encode and talk about and have vocabulary that, of course, we don't have in English to describe those systems and those places. So, yeah, there are close connections. And, of course, with the sort of loss of biodiversity, there is the related loss of linguistic diversity.

39:25There's a real connection. And there's different cultural characteristics of different societies and languages, I would imagine, would evolve to gear up to that. I mean, in a very simplistic way. we always hear Eskimos would have more ways to say ice and snow and French would have more ways to say kiss. It's just kind of fun to think that some languages put more energy into this and some, because of their circumstances, put more energy into that. As a linguist, do you feel like there's a quarry of cultural insights that are hiding out in these languages, that we can learn more about different cultures?

40:02And that's one reason to protect them because we lose that connection from where we came. On the one hand, there's, you know, sometimes the sort of the old saw about the Inuit words for snow or other things can be exaggerated, but the basic truth is certainly there, that languages encode the things that matter to their speakers and that their speakers experience in their environment. You know, hunter-gatherer languages have often, you know, spoken by hunter-gatherer peoples, have really rich vocabularies that would help you hunt and gather in those environments and words for smells and words for things that we just wouldn't even have or think about.

40:40So it really is a deep insight into ways of life and historical patterns, and it's just a sort of a gateway into a whole world. Dr. Ross Perlin is a linguist and translator and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance and teaches at Columbia University. He's with us today on Travel with Rick Steves to update us on the state of endangered languages around the world. Ross profiles New York residents who are working to document and revive their own native languages before they disappear. It's in his book called Language City, the fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York. He has more about linguistic diversity on his website, rossperlin.com, and that's P-E-R-L-I-N.

41:25Can you talk about a few cases where governments have politicized it and actually tried to kill languages? You know, language policy is a whole kind of interesting field unto itself that people often don't think about how governments really shape this stuff. And indeed, you know, so often it's really been ham handed and it's been kind of language oppression, whether it's looking at, you know, the treatment of Kurdish speakers in Turkey who really were not, you know, not only not encouraged to speak their language or given any resources, but actually could be, you know, locked up or in serious trouble for speaking it.

41:58But Basque and Catalan in Spain under Franco. That's right. Under Franco, any minority languages of Spain like Basque and Catalan were strongly repressed. And, you know, this takes so many forms. If you look at the history of Native American languages in the U.S. as well, particularly the boarding schools, the residential schools, those were places where often, you know, the language was beaten out of kids and they really were pressured to switch to English. So this is a common story in so many places. And I do hope now that we're sort of turning the corner on that. I don't know that it's going to be everywhere.

42:26There's a lot of variation, but hopefully some places are sort of kind of trying to actually give some support to the languages in each place. Well, this is very interesting to me because, you know, my beat is Europe. And Europe has, with the European Union now, these small languages have had a new lease on life because it's not Basques and Catalans against Madrid, you know, and it's not Britain people against Paris. But it is Britain people as part of Europe. Britain meaning Brittany. and Basque being that little country that didn't get its country, what do they call it, a nation without a state, and where the government up until now has just said, well, here's the line, you speak French and you speak Spanish, but no, we're Basque.

43:08But with the EU, that's been accepted now. And I think around the world, we've got this very interesting thing of languages actually being reborn. I mean, you write about it in your book, Maori, Welsh, Hawaiian. Talk about some of the success stories of the smaller languages. There are an increasing number of success stories. Some of the ones you just mentioned are some of the kind of amazing cases. A lot of people know the story of Hebrew, which had ceased really to be a spoken language for most people over 2 ,000 years, but was sort of revived as a daily spoken language with the sort of lead-up to the founding of the State of Israel just in the first half of the 20th century.

43:50And that is now a native language for millions of people. with Welsh, it's extraordinary that right there, kind of in right next to English, this language has survived and thrived. The cases of Maori and Hawaiian really in the last half century through language nests, as they're called, sort of like preschools. And then, you know, the Hawaiian language revivalists have built up a whole education system in Hawaiian when that language had been sort of driven to the brink. So there's a number of these cases now that are quite extraordinary and show that it's not some inevitable thing that only a few languages are going to sort of triumph, but that actually this multiplicity can be very much a part of modern life and that people can have these many languages in their lives.

44:33This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're joined today by Dr. Ross Perlin. His book, Language City, explores the hundreds of languages spoken in New York City and how they represent both the world's linguistic diversity and the urgent need to preserve and document the linguistic riches on our planet. That's what Ross Perlman writes about in his book, and that's what his nonprofit, the Endangered Language Alliance, focuses on. That website is ELAlliance.org. Ross, I am so fascinated at this thought that you've got half of all the languages on the planet have less than 10 ,000 speakers, and at what point does a small language become terminally ill?

45:14Or in other words, what are the critical little features that can keep a language, even if it's small, vibrant? The number of speakers is, you know, sort of seems like a common sense kind of way of evaluating the health of a language, but really even more important than that is intergenerational transmission. If you have even one generation where no children are being taught the language by their parents or caregivers, that really can set the language on a terminal course. What about a society where you, if you have journalism, a newspaper, television, media, the language taught in schools, is that something that people who want to intervene realize is important to have a foundation?

45:56Or is it really just having that intergenerational spirit, that esprit de corps for the language? You know, all of the sort of media education, official support, those things I think certainly help. There's certainly a sign of linguistic vitality, and there is a whole scale by which linguists can try to evaluate the endangerment level of a different language, and those things all weigh into it. But I think many would agree, and I certainly feel, that the home is the fundamental space for a language. And that's the attitude of the parents, because in a lot of cases, I think parents, because they love their children, they wrongly or rightly decide, no, you're going to learn English or you're going to learn Mandarin, you know.

46:36it might be out of fear of reprisals or economic disadvantage. It's an understandable feeling. You know, in many cases, they themselves have been made to feel shame or feel that their horizons have been limited by speaking a smaller language. So I think, you know, it's important to support those parents in their choices so that they actually can give the linguistic future that they want to give. I think most parents, you know, given a really level playing field, would certainly pass on, you know, their mother tongue, would have an affection for and pass on their mother tongue to their kids. It's only when it's really stacked against them that they would not do that.

47:09And related to that, you write in your book, Language City, about the onslaught of, quote, killer languages, you know, the ultimate sort of consolidation where in the future the entire world might speak Spanish and Chinese and English. I mean, killer languages sounds like a rough term. And obviously, you know, there's nothing. It's nothing about the languages themselves. But, yeah, if their speakers and their institutions kind of push these languages to the exclusion of others, that's, you know, building up resentment. That's killing off the richness of so many other languages. You know, I think that's a problem.

47:42So it's about finding a balance between, you know, this linguistic diversity of the planet, which has held for thousands of years, and the usefulness of having some lingua francas for certain things. It's so interesting how you report on the fact that there's hundreds of languages that have just a handful of speakers, and they're on the way to going extinct. And these little languages, which used to be the foundation of a culture, they die without a whimper. Almost nobody notices except linguists like you. Tell me just the emotional feeling you have when you realized this language was alive last year and today.

48:22It's gone totally. It's the languages that are most endangered about which we know the least and which have, you know, in many cases not been documented at all. We have very few recordings. And, you know, the idea just emotionally speaking that you'll no longer be able to hear that language, learn from that language, hear the stories in that language, understand the worldview that is encoded in it and part of it is just, you know, one linguist described it as like a bomb being dropped on the Louvre. I think that's what we're talking about. If your heart breaks for the looting of a great museum in a war or something like that, as mine does, I think if we are more sensitive about linguistic diversity, it should break the same way when these languages die.

49:05As you talk about, Ross Perlin, in your book, Language City, just for a final thought, it seems like it's your mission driven here to raise people's appreciation of the value of linguistic diversity. Most of us are sort of predisposed to be monolingual in our mindset. How can we cultivate a multilingual mindset, even if we're only fluent in one language? I was raised with one language pretty much. Many, of course, especially in the U.S., English speakers are raised monolingually, and then we kind of sometimes break our heads against other languages, and we're like, oh, that's just not going to be easy for me to learn.

49:46And that's understandable. You know, it's great to try. It's amazing that, you know, now with tools like Duolingo, people are really, you know, you see how much people want to do this, and that's a wonderful thing. But, yeah, even, you know, failing that, I think it's still important to have that multilingual mindset where you recognize and respect and pick up a few words of other languages and just sort of enjoy them being around and not to feel fearful that, oh, this, you know, why don't they speak my language? but to say, you know, to enjoy it and to understand that it's just as much a part of the world's kind of diverse ways of being as different foods or different musics and so on.

50:22We can celebrate it. Dr. Ross Perlin, thanks for writing Language City and best luck with your work at Endangered Language Alliance. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Muralhall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe and Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. Find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves.

51:01I teach Europe, TV shows, guidebooks, and bus tours. And I wrote a book called Travel as a Political Act as well because I've learned that the very best souvenir is a broader perspective. You can broaden yours by watching my travel specials. TV shows on Iran, Palestine, Israel, the story of fascism in Europe, that'll blow you away, and Hunger and Hope, lessons learned in Ethiopia and Guatemala. I've got shows ranging from Martin Luther and the Reformation all the way to Cuba. I love how 1 ,400 years ago, Mohammed said, don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled. You can stream these shows and many more for free at ricksteves.com.