Endangered Languages, Endangered Thought

by Pierre Joris · March 6, 2009

An interesting issue of the UNESCO Courier on disappearing languages:

With the death of Marie Smith Jones, the Eyak language of Alaska (United States) died out last year; Ubykh (Turkey) vanished in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenç. Some 200 languages have become extinct in the last three generations, according to the new “UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger”.

The Courier’s feature, published in honour of International Mother Language Day (21 February), focuses on this worrying trend. When languages become extinct, not only words disappear, but ways of seeing and describing reality; we lose valuable knowledge and worlds of thought. Read the editorial

Each language is a unique world of thought

Australian linguist Christopher Moseley explains the crucial importance of preserving languages and presents the main innovations of the just-released third edition of the UNESCO “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger”. More

The monkeys, the scorpion and the snake

Stone is petrified speech, water is language laughing, the sown seed, a promised word: every element of reality is an integral part of Toro Tegu, currently spoken by some 5000 Dogons in the north of Mali. More

Seriously speaking : what is Ch’ti?

The French film “Welcome to the Land of Ch’tis” has been making Europeans laugh recently. But the reality is not so funny: Ch’ti, which is a variation of the Picard language spoken in northern France, has become a social stigma, or at best a quaint museum piece. More

Wuthing we gwen tull?

The same language is spoken on the islands of Norfolk and Pitcairn (Pacific), yet it has developed differently in the two places, separated by 3,907 miles. A native Norfolk islander tells the curious story of this language, which came into being in the late 18th century and split into two 70 years later. More

An epidemic is threatening indigenous languages

Some languages are spoken by very few people but are still very much alive, while others have been preserved by the isolation of their speakers. Marleen Haboud from Ecuador explains these apparently paradoxical phenomena. More

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Tags: Eyak language Tevfik Esenç UNESCO

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Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946, was raised in Luxembourg. Since age 18, he has moved between Europe, the Maghreb & the US & holds both Luxembourg & American citizenship. He has published over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) & The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). Forthcoming are: Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (Small Orange Import, 2023) & Diwan of Exiles: A Pierre Joris Reader (edited with Ariel Reznikoff, 2024). For a full list see the right column on this blog.

In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris’ work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff & Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).

Other work includes the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta’wil Productions). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, and with Habib. Tengour Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3: The University of California Book of North African Literature.

When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte. A volume of their collaborative work, to be called Domopoetics, will be published in the near future.