The last speakers of Maidu

[shenmue]

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29804445

In North Carolina, small groups of people still speak Welsh and another language, Maidu. What is that? Very few know the answer. In this day and age, they seem to like it that way.

[Igel]

1. At this point the language as a language is already dead.

Some linguists, even, don't want to acknowledge it. There are a lot of definitions of language.

For some, it's strictly grammar--phonology, morphology, syntax. For others, it includes phonetics. And yet others really need lexicon, the words used and their definitions.

More broadly, it's not just the "barebone facts" but the variation. How do things change when you speak fast? What's considered folksy? Educated? Formal? How do you talk to your dog? To your sister? Your mother? Your wife? How do you talk when drinking with a buddy versus talking to a village elder about a political point? How do you change your vocabulary, your pronunciation, your grammar when you're angry versus neutral?

How does variation in the community work? What are the values given to geographic, social, age variation? Do kids speak the same way as their elders? Workers as their bosses? Do shepherds really speak the same way as rope makers?

Every language has a sort of core, neutral grammar. It has a range of styles by situation. A set of variations by geography, by social (or other) class. You can often ID a person by their speech--meaning each speaker's language is a bit different. But all of the differences add up to make a language what it is. Not just a set of phonetic values and phonotactic variation, with targets and parameters.

Old people pronunciation is often a little off. Hearing loss, dentition, motor skill atrophy can alter the phonetics a bit. You preserve that pronunciation, freeze it in time, and you are usually a little off. Your sample is skewed in ways you can't accurately adjust for.

When you get a small number of speakers each idiosyncrasy is important. Instead of averaging thousands, you average 5-10. It gives each quirk outsized importance.

But worse, at that level you've lost words and the range of variation in a language. And for a language like Maidu that just lacks words for recent innovations it's a nightmare.

For that reason, Israeli Hebrew is fundamentally different from Tiberian Hebrew. Modern Cornish and Manx are fundamentally different from the varieties spoken 500 years ago. You can't take a small sample and reimpose the variation--all the variation, all the values, will be no so much recreated as imported from the substratum language. For Manx, Cornish, it's going to be English.