J. Davidson - Planet Word

Although Akha does not have an established writing system, various missionary sects have created nine alternatives. There’s a Catholic one, a Baptist one, a Lutheran one, a Methodist one, all tinged with the underlying premise that the Akha should convert to Christianity. Aju doesn’t approve of missionaries. He explains that the Akha have not yet decided on a system for writing their language, but it will be a new one, created for and by Akha and based on the Roman alphabet with some special ways to signify the tonal nature of their language.

Oddly, the Akha, for so long in contact with the dominant cultures that do have writing, have never had a system for recording, be it alphabet or ideogram. Aju says, ‘In the old days, I don’t know how many years ago, they say Un Ma, the first spirit, gave an alphabet to all people and, because he’d run out of paper, he presented the Akha tribe with a water buffalo’s hide on which the Akha letters were written. The Akha took the skin home and it was fine. But then one day there was a great storm, and it got wet. So they took the skin near the fire to dry it out. But the smell got so nice that they couldn’t resist eating it, and since then the Akha have had no alphabet. We ate it!’

The blacksmith hammers away, and before long a blade that will be used to kill an ox and finish the ceremony takes shape. It’s all very relaxed, and a lot of rice wine is consumed as the elders begin their recitation, which is nothing less than the history of the tribe. The sixty generations that the initiate will have to learn tell of the Akha’s migration through southern Yunnan, Burma and Laos to their present place high on this saddleback in the Golden Triangle. It seems not dissimilar to those biblical passages where begat is a much overused verb.

It’s old men doing their old men’s stuff (no women take part). Aju confesses his own daughters are more interested in their Facebook friends, Twitter and watching YouTube. And therein lies the rub. To communicate with the larger world the Akha must learn either Thai or English.

The village primary school is new, a well-built block of five classrooms, adorned with various pictures of the King of Thailand and more Thai flags than the national airline. A football pitch takes centre stage with the dramatic hills behind that define the border with Burma. Money has obviously been spent on it. The village is only 5 miles from the border with Burma, and the Thai government is keen to instil a sense of national identity in these hill tribes whose allegiance is, at best, fluid. The key to this is language. Thai is the compulsory medium of all instruction, and even if a universal Akha script existed it probably would not be taught even as a second language, English being given preference. But Aju is adamant that the Akha, along with the million plus other hill-tribe people, need to have their written language to maintain their identity and at least give them a chance to maintain their rich culture and heritage. Linguicide leads to cultural genocide within a generation.

Aju is not convinced that the Akha language will survive for many more generations, but he is determined to do his best to preserve it. He explains how he recently went to a meeting of hill-tribe people in Yunnan in southern China, and they agreed on the style of the new Akha script. But it may be too late. Aju’s daughters don’t even speak Akha at home that much, preferring to speak Thai. Wistfully Aju laments: ‘At my home I speak Akha language, my wife and I speak Akha to them, but they reply to me all in Thai. But they understand Akha. Most of the Akha, especially the younger generation who moved to the city, they don’t show to the outsider that they are Akha because we used to be looked down on by the majority of the Thai people, and they said the Akha people were dirty and lived in the forest, and didn’t have a proper language. And this memory transfers to the kids; that’s why the kids want to hide it. They don’t want to be Akha.’ Like so many minorities, they feel slightly ashamed of their own language with its perceived ‘primitiveness’. So they do their best, like all children, to fit into the dominant culture.

To lose a language is to lose a culture and its history. Homogenization of both language and culture seems inevitable in this part of the world, but, while it might seem cleaner, easier and safer, it diminishes us. It may not seem as bad as the extinction of a whole species, but it is as great a loss.

The west coast of Ireland on a bitterly cold December morning is one of the most unusual — certainly the most beautiful — places to play a round of winter golf. The Connemara Isles golf club is on the westernmost tip of Europe and Connemara in County Galway is part of what is called the ‘Gaeltacht’, one of the central areas for the speaking of the ancient language of Ireland — Irish. ‘Everybody here thinks in Irish,’ one of the golfers explains. ‘You can get through your lifetime here without speaking English.’

The thatched club house is a reminder of a catastrophic event which helped to shape the story of the Irish language. It was built by the great grandfather of the current owners in 1850. He was one of a handful of survivors from the wreckage of the famine ship Brig St John , which foundered on rocks near Boston Harbour in October 1849.

The Brig St John was a so-called coffin ship, one of the many ill-equipped, overcrowded vessels which carried hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants across the Atlantic to the east coast of America between 1845 and 1851. This was the time of An Gorta Mór — the Great Hunger — better known outside Ireland as the Potato Famine. Around a million people — one in eight of Ireland’s population — are thought to have died from starvation or disease; another million emigrated from Ireland to the States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. The Irish potato famine was probably the worst human disaster in nineteenth-century Europe and a watershed for Ireland, politically and culturally; it sounded the death knell for the Irish language.

It’s difficult to get your head round just how catastrophic An Gorta Mór was. There aren’t many written accounts from survivors; a bit like people who lived through the horrors of the Battle of the Somme or the Nazi concentration camps, they simply didn’t or couldn’t talk about it. There was extensive newspaper coverage at the time, however. One of the worst-affected areas was County Cork in south-west Ireland; the town of Skibbereen — where one in four of the population is thought to have died — became the focus for press and outsider interest. The Illustrated London News hired its own special correspondent, illustrator James Mahony, to report from Skibbereen. And, in a world before printed photographs, the illustrations accompanying Mahony’s graphic two-part series became synonymous with the famine.

We next reached Skibbereen … and there I saw the dying, the living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as all were in the same state; and, not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of three or four, even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last resting place.