24 WINTER 2020 / POPSCI.COM
WHY
SAVE DYING
LANGUAGES?
by HANNAH SEOLINGUIST NICHOLAS EVANS
had heard the Kaiadilt people,
an Aboriginal group in North
ern Australia, utter “malji” on
the beach many times. He
knew the term meant “schools
of mullet” and “holes of a fish
ing net,” but they would say it
even when pointing at empty
water. It wasn’t until he saw a
local artist’s painting of malji—a
blue canvas covered in pink and
red eyelets—that he realized the
word also described the bub
bles of light that indicate where
the catch might be.
As with many small, remote
cultures, the Kaiadilt’s native Ka
yardild vocabulary got muffled
by Europeans and missionary
teachings. In modern history,
the tongue’s never had more
than a few hundred speakers.
Today, according to UNESCO,
about 40 percent of the world’s
7,000 languages are at risk of
vanishing in the next century or
two. Losing them means letting
go of ancient knowledge about
littleknown places embedded
within the words—and gleaned
from multigenerational obser
vations. “Each language holds
clues that help us understand
all people, but you don’t know
until you look,” says Evans, who’s
also a professor at Australian
National University.
Take Australia, for example.
As Kayardild and other Aborigi
nal tongues faded under British
rule, the communities lost the
ability to pass on their under
standing of natural patterns
and island ecology. In Kune,
which is spoken in the North
ern Territory, manyawok refers
to both longhorned grasshop
per and yam; the shared name
arose because the critters’ sum
mer chirps cue when it’s time to
harvest the tubers. Other terms
help lay out precise directions
with geographic cues.
From a global perspective,
anthropologists can trace the
evolution of speech patterns
to help fill in our history. They
can see how people migrated
across islands and pinpoint
when technologies like canoes
emerged by tracking the emer
gence of seafaring terms.
On the individual level, work
ing to preserve tongues offers
a way to reclaim identity and
share cultural pride. That’s
been the case in Hawaii, where
immersion schools run jointly
by Native Hawaiians and the
state government helped the
number of Ōlelo fluent house
holds jump from a few dozen
to 24,000 between 1985 and- Elsewhere, international
groups like Terralingua and the
Endangered Language Fund
are helping Indigenous scholars
launch their own campaigns.
Each word they save imparts a
lesson with the power to round
out the human experience.
BIG QSpostcardLITTLE QWHERE WILL
ALL THE
PLASTIC GO?
WE’RE LOSING THE WAR AGAINST WASTE.
Although many Americans reflexively use recycling bins,
less than onethird of plastics are reworkable. Even that fig
ure is misleading, since particles like food residue can get
materials rerouted to the trash. In 2017, just 8.4 percent of
all plastics found new life, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency. The unfortunate truth is that recycling
can’t keep us from drowning in polymerbased refuse.
For more than 20 years, Chinese companies helped hide
the problem by buying about 700,000 tons of paper and plas
tic from the US every year. Cheap labor there meant people
could sort objects, which made it simple to separate trash
from treasure. In the case of tricky combos like bags full of
mixed materials, for instance, workers could pull bottles from
heaps of greasy takeout boxes. But in 2018, worried about the
amount of sheer junk like cling wrap coming in, China banned
all rubbish imports save for 99.5 percent pure plastic.
Back in the US, plants are now chipping away at our
mountain of garbage by improving automation. Some facil
ities use cameras to spot plastic bags that could tangle up
sorting machines, or deploy robotic arms to shake bottles
out of the irksome sacks. Others use blasts of air to sepa
rate paper from plastic based on weight. But those small
tweaks won’t be enough. To handle our nation’s plastic
trash—262 million tons a year, or 234 pounds per person,
according to analysis by the global risk consulting firm
Verisk Maplecroft—we’d need to increase our recycling
capacity by more than tenfold.
Some experts argue that we should just waste less. “Not
producing trash in the first place will always be better than
having something to recycle,” says Jenna Jambeck, a pro
fessor of environmental engineering at the University of
Georgia. To shrink our pool of wouldbe recyclables, US com
panies will have to prioritize selling longlasting objects over
singleuse goods—and change the way they wrap them. Many
products come in packaging designed for immediate dis
posal, Jambeck says, which accounts for 40 percent of plastic
use. Consumers can pressure manufacturers to do better by
seeking out companies that employ reusable or biodegrad
able wrappers. “Every time we can make a choice to not use
singleuse plastic, it makes a difference,” Jambeck says.
Additional reporting by Rachael Ziskby candice wang