“Medical help is being given to the last-known surviving speaker of a minority language in Nepal. Soma Devi Dura, an 82-year-old living in western Nepal, is thought to be world’s sole speaker of Dura, a Tibeto-Burman minority language. Scholars want to preserve Nepal’s disappearing minority languages. The country has more than 100 tongues, several with fewer than 100 speakers each.”

[via InterWorld Radio News Bulletin, 16 Jan 2008]

A peice like that really gets me thinking about language in particular, and communication in general. The choice of what form of communication to use (gestural, vocal, body language/facial expression, email, SMS, IM, FaceBook message, FaceBook poke…).

What makes us incline towards using one communication means over another at any given point in time?

Factors include:

• Who we’re contacting
• Time of day (where we are / where the other party is)
• Technology / network available at the moment of communication (where we are / where the other party is)
• Cost of network time at the moment of communication (where we are / where the other party is)
• Desire for privacy  / desire for publicity
• Shyness about opening a channel of communication
• Social implications of the communication channel

I’m sure there are others.

Personal related anecdotes:

• Only “old folks” use email. Kids use SMS.
• “Poking” someone on FaceBook when I’m not sure they’d want to be a friend, but might feel compelled to accept if they received an invitation.
• Wanting to kick someone under the table during a conversation, but refraining.
• Calculating which landline (or cell phone line) to use to call a relative in another country, based on calling plan rates.
• Trying to reassure a tense friend whose mother-tongue is Tagalog.
• A surprised daughter exclaiming, “Mommy! They all talk like we do!” in a supermarket in San Francisco.
•  Delaying data downloads to the cell phone until accessing a WiFi network.
• Receiving an SOS email: “Are you up? Can I call you?”
• Being available to that friend in crisis when she can’t call anyone in her own country for help at 2.00am local time.

Back to our opening story…

What would it feel like if your native tongue were nearly extinct? What would it be like to live in a world where you always — always — had to speak in a foreign language to be understood? What kind of alienation would you feel?

My favorite books on language:

• The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
• Seeing Voices
• A Man Without Words
• The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet
• Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew
• The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English