Documenting Endangered Languages: Ensuring Traditions are Not Erased- Sadaf Munshi

On this episode of Life Beats with Sirisha, we talk to Professor Sadaf Munshi, a linguistics professor at the University of North Texas. We discuss how endangered languages and culture are at risk of disappearing at an alarming rate, with estimates suggesting we could lose 25-50% of languages in the next two to three decades. Prof. Munshi shares her experiences documenting and training others to work with these endangered languages, including her work with the Busheski language and Mankiali, an undocumented language. We explore the importance of language documentation and the impact of losing oral traditions. The podcast also delves into Sadaf's interests in the poetic and musical traditions of South and Central Asia and her work with artists and filmmakers, resulting in a collaboration album called "Voices and Bridges." Throughout, we raise questions and concerns about access to endangered languages and how to preserve them, while acknowledging the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Sadaf Munshi is a Kashmiri playwright who is known for her work in preserving the Kashmiri language. She became interested in linguistics when she was tasked with transliterating scripts between Devanagri and Persian Arabic. Sadaf took advantage of her knowledge of both scripts to navigate between them, which led her to become interested in linguistics. She heard about a new diploma program on linguistics at the University of Kashmir and decided to attend. Before this, she had started writing plays for Doordarshan, a popular television network. Today, Sadaf is known for her linguistic work and her contribution to preserving  Kashmiri  and other South & Central Asian languages like Busheski and Mankiali .

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Transcript

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:00:00]:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Life Beats with Sirisha On Radio Carawan. 104.1 FM and 700 a. M. If you're tuning in from Dallas, it's raining outside and most of us got me and my guest got caught in the thunderstorm. So we are a little wet and trippy today in the studio. Thank you for joining us. I am your host, Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi. I'm an entrepreneur, a podcast host, and a former tech executive. I host the podcast women Career and Life. It's a top 30 person, 45 podcast where I share stories and advice to achieve your career and life goals. To give you an example, the episode that dropped yesterday with People was the story of her being an immigrant in the US. And really how she's managed to learn and grow her career from an engineer to a senior vice president. I also have a business, Sahita, which is a global platform for South Asian women to achieve career and financial empowerment. So if you're wondering what to do with your first paycheck, how to start investing, or how do I even have that conversation with your boss on what do I do to get a promotion, am I doing the things? What are the next steps? You can join Sahita. It's Sahita circle. So look it up online. S-A-H-I-T-A circle. Circleso. And I hope to see you online. And thank you for tuning in today. I am excited about today's conversation. It is on endangered languages and what we do to keep the ecosystem alive. I have professor Sadaf Munshi. Sadaf and I met at the US India Chamber of Commerce event a few months ago. And what got us connected is she is the former chair and professor of linguistics at the University of North Texas. Not only is she an academic, she's also poet and an artist, and we are going to explore her history with languages, but also duel into some personal aspects as well. SADA, thank you for being here today.

Sadaf Munshi [00:02:07]:

Thank you, Sirisha, for having me here. I'm really glad to be here.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:02:11]:

Yeah, this is exciting because I had never actually thought so much about Njnjet languages. So why don't you walk us through your own journey? I know you're originally from Kashmir and now you're teaching in the US. So how did you get into linguistics and kind of what's been your path here?

Sadaf Munshi [00:02:26]:

Well, many years ago when I started my career as a playwright, I met another writer who was also a Kashmiri speaker, and we were talking about dictionary of the Kashmiri language. And at that time, some of the artists had left Kashmir and people were not able to read in Kashmiri language. So I was given the task of transliterating from one script into another script. There are very few people who can who know both Devonagri and Persia Arabic, so I was one of them. So it was an opportunity for me to navigate between these two scripts and know different people and know about languages. So that's where I got interested in the languages. And then I heard about the field of linguistics. They had started a new diploma program at the university of kashmir. I was still an undergraduate student, and I heard about it from one of my uncles, who was also a public relations officer at the university. So he told me about it. So it got into my brain already. Although I had started writing plays for DuDarshan. Oh, wow.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:03:36]:

Okay.

Sadaf Munshi [00:03:39]:

Yes. For a brief few years, I wrote place for DuDarshan srinagar, kashmir. And then, because of the political situation in kashmir, I couldn't stay there, I couldn't question my education there. So I started exploring new areas. So I went to delhi university and where I applied for a master's degree in linguistics. And that's where my introduction to linguistics started. I was very interested in different languages.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:04:12]:

Yeah. And then so any place that anyone might have seen on doordashian, in case any of the listeners here might remember.

Sadaf Munshi [00:04:20]:

I doubt, because they were for local kashmir, kashmir state television. So unfortunately, probably not. But maybe we can dig back.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:04:31]:

Yeah, that would be good. Yes, for sure. And then I think you came here to study, right, from in austin in the linguistics department. Yeah.

Sadaf Munshi [00:04:39]:

So I did my master's in m. Phil degrees in delhi university, which is where I kind of got my training in historical linguistics and got to know about different languages and language families. My supervisor was one of the leading historical linguists, dr. Pram singh. They encouraged my professors, encouraged me to go to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree here. So I applied for a doctoral degree at a couple of universities. One of them was UT austin, which is where I did my PhD. Eventually. And it's there that I got exposed to other fields of linguistics, and I got to know about this emerging field of linguistics, which is called documentary linguistics now, or land language documentation. And we had a very strong program there at UT austin in language documentation. And that's where I got introduced to this newly emerging and fascinating field of different languages, knowing about various languages that.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:05:43]:

Need documentation and what sort of languages need documentation.

Sadaf Munshi [00:05:48]:

So there are roughly about 6000 or 7000 estimated languages, depending on whether people call them languages or dialects. Different figures have been given by different experts ranging between 3007 thousand. And a lot of languages are highly endangered, which means that people are no longer continuing to speak their language, or younger generations are not learning their heritage languages anymore due to a variety of reasons. It can be political, economic, educational, and otherwise, and migration. Also. So many languages are dominated by other stronger languages which have more power, political power, or prestige, cultural prestige, educational and other kinds of values. So in relation to those languages, these minority languages do not have that much scope in getting you somewhere economically or politically. So many of these languages have been suffering at the hands of stronger dominant languages. In many cases, languages are losing speakers abruptly, in some cases it's happening slowly, depending on what is the situation of a particular language. So there are languages that have very few speakers, a handful. There are languages which have the last speakers now, and there are languages which have like 25 speakers, few dozen speakers, a few hundred, few thousand, and so on. But there are also languages that have millions of speakers, but they're also suffering. It's just a matter of a few generations that the languages could die if we don't do anything about them.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:07:35]:

Yeah, I guess thinking about our own personal experiences as immigrants to another country. My kids do not speak my mother tongue. I mean, one of them learnt it, but over time it's kind of left away. And so I can totally see like two generations from them just as that process shrinks, that you can easily lose it. Of course, the language is quite large because I speak Telugu at home. That's a huge population. But there's so many other languages which might be smaller population size that can eventually disappear. So what is the prediction? Like, how many languages do they expect there to be? Like, say, a decade from now or a century from now?

Sadaf Munshi [00:08:12]:

Some linguists have estimated that one language is dying per two weeks, which is kind of an exaggeration, maybe. Now, some experts are doubting that, I mean, they're questioning that estimation, but it's hard to tell. But maybe one of the estimates is like within the next 20 years or so, the languages will be gone, but if we do something about it, then probably that may not happen. There are languages which have a lot of resources, written resources, and there are languages that do not have a lot of resources. So depending on how the situation with respect to a particular language is, whether or not it has written materials or other kind of material, documentation materials, whether it's audio, video and other kinds of texts. So there are languages which are only orally preserved, they're only spoken and they don't have any written materials, so those languages are suffering more. So a lot of linguists are documentary linguists have been working on documentation, digitization and preservation of languages, but also working with native speakers of some of these languages. And my focus mainly has been to now, recently, to train native speakers in documenting and preserving their own language and also revitalizing them.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:09:40]:

So I know that obviously that's a rapid shrinkage. What you're talking about to lose I mean, when you lose a language, you don't just lose language, right? You lose the culture, you lose the ecosystem, you lose the heritage, you lose.

Sadaf Munshi [00:09:53]:

A lot of knowledge associated with it, you lose kind of your identity, which is something very personal to you, so, yeah, it's like a whole world. You're losing a whole world.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:10:05]:

Yeah, you've just kind of wiped it slowly off the map. And think about it, a lot of languages are oral tradition. They don't have a written script, so that's how they went, which is why you're trying to probably that intersects what you're doing as written thing as well. So if you lose the language, then it's not just I can read a textbook and learn from it. That thing is completely swept out into the ocean and you'll not likely see it again. So when you say you're documenting it and you're deciding it, what kind of triggers, which languages? Because I think when we were talking you do on Guru, Shakti, Kashmiri and Mankiali, but how do you decide which languages? And I think from yours is largely in what, south central Asia. Central Asia, that's where you're focusing on what are the ways you decide it's become endangered enough. How do you get access to these languages to be simple? And what do you do?

Sadaf Munshi [00:10:56]:

Right, yeah, access is very important. So in my case, when I got to know about documentary linguistics and language documentation, it was like a chance discovery. I discovered this Busheski language in my own hometown, Srinagar. I didn't know this language was spoken there. There were only about 350 people who had migrated prior to the partition of India and Pakistan. So in around 1890, their ancestors, who were also from a royal family, king Raja Alzheimer was one of their forefathers. He was the king of the Gilgit agency. So Raja Azukhan, his family, very close family, and some maybe attendants, and all around 20 people in total were arrested by combined British and dogra forces back then in the 1890 or 91, and they were brought to Srinagar and they were put under arrest in this fort, which is called Haripat fort, it's known as Haripat fort. So they were put there and then eventually after sometime they were given like a piece of land or whatever compensation, and they settled there. Then the partition happened and they lost contact with their parent community. And so many people didn't know about them until recently. They were also seen as Tibetans, probably by locals they call them, butraj what is a term for used for Potia, which is Tibetan. So many people didn't know their origin or anything. So I actually, by chance, met a speaker of this time in Iran. I was visiting my husband in 2002. I was just married in 2002, and I was visiting my husband and I saw one of his friends, he was also from Srinagar, and I just asked him, which language do you speak? And he didn't know the name of his language. And he said, I don't know, I don't think it's a language, it's a bowling, it's like a dialect or something. I said, no, whatever you speak, it's a language. So I got very curious and I started asking questions, and I then did my own investigation. I called my dad and told him gave him a word list and asked him to get their words for a particular word list and started digging what is the origin of the language that he speaks? And that's how I discovered that. Then I got curious, and I wanted to work on it. And what happened to this language because of being away from their parent community? How did it change? And then I applied for a National Science Foundation grant to work on the language, and my reviewer suggested I should document it. I wasn't planning to document in the beginning. I was planning to look at how the language had changed. So that's how I got interested in documentation work. And the second language that I started working on after many years is Mankiali, and Manchyali is completely undocumented. There was absolutely no literature on it. And although Brusheski was there, I mean, there was a lot of work on Brushowski, not documentation work, but quite a bit of work on other dialects. But Manteli was completely out of the map. It wasn't even in the list of the world languages. So we had to do some paperwork to get it in the list. In 2017, it got added to the list of the world languages. It was because of some people in Pakistan. They contacted me because I was working in I had done a lot of feed work. I extended my work in Pakistan after some years of working in India because I knew the parent community was in Pakistan. So I started going there. Then in the middle of my work, I thought, I can't document every single language. Even one language is out of my hands, like documenting one single language. It's a lifetime project, so I thought, it's not helpful. So I started thinking about training people. So I started training workshops in Pakistan, and then I did some training workshops on the other side in India also. So I've been doing training workshops as part of while I'm doing documenting these languages, I've also been providing training, hands on training to native speakers of many different languages that are endangered and have very reduced number of speakers and do not have any materials. We're training them in documentation.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:15:35]:

The only way to kind of expand the scope of it not one woman's job to keep it all together, tied together. And it's hard. Yeah. It's interesting. The story you said, right, the gentleman you met when you went to Iran didn't think he had a language or didn't know that it was a language or that he spoke it. And you're an investigative detective, like a CSI on languages. That's exactly what you are. Yeah. You have to find code. Yeah. Get forensic evidence, figure out what it is, look at the clues, and then do it. I think for anyone who's listening, by the way, the phone lines are open. If you want to talk to Saddav, the number is 2148-1733. The number again is 2148-1733. You are listening to Light beats with Teresa on Radio Caravan. I am interviewing Dr. SAF Munchi. She's a professor in linguistics at the University of North Texas who works on endangered languages largely from Southeast Asia and Central Asia. And she's looking at those languages that are disappearing. And the statistics that she just said, which is kind of intimidating, is probably in the next two, three decades we could lose 25% to 50% of the languages, probably 50 years, if we don't do much. If we don't do much. So whatever we can all do. I haven't passed on my own language to my kids. It's been a bit slutty experience. But those of us who speak languages that are not, as you call it languages are defined by political, business, lot of other cases that kind of give it cloud in a way. It's not just a language of choice and also the culture that is an ecosystem that is around it. Since most of the listeners on this radio channel are largely from the South Asian community, most of our languages in many years ago, many centuries ago, did not have a written word. They were all very often you could have languages that were oral tradition. So you can lose them much more quickly if they were not a written word. A lot of what Sadhg is doing, which is very cool. Right. You are taking documentation, you are training people to take a look at it and figure it out. If you're listening, this is Dr. Serisha Kuchimanchi. I host the podcast Women Career and Life and have the global platform for South Asian women, Sahita. You can join Sahita by going to Sahita Circle so that we're talking about languages. You are also a poet. You also started to learn this into I think you picked up a musical instrument and an artist. Why don't you dwell into that and are you bringing parts of that back into what you do?

Sadaf Munshi [00:18:13]:

Yes, more recently I've started doing incorporating my interest into my research. And so I've been exploring more and more of the endangered poetic traditions and musical traditions of south and Central Asia. I've been working with musicians, poets, theater people. Like we in Kashmir, we have this outdoor theater called Bandwidth. So I've been exploring it's a dying tradition, street theater, and a lot of it involves folk music, folk poetry, folk songs and different types of musical instruments that are indigenous. And they're also old musical instruments that have been kind of dying. So I've been working with multiple people, documentary filmmakers, actors, people in theater, musicians from different countries working on multiple different languages. We did a project recently during COVID when COVID in 2020 March. I had invited an artist from Kashmir, a vocalist, Gasad Nizami, and we were going to do musical performance at UNT. He's a vocalist trained in classical Indian as well as Kashmiri sofiana Music Musiki but unfortunately, as soon as they arrived, everything got locked down and we got locked down. And then two and a half months he stayed with us at my house. So we did a lot of things during that time and we collaborated with other musicians, an Iranian musician, one of my friends also, who was teaching me sancho then. So we ended up doing a multilingual working on a multilingual collaboration. It's called voices and bridges. There's an album? Yeah, I was the linguistic and academic advisor on that, so yeah, it's in multiple different languages, including Kashmiri, Urdu, Persian, French, English, many languages.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:20:31]:

So again, a plug. What is the name of the album and where can people find it?

Sadaf Munshi [00:20:35]:

The album is called The Voices and Bridges. The composer is Asan Maturi. He's an Iranian musician and a santurist. He's my santor teacher also. So we collaborated on this project during that time.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:20:51]:

I'm going to try and look it up because the thing is, the way I'm thinking as a layperson is the easier way to keep a language alive is through art plays and music, if I'm listening, because during COVID I went to listen to music across the world. I was listening to music from Israel, listening to Sufi music, listening to this musician from UK Musician originally she's Sri Lankan origin who sings Kabali. Her name is Abi Sampa. So it's like watching all this.

Sadaf Munshi [00:21:19]:

She's beautiful.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:21:21]:

Have you heard her? She's amazing. If you haven't heard her, you should google Abi Sampa.

Sadaf Munshi [00:21:25]:

No, I love her.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:21:27]:

Yeah. And for those who are listening on the radio, you should check her out. I mean, she's so good. And leave the video as just her voice and the whole system, just the orchestra with her is like fantastic to listen. So we have about three minutes on the show. If you have any questions for Sadaf, you can call 2148-1733. This is live peace with Sarisha. On Thursdays at two next week, I will be traveling, so there's no show, but the week after we will be talking with Pratiba Aphale about productivity and time. So, Sadaf, as you're getting to closer to finishing up, we met at this conference and I think the conversation that got us started talking was about shuttling our kids back and forth for school. So I know you work and you're teaching and you have young kids, so how is that how is that balancing act going on?

Sadaf Munshi [00:22:21]:

Well, it's much better than it used to be. They're growing now. My daughter is twelve and my son is going to be 18 soon, but it's been a handful. When I did my first field trip to Pakistan, I was six months pregnant and most of my subpart of my travel was by road. One of the trips was 26 hours drive through a very treacherous road. And I didn't tell people here, I didn't tell my husband what was going on because my flight was canceled and a lot was happening. So, yeah, it's been very challenging. But my husband is also a doctor, so he has a very difficult schedule as well. But he's very helpful. He was away for some years, so it wasn't a cakewalk. But, yeah, it's happening. We're doing all these things alongside personal challenges and managing. Yeah, it's tough, but it's getting better.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:23:23]:

It does, I know. And those of you who may be listening, who might be parents, uncle, aunt, or have an ecosystem with young or growing children, there are different stages in life. All I can say is enjoy it. It might feel overwhelming at that point, but you look back and say, oh, I either had a wonderful experience or I should have spent more time. My son is getting ready to go off to college and one is a sophomore in high school. So I can kind of look back and I can't imagine them as being incredibly small anymore. But when I meet parents of young children and they're thinking, sometimes you feel like you're drowning because there's just so much when they're young, but it's a fun age and really enjoy it and have fun. So I wanted to conclude with what would you want us to remember? What should we be doing for these languages that we might all be speaking at home or hear about?

Sadaf Munshi [00:24:13]:

I think speaking those languages would be the best thing to do, but to make it more fun, I really believe that performing arts, whether it's play theater, anything, singing it's fun and making it fun for the kids also. So as part of that, I did some satirical and I think performing arts will be very helpful in doing that and speaking the language.

Sirisha Kuchimanchi [00:24:41]:

Okay, so tune into music if you haven't heard Abi Sampa, which we both plug. And thank you for tuning in for LLife Beats with Sirisha. And let your heartbeat to the rhythm of success.