Maria Bardají: "There came a moment when the toli changed their language"

BarcelonaThe icon on her mobile today is of a train journey between Geneva and Grenoble, but before that, she had had the image of very different waters: those of an Indonesian beach, where she has been doing fieldwork since 2018. Every year or two she travels there to study an Austronesian language in the process of extinction, totoli. She now captains the project from the University of Barcelona with ministerial funding.

When you first landed in Indonesia, did you already speak Indonesian?

— I had studied for a year at the University of Cologne. I was assigned to a village where it takes three days to get there and where there was no one who spoke English, not even the English teachers at the school. I had to learn Indonesian, no matter what, and it was quite fast.

What did you go there to do?

— She was a doctoral student on the project of linguist Nikolaus Himmelmann. The objectives are the documentation and description of Totoli. It consists of recording the language in as many situations and contexts as possible, and transcribing and translating this corpus into Indonesian and English. Then comes the work I like most: deciphering the gears that the language has, and that speakers have in their unconscious, to arrive at some norms. But grammar cannot be separated from social impact, and it is true that I have an interest in it as an activist, I see an identification with minority languages, like ours.

Totoli is an endangered language. How many speakers does it have?

— There are about five thousand left. It has lost between 15,000 and 20,000 speakers in just twenty years: this means that generations are dying out without new speakers joining them. Furthermore, it has very limited, familial areas of use, and only between parents and grandparents. There is a generation of young people who can no longer transmit the totoli.

Why did this happen?

— Indonesia has more than 700 languages. Celebes island alone, which is the second largest in the country, has a hundred languages; it's not like Papua, which has 900, but wow. And what happens with many languages has happened: the language of government, of school, the language that has been promoted, is Indonesian. It has been made to believe that all others are not languages of culture, and they do not have a place in many areas of society. Many families have believed it necessary for children to learn Indonesian first so they can do better in school, thinking that they would learn totoli later.

Hasn't it been like this?

— No. There have also been many migratory flows. Tolitoli is a very fertile region and people from other regions arrived there. At first they learned Tolitoli, but a moment came when the Tolitoli began to change their language and learned Bugis, Kaili, the languages of the people who settled there, to the point that the Tolitoli made Tolitoli dispensable. In the region's capital, Tolitoli is no longer heard, and around it there are few speakers left, elderly people. A region to the north remains where it is the language of daily life, in five small villages, but it has not been passed on to children either, except in the most isolated village.

And you ended up there. What is it like to live there?

— Normally I stay at the mayors' houses, I move around the north and the south. The first weeks you don't work, you have to see people, they invite you to weddings, you have to eat a lot and sometimes in front of an audience, because you generate a lot of curiosity. They ask you what winter is and what houses are like. Eight years ago you couldn't even talk on the phone, and the last time I was amazed at how TikTok has entered now, but without going through email or Google. Since the first years of life are spent a lot at home, because it is very hot, children have many inputs from television and mobile phones, and they speak more Indonesian than Totoli.

Are all language shift processes the same, or does each language become extinct in its own way? It's for a friend...

— All languages that become extinct reach the same point, but it has not been sufficiently investigated in what ways they do so. What we have seen is that changes in lifestyle and migratory flows play an important role. And the other factor is the identity link and linguistic awareness.

Is globalization the main contemporary factor of linguistic change?

— It is contemporary, but also a repetition of history. The first great wave of loss of linguistic diversity was when hunter-gatherers transitioned to sedentarization. Now it is undeniable that we are also facing a very big change in life, migratory flows. But contact between languages is never a problem.

Mmm... no?

— In the Amazon there is a lot of linguistic contact, a lot of diversity, and the languages have a lot of vitality. The problem is when there is a dominant language with many monolingual speakers that clashes with this other language, when a language is in the minority or when speakers change language whenever someone from outside comes.

That sounds familiar...

— It is impossible not to draw parallels with Catalan. Objectively it is very different, because Catalan has millions of speakers, prestige and institutional support, but all it takes is for us not to use it or to change it for another. It is one of the main reasons that have caused the totoli to be lost. When there is no awareness, the speaker plays the role of an inactive observer. Sometimes they talk to me as if they had encountered it, as if they were not part of this process, of the fact of not transmitting the language.

The more a language is threatened, the more awareness there is? Are we afraid it's too late to act?

— When we talk about Catalan as an endangered language, they tell us "Hey, there are languages in the world that are much worse off". Yes, but what should we do, act when it's already symbolic? Do we want to revitalize Catalan or just maintain it? We must act now that it is not too late, now that Catalan still enjoys certain privileges and certain vitality.