According to a World Economic Forum 2022 report, over 20 percent of existing languages may no longer be spoken by the century’s end. But new efforts show that regenerative tourism and responsible travelers could help save these Indigenous languages—all the while deepening their own experiences.
Anna Belew is one of those people. A program manager at the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), she aims to strengthen a worldwide collaboration to support and build connections between people working to save endangered languages. But at the core of ELP’s work is an online space in which language teachers and advocates around the world can record, access, share, and research Indigenous languages. The ELP leverages technology to serve individuals and connect them with others doing the same. “Language endangerment is everywhere, and it affects millions of people. No matter where you live,” says Belew.
Research shows that around 41 percent of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are endangered. Estimates suggest 50 to 95 percent of the world’s languages will disappear or be in serious trouble around the 22nd century if current trends continue. Losing even a single language has far-reaching consequences. Bogre Udell, the founder of Wikitongues—a nonprofit aiming to sustain and promote all languages—put it this way: “When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions … Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”
Languages suffer for complex reasons but each endangerment shares a common denominator: Threats to the people who speak the language. Indigenous peoples speak over 85 percent of the world’s languages yet comprise about five percent of the global population. The majority of language loss is due to violence, in one form or another, against Indigenous peoples. Human-caused climate change is further impacting language loss as it fractures already strained communities. This is happening in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. The island is the nation with the world’s highest density of languages, but rising seas and impending displacement could separate the few who do speak Vanuatu’s native languages from one another.
“Language endangerment is a painful and tragic issue, but it’s important to look for the light,” Belew says. Her hope lies in language revitalization efforts that focus on community-based immersion, education and documentation. And, maybe, tourism could have a positive influence on these efforts.
When we lose languages, we lose cultural perspective and a connection to the places those languages developed—two aspects of what makes travel… well, travel.
Right now, the door is open for the tourism industry and responsible travelers to step up and support languages meaningfully. Connecting with even a little bit of a local language can go a long way to deepening your understanding and experience of a place, its people and its ecology. When you support and engage with Indigenous-led efforts and community-based initiatives in the destinations you are traveling to, the local language is bound to be integrated—and you are supporting the speakers of that language directly. But there has to be some time and effort put in by both travelers and locals in order for real impacts to occur.
“If a lei just gets put around your neck, and that’s your only experience, you’ve learned nothing,” says Mālia Sanders, the director of the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association. “What kind of tangible things can locals teach a visitor or have them engage with that allows them to learn a way that won’t damage our place, people, and culture, but yet will help them leave changed [for the better]?”
Sanders is leading a program that links Native Hawaiian Cultural Ambassadors with hotels and other traditional tourism spaces, to act as both gatekeepers and resources. So, when a lei is placed around a visitor’s neck by an ambassador, that visitor is taught about its meaning, story, and significance from a Hawaiian perspective, with insight to Indigenous values like patience, gratitude and balance with nature. And so, the Hawaiian language becomes a part of the experience. “We know when our visitor comes to richly cultural places, they’ll learn parts of the language by default.”
Collette Leimomi Akana’s book Hānau ka Ua exemplifies the value of languages intensely rooted in a place and its people. The book compiles over 200 names for ‘rain’ in Hawaiian, which “codify millennia of nuanced scientific observations about ‘when a particular rain would fall, its color, duration, intensity, the path it would take, the sound it made on the trees, the scent it carried, and the effect it had on people.’” These ancient cultural and scientific insights are part of what we risk losing.
Lars Miguel Utsi—Vice President of the Sámi parliament of Sweden—shows us the multitudes contained in a single hyperlocal word: Guohtun. This Northern Sámi word describes ideal conditions for reindeer to find lichen to graze under a snow covering. Utsi suggests the meaning runs deeper, as “it encompasses geography, plants, lichens, snow and reindeer. It exemplifies the language and its connection to land and water.” Losing that word would be losing a part of Sámi culture and knowledge.
Words are often so specific to a place and people that they resist easy translation. Didxazá-speaking Zapotec poet Irma Pineda created a book responding to the culturally bound specificities of languages: Intraducibles (Untranslatables) in 2021. It contains drawings representing 68 untranslatable words from 33 Mexican Indigenous languages. Now, imagine losing all this wealth of knowledge—that’s precisely what is happening in the world today. When we lose languages, we lose cultural perspective and a connection to the places those languages developed—two aspects of what makes travel… well, travel.
Integrating language usage as part of the experience helps restore community culture and traditions, while also enriching tourist experiences.
The link between tourism, language, and community is an emerging field. As the Sámi word guothun shows, ecology, culture and language are inseparable. If regenerative tourism’s lofty goals to leave a place better than it is found are to be achieved, it must bring support for languages into the fold.
To support languages, Anna Daigneault of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages emphasizes that first, responsibly minded travelers “should look at endangered languages in their home region because that’s where they can make the biggest impact.” Supporting local endangered languages opens opportunities for direct action in helping sustain those communities. When traveling, we can also support Indigenous and community-led experiences and organizations—another way we’d be supporting the language itself.
Real-world examples hint at positive developments. In her 2015 article, Kelly Whitney-Squire explores how the Haida people in Canada, through the Haida Heritage Center and the Haida Gwaii Museum, have increasingly made language more visible and accessible within the broader community. The results of centering local language, Whitney-Squire shares, have meant “maintaining local identities and heritage, by supporting culturally appropriate, culturally relevant language use within community-based and tourism-related settings”. Language then reaches across tourism to touch places and people, both local and visiting, Whitney-Squire concludes.
Tourist experiences with the Xaayda kil or Xaadkkil language of the Haida, Ladin in North Italy, and Nahuat in Puebla, Mexico, show that a mutually beneficial relationship is possible at the crux of language survival and responsible travel. In all three cases, integrating language usage as part of the experience helped restore community culture and traditions, while also enriching tourist experiences. Sustaining languages is critical to sustaining cultures and, by extension, cultural tourism.
Tourism hasn’t always had positive outcomes for languages. As recently as January 2022, Tulum, Mexico, made headlines when Copal Hotel employees and their supporters protested against the company for prohibiting employees from speaking Mayan. But Indigenous, community-led initiatives are increasingly popping up and modeling how they want and expect to be treated by travelers and the industry at large.
“We’re adapting [the Western model of tourism] to our Indigenous thought process in our Indigenous culture and our Indigenous language … to sort of make that mindset shift for our visitor,” says Sanders. Language aspects of culture, via an Indigenous-led model of tourism, can become a pull factor for a destination this way. The monetary influx of tourism can then go back into the hands of host communities, who remain in charge of generating experiences and spaces that align with their living culture and practices to keep it flourishing.
The Endangered Languages Project publishes a map every year illustrating where languages are in trouble. It’s distressing to see. But in August 2023, a new map will be published, instead showing users where people are actively working to revitalize their languages. “Amazing things are happening in language revitalization all over the world,” Belew says. “We want to highlight this good work.”
The next time you go to book a holiday, have a look at the map. Be curious. Support Indigenous-led initiatives when you’re a visitor. We live in a world of worlds, and our languages reflect deep histories, heritage and landscapes. In this time, responsible travel means helping our many worlds flourish.
Joliene Carolina is a travel and adventure writer based in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Before she started freelancing, she earned MAs in Linguistics and in Comparative Literature to support and spread the joys of multilingualism and has collaborated with the Northwest Indian Language Institute since 2015. Her driving purpose in writing is to be a vessel for the stories that risk never being told.
