Harald Hammarström documents languages on the verge of extinction

What is the word for “stone” in your language? What word do you use for “hand”? For “head”?

These are the kinds of questions Harald Hammarström asks when he is out in the field in a distant land to document a language. He spends several months living in a village to connect with the inhabitants and study their local dialect. At the moment, he is focusing mainly on New Guinea.

“There are a huge number of small languages at risk of extinction there,” says Harald Hammarström when we meet him in his office at the English Park Campus.

Documenting the language Mor

He mainly works in the western part of the island, which belongs to Indonesia. He communicates with the villagers in Indonesian, which is gradually replacing many of the original small languages. An example of one of these small languages is Mor, which Harald Hammarström is currently documenting.

“There are 26 people left who can speak it, and the ethnic group consists of perhaps 100. Individuals over the age of 40–50 can speak Mor. Some of the younger individuals can understand quite a bit, but if you ask them to say something, they respond with ‘I don't know. Ask Granddad’ or with something that is clearly mixed with Indonesian. Everyone is switching to Indonesian,” he explains.

Three years’ work on grammar and a glossary

Documenting a language is time-consuming work. Harald Hammarström estimates that it takes around three years to document the grammar and compile a reasonable glossary. For many languages, time is running out.

“Throughout time, smaller languages have always been swallowed up by larger ones. But now, with globalisation, this is happening at an incredibly accelerated pace. In my village, for example, let’s say there are 100 people living there, but 30 of them are in the city all the time. In the city, no one knows what ‘Mor’ is,” says Harald Hammarström.

This is a trend that cannot be stopped.

“To the extent that there is a choice, people both here and there choose finances over their own language. Even if they are aware of it, they are willing to sacrifice the old culture and everything associated with it to secure better financial opportunities there,” he says.

Today, there are around 7,000 languages, roughly half of which have not yet been scientifically documented. The more languages that are documented, the closer we can get to answering the big questions about human communication, history and culture.

“With more languages, especially those that are not related to any other language, we can answer these questions about where language comes from, how long those people have probably lived there, and what is universal in language. Why do we have language, and what characteristics do all human languages possess that, for example, ‘crocodile language’ does not? Many are also interested in the question of how the surrounding culture influences the nature of language,” explains Harald Hammarström.

A key to human history

Language has always been key to understanding human history, culture and how we have moved from place to place. For this reason, it was only natural that Harald Hammarström became one of the principal investigators when the centre of excellence “Center for the Human Past” was established in 2024. There, researchers in genetics, archaeology and linguistics work together to expand knowledge in this field.

Harald Hammarström himself first became interested in languages as a teenager when he was told that Greek and Latin would be difficult to learn because they have so many cases.

“But then someone said that Finnish has 15 cases. I thought that something wasn’t quite right, because the Finns don’t seem to have any problems with their language. So I became curious about what it could be,” he recalls.

However, he had no plans to pursue a career as a linguist when he got older. He was more interested in computer science. But during his studies, he took language courses on the side, just for fun.

“Here in Uppsala, you can study lots of different languages, such as Swahili and Arabic. I picked up loads of languages like that because I found language learning fun. I studied every one that was available here. I think I studied 35 languages or something like that. But I didn’t really study any of them in depth. I wanted to know how that language works. I was obviously a linguist, even if I didn’t realise it,” he says.

Drawn to strange languages

After earning a degree in computer science, he moved to Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology, where, as a PhD student, he furthered his studies in computers. His subject of choice was now computational linguistics.

“That’s when I realised just how many strange languages there are. I had studied all the odd small languages available here at Uppsala University, and everyone had given the impression that Swahili was the strangest language there was. But there are actually 7,000 others that are even stranger and which I had never even heard of. I happened to discover this by chance while working on numerals in computational linguistics,” he explains.

Attending linguistics conferences

It was at this point that his interest in languages began to take over. Harald Hammarström started attending linguistics conferences to learn even more about languages and their structure. But, at the urging of his understanding supervisor, he went ahead and defended his thesis as planned.

“Despite completing my thesis in computational linguistics, I had become personally convinced that I had to devote my research to these strange languages instead,” says Harald Hammarström.

And that is exactly what happened.

Åsa Malmberg