I recently checked a book out of the local public library (remember those?) called Flutes of Fire, which is basically a collection of essays about the native languages of California. I'd whole-heartedly recommend it to anybody interested in Linguistics; I'm no expert in the field myself, but the book has been a fascinating and informative read without being so technical as to be difficult for me to understand.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter so far, for me at least, was actually the first one, but before I talk about that I think I should say a little bit about singing. I, personally, can't sing, at least not in any way that anyone would want to listen to, and in my day-to-day life it would be pretty unusual for me to run into somebody who was. For the most part, the people I know and have grown up with aren't comfortable singing around other people, even close friends and family, and I'm not sure that many of them ever sing when they're alone, either. Singing just doesn't seem to be something that many "regular" people do, except maybe in karaoke bars, and that's mostly considered a somewhat embarrassing joke.

This state of affairs seems to be something of an anomaly in the history of the world and its diverse cultures. Even a casual reading of traditional anthropology shows that in many if not most cultures singing is something that people do on an everyday basis. Songs have been tremendously important in many Native American cultures, where they are often tied to religious ritual and traditional healing practices, in Aboriginal Australia, where people traditionally navigated the often inhospitable landscape by following directions encoded in song, and even Ancient Greece, often credited as the birthplace of western culture, where epics like the Illiad and the Odyssey were sung from memory with instrumental accompaniment.

There might be any number of reasons for singing's importance in so many societies. Before the advent of mass media, people had to find ways to entertain themselves and those around them during idle hours or to take their minds off of onerous labor. Singing has been shown to help reduce stress and thereby improve both mood and immune function, and helps regulate breathing when performing strenuous exercise. Singing is also a fairly intimate form of social interaction, which is probably why so many people aren't very comfortable doing it around others, and might help to build and reinforce bonds of community and trust.

Getting back to what I was originally talking about, the first chapter of Flutes of Fire details a meeting between a group of Diegueño people (Native Americans who trace their ancestry through the inhabitants of Mission San Diego) from Southern California and the Kiliwas, a people who live in northern Baja California and speak a language related to the three spoken by the Diegueños.

Now, the languages spoken by these two groups of people have probably been developing separately from one another for at least 600 years. Their homes were separated by more than 100 miles of rugged and frequently inhospitable terrain, and for more than 100 years by an international and linguistic border as well. Both had suffered the impact of centuries of colonization; today there are estimated to be only around 10 native speakers of Kiliwa, while the languages of the Diegueños together may have as many as 110 speakers in the United States and a somewhat smaller number in Mexico. Furthermore, their lifestyles were radically different; these Diegueños lived in the city of San Diego and spoke fluent English, while the Kiliwa were, at the time, still relatively isolated from Mexican society at large, continued to eat mostly wild foods, and for the most part spoke no language besides their own.

It is not terribly surprising, then, that the Diegueños and the Kiliwas were mostly unable to understand each other's speech. That's not to say they were unable to communicate, however, because even after a century or more of separation, they all knew the same songs. Here were people who had never met before, shared at most a handful of words, and practically had less in common than two random people selected from any two modern cities in the world, and yet within less than an hour they were singing together with perfect ease. They even taught each other new songs in the same familiar genres, without the need for any non-lyrical explanation.

From the early days of colonial California, visitors and settlers from Europe, Mexico, and the United States have commented on the almost incredible diversity of the native languages. Traveling a distance shorter than many a modern Californian's daily commute, one could go from familiar territory into that of a people whose speech was almost totally alien. And yet, the archaeological record and the recorded testimonies of native peoples show that vigorous networks of trade extended to every corner of the state and beyond, carrying valuable goods like quarried obsidian, finely-carved soapstone tools and ornaments, and various types of shell bead "money" hundreds of miles from their site of manufacture.

It seems that, from prehistoric times, this kind of trade, as well as many other sorts of interactions both known and forgotten, was facilitated at least in part through the use of songs. Despite romanticized modern depictions, the peoples of the Americas were much like people anywhere else in that they frequently came into conflict with one another, and by announcing themselves and their peaceful intentions in song, travelers could hope to find a warmer reception in places where that song was recognized. Indeed, a fair amount of information could be conveyed in some of these songs, despite the fact that many contained no intelligible words at all. Genres of song recognized across linguistic boundaries could themselves be viewed as languages in some ways, or at least as codes for facilitating certain kinds of formalized interactions.

And I think that's really cool. >_>