Reading about some languages considered endangered (like Breton, for example), I came across various revival efforts. It makes sense to me that the language speakers themselves might be concerned about the loss of what is part of their cultural heritage. But then I saw that UNESCO is involved – they publish a periodic listing of endangered languages and make efforts to save these languages as active and daily-use languages.
So while it makes sense why, say, a Breton person and speaker would want to keep the Breton language around as every-day primary languages, why should I (or international organizations like UNESCO) be concerned? I want these languages studied and documented, as I am interested in all of human culture, but why should I care if people use the language day-to-day as long as the language and its characteristics have been recorded for study? It seems to me that, as long as we have records and comprehensive data on as many human languages as we can, fewer languages being spoken in the world is actually a good thing.
If we had good records and data on every human language currently spoken, wouldn’t it be a very positive thing for humanity if, in a few hundred years, everyone speaks the same language as their primary language?
#1. It’s not pure natural selection: in many cases, as with Breton, the dying languages are dying precisely because the dominant culture has made a sustained effort to kill them. There’s sort of a moral dimension here: it’s not a fair fight, and we like to root for the underdog.
#2. Diversity. A unique way of perceiving the world will be lost. In the case of Breton, their worldview is reasonably well documented, but that’s not the case for most endangered languages.
#3. Social cost. A colonized population is generally a troubled one. [I’m not prepared to argue this point, though.] Language is one key element in this. Without language, heritage culture is only accessible in a limited, attenuated form. I’ve met a lot of Bretons who feel ashamed that they don’t speak “their” language, and also Bretons who speak it but feel ashamed that they do. Preserving the language validates it and takes shame out of the equation.
#4. The sheer romance of it all. The Bretons took their language to France in (more or less) the 5th century, and have kept it alive there for 1500 years. You want it to die on your watch?
#5. Bilingualism is good for the brain. Preserving minority languages gives people this benefit while simultaneously tying them to local history and community.
#6. For Breton, in particular, it’s just a cool-looking language. Petra 'zo gwelloc’h da welout eget ar yezh Brezhoneg skrivet?
I’m going to say that Dr. Drake’s #4 accounts for about 95% of it. It’s the same reason people are sad when an old house has to be bulldozed–they like to imagine how romantic it would be to speak/live in it until they have to deal with the knob-and-tube wiring, shoddy heating, and nonexistent plumbing … or the lack of cultural and economic opportunities, as it were.
While linguistic diversity sounds nice in theory, when you come down to the viability of the people who speak a dying language, there are reasons languages die out. It’s sad in theory, but you can’t help but sympathize with the former speakers who have pursued better lives at the cost of a dying culture.
This makes sense. What about a case in which there’s no effort made to kill the minority language – just cultural diffusion that results in a slow replacement by a larger language?
I’m not convinced that different languages lead to different world views. Different cultures certainly can, but why would differing languages necessarily mean differing world views?
This seems tied to #1, so I’ll repeat my question – what if it’s not due to colonization, but rather just slow and voluntary replacement? Like if Puerto Rico (which obviously was originally colonized by Spain) became a US state and over future decades English supplanted Spanish.
Not particularly, but what do I lose if it does, as long as good records and research remains?
This makes sense, but I’m not sure if it’s better than the one-world-language alternative.
Okay, then I’m convinced
For all of it together, these are good points, but is this world better than one in which, through long-term non-forced cultural diffusion, everyone spoke the same language? It seems to me that the latter would result in a more peaceful and more understanding world, as well as a world in which professionals and scientists of every type could easily coordinate with every other colleague in the world.
I tend to agree with the OP. I see linguists mourning the loss of languages as if species were going extinct. But I don’t think that’s a good equivalent. A language is just a tool; it’s not an entity with its own self-worth.
And the simple fact is that with a language, the more people that speak it, the more useful it is. Language is about communicating. A language than lets you communicate with a billion people is more useful than a language that lets you communicate with a thousand. Encouraging groups to speak little-used languages is also placing these groups in cultural enclaves that are isolated from the rest of the world. It’s marginalizing people so grad students have something interesting to study.
I would oppose the idea of forcing people to abandon a language. But if people are free to choose what language they want to speak, I don’t blame people for choosing French over Breton.
I think it’s for the same reason humans lament the extinction of many things (things that often have no bearing on our lives), be it species, cultures, language, etc.
I believe humans are blessed/cursed with a nostalgia gene that interferes with many of our lives, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Better to be soft-hearted than robotic. We don’t like it when things that we like to go away forever.
I’m confident if we were around 252 million years ago, during the end-Permian mass extinction, we’d all be saying, *“remember the good old days when those good ol’ trilobites were still around?” *
Not that we mourn for all things. I shed no tears when Disco music died.
Well, you can argue that it’s still colonization: cultural imperialism, as it were. Think of English as the McDonald’s of languages (but better for you): delicious, but sometimes you just want Panda Express.
For me, the argument you suggest has an air of natural selection about it: the better language wins. But that’s not so: it’s a numbers game. The more prestigious language always wins, and it’s more prestigious because it’s more powerful.
I don’t know. I think that for me, the best reason is that without their language, a people become merely a flavour of another people. Modern Bretons are more or less French people. A hundred years ago, they weren’t: they were their own people. But then again, taking the long view, there’s no particular reason that 200 years from now that would make any difference.
Another factor complicating the mix is the ol’ “what is language” argument: dialects and regional varieties have all the same issues, but rarely does anybody care, especially if the speech community consists of poor people.
But they’re not free: how old were you when you decided what your mother tongue would be? How old were you when you decided what language your teacher was going to use in school?
That said, it makes sense for each nation to have a common national language. I think part of the problem is that so many people, at all levels of policy-making and just thinking about it, assume that it’s a zero-sum game, and that learning one language means not learning another.
Languages also go hand in hand with culture, and sustainment of that culture and its traditions. Native Hawaiians, for example, know very few people will read the editorial written in Hawaiian in the local paper, but that’s not the point.
I don’t think any language is better or worse than any other, so this isn’t really it from my point of view. I just think that, aside from possible losses to culture, fewer languages in the world seems like a better thing than more languages in the world.
I lived in an enormously diverse part of Cameroon (which has more than 200 languages) where languages were dying in front of my eyes. In my area, a diverse mixed culture with a strong emphasis on indigenous traditions was over the course of decades being replaced by a sort of watered down generic West African monoculture. Without much in the way of universities or cultural centers or museums, there isn’t any structure for recording, preserving or fostering the local culture, and few outlets for those who would like to keep the culture alive.
Pluses and minuses. As a language lover, I regret the loss of any language. But we hoo-mans have so many reason to fight over things, it would seem that having one less thing to fight over would be a good thing.
Honestly, though, when some minor language that only a handful of people speak goes dead, it’s really more “meh” than anything else.
It’s not an irreversible choice. People are free to change their minds about what their primary language is at any point in their life. Breton speakers can choose to become French speakers and French speakers can choose to become Breton speakers.
But, for the sake of harmony, I’ll amend my statement to “if people are free to choose what language they raise their children to speak, I don’t blame people for choosing French over Breton.”
Surely there’s a trade off between cultural diversity and ease of communication, and hence an optimal number of languages.
I’m sure the optimal number of languages is more than 1, but it’s probably less than the total number we have today. I.e. I don’t think we should lose Spanish or Hausa or Quechua, but we could probably stand to lose Oubykh.
I’ll go with the comparison to species. Yeah, okay, so what: the snub-nosed owl is extinct. Who gives a damn? But if you view a thing in a kind of philosophical sense – it is valuable to itself – then the loss of anything is a shame.
Also, I’m a hoarder/keeper/collector. My instincts are all in favor of archiving knowledge. No book should be burned; no poems should be thrown out. Even crappy arts – children’s drawings and freshman essays and people’s first attempts to write novels – should be preserved. They reflect the efforts of a mind to create something of value.
The local Kumeyaay Indian tribe has rules against allowing outsiders to know or use their words. They refuse to publish a dictionary. They don’t want people opening, say, an Ice Cream store using a Kumeyaay word for the name of the store, because they feel this will cheapen their language. But the practical effect is that this is driving the language to extinction. Outsiders aren’t allowed to study it!
Why wouldn’t it be sad? Do you not find it sad in general when anything big and awesome dies? Are you unclear on the concept of emotion?
A language is a tool, sort of. But it isn’t just a tool in a single hand, it’s a culture. It has history, it has texture, flavor, and a kind of life. It allows us to commune with those who wrote in it in the past. That’s a lot to lose just for the sake of ease of doing business with the thrice-damned Parisian snobs in their capital city.
They may not lead to different world views, so much as express different world views differently. Above the purely functional level, translation can be notoriously approximate.
And then there’s what I call the Joni Mitchell Principle: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It may seem neat and tidy if we all speak the same or a limited number of languages for the world we have now; but what’s wrong with keeping options open?
