You just gave an example yourself, so I won’t. I don’t want to get too far into current thought on the native language acquisition process, but there is clearly a difference based on the age of the person at the time of exposure to a language. Why handicap a child with your dying language for sentimental reasons like “heritage”?
Economic well-being is not the real consideration here–I’m talking about access to information. The internet, only uses 10% of the world’s languages. That mean if you only now any or all of the other 90%, you get access to none of it. I believe that that is our heritage and that we all have the right to access the stores of human knowledge online, in books, etc.
As an aside, from a couple of friends who learned Mandarin, it is not very difficult to learn to speak. Read/write is another matter.
Maybe it also helped with Hebrew that it is not very hard to learn. Took me about a year of immersion in my late 20s to achieve fluency. The grammar is pretty logical and rigid, not very complex, word formation is very logical, and the number of possible roots (vast majority of which are 3-letter) are 222222 = ~10,000 (and obviously not all letter combinations are used).
You seem to be basing your argument on access to quantity of information, rather than quality. If that is your criterion, I can’t argue with you. There is, unambiguously, more information available if you can read Chinese, and that’s clearly the language we should all be using. Fuck English.
It’s clear that you place little to no value on oral tradition (which is enduring, but made up of ephemeral performances) or on culture-specific knowledge. This thread is endeavoring to answer precisely that question: what is the value in minority languages?
You are focused on the flip side of the argument, which I do think is important: what is the cost of preserving minority languages?
I acknowledge that the cost is great, though not so great as you seem to think, and I think the value is greater. I don’t think I’ve managed to convince anyone here, and I don’t think you, personally, can be convinced, judging by your persistent use of phrases like "why handicap a child. . . . "
Emphasis added. There is?
The problem is when the cost is borne by people who had no say in it.
I, for instance, am lucky to be a native speaker of English, and thus get access to a bunch of stuff in English, BUT what if the good stuff really is all in “Chinese”? Probably after months of study, I could successfully place a restaurant order or ask where the restroom is, but no way am I going to be able to comprehend complex thoughts without tremendous effort, if ever.
Together, my parents only had access to two languages to teach me, and luckily, they did not impose the useless one at all. Maybe I’m screwed because neither was Chinese, but at least there is plenty of stuff in English and I am able to understand even very complex writing and conversation as opposed to having a shallow/functional understanding of two or more languages and a deep understanding of none.
Some languages and cultures are unappealing, so people defect. iPhone or getting circumcised with sharp rocks at age 12 in a hut while elders pass on their beliefs in various fairy tales, hmmm, tough choice…
ETA: No, you will never convince me. When a few people are left that speak a language, it is sad, but when the last one is gone, there is no one left to be sad for.
Hmm. Maybe that was a bit strong. China has way more speakers, of course, and a much longer history as a written language (and as a printed language), but currently it looks like English is publishing more books / year. English wikipedia is about 6 times the size of Chinese wikipedia. I have no idea how to assess the total amount of information in one vs. the other; my bet is still on Chinese, but I don’t know how to find a definitive answer.
Mandarin or Cantonese or one of the other 100+ languages in China? If you include fluency rather than native speakers which has more speakers? Which are there more of, native Chinese speakers who also speak English or the other way around, especially among the educated who are likely to be writing stuff?
Well, that’s why I originally specified written Chinese, but if you look at the numbers, Mandarin alone dwarfs everything else.
I am not an expert in anything to do with Chinese!
Getting a little flippant – but a value which an out-of-the-way language spoken by a small minority can have: is for clandestine communication in the presence of speakers of a dominant majority language, in situations of less than perfect harmony between the two groups. English folk who visit those parts of Wales where Welsh is still widely spoken, quite often complain that they will go into a shop, pub, whatever: locals already there, and conversing with each other in English, promptly switch to Welsh when the English visitors enter the establishment. I’ve no doubt that this does happen at times. One reckons, less than perfectly polite on the part of the Welsh people; but my own feeling is that I greatly like it that Welsh is holding up fairly well as an everyday-use language – and potentially being on the receiving end of this tactic, as an English visitor, is a price that I’m happy to pay.
In the British Channel Islands, for a number of centuries the English language, and the islanders’ old Norman-French dialect (now almost extinct as a birth-speech) were used in parallel. 70 / 80 years ago, considerably more islanders knew Norman-French than is now the case – during the period of German occupation of the islands in World War II, the language came in handy as a gesture for excluding Germans, and for the purpose of talking in their presence about matters which it was desired that they not know about.
This is useful for more than just gossip/mockery/insults – speakers of obscure minority languages have served as “code talkers” in a number of military conflicts, most notably WWI and WWII. The Navajo-based code developed for the US military during WWII is reportedly the only spoken military code never to have been cracked by the other side.
I doubt it. English is the universal language and has been for decades.
I understand that in the Cold War, British military intelligence made a lot of use of Welsh-speakers, for purposes of communication which would be unintelligible to their Soviet opponents. Further, I gather that it’s not that Welsh is (unlike Navajo) that difficult for a non-native-speaker to master; it was just that for some reason, the Soviets found it difficult to get their heads around the fact that there existed, an alive-and-well Welsh language. This really shouldn’t have been a problem for them – the USSR had any number of obscure languages spoken by few people.
(The above may be rubbish, which posters will debunk – I can’t give any sites for it, but it’s stuff which I have heard / read, and feel that if it isn’t true, it ought to be !)
The Wikipedia article on code talkers briefly mentions Welsh being used for this purpose by British forces in the Balkans during the Yugoslav wars.
One of the advantages of using an obscure language for sending messages is that the messages can still be coded. So even if the enemy figures out what language is being used and manages to find a translator (all of which would take time) then they’d still need to figure out what “The duck quacks at midnight” is supposed to mean.
Not really true. You’re unlikely to become really fluent in your second language, or to master it as well, to understand the nuances, etc… And besides it has to be a collective effort. If you’re the only one in your village who speaks Breton, it won’t do you much good. Once French has been imposed from above (by forbidding to use Breton in school, by making French the only allowed language for official documents or in court, etc…), you’ve mostly been deprived of any real choice. Only if bilingualism is encouraged will you have such a choice (or rather the population as a whole will make this choice to keep using Breton or not. Even then, it’s mostly not an individual choice).
English is a lingua franca, not an universal language. It’s used for communication purposes, but people whose first language isn’t English have kept producing most significant cultural material in their own language. So, I see no reason to assume that there’s more English than Mandarin material available. Especially since English dominance is pretty recent. Go back 250 years and there aren’t many English speakers around to produce anything.
Of course, we produce much more material now, but I’m not sure how many years of abundant modern American cultural production is needed to “catch up” with centuries of more limited ancient production in Mandarin. And of course, there are nowadays almost three times more native speakers of Mandarin than native speakers of English. So even if they’re less “productive” (publishing books, relaying rumors on the internet, whatever), even the current production in Mandarin can’t be ridiculously lower.
If I had to bet, I’d bet on more material existing in Mandarin than in English.
It matters less how many native speakers of English there are, but how many people publish stuff in English. Given the internet and English’s dominance therein, English is going to beat out Mandarin handily.
Go back 250 years, and not much of anything is produced in any language compared to today. How many native Mandarin speakers are producing content in English vs English speakers producing content in Mandarin. It’s no contest.
I enjoyed studying such as “useless” language as Irish Gaelic, and it would have been harder had I not had native speakers around to help. Different languages and studying them can bring enjoyment even if you never become fluent in those languages and for that reason alone I think the death of a language is sad - it means options are more limited.
That said, it does seem inevitable we’re going to have fewer languages going forward.
I’m not sure having just one global language would ensure peace and understanding, though - brutal wars have been fought among people sharing a common language and culture (see just about every civil war ever).
Linguistic science. There are millions of species of plants and anmimals and most of the major families have been studied. But there are only a few thousand languages, many of them with little or no written form. The same globalization which allows scientists to study these languages also drives them quickly to extinction. Linguists find fascinating linguistic forms among rare languages, and doubtless some forms will never be known due to extinctions.
But does this matter to anyone but linguists?
I think languages do have a strong effect on cognition and social norms. For example, the simplicity of English pronouns may promote egalitarianism rather than the “pecking orders” implied in languages with a large number of personal pronouns. (But to support one language over another for this reason almost seems like thought control!)
Cultures are defined by customs, borders and language. When a language dies out, it sounds the death knell for a culture as well.
In addition to what Dr. Drake said, I’ll add : because we do lose out on human culture in a very real sense. Once nobody understands or speaks a given language every song, tale, play, book, administrative/historical document written in this language becomes gibberish. Yes, they can be translated, but speaking as a freelance translator who’s *tried *to translate English poetry into French and vice versa, that’s far from a loss-less process :).
And that’s a very real, almost tangible human capital going down the drain right there.