Sounds pretty Darwinian, indeed.
I’m not glad when a language dies out. But if more people can communicate with each other, and any lost language has been recorded for posterity and historical study, then I think the net benefit to humanity when a new generation voluntarily speaks a majority language might be positive.
Oh, no, not you - AnaMen was proclaiming a language dying out was a good thing, made him/her happy, etc. I just do not understand that mindset.
I have a personal anecdote about wanting to learn another language for purposes of reading material in that language. I’m a big fan of Japanese RPGs, and I’ve always wanted to play games like Final Fantasy in their native language, especially since some of them hadn’t been translated to English until recently. Unfortunately, Japanese is a difficult language to learn, at least for a native English and Spanish speaker. I find it fascinating that most of the characters in those games have English names translated into Japanse. I don’t have any Japanse ancestry, but if I did, I would definitely have wanted the language passed down to me. As it stands, I definitely appreciate the fact that I know Spanish, and can watch TV shows in Spanish that would never be translated into English.
As for the question in the OP, yes, it would be nice if languages didn’t die out, but I think that the death of minor languages is inevitable in an era where the whole world is interconnected. My guess is that there is probably a lot fewer languages around now than there was in 1500. I would also guess that the languages we do have are a lot older now than the languages spoken in 1500 were at that time. I doubt that any new languages are being born anymore. Now that I think about it, however, I have an interesting question that has some bearing on the issue of languages going extinct. Which language that is used in everyday life is the youngest language?
Not quite true - for example, Nicaraguan Sign Language developed in the 1970’s.
Even if fewer languages are being born at present, the capacity for humans to develop new languages is still there and it will happen under appropriate conditions.
What I was trying to get at is the appropriate conditions for new languages coming into existence aren’t present, and I don’t reall see those conditions occurring any time soon. For a new language to develop I would think it would require a group of people who currently speak the same language to become isolated from each other so that the original language can diverge, the way that Latin evolved when the Roman Empire broke apart. I just don’t see that happening in a world with the internet.
She’s made it quite clear. She has somehow gotten into her head that preserving a language means depriving children of another, more useful language. No amount of disabusing her of this notion seems to affect her. When shown that her scenario doesn’t happen, she moved on to this idea that they’d still inherently not be learning some other language, as if you have to deprive the kid of one language to learn another. When that was shown to not be how it works, she started in on how wrong it was for the parents to force their kids to learn a language, as that would somehow harm them. So we’re right back where we started at the beginning.
And that’s leaving out the stuff on early language acquisition that is completely backwards. It’s the whole reason to teach the language instead of just waiting on someone becoming an adult and deciding to pick it up. She complains about choice, but this is how you get choice. You can always choose to let the language lapse.
And let’s not forget the idea that the parents who choose to teach their kids this language are themselves being forced by the preservationists, instead of deciding for themselves that the language and culture does have some use. She says it doesn’t.
Ultimately, there isn’t a rational viewpoint here. So there’s nothing to understand. It just boils down to “I don’t think this is valuable, so I’m happy when other people make it go away.” Screw anyone else’s view of what is valuable.
How is Esperanto or Ido doing these days? Don’t hear much about it.
Wow, no. Pretty much none of that.
It’s sad when people are culturally isolated by knowing only an obscure language (and I’m not talking about Dutch or Gaelic–I’m talking about languages spoken by a few hundred people or fewer) and those people DO exist. It’s sad when people are ignorant of basic science and when they are isolated in this manner remain so. It’s sad when nonsensical cultural rituals–like circumcising pre-teens–are preserved, in part via ignorance, which is enforced via language.
When your language doesn’t have words for something, people don’t talk about that thing. Obscure languages spoken by a handful of people have a shrinking vocabulary: think about the number of words that exist in your native language versus the number you actually use. Over the years, people’s conversations are controlled in a sense by this dearth of words.
When you don’t know a popular language, none of its writings are accessible to you. The ideas of the rest of the world’s thinkers are nothing you’ll ever hear of. Your culture becomes inbred and so does your gene pool. The people that stay in the culture of the dying language are the ones afraid to leave, so the elders pass on their fearful, conservative thinking along with the myths they think are actual explanations for natural phenomena and insular viewpoints.
When a language dies out completely, it can’t isolate anyone anymore. I know some of you apparently believe that people who speak only obscure languages do not exist, but—newsflash!–they are isolated: you aren’t going to hear or read much about them for obvious reasons. They aren’t part of the conversation and that’s the problem. Even if you read an interview with one (enabled by a translator), what are they being told about the rest of us? Only what a translator chooses to pass on. That makes me sad for the person. Even if they learn a language spoken by more people, they will never have native fluency. Their voice has been stunted and they might have had something valuable to say.
I’m sad for these two remaining fluent speakers of Nuumte Oote, but it is kind of hilarious that they refuse to speak to each other.
http://theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/13/mexico-language-ayapaneco-dying-out
I am sad for this poor elderly last-remaining Nepalese Kusunda-speaker, who crushes stones for a living, says (she also speaks Nepali) “I feel very sad for not being able to speak with people from my own community. They neither understand nor speak the Kusunda language–it will die with me.”
This 75-year-old woman crushes stones for a living and has no one to talk to in her native language. How is THAT not sad, but the death of the language is? Soon, the language will be gone, or maybe it already is, since that article is three years old. Her sadness will die with it (or already has), so there will be nothing left to be sad about. No one else will be stuck in her situation over this language and I am glad.
Plus, let me just point out a third time that she crushes stones for a living. At age 75, not that this sounds like a fulfilling career at any age. Could she have grown up to be a doctor? A physicist? An engineer? A movie producer? A novelist? When an elderly person in America has to do manual labor for a living, we generally think that is sad, even when the labor is not as idiotic as manually crushing rocks. She probably had no opportunity to make choices that would have resulted in a better situation for herself, in part, because of the restrictions imposed by language. She lived, she crushed rocks, everyone else who spoke her language died, and now she is a sad and lonely rock-crusher. That sucks.
Good question. I’m sure it pops up more often in Europe, but as an American, the last time I even heard someone mention Esperanto was probably a joke on Tiny Toons in the '90s. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of Ido until now.
Anaman, what, exactly do you know about this? You’ve posted some very emotional theories, but what is your actual experience with endangered languages? Are you a linguist? An anthropologist? And aid worker? An endangered language speaker? Have you tested your ideas, talked to some of the people involved?
My closest neighbors in Cameroon spoke Mambay, a severely endangered language from Chad with about 2,000 speakers. They also spoke Fulfulde, a language with 25 million speakers used across west Africa, which is the language of trade and daily life in the region, fluently. They also spoke the local language of my village, and Hausa (39 million speakers) and the younger family members spoke French and some English, depending on how much schooling they got.
They were poor, but not for heavens sake because they speak Mambay! They were poor because the area has bad roads, limited schooling, unreliable electricity, little industry and some major health epidemics. Speaking Mambay has literally nothing to do with it. Zero. Of all the problems in their lives, that just isn’t one of them.
Nor will eliminating Mambay open any additional doors for them. They aren’t going to build a school and a factory just because someone drops their fifth language. These are complex places, and “has minority language speakers” is just one tiny part of the entire local economy.
Indeed, becoming more “international” is the last thing they need. The closest global influence, by way of Nigeria, is global radical Islam. That’s what is waiting when the local culture is gone. 170 years ago the first Islamic investors waged Jihad in Central Cameroon and the Christian and Animist minorities hid in the hills where they have to this day kept a religiously tolerant mixed culture. But from their perspective, the strain of Islam behind that first invasion is the prestigious, cosmopolitan, internationally connected culture. That’s what is waiting to connect these “poor, backward, isolated” villagers. Not American TV and becoming astronauts.
even sven, this particular poster is a lost cause. He / she mentioned that one of his / her parents chose not to pass on a minority language, and it’s pretty clear that the entire response is an emotional one. No amount of factual information is going to penetrate that barrier. Just hope that he / she isn’t in a position to influence policy.
The OP is about why it is “sad when a language dies out.” Sadness is a feeling–an emotion, if you will. My “emotional theories” address this question. We aren’t trying to plan a practical course of action here which I am waylaying with misplaced emotion: it is the actual topic at hand.
Of course I am not a linguist or an anthropologist. I have some minor interest in linguistics, but language is primarily interesting to me as a means of communication. The stuff that is communicated is the interesting part, so if someone lacks native facility with a language, I feel they are typically held back from communicating ideas as complex as if they had the benefit of using their first language for this purpose, provided their first language has the words and audience for these ideas. Language does shape thought, so one’s first language is ideally robust and in widespread use. The practices of modern anthropology disgust me and I know more than enough about it, as there has always been an anthropologist or sympathizer ready to shove some ill-conceived theory down my throat under the guise of education.
I don’t speak any endangered languages, but I have talked to people that do. They are generally very interested in learning languages useful for international communication, but obviously the ones I meet would be or they wouldn’t be able to talk to me at all, so I don’t consider them representative.
I don’t care if they speak Mambay and I’m certainly not claiming they should stop or that their lives would improve if they did. I just don’t think it would/will be sad when their language and culture are gone. If you can’t see how the language and culture are holding back individuals who could get the heck out of there and to somewhere with modern medicine, education, and reliable electricity, you aren’t thinking about it very hard.
The numbers are fuzzy but there are apparently around 2 million Esperanto speakers these days world wide, and around 2,000 native speakers who learned it as infants or toddlers. Not a major world language, but larger than, say, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Basque, or Icelandic.
Ido has something like 1,000 speakers by most sources I’ve googled, but it’s not nearly as well known as Esperanto. Looks like more people speak Klingon, a language designed to be difficult for humans, than Ido although probably (since it’s easier to learn) there are more fluent speakers of Ido than Klingon.
Uh… what restrictions? She speaks Neplali. She is able to speak with the people around her.
You have this bizarre notion that people can’t be bilingual, even natively bilingual in that they can have multiple “native tongues”. Even if they aren’t bilingual from infancy people are capable of being fluent in multiple languages simultaneously.
And the notion that speaking a major language would have elevated her out of living in poverty in Nepal is… strange. Nepal is a desperately poor nation, virtually no one there has the opportunity to be a doctor, physicist, engineer, movie producer, etc. Even if she spoke fluent English from birth it’s extremely unlikely she would have been any of those things, not because of her language, not because she is poor, but because she is a woman and women still have very little status or opportunity in Nepal.
It baffles me that you say you have some interest in linguistics and communication yet you don’t seem to know that you can have more than one “first language”. If you learn multiple languages in toddlerhood then you can achieve native fluency in all of them.
It’s not language holding those people back because they already speak “world languages”.
Yet, apparently that is not sufficient, as she is sad because she has no one to speak the language with, by her own report. The thought of someone having no one left to talk to in a language is sad to me.
Yes, I know about bilingualism. Let go of the idea that that is not the case.
We will never know what could have been, but what we do know is that when a 75-year-old lady must crush rocks for a living, any edge may have yielded a better result. Maybe she’d have struck up a conversation with someone or vice-versa and everything could have been different.
Yeah, it would be weird if I didn’t know that, but I do.
Some do, some don’t. The degree to which they are confident and able varies greatly, as does the language in question and the opportunities that come their way, opportunities that they may not even recognize or understand due to linguistic impairment.
When a language has only a few speakers, why is there this assumption that every speaker also must speak another more-popular language? Pointing out bilingual people who do speak other languages as “evidence” that no one is stuck with only the dying language is nonsensical and does not disprove the existence of monolingual dying-language-speakers.
The number of people in this situation is NOT zero.
I’m sad I have no one with which to practice Irish Gaelic with in my life, but that’s the breaks. I still speak two other languages (granted, my French is not and never has been fluent).
It’s more of a tragedy because she’s the last speaker, but it’s not like she’s in solitary confinement.
Given the poverty of Nepal, and that a lot of 75 year old people are unable to engage in physical labor but she is, I’m not entirely convinced this is the worst of all possible worlds here. Granted, it would be better if she could spend her golden years in idle comfort but most people aren’t that lucky.
Seriously - she obviously CAN “strike up a conversation with someone” because she DOES. Otherwise she couldn’t be interviewed.
MOST people who speak such a moribund language do, in fact, speak another language. Or several such. Yes, there are some unfortunate cases where people are monolinguist speakers of nearly dead languages but they are the exception.