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 nother
day, another dead language. A rousing new report by researcher Payal
Sampat of the Worldwatch
Institute bemoans the "cultural homogeneity" spreading across
the Earth as thousands of human languages head toward extinction.
"Today," writes Sampat, "the world's speech is increasingly homogenized.
The 15 most common languages are now on the lips of half the world's
people; the top 100 languages are used by 90 percent of humanity."
Sampat's is just the latest nostalgia for "linguistic diversity"
(the kissing cousin of "biological diversity") to have surfaced
in the academic press. Inevitably such articles drive their authors
to the brink of bathos: The author himself is almost always a "victim"
of cultural imperialism, his village's unique dialect of Farsi or
some other distinct tongue having been snuffed out by the march
of civilization.
"In Bombay, where I grew up," says Sampat, "I used these languages
everyday. To get by on the streets, to get directions, to interact
with people — I had to be able to speak Marathi." But he "sensed
from a very early age that Kutchi wasn't useful in any obvious way."
Alas, he abandoned the language of his ancestors, "and chose instead
to operate in the linguistic mainstream."
Sampat is not alone. Whatever the original number of languages in
existence at the end of the Ice Age (estimated in the tens of thousands),
we are down to about 6,800 today. Nearly half of those languages
are now spoken by fewer than 2,500 people. At the current rate of
decline, linguists estimate that, by the end of this century, at
least half of the world's present languages will have disappeared.
Michael Krauss, a linguist at the Alaskan Native Language Center,
thinks things are even worse than that; he estimates that only 600
of the world's languages are "safe" from extinction, insofar as
they are still being taught to children.
What's especially interesting about the current rate of linguistic
attrition is that it vastly exceeds that of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, when anti-colonial writers decried British
imperialism and the culturally repressive policies of the U.S. Bureau
of Indian Affairs. Nowadays, in spite of bilingual-education programs
and "diversity" initiatives in the public schools, most aboriginal
languages in North America are on a downward slalom course toward
oblivion.
And to this I say: "Hooray!" Why so? Because today we can chalk
up trends in cultural assimilation almost exclusively to increased
labor mobility and modern communications technologies, not to farmers
stomping over hunter-gatherers, or to more venomous tribes overriding
weaker ones by force. What's more, we now have indubitable evidence
that government efforts to shore up dying languages are doomed to
fail. Most of the world's books, newspapers, and e-mails are written
in English, which is now spoken by more people as a second language
(350 million) than as a native tongue (322 million). This is reason
to celebrate. Just like immigrants who trade their ancestral culture
to reap the financial promise of a new land, speakers of dying tongues
are rational economic actors: They have traded in their indigenous
language in order to participate in the global economy.
Too many folks on the cultural Left, however, refuse to treat human
beings as rational agents. My home country of Canada, awash in failed
leftist policies, is a case in point. Canadian native leaders recently
called the extinction of "First Nations" dialects a "state of emergency,"
and lobbied the federal Liberals to inaugurate programs to resuscitate
these ancestral tongues. The Canadian Heritage department has committed
tens of millions of dollars in "language preservation" to native
communities. And nobody beats the province of Quebec when it comes
to linguistic protectionism: Last month, the ever-vigilant office
de la langue française charged Stanley and Muriel Reid, fifth-generation
farmers from Godmanchester, Que., for the crime of creating an English-only
website that sells maple syrup.
Should we put people in jail on the altar of "linguistic continuity"?
For that is the logical consequence of linguistic preservationism.
Anthropologists try to skate around this fact with hyperbole and
theatrics; the scholar Jared Diamond says the most common way to
see a language disappear "is to kill almost all its speakers." This
may have been true in the 1800s, but not today. And what about the
argument that language loss hurts our ability to understand our
past? Ironically, private enterprise and the Internet, so often
blamed for hastening globalization and Western imperialism, may
hold the answer. SIL International, a Texas company with a huge
linguistics database, catalogues more than 6,700 languages across
228 countries. The website
of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon provides
connections to online learning facilities for 115 dying and dead
languages, including Basque, Navajo, and Old English. Ancient documents
written in these languages will forever be accessible to decipherment.
Even unwritten languages can now be transliterated phonetically
and stored on audiotape.
All of us, as infants, once spoke a unique dialect, a mixture of
parental language, baby talk, misarticulation, and inaccurate syntax.
When we grow up, we leave our "mother tongue" behind, even though
its echoes remain with us and move us at unexpected moments. Emotion
aside, we forego the embrace of childhood and move on to learn the
language of our peer group. When we become grown-ups, we "lay aside
childish things." And so it is with dead languages. They simply
outgrow their usefulness.
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