Final Words
There’s plenty of reason to celebrate mass linguistic extinction.

By Neil Seeman, NRO associate editor
June 20, 2001 9:00 a.m.

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.