How languages disappear
How do languages go extinct? Just as there are different ways of killing people—by a quick blow to the head, by slow strangulation, or by prolonged neglect—so too are there different ways of eradicating a language. The most direct way is to kill almost all of its speakers. That was how white Californians eliminated the language of the last “wild” Indian of the United States, a man named Ishi (Plate 29) belonging to the Yahi tribe of about 400 people, living near Mount Lassen. In a series of massacres between 1853 and 1870 after the California gold rush had brought hordes of European settlers into California, settlers killed most Yahi, leaving Ishi and his family, then Ishi alone, to survive in hiding until 1911. British colonists eliminated all the native languages of Tasmania in the early 1800s by killing or capturing most Tasmanians, motivated by a bounty of five pounds for each Tasmanian adult and two pounds for each child. Less violent means of death produce similar results. For example, there used to be thousands of Native Americans of the Mandan tribe on the Great Plains of the United States, but by 1992 the number of fluent Mandan speakers was reduced to six old people, especially as a result of cholera and smallpox epidemics between 1750 and 1837.
The next most direct way to eradicate a language is not to kill its speakers, but instead to forbid them to use their language, and to punish them if they are caught doing so. In case you wondered why most North American Indian languages are now extinct or moribund, just consider the policy practised until recently by the United States government regarding those languages. For several centuries we insisted that Indians could be “civilized” and taught English only by removing Indian children from the “barbarous” atmosphere of their parents’ homes to English-language-only boarding schools, where use of Indian languages was absolutely forbidden and punished with physical abuse and humiliation. To justify that policy, J. D. C. Atkins, the U.S. commissioner for Indian affairs from 1885 to 1888, explained, “The instruction of Indians in the vernacular [that is, in an Indian language] is not only of no use to them, but is detrimental to the cause of their education and civilization, and it will not be permitted in any Indian school over which the Government has any control…. This [English] language, which is good enough for a white man and a black man, ought to be good enough for the red man. It is also believed that teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a positive detriment to him. The first step to be taken toward civilization, toward teaching the Indians the mischief and folly of continuing in their barbarous practices, is to teach them the English language.”
After Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879, the Japanese government adopted a solution described as “one nation, one people, one language.” That meant educating Okinawan children to speak Japanese and no longer letting them speak any of the dozen native Okinawan languages. Similarly, when Japan annexed Korea in 1910, it banned the Korean language from Korean schools in favor of Japanese. When Russia re-annexed the Baltic republics in 1939, it replaced the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian languages in schools with Russian, but those Baltic languages continued to be spoken in homes and resumed their status as national languages when the republics regained independence in 1991. The sole surviving Celtic language on the European mainland is Breton, which is still the primary language of half a million French citizens. However, the French government’s official policy is in effect to exclude the Breton language from primary and secondary schools, and Breton’s use is declining.
But in most cases language loss proceeds by the more insidious process now under way at Rotokas. With political unification of an area formerly occupied by sedentary warring tribes come peace, mobility, and increasing intermarriage. Young people in search of economic opportunity abandon their native-speaking villages and move to urban centers, where speakers of their own tribal language are greatly outnumbered by people from other tribal backgrounds, and where people needing to communicate with each other have no option except to speak the majority language. Increasing numbers of couples from different language groups marry and must resort to using the majority language to speak to each other; hence they transmit the majority language to their children. Even if the children do also learn a parental language, they must use the majority language in schools. Those people remaining in their natal village learn the majority language for its access to prestige, power, commerce, and the outside world. Jobs, newspapers, radio, and television overwhelmingly use the majority language shared by most workers, consumers, advertisers, and subscribers.
The usual result is that minority young adults tend to become bilingual, and then their children become monolingual, in the majority language. Transmission of minority languages from parents to children breaks down for either or both of two reasons: parents want their children to learn the majority language, not the parents’ tribal language, so that their children can thrive in school and in jobs; and children don’t want to learn their parents’ language and only want to learn the majority language, in order to understand television, schools, and their playmates. I have seen these processes happening in the United States to immigrant families from Poland, Korea, Ethiopia, Mexico, and many other countries, with the shared result that the children learn English and don’t learn their parents’ language. Eventually, minority languages are spoken only by older people, until the last of them dies. Long before that end is reached, the minority language has degenerated through loss of its grammatical complexities, loss of forgotten native words, and incorporation of foreign vocabulary and grammatical features.
Of the world’s 7,000 languages, some are in much more danger than are others. Crucial in determining the degree of language endangerment is whether a language is still being transmitted at home from parents to children: when that transmission ceases, a language is doomed, even if 90 more years will pass before the last child still fluent in the language, and with him or her the language itself, dies. Among the factors making it likely that parent-to-child transmission will continue are: a large number of speakers of the language; a high proportion of the population speaking the language; government recognition of the language as an official national or provincial language; speakers’ attitude towards their own language (pride or scorn); and the absence of many immigrants speaking other languages and swamping native languages (as happened with the Russian influx into Siberia, the Nepali influx into Sikkim, and the Indonesian influx into Indonesian New Guinea).
Presumably among the languages with the most secure futures are the official national languages of the world’s sovereign states, which now number about 192. However, most states have officially adopted English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, or French, leaving only about 70 states to opt for other languages. Even if one counts regional languages, such as the 22 specified in India’s constitution, that yields at best a few hundred languages officially protected anywhere in the world. Alternatively, one might consider languages with over a million speakers as secure, regardless of their official status, but that definition also yields only 200 or so secure languages, many of which duplicate the list of official languages. Some small languages are safe because of governmental support, such as Faroese, spoken by the 50,000 inhabitants of Denmark’s self-governing Faroe Islands, and Icelandic, spoken as the official language of 300,000 Icelanders. Conversely, some languages with over a million speakers but no or until recently limited state support are threatened, such as Nahuatl (over 1,400,000 speakers in Mexico) and Quechua (about 9,000,000 speakers in the Andes). But state support doesn’t guarantee a language’s safety, as illustrated by the fading of the Irish language and the rise in the English language in Ireland, despite strong Irish governmental support for Irish and the teaching of Irish as an official language in Irish schools. It’s on these bases that linguists estimate that all except a few hundred of the world’s current 7,000 languages will be extinct or moribund by the end of this century—if current trends continue.
Are minority languages harmful?
Those are the overwhelming facts of wor
ldwide language extinction. But now let’s ask, as do many or most people: so what? Is language loss really a bad thing? Isn’t the existence of thousands of languages positively harmful, because they impede communication and promote strife? Perhaps we should actually encourage language loss. This view was expressed by a deluge of listener comments sent into the British Broadcasting Corporation after it broadcast a program trying to defend the value of disappearing languages. Here is a sample of the quotes:
“What an extraordinary amount of sentimental rubbish! The reason that languages died out was that they were the expression of moribund societies incapable of communicating the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics required for sustained longevity and evolution.”
“How ridiculous. The purpose of language is to communicate. If nobody speaks a language, it has no purpose. You might as well learn Klingon.”
“The only people that 7,000 languages are useful to are linguists. Different languages separate people, whereas a common language unites. The fewer living languages, the better.”
“Humanity needs to be united, that’s how we go forwards, not in small-knit tribes unable to communicate with one another. What good is there in even having five languages? Document them by all means, learn what we can from them, but consign them to history where they belong. One world, one people, one common language, one common goal, perhaps then we can all just get along.”
“7,000 languages is 6,990 too many if you ask me. Let them go.”
There are two main reasons that people like those who wrote to the BBC give in order to justify getting rid of most of the world’s languages. One objection can be summarized in the one-liner “We need a common language in order to communicate with each other.” Yes, of course that’s true; different people do need some common language in order to communicate with each other. But that doesn’t require eliminating minority languages; it just requires that speakers of minority languages become bilingual themselves in a majority language. For example, Denmark is the seventh-richest country in the world, although virtually the only people who speak the Danish language are the 5,000,000 Danes. That’s because almost all Danes also fluently speak English and some other European languages, which they use to do business. Danes are rich and happily Danish, because they speak Danish. If Danes want to go to the effort of becoming bilingual in Danish and English, that’s their own business. Similarly, if Navajo Indians want to go to the effort of becoming bilingual in Navajo and English, that’s their business. The Navajos aren’t asking and don’t even want other Americans to learn Navajo.
The other main reason that people such as those who wrote to the BBC give to justify getting rid of languages is the belief that multiple languages cause civil wars and ethnic strife, by encouraging people to view other peoples as different. The civil wars tearing apart so many countries today are determined by linguistic lines—so it is claimed. Whatever the value of multiple languages, getting rid of them may supposedly be the price we have to pay if we are to halt the killing around the globe. Wouldn’t the world be a much more peaceful place if the Kurds would just switch to speaking Turkish or Arabic, if Sri Lanka’s Tamils would consent to speak Sinhalese, and if Quebec’s French and the U.S. Hispanics would just switch to English?
That seems like a strong argument. But its implicit assumption of a monolingual utopia is wrong: language differences aren’t the most important cause of strife. Prejudiced people will seize on any difference to dislike others, including differences of religion, politics, ethnicity, and dress. The worst mass killings in Europe since the end of World War II involved Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrans (who later split from each other), Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia slaughtering each other, even though all of them speak the same language, Serbo-Croat. The worst mass killings in Africa since the end of World War II were in Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu people killed nearly a million Tutsi and most of Rwanda’s Twa people, all of them speaking the Rwanda language. The worst mass killings anywhere in the world since the end of World War II were in Cambodia, where Khmer-speaking Cambodians under their dictator Pol Pot killed about two million other Khmer-speaking Cambodians. The worst mass killings anywhere in the world, anytime in history, were in Russia under Stalin, when Russians killed tens of millions of people, most of whom also spoke Russian, over supposed political differences.
If you believe that minorities should give up their languages and adopt the majority language in order to promote peace, ask yourself whether you also believe that minorities should promote peace by giving up their religions, their ethnicities, and their political views. If you believe that freedom of religion, ethnicity, and political view but not of language is an inalienable human right, how would you explain your inconsistency to a Kurd or a French Canadian? Innumerable examples besides those of Stalin, Pol Pot, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia warn us that monolingualism is no safeguard of peace.
Given that people do differ in language, religion, ethnicity, and political view, the only alternative to tyranny or mass killing is for people to live together in mutual tolerance. That’s not an idle hope. Despite all the past wars over religion, people of different religions do co-exist peacefully in the United States, Germany, Indonesia, and many other countries. Similarly, many countries that practise linguistic tolerance find that they can accommodate people of different languages in harmony: for example, 2 native languages in the Netherlands (Dutch and Frisian), 2 in New Zealand (English and Maori), 3 in Finland (Finnish, Swedish, and Lapp), 4 in Switzerland (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), 43 in Zambia, 85 in Ethiopia, 128 in Tanzania, and 286 in Cameroon. On a trip to Zambia when I visited a high school classroom, I recall one student asking me, “Which tribe in the United States do you belong to?” Then each student told me, with a smile, his or her tribal language. Seven languages were represented in that small classroom, and no one seemed ashamed, afraid, or intent on killing each other.
Why preserve languages?
All right, so there’s nothing inevitably harmful or burdensome about preserving languages except the effort of bilingualism for the minority speakers themselves, and they can decide for themselves whether they’re willing to put up with that effort. Are there any positive advantages of preserving linguistic diversity? Why shouldn’t we just let the world converge on its five top languages of Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hindi? Or let’s push that argument one step further, before my English-speaking readers enthusiastically answer, “Yes!” If you think that small languages should give way to big languages, a logical conclusion is that we should all adopt the world’s biggest language, Mandarin, and let English die out. What’s the use of preserving the English language? Among many answers, I’ll mention three.
First, with two or more languages, we as individuals can be bilingual or multilingual. I discussed earlier in this chapter the evidence for cognitive advantages of bilingual individuals. Even if you’re skeptical about bilingualism’s reported protection against symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, everyone fluent in more than one language knows that knowledge of different languages enriches one’s life, just as a large vocabulary in one’s first language permits a richer life than does a small vocabulary. Different languages have different advantages, such that it’s easier to express some things, or to feel in certain ways, in one language than in another. If the much-debated Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, a language’s structure molds the way in which that language’s speakers think, with the result that one views the world and thinks differently when one switches languages. Hence language loss doesn’t only curtail freedom of minorities; it also curtails the options of majorities.
Second, languages are the most complex product of the human mind, each differing in its sounds, structure, and pattern of thought. But a language itself isn’t the only thing lost when a language goes extinct. Literature, culture, and much knowledge are encoded in languages: lose the language, and you lose much of the literature, culture, and knowledge.
Different languages have different number systems, mnemonic devices, and systems of spatial orientation: for instance, it’s easier to count in Welsh or Mandarin than in English. Traditional peoples have local-language names for hundreds of animal and plant species around them: those encyclopedias of ethnobiological information vanish when their languages vanish. While Shakespeare can be translated into Mandarin, we English-speakers would regard it as a loss to humanity if Hamlet’s speech “To be or not to be, that is the question” were available only in Mandarin translation. Tribal peoples also have their own oral literatures, and losses of those literatures also represent losses to humanity.
But perhaps you’re still thinking, “Enough of all this vague talk about linguistic freedom, unique cultural inheritance, and different options for thinking and expressing. Those are luxuries that rate low priority amid the crises of the modern world. Until we solve the world’s desperate socio-economic problems, we can’t waste our time on bagatelles like obscure Native American languages.”
Then please think again about the socio-economic problems of the people speaking all those obscure Native American languages (and thousands of other obscure languages around the world). They are the poorest segment of American society. Their problems are not just narrow ones of jobs, but broad ones of cultural disintegration. Groups whose language and culture disintegrate tend to lose their pride and mutual self-support, and to descend into socio-economic problems. They’ve been told for so long that their language and everything else about their culture are worthless that they believe it. The resulting costs to national governments of welfare benefits, healthcare expenses, alcohol-related and drug-related problems, and drain on rather than contribution to the national economy are enormous. At the same time, other minorities with strong intact cultures and language retention—like some recent groups of immigrants to the U.S.—are already contributing strongly to the economy rather than taking from it. Among native minorities as well, those with intact cultures and languages tend to be stronger economically and to place fewer demands on social services. Cherokee Indians who complete Cherokee language school and remain bilingual in Cherokee and English are more likely to pursue their education, obtain jobs, and earn higher salaries than Cherokees who can’t speak Cherokee. Aboriginal Australians who learn their traditional tribal language and culture are less prone to substance abuse than are culturally disconnected Aborigines.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 49