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Their Loss is Our Loss |
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Estimates of between 6,000 and 8,000 existing languages are imprecise but the assertion that only 200 to 250 are spoken by more than a million people is both more precise and also more revealing. An article last month in the London Independent article declared that - Most of the world's languages 'will vanish by 2100' which statement was based on the conclusions of Dutch psycholinguists who studied the effects of the mass of people learning the three 'winning' languages - English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. This is a dire warning and one that is generally ignored in all the talk of a 'world democracy'; talk which is the province of the well-educated liberals, most of whom, if not bilingual, are content with their mastery of English, which they consider to be 'the world language', oblivious of the fact that fluency in it is confined to the elite of the world's educated classes and to the minority of hte world's populaition who live in lands where it is a mother-tongue. Small languages are vulnerable and with the disruption of primitive societies and their replacement by uniform national patterns of schooling and industrailization the ways of life that shaped and illustrated these tongues they disappear. As older members of the tribe die the languages often die with them. This happened in the 18th Century England, when the last Cornish speaker died, leaving only a few Cornish words in the local dialect. New languages have arisen - English between 1000 and 1300 and the Romance languages from Latin earlier on - but far less quickly than it takes for a small language to disappear. 90% of languages today are said to be each spoken by fewer than 100,000 people. The steam-roller effect of great languages is nowdays made irresistible by all the mechanisms of modern scientific and technological progress. The printing-press still makes its continual inroads, but nowadays, radio, television and even the use of the Internet are having greater impact. Where political efforts are made to aid the survival of minority languages they are usually successful only with difficulty. To learn a language is to gain an insight in ways of thought, behaviour and world-view otherwise unattainable. It is an educational benefit that is of priceless, indeed unique, value. That is why language is 'a key ingredient of humanity's cultural heritage'. But if we lose a language we lose 'the product of human creativity and the extent of language variation gives us insight into the nature of ourselves.' It is only a few decades that the world has become aware of how great is the danger of wiping out much of the world's heritage of ecological diveresity. But just as that discovery has come almost too late to save vast swathes of living things, so too, the realisation of the loss entailed by language extinction is likely to be too late for many of those tongues that are spoken by small isolated groups. above all where they are in the path of 'progress' and profit-seeking. Anyone can feel that the disappearance of their own language would be a deep and lasting loss. This has been evident over and over again in the past and it is still true. And the lost of other languages is no less serious: but we are generally able to bear the losses of others with more equanimity than our own. Nevertheless, the loss of any language means cultural impoverishment. The capacity to understand and above all to use other languages is a good that needs to be experienced to be understood to the full. We then can find that it gives a depth of understanding of other modes of thought and even of ways of life that nothing else can offer. To become fluent in another language can be an educational gift of immense benefit. For that reason, the imminent loss of large numbers of languages is of serious concern to all of us, even if, monolingually, we do not yet appreciate it.
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