In World Affairs for Fall 2009, John McWhorter writes about the slow but certain death of many languages spoken around the world. As English gradually becomes a universal tongue, he asks if this is problematic, or rather advantageous in a highly interconnected and interdependent planet.
“Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.”
As a linguist, this is certainly nothing to celebrate. Conversely, keeping languages alive that have little utility is extremely challenging. Learning a language, especially if it’s on a branch of the language family tree that is far from your own tongue, is similarly difficult. To counter the argument that the death of language leads to “cultural oblivion,” McWhorter claims that culture will persist, despite a lack of its respective native speakers.
“…The oft-heard claim that the death of a language means the death of a culture puts the cart before the horse. When the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. The reverse, however, is not necessarily true. Groups do not find themselves in the bizarre circumstance of having all of their traditional cultural accoutrements in hand only to find themselves incapable of indigenous expression because they no longer speak the corresponding language. Native American groups would bristle at the idea that they are no longer meaningfully ‘Indian’ simply because they no longer speak their ancestral tongue. Note also the obvious and vibrant black American culture in the United States, among people who speak not Yoruba but English.”
McWhorter goes on to address another question that naturally comes to mind when considering up-and-coming world powers. Will Chinese overtake English?
“…Notice how daunting the prospect of Chinese as a world language is, with a writing system that demands mastery of 2,000 characters in order to be able to read even a tabloid newspaper. For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go.”
He sincerely doubts that Mandarin Chinese, which has to be transliterated into Roman letters anyway to use on a keyboard, will become a lingua franca outside of China.
“At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation — such as that of the Amish — or brutal segregation.”
In its simplest form, the death of many languages is a result of finding the best way to communicate between people who don’t share a common language, and the discontinued use of formerly non-shared languages. Culture will remain one of the largest obstacles to successful communication, which must be understood in its visible and invisible forms, as the language of culture is oftentimes not audible. It is, however, much easier to learn than, for example, Hindi or Cantonese.
Click here to read McWhorter’s article.
Sean
RW-3.com
