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The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
Wouldn't this be a good thing? Less languages will mean more people speaking the same one, thus promoting better communication.
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
To me, extinction of lots of languages is a good thing ( especially if it includes COBOL :). With one common language, we may have a better chance of understanding each other. Remember the biblical tale of Babel, in which the profusion of languages was supposedly a punishment? How did we acquire the idea that languages have some values of their own? A language is a tool, to be replaced with a better one when it comes along.
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
English, as a language, is a tar baby. Punch it and it will stick to you. English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will) for two -- no, three -- reasons. One, money and power. Two, it's as flexible as it is convoluted. Three, pure entertainment.
Don't think American's use collective nouns? Bull. Don't think British English uses the subjective form? They must not be watching TV.
If you want rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling that don't keep up with the actual usage, go speak French. Or Latin. Or be the 27th idiot to learn Esperanto, which has no problem keeping up with actual usage (your contributions would be welcome, I'm sure).
Now, excuse me while I lie about getting laid.
There have been thousands of cultures that have developed, sometimes to world-conquering levels, then faded and disappeared. Some did so naturally through being unable to self-sustain, others were the result of genocide or forced assimilation. Whether you feel sad about it or not, if Hitler had succeeded the Jewish culture would definitely not be the first to disappear through violent means. Not by a long shot.
The difference now is that there are forces that speed up the extinction of non-self-sustaining types of cultures. Here in Canada there are more than a few First Nations languages which no more than a couple of people still speak. These are being recorded and documented as quickly as possible but it is understood that these will die out as soon as there is no one who needs to use them as part of their daily existence.
Is it sad that this is happening? Only if you don't realize the fact that the only reason there are so many different languages on earth is because of historic geographic isolation of all the different peoples. With instant worldwide communication and the ability to travel to just about any spot on the earth within a day or two, the conditions that allowed disparate languages and cultures to develop in the first place no longer exist.
That being said, languages are still developing and evolving, but now due more to artificial forces such as intentional introduction of slang as personal identification and new technologies and methods that need new terms to describe. e.g.: "Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in English.
We live in interesting times. The second case of technological development having a profound effect on all mankind, the first being the industrial revolution. I believe this second phase will have a much greater effect than the first.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Various words just have no real translation. "Gesellig" (Dutch) just means so much more than the dictionary equivalents: genial, social. Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit.
Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. You just need to look at Inuit, Uustalian Aboriginal and various other groups to see that this is a bad thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes, it is good that people can communicate as we move towards a one-world language. It breaks down a powerful barrier to understanding, as language is deeply intertwined with culture, history, and worldview.
So thats good, practically speaking.
Unfortunately, since language is so powerful in molding minds, we lose a lot when a language dies. We lose profound knowledge about a culture and the way it sees the world. To an anthropologist or linguist, this loss is irreplacable, which is why there are projects about whose goal is to record native languages before thier last speaker dies. Piecing together the natural history of humanity becomes that much harder when language dies.
Like everything else, you take the good with the bad.
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A language is just a communication protocol. Would you say that having 7000 incompatible networking protocols is a good thing? No, it patently isn't. Thousands of incompatible languages simply help create pockets of ignorance and deprivation. The only people who benefit are those who can translate.
Having said that. The corollary is that learning multiple languages is a good idea for an individual. If you live in the UK and speak only English then you are excluded from the largest economies on the continent; France Germany etc. The French and Germans all speak English. If their economies tank, they can always look for work in the UK.
Speaking of which, I have a German lesson this evening.
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The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Only because of the vast population of China. It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one. I don't see Chinese making any serious inroads in the West just for that reason alone. As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
No language is the best. English became a major world language in part because of the spread of the British Empire and in part because English grammar is pretty simple. Yes, much of the spelling makes no sense (well, there are reasons for it, but I'll skip the long explanation), but the grammar is basically easy. English is non-inflected, lacks grammatical genders, and the verbs have very simple conjugations. All of these make the language relatively easy to learn. Let's take Russian for an example now. It is inflected (6 cases), has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and almost all verbs come in pairs (perfective and imperfective). English got a big boost from the rise of American culture, but the relative simplicity of the grammar is why it became a world language. Mark Twain wrote a famous piece on his attempts to learn German and the insane grammar of the language where the word for "wife" in German is a masculine (!!!) word. Twain said that any reasonably intelligent person could come to grips with English a lot quicker than they could German just because the grammar of English is so much easier.
Well, unless you're proposing that rules cannot possibly ever change, I don't understand your gripe.
When I started learning English some 20 years ago, I was taught the "shall-will-will" future tense. However, my teacher told me back then that by the time I grew up, it would probably be "will-will-will". And guess what, she was right - I haven't noticed the "old" future tense being used much lately.
Another English teacher recently told me that one British author of foreign language teaching books predicts that the -s in 3rd person singular is also bound to disappear, probably in the next 20-50 years.
Language evolves.
Better yet, languages evolve. And though as a linguist I'm a bit saddened by language extinction, it is a normal process - some languages will die out, but eventually many more will develop, though most probably as jargons. It is an inevitable consequence of globalization, and can no longer be stopped.
Ignore this signature. By order.