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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."
What will happen to the grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling differences between British English and American English (as well as others)?
For example, British English uses collective nouns (Microsoft are instead of Microsoft is) while American English thinks of the collective noun as singular.
In the contrary, American English uses subjunctive form while it seems British English doesn't use it .
Then you have all of the people that don't understand the differences between intransitive (takes no object) and transitive. (Lay and lie, anyone?)
What is going to happen to the English language? Increasingly, I see blatant grammatical errors on signs in big box stores, advertising, and even documentation!
Is grammatically correct English where the native speakers understand the differences of English in different countries?
How students possible learn a native language like German and hope to speak it correctly with the proper articles if they don't even the grammar rules of a language with commonalities with the language that they would like to learn?
Is this why foreign languages are dying? Or is it imperialism? Or is modern communication technology giving English even more priority over other languages?
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Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those? Plus the regional dialects are what the parents and grandparents use. Mandarin is the cooler, hipper dialect.
It'll be sad when the regional dialects die out because some of them are much older than Mandarin and some classical Chinese poems only rhyme properly in the south dialects such as Cantonese.
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I have to agree that having fewer languages will eventually be beneficial, but we should keep in mind that there are some downsides as well. First of all, languages that don't get spoken are more difficult to be understood (ancient writings, for example). But on that same note, we may not even know exactly what certain words meant 500 years ago in current languages.
Also, there is a comment further down about how each language gives the same communication, but with different grammar/words... and while for the most part that is true, there are some aspects of languages that define certain cultures. Just the way that you express yourself in certain languages defines quite a bit about you. For example, in English you say "I dropped the rock."... admitting that you were the one who did it (even if it were accidental)... in Spanish you say that exact same thing a bit differently... and while it means the same thing, you think about the situation a little differently... "Se me cayo la piedra." or "The rock fell on me" (not 'on' as in 'on top of' but 'on' as in 'my computer crashed on me')... So spanish speakers are more prone to never think anything is their fault.
Sure, that sounds kind of stupid, but if you know a lot of native spanish speakers you will agree with me (there are exceptions, of course... on both sides).
There are people who argue that different languages carry a certain value for different fields and endeavors, but I don't buy this. English is an incredibly adaptable, flexible, evolving, absorbing language, so there should never be a lack of words to describe any concept one comes upon.
Further, if and when we discover civilizations on other planets, having a unified planetary language could only be beneficial.
Not to mention, we can free up massive amounts of wasted highschool and college education hours that are spent teaching students a four year language that 98% of them will never ever use (or remember) two years after graduation.
The problem for most Americans is that they never get to practice their second language. A second language is usually a requirement for graduating high school. Same is true for most colleges. Unfortunately, if you don't have a chance to use it, you forget most of it.
This probably explains why most 2nd generation Americans don't speak the language of their parents.
Spanish is probably the only other language besides English that a majority of Americans will ever get a chance to use in the US. Even so, I know lots of Hispanic-Americans that don't bother learning it.
> English is an incredibly adaptable, flexible, evolving, absorbing language
:-)
Spanish and Russian are too
For one thing, English spelling sucks. I have read recently that difficult foreign leaders' names are spelled out "phonetically" in important speeches for president Bush and others. This is not because Bush can't read, but because English writing sucks. Spelling out someone's name "phonetically" is unnecessary and unthinkable in Russian. It is already spelled (sort of) phonetically.
> You also welcome the Microsoftization of the computer world too?
Microsoftization? Come on. If we had 7000 operating systems, that would be BA-A-AD... I would readily vote to reduce this amount to 3 or 4. Plus, language is not a commercial structure, nobody 'owns' language and it can't be used for profit. So, the analogy is flawed.
> El mismo reason tu queres solamente ingles?
Don't play dumb. Why do you think so many people now speak Spanish on the American continent? No one spoke Spanish there before 1492... Could it be that somebody was pushing the policy of solamente Espanol for several hundred years?... You are just looking in the mirror, amigo. And the other side of the mirror is much, much more forgiving then your side with the conquestadors. You come to the USA, sometimes illegally, try to dictate the rules, and they don't even burn you in the stake.
How many languages do you speak ? Let me guess. One ?
As one post replying to yours said a language is linked to a culture. The language and the culture disappear together.
I will add the following: a language is an imperfect way to express our ideas. There is not necessarily a one to one mapping between a concept in your head and a word. The word comes with its bit of culture, of use in different contexts, that allow other people to understand what you mean or sometimes go in the way if they don't have that bit of culture. When you know several languages, you start identifying this imperfect mapping. Because words in other languages that have the same meaning don't necessarily have the same culture attached.
Finally, the more developed your grasping of a language, the easier it is for you to communicate a concept to someone else. But that also depend on your language having the concepts inbuilt in it. I am sure inuits have lots of words for things we don't have in our languages, because their experience of life is vastly different from ours. You will probably tell me that most of these concepts may have a translation in lets say English, but I guess that for some, 99% of the people speaking English won't know them, thus cannot use them.
In France it is not uncommon for people coming from the field to not understand the young people coming from the suburbs, because internally the set of words used is different and (especially in the suburbs) the languages are evolving rapidly. That's the way I think we are leaning to: less languages, but more and more sub-languages part of the main ones. Languages are still going to be attached to a culture, but instead of being geographically located, they are going to be spread over the world thanks to global communications.
(I am not an expert in that field so take this with a grain of salt)
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"different languages give rise to different ways of thinking about things."
What you're thinking of is the sapir-worf hypothesis. It was proven false; children raised speaking Loglan, for instance, are still capable of making first order logic mistakes. They just can't express them in words.
Similarly, there is an Indonesian language where there are only 2 words for colors: dark ones and light ones. But they don't see the world in black and white; they know that yellow and white are different, even though they have only one word for both.
It's also a load of crap. The concept still exists, whether there is a language capable of describing it or not.
The Nunavut language has a special word that means "bears are evil", for which there is no English equivalent, as we have no special word that refers specifically to the type of evil that can only be associated with a bear.
You are wrong if you think language policies are liberal everywhere. For example, in France Breton-language schools are still forced to exist outside the normal school system because the state wants to keep the monopoly on one state language (in spite of Breton having something like half a million speakers) - France has a long tradition of laws against minority languages, up to the middle of the century in northern France you could see signs like "il est interdit de parler flamand et d'uriner sur les murs" ("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls"). Or in Russia, the autonomous republic of Tatarstan wanted to switch the official alphabet for the Tatar language from Cyrillic to Latin to have more coherence with other Turkic languages, and they passed a law to that extent and started hanging up Latin-script streetsigns and everything, and then the Russian federal government forbade it because they want to keep the Cyrillic alphabet as a homogenous symbol of federal Russian identity. You can find plenty of cases like this; language policy is still a hot iron in many countries as of today.
Wrong again. Society likes uniformity, but society also needs a certain amount of diversity - or rather people have their linguistic identity, and society has to cater to the identity of its members to some extent. Which is why the EU has directives on minority languages, and why the UK has Welsh-language television, and why in East Germany there are Sorbian-language schools - or to go outside the scope of Western democracies why in Xinjiang children are learning Uighur in school (because otherwise they'd be learning it in the mosque, which the Chinese government doesn't want), or why in Russia there are Tatar-language schools because otherwise some Tatars would sooner or later start to want to go the way of the Chechens.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
In New Zealand, the Maori language was arguably "dying out" a few decades ago. It was certainly on the decline. It is likewise arguable that Maori culture was going the same way. A concerted effort was put in place to teach Maori language and culture both in purpose built schools (Kohanga Reo) and to a lesser extent in mainstream schooling.
Since the 70's, there has been a marked resurgence in Maori language, but more interestingly, in the culture itselft and pride in it. This has led to Maoridom pushing itself out onto the global stage in a much more assertive and confident manner than I think it had in the past. Something which I would argue has not only been of benefit to Maori, but to NZ society in general.
I'm not opposed to there being a 'lingua franca' of the modern world, and if that happens to be English, I will be all the more pleased. But I also see that there is a real cost of languages disappearing from the world, because the words are not all that is lost: there are whole lives, whole other worlds wrapped up in particular languages. It seems to me, however, that languages do not save themselves. Unless there are a group of people willing to actually teach and actively support the usage of languages (Maori is an official language of NZ) then the task will not be managed.
I don't think we can nor would want to save all languages, but where a significant chunk of unique culture is bound up with a disappearing language, I would encourage the guardians of the culture to make real moves to save it because the alternative is to lose much more than you bargained for.
There, I hope I got your attention there: I really just wanted to add a few points here about languages, their uses and development.
Firstly, I speak 5 languages fluently (English, Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Swiss-German and French) and can get by in two more (Spanish and Turkish). I'm a South African, my girlfriend is Afrikaans, I've lived in Switzerland for some 17 years now, and in Germany and Spain before that and in Turkey for a year as well. My father was French speaking. I'm not reciting all this to brag. The knowledge of different languages has been of vital use to me in my life and has actually saved my life on a number of occasions, literally.
When I first got to Europe 21 years ago, I could only really speak English and Afrikaans. I knew a smattering of French from my dad, but I only really learned from my French girlfriend at the time. I worked in what was then West Berlin for the US Airforce, but before that, for my first year, I survived by doing odd jobs and basically pestering people to let me stay somewhere, and I learned German really quickly, because in those days, not many Germans could or wanted to speak English. The USAF people I knew, on the other hand, lived in American bases, went to American shops and watched American movies, and almost none of them understood a word of German. They had no need, but they had plenty of problems when out in the city doing shopping etc.
When I worked in Turkey, as usual, I made the effort to communicate with the locals, who surprise surprise, generally only spoke Turkish and perhaps enough German to sell stuff to tourists. Knowing Turkish made me friends and made my life that much more pleasant, and cheaper, since I could order in Turkish I paid the prices that locals paid for drinks and food which is considerably less than tourists pay.
A tidbit of info is that the Turkic languages are so closely related that knowledge of Turkish will enable you to make yourself understood from Turkey to Kazakhstan, including parts of Russia where Tartar is spoken, which is quite a span of territory. Not that I ever plan on visiting that part of the world, but if I ever do get the chance to see the Altai mountains, I'll be able to get around without too much trouble.
Another tidbit of info is that Turkic grammar gives you a head start if you ever need to learn Hungarian, Finnish or want to chat up a blond Estonian beauty. They all work the same way.
Another one is traveling in France. The French are also somewhat monolingual, like most English speakers, and I know a lot of Americans having a bad time in France because they find the French resentful of having to speak English. The joke is that the French generally don't mind if you don't speak French, but they really appreciate it if you just try a few words.
Switzerland is another special case. Swiss German is a dialect of Alemannic that is unintelligible to most Germans from the North of Germany, with some subdialects that are incomprehensible to almost all Germans. It is the most spoken language in Switzerland, but it is not a written language. The written language of Switzerland is German. You can get by perfectly with standard German in Switzerland, but knowledge of the spoken language is what will make you friends or get you business contacts with the locals. There is even a local language that is endangered, called Rumantsch, which is a direct descendant of the vulgar latin the Romans soke here 2000 years ago. It is kept alive by the Swiss not for its practical value, since all of its speakers are also fluent in German, but for its cultural heritage. It adds colour to the landscape, so to speak.
I'm telling all these stories in an attempt to show that just because you think English is a universal language doesn't make it so. In Zurich, where I work, everyone in my company speaks English to some degree, but the one guy who only spoke English at work constantly had to fight against the language barrier. I don't think he was very happy. It's often the same in large parts of
I know exactly what you mean. Take the expression "to earn money" (as in working for and getting money). In English you "earn" (inherit) it. In French it's "gagner de l'argent", which means "to win money", in German you have "Geld verdienen", you have to "work for it". It's all a question of a certain mentality expressed through language.
"In English you "earn" (inherit) it."
Please check a dictionary before you post such twaddle.
From m-w.com "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered b : to bring in by way of return ", or "to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to b : to make worthy of or obtain for "
There is no sense of inheritance or entitlement in the word. It appears to be originally descended from a German verb that meant "to reap". Reaping, at least at the time the word was in use in Old High German, certainly involved a lot of work.
No, it's not. It's a way of how relate to the world, it's a way of being. Most of our reality is categorized through linguistic categories. If we loose them we loose our world.
If you skip from English to German, it's not a big step (on a global scale), the are closely related (being both West-Germanic) and have been in contact for centuries. The speech communities share large parts of their religious and political believes, their material culture is quite similar and they have exchanged cultural artifacts (texts etc.) since their very early history. So just for your German lesson today think about the semantics of "Becher" (mug, cup, pot, beaker, goblet - You drink coffee out of them, but not beer, Yoghurt comes in a "Becher", the tooth brush rests in one, You measure flour etc. in one...) for a German speaker "Becher" are all the same thing, are they for you? Or try "gemütlich", "eben", "halt" - you would really amaze me if you could use one of these like a native speaker.
If losing a language is a good thing I recommend to you to use a hunter-gatherer language (try an aboriginal one from Australia or an Aslian language from Malaysia) in your daily life in a Western culture. You'll find that you have some very handy terms for hunting techniques but ordering a coffee politely (but not chummily) might be awkward, as will be discussing the problem with your car with the mechanic or discussing some personal problem or less specific angst with your shrink.
Death of language is good if your language remains, it's bad if another remains.
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One example, from Greek - most languages have support for being able to mix up the words in a sentence and come out with the exact same basic meaning whilst allowing the speaker to put more emphasis on certain items. From my Greek Book (Alpha to Omega by Anne Groton - I have an older edition than that one) is: Greek allows you to write it, keeping the same exact meaning, as "the dog the cat chased", "the cat the dog chased", "chased the cat the dog", "chased the dog the cat", "the cat chased the dog". Now looking at the English of that, most of it makes no sense, and one variation has a completely different meaning.
Some of this we can help by using what grammar we do have, however, as English teachers are also not teaching all the grammar any more, it also results in more confusion, especially for native speakers. (It's funny when non-native speakers know the language better than native speakers, which at least with the U.S. English variant is typically the case.)
On the other hand, languages like Chinese and Japanese don't have plurals - plurals are expressed as a number plus the "singular" form - e.g. instead of saying "there are three trees", a Japanese speaker would say "there is three tree" - however, they are still a lot more expressive in other ways - e.g. Japanese is a very poetic language.
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While modern day English uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive, it wasn't always the case. It evolved from the English genitive form, which looked like either "-his" or "-es" (and a few other variations) depending on your location.
So to say "The stone's" it'd be "stones" Or "stonhis". Eventually the h was lost (H's are are common to be dropped, they don't sound too much) and the ' replaced the "i" in the written language, as little written aid. So in a sense it is still to indicate a missing letter.
No, to indicate the possessive, English uses an inflectional suffix (with weird syntax/morphology, but I digress).
You're making a Linguistics 101 error: the grammar of a language must be stated in terms of its spoken form, not in terms of its orthography. Orthography is a very imperfect and inconsistent rendition of the language.
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