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."

Comments

What will happen to English?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
www.openbsd.org
Protected mode > real mode

Re:What will happen to English?

[mysticgoat]

What is going to happen to the English language?

It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.

For years now, there are more users of English as a second language than there are native speakers of the language. If we have not done so already, we are coming close to the point where there is more correspondence in English between people who learned English as a second language than there is correspondence that involves at least one native speaker of English. We are also moving toward the point where there sum of all documents ever published in English by native English speakers is smaller than the total of all English documents written by non-natives.

It is now not uncommon for a Finn, a Pakistani, an Israeli, and a Brazilian to collaborate on a software project written in Python, Ruby, or Perl, and use English as the language for all aspects of the project even though none of them are good speakers of English.

English is getting stripped of a bunch of silly rules that were never really core to the language, and is being expanded by a bunch of new concepts that new users are bringing in from their own native languages. The result is probably going to offend the sensibilities of a lot of the older English teachers in English speaking countries. Gee, that's too bad if they can't keep up. But the benefits of a global language are worth putting up with jarring phrases and strange sounding usages.

Re:What will happen to English?

[Rufty]

Nothing is new. English started so that "Norman knights could chat up Saxon barmaids"
And now it's used for Russian Rubyists to insult Portuguese Pythonistas? Plus ca change ...

Re:What will happen to English?

[williamhb]

That said, much of the perversion of language today has a lot of blame to lay at the feet of America. But even that is a mixture of linguistic changes brought on by marketing demographics.

Curiously, one piece of "folk wisdom" about this that often gets mentioned in the UK is that American English has remained fairly static over the last two to three centuries, while British English has moved on. In other words, many "Americanisms" are old 18th century "Britishisms". Naturally, as with all folk wisdom, though, nobody's that fussed to check the veracity of the claim!

Re:What will happen to English?

[David Off]

What you have described is effectively how English got started in the 8-12th centuries where it became the interface language between Saxon and Viking tribes and later Saxon and Norman conquerors. In the process it lost a lot of the more complicated features of Germanic languages while picking up a richer vocabulary from French. As a native speaker I personally welcome some of the anachronisms and archaic parts of English vanishing but I think the result will be that English as she was spoken C 1950 will be extinct by 2100.

Re:What will happen to English?

[Space cowboy]

The main reason for the subtlety inherent in English is the last time we lost a war on home soil - almost a thousand years ago, the French successfully invaded and started to change the language. English was almost destroyed while royalty had more ties to France than England; with the removal of the english-speaking aristocracy, French became commonplace amongst the powerful families governing the land, and inevitably trickled down to the populace.

A few hundred years later, English rebounded with the establishment of powerful nobles and royalty that considered themselves English, not French. I think it was circa 1300-1400 that the language was codified and standardised. We ended up with two (or more, when you consider that the church were pushing Latin) words for pretty much everything, so subtleties crept into the language.

That acceptance of words from other cultures became the hallmark of English - in the colonial era "the sun never set on the British empire", leading to a massive influx of new ideas, culture and (of course) words. The language is a dynamic living thing - depending on your disposition, it could be called a hybrid of opportunity, or a mongrel language.

From the British perspective, we're taught that Americans decided the (rather acrimonious, after all :) break from the motherland was a good time to clear up some of the oddities that had crept into the evolving language, so Z replaced S in several places, a few U letters were sent packing, and a couple of tenses were changed. What astounds me is that they didn't take the opportunity to clear up the ough problem - consider the pronunciation of through, though, thought, thorough, bough, and cough - and that's just off-the-cuff. I'm sure there are more...

So, at the end of all this, I suppose my point is that the language is dynamic, has been both stable and evolving for almost a thousand years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Worrying about it, or becoming too focussed on the minutiae is counter-productive. If my American cousins spell colour without the U, so what ? - I can understand them perfectly well, and the purpose of language is to communicate. To be honest, I have far more problems with tomAYto - whenever I ask for tomAHto on a sandwich, I get blank looks... Oh well, when in Rome (or CA, for that matter :)

Simon.

Metcalfe's Law at Work

[Comatose51]

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.

Secret Information

[paleshadows]

here are some reasons why we'd want to preserve dying languages [from the paper]:

When a language is lost, centuries of human thinking about animals, plants, mathematics, and time may be lost with it, Swarthmore's Harrison said. "Eighty percent of species have been undiscovered by science, but that doesn't mean they're unknown to humans, because the people who live in those ecosystems know the species intimately and they often have more sophisticated ways of classifying them than science does," he said. "We're throwing away centuries' worth of knowledge and discoveries that they have been making all along." In Bolivia, Harrison and Anderson met with Kallawaya people, who have been traditional herbalists since the time of the Inca Empire. In daily life the Kallawaya use the more common Quechua language. But they also maintain a secret language to encode information about thousands of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science, that the Kallawayas use as remedies. The navigational skills of peoples in Micronesia, meanwhile, are similarly encoded in small, vulnerable languages, Harrison said. "There are people who may have a special set of terms ... which enable them to navigate thousands of miles of uncharted ocean ... without any modern instruments of navigation."

Re:Good thing?

[rxmd]

and in modern times no one is outlawing things.

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.

Society likes uniformity to a degree and that is what is happening.

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.

Te Reo Maori

[kaffiene]

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.

Cultural ignorance can be the death of you

[theolein]

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