The speakers of small and diminishing languages are the guardians of important human heritage. Every time a language dies one different kind of way to perceive the world disappears. This is something typical majority culture members don’t seem to apprehend and want to accept. Many seem to believe that making others unidimensionally part of their own culture makes it more powerful. They don’t seem to see how everybody looses. (I myself am a majority culture member and not bilingual).
It is even said that fluent speakers of several languages have – bilingual or multilingual people have kind of slightly different angle of personality in each language. This well known fact has been also verified in the recent studies. Each language carries deeper cultural values and world apprehension angles that most speakers may not even be aware of. They’ve developed along the history and are due to the experiences of the forefathers. Yet they are not stationary: when the world changes, the language changes and they change.
Each language is unique. There is actually Piraha language, whose monolingual speakers don’t have any mathematical understanding nor do they tell any stories. One may wonder what is meaning of such a language, but it just shows how languages adapts to surroundings and how different they can be. It also clarify, how much language can affect toward our understanding and even experiencing the world. Last year there was a study, where the Russian speakers were able to differeante more blue shades, which was said to be due their several different words for blues.
Our uniting culture as well as communication and education systems are fast killing languages. There is both voluntary, but also a lot of forced assimilation. If the own language has no higher cultural forms, many educated people start to downplay it. That is why it is important to have a written form of language. Also genocide and in limited cases other disasters can, if not directly cause at least speed up the death of a language. In especially 19th and 20th century Europe the central governments (especially in France, Italy and Spain) have been forcing the generalised languages instead of the local variants.
Yet many languages have disappeared along the history not due the death, but due natural development and differentiation towards new languages. This is something that happened to Latin and Old English, which produced modern Romance languages and English. All the language loose words and change their meanings due the changes in the culture and way of living. Some languages do it faster and other slower. There are certain language known to preserve the loaned words well, which are very important to language research.
Language have also naturally died along the history. What is alarming is the fast rate of modern language deaths. The world is fast loosing its heritage and cultural diversity, for many as important as natural diversity. Only about 200-250 of the worlds about 6000 languages are spoken by more than million people and 90% of them are spoken by less than 100.000 people. There are over 350 languages that have less than 50 speakers and are practically extinct already. According to same sources up to 5000 languages are in some sort of danger and that is over 80% of the total 6000.
There is also a phenomena called language revitalisation . The most famous case is the modern Hebrew change from the liturgical to everyday language and also there have been some success in Welsh and Hawaiian. Other notable revival movement are revival of the Irish and Catalan languages. The revival of Hebrew on the other hand has made Yiddish (the Germanic Jewish language) endangered. One must remember that Jews did not speak Hebrew anymore in the Roman times – at then the language was usually Aramea. After that several Jewish forms of languages like Arabic have developed.
In the case of languages that have already died once like Cornish (the ), not such reached the level of near extinct, one must ask, if the rebirths even truly possible or even meaningful. In the sense they’ve become artificial languages. Yet in some ways the Hebrew was already also extinct. In the case of languages that are still spoken, like Welsh and Irish the question is different. Yet I think the most important is to guard the ailing languages from extinction than try to rise something already dead from their graves. Yet I don’t consider even that effort silly as the interest in language keeps up the other forms of the culture.
April 17, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Yes, each and every language is worth preserving. All there are plenty of examples of direct oppression, languages frequently die because people switch to another tongue seen as more useful, more modern.
I would argue the case for a neutral second tongue as a way of putting people of different mother tongues on an equal footing. That language should not belong to any nation, tribe, or power bloc. A case for Esperanto, I feel.