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The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Sep 30, 2007 11:06 PM
from the culture-drain dept.
from the culture-drain dept.
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."
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I welcome... (Score:5, Funny)
What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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Protected mode > real mode
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Informative)
Repeat after me: you don't need an apostrophe to pluralize! The apostrophe is 99% of the time supposed to indicate missing letters, like "do not" becoming "don't". The apostrophe replaces the "o".
The only time you might use an apostrophe to pluralize is in the case of years or other numbers, but I still prefer not to. Like "90s" instead of "90's". And I still like using " CDs" instead of " CD's ".
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
And now it's used for Russian Rubyists to insult Portuguese Pythonistas? Plus ca change
English does not borrow from other languages.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:English does not borrow from other languages.. (Score:5, Informative)
-- James Nicoll [wikiquote.org]
The death of language is GOOD, not bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Funny)
Australia seems to be doing rather well when it comes to using correct English.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Rubbish. (Score:5, Funny)
I take it you are not a big fan of Shakespeare or Chaucer then?
Re:Rubbish. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I welcome... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry about the Chinese. Bad English is still the most widely spoken language
Oh, and did you notice how X.25 is dying out? He have to do something to preserve it. Not.
Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Informative)
From The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."I know you're just joking, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me put it this way: would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Less wars? If most of the world's cuisines were facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Music styles and dance?
Try chatting with a Native North American one day, and ask how they feel about the extinction of indigenous languages. Here in the United States, indigenous people suffered deliberate attempts at extermination, marginalization, and assimilation. At various times, it was illegal to speak Native languages, practice Native religions, or hold traditional dances or ceremonies, such as weddings. A lot of Native tradition have disappeared, and those that still exist are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Not many Native Americans I've spoke to are happy about the state of affairs.
Some might answer, "Oh well, that's the way things go. Who cares if we lose a culture in the middle of the amazon? In history, there are winners and losers. It sucks, but it happens." Are those people willing to say the same thing about the annihilation that Jews were facing during WWII? If Hitler had conquered the world, he may have succeeded in exterminating the Jews. Would we be so quick to say "Oh well, the Jews lost out in the history of the world" as we are some tribe on an island? Why or why not?
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Religions are not always benevolent in their own right.You seem to be putting more value on one group of people versus another. Why?
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, and Godwin.
Re:Good /bad thing? - Irrelevent. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
While native Americans had something to complain about in the past there is a LOT of encouragement for them to maintain their culture now. Most of the younger generation simply isn't interested. They have a point -- a lot of the tradition is badly outdated.
Culture is valuable in that it provides variety, but at some point a lot of it is something that needs to go live in a museum because it simply isn't relevant to modern life. Every person alive has abandoned most of the culture of their ancestors. There's simply too much to actively maintain. I don't know how to speak Latin, build a square rigged sailing ship or shoe a horse (all things at least some of my ancestors would have been able to do). The white/Christian/English speaking group just likes to feel responsible for everything and therefore guilty.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that most language loss at present is due to cultural and economic pressure rather than force, but it is not true that "no one is killing people" and it is not true that "in modern times no one is outlawing things". One of the causes of linguistic and cultural loss in the Amazon is the extermination of Indians by rubber planters and other farmers who want their land. Some small tribes have been wiped out by slavers. The slavers, of course, don't intend to kill everyone, but they kill some in capturing the others, many others die in slavery, and those slaves who stay alive do not pass on their language and culture. Other areas in which genocide is affecting small cultures include the southern and Darfur regions of Sudan, parts of Ethiopia, and parts of Burma.
As for outlawing languages, one prominent example is Kurdish, which it was illegal to speak or teach in Turkey until last year, when the Turkish government finally succumbed to pressure from the European Union, which it wants to join. Even so, the Turkish government continues to repress Kurdish. Kurdish is also repressed by Iran.
Furthermore, to interfere with minority languages you don't have to ban them completely. If you send the kids to boarding schools and forbid them to speak their own language, you damage the transmission of the language. This was a very common practice until quite recently (in some places it ended only ten or twenty years ago), and in some places it continues to this day.
For anyone interested in this area, I strongly recommend Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' book Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? [amazon.com].
Personally I vote we learn to meow ;) (Score:5, Funny)
On the upside, IIRC they have like 100 words total, so we can give up on the whole character set madness. (If I give you a
Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Plus, think how much easier poetry will be. E.g., you have to rhyme with "meow", you can't go wrong with "mew" or "mrow".
Not all languages are equally expressive (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not all languages are equally expressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
etc etc etc. Japanese got so so so many foreign words for things they didn't had at that time, and plus use more and more English words (in katakana) because they are "cool" and therefore create new words.
I see no problem with that. Perhaps 100 Languages disappear, but seriously, if something doesn't get used, why force it to stay alive. If it is important it will get tought (like Latin), if not, its not a loss at all.
Of course the horrible grammar mangling is nothing beautiful. But English is just used by so many people who learn it as a second language that it just gets change and adapted a lot. Same with German. A lot of Aliens learned it as a second language and so there is a new sub dialect evolving
Language is just alive and although some people love to put it down in stone, it will never stay the same. The more people communicate online, the more one language will evolve
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Funny)
Bearvil.
As soon as there is a concept which someone needs to express, they will come up with a word for it. See "haxor", "0wned", "automagical", etc.
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is one way to look at it. However, I'd argue there's a lot more than nostalgia at stake here. I'm no linguist, but it seems fairly self-evident (and something that is backed up by linguistics) that different languages give rise to different ways of thinking about things. Certain concepts just don't exist in language X, but do in Y and Z. This can have a profound effect on higher level thinking in the language, as well as providing for curiosities, like that language that only has words for one, two and many. [newscientist.com]
Also, there's a lot of linguistic and anthropological history at stake. When languages go extinct, you lose a great resource for understanding the evolution of that language, as well as all the others that are related to it.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
This can only really be a bad thing, because languages themselves are important data, especially in historical linguistics. Look up "Proto-Indo-European" on google. Basically people figured out based on the similarities of languages like Snaskirt, Latin and German, that most of the languages of Europe and west to central Asia were derived from an early (bronze age) language spoken by one people, which later branched out into the Indic, Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families. The study of languages thus has an impact outside of the lanuage itself, it can contribute greatly to the knowledge of the human race. This however is not possible if ou keep destroying the data, i.e. the languages in question.
So unless you feel that history and archaeology are basically unimportant (probably not a uncommon opinion here), preservation of languages does have a rather important role in science.
Also, studying what is possible in real-world language syntax and grammar can teach us about the language faculties of our brain, and what its limits are.
I'm curious why you think that the destruction of language is a nessecary part of increasing communication, however. You seem to be assuming people can only speak one language? The greatest spread of English has been as a second or third language to various foreign groups, so it is clearly possible to have both lingustic diversity and a common communications medium.
This is a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:5, Funny)
SUV's (Score:5, Funny)
Metcalfe's Law at Work (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
An Inconvenient Language Root (Score:5, Funny)
14 Days (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Linguists, anthropologists hardest hit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More sources of information (Score:5, Informative)
The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:
Te Reo Maori (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Is that bad? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:progress being made? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, after all, the Brits and Americans never fought, neither did all those German states or all those Latin-speaking folks. I mean, they all lived in harmony, and never took to arms.
Where the hell do you people learn your history? I'm thinking you probably don't.
Re:My god... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language follows money when it can (Score:5, Insightful)
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.