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The world's languages are vanishing

BY PETER LADEFOGED

We recently started a new millennium. By the time the next one comes around, probably all but a handful of the world’s languages will have disappeared. This is the price of globalization. Languages thrive when they provide a way of communicating with a wide range of people. They weaken when they are no longer useful in the bigger marketplace. They disappear when mothers no longer use them to speak to their children.

When a language goes, it is an enormous tragedy for the people who speak it. They lose something vital that identifies them. Their old tales get lost in translation and their folk songs become just music. Most importantly, as one young Apache put it to me, “We can no longer speak to our ancestors,” a tragedy that violated his soul.

We all lose when a language dies. Linguists view language as a window into the way that the mind works, and every language that disappears means the shutting of another window with a slightly different view. We also lose the folk learning — the knowledge of plants that have medicinal use and of the habits of animals that aid our ecology.

There is no doubt that the loss of a language, like the loss of a species, makes our world smaller. But the parallel between endangered languages and endangered species should not be taken too far. Fortunately, the loss of a language does not mean that it cannot be revived.

Languages are always changing. My grandchildren use words that are new to me, and they have lost some old words — they don’t know a milliner from a haberdasher. When a language is brought back, it may not be exactly the same as it was before, but it can still serve as a binding cultural property.

Hawaiian is a good case in point. Native Hawaiian people want a cultural asset that keeps them distinct from the millions of newcomers in their land. To this end they have been developing Hawaiian immersion schools and Hawaiian radio stations. The language used in these developments may differ from older forms of Hawaiian, but that does not matter as long as it helps to hold the Hawaiian people together.

When people lose their language they often do so because they think they will do better in another language. I have met speakers of small minority languages in Africa who are proud that their children speak Swahili rather than their tribal tongue. They feel that their children will have better jobs and better lives than they could ever have had while identified as members of a minority tribe.

Of course, this is far from always being the case. The breakdown of aboriginal societies in Australia has landed many people in abject misery. But, to take another example from Africa, many of the Bushmen in Botswana are likely to live longer and healthier lives as a result of becoming more assimilated into a larger, healthier community through attending schools where they learn to speak Tswana and go on to make it their home language. Languages come and languages go, sometimes with good and sometimes with bad results.

Ladefoged is professor emeritus of phonetics. He spent most of the last decade recording and analyzing the sounds of endangered languages on every continent except Antarctica.