Endangered languages

[hongi]

As a person who's very interested in languages and studying linguistics, the state of the world depresses me. Over 6000 languages. One language dying every two weeks, roughly.

Scientifically, it's an awful loss. It must be what biologists feel like when a species goes extinct, never to return again. For the value to linguistics alone, these and indeed all languages are useful to keep around. Linguists need data. Languages are data and it helps to have as many data points as possible.

But there's an equally strong case for helping these languages out, and it's a purely emotional one. Simply put, (some) people care about their languages. They feel grief at the thought of their children not being able to speak it. That's enough for me.

We care about all sorts of things. A multi-billion dollar industry has risen around keeping pets for instance, even though it's not at all necessary for most of us to keep pets. If we care about that, we can care about the very mode of communication that humans use with each other.

[Sir Sirius]

I would actually like to see all but one language go extinct. The huge number of languages spoken around the world at the moment is horribly inefficient. In a monolingual world communication on the global level would be far more effective.

Yeah, I know. Total pipe dream, not going to happen. But one can always dream.

[Serafina]

I would actually like to see all but one language go extinct. The huge number of languages spoken around the world at the moment is horribly inefficient. In a monolingual world communication on the global level would be far more effective.

Yeah, I know. Total pipe dream, not going to happen. But one can always dream.

Also utterly idiotic.

Now if your goal would be to have just one efficient language spoken worldwide, okay, i can understand that.
Buy you can preserve languages with relatively little effort. All you need is a linguist recording it properly and updating those records regularly to adapt for changes in the language they were recorded in (like updating a german-english dictionary when one of the languages in it changes).

But of course there is no possible value in preserving a large amount of languages if you want to create an efficient one

[hongi]

On the other hand, everyone else could be bilingual and have just one dominant trade and business language.

Buy you can preserve languages with relatively little effort. All you need is a linguist recording it properly and updating those records regularly to adapt for changes in the language they were recorded in (like updating a german-english dictionary when one of the languages in it changes).

We can't really preserve languages like that. We can document some languages, but even the best documentation (e.g. hundreds of hours of video tapes, reams and reams of writing) captures only a small proportion of what a language is really like. Sometimes, it's easier to just keep the language alive than to create a huge mausoleum.

[Shroom Man 777]

A lot of immigrants kind of forget their original languages by the time they reach the third or fourth generation in their new homeland. I'm fourth generation Chinese, and I can't speak it at all. It must be so disappointing and sad for the older generation, to see something they practice just being forgotten by the next generation.

[SCRawl]

I've always been of the opinion that if languages are going to expire, then let them expire. It's up to the people who speak these languages to either allow them to flourish or expire. If it's not important enough to them, then to what other entity is it important enough to make that effort? I understand the scientific point of view, but is it worthwhile to study a language that's being artificially propped up?

Some special recognition has to be given to cultures who have had a thumb on the scales, though. If a government of the past has made efforts to eradicate a segment of its culture (or the segment of the population that supports that culture) then an argument can be made for its successors to try to make reparations.

[Thanas]

I would actually like to see all but one language go extinct. The huge number of languages spoken around the world at the moment is horribly inefficient. In a monolingual world communication on the global level would be far more effective.

Yeah, I know. Total pipe dream, not going to happen. But one can always dream.

Everybody who says languages dieing out is a good thing is an idiot or an uncultivated barbarian. The number of great works of culture that would be lost or inaccessible to all but a select few is nothing trivial. And it is already happening - who can read fortunatus, for example, or the poetry of Walther v.d. Vogelweide? These are great works which helped shape our modern culture to no small extent and people just propose abandoning them.

Right.

[Sarevok]

But there's an equally strong case for helping these languages out, and it's a purely emotional one. Simply put, (some) people care about their languages. They feel grief at the thought of their children not being able to speak it. That's enough for me.

We have information technology now. Every bit of information about a culture can be saved. I think the only real problem is finding a patron willing to fund the process. Correct me if wrong but does not UNESCO fund this sort of activity ?

[Rabid]

The problem Sarevok, is that a language is more than just grammar and vocabulary : it is a culture. There is tons of things that you could record with information technology, sure ; but there's also a ton of things that you'll miss and that will disappear, such as parts of the oral tradition, traditional jokes, prayers, etc... There is just no way that you could record an entire culture.

This is why, from an historical, linguistic, and human standpoint, it is worthwhile to save endangered language, to keep people using them on a day-to-day basis, as much as we save endangered species : to protect diversity, to protect our heritage.

When a language disappear, we lose access to a part of our History. Forever.


Sure, when a language disappear, there's reasons for it - a process of natural selection applied to our culture. But as much as we try to save species, when only a fraction of those we tried to protect are saved ; if we can save only One on Ten language it will still be better than None.


Now, I agree that if everybody could understand each other, that would be a great thing, possibly one of the greatest achievement of Mankind. But in no way it does justify committing, actively or passively, the eradication of entire cultures - a cultural genocide. When the Chinese do that to the Tibetan (allegedly), it is dramatic, unacceptable, barbaric ; but when you are talking about doing this on a global scale, it suddenly seems like a great idea ?

Addressing here the guy who think suppressing all languages but one is a great idea : I'm curious. How exactly do you wrap your mind around such a concept ?

[Sarevok]

The thing is recording a language before it dies out is usually the only useful action available. In some cases like Gaelic in Ireland a languge can be eventually revived. But in most cases it will not be possible to convince remaining population to continue using what they see as a relic. It is a tragedy yes but one that sadly can not be averted.

[Rabid]

The thing is recording a language before it dies out is usually the only useful action available. In some cases like Gaelic in Ireland a languge can be eventually revived. But in most cases it will not be possible to convince remaining population to continue using what they see as a relic. It is a tragedy yes but one that sadly can not be averted.

Absolutely. I just wanted to point out that once a language die (when nobody speak it anymore), when revived it will only be a shadow of what it once was, as a great of the culture that supported it in the first place will have disappeared. But yes, recording all we can of a language is in most of the case the best thing we can do.

[Broomstick]

A lot of immigrants kind of forget their original languages by the time they reach the third or fourth generation in their new homeland. I'm fourth generation Chinese, and I can't speak it at all. It must be so disappointing and sad for the older generation, to see something they practice just being forgotten by the next generation.

On the other hand, my Russia grandparents deliberately killed the language in their family. My dad says he never heard either of his parents speak Russian in front of him, although since his father came over at around age 12 he must have known that language. They refused to let other relatives speak it around them. My grandparents felt that since they were in America and their children were American they would speak English and not Russian. Not everyone wants to preserve the old languages.

Granted the circumstances under which they left Russia - fleeing for their lives - might well have played into that. They did not leave voluntarily.

[Darmalus]

While the total loss of a language is unfortunate, unlike a biological organism, languages don't form a huge interlocking system that makes food and air and keeps us from dying horribly.

I have to wonder, if no one was concerned enough to bother translating some book of poetry into a more current language, was it worth keeping around at all? I would argue that such works were dead long before the number of people who could read it reached zero.

[Broomstick]

Uh-huh.

Now consider the effort put into deciphering things like Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Epic of Gilgamesh was lost for a couple thousand years before rediscovery and translation and is now available at any decent library for our current enjoyment.

Yeah, I'm sure there's been lots of worthwhile poetry and literature lost to the ages, just based on what's been pulled out of the trash heap by considerable effort.

[Rabid]

To put things into perspective (somehow), remember that more than half of the films produced before the 50's are lost forever, and that we will never know but a vague superficial outlook of a number of ancient civilization's cultures because most, if not all of their work of art, except for the architectural ones, have been lost to time.

Each language that we archive is a work that the future linguist and archaeologist/historian will not have to try to do from scratch.




When you believe that Knowledge is Sacred, and are irked at the simple thought of dumping books, even bad ones ; the very idea of letting a language die seems like a very dangerous heresy.

[Sea Skimmer]

Its well worth preserving all the details we can on dying languages now that storing vast piles of audio recordings is kind of trivial for universities and similar institutions but in the end its nothing something that terribly concerns me. It is history in action. Language constantly evolves, and while we gain a lot of new words and concepts and phrases its inevitable that old stuff will die out in common use. Many languages simply have not and are not going to adapt well to the modern industrial world and its often highly technical terminology and need for rapid global communications that can be typed on a reasonable keyboard. Languages that don't have the support of a major economy that will keep them in circulation and produce products that utilize them look pretty doomed to me in the long run.

[Simon_Jester]

I have to wonder, if no one was concerned enough to bother translating some book of poetry into a more current language, was it worth keeping around at all? I would argue that such works were dead long before the number of people who could read it reached zero.

For some cultures, like the Aztecs, this isn't even true- the art of those societies didn't "die;" it was murdered by its conquerors. Their mythology and philosophy and artistic styles were suppressed as heresy or simply cast aside by conquerors who had no interest in preserving the culture.

In other cases, we have playwrights (like Sophocles) or poets (like Archilochus) who we know were damn good, because their reputation and critical reviews kept going for centuries after their deaths, with people many many years later still talking about their work... and yet we've lost the vast majority of the work itself. It defies belief that these works were lost simply because they were "bad;" if they were bad they wouldn't have been popular enough during those centuries for other people to be talking about them.

On top of that, most of this material was produced in societies with very small populations who had the literacy and leisure time to sit around amassing books. It took a lot less in the way of destruction and pillaging to wipe out the relatively small number of library collections and elite scholars that existed during the area- the sack of a major city in ancient times might permanently destroy all surviving copies of a manuscript, or at least thin out the numbers enough that the work no longer had any real chance of long term survival, whether it was artistically good or not.

[Johonebesus]

Languages can also be useful tools in understanding the movements of peoples. For example, from the Middle Ages Western travelers described Germanic speakers in the Crimean peninsula. It was assumed that they were descendants of the ancient Goths, some relic population that didn't flee in advance of the Huns. Of course, Germans were migrating eastward right up until WWII. Russia gets its name from a Germanic tribe. There is no way to be positive that the Crimean Germans were in fact Goths. Today the ethnic group is gone, absorbed into the "indigenous" Tatars and Slavs or relocated during Soviet rule. The language they spoke is dead, and only a few words are recorded. If the language still lived, or at least had a sizable corpus, it could be compared with the Gothic of Ulfilas' Bible. As it is, we can only guess if they were Goths or some other tribe that has been forgotten.

[Duckie]

I would actually like to see all but one language go extinct. The huge number of languages spoken around the world at the moment is horribly inefficient. In a monolingual world communication on the global level would be far more effective.

Yeah, I know. Total pipe dream, not going to happen. But one can always dream.

Dear sir

Across all of human history, and all of human civilisation, one thing has been constant: People are able to speak more than one language.

Historically, it is an anomaly of the modern era to speak only one and seems localised mostly to areas where the nation-state was born (helped along, no doubt, by the english attempting to destroy the welsh and gaelic languages, and the french the dozens of romance languages within their borders, and so forth). Note that even in such areas, only the conquering colonial people speak literally only one language, because they can count upon everyone speaking their language. The Maltese, unlike the British or the French, are habitually trilingual and often quadrilingual. This appears to pose no physiological or psychological stress upon the average maltese and does not appear to make the maltese nation destroy itself due to brief inefficiency in communication.

Further, such an arrangement is not particularly inefficient, because the alternative doesn't work. Were you to standardise the world on one language, it would fall apart again into dozens of regional dialects, then dozens of regional languages, like it always was and will be. Also it is inefficient to standardise on such a high level, for the same reason as the entire world doesn't have a unified electrical plug- it would cause more problems creating such a thing and convincing 95% of humanity to abandon their electrical sockets than it would help to not have to buy adaptors (read translators and interpreters).

Sincerely, Linguistics

I've always been of the opinion that if languages are going to expire, then let them expire. It's up to the people who speak these languages to either allow them to flourish or expire. If it's not important enough to them, then to what other entity is it important enough to make that effort? I understand the scientific point of view, but is it worthwhile to study a language that's being artificially propped up?

By such thinking you could easily blame the natives for economic disasters on their land, because it's their responsibility to protect their land and if they don't feel their environment is worth protecting against multinational interests, then why should they? (Hint: Coercive economic interests are at work in both)

As to your second question, Yes.

[SCRawl]

I've always been of the opinion that if languages are going to expire, then let them expire. It's up to the people who speak these languages to either allow them to flourish or expire. If it's not important enough to them, then to what other entity is it important enough to make that effort? I understand the scientific point of view, but is it worthwhile to study a language that's being artificially propped up?

By such thinking you could easily blame the natives for economic disasters on their land, because it's their responsibility to protect their land and if they don't feel their environment is worth protecting against multinational interests, then why should they? (Hint: Coercive economic interests are at work in both)

As to your second question, Yes.

Situations like the one you mention -- indeed, that very one -- prompted me to write the second paragraph, the one you didn't quote. I believe that it answers your criticism.

[aerius]

The problem Sarevok, is that a language is more than just grammar and vocabulary : it is a culture. There is tons of things that you could record with information technology, sure ; but there's also a ton of things that you'll miss and that will disappear, such as parts of the oral tradition, traditional jokes, prayers, etc... There is just no way that you could record an entire culture.

That's for sure, take my first language for example; Taiwanese, a lot of the interesting idioms and expressions will likely die with my parents' generation, or at the latest, my generation. For instance instead of saying something is "dull as a butter knife" we have a phrase which roughly translates as "dull as a shit scraper", now where the hell did that come from? Well that comes from back in the days when people squatted over a hole in the ground to take a dump and didn't have toilet paper, so they had specially shaped pieces of wood or bamboo to scrape the crap off their butts. And obviously those scrapers had to be nice & dull or else you'd slice the crap out of your ass. In 50-100 years there's going to be very, very few people who will know the origins of that phrase, when & how to use it, and why it's downright hilarious.

[hongi]

In large parts of Central and Northern Australia, it's common to speak at least four languages. Exogamy is not merely a word, it's a practice. Your mother and father each come from different places, not to mention the different languages spoken by your mother in law and so forth. Or at least it was common - Australia and America have undergone some of the worst of the colonisation process. Lots of languages don't pass away naturally, they're murdered. But you can still find people who speak more than 10 languages if you look.

[Rabid]

Out of curiosity, how well do they speak those 4 to 10 languages ? Are they truly bilingual, or are they "merely" particularly good at speaking and understanding them ?

[Lagmonster]

Were you to standardise the world on one language, it would fall apart again into dozens of regional dialects, then dozens of regional languages, like it always was and will be.

On this point alone, would it or would it not be more reasonable to expect the opposite trend the better off our global communications networks become?

I know that I'm simply assuming that since when you isolate populations they often diverge, that the opposite would be true when you bring people together with instant, widely-available global communications networks.

[hongi]

Out of curiosity, how well do they speak those 4 to 10 languages ? Are they truly bilingual, or are they "merely" particularly good at speaking and understanding them ?

Truly multilingual. But proficiency depends on whether they get to use one particular language a lot.

Again, bilingualism isn't something odd or strange. It is the natural state for plenty of people around the world.