the problem – language death

7/28/2019 THE PROBLEM LANGUAGE DEATH

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1THE PROBLEM LANGUAGE DEATH

By now, it is well documented that languages are vanishing at a rate that has

never been seen before. Since 1500 AD, the world has lost about 15% of the

7000 languages we think were spoken then, and the pace is quickening

dramatically. In just the last few dozens of American Indian languages have

died and the story is being played out in Australia, South America, New

Guinea, and Africa.

And its not just the little languages that are dying. A hundred years ago,

Breton had a million speakers, but is now struggling for survival. Thirty

years ago, Navajo had over 100,000 speakers and now faces an uncertain

future.

We recognize easily the danger in losing biodiversity, but is the loss oflanguage and thus cultural diversity really a problem? For all we know,

one language and one culture might be just fine. Why not, say, English or

Chinese for everyone?

For 40,000 years, since the beginning of modern Homo sapiens, we humans

have been a great evolutionary success story. From perhaps half a million of

us, living in just a few spots, we have expanded to about 6 billion people,

occupying deserts, tundra, tropical forests, and high mountains. During this

spectacular adaptive radiation, as biologists call it, we acquired a stock ofknowledge about survival in all these environments, and that knowledge was

stored in all the languages that developed along the way. And now those

languages are vanishing.

Lets be really clear about this. Language diversity did not cause the

evolutionary success of humans. But the knowledge generated by all those

successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in the

languages now spoken around the world and the knowledge base is under

siege. Of the 6000 languages spoken today, fewer than 300 cover 5.5 billion

speakers. All the rest of the languages, 95% of them, are spoken by just 300million people.

Think of it: 5% of the people in the world speak 95% of the world's

languages, which means that 95% of the cultural heterogeneity of the planet

95% of the differences in ways of seeing the world is vested in under 5%

of the people, and the problem gets worse each year.


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One take on this, I suppose, is that language die-off is just part of natural

evolution, and nothing to worry about. Neither the language of Jesus nor the

language of Cesar is spoken by many people today and nothing catastrophic

seems to have happened. Why worry now?

This is a high-risk game. I wouldnt be worried if we had 20 or 30 Earth-like

planets, unlimited time, and god-like power to test whether language

diversity was really good for human evolutionary success. On some planets

we could ordain that language diversity remain high, while on others it

would decline toward zero. Then, over a few hundred years, wed see

whether the decline in diversity placed the survival of humanity on any

planet at risk.

And wed also learn how to rescue the knowledge from each language bytranslating it into a widely spoken languages. But what were doing now is

an experiment to find out if eliminating language diversity is harmful to our

survival as a species. With no planets to fall back on, it's truly a reckless

experiment. It should be stopped now.

THE SOLUTION HOW TO PRESERVE LANGUAGES

Fortunately, there are a lot of really interesting things going on. Linguists are

recording texts by the last speakers of languages across the world. Linguists

are also helping indigenous peoples from the Amazon to New Guinea to

write dictionaries and grammar books so that school children who are

participating in bilingual education programs will have basic tools for

learning their languages. Native speakers of Mayan and other indigenous

languages are getting degrees in linguistics and joining the effort to

document those languages.

Until a few years ago, Hualapai, Maori, and native Hawaiian children were

no longer learning their ancestral languages. Now, those children in Arizona,New Zealand, and Hawaii are in total immersion programs and coming out

as fully fluent young speakers of those languages. In California, some

American Indian groups have set up what are known as master-apprentice

programs so that older, fluent speakers of Indian languages can teach

younger people in their tribes to become fluent, too.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL_21.htmlhttp://www.uwm.edu/Dept/electaq/resources/greenbook.htmlhttp://www.uwm.edu/Dept/electaq/resources/greenbook.htmlhttp://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL_21.htmlhttp://www.uwm.edu/Dept/electaq/resources/greenbook.htmlhttp://www.uwm.edu/Dept/electaq/resources/greenbook.html


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There is one more thing that works. The major languages of the world have

great literary traditions. Most languages have no literary tradition. In

todays, world, no books means language death. This is the goal ofCELIAC.

the Centro Editorial de Literatura Indgena, Asociacin Civilor the Center

for Native Language Publishing, in Oaxaca, Mexico (Asociacin Civil

means 'not-for-profit corporation' in Mexico.)
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htmhttp://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htmhttp://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htmhttp://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htmhttp://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htmhttp://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/CELIAC.htm

the problem – language death

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