Death of Languages

Languages The death of a language is caused by a number of different factors. The first is that increased transportation and communication will increase the need for people to be able to communicate with each other. In some cases, this gives rise to a lingua franca, but in many cases it only gives rise to a majority language. A lingua franca like Chinook did not stick when the population of English-speakers became large enough to dominate conversations.

Other lingua francas like Hindi or Malay give way to a third-party language like English because there is a lesser ethnic connotation associated with a third party language -- in a modern independent nation the colonial language is less offensive than one belonging to a dominant domestic group. Many languages developed only because there were conditions of geographic isolation that allowed the language to evolve over millennia into something distinct, so reversing that isolation can be expected to reverse the trend towards different languages.

Another factor that contributes to the death of languages is education. Among native speakers in North America, for example, there were active policies to discourage the speaking of native languages, so that generations of children were only taught the dominant language. The result is that the only speakers of many Amerindian languages today are the elderly. Pragmatism also results in the demise of languages. Many regional dialects in Europe are being absorbed into dominant languages because those are the easiest ones to use outside of a person's local area.

The people will need to know the dominant language anyway, and eventually they will simply find it easier to learn it. In some instances, children are raised to learn their own native languages. However, whether that language is Gaelic or Algonquin, they will also learn a non-native language that will be more practical in their education and careers, resulting in their favoring that language.

In many cases, the older language became stigmatized, so that even native speakers would discourage their children from learning it, as occurred in the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century. These factors contribute to the crowding out of languages. When a language dies, a lot is lost, because the language is not just a set of vocabulary words; it represents an entire perspective on the world. Harrison recounts how Tuvans do not have words for the days of the week.

Their language is Turkic, so in theory should be embedded with such words, but they have been lost if they were ever there. Days of the week is a concept that is irrelevant to nomads, but the lack of such words tells us much about the Tuvan view of time. While we structure our time very carefully, they do not. Their language reveals that no day was different from any other day, so there was no need to differentiate between days.

In other cultures, attitudes towards time are vastly different from our own. The lexicons of Aboriginal tribes in Australia describe a view of time as being non-linear, reflecting a worldview barely comprehensible to Westerners. Yet, if we lose those languages, it will be much more difficult for those people to understand their own concept of time, much less explain it to anybody else. An entire body of knowledge would be lost to us. Another example Harrison provides is plant and animal species.

The words people use to describe the natural world, the folksonomy, tell us things we did not otherwise know. There are instances where a native culture will have two different words for an animal we originally thought was one -- they knew it was two species. Words can also reflect description, for example the Hawaiian fish kihikihi is named for the way it moves.

While Westerners often describe animals based on visible traits, native language naming traditions might emphasis other traits, informing us about something we do not yet understand in detail. The description of hikihiki is a good example of how languages are a window into a world. We can find many -- the number of different sausages in Germany, the number of different pastas in Italy -- that tell us about languages that view certain subjects with a high level of specificity vs. languages that do not.

Harrison also notes that the unique perspectives the Rofaifo people in Papua New Guinea have on their natural environment is already being lost just thirty years after contact. In many cultures, time is organized around events, giving us a window into how important those events are to that society -- the Inuit and Tuvans are both explained by Harrison in this context. I believe that language death should concern us, even though we are English speakers. Language death is not simply about the loss of vocabulary.

The more alarming this is the loss of knowledge about our plant. As our scientists are gathering more information about our world, we are.