Confessions of a Language Addict: "I don't know whether Breton will hang on, though I'm not overly optimistic. And if it doesn't, I'm certainly not prepared to shrug my shoulders and mouth platitudes about the progress of civilization and how it's all for the best. On the other hand, it's not all for the worst. Truth be told, without the nationalization and globalization that threaten Breton culture and even make people uneasy about the status of French culture, a kid from rural Michigan would never have seen the Breton culture to mourn its passing - or gone to Brittany to study French!"
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In 100 years, I see all languages disappearing except a new English with lots of presently foreign vocabulary.
The Internet makes us all one village, and English is far ahead as the dominant language.
A friend used to go to a Celtic Festival in Brittany, to represent Scotland versus Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. And what ur-Celtic sport did he play? Bridge.
When I saw this,at first I thought he was referring to Cape Breton (of Nova Scotia).
In any event, cultures that don't change become stagnate and become repressive.
Re: In 100 years, I see all languages disappearing except a new English with lots of presently foreign vocabulary.
Barring major catastrophes, any language with over one million speakers, a written form and official national status will still be around in 100 years. English will probably continue as the world's main second language, but it's never going replace languages like French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Mandarin.
It seems likely that many languages will naturally converge over time, as Tom Kelly implied, but that will be hard for Mandarin, because of the writing system (characters rather than an alphabet). I was tangentially involved with preparing a course (in Cantonese, not Mandarin) for option traders when the first options were traded on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. Before preparing the materials, the preparers first had to make up both words and characters for puts, calls, straddles, etc., so that the class could be taught in Cantonese. In, say, French or German, one could take the English word and change the sound and spelling a bit to make it sound more local, but there's no easy equivalent with the character system.
JonF wrote: Barring major catastrophes, any language with over one million speakers, a written form and official national status will still be around in 100 years. English will probably continue as the world's main second language, but it's never going replace languages like French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Mandarin.
That's probably right, although I think the Firefly universe did present a plausible possibility: the whole of humanity comprised of bilingual speakers of an Americanesque form of English, and Chinese. Although I presume the real thing would be subject to expletives spoken in whichever language was convenient at the time, and not merely the one most likely to slip bast monolingual FCC censors.
For larger languages, any language with a million speakers (give or take a few hundred thousand) and a middle class behind it will survive indefinitely.
For smaller languages (and larger ones not supported by a middle class) the question seems to be values.
Some years ago I reviewed a book on endangered languages for a linguistics journal and the independent variable in a language's survival seems to boil down to the following: Do the speakers perceive using the language as a value in an of itself?
If the answer is yes, then a language can buck the odds and hold on against tremendous pressure (usually in a stable bi- or multi-lingual context).
If the answer is no (or if the value in using the language is outweighed by material values) then a language can have everything going for it and it won't last.
Irish speakers collectively decided that either Irish wasn't worth using for its own sake (or that perceived financial opportunities of English monolingualism were of a higher value) and so bye bye Irish (despite a dedicated minority that's interested in keeping the language merely moribund instead of technically dead).
I'm not sure what Breton speakers have decided.
It'd be great if we could all just use one language. We're one world, let's all just use one language! Plus, all those different languages get in the way of making money, and next to that things like culture means little. Let no linguistic trivialities stand in the way of global capitalism!
It seems rather obvious to me that you can't force people to keep using a language if they don't want to. You can't force them to keep a culture if they don't want to.
Languages and cultures evolve, change, and die. Fighting it would require some sort of massive intervention that involved forcing people to live a life according to some standard...
On the other hand, we should document any dying languages or cultures for future reference. The knowledge may be useful and/or valuable.
Maybe its just me, but conscious efforts to "save" a culture, especially government intervention to protect a culture, only have the effect of cheapening the culture. If its so great, why do you have to subsidize it? When it gets to that point you are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The pseudo-culture promoted by government will only serve to cheapen the culture and probably hasten its demise. At least, it will if I'm not the only guy who feels like smoking after seeing an anti-smoking PSA.
Look at it this way TLB; global capitalism is weakening the tribalism by breaking down cultural barriers. When its just ruining funny pants and a weird accent its seems sad, but its not such a bad thing when you remember Rwanda and other places in the world where cultural differences aren't just fodder for tourist traps.
Actually, cultural differences and barriers (as understood in the social scientists) are as strong as ever and there are no signs of any spontaneous convergence (apart from the most superficial kinds of pop culture being available everywhere now).
And in Rwanda, both sides share the same culture and same language. The carnage in Rwanda was an example of _intra_cultural and not intercultural conflict.
I love learning languages, but the value of any language isn't its endearing idiosyncracies, it's the ability for its speakers to communicate with each other. The larger the community that depends on a language, the greater that language's value. Languages disappear because their communities become too small.
One of English's glories is its flypaper ability to absorb material from other languages, and its comfort with neologisms. (See the anecdote on coming up with new Chinese characters to represent puts and calls above.) The barriers that France foolishly erects to such growth condemn it to becoming an eventual backwater. Hindu must now compete with English in its homeland. Arabic is constrained by its incredible dearth of new written works.
For these reasons, English will dominate. Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic will survive perhaps indefinitely, but certainly longer than Hindu and French. The rest are on their way to irrelevance. Their only hope is the development of capable translation technology of the sort that is now in early use in Iraq.
conscious efforts to "save" a culture, especially government intervention to protect a culture, only have the effect of cheapening the culture.
Yeah, that's why that whole absurd effort to resurrect Hebrew was both doomed and worthless. There was no chance it'd lead to a viable cultural or political entity, and no way it could ever have lasted 20 years, let alone a hundred. And certainly, nobody was ever going to write a decent modern novel in Hebrew.
the value of any language isn't its endearing idiosyncracies, it's the ability for its speakers to communicate with each other. - Larry
I don't see why you would think this true. Language is a human art. You can't dance what you would dance in hip-hop with the tools available in ballet, and you can't recreate a French intellectual talk show in English. The question of whether a given language has value is not particularly different from the question of whether a given art form has value. There's no way to quantify what would disappear from the world if there were no ballet, but it would be something.
One of the most useful aspects of the Internet is that it reminds one of the continuing presence of one's enemies.
This blog, for instance, brings out the economist/engineer/technocrats, who see no criterion for evaluating any human phenomenon other than: Does it further the efficient production and exchange of goods and services?
Yep, the Jews=Breton culture.
And there is plenty of cultural convergance; many countries have successfully created a national identity rather than local ethnic ones. Of course it hasn't done away with all cultural barriers... anyone who takes that from my argument is intentionally constructing a strawman.
The Irish immigrants in America used to be discriminated against quite badly; now most people of Irish descent party a little harder on St. Patties day, maybe a cuss word or two in gaellic and thats about it. And nobody discriminates anymore against Irish people. Was the death of traditional Irish culture in these immigrants a crying shame? I suppose someone thought so. But no one cares now.
Earnest Iconoclast has it right- you really can't force culture. Whether or not a language survives is purely a matter of relative numbers.
If I had to hazard of guesstimate for whether a language is extant 100 years from now, I would say that the language today would have to exist in a homogenous culture of at least 1,000,000. French will surely still be spoken 100 years from now in what is today called France (see Quebec for a historical instance in which French has survived in an English speaking country for over 250 years).
English will grow in dominance for commerce and international communication. It has gained an edge that will be nearly impossible for any other language to overcome, short of a complete collapse of civilization. It is already, far and away, the largest 2nd language adopted by non-native English speakers. And you also see this same trend in the relative lack of bilingualism in native English speakers, though this is often mistakenly dismissed as a sort of cultural ignorance/lassitude/chauvinism. It is none of these- there is simply less real incentive for a native English speaker to learn a 2nd language than there is for a non-native speaker to learn English.
"traditional Irish culture": my grandfather who was brought up in it thought it stank - violent, dishonest, untruthful and priest-ridden. Good riddance.
brooksfoe -
I agree that some languages will survive as art - see ancient Greek. It's just that they won't be used as languages, that is, as tools for living daily lives.
"there is simply less real incentive for a native English speaker to learn a 2nd language than there is for a non-native speaker to learn English"
Doesn't this make monolingual English speakers into free-riders in the arena of cross-cultural-lingual communication?
The best answer I heard to this question was: If the language has produced work of literary merit, it will never disappear. If it has not, it should.
The illustrative example was Provencal (Occitan), where Girart de Roussillo means the language will always have people learning it and speaking it.
-zanon
Re: Irish speakers collectively decided that either Irish wasn't worth using for its own sake (or that perceived financial opportunities of English monolingualism were of a higher value) and so bye bye Irish
In the 19th century most Gaelic speakers either died in the famine or emigrated.
Re: The barriers that France foolishly erects to such growth condemn it to becoming an eventual backwater.
More likely the barriers are ineffcetive. They may succeed at keeping Anglicisms out of formal print (much as our regulations usually keep obscenities out of formal print) but they are useless in preventing such words from infiltrating the spoken language. So at best they keep them as slang in the lower spoken register of the language.
Re: Hindu must now compete with English in its homeland.
The two languages are not competing at all: they complement one another. English is used as a lingua franca so that speakers of Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, etc. can all communicate (and communicate as well with the outside world) but Hindi is holding its own quite effectively. English is playing the same role in India today that Greek played in the ancient Middle East.
Re: Arabic is constrained by its incredible dearth of new written works.
So there's no great literature being written in Arabic. But tens of millions of people spend their whole lives speaking it, and there's plenty of newspapers etc. that use its written form. Not to mention that all Muslims are expected to master classical Arabic so as to read the Qu'ran (whose only valid version is the Arabic text).
Re: Yeah, that's why that whole absurd effort to resurrect Hebrew was both doomed and worthless.
Hebrew never became truly extinct. It survived as the language of Jewish religion and scholarship but not as a spoken language.
I don't think it's worthwhile to preserve regional languages besides having a kind of university or educational facility that is devoted to preservation and understanding all languages for research purposes and the human historical record.
But it makes little sense to preserve languages for every day usage that are being abandoned. Ultimately I think we will end with maybe four or five, and the same ones as outlined in the comments above.
"In the 19th century most Gaelic speakers either died in the famine or emigrated"
True, I've read that the fact that the famine was also effectively killing the language did not cause any anguish among the English.
That said, there was nothing stopping Irish speakers from trying to actively cultivate the language later on. Instead, the Irish language movement seems at every step to be a case of planned (and fervently hoped for) failure.
Doesn't this make monolingual English speakers into free-riders in the arena of cross-cultural-lingual communication?
If the ship is headed south and you want to travel today, plan on heading south. It doesn't much matter what your port of entry was.
Toxic, what your example of the Irish in America reveals is that your model of linguistic evolution is that of assimilation in the US. This is an unconscious bias of many Americans, and it's part of what we're failing to get about the world. The world is not the US, and globalization is not American-style assimilation.
Vietnamese will never disappear. Thai will never disappear. Zulu and Xhosa will never disappear. Urdu will never disappear. Turkish will never disappear. Bahassa will never disappear. I would go much further down and agree with the more linguistics-literate commenters above that languages with well over a million native speakers, like Ewe, Twi, Haussa, and so on, will not disappear. (By "never" I mean "not within any time frame within which any other historical trend can be viewed meaningfully" - say, 300 years, by which time there's no reason to believe that English will be dominant rather than Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, or the computer code used in our subcutaneous Babelfish devices.)
I'm not arguing that there will be one language in the future. Of course not. There will be still be tons of languages spoken. But there's something like 6000 languages in existence today. The BBC carries news in 33 languages, just to give an idea of how many languages aren't on the radar. There are 2000 languages being spoken in Asia. 800 in Papua New Guinea alone.
Most of those languages are spoken by very few people. Very very few. That is where the extinction level event is occurring. Basically, if the average educated person has ever heard of the language, its probably safe. Its the 5500 other languages that are in trouble. That is where the linguistic crisis is. Not Hindi or Cantonese or any other language that you or I has ever heard of.
http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf
Just to go further, thats why I argue that the desire to communicate is leading to the death of the majority of languages. If you are literally surrounded by people who you can't talk to in your own country, the pressure to switch is immense, especially over generations.
Once again, not talking about French, talking something like Agi, which is spoken by 900 people or Aimelee which is spoken by a whopping 137 people.
I'm actually one of those people who thinks that technology actually slows the death of minority languages, because there are more forums to read, write, and communicate in those languages, and increasing wealth of countries can devote resources to educating people in those languages. The costs of multilingualism are simply lower than they were in the past, so governments can afford to be more accommodating of the minority languages within their borders.
However, that's a mid-to-late 20th century innovation. France's efforts (and those of a lot of other European nation-states) to suppress minority languages in the 19th and early 20th centuries seems pretty similar to the misguided cultural demands of elites that some of you are accusing the Gaelic-preservers of.
Toxic -
in that case we basically agree. We might have some narrower disagreements about where the lines will fall; when I was living in Togo, in West Africa, it was more a matter of languages spoken by tens of thousands of people giving way to languages spoken by hundreds of thousands of people. The most interesting case I remember was speakers of Gourma, spoken by about 100,000, bemoaning the fact that the youth were increasingly speaking Moba, spoken by about 200,000. Yet Moba isn't even one of the dominant ethnic languages in Togo; those are Kabiye and Ewe (mainly in its Mina dialect). Meanwhile the lingua franca, the language of government and commerce, is French; but nobody considers French their first language, that would be ludicrous.
I am curious when exactly these people are expected to switch over to English. They have been learning mandatory French in primary school for 80 years now, without much effect on their native tongues.
Backlash against (especially Muslim) immigrants' largely failed integration (and the broader cultural erosion this imigration has brought) will probably spawn a fairly successful mandatory home-language movement in many of Europe's existing countries. The effect will likely be the extension and preservation of German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Czech and Slovakian/Slovenian (and to a lesser extent, the Skandinavian languages) beyond what would otherwise have been their expected life spans. This phenomenon is likely to do relatively little, however, to counter the ongoing extinction of regional dialects.
"It seems rather obvious to me that you can't force people to keep using a language if they don't want to. You can't force them to keep a culture if they don't want to." EI
The more I think on this the more I'm intrigued. What is this place or nation that is saying "You people must stay Caddo/Miwok/Pawnee/whatever and not assimilate into society." Here's a list of endangered languages, maybe you can find one where outsiders are the ones pressuring that it be maintained.
http://www.ethnologue.org/nearly_extinct.asp
The only mandates I can think of offhand are among American Indian tribes that decided in favor of them. And they amount to learning the language in classes or talking it with elder speaking. Will simply learning Pawnee screw up a kids brain somehow? Why? Where's the evidence?
As for Irish Gaelic it has over 300,000 speakers.
http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=gle
In the Aran Islands I believe native speakers are fairly common. In addition to that it's comparative failure as a literary language, doesn't negate it's been quite a successful language in music. It's not anywhere near dying out. And it will likely adapt to changes in the world and technology just as Latin has. (That's not a misprint, the Vatican's updated Latin every so often)
In a related vein here's Irish-Gaelic Wikipedia.
http://ga.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%ADomhleathanach
Breton Wikipedia has 18,807 articles
http://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degemer
(This isn't an endorsement of Wikipedia, just easy to find examples of these languages online)
Put me down for believing that Americans continue to impoverish themselves by not making an effort to learn another language. I know it's not likely you'll run into a French or German speaker (we'll leave Spanish aside) if you're in Kansas, but it opens the door to another culture and makes us more aware of how we differ from others. I'll go further and say it's one of our major failings in the GWOT - that we lack understanding of other cultures because we somehow believe American culture and the English language is a pinnacle of achievement and should be emulated everywhere. It's not just our inability to communicate outside of English-speaking countries, but our overt effort to build a wall between 'us and them' when we're actually living in another country. My first hand observations and repeat visits to Afghanistan bear this out - the walls just keep getting higher. The separate economy we build to serve our pampered selves completely disconnected from the country around us only serves to distance ourselves physically and mentally and serve this superior attitude we always seem to have (the 'ugly American' syndrome).
OK, I'm off on a rant....
Again, put me down for encouraging everyone to learn at least one other language besides their mother tongue. You'll look at the world much differently.
I am curious when exactly these people are expected to switch over to English.
About 5-10 years after personal computing and Internet infrastructure become mainstream in their region of the world.
Michael W -
I think that much of what you're attributing to American culture and Ugly American Syndrome is just human nature and, in many cases, a rational balancing of costs and benefits. When I taught about financial markets in Hong Kong - a small city-state with an open economy that relies heavily on trade - many of my local HK Chinese students didn't want to learn about any stock exchanges, debt markets or banking systems outside of Hong Kong. They not only didn't want to learn from, say, the US Savings and Loan crisis (and the similar problems less than a decade later in Japan's banking system) - they didn't even want to learn about the financial systems of the other 3 of the 4 "Tiger Economies", or about mainland China's early tentative experiments at a financial system. They only wanted to know current HK practices, since it was easier to stick with just one small subset of the planet at one specific point in time.
It takes time and effot to have a broad world view (or a broad historical view), and people have many priorities. This isn't unique to the US. When people argue that other countries are much more aware of the world than the US is, what they mean is that kids in some small country far from the US are more likely to have heard of the US than kids in the US are to have heard of any one randomly chosen small country. That's not a valid comparison.
Personally, I think that living in a foreign country would do more than learning another language to help people broaden their viewpoints. But my favorite approach would be to have a 'soap operas from around the world' TV channel with subtitles, so that Americans could get to know the rest of the world just as the world has gotten to know us by watching Dallas and Baywatch. It would be cheaper and a lot more fun, and I could rediscover the Korean soap I used to watch when there was no English language programming on in Hong Kong.
I'm only half-kidding. There's no doubt of the benefits of learning another language, but the costs are still substantial, and there are other ways of learning about different cultures.
Ann - I agree that living there is another way and you do soak up a lot of culture even without the language (I must note here my European friends disagree with me on this point; they insist the language is imperative to understanding the culture).
It is true that Dutch children have a different kind of pressure to learn another language than American kids -- you may not be able to get a good job without it in the Netherlands. Yet, even as the barriers to the flow of information go down, we seem to be hobbled by our physical isolation. What, at one time, was a great advantage (water and distance from our enemies) now seems to be a disadvantage as Americans increasingly seem to be ignorant using our isolation as justification (Why do I need to understand them; I'm never going there).
Should everyone learn a second language? Yes, and while young, for the reasons listed above.
For English speakers, I recommend Chinese rather than Spanish or Arabic (the other obvious choices) because it gets so many things right that English gets wrong (notably, grammar) and so many things wrong that English gets right (writing).
Ann wrote: When people argue that other countries are much more aware of the world than the US is, what they mean is that kids in some small country far from the US are more likely to have heard of the US than kids in the US are to have heard of any one randomly chosen small country. That's not a valid comparison.
Classic European puffery of "world awareness" reduced to less than fifty words! Give the lady a cigar and a boquet of flowers -- I'm going to hang onto this one for the next time one of my European or South American contacts is lecturing me on the evils of American global ignorance.
"bI am curious when exactly these people are expected to switch over to English...." About 5-10 years after personal computing and Internet infrastructure become mainstream in their region of the world. - anony-mouse
That was 2002-2007. Internet cafes on every corner by the time I got to Lome in 2000; dusty old PCs in every office. Your deadline has passed.
I'm not sure everyone needs to learn a second-language. There was just some sentiment verging on "no one should learn a second-language, unless it'll profit them financially" that I found odd. I took a year of Chinese, but I doubt I'm ever going to use it. I'm still glad I did so.
"About 5-10 years after personal computing and Internet infrastructure become mainstream in their region of the world." anonymouse
Has Iceland or Sweden entirely switched to English? More a question than anything as I don't know. I found a source indicating that in 1997 those two nations had more Internet users per capita than the US.
"Ann wrote: When people argue that other countries are much more aware of the world than the US is, what they mean is that kids in some small country far from the US are more likely to have heard of the US than kids in the US are to have heard of any one randomly chosen small country. That's not a valid comparison."
This sounds very nice and makes Americans feel good about themselves. It also has a logic so appealing that it's tempting to want it to be true. Alas though it's mostly not. It might be true of the British or the Belgians, but in several other European countries the kids really do know more about China or Pakistan than our kids do. Their news really does pay more attention to Brazil or Indonesia than ours would. If Swedes think they have a better understanding of the world than us it's because all testing scores and polls show they do have a greater understanding of the world than us.
That doesn't mean they have as good an understanding as they think. I knew a Spanish kid who came here knowing English, but he only knew it "by the book." He could read our papers, but he couldn't speak to us. In some areas the "book" or "news" education some Europeans have I think leads them to believe they know more than they do. The Internet might aid that as they think "hah these Americans couldn't speak as well on a forum or chatline in my language!" However actually sent to live in Brazil or the US many of them would be as flummoxed as we'd be if we moved to Germany or Brazil.
Still Western Europeans do generally know more factual information about large nations. Unless all studies on this matter are wrong.
Thomas R -
It's possible that Western Europeans are more aware of the world than most. After all, someone has to be at the top of the rankings. My point is that this doesn't prove that the US is at the bottom.
I've met people from Malaysia and the Philippines and Taiwan and Brazil and Venezuela who all told me that the general populations of their countries were more aware of the world simply because they knew more about the US. The fact that many people watch US movies and TV and hence know something about us doesn't prove that it's uniquely American to be ignorant of the rest of the world. The children in Asia generally know little about Latin America, and vice versa, relative to what both know about the US.
And by the way, I say this as someone who would love to hear more about international news, and who thinks more Americans should travel (and live) outside the US. But I'm sceptical that people in the US are as bad as so many claim, even before adjusting for the fact that we're very large geographically, with oceans on two sides.
"But I'm sceptical that people in the US are as bad as so many claim,"
I agree with that. Americans are seen as much more parochial and stupid than they are. To a degree I think that might be because we encourage that image. The American TV they see makes us look like pretty stupid people. I remember an episode of "The West Wing" where his aides had to be told what the "Mercator Projection" even was. Kind of giving an impression that even our educated class couldn't pass eigth grade geography. (And then there's "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" or "Borat") In reality America's smart people are competitive with smart people anywhere in the world.
That being said in college I took a higher level course on Middle Eastern history and about half the men there argued for nuking France. Some people here really are stupid.