|
Extinction is everywhere, in the death of species, of peoples,
of human languages, of last names, of technologies.
Nothing lasts forever, as the cliche has it.
The reaction to this sordid little observation varies;
some of us shrug it off with the attitude "that's life", and others mourn.
I'm with the ones who mourn. The tough-love attitude that things
pass away, and that we should live with it, hardens the soul.
Stay tender. Without grief for the beauty that passes, we have
less appreciation for the beauty that remains.
This is my page to commemorate lost things. Let us begin with languages. Later, with species. After that, who knows? Languages, and their deaths. Some quotes from The Cambridge Encylopedia of Language. Chapter 47: For a language to count as "living", there obviously have to be native speakers alive who use it... The speed with which a language can die in the smaller communities of the world is truly remarkable. The Amazonian explorations led to the discovery of many new languages, but they also led to their rapid death, as the Indian became swallowed up by the dominant western culture. Within a generation, all traces of a language can disappear.... In the 19th century, there were thought to be over 1,000 Indian languages in Brazil; today, there are fewer than 200. Chapter 52 [on Khoisan]: Few of these languages have more than 1,000 speakers - only Kwadi and Sandawe (spoken in Tanzania) have over 10,000. The numbers are dimishing, and several languages are known to have become extinct. Chapter 52 [on North American Indian languages]: There were originally around 300 languages spoken by the indigenous American Indian tribes, but this number had more than halved by the 1970s. Many of the languages are now spoken by only a few old people... [Of the Salish languages:] These days, the numbers of speakers is very small - mostly fewer than 1,000 and in several cases fewer than 10. Pentlach, spoken on Vancouver Island, was already extinct in the 1970s. The problems of the death of a language constantly evoke the problems of the extinction of a species. The loss of diversity is obvious, and with it the loss of beauty and potential usefulness (would we ever have expected click languages had they not existed in the wild?; what can they teach us about ourselves and the possibilities of language?). The culture and knowledge, the worldview and folklore and technical expertise of a people are intimately bound up with their language, and are lost when the language is lost. But language divides. The European Community has 9 official languages. In 1980, more than half its budget went to translation and interpretation. To communicate, we need a language in common; to keep our native tongues discourages this. Language differences can lead to conflict, even to war. The realm of human speech may be increasingly homogenized; travel, and electronic media, will promote the ascendancy of the dominant dialects in most countries (like England, where BBC radio and TV have increased the number of speakers using the standard accents), and the wider use of English everywhere. There is no avoiding this, because people will be motivated both by curiosity and the desire to improve their social and financial standing. But this will lead to the further extinction of languages. Even where a language survives, it will sometimes be marginalized, reduced to the chatter of emigres around a cafe table. Is there any solution to this contradiction: the need for a common language, without that common language reducing or extinguishing smaller, weaker languages? A way for people to keep their culture and language, while joining the larger world around them? The solutions I've seen so far seem like stopgaps. And if Quebec is any example, perhaps we're better off incorporating the minorities in the dominant culture. Divisions are costly, and multiple languages promote division. But what must it be like, to be the last surviving speaker of a language, and to know that it will die with you? To have grown up thinking in that language, and to know that no one will ever do so again? Each time one of us dies, a world dies; but when the last speaker of a language dies, it's more than one world - it is the history of many worlds; it is a collective world, and it is gone irretrievably and permanently. |