More than half of the world’s languages are at risk, but an unlikely saviour is at hand.
What is an endangered language? As a rough guide, any language with fewer than 10,000 speakers is in danger. However, the total number of speakers is not always a clear indication of the health of a language. In the South Andaman Islands, for example, fewer than 100 people speak Onge, but it is the primary language of those who do, and, critically, the first language of all the islands’ children. Consequently, it would be considered less threatened than a language such as Chipweyan in Canada, where more than 4,000 belong to the ethnic group that uses the language, but there is little use among the new generation.
It could be argued that in today’s globalised world, we would be better off all speaking the same language, be it Chinese, English or Spanish. It might bring us closer together, and we would certainly be more likely to make our ideas comprehensible. The majority of linguists argue, however, that when it comes to language, diversity matters.
“People’s understanding of themselves, and their relationship with their environment are all framed in terms of concepts expressed in their own languages,” says Marcus Colchester, director of the Forest Peoples Programme. “Many indigenous peoples derive their identities from the way they live off their land. Day-to-day activities such as hunting, fishing and farming are directly connected to spirits and mythic beings whose stories make these people who they are.”
Louisa Maffi of Terralingua, an organisation that protects cultural and biological diversity, believes linguistic diversity is of immense value to humanity as a whole. As we lose each language, we lose a repository of knowledge, values and beliefs that, in many cases, provide alternative solutions to human problems; we diminish that pool of creativity and inventiveness, and our ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Nicholas Ostler, chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, points out the scientific interest in maintaining linguistic diversity. To lose diversity will mean losing awareness of the many and varied features of human language – what part of our vocal tract we use for communication, the different ways we use words to reflect meaning, and so on.
Historically, colonial governments practised policies of compelling minority cultures to speak the majority language. But even where there was little or no forced assimilation, imperialism still took its toll. Ostler cites the example of the ancient Roman Empire, which had no specific policy of forcing subjects to speak Latin, but still greatly reduced linguistic diversity across Europe. There was some prestige associated with the language – it was the medium of trade and administration – and people who wanted to get on in life tended to learn it. And similar processes are threatening minority languages today, says Ostler. “The Romans succeeded in making people live in larger communities, what we now call urbanisation. And nowadays people move from the countryside to cities where regional languages aren’t maintained. The new generation grows up with their lives focused on the wider community. It may take several generations for the traditional language to fall out of use completely.”
“Many nation states see cultural diversity as a threat to national unity,” says Maffi. “So monolingualism is promoted in specific contexts, particularly schools, where there is no multilingual education offered, and in government, where politics is only conducted in the national language. Such implicit endorsement of monolingualism conspires to place pressure on minority peoples to assimilate. There is essentially a misconceived either/or ideology: either you maintain your mother tongue, in which case you can’t participate in national life, or you forget your mother tongue and learn the majority language.”
In recent decades, the mass media have reinforced this process further and extended the penetration of metropolitan languages like English and Spanish beyond urban centres into smaller communities. The pervasive influence of the media has effectively created a cultural divide between the generations. Ostler continues, where young people speak their traditional language with their elders, but English among themselves. Maffi describes similar trends among indigenous minority groups worldwide. “All of the images children see in the media are of the glamorised lifestyle of the majority, and that lifestyle is communicated in the majority language. So it becomes very difficult for them to find a reason to value their own language.”
When the internet first took off during the mid-1990s, many feared it represented the end of the road for endangered languages. Because it was only available to English-speakers, it would only serve to continue the decline. However, these fears proved to be unfounded, as the diversity of languages on the web increased rapidly in the years that followed. Peter Austin, of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, attributes this to the lack of control of the internet. “Unlike most TV or radio, the web isn’t in the hands of big media corporations. All you need is an internet account and a little technology, and you can produce information, news, videos, and so on, as much as you want.” Minority groups around the world—in Hawaii, Mexico, Siberia, and many other places—are now taking advantage of this autonomy to document their language in written, audio and visual format. And, crucially, it is in a form which appeals to young people. It seems that the mass media could, after all, be the salvation of the world’s most threatened languages.