There is an interesting essay in today’s New York Times by David Berreby, entitled “Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways”. The essay is partly in response to an article in the May 15 issue of Nature:
“Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species”. William J. Sutherland. Nature 423, 276 - 279 (2003)
There are global threats to biodiversity with current extinction rates well above background levels. Although less well publicized, numerous human languages have also become extinct, and others are threatened with extinction. However, estimates of the number of threatened languages vary considerably owing to the wide range of criteria used. For example, languages have been classified as threatened if the number of speakers is less than 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 100,000. Here I show, by applying internationally agreed criteria for classifying species extinction risk, that languages are more threatened than birds or mammals. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones. Areas with high language diversity also have high bird and mammal diversity and all three show similar relationships to area, latitude, area of forest and, for languages and birds, maximum altitude. The time of human settlement has little effect on current language diversity. Although similar factors explain the diversity of languages and biodiversity, the factors explaining extinction risk for birds and mammals (high altitude, high human densities and insularity) do not explain the numbers of endangered languages.
In his New York Times essay, Berreby argues essentially that we should not worry too much about the death of many indigenous languages all over the world.
- We should not listen to linguists because their motivations are suspect: “It is no surprise that linguists and activists promote maintaining spoken languages. Just as the Poultry and Egg Council wants us to eat eggs, linguists want languages to study. I wonder, though, where science ends and politics begins.”
- As long as some information about dying languages are preserved, they can be revived if needed: “If the information and political will are present, Ubykh can be revived 500 years from now. Hebrew, after all, was brought back from ancient texts into daily use after 2,000 years.”
- Language regenerates: “It would be a terrible thing to run out of languages. But there is no danger of that, because the reserve of language, unlike the gas tank, is refueled every day, as ordinary people engage in the creative and ingenious act of talking. Old words, constructions and pronunciations drop away, new ones are taken up, and, relentlessly, the language changes.”
I am not myself a linguist working on endangered languages (English and German are not endangered, although my mother’s native language “Plattdeutsch” (Low German) — and in particular her dialect of “Heidscher Platt”, spoken on the Lüneburg Heath — certainly is). But I am mostly convinced by the arguments from endangered language specialists, especially my departed colleague Ken Hale, who was a tireless worker in defense of languages. He once said “As languages disappear, cultures die. The world becomes inherently a less interesting place, but we also sacrifice raw knowledge and the intellectual achievements of millennia.” [Ken's friends in Australia have put up a page of obituaries.]
It appears to me that the efforts at saving endangered languages go hand in hand with efforts at saving endangered cultures. Berreby seems to want to give the impression that these efforts come from outside “language bullies” who are motivated by suspect political (and financial) reasons. But from what I know about work on indigenous languages, these efforts are fully supported by the indigenous communities and are not the work of “language bullies”.
For many links on endangered languages, see the resource page of the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative. Other good collections: the Teaching Indigenous Languages page at Northern Arizona University and its collection of resources; Randy J. LaPolla’s Handout on Endangered Languages; a page on “The importance of culture, language and identity” on the website of Racism. No Way!, an Australian government project; an article on “Reclaiming Indigenous Languages” on the National Park Service’s Common Ground Online website.
Update For an additional pertinent quote from Ken Hale, see this entry.
Setting up diversity of languages and species as parallel values has a bad precedent in the history of national socialism. W. Schoenichen detailed the official plans of the dictatorship for the administration of the world in a pro-diversity manner by establishing reserves which were to conserve rare languages and species at the same time. This plan is described in Proctor’s ‘nazi war on cancer’ which your library may have. The raising of diversity to the status of an ultimate value in general will have such a tendency today as it did in Germany at that time. Therefore, I say the valorization of diversity now must be questioned (as at the undersigned’s site)…
April 15th, 2004, at 4:21 am #