'Status' drives extinction of languages

[Nicholas Ostler]

Anthea Fraser Gupta wrote:
> I'd like to separate two of the points:
>  
> (1) Languages 'driven to extinction are almost always tongues with a low social status'. That seems to be fairly uncontroversial. Have we had a counter example of it? Remembering that we should define 'extinction' as 'having no speakers left of the language or of any language that developed from it anywhere in the world'.
>   
Not so fast ... (And I'm not so ready to accept your strict definition 
of 'extinction' - since it would suggest that Latin in the early modern 
age had nothing to lose provided that at least one Romance language 
survived; and that a language in severe decline - even if still 
marginally present - would again not count as evidence.)

A rather big, and fairly recent, counter-example to the status 
generalization is Manchu, which was largely been undone, in the three 
centuries after the establishment of the Qing dynasty, by the 
distribution of its (high-status, because ruling) speaker population 
throughout China. Mandarin seems simply to have swamped it, despite a 
continuing conscious effort by the goverment to maintain it. Strictly 
speaking it is not (yet) extinct, since there is still a community (Sibo 
or Xibo) speaking it in the north-east, descended from a detachment of 
border guards sent up there.

Another very different example of a high-status casualty is Latin in 
Europe, in decline for serious use in a spreading wave of functions 
(commerce, admin, diplomacy, literature, science), and geographically 
west to east, between 1600 and 1850. Here the loss was doubly strange, 
since the prestige language was replaced not by another language, but by 
a  variety of national languages - so that international relations for 
the first time required serious amounts of interpreting and translation.

Most likely Akkadian too  had higher status than Aramaic in the Assyrian 
empire, but gave way to it nonetheless after the 9th century BC. (And 
this was not just a question of what language was used for written 
communications.)

In the Inca Empire, Puquina - the language of the ruling caste when they 
still lived south of Lake Titicaca - nevertheless was supplanted first 
by Aymara, and later by Quechua. The Incas adopted new official 
languages, it seems, as they moved into new positions of dominance - not 
necessarily losing knowledge of their previous languages, but not 
spreading them.

In all these cases, it seems that sheer numbers could make ruling elites 
in large empires change their language - perhaps because it became 
impractical to restrict communication just to members of the elite.

-- 
Nicholas Ostler
Chairman, Foundation for Endangered Languages
Registered Charity: England & Wales 1070616
www.ogmios.org
nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk