<div dir="ltr"><h1 itemprop="headline" id="story-heading" class="">Why Save a Language?</h1>
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DEC. 5, 2014
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Olimpia Zagnoli </span>
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Gray Matter </p>
<p class="">By <span itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<span class="" itemprop="name">JOHN McWHORTER</span>
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<p class="" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-1">“TELL me, why should we care?” he asks.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">It’s
a question I can expect whenever I do a lecture about the looming
extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which
are spoken by small groups of indigenous people. For some reason the
question is almost always posed by a man seated in a row somewhere near
the back.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">Asked
to elaborate, he says that if indigenous people want to give up their
ancestral language to join the modern world, why should we consider it a
tragedy? Languages have always died as time has passed. What’s so
special about a language?</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">The
answer I’m supposed to give is that each language, in the way it
applies words to things and in the way its grammar works, is a unique
window on the world. In Russian there’s no word just for blue; you have
to specify whether you mean dark or light blue. In Chinese, you don’t
say <em>next week</em> and <em>last week</em> but <em>the week below</em> and <em>the week above</em>. If a language dies, a fascinating way of thinking dies along with it.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">I used to say something like that, but lately I have changed my answer.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">Certainly,
experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on
how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds
faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into
light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to
imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character,
because the word is marked as feminine in his language.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">This
is cool stuff. But the question is whether such infinitesimal
differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews —
cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I
think the answer is no.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">Furthermore,
extrapolating cognitive implications from language differences is a
delicate business. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express <em>If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant</em> with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic <em>If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant</em>.
One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese
makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face
it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on
the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality
and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than
in English.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-2">If
we can’t consider this aspect of Mandarin a cognitive facet of being
Chinese, then we can’t, in fairness, associate the “cool” features of
other languages with the worldviews of their speakers. Surely worldviews
aren’t only those ways of perceiving things that we consider admirable
or charming.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">But
if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the
lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the
current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-3">First,
a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the
fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language
happens to be like. Certainly, a culture can thrive without its own
language: No one would tell today’s American Indians that if they no
longer spoke their ancestral language it would render them non-Indian.
Likewise, being Jewish does not require speaking Hebrew or Yiddish.</p><div class=""><a class="" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/why-save-a-language.html?_r=0#story-continues-4">Continue reading the main story</a>
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</div><p class="" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-4">Yet
because language is so central to being human, to have a language used
only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a
sense of community. Few would deny, for example, that American Jews who
still speak Yiddish in the home are a tighter-knit community, less
assimilated into Anglophone American life and less at odds with
questions about Jewish identity, than Jews who speak only English.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody" id="story-continues-5">Second,
languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index
cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the
world’s fauna and flora.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">For
example, whether or not it says anything about how its speakers think,
the fact that there is a language in New Guinea that uses the same word
for <em>eat</em>, <em>drink </em>and <em>smoke </em>is remarkable in
itself. Another New Guinea language is Yeli Dnye, which not only has 90
sounds to English’s 44, but also has 11 different ways to say “on”
depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point,
scattered, attached and more. And there is Berik, where you have to
change the verb to indicate what time of day something happened. As with
any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands
our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">These
are the arguments I have ready for the “Why should we care?” fellow
these days. We should foster efforts to keep as many languages spoken as
possible, and to at least document what the rest of them are like.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">Cultures,
to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are
variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing
called life.</p><p class="" itemprop="articleBody">Surely, that is something to care about.</p>
<div class=""><p>John McWhorter teaches
linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University.
His latest book is “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in
Any Language.” <br></p><p>New York Times, Dec. 7, 2014.<br></p></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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