ELL: response to WSJ editorial

[Doug Whalen]

Response to Wall Street Journal editorial
      From The Endangered Language Fund Newsletter,  Volume 6, number
1, April 2002.
      by D. H. Whalen
      President, The Endangered Language Fund
      John L. Miller (Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2002, p. W13)
would like to convince us that it's a good thing that half the
languages on the planet will disappear within a generation.
Protecting language diversity, in his opinion, is as "dubious" as,
say, affirmative action in college admissions or preserving
endangered species.  Miller implicitly admits that language
endangerment is a  fundamental questions, but the issues are poorly
served in his piece.
      He first confuses language change with language death.  Yes, it
is true that all languages change and that over the course of a
thousand years or so, it is difficult if not impossible to understand
the original.  But life is change.  Does Miller feel less alive
because he is no longer the baby he once was?  Or, to adopt a closer
analogy, does he feel that Western civilization has died because our
way of life is almost unrecognizable compared to the Middle Ages?
Presumably not; it is clear that only dead things remain unchanged.
So the fact that languages change is irrelevant to the question of
whether they should die or not.
      Miller's assumption that modern culture is good for everyone is
comforting to those of us who live in that culture, but it is far
from true for the "primitive" people he would like to save.  Most
indigenous peoples lose a large percentage of their population upon
contact with the modern world through disease.  Then, they are
immediately "poor," having had no reason to generate the wealth that
matters in the modern economy.  Would they rather starve while
looking at a picture of a Big Mac, or continue living on the "fistful
of beetle larvae" that sustained their ancestors for generations?
This is without considering whether one diet or the other is actually
healthier.  At the same time, Miller conveniently ignores the fact
that indigenous people today are mostly in marginal ecosystems,
precisely because the good ones have already been acquired by the
modern economy (through one means or another).
      Miller seems as unconcerned about the disappearance of
ecosystems as he is of the disappearance of languages.  Perhaps it
will only be when he takes his last puff of oxygen from the last tank
on earth that he might be convinced that diversity is a good thing.
We have reached the stage, as a thinking species, at which we can
recognize long-term trends, but these trends unfold at a time scale
that is difficult for us to react to.  What will the consequences  of
language and species loss be?  We won't know for sure for decades or
centuries, but we know that there is no going back once we lose them.
      It was a great surprise to see Miller cite the public education
system as a reason for not allowing bilingualism, since he probably
would say that that same system fails monolingual speakers as well.
He thinks that bilingual education leaves its students "fluent in
neither" language, but would he feel the same looking at just the
English speakers' efforts?  Bilingualism is the norm in most of the
world, and most people find the level of competence in each language
that they require.  Further, the only reason that non-native speakers
of English would need the kind of competence that Miller envisions
would be if they were planning on abandoning their native culture,
i.e., "rudimentary" may be plenty.  However, it is clear that Miller
hopes that they will abandon their culture and globalize-after all,
it works for him.  Why can't everyone else be like him?
      Americans like to think that they have learned nothing from
indigenous peoples, but let's look at one of the traditional
"American" treasures, democracy.  The roots of democracy are traced
to the Golden Age of Greece (which we only know about through the
preservation efforts of Muslim clerics, but that's another story).
Why was it, then, that democracy was not the norm in Europe, where
the keepers of this tradition supposedly lived?  Why was it that they
needed to come to America to (re)discover democracy?  It was not
until they came here and saw democracy in action in the Native
communities that it began to dawn on them that there was a better way
to rule people.  The rest, as they say, is history.  But without that
diversity, we would not have a USA now; we would still be vassals and
serfs serving royal masters.  We have yet to discover the other
treasures that indigenous peoples encode in their languages, and if
we do not preserve those languages now, we will never know.


--
Doug Whalen (whalen at haskins.yale.edu)
Haskins Laboratories
270 Crown St.
New Haven, CT 06511
203-865-6163, ext. 234
FAX:  203-865-8963
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/
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