Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways (article)

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Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways

May 27, 2003
By DAVID BERREBY

For the past decade, scholars and political activists have
been working to get the rest of us worried about the future
of the world's 6,000 or so spoken languages. One tool is an
analogy: languages with fewer and fewer speakers, they
argue, are like species heading for extinction.

A paper published on May 15 in Nature gives the comparison
a statistical basis. The analysis, by Prof. William J.
Sutherland of the University of East Anglia, notes that
when standard measures of species risk are applied to
language communities, human tongues come out even more
endangered than the animals.

The metaphor of "endangered languages" is both easy to
grasp and appealing to the sense of fair play: fluent
speakers of languages like Kasabe, Ona and Eyak are dying
off, while their children and grandchildren increasingly
speak languages like English, Chinese, Spanish or Swahili.
Language preservationists have been using this analogy for
years. The often-quoted question posed by Dr. Michael
Krauss, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the
University of Alaska, for instance, is: "Should we mourn
the loss of Eyak or Ubykh less than the loss of the panda
or the California condor?"

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.

How, really, are the panda and Ubykh equivalent? The panda,
once gone, is gone forever. 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. Ubykh, a language
of Turkey, is a human creation. The panda is not; it is our
neighbor, not our invention.

Talk of endangerment and extinction suggests languages as a
finite resource, like gas in a tank heading toward empty.
Preservationists have predicted that only half the world's
currently spoken languages will be around in a century.

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.

Every day, English, Spanish, Russian and French, along with
almost all other living languages are being altered by
speakers to suit changing times. In 2000, for example,
another Nature paper revealed that even the Queen of
England now pronounces her English less aristocratically
than she used to.
As Professor Sutherland noted in his paper, languages are
in "continual flux." That probably explains why a recently
settled island can be as rich in languages as a
long-inhabited continent. That flux never stops. Even this
morning, languages are being altered by their speakers to
suit changing times and places.

In an era when languages continue to change with time,
can't we expect the big languages, like Latin before them,
to blossom into families of related but distinct new
tongues? Already, more than 100 new languages have been
created out of the vast mixings of peoples and cultures of
the last four centuries.

For example, on the preservationist Web site
terralingua.org, one can find the organization's statement
of purpose in Tok Pisin, a language of Papua New Guinea.
Tok Pisin did not exist 150 years ago. Like Haitian Creole,
it is a new language, born of the last few centuries of
human history.

So maybe the human race has all the languages it needs, and
deserves. When we need a new one, we invent it. Language
evolution is taking place every day; why interfere with it?


Preservationists call this an argument for accepting
injustice. James Crawford, a thoughtful writer about
language and a preservationist, notes that "language death
does not happen in privileged communities."

"It happens to the dispossessed and the disempowered,
peoples who most need their cultural resources to survive,"
he continues.

This is certainly true; many of the dying languages were
systematically attacked by missionaries and governments in
cruel, despicable ways. The game they lost was rigged.
Abuses continue to be committed in the name of education,
modernization and national identity, so the
preservationists do good work in noting and protesting such
practices.

It is important, though, to be clear about what - or
rather, who - deserves protection. The right to remain safe
and whole belongs to human beings, not to abstractions
created to describe what human beings did yesterday.

The difference between a living creature with blood in its
veins and a general notion should be obvious: your
auburn-haired neighbor, nicknamed Red, has rights. The
concept of "red" does not.

But don't people need their "cultural resources"? Sure, but
because culture is reinvented by each person to suit a
particular place and time, members of a culture will argue
with one another about what those resources are. When we
describe culture as an organism, we do not see the
individuals inside it.

So if the study of languages is a scientific enterprise,
the effort to preserve them is not. It is a political
question: which voices represent the communities whose
languages are fading?

Hearing how his ancestors were punished for speaking their
own language at school, a young speaker might be persuaded
by an elder to learn the ancestral tongue. That is a reason
to preserve that language in the archives. Suppose, though,
that the tales of days long gone do not resonate with this
hypothetical child. Is it science's job to help the elder
preserve his sense of importance at the expense of the
younger?

Language bullies who try to shame a child into learning his
grandfather's language are not morally different from the
language bullies who tried to shame the grandfather into
learning English. The elucidation of language in all its
complexity is an enthralling scientific enterprise. But
"saving endangered languages" is not a part of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/science/27ESSA.html?ex=1055067597&ei=1&en=189342f2df585fdd

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company