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

[Matthew Ward]

I found this article to be pretty useful, as it sums up a lot of the (in
my mind, bogus) arguments against language preservation.  I'm sure you
all can find reasons why it's wrong (or even, in places, right) but just
two that come up to my mind right away:

1).  Using Hebrew to argue "You can revive a language, but you can't
revive an extinct species"

The conditions that Hebrew were revived were, shall we say, unique, and
not likely to be repeated.  Other "dead" languages do not find
themselves in the same situation.  I strongly support efforts to revive
"dead" languages, but the fact is, when all native speakers are gone,
reviving a language poses an enormous challenge.  Keeping languages
alive, while a great challenge in itself, is far easier than reviving a
language which has lost all of its native speakers.

2).  "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."

Who, exactly, are the real "language bullies?"  I fully support
linguistic self-determination, which means, among other things, that
speakers of endangered languages have the right to let their languages
die if they so choose.  What we are talking about is simply reversing
the course of centuries of real "language bullying," by giving speakers
of endangered languages the resources and rights that have been taken
away from them by force--no-one is forcing anyone to preserve their
languages.

At this point, the real "language bullying" is the status quo the
equivalent to beating someone nearly to death, and then refusing to give
that person medical help.  Hey, I do support the right to die, but it
doesn't follow that I support murder as well.

Thanks for the article, at any rate, I'm sure it will get us all thinking.

cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU wrote:

>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
>
>
>