Language Death and the Wall Street Journal

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 13.871
Thu Mar 28 2002

From: Stirling Newberry <stirling_newberry at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: 13.816, Media: Language Death: Wall Street Journal


An open letter on the economic value of language diversity:

In his editorial of March 8th in the Wall Street Journal on page 13, John
W. Miller laughs gleefully about the predicted extinction of half of the
world's languages within the next generation. He argues that if they are
dying out, that is because they are inferior, and says that it is the
"reality" that "most people prefer a Big Mac."

What is ironic here, for those that miss it, is that "Big Mac" and, the
restaurant that made it famous "McDonalds", and the famous "Ronald
McDonald" icon which represents them both - all play off of Gaelic
patronymics. The Gaelic languages of the British Isles being exactly the
sort of minor languages which the piece scoffs at the utility of. If minor
languages were not useful, there would be no "Le Big Mac" in Paris to
sell.

This is a general point - one of the sources of economic utility which a
society has access to are the non-dominant languages which exist within
the sphere of economic and political power of a dominant language. If one
needs a more hard headed example, consider the use of Navajo as a code
language by the US in World War II and later. Ready made, and resistant to
attempts to decipher it, since it avoided the markers which are most
useful in code cracking - gramatical markers of usage or position.

To take an even larger example - "Anglo-American" jurisprudence and
business culture have a very large dose of the Hebrew law scholarship and
Yiddish hard headed saavy mixed in. The integration of these language
resources into English in America is part and parcel of the success of New
York at becoming financial capital of the world.

The argument for "linguistic monoculture" runs thin quickly, when one
considers that many of the languages of Europe's current EU members and
other European states were, a little more than a century ago, politically
peripheral - even banned. Finnish, Czech, and Norwegian are all, in their
modern forms, languages created by conscious activity. If a century and a
half ago the advice of the Wall Street Journal had been followed, we would
still be dealing with decaying central european empires imposing cultural
hegemony. I would advise anyone telling a Finn that his language is
culturally subsidiary and therefore it should have been extinguished by
the Russians to be out of arms length when they do so.

The process which changed languages such as Finnish from being folk
tongues spoken by a handful of economically marginal individuals to being
national languages used by digitally connected politically stable social
democracies began in the 19th century, and is a by product of Romantic
Nationalism. The process was predicated on the idea that small tightly
knit zones of language and cultural unity possessed the advantages of
being focused over lumbering language monopolies imposed from afar. That
the process of conversion from folk resource to national language has not
completed in many regions of the world - such as former colonial areas of
Africa - does not deny the economic utility of producing national
languages in those regions, from which stable nation-states with stable
business climates emerge.

In otherwords, it is not in the long term best interest of the West to
prevent the same process which turned Europe from a feudal patchwork riven
by constant tribal warfare into a commonwealth of nations from taking its
course else where. In fact, as with the introduction of many other Western
ideas, the conversion of languages from their subsistence agricultural
form, to one capable of running a modern economy, is part of the process
known as "globalization". People in Shanghai do not speak English, they
speak a chinese which is aquiring the ability to interface with the global
technological and financial community.

The further economic utility of non-politically dominant languages can be
seen in the daily diet of the average American. Coffee, tea, potatoes,
rice, corn, tobacco, squash, pumpkin, pasta are all products which were
originally center in particular cultures, who preserved the ethno-culture,
that's how to raise the damn things to the academically challenged out
there, of the particular crop. It was local tribes that taught Europeans
to dry tapioca leaves in the sun - as harvested they are poisonous. In an
era which is discovering the vital importance of harvesting genetic
information for drugs and treatments, we should be appreciative, not
dismissive, of the benefits of localised knowledge stored in localised
forms.

The implicit argument, however, in the piece is that minor languages
cannot compete in the global world. However, the facts state otherwise.
Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Tamil, Czech, Hebrew and Gaelic are all
languages which are spoken by relatively limited groups of individuals,
and yet these groups are economically vibrant.

The ability to preserve a culturally central language, and still compete
in the global economy is a social technology. Like other social
technologies - such as voluntary compliance with laws, limiting family
size, education of children and personal hygiene to prevent the spread of
disease - it can be transfered and taught. So long as language instruction
in the economically important language begins very early, there is no
conflict between maintaining a regional language, and complete fluency in
the economically central one. In fact, in my industry - telecommunications
- customer relationship call centers are being relocated to India because
many people residing in that nation speak more accurate Standard Business
English than can be found at comparable salaries in the United States.

A further economic utlity of subsidiary languages is, in fact, in
globalisation. The use of the regional dialect of Chinese as a means of
creating a small cultural space where credibility can be monitored without
reference to governments is part and parcel of the economic success of
ethnic Chinese in Europe, the US and across Asia. Economists even have a
name for the structure it has produced - "The Bamboo Kite".

Thus the utility of a large cross section of languages cannot be denied.
The WSJ piece makes the implicit argument that if people are not
preserving subsidiary languages, it is because there is something
defective about them, or the absence of a general will implies that that
is the correct course of action. This, however, is an argument
contradicted by the fundamental text of Capitalist theory: Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations. In it Smith argues that education is one of the pillars
of the market economy, which must be maintained as part of the common
good, just as prevention of monopolies must be maintained. While there are
short term advantages in allowing control, subordination or decay of the
commons, the long term interests of the whole dictate that all be willing
to maintain educational commons because all benefit by more than the cost
of maintaining them.

The UN's purpose is to serve as a global organisation to maintain the
commons of the entire planet. Peace being the most important single common
resource, naturally the pursuit of globally productive peace is first and
fore-most, but the maintenance of health, education and, yes, cultural
resources is also part of both its mandate and its purpose. To scoff at
the UN being concerned about the deterioration in one aspect of the common
resource from which economic activity draws makes as much sense at
scoffing at a company concerned about deteriorating market conditions.

Thus the solution to the problem of dying languages is not a museum like
preservation, but application of the techniques of modernisation,
economisation and culturalisation of languages which have been gradually
developing over the last 2 centuries - and to teach smaller language
groups the technologies which have allowed Dutch and Finnish - to name two
- to remain active and growing languages, while also being intimately
interconnected with the global economy.