The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct 939
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
Is that bad? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Informative)
From The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."Census Dot Gov (2006) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Informative)
Leaving aside the fact that there is no one language called "Eskimo", the 'many words for snow' thing is a well know urban legend. [wikipedia.org]
There are still thousands of languages on the earth which can have different ways of expressing concepts and ideas. I know jokes in Japanese that just cannot be translated into English or French or even Chinese for that matter. However, languages are fluid and you can't say that the words won't develop in English that will let me tell those jokes.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
This can only really be a bad thing, because languages themselves are important data, especially in historical linguistics. Look up "Proto-Indo-European" on google. Basically people figured out based on the similarities of languages like Snaskirt, Latin and German, that most of the languages of Europe and west to central Asia were derived from an early (bronze age) language spoken by one people, which later branched out into the Indic, Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families. The study of languages thus has an impact outside of the lanuage itself, it can contribute greatly to the knowledge of the human race. This however is not possible if ou keep destroying the data, i.e. the languages in question.
So unless you feel that history and archaeology are basically unimportant (probably not a uncommon opinion here), preservation of languages does have a rather important role in science.
Also, studying what is possible in real-world language syntax and grammar can teach us about the language faculties of our brain, and what its limits are.
I'm curious why you think that the destruction of language is a nessecary part of increasing communication, however. You seem to be assuming people can only speak one language? The greatest spread of English has been as a second or third language to various foreign groups, so it is clearly possible to have both lingustic diversity and a common communications medium.
Re:Good thing? (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that most language loss at present is due to cultural and economic pressure rather than force, but it is not true that "no one is killing people" and it is not true that "in modern times no one is outlawing things". One of the causes of linguistic and cultural loss in the Amazon is the extermination of Indians by rubber planters and other farmers who want their land. Some small tribes have been wiped out by slavers. The slavers, of course, don't intend to kill everyone, but they kill some in capturing the others, many others die in slavery, and those slaves who stay alive do not pass on their language and culture. Other areas in which genocide is affecting small cultures include the southern and Darfur regions of Sudan, parts of Ethiopia, and parts of Burma.
As for outlawing languages, one prominent example is Kurdish, which it was illegal to speak or teach in Turkey until last year, when the Turkish government finally succumbed to pressure from the European Union, which it wants to join. Even so, the Turkish government continues to repress Kurdish. Kurdish is also repressed by Iran.
Furthermore, to interfere with minority languages you don't have to ban them completely. If you send the kids to boarding schools and forbid them to speak their own language, you damage the transmission of the language. This was a very common practice until quite recently (in some places it ended only ten or twenty years ago), and in some places it continues to this day.
For anyone interested in this area, I strongly recommend Tove Skutnabb-Kangas' book Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? [amazon.com].
More sources of information (Score:5, Informative)
The Living Languages Institute is just the latest of a number of organizations devoted to the study and/or maintenance and revitalization of endangered languages. Here are some other organizations and sources of information:
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:4, Informative)
Differences between British English, American English, and Indian English are all just a matter of colloquialisms and preferences. heck you could say the same thing about the differences between Bostonian, Southern, and Midwestern dialects within the United States (such as vowel pronunciation in Boston, second person plural use in the south, and regional vocabulary for carbonated beverages in the midwest).
As the influence of global relations (trade, culture and otherwise) expand the differences in usage will likely decrease in public publications and media but increase within subcultures as the psychological need to create a individual/social identity becomes increasingly difficult in an ever more homogeneous world culture.
This doesn't mean anyone is talking "wrong". Unless you are trying to be silly, you can't really speak your native tongue in any way but the right one!
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Informative)
Repeat after me: you don't need an apostrophe to pluralize! The apostrophe is 99% of the time supposed to indicate missing letters, like "do not" becoming "don't". The apostrophe replaces the "o".
The only time you might use an apostrophe to pluralize is in the case of years or other numbers, but I still prefer not to. Like "90s" instead of "90's". And I still like using " CDs" instead of " CD's ".
Re:English does not borrow from other languages.. (Score:5, Informative)
-- James Nicoll [wikiquote.org]
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:3, Informative)
[1] I thought (I'm not 100% sure) that female ones can sometimes have foals, though it's very rare.
Some stats from Europe (Score:2, Informative)
http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf [europa.eu]
56 % of Europeans can have a conversation in 1 foreign language
28 % with 2 foreign languages
11 % with 3 or more foreign languages
Clearly, there are lots of benefits from knowing another language in Europe, and it's probably also a status symbol to some extent. For a college educated European being able to speak 2 foreign languages is a norm. This is what I've always loved about in Europe - an endless supply of true cosmopolitans.