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."
What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, British English uses collective nouns (Microsoft are instead of Microsoft is) while American English thinks of the collective noun as singular.
In the contrary, American English uses subjunctive form while it seems British English doesn't use it .
Then you have all of the people that don't understand the differences between intransitive (takes no object) and transitive. (Lay and lie, anyone?)
What is going to happen to the English language? Increasingly, I see blatant grammatical errors on signs in big box stores, advertising, and even documentation!
Is grammatically correct English where the native speakers understand the differences of English in different countries?
How students possible learn a native language like German and hope to speak it correctly with the proper articles if they don't even the grammar rules of a language with commonalities with the language that they would like to learn?
Is this why foreign languages are dying? Or is it imperialism? Or is modern communication technology giving English even more priority over other languages?
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
www.openbsd.org
Protected mode > real mode
Metcalfe's Law at Work (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those? Plus the regional dialects are what the parents and grandparents use. Mandarin is the cooler, hipper dialect.
It'll be sad when the regional dialects die out because some of them are much older than Mandarin and some classical Chinese poems only rhyme properly in the south dialects such as Cantonese.
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, there is a comment further down about how each language gives the same communication, but with different grammar/words... and while for the most part that is true, there are some aspects of languages that define certain cultures. Just the way that you express yourself in certain languages defines quite a bit about you. For example, in English you say "I dropped the rock."... admitting that you were the one who did it (even if it were accidental)... in Spanish you say that exact same thing a bit differently... and while it means the same thing, you think about the situation a little differently... "Se me cayo la piedra." or "The rock fell on me" (not 'on' as in 'on top of' but 'on' as in 'my computer crashed on me')... So spanish speakers are more prone to never think anything is their fault.
Sure, that sounds kind of stupid, but if you know a lot of native spanish speakers you will agree with me (there are exceptions, of course... on both sides).
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Further, if and when we discover civilizations on other planets, having a unified planetary language could only be beneficial.
Not to mention, we can free up massive amounts of wasted highschool and college education hours that are spent teaching students a four year language that 98% of them will never ever use (or remember) two years after graduation.
Secret Information (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:3, Interesting)
This probably explains why most 2nd generation Americans don't speak the language of their parents.
Spanish is probably the only other language besides English that a majority of Americans will ever get a chance to use in the US. Even so, I know lots of Hispanic-Americans that don't bother learning it.
Re:Good thing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Spanish and Russian are too
For one thing, English spelling sucks. I have read recently that difficult foreign leaders' names are spelled out "phonetically" in important speeches for president Bush and others. This is not because Bush can't read, but because English writing sucks. Spelling out someone's name "phonetically" is unnecessary and unthinkable in Russian. It is already spelled (sort of) phonetically.
Re:Good thing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoftization? Come on. If we had 7000 operating systems, that would be BA-A-AD... I would readily vote to reduce this amount to 3 or 4. Plus, language is not a commercial structure, nobody 'owns' language and it can't be used for profit. So, the analogy is flawed.
> El mismo reason tu queres solamente ingles?
Don't play dumb. Why do you think so many people now speak Spanish on the American continent? No one spoke Spanish there before 1492... Could it be that somebody was pushing the policy of solamente Espanol for several hundred years?... You are just looking in the mirror, amigo. And the other side of the mirror is much, much more forgiving then your side with the conquestadors. You come to the USA, sometimes illegally, try to dictate the rules, and they don't even burn you in the stake.
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
As one post replying to yours said a language is linked to a culture. The language and the culture disappear together.
I will add the following: a language is an imperfect way to express our ideas. There is not necessarily a one to one mapping between a concept in your head and a word. The word comes with its bit of culture, of use in different contexts, that allow other people to understand what you mean or sometimes go in the way if they don't have that bit of culture. When you know several languages, you start identifying this imperfect mapping. Because words in other languages that have the same meaning don't necessarily have the same culture attached.
Finally, the more developed your grasping of a language, the easier it is for you to communicate a concept to someone else. But that also depend on your language having the concepts inbuilt in it. I am sure inuits have lots of words for things we don't have in our languages, because their experience of life is vastly different from ours. You will probably tell me that most of these concepts may have a translation in lets say English, but I guess that for some, 99% of the people speaking English won't know them, thus cannot use them.
In France it is not uncommon for people coming from the field to not understand the young people coming from the suburbs, because internally the set of words used is different and (especially in the suburbs) the languages are evolving rapidly. That's the way I think we are leaning to: less languages, but more and more sub-languages part of the main ones. Languages are still going to be attached to a culture, but instead of being geographically located, they are going to be spread over the world thanks to global communications.
(I am not an expert in that field so take this with a grain of salt)
Re:Maybe... (Score:1, Interesting)
What you're thinking of is the sapir-worf hypothesis. It was proven false; children raised speaking Loglan, for instance, are still capable of making first order logic mistakes. They just can't express them in words.
Similarly, there is an Indonesian language where there are only 2 words for colors: dark ones and light ones. But they don't see the world in black and white; they know that yellow and white are different, even though they have only one word for both.
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Nunavut language has a special word that means "bears are evil", for which there is no English equivalent, as we have no special word that refers specifically to the type of evil that can only be associated with a bear.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.
For years now, there are more users of English as a second language than there are native speakers of the language. If we have not done so already, we are coming close to the point where there is more correspondence in English between people who learned English as a second language than there is correspondence that involves at least one native speaker of English. We are also moving toward the point where there sum of all documents ever published in English by native English speakers is smaller than the total of all English documents written by non-natives.
It is now not uncommon for a Finn, a Pakistani, an Israeli, and a Brazilian to collaborate on a software project written in Python, Ruby, or Perl, and use English as the language for all aspects of the project even though none of them are good speakers of English.
English is getting stripped of a bunch of silly rules that were never really core to the language, and is being expanded by a bunch of new concepts that new users are bringing in from their own native languages. The result is probably going to offend the sensibilities of a lot of the older English teachers in English speaking countries. Gee, that's too bad if they can't keep up. But the benefits of a global language are worth putting up with jarring phrases and strange sounding usages.
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are wrong if you think language policies are liberal everywhere. For example, in France Breton-language schools are still forced to exist outside the normal school system because the state wants to keep the monopoly on one state language (in spite of Breton having something like half a million speakers) - France has a long tradition of laws against minority languages, up to the middle of the century in northern France you could see signs like "il est interdit de parler flamand et d'uriner sur les murs" ("It's forbidden to speak Flemish and to piss on the walls"). Or in Russia, the autonomous republic of Tatarstan wanted to switch the official alphabet for the Tatar language from Cyrillic to Latin to have more coherence with other Turkic languages, and they passed a law to that extent and started hanging up Latin-script streetsigns and everything, and then the Russian federal government forbade it because they want to keep the Cyrillic alphabet as a homogenous symbol of federal Russian identity. You can find plenty of cases like this; language policy is still a hot iron in many countries as of today.
Wrong again. Society likes uniformity, but society also needs a certain amount of diversity - or rather people have their linguistic identity, and society has to cater to the identity of its members to some extent. Which is why the EU has directives on minority languages, and why the UK has Welsh-language television, and why in East Germany there are Sorbian-language schools - or to go outside the scope of Western democracies why in Xinjiang children are learning Uighur in school (because otherwise they'd be learning it in the mosque, which the Chinese government doesn't want), or why in Russia there are Tatar-language schools because otherwise some Tatars would sooner or later start to want to go the way of the Chechens.
Te Reo Maori (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the 70's, there has been a marked resurgence in Maori language, but more interestingly, in the culture itselft and pride in it. This has led to Maoridom pushing itself out onto the global stage in a much more assertive and confident manner than I think it had in the past. Something which I would argue has not only been of benefit to Maori, but to NZ society in general.
I'm not opposed to there being a 'lingua franca' of the modern world, and if that happens to be English, I will be all the more pleased. But I also see that there is a real cost of languages disappearing from the world, because the words are not all that is lost: there are whole lives, whole other worlds wrapped up in particular languages. It seems to me, however, that languages do not save themselves. Unless there are a group of people willing to actually teach and actively support the usage of languages (Maori is an official language of NZ) then the task will not be managed.
I don't think we can nor would want to save all languages, but where a significant chunk of unique culture is bound up with a disappearing language, I would encourage the guardians of the culture to make real moves to save it because the alternative is to lose much more than you bargained for.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
And now it's used for Russian Rubyists to insult Portuguese Pythonistas? Plus ca change
Cultural ignorance can be the death of you (Score:5, Interesting)
Firstly, I speak 5 languages fluently (English, Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Swiss-German and French) and can get by in two more (Spanish and Turkish). I'm a South African, my girlfriend is Afrikaans, I've lived in Switzerland for some 17 years now, and in Germany and Spain before that and in Turkey for a year as well. My father was French speaking. I'm not reciting all this to brag. The knowledge of different languages has been of vital use to me in my life and has actually saved my life on a number of occasions, literally.
When I first got to Europe 21 years ago, I could only really speak English and Afrikaans. I knew a smattering of French from my dad, but I only really learned from my French girlfriend at the time. I worked in what was then West Berlin for the US Airforce, but before that, for my first year, I survived by doing odd jobs and basically pestering people to let me stay somewhere, and I learned German really quickly, because in those days, not many Germans could or wanted to speak English. The USAF people I knew, on the other hand, lived in American bases, went to American shops and watched American movies, and almost none of them understood a word of German. They had no need, but they had plenty of problems when out in the city doing shopping etc.
When I worked in Turkey, as usual, I made the effort to communicate with the locals, who surprise surprise, generally only spoke Turkish and perhaps enough German to sell stuff to tourists. Knowing Turkish made me friends and made my life that much more pleasant, and cheaper, since I could order in Turkish I paid the prices that locals paid for drinks and food which is considerably less than tourists pay.
A tidbit of info is that the Turkic languages are so closely related that knowledge of Turkish will enable you to make yourself understood from Turkey to Kazakhstan, including parts of Russia where Tartar is spoken, which is quite a span of territory. Not that I ever plan on visiting that part of the world, but if I ever do get the chance to see the Altai mountains, I'll be able to get around without too much trouble.
Another tidbit of info is that Turkic grammar gives you a head start if you ever need to learn Hungarian, Finnish or want to chat up a blond Estonian beauty. They all work the same way.
Another one is traveling in France. The French are also somewhat monolingual, like most English speakers, and I know a lot of Americans having a bad time in France because they find the French resentful of having to speak English. The joke is that the French generally don't mind if you don't speak French, but they really appreciate it if you just try a few words.
Switzerland is another special case. Swiss German is a dialect of Alemannic that is unintelligible to most Germans from the North of Germany, with some subdialects that are incomprehensible to almost all Germans. It is the most spoken language in Switzerland, but it is not a written language. The written language of Switzerland is German. You can get by perfectly with standard German in Switzerland, but knowledge of the spoken language is what will make you friends or get you business contacts with the locals. There is even a local language that is endangered, called Rumantsch, which is a direct descendant of the vulgar latin the Romans soke here 2000 years ago. It is kept alive by the Swiss not for its practical value, since all of its speakers are also fluent in German, but for its cultural heritage. It adds colour to the landscape, so to speak.
I'm telling all these stories in an attempt to show that just because you think English is a universal language doesn't make it so. In Zurich, where I work, everyone in my company speaks English to some degree, but the one guy who only spoke English at work constantly had to fight against the language barrier. I don't think he was very happy. It's often the same in large parts of
Re:Good thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, much of the perversion of language today has a lot of blame to lay at the feet of America. But even that is a mixture of linguistic changes brought on by marketing demographics.
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Please check a dictionary before you post such twaddle.
From m-w.com "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered b : to bring in by way of return ", or "to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to b : to make worthy of or obtain for "
There is no sense of inheritance or entitlement in the word. It appears to be originally descended from a German verb that meant "to reap". Reaping, at least at the time the word was in use in Old High German, certainly involved a lot of work.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The death of language is GOOD, not bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's not. It's a way of how relate to the world, it's a way of being. Most of our reality is categorized through linguistic categories. If we loose them we loose our world.
If you skip from English to German, it's not a big step (on a global scale), the are closely related (being both West-Germanic) and have been in contact for centuries. The speech communities share large parts of their religious and political believes, their material culture is quite similar and they have exchanged cultural artifacts (texts etc.) since their very early history. So just for your German lesson today think about the semantics of "Becher" (mug, cup, pot, beaker, goblet - You drink coffee out of them, but not beer, Yoghurt comes in a "Becher", the tooth brush rests in one, You measure flour etc. in one...) for a German speaker "Becher" are all the same thing, are they for you? Or try "gemütlich", "eben", "halt" - you would really amaze me if you could use one of these like a native speaker.
If losing a language is a good thing I recommend to you to use a hunter-gatherer language (try an aboriginal one from Australia or an Aslian language from Malaysia) in your daily life in a Western culture. You'll find that you have some very handy terms for hunting techniques but ordering a coffee politely (but not chummily) might be awkward, as will be discussing the problem with your car with the mechanic or discussing some personal problem or less specific angst with your shrink.
Death of language is good if your language remains, it's bad if another remains.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's at the core? IMHO, English *is* just a bunch of silly rules. I'm not sure that the core is actually part of the language itself, but rather the worldwide culture that has made it easy for new words, silly rules, and ideas to easily be added or removed.
Personally, I think of it as the perl of natural languages - there's many, many more ways than one to say it, and the language-culture includes built-in ways of modifying itself. Just like with perl, the many speech patterns that are possible make it so that it is possible for two speakers to not understand each other if they both know different areas of sublanguage.
Similarly, I expect that as concepts continue to emerge, new sublanguages will arrive. Some will be nothing more than jargon on top of existing things, but I imagine some will be more complete.
Re:Good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
One example, from Greek - most languages have support for being able to mix up the words in a sentence and come out with the exact same basic meaning whilst allowing the speaker to put more emphasis on certain items. From my Greek Book (Alpha to Omega by Anne Groton [amazon.com] - I have an older edition than that one) is: Greek allows you to write it, keeping the same exact meaning, as "the dog the cat chased", "the cat the dog chased", "chased the cat the dog", "chased the dog the cat", "the cat chased the dog". Now looking at the English of that, most of it makes no sense, and one variation has a completely different meaning.
Some of this we can help by using what grammar we do have, however, as English teachers are also not teaching all the grammar any more, it also results in more confusion, especially for native speakers. (It's funny when non-native speakers know the language better than native speakers, which at least with the U.S. English variant is typically the case.)
On the other hand, languages like Chinese and Japanese don't have plurals - plurals are expressed as a number plus the "singular" form - e.g. instead of saying "there are three trees", a Japanese speaker would say "there is three tree" - however, they are still a lot more expressive in other ways - e.g. Japanese is a very poetic language.
Re:Metcalfe's Law at Work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:4, Interesting)
A few hundred years later, English rebounded with the establishment of powerful nobles and royalty that considered themselves English, not French. I think it was circa 1300-1400 that the language was codified and standardised. We ended up with two (or more, when you consider that the church were pushing Latin) words for pretty much everything, so subtleties crept into the language.
That acceptance of words from other cultures became the hallmark of English - in the colonial era "the sun never set on the British empire", leading to a massive influx of new ideas, culture and (of course) words. The language is a dynamic living thing - depending on your disposition, it could be called a hybrid of opportunity, or a mongrel language.
From the British perspective, we're taught that Americans decided the (rather acrimonious, after all
So, at the end of all this, I suppose my point is that the language is dynamic, has been both stable and evolving for almost a thousand years, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Worrying about it, or becoming too focussed on the minutiae is counter-productive. If my American cousins spell colour without the U, so what ? - I can understand them perfectly well, and the purpose of language is to communicate. To be honest, I have far more problems with tomAYto - whenever I ask for tomAHto on a sandwich, I get blank looks... Oh well, when in Rome (or CA, for that matter
Simon.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:3, Interesting)
The literacy rate in New England around the time of the American Revolution was 90%+
The standard for literacy back then was if one could read their bible and comprehend what it said. Since the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy showed that 14% of 'literate' Americans have below basic literacy, I would say that it's arguable that America at the time of the Revolution (especially New England) was more literate than today.
Re:What will happen to English? (Score:3, Interesting)
This paper (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0006032 [arxiv.org]), by Xerox Research Center Europe says non-English language presesence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English. Surprising data: Esperanto beats Welsh, Lithuainian and Latvian (amongst others).
English as a lingua franca is a losing proposition. I know no one truly fluent and with good command in English that has learned it from a school. They all lived abroad. OTOH, I know francophones and speakers of Italian that are fluent and indeed learned them at foreign language schools (including myself). Of course, this observation is biased.
I mean, it's absolutely amazing how some very smart people with over a decade of contact with English have absolutely terrible command of the spoken language (while being able to write pretty good English). This phenomenom happens because English is highly irregular(*). Of course, increasingly we will resort to automated tools when we could simply reach out to a language tool. I feel this problem will only grow in the field of documentation for free and open source software (ideally, we would document in an auxlang and machine-translated it to native). We tend to think that English is acceptable. But it is not. English is too difficult. Additionally, it is not fair. The UK saves 100 Euros/year/inhabitant just by speaking English, whereas other countries have to spend a huge amount on coaching students in a language most will inexorably fail in, despite the cultural invasion of US American music and films. Anyone who's a native English speaker and has ventured out of his bubble knows that the idea you can just go to any corner of the world and communicate in English is false. Ex-colonies give you a false impression, too.
BTW, I know this is going to sound crazy, but Esperanto is the most cost-effective solution http://www.lernu.net/ [lernu.net]. I'm saying rational, optimized, here. I have some fluency [wikipedia.org] in Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese (native), and intermediate German, beginning Japanese and Russian - oh, and Esperanto (just started this last week and half, due to my reading on it), so you can imagine I have at least some ground to sustain an opinion like that. When you get to Level II, III, or IV languages - as defined [dliflc.edu] by the USA's Defense Language Institute [wikipedia.org] coming from a Level I standpoint you begin to appreciate what the difficulty for non-English/Romance language speakers must be. For instance, Russian verbal aspect is very poor compared to Portuguese, which has the most intricate verbal aspects of Indo-European languages, probably (and this is not an idea of my own, BTW). OTOH, the 6-case declension system of Russian can be really hard for those who speak a Romance tongue. One thesis I have as to why Linus Torvalds is such a smart guy is because speakers of Finnish must keep 16 cases [wikipedia.org] of declension in their heads. That alone ought to make a child have a few more IQ points!
For more on "the language problem", YouTube has a fascinating 9-part series by a gentleman who whas a UN translator for many years, Mr. Claude Piron (he has become an Esperanto proponent, due to the many problems he witnessed (**) and based also on his extensive knowledge and proficiency)(***)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=claude+piron&search=Search [youtube.com] (Spoken in French).
(*) "Query does not rhyme with very,
neither does fury sound like bury,
dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth,
job, Job, bo
Still is to replace the letter (Score:2, Interesting)
So to say "The stone's" it'd be "stones" Or "stonhis". Eventually the h was lost (H's are are common to be dropped, they don't sound too much) and the ' replaced the "i" in the written language, as little written aid. So in a sense it is still to indicate a missing letter.
Linguistics 101 reminder. (Score:2, Interesting)
No, to indicate the possessive, English uses an inflectional suffix (with weird syntax/morphology, but I digress).
You're making a Linguistics 101 error: the grammar of a language must be stated in terms of its spoken form, not in terms of its orthography. Orthography is a very imperfect and inconsistent rendition of the language.