Viscerally, as a great fan of Russian for many years, I am as uncomfortable as anyone else with the prospect of Russian no longer being passed on to children. However, I am also aware that mine is not necessarily a logical discomfort. Coming back to the Tower of Babel, can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation--such as that of the Amish--or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.
The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation--complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.
As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world's language being, say, Eyak.
One world language?
Wednesday November 4, 2009
Categories: Culture
Filed Under: John McWhorter, language
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I have long thought of globalization as The Contemporary Tower of Babel due for a fall. If we see globalization and modernization fall apart due to peak oil et al., well, chances are my dialect in Cleveland is going to sound a heck of a lot different than that in Dayton really fast. Language will become fragmented once again, albeit in much different forms than, let's say, the end of the 19th century. I'm not really worried about a One-World Language -- history will take care of that sooner or later.
...well, chances are my dialect in Cleveland is going to sound a heck of a lot different than that in Dayton really fast.
Why? Will TV quit working too?
Ah, I come late to this topic! Linguistics was my college major, and language contact, change, and variation are my favorite emphases in the field.
My take: the media is not powerful enough to counter the natural tendency of languages to shift.
Have you heard the way English is spoken in India? Educated people there learn the language very young, but they DON'T speak the Queen's English. Indian English is its own unique register, laced with grammatical and lexical borrowings from the local languages. They have co-opted English as a semi-neutral lingua franca, but they have not left it unadulterated. Similar patterns are to be found throughout East and Central Africa. Read an English language editorial page of a Nigerian or Kenyan paper and you will be struck by the vim and vigor of the imagery, though you will not immediately there is something "extra-English" about it.
Even IF English is widely adopted and displaces many other languages, those languages and those cultures and populations will have their own impact on the language. These varieties will drift further and further from standard. People will come to speak a localized English, along with some native languages. Educated people will be able to speak standard English, but this will have limited inroads to normal society.
Media will slow the drift of English, but not stop it. Local media broadcasting in local versions of the language will hold great sway, all the moreso with the de-centralization of media away from state-run conglomerates and towards a diversity of internet modes. You will see a situation somewhat like Latin and the Romance languages, as they first started to drift apart. Demographics and history are against us. We cannot hope to hold this massive cultural and linguistic hegemony any more than Rome could hope to hold its vast empire for long. English will be dominant for some time, but we its original speakers will lose influence over its varieties rather quickly.
Re: chances are my dialect in Cleveland is going to sound a heck of a lot different than that in Dayton really fast.
Those cities are too close together for significant dialect differntiation. After all, how different was Dayton American English from Cleveland American English in 1820 (pre railroad, pre internal combustion engine)? Obviously if people could not travel easily (and broadcast technology were lost) dialects would begin to diverge, but even then the existence of a common written language would keep them from getting too out of line with one another.
Esperanto indeed is the logical choice.
It's unfortunate however that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
After a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, and a languag choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
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