The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (70 page)

Those are the overwhelming facts of worldwide language extinction. But now let’s ask, as do many or most people: so what? Is language loss really a bad thing? Isn’t the existence of thousands of languages positively harmful, because they impede communication and promote strife? Perhaps we should actually
encourage
language loss. This view was expressed by a deluge of listener comments sent into the British Broadcasting Corporation after it broadcast a program trying to defend the value of disappearing languages. Here is a sample of the quotes:

“What an extraordinary amount of sentimental rubbish! The reason that languages died out was that they were the expression of moribund societies incapable of communicating the intellectual, cultural, and social dynamics required for sustained longevity and evolution.”

“How ridiculous. The purpose of language is to communicate. If nobody speaks a language, it has no purpose. You might as well learn Klingon.”

“The only people that 7,000 languages are useful to are linguists. Different languages separate people, whereas a common language unites. The fewer living languages, the better.”

“Humanity needs to be united, that’s how we go forwards, not in small-knit tribes unable to communicate with one another. What good is there in even having five languages? Document them by all means, learn what we can from them, but consign them to history where they belong. One world, one people, one common language, one common goal, perhaps then we can all just get along.”

“7,000 languages is 6,990 too many if you ask me. Let them go.”

There are two main reasons that people like those who wrote to the BBC give in order to justify getting rid of most of the world’s languages. One objection can be summarized in the one-liner “We need a common language in order to communicate with each other.” Yes, of course that’s true; different people do need some common language in order to communicate with each other. But that doesn’t require eliminating minority languages; it just requires that speakers of minority languages become bilingual themselves in a majority language. For example, Denmark is the
seventh-richest country in the world, although virtually the only people who speak the Danish language are the 5,000,000 Danes. That’s because almost all Danes also fluently speak English and some other European languages, which they use to do business. Danes are rich and happily Danish,
because
they speak Danish. If Danes want to go to the effort of becoming bilingual in Danish and English, that’s their own business. Similarly, if Navajo Indians want to go to the effort of becoming bilingual in Navajo and English, that’s their business. The Navajos aren’t asking and don’t even want other Americans to learn Navajo.

The other main reason that people such as those who wrote to the BBC give to justify getting rid of languages is the belief that multiple languages cause civil wars and ethnic strife, by encouraging people to view other peoples as different. The civil wars tearing apart so many countries today are determined by linguistic lines—so it is claimed. Whatever the value of multiple languages, getting rid of them may supposedly be the price we have to pay if we are to halt the killing around the globe. Wouldn’t the world be a much more peaceful place if the Kurds would just switch to speaking Turkish or Arabic, if Sri Lanka’s Tamils would consent to speak Sinhalese, and if Quebec’s French and the U.S. Hispanics would just switch to English?

That seems like a strong argument. But its implicit assumption of a monolingual utopia is wrong: language differences aren’t the most important cause of strife. Prejudiced people will seize on any difference to dislike others, including differences of religion, politics, ethnicity, and dress. The worst mass killings in Europe since the end of World War II involved Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrans (who later split from each other), Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia slaughtering each other, even though all of them speak the same language, Serbo-Croat. The worst mass killings in Africa since the end of World War II were in Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu people killed nearly a million Tutsi and most of Rwanda’s Twa people, all of them speaking the Rwanda language. The worst mass killings anywhere in the world since the end of World War II were in Cambodia, where Khmer-speaking Cambodians under their dictator Pol Pot killed about two million other Khmer-speaking Cambodians. The worst mass killings anywhere in the world, anytime in history, were in Russia under Stalin, when Russians killed tens of millions of people, most of whom also spoke Russian, over supposed political differences.

If you believe that minorities should give up their languages and adopt the majority language in order to promote peace, ask yourself whether you also believe that minorities should promote peace by giving up their religions, their ethnicities, and their political views. If you believe that freedom of religion, ethnicity, and political view but not of language is an inalienable human right, how would you explain your inconsistency to a Kurd or a French Canadian? Innumerable examples besides those of Stalin, Pol Pot, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia warn us that monolingualism is no safeguard of peace.

Given that people do differ in language, religion, ethnicity, and political view, the only alternative to tyranny or mass killing is for people to live together in mutual tolerance. That’s not an idle hope. Despite all the past wars over religion, people of different religions do co-exist peacefully in the United States, Germany, Indonesia, and many other countries. Similarly, many countries that practise linguistic tolerance find that they can accommodate people of different languages in harmony: for example, 2 native languages in the Netherlands (Dutch and Frisian), 2 in New Zealand (English and Maori), 3 in Finland (Finnish, Swedish, and Lapp), 4 in Switzerland (German, French, Italian, and Romansh), 43 in Zambia, 85 in Ethiopia, 128 in Tanzania, and 286 in Cameroon. On a trip to Zambia when I visited a high school classroom, I recall one student asking me, “Which tribe in the United States do you belong to?” Then each student told me, with a smile, his or her tribal language. Seven languages were represented in that small classroom, and no one seemed ashamed, afraid, or intent on killing each other.

All right, so there’s nothing inevitably harmful or burdensome about preserving languages except the effort of bilingualism for the minority speakers themselves, and they can decide for themselves whether they’re willing to put up with that effort. Are there any positive advantages of preserving linguistic diversity? Why shouldn’t we just let the world converge on its five top languages of Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hindi? Or let’s push that argument one step further, before my English-speaking
readers enthusiastically answer, “Yes!” If you think that small languages should give way to big languages, a logical conclusion is that we should all adopt the world’s biggest language, Mandarin, and let English die out. What’s the use of preserving the English language? Among many answers, I’ll mention three.

First, with two or more languages, we as individuals can be bilingual or multilingual. I discussed earlier in this chapter the evidence for cognitive advantages of bilingual individuals. Even if you’re skeptical about bilingualism’s reported protection against symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, everyone fluent in more than one language knows that knowledge of different languages enriches one’s life, just as a large vocabulary in one’s first language permits a richer life than does a small vocabulary. Different languages have different advantages, such that it’s easier to express some things, or to feel in certain ways, in one language than in another. If the much-debated Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, a language’s structure molds the way in which that language’s speakers think, with the result that one views the world and thinks differently when one switches languages. Hence language loss doesn’t only curtail freedom of minorities; it also curtails the options of majorities.

Second, languages are the most complex product of the human mind, each differing in its sounds, structure, and pattern of thought. But a language itself isn’t the only thing lost when a language goes extinct. Literature, culture, and much knowledge are encoded in languages: lose the language, and you lose much of the literature, culture, and knowledge. Different languages have different number systems, mnemonic devices, and systems of spatial orientation: for instance, it’s easier to count in Welsh or Mandarin than in English. Traditional peoples have local-language names for hundreds of animal and plant species around them: those encyclopedias of ethnobiological information vanish when their languages vanish. While Shakespeare can be translated into Mandarin, we English-speakers would regard it as a loss to humanity if Hamlet’s speech “To be or not to be, that is the question” were available only in Mandarin translation. Tribal peoples also have their own oral literatures, and losses of those literatures also represent losses to humanity.

But perhaps you’re still thinking, “Enough of all this vague talk about linguistic freedom, unique cultural inheritance, and different options for
thinking and expressing. Those are luxuries that rate low priority amid the crises of the modern world. Until we solve the world’s desperate socio-economic problems, we can’t waste our time on bagatelles like obscure Native American languages.”

Then please think again about the socio-economic problems of the people speaking all those obscure Native American languages (and thousands of other obscure languages around the world). They are the poorest segment of American society. Their problems are not just narrow ones of jobs, but broad ones of cultural disintegration. Groups whose language and culture disintegrate tend to lose their pride and mutual self-support, and to descend into socio-economic problems. They’ve been told for so long that their language and everything else about their culture are worthless that they believe it. The resulting costs to national governments of welfare benefits, healthcare expenses, alcohol-related and drug-related problems, and drain on rather than contribution to the national economy are enormous. At the same time, other minorities with strong intact cultures and language retention—like some recent groups of immigrants to the U.S.—are already contributing strongly to the economy rather than taking from it. Among native minorities as well, those with intact cultures and languages tend to be stronger economically and to place fewer demands on social services. Cherokee Indians who complete Cherokee language school and remain bilingual in Cherokee and English are more likely to pursue their education, obtain jobs, and earn higher salaries than Cherokees who can’t speak Cherokee. Aboriginal Australians who learn their traditional tribal language and culture are less prone to substance abuse than are culturally disconnected Aborigines.

Programs to reverse Native American cultural disintegration would be more effective and cheaper than welfare payments, for Native American minorities and for majority taxpayers alike. Such programs aim at long-term solutions; welfare payments don’t. Similarly, those countries now racked by civil wars along linguistic lines would have found it cheaper to emulate countries (like Switzerland, Tanzania, and many others) based on partnerships between proud intact groups than to seek to crush minority languages and cultures.

Language as a focus of national identity can mean the difference between group survival and disappearance not only to minorities within a
country but to whole nations as well. Consider the situation in Britain early in World War II, in May and June of 1940, when French resistance to the invading Nazi armies was collapsing, when Hitler had already occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland and Norway and Denmark and the Low Countries, when Italy and Japan and Russia had signed alliances or pacts with Hitler, and when the United States was still determined to remain neutral. Britain’s prospects of prevailing against the impending German invasion appeared bleak. Voices within the British government argued that Britain should seek to make some deal with Hitler, rather than to attempt a hopeless resistance.

Winston Churchill responded in the House of Commons on May 13 and June 4, 1940, with the two most quoted and most effective 20th-century speeches in the English language. Among other things, he said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…. You ask, what is our policy? I will say. It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime…. We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and ocean, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

We know now that Britain never did surrender, did not seek a settlement with Hitler, continued to fight, after a year gained Russia and then the United States as allies, and after five years defeated Hitler. But that outcome was not predestined. Suppose that the absorption of small European languages by large languages had reached the point in 1940 at which the British and all other Western Europeans had adopted Western Europe’s largest language, namely, German. What would have happened in June 1940 if Churchill had been addressing the House of Commons in the German language, rather than in English?

My point is not that Churchill’s words were untranslatable; they ring as powerful in German as in English. (“Anbieten kann ich nur Blut, Müh, Schweiss, und Träne….”) My point is instead that the English language is a proxy for everything that made the British keep fighting against
seemingly hopeless odds. Speaking English means being heir to a thousand years of independent culture, history, increasing democracy, and island identity. It means being heir to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and other monuments of literature in the English language. It means having different political ideals from Germans and other continental Europeans. In June 1940, speaking English meant having something worth fighting and dying for. While no one can prove it, I doubt that Britain would have resisted Hitler in June 1940 if the British had already been speaking German. Preservation of one’s linguistic identity is not a bagatelle. It keeps Danes rich and happy, and some native and immigrant minorities prosperous, and it kept Britain free.