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Why do languages die?
Christopher Moseley
What do we mean when we speak of a language
‘dying’? How does it happen? Can it be predicted? Can it be prevented?
Th is is not a happy subject. For those of us who love languages, it’s terrible to see that they’re dying at a very rapid rate. About half the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers—about enough to fi ll a small-town football stadium. Even worse is that most of the languages spoken in the world today—nearly 90 percent, some think—may be lost by the end of this century.
Th ere are languages with only a handful of speakers left in the world—some have only one or two. When those last speakers die, the language dies too.
Why do languages disappear? Th e short answer is that they are no longer passed on to younger speakers, and eventually only the elderly speakers are left to die out. But what would make a community no longer want to pass on its spoken heritage to the younger generation? Th e circumstances vary from place to place.
Let’s look at some examples. In the mountains of India we can fi nd—if we hurry—the Sulung people, now down to only a few thousand, who’ve been driven to a remote area by constant warfare with neighbouring tribes. If they’re wiped out by their enemies, their language will vanish. Wars destroy more than people.
You might ask, can there be any new languages left to discover?
Surprisingly, yes. A few have recently come to light when previously uncontacted peoples were found in isolated places. In 1991, for instance, an ancient language known as Gongduk was discovered in the Himalayas. For linguists, this was like fi nding the fabled lost valley of Shangri-La. And in the deep Brazilian interior, there are still languages being discovered, some of them apparently unrelated to any other known tongue. But stories like that are rare. Th e over-whelming trend is in the direction of extinction.
For the most part, geographical barriers—high mountains, steep valleys, lack of infrastructure or roads—aff ord little protection, not even in the far corners of the earth. Th ink about the speakers of Rapanui, on Easter Island in the Pacifi c. Aft er a millenium and a half of separation from the world, in the nineteenth century they were taken from their island as slaves to collect guano from the coast of South America. Very few came back; today there are just a few thousand people who have kept Rapanui alive in the face of Spanish, imported from Chile.
Th irty years ago, in Brazil, ranchers and illegal timber cutters drove the Jiahui people out of their traditional lands into the hands of hostile neighbors. Th e few that were left joined a less hostile group or drift ed to the cities. Now the Jiahui have reclaimed some of their lands, but how many of them are left ? Just fi ft y.
Or what about the Rikbatsá people in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state?
Th ey were great warriors, but they couldn’t fi ght epidemics of infl u-enza and smallpox that were brought by Jesuit missionaries. Diseases imported from Europe decimated them and dozens of other native peoples of the Americas—and with them their native tongues.
Why do languages die? 109
And if human invasions aren’t bad enough, nature itself can swallow up languages. In 1998 a terrible tsunami struck the north coast of Papua New Guinea, killing nearly all the speakers of the Warapu and Sissano languages. Just a few who weren’t home at the time are the only ones left to keep the languages alive.
Finally, so-called ‘killer languages’—like English or Spanish—are so dominant that people may voluntarily give up their mother tongue—for convenience or economic reasons. Indigenous peoples sometimes abandon their language to overcome discrimination, or fi t into a majority culture. As children stop learning them, the languages slowly wither away.
Why should we care? Because with the loss of a language comes the loss of inherited knowledge, an entire thought-world. I’ve oft en heard it compared to losing a natural resource or an animal spe-cies. Yes, there are ways of reconstructing an extinct language from surviving evidence, and linguists are able to do that in some cases;
but in the end what we have then is not much more than words on paper. We can’t bring back from the dead a society that spoke the language, or the heritage and culture behind it. Once a language is gone, it’s gone forever.
It’s only in the past couple of decades that the urgency of the question of language extermination worldwide has been realised.
Organisations have been set up to do what they can to preserve language diversity. Th ere are the U.S.-based Terralingua and the U.K.-based Foundation for Endangered Languages, both dedicated to encouraging and supporting research into threatened languages and their maintenance; there is the UNESCO Endangered Languages Project; and recently a department for endangered languages was set up at the University of London.
About the author
Christopher Moseley ([email protected]) is a linguist at BBC Monitoring, part of the BBC World Service based near Reading, England, which translates news items from the world’s media. He is also a writer and freelance translator, editor of the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor of the Atlas of the World’s Languages (Routledge, 1993). He has a special interest in artifi cial languages (and has created one himself).
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Th e topic of how languages become extinct (or escape extinction) is discussed in chapters 2 (languages of the world), 25 (revitalizing threatened languages), 41 (Are U.S. dialects dying?), and 50 (Latin).
Elsewhere:
Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices (Oxford University Press, 2000). A serious and thoughtful study of the problems, causes and eff ects of language endangerment all over the world, relating the issue to biological diversity.
Crystal, David. Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
An impassioned plea on behalf of the world’s smaller languages, full of interesting anecdotal information about the treasures we are losing.
Abley, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels Among Th reatened Languages (Heinemann, 2004). A personal travelogue of the author’s visits to some of the world’s smallest language communities to see how they are faring in the modern globalised community; quite appealing as a travel book as well.
Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word (HarperCollins, 2005). Takes a sweeping overview of the’s world recorded history from the point of view of the big victorious languages—the other end of the telescope—
and shows how successive empires have claimed to spread their ‘interna-tional languages’ all over the known world. English is just the latest in a long line of conquerors.