I think that the negative effects of language death are overstated, and due at least four factors.
The first is presentism: we take a "snapshot" of the world as it appears now and assume that it is the natural, permanent order and the status quo must be preserved. When one reads documents like the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, it is clear that some non-majority or non-official languages are perceived to belong, whereas others are not. The reasons are normative and seem to relate to the concept I brought up in class of "squatters rights". English "belongs" in the United Kingdom because it has been there for hundreds of years, whereas Hindi has only been spoken in the UK for perhaps half a century, so it is not afforded any sort of protections. While this case may seem clear-cut, in other areas, it is highly prone to political manipulation. Based on history, should Turkish be a protected minority language in the Balkans or should Arabic be a protected minority language in Southern Spain? Obviously political contingents in both these settings would disagree. What about Romani? Do the Ronani people "belong" in Europe, given their long history but ultimately non-European origins? Should Tahitian be protected in Europe because it is spoken in French Polynesia?
The second factor, as I see it, is due to attributional biases. Due to technology, global scholarship, and a variety of other influences that make global communication possible, we are able to see linguistic shift as never before. Because we can observe it, we assume that we are in some way responsible. An environmental analogy may help here, borrowing from the discourse of ecolinguistics. Yes, in some cases, a species may go extinct due to explicit human interaction. The tree frog dies because its environment was destroyed, an artificial constraint on the species not due to natural selection. Yet the tree frog could just as easily go extinct because of a change in weather or other animals predation patterns, for instance. Or, it could evolve over generations (while we generally think of evolution as occurring over millions of years, if you go back and think about Darwin's finches it can occur over a much shorter time frame as well) to be the point where its evolutionary line may split or it may not even be considered the same species. It is perhaps worthwhile to note that scientific classifications of animals are also somewhat normative just like linguistic distinctions (though perhaps more grounded in hard science, i.e. DNA than linguistic distinctions). The difference between the moose and the elk has less to do with genetic differences than whether it resides in America or Europe. Similarly, whether one speaks Moldovan or Romanian has to do with what side of the border one lives on.
Ultimately, though, the ecological comparison fails. Language is a purely human phenomenon, so any human influence on language is not artificial in the same way as, say, a bulldozer in the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, this distinction between "human" and "natural" is a bit fuzzy. If we were to nuke the Yucatan peninsula and cause the extinction of an entire class of animals, we would say it was an artificial human occurrence. Yet that is effectively what happened 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs.
The third factor is a bias among linguistics to assume that language death is bad. Given what linguistics do, obviously language death is something to be feared. A linguist is no more likely to accept the fact that some languages should be allowed to die than a doctor is likely to accept the proposition that a patient with cancer should be refused treatment. Yet ultimately, the patient will die. Similarly, although linguistics can protect languages, language shift is inevitable.
Finally, the language that we use to describe language shifts has clearly negative connotations. "Language death," "linguistic genocide," and "linguistic social Darwinism" all have more-or-less unpleasant connotations. "Language extinction" is more clinical but still negative. I use the term "language shift" to reflect the fact that languages evolve over time, but this term fails to capture the fact that sometimes languages do abruptly seek to exist when the last speaker dies.
Another thing worth considering is the relationship between "language" as a living phenomenon - continuing an ecological metaphor - and language as a static concept - i.e. English, with a dictionary and a uniform set of rules. Codifying a language in essence removes it from its competitive environment of natural selection, akin to raising and animal in captivity. How does this relate to language shift? Does a language that is no longer spoken but still written down - for example Latin or Sanskrit - "die"? Is it still "alive"? Are we looking at the unliving skeletons of the Latin language, codified and preserved in museums, or is its essence still around?
A few things off the top of my head:
ReplyDelete1) Is language a "purely human" phenomenon? I don't think so. Certainly we are the only creatures we know of with heavily codified systems of letters and characters and phonotactic constraints, etc., but if you accept the notion that language is indeed a "hierarchical system of signs" rather than simply a bunch of arbitrary sounds with arbitrary meanings (because I don't think language is arbitrary either; there is instead a scale of arbitrariness), then don't animals have the ability to sign and create meaning as well? That is a bit off topic, but still a valid series of questions.
2) I do believe language death is bad, but I completely understand your more "evolutionary" argument. However, how do you propose we rationalize the desire to understand languages and cultures with the realization that languages are dying? Should we attempt to prevent or prolong language death, even though it is inevitable? Or should we simply accept that languages die, and instead focus on robust, living languages?
3) When does a language die? I would say when two people no longer speak it. However, I don't think that language is ever (emphasis on the ever) static as long as it is still in use. The beauty of language is how dynamic it is. We can look at snapshots or points in time, thus making language appear static, but it is constantly changing and evolving (usually pretty slowly, but still). To me, codifying a language can limit how productive it is—in terms of change—but I do not think that codification limits a language to the point that it is ever static or dead.
I think functionally, yes, language is a purely human phenomenon, at least for our purposes. The point is not to exclude animals but rather to remind us that "artificial" measures like LPLP are as natural to language as, well, language itself.
ReplyDeleteAnimals may use language, but significantly, they aren't sentient of the fact that they are using language. Crows may have highly developed languages, including differing regional dialects, but if the North Carolina crow dialect dies out the rest of the crow's don't sit around and talk about how crow-kind is now culturally worse-off. The bottom line is this: animals may use language, but they don't use linguistics.
I agree that all other things being equal, language death is bad. I think it is probably sad when a language dies out, but I can't think of any empirical or scientific reason for why this is. If we kill the last tree frog in the Amazon, you can make an argument that maybe that tree frog was the key to curing cancer. I'm not sure you can do that with languages.
As for what this means for the study of languages... you got me there. I think we need to remember, though, that by studying a language by, say, making a grammar of it, you are not capturing the essence of the living phenomenon that is language. You create an artifact of the language at a specific place in time and space. No one would claim that a written ethnography of a certain group is the groups culture in and of itself, so why is it that a dictionary and a grammar are presumed to be the true language when in reality they are extremely limited hermeneutics?
I think when it comes to language death, we should distinguish among several different types of death. Absolute language death is not something we can study. An unwritten language that dies out is one that is lost forever - it effectively never existed. The majority of human languages probably fall into this category. No one knows what prehistoric men spoke. The cases of language death we can study are thus cases in which the language is not truly dead, because if we are aware that the language exists, than by definition some aspect of it must have survived.
As an addendum, to my earlier point about the terminology related to "death," "genocide," etc. I'd like to point out that I have a major problem with the term "mother tongue". If we go back to Taiwan, the idea of teaching someone their mother tongue in school strikes me as a massive failure of the term. Shouldn't the "mother tongue" equal the "first language" or at least the language in which someone is most dominant? If I'm a first-generation Irish-American is Gaelic my mother tongue, and do I have a right to be educated in that language even though I've never spoken it?
ReplyDeleteTouche about the crows. Fair and valid point.
ReplyDeleteI want to find a way to rephrase my opinion on language death. I want to say that language death is "bad" in the sense that death in general is bad. Dying is never a good thing. For anything: person, tree frog, or language. By losing language, we lose valuable insights into their culture and their existence. We lose an understanding of the pharaohs, how they might've built the pyramids. We lose an understanding of their approaches to viewing the world. If the Renaissance rediscovered (not that they were ever really "dead") texts- and so much of our modern world was defined by this revival- then we must look at language death as a loss of (possibly) beneficial knowledge, just like the loss of a tree frog and his possible medical uses.
Hmm I'd like the challenge your idea that "dying is bad." Why?
ReplyDeleteDying might suck for an individual, but it's certainly necessary for societies and ecosystems as a whole, and it is a natural process that cannot and arguably should not be avoided.