Sadly, languages are now vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current trends continue, 95% of the languages handed down to us from the tens of thousands of years of history of behaviorally modern humans will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100. Half of our languages will actually have become extinct by then, most of the remainder will be dying languages spoken only by old people, and only a small minority will be “live” languages still being transmitted from parents to children. Languages are disappearing so rapidly (about one every nine days), and there are so few linguists studying them, that time is running out even to describe and record most languages before they disappear. Linguists face a race against time similar to that faced by biologists, now aware that most of the world’s plant and animal species are in danger of extinction and of disappearing even before they can be described. We do hear much anguished discussion about the accelerating disappearance of birds and frogs and other living species, as our Coca-Cola civilization spreads over the world. Much less attention has been paid to the disappearance of our languages, and to their essential role in the survival of those indigenous cultures. Each language is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking and talking, a unique literature, and a unique view of the world. Hence looming over us today is the tragedy of the impending loss of most of our cultural heritage, linked with the loss of most of our languages.
Why are languages vanishing at such a catastrophic rate? Does it really matter? Is our current plethora of languages good or bad for the world as a whole, and for all those traditional societies still speaking languages now at risk of vanishing? Many of you readers may presently disagree with what I just said, about language loss being a tragedy. Perhaps you instead think that diverse languages promote civil war and impede education, that the world would be better off with far fewer languages, and that high language diversity is one of those features of the world of yesterday that we should be glad to be rid of—like chronic tribal warfare, infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and frequent starvation.
For each of us as individuals, does it do us good or harm to learn multiple languages? It certainly takes much time and effort to learn a language and become fluent in it; would we be better off devoting all that time and effort to learning more obviously useful skills? I think that the answers emerging to these questions about the value of traditional multilingualism, both to societies and to individuals, will intrigue you readers, as they intrigued me. Will this chapter convince you to bring up your next child to be bilingual, or will it instead convince you that the whole world should switch to speaking English as quickly as possible?
The world’s language total
Before we can tackle those big questions, let’s start with some preamble about how many languages still exist today, how they developed, and where in the world they are spoken. The known number of distinct languages still spoken or recently spoken in the modern world is around 7,000. That huge total may astonish many readers, because most of us could name only a few dozen languages, and the vast majority of languages are unfamiliar to us. Most languages are unwritten, spoken by few people, and spoken far from the industrial world. For example, all of Europe west of Russia has fewer than 100 native languages, but the African continent and the Indian subcontinent have over 1,000 native languages each, the African countries of Nigeria and Cameroon 527 and 286 languages respectively, and the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (area less than 5,000 square miles) 110 languages. The world’s highest language diversity is on the island of New Guinea, with about 1,000 languages and an unknown but apparently large number of distinct language families crammed into an area only slightly larger than Texas.
Of those 7,000 languages, 9 “giants,” each the primary language of 100 million or more people, account for over one-third of the world’s population. In undoubted first place is Mandarin, the primary language of at least 700 million Chinese, followed by Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese in approximately that sequence. If we relax our definition of “big languages” to mean the top 70 languages—i.e., the top 1% of all languages—then we have encompassed the primary languages of almost 80% of the world’s people.
But most of the world’s languages are “little” languages with few speakers. If we divide the world’s nearly 7 billion people by 7,000 languages, we obtain 1 million people as the average number of speakers of a language. Because that average is distorted by the 100-million-plus speakers of just 9 giant languages, a better measure of a “typical” language is to talk about the “median” number of speakers—i.e., a language such that half of the world’s languages have more speakers, and the other half have fewer speakers. That median number is only a few thousand speakers. Hence half of the world’s languages have under a few thousand speakers, and lots of them have between only 60 and 200 speakers.
But such discussions of numbers of languages, and numbers of language speakers, force us to confront the question that I anticipated in describing my New Guinea campfire language poll at the beginning of this chapter. What’s the difference between a distinct language and a mere dialect of another language? Speech differences between neighboring populations intergrade completely; neighbors may understand 100%, or 92%, or 75%, or 42%, or nothing at all of what each other says. The cut-off between language and dialect is often arbitrarily taken at 70% mutual intelligibility: if neighboring populations with different ways of speaking can understand over 70% of each other’s speech, then (by that definition) they’re considered just to speak different dialects of the same language, while they are considered as speaking different languages if they understand less than 70%.
But even that simple, arbitrary, strictly linguistic definition of dialects and languages may encounter ambiguities when we try to apply it in practice. One practical difficulty is posed by dialect chains: in a string of neighboring villages ABCDEFGH, each village may understand both villages on either side, but villages A and H at opposite ends of the chain may not be able to understand each other at all. Another difficulty is that some pairs of speech communities are asymmetrical in their intelligibility: A can understand most of what B says, but B has difficulty understanding A. For instance, my Portuguese-speaking friends tell me that they can understand Spanish-speakers well, but my Spanish-speaking friends have more difficulty understanding Portuguese.
Those are two types of problems in drawing a line between dialects and languages on strictly linguistic grounds. A bigger problem is that languages are defined as separate not just by linguistic differences, but also by political and self-defined ethnic differences. This fact is expressed in a joke that one often hears among linguists: “A language is a dialect backed up by its own army and navy.” For instance, Spanish and Italian might not pass the 70% test for being ranked as different languages rather than mere dialects: my Spanish and Italian friends tell me that they can understand most of what each other says, especially after a little practice. But, regardless of what a linguist applying this 70% test might say, every Spaniard and Italian, and everybody else, will unhesitatingly proclaim Spanish and Italian to be different languages—because they have had their own armies and navies, plus largely separate governments and school systems, for over a thousand years.