The usual result is that minority young adults tend to become bilingual, and then their children become monolingual, in the majority language. Transmission of minority languages from parents to children breaks down for either or both of two reasons: parents want their children to learn the majority language, not the parents’ tribal language, so that their children can thrive in school and in jobs; and children don’t want to learn their parents’ language and only want to learn the majority language, in order to understand television, schools, and their playmates. I have seen these processes happening in the United States to immigrant families from Poland, Korea, Ethiopia, Mexico, and many other countries, with the shared result that the children learn English and don’t learn their parents’ language. Eventually, minority languages are spoken only by older people, until the last of them dies. Long before that end is reached, the minority language has degenerated through loss of its grammatical complexities, loss of forgotten native words, and incorporation of foreign vocabulary and grammatical features.
Of the world’s 7,000 languages, some are in much more danger than are others. Crucial in determining the degree of language endangerment is whether a language is still being transmitted at home from parents to children: when that transmission ceases, a language is doomed, even if 90 more years will pass before the last child still fluent in the language, and with him or her the language itself, dies. Among the factors making it likely that parent-to-child transmission will continue are: a large number of speakers of the language; a high proportion of the population speaking the language; government recognition of the language as an official national or provincial language; speakers’ attitude towards their own language (pride or scorn); and the absence of many immigrants speaking other languages and swamping native languages (as happened with the Russian influx into Siberia, the Nepali influx into Sikkim, and the Indonesian influx into Indonesian New Guinea).
Presumably among the languages with the most secure futures are the official national languages of the world’s sovereign states, which now number about 192. However, most states have officially adopted English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, or French, leaving only about 70 states to opt for other languages. Even if one counts regional languages, such as the 22 specified in India’s constitution, that yields at best a few hundred languages officially protected anywhere in the world. Alternatively, one might consider languages with over a million speakers as secure, regardless of their official status, but that definition also yields only 200 or so secure languages, many of which duplicate the list of official languages. Some small languages are safe because of governmental support, such as Faroese, spoken by the 50,000 inhabitants of Denmark’s self-governing Faroe Islands, and Icelandic, spoken as the official language of 300,000 Icelanders. Conversely, some languages with over a million speakers but no or until recently limited state support are threatened, such as Nahuatl (over 1,400,000 speakers in Mexico) and Quechua (about 9,000,000 speakers in the Andes). But state support doesn’t guarantee a language’s safety, as illustrated by the fading of the Irish language and the rise in the English language in Ireland, despite strong Irish governmental support for Irish and the teaching of Irish as an official language in Irish schools. It’s on these bases that linguists estimate that all except a few hundred of the world’s current 7,000 languages will be extinct or moribund by the end of this century—if current trends continue.
Are minority languages harmful?
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?