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.
How can we protect languages?
If you now at last agree that linguistic diversity isn’t harmful and might even be good, what can be done to slow the present trend of dwindling linguistic diversity? Are we helpless in the face of the seemingly overwhelming forces tending to eradicate all but a few big languages from the modern world?
No, we’re not helpless. First, professional linguists themselves could do a lot more than most of them are now doing. The great majority of linguists assign low priority to the study of vanishing languages. Only recently have more linguists been calling attention to our impending loss. It’s ironic that so many linguists have remained uninvolved at a time when languages, the subject of their discipline, are disappearing. Governments and society could train and support more linguists to study and tape-record the last speakers of dying languages, so as to preserve the option that surviving members of the population can revive the language even after the last aged speaker dies—as happened with the Cornish language in Britain, and as may now be happening with the Eyak language in Alaska. A notable success story of language revival is the modern reestablishment of Hebrew as a vernacular language, now spoken by 5,000,000 people.
Second, governments can support minority languages by policies and by allotting money. Examples include the support that the Dutch government gives to the Frisian language (spoken by about 5% of the Netherlands’ population), and that the New Zealand government gives to the Maori language (spoken by under 2% of New Zealand’s population). After two centuries of opposing Native American languages, the U.S. government in 1990 passed an act to encourage their use, and then allocated a small amount of money (about $2,000,000 per year) to Native American language studies. As that number illustrates, though, governmental support for endangered languages has a long way to go. The money that the U.S. government spends to preserve endangered animal and plant species dwarfs its expenditures to preserve endangered languages, and the money spent on one bird species alone (the California condor) exceeds that spent on all of our 100-plus endangered Native American languages combined. As a passionate ornithologist, I’m all in favor of spending money for condors, and I wouldn’t want to see money transferred from condor programs to Eyak language programs. Instead, I mention this comparison to illustrate what seems to me a gross inconsistency in our priorities. If we value endangered birds, why don’t we assign at least as much value to endangered languages, whose importance one might think would be easier for us humans to understand?
Third, there’s a lot that minority speakers themselves can do to promote their languages, as the Welsh, Quebec French, and various Native American groups have been doing recently with some success. They are the living custodians of their language—the people in by far the best position to pass the language on to their children and to other members of the group, and to lobby their government for support.
But such minority efforts will continue to face an uphill struggle if strongly opposed by the majority, as has happened all too often. Those of us majority-speakers and our governmental representatives who don’t choose actively to promote minority languages can at least remain neutral and avoid crushing them. Our motives for doing so include ultimately selfish motives as well as the interests of minority groups themselves: to pass on a rich and strong world, rather than a drastically impoverished and chronically sapped world, to our children.
CHAPTER 11
Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Sloth
Our salt intake Salt and blood pressure Causes of hypertension Dietary sources of salt Diabetes Types of diabetes Genes, environment, and diabetes Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders Diabetes in India