© Philippe Franchini, Paris
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Nothing stays longerin our
souls than the language we inherit.
It liberates our thoughts unfolds our mind and softens our life.
From
a poem in the Sami language
(Sweden)
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If Guarani comes to an end,
who will pray that the world won’t come to an end?
Guarani
saying
(Paraguay)
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Ten languages die out
each year. International action is needed to counter this erosion of cultural diversity
 Are the vast majority of languages doomed
to die out in the near future? Specialists reckon that no language can survive unless
100,000 people speak it. Half of the 6,000 or so languages in the world today are
spoken by fewer than 10,000 people and a quarter by less than 1,000. Only a score
are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
The death of languages is not a new phenomenon. Since languages diversified, at least
30,000 (some say as many as half a million) of them have been born and disappeared,
often without leaving any trace. Languages usually have a relatively short life span
as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Basque, Egyptian, Chinese,
Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Tamil, have lasted more than 2,000 years.
Minority
languages sidelined
What is new, however,
is the speed at which they are dying out. Europe’s colonial conquests caused a sharp
decline in linguistic diversity, eliminating at least 15 per cent of all languages
spoken at the time. Over the last 300 years, Europe has lost a dozen, and Australia
has only 20 left of the 250 spoken at the end of the 18th century. In Brazil, about
540 (three-quarters of the total) have died out since Portuguese colonization began
in 1530.
The rise of nation-states, whose territorial unity was closely linked to their linguistic
homogeneity, has also been decisive in selecting and consolidating national languages
and sidelining others. By making great efforts to establish an official language
in education, the media and the civil service, national governments have deliberately
tried to eliminate minority languages.
This process of linguistic standardization has been boosted by industrialization
and scientific progress, which have imposed new methods of communication that are
swift, straightforward and practical. Language diversity came to be seen as an obstacle
to trade and the spread of knowledge. Monolingualism became an ideal, and at the
end of the 19th century the notion of a universal language was born–a return to Latin
was even considered–which gave rise to a spate of artificial languages, the first
of which was Volapük. The one that gained the widest acceptance and has survived
longest is Esperanto.
More recently, the internationalization of financial markets, the dissemination of
information by electronic media and other aspects of globalization have intensified
the threat to “small” languages. A language not on the Internet is a language that
“no longer exists” in the modern world. It is out of the game. It is not used in
business.
The rate of language extinction has now reached the unprecedented worldwide level
of 10 every year. Some people predict that 50 to 90 per cent of today’s spoken languages
will disappear during this century. Their preservation is an urgent matter.
The effects of the death of languages are serious for several reasons. First of all,
it is possible that if we all ended up speaking the same language, our brains would
lose some of their natural capacity for linguistic inventiveness. We would never
be able to plumb the origins of human language or resolve the mystery of “the first
language”. As each language dies, a chapter of human history closes.
Multilingualism is the most accurate reflection of multiculturalism. The destruction
of the first will inevitably lead to the loss of the second. Imposing a language
without any links to a people’s culture and way of life stifles the expression of
their collective genius. A language is not only the main instrument of human communication.
It also expresses the world vision of those who speak it, their imagination and their
ways of using knowledge.
Dying
whispers of traditional cultures
To grasp how differently
each tongue reflects the world, one only needs to list the words that crop up in
every language with exactly the same meaning, words like I, you, us, who, what, no,
all, one, two, big, long, small, woman, man, eat, see, hear, sun, moon, star, water,
fire, hot, cold, white, black, night, land. There are about 300 at the most.
The threat to multilingualism is similar to the threat to biodiversity. Not just
because most languages are like disappearing “species”, but because there is an intrinsic
and causal link between biological diversity and cultural diversity. Like plant and
animal species, endangered languages are confined to small areas. More than 80 per
cent of countries that have great biological diversity are also places with the greatest
number of endemic languages. This is because when people adapt to their environment,
they create a special stock of knowledge about it which is mirrored in their language
and often only there. Many of the world’s endangered plant and animal species today
are known only to certain peoples whose languages are dying out. As they die, they
take with them all the traditional knowledge about the environment.
The 1992 Rio Earth Summit set up machinery to combat shrinking biodiversity. Now
it is time for a Rio summit to tackle languages. The need to protect languages began
to be appreciated in the middle of the 20th century, when language rights were included
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 2). Since then, a number of
instruments have been adopted, and projects have been launched (see pages 30-31) to safeguard what is now considered
a heritage of humanity. These laws and initiatives may not prevent languages from
dying out, but at least they will slow down the process and encourage multilingualism.
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