John McWhorter: Dying Languages Should Be Saved: But Will They Be Spoken?
[John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic]
You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.
I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.
Meanwhile, there are efforts of revive languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of being no longer spoken, such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Maori (Mark Abley’s book Spoken Here is a nice introduction, journalism-style, to such programs).
However, in these cases what seems to be happening is more that the languages are living as what I have called elsewhere “taught languages,” spoken by almost no one from the cradle, mainly used as second languages by a dedicated set but hardly an entire country of people. Even this is great. Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew, and that was a very unusual story driven by a unique confluence of religious commitment, a sudden mixture of people speaking many different languages, and arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes where only Hebrew was spoken. This kind of thing can’t ever happen in, say, Ireland.
Many address this issue as a threat to linguistic “diversity”--a diversity which I have revelled in avocationally my entire life and vocationally for most of it. However, given current realities, I ask in the essay whether this diversity is essentially an aesthetic issue, that we could approach largely with a dedicated commitment to documenting languages before they are no longer spoken. Along those lines, I also ask whether it would really be, in itself, such a horrible thing if all humans spoke one language...
Read entire article at The New Republic
You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.
I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.
Meanwhile, there are efforts of revive languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of being no longer spoken, such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Maori (Mark Abley’s book Spoken Here is a nice introduction, journalism-style, to such programs).
However, in these cases what seems to be happening is more that the languages are living as what I have called elsewhere “taught languages,” spoken by almost no one from the cradle, mainly used as second languages by a dedicated set but hardly an entire country of people. Even this is great. Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew, and that was a very unusual story driven by a unique confluence of religious commitment, a sudden mixture of people speaking many different languages, and arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes where only Hebrew was spoken. This kind of thing can’t ever happen in, say, Ireland.
Many address this issue as a threat to linguistic “diversity”--a diversity which I have revelled in avocationally my entire life and vocationally for most of it. However, given current realities, I ask in the essay whether this diversity is essentially an aesthetic issue, that we could approach largely with a dedicated commitment to documenting languages before they are no longer spoken. Along those lines, I also ask whether it would really be, in itself, such a horrible thing if all humans spoke one language...