December 30, 2006
Iminngernaveersaartunngor- tussaavunga
John McWhorter in the New York Sun:
In the rush of the holiday season you may have missed that a white buffalo was born at a small zoo in Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 million buffalo is born white, and local Native Americans gave him a name in the Lenape language: kenahkihinen, which means "watch over us."
They found that in a book, however. No one has actually spoken Lenape for a very long time. It was once the language of what is now known as the tristate area, but its speakers gradually switched to English, as happened to the vast majority of the hundreds of languages Native Americans once spoke in North America.
The death of languages is typically described in a rueful tone. There are a number of books treating the death of languages as a crisis equal to endangered species and global warming. However, I'm not sure it's the crisis we are taught that it is.
There is a part of me, as a linguist, that does see something sad in the death of so many languages. It is happening faster than ever: It has been said that a hundred years from now 90% of the current 6,000 languages will be gone.
Each extinction means that a fascinating way of putting words together is no longer alive. In, for example, Inuktitut Eskimo, which, by the way, is not dying, "I should try not to become an alcoholic" is one word: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:43 PM | Permalink
Comments
McWhorter seems to assume that bilingualism is nearly impossible, and where it is occurs is "almost always due to an unequal power relationship." His example is shtetl Jews, who spoke Yiddish and Russian because of an "apartheid system." I'm not an expert on that time and place, but might it not be possible that they spoke Yiddish at home because they liked the intimate feeling it gave them, and Russian to the gentiles because that's what the gentiles understood? A people living between two cultures, to be sure, but not a case of "apartheid," exactly.
Similarly with immigrant communities the world over. If attempts are not made to suppress the old language, it continues for at least one generation because it's the natural way of communicating with others from the old country (who are often earlier immigrants who provide vital help in coping with the new country) and with one's family. The kids, if allowed to mix with kids native to the new country, pick up the new language naturally and are usually bilingual. The third generation often rejects the old language as useless for their purposes, and smelling too much of the "old folks"; and some in the next generations may decide to seek their roots by picking up as much of the old language as possible. (An overschematized history, but not far off, I think.)
Native American languages suffered because the U.S. authorities deliberately tried to eradicate them, punishing the kids in school for using them. But if that is not done, the old languages will survive in ethnic sub-communities as long as they are deemed useful by their speakers. French has lasted quite a while in certain parts of Canada, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I imagine that this will also be true of Spanish, and some other languages, in the U.S. unless the "English-only" folks get to feeling their oats too vigorously. (Similarly for the German dialect of the Amish.)
It's rather quaint that McWhorter assumes that if a single world language develops, it will be English. In this ethnocentrism, he is rather typical of right-wing communities like the Manhattan Institute. I think it's at least as likely that the final winner in the world language sweepstakes, if there is only one, will be some version of Chinese. Already, a very large proportion of the communication over the Internet is being conducted in Chinese; I don't know how much, relative to English, but those who think that English is "the" langage of the Internet are simply blinded by the fact that they only know English, so the Chinese part is invisible to them.
But what I think is most likely is that things will continue indefinitely much the way they are now, with English as a useful common language for much of the world's population, and other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic serving the same purpose for other groups. That is, not a single world language but an overlapping set of languages.
And as now, most of the world's population will live and die knowing only their native language. Relatively small groups of multilinguals will have to tie the human race together.
Posted by: JonJ | Dec 30, 2006 6:19:20 PM
Post a comment