Tasmania in the early 1800s by killing or capturing most Tasmanians, motivated by a bounty of five pounds for each Tasmanian adult and two pounds for each child. Less violent means of death produce similar results. For example, there used to be thousands of Native Americans of the Mandan tribe on the Great Plains of the United States, but by 1992 the number of fluent Mandan speakers was reduced to six old people, especially as a result of cholera and smallpox epidemics between 1750 and 1837.
The next most direct way to eradicate a language is not to kill its speakers, but instead to forbid them to use their language, and to punish them if they are caught doing so. In case you wondered why most North American Indian languages are now extinct or moribund, just consider the policy practised until recently by the United States government regarding those languages. For several centuries we insisted that Indians could be “civilized” and taught English only by removing Indian children from the “barbarous” atmosphere of their parents’ homes to English-language-only boarding schools, where use of Indian languages was absolutely forbidden and punished with physical abuse and humiliation. To justify that policy, J. D. C. Atkins, the U.S. commissioner for Indian affairs from 1885 to 1888, explained, “The instruction of Indians in the vernacular [that is, in an Indian language] is not only of no use to them, but is detrimental to the cause of their education and civilization, and it will not be permitted in any Indian school over which the Government has any control…. This [English] language, which is good enough for a white man and a black man, ought to be good enough for the red man. It is also believed that teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a positive detriment to him. The first step to be taken toward civilization, toward teaching the Indians the mischief and folly of continuing in their barbarous practices, is to teach them the English language.”
After Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879, the Japanese government adopted a solution described as “one nation, one people, one language.” That meant educating Okinawan children to speak Japanese and no longer letting them speak any of the dozen native Okinawan languages. Similarly, when Japan annexed Korea in 1910, it banned the Korean language from Korean schools in favor of Japanese. When Russia re-annexed the Baltic republics in 1939, it replaced the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian languages in schools with Russian, but those Baltic languages continued to be spoken in homes and resumed their status as national languages when the republics regained independence in 1991. The sole surviving Celtic language on the European mainland is Breton, which is still the primary language of half a million French citizens. However, the French government’s official policy is in effect to exclude the Breton language from primary and secondary schools, and Breton’s use is declining.
But in most cases language loss proceeds by the more insidious process now under way at Rotokas. With political unification of an area formerly occupied by sedentary warring tribes come peace, mobility, and increasing intermarriage. Young people in search of economic opportunity abandon their native-speaking villages and move to urban centers, where speakers of their own tribal language are greatly outnumbered by people from other tribal backgrounds, and where people needing to communicate with each other have no option except to speak the majority language. Increasing numbers of couples from different language groups marry and must resort to using the majority language to speak to each other; hence they transmit the majority language to their children. Even if the children do also learn a parental language, they must use the majority language in schools. Those people remaining in their natal village learn the majority language for its access to prestige, power, commerce, and the outside world. Jobs, newspapers, radio, and television overwhelmingly use the majority language shared by most workers, consumers, advertisers, and subscribers.
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
“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
