A Loss for Words: Can a Dying Language Be Saved?
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Give it some time.
And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise.
That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language.
In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise?
It's the opportunity cost.
How does one rank the usefulness of knowledge? Language acquisition (and the acquisition of a particular language) is not a skill in isolation. It enhances other skills such as problem solving, logical inference, the ability to recognize patterns, knowledge synthesis... skills I daresay are useful in other fields, such as computer programming. I hear your argument a lot among people who just plain don't like learning languages and think it's "worthless," or that they'll "never use it" -- but the same thing could be said of some mathematical disciplines. However, there is little doubt that those mathematical disciplines contribute to other areas of knowledge.
Really? How, exactly? Will a significant number of these countries be doing business directly with Chinese counterparts ...who don't already speak English? As someone who learned Mandarin, I can promise that the vast majority of its benefits I've had to go out of my way to enjoy.
Why should the small number of people who will find any use at all out of Chinese be valued more than maintaining a language that is significant to their heritage?
However, all primary school children are forced to use "incidental Welsh" in every single subject lesson. In my kids school there are Urdu, Mandarin, Swedish, Spanish speaking kids .. but none that speak Cymraeg at home as a domestic language.
Most people who can speak some Cymraeg can't write in it and aren't fluent. Of those that are fluent the majority 75-80% use English for emails and texts and social media (per a recent study by the Office of the Welsh Language Commissioner).
Yet still, all subjects in primary school are hobbled by backward looking misguided nationalism - at present rates the only kids who will use Cymraeg in a job post-school are those in the Welsh Language Commission.
It serves no useful purpose for the kids but it's treated as more important than maths, science, English, ...
Now, I've nothing against languages. I find them fascinating but in mainstream education languages should be taught first as a means of communication. If people want to learn them later so they can hide away and not talk to people from other cultures that's fine - but that's not what compulsory schooling should be about.
Aside, how does language learning of itself improve problem solving?
Welsh has been largely abandoned in Cardiff and southern Wales, but there are large sections of the country where at least a quarter of the population speaks Welsh, and in other places 65-80% of people speak Welsh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language#/media/File:Wel...
Does communication have so little value that you'd choose an anachronistic minority language that a small proportion of the native population understand - and an even smaller proportion prefer in daily communication - in favour of a modern, widely used, language?
History has its place but there is very little of use to the majority that is gained by using minority languages - recently I was looking at an artistic Kufic Arabic script and at other times have studied (briefly) historic languages to understand other peoples, but there's no need to learn Cymraeg to understand Welsh people when you are one speaking the language of your people modern Welsh (aka English, that is seemingly dismissed for its name).
Learning Chinese, Spanish, or German as a child can help a lot during live, socially, and in other aspects.
Learning a language like this just for the sake of saving it won't have those same benefits.
Diglossia is very, very common worldwide, and many languages have a different functional distribution. In Morocco, kids may speak Berber at home, Arabic on the street, French in school. In other places, you may learn math and science in an international language and literature in a mother tongue.
Bilingualism is very common worldwide; people being bilingual isn't actually a big problem that you need to use state resources (schools and education policy) to stamp out mother tongues.
And as Joshua Fishman points out, if society isn't supporting minority mother tongues, then it is opposing them.
After having a child, I've become far more conscious of people who have lots of concerns about everyone's children. If learning Gaelic or Navaho instead of something else is a problem, it's not one that I'm worried about. Well rounded education is more important to me.
I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.
In other words "let me present my genuine opinion by wrapping it in a more presentable delivery".
It's an honest question and I was hoping for some interesting answers. I was hoping someone would come along and have something interesting a la Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs, & Steel"[0] that may explore what role languages had on development of cultures, similar to the aforementioned book's exploration of the development of civilizations and how that led to the fateful interactions that have shaped the modern world.
No, instead of an insightful answer, let's just let our liberal outrage fly at a comment that could not possibly have any good or real intent behind it. I'm clearly just a neo-Nazi posting up in here in HN, advocating the destruction of those damn Injuns! God forbid one uses a rhetorical device!
However, I feel that nobody plays devil's advocate in good faith. In the worst case it's a shallow wrapper for "lets pretend my hate is a hypothetical" or in the best, "lets spend a few minutes kicking the skulls of innocents down the road, merely for idle argument's sake." Which evinces such a callous disregard it's hardly better than the former.
More than 90% of their community was slaughtered in the Selk’nam Genocide, and the survivors were resettled in a mission camp. This is like saying that Yiddish in Germany in the 20th century was an "experiment that didn't pan out."
There is no need to pretend that what happened to these communities was ethically neutral.
A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world.
It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.
If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
Simple example: translate namaste into one English word.
I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.
Words aren't these indivisible blocks that exist in the universe outside of us. When we first learn what, for example, a "fish" is, we don't do a lookup in a mental dictionary for the brain-word that means "fish." We learn that whole paragraph about how fish are animals that swim in water and have gills and fins, etc. Then we come up with a name for that swimmy-water-animal-thing, and move on.
If a foreign word or concept is not sufficiently similar to anything readily available in a language, that language grabs the foreign word as a loanword and moves on. That's what languages do. This means it's valuable to have this as a reference, but perpetual storage -- redundancies and all -- in the brains of generation after generation seems inefficient and burdensome to the brains who actually have to expend effort to store it and also compete in a global society. If they want to, more power to them, but I don't know if that's the best mandated investment of resources/time.
I have a friend who writes screenplays. One of the more difficult things is getting the language correct for period pieces. It's hard to tell what turns of phrase would be out of place in, say, the 40's, and what would be in place.
Going back a little further, nobody alive knows what the Confederate "rebel yell" actually sounded like.
As long as the language is extensible then I don't see a major problem with translation losses, because they can just get incorporated into the language of the day.
I get that each language has ways of describing certain things better than others, and those superior language features are likely tied directly to the culture that originally created the language. I just think that the cost of maintaining a large amount of languages might. T be worth it.
Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn.
EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
I am too lazy to google but I am pretty sure that I read multilingual kids have slightly better performance compared to monolinguals.
A good introduction to the topic from Paul Bloom (a professor of developmental psychology at Yale) is here: http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/psyc-110/lecture-6.
A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_biling...
This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price.
The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.
Go on, raise them in a language that will limit their life choices and potential. See how that works for them. Then have them tell us how that went. Oh, sorry, that won't happen so easily, now, would it?
"Linguistic diversity" Is just another way to say "Communication barriers".
Funny how is is always something that should happen to other people.
False dilemma. You can raise a bilingual child, in no way limiting their life choices and potential. In fact, there is evidence that suggests that bilingualism provides cognitive benefits later in life.
In general, all knowledge should be preserved when possible. The question is whether it's better for it to be stored on hard drives or in brains.
Language contributing to group segregation is a very strong claim, however, and if you have any case studies (or, like, newspaper articles, this isn't academia) I'd be interested in seeing them.
Brains conceive new questions.
Languages are only ever "dying" because of state coercion aimed at robbing children of their cultural heritage.
And it's all in vain, making a language alive is the opposite of preserving it because live languages change.
Multilingualism is the norm. And it's easy enough to learn Math in English, English in English, and literature in your mother tongue.
I just dont understand why do we need multiple languages anymore. If anyone says we need them to preserve the culture, I dont understand that either.
My native language is not English, just in case anyone feels I want to force English down your throat.
As someone who speaks both English and a tad of Chinese, I am aware of instances where there are words in either language that can't be easily said in the other.
You'd think with a good enough command of English and logic you could necessarily translate any word of any other language in the universe.
However, I suspect it is not that simple. Some words invoke particular neuronal activity that encodes a particular thought which may be hard to replicate through the usage of a clumsy translation. Thus a difference in language may also be a reflection of a difference in culture and way of thinking.
Since people around the world care about different things, they will use different words more frequently, attach different connotations to them, and even invent new words whose usage you'd find to be isolated to particular geographical regions. So, the selection of a common language is almost like the selection of a particular way of thinking. The notion of cultural uniformity/superiority can rub people the wrong way.
So if there is to be a common language, it would be more considerate if it incorporated features from different languages, rather than be entirely from one language (English), and it should probably be engineered to be somewhat culturally agnostic.
Diglossia and multilingualism are the norm. There's no reason why people can't speak a mother tongue at home and in a local community, and use an international language for math, science, and travel.
The question is whether people should be coerced into abandoning their mother tongue.
What's that supposed to mean? Apart from as a tautology because we're part of the cosmos.
The prestige of English is wide but shallow: everyone's just in it for the money, and if something nicer shows up, the world will abandon English in a heartbeat.
If a language has spiritual value (like Latin, Sanskrit, or Classical Arabic), that's tapping into a narrower but deeper source of prestige.
Arabic listed as one language? Can Gulf Arabic and Moroccan Arabic speakers understand each other? I've heard people speak to each other where one speaks Spanish and the other Brazilian Portuguese. The main difference between Hindi and Urdu is the different script. Don't those languages have more justification for being counted as one than those of Arabic? It's even a bit iffy to count English as one language -- put 3 people speaking Indian English, Ebonics, and Geordie in a room together and see how well they communicate!
Distangling the Chinese languages is another huge problem, since the government of China sees them as all dialects of a single language, but any real comparison of phonology, syntax, or lexicon shows them to be quite distinct indeed.
My understanding is the syntax of Hindi and Urdu are very similar, but the lexicon is quite distinct. Since each has either a relatively more a Persianized or Sanskritized vocabulary.
It seems slightly obtuse to me that whilst do not teach computer science, programming, engineering or science particularly well in schools, we should worry about the preservation of teaching of old languages. That being said, I think it is extremely important to teach kids (and the public in general) about history as a way of avoiding past mistakes so I don't think we should eliminate it - I just think there are more important things we need to fix first.
The fact that 12-13 years of taking Irish classes daily leads to most Irish people having a few words and phrases is a damning indictment of our education system. It is also a perfect example of how saving a language that has fallen out of use is incredibly difficult. All that effort teaching a language to a country and, because it is almost never used outside of the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas, mostly in the west of the country) it has been my experience that most people very rapidly lose their ability in Irish after leaving school.
I have long held the position that forcing children to learn a dead (or at the very least, on advanced life support) language is doing more harm than good. It instilled antipathy towards Irish more than love for Irish in my peers. Making it an optional subject would mean only people who cared would study it, and they would perhaps be more likely to try and use it.
My mother is a primary teacher in a non-Gaelscoile (school taught through Irish), so I am well aware of the institutional funding bias that exists and agree it is completely unfair. It is another ill-thought out attempt by our Department of Education to prop up a failing system.
[1] Many Irish universities require English, Maths and a second language (Irish, French, German would be the most common). However if you don't want to go to college you don't need to sit those exams.
Languages have to be used or they're lost. I spent a year learning to read Old English and got up to a decent proficiency; that's gone, now, too.
Education policy in the West, but until the late 20th century, was oriented towards exterminated the use of minority languages. Consequently, there wasn't much experience until recently with policies to regenerate linguistic communities after oppression.
Mandating some minimal classroom instruction for non-mother-tongue speakers is exactly the kind of ineffective policies that people like Joshua Fishman criticize. More efforts these days is going into mother tongue preschools and "nests".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJ5tg6Pqcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAgcA0JEQkk
"But the loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them."
Would we discover that like computer languages, certain languages are just better at expressing some concepts? Would we talk about love in French and about science in English or German?
Or would our easy use of language just encourage us to merge the best of all languages into some optimized hodge-podge general-use language?
Well, obviously.