Why it’s not so bad when languages disappear

Chances are you don’t speak any Sorbic, Ainu or Manchu. These are among the 50 percent of the world’s 7,000 spoken languages threatened with extinction. Chances are you are intuitively shocked by the news that so many languages are disappearing. It signals a loss of cultural diversity, linguists continually claim, and of course they’re right - just as it is a shame that unique knowledge of nature and history is being lost.

But modern-day “language saviors” seem to overstate the case. As a post on the Exchange part of Ode’s website mentions, K. David Harrison, a professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College, is documenting endangered languagues, while being “on a quest to stop this massive upheaval of knowledge, fearing thoughts and ideas will become lost in translation.” He claims “the loss to science, to humanity and to the native communities themselves will be catastrophic.”

The problem is that Harrison wants to document the disappearing languages, while he should really be documenting the knowledge. Instead, on his website, Harrison writes on his homepage, “As a theoretician, I primarily investigate Phonology (sound structures) and morphology (word structures). I am particularly interested in a set of complex, emergent patterns known under the umbrella term 'vowel harmony.’”

That might all be very interesting if you’re a linguist, but what is the point of documenting an endangered language that only a few people speak, without making an effort to distribute the “thoughts and ideas” that could be beneficial, as Harrison argues himself, for science and humanity. Knowledge can only be beneficial when it’s available in a language others understand.

Just as the extinction of several European currencies ultimately yielded economic and practical advantages, the same applies - to a certain extent - to the extinction of languages. After all, it is a signal that previously isolated regions are increasingly united and that fresh opportunities are arising for young people who until recently were forced to develop their talents narrowly, within their own cultures.

Nowadays, natural disasters or new laws rarely cause a language’s disappearance. More often, people choose to move to the city for work and therefore speak the traditional languages less and less. It then becomes natural not to teach them to their children. After all, a more widely spoken language offers greater prospects for progress and economic success. Parents in Lausitz, on the border of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, would rather teach their kids German than traditional Sorbic simply because German will help them get on in the world. Young people themselves don’t seem to care one way or the other. A forgotten language should be seen as signaling rather than causing the loss of cultural identity.

The extinction of plant and animal species strikes a serious blow to an ecosystem, which must find a new balance. But a language plays no role in the greater whole. Language was conceived so people could understand one another. In a world in which people are increasingly connected and work in close cooperation, it is only logical that the need for local languages would fade.

In fact, the reason why we’re publishing Ode not only in Dutch, when we started in the Netherlands in 1995, but also in English, is that the Dutch language doesn’t bring us very far if we want to change the world by inspiring readers to make a difference in a world.

More to the point, less confusion in our Tower of Babel is conducive to world peace. How different might things be if Israelis and Palestinians could - literally - understand each other? Perhaps the “others” we always tend to mistrust wouldn’t seem so “other” if we could communicate better with them.