Originally published 10 April 1995
In prehistoric times there were 10,000 languages spoken in the world. No kidding. Ten thousand. Maybe more.
This revelation, garnered from an article in the journal Science, came as a surprise. I would have guessed 500. But then I hadn’t thought about it much. Ten thousand languages is about one language for every unglaciated land area the size of Connecticut. When you look at it that way, the number seems reasonable.
The diversity of languages is diminishing. Plummeting, really. There are currently about 6,000 actively spoken languages and half of them are dying. Children are not being taught the languages of their ancestors. Instead, they learn English, Spanish, Arabic, or another of the more popular tongues.
By the end of the century we may be left with only a small fraction of the languages we have today.
I spend part of each year in one of those few places in the west of Ireland where Irish (Gaelic) is still the spoken language. The Irish government tries hard to keep the language alive at home and in school, but the pressure towards extinction is considerable. Blow-ins like me who can’t speak Irish accelerate the decline.
But the summer resident is not the main problem. More important are television, music, movies. The English-speaking mass media may succeed in doing within a generation what British imperial rule failed to accomplish in 400 years — driving the native language out of the mouths of babes.
It’s hard to know what to make of this.
On the one hand, I value diversity. A language is a culture’s most prized possession, a badge of identity. When the language dies, the culture dies. That’s the theme of Brian Friel’s drama Translations, which recently played in Boston. In the play, the British have come to a village in rural Ireland to map the land and Anglicize Irish place names. The purpose, of course, is to undermine the autonomy of the native culture by suppressing its language.
Our sympathy is clearly meant to be with the villagers, who are forced to surrender their linguistic birthright for a place in the world of power.
Linguistic imperialism.
On the other hand, the world today may have become too small for 6,000 cultures. Diversity should be our glory, but we have made rather a mess of it. It seems we have a low tolerance for folks who look, think, or speak differently than ourselves.
The fictional village in Friel’s play is Baile Beag, which means in Irish “little place.” It becomes Ballybeg on the British map. To preserve the one versus the other — symbolically speaking — Irish nationalists have planted bombs in bars and city shops, and British security forces have tossed purported bombers into jail with only a shambles of justice.
And so it goes over the face of the globe. Turks versus Kurds. Chechnyans versus Russians. Bosnians versus Serbs. Hutu versus Tutsi. Senseless violence. For what? An illusion of cultural autonomy.
In the long run, how we feel about linguistic or cultural diversity won’t make a bit of difference. There’s a force at loose in the world more powerful than any affection for vernaculars, namely those satellites hanging up there in the sky beaming down Coca-Cola culture to every square inch of the globe.
In the future, what the Irish, British, Chechnyans, Russians, Bosnians, Serbs, Hutu, Tutsi, and all the rest of us eat, drink, wear, play, do, and think will be largely determined by a few multi-media corporations that control the worldwide web. CNN and the Internet are the precursors of a new electronic imperialism.
The language that is beamed from the sky will displace all others as the world’s common speech. That language will be English whether we like it or not.
If the majority of the world’s languages are doomed to extinction, then it may be good to remember the ways our speech unites us rather than divides us.
The linguists Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have argued that all languages share a deep structure that is genetically wired into the human brain. Pinker’s new book is called The Language Instinct. We speak, he says, for the same reason birds migrate: We have no choice. The specific words we speak are culturally transmitted, but the instinct to speak is born with us.
“There are Stone Age societies,” says Pinker, “but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.” The speech of the most culturally isolated people on earth is as rich as the language of Shakespeare. A common human grammar is coded in the genes.
I’m not sure that Chomsky and Pinker have proved their case for language genes, but I’d like to believe it. As thousands of languages are driven into oblivion by the satellite empires of the sky, it will be consoling to know that our common linguistic heritage is more important than the fragile differences between, for example, Baile Beag and Ballybeg.
