There is an article in The New York Times which focuses on the fact that many languages are going extinct as native speakers die. Here is the critical issue:
In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were "vulnerable to loss and being forgotten." Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
A language is a window into the mental ecology of ideas of a people. It is a connection to the past, and a promise to the future. When we abandon one language for another we retroactively shift our ancestral memories, when the nobility of Gaul gave up their Celtic speech for Latin they turned their back on the legends and myths of their past and seized upon a future where Caesar and Cincinnatus would become the heroes of their descendants; when the German Franks invaded their lands the nobles presented themselves as Romans, heirs to the vanquishers of Vercingetorix. The interleaved relationship of language, myth and history are clear when we consider the preservation of the great cycles of Gaelic epic history concurrent with the persistence of the language. On the other hand the legends of the Gauls or the Celtiberians are ghosts to us, preserved often in the garbled propaganda of their Roman conquerors or folk memories of their Roman descendants. But let me ask, what language does the typical citizen of the Republic of Ireland speak now in their day to day life? Though we may wax romantically about the whithering of the vast panoply of human languages,
there is a reason that local peoples have abandoned the village tongue for more a prestigious lingua franca
. This is no new process, it is a fundamental dynamic which has characterized all of human history. The peoples of Australia or North America did not come fully formed from the Dreamtime or the bosom of Mother Earth singing in the mellifluous tones of their "indigenous" dialects. Not only do languages change, but the orally transmitted ones tend to evolve the fastest. The diversity of tongues across Australia or North America is a testament to this quicksilver pace of linguistic innovation. This does not even take into account the natural synthesis, and periodic replacements, which would occur in the normal course of history. The evolution of languages is a destroyer of information, the breaker of old legends, and the shaper of new myths. Language serves to preserve history, unique information which records the past of our species. Information is precious, but fundamentally the perpetuation of linguistic diversity is a positive externality, all of humanity benefits from this richness, diversity and preservation of our species' creativity. This does not put food on the table, or allow one to participate in the global economy. The ancestral dialect does not give one access to the enormous body of literature which can be found in world languages. Some of my ancestors switched from Dravidian or Austro-Asiatic dialects to the tongue of the Indo-Aryans some thousands of years ago. Others shifted from the Persian or Turkic of their youth to the camp language of the Mughals, Urdu. These latter then gave up Urdu for the Bengali which defined the new nation in which they lived. I myself am illiterate in Bengali, but am quite familiar with the English language, as will be my own children. Their pasts will be that of the triumphant German step-child of Norman French. On a more philosophical level one must ask whether the creative genius of humanity is constrained and defined by the texture of a particular language, or whether specific works are simply masks placed upon universal faces. Does the language make the myth, or does the myth simply seek a language? I lean toward the latter, though I do not deny that the ancients puns and Hebrew world-play embedded within the Pentateuch are obscured in translation. Something special, sui generis, is lost as a language winks out of existence, but the fundamental truths that we value as human beings is extant in stories which transcend the particular speech in which they are transmitted. The Epic of Gilgamesh has the same heart whether it is in Sumerian, Akkadian or English. All men live only in memory after they die. Related: Ruchira Paul offers her opinion. Update: Check out this comment from Ruchira on her blog.
