The Living Dead

Being the language addict I am, an Associated Press article caught my eye this past week about how thousands of languages around the world are dying out as speakers turn to more commercially-useful or national languages.\n According to the article, the world has about 7,000 living languages, as many as half of which have never been written down. Languages are dying out at a rate of about one every other week. For some languages, this is because researchers have not yet gained cultural access to them. For others, it is because we do not yet even know they exist.\n People hardly ever think about the importance of language on a greater scale than its usefulness as a personal communication tool. Especially as English-speaking Americans, we tend to have a “Tower of Babel” mentality that language plurality is evil. That unfortunate mentality often gets in the way of being able to communicate with everyone. But we would not be better off if everyone spoke English, because every language teaches us something new about human thought. \n A lot of people are apathetic about language extinction. Their philosophy: Times change, attitudes change; languages die out when they are not useful anymore. Speakers of a language obviously have a nostalgic drive to keep it alive because of cultural heritage, but evolution will eventually kill it just like every other language in history. It’s silly to keep a language alive if the only culture that needed it to communicate is dead.\n This viewpoint is right, to an extent. Language is meant for communication, and language death is an inevitable part of history. But for linguistic researchers, language is a tool for a different purpose. Whereas speakers use it as a tool to make meaning of their place and time in the world, researchers use it to compare those meanings.\n Of course, living languages are the most useful in terms of making such comparisons because they are more closely connected to their culture. But even languages that have been artificially kept alive allow researchers to see helpful cultural remnants. Because no two languages are the same, even these remnants provide valuable information about language that cannot be obtained from other languages. \n If we all spoke English, we would be less likely to find out how much we really “know” about the world around us. By studying languages, what we thought was “real” or universal is metaphorical or only related to knowledge of what is current and immediately around us. In English, we might think objects relate to other objects in a certain way, then realize how relative our ideas were when we look at how that object is expressed in another language.\n Although, as college students hanging around IU we do not have much control over language extinction, we should try to understand that the plurality of languages is important. Any knowledge we can gain from foreign languages is knowledge we would not otherwise have about the human experience.