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Endangered Languages

  
 
grant
19:25 / 18.02.04
New Scientist: Our languages are dying out.

It's like the asteroid that did away with the dinosaurs out there in linguistics-land!

Half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures, scientists have warned....

There are fewer languages than there were a month or six months ago," David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, US, says. "Human languages are literally disappearing as we speak."


Cognitive scientists say every one of these languages represents a way of looking at the universe. Like, whole ontologies are being wiped out here by globalization pressures.

Still, there be hope: But just as many minority languages are dying out, the languages that dominate the globe, such as Chinese, English and Spanish, are becoming increasingly varied and complex, says David Lightfoot, a language researcher at Georgetown University. And new languages may even spring up. For example, new versions of Chinese are likely to emerge that cannot be understood by some other Chinese speakers.



Does that mean that global culture languages are like memetic cockroaches in this extinction scenario?
 
 
grant
19:28 / 18.02.04
One outfit hoping to stem the tide is the Rosetta Project, which is hoping to archive over 1,000 languages and store them on this high-tech, long-life disk as well as their web page, so people far in the future can, uh, put it in their CD-ROMs and recreate the extinct grammars and vocabularies.
 
 
Bomb The Past
01:50 / 19.02.04
The most worrying issue for me is the ontological question. I supose you can see langauges as implicit metaphysical treatises. For example, Mandarin's usage of mass nouns predisposes its discourse to take a more holistic approach to the world than say, English, which demarcates objects more readily. Every language has a different way of slicing up the world or handling concepts, and it seems terrible that some of these configurations might be lost.

Even if the aims of the satisfyingly named Rosetta Project are fulfilled, there still might be problems. Without native speakers, there seems to be a possiblity of the failure of radical translation à la Quine. That is, we might just slot the language into our existing mental frameworks with respect to language and thereby lose some of the quiddity of the language and the concepts it brings with it.
 
 
Fist Fun
08:00 / 19.02.04
Perhaps it is an evolution rather than an extinction. If each of these smaller languages provided real value then they wouldn't be in danger of extinction. Having fewer languages that more people can understand and communicate with is surely better.
 
 
Lugue
19:48 / 19.02.04
Buk, you're not taking in consideration the cultural value of languages. You're argument that a language that fails to make the process of communication an easier one is useless is obviously valid since the point of a language is to allow communication, sure, but languages are also constantly evolving cultural artefacts, closely tied to the culture(s) to which they're initially associated with, changing and growing as it (they) do.

Of course, with the use of English (and other important languages) as a bridge between cultures, native languages suffer the process that this thread is about in the first place, which you'd seem to consider natural. And it is. I just personally don't see it as a good one, as languages are important cultural aspects.

Oh my. This might just be my first post outside Conversation. I expect a severe beating for my lack of wit and brilliant use of rethoric. But I just felt like adding my (unoriginal) thoughts :P
 
 
eye landed
20:20 / 19.02.04
Bemoaning the loss of languages presupposes the Sapir-Whorf theory, which says our thoughts are determined by the linguistic tools we learn to articulate them.

If language is a product of thought, on the other hand, loss of language merely reflects a recognition of their inefficiency in expressing the thoughts we currently want to express.

Like most psychological processes, language and thought certainly influence each other both ways. While we can be saddened by losses, we should take heart that languages are lost because they aren't needed anymore. If we (as a species) invented a language--and its unique cognitive web--then it's in our brains somewhere and we can invent it again, perhaps in a different form.

On the other hand, it is upsetting to see which languages in particular are taking over. Colonialism may have failed in the political realm, but cultural hegemony is well under way. Especially because of the internet, I can't see any language other than English surviving the next hundred years as more than a dead, ritual language. But political events may again lead the way to linguistic change. The cultural dominance of English speakers could be broken at any moment (as radical Islam keeps trying to do).
 
 
eye landed
20:23 / 19.02.04
Sorry...I didn't mean that every "radical" muslim out there is trying to break English cultural hegemony. I meant that the primary force trying to break English hegemony is a certain collective of radical muslims.

Also excuse my ignorance of how to properly use the words "Islam" and "muslim" and possibly "Islamicist."
 
 
Bomb The Past
21:57 / 19.02.04
From the position of a strongly deterministic reading of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the loss of languages would be über-bad. Effectively, we'd lose the ability to express certain thoughts. However, not many people go that far. The consequences are less bad for a weaker determinsim like the one you suggest, whereby there is a two-way causal link between thought and language. But, I'd still say the loss is pretty bad. Even if the same concepts are still expressible, the grammar of a langauge can intuitively guide us towards certain formulations over others. The less languages in play, the more people will tend to think in similar boxes.

I've had a quick look at some statistics on world languages. It seems that Mandarin is still leading the field by a fair bit, followed by English. I wouldn't underestimate Asia's role as a centre for language, especially as China is becoming more powerful economically. I'd be very suprised if we were living in a monolingual world a hundred years from now.
 
 
Fist Fun
08:01 / 20.02.04
you're not taking in consideration the cultural value of languages

Languages are beautiful. But the death of a language is a natural cultural evolution.

The growth and spread of a dominant language that is easy to learn and widely spoken is fantastic for humanity. It would be nice to keep all the other languages as well but that depends on enough people seeing the value in that.

You could reasonably do both. Encourage universal languages that help everyone to communicate and local languages that keep a culture alive. The first is important for business, trade, politics, peace the second for culture.
 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
15:50 / 20.02.04
It seems that Mandarin is still leading the field by a fair bit, followed by English. I wouldn't underestimate Asia's role as a centre for language, especially as China is becoming more powerful economically.

I would be very surprised to see Mandarin prevail over English. English is easier to learn and less complicated. I have heard that English is more succint when discussing technological issues. I think it will come down to whichever language is better at describing technology, it is the driving force of globalization that is causing the extinction of these languages.

It would not surprise me to see a largely monolinguistic global culture 100 years from now. I don't know that English will necessarily be that language, I think Spanish will give English a run for its money. However, whichever language is eventually adopted as the world standard will be different from its present form. Part of that will come from the natural tendency of languages to evolve. When a language is adopted as universal, it will end up with quite a few words being imported from other languages, as has happened with the English language over the centuries.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
10:13 / 21.02.04
The ethics of language preservation and language death are interestingly complex. As a student of linguistics I briefly considered getting involved in fieldwork with endangered languages. However, when I investigated the possibilities I discovered that the major organisation involved in preserving minority languages is the SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) which is a Christian set-up. They have quite a few non-Christian linguists working for them who have evidently decided that the data they are collecting justifies the infliction of missionary Christianity on the people they are collecting it from. I disagree, so I didn't get involved.

The general problem is that there will always be a cost to the speakers of the language. If they lose their language, they lose part of their culture. If they don't lose their language, they lose something else, usually economic advantage.

In my view the best thing that can be done is to give training in descriptive linguistics to native speakers of the minority languages, since native speakers tend to do the best job of description, and being members of the culture themselves, are less likely to have ulterior motives. They will also be able to carry out long term work.

As for the strong version of Whorfianism (Some types of natural linguistic structure inevitably determine thought differently from others), it's crap. Whorf did much of his work on the semantics of Hopi. He never actually spoke to a native speaker of Hopi, or even got closer to one than about 200 miles. Subsequent investigations of Hopi have shown he misrepresented evidence to support his case (I can't remember the references but will post them if anyone's interested)
There has been some interesting work on the weaker versions of linguistic relativity, which has provided much better cases and evidence than Whorf ever did. A good example is directional terms in Guugu Ymithir (an Austrailian language). Guugu Ymithir doesn't have person centred directional terms (equivalents of in front, behind, left & right), but only abstract ones (e.g north, south)
I definitely believe in a weak version of linguistic relativity. Unfortunately we can't say anything more meaningful than this. The trouble is that the semantics/pragmatics of natural languages is still so primitive that it is difficult to put one's finger on what exactly is being lost, and therefore it is even more difficult to figure out what amount of effort should be put into saving it. Nevertheless it is absolutely clear that language preservation work should be carried out.

Substatique, I think your point about our ability to regenerate languages may be technically valid but is misleading given the realities of the situation. We probably will be able to regenerate the lost grammars at some time in the future. However, we don't know when this will be, so it seems foolish to ditch them now. The grammars of these languages contain vital clues to the nature of the human language faculty, which is still very much an unsolved problem.
Abandoning endangered languages in this way is like chucking away pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle and arguing that we will be able to figure out what they were later on. It's just too happy-go-lucky for me to be comfortable with. We have these resources, and ceteris paribus we should try and preserve them. If we don't, we run the risk of hobbling the development of linguistics.
 
 
grant
14:51 / 23.02.04

I would be very surprised to see Mandarin prevail over English. English is easier to learn and less complicated.

English might be more succinct about technology, but Mandarin has no verb tenses and no difference between "he" and "she" (or "him" and "her").

In fact, compare:
Wo shih ta-da tai-tai | I am his wife
Ta shih wo-da tai-tai | She is my wife.
Wo shih Grant Tai-tai | I am Mrs. Grant.

The vocabulary is streamlined, there aren't contractions, there aren't irregular pronouns (or verbs, since there aren't tenses).
Learning to read Mandarin is a challenge, although it uses the same written form as every other Chinese dialect (and is vaguely similar to Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese). But speaking it with correct grammar isn't as difficult as speaking English -- the main challenge for English speakers are the tones, but for someone raised in the language, they're not a problem.

One of the things the study points out is that dialects are continuing to diversify and grow within large language groups, like Chinese -- differences based on regional accents or on technical requirements. This might be analogous to, I dunno, different kinds of stray dogs filling the empty ecological niches left by the extinctions of, say, bobcats, raccoons and otters. The ecosystem might continue onward, but it could be that the lack of genetic diversity would cause a problem (like if a "dog-flu" swept through the area, killing all the dogs -- the system would collapse).

So I suppose the question would be: Do languages function like organisms in an ecosystem? Can their memetic variety help us deal with new and different ideas -- including particularly challenging ones? What would a "dog-flu" idea look like anyway?
 
 
Hieronymus
15:28 / 23.02.04
Slashdot made an interesting link between languages and the need for their variety in programming languges. Something I've never seen drawn before.

"...with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics"
 
 
grant
18:20 / 24.02.04
The Washington Post just had a fascinating piece today on nushu, a women-only script developed in Hunan Province, China as a way of getting around the patriarchy. It, too, is dying out.

Scientists have only known about it for 20 years.

The sworn sisterhood tradition in this region has led some scholars to speculate that nushu developed as a secret language for lesbians, according to Zhao Liming, a literature professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who helped bring nushu to researchers' attention in the 1980s and is one of the foremost authorities on it.

"But that is not true," she said in an interview. "They just wanted a way to express themselves." She added: "Women needed a spiritual life. They could not write Chinese, but they wanted to express their feelings."

Most important to the women who learned it, sometimes memorizing letters written on the palms of their hands because of a lack of paper, nushu liberated them from illiteracy.

 
 
Cheap. Easy. Cruel.
11:49 / 08.03.04
This article in National Geographic says that English could become like Latin was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. It will be the language of science, but not necessarily the everyday language of the scientists using it. It also says that Mandarin Chinese is the language with the most native speakers in the world.
 
 
grant
15:14 / 08.03.04
It might have the most native speakers in the world, but that's not nearly as mobile a population as English speakers. Or, for that matter, German speakers.

If the new Chinese economic & cultural reforms lead to a traveling business class (the kind of nomadic professionals I *know* Nick started a thread about in either the Switchboard or the Head Shop, but I can't find now), then you'll find a lot more Chinese words filtering into business-speak -- corporate jargon as well as service-industry stuff (waiters, hotel clerks, flight attendants, limo drivers, tech support people, all those folks).

And I think the net is going to have a significant -- significant -- effect on the way we use language, especially between cultures. It takes personal mobility out of the equation, since websites are kind of everywhere at once. I think English is better on the web than Chinese because there's no good way to write out tones in pinyin (that is, using the Latin alphabet we use), so words suddenly have all sorts of extra meanings. But I think there are probably other languages (Japanese? Bahasa Indonesia?) that could really flourish online if they had enough of a web citizenry to push them forward. For now, English is top dog in net-based global communication, though, and I think it's likely to remain so until something drastic changes.

I don't think the web is centered around a kind of technical discourse like Latin once was. But the Morse Code used by telegraph operators might be a more apt comparison, more personal and communication-oriented... and there's not a lot of Morse fluency out there anymore either.

Anyway, I'm gonna stop talking out of my butt and go read that article now.
 
 
Panic
17:42 / 08.03.04
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley is a great, heartbreaking look at this topic.

A certain Aboriginal language is down to three speakers; one speaks a dialect so significantly different it is almost incomprehensible to the other two. The other two are brother and sister, and tribal taboos prevent brothers and sisters from speaking to one another after puberty.

I had to put it down after that part.
 
 
Panic
17:48 / 08.03.04
Buk said; Perhaps it is an evolution rather than an extinction. If each of these smaller languages provided real value then they wouldn't be in danger of extinction. Having fewer languages that more people can understand and communicate with is surely better.

Is there such a thing as Laissez-Faire Linguistics? If not, I think you just invented it!
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
20:23 / 08.03.04
The bottom line is that languages aren't fluffy, and there's nothing anyone can do about that. It's a rare person who can get worked up about the loss of another split-ergative case system.

I can't see Mandarin spreading outside China because of the tone thing. Tone difference distinguishing lexical items is very hard to do if you don't have it in your first language.
Japanese is possible, I s'pose- it goes into Roman without serious trouble- but the verb is at a different end of the sentence from most of the worlds languages. Also they have all that politeness stuff, tho' i gather it is falling out of use with the younger generation.

Frankly, tho' I think any account that prefers one language over another for functional reasons is kidding itself. What ultimately matters, unfortunately, is power. Otherwise the world's dominant language would be something with a decently phonemic alphabet, minimal variant conjugations and declensions, and a sensibly combinatorial lexical morphology. Like Russian. Instead we have a bastard Germanic with hopelessly mongrel vocabulary and a retarded spelling system straight out of the fifteenth century.

Looking on the bright side, however the dominance of English doesn't have to mean everyone speaking the same stultifying McLanguage. People inevitably change the language they use, more often than not creating marvellous bits of linguistic reverse-engineering that preserve the distinctiveness of their cultures and do a much better job of communicating the individuality of the cultures to the rest of the world. It's amazing how far you can get from standard English in a little over a century: Radio Australia News in Tok Pisin
 
 
Fist Fun
18:27 / 20.03.04
The Slashdot quote;
"...with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics"

That makes little sense. Sure one way of improving underlying heuristics would be to artificially keep alive commercially unviable languages but are more efficient ways to do this. Like research.

With human languages it is different because it isn't just a commercial transaction.
 
 
beelzebub jones
21:58 / 20.03.04
can you imagine english if the french hadn't taken over for a couple of hundred years. without those fabulous adjectives we'd be saddled with compound nouns like the germans. speaking of german, angst and schadenfreude are now english words. even so english will never paint the world as poetically as spanish who think of the sea as profound, not just deep. and he in japanese means fart, he he. who can conjugate the word "dah" in spanglinese? and whose to say dead languages can't talk? dico ergo sum.
 
 
Bomb The Past
16:17 / 24.03.04
Another link here - a new centre for research into endangered languages is being set up at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The article says that parents are tending to give economic concerns more importance in choosing what languages to teach their children. Naturally, this is leading to homogenisation as common languages for business communication are sought. This seems to support Buk's laissez-faire linguistics in both senses of the term.
 
 
grant
19:56 / 05.04.04
I just found some ammunition for the "survival of the fittest" side of the battle here.

It's a page on the Alamblak numbering system.

From the site:
Alamblak has only words for 1, 2, 5, and 20, and other numbers are described as combinations of them.



It's a sublanguage under "Sepik" and is spoken on Papua New Guinea, apparently by a race of mathematical savants.
 
 
telyn
23:14 / 09.04.04
I find the existence of a dictionary and grammar far more unsettling than the threat of globalistation. I don't think that modes of communication and expression should ever have a "right" or "wrong" about them. I can see that standardisation of language has made communication much faster and easier, but at a cost to personal involvement - a lethargy towards exploring and understanding the world. (I think that reaction may have more to do with my relationship with English as taught in the British education system.)

Cultures can defend themselves. Immigrant communities within another country, or even specific islands. Take the celtic countries for example. Once they realised they were under threat (Wales in particular), they have taken steps to preserve their identity and promote their languages (eg bi-lingual schools, promotion of national instruments and traditions). However these are relatively wealthy countries with the resources to do so and a commercial incentive through the tourist trade. I can't see a small village in Russia achieving or even attempting that.

I think there is a great deal of potential for new languages and modes of communication to be developed on the net. A spoken language always has some degree of flexibility within it, and especially English with such a history of change. I can imagine communities adapting that into something new, a distinct language to go with a distinct and separatist identity. The net also has a potential as a medium for new forms of communication, because computers are tools we haven't fully explored yet. I can't imagine distinct modes of thought springing up around a language that is essentially bastardised english but I can imagine new modes of thought surrounding something that is based upon communcation not through a written or spoken language.

I'm hoping that as globalisation becomes more obvious there will be more communities who chose to hold on tightly to their culture and what aspects of their way of life they can keep. One day we might all be immigrants in a world of global culture and make an effort to preserve our culture and language.
 
 
Scanner Vainly
05:14 / 10.04.04
There is evidence of a relationship between a culture's degree of industrialization and the variety of color words in its language: Check out this Scientific American article. While humans may experience the senses in some fundamental way, lingual evolution comes out of necessity and transition within specific cultures. Perception may alter language, rather than the other way around. As Israel was established, Hebrew, a language previously found only in prayer or embedded in patois such as Ladino and Yiddush, was forcefully resurrected. The language was modernized, partially as a way to foster unity and nationalism. Language is often a very powerful rallying point for ethnicity and class, so no wonder it shifts about through development and revolution.
 
 
telyn
12:49 / 10.04.04
Maybe languages are the tangible, visible part of a culture as a whole. It's very hard to measure how modes of thought exist but much easier to measure how many people speak a language. Maybe the greater danger is people losing their way of life and the loss of language is just symptomatic.
 
 
kid entropy
12:41 / 11.04.04
if it's not complex enough,it gets dissolved.no matter how sentimental a view one takes,if the language is incapable of 'connecting the dots',it's out.do our opinions really matter here?it'll all unfold,despite the babble and chatter.one language eventually,i think.once everyone gets comfortable in the enormous sea of language that is...uberspeak.
 
 
solomon
21:41 / 12.04.04
don't forget that having your own language is the strongest method of defending and defining cultural groups. i consider myself a celt, but you look at me and see a white guy. it's a bit hard to convince others that my ethnic identity is part of a seperate tradition that was attacked and erased by these english "whites". why? because where i live, the goverment long ago set about persecution of spoken gaelic, along with miq'maw, so that celtic settlers would see all native tribes as homogenous "indians", and they would see us as homogenous "whites". today we're allies in a last ditch effort to save both our cultures from complete assimilation. language is a weapon
 
 
grant
14:06 / 13.04.04
Language is a weapon

and

Hebrew... was forcefully resurrected

kind of stand out as having a relation here.

My filecard on spoken Hebrew: all their swear words come from Arabic. Because the language wasn't a living language, you see. It wasn't even a common tongue -- it was designed only for prayer and commentary on prayer. So if a Hebrew-speaking Jewish settler wants to say, "Get your donkey shit out of my suburb!" to a Palestinian farmer, he has to use an Arabic word to do it.
 
 
Scanner Vainly
14:59 / 13.04.04
There is also English in modern Hebrew; the word "university" for example is transliterated in Hebrew text. Perhaps it's beneficial for a language to be a synthesis of various modern languages. More extremely, Esperanto, which from what I've heard is more of a hobby language than a mode of communication, is a combination of several European languages. It's been shown that students who learn Esperanto before Spanish etc. have an easier time picking up other foreign languages.

So regardless of the politics of an ethnicity's borrowing of language, I'm a big fan of manipulating existing languages to create more efficient modes of communication. Another language-synthesis concept that's interesting is the portmanteau, which combines words rather than compounding them. "Smoke" and "fog" making "smog," for example. This open English, an already excitingly idiosyncratic tongue, to variations.
 
  
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