The Death of Languages as the Death of Community: A Comment on When Languages Die

Languages do not, properly speaking, die. It is an evocative metaphor that accesses some of the compelling emotional and cultural elements that are indicated when a language is no longer in use, but it isn’t a death. K. David Harrison characterizes this as being “crowded out,” replaced by bigger and more prevalent communities, or sometimes simply “sleeping” (5). A close analysis of his own text, however, makes it clear that the proper metaphor – for it is still only a metaphor for the complex linguistic process of language shift – is that languages are lost, forgotten. This is appropriate because it accesses the element of carelessness that is embedded in the loss of a language. That is to say, carelessness in a strong sense—lack of care—rather than simply absent-mindedness. For a language to be lost indicates that there is larger structural neglect of those language speakers; they become a community who is so forgotten that one of the main dividing lines of their communal quality, their language, becomes impossible discern. They are watered down and blended out until they are largely indistinguishable from the larger language and cultural tradition that surrounds them. Many forms of specific information are lost in this process, but perhaps the most important absence is that of the perspective of the speaker. A community is destroyed when a language is lost because what had previously marked, created, and reinforced the boundaries of that community becomes impossible to discern. More to the point, a group of people who previously had communicative status in order to be able to demand consideration, political, economic, and normative, no longer have the ability to truly acknowledge themselves as a “we” that is capable of asking for consideration from the more powerful majority. In order to show this, this paper will discuss the processes by which languages are lost, and the information that disappears when they go, to help demonstrate that a foundational quality of a language is its ability to create a community of speakers that can stand up for themselves, even if they have to communicate to authority in a different language.

This process of community and language erasure begins, usually, with discrimination against the speakers of a language. Some countries explicitly attempt to stamp out the less prevalent tongue, such as Russia in regards to the Tofa language of Siberia (8), but that explicit discrimination is unnecessary for the language to disappear. Instead, it could simply become dispreferred, relegated to increasingly small subsets of cultural life, before vanishing entirely. Many of the endangered languages in the book are entirely unacknowledged by contemporary markers of authority. The Monchak people of Western Mongolia, for instance, are not considered to be an ethnic minority at all, entirely unacknowledged as a group that lives within the country (95). They are largely literate, but the only language they ever read is Mongolian, not their native language. Even their birth certificates have to have Mongolian names, making it extremely difficult to maintain an identity distinct from the majority (95). In 2005, Harrison indicated that almost 1/3 of the Monchak community was no longer living in their indigenous lands, but had relocated to the shantytowns surrounding the capital city of Ulaan Bator (99). The community disappears in this context because the language is no longer capable of maintaining connection to each other.

Languages are a marker of community insofar as they develop in order to be able to transmit information efficiently, leading the values of the group being literally encoded in the words they use. Harrison cites a vivid example, discussion the Tofa language and its tradition of reindeer herding; a Tofa speaker is able to identify a “5-year-old male castrated rideable reindeer” with a single word (27). This information does not only information of practical utility, but it also helps construct a shared valued system about the place of objects in the world. A common instance of this sort of function of language is folk taxonomies, which classify various animals, usually in terms of their utility in the world. For instance, the ||Gana people of Botswana separate all plants and animals into three categories: “eat-things,” “bite things,” and “useless things” (39), differentiating the understanding of the meaning of a thing on the basis of what function it serves in the life of the community. Similar sorts of examples can be seen in English, specifically if we reflect on words like “maiden.” This is a word that is archaic now because the social category that it indicates is now out of date; the language no longer has any pressing need for a class of young women identified solely by her virginal and never-married status. The loss indicates a change in cultural characteristics. Additionally, English words like ‘uncle’ do not contain a great deal of specificity about the precise relationship of the adult man to the child, indicating the lack of cultural importance on that kinship relation. But in Tofa, there exist five different words for five different types of uncles, demonstrating an entirely different family relationship simply by the words used to articulate it (58). Language contains within it much information about the relationship and world in which the communities live, and when the language is lost, the communal organization tends to leave with it.

The relationship between folk taxonomies and community development is fairly intuitive, but here is also a strong relationship between numerical systems and the development of culture. Humans always need to count things, but the nature and quality of these counting habits differ depending on the cultural contexts. To readers used to the base-ten system, body counting seems irrational and inefficient, but it reveals specific mathematical philosophies that would be lost in the absence of the counting system (176). It is suggested that humans evolved math through the creation of metaphor and in response to the predictability of the physical world (182), demonstrating that the ways in which cultures count indicates beliefs about the nature of the universe. For instance, the Amazonian language of Pirahã has an extremely “impoverished” number system, reflected in a general cognitive limitation on counting small numbers of objects (186). Other small languages have similarly paltry numerical systems, revealing the fact that numbers may not be necessary for human cognition and calculation (194). Some languages, like Pirahã, rely on the innate non-linguistic capacity of the human mind, while others offload the task onto the counting of sticks, bodies, or calculators (195). These differences are in response to environmental demands, revealing distinct ways of life.

To an extent, it seems reasonable to be suspicious of overmuch sentimentalizing about the loss of these different tongues. As Harrison discusses in his first chapter, the distribution of world languages is extremely unequal, with half of them having fewer than 5,000 percent of the people(14). He mourns these losses, implicitly and explicitly throughout the book, but it is possible such things are impossible to correct. Languages have very strong network effects, where it is more productive to learn a different language the more people that surround you that speak it. This leads to the fact that urbanization is, as he cites, incompatible with language diversity (14). Harrison appeals to the idea that the various languages, due to the information packed within them, are valuable for the knowledge that can be transmitted through them, the linguistic concepts embedded in the language itself, and the simple fact of diversity of perspectives on the world.

However, the existence of diversity does not imply an obligation to preserve it, in and of itself. In fact, while I agree with the three main points that Harrison cites as indicating the necessity of preserving obscure languages (the erosion of the human knowledge base, the rich stores of cultural heritage, and the insights into human cognition) (19-20), it seems that the most pressing argument in favor of their preservation is the final one he offers. Namely, the disappearances of languages is a product of massive, systemic colonialism, which has caused, is causing, and will cause massive suffering and death throughout the Global South and other peripheral communities. The disappearance of language appears both symptomatic of a systemic devaluation of indigenous voices and reinforcing that same lack of attention. This devaluation is explicit in the experiences of younger generations of these cultures, who frequently disparage and disdain their ancestral languages (27). Languages are forgotten in large part because the cultures that speak them are disparaged and themselves forgotten. Members of these linguistic minorities are cultural, ethnic, and political minorities. Perhaps the greatest reason to work to correct language loss is that it is work to maintain communities that provide strength and identity to human beings all over the world.

Reference

Harrison, K. D. (2007). When languages die: The extinction of the world's languages and the erosion of human knowledge. Oxford University Press.