> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.
This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone.
You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives.
You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation.
Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go.
If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
That's not really a fair comparison. The languages that are dying out do not have even remotely as much existing cultural material as English.
Even Latin, which has no native speakers and dramatically less published material than English is in no danger of dying out. People learn it just to access the existing material.
There are a ton of languages I would love to learn but I have no access to any substantial amount of written or spoken content, like you mentioned.
Hell even being in America, your access to pop culture media created in most widely-spoken European languages is severely restricted. If I want to read a German language book I only have a few choices to pick from that aren't specifically written for learning language. Movies are even harder to come by, and German is very much a living language.
I'm not arguing that niche languages shouldn't be saved, just refuting the argument that we need to keep speaking them in order to retain access to their cultural materials. Like you said, they need written or recorded cultural material to begin with.
A major factor in language death is parents choosing not to speak the language to their children. So apparently people are plenty willing to give up those things.
The flip side is it's easy to wax poetic about the importance of preserving language and culture when you will not face major barriers because of your language or dialect.
Your observation is valid, but there can sometimes be quite a bit of angst and suffering in this process, both when parents choose not to pass on heritage languages (that their children wish had been passed on) and when children choose not to speak heritage languages (that their parents wish they'd continued to speak). I've experienced this within my own family and heard about it very often in other families -- even where the languages in question aren't endangered in the least!
Sometimes the parents or children involved found this to be quite a hard and quite a stressful decision, and the people on the other side of the generation gap don't always feel entirely comfortable with the decision.
But you're right to point out that this doesn't have to involve any sort of coercion or compulsion; it's often just people making choices about what they think is best for their own families at a given point in time.
>A major factor in language death is parents choosing not to speak the language to their children.
And this happens with even major languages. I have a coworker who's grandparents immigrated to the US from Spain. Her parents knew Spanish, but didn't speak it to her. Now she has no way to communicate with her grandparents because she only knows English.
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. I have lived over half my life in Norway and my children have lived all their life here it would never have occurred to me to bring them up monolingual in Norwegian.
I was going to write "Why on earth did they not speak it to her?" but of course it is quite likely that there were perfectly good reasons in the time and place. And I know it isn't quite as simple because my language is English but I think the point still stands that she was ill served by the decision to not speak Spanish at home. Not only because she can't speak to her grandparents but also because she cannot experience Spanish culture quite as directly as she might have.
You sure made some assumptions about me and ran with them. An assumption you could have made, but didn’t, is that I was speaking entirely from first-hand experiences and/or the experiences of people close to me. And an observation you could have made, but didn’t, is that only one part of my post resembled any kind of actionable advice: The solution anyone can offer.
I don’t know that there is a different solution. If your community dies, you can move on or die with it. But if someone’s going to celebrate that, I hope they realize what they’re saying.
English is my third language, and I'm studying a fourth. This has made me keenly aware of the effort it takes to be a polyglot. One of the languages I speak is spoken by only three million people, and it can't disappear fast enough as far as I'm concerned. Language should not be conflated with culture.
I sort of hate to impose, but since it came up in a parent post… can you translate a joke from your 3 million person language into English which is not funny in English? I promise to use it as an example in conversation and preserve it!
> This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
I speak one of UN's big 6 languages and it's future is secure.
I care little for it's jokes, new ones will be made.
But if it disappeared tomorrow in it's entirety then I would not only not be disappointed, I would celebrate instead. The barriers are gone, the people are united. And that annoying "learn English" advertisement spam would also disappear, that's perhaps one of the best parts.
Some day soon, the last person who genuinely cares about the Howdy Doody TV show will die. No one else will truly care about it after they're gone, because no one will have fond childhood memories of watching it.
All this stuff dies even if the language lives on. The jokes stop being funny, and the stories stop being enjoyable. We just end up with a few preserved works that we label "classics" and force school children to read.
Honestly, I would be delighted if my first language somehow never existed and everybody speaking it was suddenly an English speaker. By what I listen around, most people in my country agrees.
And it's one of the top 6 languages of the world. I can't even imagine how somebody stuck with a niche language feels.
Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort?
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
The first time I read your post, I completely misunderstood it, probably because my idea of comfort is diametrically opposite to how you put it.
To me, the harshness of life is that there are different languages in existence, and that people are in no hurry to converge on one. And the discomfort is the necessity to translate between languages, or to learn multiple languages, or to get in communicative situations when either you or your interlocutor are not particularly fluent in the language you are trying to communicate in. For me, the less discomfort of such kind the better, even if it means that multiple cultures will become inaccessible to non-scholars. I do not believe we (common folks, I mean) are terribly missing the Roman, or the Ancient Greek, or the Mayan culture, etc.
Perhaps they felt that your point was badly made or that the world adjusting and someone's comfort were not connected in the way that you seem to be saying.
I think my point is that both you and they could have explained a bit more.
Either I'm getting downvoted because my argument was weak or didn't advance the conversation, or because I went against the site's hivemind. In either case, this site as a whole benefits when either are pointed out or explained. Either I become a little less ignorant, or someone else learns to question their beliefs a bit more.
That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language.
And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost.
But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure.
Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone.
You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives.
You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation.
Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go.
If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.