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[epistemic status: not sure if endorsed, but I’m just going to throw it out there]
Linguistic rights are pretty uncontroversial. Even the UN endorses it:
Considering that universalist must be based on a conception of linguistic and cultural diversity which prevails over trends towards homogenization and towards exclusionary isolation;
Considering that, in order to ensure peaceful coexistence between language communities, overall principles must be found so as to guarantee the promotion and respect of all languages and their social use in public and in private;
Considering that various factors of an extralinguistic nature (historical, political, territorial, demographic, economic sociocultural and sociolinguistic factors and those related to collective attitudes) give rise to problems which lead to the extinction, marginalization and degeneration of numerous languages, and that linguistic rights must therefore be examined in an overall perspective, so as to apply appropriate solutions in each case;
In the belief that a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights is required in order to correct linguistic imbalances with a view to ensuring the respect and full development of all languages and establishing the principles for a just and equitable linguistic peace throughout the world as a key factor in the maintenance of harmonious social relations;
So what are the advantages of linguistic diversity? Well, for one thing, every language that goes extinct is one less language for linguists to study, and that makes it harder to figure out how exactly language works. For another, many languages have literature which has not been translated and, without speakers, may never be translated. Some things like poetry are entirely untranslatable.
This seems to me to be less an argument in favor of reviving dead languages and more an argument in favor of a sudden frantic burst of linguists and translators.
My position here is shaped by me being a skeptic about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The weak form of Sapir-Whorf has been validated: languages that use “north/south” rather than “right/left” have speakers that remember where North and South are more easily; speakers of languages that make more color distinctions have an easier time remembering colors. However, the strong form has not been validated, and I don’t think it will be.
Think about so-called “untranslatable” words from other languages. It turns out that all of those words are, in fact, translatable; it’s just that you need a paragraph to translate them, rather than a sentence. There’s nothing inherent in the English language that means we can’t express a particular concept. Of course, it’s easier to express a concept if you have a particular word, but English has never had any particular difficulties inventing words that its users need. The language which brought us “one-reply bitch”, “lackoass”, and “post-fartum depression” will not be long stymied by concepts without words.
As for the downsides:
The burden of linguistic diversity falls disproportionately on those marginalized. As a native English speaker, I am at an advantage in science, trade, and even tourism, because my language happens to be the lingua franca. A member of a group with a dying or dead language is in one of two situations.
First, they’re raised as a native speaker of a language with a few thousand other speakers, and then they have to learn English. If they’re not linguistically gifted– several of my friends are cognitively incapable of learning a second language, and I imagine this is not a malady limited to native English speakers– they might be confined to jobs that only require the ability to speak their native language.
Second, language preservationists want to make them learn the language. I notice that no one’s language preservation tactics involve making me– a white, upper-middle-class American– learn Quechua. They want to make the people who originally spoke these languages learn them. These efforts disproportionately affect poor people, people of color, and people in developing countries, for the simple reason that those people’s languages are the languages that are dying. Even the white, developed countries that have language-preservation efforts, such as Ireland, are countries that have a long history of colonization, imperialism, and oppression.
The problem is that all the effort being put into preserving a dying language is not being put into anything else. The school hours that Irish students spend learning Irish are hours that American students are spending on science or math. The money spent on state-owned television stations in a dying language is money not being spent elsewhere. Is it really worth directing that effort?
Now, I’m not saying we engage in the deplorable practices of wiping out languages. We should not punish children for speaking their native language, force people to change their names, or require workplaces by law to only use the preferred language. But I am suggesting that we leave it up to individuals whether they want to preserve a language. I suggest an end to deliberate efforts to support a language. There’s a difference between cold-blooded murder of a language and taking it off life support, and we’ve too long equated the former with the latter.
Thing of Things 
First, they’re raised as a native speaker of a language with a few thousand other speakers, and then they have to learn English. If they’re not linguistically gifted– several of my friends are cognitively incapable of learning a second language, and I imagine this is not a malady limited to native English speakers– they might be confined to jobs that only require the ability to speak their native language.
I don’t think this is a malady restricted to native english speakers, rather it’s a malady highly highly correlated, among other things, with people who grow up only speaking one language.
I would be very surprised if the number of people who can learn 1 language from early childhood substantially differs from the number of people who can learn 3 languages from early childhood. Also languages are weird, they’re one of the things you learn best when you are younger and worse when you are older.
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(epistemic status: gesturing vaguely a concept not fully endorsed)
This seems like is has a possible contradiction with your position in favor of transness continuing to exist in the case of humans being able to somehow resolve it. That is, a larger possible number of languages seems like it increases human flourishing/handwavey eudaimonia in the same way as a larger possible number of gender/sex relational setups.
That being said, language preservation efforts being focused on the groups who formerly spoke that language seems like a pretty basic coordination solution: it costs less (effort/time/money/knowledge) to focus those efforts in an area that is geographically, culturally, and politically constrained, and more likely to be receptive of those efforts to boot, than to provide high quality instruction in obscure languages in every public school system.
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“several of my friends are cognitively incapable of learning a second language”
Do they have some condition? Or are you basing it on their testimony?
Yes, not everybody can become fluent in their non-native language, but to be honest I think most English speakers who find learning new languages really difficult would be able to learn them if it was necessary. The reason it is so hard to learn a language for many English speakers is that most of us have little practical reason to do so.
Compare to, say, Scandinavian countries, which are heavily urbanized societies with a strong education system who speak languages that only a few million people in the world speak.Virtually all educated Scandinavians speak English fairly well, even if some aren’t at the level of fluency. They certainly speak it well enough that they could live in an English speaking country just fine.
With the right education*, I suspect that very few, if any, of the people speaking the dying language would be incapable of learning English (or some local lingua franca like Russian, Spanish, French, Mandarin, etc.) to at least a basic conversational level, even if they couldn’t have super deep or technical conversations in it.
*Which I grant that, in practice, might be hard to provide to poor people often living in rural areas.
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I don’t know if they have been diagnosed with any particular learning disabilities, but yes I know people who have had very strong motivations to learn a language and simply been incapable.
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How much time have they spent in an environment where people around them spoke only their target language and not English?
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I know nothing about your friends, their language-learning abilities, their techniques, or their motivations.
But for the median human being, at any age between 4 and 40, I would expect language acquisition to fail except in very limited circumstances:
1. The language is a dominant language of the learner’s peer group.
2. Fitting in is a matter of social success and survival.
3. Giving up is not a practical option.
These conditions do not usually hold for, say, an English-speaking professional living in Germany. It’s reportedly easy to build an English-speaking peer group and live inside an English-speaking bubble for decades.
On the other hand, imagine a grad student or postdoc who moves to the US with a decent reading knowledge of English, but very weak speaking and writing skills. If they work with an English-speaking peer group, and if they date or marry a native English speaker, then they will almost always be highly proficient in spoken English within 3–10 years. If they also read voraciously in English, they will also typically gain the ability to write plausibly and to use “intellectual” vocabulary outside of their specialty.
There are ways to learn a language that isn’t used by a peer group, but the costs of doing so are significant. Once again, the actual necessity of learning plays a big role. A French-speaking computer programmer, for example, has a very good chance of becoming a fluent reader of English, because the reference materials for many popular languages are ten times better in English. Or to give a more extreme example, an English speaker who sells all their English-language books and media, and who isolates themselves in a bubble of another language, will often pick up that language fairly quickly. But this is very drastic life decision, and it can often be an isolating one. It does not apply to the median person, and certainly not to the median person who struggles to put food on the table.
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I suspect that the inability to learn another language is a result of English being the lingua franca.
If you have a non-english language and go abroad, you can choose between learning english and communicate roughly or to learn the local language.
If you are speaking english from the start, you can usually just continue to use english.
The English people I know who travel extensively often complains about how it is impossible to get the ‘natives’ to not speak english so that there exists no opportunity to learn the local language.
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Related: I hold the opinion that if you move to a country/region with a dominant language, it’s your responsibility to try and learn that language. As xenophobic as the “English only” proponents in the US tend to be, I would never move to a country where English isn’t the primary language and expect that country’s documents to be available in my language. (By that same token, I’m in favor of robust resources for immigrants to learn their new country’s native language – it’s not right to expect someone to accomplish something as difficult as learning a new language without the necessary tools to do it.)
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Mm. I disagree? In part because a lot of people have impairments in language learning, in part because you’re never going to get everyone to learn a particular language and then they’ll miss out on important information, and in part because as a monolingual English speaker who grew up near Miami I appreciate their accommodations for my minority language. 😛
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Mmm, see, I’d be anti-Miami-becoming-primarily-Spanish-speaking in the first place.
I’m not advocating for callousness – if someone can’t learn a language then it’s not reasonable for me to expect them to. That’s pretty standard ethics: ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. I’m referring to a particular attitude I see, especially regarding Spanish in the US. If I moved to Mexico I’d do my damndest to learn Spanish because it’s polite; expecting the same isn’t outrageous provided sufficient resources are provided such that the ‘ought’ can become a ‘can’.
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When in Rome?
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@Lambert
Learn Italian? Latin? Something?
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My issue with a bilingual society is that you’re requiring everyone other than native English and Spanish speakers to become trilingual.
I acknowledge that there’s a parity to arguments like “we ask them to learn English, why can’t we learn Spanish?”
At the same time, there’s a real advantage to a society where a newcomer only needs to learn 1 language, instead of 2 or more.
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The American Southwest was Spanish-speaking before it was English-speaking, which makes the situation less clear-cut.
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@Matthew
Sure. Conquest adds a nasty wrinkle to things, and countries aren’t always the greatest linguistic dividing lines. I did mention region at one point, but didn’t want to bother typing region/country every time. (Quebec’s continued insistence on remaining francophone being another example, and that’s without touching countries like India.)
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“The American Southwest was Spanish-speaking before it was English-speaking”
Actually no. Spanish was spoken there before English, but it was never a majority or even a dominant language. The Spanish were defeated in a massive uprising and stayed in their little shtetl/pueblos for the next three centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt
The small Spanish enclave in New Mexico is the exception. The area was never extensively settled by Mexicans until after WWII.
The situation in Texas was similar, with the Comanches demolishing Spanish and Caddoan power in the region. It is a common misconception, common to people who, live in a world of documents, that Anglos took Texas from Mexico, In fact the Comanches did that and the Mexicans are too racist to admit that. Then the Anglos took it from the Comanches.
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That’s not very efficient. Wouldn’t it be better that some professional translators translate some documents instead of asking millions of non-professionals learn a new language? Specialization exists for a reason.
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This works when the only objective is getting to the documents. You’ll find that Evangelicals have only a slight interest in New Testament Greek or Biblical Hebrew, and they have more than about any other Christians.
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I think Christianity as a whole benefited a lot from giving up their linguistic snobbery and translating their holy texts to “vulgar” languages.
Then again, Islam is fairly successful too, and I think they insist that any translation of their holy text loses its holiness.
There is also a stereotype that Islam is very rigid (western converts often also adopt an Arab-like culture) and Christianity is very flexible (people from one denomination of Christianity complaining that the other denomination is “cherry picking” for example). I think their respective language policies may have something to do with that.
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Santiago,
Andrew Greeley argued that the undivided church, Catholic and Orthodox, went the way you say, and that’s what makes Christianity a world religion, the fact that it is not a reflection of or based on a specific ethnic culture. He also argues that Calvinism went the other way, mainly because of the adoption of literal readings of scripture, “the paper Pope”, as a rejection of papal magisterial authority.
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Isn’t this the same issue as advocating for the continued existence of disabilities on neurodiversity grounds, except that being multi lingual is a thing, so the cost is a lot lower?
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Certainly! And you’ll notice that “people should more-or-less autonomously decide what languages they want to speak” and “people should more-or-less autonomously decide what neurodiversities they want to have” are, in fact, the same position. 😛 (I even support accommodations for people who speak less common languages!)
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But not accommodations (which means subsidies, all accommodations are subsidies, always) for people who want to learn them?
“The problem is that all the effort being put into preserving a dying language is not being put into anything else. The school hours that Irish students spend learning Irish are hours that American students are spending on science or math. The money spent on state-owned television stations in a dying language is money not being spent elsewhere. Is it really worth directing that effort?”
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…all accommodations are subsidies? I think we might have very different definitions of “accommodation” or of “subsidy”. My definition of the former includes, say, being able to email my professor and ask for the PowerPoint slides, my partner noticing when I’m nonverbal from anxiety and helping me get out of the situation, the police not harassing my friends when they stim in public, and access to the drugs that keep me functional.
Irish students can certainly have Irish as an elective (actually they should have math and science as electives too. Institutionalized unschooling now! :P). And if a television station can support itself it should do so.
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Re accommodations- my use of the term comes from disability rights law, where “accommodation” means “things your employer/school/governmental entity is required to do that it wasn’t doing before.”
I suppose if you want to call “cops not hassling you unnecessarily” an accommodation, then some accommodations do not cost money.
If I understand your position correctly after clarification in the comments, it is something like this: State sponsored mandatory courses in Irish- waste of time and money that could be spent on something productive like science or math. Elective courses in Irish coupled with the existing social pressure that led to the mandatory courses in the first place- freedom of choice for which society is morally obliged to pay. But surely that money and time could be spent elsewhere either way?
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My impression as a linguistics student (which might be wrong, I still don’t have an enormous degree of familiarity with the discipline) is that most academic linguists would essentially agree with this. Well, at least, linguists would agree that one should leave it up to individual communities (maybe not individuals themselves) to decide whether they want to preserve their language, and that the priority for linguists is to document the language as thoroughly and quickly as possible.
It gets tricky in cases like the Irish situation, where I think a lot of Irish people value the existence of Irish as a living language* but aren’t motivated enough to learn it themselves. In those cases you could argue that the government’s language-preservation efforts might serve to prevent a sort of coordination failure where people would prefer to all be using their own language to communicate with each other within their community, but find that as long as other members of the community don’t know the language it is more practical to use a different one. Of course, these language preservation efforts seem to have little success in preventing this situation in Ireland.
* I assume they do, but I haven’t heard any Irish people’s opinions on the matter, so maybe I’m wrong. Would an Irish politician be able to say that learning Irish is pointless and not get a mostly negative reaction?
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My impression as an academic linguist is that most academic linguists regard preserving the diversity of the world’s languages as virtually a terminal goal.
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Hi, Irish person (and language/social psychologist) here!
If an Irish politician were to publicly suggest that Irish is pointless, the reaction would be
1) a very angry reaction from the gaeltacht areas (where Gaeilge is the first language). These areas are small, and rural, and generally economically disadvantaged.
2) a largely positive reaction from eastern Irish people who think that Irish is pointless and want to stop “wasting money” on printing government docs in both languages, having irish speakers available in the civil service, teaching irish in schools etc.
The first group want to preserve their culture, and understand that some government support is needed to do so. In many ways, the gaeltacht areas form a distinct cultural subgroup in Ireland.
Maintaining the Irish language (for me) is about maintaining contact with a rich history of art and literature, about establishing our national identity in the wake of centuries of imperialism (see also: Wale and Scotland’s huge movements to not just maintain their gaelic languages, but pretty much raise them from the dead).
It also provides a great insight into some of the delightful quirks of hiberno-english. For instance, Irish people use a form of present tense continuous that doesn’t exist in english proper “Sure, he does be hanging around the shops all the time.” And the notorious “feck” swearword derives directly from “feic”, the verb “to see” – “Would you feic at him there? Big smug head on him” (things being “on” people being another one).
When you’re speaking irish, having been brought up in hiberno english, it feels … right. Like you’ve been trying to twist English into these rhythms and cadences your whole life.Makes me a happy language geek.
On the post itself, couple of quick points (that I’ll try to come back and elaborate later)
– There’s evidence that bilingualism is good for you cognitively, in general. So there’s that argument for supporting bilingualism in state education, aside from the cultural ones.
– I think the weak version of Sapir-Worf is way, way too weak. The core activity of intelligent behaviour is relational responding (see Roche & Cassidy, 2010), which is pre-requisite for language (Relational Frame Theory: Hayes, Barnes & Roche, 2001). There’s lots of mental representation-free, functional contextual work going on in Psychology at the moment, and I think language is right at the heart of the big questions. Sapir Worf will make a strong comeback, I think.
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“For instance, Irish people use a form of present tense continuous that doesn’t exist in english proper “Sure, he does be hanging around the shops all the time.”
This furnishes a further example of the value of these preservation efforts; the insights they give into languages that have borrowed stuff like this. you are tight that this aspect distinction is not found in common English, but it is a feature of African-American Vernacular English, the is/be distinction, as in “You know you fuckin’ up.” (and you need to stop.) vs. “You be steady fuckin’ up.” (and you need to mend your ways.) and this feature was very likely borrowed from the Irish-influenced English of the several hundred thousand Irish slaves trafficked into the Caribbean and southern colonies in the 17th century. There were cases of Irishmen hearing African slaves (many of whom were bi-and trilingual back home) conversing in Irish, both for useful secrecy of it and for fun.
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Is there a proper distinction between strong and weak sapir-whorf?
Also there’s probably a word in German for things otherwise considered untranslatable, and it is probably a paragraph long. 🙂
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I feel like this is very accurate except for your mental model of what a language dying looks like.
It’s my impression that languages dying usually looks like the situation with Irish Gaelic or Yiddish. No speaker of the language wants the language to die, or even to personally stop speaking the language. Many people who are part of the associated culture but don’t speak the language want to learn the language. It’s just that learning a new language is hard, and although people value the language surviving they don’t value it enough to spend years learning a language to fluency when they could be doing other things they want to do.
I don’t think it’s usually the case that foreigners insist that a population that wants to stop speaking their native language continue to do so, because it’s rarely the case that a population actually consciously wants to stop speaking their native language to begin with. It’s much more common that foreigners insist that a population that wants to speak their native language (partially or exclusively) stop doing so, although again not as many languages die to coordination failure like with Irish Gaelic.
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Irish Gaelic or Yiddish are languages whose natural transmission has already been previously compromised. Learning a new language entirely is indeed hard, but learning a native language is not (or, at least, it is mandatory effort for every kid). In a sense a language with no children speaking it natively is already mostly dead.
Plenty of issues of linguistic diversity do not look like this; they look like a situation where everyone, aside from some remote villages, currently grows up bilingual in e.g. both Russian and Udmurt, and later on they end up finding there’s no point in using Udmurt anymore because Russian is handier and the ethnically-Russian people never bother to learn Udmurt. And then the risk is that their kids never grow up fluent in Udmurt in the first place, when the kindergarten and the television programs and school are all Russian-speaking.
(More generally, we can set up a scale of language vitality largely according to how old the youngest first-language speakers are. 20 to 30-somethings is usually an easy situation, as long as the majority and the government are willing to play along. 40 to 50-somethings is more difficult. Sometimes a language is down to 80-somethings and even that can be a salvageable situation, given a whole bunch of linguists to train second-language speakers and a whole bunch of funds to arrange e.g. language nests for kids to talk with the elderly…)
So key problem of language revitalization tends to be “how can we create more spaces where this language can be used”? Living languages after all cannot be only passively known, they will only survive if regularly used in everyday life. If a language like Irish ends up merely a hobby of nationalists, historicians, folk culture enthusiasts etc, that’s effectively a death sentence (even if these people would be, with sufficient funding, perfectly capable of embalming it and preserving it in a state similar to ecclesiastic Latin).
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How about a more concerted push to teach most of the rich world’s children to be bilingual when they are young, and this comes much more easily to most?
Yay linguistic diversity, yay relatively low cost.
Then we can have English/ASL* speakers which might help with the survival of Deaf culture in the face of increasing technological pressures against Deafness; and bonus, maybe it helps us examine hypotheses like “sign language evolved first”.
We can have English/Lojban speakers who might validate stronger forms of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. Like, are they kickarse at maths, or legal drafting, or analytic philosophy? I feel they might be.
Then we can have more German/Mandarin speakers which may help bridge a cultural gap and improve EU and China relations. Or maybe not, that’s speculative of course. But I don’t think you can argue it hurts. OK, yes, most educated Europeans are already polyglots, but I didn’t want to keep going to English as the “rich world mother tongue”. I should have gone with Japanese or Korean or something.
Etc.
And now, by forcing a relatively few privileged kids to learn marginalized language X, you give the language a community of speakers that’s maybe big enough to keep it and its culture alive, without having to put all the pressure for that cause on the children of the marginalized people who speak it natively.
=============
* (or BSL and its derivatives. Auslan represent, yo.)
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Confession: Yes, Lojban doesn’t really fit the bill of “native tounge of a less privileged community”.
But the idea makes me squee too much to leave out. Sorry.
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First, a large portion of the rich world’s children outside the English-speaking world *are* bilingual, it’s just that English is usually their second language.
I’m all for more early bilingual education, but I would want it to be in a useful language. Teaching children a dying language from a distant part of the world won’t preserve the language; the children will mostly lose functional use of the language pretty soon after leaving school, most likely. Why would they retain it? To maintain connection to a very very small community of people they may have nothing in common with save the language? A community with probably produces little culture they’d be interested in? My understanding is that a great portion of rich-world children who learn English in school maintained their knowledge of the language (and even helped develop it initially) for economic or cultural reasons (e.g. watching American movies without dubbing or subtitles). It’s hard enough to get native English speakers to retain knowledge of much more useful languages like Spanish (though not useful enough to retain), so I don’t see how somebody who learned an obscure central american language would maintain their knowledge.
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OK, yes, its artificial, and no more likely to make an enduring difference than the people who taught their kids Klingon as a native language.
But given The Internet, I feel like there is an iteration of this idea that can work.
Certainly I’d be happy to start with a goal of universal bilingualism focussing on obviously useful languages, before trying to experiment with more obscure ones.
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So how about “intermediate Sapir-Whorf”? The idea that “you don’t have a word for a concept so you can’t think it” seems obviously wrong, but I wonder if you’re giving short shrift to the idea that having pre-existing ways of dividing up concept-space or assigning central examples can make it hard to think of, communicate, or acquire new ones that are only a little bit off in an important way (and language does a lot of work in determining how you divide up concept-space and pick central examples).
…that said, it’s not clear that this idea has much of anything to do with linguistic diversity.
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Are you, perhaps, monolingual? Untranslatability is easy to trivialize when you see the output and figure, that seems understandable enough, but even seemingly trivial things like colours are so thoroughly embedded in a language+culture context that you could write a paper on it and still miss details. Being totally unable to express concepts is basically a nonissue.
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I’ve studied Latin and classical Greek on an undergraduate level, so I have a passing familiarity with the difficulties of translation, but I’m no expert.
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Consider that programming languages are indeed languages in a very reasonable sense. They just happen to need to be intelligible by a CPU or some virtual machine model as well as people, which constrains them to take very different forms.
Likewise, I always say that maths is at its most fundamental a radically different form of human language.
Note that at the birth of modern Western mathematics, in early Renaissance Italy, arguments were made using pages and pages of Latin prose – “consider that equation of the quadratic variety which, having the first of its roots greater but not equal to the second of its roots”, etc.
I think these examples are enough to prove an incredibly strong form of Sapir Whorf, provided you are willing to define language broadly enough. Of course its an open question if there exists any way to teach the average human to speak Python or Calculus “natively”, etc, so in this sense they’re not as interesting in this sort of discussion as natural language.
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And its easy to see examples that suggest natural language and math / code are on a continuum, rather falling into any sort of clear binary taxonomy. Consider what something like Wolfram Language is trying to be on the one hand, and Lojban on the other.
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The problem with leaving it up to the individual whether to learn a particular language is that the best time to start learning a language is under the age of 7.
(Okay, there’s argument about this — as far as I can tell, adults learn languages more cognitively and children learn languages more intuitively. Adults get larger vocabularies faster, but it’s hard to speak with a good accent and an intuitive, automatic grasp of grammar unless you start young.)
Children under seven aren’t the best at evaluating the political context of language learning, and it seems pretty common for second or third generation immigrants to regret, later in life, that they didn’t learn to speak more of their parents’ or grandparents’ language.
There’s some evidence that bilingualism improves executive function, too. I’m not convinced that language study is a bad use of classroom hours; Japanese kids have to study not only English but Classical Japanese in high school (now THAT’S a bad use of classroom hours), and they still manage to learn plenty of math and science.
I think that, if we can introduce young children to second languages in a way that’s fun and engaging, to give them a base for future study later on if they decide to pursue it — supplemented by lots of songs and comic books and cartoons and prose books in the target language — that might be the ideal situation.
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And the argument that I really wanted to make and somehow missed entirely:
It seems that high school language classes in typical American high schools are actually The Worst, as almost all students take 2-4 years of Spanish or French or German without ever becoming able to communicate effectively in the language. If this is the best we can do, we should just get rid of it; but I’m convinced that we can, in fact, do a lot better than that.
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“It seems that high school language classes in typical American high schools are actually The Worst, as almost all students take 2-4 years of Spanish or French or German without ever becoming able to communicate effectively in the language. ”
This is so true and I’ll tell why this is true (First, some context: I taught high school French, and Spanish occasionally, for four and a half years.)
For one thing most students take those two years of language simply to check the block. It’s a requirement for college admissions to most schools. They have no intention actually learning the language. the easy fix is to base a passing grade on some standard of mastery. I know, dream on.
For another, the selection of commonly taught languages is stuck in a time warp. Some schools even still teach German, but even with French, it’s been decades since it had any relevance to an actual work life. Spanish is not much better for any real use in the job market.
That means kids need Chinese, and here on the West Coast Japanese and Korean are important, and eventually Vietnamese someday. As for Spanish, even the Mexican parents see no point in it. (Most of them are Mixtec, Zapotec or other indigenous L2 speakers of Spanish anyway.) I suppose elsewhere Arabic or Russian might be useful.
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I strongly support the right of people to decide what the languages they want to speak. But there are some tricky cases. To give some examples that I’ve seen:
– Most French workers wish to speak French at work, but foreign multinationals have occasionally insisted that their French employees must use English while working in France. This is, of course, highly stressful and difficult for most adult French speakers. And so French law states that workers have the right to work in French (“la loi Toubon,” and several related laws). Within obvious limitations, this seems like a reasonable principle.
– Quebec presents an even trickier case: There’s a French-speaking majority that was historically oppressed, both linguistically and economically, an English-speaking minority which was later subjected to language laws that were partially overturned by the courts, and—in Montreal—a very large “allophone” group that speaks English and French as second and third languages. At least in Montreal, the solution has been for a large fraction of francophones and anglophones to gain a reasonable competence in each others’ languages and to try to minimize linguistic friction as much as possible. This has worked surprisingly well. Some of stickiest remaining difficulties involve tensions between parts of the francophone community and those members of the allophone community who choose to focus on English.
– There are plenty of countries where multilingualism is common, and there are endless patterns and variations. People may have different strengths in different languages, and may use them in different contexts. For example, I’ve spoken with an Algerian who observed, “I can’t really socialize in French, and I can’t carry on an intellectual conversation in Berber.”
Given all these situations, I am in favor of linguistic diversity. A certain degree of good-natured multilingualism is often the only way to achieve harmony in a diverse society—once you start preaching monolingualism, it becomes necessary to decide that one group wins, and that the other groups lose. And the costs for the losing groups are severe. It’s probably better, even from a utilitarian perspective, for the anglophones and francophones of Montreal to politely muddle through in their second languages when necessary. This at least has the advantage of being a symmetric solution where no one group is singled out and forced to bear all the costs.
…
And a few thoughts on language learning: Young children, in general, tend to only learn those languages which they actually need to speak. If they speak one language at home, and another on the playground, they will often grow up with weak to non-existent skills in their home language. Even a 3-year-old is capable of noticing that (a) nobody except one family member speaks language X, and (b) speaking language X requires hard mental work. And a large fraction of such 3-year-olds will drop language X as quickly as possible.
At the same time, adults who have no choice but to learn a second language will very frequently succeed (though the process may be long and stressful). My wife became fluent in my language in her 20s; I became tolerably fluent in her language in my 30s despite limited exposure. European soccer players who move to a new country routinely pick up the language of their teammates with little or no formal study.
If you look at the linguistics literature, you’ll find lots of research on a “critical period” for language learning. There’s pretty solid evidence of a critical period for accent acquisition. There’s some evidence for a critical period for achieving flawlessly native-like grammar. But after that, the evidence becomes weak and contradictory, and a lot of the studies are very badly designed.
As for various learning disabilities, well, that’s definitely outside of my experience. But I would encourage people with learning disabilities who want to learn a language to speak with any of their peers who have actually succeeded. One of the (secondary) reasons that anglophones are so bad at learning languages is that we have very few successful role models to ask for advice. Imagine, if you will, that there are at least 20 perfectly good ways to learn a language, and a 100 bad ways, and that some people will have strong preferences among the 20 good methods. Under such circumstances, it helps to find several trustworthy sources for advice and to experiment a bit.
Also, it helps to burn your ships and spend 500 to 1000 hours with the language skills of a toddler, socializing and struggling to communicate even basic ideas. (Or, alternatively, a ton of time plowing through half-understood books and TV series.) Obviously, many people will decide that’s much too high a price to pay, and I certainly can’t blame them for that.
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This seems like a case of individual rights vs. group rights. We prioritize the former over the latter, but we didn’t recognize the latter at all, and applied this view to languages, then all aboriginal languages would have died out already. I don’t know, but something about that seems bad and illiberal to me.
I also think that you could extend the reasoning of the OP to say that the arts and culture and sports and everything that’s not the hard sciences is a waste of time somehow, which I can’t agree with. Something that a lot of people care about and want to preserve by definition can’t be a waste of time.
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[warning: snippy]
(1) It’s interesting that you seem to implicitly divide all languages into “lingua franca”, “dying” and “dead”. Here’s an analogy: “I’m perfectly healthy, and keeping dying people alive is very inefficient and torturous for everyone involved, so I’m against medical care.”
(2) Explaining a single word in an entire paragraph may be a non-issue in technical translation, but it completely wrecks fiction. As a result, translated fiction is always different from the original. And yes, often there is no way to reproduce the original effect in the target language.
(3) Sure, some people are bad at learning languages. But business communication doesn’t require perfect fluency. And we’re not going to stop teaching mathematics at school just because some people will never master calculus (right?).
Look, I’m a filthy rootless cosmopolitan. I like English. I had to be persuaded that software localization is not a silly idea. I’m skeptical about many language preservation efforts. But seeing a native English speaker wring their hands about the plight of the poor minority language speakers suffering from the lack of English supremacy was still pretty irritating.
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The Internet might make saving threatened languages easier. Welsh (Cymraeg) is a living language because of all the mass media in that language, combined with a conscious effort to conserve it (it’s a mandatory language in schools in Wales, even though native English speakers don’t really learn it well enough to use it). Internet makes it easier and cheaper to create resources and media for minority language speakers.
As a native speaker of one of the exotic but not at all threatened languages (Finnish), what I would like to abolish is the concept of monolingualism being the norm. There’s nothing about languages that make people more suited to speaking just one. There are places in Southeast Asia where everyone speaks at least two or three languages, regardless of the level of education.
Basically, I think if a minority language community wants to keep their language alive, we-as-the-society or we-as-the-international-community should probably direct some of our resources to that effort. If no such community exists, we might want to at least study and document the language before it’s too late. It is unfortunately a near certainty that every critically vulnerable language on Unesco’s list is going to be extinct in the not-so-distant future.
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” what I would like to abolish is the concept of monolingualism being the norm.”
This is a very worthy goal. Monolingualism is can become a cognitive deficit. It’s a heavier lift with languages like English or mandarin, but tellingly high status parents in china insist that their kids at least study, if not learn, English.
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Scottish person here: Scots Gaelic was never a majority language, but it has been promoted extensively by the devolved scottish government in the last couple decades with things like schools and media (including famously a tv station with less veiwers than employees). This is mainly a way of securing votes in the Highlands and islands, which due to the way boundaries are drawn have disproportionate voting power. So its unlikely to end soon. It also links into wider nationalist rhetoric
This greatly annoys me, because however effective you think government is, i think literally any other way of spending the money would be more useful.
David Mitchell the British comedian had a good video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvlQXPNwrqo
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The dichotomy between “making” someone learn a language, and preserving a dying language, seems false to me. The situation of Irish (technically a minority language, but one that enjoys enormous prestige and is enshrined in the constitution as the first language of Republic of Ireland) is a historical aberration as far as minority languages go; generally, minority languages must contend against high-prestige languages and dialects, and minority languages are *at best* ignored by speakers of majority languages. More likely, they’re perceived as uneducated, backward, or otherwise barbaric.
Most language revitalization efforts (and the most successful ones I’m familiar with are in North America and Australia) don’t enjoy official government support; they make do with what grants and donations they can secure, and are spearheaded by the native speakers or indigenous communities themselves; the aim is to preserve a culture as much as it is a language. Language and culture are not easily separable; when a language is lost, more than a linguistic data point is lost, even if we share your view on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I do, for the record; I think the strong version has been thoroughly debunked). Languages capture entire literary and cultural traditions, poetic forms, stories, myths, etc.; the loss of a language almost invariably means the wholesale loss of such a tradition, and even if it doesn’t, it inevitably closes much of it off. What poetic forms work well in one language are excessively awkward in another, for instance (compare the haiku in Japanese versus English), and just because concepts are freely translatable between languages, doesn’t mean that the entire edifice of a piece of literary art (which is not only conceptual–allusive, culturally entrenched, and highly contextualized–but structured around factors genuinely unique to languages, like their grammar and particular phonaesthetic milieu) is–if it were, translators would not have been gnashing their teeth lo these many centuries over the problem of literary translation.
As other commenters have covered, humans, in the overwhelming majority of cases, don’t learn languages they don’t have to. Given an environment where a child is exposed to Majority and Minority Language (say, Minority Language at home, Majority Language outside the home, as it usually is), a child may begin to acquire both at a young age, but will quickly tend to default to a strong passive understanding of Minority Language, while being less proficient at producing it, while speaking Majority Language in the rest of their daily life; since passive and productive faculties with language are very different things, they are much less likely to pass on the Minority Language to their own children. A community can lose a minority language in as little as a couple generations this way; since most languages in the world are spoken by a small number of people, this means that languages can die out extremely quickly, often shortly after the communities that speak them come into contact with the outside world.
Since most of these languages are spoken outside the developed world, even where there’s a will to preserve them, there might not be the means; hence most language “preservation” efforts are actually frantic efforts at documentation: the results are usually woefully insufficient, if your aim is preserving anything like a significant representation of the cultures being obliterated by this inexorable homogenization, since there’s only so much individual field linguists can do.
More generally, I would invite you to reframe your mental image of language preservation as something being primarily relevant to the developing world, poor communities, and people who genuinely and seriously want to preserve their language, but have difficulty doing so against very powerful, impersonal forces arrayed against that objective.
As to miscellaneous other points:
The framing of Irish education as something that takes away valuable time from other subjects seems strange to me. I don’t think educational curricula are designed so specifically that every hour of every day is of determinable value; surely things like class size, competence of teachers, and funding for schools are things we should be worrying about far head of whether an hour a day is spent learning Irish, if we’re worried about the mathematical and scientific competency of Irish students. We should also be more worried about the fact that Irish education is *terrible*, and if the goal is to teach people how to speak and read the Irish language, almost nobody in this country is pursuing that objective in a manner likely to lead to success. I also think the fetish for math/science as Real Education is a deeply harmful way to think about education, but I recognize that in these days (and in this quarter of the internet), I’m likely in the minority.
Anybody capable of learning a language fluently is capable, in theory, of learning a second language fluently. This doesn’t mean they’re capable of doing so in a classroom, using traditional foreign-language education methods–but traditional foreign-language education methods are *terrible*. (There is a myth that is relatively pervasive that only babies and small children have the magic faculty of picking up languages easily or quickly; in truth, more recent studies tend to show that children are as terrible at learning languages as adults, if not worse; they just have more time to devote to the endeavor.) Where minority languages are preserved against majority languages in the developed world (Irish, Canadian French, Welsh, Native American languages), speakers of minority languages are overwhelmingly bilingual as a rule. I am less confident about the developing world, but I would wager “decent paying jobs existing at all” is probably a concern that outpaces “decent paying jobs existing for monolingual minority language speakers”. Generally, I think the experience of growing up monolingual in a country with a clear majority language probably causes us to overrate the difficulty of picking up additional languages–precisely because we have never genuinely needed to. In the United States (heck, even here in Ireland), you have to go out of your way to encounter meaningful amounts of a foreign language. If your social environment was consistently saturated with two languages, and as a fluent speaker of one you had a genuine interest (whether through social incentives or simple curiosity) in picking up the other, then you would probably do so quite rapidly, even if you were the kind of person who fancies themselves bad at learning languages.
And, for that matter, what about countries like Nigeria, or India, with massive linguistic diversity, such that nobody’s first language can lay a real claim to being a majority language? Is the ideal end state every native language quietly dying out to a colonial language? Of picking a local language at random, and making it the prestige language? Both hardly seem satisfactory; yet people seem to communicate, travel, and work together well enough in these countries, despite the apparent difficulties of language barriers.
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Also, IIRC, there are numerous studies that bilingual children have better overall educational attainment than monolingual children–that, if nothing else, is a strong argument against monolingualism.
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“The school hours that Irish students spend learning Irish are hours that American students are spending on science or math.”
No they aren’t, they really aren’t. those are hours the American students spend studying useless electives. They spend a whole semester learning the same three things about STDs in Health class (and never a word about nutrition and metabolic syndrome and all the resulting conditions).
Monolingualism is a an educational deficiency just as illiteracy and innumeracy are. It imposes limits on the ways a speaker describes the world, as you yourself point out:
“Think about so-called “untranslatable” words from other languages. It turns out that all of those words are, in fact, translatable; it’s just that you need a paragraph to translate them, rather than a sentence.”
That paragraph is not a translation, it’s a footnote, and the proof of its inadequacy as a translation is the eagerness with which speakers of other languages will borrow those “untranslatable words” – the paragraphs are not a suitable substitute; they simply d not convey the same meaning with the same obviousness.
“So what are the advantages of linguistic diversity? Well, for one thing, every language that goes extinct is one less language for linguists to study, and that makes it harder to figure out how exactly language works. For another, many languages have literature which has not been translated and, without speakers, may never be translated. Some things like poetry are entirely untranslatable.”
You missed one, the one that communities of speakers care about just as much as the second: a distinct language is an important marker of a distinct identity, and that can have real world effects. in our region two wealthy (formerly) Lushootseed-speaking trines, the Tulalips and the Puyallups, are investing a good chunk of money in reviving that language as a social project. They feel the loss of the language has been one factor in their substance abuse and domestic abuse issues, and that reviving the language is a matter of spiritual wholeness.
“This seems to me to be less an argument in favor of reviving dead languages and more an argument in favor of a sudden frantic burst of linguists and translators.”
The two are separate and it’s not an either/or question. But yes to both. BTW we have the dead hand of Chomskyanism to thank for the diversion of energy and resources away from the study of actual languages to mumbo-jumbo theoretical models.
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Kill all languages! Vivu la internacia lingvo Esperanto! 😀
I suspect that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is most popular in countries where most people don’t speak a second language, so they have no means to verify it. People who speak a second language are probably well aware that it didn’t unlock any magical powers in their brain. (Though they may still believe that some other language could.)
Speaking from my own experience: Sometimes there is a more convenient word for something. Sometimes one language requires you to specify an information that would be ambiguous in another language. (Even then, they usually is a way to express it the other way, it just may sound weird.) And that’s all, pretty much. Having a jargon for something usually gives you much more expressive power.
The problem with losing languages in my opinion is (1) losing the access to one’s cultural heritage, and (2) a cultural gap between generations. And both these costs would usually be forced upon a disadvantaged community.
In a more rational world, the problem of cultural heritage would be solved by translating all interesting documents into the new language, and thoroughly documenting the old language just for case some interesting documents would be found later. The generational gap could be solved e.g. by transitional 100 years of mandatory bilingualism.
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Hello! As a longtime lurker and linguist, I’d like to add that the perceptions of communities on their languages change over time. It’s fairly common (at least in Australia, where I live) for the last L1 speakers of a language to pass away, leaving the language ‘dormant’, until later generations regain an interest in the language of their parents and grandparents. Whereupon, if the community is lucky, there is some documentation and learning materials in the language they can use for teaching – the alternative is attempting to create a ‘salvage grammar’ out of what the descendants of L1 speakers can remember.
I realise of course that language documentation and language learning are two different things – but what you and Less Wrong have taught me is the concept of ‘failing gracefully’, and I think linguistic diversity is an area where we can afford to gracefully fail. A community of speakers is not a static object; in studying its members and its language, one should be prepared for future generations regaining fluency, and not regard ‘dead’ languages as being ‘dead’ forever (linguists as necromancers?)
~
On a somewhat-related note, English (and other large, hegemonic swarm languages) export different cultural mores as well as linguistic material. There’s this classic story of SIL (a big Bible translation group, based in the US) linguists travelling to the Amazon, and bringing a deck of cards with them. They shared the deck of cards with the kids of the community they stayed in, and hey presto, introduced the concept of competitive play to their society.
The idea that languages have a utility cost I would regard as a product of a large, settled society; not necessarily Western, not necessarily capitalist (you can hear similar statements on linguistic diversity from Roman Empire commentators), but still different from the ideal of language that exists in small, hunter-gatherer societies (and their remnants). In these societies, multilingualism is the norm, and language functions far more as a marker for identity than as a communication utility.
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Doesn’t that invalidate the “preserving ASL” argument against curing deafness? Clearly whatever pressure can be invoked on kids to learn a spoken language is nowhere near being forced to learn one thing by their own body.
One counterexample – Baltic states. If you don’t count Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, they didn’t have a history of colonization, but rather themselves were annexed by the USSR. And now they’ve been introducing policies to raise the popularity of their languages, primarily over Russian.
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I’m surprised nobody’s gone into New Zealand yet. This is a country where there is a significant effort not only to preserve a language within its native population, but also to teach the language to the non-Indigenous people.
They actually seem to be doing quite well? It is still true that the majority of properly bilingual kids are Maori and the majority of properly bilingual schools are very majority-Maori, but there are grades of how bilingual a school is (no required Maori language class, required Maori language classes, required Maori language classes and also subjects other than Maori taught in Maori).
Basically, it seems to me that NZ has realised that in order for Maori to be preserved it needs to be something that is spoken generally in NZ, rather than something that Maori kids only speak at home if at all, then speak English everywhere else.
Fairly recently, a huge amount of effort/resources have been put into Maori. A lot of things are now signposted in both languages, and there is Maori language TV and radio. One of the things I saw there that I thought was a great idea was a sitcom that seemed to be basically a Kiwi ‘Friends’ where many of the characters are ethnically Maori, in which characters will occasionally drop into subtitled Maori or drop Maori words into conversation that are then subtitled in English – it seems designed to basically introduce a little bit of learning Maori into a casual entertainment context, and it felt like something that could be pretty effective.
A lot of these measures to get more people speaking Maori are fairly new so it will be interesting to see how successful they are!
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I feel your position is a touch incoherent; you state that we should be encouraging a flourishing of study into languages so as to not lose literature and poetry, but later you pooh-pooh the idea that people should be forced to study them in schools. You state that nobody expects a white person to have to learn native American languages, and from this you conclude that nobody should have to. Why did you so readily dismiss the i position that white people *should* have to learn them? See the comment above about Maori in New Zealand. And in a less race-related way Gaelic in Scotland, which, yes, was always a minority language, but how can it possibly be a bad thing that it is studied throughout the country? (N.B. I’m of English background, living in Scotland)
I’m also surprised you’re a Sapir-Whorf skeptic given your enthusiasm for non-traditional pronouns. Would you not agree that English grammar fundamentally erases non-binary people, and that this leads to a lack of understanding of non-binarism amongst English speakers? As I understand it the inspiration for ze etc. comes directly from other languages which use a gender-neutral pronoun instead of or in addition to the gendered ones. Surely this is a great example of the benefits of linguistic diversity?
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China has no gendered pronouns in speech and does not seem to have socially acceptable nonbinary people. You seem to be reversing causation here: we acquired the concept ‘nonbinary people’, and then invented words to deal with this concept.
I can think it is very important that somebody know a particular set of knowledge without thinking it’s important that everybody know it. For instance, I think it is very important that someone know about petroleum engineering, but certainly I would object to mandatory petroleum engineering classes in high school.
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I dunno, by that rationale, should there be any compulsory subjects in school at all?
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I’m an unschooler…?
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