Lost Languages

The title of a book that was recently published in the UK, Language in Danger: How Lan-
guage Loss Threatens(1) Our Future by Andrew Dalby (Penguin Press) may be self-
explanatory. The author claims(2) that a language becomes extinct every two weeks and
that, at this rate(3), half of the world's languages will have disappeared by the end of this
century. This, Dalby believes, is a cause for alarm.

The numbers game

Estimating how many languages there are in the world is by no means (4) easy. Dalby puts
the number at 5,000. Five years ago, Speak Up re-produced an article from Time magazine,
which estimated that the total was 6,500: if, in the
meantime, a language has disappeared every fortnight(5), then about 125 have been lost
since then. By the year 2100, another 2,500 will have gone. Dalby is certainly in a position
to know. He has the title of "Honorary Librarian" at the Institute of Linguistics in London and
his personal language "repertoire" is said to include French, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese,
Romanian, German, Greek, Pali, Burmese and Sanskrit. His previous publications include A
Dictionary of Languages, which offers a historical guide to the "400 major languages" and
which the American Library Association described as an "Outstanding Reference Source." Nor
are his interests limited to language matters (6). Dalby is also an accomplished(7) historian
who has written several books on the history of food.

Look at Latin!
Certainly, Language in Danger will provide readers with plenty of food for thought(8).
Languages disappear for different reasons. Some, like the local languages of Tasmania,
simply died as their speakers were massacred, while the invasion of the Spaniards finished
off the Aztec languages of Mexico. Today English is the language of cultural domination. Its
popularity (which is, to use a French term, the "raison d'etre" for a magazine like Speak Up)
is destroying other languages, in the same way that the spread (9) of Latin was disastrous for
Punic, Gaulic and Etruscan. The reasons were very similar: Latin, like English today, was the
language of social advancement and parents encouraged their children to learn it. English, as
we all know, has become the language of the academic world, trade (10), science and the
internet. It is the most popular of what Dalby calls "the 11 languages of mass
communication," which are learnt by about half of the world's population. Dalby estimates
that 700 million people now speak English fluently, while 1,800 million speak it competently.

What we lose
Yet Dalby doesn't see the amazing success of English as a cause for celebration. He
argues(11) that the death of any language is negative. The things that get lost include local
knowledge of the natural world, an alternative view of life and a source of new words for the
surviving languages, which will stagnate if they cease to interact with the others. Of course,
language is also political: Mahatma Gandhi considered English to be a "cultural usurper" and,
like colonialism itself, it was to be resisted. But, as Dalby observes, Gandhi made his appeal
against English in English!

On the home front

There have also been several anti-English language movements within the British Isles. The
Welsh language, of which the Victorian Matthew Arnold said "the sooner it disappears as an
instrument of the practical, political and social life of Wales; the better for England, the
better for Wales itself," has since become a battle cry (12) for the Welsh nationalist movement.
Today it is spoken by about half a million people, but Dalby doesn't think it has a great
future. Most of its speakers are bilingual and he reckons (13) that it will disappear within a
couple of centuries. Like another extinct language of the British Isles, Cornish, which is said
to have died with Dorothy Jeffrey in 1777, it will be limited to tombstones (14).

Here today, gone tomorrow

Dalby is also pessimistic about Irish which, like Welsh, has been given great educational
support and which is said to have a million speakers. Like Welsh speakers across the Irish
Channel, they are bilingual and Dalby says this doesn't bode well (15). But before speakers
and learners of English get too pleased with themselves, perhaps they should stop and think.
After all, isn't Latin, which once dominated the western world, now dead?