Speak, Memory

Language kindles a light in the mind that frees us from inarticulate isolation yet cages us within the words whose meaning we can grasp. “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein. “All I know is what I have words for.” Yet even as it opens the mind, language defines its unbridgeable borders, erecting barricades of repression and bigotry. Not since the Tower of Babel collapsed in a heap of fired brick have the many languages we speak sparked such a combustible mixture of tolerance and intolerance.

In September, a factory that makes radiators outside Chicago was ordered to pay $192,000 to eight of its workers because plant managers forced them to speak only English on the assembly line. One worker had been fired simply for saying good morning to a friend in the wrong language.

Two weeks later, a telephone company in Dallas was ordered to pay $790,284 to 13 telephone operators fired for refusing to speak only English at work. Ironically, the company had hired them to speak Spanish to customers calling from Mexico but sought to forbid them from speaking it at any other time in the workplace.

In Washington, D.C., the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs formally apologized to Native American tribes for having done so much to erase their languages. Nearly 100 indigenous languages once spoken in California are dead, mostly because of the activities of the bureau’s reservation schools and other official policies aimed at eradicating every vestige of Indian identity.

In Canada, the government apologized for forcibly preventing the Native Nations from speaking their own languages in schools on reservations. Leaders of the Anglican, Presbyterian, United Church of Canada and Roman Catholic churches in Newfoundland this summer issued their own blanket apology to native peoples for abuses in schools the churches ran, including attempts to quash their languages.

The former Soviet Union, like China, Turkey, Spain and many other countries, systematically suppressed minority languages as a way of subjugating ethnic groups within its borders. Earlier this fall, the Tatars in the largely Muslim republic of Tatarstan, southeast of Moscow, decided to abandon Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet which had been imposed on them by Stalin in 1939. Before then, the Tatars had written their language in Arabic script. Now they are adopting the Roman letters used in the West.

The heightened awareness of the politics of language today is an expression of identity in an increasingly global culture. It owes its energy to a new respect for human rights, in which the right to speak one’s mind in the language of one’s choice is becoming among the foremost. Yet these hard-won tokens of respect for linguistic rights come just as many languages around the world face extinction. More languages are dying today than at any other time in the world’s history. By the end of the 21st century, as many as half of the planet’s 6,800 remaining languages--each of them as intricate and sophisticated as English or Chinese--will be little more than field notes in a linguist’s archives. They are casualties, not only of political suppression but also of economics and globalization. It is this impending catastrophe that has galvanized the authors of two provocative recent books on the state of the world’s languages.

They argue that the loss of so many languages is an environmental disaster threatening the fundamental well-being of humanity. For humankind itself, they suggest, is an ecological system that depends for its survival on cultural and linguistic diversity, just as the health of a rain forest or an ocean depends on the diversity of its flora and fauna. “Yet few people think of languages in the same way as they do of other natural resources such as air, water, and oil, which need careful planning.” So write London-based anthropologist Daniel Nettle and linguist Suzanne Romaine, Merton professor of English Language at Oxford University, in “Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages.” “The loss of linguistic and cultural diversity should be seen as an integral part of larger processes threatening biodiversity on Earth.”

David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost authorities on global language issues, makes this point forcefully in “Language Death.” “The arguments which support the need for biological diversity also apply to language. . . . If diversity is a prerequisite for successful humanity, then the preservation of linguistic diversity is essential, for language lies at the heart of what it means to be human.”

The authors articulate the keening of scholars who mourn the impending loss of so many unique ways in which the human mind has learned to express and organize itself, for human identity is embedded in language. Indeed language affects the very structure of our brain. The brain is so attuned to speech that even for those who grew up without any ability to hear, the neural circuits that handle their sign language still are those usually crucial for any spoken tongue.

What other tool than language have we to explore the intangible landscape of thought? As each unique means of expression vanishes, we lose an irreplaceable guide to that interior world, for poetry, literature, speech and song are in their own way diagnostic probes of the working mind as effective as any PET scanner or functional MRI imaging device. What is lost, they say, is measured in more than vocabulary sheets and pronunciation guides. The death of a language is, by its nature, intensely personal.

When a frail farmer named Tefvik Esenic died in rural Turkey in 1992, it was also the death of the Ubykh language. He was its last speaker, and with him was buried the voice of all those who spoke it before him. So too, when Roscinda Nolasquez died in Pala, in San Diego County, in 1987, the Cupen~o language she spoke also ceased to exist. When Red Thundercloud died in 1996 in South Carolina, so died Catawba Sioux. And when, on the Isle of Man in 1974, Ned Madrell was buried, so too was the language of Manx, one that when Madrell was born accommodated almost 12,000 fluent speakers. Each is a powerful reminder of how language allows us to voice our differences.

Of this, Romaine and Nettle write with a preservationist’s passion in the hope they can rally those who support more conventional environmental causes--to save the whales or safeguard old-growth forests--to aid these most unique human resources. Nettle and Romaine offer an authoritative overview of languages on the brink, rich in anecdote and shrewdly political. They make explicit the link between the survival of threatened languages and more conventional environmental issues. It is no coincidence, they say, that the areas of greatest linguistic diversity naturally occur in the same parts of the world where the greatest biological diversity flourishes. Indigenous peoples comprise about 4% of the world’s population but speak at least 60% of the world’s languages. Moreover, endangered languages and species fall prey to the same forces of economic and social disruption. The enemy here is not bad grammar or tortured syntax; rather, it is the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the forces of globalization.

What makes these books so intriguing, however, is the argument they make for why anyone outside the academic world of linguistics should care when a language not their own is dying. After all, would it not be better to let small cultures and languages simply die a natural death when they have outlived their usefulness?

Unlike Arup in New Guinea or Coahilla in Southern California, so this thinking goes, English can unlock a global treasure store of resources as the international medium of business, popular song, publishing and film. It is the language of one quarter of the world’s periodicals and the vast majority of scientific and technical journals. It is the default language of at least 75% of computer Web sites and 95% of commercial servers. So, English thrives as the third most widely spoken language in the world, while its closest relatives--three Frisian languages spoken on the coastal fringe of northern Europe--are on the endangered list.

Why should we care? Because, says Crystal, languages express identity. They are repositories of history that contribute to the sum of human knowledge. And, he says, all human languages, equally rich, equally complex, equally instructive, simply are interesting in themselves.

It may be hard for those who were born into one of the world’s mega-languages, like English, Spanish, Arabic or Chinese that are spoken by 50 million or more people, to imagine what it must be like to feel one’s way of speaking die, to lose the natural voice of one’s thoughts. But none of these dominating languages is immune to change. English speakers tend to be smug as their language becomes more global, but even they may come to find their native tongue unintelligible.

No living language can stand still for long, lest it lose its umbilical connection to the world that sustains it. Even as it assumes global mastery, English itself is too busy jitterbugging to maintain any standard form for more than a few decades. Renowned for its ability to absorb new elements from other tongues, English is itself morphing under the pressure of globalization. More people today speak it as a second language than as a native tongue. Hip-hop slang, Spanglish, Sea Speak and Weblish--as the emerging online techno-talk is called--are the vibrant evolutionary experiments of a healthy parent tongue. The new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes 62 new words representing cultural changes in just the last year alone, including cyber-squatting, screenager, webcam, gaydar, chuddies and blipvert.

In this way, no doubt, English eventually will go the way of Latin, which once held sway as the language of empire and a universal church. Just as the Romance languages spun themselves from the thread of vulgar Latin, so English may in time give birth to entirely new families of speech that will make the words on this page seem as alien as the Anglo Saxon of “Beowulf.” It is worth remembering that all of the 6,800 languages whose survival today so concerns contemporary linguists owe their origins to earlier and now entirely extinct, forgotten proto-tongues.

“Languages die like rivers,” Carl Sandburg observed. But exactly what constitutes a natural death for a language today is open to argument. To be sure, it is a principle now properly part of law that no majority should oppress a minority language. Few would argue today with the right to be bilingual. But at what point does diversity become, as a practical matter, divisive? How far should a majority language group extend itself--through publicly funded schools, the legal system and the official discourse of government--on behalf of other languages?

In Los Angeles, where more than 120 languages are spoken today, these questions of language diversity are anything but academic. Many Spanish-speaking citizens of the city may feel short-changed by bilingual education, for example, but imagine how overlooked those local speakers of Hmong, Tagalog, Amharic or Q’anjob’al must feel. Of such conundrums are elections made, but practical answers to the problems of how so many languages should live together are absent from both of these books, to their detriment.

In their passion for endangered languages, however, Crystal, Nettle and Romaine rightly remind us that we are living through one of history’s unique mass extinctions. It is one measured in the dying whispers from lost worlds of words.