21 ms·

Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (2014)

99 points by sndean 10y ago

lugus35 10y ago
French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore, we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.
- youngbullind 10y ago
  And in England we speak a mix of English and French words. Have done since around 1066.
  - lugus35 10y ago
    It's a problem of speed of changes, old people can't have a true discussion to young people anymore.
    - shiggerino 10y ago
      I've noticed that whenever I've been to France. I learned French in school, and I notice there's an age cut-off when I can no longer understand what people are saying. A small consolation is that the people who no longer speak intelligible French are usually somewhat better at English.
    - freyfogle 10y ago
      This is nothing unique to French, it is just the generational evolution of language. Listen to a news report in any language from the 1920s. It is vastly different in tone, style, vocabulary and possibly accent than a news report today. Change is the only constant.
- blockross 10y ago
  French is actually doing very well. First, using a lot of English words doesn't mean we can't speak real French anymore (we use a lot of English words in my group of friends when we speak, but our written conversations are much purer). Secondly France is not the only place where French is spoken (common misconception in France), and among these other locations a lot of African countries speak a very good French, if not better than ours.
- avar 10y ago
  French is currently unique in that it's the previous lingua franca, so much so that the term for "world language" in English is a French term. That French is now using loan words from English doesn't mean that it's dying. Have you tried to speak English without French / Latin / Norse loan words? Good luck. It just means that French is like any other language now, aggressively borrowing from the current world language. Nothing wrong with that.
  - derriz 10y ago
    not quite. The term "lingua Franca" originally referred to a Mediterranean trading language - certainly a Romance language but not French. Yes for a while French was a lingua Franca in the modern sense but the term doesn't come from French. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  Quebec is trying to save French through some crazy laws: - You can't have a company whose name isn't French. - The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc. - I can't send my kid to an English school if I haven't been to one myself.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    "Big Mac is Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac" (C)
  - jeromegv 10y ago
    - You can't have a company whose name isn't French. That's much more nuanced than that. See article: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-on-english-brand-names-forces-prominent-french-signage-to-be-included http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-... - The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc. It's about having the language of the work environment in French. If the company decided to switch the keyboard to French and change your microwave in French, that is just a company policy, not a government regulation. The point of having the HR software in French is to allow someone that only speak French to work in HR in the company. Surely you can still use the software in English if you want to, but at least it's available in French.
    - miguelrochefort 10y ago
      No, the French police forced us to made these changes.
  - douche 10y ago
    On the other hand, at this point, anyone under 30 in Quebec is fluent in English, because they had to be to pass school. I've only had trouble making myself intelligible to people 40-60+, and even then, that tends to be when I am way, way north-east towards Baie Comeau.
- Rexxar 10y ago
  And half of this English words are used completely differently than in English or even don't exist in English (parking, shampooing used as names for example)
- realusername 10y ago
  French is absolutely not endangered at all, there is no risk for the language dying in the next 50 years with that much speakers. The number of speakers is actually growing (along with the other top 15 languages). The languages we are speaking about might only have a handful of people from the older generation speaking it. The French legacy dialects actually are on the other hand endangered.
clamstew 10y ago
Rosetta Stone works to preserve languages with its products http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032 http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032
ggreer 10y ago
It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good thing. Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't. And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages. Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.
- mrob 10y ago
  We probably would invent new languages, or at least new dialects, to signal group membership. If somebody has made the effort to learn the language then they're probably serious about being part of the group. As a practical example, consider the revival of the Hebrew language, which happened mostly as an expression of Jewish identity. Strengthening group identity is the main motivation for preserving rare languages.
  - ufmace 10y ago
    That's an interesting take on it. I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages. I only speak English, but I've heard several different accents on it so strong that they're hard to understand. I wonder if the speakers of these accents find it impossible to understand other strong accents.
    - mablap 10y ago
      Well there you have it. The vocabulary teens use varies from city to city. The vocabularies of (France) French and Canadian French are different to an extent, as are those of (England) English and American English. It seems to me completely obvious that "one language to rule them all" is an absurd idea bound to fail. It will morph and splinter by itself.
Kenji 10y ago
If computer scientists made similar emotional arguments: Save EBCDIC because diversity. No. Full stop. It's the adherents' of these cultures (speakers' of these languages) duty to compile and/or translate their cultural insights and knowledge. If they fail to do that - good bye, it probably wasn't that important, otherwise the culture or language would have been dominant.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  No, it's not the same. The natural languages that "won" did so because of colonisation, not meritocracy - or should computer scientists compete by oppressing their competitors?
  - zephyrfalcon 10y ago
    You have a point, although technologies don't necessarily win because of merit either. In fact, they often don't...
    - Chris2048 10y ago
      That's the MS way! ;-D
- enugu 10y ago
  The point is that the existing speakers would like to preserve the language, but might not have resources for doing so. One good thing is that technology allows us right now to do archiving in an easier way. Recording speech, stories, and songs can be done more conveniently. Learning resources can be created in a better way. Problem is that the tools for all this might not be accessible to people living in remote areas if they do wish to preserve their language.
- derriz 10y ago
  Maybe we should all program C on Windows - and only teach it - because any alternative that is not "dominant" has no value or importance?
- 10y ago
jfaucett 10y ago
As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments are weak emotional appeals at best. The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system. As a programmer, when you think how much easier everything would be if there were only 1 OS, 1 Web Browser, 1 programming language, 1 data exchange format, 1 byte order, etc, etc. and then you think about languages its clear how much easier everything would be. Of course, we have different OSes, Browsers, Image Editors, because they are all better at different things and we aren't one organism - we as humans have different needs & preferences - which we bring to the table everytime we choose from one of the zillions of different options available to us. Its the same with languages, when you want to be amazed by poetic eloquence and the rhythm and rhyme of words you read Pablo Neruda in Spanish, when you want to delve into highly analytical thought processes you read anything by the German Think Tanks such as Freud, Marx, Nietsche, Gauss, in German. When you want to talk to a superior in a formal setting, you adapt a different tone, appearance and language, as opposed to when you are splurting out your particular workplace jargon with collegues. The list goes on and on virtually forever, its even the case that the language we speak i.e. English, Spanish or whatever it may be - is completely unique to ourselves like a fingerprint which can identify us from all the other people on the planet. Social Scientists study these aspects of our humanity, believing they give us insight not only into how people function but also into the optimization of more subjective qualities of that functioning such as happiness, group behaviors, moral motivations, etc. But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :)
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :) You'll soon find yourself in dangerous territory here. The current mantra is diversity is not only morally good, but also actually beneficial - but the former shrinks to the latter whenever challenged, with an extra helping of bad-faith accusation...
  - 10y ago
stretchwithme 10y ago
Our awareness of language diversity is artificial. It only exists because of the same forces that are reducing it: modern communications and transportation. Most languages will be fully understood by artificial intelligence soon enough. Anybody that wants to learn them 1000 years from now will be able to. And once we enhance our own brains with technology, people will be inventing new languages with ease. And integrating the unique features of old ones. There are probably millions of languages throughout the universe. We may not be the only species that uses language on Earth either. We are really just at the beginning of discovering language diversity.
Paul_S 10y ago
I'm not advocating one global language and I think everyone should learn at least one language other than English but let's let the dying languages die. Natural selection is doing a good job. The good ones will survive.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more efficient (in terms of syllables per second over syllables per bit of information). The Ainu didn't have much interest in expansion and got more or less assimilated by Japan. Doesn't mean the language got selected against, the _culture_ got selected against. While language may have an effect on a culture's success, I suspect a culture has much more impact on a language's success. Natural selection is a terrible metric of “good ones” in that case.
  - voaie 10y ago
    Agree. Culture is what makes the language more beautiful. When a small town turns into a big city, the language will gradually lose its power if everyone goes for profit without the culture carried forward. Also, like what @gkya said, if the government aggressively enforce an official language on the people, other languages will die more quickly.
- gkya 10y ago
  > The good ones will survive. FTFY: the ones with more speakers and more political ties attached. It's hard to say that a language is better than another one, it's highly subjective. But languages die not because they're worse, but because speaking them is a burden if you are: killed for speaking them, excluded for speaking them, there's no one to speak in the language with, you can't use it to shop or at the doctor's, etc.
sethbannon 10y ago
Anyone interested in the effort to catalogue all the world's languages should check out the nonprofit Wikitongues: http://www.wikitongues.org http://www.wikitongues.org They have a fascinating collection of videos of people speaking in their native languages.
beloch 10y ago
"What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says. "" The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been translated into. Preserving languages as living, spoken tongues is not necessary for the mere preservation of stories and history. "Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.” “It’s very hard as an English speaker to understand that,” " This is true. English is now so widely used that it isn't really associated with one particular culture. You can travel to a completely alien country that speaks English, just differently than you. “Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems,” Harrison says. Returning to Cherokee, unlike English it is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are acting upon." Many languages have unique attributes that let them excel at certain things. German, for example, is fantastic for creating compound words (e.g. Gedankenexperiment). English, however, gleefully swallows up such words and incorporates them. "There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the 1960s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away. Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. " Another example of this is written Mayan. The first archbishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, deliberately wiped out every trace of written Mayan he could. Paper codices were burned. Stone monuments were defaced. Literate Mayans were executed. He was so successful that, by the 20th century, written Mayan was a complete mystery. It has since been deciphered, but outside of a very small number of paper codices, all that remains are stone monuments. This is unfortunate. Consider the writing on monuments in Washington as compared to what's in the Library of Congress. As useful as different languages may be for different things, they're also distressingly good at preventing us from communicating with and understanding each other. Perhaps the rise of more global languages is worth paying the price of losing some of our lingual diversity.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
auganov 10y ago
Would any of you make your children monolingual [0] speakers of your national language? Wouldn't you feel like you're doing them a disservice? [0] monolingual in the sense that the national language would strictly be their native language spoken at school/education, with friends and family even if they'd still be learning English
contingencies 10y ago
I've personally volunteered for the anthropologist and linguist interviewed in the article sporadically since the 1990s, doing things like OCR'ing early Himalayan journals, setting up and maintaining websites (Digital Himalaya Project, World Oral Literature Project). Eventually I met him for a beer in Cambridge in 2009, shortly before he moved to Yale... great character! I believe he has since moved on to Canada. That said, as a westerner who has picked up fluent Mandarin (and dabbled in dozes of languages) and who lives nearly full time in China, now raising my own child, I can see the efficacy and likelihood of evolving toward a reduced set of tongues or even a single-tongue. My grandparents spoke English, Croatian, German, and to a lesser extent probably some Russian, Yiddish and Scot. Other than English, only one surviving grandparent (90+) still speaks one of those languages. Similarly on my wife's side, her family have learned and forgotten Arabic and Vietnamese. If indeed over hundreds of years the world does converge toward a single tongue, I would be surprised if Mandarin Chinese is not a serious candidate: offering simple grammar, huge and well dispersed population, with a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to culinary and other cultural acquisitions from integrated populations. The biggest issue is the number of characters, however a common international subset is perhaps emerging, largely through shared manufacturing supply chains, software interfaces, public signage and media.
- douche 10y ago
  They'll have to come up with a better writing system, either settling on pinyin on wade-giles, or something else. Really, ideographs are awful, an alphabet or even a syllabarry would be workable, but needing thousands of characters to read a newspaper is unforgivable.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    That's OK, people don't read newspapers anymore and pinyin is a viable and highly consistent Romanization system already used by 1.4 billion. Wade Giles is a historical footnote. A little known fact is that the darling of the 20th century communist party's modern Chinese literary world, Lu Xun, advocated for the abolition of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan's ongoing use of kanji?
anabis 10y ago
If an adult wants to learn it, fine. But I will not teach my children a minor language as the first one. Otherwise, record few TB worth of speech and be done with it.
vonnik 10y ago
Many will die, but some are being digitized. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html
seanvk 10y ago
I find this ironic that all the comments (both for and against) are in English.
- voaie 10y ago
  People talk about this topic around the world. HN is just a small place.
xchip 10y ago
If those are all the reason to save dying tongues, then this article proved the opposite of what it meant to prove :)
benkarst 10y ago
https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures
takshak 10y ago
A language carries its philosophy inside the words. Not all philosophical concept can be easily translated in other language. Take a Hindi/Sanskrit word "Aatma/Ātman" for example, it is translated into english as "soul". But it is wrong translation as plant, animal don't have "soul", while even bacteria have "Aatma/Ātman". If Sankrit is lost then the concept of "Ātman" will also be lost.
TheHexagon 10y ago
A quote that I love regarding this:  “Every  language  is  an  old-growth  forest  of  the  mind, a  water shed  of  thought,  an  ecosystem  of  spiritual  possibilities.” In  one  or  other  old‐growth  forest  of  the  mind,  we  need  to  watch  the  trees  grow.
bmrishabh 10y ago
My immediate thought after reading this article was like there is nothing wrong or disadvantageous in having a single language all over the world. It would make communication easy and universal. But the point here, which the author stresses, is that every language has its own perspective of looking at an object, emotion, action etc. If we let a languages die then we are essentially losing this perspective. May be there is some language in this world which can express a particular emotion which other languages, for example English, cannot express no matter what. Won't humanity lose a lot in this scenario? And besides this I think that English is the so called universal language just because English speaking population conquered most of the world. It is not so that English is the easiest or most simple and complete in all aspects. As a student of science I tend to believe in universality of language. It makes exchange of knowledge easy. But the points that I mentioned above are also important. According to me, letting a set of people try and revive the dying languages is worthy and helpful to human civilization.
MrPatan 10y ago
Or: Why Other People must keep having difficulty accessing information and opportunities, for my own aesthetic pleasure, but I bring up my kids only with useful languages.
a_imho 10y ago
IMO proposing of speaking only one language because of usefulness on an English speaking site is a bit hypocritical, considering it is not even the most widespread. Surely keeping English around is just emotional appeal.
timwaagh 10y ago
i thought it was going to come up with a rational argument. something like the real reason people are doing this and getting paid handsomely to do it. but its just all sentimental nonsense, isn't it?
xchip 10y ago
Yet another super long article that could be summarized in a couple of lines.

99 points by sndean 10y ago

French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore, we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.

youngbullind 10y ago
And in England we speak a mix of English and French words. Have done since around 1066.
- lugus35 10y ago
  It's a problem of speed of changes, old people can't have a true discussion to young people anymore.
  - shiggerino 10y ago
    I've noticed that whenever I've been to France. I learned French in school, and I notice there's an age cut-off when I can no longer understand what people are saying. A small consolation is that the people who no longer speak intelligible French are usually somewhat better at English.
  - freyfogle 10y ago
    This is nothing unique to French, it is just the generational evolution of language. Listen to a news report in any language from the 1920s. It is vastly different in tone, style, vocabulary and possibly accent than a news report today. Change is the only constant.
blockross 10y ago
French is actually doing very well. First, using a lot of English words doesn't mean we can't speak real French anymore (we use a lot of English words in my group of friends when we speak, but our written conversations are much purer). Secondly France is not the only place where French is spoken (common misconception in France), and among these other locations a lot of African countries speak a very good French, if not better than ours.
avar 10y ago
French is currently unique in that it's the previous lingua franca, so much so that the term for "world language" in English is a French term. That French is now using loan words from English doesn't mean that it's dying. Have you tried to speak English without French / Latin / Norse loan words? Good luck. It just means that French is like any other language now, aggressively borrowing from the current world language. Nothing wrong with that.
- derriz 10y ago
  not quite. The term "lingua Franca" originally referred to a Mediterranean trading language - certainly a Romance language but not French. Yes for a while French was a lingua Franca in the modern sense but the term doesn't come from French. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
miguelrochefort 10y ago
Quebec is trying to save French through some crazy laws: - You can't have a company whose name isn't French. - The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc. - I can't send my kid to an English school if I haven't been to one myself.
- smsm42 10y ago
  "Big Mac is Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac" (C)
- jeromegv 10y ago
  - You can't have a company whose name isn't French. That's much more nuanced than that. See article: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-on-english-brand-names-forces-prominent-french-signage-to-be-included http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-... - The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc. It's about having the language of the work environment in French. If the company decided to switch the keyboard to French and change your microwave in French, that is just a company policy, not a government regulation. The point of having the HR software in French is to allow someone that only speak French to work in HR in the company. Surely you can still use the software in English if you want to, but at least it's available in French.
  - miguelrochefort 10y ago
    No, the French police forced us to made these changes.
- douche 10y ago
  On the other hand, at this point, anyone under 30 in Quebec is fluent in English, because they had to be to pass school. I've only had trouble making myself intelligible to people 40-60+, and even then, that tends to be when I am way, way north-east towards Baie Comeau.
Rexxar 10y ago
And half of this English words are used completely differently than in English or even don't exist in English (parking, shampooing used as names for example)
realusername 10y ago
French is absolutely not endangered at all, there is no risk for the language dying in the next 50 years with that much speakers. The number of speakers is actually growing (along with the other top 15 languages). The languages we are speaking about might only have a handful of people from the older generation speaking it. The French legacy dialects actually are on the other hand endangered.

clamstew 10y ago

Rosetta Stone works to preserve languages with its products http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032 http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=30485894&catId=112032

ggreer 10y ago

It's not a well-liked view, but I'm very glad that humanity is on the path to speaking only a few languages (or perhaps just one). If you disagree, consider this thought experiment: Imagine if the entire world spoke a single language. Would we ever want to invent new languages, making mutual communication harder? It would be silly. I do feel for the speakers of these dying tongues, but in the long run, this is a good thing. Do you feel stunted or unsatisfied because your ancestors didn't pass their native tongues down to you? I don't. And most people don't realize how great a cost we pay for having so many languages. Ideally, linguists and historians would document these languages and their cultures, then let them quietly fade. Teaching them to new generations is not only a futile effort, it's less beneficial on net.

mrob 10y ago
We probably would invent new languages, or at least new dialects, to signal group membership. If somebody has made the effort to learn the language then they're probably serious about being part of the group. As a practical example, consider the revival of the Hebrew language, which happened mostly as an expression of Jewish identity. Strengthening group identity is the main motivation for preserving rare languages.
- ufmace 10y ago
  That's an interesting take on it. I wonder if there's much history of groups starting out with common languages, then groups separating and the languages evolving separately, either intentionally to demonstrate group membership, or just due to lack of communication between groups, and continuing to differentiate until they're effectively different languages. I only speak English, but I've heard several different accents on it so strong that they're hard to understand. I wonder if the speakers of these accents find it impossible to understand other strong accents.
  - mablap 10y ago
    Well there you have it. The vocabulary teens use varies from city to city. The vocabularies of (France) French and Canadian French are different to an extent, as are those of (England) English and American English. It seems to me completely obvious that "one language to rule them all" is an absurd idea bound to fail. It will morph and splinter by itself.

Kenji 10y ago

If computer scientists made similar emotional arguments: Save EBCDIC because diversity. No. Full stop. It's the adherents' of these cultures (speakers' of these languages) duty to compile and/or translate their cultural insights and knowledge. If they fail to do that - good bye, it probably wasn't that important, otherwise the culture or language would have been dominant.

Chris2048 10y ago
No, it's not the same. The natural languages that "won" did so because of colonisation, not meritocracy - or should computer scientists compete by oppressing their competitors?
- zephyrfalcon 10y ago
  You have a point, although technologies don't necessarily win because of merit either. In fact, they often don't...
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    That's the MS way! ;-D
enugu 10y ago
The point is that the existing speakers would like to preserve the language, but might not have resources for doing so. One good thing is that technology allows us right now to do archiving in an easier way. Recording speech, stories, and songs can be done more conveniently. Learning resources can be created in a better way. Problem is that the tools for all this might not be accessible to people living in remote areas if they do wish to preserve their language.
derriz 10y ago
Maybe we should all program C on Windows - and only teach it - because any alternative that is not "dominant" has no value or importance?
10y ago

jfaucett 10y ago

As much as I feel sad about losing so many amazing languages, these arguments are weak emotional appeals at best. The only legitimate argument you can make for keeping minority languages around is to basically reframe the context and say your goal as a society is to promote cultural and linguistic diversity because society needs it more than it does a highly effecient raw information processing system. As a programmer, when you think how much easier everything would be if there were only 1 OS, 1 Web Browser, 1 programming language, 1 data exchange format, 1 byte order, etc, etc. and then you think about languages its clear how much easier everything would be. Of course, we have different OSes, Browsers, Image Editors, because they are all better at different things and we aren't one organism - we as humans have different needs & preferences - which we bring to the table everytime we choose from one of the zillions of different options available to us. Its the same with languages, when you want to be amazed by poetic eloquence and the rhythm and rhyme of words you read Pablo Neruda in Spanish, when you want to delve into highly analytical thought processes you read anything by the German Think Tanks such as Freud, Marx, Nietsche, Gauss, in German. When you want to talk to a superior in a formal setting, you adapt a different tone, appearance and language, as opposed to when you are splurting out your particular workplace jargon with collegues. The list goes on and on virtually forever, its even the case that the language we speak i.e. English, Spanish or whatever it may be - is completely unique to ourselves like a fingerprint which can identify us from all the other people on the planet. Social Scientists study these aspects of our humanity, believing they give us insight not only into how people function but also into the optimization of more subjective qualities of that functioning such as happiness, group behaviors, moral motivations, etc. But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :)

Chris2048 10y ago
> But why does society need diversity more than efficiency? Someone else can give that one a try :) You'll soon find yourself in dangerous territory here. The current mantra is diversity is not only morally good, but also actually beneficial - but the former shrinks to the latter whenever challenged, with an extra helping of bad-faith accusation...
- 10y ago

stretchwithme 10y ago

Our awareness of language diversity is artificial. It only exists because of the same forces that are reducing it: modern communications and transportation. Most languages will be fully understood by artificial intelligence soon enough. Anybody that wants to learn them 1000 years from now will be able to. And once we enhance our own brains with technology, people will be inventing new languages with ease. And integrating the unique features of old ones. There are probably millions of languages throughout the universe. We may not be the only species that uses language on Earth either. We are really just at the beginning of discovering language diversity.

Paul_S 10y ago

I'm not advocating one global language and I think everyone should learn at least one language other than English but let's let the dying languages die. Natural selection is doing a good job. The good ones will survive.

PeCaN 10y ago
The problem with natural selection as pertaining to language is that the language may be great but die because the culture dies off or shrinks or gets assimilated. For example, I don't consider Spanish an efficient or well-designed language in the slightest, but it's very widely spoken because the Spanish are good at conquest. Ainu is very fascinating and possibly more efficient (in terms of syllables per second over syllables per bit of information). The Ainu didn't have much interest in expansion and got more or less assimilated by Japan. Doesn't mean the language got selected against, the _culture_ got selected against. While language may have an effect on a culture's success, I suspect a culture has much more impact on a language's success. Natural selection is a terrible metric of “good ones” in that case.
- voaie 10y ago
  Agree. Culture is what makes the language more beautiful. When a small town turns into a big city, the language will gradually lose its power if everyone goes for profit without the culture carried forward. Also, like what @gkya said, if the government aggressively enforce an official language on the people, other languages will die more quickly.
gkya 10y ago
> The good ones will survive. FTFY: the ones with more speakers and more political ties attached. It's hard to say that a language is better than another one, it's highly subjective. But languages die not because they're worse, but because speaking them is a burden if you are: killed for speaking them, excluded for speaking them, there's no one to speak in the language with, you can't use it to shop or at the doctor's, etc.

sethbannon 10y ago

Anyone interested in the effort to catalogue all the world's languages should check out the nonprofit Wikitongues: http://www.wikitongues.org http://www.wikitongues.org They have a fascinating collection of videos of people speaking in their native languages.

beloch 10y ago

"What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says. "" The Illiad is doing just fine in the many different languages it has been translated into. Preserving languages as living, spoken tongues is not necessary for the mere preservation of stories and history. "Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear. “If we are to survive, to continue on and to exist as a people with a distinct and unique culture,” he continues, “then we have to have a language.” “It’s very hard as an English speaker to understand that,” " This is true. English is now so widely used that it isn't really associated with one particular culture. You can travel to a completely alien country that speaks English, just differently than you. “Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems,” Harrison says. Returning to Cherokee, unlike English it is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are acting upon." Many languages have unique attributes that let them excel at certain things. German, for example, is fantastic for creating compound words (e.g. Gedankenexperiment). English, however, gleefully swallows up such words and incorporates them. "There are also a few examples of languages being revived even after actually going extinct. By the 1960s, the last fluent Miami language speakers living in the American Midwest passed away. Thanks largely to the efforts of one interested member of the Miami Nation tribe, however, the language is now taught at Miami University in Ohio. " Another example of this is written Mayan. The first archbishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, deliberately wiped out every trace of written Mayan he could. Paper codices were burned. Stone monuments were defaced. Literate Mayans were executed. He was so successful that, by the 20th century, written Mayan was a complete mystery. It has since been deciphered, but outside of a very small number of paper codices, all that remains are stone monuments. This is unfortunate. Consider the writing on monuments in Washington as compared to what's in the Library of Congress. As useful as different languages may be for different things, they're also distressingly good at preventing us from communicating with and understanding each other. Perhaps the rise of more global languages is worth paying the price of losing some of our lingual diversity.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

auganov 10y ago

Would any of you make your children monolingual [0] speakers of your national language? Wouldn't you feel like you're doing them a disservice? [0] monolingual in the sense that the national language would strictly be their native language spoken at school/education, with friends and family even if they'd still be learning English

contingencies 10y ago

I've personally volunteered for the anthropologist and linguist interviewed in the article sporadically since the 1990s, doing things like OCR'ing early Himalayan journals, setting up and maintaining websites (Digital Himalaya Project, World Oral Literature Project). Eventually I met him for a beer in Cambridge in 2009, shortly before he moved to Yale... great character! I believe he has since moved on to Canada. That said, as a westerner who has picked up fluent Mandarin (and dabbled in dozes of languages) and who lives nearly full time in China, now raising my own child, I can see the efficacy and likelihood of evolving toward a reduced set of tongues or even a single-tongue. My grandparents spoke English, Croatian, German, and to a lesser extent probably some Russian, Yiddish and Scot. Other than English, only one surviving grandparent (90+) still speaks one of those languages. Similarly on my wife's side, her family have learned and forgotten Arabic and Vietnamese. If indeed over hundreds of years the world does converge toward a single tongue, I would be surprised if Mandarin Chinese is not a serious candidate: offering simple grammar, huge and well dispersed population, with a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to culinary and other cultural acquisitions from integrated populations. The biggest issue is the number of characters, however a common international subset is perhaps emerging, largely through shared manufacturing supply chains, software interfaces, public signage and media.

douche 10y ago
They'll have to come up with a better writing system, either settling on pinyin on wade-giles, or something else. Really, ideographs are awful, an alphabet or even a syllabarry would be workable, but needing thousands of characters to read a newspaper is unforgivable.
- contingencies 10y ago
  That's OK, people don't read newspapers anymore and pinyin is a viable and highly consistent Romanization system already used by 1.4 billion. Wade Giles is a historical footnote. A little known fact is that the darling of the 20th century communist party's modern Chinese literary world, Lu Xun, advocated for the abolition of characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun Perhaps long texts will be read in a Romanized form (Pinyin) and characters will be reserved for use in concise international symbologies, much like Japan's ongoing use of kanji?

anabis 10y ago

If an adult wants to learn it, fine. But I will not teach my children a minor language as the first one. Otherwise, record few TB worth of speech and be done with it.

vonnik 10y ago

Many will die, but some are being digitized. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/science/28prof.html

seanvk 10y ago

I find this ironic that all the comments (both for and against) are in English.

voaie 10y ago
People talk about this topic around the world. HN is just a small place.

xchip 10y ago

If those are all the reason to save dying tongues, then this article proved the opposite of what it meant to prove :)

benkarst 10y ago

https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures

takshak 10y ago

A language carries its philosophy inside the words. Not all philosophical concept can be easily translated in other language. Take a Hindi/Sanskrit word "Aatma/Ātman" for example, it is translated into english as "soul". But it is wrong translation as plant, animal don't have "soul", while even bacteria have "Aatma/Ātman". If Sankrit is lost then the concept of "Ātman" will also be lost.

TheHexagon 10y ago

A quote that I love regarding this:  “Every  language  is  an  old-growth  forest  of  the  mind, a  water shed  of  thought,  an  ecosystem  of  spiritual  possibilities.” In  one  or  other  old‐growth  forest  of  the  mind,  we  need  to  watch  the  trees  grow.

bmrishabh 10y ago

My immediate thought after reading this article was like there is nothing wrong or disadvantageous in having a single language all over the world. It would make communication easy and universal. But the point here, which the author stresses, is that every language has its own perspective of looking at an object, emotion, action etc. If we let a languages die then we are essentially losing this perspective. May be there is some language in this world which can express a particular emotion which other languages, for example English, cannot express no matter what. Won't humanity lose a lot in this scenario? And besides this I think that English is the so called universal language just because English speaking population conquered most of the world. It is not so that English is the easiest or most simple and complete in all aspects. As a student of science I tend to believe in universality of language. It makes exchange of knowledge easy. But the points that I mentioned above are also important. According to me, letting a set of people try and revive the dying languages is worthy and helpful to human civilization.

MrPatan 10y ago

Or: Why Other People must keep having difficulty accessing information and opportunities, for my own aesthetic pleasure, but I bring up my kids only with useful languages.

a_imho 10y ago

IMO proposing of speaking only one language because of usefulness on an English speaking site is a bit hypocritical, considering it is not even the most widespread. Surely keeping English around is just emotional appeal.

timwaagh 10y ago

i thought it was going to come up with a rational argument. something like the real reason people are doing this and getting paid handsomely to do it. but its just all sentimental nonsense, isn't it?

xchip 10y ago

Yet another super long article that could be summarized in a couple of lines.