8 ms·

Should a dying language be "saved"? Preserving cultural heritage is all very well, but expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which wo

by waqf 12y ago

Should a dying language be "saved"? Preserving cultural heritage is all very well, but expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems far too high a price.

LesZedCB 12y ago
My girlfriend is a linguist with a particular passion for dying languages and cultures. I often find myself asking the same question every time she talks about it. I think the more important factor than usefulness in society is the fact that, like the article said, being the last of anything is lonely. For me, at least, that is a particularly hard position to empathize with because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. So, while I can't or don't understand the feeling, I think it's important to allow these people at least the little justice of trying to respect and preserve their cultural heritage.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. Give it some time.
  - LesZedCB 12y ago
    sure, I didn't mean to make it seem impossible, just that for now, it's not facing the same danger as other much smaller ones.
intopieces 12y ago
This comment is predicated on an assumption that I'm not sure has a foundation in science: that a child's "language-acquisitive resources" are finite in some way, or that a child learning a minority language won't "have room" for other subjects because of it. Because many, many children in the world speak one language at home and another at school, I'm not sure there is any foundation for this assumption.
- benbreen 12y ago
  Agreed (in fact, given my anecdotal experiences with polyglots from places like Switzerland or Scandinavia, I wouldn't be at all surprised by the finding that learning one language at a young age actually increases facility in other languages). And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
- freehunter 12y ago
  What does have a foundation in science (or reality) is that the teaching of another language means a child won't have room in their daily schedule for other things. There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise. That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language. In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? It's the opportunity cost.
  - intopieces 12y ago
    >what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? How does one rank the usefulness of knowledge? Language acquisition (and the acquisition of a particular language) is not a skill in isolation. It enhances other skills such as problem solving, logical inference, the ability to recognize patterns, knowledge synthesis... skills I daresay are useful in other fields, such as computer programming. I hear your argument a lot among people who just plain don't like learning languages and think it's "worthless," or that they'll "never use it" -- but the same thing could be said of some mathematical disciplines. However, there is little doubt that those mathematical disciplines contribute to other areas of knowledge.
bsho 12y ago
“The older people are the only ones who can tell you what their youth stands to lose,” he said. “The young are the only ones who can articulate the loss of an identity rooted in a mother tongue that has become foreign to them.” I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.
- Potando 12y ago
  This just means the last speakers are hoping to pass their insecurity problem on to another group of new "last speakers" to suffer it for them. Nothing against an individual having that desire, but for a 3rd party to help them, it's really doing any overall good. It's just moving the problem to somebody else.
bkurtz13 12y ago
There is a particularly human egotism with respect to "saving" things that have outlived their usefulness and purpose, or preserving things that should be changing. If language can be viewed through its evolutionary purpose, these dying languages are simply experiments that did not pan out, and should be allowed to become extinct.
- yrlson 12y ago
  That's not really reasoning, just self-fulfilling prophecy. Hebrew was revived, and I can't see a solid reason why the same could not be done on a smaller scale.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - gizmo686 12y ago
    The question isn't can a language be revived, it is should a language be revived. I am of the opinion that it was a mistake to revive Hebrew, as doing so has needlessly introduced language barriers.
    - _ak 12y ago
      It also turned out to be a consensus language for Jews from around the world that moved to Mandatory Palestine and later Israel.
    - panglott 12y ago
      As I understand it, there was already a language barrier in Yiddish vs. Judeo-Arabic.
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  Many of these cultures (including their language) were forcefully banned, obliterated by law, lynching, displacement. discriminatory treatment, and the stealing of children. I do not exaggerate. So don't pretend they are dying of natural causes when the knife is still sticking out of their back.
japhyr 12y ago
Yes. Because each language holds concepts that are unique. A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world. It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  Would you be able to provide some examples of these untranslatable concepts or ways of thinking? I suspect that the fact that you can provide them, in English, means that English is as capable as any other language to at absorbing that idea and making it expressible. If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
  - japhyr 12y ago
    I'll try to share some examples in a bit. Short reason this approach is "lossy": it's a huge game of telephone. Translation retains most of the translated concept, but not all of the concept's subtleties. The farther removed we get from the original, the less faithful the translation. We see this most clearly where it takes a paragraph of English to start to communicate the meaning contained in one word from some languages. Simple example: translate namaste into one English word. I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.
monocasa 12y ago
When you're a child, language acquisition isn't a zero sum game.
- maaku 12y ago
  Nonsense, of course it is. I'm raising bilingual children and every one of them has developmental delays. Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but as a result I've been quite motivated to keep up with the research. My family is not exceptional among bilingual families. Developmental delays are common, as are poor performance in elementary school as multi-lingual children struggle to integrate disjoint systems of knowledge. Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn. EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
  - japhyr 12y ago
    Are the developmental delays long term, or just focused in primary/ else tardy grades? I've been envious of my peers who grew up bilingual; none appeared delayed when I knew them in late middle school and beyond. In fact, they seemed more academically capable than my monolingual peers.
    - maaku 12y ago
      Early. They seem to pull it together around age 10 plus or minus a few years. Statistically speaking -- every child is different. Mine are still young enough to have persistent problems.
  - S4M 12y ago
    An anecdote to counter yours: I am French, my wife is Japanese and we live in Barcelona in Spain where the school is in catalan. Our four years old understands Japanese and Catalan quite well (similar to a monolingual kid) and can speak French, English and Spanish a bit (I speak to him in French, adn with my wife we speak English) but not as well as a monolingual kid. Ofmcourse we have to see how it will turn out for him, but to me in terms of languages he's pretty much like a sponge.
DanAndersen 12y ago
That's a good point. I think there's a tendency to conflate the idea of "lost knowledge" with "inactive practice" when it comes to dying languages. Record, preserve, archive information about a language, as much as possible, but to say that all languages must remain "alive" means that we're saying that some portion of humanity must expend the time and effort to remain multilingual in languages that they may not receive practical benefits in. Maintenance costs of "in-brain preservation" are relatively high, and in doing so that's allocating time that may or may not be spent in pursuits that are beneficial to the actual people whom some want to be vessels for a dying language.
- panglott 12y ago
  Languages don't "die", they are smothered by a society hostile to the community that speaks them. That may be outright genocide (as in the article), or it may be something as simple as forcing children to go to attend school in a language foreign to them, that offers zero recognition of their mother tongue. The kids may have to learn the content in a foreign language, and they are denied even so much as a hour-a-week class on the literature of their native language. A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/
indubitably 12y ago
There is no general answer to this question.
canjobear 12y ago
There's a substantial scientific literature arguing that learning multiple languages as a child actually confers many cognitive benefits. I don't know how credible it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_biling...
mmphosis 12y ago
UGTR :)
panglott 12y ago
Diglossia and bilingualism is very, very common in the world and probably the norm for humans: large monolingual countries are exceptional. Even in monolingual situations, people invent different registers for different formal situations. There is no reason that different linguistic codes cannot coexist for different functions. This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price. The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.

by waqf 12y ago

LesZedCB 12y ago

My girlfriend is a linguist with a particular passion for dying languages and cultures. I often find myself asking the same question every time she talks about it. I think the more important factor than usefulness in society is the fact that, like the article said, being the last of anything is lonely. For me, at least, that is a particularly hard position to empathize with because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. So, while I can't or don't understand the feeling, I think it's important to allow these people at least the little justice of trying to respect and preserve their cultural heritage.

jacquesm 12y ago
> because my culture is incredibly widespread and probably isn't going anyway. Give it some time.
- LesZedCB 12y ago
  sure, I didn't mean to make it seem impossible, just that for now, it's not facing the same danger as other much smaller ones.

intopieces 12y ago

This comment is predicated on an assumption that I'm not sure has a foundation in science: that a child's "language-acquisitive resources" are finite in some way, or that a child learning a minority language won't "have room" for other subjects because of it. Because many, many children in the world speak one language at home and another at school, I'm not sure there is any foundation for this assumption.

benbreen 12y ago
Agreed (in fact, given my anecdotal experiences with polyglots from places like Switzerland or Scandinavia, I wouldn't be at all surprised by the finding that learning one language at a young age actually increases facility in other languages). And taking another tack, I think it's important to keep in mind that languages are also vehicles for irreplaceable cultural information that might not be translatable. When we talk about the loss of a language, we're also talking about the loss of conceptual models, epistemologies, turns of phrase, oral traditions, jokes, etc that may be the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural continuity.
freehunter 12y ago
What does have a foundation in science (or reality) is that the teaching of another language means a child won't have room in their daily schedule for other things. There's only so much time in the day. If a child is learning math and science and their main language and other skills for seven hours, sleeps for eight hours, and eats for two hours, that only leaves seven hours in the day to fit in everything else, including play time and exercise. That's the limit on learning languages. We're only good at our first language because we spend our entire lives practicing it. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice and studying to learn another, even as a child. Double that if it's not a commonly spoken language. In Switzerland, it might be possible for everyone to speak English, German, French, Italian, and Romansh if you're around people who speak it for your entire life. But if a child is actually being taught these languages, let's say an hour each day... well what time is there left for anything else? Sure it might not push other knowledge out of their brain, but if it pushes other knowledge out of their reach due to not having time to learn other subjects, that's even worse. How much time will they put in learning a dying language, and what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? It's the opportunity cost.
- intopieces 12y ago
  >what other, more useful knowledge could they have gained otherwise? How does one rank the usefulness of knowledge? Language acquisition (and the acquisition of a particular language) is not a skill in isolation. It enhances other skills such as problem solving, logical inference, the ability to recognize patterns, knowledge synthesis... skills I daresay are useful in other fields, such as computer programming. I hear your argument a lot among people who just plain don't like learning languages and think it's "worthless," or that they'll "never use it" -- but the same thing could be said of some mathematical disciplines. However, there is little doubt that those mathematical disciplines contribute to other areas of knowledge.

bsho 12y ago

“The older people are the only ones who can tell you what their youth stands to lose,” he said. “The young are the only ones who can articulate the loss of an identity rooted in a mother tongue that has become foreign to them.” I work in Navajo language education. Most insecurity in Navajo adults derives from this single disconnect. It seems later in life, in those that have connected "to the rest of contemporary humanity" at the expense of learning their language, give up because of the complexity of the language, especially the verb.

Potando 12y ago
This just means the last speakers are hoping to pass their insecurity problem on to another group of new "last speakers" to suffer it for them. Nothing against an individual having that desire, but for a 3rd party to help them, it's really doing any overall good. It's just moving the problem to somebody else.

bkurtz13 12y ago

There is a particularly human egotism with respect to "saving" things that have outlived their usefulness and purpose, or preserving things that should be changing. If language can be viewed through its evolutionary purpose, these dying languages are simply experiments that did not pan out, and should be allowed to become extinct.

yrlson 12y ago
That's not really reasoning, just self-fulfilling prophecy. Hebrew was revived, and I can't see a solid reason why the same could not be done on a smaller scale.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- gizmo686 12y ago
  The question isn't can a language be revived, it is should a language be revived. I am of the opinion that it was a mistake to revive Hebrew, as doing so has needlessly introduced language barriers.
  - _ak 12y ago
    It also turned out to be a consensus language for Jews from around the world that moved to Mandatory Palestine and later Israel.
  - panglott 12y ago
    As I understand it, there was already a language barrier in Yiddish vs. Judeo-Arabic.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
Many of these cultures (including their language) were forcefully banned, obliterated by law, lynching, displacement. discriminatory treatment, and the stealing of children. I do not exaggerate. So don't pretend they are dying of natural causes when the knife is still sticking out of their back.

japhyr 12y ago

Yes. Because each language holds concepts that are unique. A language is more than a collection of symbols that can be replaced arbitrarily with another language. Languages, particularly indigenous languages, contain ideas and ways of understanding that are not directly translatable. When we lose the language, we lose that people's take on the world. It is a sad thing, intellectually and spiritually, to lose the unique perspective of a people who have survived for millennia. Globalism is great; homogeneity is not so great.

DanAndersen 12y ago
Would you be able to provide some examples of these untranslatable concepts or ways of thinking? I suspect that the fact that you can provide them, in English, means that English is as capable as any other language to at absorbing that idea and making it expressible. If different languages contain unique ways of thinking that can't be expressed in other languages, then what benefit is there to the preservation of that language? If the idea cannot be communicated outside its language, then what impact can it have on the world outside it? If it can be communicated, then why not simply use loanwords (as languages like English are very prone to doing) to absorb that particular concept into the set of concepts that can be expressed in the language?
- japhyr 12y ago
  I'll try to share some examples in a bit. Short reason this approach is "lossy": it's a huge game of telephone. Translation retains most of the translated concept, but not all of the concept's subtleties. The farther removed we get from the original, the less faithful the translation. We see this most clearly where it takes a paragraph of English to start to communicate the meaning contained in one word from some languages. Simple example: translate namaste into one English word. I come at this from a context of living in Alaska, and seeing firsthand the value of language retention, and the tragedy of language loss. I've also had great benefit from digging into other cultures' world views, and each of those experiences was heavily dependent on paying attention to the nuances of older languages. These concepts are hard to grasp if this whole topic is approached from a strictly academic context.

monocasa 12y ago

When you're a child, language acquisition isn't a zero sum game.

maaku 12y ago
Nonsense, of course it is. I'm raising bilingual children and every one of them has developmental delays. Of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but as a result I've been quite motivated to keep up with the research. My family is not exceptional among bilingual families. Developmental delays are common, as are poor performance in elementary school as multi-lingual children struggle to integrate disjoint systems of knowledge. Of course I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was absolutely worth it, but the idea the children are sponges that pick up language without trouble at all is a myth that needs to die. Children do learn languages faster and better than adults, but IMHO that is mostly due to (a) time, (b) motivation, and (c) adult learners rationalizing their failures rather than actually trying to learn. EDIT: But to be clear, although it is not my place to tell anybody what to do, I do wish speakers of dying languages would pass on their words and culture to their children. It's hard, but worthwhile IMHO.
- japhyr 12y ago
  Are the developmental delays long term, or just focused in primary/ else tardy grades? I've been envious of my peers who grew up bilingual; none appeared delayed when I knew them in late middle school and beyond. In fact, they seemed more academically capable than my monolingual peers.
  - maaku 12y ago
    Early. They seem to pull it together around age 10 plus or minus a few years. Statistically speaking -- every child is different. Mine are still young enough to have persistent problems.
- S4M 12y ago
  An anecdote to counter yours: I am French, my wife is Japanese and we live in Barcelona in Spain where the school is in catalan. Our four years old understands Japanese and Catalan quite well (similar to a monolingual kid) and can speak French, English and Spanish a bit (I speak to him in French, adn with my wife we speak English) but not as well as a monolingual kid. Ofmcourse we have to see how it will turn out for him, but to me in terms of languages he's pretty much like a sponge.

DanAndersen 12y ago

That's a good point. I think there's a tendency to conflate the idea of "lost knowledge" with "inactive practice" when it comes to dying languages. Record, preserve, archive information about a language, as much as possible, but to say that all languages must remain "alive" means that we're saying that some portion of humanity must expend the time and effort to remain multilingual in languages that they may not receive practical benefits in. Maintenance costs of "in-brain preservation" are relatively high, and in doing so that's allocating time that may or may not be spent in pursuits that are beneficial to the actual people whom some want to be vessels for a dying language.

panglott 12y ago
Languages don't "die", they are smothered by a society hostile to the community that speaks them. That may be outright genocide (as in the article), or it may be something as simple as forcing children to go to attend school in a language foreign to them, that offers zero recognition of their mother tongue. The kids may have to learn the content in a foreign language, and they are denied even so much as a hour-a-week class on the literature of their native language. A system that is intent on eradicating the cultural heritage of a people is not trying simply to do only what is beneficial for the kids. =/

indubitably 12y ago

There is no general answer to this question.

canjobear 12y ago

There's a substantial scientific literature arguing that learning multiple languages as a child actually confers many cognitive benefits. I don't know how credible it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_advantages_of_biling...

mmphosis 12y ago

UGTR :)

panglott 12y ago

Diglossia and bilingualism is very, very common in the world and probably the norm for humans: large monolingual countries are exceptional. Even in monolingual situations, people invent different registers for different formal situations. There is no reason that different linguistic codes cannot coexist for different functions. This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price. The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.