Forty-Third
Edition -
The Cost of Monolingualism
Can you envision a world where everyone speaks the same language? An article
published in the January 1st to 7th issue of The Economist under the title
Babel runs Backwards calls our attention to the high rate of language
mortality among minority languages, concluding that environmentalists have made
more progress in preserving an ecosystem or an endangered species than we have
made in preserving endangered languages. Imagine if the Tower of Babel really
ran backwards and the world became monolingual.
As the story of the Tower of Babel goes, God bestowed multilingualism on his
people as a punishment for their pride, taking them away from their comfort zone
and forcing them to learn other languages in order to communicate. As people
scattered around the world and multiplied, so did the number of languages -–
into tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of languages, according to the
article. Languages, like people, have come and gone since then. Languages that
developed a writing system, have left a trace, those that did not, have forever
disappeared.
Over the years, the number of the world's languages has been shrinking. When our
ancestors were hunter gatherers, living in small and relatively mobile groups,
each isolated group developed a distinct mode of communication. As societies
became more agricultural and less nomadic, the number of languages diminished.
Industrialization and compulsory education further reduced linguistic diversity,
but the greatest threat to endangered languages have been globalization and
access to better communications that have accelerated the growth of the dominant
languages to the detriment of the minor languages. The Economist article cites
the Summer Institutes of Linguistic in Dallas as its source for the number of
languages in existence today: 6,800. It also points out that, as a general rule,
there are more languages in the hot wet zones of the world, such as the Americas
and Africa, than in the more temperate ones, such as Europe, for example.
Four hundred, or six percent, of the world's languages are threatened with
extinction. (Please
refer to the 21st Edition of the Global Advisor Newsletter for more information
on some of these languages on the verge of extinction.) In general,
languages with one hundred speakers of fewer are in imminent danger of becoming
extinct, and some have already disappeared. According to the article, pessimists
contend that as much as 90% of the world's languages will disappear in the space
of a century, and only 200 languages will continue to exist into the next couple
of centuries.
Some say monolingualism has its advantages, but my albeit brief research for
this newsletter has found fewer arguments in favor of monolingualism than
against it. Some favor monolingualism because they feel that linguistic
diversity poses a threat to the homogeneity of their culture. It is hard to
believe this now, but before contact with Europeans, California was more
linguistically diverse than Europe. Today, the fifty surviving native languages
of California are endangered. In the article Racing Against Extinction -
Saving Native Languages, author America Meredith points out that native
languages are not dying by chance. In 1868, a Federal commission stated:
Schools should be established, which children should be required to attend;
their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language
substituted. (Atkins quoted in Crawford a). From that point until
well into the 20th Century, native children were removed from their parents and
sent to a Government or Church boarding school. Under strict English Only rules,
students were punished and humiliated for speaking their native language as
part of a general campaign to erase every vestige of their Indian-ness, writes
Crawford. At the end of 1886, the Federal Government announced its policy
outlawing any use of native languages. This policy continued until the 1950's
and can be credited with the extinction of more than 150 languages (Hirshfelder
84).
In 1998, 61% of California voters elected to pass Proposition 227, banning
bilingual education in schools. This English for the Children law banned
bilingual education and the use of any other language than English for
instruction in public schools. Changes in the education code as a result of this
proposition have resulted in court action by the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (MALDEF) and other civil rights groups, claiming that the law
violates the rights of language minority students to an equal education.
According to Professor Colin Baker of the University of Wales, research projects
around the world support the notion that bilingualism is an advantage. Bilingual
children have more fluent, flexible and creative thinking. They can communicate
more naturally and expressively, maintaining a finer texture of relationships
with parents and grandparents, as well as with the local and wider communities
in which they live. They gain the benefits of two sets of literatures,
traditions, ideas, ways of thinking and behaving. They can act as a bridge
between people of different colours, creeds and cultures. With two languages
come a wider cultural experience, greater tolerance of differences and less
racism. As barriers to movement between countries are taken down, the earning
power of bilinguals rises. Further advantages include raised self-esteem,
increased achievement, and greater proficiency with other languages.
The war in Iraq has been a painful reminder of the lack to attention to language
education in the U.S. Congressional officials have expressed concern that
intelligence agencies do not have nearly enough officers who speak Arabic. The
reality is that it is impossible for any country to be proactive about which
languages will be needed when, therefore language education that covers all or
most languages is the only solution. As a member of Congress pointed out, you
cannot hire employees who are proficient in languages if they do not exist, no
matter how many incentives you offer.
Also, there is little evidence that linguistic homogeneity unites and promotes
peace. As The Economist article points out, the Protestants and Catholics in
Northern Ireland speak the same language, and most people in Yugoslavia spoke
Serbo-Croatian at the time of its civil war. In fact, sharing a common language
may make people more bellicose. According to the legend of the Acoma tribe in
New Mexico, the goddess Iatiku multiplied the number of languages so people
would quarrel less.
In business, English is the predominant language. According to an article by
Domenico Maceri, published in The Seoul Times, 80% of websites are in English,
even though 43 percent of Internet users are native English speakers. However,
Maceri remarks that if you ask Japanese businessmen what is the most important
language in the world, their response is: The customers' language. A very
savvy answer, considering that Japan’s economy depends largely on exports. The
percentage of native English speakers in the Internet is decreasing and the
Internet is becoming more linguistically diverse as more people around the world
are surfing the Net.
In an article published in Nature Magazine, William Sutherland compared
endangered languages to endangered animals. Languages ''seem to follow the
same patterns'' as animals, Sutherland told a reporter for Bloomberg News,
''Stability and isolation seem to breed abundance in the number of bird and
animal species, and they do the same for languages.'' But, Sutherland makes
clear, the one life form even more endangered is human culture.
A 2003 UNESCO paper sums up why people should care about the preservation of
languages:
“The extinction of each language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique
cultural, historical and ecological knowledge. Each language is a unique
expression of the human experience of the world. Every time a language dies, we
have less evidence for understanding patterns in the structure and function of
human language, human prehistory, and the maintenance of the world’s diverse
ecosystems. Above all speakers of these languages may experience the loss of
their language as a loss of their original ethnic and cultural identity.”
References:
The Economist January 1st to 7th
Nature Magazine, Spring 2003
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/forums/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1806&Main=1806
http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=209
http://www.basqueclubs.com/Hizketa/Hizketa/12-2-1.htm
http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/Prop227/EngOnly.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
http://www.ahalenia.com/noksi/tsalagi.html
