Why are languages worth preserving?

The world of languages

This post being prompted by the article at reference 1 in the magazine Sapiens. There is also the article at reference 2. And I have also turned up my own, faintly related posts at references 4 and 5.

There are presently lots of live languages in the world, some spoken by quite small numbers and in danger of dying out.

There are lots of people who want to slow this process down, to do something about it. They might do this for a variety of reasons.

The speakers of a small language might want to preserve their language, preserve their heritage for their children. In many such cases, there is little or no built or manufactured heritage and cultural heritage, of which spoken language is an important part, is all they have.

People who have their own language and who are able to use it, seem to do better than those who do not. They are less likely to become alcoholic outcasts in what was their own country. But remember that, to the extent that people are encouraged to speak a small language at the expense of their speaking some more widely used language, they are cutting themselves off from the rest of the world. One might argue that the countries of Europe prospered because the arrival of printing and standardised languages swept away many of the old barriers to communication, commerce and progress.

Having diversity in language is an important resource for those studying how languages work. Studying all the different ways in which communication can be done. It is also, for example, useful to those trying to trace the movements of peoples through history.

And there are a lot of people who value diversity for its own sake.

But there are costs.

The fostering of small languages is expensive. One has to pay people to write them down and one has to pay people to learn how to teach them. One has to find time and place for people to be taught.

Support of a small language to the extent of making it an official language, with all the machinery which goes with an official language, is very expensive. I believe that the Chinese of old mitigated this problem by allowing several version of spoken Chinese, but just one written version. That is to say, they all wrote the same.

And I have known some people from Ireland who resented the amount of time that they had to devote to Gaelic during their school days. Time which might have been better spent on mathematics, on history or whatever. And some people from the UK who resented the amount of time they had to devote to Latin. Although speaking for myself, I am quite glad to have been exposed to it – and it only cost me around 1,000 hours of my valuable time.

Statistics

Good quality, free statistics about all this are hard to come by. But from reference 9, which seems to have gone to some bother to stop one copying their material, I learn that there are at least 7,000 live languages, with 23 of them having more than 50 million users, accounting for a little more than 4 billion of us, out of a total of more than 7 billion. So there is a long tail and a lot of people shut out of the mainstream of the world – given that at the present state of the art, all the stuff produced in one of those 23 languages cannot be projected to the other 22, never mind the other 7,000. And I dare say that the 23 languages account for a much larger proportion of the broadcast, printed or otherwise published word than the proportion of the world’s population which they represent.

On the other hand, I am surprised that the 23 big languages only cover something over half the population of the world. So what, for example, has this count done about the many millions of people who speak both an indigenous language and the language of their state?

Nevertheless, we do look to have a problem: far too many people are shut out of said mainstream.

Part of this absence of good statistics may be the statistical intractability of the subject. One might think that the family of languages in the world is a bit like the family of animals in the world – which it is, up to a point. Unfortunately the notion of species – a group of animals which may freely interbreed, producing viable and fertile offspring – does not read across to language. Saying that two people speak the same language if they can make each other understood does not really cut it and the boundaries between languages are much more tricky than the boundaries between animals. When exactly, for example, is one of the Italian regional languages considered to have been swallowed up by the language of the state? Neither does the notion of assigning any one animal to at most one species read across, as, as already noted, there are plenty of people with more than one language.

Then there is the cost of cataloguing languages which are not spoken by large numbers of people, a task which requires both technical knowledge and time, perhaps in a not very hospitable part of the world. Missionaries have done a lot of the work which has been done.

Miscellanea

English speaking Canadians, given both their history with the French and with their many indigenous peoples are rather sensitised to all this. A sensitivity which is reflected, inter alia, in the luxury of their metropolitan museums devoted to indigenous peoples, their culture and their works. See, for example, reference 8.

One might mourn the passing of the study of Old English from the carricula of English universities – but there are neither the students who want to do such studies nor the monies to pay for them.
The speaking of Hebrew in Israel is about the only example of a country successfully deciding to renew a more or less extinct, old language.

Unesco are keen on indigenous languages, to the extent of proclaiming a decade for them. But, on the whole, they don’t have to pay.

The block diagram

The world of blocks

Some of this is summarised in the block diagram above. A territorial nation state which has one, occasionally more, official languages. We might have the complication of a territorial nation state or province belonging to a federation – which might or might not enforce its own official language or languages. We might have the complication of a territorial nation state having two widely spoken languages, but with their being very mixed up on the ground, making apartheid impractical. I believe that this happens in parts of India – a very multilingual union – and no doubt elsewhere.

The official languages which must, inter alia, appear in schools, on road signs and on government forms.

For present purposes, a person belongs to exactly one territorial nation state and, with few exceptions, will speak one or more languages. Many people will have parents, children and siblings, and there will be a strong correlation between the languages spoken by related people.

And there will be relations between languages. These languages make up that family. This language is very close to that language. This language is the parent of that language. And some languages will have no speakers.

Conclusions

I think all this leaves me neither for not against. Languages have always changed, in something of the same way as animals have evolved; languages will always come and go. Some of this will reflect conquistas, military or commercial.

But if there is enough interest in studying, promoting and preserving some particular language, fine. Provided that the people who want to do this are reasonable in the call they make on central resources. Bilingualism, not to say multilingualism, is expensive and has an opportunity cost. And each case, or group of cases, should be treated on its merits.

PS 1: there may be a copyright connection between the big graphic included above and the ‘South China Morning Post’. Or with Alberto Lucas, or both. And if you count carefully, the graphic does indeed contain 23 languages.

Heritage studies

PS 2: having talked of mourning the passing of Old English, I chanced upon the back cover of the book about Roman emperors last noticed at reference 10. Listing a lot more books, a lot more subjects, in which interest is probably passing. Who still bothers with such stuff? From where I associate to festivals of nostalgia for the buildings of old and for the handicrafts of old, promoted by the likes of the National Trust.

References

Reference 1: Why are languages worth preserving? - Anastasia Riehl – 2019.

Reference 2: How to Resurrect Dying Languages: community activists are using creative methods to revive endangered languages and reawaken dormant ones – Anna Luisa Daigneault – 2019.

Reference 3: https://www.sapiens.org/. ‘SAPIENS is a digital magazine about the human world. It’s about how we communicate with each other, why we behave kindly and badly, where and when we evolved in the past, and how we live and continue to evolve today. It’s about the relationship between our laws and ethics, the cities we build, and the environment we depend on. It’s about why sex, sports, and violence consume and intrigue us, what life was like in centuries past, where we might be headed in centuries to come, and much more. In January 2016, we launched SAPIENS with a mission to bring anthropology [to the people] ... SAPIENS aims to transform how the public understands anthropology…’. See also the parent, the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/aryans.html. A family tree of the Aryan family of languages.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-gift-of-tongues.html. An introduction to the study of language.

Reference 6: https://www.sil.org/. These people are very big in the world of small languages. They are also God people from the southern part of the US: ‘SIL’s service with ethnolinguistic minority communities is motivated by the belief that all people are created in the image of God, and that languages and cultures are part of the richness of God's creation’.

Reference 7: https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/ethnologue. Offers comprehensive but expensive catalogues of the more than 7,000 languages, spoken and signed across the world.

Reference 8: https://www.historymuseum.ca/.

Reference 9: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-world-of-languages/.

Reference 10: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/reprieved.html.