A Times Editorial

Loss of language

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 7, 2000

Language is culture. The words we use reflect our aspirations, express our geography and contain our past. Almost 300 years ago, the British set up English language "charter schools" in Ireland to try to eradicate Irish Gaelic, estranging the people from 2,000 years of literature and history. More recently, Sioux children in U.S. government boarding schools were beaten for speaking their language, robbing them of the heart of their heritage.

There are more than 6,000 languages in the world, but according to linguistic experts, most will disappear by the end of this century. Around 90 percent are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some are spoken by only a few dozen. When those last ones die, the language will die -- along with much of that society's treasure house of stories, songs, gods and myths, reaching far back in time.

Does it matter? After all, Latin is dead, as is Sumerian, Hittite and Manx. We don't feel the loss in our daily lives, especially those of us who speak the current great colonizing language: English. We are the winners. English pushed the older Celtic languages to the mountainous western corners of the island, overcame an incursion of Norman French and got enriched by Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire took English to India, Asia, Africa, North America and the South Pacific. In the 20th century, the American Empire spread our version of the mother tongue around via soldiers, movies, music and television. Now the Internet -- almost entirely in English -- is reaching every part of the globe.

Where Latin was once the imperial language, it is now our own English, followed closely by Mandarin and Spanish. So where does that leave minority languages? Obviously on the critical list.

Once a language is near death, it is very hard to revive it. Most of the 6,000 minority tongues will go under as the tsunami of the few global languages hits them. And while it may be true that no one will starve because of it (except maybe some dusty scholars), our world will be the poorer for losing Tzeltal, the Mayan language, which has a holistic way of expressing direction, or Basque, a language so old it's pre-Indo-European. Many species of animals and plants become extinct every year, too, and we in developed nations don't feel adverse effects. But when we lose the unique, particular, small glories of our varied world, we are all the poorer for it.

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