Language

Diversity in danger

DEBORAH CAMERON

As the twenty-first century gets into its stride we’re hearing more and moreabout ‘endangered languages’. Last year, the British Association for AppliedLinguistics awarded its annual book prize to Daniel Nettles and SuzanneRomaine’s Vanishing Voices, a polemical account of the disappearance oflinguistic diversity on planet Earth.1 It may be even more significant that thebook has also received high ratings from the broader reading public thatfrequents the website of amazon.com. It isn’t just linguists who are gettingthe message that preserving what remains of the diversity of humanlanguages is an urgent task, which we neglect at our peril.

Though accurate statistics on language endangerment are hard to comeby, most linguists agree that the overall picture is depressing. In Australia,where before European colonisation some 250 indigenous languages werespoken, only a handful of those languages now have more than a fewageing speakers. In north America, significant populations still speak a fewindigenous languages like Navajo and Cherokee, but most Amerindianlanguages are endangered, moribund or extinct. Languages are also being lostin South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and parts of the formerSoviet Union. The indigenous tongues which are closest to home for Britishreaders – the Celtic languages – survive, but most have only a relatively fragileexistence in the shadow of English (or, in the case of Breton, French).

Nettles and Romaine suggest that the assault on linguistic diversity hascome, historically, in two ‘waves’, which they call the ‘biological wave’ andthe ‘economic wave’. The biological wave occurred when some humansocieties turned from nomadic hunting and gathering to farming: farmingled to massive increases in population, so that farming peoples were im-pelled to colonise more and more territory. As small groups were over-whelmed or pushed aside by larger groups whose economies were based onagriculture, the same thing happened to their languages. This produced anew and less diverse linguistic ecology, but there was nevertheless sometrade-off between the loss of established languages and the development ofnew ones.

The balance started to go more seriously awry with the ‘economic wave’,which began when Europeans set out to colonise other parts of the world.Among the things they took with them were their ‘diseases of the crowd’ –infections like smallpox and measles to which the indigenous people theycame into contact with had no immunity. In the Americas and the Caribbean,huge numbers of indigenous people were wiped out by these diseases, andtheir languages perished with them. In this case the outcome was un-intended (indeed, it caused serious labour shortages, a problem whoserepellent solution was the Atlantic slave trade). Later, though, Europeanswould adopt policies that were more deliberately aimed at either reducingthe numbers of indigenous speakers or reducing their allegiance to theirancestral languages through assimilation. In both Australia and northAmerica, many indigenous children were taken from their families andbrought up in the majority language and culture. Even when colonisersbehaved less brutally towards the colonised, they built societies in whicheconomic and social advancement depended on abandoning indigenousfor colonial languages. Today, as globalisation brings the imperatives ofneo-liberal market economics to places once untouched by outside influ-ences, multinational oil companies and logging companies replace colonialadministrators as scourges of language diversity – but the ultimate effect isthe same.

Why, though, does this matter? It is obvious why one might (arguably,should) deplore the social injustice of global inequality perpetrated bycolonialism and neo-liberal economics, but it is less obvious why the con-comitant reduction in language diversity deserves our condemnation in andof itself. Some of the arguments advanced by linguists on that score seemembarrassingly self-serving. It is pointed out for instance that if we do endup with only a couple of hundred languages, most belonging to the samefew language families, we will be basing our accounts of human languageon a biased and inadequate sample. The rich data we need to make soundclaims will no longer be available. One pictures a linguist pleading with agroup of Aboriginal Australians who are now all but monolingual in English:‘but what about your wonderfully complex noun classifier system?’ But thepeople in question could hardly be blamed if they were unimpressed bythe proposal that they have a duty to preserve their ‘exotic’ grammars forthe benefit of science. Of course, many indigenous groups do – for culturalrather than scientific reasons – wish to preserve the languages of theirancestors. But surely what matters is the wishes of the people?

Another common argument for preservation is that, when a languagedisappears, the centuries of wisdom encoded in it, dealing with subjectsranging from cosmology to fish-spawning cycles, must also be lost. This is a

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curious idea coming from Westerners whose own culture is to a significantextent based on wisdom encoded in languages no longer spoken natively byanyone, and understood by very few (Latin, classical Greek, scripturalHebrew). If preserving the wisdom of the ages depended on preserving thelanguages it was originally encoded in, modern Westerners would have noreligion or mathematics, little philosophy, history or law, and no access tosome of the greatest works of Western literature. Of course, in the Westerncase the original languages are preserved in the sense that their usersproduced written texts which are still available for perusal, whereas manycurrently endangered languages are unwritten. Concerted action may indeedbe needed to ensure that valuable traditional knowledge is preserved; butpreserving that knowledge does not necessarily depend on the continueduse of particular languages.

The only situation in which language loss necessarily entails the loss ofeverything the users of a language knew is the situation in which a wholelinguistic community is wiped out in a short time, through natural disaster,epidemic or deliberate genocide. These eventualities are all historicallyattested, but the main threat to linguistic diversity now lies elsewhere, in‘voluntary’ assimilation and language shift. I put ‘voluntary’ in scare-quotesbecause I agree with Nettles and Romaine that indigenous and minoritycommunities very often have to make their choices in conditions that leavethem effectively no choice; there are coercive forces that favour larger oversmaller languages. I also agree with these authors that political action takento level the playing field (e.g. the granting of land-rights to indigenouscommunities, the curtailment of abuses by multinational companies and thereform of the unfair terms of global trade) should be supported by anyonewho cares about any kind of diversity, not to mention any kind of justice.But it is not so clear to me that all communities would always choose topreserve ancestral languages if their circumstances permitted them to doso without serious disadvantage. Insisting that they should is surely justanother form of Western paternalism, and to the extent we ourselves haveignored the same injunction, it also smacks of hypocrisy.

Terms like ‘diversity’ (Nettles and Romaine speak of ‘bio-linguisticdiversity’), ‘language death’, ‘endangered’ or ‘extinct’ languages point to anunderlying trope whereby languages in this debate are compared to plantand animal species. Rhetorically effective though it may be to liken the fateof Dyirbal or Taiap to that of the Siberian tiger or the mountain gorilla, it is amisleading analogy. Languages are not species: they have no existenceindependent of the human beings who use them. But in popular discourse,the ‘organic’ conception of languages as living things, which is essentially ahangover from the linguistic science of the nineteenth century, resolutely

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resists all attempts to dislodge it. And in the now-fashionable ‘green’linguistics which seeks to mobilise us in defence of diversity, the sameconcept gets dressed up in the clothes of modern eco-science.

Commentators observe, for instance, that a diverse ecosystem is inherentlymore stable, less vulnerable to disaster, than one which incorporates onlya few species; therefore we should be cautious about any diminution ofdiversity. The force of this argument is easy enough to see when applied to,say, the knock-on effects of over-fishing or the colonising of vast landsby a few GM cereal crops. But how could it apply to languages? If, forthe sake of argument, the whole world in the year 3000 had shifted tospeaking Mandarin, in what way would that situation be less stable than thecurrent one? To what novel danger or calamity would humankind becomevulnerable?

For some commentators, the answer to this question is that mono-lingualism produces cultural uniformity, whereas linguistic diversitysupports cultural diversity. If we all spoke Mandarin, you might argue,there would be a homogeneity about our culture and our thinking thatwould necessarily impoverish humankind. Again, this line of reasoning isa hangover from earlier centuries (in this case the eighteenth as well asthe nineteenth); it comes from the period of nationalist ferment in whichphilosophers elaborated notions like ‘Volksgeist’, the spirit of a peoplewhich derives from their historical association with a particular place andway of life, and is expressed and transmitted in particular through thegroup’s unique language. Always something of a myth, this view of culture,and of the relationship of language to culture, seems more and more remotefrom contemporary realities.

On one hand, it clearly isn’t true that, in contemporary conditions,linguistic distinctiveness protects you from outside cultural influences. Theinfluence of US entertainment culture, for instance, is not much lessnoticeable in Germany or Italy, where its products have to be dubbed, thanin Britain, where they do not. On the other hand, it is not true either thatwe are moving relentlessly in the direction of the culturally homogenised‘global village’. Affluent Western nations are more diverse internally thanever before, with bilingual diasporic communities combining their consump-tion of local and global culture with enthusiastic importation of culturalproducts from ancestral ‘homes’ some of them have never actually lived in.Hindi movies are watched in Leicester, Turkish music is heard in Berlin,Brazilian soap operas are discussed in Milan. ‘Minority’ cultural productsare made with transnational funding and marketed to ‘mainstream’audiences: even as I write, an Inuit film with dialogue in Inuktitut andEnglish subtitles has just opened in London, to favourable reviews. The

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vision of ‘diversity’ we find in jeremiads about endangered languages is anold-fashioned vision of separate but internally homogeneous cultures, eachcontained snugly in its own little box, where we are sternly enjoined to leaveit in peace (much as conservationists plead with us to leave endangeredanimals and their habitats undisturbed). But the ‘new’ diversity is producedby the encounters that take place inside the boxes, or in the spaces betweenthem.

To say this is to acknowledge that there is more to globalisation than theoppressive encounter with neo-liberalism. Of course we must not lose sightof that: Nettles, Romaine and others are right to draw attention to injusticeand to advocate support for indigenous struggles against it. What is ques-tionable is not their analysis of the economic power relations that endangerindigenous languages and ways of life in Amazonia or Papua New Guinea,but whether that analysis should become the basis for a global, vernacularistand preservationist politics of language.

On balance, I would argue that it should not. In a world that is more opento more people, where communication happens across borders as well aswithin them, and where cultural traditions are increasingly deterritorialised(that is, their continued existence and development does not depend ontheir occupying a single or continuous spatial location), the global ecologyof language is bound to change. Some indigenous and minority languageswill no doubt continue to flourish alongside ‘global’ languages in multi-lingual repertoires; some will be preserved as ‘heritage’, though little used;some will be abandoned and leave no trace. Meanwhile, new hybridlanguage varieties and what the linguistic anthropologist Marco Jacquemetcalls ‘transidiomatic practices’ will continue to emerge. There will still belinguistic diversity, even if its outlines do not conform to the blueprintcreated in the early stages of linguistic science. In the same way that wehave not yet found an ethics or politics capable of dealing intelligently withthe complexities produced by new developments in genetics, so arguablywe have not yet found a politics of language that can deal with the culturalcomplexities of postmodernity.

Note

1 Daniel Nettles and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2000).

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