General Language Thread

Or language extinction or whatever your preferred term. Is it a good thing? Does it help us work towards instating a universal language? Should we have a universal language? Is death of an obscure language inevitable? How much resources should go towards preserving a given language? What can we get out of preserving a language?

It doesn't look like we had this thread, and I figure it's worth talking about. Especially since I might end up dealing with it in my career years from now.

Wikipedia link.

In some ways it is inevitable, I believe. I mean, there are some languages in Australia that only a bare handful of people speak - I heard of one that had only two old men left. I don't really think it's possible to bring a language back from that.

I'm going with yes it's inevitable, and yes on inherently good thing. Languages are a system of communication protocols, the more people use the same protocols to communicate, the better. However, I don't believe there will ever be a "universal language" due to the simple presence of jargon. I believe there was an actual theory that language divides would begin with jargon differences.

Endangered languages should give us their delicious vocabulary before passing on.

I'm glad to see that someone else is interested in this subject. I did very extensive research on language revitalization when I was an undergraduate in the linguistics department, so I get excited when someone cares to mention it.

People who work in language revitalization projects have a very hard time communicating their justification to IRBs (Infromation Review Boards), especially in the university system. Linguists have to work very hard to make compelling proposals for grants needed to promote community development projects overseas and domestically. You've probably heard of the old argument that the liberal arts are useless in professional fields, and this argument gets heavily extended to linguistics.

It's been said that a language dies every two weeks. Furthermore, there are roughly 4,000 to 6,000 languages spoken in the world, and only about a third of those languages have a written component. The vast majority of oral languages are passed down through a natural oral tradition, but colonialism, genocide, and gentrification have reduced those oral traditions exponentially every decade. Endangered languages are typically only spoken by no more than 10,000 members of a given population set, and the majority of fluent speakers of the language are over the age of 60. You can see how this age factor has a negative impact on the inter-generational survival of the language.

Language death is a natural sociological process, but the question among linguists is whether or not we should do anything about it. My personal response to that pondering "Of course, why not?", but for the sake of argument, we should bear in mind that there is a sort of natural selection to language propagation and language survival. The obscurity of the language is inversely proportional to its longevity, and this has nothing to do with difficulty in comprehension.

The big topics among linguists at the moment are the following:

1.) How much should language communities immerse themselves in a revitalization program?

2.) Should only members of the ethnic, religious, or cultural group from which the language derives have the final say as to governs its use?

3.) To what degree should we incorporate technology into revitalization projects? Do electronic communication devices aid or detract from revitalization?

4.) If a speech community does not want to revitalize their language, should the language be left alone or recorded anyway? This is a big issue especially among Native American tribes where only members of the tribe are allowed to speak the language.

Speaking of which, language maintenance projects are divided into three categories:

1.) revitalization 2.) preservation 3.) documentation

I personally feel that all languages should be maintained, but note that you can take any of the three above components independently without using the other. Additionally, those three components don't have to be used in that specific order. I can tell you from my experience that one of the greatest killers of languages is lack of economic viability. To elucidate, the advent of the Second Industrial Revolution led to a more rapid increase in language death, so there's an ongoing debate on whether or not semi-industrial and non-industrial societies should engage in economic expansion in order to save their language.

The Maori, Welsh, Chippewa, Northern Paiute, Winnebago, and some of the Western Sami languages have had some of the most notable success rates in revitalization. All of the language communities I just mentioned have one thing in common: they actually cared about restoring their language to inter-generational transmission. Apathy, I believe, is the number one killer of languages worldwide.

Edit: Cleaned up some grammar.

edited 31st Oct '10 8:49:12 PM by Aprilla

Endangered languages should give us their delicious vocabulary before passing on.

And better yet, their delicious syntax. I'm partial to the agglutinative kind myself. The "fact" that the Inuit have over 9000 words for snow is less interesting than the fact that they express what we'd convey with entire sentences as one big multiply-inflected verb.

What about that one language where syntax changes depending on how you obtained a given piece of information?

edited 31st Oct '10 10:57:25 PM by storyyeller

There are actually several languages that do this, particularly polysynthetic languages. Japanese uses an honorific syntax and lexicon that change depending on the level of authority of the listener, but the syntax tends to be SOV (subject object verb). Some North Atlantic and East African languages alternate between an SVO (subject verb object) and an OSV (object subject verb) syntax, depending on the status of the listener.

Languages that have transmutable syntactic structures tend to reflect upon the hierarchical nature of the speech community, but certainly not always.

edited 31st Oct '10 11:11:21 PM by Aprilla

No, I mean a language where

• Bob is playing catch. (I know because I saw him)
• Bob is playing catch. (I know because Someone told me)

Would be said in different ways.

edited 1st Nov '10 6:34:20 AM by storyyeller

Again, this is basically what I said earlier. There are languages where the syntax changes for a variety reasons including but not limited to location, hierarchical status of the speaker, the distance between the speaker and the listener, the presence or absence of daylight, the gender of the speaker/listener and the shape and size of the object being described like the sentences you just used. A few languages in the Indo-Iranian family once used a polymorphic syntax to the same effect as the sentence you just described, but that has less to do with syntax are more to do with semantics and lexical-function grammars.

Some of the Dené-Yeniseian languages from northwestern North America and Siberia also use context-sensitive syntax (or polymorphosyntax) based on, among other things, whether or not the speaker heard and saw the action being described.

edited 1st Nov '10 7:23:53 AM by Aprilla

If I'm not mistaken, Turkish has evidentiality markers as well. So it's not a feature limited to a few dying languages.

A worldwide language would be good, but many people, like me, wouldn't like it.

Methinks a worldwide language is too convienient to be anything but ineviteable. It's getting harder and harder to kick against the pricks.

I think that all languages should be preserved, and that language death is a horrible tragedy.

A universal, worldwide language, while sounding convenient, wouldn't be possible without a variety of drastic fundamental shifts in human cognition and the coagulation - or even singularization - of cultural values. I'm not saying its totally impossible, but the plausibility of a universal language is dim, at best.

This question has been asked very frequently in linguistics and philosophy circles, and most scholars agree that such a change is dependent on qualities such as culture, the transmission of ideas, and the publicity of language. This debate is a huge can of worms in linguistic philosophy. Before we can figure out the feasibility of a universal language, we need to determine the primary source of language and its primary use.

1.) Is language private or is it public? In other words, does it depend on the individual synthesis of ideas, or does language truly manifest itself in terms of participation in speech communities?

2.) Are ideas independent of language? Can you create and develop an idea without using language?

3.) If languages are private, then why can a speaker of another language learn and understand the communication of a speaker of another language. If language is public, then why do we have multiple languages in the first place?

All of these questions have a sort of chicken-or-the-egg premise that can make things messy if you're not careful. My contention is that you're going to have to streamline cultural value systems and monopolize human cognition in such a way that a single-language transmission environment can operate without interference. You can imagine the unfortunate implications of doing so, and this dilemma has been explored in countless sci-fi stories with alien species that are unrealistically homogenized.

It's also worth noting that this is by no means the first time anyone has brought up the idea of a universal language. Societies have flirted with the development of universal languages for thousands of years, and everyone has their own idea as to what a universal language should be. Some cultures have unfortunately insisted upon so-called universal languages in the process of destroying other cultural groups. We've seen this with colonialism and imperialism too many times.

Some philosophers, mathematicians, and psychologists suggest that we already have a universal language - human thought. While the theory isn't totally buttoned down, it seems that we all share a fundamentally compatible ability to express ideas. Aside from speech-based and cognition-based pathological disorders, we all more or less have thoughts and an aptitude for communicating those thoughts, even if we have different ways of doing it. There are universal aspects of language just as there are universal aspects of culture. ASL (American Sign Language) users stutter with their hands, they monotonously wave with their hands when they've forgotten what they're going to sign (the same as saying "uhhh"), and they even sign in their sleep the exact same way speakers do.

Some mathematicians in particular claim that math is the one absolute language we have, and there is a lot of truth to this statement. I can go to a different planet and use math to speak to aliens, and they'll understand it perfectly fine, provided they have the proper translational materials via algebraic expressions. I can go anywhere in the world and express 2+2=4, and this law of addition is universally and scientifically accepted.

As for phonological usage, I have my doubts. The closest thing we have to a universal alphabet, but not a language, is the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA does have its drawbacks, and it goes through revisions every once in a while.

On a more practical level, one of the biggest problems with a world language (and also with spelling reform or any kind of linguistic reform) is backwards compatibility. Natural language change gradually makes it harder to understand old documents; imagine what a relatively sudden, top-down reform would do for comprehensibility. We could of course make translations, but that would be a huge amount of work— and raise philosophical questions of its own, like whether any translation can possibly capture the sense of the original.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

This is the closest example I know of of a language developing without a parent.

With cultures as they are, I doubt things would go well if power was so centralized that a single language was enforced universally. I don't think we've seen the full cultural effects of internationalization, but I think that foreign languages will continue to exist at least in small, secluded pockets of the world.

I think humans are pretty efficient with language use, and it takes quite a bit to manipulate it artificially. I don't think that it would be practical to force anything.

I was wondering more about the possible benefits of preserving a language when I made this thread. Exactly how much value is there in doing so, do you think?

Well, I would say that there are historical and cultural merits to be found in language preservation efforts. For example, a linguist once studied with South American Aboriginals with the hope of documenting and revitalizing their language, and it turned out that these people held the secret to a cure for a very violent skin disease by maintaining an oral encyclopedia of the local plant life.

When a language dies, a culture dies with it. By preserving and revitalizing languages, we have a better chance of sustaining human value systems that offer clues on why we work the way we do. Uncovering obscure languages with unusual grammars and lexicons can also provide further insight into the neurological and cognitive forces at work in language usage. In turn, we can cure and prevent developmental disorders that hinder speech and other forms of communication.

Language revitalization and preservation have a lot of potential for the greater good, but I can see why some people would be opposed to these programs, especially if it's a cultural group that would prefer to keep its language within the confines of its own people. There's some controversy about the observer's paradox and language contamination caused by outsiders working in a speech community.

One such case is the periphery dilemma, a phenomenon in which the endangered language becomes secondary to the primary language being used to teach the secondary language. A group of linguists once taught English to Hopi children and many of them stopped speaking Hopi in favor of English, going so far as to leave their reservations and abandon the Hopi tradition after getting jobs in the cities. Linguists have to make a tough call on when to insist on language revitalization and when to back off and let the community do what it wants with the native language, even if that means the eventual death of the native language.

I would expect that a majority of speakers of a dying language would have at least a better than completely neutral attitude towards allowing researchers to record their language, and I would make an uneducated guess that there are enough dying languages for it to be a non-issue except where a language is particularly novel.

Anyway, with regards to children dropping the old language, I think it's more important that a group of individuals were given better educational opportunities, than any given culture being preserved.

It's interesting that a medicinal fact was able to be extracted from that language, though. Come to think about it, I remember hearing about something like that. I guess that satisfies my curiosity about whether there's more concrete benefits to be found in this field.

As for neutral attitudes, you'd be surprised to find the number of communities that want absolutely nothing to do with linguists and want even less to do with documentation projects. Some tribal groups consider outside documentation to be disrespectful and even a form of bad luck.

The problem with the Hopi children was that they didn't see the value in speaking Hopi. Many Hopi are bilingual in Both Hopi and English and can operate both languages with equal competence. The issue wasn't really with educational opportunities, and I'd go so far as to argue that educational advantages and cultural preservation are anything but mutually exclusive. On the plus side, some Hopi are returning to their reservations after having been trained in in civil engineering and language revitalization.

I'll put it this way. I'm a highly educated African American, but I can't speak a word of my ancestors' languages, Cherokee or anything from West Africa. I would personally love to be able to speak a language that is - or was - indigenous to my people, but that's not going to happen anytime soon because my ancestors were coerced into assimilation. One of the quickest and most efficient ways to subjugate a culture is to strip them of their language.

Cultural identities change with time. But as much I hate to say it, I would rather have young members of a speech community voluntarily abdicate native language usage than to have it beaten out of them - the lesser of two evils. Of course, natives wouldn't have that problem if aggressive foreigners hadn't subjugated them in the first place. Even today, various ethnic and cultural groups are being oppressed, and you can still find countries that discourage certain groups from using their language in public discourse.

Quick note: If you're not already familiar, look up Japan's treatment of the Ainu people. Fewer than 100 speakers of the Ainu language remain, and Japan is doing a lovely job of suppressing the entire group. As a nation, Japan isn't as homogenized as their government would have us believe, and I say that with all due respect to that country.

edited 1st Nov '10 8:58:03 PM by Aprilla

Well, I was just trying to make a point about it being easier to get an education if you know English as opposed to a given tribe's language, and quite a lot of people don't have the time or interest necessary to learn more languages than they need.

I don't want to advocate forcing any group to learn a language, I just think it's a wonderful opportunity to present.

I'm sure you know, but languages don't always get forgotten because of oppression. I think a good number of my great-grandparents were native speakers of non-English European languages, and I don't think it's necessary for me to learn, say, Italian. Of course, I might have felt differently if I knew my progenitors didn't choose to come to America. As a side note, I would actually be interested in learning Italian because I have relatively distant relatives in Italy.

I haven't heard a whole lot about the Ainu, but what I've heard sounds interesting. There's actually a museum several blocks away with an exhibit on the Ainu that I've glanced at. I've been studying Japanese in college. You think this could be something worth looking into? I've been thinking about doing some study abroad program. Maybe I can find one that will let me study this.

If you can do thesis work on the Ainu or even participate in a project involving direct contact, by all means, go for it. It's a rare opportunity.

Natural language degradation is an issue, too. As I said earlier, linguists and anthropologists butt heads on whether or not native speakers should just let the language fade away if they don't find it useful. This also raises a debate about an inherent conflict between socio-economic progress and cultural retention (like we said previously about the relationship between culture and education). It also bridges into arguments about the legitimacy of sacred languages and voluntary segregation, but that's a bit of a detour.

I wasn't really shooting down your previous post. You actually brought up a good point. Should we really care about the languages spoken by our ancestors, and if so, to what extent? There's much to explore in answering that question.

edited 1st Nov '10 9:44:50 PM by Aprilla

I didn't mean to be defensive, I just have my attention divided right now and wanted to make sure I wasn't saying anything I didn't mean.

No problem. It's fine.

I honestly don't car eif a language dies out. The places in the wrold with thse problems are areas where cultural unifaction (except Asutralia) is really needed IMO. Also, I really dont see the point in pserving languages that so little people speak. What does it matter what languages people speak?

What does it matter what languages people speak?

How people say something is usually at least as important as what they say.

If you go by the "language equals thought" philosophy, then the loss of a language is the loss of a mode of human thought, which is an existential loss. Then again, we lose stuff all the time, so it's not like this is somehow unique or special.

Human beings will always have a need to communicate with one another. Where this communication crosses linguistic barriers, some form of compromise is needed, and that compromise tends to become the "common" language. English is well on the way to becoming that on a worldwide basis for humans, although there's a long way to go and some question if the movement will continue if the United States falls out of power in some hypothetical future.

However, this won't stamp out regional or cultural languages, and it seems to me that it's unnecessary to do so anyway. Learning multiple languages is an extremely valuable intellectual exercise for any person, and it would suck if we eventually had no other languages to learn.

Further, as was said earlier, if language is inextricably tied up in culture, then you're never going to homogenize human language without also simultaneously homogenizing human cultures. You'll also continue to have specialized languages as long as there is a need for specialist occupations.

As to whether we should actively seek to do something about language death, I believe that recording languages for future study is a vital tool of cultural and linguistic history. Even if nobody speaks them anymore, it would be a tragedy to lose them completely. As for revitalizing them, it seems that we should respect the wishes of the people who speak them.

edited 18th Nov '10 1:24:57 PM by Fighteer