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September 19, 2007
The Rhetorical Weirdness of "Endangered Languages"
I find the rhetoric of folks talking about "endangered languages" very annoying - almost as annoying as Historical Preservation Fundamentalists (save our collapsing Historic Gas Station!) and always end up wondering about motives. It's the same annoyance as my general distaste for use of the biological model to describe inanimate objects. Art doesn't evolve, folks. Only things that can reproduce evolve. People make art. Art doesn't develop - artists change the things they do.
Here's a splashy article on language extinction, complete with video, from National Geographic News.
O.K. - about the rhetoric. Languages are not living or dead - they're languages. People are living or dead. People die. Species flourish or go extinct.
Members of the Language Preservation Community, or whatever they want to call themselves, have interesting goals - preserving human knowledge that is encoded in particular languages - that seems to ignore what many of us (most of us?) think languages are for - communication per se. You see, knowledge about specific remedies (their marketing point for making us care about vanishing languages) is there, it could be shared in the languages other people speak. If we're just talking about new and linguistically exciting names for things, then there's only interest to people who like many languages.
It seems to me that their suggestion, that with the "extinction" of a language the knowledge is no longer accessible because the nomenclature would no longer be used and shared, isn't much use. Now if the knowledge of natural cures for ancient ills is no longer shared because contemporary children prefer watching Australian television to learning respectfully from their bilingual elders, then the Language Conservationists may be right but they're also completely incapable of offering a solution. I feel the same way about Western Civilization myself, after all, and that has little to do with language.
But then people like me have always been thinking that the world was going to Hell in a hand basket. Surely Sumerian scribes thought so. Dressing up your plaint in fashionable extinction rhetoric doesn't make the position much stronger.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 19, 2007 6:45 AM