Language murder, language suicide and the killer languages

(Nyelvi gyilkosság, nyelvi öngyilkosság és a gyilkos nyelvek)

My approach will follow the concepts and the intellectual stance adopted by biolinguists. Biolinguistics treats languages in their broadest possible context: the ecologic context or framework. According to this approach languages, just like any living creature in nature develop, live and die, and they do so due to some stressful circumstances, natural or social.

The justification for this biological parallel is that language is not a self-sustaining entity, it exists only there and only as long as a viable environment exists. Where communitie cannot thrive, their languages are endangered. Where languages lose their speakers, languages die.

The term language muder and language suicide suggest that languages never die natural deaths. These deaths always occur under stressful social circumstances, where there is no other possibility to survive but to give up. People stop speaking their mother tongues out of self-defence, as a survival strategy, so to say.

The correlations between biology and language are not accidental. The areas with the greatest biological diversity also have the greatest linguistic and cultural diversity. Extinctions of both languages and species can be conceived as part of a more general pattern of human activities which result in radical alterations of the ecosystem. A natural calamity, flood or the eruption of a vulcano can eradicate a whole speech community and also a language which was spoken only by that tribe. Quite often unfortunate historical or social events (laws in modern societies) bring about the eradication of a language.

A telling example of language murder is what happened in El Salvador in 1932, when after a peasant uprising anyone who identified as Indian either by dress or physical appearance was rounded up and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. (25.000 people were killed this way).

Linguistic diversity is always a benchmark of cultural diversity, consequently the death of a language also means the death of a culture. The fate of a language is bound up to the fate of its speakers. Language shift and language death occur as a response to various social, economic and cultural pressures. Every time a language stops performing a particular function, this function is taken over by another language, and next another function is again replaced, and then another, till finally language shift takes place.

How many languages are endangered?

According to the journal of the largest Protestant missionary society the Ethnologue about 20% of the world languages are moribund.

The criteria for the moribund status is when the language is no longer transmitted naturally to children in the home of the parents or when the language is no longer used for all kinds of social purposes.

According to the Etnologue data 90% of the world’s population speaks the 100 most-used languages. Linguist Michael Krauss of the Alaska native Language Center suggests that including all the languages which have more than 100.000 speakers, there may be only 600 safe languages. As a result, an overwhelming majority of the world’s languages may be in danger of extinction. In the United States and Canada 80 percent (149 out of 187) of the native Indian languages are no longer learnt by children. In Central America 17 percent (50 out of 300) are no longer viable, in South America 110 language are extinct out of about 400 known. South America is the richest area in languages, and it has a considerable number of unique languages not related to any other. In Brazil, for example, a large number of languages has not even been documented. However, with the exception of Paraguay, no nation expresses national culture and identity through indigenous language. In Paraguay Guarani is still used in spite of the fact that Spanish is the official language.

In Australia 90 percent of the estimated 250 Aboriginal languages are near extinction. Only 50 languages are spoken and of these only 18 have at least 500 speakers.

Africa and Asia are with the highest number of living indigenous languages, although European languages have spread over both regions in the past 200 years. A recent attempt to estimate language situation in Africa, indicates that 54 languages are already extinct and another 116 are in the process of extinction. The most reliable estimates come from Kenya where 8 languages already vanished. In Africa Nigeria has that largest number of languages and the largest number of extinct languages ( 10 already extinct, 17 in the process of extinction). The Russian enforced „melting pot” and dictatorial system killed about 200 smaller languages on the territory of the Soviet Union by enforcing tre spread of Russian. In India, though English is a key official language next to Hindi, 14 other languages have obtained official status making the Indian democracy the most multilingual administration. The 850 million inhabitants share 405 living languages spoken by people belonging to 1.700 historic communities.

On the other hand it cannot automatically be concluded that all small languages are at risk. Icelandic is a counter example, because it is not threaten in spite of the fact that it is spoken only by 100.000 people.

There are still too many languages which are not documented at all, not described, perhaps not even discovered by linguists, and too many have become extinct without being documented. Undeniably this is a great loss for the world’s accumulated knowledge. Just like in case of species, many small languages urgently need to be documented and monitored, because the health of small languages can change very quickly as their speakers belong to the most threatened groups.

Why is it a tragedy that languages are dying?

First of all because linguistic diversity gives us a unique perspectives into the mind by revealing many creative ways in which humans organize and categorize their experience. We also know that the most complicated and unusual languages in terms of grammar and sound system are isolates, languages which are not related to any other language and generally are spoken by small tribes whose traditional way of life is often threaten. The majority of „world languages” such as Chinese, English, Spanish and Arabic, spoken by 50 million or more people, are not isolates and are grammatically by far not as complex as the world’s smaller languages. Biolinguistic diversity is found in the areas inhabited by indigenous peoples who represent only about 4 percent of the world’s population, but speak at least 60 pc. of its languages.

The tendency is that the more widespread a language becomes, the more simple it becomes. Expansion results in simplification. This can be noticed in the development of English as well. After the Norman Conqest English absorbed much vocabulary from French and lost the complexity of the Germanic grammar. The differences are obvious when we consider that a modern Icelander can still read Icelandic sagas, while the language of Old English Beowulf for example cannot be understood by modern speakers of English. The world’s major languages are becoming more like one another through cultural contacts and intertranslation.

The threatened and dying languages are those languages whose speakers lived in the closest contact with nature thus their language can provide useful insights into the managenemt of natural sources. If these languages are lost detailed knowledge of natural environment encoded in language is also lost, thus universal human knowledge is at loss. Some interesting example to support this point.

In the Hawaiian islands for example the majority of native plants and animals are found nowhere else on the world and face impending extinction. Although the island state represents only less than one percent of the US total land mass, over 30 percent of the threatened species found in US are in Hawaii......

  • The Inuit people who inhabit the northern Artic regions developed ways of surviving under harsh climacteric conditions. Knopwledge of the ice that could support the weight of a man, a dog or a kayak was critical for their survival so they named these kinds of ice individually.
  • In the native American language, Micmac trees are named for the sound the wind makes when it blows through them during the autumn, about an hour fter sunset, when the wind always comes feom a certain diurection. These names are not fixed but change as the sound changes. If an elder member of the community says that a certain stand of trees used to be called by a particular name 75 years ago, but it is now called differently, these terms can be seen as scientific markers for the effect of acid rain over a period of time.
  • Similar examples can be given from the Philippines, an area with outstanding biological diversity where some 430 plants are cultivated . In consequence there are 10 basic and thirty derivative types of soil, four different terms for soil firmness, five classes of land, three different ways of classifying slopes.

It is clearly proved that the threat of species go parallel with the threat of language and the other way round, which supports the idea that language loss can fairly well be treated in the larger ecological framework.

Which are those social-historic changes that brought about the spread of certain languages and the murder of other languages?

The first social phenomenon that made a huge impact on the environment and also caused the spread of certaion languages, was the transition from hunters-gatherer way of life to sedentary farmer societies. Farming altered drmatically the landscape and the ecosystem that supported different species.

Several other major transformations in human society also have the effect of favouring certain popular languages and killing many other small ones. Such events and trends are the expansion of the Europeans in the New World, the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and the scientific revolution that resulted in the rapid development of the electronic media in the last decades of the 20th century which transformed the world into a „global village”. The language shift thus is only the symptom of a large-scale social process that affects people everywhere, even in the remotest regions of the Amazon. Many smaller languages and cultures are dying outdue to the spread of a few world languages such as English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian and so on. The European expansion did not stop at the continent’s boundaries, Europeans took effective control of large parts of Asia, and the Pacific, wherever the climacteric characteristics were similar or partly similar to that of Europe.

This radical restructuring of the world’s societies is rooted in the strong economic development of certain nations, the strongest of them speaking English. Those in social and economic power fail to realize that multilingualism (multiculturalism) is a natural state of the world, much more natural than the enforced homogenty. It is a common mistake to think that communication, economic development and modernization is hindered by the existence of many languages because the gain in making life and communication easier and homogenous requires painful losses from the part of the less powerful minority societies and languages.

As we all know languages and dialects are often symbols of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, race and other particular affirmations, and it is also easy to see that languge always underlie conflicts. Quite often social, racial and political conflicts go hand in hand with linguistic issues. Many examples can be ennumerated. We can mention the struggle for linguistic and human rights of those two milliom Hungarian minorities living in the neighbouring countries. But more bloody examples can also be given: In 25 years of bloody occupation of of the Indonesian invaders in East Timor one-third of the Timor population was killed, thus their language threatened by extinction. Another striking example is that of the Kurds, one of the oldest people in the Middle East with between 5 to 10 million speakers in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Sovier Unon. One fifth of the Turkish populatin is Kurd, though their existence is denied, they do not count in census, the use of Kurdish is banned and its use results in prison sentence amounting up to 15 years. This is language murder.

But:

Seen from an economist’s perspective the arena of languages is just another free, competitive market where the free choice of the speakers produces language shift and loss of the mother-tongue or in other words, native language suicide. Language siucide happened to the Scots Gaelic which disappeared as early as the year 1400 and Irish Gaelic

which was the language of the ordinary people of Ireland before the17th century. From around 1800 a spectacular linguistic collapse began pushing the Irish back. The numbers of its speakers declined from 1.5 million in 1861 to around 600.000 in 1901. Today it is a compulsory second language in the Irish schools, and hated by students who consdir it an extra burden to learn the mother tongue of their forefathers which produced such a rich literature of sagas around the year 1000.

In conclusion we can state that any clear thinking man in any part of the world has the key role to struggle for cultural and political distinctiveness because as John Donne says in his Devotions XVII

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in

Mankind;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

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