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rfmcdonaldOver at Century 22 PBEM, I posted a mock article describing the mass language death of the 21st century.
I was writing future history, true. I don't think that I was being overly speculative though.
Take the example of the Welsh language, as described in The Economist's overoptimistic article "From mother tongue to meal ticket." The Welsh language is a language that has undergone a model revival process over the second half of the 20th century, moving from marginalization in every area of public life to mandatory equal status with English. And yet, as the writer notes, "[b]etween 1991 and 2001, Welsh speakers declined in number in the five mostly rural counties where they had been most common. As a rule of thumb, say linguists, a minority language will die out if it is spoken by fewer than 70% of the population. Ominously, the number of wards where that density was achieved fell from 87 to 58 during the 1990s." More, as the graphic (originally from The Economist) to the left indicates, the Welsh language is increasingly a language spoken in the poorer and more rural west and northwest of Wales, not in the urbanized south. The Welsh language, the article continues, is now a language pased to the younger generation mainly not through the home, but rather through school and public life. Welsh is strongly associated with higher incomes, true, but wil this be enough to save Welsh from the fate of Irish? I have my doubts. What fate will other languages, with fewer speakers, or poorer speakers, or more disenfranchised speakers, face? Nothing, I fear, apart from their current speakers' descendants noting, perhaps with a certain sadness, that once upon a time their ancestors spoke one particular language but now it's gone, though, don't worry!, you can still find those extinct languages preserved in books and in various audio formats.
More interesting to me is the question of what should be done about this. Too often, language death has been precipitated by linguistic imperialism, by the decided efforts to drive a language out of the public sphere and widespread use in order to strengthen one empire's hold over a particular territory. That hasn't worked as a strategy for control, more's the irony: Ireland was overwhelmingly Anglophone when the Republic formed, and Russophone Ukrainians like Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko leading the Orange Revolution. Irish's fate was sealed by the early 20th century; Ukraine gained independence, for its part, while the Ukrainian language was still widely spoken as a vernacular. Ukraine may be an exception, though. What can be done on behalf of languages which lack the relatively secure territorial basis and large numbers of speakers enjoyed by Ukrainian, spoken by people who--particularly in language-rich areas like sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia--will soon come under the sway of prosperous urban areas where one or two lingua franche are in wide use? The textbooks and the audio files might well be all that linguists and activists can save before these less-favoured languages fade away.
(AFP) Brest: In the historic centre of the old province and grand duchy of Brittany, a coalition of French regionalists presided over the opening of the Museum of Minority Languages.
[. . .]
This museum is an explicitly political institution. As Breton nationalist writer Yannick Le Goannec said at the opening ceremonies, the Museum was founded to "mourn the victims of the chauvinist Parisian centralism, the languages killed by French."
Over the course of the 21st century, most of the regional languages of France have died out as living languages, lacking an ability to attract younger speakers: Breton in Brittany, Alsatian and Flemish in the border regions, the Occitan dialects of the south, Creole in the French Caribbean and Réunion, Kanak dialects in New Caledonia. Tahitian has survived in French Polynesia thanks to that country's autonomy, and many immigrant languages ranging from Vietnamese to Kabyle to Wolof are spoken in the cities of France. With these exceptions, France is monoglot for the first time in its history.
[. . .]
"The 21st century was a century of the mass death of languages," Le Goannec said, "when less-spoken languages vanished not by genocide, no, but by the decision to let market forces determine the future of languages already beaten down. And so, to be understood here in this the largest city of Brittany, I must speak French."
[. . .]
An estimated four-fifths of the languages spoken as living languages at the beginning of the 21st century were no longer spoken at the century's end. Genocide, with some exceptions, was not responsible for this shrinkage. Rather, the modernization of the world--the spread of state-sponsored education, global and national popular cultures, the urbanization that dislocated traditional peasant cultures and created new melting pots--undermined the traditional basis for many language communities. Few languages which managed to secure official status and effective equality passed away; all of the official languages of Europe's nation-states, for instance, remain vibrant first languages to this day. Languages which lacked these protections, rather, are the languages which passed away.
I was writing future history, true. I don't think that I was being overly speculative though.
Take the example of the Welsh language, as described in The Economist's overoptimistic article "From mother tongue to meal ticket." The Welsh language is a language that has undergone a model revival process over the second half of the 20th century, moving from marginalization in every area of public life to mandatory equal status with English. And yet, as the writer notes, "[b]etween 1991 and 2001, Welsh speakers declined in number in the five mostly rural counties where they had been most common. As a rule of thumb, say linguists, a minority language will die out if it is spoken by fewer than 70% of the population. Ominously, the number of wards where that density was achieved fell from 87 to 58 during the 1990s." More, as the graphic (originally from The Economist) to the left indicates, the Welsh language is increasingly a language spoken in the poorer and more rural west and northwest of Wales, not in the urbanized south. The Welsh language, the article continues, is now a language pased to the younger generation mainly not through the home, but rather through school and public life. Welsh is strongly associated with higher incomes, true, but wil this be enough to save Welsh from the fate of Irish? I have my doubts. What fate will other languages, with fewer speakers, or poorer speakers, or more disenfranchised speakers, face? Nothing, I fear, apart from their current speakers' descendants noting, perhaps with a certain sadness, that once upon a time their ancestors spoke one particular language but now it's gone, though, don't worry!, you can still find those extinct languages preserved in books and in various audio formats.More interesting to me is the question of what should be done about this. Too often, language death has been precipitated by linguistic imperialism, by the decided efforts to drive a language out of the public sphere and widespread use in order to strengthen one empire's hold over a particular territory. That hasn't worked as a strategy for control, more's the irony: Ireland was overwhelmingly Anglophone when the Republic formed, and Russophone Ukrainians like Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko leading the Orange Revolution. Irish's fate was sealed by the early 20th century; Ukraine gained independence, for its part, while the Ukrainian language was still widely spoken as a vernacular. Ukraine may be an exception, though. What can be done on behalf of languages which lack the relatively secure territorial basis and large numbers of speakers enjoyed by Ukrainian, spoken by people who--particularly in language-rich areas like sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia--will soon come under the sway of prosperous urban areas where one or two lingua franche are in wide use? The textbooks and the audio files might well be all that linguists and activists can save before these less-favoured languages fade away.
