When the last speaker of the Sechelt language, a tongue spoken by fewer than 40 people in southwestern British Columbia, eventually dies, an entire language will perish too. But, linguist John McWhorter wonders, so what?
In his recent article in World Affairs, McWhorter explores the phenomenon of dying languages and asks what we really lose when a language goes extinct. “The main loss when a language dies,” McWhorter argues, “is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.”
The old canard that “the death of a language means the death of a culture,” McWhorter says, “puts the cart before the horse. When the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. The reverse, however, is not necessarily true.” McWhorter cites the Native Americans as a group that has mostly given up its many ancestral languages while remaining faithful to their cultural identity.
Many travelers are discomfited by the fact that English is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the entire world, even when it makes communication much easier. When travelers converse with Tibetan monks who speak better English than they do, it can take the “authenticity” away from a should-have-been-more-exotic experience. It also reeks of British and United States imperialism: once again the powerful countries are imposing their will on the rest of the world.
But McWhorter argues, language extinction is inevitable as the world becomes increasingly globalized and interdependent. As isolated peoples move to urban areas, they eventually adopt the native language. The only solution to this is worse than the problem it’s trying to solve: “The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation– complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.”
Check out the entire thought-provoking article here.