The history of the world's languages is largely a
story of loss and decline. At around 8000 BC, linguists estimate that upwards
of 20,000 languages may have been in existence.[1] Today the number stands at 6,909 and is
declining rapidly.[2] By 2100, it is quite realistic to expect that
half of these languages will be gone, their last speakers dead, their words
perhaps recorded in a dusty archive somewhere, but more likely undocumented
entirely.[3]
What causes this? How does one become the last speaker
of a language, as Boa Sr was before
her death in 2010? How do languages come to be spoken only by elders
and not children? There are a number of bad answers to these questions. One is
globalization, a nebulous term used disparagingly to refer to either global
economic specialization and the division of labor, or the adoption of similar
cultural practices across the globe.
The problem with globalization in the latter sense is
that it is the result, not a cause, of language decline. Another bad answer,
encompassed in the former definition of globalization, is trade and capitalism.
Trade does not kill languages any more than it kills any other type of cultural
practice, like painting or music. Trade enhances the exchange of cultural practices and fosters their
proliferation; it does not generally diminish them. Historically, regional
trade has fostered the creation of many new lingua francas, and the result
tends to be a stable, healthy bilingualism between the local language and the
regional trade language. It is only when the state adopts a trade language as
official and, in a fit of linguistic nationalism, foists it upon its citizens,
that trade languages become "killer languages."
Most importantly, what both of the above answers
overlook is that speaking a global language or a language of trade does not
necessitate the abandonment of one's mother tongue. The average person on this
planet speaks three or four languages. Must youth in Japan abandon Japanese in
order to partake in global English commerce? Must a business executive in
Germany stop speaking German to her kids in order to be successful at her
English-speaking office? Why bother giving up one language for another when you
can just speak both?
The truth is, most people don't "give up"
the languages they learn in their youth. They tend to speak those languages
either until they die or they no longer have someone to speak them with.
Instead, languages are lost when the process of intergenerational transmission
is altered or interrupted. To wipe out a language, one has to enter the home
and prevent the parents from speaking their native language to their children.
Given such a preposterous scenario, we return to our question — how could this
possibly happen?
One good answer is urbanization. If a Gikuyu and a
Giryama meet in Nairobi, they won't likely speak each other's mother tongue,
but they very likely will speak one or both of the trade languages in Kenya —
Swahili and English. Their kids may learn a smattering of words in the heritage
languages from their parents, but by the third generation any vestiges of those
languages in the family will likely be gone. In other cases, extremely rural
communities are drawn to the relatively easier lifestyle in cities, until
sometimes entire villages are abandoned. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. The
first case of massive language die-off was probably during the Agrarian
(Neolithic) Revolution, when humanity first adopted farming, abandoned the
nomadic lifestyle, and created permanent settlements. As the size of these
communities grew, so did the language they spoke. But throughout most of
history, and still in many areas of the world today, 500 or fewer speakers per
language has been the norm. Like the people who spoke them, these languages
were constantly in flux. No language could grow very large, because the
community that spoke it could only grow so large itself before it fragmented.
The language followed suit, soon becoming two languages. Permanent settlements
changed all this, and soon larger and larger populations could stably speak the
same language.
Quite impressively for someone with little to no
knowledge of the linguistics of his day, Mises had already come to understand
these connections between language decline, community growth, and economic
exchange even in his earliest writings:
In primitive times every migration causes not only
geographical but also intellectual separation of clans and tribes. Economic
exchanges do not yet exist; there is no contact that could work against
differentiation and the rise of new customs. The dialect of each tribe becomes
more and more different from the one that its ancestors spoke when they were
still living together. The splintering of dialects goes on without
interruption. The descendants no longer understand one other.… A need for
unification in language then arises from two sides. The beginnings of trade
make understanding necessary between members of different tribes. But this need
is satisfied when individual middlemen in trade achieve the necessary command
of language.[4]
Thus urbanization is an important factor in language
death. To be sure, the wondrous features of cities that draw immigrants —
greater economies of scale, decreased search costs, increased division of labor
— are all made possible with capitalism, and so in this sense languages may die
for economic reasons. But this is precisely the type of language death that
shouldn't concern us (unless you're a linguist like me), because urbanization
is really nothing more than the demonstrated preferences of millions of people
who wish to take advantage of all the fantastic benefits that cities have to
offer.
In short, these people make the conscious choice to
leave an environment where network effects and sociological benefits exist for
speaking their native language, and exchange it for a greater range of economic
possibilities, but where no such social benefits for speaking the language
exist. If this were the only cause of language death — or even just the biggest
one — then there would be little more to say about it. For as Mises so lucidly
states,
Since nobody is in the position to substitute his own
value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment
on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would
make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what
he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in
dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations,
declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the
critic.[5]
Far too many well-intentioned individuals are too
quick to substitute their valuations for those of the last speakers of
indigenous languages this way. Were it up to them, these speakers would be
resigned to misery and poverty and deprived of participation in the world's
advanced economies in order that their language might be passed on. To be sure,
these speakers themselves often fall victim to the mistaken ideology that one
language necessarily displaces or interferes with another. Although the South
African Department of Education is trying to develop teaching materials in the
local African languages, for example, many parents are pushing back; they want
their children taught only in English. In Dominica, the parents go even further
and refuse to even speak the local
language, Patwa, to their children.[6] Were they made aware of the falsity of this
notion of language displacement, perhaps they would be less quick to stop
speaking their language to their children. But the decision is ultimately
theirs to make, and theirs alone.
Urbanization, however, is not the only cause of
language death. There is another that, I'm sad to say, almost none of the
linguists who work on endangered languages give much thought to, and that is
the state. The state is the only entity capable of reaching into the home and
forcibly altering the process of language socialization in an institutionalized way.
How? The traditional method was simply to kill or
remove indigenous and minority populations, as was done as recently as 1923 in the United States in
the last conflict of the Indian War. More recently this happens through
indirect means — whether intentional or otherwise — the primary method of which
has been compulsory state schooling.
There is no more pernicious assault on the cultural
practices of minority populations than a standardized, Anglified, Englicized
compulsory education. It is not just that children are forcibly removed from
the socialization process in the home, required to speak an official language
and punished (often corporally) for doing otherwise. It is not just that
schools redefine success, away from those things valued by the community, and
towards those things that make someone a better citizen of the state. No, the most
significant impact of compulsory state education is that it ingrains in children the idea that their language and their
culture is worthless, of no use in the modern classroom or society, and that it
is something that merely serves to set them apart negatively from their peers,
as an object of their vicious torment.
But these languages clearly do have value, if for no
other reason than simply because people value them.
Local and minority languages are valued by their speakers for all sorts of
reasons, whether it be for use in the local community, communicating with one's
elders, a sense of heritage, the oral and literary traditions of that language,
or something else entirely. Again, the praxeologist is not in a position to
evaluate these beliefs. The praxeologist merely notes that free choice in
language use and free choice in association, one not dictated by the edicts of
the state, will best satisfy the demand of individuals, whether for minority
languages or lingua francas. What people find useful, they will use.
By contrast, the state values none of these things.
For the state, the goal is to bind individuals to itself, to an imagined
homogeneous community of good citizens, rather than their local community.
National ties trump local ones in the eyes of the state. Free choice in
association is disregarded entirely. And so the state forces many indigenous
people to become members of a foreign community, where they are a minority and
their language is scorned, as in the case of boarding schools. Whereas at home,
mastering the native language is an important part of functioning in the
community and earning prestige, and thus something of value, at school it
becomes a black mark and a detriment. Given the prisonlike way schools are run,
and how they exhibit similar intense (and sometimes dangerous) pressures from
one's peers, minority-language-speaking children would be smart to disassociate
themselves as quickly as possible from their cultural heritage.
The result is that, two generations ago, after the
Prussian model of compulsory education had firmly taken root in countries
across the world, an entire generation of minority peoples decided that their
language was worthless, and when they had children of their own, refused to
teach it to them. The impending die-off of languages is no less the result of
processes put in motion a century ago by the state as it is the result of
continuing hegemony today.
Mises himself, though sometimes falling prey to common
fallacies regarding language like linguistic determinism and ethnolinguistic
isomorphism, was aware of this distinction between natural language decline and
language death brought on by the state. In fact, the entire first chapter of
one of his earlier works, Nation, State, and
Economy, is devoted to issues of language and the state. He
notes,
Quite distinct from natural assimilation through personal contact with people speaking other languages is artificial assimilation — denationalization by state or other compulsion.… If individuals are put into an environment where they are cut off from contact with their fellow nationals and made exclusively dependent on contacts with foreigners, then the way is prepared for their assimilation.[7]
This is precisely what the Bureau of Indian Affairs
accomplished by coercing indigenous children into attending boarding schools.
Those children were cut off from their culture and language — their nation —
until they had effectively assimilated American ideologies regarding minority
languages, namely, that English is good and all else is bad.
Nor is this the only way the state affects language.
The very existence of a modern nation-state, and the ideology it encompasses,
is antithetical to linguistic diversity. It is predicated on the idea of one
state, one nation, one people. In Nation, State, and Economy,
Mises points out that, prior to the rise of nationalism in the 17th and 18th
centuries, the concept of a nation did not
refer to a political unit like state or country as we think of it today. A
"nation" instead referred to a collection of individuals who share a
common history, religion, cultural customs and — most importantly — language.
Mises even went so far as to claim that "the essence of nationality lies
in language."[8] The "state" was a thing apart,
referring to the nobility or princely state, not a community of people (hence
Louis XIV's famous quip, "L'état c'est moi.").[9] In that era, a state might consist of many
nations, and a nation might subsume many states.
The rise of nationalism changed all this. As Robert
Lane Greene points out in his excellent book, You Are What You
Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity,
The old blurry linguistic borders became inconvenient
for nationalists. To build nations strong enough to win themselves a state, the
people of a would-be nation needed to be welded together with a clear sense of
community. Speaking a minority dialect or refusing to assimilate to a standard
wouldn't do.[10]
Mises himself elaborated on this point. Despite his
belief in the value of a liberal democracy, which would remain with him for the
rest of his life, Mises realized early on that the imposition of democracy over
multiple nations could only lead to hegemony and assimilation:
In polyglot territories, therefore, the introduction of a democratic constitution does not mean the same thing at all as introduction of democratic autonomy. Majority rule signifies something quite different here than in nationally uniform territories; here, for a part of the people, it is not popular rule but foreign rule. If national minorities oppose democratic arrangements, if, according to circumstances, they prefer princely absolutism, an authoritarian regime, or an oligarchic constitution, they do so because they well know that democracy means the same thing for them as subjugation under the rule of others.[11]
From the ideology of nationalism was also born the
principle of irredentism, the policy of
incorporating historically or ethnically related peoples into the larger
umbrella of a single state, regardless of their linguistic differences. As
Greene points out, for example,
By one estimate, just 2 or 3 percent of newly minted "Italians" spoke Italian at home when Italy was unified in the 1860s. Some Italian dialects were as different from one another as modern Italian is from modern Spanish.[12]
This in turn prompted the Italian statesman Massimo
D'Agelizo (1798–1866) to say, "We have created Italy. Now we need to
create Italians." And so these Italian languages soon became yet another
casualty of the nation-state.
Mises once presciently predicted that,
If [minority nations] do not want to remain politically without influence, then they must adapt their political thinking to that of their environment; they must give up their special national characteristics and their language.[13]
This is largely the story of the world's languages. It
is, as we have seen, the history of the state, a story of nationalistic furor,
and of assimilation by force. Only when we abandon this socialist and utopian
fantasy of one state, one nation, one people will this story begin to change.
Notes
[2] M. Paul Lewis (ed.), Ethnologue: Languages of the
World, Sixteenth Edition (2009), Dallas, TX: SIL
International.
[3] Krauss, " The World's Languages in
Crisis"; Christopher Moseley (ed.), Atlas of the World's
Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. (2010), Paris, UNESCO Publishing.
[4] Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy (Online edition, 1919;
1983), Ludwig von Mises Institute, p. 46–47.
[5] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Scholar's
Edition, 2010) Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, p. 19.
[6] Amy L. Paugh, Playing With Languages:
Children and Change in a Caribbean Village (2012), Berghahn
Books.
[10] Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the
Politics of Identity (Kindle Edition, 2011), Delacorte Press,
p. 132.
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