The Imperial Legacy of Language
Language is the essence of culture, and culture is the epoxy of society. Individually and collectively, people tend to feel passionately about their mother tongue, especially when they have reason to believe that it is threatened in some way. Ever since the use of language evolved in early human communities, some confined in isolated abodes and others on the march into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas, languages have arisen, flourished, and failed with the fortunes of their speakers. Linguists estimate that tens of thousands of such languages may have been born and lost, leaving no trace. Some major ones, including Sumerian and Etruscan, survive fragmentarily in their written record. A few, such as Sanskrit and Latin, live on in their modern successors. But the historical geography of language is the story of a loss of linguistic diversity that continues unabated. At present, about 7,000 languages remain, half of them classified by linguists as endangered. In the year from the day you read this, about 25 more languages will go extinct. By the end of this century, the Earth may be left with just a few hundred languages, so billions of its inhabitants will no longer be speaking their ancestral mother tongues (Diamond, 2001). If this projection turns out to be accurate, the language loss will not be confined to those spoken by comparatively few people in remote locales. One dimension of the “flattening” of the world in the age of globalization is the cultural convergence of which linguistic homogenization is a key component. Some of my colleagues view this as an inevitable and not altogether undesirable process of integration, but if I may be candid, most of those colleagues speak one language only: English. Having spoken six languages during my lifetime (I can still manage in four), I tend to share the linguists’ concern over the trend. English has the great merit of comparative simplicity and adaptable modernity, but as it reflects historic natural and social environments it is sparse indeed and no match for the riches of French or even Dutch. If such contrasts can arise and persist among closely related languages in Europe, imagine the legacies of major languages such as Yoruba, Urdu, Thai, and others potentially endangered as language convergence proceeds.