A New Extinction Threat

I expect you’re busy—we all are—but this is an emergency. It seems, just when we were feeling a little better about the polar bears and the killer whales, we have a new crisis, in the world of language. The National Geographic News warns that fully hundreds of languages are “teetering on the brink,” a “a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction."

No, seriously. If a language no longer has any speakers, this is a tragedy, right? It is just as if an animal species has become extinct, right? We should all be upset, shouldn’t we, and taking firm government measures to preserve our endangered languages?

Or not. A language is a tool. Tools are more often for throwing out when they no longer happen to be useful. There is some logic in preserving old tools in museums, for interest. There is very little logic in obliging some people to keep using them, demonstrably beyond their usefulness.

And language is a tool, specifically, for communication. It follows that the more people speak a languages, the better language works. A language spoken by very few people is intrinsically less useful. Insisting on preserving languages spoken only by small minorities is like making them chop firewood. With a stone axe.

Conversely, if the world is speaking fewer languages year by year, that is a sign of progress. Just as, with the printing press, the infinity of small dialects in England or France resolved into one recognizable literary language.

Push the logic of preserving small languages to an extreme, and one must also fight to preserve a speech impediment rather than learning to speak as everyone else does.

National Geographic, to the contrary, beats the drums of alarm yet louder. It claims that losing a language means losing important knowledge: “irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world.”

"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," the NG’s expert, David Harrison of Swarthmore, warns.

Right. Let’s see how that works. When did knowledge become language-specific? Has National Geographic never heard of the possibility of translation? Does it think it is only possible for each human to speak and understand one language?

And, if so, if the very last few speakers of some minority language never learn any other language, how do they manage to get by—without being able to speak to anyone?

In the real world, languages most often die out not because everyone who speaks them suddenly dies of the plague, but because those who had spoken them gradually switch to a different language. Absent government action, they switch if and only if they find the new language more useful.

I’m trying hard, but I can’t get excited over the loss that represents. A loss to whom? After all, not even the knowledge of the language itself is lost, so long as a grammar and a dictionary have been written down. Latin has done remarkably well with no native speakers for a couple of thousand years.

Therefore, unless things known in one language are genuinely untranslatable, no knowledge is lost when a language dies. Not even the vocabulary or grammar of that language, if anyone has ever taken the time to write it down.

I gather we are simply running out of things to worry about.