How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Second, the whole world doesnt need to speak the same language for cohesive unification. We just need star trek level translation which doesnt seem so far fetched these days.
Finally, everything comes and goes- the stars, the tide, human life, and language. Have you tried speaking to someone from east Baltimore lately? I havent either, but according to my source, The Wire, they speak a language that would probably be close to unintelligible between people from other parts of the English speaking world.
In other words, I'm not worried about language diversity- whenever humans find the need to express themselves in ways that doesnt fit in the current framework, they find a way.
I think language is a clear representation of culture - your first language directly informs how you see the world.
The world would be a lesser place if everybody grew up with the same linguistic experience.
On the other hand, I'm a monolingual English-speaker. I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario, I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages; so I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge.
You gain a great deal if you have the ability to communicate with millions (billions?) of people that you otherwise couldn't.
Being understood by most people (instead of almost none) is pretty handy.
"""5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."""
Exactly, that's why different languages can spawn different communication. Certain things cannot be translated, whether they are idioms or grammatical constructions. It's not just "sad", it means a unifying and, in some case, simplification of thought. Now, with English becoming more dominant, I guess it depends on your background and ideas whether this reduction to "things that can be expressed in English" is a good thing or not. I pick English here, because it is the most obvious example given international trade, travel and the internet, though the same applies for various big, hegemonic languages in their surroundings, and the same happens with dialects even within a technically mono-lingual environment.
The cool thing about languages though is that they evolve. English is a prime example of this: things that can't be translated just end up being imported and becoming new English words.
The end result is a more powerful language, where you can express the combination of certain ideas and concepts that simply couldn't be expressed in a single language before.
"His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.
"Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography."
Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of the Internet, will not likely be used on the Internet. Whether or not such languages are still used in family life or for local community interaction is a distinct issue.
I am multilingual, as disclosed on my Hacker News user profile. The number of languages in regular use on the Internet is more than any one person can learn in a lifetime (most claims of one individual being able to speak dozens of languages fluently are very badly exaggerated) and every one of those languages, from multiple language families, is very likely to stay alive for a long time. A person who speaks more than one language, as I do, can choose to use different languages in different circumstances, as I do. Indeed, for many multilingual people, "code-switching" is part of signaling a switch to a different tone in conversation (say, from serious to humorous, or the other way around) or signaling "social register" (whether the person you are speaking to is being treated with friendly intimacy or with distant deference).
So I am not worried about this, on the whole. Other comments here posted before mine talk about the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (that "language shapes thought") but the strong version of that hypothesis is certainly untrue. (For one thing, human beings don't always think in language, but often also in pictures or in music.) Diversity in language will not go away because of the Internet. If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?
It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the reality of space and time.
There was a time when each culture had their own method for transcribing numbers. (My favorite is Egyptian Numerals that denoted 10,000 with a drawing of a bent finger.)
Today, I imagine (but I'm not sure) that I can travel almost anywhere in the world and the number 123 would mean the exact same thing. And that seems to be a good thing.
This is a problem in contemporary linguistics- the "big" languages are really heavily studied and theories are developed to describe them accurately, nevermind that they may completely fail for, say, Xhosa or Straits Salish. The bias has been decreasing over the last few decades, but getting a really good idea of the real fundamental underpinnings of human language depends on all those minority languages not disappearing, undocumented, before we're done.
Of course, there are other reasons which are important to people working on other fields- languages are strongly tied to culture, and when a language dies, so does a lot of other cultural knowledge and practice that may be useful to ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.
A good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
"As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom."
Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in languages in huge, and we wouldn't know about it without being able to study a lot of languages. I don't know if that has any economic value[3], but then neither does paleontology, but we consider that pretty important, important enough to preserve the available data.
Really, as nice as it would be to keep these languages spoken, preserving a complete grammar and audio recording of individual sounds as well as longer spoken passages would be enough for most purposes. But the problem is that this is a lot of work, and languages are going extinct faster than we can document them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation
[2] http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm
[3] Well OK, some people get paid to invent languages for sci-fi/fantasy and a lot of linguistic data helps with that, but... that's not much.
In addition to the above pure artifact preservation aspect language (when paired with a lot of text, this is not always the case, e.g. Etruscan language) can make available vast data about a community. When Asyyrian was decoded and the great libraries of tablets were discovered (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal), our knowledge of the culture of the Ancient Middle East increased exponentially.
"As languages disappear, cultures die. The world becomes inherently a less interesting place, but we also sacrifice raw knowledge and the intellectual achievements of millennia."
Ken Hale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, quoted in Davis, W. 1999.
Language and your cultural identity are very tightly coupled. Without language you essentially lose your identity, which is why its crucial to preserve your language. It's one of your primary identifiers of you and your culture. Wenying Jiang stated it quite well in her paper, "The Relationship Between Culture and Language" when she says your culture is like an iceberg. Your language is the tip which sits above the water. The rest which sits under the water is the rest of your culture. Your customs, your religions, your societal norms.
Link to her paper which is worth a read: http://203.72.145.166/ELT/files/54-4-3.pdf
Also consider the following:
"With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced–the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest.
The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone.
Large amounts of local knowledge about fauna and flora, ecosystem management, local place names, spiritual values, and so on are all submerged, altered or gone because the original languages that expressed these concepts are gone or no longer well understood."
source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/15/0005_nati...
People choose what language to speak. If they -- rather, we -- have a choice of languages, why do we choose common ones instead of uncommon ones? We are actively choosing to speak common languages, not some abstract network of computers is killing something.
If linguists or anyone else says we're doing something wrong and losing something valuable, why do we keep doing it?
Is it possible they're missing something, that maybe we gain more in choosing to understand each other than we're losing in ... in what, being able to read books that we haven't translated yet? In having a different set of nuances? Do any languages have a greater ability to describe thoughts than others? I suspect different languages have different nuances, but I doubt any has greater total ability to communicate.
Movies and TV did this too, but being broadcast media, they could - with state support - throw a fig leaf for "regional" languages.
Preserving languages is about preserving data for linguistics (and other fields). We preserve a lot of things with no "real value". We preserve fossils, species (any species with fewer than 100 remaining specimens isn't contributing to any ecosystem), books (even ones that are outdated and no one is ever likely to read), websites... I could go on all day. We preserve this stuff because we can learn by studying it.
Languages don't just have different nuances, they have completely different ways of putting human thought into words. They have grammars so different that a word for word translation would be no more readable than an untranslated text. They have such a huge variety of sounds that encoding them into IPA stretches the limits of Unicode's variants of the Latin alphabet, relying on many diacritic marks on top of regular characters.
It's not about preserving something that gives some greater ability to communicate. It's about preserving a database of linguistic evolution and the bounds of how human thought can be encoded orally.
"An online collaborative effort to protect globa linguistic diversity".