TODAY'S QUOTATION – Literary Menus – Alphabet of Recipes – Historical Prescriber – IFAQs
Bacchus Extra – Dangerous Tastes Extra – Dictionary of Languages Extra – Food in the Ancient World Extra – Guide to World Language Dictionaries Extra – Notes in the Margin Extra

HOME – THE BOOKSHELVES – THE DICTIONARY – LANGUAGE INDEX – WORK BY ANDREW DALBY – LINKS – WEB SEARCH

Look up highlighted words in the dictionary (and please tell me if definitions need correcting!)

Bilingualism,
language loss and our future

Remember those Eskimo words for ‘snow’? Depending where you first heard about them, you may recall that the Inuit language has five, ten, twenty, or even a hundred words for snow. In fact, anthropologist Franz Boas identified four English words for snow and four Eskimo ones (all bids higher than four arise from shameless exaggeration by academics and journalists). His point was this: the concept of snow is divided up differently in the two languages. English has snow, sleet, drift, blizzard; Inuit has aput ‘snow on the ground’, qana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpok ‘drifting snow’, qimuqsuq ‘snowdrift’. More interesting than counting the words is finding out how many ways there are to classify the world.

In the Yupik language of Alaska, the word for ‘world’ carries associations such as ‘outdoors’ and ‘weather’. European words for ‘world’ go with concepts like ‘people, crowd’. For example, French le monde means ‘the world’, but du monde means ‘a lot of people’, and tout le monde means ‘everybody’. Classic English authors use all the world to mean ‘everybody, or everybody who matters’. Naturally so: if you look outdoors in urban Europe you see a world of people; if you look outdoors in rural Alaska you see a world of weather. Here again, the really fascinating point is the different associations that come with words which are translated identically.

These differences between languages [...] are our guarantee that each language brings different insights, unforeseen enlightenment. Children learn one way of classifying the world from their first language. If they grow up bilingual, they learn two ways, and, more important, they learn that multiple ways can exist. [...] In many countries in today’s world children learn a local language at home, then a national language at school, and then English; English is a second or third language almost world wide. There are hundreds of millions of bilingual and multilingual young people.

This is very good; but it is set to change. There are 5,000 languages in the world (some say more) but minority languages and cultures are being forgotten [...] Nationalists tend to aim at one language per nation and they are getting better at achieving their aims. Multinational corporations know how much easier it will be for them when only one language matters. By 2200 we could be down to about 150 languages, and perhaps, soon after that date, one.

Should we care? [...] Some argue that increased international understanding would result. Unluckily for this argument, many wars are fought between people who speak the same language: Rwanda, Bosnia, Kuwait, Yemen, Somalia are among recent examples. No wonder Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, said that the babel-fish, his universal translator, by removing barriers to communication between cultures, ‘has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of Creation.’

We have much to lose when there are no multiple languages and no bilinguals.

First, we lose the insights that each bilingual speaker can give – insights into the different ways that human languages can map the world. There’ll be no more of those sudden flashes of inspiration which are among the rewards for everybody who learns another language [...]

Second, the continual clash between languages acts as a catalyst: it makes us change and update our speech. Our descendants will have to manage without this impulse. Where did the gloriously rich and flexible word-hoard of twenty-first century English come from? Most of it is borrowed straight out of other languages [...]

Third, there is the pure loss of knowledge as each language disappears. Eight languages were spoken in Tasmania when English speakers began to settle the island in the 19th century. They are lost. Typical indigenous languages name hundreds of useful plants, discovered and tested over centuries [...] If forgotten, as the medicinal plants of Tasmania are forgotten, they take centuries to rediscover. Do we have that long?

Extracts from 'Language In Danger' by Andrew Dalby, first published in Saab Magazine no. 1 (2005).

CLICK HERE TO BUY LANGUAGE IN DANGER FROM AMAZON.COM

STREET OF THE BOOKSELLERS

HOME – THE BOOKSHELVES – THE DICTIONARY – LANGUAGE INDEX – WORK BY ANDREW DALBY – LINKS – WEB SEARCH

Bilingualism,language loss and our future

Bilingualism,
language loss and our future