According to National Geographic, "Every 14 days a language dies. By the year 2100, over half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them never yet recorded — will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works."
It has always been my opinion that language is free and language is fluid, but those two conditions cannot be met if a language dies. But why are languages dying? Both a difficult and nearly obvious answer exists. Earth is slowly developing into a single civilization. Traditional societies and languages are dying; disappearing and waves of rapid modernization aid in the erosion of tradition. The answer cannot be left at just that however, because there are many reasons, effects, and causes intertwined in the death of a language.
The most common 'cause of death' comes from globalization - colonization and the growth capitalism. Dominant languages forced on populations by colonization or global capitalism leave the traditional language to wither in the dust. Children then learn the dominant language and miss the traditions and histories of their traditional people since language is a huge factor in history and tradition. As with the growth of global capitalism, the rate of death for smaller languages is increasing rapidly.
There are programs working to document and revitalize dying languages. This past year my swahili professor, Deo Ngonyani, traveled to northern Malawi to learn and document a disappearing language. He has previously documented two other languages, but these were not in danger of dying out. He was given a grant for a few years study of the language and culture of the traditional people associated with the language. There is also an organization called Living Tongues, which is associated with National Geographic Enduring Languages program. Living Tongues works with communities to document and preserve languages in danger of dying out. They enter communities and train the people to document their own language. Intellectual property rights of the community is the primary concern of Living Tongues. The communities grant Living Tongues permission to document and disseminate the research they gain from the endangered communities. Living Tongues has said that extinction of traditional and ancestral languages is one of the greatest socio-cultural threats of the 21st Century.
Dominant languages become dominant by way of oppressive structures. It is difficult to say that this would not have happened - that civilizations would have developed differently, but we cannot try to rewrite the past. With booming technology, traditional societies are becoming whitewashed at the expense of political and economic gain. In the course of this boom entire histories and cultures of people are effectively erased. Can you imagine being erased from the face of the earth?
From the When not in Africa. . . blog.
Previously posted on the Young People For Blog.
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2 comments:
I think you make some valid points comrade, but at the same time you are treading on dangerous waters.
It is true that global capital is scourging the earth, and it has demonstrated its inability to further develop many of the areas of Africa. However, I dont think it is bad because it "unites the world into a single civilization". Sure, the eroding of certain languages and cultures may seem as extremely sad for some academic circles, but at the same time, is this feeling based on nothing more than some sort of "melancholy"? Wouldn't networking actually further the cause of humanity?
Don't mistake my argument for some sort of apology. I wish nothing less than the destruction of global capital. However, I think people should focus more on actual liberation, rather than putting too much emphasis on "languages" and "cultures". This sort of mindset creates very superficial "identity politics" which generally, rally behind a single superficial issue, without understanding the totality of the problem.
Comrad Marmot:
I'm not sure that this issue is purely academic. Language is much more than identity politics, or the simple conduit of meaning. A language embodies a worldview, as linguistic and rhetorical structures are shaped by larger social and political structures (i.e., capitalism, socialism) within which a language is spoken. So if developing class consciousness is prerequiste to the struggle for socialism, language -- which is the mechanism for consciousness, as thought is only possible through language -- represents one of the primary terrains for socialist struggle. Or put simply, language and consciousness (including class consciousness) are inextricably bound.
There's a wide range of Marxist thought that identifies the central role that language plays in socialist struggle (Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Satre, Frantz Fanon -- especially in Wretched of the Earth -- Hughy Newton, Raymond Williams, just to name a few). I plan to talk about this at one of YDS's educational sessions, and also during sessions of the newly-formed Black Rose Tendency (Marxist reading group; I hope you're down with this!)
But before we even get to Marxist-socialist theory, we can look further back in history to see this link between language, consciousness and power. Two examples come to mind. The first is the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the U.S. slave plantocracy. Slave traders would intentionally mix up different African language groups to prevent the enslaved from talking to each other and planning insurrection. The nascient capitalist class that ran the slave trade knew the power of language and resistance.
The second example goes back a little further. The administrators of the Roman Empire dominated the known world by two means: the sword, and the enforcement of proper Latin as the lingua franca of their conquered subjects. Brute force worked good, but the irradication of the conquered subjects' culture and identity worked even better.
Within this historic context, I think we can still say that the struggle to preserve language remains central to the struggle for liberation.
Greetings from Jamaica!
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