We all know languages go extinct and we can often even name some extinct languages (Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English and many more). Some of these we hold in the greatest esteem, such as Latin, about which we speak with admiration, often from a place of not really knowing much Latin ourselves.
Frequently, some concerned language enthusiast will speak of the decline of his or her language and will cite examples of how it's all going to the dogs and how every thing used to be better. We, of course, now know that language change is essentially a good thing, as it allows a language to adapt to the needs of its time and its speakers. And you get used to the new norms quite quickly.
In some countries outside the English-speaking world there is often great concern that English will supplant their native language. France, for instance, strictly regulates how much English is broadcast on the public airwaves. These concerns, I'm afraid, are unfounded. It is very unlikely that English will supplant any language where it is not spoken or used at all levels. Only if English is the majority language in a nation, is used by the administration as the primary language of communication, by the people in daily life and by the media outlets as their preferred language, do the other language kids in the playground have to start worrying (don't worry, we'll talk about the British Isles later on).
However, the fact remains that languages die out. We have evidence that it's happened in the past and that it's happening in the present. But why?
First off, we need to make a distinction between language death and a language dying out because of normal language changes (like sound change, morphological change). In the case of the former, it is the end of the line and that particular branch of the language dies out completely. A good historical example of that form the Anatolian languages, of which Hittite is the main representative. At one point, several thousands of years ago, this language group just disappears from history leaving little to no traces in the other languages in that particular area.
If a language goes extinct because it undergoes normal changes, then we can't really speak of language death, since it essentially continues in a new, adapted form. For example:
Old English > Middle English > Early Modern English > Modern English
Or:
Classical Latin > Vulgar Latin > French; Spanish (castellano); Catalan; Portuguese; Italian; Romanian; and a bunch of others.
These parent languages haven't really died out, but rather evolved or morphed into something new.
That's all well and good, but why do languages go extinct and disappear then? Well, we can identify several distinct factors, although it's often a combination of these factors and different factors start playing a part at different stages. They are:
- gradual language death
- bottom-to-top language death (language change begins at a low level, such as the home life)
- top-to-bottom language death (language change begins at the highest level, such as the administration and, more recently, mass media)
- radical language death
- linguicide
Most often what will happen, is that a large number of speakers of a particular language will become bilingual and gradually shift allegiance to the new language, forcing them to abandon their original, or heritage, language. By far the largest contributor to people voluntarily giving up their native language in favor of another are economic considerations. Also, the heritage language can be seen as inferior by the speakers themselves. Russian, for instance, has an overwhelming cultural and economic influence on the many hundreds of languages spoken in the Russian Federation. If you want to succeed in Russian society, you need to be fluent in Russian. This has caused some languages to fall into decline and even to die out. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing or that this makes the Russians evil, but this is the way it has been going up until this point in Russia. For the sake of fairness, I need to also state that since the Russian Revolution, Russia has become more aware of its minority languages and many of them have had varying degrees of success in language revitalization projects. Also, Soviet linguists often made very useful and complete language analyses. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, has largely contributed to the further decline of many of these minority languages. Time will tell what their future will be.
Recently extinct languages
We live in a remarkable age, in that we are obsessively documenting everything about everything and usually call that by the name of science or knowledge. As a result, a language dying out, for whatever reason, usually no longer is a silent event, but rather the end of a stage of massive effort to preserve this moribund language for future generations to study. A good example of that is the Ubykh language.
Oh, come on! Now you're just making up languages!
Not at all! The Ubykh language is a now extinct Northwestern Caucasian language that originally was spoken in modern-day Russia on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. In the 1860s, its speakers migrated en masse to Turkey. At this point, we need to introduce the hero of this language, for without him, the language would have just faded into oblivion. His name was Tevfik Esenç.
While Mr. Esenç worked in Istanbul, he encountered French linguist Georges Dumézil and his associate Georges Charachidzé. He had an excellent memory, was a purist and related to Dumézil, his associate and the other linguists who came to see him not just the language, but also the mythology, culture and customs of the Ubykh people. He was the last speaker of Ubykh and died in 1992 at the age of 88. On his request, his tombstone read:
"This is the grave of Tevfik Esenç. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh."
Here's a tissue.
Most languages don't have the benefit of having a Tevfik Esenç-like figure to champion them during their last threnodies. The Kamassian language, a Samoyedic language spoken to the east of the Ural mountains in Russia, died out with its last speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova in 1989. Yugh, a Yeniseian language of central Siberia, only had two or three non-fluent speakers left by the early 1990s, which, in linguistic terms, means the language is pretty much extinct. Klallam, a Straits Salishian language spoken on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada is in the bizarre limbo of languages where there are more linguists who speak it than native speakers (natives 4 - linguists 5). The North Straits Salish language, divided into six dialects despite its only 20 speakers, may very well die out sooner rather than later. And there are many, many more examples.
Some countries and continents highlighted
I love maps and languages and that is why I absolutely love the UNESCO Atlas of the World's languages in danger. I've taken some maps to demonstrate exactly what kind of situation most minority languages are in. A small legend to the maps: black means the language is extinct, red is critically endangered, orange is severely endangered, yellow is definitely endangered and white is vulnerable. Let's start with the US.
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| Alaska |
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| Hawaii |
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| The US east of the Mississippi river |
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| The US west of the Mississippi river |
Oh, those barbaric Americans! I'm sure Canada is doing better.
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| Canada's indigenous languages |
It is, but not by much. - Mexico then? They had the Aztecs and the Mayas. Surely the descendants of their languages must be faring better.
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| Mexico |
Based on this, I wouldn't say that the bulk of Mexico's indigenous languages are flourishing. Brazil then.
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| Brazil |
Do I even want to ask about China?
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| Minority languages in China |
Concerning EU member states, they mainly already either eradicated their indigenous languages, or the surviving languages are currently protected by the minority languages charter of the EU. Still, France, for example, will not allow languages like Breton or Occitan to be used in the administration at a local level and is still clinging to the concept of cultural superiority of French. France is not unique in this, mind you.
A while back, I saw an episode of David Mitchell's soapbox. David Mitchell is a man whom I tremendously admire and enjoy watching in pretty much everything he does. However, when he spoke of the Gaelic language (meaning Scottish Gaelic), he said this:
"I find I have mixed feelings about [saving the Gaelic language]. Certainly, if it were in my power, I'd rather see any language survive rather than die. But I'm uneasy about spending too much money or time on a language which is now not far above the level of a private code."
A fantastic way of underplaying the importance of the Gaelic language as a source of cultural identity for the Scottish people. We all like to feel connected to the region we're from and the ethnic group we belong to and one of the main ways of achieving that is by speaking the language of your ancestors. Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaeilge used to form a single dialect continuum and, as such, the Scottish ancestral language predates the Anglo-Saxons' presence in Britain by at least a few centuries. To dismiss their language and to designate it as a private code, shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the psychological effects of linguistic displacement.
"If I were a parent and I spoke Gaelic, then I would certainly bring my child up as bilingual, because that's basically like giving them a free language. But I think it would be quite hard to justify Gaelic as a priority language to teach my child or learn myself from scratch. After all language is fundamentally a tool of communication and if you've learned Gaelic, you have enabled yourself to speak with only 60,000 people, all of whom also speak English."
Yes, and Czech was a language of only five million speakers compared to the many dozens of millions of speakers of German. Lithuanian was a language of only three million, compared to the roughly 200 million speakers of Russian. Yet these languages felt it was justifiable to foster their own language and promote it, rather than simply adopting the language of the country that had invaded them and forced a foreign tongue on them. Also, it's a little bit of a contradiction to first extol the virtues of bilingualism (remember, it's a free language!) and then later use the communication-is-easier-if-we-do-it-in-my-language-since-you-already-speak-it argument to get out of learning Gaelic.
"Isn't it a pity, though, when an ancient language dies? Yes, it is, that's exactly what it is: a pity. Not the end of the world. The extinction of an animal in the modern world is almost never because of natural selection. It's because of the actions of man. The extinction of a language, however, still is natural selection. If it dies out, it's because humans no longer needed to communicate. As long as they do, they will. After all, it's not as though the language will disappear when no longer spoken. It will still be available for anyone to learn and, indeed, to communicate if they so wish. Just as people still learn Latin or Old English."
Social darwinism at work. If Gaelic dies out, it's because of natural selection and not because of the hundreds of years of suppression and the fact that speaking it was outlawed. It's not that, to this day, Scottish Gaelic has not been given the same degree of official recognition as Welsh has, or that it took until 2005 for the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act to provide it with rudimentary language rights. No, not at all. This is natural selection. No humans needed.
Fortunately, there is such a thing as a language revival movement, although, as we will see in the next section, that doesn't always go quite as smoothly as initially conceived.
We need to talk about Irish
Any attempt at talking about the fate of Irish automatically suffers from a good dose of Oh-look-at-the-English-being-the-assholes-of-history-again Disease. In part, it's because England did in fact discourage the use of Irish, often in less-than-nice ways. And in part, it's because language, politics and nationalistic sentiment are often intricately woven into a nice mesh of selective memory. We'll take it from the beginning.
Every thing was fine in Ireland until the mid 12th century: they had a rich, well-developed and refined language and a literature that, after Ancient Greek and Latin, was the oldest in Europe. Clear skies ahead, you'd say.
And then, starting in 1169, the Normans came and briefly brought Ireland under control of the Plantagenet Kings of England. However, from the 13th century onward, the Norman invasion of the rest of Ireland first faltered, then waned. The Normans gradually assimilated into Irish culture and the only part of Ireland that remained under the English crown was an area that became known as The Pale (Irish: an Pháil).
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| Ireland in 1450 |
Phew, that was close! But Irish survived and even most of the English settlers in The Pale became predominantly Irish-speaking by the 1500s. And then things take a rather grim turn for Ireland. The declaration of the Kingdom of Ireland by Henry VIII (he of the six wives) and the subsequent Tudor conquest of Ireland, which was largely completed by the turn of the 17th century, had led to all of Ireland coming under English law. Still, Irish was not really in danger yet, even though English was considered a prestigious language and bilingualism increased among the gentry and the middle classes. Elizabeth I actively encouraged the use of Irish in The Pale, seeing it as the ideal vehicle to promote the Reformed faith. A primer was even drawn up for her by Sir Christopher Nugent, 6th (or 14th) Baron Delvin. It is thought that even as late as 1800, Irish was still the majority language in the Kingdom of Ireland, now part of the United Kingdom. Yeah, and then the English started acting a little bit like dicks.
The 19th century started out as rather disastrous (this is, in fact, the understatement of the day) for the Irish language and Ireland in general. In 1831, a system of primary education called the National Schools was introduced, in which Irish was prohibited until 1871. The National Schools run by the Roman Catholic Church discouraged the use of Irish until as late as 1890. The motivation behind this was that economic opportunity for the Irish could mostly be found in the United States and England, both bastions of the English language.
There was another little event that contributed heavily to the decline of Irish, namely The Great Famine (Irish: An Gorta Mór), otherwise known as the Irish Potato Famine, which rampaged through Ireland from 1845-1852. Many of the most hard-hit areas were those inhabited by the poor, who formed the majority of Irish speakers. During the famine, approximately one million people died and another one million emigrated, mostly to the United States. Those who emigrated, often abandoned using Irish as a medium for communication, ironically in favor of English. In Ireland itself, many parents discouraged use of Irish in their children, since it was now seen as backward and a hindrance to social advancement. Remember, this is the same language with that long and proud literary tradition and the oh-so-refined and developed vernacular. All in all, not a great century for Ireland and the Irish language.
But Ireland became independent in 1921, surely that must have solved the problem?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? First of all, Ireland after independence became the Irish Free State, which was an entity that functioned autonomously from Britain, but was still a part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. A Civil War broke out and it wasn't until 1949 that Ireland became fully independent (as the Republic of Ireland). However, the newly formed Irish Free State retained English as the language of the administration, forcing many, even in areas where up to 80% of people spoke Irish natively, to have to switch to English. The areas where a majority of people spoke Irish were designated as Gaeltachtaí (singular: Gaeltacht, literally 'Gael (Irish) land'). The opposite of this, meaning counties where English is the primary medium, is, confusingly, called Galltacht.
The Irish government refused to implement the recommendations of the Gaeltacht Commission of 1926, which included the restoration of Irish as the language of the administration in these areas. (That whirring sound in the background is the dwindling number of speakers of Irish.) It is a case of supreme irony that the Irish language, which was elevated to the status of a national symbol for independence and absolute Irishness, was nearly brought to extinction by the government, which early on already declared its desire to restore Irish to its former glory. It went as follows.
The state was the largest job provider in the country by far and, naturally, all employees of the state had to have a qualification in Irish in order to work for the state. But the required level wasn't very high and most employees seldom used Irish. In the Gaeltachtaí, employees involved in local government often hardly spoke any Irish at all, so if you wanted to get anything done, you had to speak English. The following quote from a 1986 Bord na Gaeilge report is telling:
"...the administrative agencies of the state have been among the strongest forces for anglicisation in Gaeltacht areas."
But arguably the biggest mistake was made in the domain of education. Quite naively, the Irish government thought that if it simply forced the children of the nation to be educated through the medium of Irish, then the language would be back on top within a generation, maybe two. Cue reality.
In 1928, Irish was made a compulsory subject for the Junior Certificate and in 1934 for the Leaving Certificate. However, from the mid-1940s onward the policy of teaching all subjects to English-speaking children through the medium of Irish was abandoned. Furthermore, due to the way Irish was taught, generations of Irishmen and women grew up either thoroughly despising Irish, or at the very least not learning it to a point of moderate fluency. The state placed all the responsibility for the survival of Irish in the hands of the education system, the go-to guy for dirty jobs to this day in most Western societies that parents and the rest of society don't want to undertake or get involved with, and the education system was not fully equipped to handle this Herculean task.
So that's it then. Irish is doomed for extinction and language revival efforts are pointless.
Not necessarily on both counts. In recent years, due to a more realistic and practical approach, there have been moderate success stories. Apart from the Irish language television channel TG4, which broadcasts in Irish, and the radio station Raidió na Gaeltachta, the most remarkable positive force in the Irish language revival movement comes from, yes, education.
The history of the phenomenon of the Gaelscoileanna (singular: Gaelscoil 'Gael school') reads like a novel in which the plucky underdog (played in the movie by the Irish language) suddenly finds himself supported by his community and is given a fighting chance against the nefarious overlord he has to combat (played for the sake of symmetry by the English language). It's a little bit more nuanced than that, but the Gaelscoil is the product of a community and not a state effort. They offer full-language immersion at the primary and increasingly secondary level and are known to produce competent Irish-language speakers. These are private, but affordable, schools and they have the added benefit of outperforming English-language schools in terms of how many students advance to the tertiary education level (22%, compared to 7% of English-medium schools). A study examining the socioeconomic benefits of this type of multilingualism showed other favorable results for competent speakers of Irish as well as English, such as higher average wage.
Also, we shouldn't be too hard on the Irish government for fumbling a bit along the way. In many ways, the Irish language revival project is a massive social experiment. It was the first time that a nation committed itself to reviving a severely endangered language. And it appears that the Irish government has learned from the mistakes in the past and is now more realistic when it comes to handling the Irish language problem. But yes, since independence the number of first-language speakers of Irish has gone down, while the number of second-language speakers has increased.
The reason why language revival efforts aren't pointless can best be illustrated by the example of Hebrew, though. Hebrew had pretty much died out as a language and only remained as the liturgical vernacular for the Jewish people. After the state of Israel was founded, Hebrew was revived and flourishes today. Though many of the people who moved to Israel brought their own language (Yiddish, Russian, etc.) and this in turn has shaped the modern Hebrew language into what it is today, the language flourishes, albeit not in the (and I hate this word) pure form that Ancient Hebrew was.
Perhaps that is the future for Irish, too. It seems unlikely that English will disappear entirely from Ireland, so realistically a fully or predominantly bilingual nation should be the ideal. Irish itself in turn will continue to be shaped and molded by English, which will introduce further language change. And even if Irish does eventually cease to exist, perhaps the Irish state would do well to embrace and foster Hiberno-English, the variety of English characteristic of Ireland, since it contains many grammatical and lexical elements of Irish. But perhaps that's not exactly what they had hoped for.
Dúirt mé.
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