Globalised Tongues

DANI EL NETTLE considers the fate of linguistic diversity around the world

Many of the world’s 6,500 or more languages are currently in trouble. They are not being acquired and used by children in their communities, and thus are in danger of disappearing as the current speakers grow old and pass away. Linguists have estimated the proportion of languages that are under threat as high as 50% or even 90%, though in truth it is hard to determine accurately how many are threatened.

So what does the long term hold for the world’s linguistic diversity? Will there be just one language, or just a few? It is difficult to answer this question with certainty, but a number of points can be stated with confidence. First, it has always been the case that economic and social interaction spreads languages. As the global economy grows, in the sense of reaching a greater proportion of the world’s population, many more people will learn international languages such as English and Spanish, and also regional economic lingua francas such as Hindi and Swahili.

This is not the same thing, though, as saying that they will lose their existing languages. Bilingualism is a perfectly common state of affairs for human communities, and many people will add an extra language to their repertoire without this entailing that any is lost.

Second, loss of languages tends to occur where there are marked inter-group disparities in wealth or power. This leads to a situation where young people abandon their traditional community either by leaving or by changing their cultural behaviours. As the disparity of wealth or power reduces, interest in the traditional language tends to return. To see this you only have to witness current interest in Welsh or Breton. People value the social identity and cultural cohesion created by a local language and the social relations that underpin it.

This interest is just temporarily overshadowed by the dash for metropolitan language and culture. What determines whether languages endure in the contemporary climate is how solid a base they have to build on once their communities reduce material inequalities and become interested in their heritage again. Welsh still had a large primary spoken base and has been quite successful, whereas Irish Gaelic has largely failed despite substantial efforts by the Irish state because its base had become too small.

Many minority languages in Africa and Asia are in the “dash for growth” phase during which people abandon traditional culture rapidly in the dizzy rush for modernity, or are not yet in this phase but are likely to pass into it soon if the world economy continues to globalise. The critical factor is how quickly they pass through this phase.

Most languages in developing countries are also very small – often just a few thousand speakers in a few villages – and this makes it more difficult for them to keep a core of transmission going, and much easier for them to disappear abruptly.

Though the current marked political and economic inequalities between societies are a great peril to linguistic diversity, if these reduce over time, then I would expect languages of at least medium size to be surprisingly resilient. It was thought that the railways, the radio and then the television would destroy local dialects, but this has not proven quite the case.

People transmit linguistic norms through local social bonds and maintain their distinctiveness in the face of competing forms, and thus, diversity in the way people speak will always be with us in some form.

Daniel Nettle is Reader in Psychology in the Evolution and Behaviour Research Group at Newcastle University.
He is the author of several books including Linguistic Diversity and Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile, both published in the UK by Oxford University Press.