2020 finally comes to us. Unlike the futuristic movies I watched in childhood that forecast in the imaginative year of 2020, cars would be flying in the skies and that humans would be living with aliens from outer space. Nothing has come true in reality although humans are advancing technology to develop self-driving cars and preparing expeditions to explore Mars.
In reality, there’re plenty of challenges for us in 2020. We start the new year with bush fires in Australia; the escalating tension between the US and China on trade and technology; and deepening clashes in ideology and the military between the US and Iran. While these events become the headlines in mass media, do you know our languages are dying off rapidly?
Linguists estimate of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, nearly half of them are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks, according to an old article in The New York Times thirteen years ago.
2020 does not begin a new decade but ends one. Looking back, if linguists made such an estimate about dying languages more than a decade ago, a decade later there must be spoken languages already dead.
When an endangered species is pronounced dead, biologists and the world will mourn it and resent the fact that humans have not done enough to preserve them. Some will even blame human activities for the cause of the extinction of the species. Skeptics will argue that it’s the cause of nature just like the extinction of the dinosaurs before the advent of humans.
As much as we praise the Internet for bringing us convenience and the closeness of the world, I wonder how many websites we’re browsing are in the dominant languages and how many of them are in the endangered languages? You’re reading this article in English, so the answer speaks for itself.
Does that mean websites in an endangered language are unpopular? Yes but no. Endangered languages are spoken by different ethnic groups at different sea levels on the planet. On the Tibetan plateau at least four Tibetan dialect groups are spoken. An isolated language that has never been studied by linguists is found on remote South Pacific islands of Vanuatu. American Indians can speak English as well as their tribal languages; so can American Amish.
From an economic viewpoint, if money doesn’t circulate, it loses its value. It’s more profitable to create a website in a dominant language than a website in an endangered language. The flow of the viewers is like money, isn’t it?
Older speakers of an endangered language may still cling to their mother tongue, but driven by economic needs and other reasons, younger speakers would rather use the dominant language in the society to communicate with outsiders. It’s tragic that native speakers can’t use their mother tongue in more domains in their life. Use it or lose it. Fewer users of the native languages will lead to the fate of the language becoming obsolete.
Urbanization and political decision can bring hope as well as a death sentence. With the support of local government and artists, the once declining Low German, widely known as Platt, is now one of the popular dialects in Northern Germany. It is taught in school curriculum and used in staging theater performances. Let’s flip the other side of the coin. Chinese Mandarin is thriving because, domestically, there is suppression of local dialects and, globally, there is China’s economic influence attracting more non-native speakers to learn Mandarin. This is sad news for speakers of other Chinese dialect groups. Learn more in my previous piece “Portuguese Renaissance.”
According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left.
Don’t forget. Many dying languages have no written forms. Investigating an extinct species, archaeologists may someday find its fossil or food chain from other living creatures. But for an extinct language, without written form, when the last speaker passes on, the language dies with the speaker. I hope there will be some folk songs, nursery rhymes of sorts left behind for future linguists to mourn and then, perhaps, revive the fossil languages.
If my writing in Golden Orchid makes a dedication to my mother tongue Cantonese, I’m happy to do it once again in my debut novel. My new year resolution in 2020 is:
Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.
Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.
Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.
Yes, how important is it? It’s worthy of repeating three times and take action!
