John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUSWHILE IT is impossible to be precise as to the number of languages spoken on the planet today the boundaries separating dialects from languages are ambiguous, and once led the linguist Max Weinrich to conclude that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" reliable estimates come up with a figure in the neighbourhood of 6,000.
However, linguists reckon that by the end of this century, many and possibly most of the world's languages will go extinct. As with living species, languages go through phases of multiplication and extinction, and we are in the midst of what may be the biggest wave of extinction in human history.
As with species extinction, language extinction is a naturally-occurring process. But just as many scientists believe that human activity, economic development, and the exploitation of natural resources has hastened the rate of species extinction of late, so too linguists believe that human activity in this case, globalisation has hastened the rate of language extinction.
It is not the first time this has happened. The last such wave of language extinction occurred at the height of the Roman Empire. Then, the switch to Latin and Greek in commerce and administration drove some four-fifths of the languages spoken in the Empire out of existence.
Interestingly, when the Empire broke up, language-multiplication resumed. As former provinces grew isolated from one another, Latin broke into a number of regional dialects. Over time, these developed into the modern Romance (from Roman) languages, such as Italian, Spanish and French. A similar wave of language-multiplication does not appear to be on the horizon today, though. Despite the fits and starts by which economic globalisation moves forward, the world is likely to become ever more integrated. And with that integration, traditional languages die out as people switch to the dominant languages of trade, education and international negotiation.
More than any other language, English stands in the vanguard. Still, some context helps to put this wave of extinction into perspective. Most of the world's languages have fewer than 100,000 speakers. The top 100 languages, by contrast, account for the vast majority of humanity, and a mere five, English, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and Bengali, are used by nearly half the planet's inhabitants. Indeed, there are hundreds of languages with fewer than 50 speakers, and whose disappearance is consequently all but inevitable.
Nonetheless, anthropologists worry that since languages are repositories of knowledge, their disappearance will remove valuable information from the human record. The plethora of words for snow in Inuit is frequently cited as an example of the detailed knowledge of an environment recorded in the language of its inhabitants. Equally, similarities in words found in geographically-dispersed languages make it possible to reconstruct ancient waves of human migration. By uncovering traces of people's movements in the words they left behind for their descendants, historians have been able to build a clear picture of the ways in which the world's continents were populated in the distant past. Therefore, when languages disappear before linguists have a chance to record them, a part of the human story dies. Given the importance the human species attaches to its history, this is something it greets with sadness.
FRENCH
While I was in France recently, I had lunch with a colleague who began discussing the uncertain future of her own language. While not threatened with extinction, French risks decline as a result of fierce competition from traditional rivals like English, which is becoming the language of global commerce, and Spanish, due to the latter's natural growth. Commenting specifically on the efforts of Quebec, Canada's main French-speaking province, to preserve its language, she suggested that resistance to English would be a losing battle anywhere a language was not attached to an economic base. To the extent English remained the language of North American commerce, upon which Quebec depends heavily, French would struggle to survive.
Ironically, therefore, it may be that Jamaican creole, which has fared better than Creole languages in some other Caribbean islands, owes its success to the country's economic under-performance, which has kept many Jamaicans largely outside the global economy. In more propitious times, though, the challenges may be of a different order.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
