Why Many Languages Are Endangered

The short story, "The Last Class," by the French author Alphonse Daudet, narrates how the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, affected the linguistic and cultural life of a small town in Alsace. Education had, until that point, been in French, but with the annexation of the province by Germany, it was made compulsory that students be taught in German. 

In Daudet's story, the schoolteacher, who has been deprived of a job and a chance to do what he loves by the vagaries of politics, delivers a moving speech about the importance of a language to its people, and the necessity of preserving it even when it is silenced, because "when a people falls into servitude, 'so long as it clings to its language, it is as if it held the key to its prison.'"

However, clinging to one’s language is not just a matter of memory and preservation. In fact, in several instances around the world, linguistic genocide, the practice of deliberately making a language extinct by forbidding its dissemination and use or imposing other languages in its place, has been a powerful tool of conquest and imperialism. Recognised retrospectively as a crime against humanity, under the United Nations’ International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it has already had a powerful impact on the survival and identity of many groups around the world.

In the eighteenth, nineteenth and even well into the twentieth centuries, the colonisation by Europeans of large swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America, along with various indigenous communities elsewhere, meant that their languages were imposed on the native people. This was most often done overtly, by demarcating spaces where the native language couldn’t be spoken, giving families financial incentives to speak the new language rather than their native one, or even deliberately separating children from their families and sending them to boarding schools, where they were forced only to speak the new language.

Over a generation or two, the dominant language became that of the coloniser, at the expense of the indigenous languages. Not only did this lead to a profound disaffection on the part of those who found themselves torn away from their communities and their linguistic underpinnings, but some strains of psycholinguistic thought might even argue that they were torn away from their traditional worldview. 

The controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics states that people cannot express thoughts for which their language does not have the words, and that people’s worldviews are necessarily influenced and shaped by the language in which they think. For example, the psychologist Eric Lenneberg showed that the Zuni people of Brazil had trouble remembering and differentiating various shades of blue and green, because their language had just one word for the two colours. At the same time, there may be nuances in other indigenous languages that are lost in translation or when speakers of these languages are forced to express them in other languages.

While the hypothesis itself has been criticised as ethnocentric, and disproved by Noam Chomsky’s theory of the Universal Grammar, it has important implications when dealing with the loss of indigenous languages. At the individual level, it is obviously damaging and traumatic to be forced to alter one’s worldview to conform to that of the target language. 

However, at the cultural level, losing a language can lead to the loss of valuable insights held by the culture, which perhaps cannot be expressed as clearly or forcefully in other languages. This has a much greater long-term impact, as cultural artifacts and wisdom are lost to history. Furthermore, many of these languages are oral only, and hence are dependent on the memories of speakers to stay alive. 

Communities like the First Nations in Canada, the Indigenous Australians and the Scheduled Tribes in India are perhaps the most visible victims of this linguistic erasure. In Canada and Australia, young indigenous children were taken away from their families and communities, and sent to boarding schools where they were forced to speak in English. These children, called the Stolen Generation in Australia, and the subject of an ongoing national reckoning in Canada, were native speakers of languages that have now become endangered or extinct as a result of this linguistic genocide.

When Japan invaded Korea in 1910, linguistic genocide became a way of cementing its power, as Korean was forbidden in schools and universities, and it became a crime to teach history from certain texts, including 200,000 works written in Korean, which were burnt. Thus, the genocide essentially erased all the Koreans' cultural memories that were preserved in writing, and created a void into which the Japanese imposed their own cultural symbols and practices to create the impression that they and the Koreans were essentially one people. This was not unlike the practices followed by the British in Ireland.

In India alone, there are at least 600 potentially endangered languages, according to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, which also says that 250 of them have already disappeared, such as the Majhi language in Sikkim, whose last few speakers were members of the same family. The researcher behind the survey, Ganesh Devy, told The Indian Express that the loss of such languages has ramifications that extend even to the economic and geographic situation of the speakers.

“When a language dies, its speakers decide to migrate. First, they migrate to another language and then they physically start migrating to another region. The second thing that happens is that their traditional livelihood patterns go down. They may have some special skills and that disappears,” Devy said in the interview. Moreover, in India, the colonial period brought with it print technology, which created a further demarcation between those languages that had a script and those which were largely oral. 

The speakers of some of the latter group of languages, such as Khasi and Santhali, devised a script so that their languages could be transmitted and disseminated, as had the Cherokee of North America under the leadership of Sequoyah. Other languages, including in India, remained oral and dependent on the memories of their speakers. Several of these are now extinct. While Devy did not specifically cite linguistic genocide as a cause of this, he did mention that, more often than not it is “the language of the marketplace” that prevails, as it is the one most closely linked to economic gain. 

Though linguistic genocide may be less prevalent now, there are other forms of domination, which is through the market, consumerism and employment. It becomes easier to sell goods and ideas to people that have identical or similar tastes, cultures and languages. As employment, for example, begins to require knowledge of a few dominant languages, the lesser-spoken languages will necessarily fade away and so also the world view that is mediated by them. 

This is perhaps the key to how linguistic changes and migration will occur in the modern era; rather than a deliberate genocide of languages, the pressures of assimilation, power dynamics and economic gain will be the driving forces that cause some languages to become prevalent and others to die out, with their speakers becoming more privileged or disenfranchised as a result. However, this will unfortunately come at the expense of the knowledge, wisdom and perception of reality that is unique to each of these dying languages.