Language Decline

The numbers are in, and they're grim: Three thousand of the world's seven thousand languages are in decline and expected to perish by around 2100. While the most prevalent languages are taking a firmer hold across the globe, the extinction rate for languages is 25 per year. Charting language demise, UNESCO ranks dwindling languages on a scale ranging from “vulnerable” to “critically endangered.” The question is how, or whether, UNESCO or sovereign governments should intervene?

Concerned language preservation organizations include the Canadian Association for Language Diversity (CALD), a charity whose goal is to prevent language extinctions. IALD spokesperson Norman Reideger says all endangered languages should be saved. “For individuals, language fosters a sense of personal identity. Language extinction means loss of priceless, irreplaceable cultural knowledge—the grammar, music, narratives, and even medical knowledge embedded in a language. A linguistically diverse planet is a healthy planet.”

Concordia University linguistics professor Marianne Houseman deplores such use of biodiversity rhetoric in linguistics discourse. “Life is life, and language is language,” she clarifies. Houseman is skeptical about whether speakers of endangered languages benefit from linguistic preservation, noting that those who abandon their language may be acting in their own best interests by adapting to a naturally evolving socio-economic climate. “Whose needs are served by government-funded social—or socio-linguistic—engineering schemes?” asks Houseman, “Their proponents are typically nationalist regimes advancing their own territorial, political and economic agendas.”

Annalisa Ducharme, a Memorial University doctoral candidate, points out that a confounding factor is variation within a language. “One language can have multiple dialects—regional varieties,” says Ducharme, “If an endangered language is to be artificially propped up with government funded schools and preschools, as they do with some First Nation languages in Canada, then which—whose—version of the language should be deemed “essential” and therefore worth saving?”As well as First Nation languages, Duchenne points to French, which “has many dialects worth sustaining. Globally, France, Louisiana, and Africa have their own versions. In New Brunswick, French dialects include Quebecois, Acadian, and Chiac, a sub-dialect that blends Acadian French, English, and [aboriginal] Mi'kmaq.”