Archives - Foreign Language: Page 10
Author: paul carson (Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:01 pm)
Title: Foreign language
The subject of disappearing languages has been in the news for some time the standard prediction is that roughly half of the 6,000 languages currently spoken are, as Unesco puts it, “doomed” but it has recently been given new impetus in the United States by the fear expressed by some conservative commentators that English is being added to the list. Will American English survive “the immigrant flood” of Spanish speaking migrants, recent columns in the weekly Human Events have asked. Their answer is, “tragically,” no. But would it really be a tragedy if English vanished?
Of course, the idea that English is a vanishing language seems a little implausible (it’s the second-most-spoken language in the world), but then it was only a few years ago that the U.S. dominated world basketball, and look what has happened there. Furthermore, there’s a long history on this continent of immigrant languages killing off the indigenous ones. Scholars believe that there used to be as many as 300 Native American languages. Now there are fewer than 200. What happened? Well, one thing that happened was that missionaries and the federal government did their best to get the Indians to stop talking in what J.D.C. Atkins, a 19th century commissioner of Indian affairs, called their “barbarous dialect” and to start talking in “civilized” languages like English. And another was that even when they couldn’t kill off the language, they were often quite effective at killing off the people who spoke it. Hence English flourished, and languages like Tlingit, for example, didn’t.
Things are obviously better today. Not only are almost no English speakers being murdered by linguistically evangelizing Mexicans; no Spanish speakers are complaining about how barbarous English is. In fact, few people today think that any languages are either barbarous or civilized. “No language,” as the linguist John Edwards has written, “can be described as better or worse than another on purely linguistic grounds”; all “languages are always sufficient for the needs of their speakers.” Which is why the effort to get people to stop speaking in their own tongues (taking them away to special boarding schools, punishing them when they didn’t speak English) and to start speaking in yours looked then, and still looks now, like an essentially arbitrary use of power. Theirs is just as good as yours: why should they give it up?
So the good news is that progress has been made; no one any longer thinks that one language is better than another. But the bad news is that many languages are dying anyway. In fact, for various social and economic reasons, they are dying faster than ever. Many of the Native American languages that still exist are spoken by a very few old people, and while no one is trying to force them to stop speaking whatever it is they speak, no one is having much success in persuading their children and grandchildren to continue speaking it. So where the tragic figure of 19th century language loss was a child discouraged from speaking her own language and made to speak English instead, the tragic figure of 21st century language loss is an elder allowed, and even encouraged, to speak her own language but with no one around to speak it to. The 19th century problem was about people who couldn’t use their languages; the problem now is about the languages themselves “tragically,” they’re disappearing.
But why would it be a tragedy if English disappeared? Why is it a tragedy if Tlingit disappears? Although we can all agree it’s a bad thing to try to get people to stop using their language, it’s hard to see why it’s a bad thing if their language disappears. Why? Because the very thing that made it a mistake for the missionaries to try to stop people from speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if English was better) makes it a mistake to care whether people continue to speak Native American languages (it’s not as if English is worse).
We can see the point clearly by pretending for a second that English really is starting to vanish. Suppose our children start speaking a little Spanish, our grandchildren become bilingual and our great grandchildren speak only Spanish. Since we can’t speak Spanish, we can’t talk to them. But if that’s a problem, it won’t last for long, and once it is solved, there will be no problem left. Just as the language we speak does everything we need it to do, the language they speak will do everything they need it to do. No doubt it’s unfortunate that our descendants won’t be able to read Shakespeare in the original. But, truth to tell, we’re not doing much of that ourselves anyway. It’s not as if we’re native speakers of Elizabethan English. That’s why there’s a market for “No Fear Shakespeare”: the Bard on one page; a “translation into modern English the kind of English people actually speak today” on the other. And, of course, instead of Shakespeare and Joyce, our descendants will be able to read Cervantes and Borges the classics of their literature if not of ours.
Which is the whole point. Our language is the one we speak, not the one our ancestors spoke. My great grandparents could read only Yiddish. Am I supposed to feel a stronger connection to Abramovich’s “Kliatche” (“Mare”), a book I never heard of until I looked up Yiddish classics on the Web two minutes ago, than, say, to “Vanity Fair,” a book my ancestors wouldn’t have understood one word of? And are my descendants supposed to feel they are losing their cultural heritage just because the old books they are reading are not the same as the old books I read?
Obviously not. Their cultural heritage will be the books they read; their language will be the one they speak. A language will have been lost, but like the old joke about the great train robbery (no loss of train), no one will have lost his language. And no one will have lost his literature or his cultural heritage or what our English supremacists say they most want to retain, their American identity. You can read “No Fear Cervantes” in Spanish; you can sing “The Star Spangled Banner” in Spanish; you can invade Iraq in Spanish; you can even lose the finals of the World Basketball Championship in Spanish. Although this year (Spain 70, Greece 47), it didn’t happen.
Walter Benn Michaels teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His new book, “The Trouble With Diversity,” will be published this month.
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