A while back in our Linguistic Anthropology class, we covered the topic of Language death, which interested me greatly, so I looked deeper into the topic, which often winds up being tangled together with language preservation, for obvious reasons. Some of the points brought up in class and in that week’s discussion involved whether or not languages were worth saving, and one thing that was briefly mentioned, and which interested me more than anything else, was when a people group decides to stop using the language of their own volition, a point that Tom Colls of BBC Today echoes: “The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?”(Colls, 2009)
This is a stark contrast to the languages lost over time due to things such as colonialists forcing native people to stop speaking their own language, or languages that just seem to adapt and be lost through the passage of time. In the case where the culture and people that that language belonged to were the ones who wanted to let the language go, it’s generally a language that, to the people, no longer serves a purpose, as it isn’t used outside of the group itself. This brings up something of a conflict of interests to some, as linguists may want to preserve a language, but not wish to go against a people group’s wishes. As mentioned by Claude Hagege in Colls’s article, “"We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population,"” and as such there are some languages that we’ll likely lose not necessarily for lack of resources or death of the last speaker, but through the peoples’ own choice.
In a case such as this, linguists truly don’t have a right, at least morally, to insist that the people keep the language alive; it is their language and their choice, and thus the decision to no longer use that language should be respected. However tragic a loss of a culture and language is, I feel it’s up to the people of that culture who use that language to choose what happens to it. If they no longer wish to use the language, then they shouldn’t be forced to continue using it, even if that means losing yet another language to the sands of time.
Sources:
Colls, Tom. (2009, October 19).
The death of language?. BBC News Today.
Retrieved From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm
That's a very good observation about how sometimes the people who actually speak a language are the ones who want to stop speaking it. Oftentimes we want to blame outsiders, but it seems that on occasion the speakers themselves do the most damage to a language. However, the good news is that even if a language isn't actively spoken, we still are in many cases able to preserve it for future generations, even if nobody actively speaks it.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that you focused on the fact that there are people who, of their own volition, choose not to speak their native, or traditional, language any more. This aspect of language death is oftentimes overlooked and instead all of the focus goes to the languages that certain people are not allowed to speak anymore. Bringing up the idea that there are people who choose to no longer speak their language is a very important part of linguistic anthropology. I fully agree with your ideas and find your post to be very informational.
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