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 By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
Just imagine your mother tongue disappearing in the near future, leaving only a few dominant languages in the world. The Korean language might be such an ``endangered'' language, given the current situation in which people are putting English before their mother tongue.
Andrew Dalby, linguist-historian and author of ``Language in Danger,'' which has been recently published in Korean, describes the idea behind the extinction of minority languages with his erudite linguistic and historic knowledge.
Dalby says that of the approximately 5,000 languages spoken around the globe today, approximately half will be lost within 100 years. He says one language disappears every two weeks in the world, so within 200 years, only 200 languages will remain. Maybe the only language eventually spoken will be English.
Then, why is it so important and what does it mean for people living in a global society? Isn't consolidation of minority languages a sign of progress toward universal understanding?
Maybe, one might ask an ironic question ― what is wrong when nothing gets lost in translation?
The book sheds light on the disappearance of languages and its consequences for future generations.
In the biblical story, the tower of Babel got so immense that it would it have reached heaven. God seeing what the people were doing, gave each person a different language to confuse them and scattered the people throughout the earth.
Since then, people lost universality of communication, biblically speaking. But people thesedays can speak at least two languages. He says the multiplicity of languages from the ``Babel curse'' has ironically evolved into enabling people to innovate and speak more efficiently.
But the extinction of the diversity of the languages might have more disastrous consequences than the ``Babel curse,'' the author argues.
Many people agree that parents don't want their children to learn minority languages. It is becoming an apparent trend among school children around the world, especially so for Korean parents. Some people who want effective international relations and an economic community might be happy for the day when there is a monolingual society.
Dalby says that historically the linguistic extinction has resulted from economic inequality, political oppression, and even genocide. But more often, it occurs through the choices of individuals pursuing prosperity by giving up their ancestral speech.
He takes historic examples from the effects of Latin's displacement of native languages in the aftermath of Rome's imperial expansion, and the aggressive extermination of hundreds of indigenous North American languages through a brutal policy of forcing Native Americans to learn English.
Citing Marianne Mithun, the book says that ``The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage ... an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience.''
The dominance of English is ``simply by chance that it became the most useful language for others to learn.''
Linguistic variety is important not only in communicating but also in sustaining and enhancing understanding of the world.
The author argues languages represent different ways of perceiving the world, which reflect cultural traditions and localized knowledge, warning that in each of those cases (when someone's mother tongue disappears in the 21st century), a culture will be lost.
Vanished languages contain perceptions on native creatures and views on culture, he says. For example, a Mexican tribe divides the rainbow into five colors, while African tribes see it as just two colors. Koreans divide the rainbow into seven colors, but as the author suggests, if the native tongue disappears, there is no concept of Korean ``rainbow colors'' at all.
The recent trend of the linguistic standardization threatens the existence of marginalized cultures and ethnic customs.
He asserts the loss of languages will lead to a loss of knowledge of marginal cultures because the native words are the outcome of accumulated experiences of the speakers' own culture.
He says the modern tools of linguistic standardization are more dangerous as ``Nowadays, television is in practically every home, talking like one of the family, in fact the most honored member of the family, the one to whom you cannot talk back.
``It provides scenes of prosperous daily life that everyone wants to emulate, and television does not speak a local dialect.''
But Dalby says that there are ``three overriding reasons why we need to stop losing languages … We need the knowledge that they preserve and transmit; the insights they give us into the way things may be; and the interaction with other languages that keeps our own language flexible and creative.''
The book offers quite interesting but distressing ideas about the future of languages. It is a good analysis but too erudite and historical, which could makes readers weary.
chungay@koreatimes.co.kr |
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yistory@koreatimes.co.kr
