The Phenomenon of Language Death: Prestige Attribution of a Language

The Phenomenon of Language Death: Prestige Attribution of a Language

“In the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, humans are punished by God for their arrogance in trying to build a tower that would reach heaven. Condemned to speak a babble of mutually incomprehensible languages, they are quarantined from each other’s minds. The many languages spoken on this earth have often seemed a curse to rulers, media magnates, and the person in the street.” (Evans, 2010)

As Nicholas Evans states in his book, the issue of language death has been widely discussed and researched by linguists and researchers. Some economists and politicians see the diversity of languages as a significant cause of trouble, corruption and instability in the modern world: They almost see the diversity of languages as a curse to humans, like that in the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel. According to them, people who speak different languages are not able to communicate with each other in a desirable way, and on the larger scale, that is why communities with different native languages and cultures cannot find a common ground for any healthy communication that would make way for world peace and understanding. Many economists and politicians advocate the existence of one common language that people can speak and communicate with others without any complications (Evans, 2010). Thus, they see the existence of a single language as the key that will unify the people of the world.

On the other hand, many academics and linguists are alarmed by the phenomenon of language death, because languages are assets to all humans. Languages are manifestations of many things such as human history, intellect, knowledge and the complexity of the cognitive ability of human beings. Such academics and linguists are especially alarmed as they know what humanity is missing out with the loss of every language and are aware of the direness and scope of the issue language death: As Kenneth Hale’s study predicts, during the 21st century, 3,000 of today’s 6,000 languages will disappear, and another 2,400 will come near to extinction (1998). This means that in less than 90 years, 90 percent of today’s existing languages will be endangered. It definitely requires very significant effort and resources to revive languages that have already died – and it may not even be possible to revive some of these dead languages at all, and this makes Hale’s numbers only more urging.

In the last couple of decades, linguists and researchers have been asking and trying to answer many aspects about language death, endangered languages and language revitalization. Language death is a serious and complex matter (Hale, 1998): The questions of how and why languages go extinct, the definition of language death, the consequences of language loss, how to save a soon-to-die language or how to revitalize a language that has already died are still being discussed by people in this field. One of the topics that researchers have been discussing for a long time is related to the reasons of language death such as glottocide and the prestige attribution of a language, and how these occurrences bring about the disappearance of a language.

Glottocide is the destruction of the language of a group due to causes such as genocide as well as wars and natural disasters that could wipe away an entire population with the ability of speaking a certain language (Tsunoda, 2006). Most of the earlier Aboriginal Australian languages, for instance, died as the speakers of these languages were massacred and introduced to certain diseases that they were not immune to from before, such as influenza and small pox. This was largely because of the presence of the British colony in Australia in the late eighteenth century (Tsunoda, 2006). The same phenomenon also took place with the Aboriginal Australians of Tasmania. Instead of dying from diseases that are completely foreign to them, these people were almost completely killed by genocide, and thus their languages lost their speakers. Although glotticide was a common form of language death in the past as these cases show, in today’s world it is less likely that the speakers of a language will vanish all together from genocide, disease, natural disasters or wars. In the modern world, such calamities can be addressed more quickly and efficiently than they were in the past, so today languages very rarely die as a result of glotticide.

Before going into depth to explain another particular reason why languages have been dying in the past and still die today, it is important to mention the common misconception that most people have about the reasons of language death. Even though the linguists and academicians, as mentioned above, are alarmed by the direness of this phenomenon, the wider public, especially the speakers of dominant languages, think that the reason why languages die can be explained by the idea of social Darwinism. Certain languages die while other languages spread more and have more speakers every day. The social Darwinist idea argues that the triumphant languages have more expressive power than the ones that die, so the dominant languages naturally replace the ones with the lesser power of expression and capacity. Thus, language death is seen as a perfectly natural process in which the more complex and richer language wins over the lesser one. This idea is important to note, especially because today most people still assume a correlation between the expressive capacity and spread and survival of a language (Dorian, 1998). The wider public is unaware of the fact that dominant languages such as English, Chinese or Spanish do not have to be the most complex and expressive languages. Indeed, if English were the only language within the human reach, for example, then humans would be missing out a lot of information and knowledge regarding the human intellect, history and cognitive ability (Hale, 1998). There are, for instance, languages with more than twenty different past tenses unlike any other dominant language, and these languages have a much greater expressive power regarding past events and depictions. Similar examples can be given in abundance. The wrong assumption that dominant languages are more complex and richer than other languages definitely has a negative impact on the minority and indigenous languages, as people regard them as weak languages that are doomed to disappear. In fact, most of these languages embody a great deal of expressive power, syntax, grammatical structures and rich vocabulary. Therefore, language death is not merely the product of a natural competition among languages where the winner is also the most well-adapted and competent language.

Though social Darwinism is not, despite common belief, among the reasons of language death, one of the most important reasons of this phenomenon is the level of prestige attributed to a language. Importantly, the prestige that is attributed to a language has led to the death of many languages in the past, both distant and recent, and is still one of the main reasons of language disappearance today. This is why, in my opinion, it is worthwhile to touch upon the prestige attribution of a language and its connection to the issue of language death more than the others.

The level of prestige attributed to a language is a very important topic regarding the causes of language death and should not be dismissed (Dorian, 1998). The prestige attributed to a language is usually closely associated with the social status of its speakers (Dorian, 1998). Therefore, the language of people who have significant power and high prestige in the society will also benefit from the same power and prestige. In the situation where people who speak a language have little power and low prestige, their language is unlikely to be well thought of (Dorian, 1998). With this idea, it is possible to argue that the prestige attributed to a language rarely has anything to do with the grammatical structures and complexities of the language, just like manifested in the idea of social Darwinism. Thus, the idea that a language’s prestige is an inherent attribute is illusory (Hagège, 2009). If a language’s prestige were dependent on the vocabulary, grammatical structures, phonology or syntax of that language, then today some other languages would have to be regarded as more prestigious than most dominant languages, such as English. Thus, attributing prestige to a language is not related to the structure and complexity of the language itself – it is a matter of its speakers’ prestige and their place in the social hierarchy.

Some languages become so exclusively associated with low prestige people and their socially disapproved identities that the natural speakers of the language prefer to distance themselves from it and start speaking some other language (Dorian, 1998). The power of this low level of prestige is quite significant, as it can often cause parents to make a conscious or unconscious decision to teach their children a language of high prestige rather than their own low prestige language. In the case of the Lakota language of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for instance, the older generation of the community did not transmit their ancestral language, Lakota, to their children, and today the language faces the threat of extinction, because the speakers of Lakota are getting older, and there are not many people who speak the language other than the older generation (Gahagan, 2010). The younger generations in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, on the other hand, are speaking English instead of their native language, and for them speaking Lakota is something to be ashamed of as they see it as a language of low status (Gahagan, 2010).

The idea that the prestige of a language originates from the prestige of its speakers was manifested with the arrival of Spaniards in the Americas and their encounter with the native cultures and languages in the continent. This encounter brought about quite drastic changes in the prestige of two major New World languages that were spoken by the Aztec empire in North America and by the Inca empire in South America: Nahuatl and Quechua (Dorian, 1998). The Aztecs and Incas held great power and prestige before the arrival of the Spaniards in their region, and the prestige that the empires had did transfer to the languages that they speak. However, when the Spaniards came to the New World, their old European culture and language took over the indigenous languages and culture. In a very short period of time, the native empires were brought down by the ever-expanding Spanish power during that period, which in turn caused a decline in the number of people who speak the languages of Nahuatl and Quechua and made them socially subordinate languages (Dorian, 1998). Historical documents show that some of the native people in the New World even believed the Europeans to be Gods; thus, they most certainly viewed the Europeans of higher social ranking and more powerful than themselves. This prestige attribution was eventually transmitted to the European language and culture, and a language shift took place from Nahuatl and Quechua to Spanish. Thus, such a shift in the social standing of these two once powerful and prestigious indigenous languages of the New World stemmed from the loss of power and prestige that the speakers of these languages had to endure.

Like the indigenous languages of the Aztec and Inca empires, the decline of Irish and Scottish languages can also be linked to the prestige attribution of a language. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, although these two languages were closely associated with the popular culture, folklore and traditions of their speakers, they were hardly used for academic purposes, by people, institutions or literary works (Hagège, 2009). This decline in the usage and prestige of Irish and Scottish was followed by another negative impact as the Industrial Revolution, with English as its primary language, started showing its effects in Europe of the eighteenth century. The lowest point for these languages came about when Ireland began suffering from the infamous famine of the mid-nineteenth century. These calamities damaged not only the economy of the country, but also hurt the social well being of the people. As stated before, the prestige of a language is that of its speakers, which is based on economic, political and social factors that they live in (Hagège, 2009). The destitute condition of Ireland and of the Irish community in turn caused a further decline in the prestige of the Irish and Scottish languages and cultures, and such a severe decline in the prestige of these languages led to a significant decrease in the number of their speakers.

While noting the experience of the speakers of low prestige languages, it is also important to mention the role of the speakers of languages with high social standing and prestige. As the people of the Aztec and Inca empires gave up their native languages and started speaking the language of the rising European power in the New World, Europeans carried what some scholars call “the ideology of contempt” (Dorian, 1998). Europeans looked down on the subordinate languages of the indigenous communities, as they wrongly assumed that the primitive means of technology of these communities used was also a reflection of the primitiveness of their understanding, culture and language. Thus, Europeans too assumed a correlation between the level of prestige that a language holds and its complexity (Dorian, 1998).

In a way, this “ideology of contempt” is a similar idea to that of social Darwinism as explained earlier. It is possible to argue that the social Darwinism of today might be the continuation of this ideology of contempt. Many centuries ago, the Europeans wrongly assumed that the languages of the indigenous communities were condemned to die, as they were not as complex and rich as the European languages. Likewise, the idea of social Darwinism argues that dominant languages naturally take over the minority languages, because their greater number of speakers means that they have more expressive power. Thus, this illusory correlation, which seems to be a common misconception of the dominant language speakers, has its roots in the past and that needs to be addressed.

In my opinion, the ideology of contempt still plays a major role in why dominant language speakers today are usually indifferent to the loss of minority languages. It is quite difficult for dominant language speakers to imagine themselves in the shoes of minority language speakers – that is, they have difficulty with understanding what losing a language means for the speakers of minority languages (Dorian, 1998). It is, indeed, unimaginable that dominant languages such as English, Chinese or Spanish will face the threats that Lakota, Nahuatl or Quechua faced in the past and have been facing today. This is why it is very difficult for dominant language speakers to empathize with the loss of the minority language speakers (Grenoble and Whaley, 1998). Such indifference due to the inability to empathize with people who lose their language is often exacerbated by the ideology of contempt – that is, these languages are not worth surviving, as they are not as advanced and complex as dominant languages. So, it gets even harder to get the wider public care about the loss of indigenous and minority languages, mainly because they are both indifferent and contemptuous of such languages.

Among other reasons of language death, the prestige attribution of a language, how this prestige leads to language endangerment and how minority and dominant language speakers form opinions about the issue of prestige are significant issues regarding language death. Therefore, it is important to think about ways to approach this issue in order to be able to prevent language death at least to a certain extent. There is a need for more research on the prestige attribution of languages, because it is one of the main reasons why languages still die today and will continue to die in the future. It is important to look into the following questions: Is it possible to increase the prestige attributed to a language in order to save it? Since the prestige of a language is largely dependent on the prestige of its speakers, should anything be done regarding communities that speak languages that are endangered due to the low prestige of their language? Would making such a community more visible and well known in the society help in saving their language? How can this be done? These are questions that we should think about to see whether the prestige attribution of a language can be addressed in order to save that language.


References

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