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By Dennis Baron

There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the globe today. Five hundred years ago there were twice as many, but the rate of language death is accelerating. With languages disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks, in ninety years half of today’s languages will be gone.

Mostly it’s the little languages, those with very few speakers, that are dying out, but language death can hit big languages as well as little and mid-sized ones. And it can hit those big languages pretty hard. Sure, languages like Degere and Vuna are disappearing in Kenya, Jeju in Korea, Manchu in China. And sure, Nigerians complain that Yoruba is fast giving way to English. But language-watchers warn that English itself may have entered a steep and potentially irreversible decline in both its native and its adoptive country.

English, having spread as a global language during the 20th century, has now become so thin on the ground back home that it’s in danger of disappearing. That’s the conclusion of a new report which sees both competition from other languages and the increased ineptitude of English speakers combining to produce a catastrophic decline in the number of English speakers in England, the language’s ancestral home, as well as in the United States, where English speakers fled in search of religious liberty and alternate side of the street parking.

The report of the Center for the Study of English in the Public Interest, or ČEPI, available on that organization’s website, warns that the language could disappear in less than three generations, or perhaps they meant to say fewer? “Why should little languages like Frisian, Kashubian, and Han get all the attention?” the report asks. “Don’t the bleeding-heart anthropologists bent on preventing the inevitable realize that people stop speaking those doomed languages because other languages do the job better?” it adds. The report calls on those intent on saving endangered languages to switch their attentions to English, a language that might actually benefit from their efforts.

There’s good reason to preserve English rather than let it die. According to ČEPI director Bill Caxton, “When the last speakers go, they take with them their history and culture too.” Granted, Eskimo may not have twenty-three words for snow, as the popular myth would have it, but Eskimos do have a special relationship with snow, as evidenced by Eskimo idioms for ’snow clumped in the paws of sled dogs’ and ’snow outside the igloo that turns yellow when Morris is around.’ When Eskimo dies out, as it eventually must, that special relationship will be lost forever, and the Eskimos and the rest of the world will be left with the terms snow, slush, sleet, and snow covered with a crust of blackened automobile exhaust, hardly a vocabulary of nuance and poetry.

With the death of English, the ČEPI report notes, we’ll lose its prolific set of terms for burgers: in addition to hamburger, there’s cheeseburger, bacon burger, bacon cheeseburger, bleu cheese burger (also, blue cheese burger), quarter pounder, quarter pounder with cheese, swissburger, curry burger, tuna burger, turkey burger, chiliburger, soyburger, tofu burger, and black bean burger. And don’t forget hamburger not cooked long enough to eliminate e. coli. The wholesale loss of these terms testifying to English speakers’ preoccupation with chopped meat, and chopped meat substitutes, would be tragic.

When languages die, we also lose their secret herbal remedies and medicinal cures that could revolutionize modern medicine, their old family recipes that could turn the Food Channel on its ear. An English speaker discovered penicillin from traditional English bread mold (or mould), not to mention the extensive

The United Nations’ International Mother Language Day has been celebrated annually on February 21st, the anniversary of the Bengali Language Movement, since 2000. It is a time when people across the world join efforts to remember the power of language to preserve our cultures, and to raise awareness of the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity and multilingual education.

Organized for the occasion of this year’s IMLD, and in the framework of the 2010 International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures

In her official message as Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova speaks about the importance of language to create inclusion and promote peace:

Languages are the best vehicles of mutual understanding and tolerance. Respect for all languages is a key factor for ensuring peaceful coexistence, without exclusion, of societies and all of
their members.

Multilingualism, the learning of foreign languages and translation are three strategic axes for the language policies of tomorrow. On the occasion of this 11th International Mother Language Day, I am appealing to the international community to give the mother language, in each of these three axes, its rightful, fundamental place, in a spirit of respect and tolerance which paves the way for peace.

As IMLD grows in importance each year, more and more countries organize educational and cultural events, such as Endangered Languages Week, in the UK. Another example of a country that is embracing IMLD’s goals is Serbia, which, according to UNESCO’s website, will be marking the occasion this week by devoting one lesson in every school to mother languages.

For an an overview of UNESCO’s work on languages in all its areas of competencies, click here.

In a world where language conveys powerful messages about attitudes and values, what better moment to introduce its many “looks and sounds” than the nursery years? My Village: Rhymes from Around the World (Gecko Press, 2008), collected by New Zealander Danielle Wright and illustrated by British artist Mique Moriuchi, does exactly that: it brings together, in a beautiful multilingual volume, an array of nursery rhymes that introduces children to the languages and cultures of 22 countries. In addition, My Village perfectly communicates the potential rhymes have of becoming “companions for life”—something alluded to by Children’s Poet Laureate Michael Rosen in his beautiful introduction to the book.

Wright’s website, It’s a Small World, offers more about the core idea behind the book. “I wanted a way to introduce different cultures to children right from the nursery“, she says. “Imagine life without world music or ethnic food - that’s what a child’s reading life would be like without international kid’s books and poems… In our grandparents generation eating ethnic food was not commonplace; now their great grandchildren live with many cultural influences outside their own and sometimes many cultural influences inside the one home. Feeding a child rich language from other cultures is a good way to help him/her grow up culturally sensitive.” The website also includes a page on the history of nursery rhymes and a map of endangered languages which points to a scary fact: within the space of a few generations more than half of the 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world may disappear, “consigning whole cultural perspectives and histories to silence.”

Ethnographer Wade Davis has a beautiful definition of language, that gives us much to think about:

Language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules – language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought and an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

Published in 2008, UNESCO’s International Year of Languages, My Village: Rhymes from Around the World is a commendable effort to introduce children to the joys of rhymes and to our world’s rich—and fragile— tapestry of languages. Here’s to hoping all our 7,000 languages will continue to exist for millenia to come.