January 13, 2010
The Death of a Language does not mean The Death of Culture
So says my favorite linguist, John McWhorter:
What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation. For example, most Americans pronounce disgusting as “diss-kussting” with a k sound. (Try it—you probably do too.) However, some people say “dizz-gusting”—it’s easier to pronounce the g after a softer sound like z. Imagine a language with the word pronounced as it is spelled (and as it was in Latin): “diss-gusting.” The group speaking the language splits into two groups that go their separate ways. Come back five hundred years later, and one group is pronouncing the word “diss-kussting,” while the other is pronouncing it “dizz-gusting.” After even more time, the word would start shortening, just as we pronounce “let us” as “let’s.” After a thousand years, in one place it would be something like “skussting,” while in the other it might be “zgustin.” After another thousand, perhaps “skusty” and “zguss.” By this time, these are no longer even the same language.
This is exactly why there are different languages—what began in Latin as augustus became agosto in Spanish and, in French, août, pronounced as just the single vowel sound. Estonian is what happened when speakers of an earlier language migrated away from other ones; in one place, Estonian happened, in the other, Finnish did. And so while Finnish for horse is hevonen, in Estonian it’s hobune.
Notice that this is not about culture, any more than saying “diss-kusting” rather than “diz-gusting” reflects anything about one’s soul. In fact, all human groups could, somehow, exhibit the exact same culture—and yet their languages would be as different as they are now, because the differences are the result of geographical separation, leading to chance linguistic driftings of the kind that turn augustus into agosto and août. In this we would be like whales, whose species behave similarly everywhere, but have distinct “songs” as the result of happenstance. Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed? The diversity of human languages is subject to the same evaluation: each one is the result of a roll of the dice.
I think he is right.
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Isn’t McWhorter making the case something of a straw man by focusing on the death of linguistic variants, rather than whole families? Diss-kusting vs. Dizz-gusting, like Portuguese vs. Italian, are tiny differences compared to English vs. Berik (the New Guinea languages where verbs are inflected according to the time of day and the weight and gender of the objects affects).
McWhorter has a better case by saying, look — many of these dying languages are really just subtle variants on currently existing ones. We don’t think of Iraqi Arabic as a radically different language from Egyptian language. If we focus on linguistic families, then the rapid death of languages is exaggerated not only in its effect but in its sheer numbers.
Of course, now we have all those Saussurean paradoxes again — what does it mean to identify a word or a language as a distinct unit? How does one distinguish one linguistic family from another?
Let me add my own assumptions here: I think language does deeply affect thought, but that this effect is impossible to demonstrate, b/c there’s no way for us to get outside of either to create a pure criterion. This is why that Lena Boroditsky essay bothered me so much.