Crystal Clear ...

Thanks to cko (who lent/loaned/leaned me her copy of Crystal's Language Death) I was finally able to read Chapter 2 Why Should We Care and Chapter 3 Why Do Languages Die. I have to say, I found the general writing style disappointing. It’s a lightweight volume that reads like it was pasted together from notes and speeches (which it may very well have been). He tends to make the same points over and over, in no systematic order.

I read nothing in the first three chapters of this book which caused me to re-evaluate my gut feeling that there may be some favorable outcomes to language death (and we linguists ought to study that possibility more closely).

Only 3 main points relate to why language death is bad:

I. Languages are like an ecosystem = ecosystems have mutually reinforcing relationships between members/elements (i.e., hurt one, hurt the system)

II. Languages are repositories of data (i.e., we can learn stuff from them: history, culture, linguistic feature space)

III. Language = identity

There’s no proof of (I) and Crystal is quick to caution against taking the analogy too far (he claims that humans are in complete control of language death factors; I suspect he is wrong about that, but ...); nonetheless, I suspect that it’s somewhat analogous. However, by the same ecosystem analogy, it may be the case that some language death may have favorable outcomes (which has been my guess all along). As I noted on cko’s blog recently, “I suspect that recent work in language learning and evolution by Partha Niyogi and folks like him will bear greatly on this topic in the coming decade.”

Argument (III) is garbled at best. Crystal claims that “Identity makes members of a community recognizably the same” (p39). Hmmmmmm. I thought it was the opposite -- identity makes members of a community recognizably different. In any case, this argument is vague at best, and does not relate directly to language death. There are various cultural factors that go in to “identity”, whatever that is.

It is argument (II) which I find most compelling, and the one I agree with most readily and without debate. Yes, I agree that all languages have unique linguistic properties that are well worth studying in themselves. But just because we find valuable data in every language does NOT mean we should stop language death per se. we need a broader understanding of the system of language interaction and language evolution, otherwise zealously stopping language death may be as irresponsible as zealously causing language death. Like a protected species over-grazing or over-hunting a locale, language over-population may serve some ecosystem harm. We just don't know.

Lie Berries

Well, it goes without saying that Crystal's book Language Death was not "On Shelf" as my research library's database claimed it was. Ihave requested a trace, but I hold little hope for its timely discovery. Google Book Search has the first few pages of each chapter available for viewing, so I've been able to sample chapters 3 and 4, Why Should We Care and Why Do Languages Die. I've also found a couple book reviews that have summarized the chapters a bit, so I'm forming an impression of the contents, though I caution that an "impression" is all I will have to go on until I can get the book.

Poser Responds!

At 3:47pm yesterday (Sept 21), Bill Poser over at Language Log posted this interesting claim: "The rate of language loss has accelerated as communication and travel have become more rapid and efficient, but the phenomenon is far from new."

14 minutes earlier, at 3:33pm (same day), The Lousy Linguist (uh, me) posted this question: "How do current rates of language death compare with historical rates?"

It's doubtful that Poser was directly answering me (but The Lousy Linguist can dream...), but it does seem to directly answer the question. Unfortunately, no supporting evidence for the claim is offered, and there's the rub. As Crystal is quick to point out, rates of contemporary language death are very difficult to determine (in fact, he refers to the attempts as "well-informed guesswork", p15 of the PDF).

And as I was even quicker to point out "surely it must be even MORE difficult to estimate historical rates".

In the one chapter of Crystal's book that I have so far read, he opts for the position that 50% of the world's languages will be "lost" in the next 100 years. I have no reason not to accept this as fair. But I don't know how this compares with the past (it seems intuitive that this is far faster than historical rates, but honestly, I have only vague intuition to go on here, and no one else seems to have anything better). And, of course (insert broken record here) we have yet to tackle the truly important question of what linguistic effect this loss has.