Globalization and Language

Freakonomics has a nice post asking the question "What Will Globalization Do to Languages?". They ask four language professionals (including Language Log's Mark Liberman) to respond. They have interesting views well worth the read (Liberman gives the most nuanced and linguistically savvy response, no surprise), but they all seem to agree that globalization and internet technologies are NOT going to allow English to "take over". Liberman offers this nugget of wisdom:

It’s obvious that globalized communications and popular culture will tend to homogenize local language varieties — but some varieties of English seem to be diverging more rapidly than ever.

I like John Hayden's point too:

English is a tool, just like a piece of technology. Much of the world’s economy is tied up in English-speaking countries and for that reason, English is like a cell phone provider offering the best plan. But if the dollar continues to drop, the most viable option could shift. Mexico and Korea don’t need English to communicate if Korea begins to find it profitable to learn Spanish.

Languages evolve via as-yet-unknown cognitive mechanisms. I suspect that "globalized communications and popular culture" will not change the way languages evolve. At best they will simply speed up the existing process.

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.