From Stuff:
Of the 7000 languages spoken around the world, more than half are disappearing.
. . . .
“My heart is a graveyard!” wrote the late French poet Anjela Duval in the late Seventies.
Living alone on the family farm in Brittany, she was mourning the deaths of her parents and her siblings. But she was also beginning to fear that the language they spoke – and in which she wrote – was dying with them.
“Va c’halon ‘zo ur vered!” reads that same line in Duval’s original Breton, the spiked consonants together looking like a row of headstones.
First brought to northern France by Celtic Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries, Breton is one of hundreds of languages now classified as by Unesco as “severely endangered”.
Although Britanny came under French control in the 16th century, Breton only really began to fall into decline after French was made the region’s official language after the French Revolution in 1789.
The situation deteriorated further after Breton nationalists were accused of Nazi collaboration during the Second World War, forcing the language deeper underground. Around two million people spoke Breton at the beginning of the 20th century; today it is used by only about 250,000, a number that is falling.
Breton is not alone. Of the 7000 languages spoken around the world, more than half are disappearing. It is estimated that we lose one or two languages a fortnight, while academics working on the Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London scramble to record them.
Inspired by the fact that so many otherwise extinct languages live on in snatches of song and poetry, the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library launched an Endangered Poetry Project last September.
“The situation is urgent now,” says the project’s librarian Chris McCabe, who describes it as “storing cultural seeds for future generations.
Historically, literature had the power to activate languages. Dante didn’t write in Latin, he used an Italian dialect. Chaucer did the same with Middle English. Both writers were breaking free from the official ‘language of thinking’ into the ‘language of real life’. And we still read them in the original today.”
The library has already received submissions of poems in 20 different languages, including Faroese, Kristang (a mix of Portuguese and Asian ancestry, spoken chiefly in Malacca), Alsatian, Cornish, Welsh and the gloriously named Wakhi, spoken in a mountain corridor of Afghanistan nicknamed “the roof of the world”.
Link to the rest at Stuff
Surely I’m not the only person who doesn’t see the extinction of languages as a terrible tragedy. Language exists for communication, but it only works when people speak the same language. Sure, different languages have their own neat things about them and often have words for things that other languages don’t have, but English isn’t the only language these days that adopts words and things from other languages. So what if we all get around to speaking the same language eventually? I guess I don’t see the problem.
Or maybe I’m just annoyed that I don’t speak Japanese when there are mangas that I want to read which have not been translated into English. The language barrier is preventing me from enjoying stories I want to enjoy–and preventing those stories from reaching a wider audience.
So … yeah, so what if smaller languages are dying out? All that means is that more people are able to communicate with each other instead of being so insular. I don’t see that as a bad thing. If there was a real need for those dying languages, they wouldn’t be dying. What’s their solution, anyway? Force people to learn the languages of their ancestors even though it’s hard, they don’t want to, and it won’t give them any advantage in their lives?