Suzanne Romaine’s research while affiliated with New York State and other places

Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world’s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity? The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world’s endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

In the previous chapter, we encountered the idea that for much of history, the number of languages in several continents was roughly constant. As in Papua New Guinea in recent historical times, the forces favoring localism and dispersal were, on the whole, just as strong as those that produce integration or domination of one location by another. One language group might have achieved preeminence over another, but this was a precarious affair which would be reversed in a few years. What was absent were massive, enduring differences between the expansionary potential of different peoples, of the kind which would cause the sustained expansion of a single, dominant language. This equilibrium has been punctured forever. Some languages have, over the last few centuries, shown an awesome propensity to spread. By now, the speakers of the ten largest languages make up half the world’s population, and this figure is increasing. The hundred largest languages account for almost 90 percent of the population, with the remaining 6,000 languages confined to 10 percent of the world’s most marginalized people, whose communities have generally been on the retreat for several hundred years. This chapter and the next seek to understand how this great transformation has come about. We will argue that the rapid loss of diversity only really occurred in the last thousand years or so.

If asked to name as many languages as possible, the average person could probably easily name a dozen, but would certainly not come up with this list: Abenaki, Bella Coola, Rama, Guguu Yimidhirr, Kahana, Adzera, Boiken, Toba Batak, Fyem, Tzotzil, Cebuano, Mokilese. You have probably never heard of these languages, or thousands more like them. One of us asked some graduate students in linguistics at the University of Oxford to write down the names of as many languages as they could think of. The number ranged from 50 to 75. Even professional linguists perhaps would not be able to name more than a hundred. A recent advertisement for “Teach yourself language courses” appearing in a popular magazine claimed to “offer introductory and advanced courses in most of the world’s languages.” To be precise, they boasted a total of 215 courses in 76 languages! However, this number represents but repercent of the total number of languages. Most ordinary readers are surprised to find that linguists estimate the number of languages in the world to be between 5,000 and 6,700.

Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world’s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity? The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world’s endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

We saw in the last chapter how languages, like species, are highly adapted to their environments and that all extinctions have as their cause environmental change. Although our opening quotation to this chapter is taken from a work of fiction, it provides a useful metaphor of a process of unraveling or disintegrating, a language being picked apart in pieces after exposure to a hostile environment—in this case, to the gradual encroachment of another culture and language. In this chapter we examine this process of change and its consequences in more detail with some case studies. In particular, we illustrate how many of the changes affecting endangered languages tend to eliminate linguistic complexity, along with much of what is culturally distinctive—for example, vocabulary for local flora, fauna, native traditions and knowledge. The knowledge contained in indigenous languages has much to con­ tribute to scientific theories through the uncovering of potentially invaluable perspectives on a variety of problems such as land management, marine technology, plant cultivation, and animal husbandry.

We have seen how the changing face of linguistic diversity in the modern world is the story of how a few metropolitan languages expanded very rapidly at the expense of the rest, as smaller communities have been pulled into the orbit of more powerful ones. Must we accept the demise of the world’s small languages? Or should we try to support them, and if so, what might really be achieved in practice? We hope we have made clear that the reasons most non-Eurasian languages are in danger of dying out have nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of those languages—which are just as complex, expressive, and creative as any others—nor with the greater intelligence, virtue, or industry of their speakers compared to speakers of other languages. If the tale of the Eurasian rise to global dominance were told as a tale of human motives it would be a shabby one indeed, with more than its share of greed, dishonesty, cruelty, and sloth. But the rise to dominance cannot be explained at this level. It instead requires an understanding of the deeper, complex, structural conditions obtained in Eurasian societies and not elsewhere. Eurasia had by far the world’s most productive farming and livestock complex. This was no more than a fluke of biogeography, but it allowed Eurasians to boom in number and eventually expand beyond their shores. It also made them hosts to the great killer diseases, which, paradoxically, gave them an edge over other peoples when the continents collided. Finally, the dense population and the high agricultural productivity, in Europe at least, unleashed a process of diversification and specialization that set those economies on the path to industrialization. Thus, a world of small-scale societies more or less equal in wealth and power has become a world of nation-states, some far wealthier and stronger than others, with ruling classes and minorities within them.

A few years ago, linguists raced to the Turkish farm village of Haci Osman to record Tefvik Esenc, a frail farmer believed to be the last known speaker of the Ubykh language once spoken in the northwestern Caucasus. At that time only four or five elder tribesmen remembered some phrases of the language, but only Esenc knew it fluently. Even his own three sons were unable to converse with their father in his native language because they had become Turkish speakers. In 1984 Esenc had already written the inscription he wanted on his gravestone: “This is the grave of Tefvik Esenc. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh.” With Esenc’s death in 1992, Ubykh too joined the ever increasing number of extinct languages. Four years later in South Carolina a native American named Red Thundercloud died, the last voice of a dying tongue. No longer able to converse in his native language with the remaining members of his community, he took the language of his tribe to the grave with him. Red Thundercloud was alone among his people, but not alone among native Americans. Roscinda Nolasquez of Pala, California, the last speaker of Cupeiio, died in 1987 at the age of 94, and Laura Somersal, one of the last speakers of Wappo, died in 1990.

Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world’s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity? The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world’s endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

We have seen how European populations, their crops, and their languages have replaced indigenous peoples in most of the New World, Australia, and New Zealand over the last five hundred years. We also saw that this expansionary wave was ultimately limited by geography. Most of non-European Eurasia was already full of dense farming populations. The moist tropics were unhealthy and difficult for Europeans to colonize. Thus these areas do not have major populations of European descent, and Europeans, whose population is now stable or declining, are no longer expanding their geographical range. We might assume that the remaining indigenous languages of the rest of the world—Africa and the tropical Pacific, for example, both rich in linguistic diversity—are safe from encroaching domination. However, a glance at the language situations of these areas shows that this is not so, for there are many examples of shifts to dominant languages which occur without a corresponding movement of people.

Few people know that nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia’s 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world’s languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices? Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity? The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world’s endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.