IELTS Academic Reading passage: Why Languages Fall Silent

Why Languages Fall Silent

Something in the region of seven thousand languages are spoken in the world today, and the figure is falling. The distribution is extremely uneven. A handful of languages, English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and a few others, are spoken by billions of people between them, while the great majority of the world's languages are spoken by communities of a few thousand, a few hundred or a few dozen. Linguists who track the smaller ones have reached a bleak consensus: on one widely quoted estimate, as many as half of the languages now spoken could have no fluent speakers left by the end of this century. A language whose last native speaker has died is usually described as sleeping rather than dead, a choice of words that, as we shall see, is more than sentimental.

Languages rarely vanish suddenly. What happens instead is a shift across three generations that has been recorded on every continent. The grandparents speak only the old language. The parents grow up bilingual, using the old language at home and the new one at school and at work. The children, seeing which language opens doors, answer their parents in the new language and speak the old one hardly at all, and their own children do not learn it. By the time the community notices, the only fluent speakers are elderly, and the language has withdrawn from the shop, the street and the classroom into the kitchens of a few houses. The last speaker of Cornish, a language once spoken across the south-western tip of Britain, is traditionally said to have died in 1777, but the language had been retreating for two centuries before that.

The causes are less often conquest than pressure. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries schools in many countries punished children for speaking their home language: Welsh children who used Welsh in class were made to wear a wooden token, and indigenous children in Canada and Australia were removed from their families and forbidden their mother tongue. Direct prohibition of that kind is now rare, but the economic pull of a dominant language is stronger than any ban. If the jobs, the universities, the television and the internet all run in one language, parents make a rational choice in raising their children in it, and the old language dies not because anyone attacked it but because no one could afford to keep it.

What is lost when this happens is easy to underestimate. A language carries knowledge that exists nowhere else: the names and uses of plants, the behaviour of fish and weather, the routes across a desert or between islands, accumulated over centuries and encoded in words that have no equivalent in the language replacing them. It also carries a distinct way of organising experience. Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, in northern Australia, do not say left and right; they say north, south, east and west, even indoors, and as a result they maintain a sense of direction that other people find astonishing. When the last speakers go, that way of seeing goes with them. And there is the matter of the community itself. Researchers working with indigenous groups have reported that those who keep their language tend to report better health and wellbeing than those who have lost it, which suggests that a language is less a possession than a part of the person who speaks it.

Yet the story has a second half. The most dramatic reversal on record is Hebrew, which had not been anyone's everyday language for many centuries when, from the late nineteenth century, a small number of enthusiasts began to speak it at home and insist that their children answer in it; within two generations it was the mother tongue of a nation. Nothing on that scale has been repeated, but smaller revivals are now numerous. In Wales, a century of decline was halted by Welsh-medium schools, by a legal right to use Welsh in public life granted in 1993 and by television and radio in the language. In New Zealand, the Māori response to the collapse of transmission was the language nest, a preschool run entirely in Māori by grandparents, launched in 1982 and copied since in Hawaii and elsewhere. In each case the lesson was the same: what saved the language was not a dictionary but children using it.

Technology has changed what is possible for the smallest languages. Recording equipment, archives and online dictionaries mean that a language can be documented in far greater detail than ever before, and a smartphone keyboard or a small edition of an online encyclopaedia gives a language of a few thousand speakers a presence it could not have had a generation ago. Documentation is also what makes the word sleeping meaningful. The Wampanoag language of Massachusetts had had no speakers for over a century when a member of the community began reconstructing it from seventeenth-century documents, including a Bible translated into it in 1663; there are now children being raised in it. But documentation alone is not revival. A language that exists only in an archive is safe, in the way that a seed in a vault is safe, and it is no more alive.

The decisive factor, in the end, is not grammar but prestige. Children learn the language that they believe will matter, and a language that is heard on television, used in a job interview and taught in school is one that they will bother to speak. Official recognition helps, money helps, and nothing helps more than the daily decision of parents to use the language at home. Where that decision is made, languages with a few thousand speakers have proved surprisingly resilient; where it is not, languages with millions have faded within a lifetime. The ending of a language is not, then, a fact of nature. It is the sum of a great many ordinary choices, and choices can be made differently.