I just read a Washington Post book review by Michael Dirda on Andrew Dalby's Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future in which the homogenizing and dominating English language is once again held out to be an agent of cultural imperialism and variety-destroying wickedness.
What these kinds of arguments never take into account is that English, itself, is a great amalgamation of words and syntactical-grammatical rules learned from dozens of other tongues. Consequently, English is an unprecedentedly large language, with several times the vocabulary of its closest competitors. (Oops. Should've picked a less Darwinian term.) It is a living repository of Latin, Greek, Old and Middle French and German, Native American tongues, Yiddish, and much else besides. We in the Anglosphere do not rely on academies (like Hebrew and French speakers do) to determine what is linguistically kosher; we know that no language is pure and that it is a laughable conceit to even try to protect any of them from corruption. If anything, it is just this "corruption" that makes English so relevant and endearing: it takes on all comers and will absorb the next best term ---wherever its origin--- so long as it's phonotactically got "it."
Dirda writes that Dalby disproves the old idea that a lingua franca serves to inhibit conflict between and among warring cultures. But was that old ideal ever understood to be true in the face of real-world oppression and illiteracy? Dalby refers to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the ongoing conflict between the two Koreas as two instances where a common language exerted no pacifying effect, but these are poor examples since there is no comparable point of ideology. In the former case, a totalitarian regime made a sudden land grab from a non-militarized and cosmopolitan neighbor. There was no real preceding dialogue. In the latter case, there can be no real dialogue between the neighbors since the one is largely isolated from the rest of the world and is, effectively, incommunicado.
Dirda appears to echo and commiserate with Dalby on the great shame it is that English is the language of today's most powerful nation and that the more it is embraced, the less contact people will have with their ancestral languages. We are condemned, they fear, to watching these tongues slip into quaint irrelevance. But that is a conscious choice made by the first acculturated generation of an immigrant family. If Italian or Jewish American families wish to continue speaking Italian or Hebrew or Yiddish, they are free to do so, especially within the family. But there can be no blame assessed against the hegemony of America or its primary language if the descendants of immigrant families grow away from this sort of bilingualism. And, frankly, there are giant metropolitan communities in this country where one can live entirely within a Spanish or Mandarin environment. I wonder if Dalby addresses the political consequences of this enclave-as-indentity issue. Does he know of any white collar jobs in Middle America for Nacho, the Non-English-speaking Bus Boy?
Ultimately, Dalby's and Dirda's concern that we are losing real "knowledge" and real "perspective" with the loss of each language is valid, but only in a romantic and theoretical sense. When the last known speaker of some Eskimo dialect dies in a nursing home at age 95, it can only be hoped that her voice was recorded and that, if she was particularly alive to the significance of her knowledge, she may have helped linguists and sociologists understand the cultural place her native language occupied. What else can we do? If the preservation of these languages is a passion for some (as I'm sure it is), they will make it their life's work to do what can be done.
But, we as English speakers cannot regret for even a moment that our language has succeeded as brilliantly as it has. There was never any guarantee that it would, you know. Four hundred years ago, English was as provincial and insignificant as any tribal language is today. But something happened. History and empire carried it along, and a natural affinity in its structure and acquisitiveness absorbed and synthesized the languages of the places it came in contact with. English is a cosmopolitan language if ever there was one. Darby's self-contradictory notion that we must preserve other languages to help keep our own "flexible and creative" is the simplest kind of gibberish. English does not need the artifice or props of left-leaning apologists and academics to be what it is. Dirda's and Darby's ideas are fertilizer. Here's what Dirda thinks of the language of Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Conrad: "Our world's cultural richness is being diminished by the ongoing success of English, an English supported by international communications technology and the success of the American way of life."
What a fucking commie.
Updated: Wednesday, 28 May 2003 4:30 AM CDT