What are the benefits in the here and now of linguistic diversity?
A lot of people argue that we should try to protect "minority languages" and support "linguistic diversity", but I struggle to understand why having more languages is actually a good thing.
I would be very interested to hear about concrete benefits in the present to linguistic diversity.
Lots of random musings I had on this
A lot of people say things like "it helps you to think differently" which I have not really understood at all (I speak multiple languages, for context, some quite different), but my sample size is really just me in saying that. They also say things like "protect minority culture" which I think is quite harmful. For example my great-grandmother immigrated to an English-speaking country in the west from Africa (she was Indian-African), and she could not speak a word of English which put her at a massive disadvantage, but also gave other family members a lot more power in their relationship because they could all speak English. [Edit: I think there's a gender aspect where women are expected to maintain the traditional language and the burden is not put on men in the same way]. I get the whole assimilation versus integration, but I think there's a very strong case for trying to assimilate (into the dominant group).
I have yet to see a case arguing why it is better to have more languages (and thus necessarily less mutual comprehension and a more segregated world) rather than a single one (e.g. if everyone spoke English). My issue is not really with high-level philosophy about what would be better in an ideal world, but multilingualism as a practical concern. For example, Tildes does not really seem to 'believe' in multilingualism because it only allows English (which personally I think is better than if we had people arguing backwards and forwards in many different languages, but I am also a native English speaker so that might prejudice my perspective).
Most of the arguments about this that I see are from (usually) French speakers bemoaning the decline of their language (and it's kind of ironic to see France becoming a flag-bearer for linguistic diversity given that they exterminated a lot of languages to force French upon the world).
I don't quite understand your anecdote with your great-grandmother - it sounds like the issue there wasn't being overly protective of her native language, but more that she wasn't in a position to learn other languages for various reasons. I don't think anyone on the "languages must be protected" side is saying that monolingualism is the goal, though!
For a lot of people, the value of linguistic diversity is that they are able to retain their native language as a minority in a larger hegemonic culture. In this sense, I don't think French is a good example - there's an entire country of French speakers, they're not going anywhere! French will be spoken for a good while yet. But it is a lot more important for languages like Welsh, which is spoken natively in only a few regions.
At that scale, it becomes harder to maintain things like Welsh-language culture, because it's easier to just show English-language television or write English-language media, or whatever else. The Welsh aspects get subsumed into a broader English-language context, and it becomes harder to mark them as different, or stake a claim to a more specific Welsh culture. But if you've been raised in Welsh, if you were educated in Welsh, if you go to church, or chat at the hairdresser's, or order your fish and chips in Welsh, then that's part of your identity - and with it will come its own culture that's surely worth keeping. (Even if you can fluently speak English as well.)
That said, I don't think this argument is going to convince you, because it sounds like you're looking for more practical reasons for multilingualism and linguistic diversity. I don't think there are many practical reasons to have lots of languages floating around (insofar as there are few practical reasons to do anything cultural - why have television except for news bulletins and the weather?), but I think there are some good reasons why it doesn't hurt anyone at all, or why it would be a bad idea to push for a single universal language.
There is also some evidence that bilingualism has some neurological benefits in old age iirc, though I don't know many details as that side of things wasn't my specialty when I studied linguistics.
I feel like it's important to acknowledge that Tildes doesn't mainly use English. It specifically allows only English as an explicit policy.
When I have seen discussion of this it has been linked to moderation and the way Tildes uses groups primarily as organization categories, opt out rather than opt in communities.
It will be interesting to see if Tildes ever gets large and adds more moderators, whether it then supports more languages. I am not advocating for or against, but this is my understanding.
Thank you, this is really interesting.
Vis a Vis my grandmother I did not explain my point very well – I think that people advocating multilingualism have a tendency to push the burden onto women to continue minority languages whereas men are free/encouraged to learn the dominant language. This is just my observation from my personal life, however.
And even outside of such sexist notions, there's a cost to learning languages that people tend to overlook a bit. Sure, your 6th language is probably easier to learn than the second, but it's never free, and particularly the second language you learn is often a lot of work. Unfortunately, it's either (A) investing that time (B) being unable to communicate effectively or (C) not being able to travel/move internationally for people like your grandma.
That's quite the burden, and keeping linguistic diversity alive is going to put that burden on people unequally, mostly along existing lines of privilege. And for what? They gate access to only a small subset of the language's cultural artifacts. Many works of that culture can be translated, and those that can for some reason not be translated (poems come to mind, as the textual structure is lost in translation) are a small subset. Personally, I've switched away from my first language and towards English for a lot of situations. While obviously I haven't abandoned that language completely (mostly-monolingual people and untranslated but translatable documents being the reason), there's not a lot of occasions where I see irretrievable losses arise if everyone else was switching too. Though of course my native language isn't going anywhere for a while.
I can't know if I'd feel differently if my native language was legit threatened with extinction, but I don't really think so. I don't particularly value the in-group cultural aspects that @Johz is describing - the point of all them is to give a kind of cultural "certificate" to text - "this could only have been written/said/understood by a true welshman". Which is exclusionary in nature, essentially. It prevents everyone else from participating. Which I'm not a fan of. I see the value proposition of that certificate, but I reject the value. The same effect can be achieved in other ways without being exclusionary.
Edit: I also find it ...cynical is too strong a word, but I hope you get the idea... to debate the value of linguistic diversity in English. To people who's native tongue is English, multilingualism and linguistic diversity is a fun hobby and cultural curiosity, not a cost to pay for access and a barrier to mutual understanding.
This is absolutely something worth considering, but it's also worth noting that a lot of language revitalization involves encouraging parents who already speak the language to speak it to their children as they're growing up so that they natively acquire it. This doesn't require the same amount of conscious effort as learning a language later in life, and it's actually strictly necessary for language revitalization to actually work -- transmission to new native speakers is an absolute necessity to keep a language from dying. The actual way we decide whether a language is endangered or not is based on this native transmission to the next generation.
In these situations, I don't think there's the same conflict at play. A child is typically going to learn the local dominant language from their peers at a young enough age to be a native speaker thereof unless they are insulated from the majority language for some reason. And I don't see any reason that a child who is natively bilingual in their local majority language and a minority language is going to have a necessarily harder time acquiring useful international languages like English. It's pretty common worldwide for people to speak a minority language at home and a majority language in settings like school and to foreigners, so we know this isn't an unsustainable situation.
99% of the time when a language is endangered, transmission to the next generation dwindles because of at best stigma against the language in question and at worst active suppression of that language by the government. You got beaten for speaking her native language in school as a child so you stop speaking it even at home and don't speak it to your kids. That type of thing. As a result, most often language revitalization is principally about counteracting these opposing forces that stigmatize and suppress minority languages as though they're inherently lesser than the majority language.
I know there are a few languages where the situation is so dire that there are no native speakers of the language left who are young enough to raise children who speak the language. Those situations are much more dire and tbh a lot more hopeless when it comes to actually revitalizing the language to have a thriving community of speakers. But these circumstances are not the only ones when it comes to language revitalization efforts.
This is something I often see, and I'd like to challenge this. Yes, in theory, anything can be translated. In practice, if I ask a random person on the streets if they're more familiar with Romeo and Juliet, or with 100 años de soledad (both seminal works), which do you think they'll know more about?
In practice, you adopt the priorities of the cultural homeland of your language. You can translate anything, but those stories and their lessons will probably end up confined to a University course somewhere. The people that have abandoned their language will not care anymore, at least not as much.
I think you're underestimating the scale of loss that comes with abandoning a language. And while you might not feel it, I bet your grandchildren will. You have no idea how many Latin kids feel disconnected and adrift because their parents wouldn't or couldn't teach them the language that would've allowed them to engage with an important part of their heritage. Eventually, like most Americans, they end up just melting into the larger hegemonic culture. Which was the intent for many immigrants, but there's absolutely a huge personal cultural loss there.
Thanks, that's a helpful clarification. I've definitely seen that sort of dynamic play out, although I think it's got less to do with linguistic diversity, and more to do with women not having the freedom to work and embed themselves in the dominant culture as much, but I get where your post is coming from a bit more now.
Sorry – my thoughts on this subject are a bit confused so I am interested to hear what everyone else has to say about it.
There's not much value in just increasing the number of languages arbitrarily, yes. But so much culture can only be properly understood and engaged with by learning its language, and many cultures have been pretty vocal about not wanting their culture anglophonized. Ultimately it's a culture's collective decision of what their relationship to foreign languages is, and that decision should be respected.
Where I have an issue with this is at the point where there are government interventions to keep a dead language on life support. If there are enough people in the culture with an interest and ability to keep a language alive then sure, it’s no skin off my nose, but otherwise I think we should make a small effort to collect some recordings of the remaining speakers for historical research and then let it die.
It's indicative of whole cultures and ways of life dying out as well though. There are hundreds of communities in India and Africa who are close to losing their primary language (for example Judeo-Malyam only has an estimated 25 speakers remaining). This is the language that defines their community, their culture, and their identity. It sometimes can be hard for monolinguals and primary-English speakers to understand just how much identity and pride is wrapped up in the language you speak. Especially where languages such as Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, or Cornish are concerned (to use examples closest to me), the argument goes along the lines of "these languages were unnaturally suppressed by a colonial power, and continuing to use them is an important part of the national/cultural identity of their speakers." Which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Either way, many of these dying languages (approximately one every 40 days, in case you weren't aware) aren't on life support, and there are no government interventions to try and save them. The absolute best case scenario for the majority of these is that enough linguists are aware of what is endangered in time to take the relevant recordings and inventory of the language. And that to me is just sad: It is indicative of the world getting smaller and less diverse. Linguistically speaking, nobody seems to bemoan loss of diversity very much, and argue that it is simply evolution taking its course. But when new generations of Africans and Indians are born who are less and less able (not willing, able) to produce some of the sounds of their native tongue, I think that is a tragedy for them, their families, and their communities at large.
I'd agree if it weren't for the fact that often those languages that are getting support (Irish, Scots, Gaelic for example) had the state purposely try to get rid of those languages.
It's reparations. The New Zealand government actively tried to wipe out the Māori language. Teachers would beat children for using their native tongue, for example. The least a government can do is try to repair the damage it's done.
@Johz mostly covered what I wanted to say with regards to the sociocultural reasons to care about linguistic diversity (which are probably the ones that matter most in the grand scheme of things). Language preservation in practice is principally about protecting cultures that have a history of being oppressed.
However, as someone with a background in linguistics, there's another reason that's more specific to our field: languages that are at risk of extinction are more often than not un- or under-documented, and we can learn a lot about human language in general from studying the unique features they have. Obviously it's impossible to do this with an undocumented extinct language and it's difficult to do so with an extinct, documented language as well. If a language with a unique feature dies out without being documented, we'll never know that such a feature is possible among human languages. If a language has no more living native speakers, we can't perform fieldwork to discover the intricacies and potential unique features of that language.
So in addition to all the sociopolitical reasons for linguistic diversity, linguists in particular have a strong vested interest in it for purely scientific reasons.
This seems like a reason to document the language before it dies out and to fund scholarship, so there are specialists in that language.
If it’s that important then I think it should be funded? Maybe providing some support for native speakers of a dwindling language is a way of doing it on the cheap?
I’m thinking of how Latin and ancient Greek are only known by academics whose business is to know these things, because you can’t do many kinds of history without them. And those are pretty important languages, historically.
Language documentation is definitely funded to an extent within academia. I haven't done any of this myself but there are definitely linguists out there doing it. But of course such fieldwork takes a lot of time, especially if you want enough data for interesting linguistic analysis (even super well-documented languages like English have things we do fieldwork with native speakers for, after all!), and when the last speakers of a language are all elderly there can be less time to document it than desired. And of course fewer native speakers left means fewer people to work with, which naturally makes the process harder as a whole.
I think part of the funding does generally go towards paying the native speakers who participate for their time. Certainly my IRB would've insisted on that.
My perspective is that of a parent in a bilingual household.
There is no cost to raise our children bilingual (or multilingual). All we have to do is speak to them in the languages we want them to learn. As a result, they can talk to both sets of grandparents and have access to knowledge, art, music, etc. in more than one language. That’s practical.
The cost to raise them monolingual is steep. They can’t speak to all family members. They can’t access knowledge, art, etc. in its original form from both cultures. They are denied the ability to acquire a skill with minimal effort of their own, for which others spend years - and often large amounts of money - acquiring.
From this perspective, linguistic diversity is practical and desirable. But I suppose most practical reasons given in response to your inquiry would be quite personal.
I also can’t abide the premise, generally. What’s the practical benefit of biodiversity? What’s the practical benefit of protecting endangered species?
Languages aren’t commodities or min-max opportunities. Just like UNESCO World Heritage Sites, their “value” is in many ways beyond practical or economic considerations.
It encodes stories. When a people learn English, they teach Romeo and Juliet, and learn the lessons there. When a people learn Spanish, they read Don Quixote and learn the lessons there. Whatever stories and lessons came before are slowly forgotten.
It's not impossible to tell a culture's stories and lessons in a different language. You can translate the Taíno origin stories into Spanish. But in practice, you don't. In practice, those stories and lessons start dying out because they've been removed from their context. And why are stories important? Stories are the building blocks of humanity. Stories keep us connected to our past, to our ancestors. They ground us and tie us to our land and people, give us a sense of place and belonging. When you take a people's language, you kneecap a people. Which the Europeans did extensively, by design.
Language is also a powerful tool of resistance. Puerto Ricans would not have remained distinct from Americans without Spanish. The Irish use their language as a powerful method distinction from the English. The Greeks kept their language alive for five centuries and avoided being absorbed into Turkish culture.
Languages perpetuate power. British and Americans were able to use the reach of English (which was spread at the barrel of a gun) to continue to dominate international culture. It gives them a prestige that is hard to imitate. To this day, people think the British have fancy accents. They don't, you just think they're fancy because that's what the domination of a language does.
I could go on. Stories are the cornerstone of human culture, and they're encoded in the language they were told. The natives of a lingua franca have a permanent advantage over everyone else.
I have no evidence of this but as someone who works with a very international team, the grammar structures, words, and understanding of cultures absolutely contributes to seeing problems from a different angle and helping creativity.
People might have a local turn of phrase that when faced with a problem they go “ahh its just like xxx” and have some unique insight.
"Different languages help you to think differently" is a bogus argument anyway. It comes from the widely debunked Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which tried to suggest that if a language lacked certain features of others, it meant that the speakers of those languages could not conceive of those concepts. It's a theory that falls down against the slightest critical thought, but it dominated popular linguistic thought for decades because it was nicely tied up in still-present colonial attitudes throughout the mid 20th century. It is the foundational idea behind Orwell's Newspeak (ie. if you can't articulate a rebellious thought, you can't rebel) too.
There have been good points made in the comments already, so I won't reiterate them. But I will ask you to consider this. What is a language? And then, more specifically, what is English? Because around 25% of the world's population speaks (some form of) English, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it is one unified language that they all speak. But that's not actually true. Accent and dialect are huge parts of languages, and there are many hundreds of those within Britain alone, and thousands when you take into account the whole planet. Which of those is "true" English? Is any? If your argument is that all of those people can understand each other, regardless of dialect and accent, then I would show you videos of Americans not understanding British people asking for water, or sun cream, or chips. If you argue that they all use the same sounds and broadly the same words, I would invite you to have a conversation with an Indian about the veritable veracity of whether or not the vikings were vulnerable to viruses.
Down to the individual level, languages are not static things. I have had arguments with people over what a "good film" is, because our definitions of that phrase differ. Your race, gender, class, job, education, sexual orientation, political leanings, artistic preferences, and specific knowledge all affect the words you use and how you understand them. At the immediate community level, you and your closest family and friends will have linguistic turns of phrase and alterations that only you use and understand, forged from years and decades of shared experience and long forgotten inside jokes. And all of their race, gender, class, etc affect their choice of words. From the individual, all the way up to entire nations, where does the line get drawn to define what is the language? Isolate a large enough community for long enough and they will become incomprehensible to outsiders. The old joke amongst linguists is that there is no such thing as a language, just dialects with armies attached.
Linguistic diversity is a hallmark of human diversity, and for me that is enough to preserve as much as we can.
I either had forgotten or never knew the name "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" but ironically had noticed the phenomenon in how I [struggle to] articulate myself as a weakly bilingual person. What do you mean when you say that the hypothesis was "widely debunked"? I happily accept there is a gradation to which something like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds true or fails to hold.
I was perhaps a little hyperbolic in my statement; the strong version of SW is debunked, but there is evidence that a weaker version holds true. The strong version states that in languages which lack morpho-syntax for specific tenses (eg. future tense in Japanese) then native speakers of that language do not have the same cognitive ability to think about the future compared to speakers of languages which do have future tense morpho-syntax. Similarly it is the same strong version of this theory that leads to the factoid about Ancient Greeks not being able to see the colour blue.
That said, weaker versions do still exist and are testably true. Russian speakers for instance are able to more quickly distinguish between light blue and dark blue (which there exist two separate words for) than are non-Russian speakers. It doesn't mean that English speakers can't distinguish between the shades, it's just that there is a (split second) difference in the speed at which they do. The reasons for this being the case are still widely debated, and those spread beyond cognitive/psycholinguistics into the realms of pragmatics, relevance theory, sociolinguistics, and cultural anthropology. It's a genuinely fascinating field of study, and one that if I ever get the funding together for a PhD fully intend to delve into.
Anecdotally, if you extend the examination of implications beyond the individual, you see some more interesting impacts. Lacking preexisting language to communicate a concept decreases the fidelity of signal in knowledge transfer until such language is properly negotiated. On an individual level, this negotiation can be relatively quick, but as you grow larger time scales grow and signal-to-noise ratios tend to decrease. There is also probably some impact on inspiration and creativity, both as individuals and groups.
On top of this, I would speculate that certain aspects of language shape early brain development in different ways. How significant or not those influences are remains to be seen, and I don't know that we can ethically test so we'd have to rely on examinations of large population/longitudinal studies (probably making it prohibitively expensive.)
This is a really interesting area, I hope you find the funding you need. Good luck!
You're accidentally scratching the surface of a LOT of contentious debate within linguistics about the nature of language's relationship with the brain/mind, especially in terms of acquisition lol. You could dig into the weeds on this for a LONG time.
I'm not going to bc tbh it's all very speculative and not my area of expertise anyway. But know that you're very close to unlocking the power to immediately start fights between linguists 😉
I'd like to challenge the premise. Why does there have to be a concrete obvious benefit to maintain or support linguistic diversity?
I feel like we get wrapped up in the cost/benefit analysis in a way that assumes a capitalistic point of view: things must be worth saving or supporting by "objective" standards which both cannot possibly be actually objective and discount the importance of emotion and subjectivity.
To this I’ll try asking a (practical, not theoretical-philosophical) counter question:
Which is the best language?
Obviously very provocative, and for a good reason: language unification (as in, the opposite to “language diversity“) will never be a thing as long as humans grow up with a mother tongue.
You won’t be able to force a billion westerners to learn Mandarin (to the degree of “perfect“ fluency, that is) just as you won’t be able to force a billion Indians to learn French.
What do we agree on as the single one language? English? Sure, but in this case prepare to exclude a decent portion of the global population, at least as it currently stands.
Most people would probably start making a case of using their first language for this, or at least one which they know or feel like they could learn somewhat easily. And the venn diagrams of everyone sharing at least one common language does not exist (yet), and if it did, we weren’t be asking this question, leaving this question unanswerable (or with an undesirable outcome to some portion of people).
On a more serious note, I like the EU's approach: Pick languages that
as the subset for the official “working languages“.
1note: this is with regards to the earlier/founding member states, arguably the countries present in the EU today that are located east of Germany are not well-represented in the working languages, linguistically. However, I also don’t know the regions well enough to be aware of a Slavic lingua franca other than Russian, which the EU will for obvious reasons not introduce as one of their main working languages anytime soon, if ever.
Edit: added superscript to note
The slavic lingua franca is English, previously mainly German and some French
Individually, I DID find that my ability to memorize new information was healthier when learning a language - of course, any knowledge space works, but language is unique in having a lot of resources (sometimes, state-sponsored) for the learning part. Modern platforms have been incorporating user-friendly SRS, mass-educating those of us without great study skills in what memorization and review is actually supposed to look like.
Globally, economic mobility might improve if the entire world consolidated into language blocs, yes, but as a country, protecting a unique language can also act as a tariff against brain drain (talent more easily immigrating to the West, for example), promoting political identity, and a way of censoring foreign ideas, among other things.
Whether this is good or not, depends on how much globalization (I/O of ideas and goods) is "optimal" for your country. India and Japan are two opposite cases for example: India exposed itself to brain drain by making English the professional language, but also supported the influx of ideas and deeper trade relationships with the West. No idea what the cost/benefit analysis is here.
Japan on the other hand, seems to have invested in soft power (anime, video games, food) and language platforms, to encourage brand identity (boosted value of Japanese products in global stage) and immigration as a treatment for its low birth-rate economy.
The idea of a mono-language global citizen can't really exist, as long as there are countries that want to take care of their own first, whom believe the calculus of assimilation doesn't make sense.
Cultural identity is a big part of language. Irish, for example, was wiped out in many parts of Ireland for economic reasons (English was more useful for getting work). It's revival attempts were brought about as a means to defy English domination of Ireland and reclaim our own cultural distinction from the English. That's why it's taught in schools. The lack of assimilation is a benefit, not a negative side-effect.
A few areas do still have Irish spoken as a first language, but I think that without government intervention in the 1900s we might be looking at a dead language instead. Gaeltachts don't exactly have huge populations.
Admittedly this isn't something that I've given deep thought to, and so I can't give a deep answer like many here have.
As someone who grew up monolingual and has been picking up a second language through the years of his adulthood, I'll say that one reason why I think multilingualism is a net benefit is because it increases expressive dexterity. As massive and far-reaching as English is, there are still concepts and nuances that it has no word for, and this becomes no more obvious than when observing a discussion between two people who share commanding skill of the same set of languages — they'll freely interweave the languages, using the words from whichever has the more suitable commonly understandable word on a case to case basis.
Maybe some day all of humanity will converge on a single "superlanguage" that has precise words to express anything imaginable, but until then I see value in being multilingual.
Are you the great Abhijit Iyer Mitra by any chance! This is mostly his argument and biggest talking point.
Jokes apart, I think you can consider language as just another intellectual skill for that matter? Just as you have chess masters, history buffs, GK and geo-political experts, etc., I think polyglots should be celebrated as wise people in society, isn't it?
Having said that, I also understand how multiple languages as medium of instruction can be confusing and challenging sometimes in education, etc. Even things like instructions at public places, artifacts, etc. can achieve some efficiency and even economies of scale if most people just use 1-2 languages as lingua franca or common bridge for getting things done.
I also see the rise of regionalism and language wars these days which is just another dimension of the larger civilizational battle. Regional leaders playing their jingoistic cards and exploiting people's sentiments towards languages just for their electoral gains, while totally ignoring the larger impact this will have as polarization of the humans, a species that began its journey in awe and mystery exploring this world as one single tribe even though it has now evolved into astronomical diversity and sub-tribes. I just hope that most of them will eventually realize the futility of all this and course correct before it's too late.