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The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
L. Wittgenstein
Imagine living in a world where whatever you say has a meaning for you only, or for just a few others. Now instead imagine living in a world where languages abound, but you are not able to talk to your neighbour, like in a modern Babylon. This is no nightmare, just the daily routine for some people living in the Australian Outback or in Indonesia. Although already a reality for some, it could become a reality for many others in years up to come.
Nowadays a number between 6000 and 7000 languages exists, but half of them are bound to vanish in a future not so far away, as English establishes itself as a lingua franca. The role of trade, globalization and technology is the major impetus for it. As we all know, globalization is far but a new phenomenon: it can be traced back to the Roman Empire, where conquering people actually meant to impose a common language and legal system. The concept nonetheless started to change during the Middle Age, thanks to religion and later, trade. It culminated in the nineteenth century, where major European countries struggled to impose their presence (and power) on the international scene.
The turn nonetheless happened right after WWII, where English became the language used in deals and communications (internet). It is now the most widely-spoken language in the world, with non-native speakers outnumbering the native ones. Hence, it would be foolish to think that English words will never make it into our national languages, especially for what concerns new terms. There are a few countries which, after realizing that they might lose their language and culture along with it, decided to fight back, trying to maintain their distinctiveness, especially in idioms (such as France). Linguistic diversity is, in itself, a relative concept since a language can be both the language of a majority and a minority. Let’s think about Mandarin Chinese, spoken by some 900 million people as mother tongue, is the official Chinese language, and is therefore the majority language (as opposed to Miao or Tibetan, for example). But if you go to another country, say Germany, Chinese would be a minority language, the language of those communities living abroad. Sometimes though, the language of a minority in a large country may become the majority language in a small one. The term “minority” itself is not clear. We often refer to a minority as the smaller group within a country, while we should identify it as a powerless group, regardless to the number of its people.
Another issue to be considered is the role dialects have: they are neither official languages nor minorities’ ones, but coexist with both. Often stemmed from vernacular idioms, they are the everyday language of most people around the world, and often the only one older generations understand and speak. The language I speak as my mother tongue, Italian, is nothing but the dialect of the Florence region, chosen to represent our country and unity among several others just two hundred years ago. But dialects itself are bound to vanish thanks to globalization, as many more young people learn English as their second language but do not take up dialects. I can still remember my first English lesson, where as a six-year-old child I was told that it was imperative for us to learn it. As a grown-up university student, I have no problems in expressing myself in this language, but to my dismay, I cannot understand a single word of what my grandma says. To sum up, globalization poses challenges on both, official languages and dialects.
Thus although there are countries which are linguistically homogeneous, such as Iceland (where new English terms are moulded over local ones), which are resolute not to lose their identities, there are other countries where you cannot even talk to your neighbour, spanning some 800 languages within the same land, such as Papua New Guinea, where English becomes de facto the only mean of communication.
As a matter of fact, globalization not only threatens local traditions and biodiversity, it even menace the world language variety, as boundaries among and within countries start to fade. Like plants and animal species, endangered languages are confined to small areas, where their loss can be substantial in terms of diversity. This is especially true for smaller countries, where even if cultural homogeneity is more likely to be present, people need to be able to speak English if they want to survive in a world more closely linked by outer trade and technology. As prof. J. Lo Bianco, director of The National Language and Literacy Institute of Australia, puts it, “Efficiency and development, growth and human capital, are not tolerant of difference. Globalized modernization requires that knowledge is imparted in ways that are comparable across differences of settings, culture and language”. This is of no help to preserve cultural diversity. That’s why many countries, recognising the importance or traditions and cultural roots, allowed their minorities to set up their own schools and centres, like in Germany. In other countries instead, such as Brazil, it was the indigenous pressure to convince the government that bilingual education was mandatory to preserve their roots.
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Selene Biffi
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