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World Affairs Journal - The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English - A thoughtful essay on the supposed death of culture that naturally follows the death of a language. I agree with McWhorter that the death of a language does not necessarily result in the death of the culture that spoke it. As he points out, who would argue that Native Americans or black Americans don’t have their own culture?
That said, his argument becomes dangerously thin in at least one place. On the value of language as a means of communication:
The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art. But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. … The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.
Before I can respond to this, I need to tell a story.
Once when I was in middle school, an African mathematician whose name I have long forgotten visited my class to talk about education, mathematics, and Africa. His visit was arranged to inspire the black kids in my school to rise above their means, follow their dreams, and seek a better life. My school was around 90% black. Most of them were very poor, and had been for generations, so this man’s visit was meant to show them what a black man could do, to demonstrate that the world was bigger than their backyard, their town, their county, their state, even their country, and most especially, bigger than both the prejudices they held and that are held against them. I don’t know who arranged the man’s visit, but at some point, to this effect, he had to be asked, “Can you give them an idea of how big the world really is?”
During the course of his lecture, I asked him a question that made him stop what he was doing and go quiet in thought. I asked, “When you’re doing math, what language is it in?” He thought for a while on it, and after a long pause, he responded (not verbatim, but this is how I remember it): “That is a good question that I do not know exactly how to answer. But let me explain it this way. Math is itself a language. It is universal. Music is also a universal language. Anyone trained to read them can understand them. I was taught mathematics in English, and in fact I learned English by learning mathematics. But in my country, there are words which have no correlation here. When I think of counting, or describing how big something is, or trying to say how far away a place is, I must always translate from my native tongue because, to me, *that* is how many, or big, or far it is, not the precise mathematical measurement.”
I have never forgotten his response. It was the first time in my life I remember meeting someone and thinking, “He doesn’t think the way I do! He doesn’t think in English!”
McWhorter’s argument assumes that language and information are mutually exclusive. Language is humanity’s response to the need of conveying information, so, logically speaking, there is information, and then there is language. But once we have language, we have a way to communicate feelings, states of being, ideas. With language we can say, “I’m worried about my friend,” or, “I think that guy’s a liar with a nice smile,” or, “I love how your hair catches the horizon in its arms.”
A language is as much a network of relationships as a culture is. With the loss of a language, we aren’t losing a way to convey information, but a way of expressing it. That is the reason for melancholy when a language dies.
From a practical, strictly logical perspective, yes, fewer languages means easier communication, less informational friction. But what of the aesthetic, the expressive value of language? Is that really as meaningless as McWhorter portrays it, or is there a deeper meaning, a value so rich that science could never discover it? I tend to think the latter.
Now, where did I last leave off on my French lesson…
