Laura Romig, Language Ambassador, Class of 2025
Are languages alive? Language death. Language extinction. I’ve talked about linguistic diversity and language loss before—but not yet using these somewhat harsher, but still common, terms. Borrowed from biology, they carry the implied metaphor that languages are living things, that they can be killed, and that their deaths are permanent. More specifically, it implies that each language is like an individual species. This metaphor is doubled-edged: On the one hand, it offers useful ways to imagine language in the world, and even to solve the problems of language loss; on the other, it can invite the possibility of comparing the history and development of languages to a process of natural selection, in which some languages are “fitter” than others and “naturally” survive—which ignores political and historical realities. For now, though, I want to focus on the advantages of this metaphor.
(The metaphor also raises an interesting question, a Ship of Theseus dilemma of sorts inspired by the discussion of “de-extinction," bringing back extinct species, in the scientific community: if written and spoken materials of a dying language are preserved after its final native speaker dies, and sometime years in the future, someone teaches themself from those materials, raises their children in that language, and even begins a community of people speaking it—can it be called the same language as the original? Or does it become something else, a new language based on the limits of the material that was conserved, and the improvisations and usage of the new community of speakers?)
But terms like “language extinction” are strongly binary, that is, they imply that a language exists in either an “alive-state,” where it is spoken, or a “dead-state” without any native speakers. We sometimes think this way about species too: public interest surges when a species or a language disappears completely, calls for donations are made, calls to preserve diversity. But we all know that life exists on a spectrum—across time, across geographic locale, due to external factors like sickness, and more. Giving attention to a language after it has already lost most or all of its speakers is important, but so is giving attention to a language at other stages of its ‘life’.
In one of my courses, for example, I recently read the work of Rodolfo Dirzo, a scientist who argues that Earth is headed for its sixth mass extinction. Specifically, he suggests that the tragedy in it is not only the complete and total loss of certain species, but also the massive reduction of populations of species, to the point where a species is no longer able to provide services to its original ecosystem. I see here a fitting metaphor for languages—when a language loses population, reduced past some critical mass of speakers, it slowly gets pushed out of its roles in the language and cultural ecosystem. This could mean that it gets spoken only at home and not in public spaces, for example.
To illustrate this, consider Gagauz, a Turkic language spoken in Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey, declared endangered in 2010, that reportedly has a few thousand speakers who regularly use the language. But most professional opportunities, all education, and even government documents in those countries are not produced in Gagauz. A few thousand speakers is not an insignificant amount, but if the language is slowly restricted to smaller and smaller regions of life—the home, the family, discussions about the family and its history—and missing from others—work, current affairs, new ideas, creativity, learning—it will most likely only continue to shrink. The language has nowhere to grow, and it can’t serve its speakers and cultural community like it used to. America's buffalo, which used to roam the plains in massive numbers, may not be extinct, but they don’t provide any of the same services to the plains ecosystem they used to. Imagine if, in a century, the number of extant, “alive-state” languages is still comparable to what it is now, 7000, but about 2500 of them—the number of languages currently endangered—are only conserved in tiny bubbles of speakers, capsules that don’t interact beyond themselves, who need to learn another, dominant language in order to get by in the world. Sure, they might not be extinct, but they're not playing the linguistic and cultural role they're meant to.
So to expand on the extinct-alive binary, I'd say there are at least two more critical states in the lifespan of a language. A language can become hegemonic. English has become a cultural monolith, a lingua franca, so much so that many English speakers expect people in every place they visit to be able to speak back to them in their native tongue. It feeds on the lives of smaller languages, becoming an almost-necessary second-language in the worlds of business, of education, even of literature. This is the type of language with authority and money behind it, getting funded by governments to be taught across the world.
Or a language can begin to lose its populations—maybe by being pushed into the private realm, out of the realm of creativity and growth, or maybe by lacking respect globally as a language. How to combat this? Just because a language has been marginalized away from certain spaces doesn’t mean it lacks the capabilities needed in those spaces, for example. Creating poetry, song, and literature, for example, in languages being marginalized begins to combat their restriction. It offers a way for them to grow. The impetus can also come from institutions rather than individuals. New laws in the Gagauz-speaking region of Moldova, for example, require local officials to speak the language. Jamaican Patois has long been stigmatized and misrepresented on a global stage, even though it is a legitimate language spoken in media, the home, and public environments across Jamaica. Now, there is momentum building from scholars and politicians across Jamaica to make it an official language, a step toward the respect it needs to survive and thrive as a language.
If you attended our Translate-athon last week, you may remember one of the lines from the poem “Languages” by Carl Sandburg: “Languages die like rivers.” A river may have a clear beginning and end, an ocean into which it flows. But a river stretches long across the land, it twists and bends with the geographic contours, and it can be redirected by human hand, sped or slowed. If we only watch a language’s final emptying into the ocean, we miss out on every opportunity to change its trajectory along the way.