Stardate 20020220.1109

(On Screen): UNESCO laments that the number of spoken languages in the world is decreasing. That comes under the heading of "You were expecting something else?" It is UNESCO's job to be concerned about that kind of thing, of course, but in fact there is nothing whatever that can prevent this trend, because spoken languages are susceptible to network effect. Indeed, they're among the prime examples of such a thing.

The value of a language has nothing to do with any esthetic characteristic it may have. It doesn't matter how beautiful it sounds, nor in practice how much poetry may exist written in it. The primary function of a language is communication with other people, and the value of a given language is directly proportional to the number of other people who speak that language with whom you interact on a regular basis. When communication and transportation were slow and inefficient, languages could sustain local predominance and prosper, but in the modern world where everything is interconnected and anyone (who has the money) can travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours, the "global village" is now here.

So the points score for an obscure Lapp dialect or some vanishing American Indian language may be a few thousand. The points score for Dutch is maybe 20 million. The points score for English is upwards of 2 billion, because that's the number of people around the world who speak it.

Like most aspects of culture, a language is first and foremost a tool, and its value is utilitarian. Within an order of magnitude, all languages are equally difficult to learn, but their value varies far more than that because of network effect.

So as time goes on, magazines and books and radio and television and the telephone and the internet and international jet travel will make small languages become smaller and big languages become bigger. In another hundred years, the world will be dominated by five languages (English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin and Portuguese), with a few others hanging on in local use (e.g. Japanese, Korean, German) but not used outside their geographical strongholds.

Is this a tragedy? It depends on your point of view. It will make communication more efficient, and that's all to the good. Some works of art written in dead languages will be lost to us, which is unfortunate unless we preserve and translate them now. Something will be lost, however, because translations of poetry are always inexact and much flavor is lost.

It is, perhaps, a good idea to try to preserve the languages before they are gone forever. But I think it is counterproductive to try to expend effort to keep them as living languages. That is a form of ghettoization for those who speak those languages. If a language is sufficiently rich and sufficiently useful, then it won't need any help to survive. If it isn't, then those who are afflicted with it will suffer if we force them to keep using it.