6.8.1 Globalization and Language

Globalization involves the worldwide spread of people, cultures, languages, products, money, ideas, and information. While it has been ongoing throughout human history, the past 500 years have seen a significant increase in its scope and pace due to advancements in transportation and communication. Starting in the fifteenth century, English explorers began spreading their language to colonies worldwide. Today, English is among the most widely spoken languages globally, holding official status in at least 60 countries and being widely used in many others. Other colonizing powers, such as Spain, France, Portugal, the Arab nations, and Russia, also spread their languages, each developing regional variants. Colonization often led to the suppression of local languages in favor of the colonizers’ tongues.

In the last 50 years, globalization has been marked by the spread of North American popular culture and language. American music, movies, television programs, and brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have become ubiquitous, along with the English terms associated with them. Additionally, unprecedented numbers of people are moving from rural areas to cities within their countries or migrating to other nations. Many move as refugees fleeing violence or due to economic hardships in their home countries. This mass migration contributes to the ongoing extinction of many of the world’s languages, as people abandon their native languages to assimilate into new communities.

6.8.2 From Language Shift to Language Death

Of the approximately 7,000 languages still surviving today, about half the world’s more than eight billion people speak only ten. These include Mandarin Chinese, two languages from India, Spanish, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German. Many of the rest of the world’s languages are spoken by a few thousand people, or even just a few hundred, and most of them are threatened with extinction, called language death. It has been predicted that by the end of this century, up to 90 percent of the languages spoken today will be gone. The rapid disappearance of so many languages is of great concern to linguists and anthropologists alike. When a language is lost, its associated culture and unique set of knowledge and worldview are lost with it forever.

Some minority languages face no threat of extinction, even if spoken by relatively few people, while others spoken by thousands may be at risk. What determines their survival? Smaller languages associated with a specific country are more likely to endure. Similarly, languages spoken across multiple national borders, like Quechua, spoken widely in South America including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina, also face less threat. The majority of the world’s languages are spoken by minority populations within their respective countries; considering there are only around 193 countries globally, and over 7,000 languages spoken, the disparity is evident.

The survival of a language within a community hinges on the collective decisions of its speakers to either sustain or abandon it, a phenomenon termed language shift. These decisions are heavily influenced by prevailing societal attitudes. In minority communities surrounded by a dominant majority, individuals may choose to maintain or relinquish their native language based on a complex interplay of factors. Crucial among these are the self-perceptions of minority individuals and their attitudes toward their language, alongside the attitudes of the majority toward the minority group.

Language serves as a symbol of identity and belonging within a group, fostering solidarity, yet it can also carry drawbacks. When a dominant group views a minority as inferior and discriminates against them, some from the minority might internalize this perception. They may assimilate into the dominant culture by adopting its language and customs. Conversely, others may proudly uphold their minority identity, viewing their language as a form of resistance against the dominant group’s prejudice. One prominent example of such a minority language, which remains vibrant in the United States and globally, is Spanish. Despite being a minority language in the U.S., Spanish holds a significant presence due to its status as a primary language in numerous countries worldwide.

An example of an oppressed minority group that has struggled with language and culture loss in the United States (and Canada) is Native Americans. Many were completely wiped out by the European colonizers, some by deliberate genocide but the great majority (up to 90 percent) by the diseases that the white explorers brought with them. As discussed earlier in this book, the US government tried to assimilate Native Americans into the white majority culture, in part by forcing Native American children to go to boarding schools where they were required to cut their hair, practice Christianity, and speak only English. When they were allowed to go back home years later, they had lost their languages and their culture but had not become culturally “white” either. The status of Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a scorned minority prompted many to hide their ethnic identities even from their own children. In this way, the many hundreds of original Native American languages in the United States have dwindled to less than 140 spoken today, according to UNESCO. More than half of those could disappear in the next few years since many are spoken by only a handful of older members of their tribes. However, a number of Native American tribes have recently been making efforts to revive their languages and cultures, with the help of linguists and often by using texts and old recordings made by early linguists.

UNESCO,  the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, classifies languages in terms of several levels of endangerment, ranging from

• safe, referring to languages that are spoken and transmitted across generations, to
• vulnerable, referring to languages typically only spoken in certain spaces or circumstances, to
• endangered, referring to languages that are not spoken nor transmitted across generations, to
• extinct, referring to languages with no native speakers (extinct languages can possibly be revitalized, so you can think of them as technically dormant).

Here is a great map showing endangered languages and the number of documents and/or audio recordings that have been made to preserve them and their cultural implications.

According to  UNESCO’s chart, of the 8,200 languages that exist of which 7,000 are actively spoken, about 2,700 are endangered. Often but not always, such languages are isolated languages, meaning they are unrelated to any other language and . cannot be connected to any language family. These remote languages, and many others, are experiencing a mass extinction and are quickly disappearing off the planet. It is believed that nearly 500 languages are in danger of being lost forever. Think about the language you speak, the knowledge and understanding acquired and discovered through that language. What would happen to all that knowledge if your language suddenly disappeared? Would all of it be transferred to another language or would major components be lost to time and be rewritten by history? What would happen to your culture if your language was lost to time? Ultimately, is it possible that the Information Age is causing a Dis-information Age as thousands of languages are near extinction? Click here to view an Esri story map on Endangered Languages. This is really a great resource!

The number of speakers of a language is certainly a key criterion in determining its overall health status or level of endangerment. As a general rule of thumb, areas that have high linguistic diversity are most susceptible to some kind of endangerment or extinction. Papua New Guinea, which is an island-nation in the world region of Oceania, is the most linguistically diverse place in the world. Of the approximate 7,000 known languages, over 800 of them are spoken in this country. What?! But more importantly, why? The most commonly cited reason includes the fact that the mountainous terrain creates isolated communities of people who have little interaction with each other over time. Thus, pockets of speakers of one language exist in relative isolation from other geographically proximate pockets of speakers of another language, and languages do not collide or co-evolve due to contact. We see here a clear example of how the physical geographic layer of place plays a role in shaping human systems, in this case, language. As a very linguistically diverse place, Papua New Guinea is also at high risk for experiencing language losses, and given how integral language is to culture, this could prove to be rather culturally damaging and traumatic.

Consider the impact of language on culture, particularly religion. Most religions have some form of written or literary tradition or history, which allows for information to be transferred to future generations.  However, some religions are only transferred verbally, and when that culture disappears (which is happening at a frightening rate), so does all of the knowledge and history of that culture.

The Endangered Languages Project serves as an online resource for samples and research on endangered languages, as well as a forum for advice and best practices for those working to strengthen linguistic diversity.

Modern communication methods, such as the use of websites, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and the like, are becoming key elements in the survival of a number of endangered indigenous languages. Facebook is now available in over 112 languages, and TikTok in 75  languages. For example, an Anishinaabemowin website has been created that seeks to preserve Anishinaabemowin, an endangered Native American language from Michigan. The language has 8,000-10,000 speakers, but most of the native speakers are over 70 years old, which means the language is threatened with extinction. Modern social media are an ideal medium to help encourage young people to communicate in their language to keep it alive.

Clearly, language and communication through modern technology are at the forefront of a rapidly changing world, for better or for worse. It’s anybody’s guess what will happen next.

You may wonder whether a language, once gone extinct, would be able to experience a comeback. The answer is ‘yes’ provided there are written documents. Hebrew is such a language.

Hebrew, once a thriving language spoken in ancient Israel, fell into disuse as a spoken language around the 4th century CE, primarily due to the Jewish diaspora and the influence of Aramaic and other languages in different regions. For centuries, Hebrew persisted solely as a liturgical language in Jewish religious texts and rituals, but it ceased to be spoken in everyday life. This decline in spoken Hebrew persisted through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, where Jewish communities around the world used local languages for communication while preserving Hebrew for religious and scholarly purposes.

The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Hebrew was chosen as the national language for its historical and cultural significance, despite it being considered a “dead” language at the time. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a prominent Hebrew linguist and educator, played a crucial role in this revival by promoting Hebrew as a living, modern language. He and other language revivalists coined new words, adapted grammar, and created modern terminology to make Hebrew suitable for contemporary life. Through educational reforms, publications, and cultural movements, Hebrew gradually regained its status as a spoken language among Jewish communities in Palestine and later in the State of Israel after its establishment in 1948. Today, Hebrew stands as a testament to successful language revitalization efforts, serving as the official language of Israel and thriving as both a spoken and written medium of communication.