How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/04/how-the-internet-is-killing-the-worlds-languages

by dctoedt • 13 years ago

20 51 13 years ago

sophacles• 13 years ago

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

thejteam• 13 years ago

I am not a linguist, but if it is true that language influences how we think then I would guess that it would be advantageous to have a multitude of thought patterns available.

pouetpouet• 13 years ago

Languages shape the mind. A language gives a special outlook on life and has its own reality. There are also specific linguistic features that are interesting to linguists and help to comprehend how languages work. One could also draw a parallel with genetic diversity.

epaladin• 13 years ago

This has been my experience with picking up a second language. There are concepts that are expressed in a single Japanese word that seem like they would need a small book to explain adequately in English. Maybe there are places where the language and culture aren't so intertwined, but Japan at least isn't one of them. So as much as I think the grand flattening of the world is great in some ways, I would be a little sad if we ended up with a global monoculture catalyzed by the coalescing of languages. Other cultures are just fascinating to explore.

gliese1337• 13 years ago

In my opinion (as someone who works in NLP & computational linguistics), preserving more data on how languages can work is the most important bit. Languages do influence cognition a little bit, but not as much as most people think. Nevertheless, most people think that they do, and if you only know a few languages, its easy to get stuck thinking that, oh, this is how all languages must work, and this is inherently how people think.

This is a problem in contemporary linguistics- the "big" languages are really heavily studied and theories are developed to describe them accurately, nevermind that they may completely fail for, say, Xhosa or Straits Salish. The bias has been decreasing over the last few decades, but getting a really good idea of the real fundamental underpinnings of human language depends on all those minority languages not disappearing, undocumented, before we're done.

Of course, there are other reasons which are important to people working on other fields- languages are strongly tied to culture, and when a language dies, so does a lot of other cultural knowledge and practice that may be useful to ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.

normloman2• 13 years ago

It's my understanding that the language you speaks has only a small effect on your outlook. The gist behind the Sapir Whorf hypothesis was that the number of concepts you could grasp was limited by the language you spoke. But I don't think most linguists seriously believe this anymore. Research has shown language to influence our outlooks in limited ways, and even those findings are suspect, since some of the differences can be explained by cultural differences.

A good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

sputknick• 13 years ago

I came here to ask the same thing. As I see if fewer languages lead to greater ease of commerce, which leads to increased wealth. It also leads to easier communication, which should lead to greater understanding and few conflicts. More wealth, less conflict. Sounds like a win all around!

DanielStraight3• 13 years ago

Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation:

"As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom."

Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in languages in huge, and we wouldn't know about it without being able to study a lot of languages. I don't know if that has any economic value[3], but then neither does paleontology, but we consider that pretty important, important enough to preserve the available data.

Really, as nice as it would be to keep these languages spoken, preserving a complete grammar and audio recording of individual sounds as well as longer spoken passages would be enough for most purposes. But the problem is that this is a lot of work, and languages are going extinct faster than we can document them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation

[2] http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm

[3] Well OK, some people get paid to invent languages for sci-fi/fantasy and a lot of linguistic data helps with that, but... that's not much.

salient• 13 years ago

It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.

Jun8• 13 years ago

It's a cultural artifact so your question, I think, is equivalent to asking the value of preserving any cultural artifact, e.g. a Greek kylix or an Inca quipu.

In addition to the above pure artifact preservation aspect language (when paired with a lot of text, this is not always the case, e.g. Etruscan language) can make available vast data about a community. When Asyyrian was decoded and the great libraries of tablets were discovered (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal), our knowledge of the culture of the Ancient Middle East increased exponentially.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

That's easy - your culture.

"As languages disappear, cultures die. The world becomes inherently a less interesting place, but we also sacrifice raw knowledge and the intellectual achievements of millennia."

Ken Hale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, quoted in Davis, W. 1999.

Language and your cultural identity are very tightly coupled. Without language you essentially lose your identity, which is why its crucial to preserve your language. It's one of your primary identifiers of you and your culture. Wenying Jiang stated it quite well in her paper, "The Relationship Between Culture and Language" when she says your culture is like an iceberg. Your language is the tip which sits above the water. The rest which sits under the water is the rest of your culture. Your customs, your religions, your societal norms.

Link to her paper which is worth a read: http://203.72.145.166/ELT/files/54-4-3.pdf

Also consider the following:

"With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced–the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest.

The highly elaborate dances that accompanied the oral tradition are frequently also gone.

Large amounts of local knowledge about fauna and flora, ecosystem management, local place names, spiritual values, and so on are all submerged, altered or gone because the original languages that expressed these concepts are gone or no longer well understood."

source: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/15/0005_nati...

normloman2• 13 years ago

We don't need to preserve languages per se. We need to record them before they disappear so that linguists, historians, and archaeologists will be able to decipher the written records of disappearing cultures.

mullingitover3• 13 years ago

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

Nux• 13 years ago

Can't upvote this enough. A united world needs to speak the same language. Down with the borders, of any kind.

latj• 13 years ago

First, I dont think lack of a language's presence online means that the language is dying. For example the world could be becoming more multilingual.

Second, the whole world doesnt need to speak the same language for cohesive unification. We just need star trek level translation which doesnt seem so far fetched these days.

Finally, everything comes and goes- the stars, the tide, human life, and language. Have you tried speaking to someone from east Baltimore lately? I havent either, but according to my source, The Wire, they speak a language that would probably be close to unintelligible between people from other parts of the English speaking world.

In other words, I'm not worried about language diversity- whenever humans find the need to express themselves in ways that doesnt fit in the current framework, they find a way.

pavel_lishin• 13 years ago

Should we all use the same programming language as well?

ronaldx• 13 years ago

I understand the sentiment but I disagree.

I think language is a clear representation of culture - your first language directly informs how you see the world.

The world would be a lesser place if everybody grew up with the same linguistic experience.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

I welcome your attempts to learn and speak Mandarin as that single global language.

efa• 13 years ago

Yep! I saw the title and thought "this is a bad thing?".

PhasmaFelis3• 13 years ago

On the one hand, I'm very much inclined to agree with you.

On the other hand, I'm a monolingual English-speaker. I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario, I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages; so I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge.

mullingitover3• 13 years ago

I personally gain much and lose nothing in this scenario

You gain a great deal if you have the ability to communicate with millions (billions?) of people that you otherwise couldn't.

gcp• 13 years ago

I have no real conception of what it feels like for the hundreds of millions of people who do speak minority languages

Being understood by most people (instead of almost none) is pretty handy.

infruset3• 13 years ago

Thank you for this comment. It would be interesting to know, among all those embracing everyone speaking english, how many are native english speakers and how many are monolingual; that might put things in perspective. In other words, it's easy to claim that everyone doing things your way with no effort on your part is the right way to go.

emilga• 13 years ago

I agree. The authors of Genesis 11:1-9 even describe the world's languages as a _punishment_ by God(!):

"""5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."""

mullingitover3• 13 years ago

Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path puts forward the notion that this is really an allegory for the adoption of the phonetic alphabet. Prior to this, all the different language speakers could communicate with a symbolic system of writing, but once the phonetic alphabet was adopted they were no longer able to communicate in writing without knowing the reader's language.

rmk2• 13 years ago

Languages are tools for communication

Exactly, that's why different languages can spawn different communication. Certain things cannot be translated, whether they are idioms or grammatical constructions. It's not just "sad", it means a unifying and, in some case, simplification of thought. Now, with English becoming more dominant, I guess it depends on your background and ideas whether this reduction to "things that can be expressed in English" is a good thing or not. I pick English here, because it is the most obvious example given international trade, travel and the internet, though the same applies for various big, hegemonic languages in their surroundings, and the same happens with dialects even within a technically mono-lingual environment.

jamoes• 13 years ago

Certain things cannot be translated, whether they are idioms or grammatical constructions.

The cool thing about languages though is that they evolve. English is a prime example of this: things that can't be translated just end up being imported and becoming new English words.

The end result is a more powerful language, where you can express the combination of certain ideas and concepts that simply couldn't be expressed in a single language before.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

The interesting article kindly submitted here reports:

"His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.

"Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography."

Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of the Internet, will not likely be used on the Internet. Whether or not such languages are still used in family life or for local community interaction is a distinct issue.

I am multilingual, as disclosed on my Hacker News user profile. The number of languages in regular use on the Internet is more than any one person can learn in a lifetime (most claims of one individual being able to speak dozens of languages fluently are very badly exaggerated) and every one of those languages, from multiple language families, is very likely to stay alive for a long time. A person who speaks more than one language, as I do, can choose to use different languages in different circumstances, as I do. Indeed, for many multilingual people, "code-switching" is part of signaling a switch to a different tone in conversation (say, from serious to humorous, or the other way around) or signaling "social register" (whether the person you are speaking to is being treated with friendly intimacy or with distant deference).

So I am not worried about this, on the whole. Other comments here posted before mine talk about the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (that "language shapes thought") but the strong version of that hypothesis is certainly untrue. (For one thing, human beings don't always think in language, but often also in pictures or in music.) Diversity in language will not go away because of the Internet. If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

tokenizer• 13 years ago

If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?

It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the reality of space and time.

jotm• 13 years ago

No, having less languages is not bad - far from it. Even the Bible (which I think is a rather useless relic of the past) says that multiple languages were made to stop people from working with each other and reach heaven.

vdaniuk• 13 years ago

My first native language is not English, nor is the second language. I say good riddance, humanity will prosper more without linguistic barriers.

diziet• 13 years ago

Since this came up again -- we recently did an analysis on a data-set of over 100 million of the app store reviews across different countries. English and other european languages were extremely prevalent, with english dominating. The people who tend to use fancy smartphones etc are much more likely to speak english and are also exposed to english language content, apps, etc. For example, in Israel, 51% of reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. More examples: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...

nostromo• 13 years ago

This happened before the internet with Arabic numerals.

There was a time when each culture had their own method for transcribing numbers. (My favorite is Egyptian Numerals that denoted 10,000 with a drawing of a bent finger.)

Today, I imagine (but I'm not sure) that I can travel almost anywhere in the world and the number 123 would mean the exact same thing. And that seems to be a good thing.

tsuyoshi• 13 years ago

Sort of. There are two other numeral systems I know of that are still being used: Chinese (used in Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Korean) and Khmer (used in Khmer/Cambodian, Thai, and Lao). Literate people in places that use those numeral systems know and use Arabic numerals too, but the Chinese and Khmer numerals are in no danger of dying out anytime soon. And even in the English-speaking world, we still use Roman numerals in certain contexts.

neakor• 13 years ago

On one hand, having a variety of languages makes the world diverse, more interesting and perhaps even encourages different ways of thinking. On the other hand, the high cost of communicating with multiple languages makes sharing thoughts and ideas harder, and perhaps even hinders our productivity and advancement as a whole. It's a tough call, but I vote for unification. In the name of advancement of humanity, we shall sacrifice diversity!

infruset3• 13 years ago

And choose what as the universal language? I assume, lest it might seem like there is a conflict of interest, that you are thinking of some language you don't speak? Thank you for showing the way in this sacrifice everyone must make.

spodek• 13 years ago

The internet doesn't "kill" languages.

People choose what language to speak. If they -- rather, we -- have a choice of languages, why do we choose common ones instead of uncommon ones? We are actively choosing to speak common languages, not some abstract network of computers is killing something.

If linguists or anyone else says we're doing something wrong and losing something valuable, why do we keep doing it?

Is it possible they're missing something, that maybe we gain more in choosing to understand each other than we're losing in ... in what, being able to read books that we haven't translated yet? In having a different set of nuances? Do any languages have a greater ability to describe thoughts than others? I suspect different languages have different nuances, but I doubt any has greater total ability to communicate.

DanAndersen2• 13 years ago

I think this is an important take on things. When talking about the fate of languages, it's important not just to view it in terms of "languages" as if they're these nebulously-existing things that are living or dying, but rather to think about it in terms of people who are or are not using a particular language to communicate with others.

dkeskar• 13 years ago

The Internet does accelerate the death of languages. Isolation created divergence, instant participatory communication will erase those differences. There is simply too much overhead to continue translating new terms (e.g. smartphone) which build on other English connotations. I wonder how the Académie_française does its job.

Movies and TV did this too, but being broadcast media, they could - with state support - throw a fig leaf for "regional" languages.

DanielStraight3• 13 years ago

In what? In being able to study the thousands of dramatically different ways humans can communicate.

Preserving languages is about preserving data for linguistics (and other fields). We preserve a lot of things with no "real value". We preserve fossils, species (any species with fewer than 100 remaining specimens isn't contributing to any ecosystem), books (even ones that are outdated and no one is ever likely to read), websites... I could go on all day. We preserve this stuff because we can learn by studying it.

Languages don't just have different nuances, they have completely different ways of putting human thought into words. They have grammars so different that a word for word translation would be no more readable than an untranslated text. They have such a huge variety of sounds that encoding them into IPA stretches the limits of Unicode's variants of the Latin alphabet, relying on many diacritic marks on top of regular characters.

It's not about preserving something that gives some greater ability to communicate. It's about preserving a database of linguistic evolution and the bounds of how human thought can be encoded orally.

plaid_hatter• 13 years ago

The measure used here is a little suspect. Looking at words used in webpages is a pretty poor measure when many languages have little handwritten language to start with. I just returned from a remote tribal group (The Khasi) in India last month and although their web page penetration may be low, they all facebook or text in their local language. I doubt these social aspects are measured and thus miss widespread use of many languages. Public webpages are often wanted to grow beyond your small group and if a writer knows a more common language, then he would rightly use that to grow the sphere of understanding.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

Related discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837722

DanBC2• 13 years ago

People might be interested in the Endangered Languages Project - http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

"An online collaborative effort to protect globa linguistic diversity".

How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

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