[p2p-research] 90 Percent Of Languages Will Be Extinct Next Century - And That's Good [Futu...

[Andy Robinson]

A typical imperial position really.

What he doesn't realise is that language is not simply an instrumental means
to communication but part of a way of viewing the world.  The death of a
language is the loss of a way of seeing, hence fundamentally impoverishes
humanity.

Also, the languages which are being lost are those which are most attuned to
situated knowledge and local perspectives, connected fundamentally to the
biodiversity of particular areas and the complex interrelations of socially
dense lifeworlds.  The ones which are 'taking over' are the ones which
subordinate verbs to nouns, the ones most suited to a reified view of the
world and to instrumentalised, reductive social relations.  This is why they
are 'competing' well in a global system geared to reification and
instrumentalism.

I doubt that the indigenous peoples most marginal to global capitalism would
view themselves as victims of impoverishment through exclusion, rather than
of cultural genocide and dispossession.  A lot of them have good reasons to
not want to be part of the rat-race.  Economic calculations often make big
mistakes by failing to distinguish subsistence (having enough to survive)
from poverty.  Subsistence societies appear as extremely poor because little
of their economy is monetised and they 'lack' large quantities of consumer
goods - but this is compensated by having enough to live, having 'dignity'
as defined culturally, and having a lot of what might be called
'qualitative' goods.  Of course, subsistence societies are also being
squeezed in terms of whether they have enough to survive and how much effort
they have to put in to get it - because other people are stealing,
destroying and polluting their lands, and sometimes driving them out with
violence.  Ironically, in being forced from subsistence into sweatshop
labour, cash-crop day-labouring or marginal life in slums or shanty-towns,
formerly subsistence peoples may seem to the economist's gaze to have become
'richer' - their monetary income, though still abysmally low, has most
likely increased.  The trick being that their cost of living has also
increased, their interpersonal security has collapsed and their quality of
life has plummeted.  It may be that this is one of those things which simply
can't be measured, but I daresay human development and subjective happiness
indices tell a truer story.  In any case, citizens of former colonial
countries which are benefitting from globally unequal and unjust
distributions should not be sitting in judgement on other people's lack of
enrichment.  The biggest problems in the global system are still
distributive.

If this was a theologian arguing that the diversity of world religions will
be replaced by much fewer in the near future - and that one major religion
such as Christianity will dominate the world - and that this is not a bad
thing, we would instantly recognise that he is some kind of religious
chauvinist.

I'd suggest reading:

Suckling, K.F. 2000. A House on Fire: Connecting the Biological and
Linguistic Diversity Crises. Animal Law 6:193-202.

and Shiva, 'Monocultures of the Mind'.
http://www.trabal.org/ad_ict4d_reader/shivamono1993.pdf

Incidentally, on a similar note, the phenomenon of the 'incommunicable'
seems to increase as the diversity of languages decreases.  Metropolitan
societies have this difficulty in a variety of forms: as cultural difference
and radical exclusion; as 'madness' and psychological difference; as
difficulties in emotional expression, character-armour, depression; as the
drying-up of creativity; as the constant difficulty of being heard amidst
the bustle of life.  I endorse Guattari's view that capitalism tends to
render the actuality of human life as unwanted 'noise', the better to reduce
life to its own monologue.  And, I daresay that as language homogenises, the
incommunicable expands - the result is that more and more people are
silenced.  Though there are also forces against homogenisation - dialects,
technical languages, hybrid languages, slang, local variations such as
Indian English, perhaps even the growth of programming languages.  Also,
many of the people in the global South who learn Northern languages such as
English and French, continue to speak one or more local languages as well.
There's little sign of, say, Tamazight or Gujarati dying out any time soon.

bw
Andy
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