SO WHY DO THEY ALL LOVE THE METRIC SYSTEM?:

Is the world really poorer without Bo?:The death of tribal languages is sometimes a good thing, revealing the itchy dynamism of human society. (Tim Black, 2/08/10, Spiked)

he death of a language is also a frequently occurring fact of human history, and by no means an undesirable one. As human societies have developed and expanded, as interaction between once isolated peoples has increased, so particular cultures and particular languages have given way to increasingly universal languages. This isn’t just a polite way of talking of bloody conquest either. As one commentator put it: ‘Often people choose to move to the city for work and therefore speak traditional languages less and less. It therefore becomes natural not to teach them to their children.’ In fact, while there might currently be just under 7,000 languages spoken globally, 80 per cent of the world’s population speak just 83 of them.

Yet despite what looks like a progressive development – an overcoming of Babylonian partiality, a movement towards a common language – many in the West today tend to think differently. In the words of Stephen Corry, the director of the tribal peoples’ campaign group Survival International, ‘With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.’

Views like Corry’s are far from unusual today. BBC News accompanied its report of Boa Snr’s death with a feature entitled ‘The tragedy of dying languages’. Asserting that with language death, we are losing a ‘significant portion of humanity’s intellectual wealth’, the BBC reporter challenges Western complacency: ‘What hubris allows us, cocooned comfortably in our cyber-world, to think that we have nothing to learn from people who a generation ago were hunter-gatherers?’

In fact, over the past couple of decades, the angst-ridden focus on ‘the tragedy of dying languages’ has become an international concern.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2010 11:28 AM