Today we celebrate the languages of the world. 21 February, you see, is officially International Mother Language Day. It was proclaimed by UNESCO, the cultural heritage branch of the United Nations, in 1999. Its objective is to raise awareness of the value of languages and to reaffirm the importance of preserving their diversity. Because languages all over the world are in danger: of the estimated 6,000 languages that are spoken, nearly half is said to no longer exist by the year 2100. In our ever-expanding world, dominated by English as a common means of communication, this may not seem important, but it is. Convenient as having one super-language may be, languages are more than a tool: they are the expression of people’s cultures and heritage.
But preservation doesn’t mean trying to prevent languages from evolving. Last year it was reported how even the Queen’s English had shifted from upper-class RP in the 1950s to a speech that is much more influenced by Estuary English today. Listen to any old record from the early 20th century and you’ll hear an even bigger change. The Dutch language society Onze Taal (Our Language) celebrates its own 75th anniversary this year, and it has come up with quite an interesting challenge for its audience: imagine how your language will have evolved in another seventy-five years, that is: by the year 2082.
The same can be done for your own mother tongue, of course. What do you think will be different by then? Will dialects have disappeared, or will they have become stronger and more diverse, becoming independent regional variants? How will spelling be affected by new technologies and computer terms? Will we be ditching declension, conjugation, accents and will the lingo of IM and text messaging pervade? And will UK and US English ever meet again?
I’d love to see this post get filled with comments. Not to boost my ego or any of my stats, but because I’d like to hear your take on it. Not just what you might imagine about the future, but why your language is the coolest, the sweetest or the best for making love in. Any message at all, really, in English, or… in your own language! And invite anyone you like to participate.
21 February 2007 at 9:15 pm
Je wil gewoon Nederlands horen hè? Terecht. Stiekem overtreft het Nederlands het Engels in subtiele dingen. Sarcasme, ironie en een vrijere zinsopbouw maken het Nederlands superieur.
Jammer dat maar drie mensen dit kunnen lezen…
21 February 2007 at 9:20 pm
Hoera! Nederlands staat bovenaan. Dank je wel!
21 February 2007 at 9:22 pm
I may be called a native English speaker, but I really speak Canadian, eh?
21 February 2007 at 9:40 pm
You mean that post title you so generously suggested is Canadian, not English?!
22 February 2007 at 10:21 am
Hi Nils,
Thanks for leaving a comment on Desperate Curiosity, for some reason though, it got deleted a day later…mmm violence and databases as a friend of mine would say.
Language day. Having learnt French at an early age and then Japanese following my wife to Japan, I’ve begun to get a better idea of the impact of the English language in this era of globalisation. You are right of course that it is not just the language that spreads but also culture, both go hand in hand. It may well be that in the future we see Mandarin become the lingua franca, but for that to happen, Chinese culture needs to be readily exportable and consumable, which at the moment I don’t think it is.
In the case of France it’s interesting to see how defiant the government has been in warding off any influence of the English language, approaching it as quasi ‘colonisation’, with acute resentment shown towards the US. This comes and goes with the waves of nationalism that spread through the country. Japan on the other was colonised/occupied by the US and to a degree she embraced north American culture. It reminds me of a type of relationship I had in high school. A ‘friend’ kept pestering me day in and day out, but it wasn’t until I slapped him in the face that we became real friends…
22 February 2007 at 11:14 am
Thanks, Andrew, for getting back to me. Pity about the comment, if you like I could retype it, but the message has been conveyed I think, so maybe not.
Good of you to mention Mandarin and the fact that it is far from being a globally expanding language yet. There may even be a big surprise in store for all these people who have begun ‘learning Chinese’ these days, when they discover that the 1% (?) of Chinese who who are actually active in international business have all learnt English.
In any case, thanks for commenting and sharing your insights and that wonderful little story.
22 February 2007 at 5:21 pm
Mai mera desh ka bhasha : Hindi, ko pasand nahin hai kyonki pathshala me bahut kathin hai. Isliye mai english pasand hai.
Translated from Hindi :
I don’t like my country’s language : Hindi, because it is very hard in school. Therefore I like English.
:D
22 February 2007 at 5:28 pm
While I’m glad I found out about this, I’m a bit bummed that I didn’t know of it in advance. I can think of a decent post for such a day, one which I’ll probably write anyway, even though I’ve missed “the day”.
I think such a holiday is a wonderful idea. You’re right, in that while it’s convenient to have a “global language”, it’s also extremely important to preserve (and even encourage the growth of) other languages. I think anyone who has studied foreign languages realizes that exact word to word translations just don’t exist. When something is translated from its original language, something is invariably lost. I think one of the simplest ways to put it, is that every language has a soul of sorts. It reflects the culture and mindset of the people who use it. Translations take a bit of that soul away.
I don’t know how English will look in 75 years. I hope, however, that you’re wrong about IM-speak taking over. I’ve come to loathe “c u later” and other such things. While I suppose IM-speak is just a natural language progression, sped up by the internet, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. :) Same goes for Ebonics.
23 February 2007 at 4:43 pm
I’m sorry I missed that day. In Sweden we actually better watch out about all our own Swedish culture, since we have adopted so many other cultures habits, not only the language. It even went so far a while that we couldn’t raise the Swedish flag at all without being considered as racists…
I hold nothing against other cultures – in fact I love to travel there and explore them – but I love to have different cultures, for them as well as for us. That’s what’s interesting. How boring it would be if we all have merged to something common…. Nothing more to explore!