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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
L. Wittgenstein
Imagine living in a world where whatever you say has a meaning for only you and for a few others. Now instead imagine living in a world where languages abound but you are not able to talk to your neighbour, like in a modern Babylon. This is no nightmare, just the daily routine for some people living in the Australian Outback or in Indonesia. Although, already a reality for some, it could become a reality for many others in years to come.
Nowadays, between 6000 and 7000 languages exist but half of them are bound to vanish in the near future, as English establishes itself as a lingua franca. The role of trade, globalization and technology is a major impetus for this. Globalization is anything but a new phenomenon and can be traced back to the Roman Empire, where conquering people actually meant to impose a common language and legal system. The concept, nonetheless, started to change during the Middle Age, thanks to religion and later, trade. It culminated in the nineteenth century, where major European countries struggled to impose their presence and power on the international scene.
The turn nonetheless happened right after World War two, where English became the language used in deals and communications (internet). It is now the most widely-spoken language in the world, with non-native speakers outnumbering the native ones. It would be foolish to think that English words will never make it into our national languages, especially given the context of current means of communication and production.
There are a few countries whom after realizing that they might lose their language and culture along with it decided to fight back trying to maintain their distinctiveness, especially in idioms (such as France). Linguistic diversity is in itself a relative concept since a language can be both the language of a majority and a minority. Consider Mandarin Chinese, the official Chinese language, spoken by some 900 million people as mother tongue and is therefore the majority language (as opposed to Miao or Tibetan, for example). If you go to another country, such as Germany, Chinese would be a minority language, the language of those communities living abroad. Sometimes though, the language of a minority in a large country may become the majority language in a small one.
The term “minority”, itself is not clear; we often refer to a minority as the smaller group within a country, while we should identify it as a powerless group, regardless of the number of people. Another issue to be considered is the role dialects have: they are neither official languages nor minorities’ ones, but coexist. Often stemmed from vernacular idioms, dialects are the everyday language of most people around the world, and often the only one older generation understands and speaks.
The language I speak as my mother tongue, Italian, is nothing but the dialect of the Florence region, chosen to represent our country and unity among several others just two hundred years ago. Globalization is responsible for vanishing dialects. As many more young people learn English as their second language and do not take up dialects the future of these dialects is at risk. I can still remember my first English lesson, as a six-year-old child I was told that it was imperative for me to learn English. As a university student I have no problems in expressing myself in this language but to my dismay I cannot understand a single word of what my grandma says.
Globalization poses challenges on both, official languages and dialects. Although there are countries which are linguistically homogeneous, such as Iceland, where new English terms are molded over local ones and who are determined to maintain their identities, there are other countries where one is not even able to talk to their neighbour. Spanning some 800 languages within the same land, such as Papua New Guinea, where English becomes de facto the only mean of communication.
Globalization not only threatens local traditions and biodiversity it even menaces the world language variety as boundaries within countries start to fade. Like plants and animal species, endangered languages are confined to small areas, where their loss can be substantial in terms of diversity. This is especially true for smaller countries, where even if cultural homogeneity is more likely to be present, people need to be able to speak English if they want to survive in a world more closely linked by outer trade and technology. As professor J. Lo Bianco, director of The National Language and Literacy Institute of Australia, puts it “Efficiency and development, growth and human capital, are not tolerant of difference. Globalized modernization requires that knowledge is imparted in ways that are comparable across differences of settings, culture and language”. This is of no help to preserve cultural diversity. That’s why many countries, recognizing the importance or traditions and cultural roots, allowed their minorities to set up their own schools and centres, like in Germany. In other countries instead, such as Brazil, it was the indigenous pressure to convince the government that bilingual education was mandatory to preserve their roots.
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Selene Biffi
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