Writing in the WSJ’s “Opinion Journal” on Friday, John J. Miller questions the thinking behind Unesco’s very public language-extinction laments. Troubled by a “catastrophic” decline in the world’s languages — a development their new report calls “irretrievable and tragic” (because “language diversity” is “one of humanity’s most precious commodities”) — Unesco has begun pushing the idea of an “egalitarian multilingualism,” a position Miller describes as a “careless embrace of multiculturalism.” In fact, Miller argues, Unesco’s alarmism only serves to mask “a trend that is arguably worth celebrating: A growing number of people are speaking a smaller number of languages, meaning that age-old obstacles to communication are collapsing.” Miller notes:

Languages disappear for all sorts of reasons, not least among them their radical transformation over time. Consider English. It helps to have a gloss handy when reading Shakespeare’s plays of four centuries ago. Chaucer’s Middle English may be understood only with difficulty. And the Old English of the Beowulf poet is not only dead but unintelligible to modern speakers.

Because languages evolve, it should come as no surprise that some expire. Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks […] believes that 10,000 years ago there may have been as many as 20,000 languages spoken by a total human population of perhaps 10 million, roughly 0.17% of our current world census. Assuming this is true, it would suggest a connection between more people and fewer languages, and between language and the technology that lets people communicate over distance.

That makes sense, because geographic isolation is an incubator of linguistic diversity.

That some languages dwindle and ultimately die should come as no surprise, therefore — usurped as they often are by the more widely spoken languages in their geographic sphere (a sphere increasingly enlarged by advances in communications technology). Should this sadden us? Perhaps. But should we try to stop the almost organic evolution of global communications?

Miller concludes:

Each language captures something about a way of life, and when one goes mute, it is hard not to feel a sense of loss. But languages are no less mortal than the men and women who speak them. Maybe linguists should try to learn as much as they can about ‘dying’ languages before they vanish completely, rather than engage in a quixotic attempt to save them.

—–