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Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>
yahoo.com>An open letter on the economic value of language diversity: In his editorial of March 8th in the Wall Street Journal on page 13, John W. Miller laughs gleefully about the predicted extinction of half of the world's languages within the next generation. He argues that if they are dying out, that is because they are inferior, and says that it is the "reality" that "most people prefer a Big Mac." What is ironic here, for those that miss it, is that "Big Mac" and, the restaurant that made it famous "McDonalds", and the famous "Ronald McDonald" icon which represents them both - all play off of Gaelic patronymics. The Gaelic languages of the British Isles being exactly the sort of minor languages which the piece scoffs at the utility of. If minor languages were not useful, there would be no "Le Big Mac" in Paris to sell. This is a general point - one of the sources of economic utility which a society has access to are the non-dominant languages which exist within the sphere of economic and political power of a dominant language. If one needs a more hard headed example, consider the use of Navajo as a code language by the US in World War II and later. Ready made, and resistant to attempts to decipher it, since it avoided the markers which are most useful in code cracking - gramatical markers of usage or position. To take an even larger example - "Anglo-American" jurisprudence and business culture have a very large dose of the Hebrew law scholarship and Yiddish hard headed saavy mixed in. The integration of these language resources into English in America is part and parcel of the success of New York at becoming financial capital of the world. The argument for "linguistic monoculture" runs thin quickly, when one considers that many of the languages of Europe's current EU members and other European states were, a little more than a century ago, politically peripheral - even banned. Finnish, Czech, and Norwegian are all, in their modern forms, languages created by conscious activity. If a century and a half ago the advice of the Wall Street Journal had been followed, we would still be dealing with decaying central european empires imposing cultural hegemony. I would advise anyone telling a Finn that his language is culturally subsidiary and therefore it should have been extinguished by the Russians to be out of arms length when they do so. The process which changed languages such as Finnish from being folk tongues spoken by a handful of economically marginal individuals to being national languages used by digitally connected politically stable social democracies began in the 19th century, and is a by product of Romantic Nationalism. The process was predicated on the idea that small tightly knit zones of language and cultural unity possessed the advantages of being focused over lumbering language monopolies imposed from afar. That the process of conversion from folk resource to national language has not completed in many regions of the world - such as former colonial areas of Africa - does not deny the economic utility of producing national languages in those regions, from which stable nation-states with stable business climates emerge. In otherwords, it is not in the long term best interest of the West to prevent the same process which turned Europe from a feudal patchwork riven by constant tribal warfare into a commonwealth of nations from taking its course else where. In fact, as with the introduction of many other Western ideas, the conversion of languages from their subsistence agricultural form, to one capable of running a modern economy, is part of the process known as "globalization". People in Shanghai do not speak English, they speak a chinese which is aquiring the ability to interface with the global technological and financial community. The further economic utility of non-politically dominant languages can be seen in the daily diet of the average American. Coffee, tea, potatoes, rice, corn, tobacco, squash, pumpkin, pasta are all products which were originally center in particular cultures, who preserved the ethno-culture, that's how to raise the damn things to the academically challenged out there, of the particular crop. It was local tribes that taught Europeans to dry tapioca leaves in the sun - as harvested they are poisonous. In an era which is discovering the vital importance of harvesting genetic information for drugs and treatments, we should be appreciative, not dismissive, of the benefits of localised knowledge stored in localised forms. The implicit argument, however, in the piece is that minor languages cannot compete in the global world. However, the facts state otherwise. Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, Tamil, Czech, Hebrew and Gaelic are all languages which are spoken by relatively limited groups of individuals, and yet these groups are economically vibrant. The ability to preserve a culturally central language, and still compete in the global economy is a social technology. Like other social technologies - such as voluntary compliance with laws, limiting family size, education of children and personal hygiene to prevent the spread of disease - it can be transfered and taught. So long as language instruction in the economically important language begins very early, there is no conflict between maintaining a regional language, and complete fluency in the economically central one. In fact, in my industry - telecommunications - customer relationship call centers are being relocated to India because many people residing in that nation speak more accurate Standard Business English than can be found at comparable salaries in the United States. A further economic utlity of subsidiary languages is, in fact, in globalisation. The use of the regional dialect of Chinese as a means of creating a small cultural space where credibility can be monitored without reference to governments is part and parcel of the economic success of ethnic Chinese in Europe, the US and across Asia. Economists even have a name for the structure it has produced - "The Bamboo Kite". Thus the utility of a large cross section of languages cannot be denied. The WSJ piece makes the implicit argument that if people are not preserving subsidiary languages, it is because there is something defective about them, or the absence of a general will implies that that is the correct course of action. This, however, is an argument contradicted by the fundamental text of Capitalist theory: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. In it Smith argues that education is one of the pillars of the market economy, which must be maintained as part of the common good, just as prevention of monopolies must be maintained. While there are short term advantages in allowing control, subordination or decay of the commons, the long term interests of the whole dictate that all be willing to maintain educational commons because all benefit by more than the cost of maintaining them. The UN's purpose is to serve as a global organisation to maintain the commons of the entire planet. Peace being the most important single common resource, naturally the pursuit of globally productive peace is first and fore-most, but the maintenance of health, education and, yes, cultural resources is also part of both its mandate and its purpose. To scoff at the UN being concerned about the deterioration in one aspect of the common resource from which economic activity draws makes as much sense at scoffing at a company concerned about deteriorating market conditions. Thus the solution to the problem of dying languages is not a museum like preservation, but application of the techniques of modernisation, economisation and culturalisation of languages which have been gradually developing over the last 2 centuries - and to teach smaller language groups the technologies which have allowed Dutch and Finnish - to name two - to remain active and growing languages, while also being intimately interconnected with the global economy.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue