Language and Identity

According to UNESCO, roughly half of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken worldwide are in danger of extinction. In addition to the dialects in German enclaves around the world, a number of minority languages within Germany are also in that list.

“Languages die not because the people who speak them disappear but because the communities decide not to speak them,” says Thomas Stolz, a linguistics professor from Bremen. Typically, in bilingual areas, a native tongue is abandoned for the politically or economically dominant language. Combined with a desire to get ahead in society, parents begin neglecting to actively pass on their linguistic heritage to their children. This allows the dominant language to quickly become the mother tongue of the next generation. When these children then teach only the dominant language to their own children, the grandchildren no longer even have a common language with their grandparents.

The Maya in Guatemala, for example, dared not pass on their language to successor generations out of fear of political persecution. In Brittany, the Celtic tongue was abandoned more for economic gain. With only Celtic and no French, their children would have been destined for a poor life of fishing while French had the potential to enable upward social mobility. A bilingual upbringing was ultimately looked down upon because of the negative image of Breton as an inferior language. Stolz sees developments of this kind as a “standard situation that exists all over the world”.

Is the German language dying?

“If we aren’t proactive with regard to the German language, it could die out as well someday,” opines Thomas Paulwitz, editor in chief of Deutsche Sprachwelt magazine and a staunch supporter of increased language awareness in Germany. But Stolz, as an expert on endangered languages, sees that type of projection as “panic mongering”. “Even if it pops up in every second tabloid publication,” says Stolz, “German is not going to die out, at least not in the next four generations. But those are typical fears that arise when a language is going through changes.” In reality, with nearly 100 million speakers, German is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

Due to the increase of Anglicisms in German and English in the media, science, international relations and, of late, as the official language in international court proceedings, Paulwitz fears that German may “over the long term become just a dialect of English”. At that point English will be used for “important things”, he thinks, while we will “only be able to speak German in our leisure time”. For German studies professor Ulrich Ammon, on the other hand, German is “linguistically too distant” for it to become a dialect of English. Furthermore, in Ammon’s eyes, “as long as at least one country uses it as its official language and the language of government and education, German is not under threat of extinction. At the moment, seven countries consider German an official language, at least for portions of their overall territories.”

Languages die. So?

According to Stolz, the inherent danger of languages disappearing is that the abandonment of one in order to adopt another does not always lead to the desired upward mobility, and the generation that no longer speaks the original mother tongue winds up feeling uprooted. They end up caught between two worlds, not fully integrated in either culture, as is often the case with the children of immigrants in Germany, for example. In extreme cases, this situation can lead to whole generations of “nationless” people.

For Ulrike Mosel, a professor and expert in Near and Far Eastern studies, it is not just about appreciating the cultural significance of documented dead languages such as Old Egyptian. As the 1st Chair of the Society for Endangered Languages, she likens the importance of linguistic diversity among humans to the biodiversity of the animal world. Ammon sees her analogy as incorrect. Unlike Stolz, Mosel and Paulwitz, the German studies expert does not view the death of a language as a tragedy. He understands it when a language is no longer used, for example when another tongue is better suited for communication due to the sheer number of people who speak it.

Languages don’t die

Language for Ammon is not as much a living organism as it is a tool. As such, he doesn’t give credence to the phenomenon of “dying” languages. “People don’t say the stagecoach or the tape recorder died,” he says. Ammon also feels that linguists are exaggerating the loss of significance and the aesthetic of text translations while overlooking the synergies that result from linguistic simplification, especially since such developments help to increase mutual understanding. We should imagine, as an example, a more direct conversation with the Taliban based on a common language. The underlying differences in the messages would of course not be resolved, but at least we could have a reasonable exchange.