Gesellschaft

In the beginning was the word, but now the word has come to an end, in all kinds of different ways – claims Berlin linguistics expert Jürgen Trabant. He talked to Goethe.de about the fact that young people have stopped talking, the shame associated with the German language, a museum for dead languages and the merits of Latin.

Mr Trabant, nowadays people appear to be chatting, talking, texting, twittering or mailing as if their lives depended on it, yet you are thinking about the death of language. Is that not somewhat contradictory?

Not at all. It is only empty chatter that is on the increase, after all. There are in fact indications on many different levels that the end of speech and language is nigh.

What are these indications?

A growing loss of linguistic activity can be observed in communicative behaviour. In groups of young men, simple gestures are often more important than verbal communication, which after all always involves articulation and thought. They spit on the street to mark their territory, push each other away instead of saying “Go away!”, or emit an unarticulated “grunt” to round up a group.

When it comes to national languages, the loss of diversity is already alarming: there are currently some 6,000 languages still in existence, yet it is estimated that only 200 to 600 of these will remain in one hundred years.

Elites turn their back on German

You once said that German no longer has much of a future ahead of it. Will German soon be dead too?

With a hundred million people speaking the language, German will obviously not die out from one day to the next.

What matters, however, is that German is already giving way to English in key, highly prestigious fields of discourse – such as in science and academia and in the social domain.

In Germany in particular, the elite is drifting away from its mother tongue. Children are being raised in English with a view to enrolling them in a global aristocracy. This hugely reduces the standing of German, with far-reaching consequences, also at “lower” levels. Why after all should migrants learn German when German elites these days wish to speak German only within the family, if at all? Migrants have no need of a second family language, as they already have one – what they need is a public or work language.

“We still feel ashamed of our language”

Can you explain why elites are turning their back on the German language?

This is partly due to general tendencies towards globalization, though it is no doubt also partly because of Germany’s special problem, namely the fact that we no longer have any faith in our native language after our experiences of national socialism. Even today, we still feel ashamed of our language – and this weakens our linguistic loyalty.

Languages, after all, exist not only for the purposes of practical communication; they are also used to transport a linguistic community’s entire mode of thinking and its culture.

Re-strengthening German teaching

What should language policy do to counter this risk?

Essentially, language policy boils down to school and education policy, and here we need to re-strengthen the teaching of German.

Today, ambitious school heads invest all their passion and enthusiasm into English teaching.

All kinds of subjects are now taught in English, which serves to weaken German in these areas. In a pragmatic sense, German lessons have become perverted – instead of teaching German-language literature, factual texts and films tend to be the focus.

As far as foreign language teaching is concerned, the wonderful idea of a “personal adoptive language” should be pursued – this was developed by the European Commission at the suggestion of Leonard Orban, the then Commissioner for Multilingualism. The idea is that all EU citizens should learn another European language apart from global English so that they can acquaint themselves with their neighbour’s culture.

This would mean that the “adoptive languages” would have to be taught alongside the mother tongue and English as a global language of communication. This is a challenge for education that we should not forget.

The cathedrals of thought are decaying

So what can be done to stop languages dying out?

Very little. Ultimately, only those languages with a large number of speakers will survive. It is essential, however, that we preserve even the languages that disappear, as their structures and grammatical rules – some of which are curious – show how differently people can think.

Humankind must create a “museum of languages”. We fight for the restoration of cathedrals, yet simply let the cathedrals of thought decay and collapse.

“Stupidity will triumph”

Will perhaps just one language survive at the end of the day?

I don’t believe so. I myself often talk about how the writing’s on the wall, and about how stupidity will triumph if we all end up speaking just English, but this is of course simply rhetorical exaggeration.

Would it not in any case be fairer to choose an artificial language like Esperanto for everyday communication?

Not in my opinion. If one were to choose a lingua franca, Latin would be better in my view, at least for Europe. Latin, after all, is rooted in great literature, which Esperanto lacks entirely. But perhaps it is better after all to participate in a living culture such as the English or American one rather than using an artificial or dead language.

A reminder of diversity

Is this also the message you communicate to your students as Professor of European Plurilingualism?

As Professor of European Plurilingualism I remind my English-speaking students from all over the world – in English, of course – that they also speak other languages and that these languages are valuable. Within this framework we usually discuss problematic cases of globalization which are often associated with the end of language and the death of languages.

This gives me the chance as a professor to experience at first hand the risks involved in English monolingualism: knowledge developed by German, Italian or French scholars of the humanities that has not been translated into English is no longer registered in this Anglophone world, with the result that entire libraries of accumulated knowledge are simply lost.