Talon AbernathyFollow

“‘I am writing this, not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone: for each of us is audience enough for the other.’”

Work has Resumed on the Tower of Babel

Languages are going extinct at unprecedented rate. This is a good thing.

At the time of Italian unification, only 2.5% of the Italian population could actually speak Italian. This was far from the exception: in a time before cars and planes, when locomotives were still an exotic luxury for most, people didn’t get around too much.

Travel was slow and costly, most work was labor intensive; thus, the logic of the age facilitated language fragmentation and hyper-localization of dialects. Mutual incomprehensibility of language in turn made wide scale trade and cooperation difficult (though not impossible).

The idea that a common language is essential for wide scale cooperation is so baked into the fabric of our collective unconscious that it forms the basis for one of the most popular myths in human folklore: the tower of Babel.

To give a quick recap of the story, a bunch of people got together and decided to build a giant tower (possibly to reach heaven, possibly for self-protection in case God decided to send another flood their way). God wasn’t too pleased with man’s hubris, so he decided to make the workers speak different tongues. Without a common language, communication broke down pretty much instantaneously and man’s great pimple got popped, so to speak.

Veracity aside, this story provides an almost perfect allegory in reverse for the rise of nationalism in Europe (and later elsewhere) from the early modern era onwards. To give a quick outline of how nationalism came about, we can think of it as the predictable outcome of a shift from a feudal rural society to an urban, industrial society. In a feudal society, where one may grow up, marry, work, procreate, grow old and die all within a tiny lordly manor, it’s natural that small, localized hierarchies would proliferate and a person’s first loyalty would not be to king or country but to squire and county.

The standard narrative of industrialization goes something like this: As more people moved to cities, as trade brought new wealth to landless traders and managers, and as the landed gentry’s power steadily declined, the winner was the king (and the new merchant classes, but here we’ll focus on the king). These conditions made despotism a possibility that simply didn’t exist before. Growing wealth enabled Kings to expand the reach of the state and create the first modern bureaucracies, expansive and well maintained systems and means of transportation, and better organizational capacities within the state apparatus.

To simplify this process immensely, the people of this time could be broadly classed into three strata: the people, the aristocrats, and the king. In the struggle for power between the king and the aristocrats, the king would bypass the aristocracy and appeal directly to the people. For a time, the people would respond and the King’s power would increase while the aristocracy’s would diminish.

When public opinion, whether shifted endogenously or more often by war or another catastrophe, turned against the king, revolution would follow; what was left of the state would be co-opted by some ruling clique who in turn would strengthen their grip on power through the expansion of the state.

What’s important here is that throughout this entire historical process, the state is taking increasingly higher precedence. The upshot to this is that as the state becomes more comprehensive and more powerful, the incentive to diminish regional identity and multilingualism increases.

Thus, common language became increasingly a concern of national importance. Government sponsored schools sprung up across countries like Spain, France, and Italy, part of their mission being to homogenize Spanish, French, and Italian.

The immediate effects of this change were enormous. One could travel the length and breadth of France and speak the same language in Toulouse, Paris, and Lyon. Common language hugely facilitated trade. It also eased the creation of professional state armies, helping to free monarchs from local levies and in turn further weaken the power of the landed gentry.

It’s important to remember that numerous changes were occurring conterminously with linguistic homogenization: railways, telegraphs, radios and newspapers were knitting the world together. Cities were centralizing populations, reducing traditional means of control and organization, and elevating new classes to power. Language was one element of many in this process but one which without it would have been impossible.

What Does that Mean Today?

This process is continuing today. Since 1960, some 28 language families have gone functionally extinct and some 46% of all living languages today are considered endangered. The knee jerk reaction to these statistics is typically disapproval. There’s a natural human preference for preservation. However, the functional extinction of most human language is actually a good thing for most people, most of the time.

The consolidation of language in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries is giving way to the international consolidation of language. There have always been lingua francas- what’s unique is the scope of our current global language: English. Roughly 1.5 billion people or about 20% of the global population speak English as either a first or a second language language and roughly half of the global population speaks one of just ten languages.

Moreover, whereas in the past trade languages were mostly found among trading, noble, priestly, and others who generally belonged to the relatively narrow strata of educated classes, nowadays, the incentives to language acquisition and the transformation of the global economy have incentivized people at all levels of the economic spectrum to drift towards a common language.

Should Languages be Preserved?

I am not arguing that we should be glad to see all but one language perish. However, it would be beneficial if all but a handful of languages fell away and those not in common use became the preserves of academics and linguists.

In fact, it would be to the general benefit of humanity if we adopted a single, human language (preferably English based both on its status as the most widely spoken language globally and its widespread adoption as a global trade language).

There are many valid reasons to keep dead languages as sorts of living fossils, alive only within the cloistered space of academia. For most people, most of the time, the advantages of a common language far outweigh the disadvantages of a multilinguistic world. While romantic nationalism may provide tasty fodder for intellectual debate, more prosaic concerns will always override the preening, manufactured self-identity of the proponents of multilingualism.

And it is manufactured. Most of those saying that French or Mandarin, Urdu or Swahili should maintain its global rivalry with English would not have been speaking French, Chinese or whatever other language they’re championing just several centuries ago.

Where this process has already occurred, the advantages of the new have far outweighed that of the old. Few in Scotland speak Gaelic and that’s largely a good thing: could you imagine how isolated the tiny nation of Scotland would be, with its 5 million people cut off from England’s 55 million?

Promising Scottish youths would be isolated from the best universities on the British isle, from the best jobs in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. Take this relatively local phenomenon and stretch it out to the world at large. Presently, American universities are able to educate the best and brightest that the world has to offer in part because of the widespread adoption of English as a global language. American universities receive additional money and brainpower, the American economy gets a short term boost while these students attend school and a long term boost if they stay on as workers post-graduation, and the students receive a world class education and an education that can potentially open up numerous professional and remuneratory opportunities from which would be otherwise unavailable.

The Absorption of Linguistic Minorities into Monolingual Society

To better understand how this assimilatory process can bring widespread benefits (and how linguistic self-isolation can hinder the economic functioning of certain demographic groups), it’s informative to look at a couple of countries in the new world.

America poses a second great repudiation to multilingualism: only a relatively small minority of the American population is descended from English settlers. Even if you only look at Caucasian born Americans, the largest ethnic group by far would be those of German descent. While many American German communities retained their native language for some time post-immigration, nearly all have made the jump to English.

You don’t even need to imagine the impoverishment that would have resulted had the Germans not assimilated into the American linguistic tradition: some of the poorest communities in America are Hasidic Jews who have spurned English for Yiddish and have consequently cut off most avenues for employment outside of their small Northeastern communities.

Imagine if the Italians who form one of Argentina’s largest ethnic groups had refused to learn Spanish or if the Germans who settled southern Brazil had refused to learn Portuguese. Economic integration would be incredibly costly as a large population of interpreters would become a necessity for even the simplest transactions. A significant amount of commerce would simply not be undertaken as the cost of communication would simply make it not worthwhile.

This isn’t a matter of guesswork: state enforced bilingualism in Canada (English and French hold dual status as official national languages) costs an estimated 2.4 billion dollars per year.

And Canada is far from the only country to mandate bilingualism as a concessionary pillar of government.

Of course, many people would like to see local languages retained out of respect for local autonomy and culture. However, in doing so they’re retarding progress for those who would benefit the most from a common language.

The tower of Babel isn’t a symbol of hubris but one of progress. Common language smooths where disparate tongues disrupt. Before we move forward, it’s imperative that we move back towards a common language.