Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael! – Nancy West
Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
You would think linguists would have a pretty good idea how many languages are spoken in the world. It’s not likely that more than two or three little bands of hunters in small villages have gone unnoticed up to now in the rugged mountains of Papua New Guinea. Yet if you search the web for the number of living languages you will find estimates ranging from 5,000 to 8,000, with 7,000 the most frequent round number. That is a discouraging experience. What’s the problem? Can’t linguists count?
The different estimates cannot be due to ignorance about Papua New Guinea, which has more languages, however you count them, than any other country. It must have to do with the definition of “language,” as opposed to “dialect.” Two people speak two different languages if they cannot understand each other; they speak two different dialects if they find each other’s speech quaint or strange but still understandable. That’s clear enough, but of course there are degrees of understanding. If they only half understand each other, do they speak different languages or different dialects?
The problem is somewhat like distinguishing between species and subspecies among organisms, but at least there is a fairly reliable standard: two creatures belong to the same species if they can produce fertile offspring, though “fertile” is also sometimes a matter of degree. With languages and dialects the distinction is often arbitrary. That is why the precise number given on the Ethnologue website, which is often cited as the most reliable source, is ridiculous. When I checked it recently it said there are 7,168 languages. Tighten or loosen the definition of mutual understanding and you could raise or lower that number by hundreds. In 2009, by the way, Ethnologue said there were 6,909 languages. What happened? Did we discover exactly 259 more languages in the last fourteen years? I don’t think so.
I remember looking at a book called Teach Yourself Serbo-Croation not long ago. Well, it’s two languages now, or three if you include Bosnian. Is English one language? I once spent half an hour sitting next to two boys in Glasgow while they chattered away, and I didn’t understand one word. Were they speaking Gaelic? No, I was told, it was Glaswegian boys’ slangy Scots English. When we English-speakers study Italian, we forget that the national standard in Italy is based on the Tuscan variety, while there are forms of Italian in the south and in Sicily that are unintelligible to Tuscan-speakers.
So we might settle on about 7,000 languages, plus or minus several hundred. The number of dialects in the world, if you get down to details, must be in the millions. Some would say there are as many dialects as there are people, since no two people speak exactly the same language. We each speak our own “idiolect.” But that’s a topic for another time.
Is the number of languages, however defined, growing or shrinking? You can point to processes that expand the number: separation of speakers and time itself. Latin, for example, was once one language spoken in and around Rome. Now there are dozens of varieties of Latin: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, Catalan, Provençal, Sardinian, and many others, with subspecies of at least the larger ones. Classical Latin itself is still spoken fluently by quite a few people, though not as a first language. Nearly all the languages of Europe and northern India go back to one language spoken around 3000 BCE by the Yamnaya people, who lived on the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas. A few languages have been brought back from extinction, such as Cornish, or from near-extinction, in the case of a few Native American languages. And of course it is possible that once upon a time, maybe seventy thousand years ago in Africa, there was only one human language.
So languages multiply over time. But languages also die. We know of quite a few extinct languages, such as Sumerian, Babylonian, and whatever the Trojans spoke. But we are now losing languages, and whole families of languages, at an increasing pace. About every four months the last native speaker of some language in the world dies. Linguists might have recorded it and figured out its grammar, but it is no longer alive. More than half the world’s tongues are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people, and nearly all of these tongues will be dead by 2100, despite heroic efforts to revitalize them. Language death, then, now seems to be a greater factor than language differentiation. The number is shrinking. There are fewer languages today than there used to be, even though there are more people speaking them than ever. Time giveth, but time taketh more away.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.