Murder that is a threat to survival

Biodiversity cannot be protected unless language genocide is halted, argues Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

Habitat destruction through logging, the spread of agriculture and use of pesticides, and the economic and political vulnerability of the people who live in the world's most diverse ecoregions are recognised as the main causes of the disappearance of biodiversity. What is less widely understood is the link between diminishing global biodiversity and the disappearance of languages. While new trees can be planted and habitats restored, it is much more difficult to restore languages once they have been murdered. And languages are being murdered today faster than ever before in human history. Even the most optimistic prognoses claim that only half of today's 6,000-7,000 spoken languages will exist by 2100. The media and educational systems are the most important direct agents in language murder today.
Most of the world's languages are spoken by relatively few people; the median number of speakers of a language is probably 5,000-6,000. There are fewer than 300 languages with more than 1m native users; half of all languages have fewer than 10,000 users, and a quarter of the world's spoken languages and most of the sign languages have fewer than 1,000 users. More than 80% of the world's languages exist in one country only.
A simple comparison, based on numbers and extinction rates, shows that linguistic diversity (LD) is disappearing relatively much faster than biodiversity (BD). Optimistic estimates claim that 2% of biological species but 50% of languages may be dead or moribund ? no longer learned by children ? in 100 years' time. According to pessimistic but realistic estimates, 20% of biological species but 90% of languages may be dead or moribund in 100 years. People might say: so what? It might be better for world peace if we all speak a few big languages and understand each other. But language diversity is decisive for the future of the planet. LD and BD are correlated: where one type is high, the other one is too, and vice versa, even if there are exceptions. David Harmon of Terralingua, an international non-profit organisation devoted to preserving the world's linguistic diversity, has compared the 25 countries that have the most endemic languages with the 25 that have the most higher vertebrates. Sixteen countries (64%) are on both lists. According to Harmon, "it is very unlikely that this would only be accidental". He gets the same results with flowering plants and languages, butterflies and languages ? a high correlation between countries with biological and linguistic megadiversity.
New research shows mounting evidence that the relationship may also be causal: the two types of diversities seem to enforce and support each other. According to a recent United Nations environmental programme report, threatened languages store the knowledge about how to maintain and use sustainably some of the most vulnerable and most biologically diverse environments in the world. It has taken centuries for people to learn about their environments and to name the complex ecological relationships that are decisive for maintenance of biodiversity. When indigenous peoples lose their languages, much of this knowledge also disappears: the dominant languages do not have the ethno-biological and ethno-medical vocabulary, and the stories will not be translated.
If the long-lasting co-evolution that people have had with their environments is suddenly disrupted, without nature (and people) having enough time to adjust and adapt, we can expect a catastrophe. If during the next 100 years we murder up to 90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity that is our treasury of this historically developed ecological knowledge, we are also seriously undermining our chances of life on Earth.
Like the loss of BD, the loss of LD is dangerous reductionism. As we see in increasingly dramatic ways, such as the spread of species that are more resistant to antibiotics and herbicides, monocultures are vulnerable. The potential for the new lateral thinking that might save us from ourselves in time lies in having as many and as diverse languages and cultures as possible. We do not know which ones have the right medicine. For this, multilingualism is necessary. Indigenous and minority people need to have a chance to maintain their own languages and learn dominant languages.
But instead of fostering and supporting multilingualism through the education system, schools participate in linguistic genocide, as it has been defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention (Articles IIb and IIe and its Final Draft Article III1). Pirjo Janulf shows in a recent study that of those Finnish immigrant minority members in Sweden who had had Swedish-medium education, not one spoke any Finnish to his or her own children. Even if these adults might not have forgotten their Finnish completely, their children were forcibly transferred to the majority group, at least linguistically.
This is what happens to millions of speakers of threatened languages all over the world. There are no schools or classes teaching through the medium of the threatened indigenous or minority languages. The transfer to the majority language group is not voluntary: alternatives do not exist, and parents do not have enough reliable information about the long-term consequences of the various choices. There is also a wealth of research and statistics about the mental harm that forced assimilation causes in education and other areas.
To stop linguistic genocide, linguistic human rights in education need to be respected. The most important linguistic human right for maintenance of LD is the right to mother-tongue medium education. But the existing and draft human rights instruments are completely insufficient in protecting linguistic human rights in education. When speakers of small languages learn other, necessary, languages in addition to their native languages, they become multilingual, and the maintenance of LD, necessary for the planet, is supported. When dominant languages such as English are learned subtractively, at the cost of the mother tongues, they become killer languages. The task for users of English is to stop it being a killer language and change it to an additive asset.

This article first appeared in the March 22, 2001 edition of Learning English, the Guardian Weekly's English language teaching supplement.© Guardian Weekly.