The Internet Is Killing Most Languages

Written by BEN RICHMOND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

April 1, 2014 // 05:30 AM EST

You might be living through another mass extinction of species—brought on by us

humans, who have been changing climate and fragmenting habitats at an

increasing clip—but what you probably don't know is that you might also be living

through a mass extinction of human languages—brought on by the magic of the

internet.

According to a paper titled “Digital Language Death,” just published in PLOS

One, less than five percent of the 7,000 languages spoken today will ascend to the

digital realm. Granted, languages have been dying as long as they’ve been spoken,

but the Endangered Languages Project reports that “the pace at which languages

are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming.” András Kornai, author

of the new paper, blames the internet for why we’re more likely to be speaking

French than, say, Mandinka, in the future.

The means and speed of language death might be new, but the pattern is old.

According to the UNESCO page on endangered languages, “a language

disappears when its speakers disappear or when they shift to speaking another

language—most often, a larger language used by a more powerful group.

Languages are threatened by external forces such as military, economic, religious,

cultural or educational subjugation, or by internal forces such as a community’s

negative attitude towards its own language.” Both of these forces, Kornai argues,

are exacerbated by the internet.

The signs of imminent death for a language are a loss of function, where other

languages take over entire functional areas such as commerce; a loss of prestige,

as the young lose interest in learning and using the language; and finally a loss of

competence, wherein a generation can maybe understand their elders, but don’t

really speak the language themselves.

The great flat, globalized world of the internet operates pretty much as a

monoculture, Kornai says. Only about 250 languages can be called well-

established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still

alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century, and

many fewer will make it on to the internet.

As a test of vitality, Kornai began where all research begins: Wikipedia.

“Experience shows that Wikipedia is always among the very first active digital

language communities, and can be safely used as an early indicator of some

language actually crossing the digital divide,” Kornai writes. “Children, as soon as

they start using computers for anything beyond gaming, become aware of

Wikipedia, which offers a highly supportive environment of like-minded users, and

lets everyone pursue a goal, summarizing human knowledge, that many find not

just attractive, but in fact instrumental for establishing their language and culture in

the digital realm. To summarize a key result of this study in advance: No wikipedia,

no ascent.”

There are 533 proposals for Wikipedia languages in incubator stage, more than

twice the number of actual Wikipedias, but Kornai estimates no more than a third of

them will ever get the required minimum of at least five active users and get

enough pages to make it onto Wikipedia proper.

It’s a self-perpetuating problem that means if you want to do business online, it’s

more than likely going to be in English, the FIGS languages (French, Italian,

German, Spanish), the CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and "the

main languages of former colonial empires" (Dutch, Russian, Portuguese). That’s

the loss of function happening for the languages with fewer speakers or less

representation online. The adage “If it’s not on the web, it does not exist,” neatly

encapsulates the loss of prestige. And as a generation of digital natives comes up,

their online tongue is likely not to be their mother tongue—a loss of competence.

As an interesting aside, Arabic, while both digitally vital and the fifth most-spoken

language in the world, was not considered at thriving status yet, as it failed to meet

one of the study’s criteria—Apple OS didn’t support it at the time Kornai was doing

the study.

But aside from the 250 digital survivors, all others are drifting towards something

Kornai calls "digital heritage status," where material is available for research and

documentation purposes, but the language is not used by native speakers online.

Ross Perlin, writing at Al Jazeera America, explained that much of the internet’s

linguistic exclusion comes back to the fact that a lot of it is written. “The language

database Ethnologue estimates that 3,535 of the world’s 7,105 living languages

have no writing system whatsoever,” he said. And with 96 percent of the world’s

languages spoken by just 4 percent, many voices get drowned out, as there are

fewer than 10,000 people who speak that language.

That said, Kornai makes a compelling case for diversity and what we miss when a

language disappears:

Each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the

manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the

world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding

of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the

intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for

some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often

under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture.

“Intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan”—If he’d added in “vulgar” he’d have

described the internet perfectly. Perlin is optimistic that increasing face-to-face

resources will make a place for non-written languages, but Kornai isn't so sure.

Actually, Kornai's fairly sure that this is the end of most of these languages.

"Evidently, what we are witnessing is not just a massive die-off of the world’s

languages, it is the final act of the Neolithic Revolution, with the urban

agriculturalists moving on to a different, digital plane of existence, leaving the

hunter-gatherers and nomad pastoralists behind," he wrote.

Well, just as there are still hunter gatherers somewhere in the world today, pockets

of these languages will remain where they always have: in the meat space. The

internet might not be making room for all of the world's languages to have their own

Wikipedia, but many will at least get their own Wikipedia page. Even when they're

no longer spoken, the internet will no doubt maintain resources for preserving

languages as subjects of study, so at the very least the wisdom in them won't be

lost forever when the last speaker signs off.

TOPICS: Lingua Franca, online, culture, languages, Wikipedia