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How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

washingtonpost.com

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Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#11

Post by Jun8 »

sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

It's a cultural artifact so your question, I think, is equivalent to asking the value of preserving any cultural artifact, e.g. a Greek kylix or an Inca quipu.

In addition to the above pure artifact preservation aspect language (when paired with a lot of text, this is not always the case, e.g. Etruscan language) can make available vast data about a community. When Asyyrian was decoded and the great libraries of tablets were discovered (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal), our knowledge of the culture of the Ancient Middle East increased exponentially.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#12

Post by latj »

Nux wrote: post #8
mullingitover wrote: post #6

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

Can't upvote this enough. A united world needs to speak the same language. Down with the borders, of any kind.

First, I dont think lack of a language's presence online means that the language is dying. For example the world could be becoming more multilingual.

Second, the whole world doesnt need to speak the same language for cohesive unification. We just need star trek level translation which doesnt seem so far fetched these days.

Finally, everything comes and goes- the stars, the tide, human life, and language. Have you tried speaking to someone from east Baltimore lately? I havent either, but according to my source, The Wire, they speak a language that would probably be close to unintelligible between people from other parts of the English speaking world.

In other words, I'm not worried about language diversity- whenever humans find the need to express themselves in ways that doesnt fit in the current framework, they find a way.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#13

Post by tokenadult »

The interesting article kindly submitted here reports:

"His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.

"Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography."

Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of the Internet, will not likely be used on the Internet. Whether or not such languages are still used in family life or for local community interaction is a distinct issue.

I am multilingual, as disclosed on my Hacker News user profile. The number of languages in regular use on the Internet is more than any one person can learn in a lifetime (most claims of one individual being able to speak dozens of languages fluently are very badly exaggerated) and every one of those languages, from multiple language families, is very likely to stay alive for a long time. A person who speaks more than one language, as I do, can choose to use different languages in different circumstances, as I do. Indeed, for many multilingual people, "code-switching" is part of signaling a switch to a different tone in conversation (say, from serious to humorous, or the other way around) or signaling "social register" (whether the person you are speaking to is being treated with friendly intimacy or with distant deference).

So I am not worried about this, on the whole. Other comments here posted before mine talk about the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (that "language shapes thought") but the strong version of that hypothesis is certainly untrue. (For one thing, human beings don't always think in language, but often also in pictures or in music.) Diversity in language will not go away because of the Internet. If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#15

Post by salient »

DanielStraight wrote: post #10
sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation: "As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom." Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in la…

It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#16

Post by gliese1337 »

pouetpouet wrote: post #4
sophacles wrote: post #2

Serious question: what are the arguments in favor of language preservation?

Languages shape the mind. A language gives a special outlook on life and has its own reality. There are also specific linguistic features that are interesting to linguists and help to comprehend how languages work. One could also draw a parallel with genetic diversity.

In my opinion (as someone who works in NLP & computational linguistics), preserving more data on how languages can work is the most important bit. Languages do influence cognition a little bit, but not as much as most people think. Nevertheless, most people think that they do, and if you only know a few languages, its easy to get stuck thinking that, oh, this is how all languages must work, and this is inherently how people think.

This is a problem in contemporary linguistics- the "big" languages are really heavily studied and theories are developed to describe them accurately, nevermind that they may completely fail for, say, Xhosa or Straits Salish. The bias has been decreasing over the last few decades, but getting a really good idea of the real fundamental underpinnings of human language depends on all those minority languages not disappearing, undocumented, before we're done.

Of course, there are other reasons which are important to people working on other fields- languages are strongly tied to culture, and when a language dies, so does a lot of other cultural knowledge and practice that may be useful to ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#17

Post by infruset »

epaladin wrote: post #9
pouetpouet wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages shape the mind. A language gives a special outlook on life and has its own reality. There are also specific linguistic features that are interesting to linguists and help to comprehend how languages work. One could also draw a parallel with genetic diversity.

This has been my experience with picking up a second language. There are concepts that are expressed in a single Japanese word that seem like they would need a small book to explain adequately in English. Maybe there are places where the language and culture aren't so intertwined, but Japan at least isn't one of them. So as much as I think the grand flattening of the world is great in some ways, I would be a little s…

As a native French speaker, I agree with you. For technical discussions such as programming or engineering it can be argued that using one language (nowadays, obviously English) encourages cooperation and progress. However, in other domains, languages carry much more than a practical means of transmitting information, they bear a whole culture with them. Two examples which I hear and read a lot in the English speaking world but which are either impossible to translate in French or at least to utter without ridicule: "successful" (as in a person), and "evil" (as in, a dictator).

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#18

Post by diziet »

Since this came up again -- we recently did an analysis on a data-set of over 100 million of the app store reviews across different countries. English and other european languages were extremely prevalent, with english dominating. The people who tend to use fancy smartphones etc are much more likely to speak english and are also exposed to english language content, apps, etc. For example, in Israel, 51% of reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. More examples: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#19

Post by DanielStraight »

salient wrote: post #15
DanielStraight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia[1] references a source[2] with a pretty good explanation: "As each language dies, many sciences - linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology - lose one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language's structure, vocabulary and idiom." Linguistics is obviously most affected. The variety of sounds and grammar used in la…

It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.

The kind of languages we are talking about aren't recorded in books, many don't even have a written form. People have to go into the field and listen and record and write up grammars and such from scratch.

Re: How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages

#20

Post by efa »

mullingitover wrote: post #6

Another way of titling this would be, "How the internet is uniting humanity." Languages are tools for communication, and while it's sad from an anthropological/historical perspective to be losing languages, from a humanist perspective it's fantastic news. The more people can communicate without barriers, the better it makes the world for everyone.

Yep! I saw the title and thought "this is a bad thing?".
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