Monday, February 21, 2005
Why Dying Languages Don't Matter
Via Gregg Easterbrook:
The fewer the tongues, the more easily societies communicate. Languages are barriers to trust and understanding. Even in well-off places with few social problems, language barriers create mistrust: Think of Quebec or Belgium. ...
People who romanticize indigenous languages usually, themselves, achieved comfortable positions in life by speaking and writing one of the top ten tongues and by living in a society that has single-language cohesion. A person who communicates only in a rare language--especially a spoken-only dialect that cannot be written--is at a huge disadvantage in anything other than an isolated community. Why is Singapore so much more affluent than its neighbors? In part owing to a long-standing policy of teaching public-school students English.
Even in Mongolia, students are learning English. English has become the language taught in classrooms all over the globe, except for one place: bilingual education classrooms here in the United States.
|posted by Jim on 2:10 PM|
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