
How the Internet is Killing the World's Languages - dctoedt
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/12/04/how-the-internet-is-killing-the-worlds-languages
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mullingitover
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.

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

~~~
DanBC
I welcome your attempts to learn and speak Mandarin as that single global
language.

~~~
gazrogers
I wish I could upvote this more than once. A lot of comments here are positive
about the idea of a single global language when it's their language that wins
out. I strongly suspect that if it were Mandarin, Arabic or Russian instead of
English that was being suggested, their enthusiasm for the idea might be more
muted.

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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...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-
why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

~~~
tokenizer
> 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.

And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I
mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of
multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just
celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?

It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some
languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually
be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely
resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the
reality of space and time.

~~~
jotm
No, having less languages is not bad - far from it. Even the Bible (which I
think is a rather useless relic of the past) says that multiple languages were
made to stop people from working with each other and reach heaven.

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nostromo
This happened before the internet with Arabic numerals.

There was a time when each culture had their own method for transcribing
numbers. (My favorite is Egyptian Numerals that denoted 10,000 with a drawing
of a bent finger.)

Today, I imagine (but I'm not sure) that I can travel almost anywhere in the
world and the number 123 would mean the exact same thing. And that seems to be
a good thing.

~~~
tsuyoshi
Sort of. There are two other numeral systems I know of that are still being
used: Chinese (used in Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Korean) and
Khmer (used in Khmer/Cambodian, Thai, and Lao). Literate people in places that
use those numeral systems know and use Arabic numerals too, but the Chinese
and Khmer numerals are in no danger of dying out anytime soon. And even in the
English-speaking world, we still use Roman numerals in certain contexts.

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

~~~
pouetpouet
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.

~~~
epaladin
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 sad if we ended up with a
global monoculture catalyzed by the coalescing of languages. Other cultures
are just fascinating to explore.

~~~
infruset
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).

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spodek
The internet doesn't "kill" languages.

People _choose_ what language to speak. If they -- rather, we -- have a choice
of languages, why do we choose common ones instead of uncommon ones? We are
actively choosing to speak common languages, not some abstract network of
computers is killing something.

If linguists or anyone else says we're doing something wrong and losing
something valuable, why do we keep doing it?

Is it possible they're missing something, that maybe we gain more in choosing
to understand each other than we're losing in ... in what, being able to read
books that we haven't translated yet? In having a different set of nuances? Do
any languages have a greater ability to describe thoughts than others? I
suspect different languages have _different_ nuances, but I doubt any has
_greater total_ ability to communicate.

~~~
DanielStraight
In what? In being able to study the thousands of dramatically different ways
humans can communicate.

Preserving languages is about preserving data for linguistics (and other
fields). We preserve a lot of things with no "real value". We preserve
fossils, species (any species with fewer than 100 remaining specimens isn't
contributing to any ecosystem), books (even ones that are outdated and no one
is ever likely to read), websites... I could go on all day. We preserve this
stuff because we can learn by studying it.

Languages don't just have different nuances, they have completely different
ways of putting human thought into words. They have grammars so different that
a word for word translation would be no more readable than an untranslated
text. They have such a huge variety of sounds that encoding them into IPA
stretches the limits of Unicode's variants of the Latin alphabet, relying on
many diacritic marks on top of regular characters.

It's not about preserving something that gives some greater ability to
communicate. It's about preserving a database of linguistic evolution and the
bounds of how human thought can be encoded orally.

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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...](http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-
store-reviews-can-tell-you-about-foreign-language-app-users/)

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vdaniuk
My first native language is not English, nor is the second language. I say
good riddance, humanity will prosper more without linguistic barriers.

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DanBC
People might be interested in the Endangered Languages Project -
[http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/](http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/)

"An online collaborative effort to protect globa linguistic diversity".

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plaid_hatter
The measure used here is a little suspect. Looking at words used in webpages
is a pretty poor measure when many languages have little handwritten language
to start with. I just returned from a remote tribal group (The Khasi) in India
last month and although their web page penetration may be low, they all
facebook or text in their local language. I doubt these social aspects are
measured and thus miss widespread use of many languages. Public webpages are
often wanted to grow beyond your small group and if a writer knows a more
common language, then he would rightly use that to grow the sphere of
understanding.

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neakor
On one hand, having a variety of languages makes the world diverse, more
interesting and perhaps even encourages different ways of thinking. On the
other hand, the high cost of communicating with multiple languages makes
sharing thoughts and ideas harder, and perhaps even hinders our productivity
and advancement as a whole. It's a tough call, but I vote for unification. In
the name of advancement of humanity, we shall sacrifice diversity!

~~~
infruset
And choose what as the universal language? I assume, lest it might seem like
there is a conflict of interest, that you are thinking of some language you
don't speak? Thank you for showing the way in this sacrifice everyone must
make.

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w1ntermute
Related discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837722)

