Language and Communication IGCSE Comprehension

1There are currently somewhere between six and seven thousand languages spoken on Earth. By the end of this century, linguists estimate, roughly half of them will have fallen silent. A language does not die all at once. It loses speakers, one by one, as the old grow older and the young move toward languages that seem more useful, more connected, more likely to earn them a living. At some point the last speaker dies, and with them goes a way of naming the world that no other language contains.

2Language is not a neutral vessel for carrying information from one person to another. It shapes what we notice, what we remember, what we are able to think. The Yagua people of Peru use five different past tenses, chosen by how long ago something happened: a few hours ago, yesterday, within the last few weeks, within the last year or two, or in the distant past of legend. English, which uses one simple past for all of these, cannot mark these distinctions in its grammar. Speakers of Yagua are not more intelligent than speakers of English. They are differently equipped.

3The global spread of English is a phenomenon without precedent in linguistic history. No other language has achieved this degree of reach this rapidly. It functions now as the language of international business, scientific publication, aviation and digital communication. A researcher in Istanbul communicates with a counterpart in Tokyo not in Turkish or Japanese but in English, a language that neither of them grew up with. For practical purposes this is enormously convenient. It is also, in ways that take longer to articulate, a loss.

4What is lost when a language dies is not just vocabulary. It is a set of lenses through which a community has looked at the world for centuries. The structure of a sentence reflects a way of understanding time, causation, relationship and identity. When the Siletz Dee-ni language of Oregon was reported, early this century, to have just one fluent speaker left, the world became very slightly less capable of thinking about itself in all the ways it had once been able to. This is a loss that is almost impossible to grieve, because it is almost impossible to perceive.

5The last fluent speaker of the Dalmatian language died in 1898. He was an old man on an island, and when he went the language went with him. Only part of it was ever written down. We know approximately what Dalmatian sounded like and almost nothing about what it felt like to think in it. That gap is permanent. We will not cross it. What we can choose is how many gaps of that kind we are willing to make.