Losing nature, losing language
During the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (Cop15) in Montreal, co-hosted by Canada and China, governments from around the world settled on a historic agreement to protect nature and halt biodiversity loss. All countries but the US and the Vatican have pledged to protect 30% of the Earth’s natural areas and restore 30% of the planet’s degraded terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine ecosystems by 2030. However, the agreement didn’t come without controversies. Indonesia, Brazil, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, three mega-biodiverse countries and home to the world’s three largest rainforests, wanted governments to agree to the creation of a new biodiversity fund separated from the UN global environment facility fund in order to obtain more direct funding for the Global South, a suggestion which was denied without further discussion and the conference was abruptly declared finished by the Chinese representative.
Nevertheless, a good thing that has come out of COP15, and the agreement respectfully, is the fact that it is now unarguable that biodiversity must be maintained and preserved. Preserving ecosystems means preserving a network of relationships between each element in natural spaces, where damage to any one of the elements can result in unforeseen consequences for the whole system.
So, what is the role of language in all of this? Well, language reflects the knowledge of flora and fauna and all those elements that constitute an ecosystem. Furthermore, linguistic diversity and biodiversity are in direct proportion with each other. As pointed out by evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel ‘‘languages, like all biological species, get thicker on the ground as you approach the equator’’. In fact, other studies have shown that areas of biologic megadiversity overlap with areas of high linguistic diversity.
For example, two of the linguistically most diverse counties in the world, Papua New Guinea (850 languages) and Indonesia (670 languages), are also home to some of the world’s largest rainforests and have a high number of endemism (characteristics that are restricted to single countries or locales and nowhere else). But while biodiversity loss and the extinction of species are rather relevant topics, the same cannot be said for the loss of languages. For many, the loss of a language does not evoke an outcry, and some even see it as a positive thing. According to this particular stance towards linguistic diversity, language extinction is inevitable, and the homogenisation of language is seen as necessary for global harmony, economic efficiency, and technological development. Therefore, “undesirable” languages that are seen as an obstacle to economic and technological growth should be allowed to die.
On the other hand, a different stance feels that the loss of a language should be mourned just as much as the loss of an animal species. They believe language to be more than just a system of grammar rules and a cluster of words. Language is seen as part of the human spirit – thoughts, metaphors, specialized knowledge, unique experiences that developed over many centuries – and therefore, the loss of a language represents the loss of knowledge, culture, and history. Some might argue that languages can be documented in written form, and while that is, in a sense, true, having written heritage of a language can never fully reflect the richness and spontaneity of the usage and creativity that comes out in spoken language in social settings – just as stuffing and preserving an animal to keep it in a museum will never be the same as having a live specimen frolicking away in nature.
And while science has been sounding the alarm for the sixth mass extinction of species, languages have actually been dying out at an even more alarming pace. It is estimated that of the 7000 languages spoken today around the world, as much as 95% might be lost by the end of the century. The remaining 5% would belong to 20 language families at most, with Indo-European and Niger-Congo language families taking up more than half of the linguistic space. Furthermore, in 200 years’ time we might have only about 600 languages spoken around the world left. Among the reasons for language loss are mass population migrations in search for better job opportunities, political reasons, natural calamities, and forced displacement. Historically, colonisation and the spread of the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese languages have led to the loss of indigenous languages in North and South America. As a consequence, the loss of indigenous languages led to the loss of indigenous knowledge of the Earth.
Today, both linguists and speakers of endangered languages are more conscious and sensitive to the issue of language loss and several organisations are working on their preservation, maintenance, and development. Apart from cultural reasons, preserving endangered languages is vital for biodiversity. It is estimated that over 80% of the world’s species are yet to be catalogued. Perhaps there are languages and populations out there that already have that knowledge.
Based on the paper Linguistic diversity and biodiversity, Ramanjaney Kumar Upadhyay, S. Imtiaz Hasnain, Lingua, Volume 195, 2017.
