The first point is about the need for a common global language. We have
gotten along without one for all of human history, do we really need one?
as homo sapiens, evidently, we do not. But the need for this tool is not a
need of humans as such, it is a need of the ecosocial system as whole. To
put it in more Latourian terms, it is a need of the network which defines
both us and our technological practices and artifacts. One could say that
our technology needs it, except that would make the same error on the other
side. It is the current partnership of humans with a certain scale and type
of technology, as with the environment as a whole (a trickier question),
that seems to ground this need.
It probably goes without saying that today there is more travel between
language groups, more communication between groups and across larger
distances, more need to coordinate more complex and more frequent sorts of
doings across language groups. In the past one needed a few translators, a
few polyglot diplomats, a few bilingual businessmen ... they were enough
for the degree of interchange that was needed at that stage of global
technological development. It's not enough now, and very soon it seems to
me that large segments of the world population will need to deal in one way
or another with communications in _more than one_ other language. That is
where the traditional model of bilingualism breaks down; we can no longer
unite our historically specific moment of the world for practical purposes
by bridging languages two at a time. It is ridiculously wasteful to imagine
more than a very small number of people learning three, four, or five, much
less a dozen other languages. Instead, we will each learn just one other
language -- except for us poor lonely native English speakers, most of whom
will miss the joy and richness of knowing, using, learning a second language.
At least until the day comes when ComSeL is so divergent from our native
English dialects that we have to virtually study it as a foreign language
... which is already the case for speakers of many creolized and nativized
English dialects.
Which brings me to the second point, really the main point, made by
Edouard. That as languages evolve, it is the ComSeL that will first adapt
to new global artifacts, practices, phenomena, and which will evolve the
new specialized registers for new cultural realities ... and then what will
become of the other languages? His proposal is that linguistic diversity is
unstable in the presence of a universal second language. Perhaps this is
true. We have no real way to know. But I do not think we should
underestimate the centrifugal forces in language use (as Bakhtin
emphasized), nor should we put the blame on language for what is more
fundamentally a question of global cultural homogenization -- itself I
think, a bit unlikely.
I do not think we will see an end to linguistic diversity, though it may
well be that the old regional languages will disappear or become mere
antiquarian curiosities or the focus of hobbyists. There are other sources
of linguistic diversity wherever there are lines of differentiation and
cleavages of community of communication. We may have occupational dialects,
new forms of social class dialects, many forms of language diversity other
than geographical or national-historical.
And if the old languages are pushed aside by the spread of new artifacts
and practices named and described and talkable-about originally in the
ComSeL, then this is primarily a homogenization of culture and only
secondarily a language effect. It really does not matter all that much, at
least so far as our linguistic knowledge suggests, whether an item has a
'native' French or Yoruba name or a phonologically transformed version of
an originally English or ComSeL one. What matters is whether the discourse
semantics changes, whether one talks about 'flatbed scanners' and
'listgroups' or 'le web' in discourses, more specifically in semantic
formations, that are one-to-one translatable or not. If they are the same
discourses, merely trivially transposed, then the value of the uniqueness
of different languages has already been lost at the level of _meaning_ and
preserving it at the level of wording is hollow at best. If languages do
not _mean_ differently, then they are just re-codings of the same language.
I am not neglecting here the importance of intertextuality and connotation
and historical allusiveness or cultural associative richness which make any
sentence even literally translated mean differently in another language.
Some of this does in fact depend on wording, and because of this, to the
extent that a community wishes to preserve these traditions, it will
probably also work to preserve the forms of its unique language, even with
a global cultural content. How well it will succeed, I don't know. We have
seen, as the example from Wales indicates, a number of cases in this
century where more or less obsolescent languages seemingly headed for
extinction under the pressure of a dominant language have been revived.
Usually for political and economic reasons, precisely the same kind of
reasons that had formerly led to their near extinction. One should never
count a language out if the will and power to maintain it remain strong in
a community. It is even possible that a universal second language will
REDUCE the hegemonic leverage of other politically dominant languages in
their own spheres. Could it happen that one day Catalan speakers and
Castillian speakers, Cantonese and 'Mandarin' speakers, will do business
with each other in Global English? as now, I imagine, Bengali and Hindi
speakers do?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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