Language in the world: properties and powers
Claims about the properties of languages
The English language, for example, has been characterized as potentially either 'a benevolent bonus or creeping cancer of modernity' (Phillipson 1992: 11, quoting Fishman). The biological metaphor recurs in this debate, sometimes leading to a reification of 'language' and an exaggeration of its properties. Thus, while likening endangered languages to endangered biological species is a seductive rhetorical device, it is deceptive if it leads us to equate the two kinds of things. Contra Nettle and Romaine, who claim that 'English, Spanish, French and so on are the monoculture crops of the cultural domain, and they balance just as their biological equivalents, wheat, rice and cattle do', we think it is important to acknowledge that cereals and animals are natural kinds, albeit ones which people have affected by farming them. Languages, on the other hand, are human products, which, as cultural emergent properties, differ in important ways from objects in the material, natural world (cf. Blommaert 2001c: 140), In our view much of the debate concerning language death and linguicide neglects this distinction, making extravagant claims about what language is, what it does and what it signifies.
For example, Phillipson (1992: 279) claims as *an incontrovertible fact that English has a lot of resources' both 'material' and 'immaterial', Crystal (2002: 44) claims that languages contribute to the sum of human knowledge'. It is not, of course, English as a language that has resources, but various groups of speakers of English who do. It is not languages as languages that contribute to knowledge, but rather human beings, whose knowledge is linguistically communicated, Rassool (2000) claims that language is the means by which groups of people name the world, and that 'in the process of naming, the world itself is transformed' (p.61). It is not the world which is transformed, however, but people's interpretations of the world, which may be modified by different ways of speaking about them. Global inequalities are not eradicated simply by redescribing them.
The analogy of linguistic diversity with biodiversity is also misleading. The species of animals and plants that are natural kinds, that maintain species boundaries by failing to interbreed, are 'diverse' in a different way from languages, which quite clearly do become intermingled, giving rise to new varieties. If they did not, the linguistic purists who seek to defend the boundaries of particular varieties (be these standard English or a threatened minority language) would be much less exercised than they are, since there would be no possibility of a contact language ('Species A') altering, or being altered by, any feature of another variety ('Species B'). Despite denials from the protagonists (see Skutnabb-Kangas et al 2001), the very notion that varieties are under threat rests on a conceptualization of languages as homogeneous entities with naturally occurring boundaries.
It also entails some commitment to linguistic determinism, if the repositories of knowledge deemed to be realized in particular varieties are lost when the variety is lost. A non-relativistic view, however, recognizes the potential of translatability between languages. Thus while a variety that has separate lexical items to denote a wider range of phenomena - such as colors, or species of plants or animals affords its speakers direct ways of conveying these meanings, a variety with fewer such distinctions obliges its speakers to take a more circuitous route to the same end, using many words to denote something which is conveyed by a single word in another language. However, so long as we recognize that human beings constitute one species rather than many, the concepts and knowledges expressed through the threatened variety can in principle be available to humanity at large. If such understanding is disregarded, this is likely to be because of the political, not linguistic, priorities of the powerful.
