Colonization operates in Third World Countries in the form of Neo-colonization.
Factors affecting language shifts:
- Factors which lie in the changing socioeconomic conditions to which speakers respond adaptively for their survival.
- (Colonization) Power has usually been invoked as an important factor that has favored language of the powerful over those of the dominated, hence, less powerful populations.
- Prestige favor a particular language (variety) over others.
costs and benefits they derive from language shift in their particular socioeconomic ecologies. They should also think out whether any actions can realistically be taken on the relevant ecologies to prevent language shift at the expense of ancestral languages. I start by articulating the senses of the notions of colonization and globalization which have figured prominently in the relevant literature, highlighting how they bear on language vitality.
2. The terminology matters
Outside population genetics, colonization conjures up political and economic domination of a population by another. This form of control is often associated with military power, which, based on the history of mankind, is the means typically used to effect such domination. This has been made more obvious by the European colonization of the world over the past four centuries, at least until the independence of African and Asian countries in the middle of the twentieth century. Still the term colonization, often in alternation with colonialism and neo-colonialism, has often been used to describe the economic relation of Third World countries with their former colonial metropoles. It is also on this interpretation of colonization that the current debate of language endangerment has largely depended, especially when languages of the Third World are at issue . Thus, power has usually been invoked as an important factor that has favored language of the powerful over those of the dominated, hence, less powerful populations.
However, by focusing on the variable fates of languages among the colonized, oppressed, or powerless rural populations of Africa, volumes such as Brenzinger (1998) highlight the fact that the vitality of a language depends very much on factors other than power. They show that if power has any role to play, basic cost-and-benefit considerations having to do with what a speaker needs a particular language for, or to what extent a particular language facilitates one’s survival in a changing socio-economic ecology, determine what particular languages are given up and doomed to attrition and eventual extinction. Many African languages have recently lost the competition not to languages of power but to peers that have guaranteed a surer economic survival.2What such literature shows is that, like the emergence of new language varieties, language endangerment is also one of the outcomes of language contact and is also subject to patterns of interaction among the populations in contact.
In order to understand the above view, it helps to also think of colonization in its population genetics interpretation, when a population relocates in a new territory, regardless of whether the latter is or is not inhabited by an indigenous population. Thus the 18th-century settlement of French colonists on Reunion and Mauritius, then uninhabited, was as much a form of colonization as the settlement of several Caribbean islands by Europeans during the 16th-18th centuries, or the establishments of trade forts on the African and Asian coasts during the 16-18th centuries, or the political and economic domination of several African and Asian countries from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries. Bearing in mind that even the spread of Indo-European populations in Europe involved as much of settlement colonization as the domination of the Americas and Australia by the English, history tells us that colonization as understood in population genetics has assumed many styles involving different patterns of interaction. The more common, political notion of colonization rests largely on the more neutral, population genetics notion.
From the point of view of language contact, the consequences of colonization have not been uniform. Although several languages have died in the process (e.g., Celtic languages in Western Europe and several Native American languages), new ones have also emerged (e.g., English out of the contact of Germanic languages among themselves and with Celtic languages, the Romance languages out of the contact of Vulgar Latin with continental southwestern European Celtic languages, and todays pidgins and creoles out of the contact of European and non-European languages in some extra-European colonies especially during the 17th-19th centuries). It is not always the colonized populations that have lost their languages. Sometimes, it is the colonists and colonizers who have, as in the case of the Norman French in England, or the Tutsi (formerly speakers of Nilotic languages) in Rwanda and Burundi, or the Peranakan Chinese in the Straights of Malacca. There are also interesting cases where the old and new languages have coexisted. For them, what is now interpreted as a threat to the more indigenous language (e.g., Basque vis-a-vis Spanish) is only a recent development.
It is thus difficult to produce a general and uniform formula of what happens when a population colonizes another, not any more regarding language vitality than regarding the development of new language varieties. As argued in Mufwene (2001), the ecology of every case of language contact is somewhat unique. Despite similarities among them, what happens in one setting is not necessarily replicated in another. To be sure, we cannot overlook similarities, such as the fact that language loss has been the most catastrophic in settlement colonies and new language varieties have emerged additively in trade colonies (i.e., without replacing some extant languages). On the other hand, one must still note differences from one colony to another, regardless of whether the members of the relevant subset can all be identified as plantation or non-plantation settlement colonies, or as trade or exploitation colonies. Settlement colonies of North America still differ from those of Latin America, plantation colonies of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean were not quite the same as those of the Pacific, and exploitation colonies of Africa were not quite the same as those of Asia.
Like colonization, the terms globalization in English and mondialisation in French have figured prominently in the literature on language endangerment. Globalization and mondialisation have typically been assumed to be cross-linguistic equivalents and therefore synonymous. Actually, they are not. They reflect yet different perspectives on a phenomenon which is related in diverse ways to the wide range of socio-economic, hence ecological, factors that produce it. A more adequate English translation of mondialisation seems to be universalization, having to do with world-wide distribution of some institutions such as McDonald (hence the terms McDonal(d)ization and mcdonaldisation in both languages), of cultural products such as Hollywood movies and American toys and pop music, and the spread of English in several parts of the world, including those where it is spoken by less than 5% of the total population (as in several former French colonies in Africa).
One should simply beware of the fact that universalization also means generalization. Although this interpretation can also be associated with globalization, it is not part of the meaning of mondialisation. The fact that these terms are not equivalent just reveals the fact that much of the ecologically-oriented literature on language endangerment has not articulated precisely what particular aspects of globalization bear on the vitality of a language and under what specific conditions. One may ask for instance why global economy and the spread of English have not been as dangerous to indigenous languages in Asia as in the Americas.
There is certainly a sense in which global, from which globalization is derived, means universal as worldwide, as in global warming. However, it does not take long to notice that global in global war does not necessarily mean worldwide. Global war is not synonymous with world war. While these examples make obvious how globalization has come to mean so many different things (see also below), the meaning of global in global economy, which has often been invoked in the recent literature on language endangerment, is closer to that of global war , which involves many interrelated parties or places than to that of global warming. Economic globalization has endangered some languages primarily as a local phenomenon . For instance, in Taiwan, English (so often blamed for the loss of other languages around the world) is not widely spoken by Taiwanese and has had nothing to do with the endangerment of Formosan languages. Chinese, which is also the language of Taiwanese global economy, is the culprit. Relative to English, Chinese in Taiwan is as safe as any language with a lot of vitality can be these days.
Many countries participate in the global economic system only to the extent that they have become parts of networks of industrial interdependencies that blur their national boundaries. Yet not all countries participate in such networks at the same level of the manufacturing structure nor to the same extent. Many Third world countries in especially Africa participate only marginally in these networks. When a particular common language, such as English or French, is required for communication among the different branches of such multinational companies, not all employees of these companies are expected to be fluent in the lingua franca, especially where most of the labor is involved in the production of raw materials to be processed outside the country, or a large proportion of the adult population is unemployed and thus seriously disfranchised from the economic system. In such places, the vast majority of the populations continue to function in their ancestral or other local vernaculars, which they in fact adopt as their identity marker to distinguish themselves from the minority of affluents.
To my knowledge, Caribbean territories reflect some of the earliest experiences of loss of ancestral languages by the enslaved Africans and by the Arawakans and the Caribs in European settlement colonies since the sixteenth century. In most of them, the creole vernaculars that later on replaced these languages (through shifts to European colonial vernaculars) have become identity markers for the present masses of the disenfranchised proletarians who function only in the local and low functions of their economies. They stand in contrast with the acrolectal varieties spoken by minorities of the more affluent members of their societies. Creole speakers have either resisted shifting to the acrolects, or have seldom faced opportunities and real pressure to do so, despite a long history of stigmatization of their own vernaculars.
However, it is helpful to remember that globalization is not equally extensive or integrated everywhere. This can be gauged by the extent to which a population depends on, for instance, electricity and the telephone for a large part of their activities. There are many Third World countries where this state of affairs is still a dream. To date, although variation in the state of globalization in a particular country reflects the extent of its economic success and technological advancement, it is to some extent also correlated with the nature of its recent colonization if the country was settled and/or dominated by Europe some time over the past four centuries.
What is especially relevant to this paper is the fact that the above-mentioned competition and selection gradually led to some monolingualism, favoring the language of the colonizing nation (England in the case of most of North America but other languages elsewhere) but disfavoring and dooming to extinction the languages brought by the Africans (who were first to lose theirs) and other Europeans originating from countries other than the colonizing one (the case or Gaelic/Irish, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Swedish in North America, except in Quebec and Ontario). Native Americans lost their languages either because they were decimated by ills and wars, or because they were forced to relocate to places where they couldn’t continue to speak their languages, or because they eventually got to function in the new, European-style economic world order which imposed a new language of business and industry. Unlike trade colonies, settlement colonies everywhere gradually evolved to some form of social and economic integration that has endangered languages other than those of the colonizing European nation, or one adopted by it.
The balance sheet has of course involved more losses than gains, but we must always remember that the outcome of population and language contact in settlement colonies anywhere, including Australia and New Zealand, has not consisted of losses only. This is especially important because we do not know what the future of creoles is, nor whether American English will always be considered a new dialect of English or a separate language a couple of centuries from now, if nothing in the present world order and in the dynamics of the coexistence of languages over the world changes.
The question of the future of creoles is relevant, because former plantation settlement colonies, in which they developed have had an economic history different from those of non-plantation settlement colonies, which are more industrialized. After the Abolition of slavery, plantation settlement colonies evolved economically on a hybrid model between the non-plantation settlement colonies and the exploitation colonies (explained below). With the exception of those that have become French overseas departments, most of the former plantation settlement colonies have not industrialized and belong in the Third World block of nations, marginally engaged in the recent trend of world or regional global economy as a network of industrial productions. The masses of their populations are hardly under any pressure to speak a language (variety) other than Creole. Jamaica is a good example, since, contrary to the expected consequences of DeCamps (1971) mistaken decreolization hypothesis, Patois has gained in vitality, and a new, divergent variety called Dread Talk, more different from the local acrolect, has been developing among some speakers.
The above considerations are simply a reminder that, just as colonization has not been uniform world-wide, the vitality of languages has not been uniformly affected everywhere, not even in former settlement colonies. In future research, it will help to examine the social structures of these former colonies in terms of which have majority European populations and which do not, whether this has some correlation with economic development, and to what extent particular patterns of interaction across language or dialect boundaries have something to do with the process of language endangerment.
It is also worth determining the extent to which settlement is advanced in a particular territory and what can be learned about the factors that bring about language endangerment. If the documentation provided by Nettle & Romaine (2000) is accurate, why are there proportionally more Native American languages surviving in Canada than in the USA, and why are there more indigenous languages still spoken in Latin America than in North America? Are these differences a consequence of variation in colonization patterns within the settlement style (including patterns of interaction with the indigenous populations), are they a consequence of variation in the physical ecologies of the settlement colonies, or do they reflect a combination of both factors? Can the size and nature of the Amazon forest be overlooked as a factor in the survival of indigenous languages in a large part of South America? Is this phenomenon entirely different from Nettles (1999) and Nettle & Romaines (2000) observation that the greatest linguistic diversity obtains along the equatorial forest, in a world-wide belt between the tropics?
One cannot be shocked by the fact that indigenous languages have survived the most in exploitation colonies, which have typically replaced and expanded former trade colonies of Africa and Asia since the mid- or late-19th century. Even those that have died or are moribund there have suffered their predicament not from European colonial languages but from other indigenous languages that have been favored by the new socio-economic ecologies implemented by European colonizers. Although both settlement and exploitation colonies developed from trade colonies, in part as the consequence of the European commercial greed in wanting to control the sources of raw materials and other products needed in Europe, very few colonizers planned or decided to build new homes in the exploitation colonies. As the term exploitation colony suggests, these colonies were intended to be exploited for the enrichment of the European metropole. The colonizers were generally civil servants or companies employees who served limited terms and had to retire back in Europe. With the help of missionaries and their schools, they generally developed an intermediary class of indigenous bureaucrats or low-level administrators through which they communicated with the local populations or they themselves learned the most important of the local languages, but they encouraged no more than this local colonial elite to learn scholastic varieties of their languages.
Instituting economic systems that generally reaped raw materials to be processed in metropolitan industry, the colonizers fostered a two-tiered economic system in which the overwhelming masses of the populations continue to communicate in their own ethnic languages or in (the new) locally-based lingua francas, such as Lingala in the Congo basin, Sango along the Ubangi River, Swahili in East Africa, Wolof in Senegal, Songhay in parts of West Africa east of Senegal (along Arab north-south trade routes), Hausa in Nigeria, Fanagalo in the Copper Belt extending from South Africa to Zambia, and Bazaar Malay in Southeast Asia. In a few places, such as Nigeria, Cameroon, and Papua New Guinea, pidgins based on European languages were being learned naturalistically (by trial-and-error attempts to communicate in these languages, without a teacher) by the masses of the populations who participated in the low ranks of the colonial economy. The expansion of these pidgins into major lingua francas sometimes competed with but did not eliminate (the development of) other indigenous-based lingua francas, such as Pidgin Ewondo in Cameroon or Police Motu in Papua New Guinea.
Overall, these colonial languages were just an addition to local repertoires of languages and constituted little threats to the more indigenous ones, which were protected by the clear division of labor in their functions, with the more indigenous ones functioning as vernaculars and the colonial ones as lingua francas. Socioeconomic changes of the late colonial and post-colonial periods, with many of the new lingua francas becoming urban vernaculars and with relatively more and more lucrative jobs based in urban centers and operating in them gave a competitive edge to the new indigenous lingua francas. Ethnic vernaculars fell in attrition in the cities, and the trend is expanding to some rural areas. The collapse of Third World economies and the increasing relative economic importance of urban centers and their lure which led to rural exodus compounded to further erode the beneficial significance of rural indigenous languages. Still, these have been eroded not by the European languages but by the indigenous lingua francas be they traditional (like Swahili, according to Nurse & Spear 1985) or new (like Lingala).
One must really remember that in the evolution of languages, the balance sheets from the contact of Europe with other countries look so much more different in settlement colonies than in their exploitation counterparts. An important reason is that the Europeans were less invested socially and psychologically in the exploitation colonies than were the colonists in settlement colonies. The latter considered their colonies as their homes (Crosby 1986) and the patterns of their interactions with the indigenous populations gradually moved from sporadic to regular, with the involvement of the Natives in the local economy growing from marginal to engaged. Also, unlike in exploitation colonies, where the European colonizers remained a small, though powerful, minority, the colonists in non-plantation settlement colonies became the overwhelming majorities and instituted socio-economic systems that function totally in their own dominant language. Once demarginalized and now minorities, the Natives in former settlement colonies have felt more and more pressure on them to shift to the majorities languages for their economic survival, especially after their physical ecologies have been transformed in ways that deprived them of the alternative of practicing their traditional economic systems.
In terms of costs and benefits, as a function of the changing socio-economic ecologies, it was only natural for the Natives to shift to the colonists languages. Unlike in exploitation colonies, language shift was critical to the survival of the Natives in settlement colonies, at the cost of losing many of their traditions. In most former exploitation colonies, the Natives did not even feel the pressure to shift, because they remained the overwhelming majorities who in the rural areas have been barely affected by the economic and political transformations undergone by their territories, including the formation of nation states. The options most of them had were either to continue operating in their traditional world or to work in the low cost colonial and post-colonial labor system that does not require a European language.
As a matter of fact, the new world order in former exploitation colonies is such that even the elite participating in the interfacing sector of the economy have had no pressure, except from their own personal attitudes, to give up their indigenous languages. If anything, unless they decided to sever links with their ancestral customs, the pressure has been just the opposite: one must preserve ones competence in the ancestral languages in order to continue interacting with ones relatives in the rural areas. Two factors have especially protected the indigenous languages from being driven out by European languages: 1) the indigenous populations have remained numerically quite superior to the colonizers; 2) the overwhelming majority of them have formed a proletariat that has barely assimilated the external values brought by the colonizers.
The closest approximation of these European values is evident in the development of urban societies, in which traditional and European-colonial ways have mixed and the new indigenous lingua francas, favored by the colonial systems, have gained economic power, and prestige, and have gradually displaced the ancestral ethnic languages. They are the ones that can be said to have endangered indigenous languages, to the extent that some rural populations have been shifting to the urban vernaculars, abandoning some of their traditional cultural values for those practiced in the city. On the other hand, the absence of economic correlates of this appeal of urban values has slowed down the effect that the current linguistic stratification could have had on rural vernaculars. The city has also frustrated some of its residents. Some disenchanted individuals have returned to their rural roots and speak their ancestral languages with zeal.
In the same vein, unemployment in cities and the ever-growing size of the proletariat in African and other Third World countries have also disfavored usage of European languages. There are fewer and fewer incentives for speaking these languages that have sometimes been interpreted as means of exploitation. Even in more prosperous former exploitation colonies such as Singapore and Malaysia, European languages have continued to function primarily as bridges with the world outside ones home, or outside ones ethnic group or neighborhood, or outside ones country. Otherwise, it remains natural to communicate with members of ones inner group in an indigenous, or non-European language.
We should thus not overrate the importance of European languages regarding language endangering. The experience in former exploitation colonies has certainly not been the same as in former settlement colonies, as much as European colonization in general has spread European languages to territories where they were not spoken 400 years ago. Former plantation settlement colonies reveal features of both exploitation and settlement colonies. They are like the latter in that the indigenous languages have generally disappeared, due to the rapid and dramatic deaths of their speakers or regarding the relocations of indigenous populations to places where they discontinued speaking their languages.
The colonies are also similar in that several immigrants lost the languages of their motherlands. As pointed out in note 4, the homestead period in these settlement colonies must have exerted a serious negative founder effect on the languages of the enslaved Africans. As explained in note 4, they were originally integrated as small minorities in the homesteads, which were isolated from each other. They had nobody with whom to speak their languages within the homestead, and in the rare events that they happened to know somebody on another homestead who spoke the same language, there was not enough regular interaction that would have permitted the retention of that common language. Attrition and loss were simply caused by lack of opportunities to interact in the African languages.11 Their creole children learned to speak the colonial languages as their vernaculars and they would in fact become the models emulated by the masses of bozal slaves of the plantation period.
While the colonies were growing from homestead societies to plantation societies, creole slaves were typically preferred to bozal slaves, as they were generally more familiar with the local customs and vernaculars (see, e.g., Berlin 1998). They were often spared the hardship of working as field hands, and they thought of themselves as superior to the bozal slaves, whom they had the responsibility of seasoning. This process entailed acculturating the bozal slaves to the local vernacular. The constant decrease in opportunities to speak African languages, especially in socioeconomic settings marked by high societal multilingualism, fostered more and more erosion of the African languages, and eventually their loss. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of how rural populations have been absorbed over the past century in sub-Saharan African cities, except that here the existence of ethnic neighborhoods has slowed down the process of language shift.
Like in sub-Saharan African cities too, the African slaves formed the overwhelming majorities of the plantation societies. People of European descent have been a small minorities, with small subsets of them emerging as affluent. Yet, the countries that evolved from such plantation societies still contain large proletarian majorities that speak Creole and identify socioeconomically with it. Because of lack of incentives in an economic system depending on foreign markets and industry, participating only marginally in the world’s global economy, and becoming poorer and poorer, Creole has gained more vitality in relation to the acrolectal language varieties spoken by the upper class. In places like Jamaica and Haiti, one learns quickly that the prestige of a language does not necessarily entail its vitality.
The underprivileged do not necessarily aspire at the varieties spoken by the more affluent members of their societies, especially if the varieties won’t improve their conditions. As a matter of fact being economically disfranchised is often a good reason for despising those prestigious varieties.
4. Why speakers shift languages: What linguists should not ignore
As argued in Mufwene (in press), prestige alone won’t favor a particular language (variety) over others. Shifting to a particular language is typically associated with particular benefits to be derived from its usage, especially economic ones. Otherwise, speakers stick to the languages they have traditionally spoken, although they may learn another one for interaction with outsiders. However, even this behavior is benefit-driven. Most Third World populations will not shift to European languages, because the alternatives are not likely to improve their conditions. In the first place, the division of labor which relies on indigenous lingua francas in the lower sectors of the economy (in which most of the workforce are engaged) makes it even unnecessary to target a European language, because the jobs associated with them are very few.
Immigrants to the New World and Australia shifted to the dominant languages because they had emerged as the only languages of the colonies economic systems and they had something to gain from the shift, or at least they avoided the danger of not being able to compete at all on the new job markets. Although slaves gave up their languages because they often had nobody else to speak them with, an important reason why their children never bothered learning their parents languages (just like children in African cities) is that they had everything to gain in speaking the colonial languages as fluently as they could.
European colonization of the past four centuries has definitely contributed to the predicament of languages around the world, as it has introduced new socioeconomic world orders that have pre-empted the usefulness of some languages. However, it is helpful to put things in a historical perspective too. Language shift and language loss are neither new nor recent phenomena, as evidenced by the fact that only 3% of the worlds languages are spoken in Europe (Mayor & Bind 2001), which is one of the most densely populated parts of the world. The prevalence of English (a Germanic language) in the United Kingdom and of Romance languages in a large proportion of Western Europe has been at the expense of Celtic languages, only a handful of which are still spoken today. The Germanic languages are now spoken in territories that used to be Celtic. The Indo-European languages have spread and prevailed in territories formerly inhabited by other populations, as evidenced by rare survivals such as Basque and Finnish.
5. Colonization and globalization: Not such new phenomena
The current literature on language endangerment has presented the phenomenon primarily as one of the negative side-effects of European expansion and colonization of most of the non-European world over the past half millennium. It is true that the geographical and political extents of European expansion have been unprecedented, for instance when one compares the size of the British Commonwealth, as discontinuous as it has been, with that of the Roman Empire a millennium earlier. However, putting things in perspective, one can also realize that the difference in size is also a function of differences in modes of communication. About 1,500 years ago, the size of the Roman Empire was certainly also unprecedented, in fact too large to have central control over, at least under the communicative conditions of the time. Easier and faster transportation systems since the 15th century have enabled the European conquest of territories much farther away from the metropole. Easier and faster means of communication (especially with the invention of the telegraph and telephone, of the radio and television, and now of the internet) have facilitated the political, military, and economic controls of bigger and bigger colonies, making the world look even smaller. Improvements in control techniques have also facilitated the control of more and more aspects of the colonies.
However, today’s colonization differs from colonization of the earlier times more in size and complexity than in kind. It is not so common to refer to the dispersal of the Bantu populations from the southern Nigeria and western Cameroon area into central and southern Africa or of that of Indo-Europeans from Asia Minor to Europe as colonization. In reality, they are, consisting of the domination of indigenous populations by outsiders with stronger forms of economy. As Nettle & Romaine (2000) point out, agriculturalists generally colonized hunter-gatherers and imposed their economic systems on them. Thus the Bantu populations have generally assimilated or decimated the Pygmies and Khoisans in central and southern Africa, and only a few of these latter populations remain today as distinct minorities in a wide area considered Bantu. Of the non-Indo-European languages which preceded the European languages, Basque, Finnish, and Lap are notorious exceptions whose survival conditions need uncovering. Basque is an especially interesting case, because it has survived both the Indo-European and Roman colonizations. Much of the present linguistic map of Western Europe represents consequences of language shift, under colonization, for Roman or Germanic languages. Celtic languages have become moribund minorities in a wide territory, from Germany to the British Isles, that used to be dominated by the Celts.
We stand to learn a lot by trying to understand similarities and differences among those earlier forms of colonization, and between them and the recent European phenomenon of the past 400 years outside Europe. For instance, both British Isles and the southern part of Western Europe were colonized by the Romans. In both parts, Latin was the colonial language. However, the Romance languages have developed only in the latter part. Although one can invoke the subsequent colonization of the British Isles by the Germanics, we cannot ignore the fact that subsequent to Roman colonization, Iberia was dominated first by the Arabs and then by the Visigoths, and France was dominated also by the Frankish. Nor can we ignore the fact that the colonization of England by the Norman French caused no language shift of the kind that would produce a new language from that of the colonizers. Its main consequence was the development of the ancestor of today’s standard English varieties.
It is also important to stress the fact that like in Africa, for instance, it was after the colonizers had left that the important proportions of the indigenous populations shifted to the colonizers languages. Can we assume that if the Germanics had not settled permanently in the British Isles, these territories would have become Romance too? Or are there other factors that must be taken into account? Why didn’t the Arab, Visigoth, Frankish, and Norman colonizations of Iberia, France, and England have the same effects regarding the vitality of indigenous and colonial languages as the Roman and Germanic colonizations of the same territories did? Did all these cases involve colonization of the same style, such as settlement or exploitation? If so, how did they vary?
There are yet similarities between England and North America in the styles of their settlement colonization by outsiders and in the fates of their indigenous languages. When the Germanics settled in England, they drove the Celts westward and later on they assimilating the survivors. So did the Europeans in North America, getting concessions on the eastern coast of North America and driving the Natives westward. Eventually, they assimilated the survivors, after the American Revolution (which was primarily the independence of European colonists from England) and the present United States had been formed. Native Americans were really not brought into American politics and recognized as American citizens until late in the 19th century, and this assimilation process in itself was quite reminiscent of the gradual absorption on of the Celts in the British Isles by the Germanic invaders. Colonized since the 5th century, some Celts such as the Irish did not become subjects of the United Kingdom until the 19th century, long after Oliver Cromwell initiated the settlement colonization of Ireland in the 17th century and potato plantations became one of its major industries. In both cases, the loss of indigenous languages did not start till the assimilation of the Natives to the current socio-economic system.
Noteworthy in all such cases is the fact that absorption of the indigenous population by the colonizers has generally led to the loss of indigenous languages, regardless of whether the Natives are kept in a subordinate position or treated as equal. The critical factor is that of involving them in an economic system in which one must use the language of the new ruler in order to compete in the labor force and function adaptively. This is an aspect of globalization qua homogenization, requiring that things work more or less the same way in the colony as in the metropole, especially in the exercise of power and control of the working class. Here one finds similarities between the Germanicization of England and the rest of the British Isles, the Islamicization of North Africa and Iberia, and the Romanization of southwestern Europe. In the latter case, the impact was linguistically the most devastating after the Romans had left, raising in part the question of why the same thing did not happen in England as in France, Spain, and Portugal. The question also arises of why what happened linguistically in part of the former western Roman empire and in Italy did not happen in the eastern empire, where the Romans continued their domination much longer?
The fact that the Romans withdrew from western part of their empire also suggests that their colonization was apparently more on the exploitation model than on the settlement one. The question thus arises of the conditions under which the language of the former colonizer may be adopted to gradually replace the indigenous languages. As we must recall, this is not about to happen in sub-Saharan Africa, where overall any danger to minor indigenous ethnic languages arises more from the expansion of the indigenous lingua francas which also function as urban vernaculars than from the European colonial languages (Mufwene 2001).18 One important social ecological factor here is that Roman soldiers and administrators married into the local communities and obviously transmitted their language to their children. The latter, who shared power with their parents, also used their Romance languages (i.e., Celticized Vulgar Latin, like todays Africanized French, for instance) in ruling their countries, continuing basically the same Roman administrative style.
In sub-Saharan Africa, segregation was the rule and cross-race unions were relatively rare. Most such unions occurred between the European merchants, those who had no political or administrative power, with African women. The children had barely more advantages than the more indigenous colonial elite, who had the same kind of colonial education. Overall, as auxiliaries to the colonial rule, the African elite were just intermediaries between, on the one hand, the indigenous populations and, on the other, the European colonizers. They continued to socialize with the less privileged indigenous mass and hardly gave up their ancestral cultures, despite their adoption of colonial values. As those of them who visited the metropole must have quickly noticed, they hardly ever westernized, in part because they were hardly acculturated extensively to it, despite their exposure to the European languages. Besides their Africanized varieties were still derided by the Western speakers. Thus their usage of European languages was highly circumscribed, being limited to interactions with Europeans and less commonly to interactions among Africans from different ethnic backgrounds.
Even the few mulattoes that were to be found still had to speak African languages in order to fit in the majority of indigenous populations. One can argue that competence in indigenous languages enabled the elite to still claim roots in an Africa that was ruled and exploited by the colonizers whom they ironically served but who shared little in benefits with them. While running post-Independence Africa, the elite generally tried to maintain the socio-economic structure of colonial sub-Saharan Africa, though they became more successful in maintaining the linguistic division of labor than in sustaining the colonial economic (infra)structure. The decline of their national economies has actually favored the new indigenous lingua francas over the European official languages inherited from the colonial rule. In Tanzania, Swahili has been promoted at the expense of English, and in cities like Kinshasa Lingala has gained more prestige than French in modern popular culture, where French is derided.
Former plantation settlement colonies are somewhat like sub-Saharan African countries in that language varieties of the proletarian masses are far from being endangered by the acrolects that were privileged by the colonial systems. As a matter of fact former English and French plantation settlement colonies were converted into exploitation colonies after the abolition of slavery, with their administrators appointed from the colonial metropoles. The economic systems of all these territories, which remain in the Third World group, have remained generally the same as those of sub-Saharan African countries, with the exception of French overseas departments, whose economic discrepancies from the metropole are just being addressed now. Haiti, which became independent the earliest, in 1804, shows perhaps even the highest proportion of speakers of Creole. As Dejean (1993) points out, this only vernacular of the overwhelming majority of the Haitian population is far from being threatened by French.
Yet, students of language endangerment cannot continue dodging interesting questions that arise from discrepancies among colonization styles. These linguistic developments are like natural evolution in population genetics, where it is absolutely imperative that one understand what ecological factors bring about particular consequences for varying species in an econiche. The non-uniform linguistic consequences of colonization over the world makes it compelling for linguists to have to investigate and better understand the socio-economic factors that affect language vitality, favoring colonial languages at times but indigenous languages at others.
It is also obvious that many of the developments today have antecedents in earlier history, more obviously in the colonization of England by the Germanics and in that of Southwestern Europe by the Romans some centuries earlier. Even the developments were not uniform. Interpreting those earlier cases depends partly on how well we understand the recent cases of colonization and what parallelisms we find between them and their antecedents of previous centuries. In turn, our understanding of the past will shed different light on what we thought we already understood well. What seems particularly obvious is that political and economic globalization in the sense of homogenization at least in the ways of doing things is not a new phenomenon. We have to put things in perspective and assess the balance sheets of losses and gains in terms of benefits to speakers, whose needs the languages had to serve in the first place. They are the ones that are the bottom line of any considerations we can have about language vitality, rather than about loss of cultures or linguistic diversity. No culture nor language has remained the same in the course of time. There is no particular reason why we should want those spoken or experienced today to do otherwise. There is new diversity coming into being all the time, and it too is as informative about the human mind and Universal Grammar as the outgoing one, in ways similar to the replacement of languages in centuries past. It is not so much a specific form of diversity that matters but rather how much can be understood about variation in the architecture of Universal Grammar based on diversity that is available. Otherwise, we would have to resurrect all the dead languages for a truly accurate picture of also the evolution of Universal Grammar itself.
6. Imperial languages and language endangerment: A myth that cannot go on
Globalization in the sense of emergence of international and regional economic networks with blurred national boundaries as well as in the sense of economic monopoly over less developed polities for raw materials and as outlets of ones technology have led world languages such as English and French to compete with each other as imperial or hegemonic languages. These are languages that need not serve as lingua francas among the elite of the indigenous populations (although they often do too) but are primarily needed to interface local economies (regardless of how globalized they are) with foreign and more globalized systems. For instance, French is maintained in Haiti only because this is necessary to maintain some economic ties with France, despite the apparently more important fact that the elite need it to isolate themselves from the proletarian mass (DeGraff 2002). Taiwan and Hong Kong could do locally with their local Chinese varieties and without English, but they use this language to maintain their global associations at the international level with The United States and the United Kingdom. Malaysia and Singapore could probably also do without English and use Malay only as their national lingua franca if their economies did not depend so largely on American and British markets. More and more Third World countries, in especially Africa, have become arenas where English and French are competing with each other for monopoly. French has been losing ground and books such as HagPge (2000), joined by Crystal (2000), Nettle & Romaine (2000), and Renard (2001), decry this expansionism of English. They connect it with the McDonaldization of the world or the world-wide spread of American movies and other cultural products. As a matter of fact, as if to trivialize the language endangerment problem, La Francophonie claims that French is endangered by English. In a March 2002 posting on The Linguist, the British Professor Geoffrey Sampson made a similar absurd observation, apparently confusing the French populations now better disposition to use English as a lingua franca with an unfounded fear of seeing it used as a vernacular in France or Francophone Belgium. There is no evidence of such an evolution yet in these strongholds of French as a vernacular, not even in Quebec, where the economic pressure for such a development is stronger.
Interestingly, McDonald stores around the world operate in the local lingua francas, if not their vernaculars (as in the case of France and Germany). It is not even evident that one needs to prove competence in English in order to have a managerial position in its stores. Hollywood films are often translated into local lingua francas/vernaculars (as in France and Germany), though the music is not. Those who learn in English to partake in American pop culture do not even dream of using it as a vernacular which is true of many parts of the world, including France, Germany, and Russia. What we learn here is indeed some association of the spread of imperial languages with their technologies, which are usually exported with their languages. However, in the vast majorities of places where the imperial languages were not already adopted during the colonial period, the languages are being learned (and introduced in the school system), or alternatively being abandoned, in terms of costs and benefits to the local population. Thus, it is those who hope to benefit from hegemonic languages who invest the most energy into them.
Practical considerations prevail a great deal more than linguists have acknowledged. Proximity to North America has made English more attractive than French to many Haitians today. Economic or technological aid from the USA (even if only symbolic), rather than ideological drives on the part of France to propagate French culture, has made English more attractive to several Third World countries. Economic and professional incentives have made English an asset, albeit as a second lingua franca, even to native Francophone professionals. In any case, one cannot lose sight of the fact that imperial languages are far from becoming vernaculars in these places where the elite still use their indigenous languages in domains associated with their local cultures. It is contradictory on the part of linguists to advocate multilingualism as a possible solution for the survival of languages around the world and yet discourage people from appropriating international languages that should enable them to satisfy personal economic and other cultural interests. One would perhaps have to worry if the hegemonic languages were becoming vernaculars, but they are not, except in former settlement colonies, where it is too late to undo things. Even in places such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where English is widely spoken among Asians of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds, the indigenous languages are far from being threatened by it, despite the overt policy of some Singaporean officials to see English function as a vernacular for all.
As noted above, in several places in the Third World, weak indigenous languages are being threatened by major indigenous languages, not by the colonial or imperial languages, which are spoken regularly only by a small fraction of the population. In those same places, degrading economic conditions have fostered more solidarity within the proletariat and more association with a local lingua franca as a socio-economic identity marker than with the colonial official language. In places such as India, numbers alone are among the strongest defense weapons against the potential spread of English as a vernacular.
There is an exaggerated view of language endangerment as a uniform problem, based on demographic considerations alone, which has been propagated by much of the literature on the subject matter. This is best illustrated with Nettle & Romaines (2000) list of the worlds most widely spoken languages, which includes Chinese varieties, Bengali, Hindi, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Telugu alongside recent major colonial languages, viz., English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic. The list is partly corroborated by the following list of eight most widely spoken languages produced by Mayor & Bind (2001:334): Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, and French.
There is no doubt that colonization of one style or another in the distant past accounts for the fact that all these languages are so widely spoken. The history of the world is marked by regular waves of population movements on small and large scales, with the stronger people assimilating or displacing those they did not kill. This is as much true of the current distribution of the Bantu languages and it is of that of Indo-European languages.21 Asia is no exception, and the current movement for the independence of Tibet from China is but an evolution from that old expansionist colonization which brought together populations speaking different languages. (This imposition is likewise evidenced by differences among Chinese varieties and promotions of Putonghua common language, native name for Mandarin official language, which is based primarily on the Peking variety, as the unifying language).
To be sure, many of the same formerly colonial languages function today primarily as vernaculars rather than as lingua francas. They are also dispersed worldwide, with diasporic communities that are largely a consequence of European colonization and its demand for labor. Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Telugu, none of which qualifies as a world language, certainly fall in this category. Even when they are spoken outside their homelands, they function only as vernaculars among transplanted people from the same ethnolinguistic background. Thus, in North America and Europe, Chinese is spoken typically in Chinatowns (though one cannot even take it for granted that the younger generation is acquiring it in these neighborhoods).
The other languages (English, French, Arabic, etc.) are recent hegemonic languages that largely owe the large numbers of their speakers also to their lingua franca functions. English and French in particular have more non-native than native speakers. While Chinese vernaculars may be a real threat to some Tibetan languages, English, French, and Arabic are certainly no dangers to many languages of the Third World, where they are spoken as second language varieties and for highly circumscribed functions, and only by small fractions of the indigenous population.
Besides, there is a fallacy in counting Nigeria and India as Anglophone countries in the same way as the United States is, or the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Island of Dominica, and Vietnam as Francophone in the same way as France, Qubec, and Belgium are. Along with Dejean (1993), I think it is problematic to count Haiti with its overwhelming majority of monolingual Creole speakers as Francophone, unless of course one counts Haitian Creole as a French dialect. The same seems to be true of all territories where creoles lexified by European languages have developed. Despite present schemes by France to develop its overseas departments economically (most by supporting their infrastructures for tourism), there is no indication that French is a threat to Creole in these territories. Similar doubt can be cast about all territories where creoles have coexisted with their lexifiers and have derived a lot of vitality from association with the cultures of the disfranchised proletarian majorities.
It is also noteworthy that Spanish and Portuguese are widely spoken today mostly thanks to the settlement colonization of several parts of the world by their European speakers during the 17th and 18th centuries. Portugal and Spain have no economic or military hegemonies today that would make them threats to other languages outside those same settlement colonies. In more of less the same vein, note that Arabic has become so much associated with Islam that it can hardly stand up to the competition of English and French for the function of international lingua franca even in those territories of North Africa and the Middle East where Arabic vernaculars are spoken.
However, as noted above, the lingua franca function is hardly a threat to indigenous languages in those territories where the hegemonic languages do not function as vernaculars. As a matter of fact, the best lesson here comes from the fact that standard varieties of the same languages have generally not displaced their nonstandard vernaculars, just like acrolectal varieties have not displaced basilectal and mesolectal ones in creole-speaking territories. In the now celebrated case of Ocracoke Brogue as an endangered dialect (Wolfram and Shilling-Estes 1995), the dialect has actually been endangered by other vernacular varieties, not by Standard English. Not even highly stigmatized varieties such as African-American English and Appalachian English are at all threatened by Standard English. French patois, as either traditional Celtic languages or rural nonstandard French dialects (franais populaires), have been threatened by urban colloquial French, not by Standard French. Perhaps one of the very reasons why hegemonic languages are a false perceived threat to indigenous languages in several places around the world is that they are not vernaculars in the first place.
7. Conclusions
Language endangerment is a much more complex subject matter than most of the literature has led us to think. The process is far from being new in the history of mankind. It has been a concomitant of language diversification, the hidden aspect that the Stammbaums of genetic linguistics have not revealed. This is itself a byproduct of language appropriation, a process during which languages currently spoken by the learners influence the one they target. Such contacts have sometimes caused language shift (instead of sustaining bi- or multilingualism), which is directly related to language loss.
It is also far from being uniform from one territory to another, being in part correlated with variation in different colonization styles and in the communicative functions that the new languages have assumed in various territories relative to their indigenous counterparts. They are largely a function of the new economic systems that have replaced the indigenous ones and the extent to which the Natives have been absorbed, assimilated, or integrated in the current systems.
Integration happens when populations coexist in some sort of peace, not when they are fighting each other. This state of affairs makes it ironical and inadequate to speak of language wars, rather than on mere competition ensuing from choices that speakers make during their verbal interactions. It also reveals an interesting thing about how language loss occurs, viz., the stronger language endangers the weaker one(s) stealthily while speakers are happy to be able to communicate (successfully) in the language of their choice and select the same language at all or most such interactions. The procedure is the same even during periods of enslavement, including the most oppressive ones from the 17th to the 19th centuries in the New World and the Indian Ocean. Making more significant the strength of the founder effect, the homestead societies inflicted a devastating blow to the languages of the enslaved Africans, with the Africans of the homestead phase being forced by the circumstances to operate only in colonial European vernaculars and the plantation-phase slaves being seasoned by the creole slaves into the colonial vernaculars (Chaudenson 2001, Mufwene 2001). The few African languages that survived were brought by indentured servants after the slave trade had been abolished and the newcomers were being slowly integrated within the former slave populations. Languages of other immigrants died also through the same process of absorption within the socio-economic majority or powerful group.
Like the enslaved Africans, the Jews enslaved in Babylon and Egypt had likewise lost their language (HagPge 2000), through integration in the economic infrastructure, while being socially marginalized. However, as has been made obvious by the linguistic experience of countries with large proletarian populations, economic marginalization has just the opposite effect. The disfranchised proletarians stick to their indigenous or nonstandard vernaculars as markers of their identity and are forced by the circumstances to avoid the language associated with their economic exploitation. In the big picture of competition and selection among languages, cases of language extinction by genocide remain exceptional. Those due to absorption of demographically or economically less powerful groups are more typical.
Language loss is indeed one of the outcomes of competition and selection among languages sharing the same econiche. Competition and selection among languages, not just between the indigenous and non-indigenous ones is similar to that which obtains among structural features in language evolution (Mufwene 2001). Like structural features, languages or dialects can be a threat to each other only when they compete for the same functions. Languages or dialects that have separate communicative or social functions can coexist quite happily, which has typically been the case between European languages and indigenous languages in former exploitation colonies. Overall, it is when a language is adopted as a vernacular that it becomes a threat to the speakers previous vernacular. European languages have been such threats to indigenous languages in former settlement colonies because they have become vernaculars, albeit in new, restructured forms. On their other hand, their status as lingua francas in exploitation colonies has made them primarily economic assets for a chosen few and rather marginal from the vernacular cultures of the overall national populations.
It is thus important to distinguish between plantation settlement colonies, where descendants of non-Europeans have constituted demographic majorities (as on the Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands), and other settlement colonies, where descendants of Europeans have become majorities (as in the American mainland and Australia). In plantation settlement colonies, distinct new varieties disfranchised as creoles and associated with the proletarian mass have emerged. They have acquired a status similar to that of indigenous vernaculars in former exploitation colonies, serving also as identity markers for the economically marginalized proletarian masses. They are not at all threatened by the acrolectal varieties associated with the elite sections of the populations, which contain a disproportionate size of people of European and mixed descent. Although new, restructured vernaculars have likewise emerged in other settlement colonies, they have generally been treated as continuations of the European languages, have become majority languages, and their generalized position in the new economic systems have made them critical to the adaptation of the other groups. That critical role has made them a threat to the languages of the indigenous populations, who have become minorities and have had to adapt to the changing socioeconomic ecologies, almost like any other minority.
Globalization has been useful to consider in this essay because it sheds insightful light on the role of socioeconomic system in language vitality. One can determine how global(ized) a particular polity is, whether or not its whole population is involved in the global economy, in what language the economy functions, what position the European colonial language plays in it, and whether it competes with particular indigenous languages for that function. It was shown above that even in places outside the West that operate in the global economy, this system is not necessarily implemented in a European language, and the European language that is spoken in the polity remains an elite language that hardly affects the role of indigenous languages, because it functions primarily as a second-language lingua franca rather than as a vernacular.
Moreover some major languages such as Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese are not hegemonic and constitute threats only to other indigenous languages over which they have prevailed as vernaculars in the present polities. Such local expansion has been facilitated by the local aspect of globalization, which is apparently more relevant to the vitality of languages than regional or world-scale aspects of economic globalization. Although we can identify diasporas in which these languages are spoken (which prompted Nettle & Romaine 2000 and Mayor & Bind 2001 to list them among the most widely spoken languages along with English, French, and Arabic), their status even as vernaculars in the Americas and Europe in particular is not the same as in their homelands (the counterparts of natural habitats in ecology). For instance, Chinese varieties as spoken in Singapore and various places in Southeast Asia are less the survival of what the Chinese traders brought there in the 15th and 16th centuries than the result of their dispersal in the 19th century by the British colonists through indentured servitude. The same is true of Indic languages, with later immigrations having only reinforced communities that developed as separate either by colonial settlement design or due to lack of socioeconomic integration in the host countries. In the Caribbean, the speakers were economically absorbed and their languages have hardly survived.
The future of languages in the 21st century obviously depends on how individual countries will evolve socioeconomically during that time. In some parts of the world, globalization is progressing without any serious obstacles that can stop its effects on indigenous languages that are not participating in the economy. On the other hand, the economic future is already so uncertain in some other parts of the world that no indigenous languages and cultures are being affected by the present course of events, except somewhat by the indigenous lingua francas. In most such polities, numbers matter little in determining whether or not a particular population will carry on their indigenous language, so far as they remain isolated from developments outside their communities, as well pointed. Even where the economy is globalizing, the effects have of course not been the same, such as between South and North America. There is obviously variation in the way globalization is taking place around the world, which should remind linguists again of the danger of overgeneralizing.
While we linguists are so concerned with linguistic diversity as a dimension of biodiversity to be maintained (Maffi 2000, 2001; Nettle & Romaine 2000), we cannot ignore a moral dilemma that arises. The socioeconomic ecologies of most populations around the world have changed since the recent European colonization of the world started four centuries ago (especially over the past four hundred years), and so have their aspirations for decent living. The changes in these socioeconomic ecologies have often involved new languages in which they are expected to develop some competence in order to compete for jobs when they are available. Where the new languages function as vernaculars, the pressure on the indigenous and some immigrant populations to function also in the new languages and be better integrated in their new societies has been unrelenting. Despite their attachments to their ancestral traditions, the pressures of the new socioeconomic systems have made it increasingly difficult to practice their traditional languages and cultures. Lack of practice has produced attrition and eventually death for the languages, despite the will of the relevant populations not to give them up.
It is certainly not unnecessary to echo Ladefoged (1992) with the following questions: Can we linguists work against the aspirations of the affected populations and exhort them to hold on to their languages and cultures only in the interest of a kind of diversity that should benefit our disciplines? In the first place is it possible to sustain a language and culture without an ambient socioeconomic system that can support it? Note that despite Nettle & Romaines (2000) characterization of such questions as the benign neglect position, languages and cultures are nurtured by practice.22 >From the point of view of competition and selection in the coexistence of languages, linguists rhetoric of the past decade seems to be working against the natural adaptive laws that have operated in mankind since our pre-hominid beginnings. Worst of all, they promote a notion of language and culture that is static, ignoring the fact that language endangerment is part of the normal process of language evolution, the same one that produced diversity in the past and is producing a new one today. Underrating the kind of diversity that is emerging now is in itself a moral problem, especially when we cannot prove that the ancestral language varieties and cultures will help the affected populations adapt more adequately to the current socioeconomic ecologies.23
We should remember that typically speakers do not consciously give up their languages. Languages die gradually and inconspicuously as a consequence of communicative practices of their speakers. We can say that speakers kill them by neglect, as they constantly select other language varieties to communicate with speakers of other languages and/or within their own ethnolinguistic group. Speakers typically do this as part of their adaptive response to current socioeconomic ecologies that requires competence in the chosen language for their survival. We cannot just encourage speakers to maintain their ancestral languages even if only as vernaculars for home without concurrent actions on the ecologies themselves that prompted them to behave in manners detrimental to their languages. As experts, linguists should consider what particular adaptive alternatives are really available for the concerned populations, including whether maintaining their ancestral languages is a realistic alternative.
Lest my views are misunderstood, this paper has described my interpretation of the current competition and selection of languages in the world market as part of language evolution. It has prescribed no action, because I feel that none need be prescribed except to fight oppression, which affects the victims behaviors. Little of what has produced language endangerment has had to do directly with overt oppression of a group by another. Except in conditions of slavery and genocide, languages have endangered others typically when oppression has been insidious. Most cases of language loss and endangerment are late results of (post-)colonization activities that cannot be reversed. I personally wonder whether linguists have been so constructive in focusing on the victims, from the point of view of language loss, rather than in addressing the perceived problems with the victimizers, those whose actions have changed the socioeconomic ecologies of the present world and produced the present conditions. Linguists need to stop for a while, take some time to interpret the situation less emotionally, and determine whether there is problem to fix, what it is, and what is the best action to take that benefits not only the linguist first but enhances the adaptability of the relevant population. Unfortunately linguists have been more preoccupied with the contribution that the maintenance of linguistic diversity will ultimately make to research the architecture of Universal Grammar than with whether or not speakers who have given up their ancestral languages and cultures have adapted beneficially to their current, changed or changing, socioeconomic ecologies.
The concern with benefits to linguistics rather than to the affected populations, or the conflation of both concerns into one, accounts for the common confusion of the notions maintenance and preservation in the relevant literature. It seems to me that linguists have little power, if any, to control the current socioeconomic ecologies that have replaced traditional ones all over the world. They cannot create the conditions that would make it rewarding for the affected populations to continue speaking in their languages, the case of maintenance. The interest of linguistics and in some ways of the affected populations (to the extent that they are interested in their past) can be served with language preservation projects, such as recording chunks of discourse, describing them, and thus making evidence of them available to posterity. Paul Newman (1998, in press) speaks eloquently about this, going as far as to exhort linguistics departments to stop underrating descriptive research work in favor of theorizing based on introspection without fieldwork.
Still, consistent with the linguists definition of a language as a system (something rather abstract in the minds of speakers), one must remember that what are being preserved through recordings and transcriptions (more or less as museum artifacts) are not languages per se but evidence thereof, Chomskyan E-languages that can be used to infer the underlying systems. Grammatical descriptions do not preserve languages either, they are analysts interpretations of systems used by speakers, and the interpretations may contain inaccuracies. For the purposes of linguistics, they are of course better than no speakers and no languages to work on. My priority still remains the ability of speakers to adapt to their ever-changing ecologies in ways that they find beneficial to them.