The day a language died

This week another language died: Carlos Westez, more widely known as Red Thunder Cloud, the last speaker of the Native American language Catawba, died of a stroke at the age of 76. With him passed away the Catawba language.

Anyone who wants to hear the war songs, the hunting songs and the religious chants of the Catawba can apply to the Smithsonian Museum, where, back in the Forties, Red Thunder Cloud recorded a series of them for posterity. Some earnest folk might even take the trouble to learn some of them by heart. But Catawba as something that lived and breathed and developed organically is gone for good. Of the creatures alive on the planet, only Red Thunder Cloud's dog, which survived him and understood commands in no other tongue, still presumably has snatches of Catawba rolling around his brain.

All of us have been alerted over the past 20 years to the damage that modern industry can inflict on the world's ecology; how the destruction of the rainforest also brings about the death of untold species of plants and insects that the forest protects, and how insecticides and herbicides lead to the "silent spring" that Rachel Carson wrote about in the Sixties.

Less obvious, but no less powerful, is the impact of a homogenising monoculture upon our languages and ways of life. We are witnessing the spread of English, carried by American culture, delivered by Japanese technology. We also are witnessing the hegemony of a few great transnational tongues: Chinese, Spanish, Russian and Hindi. With their rise as tools of culture and commerce has come the deaths of hundreds of other tongues that are the losers in the competition for linguistic survival.

Scholars believe there are some 6,000 languages around the world. Not only is the richest plant life closest to the equator, but so is the richest linguistic life. The fecundity of nature means that tribes can survive in smaller areas in relative isolation beyond the reach of the outside world, so keeping their culture and language intact. But most of these languages are spoken by very small numbers of people. And according to Gail Vines, writing recently in New Scientist, more than half of them could die out within the next 100 years.

Aore is the language native to Vanuatu in the Pacific. But its fate is sealed. Like Catawba (until this week), it is spoken by that island's only remaining native inhabitant. So it, too, is bound to die out.

Many other languages will share its fate. A large proportion of the languages of Ethiopia are used by tiny numbers of people. Two speakers of the Ethiopian language Gafat were fine until a well-intentioned language researcher took them out of their native jungle, whereupon they caught cold and died.

One of the world's richest language banks is Papua New Guinea, where more than 100 languages are threatened with extinction. The link between this and the destruction of the natural habitat by foreign commercial exploitation is glaringly obvious. In the Americas, 100 languages, each of which has fewer than 300 speakers, are on their last legs. North America, which once had hundreds of languages, has only about 100 languages left.

It was for this reason that Red Thunder Cloud's death this week made news around the world. If native Americans face a peculiarly keen and formidable threat to their languages, Red Thunder Cloud was one of the first to recognise this and to try to do something about it.

He was not actually born into the Catawba tribe, and the language was not his mother tongue. But he was a frequent visitor to the reservation in South Carolina and immersed himself in the language. The songs he recorded for the Smithsonian helped to start a craze for native American music. In his attempt to spread word of the tribe's language and culture, he came as far as Britain, where in 1992 he erected a tepee in Edinburgh and gave demonstrations of story-telling.

Now he is gone and the language is dead. But what does it mean for the rest of us when a language disappears?

When a plant or insect or animal species dies, it is easy to understand what has been lost, to appreciate that one more item in the world's ecosphere has gone for good. But language is merely a product of the mind, an arrangement between the different parts of different people's nervous systems. To be the last remaining speaker of a language, like Red Thunder Cloud or like Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, the last person to speak Cornish as her mother tongue, must be a peculiarly lonely destiny, almost as strange and terrible as to be the last surviving member of a dying species. But what the rest of us lose when a language dies is the possibility of a unique way of perceiving and describing the world.

For speaking a language is a complex accomplishment. Understanding how we do it has produced a vast literature in philosophy, semiotics and the neurosciences. The earliest theories of language, advanced by philosophers such as John Hume, were that words and ideas stood for sensations and feelings. It was only in the 20th century that theories of language became more complex and proliferated. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, argued that language was essentially a public affair, not the product of something that happened in our brains. Noam Chomsky, the American academic, made a reputation for himself with the claim that we can only speak languages because our brains have an innate capacity to understand the underlying structure of a language.

More recently Mark Pagel, a biomathematician in the zoology department of Oxford University, has taken this idea further, claiming that learning a language brings about permanent changes to one's brain - changes at a physiological level. One example he gives is of the Japanese inability to distinguish the letters "l" and "r". All babies the world over, he says, can tell all sounds apart; so if Japanese adults cease to be able to differentiate certain letters, he says, "the brains of Japanese-speaking adults differ from those of non-Japanese speaking adults, and do so at a physiological level".

The theory lacks neurological substantiation, but one's own experience as a language learner is that to speak another language is to become another person. Who among those who have learnt to speak French moderately well has not had the sensation of discovering a new personality, one to whom shrugs, hand gestures, and an urge towards precision come naturally?

Learning a language that is extremely remote from English, such as Japanese, is to take on a radically new identity. In Japanese, one discovers, it seems impossible to have the sort of hammer-and-tongs discussions that are easy in European languages. There are immense opportunities for vagueness, and great difficulties in being precise. There are many different ways of saying thank you and sorry, half a dozen different ways of saying "I", many subtle ways of expressing formality or intimacy, humility or arrogance, without saying anything of substance at all.

Yet one would not, except out of great perversity or scholarly zeal, learn a language that is close to extinction, for the very obvious reason that the point of a language is to communicate, and if the language is only a sort of trophy, used for ceremonies, toasts or greetings, before one lapses, in conversation, into English, it has already ceased to exist in a meaningful sense. It is already on the road to extinction, awaiting only the last rites.

There is an escape clause, however: if the language has been written down (as Catawba was not), there remains at least the theoretical possibility of reviving it. The one truly miraculous example in modern times is what has happened to Hebrew in Israel: long replaced as the language of the Jews by the tongues dominant wherever they happened to find themselves during the Diaspora, its only remaining purpose was in the synagogue, as Latin was formerly used in Roman Catholic churches, and as Sanskrit is still employed in Buddhism.

In Israel, however, it is now the universal language of everyday life; it has arisen from a 2,000-year sleep, once again to breathe, change, develop slang, accents and obscenities. The reason this has happened was the simple necessity of forging a nation out of the disparate ingredients that were "ingathered". Language - especially if it is already defined as the language of the tribe - is the only thing that can have that sort of binding function.

English played a similar role in binding together the polyglot, multicultural elements of the empire, and making a self-conscious entity of them. But while the engine of colonialism long ago ran out of steam, the momentum of its languages is still formidable, and it is against their tyranny that the smaller languages fight to survive.

Indeed, there are signs of a growing trend to defend regional languages as a way of defending regional identities against the onslaught of global culture. In our own backyard, the surviving Celtic languages still fight it out.

In the last century, the proper thing to do with Welsh, it was generally agreed, was to stamp it out. This century the decline of Welsh has been slowed and, arguably, reversed: from about 900,000 speakers at the turn of the century, the number has shrunk to half a million. But vigorous campaigning has meant that the numbers speaking Welsh has stabilised. More than 21 per cent of the population, according to a recent survey, speak the national tongue; of that number, it is the mother tongue of 55 per cent. Most significantly, the use of the language among young people is now climbing again, thanks to its inclusion in the national curriculum; in 1993-4, 78.4 per cent of pupils learnt it as either first or second language.

This, then, is one language that is not going the way of Red Thunder Cloud and Catawba. But what difference does it make if you speak Welsh? How differently does one see the world? What is the nature of one's potential Welsh personality? Those are questions impossible to answer without learning it.