Is English a "killer" language – or is it dying?

Starting in the 1980s, one imperial language began to nose ahead of the field, and then to lap the others. English has been, so far, the sole beneficiary of the new era of globalization, the first truly global language. Some have gone so far as to brand it a “killer,” on the grounds that it has driven many smaller languages to extinction, but that is not a label that sits easily with everyone. Salikoko Mufwene, a Congo-born linguist at the University of Chicago, points out that English has expanded mainly as a lingua franca. It may have squeezed other lingua francas, such as Swahili in Africa or Malay in Asia, but it hasn’t dented the indigenous languages that are spoken day to day in those places. The “killer” label reflects a very Eurocentric outlook, Mufwene says, because it is Europe that has made a specialty of monolingualism. In much of the rest of the world, stable bilingualism or even multilingualism is still the norm. 

Besides, English is simultaneously diverging into varieties that may one day be unrecognizable as the same language. So is English killing, or is it dying, or is it somehow doing both at once? It is true that there are more and more varieties of English, says Australian linguist Nicholas Evans, but it’s unlikely to go the way of Latin, which exploded in a starburst we call Romance. Few in the late Roman Empire could read or write, and ordinary people living at opposite ends of that empire were not in direct contact with each other. The centrifugal forces pulling their vernaculars apart had no centripetal force to counteract them. Thanks to television, the internet and social media, the speakers of different English vernaculars are exposed to each other’s speech, and to a standard written form of the language. Though it’s difficult to predict a language’s future, Evans says, English could well settle into a state of diglossia, where a gulf exists between the shared written form and the many spoken varieties, but the two bind each other together into a single tongue. 

These debates matter, in part, because they have a bearing on the question of language erosion. Of the roughly seven thousand languages that are spoken in the world today, nearly half are considered endangered. Some assessments suggest that fifteen hundred could perish by the end of this century, and attempts at resuscitating the dying ones have proved, by certain measures, disappointing. The shining exception is Hebrew, which was reclaimed in unique circumstances (the birth of the modern state of Israel). But despite decades of intensive language-teaching and strong grassroots support, fewer than twenty per cent of Welsh people spoke Welsh in 2022, and the number had shrunk over the previous decade. Welsh is considered the healthiest of the surviving Celtic languages. The Irish that is being reinvigorated in Ireland is, experts say, heavily influenced by English. 

so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth … 

[From ‘here yet be dragons’ by Lucille Clifton]

Not everybody finds these trends discouraging. Some point out that in prehistory, a language at the peak of its health had as few as a thousand speakers. Revival shouldn’t be measured by number of recruits, therefore, but by the extent to which the language is the vehicle of a vibrant culture and whether young people are taking it up. It’s inevitable, too, that a language that has been reclaimed or reinvigorated should differ from its original form; that’s evolution. (The Israeli-born linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann argues that instead of Hebrew being revived, a new, Hebrew-European hybrid language was born. He calls it Israeli.) 

Keeping endangered languages alive seems an indisputably good thing, if it’s what their speakers want, and language activists are getting better at it. They’ve understood that the solution isn’t simply to plough ever more resources into teaching. First they have to work out why people are abandoning the languages, then they have to address the inequalities that are causing them to do so. Language is a tool: It lives for as long as it’s useful, for as long as it opens doors for its speakers and equips them to improve their lives. And while nobody denies that language deaths outnumber language births at present, it’s important to take any numbers attached to the erosion phenomenon with a pinch of salt. Because language is so entwined with identity, any tally is at least partly subjective. Languages are changing on their speakers’ lips as I write. Since most of those changes go unrecorded and unstudied, and linguists can’t agree on what constitutes language genesis, the deaths may have been exaggerated at the expense of the births. It’s time we took note of those hubs which, like hot vents at the bottom of the sea, have been churning out new linguistic life for decades now, and asked: Are we on the brink of a linguistic renaissance?