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Tuesday::Apr 16, 2024

Language Selection

O

n his old soapbox youtube channel, David Mitchell has a video in which he talks about the deaths of languages, and efforts to keep them alive. In the beginning, he lays out that once upon a time, there was such a thing as natural selection on the organisms living on our planet, in which only those individuals and species which were able to survive and reproduce could pass on their lineage, and that this represented the natural way of things. However, since mankind showed up, natural selection has gone out the window, as human beings are now basically the ones calling the shots on who lives and who dies. However, says Mitchell, there is an arena in which natural selection is still happening, and that is in languages. If a language is successful in facilitating communication, it survives. Otherwise, it dies out. Mitchell's further point is that spending effort trying to keep dying languages alive is basically fighting against the course of nature, and one senses that some people with whom he disagrees politically are perhaps trying to use "saving a language" as a talking point to prop up other proposals that Mitchell would rather not come to pass.

Mitchell's motivations aside, the whole argument is a mess from top to bottom, which is a shame as I find him an interesting and clever thinker a lot of the time. His fellow actor Robert Webb, in a humorous follow-up, provides something a riposte, but it is a much weaker counter than it could be. He basically concedes Mitchell's point, while calling it in passing "bleak", but then accuses Mitchell of hypocrisy for caring so much about correct grammar in his own language of choice.

I don't much care whether David Mitchell's outlook on the lives of language is bleak or not, I care that it's completely wrong. First of all, David Mitchell had better start being okay with talking theology if he wants to contend that somehow the actions of human beings don't count, morally, as natural selection. From a "naturalist" perspective, humans are just one more, particularly influential, species on Earth that is directing a great deal of selection pressures, the same way that army ants do in the Amazon, that Orcas do in the ocean, that bacteria do all over the Earth.

But more importantly, the idea that languages are living in some pristine environment, in which their base utility is the only thing that governs whether or not they survive is laughable, especially coming from an Englishmen, whose ancestors spent a great deal of time trying to force the Irish and Scots to stop using their native tongues and adopt the English language. Only a cursory glance at history shows that aggressive powers have incessantly tried to prevent people from speaking their own languages, generally in an attempt to destroy internal unity, and more easily enforce the new law and order. Languages are the target of violence no less than African elephants are, and pretending that Welsh is only dying out because it's an "unfit language" is not "bleak", but criminal ignorance.

Furthermore, all of this assumes that the primary use of languages is simple "communication", in the sense of transfer of information, which is, by the way, also patently untrue. Languages serve a great number of functions, many of which might make them targets by enemies of whatever people happen to speak them. And then, to have the gall to say that it's immoral to spend time and money trying to resuscitate a language that his own people helped to destroy -- the height of arrogance.