“One night, I was helping my mom cook dinner when she asked me to chop up some tỏi. I had no idea what that was, and I didn’t want to ask because it’d be embarrassing. So, I grabbed an onion from the pantry.
“Wrong. So wrong,” writes freelance journalist Mai Nguyen in a HuffPost Canada article.
Like many second-generation children, Nguyen grew up learning two languages at the same time, Vietnamese and English. It helped that the Halifax suburb where she attended school was thriving with first and second-generation kids, who also spoke another language. She learned to juggle two languages speaking English at school and her mother tongue at home.
“When I was 17, I was accepted into a journalism school in Toronto. I packed several suitcases, said goodbye to my folks, and promised to call every day I was away. I didn’t. The only time I spoke [Vietnamese] was when I called home. Once, I went two entire weeks without speaking Vietnamese at all!”
This article’s story is a common one for people who grow up speaking more than one language, but are eventually led to prioritize one over the other. You have to speak a language to retain it; and with no one to speak it, a language can die. Fortunately, in this specific case, Vietnamese is not a rare language. Anyone wanting to learn (or re-learn) Vietnamese has an array of tools and teachers available to help them do so. But what if the language is Romani or Picard? Kosraean or Menominee? Or one of the many languages in the world with so few surviving native speakers, you could count them all without breaking a hundred?
The latest prediction reports 90 percent of the world’s languages will vanish by the end of this century. Although this might not seem important to an English speaker with no personal ties to another culture, language loss does matter. It’s a gradual loss, and when a language dies, it matters.
If we lose a language, we essentially lose a culture.
Language is key to unlocking a culture’s medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather and climate patterns, spiritual attitudes and its history. We also lose the expression of what it means to be human. Language does this for us.
While technology can be a savior, it’s also one of the forces that threatens to snuff languages out. A 2013 analysis suggested only 5 percent of languages have a chance of thriving in the digital realm and that there is evidence of a massive die-off caused by a digital divide.
Linguists compare the loss of a language to the loss of a species: just as our understanding of history and science becomes more limited when a species goes extinct, so is our understanding of humanity more limited with the extinction of a language.
