Why Learn a Minority Language?

the reasons may surprise you!

Illustration: M.C. Escher’s Tower of Babel, via Wikimedia.

No human can contain the breadth of human knowledge. You probably knew this. There’s simply too many subjects to plumb, too many regions on Earth with their own peoples and faunas, too many stars in the sky. Just having a mental catalogue of every subject for which there’s an expert would be its own kind of expertise, and even then, such an expert-squared would only know what they don’t know.

But one person of any sort can contain lots of specialized knowledge. The real question is whether or not others think their knowledge is valuable. Working at the public library puts me face to face with this quandary often. We have an intellectually disabled regular I’ll call Bobby who visits every branch in our system in search of newly released DVDs. (He tries to see them all.) Bobby speaks in a very stereotyped way, stuttering often, and in an average conversation with him, he only repeats the same few lines. In a discussion about the totality of human knowledge, we might assume that he has nothing to add. But, if a tired parent came into my work with three screaming children and asked where to get the new Pixar movie for the little ones tonight, I would be forced to rely on Bobby’s knowledge to get the answer before the kids gave me a headache.

Which branch is most likely to have the new Pixar DVD on the shelf? This is not a Googleable question. The answer is the result of research, weeks of it, more unpaid hours than I would ever spend scouring library shelves. More than that, Bobby has spent time considering the data, and has by now worked out which branches are favored by the system, and which aren’t. I lied to you before: he doesn’t go to every branch. Many he considers a waste of time, only worth visiting if the branches that usually have new movies disappoint him.

Let’s return to our screaming children. If I want to see where an item is, I need to open up the catalogue record and then the individual item record, and then when I back out of the item record, I’ll be sent back two screens instead of one.¹ For a Pixar DVD, which we might have several hundred copies of, this isn’t a practical way to find the answer. Instead, I can narrow my search by location, picking the locations Bobby has previously indicated are wealthy in new DVDs. In less extreme circumstances, I’ve parroted Bobby’s research several dozen times, telling other DVD-heads where to search, and in the process bolstered the erroneous image of a library clerk as someone who knows everything.²

If we consider information as a series of nodes, then Bobby can stake a claim to something truly special. He knows the most about one of information’s intersections: where to find the new movies in a specific library system. Conceptualizing information in this way shows us something else interesting. If humanity’s information net has a node for every bit of local knowledge, then the vast majority of the unwritten Library of the World is not about great classics and quantum physics. Rather, most information is about the local — the sandwich shops, library DVDs, and sidewalk cracks that make up most of our day-to-day existence. But, since each person can only contain so much knowledge, most of this is destined to be forgotten.

Much of humanity’s cultural wealth is preserved because it’s local. That’s just how we do things here, you see – and in the process we so happen to transmit the oldest narrative in the world, preserve the environment, and so on. The local is our locus of control, and it’s also the library where we store most of our cultural achievements. I don’t have much of a chance of being a world-renowned author remembered by everyone, but – if I become more involved in my local community – I’ll be read long after I’m dead by people who live on my street. Concern with local affairs allows us to be neighbors across time, once we recognize the commonality of space.

The more local cultures there are, the more culture there is. How many painters did you learn about in school because they were from your country? How many of their works hang lonely in the Louvre, overlooked except by those visitors who see them and remember something of their childhood curriculum? A curriculum can’t contain every artist that’s important. At some point, you have to pick and choose – and by choosing local culture, you do something concrete to make the world less homogenous.

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Europe is built on top of dead nations. I don’t necessarily mean African and Asian nations, though they’re a part of the puzzle: rather, for every official language of Europe, there are two or three unofficial tongues, just as ancient, marginalized as “dialects” or “kitchen languages.”

Which tongue became a language of state and which was “too vile for the Devil’s ear” is something of a historical accident. If you asked a learned European of the eleventh century whether the langues d’oc³ or the langues d’oïl⁴ would, in a thousand years’ time, be spoken by over 300 million souls, he’d think of the illustrious troubadours of South France and say, “the langues d’oc, of course.” At that time, even the term “South France” wouldn’t have parsed, since “the North and the South of what is now France were, in the twelfth century, two different countries, as different as France and Spain are today.”⁵

But borders change. With the Pope’s help, France conquered Occitania in the 13th century, making it an integral part of the French Kingdom. This campaign, called the Albigensian Crusade, was so violent and so focused on eliminating religious difference that it’s often been termed an early example of genocide, including by the man who coined the word “genocide.” Afterwards, the language of the Troubadours was renamed “Provençal” (i.e. Provincial), so to better convey the new political reality of Occitian as a garbled Parisian French, for which a child could be beaten for speaking. Despite this, Occitian is still spoken today, and enjoying something of a revival.

This general story plays out over and over across European history. Basque – a language isolate unlike any other language on Earth – is a minority language whose speech community is interrupted by the French-Spanish border. Catalan speakers have long sought independence from Castilian, a language usually called “Spanish” in English, as if every person with a Spanish passport is a Castilian. The status of Standard High German as the language which every German must learn and speak has pushed dozens of smaller Germanic languages, like Plattdeutsch, toward extinction. And the UK, whose Celtic minority languages are an object of fascination the world over, has chosen holiday homes over real Gàidhlig revitalization efforts, not to mention Welsh or Irish’s uphill battles against the global hegemony of English.

In each case, there’s no linguistic reason why Castilian should assert itself over Catalan and Basque, nor French over Occitan and Breton, nor English over Irish and Welsh. French is in no way more pure, more grammatically beautiful, or more suited to be a global language. Neither is English, Castilian Spanish, or High German. Rather, political realities have made it such that someone from the Outer Hebrides can favor scenes from a Londoner’s childhood over their own. When languages are subsumed in this way, ethnicities often aren’t far behind. If you assimilate something so big as your speech, then smaller folkways, like food and land stewardship, are often not far behind.⁶

Take for example the difference between the English word “sin” and the Hebrew word “chet.” The English word implies a Christian worldview, wherein a sin is an intentional moral transgression against God. Conversely, “chet” means “miss.” It’s a missed chance to do something good rather than an evil deed. This difference is reflected in how repentance works in the two faiths. A Christian who has sinned must ask forgiveness from God for their wrong, whereas a Jew promises not to do it again and tries to “make up” the mitzvah, through a monetary donation or similar. Neither conception is better than the other. But it’s hard to imagine such a minute difference surviving several thousand years of diaspora if not for the word “chet” itself, which is derived from the root “to miss the mark,” and thus preserves the Jewish theology much better than the English word “sin.”

Sometimes, the case for minority languages is made from linguistic scarcity. That is, a language like Basque is so rare, it deserves special protection. But not all minority languages are linguistically unique. In a world with borders, most of which were drawn in the past two centuries, many minority languages are the result of political borders being drawn around existing communities. Consider for example the fact that Texas was Mexico for several centuries before it was Texas, and yet, Tejanos who speak Spanish there are often treated as foreigners. The extinction of Tejano Spanish would mean that human society has changed itself to accommodate rather new political realities.

If Spanish were no longer spoken in Texas, it wouldn’t mean the language had been wiped from the face of the Earth. It would instead mean that there are no Tejanos in Texas. Though not linguistically distinct in the way of a Celtic language or Basque, the extirpation of a language from a region is still something to be mourned. It means there was once a local culture that’s now gone, and with it, all the artistic and ecological knowledge that the community its people accumulated while there.

This is a common situation of Jewish languages. Many listed by the Jewish Languages Project are quite simply the local language with minor changes like Hebrew vocabulary and vowel shifts. For example, I showed a heritage speaker of Farsi a clip of Judeo-Persian, and she described it as essentially just Persian with very nasal vowels and a dash of Hebrew loan words. However, these languages could have one day grown into linguistic and literary treasure troves akin to Yiddish and Ladino, if political realities had not prevented it.⁷

Minority languages are inversely correlated with cultural homogeneity. Their presence means human society is normal. People will always be moving around, depositing little languages along the way. For several thousand years, minority languages like Gàidhlig and Occitan have enjoyed healthy speech communities, surviving into modernity in spite of bigoted attitudes from their rulers. It’s only fairly recently that their speech communities have declined.

If the massive decline of such languages since the Enlightenment suggests anything, it’s that modernity has a peculiar desire for everyone to be exactly the same. After all, if you’re printing labels on a shampoo bottle, you don’t want to cram 300 languages on there, nor deal with the logistics of sending 300 slightly different bottles of shampoo to markets across the globe. Better to tell them all to speak English and be done with it.

Our political institutions are built on the idea that each nation should have a state in a one-to-one correlation, and everyone belonging to a certain nation must live in the corresponding state. This idea leads to horrible things, like forced migrations, population exchanges, apartheid, and genocide, all in the pursuit of an ethnically homogenous state.

But such a state is a fantasy. It has never existed, except for where it’s been artificially created. Greeks who appeal to their country’s Christian heritage can only do so because of population exchanges with Turkey and the mass death of Jews. Far-right Hindus who advocate for Hindi to become an official language of the U.N. do so at the expense of Gujarti, Bengali, Tamil, and every other Indian language which would be Provençal-ized in order to bolster the reputation of Hindi. In every case, an appeal to the halcyon pre-DEI times is actually a call to enact the ethnic cleansing of a totally normal society. In a normal society, people migrate, mixing languages, cultures, and traditions. The abnormal state is one where everyone is the same.

I don’t want to live in a world where everyone speaks the same language, everyone eats the same food, and everyone consumes the same art. Neither should you. Such a world would have less to explore, less art to enjoy, and less biodiversity to stave off climate change. Without a concern for local artists, there would be far less artists, and only a few Taylor Swifts to bridge the gap. That tragedy is amplified by a thousand every time a language goes extinct. The totality of human knowledge becomes smaller with every language that dies.

Consider again our model of the world — or more neatly, the world’s information — as a net of lines and dots, connections and nodes. If all of Glasgow’s artists were to move to London and take office jobs, the Glaswegian net would shrink forever. The London net would probably not grow the same amount the Glaswegian net shrank, as it’s already saturated with artists to remember (and for that, artists with a stronger tie to local London than the newcomer Glaswegians). In effect, the world’s information has grown smaller for this migration.

Good thing Glaswegians aren’t all moving to London. But young people from the Highlands and Islands, seeing no monetary future in their hometowns, are regularly moving to Glasgow. In the process, Gàidhlig dies, and we move closer to a monocultural world. When we take seriously the idea that some languages are “prestigious” and others are a “waste of time,” we allow a worldview where only people who were born certain places have something to say. If you need to write in English to win a book award, then what about everyone born outside the Anglophone world? Hopefully everything they want to say translates well. It sure is a good thing that poems, songs, folk tales, oral histories, and idioms are famously translatable.

The notion of a “world with one culture” is hyperbolic for now. But it’s clear the shampoo companies would like to pay translators less, and the states have discovered there’s big money in ethnofascism. The good news is, ethnofascism relies on no one involved throwing sand in the gears. So throw sand in the gears. It doesn’t take any particular ability or talent — even Bobby, my library regular, is doing his part to prevent the homogenization of the world’s information, by getting his DVDs from the library rather than the Internet. You can do something similar.

What language do your neighbors speak? Spanish, Polish, Gàidhlig? You should learn it. I’m not a particularly skilled language learner, and even so I’ve learned enough Spanish to make an abuela smile, and enough French to help patrons fill out a job application. Fluency isn’t required to taste the sweetness of another language’s cultural outputs — only effort. A few lessons is enough to hear something new in your favorite K-pop songs, and learning the phonetic rules of languages spoken near you will regularly save you the embarrassment of saying, “Um, how is your name pronounced…”

If your local minority language is open to learners, you should learn it. If not, there are plenty of little ways you can divest from the status quo, from going to a folk music session to listening to your grandma’s old stories with a new attention. Now’s as good a time as ever to get invested in the local.

1. This is because our ILS is dogshit.

2. The guy you ask questions at the library is some doofus the real librarians put behind the desk because they can google faster than the average senior citizen. By default, we only know the answers to a few questions: where’s this book, can i have a library card, what books do you like, where’s the bathroom. Any time a library clerk answers a harder question like “what branch has the most new DVDs,” the answer doesn’t come from our ability to commune with the library ghosts, but rather from knowing some guy like Bobby.

3. i.e., Occitan and its sister Romance languages.

4. i.e., French and its sister Romance languages.

5. “The Albigensian Crusades,” Joseph Strayer, page 9. In some ways Strayer’s scholarship is quite outdated – his approach to statebuilding is patently colonial, for example – but this monograph is still a good read, especially for those interested in language policy in France. I often find myself referencing the last few chapters where he discusses the difference in administration between England and France, for example.

6. Obviously, this is simplistic. Natives in the U.S. and Canada have done an admirable job of preserving traditional knowledge even without the traditional language, for example, and Jews have been known to speak just about any language whilst practicing Judaism. Those are extreme examples, though. And there’s a very good reason that many tribes in the U.S. and Canada are hard at work at language revitalization – without a language of one’s own, it’s hard to preserve a culture. (It just so happens that in the case of Jews, that language is liturgical.)

7. In general, migration to the State of Israel has greatly reduced the linguistic diversity of Jewry. Yiddish has been marginalized by the State since its founding, denigrated as a “foreign language” in spite of being the native language of most European Jewish refugees. Many languages listed by the Jewish Languages Project are extinct or moribund either because of mass expulsions or mass aaliyah campaigns. Though these new Israelis were expected to Hebraize themselves, not all did, and Yiddish continues to be spoken in Israel, alongside languages like Romanian and Russian.