140 Before Agriculture
have long contributed to reducing linguistic diversity everywhere in the world,
even well before the era of colonization and empire building. As with biodiversity,
however, what is unprecedented is an extinction crisis of the present magnitude
and pace. It has been estimated that there may already be 15 per cent fewer lan-
guages now than 500 years ago, when the era of European colonization began.^4
Losses have been especially marked in the Americas and Australia. And the trend
is now accelerating throughout the world, with Australia and the Americas (espe-
cially the US) still in the lead.
Causes of language loss
By and large, the main waves of colonial and imperial expansion in human history
(both European and of other major civilizations) have come not only to the detri-
ment of local peoples’ sovereignty and control over their ancestral territories,
resources and cultural traditions, but also to the detriment of their ancestral lan-
guages. Whenever assimilation into the dominant culture has been the goal (as it has
been in most cases), this assimilation has been effected crucially by way of linguistic
assimilation, through the imposition of the dominant language in schooling, the
media, government affairs and most other public contexts – and, in parallel, through
the denigration of the local languages (and the cultures they embody) as defective,
primitive, unfit for the ‘modern world’, as well as through the severe restriction of
their contexts of use and even the explicit prohibition of and punishment for their
use. Awareness of the political implications of linguistic assimilation was perhaps
never better expressed than by the 15th-century Spanish grammarian Antonio de
Nebrija. In 1492, presenting Queen Isabella of Spain with his grammar of Spanish
(the first grammar of any modern European language), Nebrija so explained its
purposes in his introduction: ‘Language has always been the consort of empire’.^5
The ‘curse of Babel’ debunked
We may well feel sorry for the speakers of these smaller languages who have lost or
are losing their ancestral tongues. But is it not the case that this linguistic assimila-
tion is ultimately just an inevitable consequence of the in turn inevitable process
of globalization the world is witnessing? Is this not, after all, a small price to pay
for intercommunication and world stability? At long last, a widespread attitude has
it, humanity will be freed of the burden laid upon it by the ‘curse of Babel’: the
multiplicity of languages. With fewer different languages in use, this line of reason-
ing goes, it will be easier to communicate with people elsewhere in the world; once
marginalized populations will be able to develop and prosper: ethnic conflict will
decrease; national unity will no longer be threatened; and we will finally be mov-
ing toward the globalized cosmopolitan world that is the ultimate destiny of
humanity.
However – whatever we may think about the inevitability of globalization and
the ultimate destiny of humanity – none of these arguments is supportable. First,