THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org 31

The increasing mobility of people, goods, and

information has driven a powerful trend toward

cultural uniformity and the extinction of local

languages. But languages that have young

people, business, and government on their side

are alive and thriving.

CAN MINORITYLANGUAGES BE SAVED?

lobalized economics andmedia are changing the faceof culture around the globe,reducing the number of lan-

guages that humans speak. As theworld economy becomes more inte-grated, a common tongue hasbecome more important than ever topromote commerce, and that putsspeakers of regional dialects andminority languages at a distinct dis-advantage. In addition, telecommu-nications has pressured languages tobecome more standardized, furthersqueezing local variations of lan-guage.

Over the past 500 years, as nation-states developed and became morecentralized, regional dialects andminority languages have been domi-nated by the centrist dialects of theruling parties. Cornish has given

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By Eric Garland

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©2006 World Future Society • 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814, U.S.A. • All rights reserved.

Without question, there will be aneed for common languages, as stan-dardization allows growth in soft-ware and in people. But global pros-perity and new technologies mayalso allow smaller cultures to pre-serve their niches. It is clear fromseveral modern examples that a dy-ing or dead language can turnaround and become vibrant again,depending on people’s determina-tion and the government policiesthat are put in place.

Reversing Language Loss

The idea of saving languages isvery modern. When linguisticsscholar Joshua A. Fishman firstwrote of “reversing language shift”in his book of that title (1990), one re-viewer actually laughed at the no-tion. The conventional wisdomamong linguists, historians, and so-ciologists was that, if your cultureand language were on the way out,their doom was assured in a global-ized world. After all, the prevailingtrends are toward globalization anda unified world. Tiny dialects—suchas Breton, the Celtic language spo-ken in Brittany, a province on thenorthwestern coast of France—arenot a benefit in the global economy,since they are difficult to learn,poorly adapted to modern life, and

unintelligible to almost everyone be-yond a small region.

Learning or relearning a nativelanguage is often a political state-ment, an act of self-definition, onethat brings solidarity with our neigh-bors. It is political power, culturalreverence, and perhaps a feeling ofcontrol in a world where politicaland cultural borders are collapsingall around us. Minority languagesmay also have a place alongside ma-jority forms of communication. TheInternational Committee for the De-fense of the Breton Language sug-gests that early bilingualism canhelp prepare young people to masterseveral languages, which will be anadvantage—if not a necessity—forthe future in Europe.

Changing world geopolitics is al-ready reforming the pressures onlanguages. The fall of the SovietUnion actually spurred a trendtoward reversing language loss. Inmany of the former Soviet republics,older Turkic languages have been re-vived, now that the Russian influ-ence is gone. Turkey is spending $1.5billion to encourage the resurgenceof Turkish throughout the region.Language is power, economic andotherwise, and the Turks are capital-izing on the possibility of extendingtheir reach, causing a reverse of lan-guage shift in the region.

32 THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org

way to English, Breton to French,Bavarian to High German, and Fu-jian-wa to Cantonese. Linguistsconcur that minority languages allover the world are giving way tomore dominant languages, such asEnglish, Mandarin, and Spanish,among others. The realities of com-merce and the seductive power ofworld pop culture are placing pres-sure on speakers of minority lan-guages to learn majority languagesor suffer the consequences: greaterdifficulty doing business, less accessto information, etc.

These pressures are inducing arapid die-off of languages aroundthe world. Languages have been dis-appearing steadily, with 3,000 of theworld’s languages predicted to dis-appear in the next 100 years. Accord-ing to the United Nations Environ-ment Program, there are 5,000 to7,000 spoken languages in the world,with 4,000 to 5,000 of these classed asindigenous, used by native tribes.More than 2,500 are in danger of im-mediate extinction, and many moreare losing their link with the naturalworld, becoming museum piecesrather than living languages.

Futurists have noted this loss withno little despair, for significant, cul-turally specific information may dis-appear along with a language. Forinstance, knowledge about uniquemedicines and treatments used byaboriginal groups could be lost for-ever if the language used to transmitthat information is banned by a ma-jority culture.

The common wisdom is that glob-alization is the wave of the future,and in many respects this is undeni-able. However, swept up in this con-ventional wisdom is the notion thatlanguages and cultures will simplycease to exist, and people will in-stead choose “global” cultures andlanguages that will transcendboundaries.

This is not the only potentialscenario. It is possible for globaliza-tion and new technology to safe-guard cultural identity while simul-taneously allowing free exchanges ofideas and goods. For centuries, di-alects and languages have been uni-fying to facilitate national identity,scientific research, and commerce.

Area Living Languages Number of SpeakersCount Percentage Count Percentage

Africa 2,092 30.3% 675.9 million 11.8%

Americas 1,002 14.5 47.5 million 0.8

Asia 2,269 32.8 3,489.9 million 61.0

Europe 239 3.5 1,504.4 million 26.3

Pacific 1,310 19.0 6.1 million 0.1

World 6,912 100.0 5,723.9 million 100.0

Note: A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one speaker. Extinct languages that are spoken as a second language are excluded. Total world languagespeakers do not reflect total population because of insufficient data for some languages.

DATA BOX: Global Distribution of Living Languages

Source: Ethnologue, 15th edition. Edited by Raymond G. Gordon Jr., SIL International,www.ethnologue.com.

It is becoming clear that, whenpeople have a strong cultural reasonto reverse language shift, they can ef-fectively resist the onslaught of ma-jority languages. Moreover, themass-media technologies that al-lowed the one-way dialogue of ma-jority languages to drive outminority languages and dialects arenow helping those silenced lan-guages to make a comeback. Speak-ers of these smaller languages canuse interactive technologies such asWeb sites, e-mail, and messageboards to talk back to the world bycreating and distributing media intheir own language to a global dias-pora.

Québec: Case Study in ReversingLanguage Shift

Some minority languages areresurging despite the pressures ofglobalization. An excellent exampleof this phenomenon is Québec,which has shown that smaller lan-guages, given sufficient economicpower and policy planning, can re-sist even the strongest linguisticforce on the planet: English.

Québec is a Canadian province ofabout 7 million inhabitants, wheremore than 95% are native Frenchspeakers. Since France signed theTreaty of Paris in 1763 and cededcommand of New France to the En-glish, North America’s French-speaking inhabitants have been sur-rounded by English-speakers, whoheld almost all official and economicpower over Québec. Though mostQuébec inhabitants lived and diedspeaking French, British governmentofficials and factory bosses generallyrequired the use of English.

As the twentieth century stretchedon, even young Québecois began toturn toward bilingualism in Englishand away from French education.After hundreds of years of survival,Canadian French appeared headedtoward extinction. This created greattension among the people of Québec,culminating in the 1960s with theRevolution Tranquille, during whichnative francophone Québecois de-manded the use of French as theonly official language of theprovince.

Today, Québecois strongly defendtheir language and have passed lawsto make it the medium of commerceand governance. Québec passed theLoi 101, requiring the public use ofFrench in all cases and relegatingEnglish to a secondary status. Frenchis now the dominant language ofcommerce and government inQuébec; English is also available onan incidental basis in federal mat-ters, but French must always be of-fered. On the commercial side, eventhe extremely technical language oftechnology is translated into Frenchfor use in the province, such as fortextbooks and training manuals.

In the media, all billboards andpublic signs must appear in French;English words, if used, must be ac-companied by a French translation.Also, the technology that supportedthe English language in Canada isnow used to maintain the regularuse of French. The Canadian govern-ment now pays for the support offully bilingual national media, boththe English-language CanadianBroadcasting Company and itsFrench equivalent, Radio-Canada.Both stations require a certain per-centage of their offering to be origi-nal Canadian content. The govern-ment has decreed that the airwaveswill be filled with Canadian French(not even European French) pro-gramming. From the news to gameshows, Canadian French is clearlythe language of the province’s popu-lar culture.

Another policy that effectively

supports the reversal of languageshift in Québec is the encouragementof immigrants to speak the local lan-guage. West Africans, Haitians, Do-minicans, Poles, and Greeks are allencouraged to speak French whenarriving in places such as Montréaland Québec City; many immigrantsremain bilingual in their nativetongue and French, even though thepowerful influence of English can befelt all around from the rest ofCanada and the United States.

Québec is an example of a placewhere a language heading towardextinction has assured its own sur-vival by education, political will, andcommercial expedience. The tech-nologies that initially placed pres-sure on the people to learn English,such as mass media (TV, radio,public signage, and print), has beenappropriated to support the locallanguage now and in the future. It isan example of the technologies ofglobalization being used to supportthe minority culture.

Dead Languages Reborn: The Case of Hebrew

Hebrew demonstrates how a lan-guage can be brought back from thedead to form the basis of a nationalidentity. Israel united first as a stateand then deliberately as a linguisti-cally unified culture.

THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org 33

Former Canadian Prime Minister JeanChretien promotes bilingualism at a conference in Ottawa.

JIM YOUNG / REUTERS / NEWSCOM

At the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, there were 10 million Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world, butnone were habitual or primaryspeakers of Hebrew. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, called the father of ModernHebrew, is responsible for the adap-tation of ancient Hebrew dialectsinto the Modern Hebrew languagecurrently associated with the state ofIsrael.

The transition to a modern lan-guage still has some bumps. Wordshave needed to be invented by lan-guage councils even to describe theactivities of daily life. In the first

years of Israel, the state publishedposters asking speakers of German,Yiddish, and Russian to learn He-brew from their children, who werebeing taught the new form. Oncethere was a second generation,where children saw their parents,policemen, and librarians speakingHebrew, a national language wasborn.

Modern Hebrew is an establishedlanguage in no threat of extinctionbecause it adheres to the three most

important factors in maintaining alanguage for the future: It is the lan-guage of education for the young, ofcommerce, and of official govern-ment activity. It is important to notethat the forces of globalization anddominant languages like Englishand French do not appear to be athreat to this young language. A lo-cal TV and film industry providesHebrew-based entertainment and acommon popular culture for youngpeople. Similarly, the rapid develop-ment of technologies and Internetsites for Hebrew has promoted thespread of the language all over theworld. Modern life is not a threat tothis recently revived language.

The resurgence of Hebrew in Israeloffers a role model for speakers oflanguages such as Welsh, IrishGaelic, Catalan, and Basque. Repre-sentatives from Catalonia and theBasque country have been sent toIsrael to study the effect that Hebrewhas had in solidifying the idea ofIsrael as a nation-state.

Minority Languages in Europe

A number of minority languagesin western Europe still exist despiteoverwhelming pressure from the ma-jority, centrist languages of thenations in which they co-exist. En-glish, French, and Castilian Spanishare clearly the dominant languages,even in the geographical areas wherethe minority ethnicities exist. But thefuture of the local languages de-pends not so much on the strengthof the national languages as on therelationship of the local language toeducation, government, and com-merce.

Here is an overview of some of thetrends in Europe’s less-widely spo-ken languages.

• Catalan: Seeking freedom inCastilian Spain. Catalan is an ex-ample of a language that has resistedthe pressures of homogenization.Catalan is the national language ofthe tiny nation of Andorra and the“co-official” language of the Catalo-nia region of eastern Spain, theBalearic Islands, and regions of Sar-dinia and France. Sharing roots withboth French and Spanish, Catalan isfar from a small minority tongue,

with 7.5 million speakers.During the Franco regime (1939–

1975) , the use of Catalan wasbanned, along with all other regionallanguages of Spain, such as Basqueand Galician. With the death ofFranco in 1975, the ban was lifted,and new Catalan newspapers andtelevision channels were launched.Catalan is now Catalonia’s officiallanguage for all government, com-merce, education, and culture. Thenew strength of the language maylead to the formation of a semi-autonomous Catalonian state withinfederal Spain.

• Irish Gaelic: Reviving Ireland’snative tongue. Despite suffering cen-turies of repression under Englishlandlords who would repeatedlyoutlaw the native language, IrishGaelic is increasing in strength andrelevance. According to the 2004 cen-sus, 1.6 million people, or 45% of Ire-land’s total population, were compe-tent speakers of Irish Gaelic, orgaeilge, up from 1.4 million speakersin 1996. It has been the official lan-guage of the free state of Irelandsince 1922, but English remains themost commonly spoken language inIreland.

Education is increasing the totalnumber of Irish speakers throughoutthe country, especially amongyounger Irish citizens. There is also aburgeoning media culture entirely inthe Irish language. The televisionnetwork TG4 provides news, currentaffairs, sports, and even a soapopera, Ros na Rún, entirely in IrishGaelic. The majority of Irish Websites are still in English, and thosewritten in Gaelic either pertain tocultural matters such as music or thelanguage itself or are of official gov-ernment publications.

The government appears to be thegreatest driver of the Irish language,if not popular culture. A growingnumber of legal precedents supportIreland’s right to require the use ofits indigenous language. For ex-ample, in 1989, European courts ac-cepted the right of the Irish govern-ment to require Dutch art teacherAnita Groener to learn Irish Gaelic asa prerequisite to her employment.

Still, the use of Irish language ingovernment has been perfunctory

34 THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org

Peruvian immigrants take lessons inHebrew language. Jews immigrating to Is-rael from around the world are helping tosupport the revival of Modern Hebrew.

RADU SIGHETI / REUTERS / NEWSCOM

until recently. The ability to functionin the Irish language is legally re-quired for all government bureau-crats, but fluency was not required,and Irish was rarely used. Mean-while, English was a daily necessity.But with the Official Languages Actof 2003, the use of Irish in the gov-ernment has increased, enabling anyIrish citizen to obtain governmentservices entirely in Gaelic.

Still, the future success of Irish re-mains uncertain. The impact ofincreased education and of the Offi-cial Languages Act is likely to givesome buoyancy to the language, butits establishment as a monoglot lan-guage of commerce remains un-likely.

• Welsh: Language becomes animportant argument for political au-tonomy. The Celtic language ofWelsh, or cymraeg, has been over-shadowed by its dominant neighbor,English. The Welsh people do notshare the Scots’ streak of indepen-dence, so their language has mostlyexisted only as a provincial tongue—one associated with farmers and notlanded gentry. Over the past twocenturies, the language has beeneroded to the point that the Welshmonoglot population is less than 1%of the nation, having declined as aresult of two world wars, television,and the increasing choice of Wales asa retirement community for manyEnglishmen.

Yet, the Welsh people and their

language haveprevailed, evenin the face ofthe economicand technologi-cal trends ofglobalization.The use of the Welsh language is acultural and political statement formany in Wales, but especially in theagrarian north. In Wales, as in Scot-land, the regional nationalist partyhas won representation in Parlia-ment. In Wales, more than 20% of thepopulation speaks Welsh fluently.

Today, Welsh is offered regularlyas a second language in schools andis increasingly the language of pri-mary instruction once again. Thepercentage of Welsh children up toage 14 who are able to speak Welshincreased from 15% in 1971 to 25% in1991. Welsh language media are lim-ited but growing. A separate WelshTV channel, S4C, began broadcastingin 1982 and now features news, cul-tural programming, and children’sshows. Today, in the governmentsector, several high-level public jobsrequire bilingualism, but in the com-mercial realm, English remains theunchallenged lingua franca.

The Welsh language may be on theupswing compared to the trends ofthe latter part of the twentieth cen-tury, but still there may not be afuture for a nation of monoglotWelshmen. A strong majority (80%)of Welshmen do not see Welsh as the

key to nationhood. For now, theWelsh language as a primary driverof nationalism is in question, eventhough the Welsh language is inresurgence.

Consistent policies expanding theuse of Welsh ensure its survival, andit is less in danger of disappearingthan it was a century ago. However,its use as the monoglot language ofcommerce or government seems un-likely in the future.

• Scots Gaelic: A museum pieceof a language. Indigenous ScotsGaelic (ghaídhlig), stands in sharp re-lief to the experiences of nativeWelsh and Irish Gaelic. Scotland hasvirtually no Gaelic-only speakers.No public services are available inthe language, and making it the na-tional language is not even an issue.

This indifference to an indigenousnational language is perhaps due tothe unique history of the Scottishculture vis-à-vis its English neigh-bors. After conquering the Scots in1746, the English victors outlawedthe Scots language and culture,along with the wearing of the tartan.Over time, the prohibition of Scottishculture was changed to assimilation.The British military began adopting

THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org 35

(Left) Mural on a Belfast rowhouse bids a Gaelic “goodbye” toBritish soldiers. The Irish government is promoting fluency in na-tive Gaelic, but the historic dominance of the English language willbe difficult to overcome, says author Garland.

(Below) Welsh Secretary Ron Davies (left) and ScottishSecretary Donald Dewar proclaim their support for both Englishand Welsh in a 1997 campaign for autonomy in Cardiff, Wales.Welsh may now be on the upswing after two centuries of dominationby English.

MARTIN McCULLOUGH / AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE / NEWSCOM

BARRY BATCHELOR / AFP / NEWSCOM

some traditions, such as music (bag-pipe and drums), as well as thewearing of the tartan for the BlackWatch. English royalty establishednew homes in Scotland, and the no-tion of the Highlander became ro-manticized: In effect, Scottish culturebecame the property of the British,as much a distinct political statementas local languages are in Ireland andWales.

Today, there are 60,000 speakers ofScots Gaelic, but they are on averageconsiderably older than speakers ofmany resurging languages. ManyScots regard the Scottish language asa relic of the past. There is nomandatory education in Scots Gaelic,and French is more popular as a sec-ond language in high schools.

Scottish-language media is limitedcompared with Irish Gaelic andWelsh. There are newspapers in theHighlands that feature sections inScots Gaelic, but no major dailies inthe language. Radio may feature thelocal language for music, but newsbroadcasts are in English. Scottishyouth are not using the Internet toperpetuate the local language. Thetechnological forces of globalizationoverwhelmingly demand the Englishlanguage.

The national linguistic identity ofScotland seems more likely to focuson the use of proper English inpublic settings and a secondarystrong regional accent for use amongcountrymen. A full resurgence of thelocal language appears unlikely.

• Breton: Overcoming Frenchsuppression and increasing the useof the native tongue. Western Franceis considered one of the seven Celticnations, home of the Breton peoplewho speak a Celtic language calledbrezhoneg. The Breton language suf-fered centuries of repression at thehands of the central French govern-ment, but Brittany retains a strongcultural and historical identity. To-day, 200,000 to 300,000 people stillspeak Breton, down from the 1.2 mil-lion who spoke it at the start of thetwentieth century. Now, however, itis gaining greater popularity andpublic acceptance, mostly througheducational and cultural means.Though government services andcommerce are conducted almost ex-

clusively in French, Breton languageinstruction in schools supports itspreservation.

Breton may attain an equal cul-tural status in Brittany, so long asyoung people are still allowed toform identities through the Bretonlanguage, but it is unlikely to enjoythe success of supremacy achievedby Canadian French and Catalan,since there is little commercial orgovernmental support for Breton.

Minority Languages for the Future

Globalized commerce and mediaare not necessarily the death knellfor local languages, because certaintrends support their preservation.Whereas one-way mass media tech-nologies such as TV, radio, and printserved to support majority lan-guages, today’s computer technol-ogy is turning the tables. It is consid-erably less expensive now toproduce video and audio in any lan-guage, and communications tech-nologies allow you to transmit thesemedia to a diaspora anywhere in theworld.

In the future, with lower prices forpowerful computers and dramatic

advances in broadband Internet(such as IPv6 architecture that willsoon turn any Internet connectioninto a broadcast device), majoritylanguages may no longer possess anadvantage in distributing informa-tion to the public. In the future, any-body anywhere on Earth could con-ceivably receive the evening news inWelsh or Irish Gaelic. Also, the avail-ability of cheap, powerful multi-media will allow teachers to trans-late educational materials into a locallanguage more easily. These educa-tional technologies will be essentialto the survival and prosperity of lan-guages in the future. Only educationof the youth assures the continuity ofa language.

The availability of government ser-vices in a chosen language is theonly path to its legitimacy in a politi-cal sense, but even more critical is fora minority language to be used incommerce.

The pressures of globalization onminority languages are undeniable,and many will likely disappear.However, extinction is not a cer-tainty. The trend toward the homo-geneity of global culture has stimu-lated many people to search for theirnative roots and hold tighter to theircultural identity.

We are living in interesting times,linguistically, as powerful nationallanguages encounter fierce resistancein their drive to dislodge local lan-guages. New technologies are offer-ing people greater freedom to choosetheir own cultural identity, andmany are choosing minority locallanguages. The linguistic giants willnot be the only choice in the future.■■

About the AuthorEric Garland is the principalof Competitive Futures Inc.,a futures consultancy,www.competitivefutures.com.His last article for THEFUTURIST, “Scenarios inPractice: Futuring in the

Pharmaceutical Industry,” appeared inJanuary-February 2006.

36 THE FUTURIST July-August 2006 www.wfs.org

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Great Britain’s Prince Charles (left),hosted by Donald McCormick, inspects theMcCormick collection of Gaelic and highland-related material at the Gaelic College atSleat, Isle of Skye.

HUSSEIN ANWAR / SIPA / NEWSCOM