Globalizing Language

5 Pages 1200 Words

Throughout history, adventurers, generals, merchants, and financiers have constructed an ever-more-global economy. Today, unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new momentum. As globally mobile capital reorganizes business firms, it sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics. Globalization creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. It is both a source of repression and a catalyst for global movements of social justice and emancipation. Globalization also allows multinational corporations to manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level. Many politicians, academics, and journalists treat these trends as both inevitable and (on the whole) welcome. But for billions of the world’s people, business-driven globalization means uprooting old ways of life and threatening livelihoods and cultures.
Experts disagree about the rate at which languages are disappearing: some say that by the end of the century half will have gone, some say 90%. But whenever a language dies, a bit of the world's culture, history and diversity dies with it. This is slowly coming to be appreciated. The EU declared 2001 to be “European year of languages”, and it is striking that even France—whose hostility to linguistic competition is betrayed by the constitution's bald statement that “the language of the Republic is French”—now smiles more compassionately on its seven regional tongues (Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish and Provençal).
Yet the extinction of most languages is probably unstoppable. Television and radio, bo...