Cultural nerve gas

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

The English language is a gatekeeper to wisdom. To information, to knowledge, to your health, wealth and relationships. I use to say that if you compare a person who knows the English language and knows how to use the internet, with a person who doesn’t know any of these two skills, they are so far behind that they might as well have been a different species. And the gap is increasing with exponential acceleration. Every. Single. Day. About 6/10 of websites are in English today. In academia, the vast majority of research papers are written in English. Podcasts, books, international communication… The English language has truly become a gatekeeper.

I read and listen a lot to books and I have found some true gems. I wanted to recommend some of them to my parents, because I knew the information would be relevant to them. But I could not find any Swedish translation of the material, and consequently, the ideas contained within the books could not reach them, which I found sad. If you are not proficient in English, you are cut off from a huge pool of knowledge and ideas. My native tongue is Swedish, and it has about 10 million speakers. English has about 400 million native speakers with another 1.1 billion as a secondary language. Another thought struck me the other day. Consider the advantage that native English countries like the U.S or the U.K. have when their companies want to recruit. They have access to a significantly larger pool of potential talent, from all around the world. Whereas (in most cases) you would need to learn Swedish to get a job here. It’s not impossible, but it is an additional barrier, and if we consider the very best people in a specific field, they have ample opportunity to go anywhere anyway.

The possibilities of a global language are huge, but there are also downsides. A tectonic shift towards western culture with English language can be compared to “cultural nerve gas”. Did you know that in about 100 years, 90% of the ~6000 languages spoken today will be extinct? Just ask the minority indigenous people around the world how they feel about this shift. When media, radio, television and now the internet arrived, their ancient traditions started dying out very quickly. I look at languages as tools. Certain tools are better suited for a specific task at hand. If you are about to shift the wheels on your car, a tire iron is perfect. But if you are about to mow your lawn, it is quite useless. We can do the same analogy with language. Certain ideas are better suited to be expressed in a specific language. Funny idioms are a great example. They do not work at all when translated. An idiom is a hyper-effective way of condensing an idea in just a few words. When 90% of the languages become extinct within the next century, we will also lose 90% of the tools at our disposal to communicate ideas. The ability to communicate ideas is arguably the single most important aspect of the human species.

Some argue that language extinction is a good thing. Wouldn’t it be great if we all could communicate with each other, all around the world, using just one language? It’s a compelling thought, but I find it naive. I argue that languages are simply not replaceable by another. Period. They shape our thought patterns to a high degree, and thus our reality. If you were to write down your memoirs in your native tongue, and then write them down in another language, chances are that your memories would not be the same! Diversity of ideas is certainly a wonderful thing, but it turns out that globalization simultaneously is a destructive force to the very same diversity that we hold dear. Language extinction is equal to culture extinction. Without different languages, cultures and borders, diversity cannot exist. The story of the Tower of Babel comes to mind.

I cannot propose a solution to this very complex problem at this moment. And I can’t figure out how I should mow my lawn with a tire iron either.