I love serendipity, and surfing around on line seems to provide plenty of opportunities for it. Today I somehow came across this quote from author and current world explorer Wade Davis:
Language isn’t just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules; it’s a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. From: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0627_020628_wadedavis.html
Never gave much thought to language as the soul of culture before, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
But then I ran across more about language in the Survival of Language in the Digital Age. For instance:
It’s an uphill battle to bring African languages onto the Internet. While there are lively communities on Wikipedia preserving European languages like Welsh or Frisian, most of the speakers of minority African languages, like Ewe or Bambara, have little net access and less net expertise. There’s the very real concern that some of these languages may die out before their native speakers start writing online.
And that’s troubling, especially if you think about Davis’ idea that language is the “vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world.” There’s a technology angle to all this, however:
But the slow spread of the Internet in many African nations suggests that it may be a while before Wolof speakers are writing in that language instead of in French. And the smaller the language, the longer it takes to establish a community online… and, generally speaking, the higher the chance that most speakers of the language don’t have regular internet access. Some African languages will not survive in a digital era.
Hm, makes you wonder about what else gets lost as technology spreads and what happens to cultural stuff that can’t keep up with the speed of the spread. Not just now, with the internet, but through all the technological “revolutions” of the past.