A school in Cradley
Heath, West Midlands has imposed a ban on speaking the Black Country dialect in class, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-24967032.
Maybe it's because I'm a Welshman that I find this action so
malevolent. My own ancestral Celtic language almost died out several times in
the last few centuries; today Welsh is now happily thriving for the first time
in over two hundred years with almost a million speakers, and booming art and
cultural heritage media. However my great uncle and aunt in the Netherlands
spoke an isolated Dutch-Platt dialect called Groesbeeks and they were among the last ever speakers of it; when
they died, it died with them. Of all the tales of Illuminati infamy, linguistic
genocide is not one you'll hear mentioned very often. Maybe it's because people
see language as nothing more than a tool for communication, with one being very
much like the other. All are interchangeable and disposable and wouldn't it be
ideal if we all spoke just one, stop all this inconvenient messing about with
translation? But a language is more than that, it's a unique landscape of human
experience and thought. People who speak different languages literally think
differently. This is why languages often borrow words from each other when they
want to describe a concept that has no word itself that fits. German and
Japanese in particular contain many words that have no English equivalent. The German
Heimat means "home", "home
country", "dream location" and "place of origin". The
Japanese word Komorebi means what
sunshine looks like when seen through the leaves of a tree. The Italian Lalochezia means "gaining emotional relief by using foul language". Only a native
speaker of these languages can truly understand these ideas properly and when
the last native speaker of a language dies then the idea is lost, forever, and
we can never get it back no matter what we do.
There are currently about seven thousand languages and
distinct dialects spoken in the world today, but only three hundred years ago
there were about twenty-two thousand. This means over two thirds of the
languages in the world have died since then. Today over ninety-nine percent of
the world's population speak only the top one hundred of the seven thousand
remaining. We are facing a massive cull in human linguistics. Within a specific
geographical language sphere, like England ,
we also see less and less variation in speech. The classic Yorkshire
dialect is all but gone. I was in Yorkshire last weekend
and heard nobody speaking it; and this is a pattern we see repeated across the
country. This is totally in line with the New World Order agenda to impose
uniformity on the people. They'll have us all speaking the same language which
they'll then downgrade into a degenerate shadow of its natural self through
engineering and political correctness; Orwell's Newspeak. What's more another
story has come to my attention along the very same lines. A teacher in Berkshire
with a Cumbrian twang has been told to tone it down, to "sound more
southern": http://news.sky.com/story/1170839/teacher-told-her-accent-is-too-northern.
Why are all the languages of the world dying out? In some cases the people who
speak it simple disappear; this is certainly the case with the American Indians
and Australian Aborigines. However the killing of a language is often more subtle
and insidious than that; people simply change their speaking habits over a long
period of time. Generation by generation they bow to social pressures that make
speaking one particular language, dialect or accent advantageous over another;
this is how Welsh, Gaelic, Manx and other minority tongues in the British
Isles declined. The solution is to expose those who create the social
norms which cause people to make subconscious decisions like that. But also we
have to understand that the decision is still our own. We can be aware of exactly what is being done to us and defy
it. We can enjoy our uniqueness and our independence, relish our differences.
Language is always evolving and changing naturally despite the attempts to cage
it. Synchronistically, the same week the above news stories came out, the
Oxford English Dictionary has just added a series of new words to its pages. A selfie is a photograph of you that you
take yourself using an electronic device and share it on social networks. Schmeat is artificial meat substitute
like Quorn and to twerk means to
dance in a sexually provocative manner, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25009621.
The author K David Harrison has written a book and made a movie called The Last Speakers, where he travels the
world meeting the last native speakers of languages and trying to record their
speech, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89PkSNTtbg.
I wish him luck. Nijmegen University
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