The End of English?

A couple of provocative posts (Post 1 and Post 2) by Don Osborn have revived some thoughts I've been having about African languages and information technology. Don's posts have arrived at a good moment - the power here in Accra just went out for the eighth time today, but I've got about enough battery life to type some preliminary notes.

Don writes about the "long tail" and the economics of language. In sum (and without network, I can't scroll back through his posts), he is thinking about the question of "smaller" languages and how people who are born speaking them relate to their mother tongues from an economic perspective. Do people who speak these "long tail" languages feel the need to learn languages higher up the tail for economic purposes? Will such people abandon their mother tongues over time, in preference for a language that allows them to communicate with more people and therefore have expanded economic and social potential?

These are questions that I have long pondered in the context of Swahili in East Africa. Swahili is very high up the tail. With somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million speakers throughout East and Central Africa, it is spoken by about as many people worldwide as German, roughly one out of 60 people on Planet Earth. Many of the languages of East Africa are endangered, and others are diminishing, with Swahili being the language of choice of many of those people who are drifting away from their mother tongues. I have witnessed rural households where the children are discouraged from speaking their ethnic languages in favor of Swahili, and thus cannot speak with their own grandparents in a common language (though they communicate fine, each speaking their preferred language but understanding what is said in the other).

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