The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (64 page)

Those shifts of function make it harder to define religion than to define electric organs, because electric organs at least all share the trait of setting up detectable electric fields in the surrounding medium, whereas there is no single characteristic shared by all religions. At the risk of coming up with yet another definition to add to those of
Table 9.1
, I’d now propose: “Religion is a set of traits distinguishing a human social group sharing those traits from other groups not sharing those traits in identical form. Included among those shared traits is always one or more, often all three, out of three traits: supernatural explanation, defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual, and offering comfort for life’s pains and the prospect of death. Religions other than early ones became co-opted to promote standardized organization, political obedience, tolerance of strangers belonging to one’s own religion, and justification of wars against groups holding other religions.” That definition of mine is at least as tortured as the most tortured definitions already in
Table 9.1
, but I think that it corresponds to reality.

What about religion’s future? That depends on what shape the world will be in 30 years from now. If living standards rise all around the world, then religion’s functions numbers 1 and 4–7 of
Figure 9.1
will continue to decline, but functions 2 and 3 seem to me likely to persist. Religion is especially likely to continue to be espoused for claiming to offer meaning to individual lives and deaths whose meaning may seem insignificant from a scientific perspective. Even if science’s answer to the search for meaning is true, and if religion’s meaning is an illusion, many people will continue not to like science’s answer. If, on the other hand, much of the world remains mired in poverty, or if (worse yet) the world’s economy and living standards and peace deteriorate, then all functions of religion, perhaps even supernatural explanation, may undergo a resurgence. My children’s generation will experience the answers to these questions.

Multilingualism
The world’s language total
How languages evolve
Geography of language diversity
Traditional multilingualism
Benefits of bilingualism
Alzheimer’s disease
Vanishing languages
How languages disappear
Are minority languages harmful?
Why preserve languages?
How can we protect languages?

One evening, while I was spending a week at a mountain forest campsite with 20 New Guinea Highlanders, conversation around the campfire was going on simultaneously in several different local languages plus two lingua francas of Tok Pisin and Motu, as commonly happens when a group of New Guineans from different tribes happens to be gathered. I had already become accustomed to encountering a new language approximately every 10 or 20 miles as I walked or drove through the New Guinea Highlands. I had just come from the lowlands, where a New Guinea friend had told me how five different local languages were spoken within a few miles of his village, how he had picked up those five languages as a child just by playing with other children, and how he had learned three more languages after he began school. And so, out of curiosity that evening, I went around the campfire circle and asked each man to name each language that he “spoke,” i.e., knew well enough to converse in.

Among those 20 New Guineans, the smallest number of languages that anyone spoke was 5. Several men spoke from 8 to 12 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15. Except for English, which New Guineans often learn at school by studying books, everyone had acquired all of his other languages socially without books. Just to anticipate your likely question—yes, those local languages enumerated that evening really were
mutually unintelligible languages, not mere dialects. Some were tonal like Chinese, others were non-tonal, and they belonged to several different language families.

In the United States, on the other hand, most native-born Americans are monolingual. Educated Europeans commonly know two or three languages, sometimes more, having learned in school the languages other than their mother tongue. The linguistic contrast between that New Guinea campfire and modern American or European experience illustrates widespread differences between language use in small-scale societies and in modern state societies—differences that will increase in coming decades. In our traditional past, as is still true in modern New Guinea, each language had far fewer speakers than do the languages of modern states; probably a higher proportion of the population was multilingual; and second languages were learned socially beginning in childhood, rather than by formal study later in schools.

Sadly, languages are now vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current trends continue, 95% of the languages handed down to us from the tens of thousands of years of history of behaviorally modern humans will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100. Half of our languages will actually have become extinct by then, most of the remainder will be dying languages spoken only by old people, and only a small minority will be “live” languages still being transmitted from parents to children.

Languages are disappearing so rapidly (about one every nine days), and there are so few linguists studying them, that time is running out even to describe and record most languages before they disappear. Linguists face a race against time similar to that faced by biologists, now aware that most of the world’s plant and animal species are in danger of extinction and of disappearing even before they can be described. We do hear much anguished discussion about the accelerating disappearance of birds and frogs and other living species, as our Coca-Cola civilization spreads over the world. Much less attention has been paid to the disappearance of our languages, and to their essential role in the survival of those indigenous cultures. Each language is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking and talking, a unique literature, and a unique view of the world. Hence looming over us today is the tragedy of the impending loss of most of our cultural heritage, linked with the loss of most of our languages.