The domination of the lingua franca

The is something in a country's language that resonates with the character and ethos of its people. There is something in the sound, the cadence how many synonyms a language has for a word that is indicative of how that people see the world. As Henry Hitchings says in The Secret Life of Words: How English became English:

Every language has a character. Our relationship with our own language can be complacent, but when we speak a foreign tongue we sense more keenly the "characterfulness" of that language, the peculiar way it channels history and culture, its special version of the world, its distinctive textures and codes. Different languages seem suited to different areas of experience. Tradition has it that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, preferred to speak French to diplomats, Italian to ladies, German to stable boys, and Spanish to God. English he seems to have used sparingly--to talk to geese. Nicholas Ostler, in his Macro-history Empires of the World, sketches 'some of the distinctive traits of the various traditions: Arabic's austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian's unshakable self regard; Sanskrit's luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek's self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin's civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity, and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen.' This type of generalization is attractive, albeit limiting, and hints at a deeper truth: that our languages hint at the nature of our world, and the history of their development is a history of consciousness.

The Economist published a study this past week about endangered languages. According to their study 34.5% are in some degree of danger of extinction while another 3.7% having gone extinct since 1950. At this point, with the process of globalization so entrenched in modern society and the majority of the Internet and media outlets in English, I am not sure what can be done. Yet the world will be a poorer place without the haunting vowels of Welsh or the sharp consonants of Yiddish and history, character, idiosyncrasies, and peoples the invoke.