by Sharon Norris
The 21st February is International Mother Language Day. The global event, organised by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) has been held annually since 1999, and aims to draw attention to endangered languages across the world.
Linguists generally consider a language to be 'endangered' when at least 30 per cent of a community's children no longer learn its native tongue. UNESCO estimates that over half of the world's 6,000 may be at risk, and in Europe alone around 50 languages look set to disappear, including Saami, or Lappish, and indigenous languages in both France and Siberia.
There are many reasons why native languages are dying out. For some, this is a throwback to former times when the use of minority languages was often forbidden. Even in the UK, until relatively recently, school children who spoke Gaelic, Welsh, or dialects from other parts of the UK were often punished. One notorious example of this was the so-called "Welsh Knot", a device that children caught speaking Welsh in class were forced to wear round their necks.
According to Professor Nik Coupland, an ESRC-funded researcher from the University of Cardiff, the name came from the unofficial Eleventh Commandment in Wales at that time - "Thou shalt not speak Welsh". It seems that this, coupled with pro-British sentiment during the Second World War, had an effect; where 50 per cent of people in Wales spoke Welsh in 1900, by 1971 the figure had dropped to one in five, where it has since remained fairly stable.
Since the passing of the Welsh Language Act in 1993, public bodies in Wales have had a statutory duty to 'protect and revitalise' the Welsh language, though as yet there is no such obligation for private bodies.
While some languages are dying out, others are gaining in influence. Around a fifth of the world's six and a half billion population speaks some form of Chinese - more than any other language - while Spanish is spoken by around 400 million people across the world. In each case the numbers are growing.
However, the influence of English, which has become the global language of education and the media, is particularly strong. Almost one billion people worldwide speak English, though less than half as their mother tongue. Nevertheless, the influence of English, and of the British or North American culture that often accompanies it, is often referred to as 'linguistic imperialism'.
One area where English is dominant is among the global academic community. Dr Theresa Lillis, a Senior Lecturer at the Open University, leads an ESRC-funded longitudinal survey of 50 academics in Hungary, Slovakia, Portugal and Spain.
The project, which began in 2001, tracks the researchers' publications, and whether they publish in English or their mother tongue. It seems the majority have faced strong pressure throughout their career to publish in English, and while the research is still on-going, already some patterns are beginning to emerge, says Dr Lillis.
"It isn't that people aren't publishing in their native languages, but the received status of what they write is affected by what language they choose to write in. Also, the nature of articles differs depending on what language is used. Generally speaking, English is used to describe theoretical knowledge, while the mother language is used when this is applied to more specific contexts in their own countries".
If researchers ever do write up their applied research in English-language medium journals, it is usually seen as 'exoticism', and according to Dr Lillis: "one distinguished researcher did comment that Hungarian researchers who contributed to these publications were viewed as a 'tribe'".
The study has also raised interesting issues about the sometimes flimsy distinction between form and content. For example, says Dr Lillis: "what might be considered an amplification of a point in Hungary would probably be seen as a digression within a North American or British academic context. What this shows is that many language practices are actually very culturally-embedded - they're not just about language".
However, there are some academics who feel uneasy about the 'enforcement' of English, says Dr Lillis. "One researcher said he felt the pressure to write in English took him away from doing the type of applied research that would be useful to his own community, and he acknowledged feeling ashamed about this".
Dr Lillis believes that academics need to react with their own community, and, she says, "This in turn raises broader questions about the role of academics, and especially their role in relation to their own community".