Is Language Loss Almost Normal?

Stories of languages lost, but also found

“Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious, or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children, but today these pressures are everywhere. The disruption of this basic natural process has come to feel almost normal.”

- Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues

I will get back to this quote by Ross Perlin, author of the recent book about endangered languages in New York, but I wanted to leave it here, at the beginning so that if you care to, you can ruminate on notions around what we consider a “basic natural process” and “almost normal” in the context of language, language loss, language transmission and multilingualism.

But first, stories from a couple of recent encounters.

My children visiting the work of Stanisław Dróżdż at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow. Dróżdż’s work centres around short texts and words analysing language and its visual forms. He often referred to his work as “pojęciokształty” or, figures of meaning.

Last week while in Kraków, I met a family also visiting from the UK while our children played together in a nearby play area. I should clarify my mom, who was also there with us, met the father first, conversing with the man in Polish before I interrupted them. It turned out, the man was not Polish but British and had only learnt the language in the decade he had been with his Polish partner. He met his wife, who had moved from Poland to England after university, in an office where they both worked. Their kids, around eight and five years old now, are being raised bilingually Polish and English and the family resides in a small village in the northwest of England. They make the trip to Poland regularly to visit the mother’s family, he told me, predominantly a (great) grandmother who only speaks Polish and expects her granddaughter’s husband to improve his Polish with each visit. Hence why, he said, he works hard to keep on top of his Polish learning and practising.

The three of us made small talk (now in English, go figure) about our trips and about Kraków, but because I like to turn everything into a gentle enquiry about multilingualism and linguistic identity, we mostly discussed how it was raising bilingual children, what the family did to help foster the languages and how his kids, and mine, felt about it all. At one point, he told me a story about his brother. When his wife joined our conversation a while later, she too shared the same story without knowing her husband had already told me. It is a story I want to share with you as it got me thinking a lot about the choices¹ we make as parents and individuals when it comes to our children’s language(s), and our own.

The British man’s brother is also married to a Polish woman, he also has two young children, and he also lives in the same village in northwest England where the brothers grew up. The families see each other often and the cousins are close. On the Polish mother’s side, the (grand) parents also don’t use English at all. But there is one significant linguistic difference between the families: the brother and his wife have chosen to use only English with their children, so unlike their cousins, the kids do not speak any Polish. I asked why.