Change of Language and Activism

It goes without saying that language is constantly changing. Many different issues factor into the changes in structure and use of most all languages. The various roles of language in every culture are both universal and specific. Universal roles of language pertain cross-culturally while the specific roles of a particular language can only be fully and truly understood by those who understand that language through its culture and likewise understand that culture through its language. One of the most highly-debated issues of current linguistic anthropology concerns the standardization of language. Many people feel that acquiring one standard, universal language, a monoglot, would significantly contribute towards unifying the world. Though language can create a sense of unity among individual cultures, a worldwide monoglot culture would inevitably be biased, limiting cultural diversity and obscuring a true view of much of the relevant ideology of different cultures existent throughout the world.

Language is continuously adapting to cultural change. Within every culture, issues and basic ways of life are forever altering, influencing language alteration along with it. Negative cultural influence can also lead to language change. Of the world's 6,000 estimated languages, 20-30% are no longer spoken by children and linguists have predicted that within the next century, at least 50% will disappear, being forced into the biased standardization of world language. Power struggles have led to colonialism and imperialism, which have dominated in some places in the world and suppressed the language. The imperial power of the British Empire valued 'geopolitical and monolingual standardization,' and influenced Australia, France, Russia, and the United States to follow their values. Though political and socioeconomic profits may benefit those who use international language, their spread and domination has caused and will continue to cause the loss of much native language. Colonialism and imperialism are the basis for which hegemony develops, creating one overarching social power. With hegemony, the media, the government, education, and religion all begin to operate as a single voice. The linguistic ideology expressed through them is based on power and control and so they all begin to sound the same and produce this monolith.

Language plays countless roles, both universal and specific, throughout every culture and society. It functions as basic communication and socialization, and to create and maintain socioeconomic organization along with social coordination and cooperation. Standardization of language "is a phenomenon in a linguistic community in which institutional maintenance of certain valued linguistic practices- in theory, fixed- acquires an explicitly- recognized hegemony over the definition of the community's norm." In claiming the term 'standard,' it asserts superiority and discounts dialect and other important parts of languages. The superiority complex encompassed in the elitism of the 'standard' is accurately described in Michael Silverstein's essay entitled Monoglot 'Standard' in America:

Even though such languages may be highly and transparently articulated into a set of context-specific registers, bespeaking subtle regularities of usage, may manifest all the communicative properties of one's own language, and may be sociohistorically specific to a cultural tradition identifiable in all other ways, still, to many speakers of standardized languages, non-standardized one's do not seem to be 'real' languages, which, ironically enough, are from them thought to come in 'naturally' standardized conditions of 'objectively' distinct systems of norms. Most all societies have particular characteristics, functions, and culture-specific ideology, which can only be genuinely understood through that particular culture and therefore, can only be accurately explained through its native language. Hence, because language is so important in determining and representing its specific cultures' functions, a monoglot language would be unable to validly depict and represent every culture in the world.