Viva Spanglish!

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The Manx language was pronounced dead on December 27, 1974, when the last native speaker passed away at age 97 in a fishing village on the Isle of Man called Cregneash. By outliving his generation, Ned Maddrell became famous, symbolizing the lost heritage of this British-governed island in the Irish Sea. In Ned's name, the Manx people have spent the past three decades attempting to inspire a revival, compiling vocabularies and teaching the language in school. But with only 150 semifluent speakers, Manx remains a far cry in popularity from Welsh or even Scots Gaelic. So is it, as the Canadian journalist Mark Abley claims in his 2003 book Spoken Here (Houghton Mifflin), "a test case for rebirth"?

These are the statistics: Of the 6,800 languages spoken today, half will be dead by the end of the century -- one tongue every two weeks. These are the standard villains: capitalism, tourism, television. And these are the typical arguments for resisting language assimilation: A society that loses its language loses its culture; a country that loses its language loses its autonomy; a civilization that loses its languages loses its diversity.

Such arguments have, naturally, been advanced on behalf of Manx. Words such as coghal -- a big lump of dead flesh after an opened wound -- evoke the harsh life lived by Ned Maddrell's ancestors, while his contemporaries left little doubt about their attitude toward the future when they used jouyl, the Manx word for devil, to mean automobile. The Manx parliament writes all laws in Manx as well as in English in the effort to preserve local identity. But are the purposes of rebirth served by holding Manx classes on a modern, English-speaking island?

Clearly, speaking Manx will neither exorcise the island of cars nor impel the children of bankers to expose their tender flesh to the high seas. If the language is not to be a ceremonial artifact of a fairy-tale past, it can neither enshrine the coghal nor demonize the automobile. Of all the arguments advanced by endangered-language advocates, only the case for linguistic diversity is coherent. Unfortunately, it also turns out to be irrelevant. Biologists tell us that we should protect species from extinction for self-serving as well as altruistic reasons, that we should care about each plant and animal because any one may some day be found to cure a disease, and because the ecosystem with the greatest variety is the most robust. So it would seem to be with languages: Each may contain useful knowledge and allow for a range of expression beyond the main global languages.

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