Debunking the Survival of the Fittest Account

When nonspecialists talk about language endangerment, they sometimes invoke the survival of the fittest account. Isn’t it true that only the fittest languages will survive, and sad as it may be, it is simply in the natural course of things? The short answer is no.

Here’s a quick reminder of your biology class. In 1859, naturalist Charles Darwin famously argued that biological species are subject to natural selection: generation after generation, the cumulative effect of differential reproduction by individuals best adjusted to their environment (thanks to certain inheritable traits) leads to the generalisation of these properties in the entire population. A popular name for this process is the survival of the fittest.

You may now wonder, How do we go from the theory of evolution about plants and animals to thinking about languages? Darwin himself didn’t resist drawing a parallel between the processes of formation and loss of languages and species: “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. . . . Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears.”1

The problem with drawing such a parallel between biological species and languages is that natural selection pertains to random variations, not the intentional choices of human agents, as in the case of language users. Another major difference is that languages are not transmitted genetically; they are the result of social processes. Hence Darwin’s observations for plants and animals cannot apply to languages other than in a sketchy way. And as we will see in this book, Darwin is wrong in his observation that a language never “reappears”: unlike species, a language can be used again by new speakers at any point in time (recall Modern Hebrew).

This leap from species to social phenomena like languages is part of a broader approach known as social Darwinism. Social Darwinism has its roots in Darwin’s own writings and inspired the infamous scientific and social eugenics movement.2 The eugenics movement minimises the role of social context and instead seeks to rank groups of people in a hierarchy based on a biological index of fitness. Following the crimes of Nazi Germany, which co-opted the eugenics ideology, scientists have turned their backs on this movement, which is now discredited as pseudoscientific.

In 2021, the American Psychological Association apologised for promoting the ideas of early twentieth-century eugenics, followed in 2023 by a similar apology by the American Society of Human Genetics.3 In its report, eugenics is summarised as follows: “Eugenic ideologies were embedded into American science, politics, and society in the first half of the 20th century. Eugenics exploited preexisting prejudices and promoted the idea that ‘unfitness’ was genetically determined. Extreme measures such as sterilisation and genocide were utilised to restrict the proliferation of people deemed ‘unfit.’”4

Species Endangerment, Language Endangerment: Is There a Connection?

Today, it is common to draw attention to the parallel processes of language and species endangerment.5 Like languages, it is striking to see that 41 percent of amphibians, 26 percent of mammals, and 13 percent of birds are threatened.6

In the 1990s, linguist Michael Krauss, founder of the Alaska Native Language Center, drew attention to language endangerment with these words: “Should we mourn the loss of Eyak and Ubykh any less than the loss of the panda or California condor?”7

But is there a connection between the two processes, beyond the fact that they are two pressing problems of our era?

For Marxist scholars, the origin of the present environmental crisis is to be found in the development of capitalism and colonialism, starting with mercantile accumulation from the 1400s to the 1800s and continuing with industrial accumulation from 1750 until 1980. This economic model aimed to extract cheap labour, food, energy, and raw materials.8 As we will see in the following sections, the extraction of cheap labor, food, energy, and raw materials decimated Indigenous peoples, destroyed the natural environment, and led to the current climate breakdown. So in historical terms, the processes of language and species endangerment are connected as they derive from the same economic model.

Other researchers set out to understand more generally whether the natural environment in which humans live shapes their social organisation and whether this in turn shapes language diversity. In one study, anthropologist Ruth Mace and biologist Mark Pagel report greater language diversity where there is also greater mammalian species diversity.9 The connection between language and species diversity here lies in the assumption that when humans live in places where there is easy, quick access to food, they tend to live in smaller groups, slowly differentiating from other closely related linguistic groups. Overall, ecoregions that support more humans (higher population density) will tend to exhibit higher language diversity, and rich ecoregions (higher resource diversity) will likely lead to greater language diversity.

Recent studies suggest that of all environmental variables, the density of rivers along with landscape roughness best predict language and species diversity.10 For example, the impact of rivers on language diversity depends on how navigable a river is. Rivers can be barriers to contact between different groups and drive language diversity. Alternatively, rivers that can be easily navigated will facilitate contact and sustain language homogeneity. In that sense, there are no universal or direct ecological factors that drive language diversity. Rather, environmental factors impact social organisation and languages differently from one region to another.11

In fact, in many cases, social factors override environmental ones. For instance, small-scale societies in Southern New Guinea live in a geographic area without major environmental hurdles and maintain close relations between different language groups including through intermarriages.12 But instead of choosing to use a single language, they promote multilingual practices (more about societal multilingualism in chapter 8). This explains the high language diversity that characterises this geographic area. In contrast, political centralisation through powerful empires and nation-states often leads to language homogeneity. In a nutshell, it is less about the natural environment than about language ideologies.

Life in Nation-States

Modern nation-states were first formed in Europe by merchants, professionals, farmers, and artisans who seized or effectively limited the power of the aristocracy and clergy.13 Key historical events are the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, and French Revolution in 1789.

As the new European nation-states took control, they pursued and amplified ongoing colonial projects to the extent that sociologist Gurminder Bhambra argues nation-states were in fact imperial states, not just nation-states with empires.14

When colonies in the Americas gained their independence, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the model of nation-states was widely adopted. Similarly, as colonies in Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific, Africa, and the Caribbean conquered their independence in the twentieth century, they also opted for the nation-state model. As a result, the United Nations grew from the 51 member states in 1945 to the current 193 states.

Some nation-states appeal to multicultural values and effectively respect the language of the ethnic groups that compose them. Let’s pause here to ask, What is the difference between an ethnicity and nation? In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, ethnicity is defined as the “shared cultural practices, perspectives, and distinctions that set apart one group of people from another.”15 When an ethnic group seeks to establish an independent political unit, we start referring to it as a nation.

In Europe, Switzerland successfully illustrates how different linguistic groups (French, German, and Italian) can persist under the same state structure in the form of a federation.

Yugoslavia was another case of a proud, ethnically diverse state. I use the past tense because during the wars of the 1990s, the rise of nationalisms led to the formation of a multitude of independent nation-states (like Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo, with the independent status of the latter still in dispute), each with its own set of minority languages.

Similarly, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet republics gained their independence as nation-states. Within the new states, the former national languages became majority languages and Russian became a minority language (as in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine).16

Indeed, in most cases, modern nation-state building is based on monolingual ideologies: one nation, one people, one language. Within these national imagined communities, linguistic and cultural differences among some groups of people are targeted by policies and programs with the goal to assimilate these groups to the dominant national language and culture.17

France is the poster child of this monolingual mindset. After the French Revolution in 1789, learning and using Parisian French was promoted to allow all French citizens to fully participate in democratic life: “French shall be taught in every commune where the local people do not speak French.”18 As you may notice, this law says nothing about not using languages other than French. The surrounding discourse was particularly hostile, however.

In 1794, Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, the spokesperson for the Committee of Public Safety to the Convention, expresses himself in the following way (brace yourself for some insulting language): “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hate of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us smash these faulty and harmful instruments. It is better to instruct than to translate; it is not up to us to maintain these barbarous jargons and crude dialects which can only be of further service to fanatics and counter-revolutionaries.”19

Like in France, the boundaries of a nation and national language rarely, if ever, coincide with the borders of a state. Competing national projects therefore often arise within established nation-states. These are met with different degrees of violence and oppression depending on the place and time.

In western Europe, several nationalist movements are ongoing. In 1979, for example, Catalonia gained the status of an autonomous community in Spain following a century-long movement for autonomy centered on the Catalan language and culture. In 2006, a new law granted the status of nation to Catalonia, but in 2010 the Spanish Constitutional Court changed it into the status of nationality. This fueled a political crisis leading to the 2017 unilateral referendum on self-determination organised by the Catalan government. In 2019, the Spanish Supreme Court found nine Catalan leaders guilty of sedition, although they’ve since been pardoned by the new Spanish government in a move toward reconciliation. History is still unfolding.

In the Middle East, the Kurds are a large ethnic minority group that resides in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Türkiye. Kurds have a distinct culture and speak an Indo-European language, Kurdish. Kurdish is currently one of the official languages of the autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq, while in the other states, Kurds continue to fight for different degrees of autonomy. In Türkiye, for example, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party began an armed struggle in 1984, and in northern Syria, during the Syrian Civil War (2011–present), the Democratic Union Party declared regional autonomy for Rojava. Despite the significant contribution of the Kurds to the military defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, to date, there has been no international recognition of an independent Kurdish state.

Life (and Death) under Colonial Rule

We have seen that even though endangered languages are found in all parts of the world, their distribution differs. Few endangered languages are found in Africa while most endangered languages are found in the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. What accounts for this difference?

According to linguist Salikoko Mufwene of the University of Chicago, this reflects differences in the language ecologies between exploitation colonies, as was typically the case in Africa, and settler colonies, as in the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand.20

In exploitation colonies, western European nations exploited people’s workforces and local resources, but didn’t settle massively. This doesn’t mean that the colonisation process was not violent, as millions of African people were murdered and their social structures disrupted. For instance, between 1880 and 1920, Congo’s population decreased from an estimated twenty to ten million people as Belgium’s colonial rule pursued the extraction of rubber, ivory, diamonds, and uranium.

Mufwene explains that in exploitation colonies, use of the colonial languages was confined to specific contexts, creating hierarchies where the colonial languages were at the top, but also allowing breathing space for most local languages.

Africans further strengthened their languages as they gained independence from western European colonial rule starting in the 1950s. Nonetheless, as acclaimed Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains, it is a long process to fully reclaim African languages: “I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples.”21

In settlement colonies, like the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, the arrival of tens of millions of European settlers took a huge demographic toll on the Indigenous peoples. Although scholars initially estimated Indigenous populations at low levels, current accounts suggest that the continent now known as the Americas was home to around 100 million people, the continent known as Australia to 750,000 people, and Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu to 100,000 people.22 It has also been established that Indigenous populations declined by up to 90 percent after the European colonisation of the Americas and Australia, and by up to 50 percent after the colonisation of Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu (New Zealand).23 This population decline is due to a mix of imported diseases, violently forced labour, and the expropriation of traditional territories by the settlers.

Let me illustrate this dramatic population collapse with the story of the Ixcatecs. The Ixcatecs currently live in Santa María Ixcatlán, a small village in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The village today has around four hundred inhabitants, but at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival, Ixcatlán was a thriving center with an estimated population of between ten and thirty thousand. The region, which had been under Aztec domination for fifty years, surrendered to Hernán Cortés and his army in 1520. Two soldiers from Cortés’s campaigns, Rodrigo de Segura and García Vélez, received Ixcatlán as a reward in 1522. Less than sixty years later, a report by Velásquez de Lara for the Spanish Crown titled Description of Ixcatlán puts the local population at no more than twelve hundred Ixcatecs.24 The reasons for this sharp drop are the same as elsewhere in the Americas: forced labour, in the case of the Ixcatecs in the mines, and a deadly pandemic, known as huey cocoliztli in Nahuatl, that started in 1545 and spread from Mexico to Peru.

Under colonisation, the Ixcatecs were forced to pay taxes to the Spanish Crown. Spanish was therefore quickly established as the language of relations between the new territories and the administration of New Spain. At the same time, few Spanish speakers settled in Ixcatlán. In this context, the Xhwani (or Ixcatec) language continued to be used by the survivors and transmitted from generation to generation. It was only in the early twentieth century, when Spanish monolingual educational policies were put in place, that the few remaining Ixcatecs stopped using Xhwani with the younger generations and started using Spanish instead.

Bio

Evangelia Adamou is Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Academy of Europe. She specialises in the study of endangered languages and has conducted extensive research in the Balkans and Latin America.

NOTES

1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 59–60.

2. Oksana Yakushko, “Eugenics and Its Evolution in the History of Western Psychology: A Critical Archival Review,” Psychotherapy and Politics International 17, no. 2 (June 2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.1495.

3. American Psychological Association, “Apology to People of Color for APA’s Role in Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Human Hierarchy in U.S.” (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2021), https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology.

4. American Society of Human Genetics, “Facing Our History—Building an Equitable Future,” 2023, 3, https://www.ashg.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Executive-Summary_Facing-Our-History-Buildinh-an-Equitable-Future-012023.pdf.

5. David Harmon and Jonathan Loh, “Congruence between Species and Language Diversity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, ed. Kenneth L. Rehg and Lyle Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 658–682, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190610029.013.31.

6. “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,” Resource, IUCN, accessed February 12, 2023, https://www.iucn.org/resources/conservation-tool/iucn-red-list-threatened-species.

7. Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” Language 68, no. 1 (1992): 4–10, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1992.0075.

8. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2015).

9. Ruth Mace and Mark Pagel, “A Latitudinal Gradient in the Density of Human Languages in North America,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261, no 1360 (1995): 117–121, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0125.

10. Jacob Bock Axelsen and Susanna Manrubia, “River Density and Landscape Roughness Are Universal Determinants of Linguistic Diversity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1784 (June 7, 2014): 20133029, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3029.

11. Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho et al., “Drivers of Geographical Patterns of North American Language Diversity,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 286 (2019): 20190242, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.0242.

12. Pacheco Coelho et al., “Drivers of Geographical Patterns of North American Language Diversity.”

13. Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

14. Gurminder K. Bhambra, “A Decolonial Project for Europe,” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 60, no. 2 (March 2022): 229–244, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13310.

15. Polly Rizova and John Stone, “Race, Ethnicity, and Nation,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, ed. Polly Rizova and John Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.470.

16. Nelly Bekus, “Reassembling Society in a Nation-State: History, Language, and Identity Discourses of Belarus,” Nationalities Papers (July 1, 2022): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2022.60.

17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

18. Harold F. Schiffman, Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (London: Routledge, 1996), 97.

19. Quoted in Schiffman, Linguistic Culture and Language Policy, 102.

20. Salikoko S. Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511612862.

21. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986), 28.

22. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Not Our Apocalypse,” Knowledge in Indigenous Networks, April 7, 2020, https://indigenousknowledgenetwork.net/webinar-2020/.

23. Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Smith, “Not Our Apocalypse.”

24. Michael Hironymous, “Santa María Ixcatlan, Oaxaca: From Colonial Cacicazgo to Modern Municipio” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2007),