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Vasilisa Lozovskaya

Academic Writing, Advanced English

November 25, 2023

Major Assignment 2 Analysis

In the chapter “Why Do Languages Die?” in the book Language Death, David Crystal

argues with moderate success that the reasons for communities losing their language are nuanced

to a great extent and no universal explanation for this phenomenon can be deduced as every case

of language death is exceptionally unique. The author carries out his argument by presenting his

readers a wide classification without any order of precedence or significance of causes of

language death which are supported by numerous examples in history of how language's vitality

has shifted. Crystal pursues the strategy of spiral reasoning, in essence, the author makes readers

go down the rabbit hole from reasons of language dying that happen to be on the surface level to

those that are subtle to keep readers immersed in the critical thinking. “Why Do Languages

Die?” was issued in 2000 by academic publisher Cambridge University Press and is aimed not

only at linguist and anthropology scholars who contribute to the linguistic and cultural research,

but at anyone with an interest in humanities and a concern about our future as mankind, as no

complex prerequisites are needed for full comprehension of the material.

The chapter consists of two sections of reasons for language death. The first major part

encompasses the main factors which have impacted the population size of language speakers

thus leading to language decline, meaning that languages become endangered; the author

outlines such causes as natural catastrophes, unsurvivability of speakers’ habitat, import of

diseases by outsiders, economic exploitation of the land where the natives live, civil wars, and

genocides. The second major section appears to be a big umbrella of reasons for cultural shifts
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such as demographic submersion, military superiority or urbanization being the motivator of

language death and for people’s attitudes toward minority languages being the trigger of

disappearance of the need to speak the endangered languages.

In order to sound persuasive, David Crystal thoroughly deploys the statistics of the

population of minority speakers shrinkage, by which he makes his explanation opposite to

wiredrawn and states his ethos. For example, the author refers to the UN World Food

Programme reports stating, “In 1998,... 10% of Sudan’s 29-million population were at risk of

starvation, chiefly in the south… Of the 132 living languages listed for Sudan in Ethnologue

(1996), there are estimates given for 122.” (Crystal, p. 72.) Moreover, Crystal points out,

“Within 200 years of the arrival of the first Europeans in the Americas, it is thought that over

90% of the indigenous population was killed by the diseases which accompanied them… To take

just one area: the Central Mexico population is believed to have been something over 25 million

in 1518, when the Spanish arrived, but it had dropped to 1.6 million by 1620.” (Crystal, p. 72.)

These alarming stats provoke anxiety about language disappearance. The readers become

strongly convinced by the visual verification as the numbers happen to be extremely eloquent.

The statistics starkly emphasize the scale of linguistic loss that the world is currently

experiencing.

However, the critical reader might question the connection between the number of

language speakers and language’s persistence. In this chapter, the author claims, “Obviously, a

language dies if all the people who speak it are dead.”(Crystal, p. 70.) Later on, Crystal

elaborates this thought in precise example of villages of Sissano, Warupu, Arop, and Malol,

saying, “...as the villages were destroyed, and the survivors moved away to care centres and

other locations, there must now be a real question mark over whether these communities (and
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thus their languages) will survive the trauma of displacement.” (Crystal, p. 71.) The author

appears to have an entrenched prejudice that languages have no existence without people or even

that notions “language” and “native speakers” or “culture” are interchangeable. The general

reader may have not considered this correlation before, as it has to be elucidated by other studies.

Omission of a warrant that language strongly relies on its speakers turns out to be a logical

fallacy, thus hindering the communication of the main argument.

Nevertheless, although the author focuses predominantly on external causes of language

death, he tries to cover the possible loopholes regarding the internal causes, “Many factors

contribute to the phenomenon of language death, so the diagnosis of pathological situations is

always going to be complex. Sociolinguists have tried to identify a single major factor to explain

the way people shift from one language to another, but all such attempts have been controversial.

For example, one proposal identifies the need for people to acquire the dominant language in

order to get a good job (or to ensure that their children get a good job): it is a plausible

hypothesis in many areas (it certainly explains the kind of case illustrated by my Johannesburg

anecdote, p. ), but it may be less relevant in others, where the type of educational system, the

presence of the media, or the nature of political pressures can be more important considerations.

Languages are not like people, in this respect: it is not usually possible to write a single cause on

the death certificate for a language

The author states his pathos by setting accents with his special wording. He uses such

techniques as logical stress, for example, “Languages decline when these positive attitudes are

missing. And in so many cases they are missing,” (Crystal, p. 81) or in “The indigenous

languages are being viewed by their speakers as a sign of backwardness…” In addition to this,

Crystal deliberately uses colons to make his thoughts more pungent, for instance, “Some of the
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factors which we have reviewed above are uncontroversially final, in their causative role: there is

no arguing with a tsunami.” (Crystal, p. 89.) These word and syntax choices allow the author to

seem more sharp and urging and his reasoning to sound more penetrating to the reader's mind, by

which the principal statement of the work is productively corroborated.

In conclusion, the author appeals to various methods to make his argument effective. The

results are statistically significant and have a cause-effect relationship which makes them

valuable to the scientific community. Thus, Crystal’s work can be considered a good example of

a research paper in the field of economic history, and contains all the essential components of an

economic research paper.

Reference list

Crystal, David. “Why Do Languages Die?” Chapter. In Language Death, 89–120.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139923477.004.