How Languages Die

Over the past few years Claude Hagège, the prestigious author of, among several books, the seminal Le souffle de la langue (1992) and Halte à la mort des langues (2000), has also positioned himself in the same camp as Phillipson (2003), notably in Français: histoire d’un combat (1996) and Combat pour le français (2006). Along with the latter author, he has spread the theme of English as a “killer language” and has, in addition, advocated the Académie Française’s mission (since the foundation of the Institution by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 ─ see also Vigouroux, to appear) to promote and defend the French language, only this time against English. From the perspective of Calvet’s (1987) notion of guerre des langues ‘language wars’, Hagège has indeed emerged as a militant calling on other French citizens and devoted Francophones to engage in resistance to English, which has increased its imperial spread by gaining more and more speakers not only in former Belgian and French colonies but also in other Francophile ones (such as in the European Union and in Brazil) and even in the native heart of la Francophonie (as group of French speakers), viz., France, Walloon Belgium, Francophone Switzerland, and Quebec. My goal in this paper is to highlight the ways in which his positions have stimulated me to think more about the complexity of the subject matter of language death. I focus on three major questions: 1) How do languages die and why? 2) Does the endangerment of the lingua franca function of a language matter in the same way as that of its vernacular function (to all its speakers)? 3) What form of globalization is the most lethal to marginalized or minority languages (in the sense of “langues minorées” in French)? Contributors to this volume have been encouraged to keep their essays very short. I have thus chosen to provide here an abridged version of parts of the paper I was invited to present at the 42 Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (in April 2006), which will be published in the proceedings of the conference. However, I have adapted the present version as an indirect response to Hagège (2006), framing my discussion more as a constructive critique than as a rebuttal of his positions. Readers are encouraged to conclude, on the basis of their own sentiments, whether any language needs protection against the spread of another, under what particular conditions, and how.