Identity

A loon was laughing thinly out on the water. It was a bleak sound, reflecting John's mood almost perfectly. Late on Christmas Eve, he was breathing in the brisk sea air from a hotel balcony in Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. His wife had left him and his children had their own families to worry about. But that was not why he was feeling disconsolate. He worked in the insurance industry in Des Moines (Iowa), on the banks of a river that seventeenth-century explorers had named after Catholic "monks" for some obscure reason. (Leave it to the French to be unusual.) At the end of a busy year, he was here to reconnect with his home province and native tongue. The whole of the United States and Canada now spoke French, and British Columbia was the last pocket of the English language on the continent. Earlier, over dinner, his temper rose steadily as the restaurant played a long selection of Christmas carols almost exclusively in French. Even those originally composed in English were being played in the continent's dominant language! John was generally easy-going, but his language was dear to him and that devotion ran through his body like a steel fibre. Here, in the open air, he was trying to recover from having that fibre twanged like an electric guitar.

If English is your mother tongue – and even more so if you speak nothing else – it is hard to imagine worrying about its future. As the world's only real lingua franca, English is here to stay. Spoken by 1.5 billion people around the globe, it is the only successor to Esperanto – that artificial language devised to unite peoples that is now used by less than two million stout-hearted souls. Pedants may worry about the gradual disappearance of the English subjunctive or the impoverishment of the common vocabulary, but that is like complaining about clouds obscuring parts of the Rockies. The mountain range remains impressive and unshakeable.

Large countries, like China, Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia, are culturally secure. Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, and French are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and are the national languages of more than one country. Even Italian, which is hardly spoken outside its motherland and diaspora, remains strong for historical and geographical reasons, and perhaps also because of the Italians' resistance to learning other people's languages. But small countries like the Netherlands and Croatia have trouble shutting themselves off so easily.

In fact, small cultures everywhere face a steamroller. Every two weeks, one of the world's seven thousand languages dies; in fact, half of them may be extinct by the end of the century. For example, only three of Canada's fifty-three native languages (Inuit, Cree, and Algonquin) are expected to survive. In isolated places like the truncated highlands of New Guinea, languages are particularly at risk; but even international ones spoken in geographical pockets can falter. To the Québécois, the corruption and virtual disappearance of French in the southern US state of Louisiana (a patois known as Cajun, from the original "Acadien," or Acadian) is the most sobering example.

Language and Identity

But why is language central to some people's sense of identity? In the words of the Canadian Mohawk artist and activist, Ellen Gabriel Katsi' Tsakwas, "Language is a gift from our ancestors and a link with our cosmology. It helps us understand our place in the world and refreshes our connection with Mother Earth and other living creatures from one generation to the next. Language and culture, like social and economic development, are inseparable parts of achieving full human rights and self-determination."

Words like "cosmology" may seem inflated to Anglo-Saxon ears. And what does English, French, or Cree have to do with our relationship to other creatures? But being open to these ideas and concerns is crucial to understanding why small, vulnerable cultures worry about their future. For them, a dying language is not a quaint and dispensable thread in a global tapestry but a particular way of looking at the world and a treasury of stories, knowledge, and wisdom. Quebec nationalists can sound as deep as any poet of the First Nations on the subject. In the words of one recent writer, "Losing one's language is not about beginning a new life in North America and learning another. Every immigrant is capable of that. Losing one's language is the same as losing one's soul and letting the souls of one's ancestors wander aimlessly in a void."

"The French language," writes Denise Bombardier, a prominent Quebec journalist and novelist,

is our river leading to the sea, or the outside world. It is less a tool of communication than a carrier of our emotions, ideas, reactions, reality. Thanks to it, the Québécois inherit a glorious and prestigious past. From Diderot to Stendhal, Voltaire to Camus, Montesquieu to Maupassant and Proust, French writers belong entirely to us. The French language distinguishes us but it also isolates us and that isolation stimulates our creativity. Our writers, playwrights, and actors draw on this language that crossed the ocean and evolved over several centuries, fortifying itself and affirming itself differently than in the mother country.

Language, of course, is not central to everyone's identity. People living in the middle of Michigan or Saskatchewan or large parts of China will not think of themselves in linguistic terms, unless they are members of a cultural minority. There are better ways of distinguishing themselves. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen describes himself as an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali, a resident of the United States and the United Kingdom, a dabbler in philosophy, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, a non-Brahmin from a Hindu background, and at the same time a non-believer. He is also a vegetarian, tennis fan, lover of poetry, environmental activist, theatre-goer, and jazz enthusiast. Our shared humanity, he feels, is "miniaturized" when the many things that distinguish us as individuals are reduced to a single classification, such as religion, community, culture, or nation. He could have added language to that list.

Another Indian writer, Salman Rushdie, relishes "hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs." Rushdie had good reason to prefer such a muddle to purism and fundamentalism, as a religious death-order hung over him for writing irreverently about Islam. But not everyone wants to become a mongrel. For reasons of security, a sense of order, tradition, family loyalty, respect for history, or simple religious faith, many people prefer to identify themselves rather narrowly, and some Quebeckers are no exception.

Language becomes a...