COMMONER - Medium
The Irreplaceable Loss of Language in Daily Life
By Faiza Zia Khan
Newport Beach, CA
There are approximately 7,099 languages spoken in the world currently including American Sign Language (ASL). Living in North America it is easy to assume English would probably be the largest spoken language due to widespread use of it in all aspects of daily life. Surprisingly, it is Mandarin Chinese (the language of Mainland China) that takes the lead as the most widely spoken language in the world.
Approximately 918 million speakers of the language make up 11.92% of the world’s speaking population as stated by the most recent language reference survey published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International.
Why is language important? It is something so commonly used in everyday life that we sometimes forget to ask the important question. The answer is just so simple, yet extremely complicated. Communication is what drives us forward in life and language is the vehicle facilitating communication. Well, to say the least that was the easy part. The complicated part is that language defines culture and background. It enables us to transcend beyond the written and spoken word to allow ourselves freedom of expression.
Language is not limited to the physical utterance of words. It can be body language personifying emotion through a look of the eye, a nod of the head, or a hand gesture - body language can be a powerful mode of communication. Language has given us the power of speaking to one another’s souls with or without physical contact and is a powerful force in human interactions.
I thought of all the wonderful things language bestows upon our lives. Without the power of language behind us we are unable to express ourselves in words. Words do not really have any intrinsic value, yet without words we cannot exist. Even if it is an expression via a drawing, ASL gestures, or a written letter – words make us humans. From the intricacies of the Oxford comma, the pleasantries, the politeness, the art of small talk, the icebreakers between strangers, to the complex prose created by writers - language provides the full spectrum of life in technicolor.
With modernization and advancement of technology, language has both evolved and deteriorated immensely over the decades. Some people might argue deterioration is not the correct rendition. Language has become more efficient where “By the way,” can be easily expressed as “BTW”. For sake of posterity in my article, I chose to abandon this argument and focus on how we as South Asians are consumers of language. South Asians are mostly polyglots speaking variations of the numerous languages acquired with knowledge depending on the region, ethnicity, or culture. We speak English as the primary language for convenience, as the assumption is everyone understands some iteration of it. However, travel to the South of the border from California and this may not be the case. Not only has the language changed but also the entire vibe of the area.
I have many friends who hail from India but are unable to speak Hindi (the national language of India) due to the regional languages being Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. In my opinion the deterioration of language began when technology intermingled with communications. A silent marriage of the two (language and technology) signaled an onslaught of the evolution that was to change the way languages were to be used in the decades to come. It was mostly radio enabled communications with Walkie-Talkies, telexes and telegrams that popularized the convention of using less words to express more. Using more words meant consuming more time. Usage of more time meant spending more money to buy that time. Thus, language became monetized and commoditized as monetary transactions.
Social media began another era in the evolution of languages and how we communicate with each other in a public sphere. Twitter forced us to express ourselves in limited word space for all to see and comprehend what we were trying to express. The basis of Twitter was founded on the platform to work via SMS in addition to the web. Due to this, technically Twitter only allowed their service to be a 160 character standard. However, skillfully they kept an extra 20 characters open so that the users could display their usernames. This limitation left the Twitter users to only have a 140-character limit. Functionality wise this limit makes it possible to show several tweets on one page without certain tweets taking up a lot more space than others usually would.
A regular Twitter user who sends out several tweets in a day should quickly get into the practice of leaving at least 20 characters free to have plenty of space for people should they wish to retweet them, as some people like to add comments to retweets. There was a period time when Twitter mulled over expanding its character limit to 280 which also became popular as the #280 Controversy. The decision was met with a fair amount of pushback from loyal users as they thrived on the shortness of tweets which was dubbed to be one of Twitter’s defining characteristics for its posts, aka the brevity.
Some of the arguments users based their criticism to prevent Twitter from increasing the character limit was sentimental - their creativity came with the fact that they were limited to a short space. To add more fuel to the fire Instagram and integration of hashtags (#) created a new lingo in a way that it was simultaneously used all across the social media sphere.
Less is more became the mantra as almost everyone owning a cellular phone got onto social media and followed the trending hashtags. The delicacy involved with accurate use of diction, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary disappeared over time. With these caveats the use of language became restricted leaning more towards lingo and this is how we ended up with where we are today #longlivethehashtag.
(Faiza Zia Khan holds a master’s in journalism degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has collaborated with news media outlets including Global National and actively volunteers for several community investment projects for the Red Cross, United Way and the Breast Cancer Foundation)
