It goes without saying that our language, as well as everything in this planet, is constantly changing. There are many different factors that cause language to change. Social and cultural changes are the most powerful changes that directly influence our language. There are, however, some specific changes that may occur within a country as a result of important historical event or something significant that brings physical, political or geographical changes.
Language is continuously adapting to cultural change. Within every culture, issues and basic ways of life are forever altering, influencing language alteration along with it. Negative cultural influence can also lead to language change.
Of the world’s 6,000 estimated languages, 20-30% are no longer spoken by children and linguists have predicted that within the next century, at least 50% will disappear, being forced into the biased standardization of world language. (Quinn 9) Power struggles have led to colonialism and imperialism, which have dominated in some places in the world and suppressed the language. The imperial power of the British Empire valued ‘geopolitical and monolingual standardization,’ and influenced Australia, France, Russia, and the United States to follow their values. Though political and socioeconomic profits may benefit those who use international language, their spread and domination has caused and will continue to cause the loss of many native languages. (Quinn 9) Colonialism and imperialism are the basis for which hegemony develops, creating one overarching social power. With hegemony, the media, the government, education, and religion all begin to operate as a single voice. The linguistic ideology expressed through them is based on power and control and so they all begin to sound the same and produce this monolith.
Language plays countless roles, both universal and specific, throughout every culture and society. It functions as basic communication and socialization, and to create and maintain socioeconomic organization along with social coordination and cooperation. Standardization of language “is a phenomenon in a linguistic community in which institutional maintenance of certain valued linguistic practices- in theory, fixed- acquires an explicitly- recognized hegemony over the definition of the community’s norm (Matrix 285).”
In claiming the term ‘standard,’ it asserts superiority and discounts dialect and other important parts of languages. The superiority complex encompassed in the elitism of the ‘standard’ is accurately described in Michael Silverstein’s essay entitled Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America (Matrix 286): Even though such languages may be highly and transparently articulated into a set of context-specific registers, bespeaking subtle regularities of usage, may manifest all the communicative properties of one’s own language, and may be sociohistorically specific to a cultural tradition identifiable in all other ways, still, to many speakers of standardized languages, non-standardized one’s do not seem to be ‘real’ languages, which, ironically enough, are from them thought to come in ‘naturally’ standardized conditions of ‘objectively’ distinct systems of norms.
Most all societies have particular characteristics, functions, and culture-specific ideology, which can only be genuinely understood through that particular culture and therefore, can only be accurately explained through its native language. Hence, because language is so important in determining and representing its specific cultures’ functions, a monoglot language would be unable to validly depict and represent every culture in the world.
