Another Language Dies of Shame...

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The late, oh, so great, Alex Harvey sang, or rather er habt sprechgesang gemacht '...another tree dies of shame...' on the 1975 Sensational Alex Harvey Band album, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in the song "The Tale of The Giant Stoneater". Like so much of the SAHBs output, the lyrical content and intent of the album's songs is so genuinely right on in the original meaning of the phrase - please don't use the term 'woke' in this context - and carries forward to the present day prescient warnings from over half a century ago: the radical shift to the right and neo-liberalism was a mere twelve/eighteen months in the future from the album's release. The environmental and political issues that have dogged us persistently since then are still as thorny and unresolved now as then. I picked up on a linguistic parallel to this today in a book review in this week's New Statesman. In Sophia Smith Galer's new book, "How To Kill a Language", she outlines that the atrophying of the world's store of linguistic variety continues apace, with the lazy, glacial forces of capital and the ever-growing ubiquitousness of English, erasing variety and cultural distinction in the service of convenient profit.

The review pointedly states that today there are around 7,000 languages in current use, but that if the extant trend in language loss continues, we'll be lucky if but 4,000 of those are left by the turn of the next century. As with habitat decline, environmental change and climate destruction, we are allowing the forces of capital to ride roughshod over those essential and vital cultural differences that mark cultures and communities out from each other and allow for the richness of human interaction to flourish. It is all of a piece: we, as a species need to embrace multiculturalism as well as the environment if we are to eventually embrace and save our planet from the forces of capital; whose sole raison d'être, after all, is the abstraction of profit from human interaction, rather than fostering human interaction itself. A sobering thought on many levels, methinks...

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