#dying language

English is the World Language, the one true reputed language amongst all others, and slowly, slowly, the way the world turns on its axis, English quietly kills off other languages until it reigns supreme.

Arcane knows that the almost dead languages cannot be salvaged, just like how a brain dead man cannot be salvaged. Even if he learns these languages, embeds them into the thick of his heart and mind, keeps them alive within himself – who will take over from him? Endless streams of scholars dedicating their entire lives to studying dying languages, keeping the flickering flame barely burning, promising away their bright future to tomes gray, dusty and dead, like their ancestors?

The language is beautiful, endlessly charming, with so many words within it that English cannot begin to embody, and yet, and yet-

It is a terrible tragedy, a great sadness, 一种无法解释的悲剧.

He’s even thinking in the language now. He needs a break.

The tome in front of him slams shut with a flurry of dust and gray matter as he stands up. Arcane wishes for sleep.

Chinese is already dying out – him ignoring it for a while won’t be the cause of its death.

-+-

It’s a Monday. The Monday Melancholy hits him like a bullet train. Arcane doesn’t understand the fuss with dying languages.

He sits in the gigantic library, people of the same caliber as him slogging away at the books, desperately learning languages that no one ever uses, frantically remembering folk tales and stories to pass on to practically no one but other scholars, and wishes that the government would just give up on reviving these languages.

Who would bother memorizing the difference between characters that look so much like when English words are easily differentiated by placement of letters? Who would bother trying to wrap their tongues around 绿 with the irritating ü sound when they can just say everything in English with much less fuss? Who would bother with Chinese itself, when English is the common tongue?

It’s the reason why French is long dead. It’s the reason why Italian died before French. All these different variations of English are simply not needed, unnecessary, simply useless. Even more so are these languages so vastly different from English, with strange characters and different pronunciations.

Arcane pushes the characters around in his mind, internalizes the story written out in careful flicks of ink vertically and horizontally across the paper, and wonders why the government is trying to hard to save this language. It’s not indigenous, or anything. It’s Asian.

It’s a Monday, in the year 2090. Already, almost 85% of the languages that existed 75 years ago are going, going, gone. 85% of languages dead. What are a few more, in the scheme of things?

-+-

Arcane is Chinese, yes, but does it matter? English is his first language. Chinese language means nothing to him.

-+-

有时，我想着，有可能，在我们的未来，有些华人不会了解华语，不能读华文，也有可能，华文这个语言，会悄悄的去世，华人也不会发现到。啊，多么恐怖的未来！

~ 日记本，2011年5月6日

Arcane doesn’t think of this as graduation, but he has moved from reading scholarly articles and famous stories to diaries. Diaries are more intimate, the words used less technical, the tone applied more informal.

It actually hurts, just a bit, when he barely understands what the writer is trying to convey, even though he can roughly guess the entirety of the diary entry.

The fifteen-year-old boy from 79 years ago worries that his mother tongue might die out. Arcane is sitting here, fifteen years old, feeling like he is being forced to learn his mother tongue and wishes that it could die just a little bit faster, just a little bit more, to take away this pain.

If he had been Greek, if he had been Italian, if he had been French, he would be a normal scholar studying astrophysics maybe, or perhaps neuroscience, the science field that was all the rage with the recent breakthroughs it had achieved. Perhaps even enhancement of human potential, the one field that Arcane had always dreamed of joining, the sole reason he even applied for the scholar program.

Instead he is stuck here in no man’s land, learning a language he will never use, just because he is of the race that once knew it like the back of their hands, the words always floating on the tip of their tongues.

“我是华人。” The words sound strange on his tongue. His enunciation is all wrong, he speaks it like it is a question, he is hesitant, he is tentative, he is unsure – everything that he isn’t when he speaks English.

“You think you’re Chinese?” A scholar by his side snorts, raising an eyebrow. “All of us over here are Chinese. But are we Chinese? No man, we’re all English here.”

“… Do you want to be Chinese?”

“Nah, man, I mean, English is all we’ve got now, right? Forget about 新年 or 中秋节 or any strange things that you might have read in these books that are giving you ideas. We’re English. British, American, it’s all one and the same now. Why bother speaking a dead language in a world where the language on our tongues is as alive as us? English, man, who would want to be Chinese in this day and age? Who you gonna talk to in Chinese, huh? Us? We speak English too.”

Arcane wholeheartedly agrees. Chinese is a dead language. Everyone spoke English. It was English or nothing.

-+-

“Hey Arcane, you’re Chinese right? Say something in Chinese man!”

“Chinese? That’s a dead language, right up in the lists with Italian and Greek. You got anything so say in Italian?”

“Ciao.”

“… That’s it?”

“Yeah man, I mean, we all speak English. Who’s got the time to learn something six feet under, like Italian? The fact that I know how to say hello is good enough!”

“Then who’s got the time to learn Chinese?”

“Oh, you got me there, brother! Good point, good point, but even if you don’t have the time, can you?”

“… 我的名字是辉雄。我是华人。华文还未去世。它有可能会活下来。”

“Woah, that’s wicked! What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Chinese is a dead language. Why should I bother learning it? Waste of my time.’”

“Cool man, least you know more than me about your language.”

“What are you talking about? English is our language.”

“Damn, that’s the truest thing I’ve ever heard. Arrivederci!”

“I think your pronunciation is off.” 

“Haha, I think so too. But it doesn’t matter, and my English pronunciation is per-fect, so who cares?”

Arcane believes that Chinese will eventually die out, just as his grandmother died, slowly and softly, quick enough such that no one will notice. The language of his family died with his grandmother, the little girl growing up in the early 2000s, hidden in the murky depths of Chinese. Her English was to her the same thing that Arcane’s Chinese is to him.

Easily classified as the bane of their existence, but also something that held a strange amount of importance in their lives.

-+ 

Arcane can’t speak fluent Chinese. He probably never will. He speaks it hesitantly and slowly, trying to remember the sounds that his grandmother once taught him. When he’s free, he suddenly finds his fingers bending stray strings in the familiar formation of Chinese knots, following the wrinkled old hands of his grandmother.

With Chinese dying, an entire legacy of history and culture dies, and Arcane is only realizing it now. Maybe this is the kind of epiphanies that geniuses in the language field suddenly get, the burning desire to salvage their language.