WALSERSPRACHE - The four main objectives of the Alpine Space ...

names. Each language sees the world in a different way and gives names
to things other languages do not see and do not name. When a language
disappears, it is many things, visible and invisible, that go namelessly down
into perennial oblivion. Erich Auerbach, at the beginning of his breathtaking
overview of European literature, made no overstatement when he
declared Western civilisation the mere offspring of two founding cultures,
the Jewish and the Hellenistic. We know we have to throw in the balance
also Renaissance Italian, Enlightenment French, the German of romanticism,
the English from essayists and economists, the Russian from the great
novels of spiritualism to get a more fine-tuned picture of what our civilisation
really is. But is that enough?
I am afraid not. There would still be a great share of human experience
and activity that would remain unrepresented if we stopped at those
classical tongues. Languages and civilisations are like rivers: their mighty
flow is the sum total of streams, rivulets, burns, becks, brooks, creeks
merging into one mainstream. We might call it with one single and most
partial name, but indeed it is made up of numberless contributions from
the tiniest drop to the almost-equal-in-size tributary. The fact that our age
is one of assimilation and generalisation should not blind us to factual evidence:
we cannot hope to maintain civilisation in all its tenets and facets
and yet let its vital saps parch and dry up. Major languages are but the
merging of knowledge and wisdom from many smaller languages. If we
silence them for ever, we lay the axe at the base of our species. In time
we will be silenced too.
So ours is not an isolated and quixotic endeavour, dictated by lack of
realism and driven by the academic flywheel. It is, quite on the contrary,
shaped by a keen awareness of what is really at stake. If in the next generation
of so we put on the bargaining table the 5,000 remaining minority
languages to be bartered for a one-language, a one-currency, a onestop
shopping, a one-way-of-life situation, I am afraid the bargain is not
worth the deal. Now, we cannot go and ask the mighty rulers of this
world, distraught by terrorism and third-world uprisings, the heads of
multinational concerns trying to outvie one another, the economists at
odds with impossible inflation-joblessness equations, to hand us the
means, the answers or the solutions to our quandary. Nor should we hold
them, or anybody else, accountable for what is happening. They, in their
own respective ways, are doing their part of the job: if we can devote
ourselves to our highly humanistic undertakings it is also due to a large
extent to a global system where many presences and forces we consider
as “enemy” are indeed co-generating the resources we depend upon. We
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