The idea that we have a special duty to prevent the death of languages is instantly compelling to anyone who loves languages; it has a good deal in common with that other conservationist instinct directed at giant pandas and polar bears. The essential argument runs something like this: language death is very bad, and therefore we must do everything we can to prevent it. But does that conclusion follow? And is the premise true?
here’s an interesting–but also extremely poorly argued–article for you from the New Yorker about language preservation and whether that’s an unconditionally good thing
A language, when it comes down to it, is a means of communication. When too few people are using it to communicate, it has stopped doing its principal job, and it may as well be allowed to die. It is, of course, a tragedy when languages are killed, especially when they are killed out of malice or bigotry. But death by natural causes—well, that’s just how things go
The author completely ignores two significant things.
One is that language, beyond being just a form of communication, is also something that bears culture for any given collection of people. Its not the equivalent of throwing away a telegraph machine just because now you have a cell phone. It’s not only a medium of passing information in the way that a cell phone or a telegraph are. Its akin to how the brain’s interpretation of drinking any given liquid is intrinsically tied to the sensory information it receives about the container the liquid is in. How it feels/tastes to drink orange juice out of a paper cup is not the same as drinking it out of an aluminum bottle, even if the orange juice is exactly the same. There is something to be said for the discrete differences involved. Thats why so many things can be translated to a point, but not truly be fully translated from one language to another. You can know that “apapachar” in Spanish means some relative equivalent of “to hug with the soul” in English. But in total, that translation does not truly carry the full weight and context of the term in Spanish.
The second thing is that the author tries to separate “killing” languages off versus “natural decline”, even though those two things are almost always related. Languages dont typically just die off on their own. Most commonly they are suppressed to a point of collapse by colonial forces and then left to die once they are too weak for colonial forces to be concerned about. Look at the Hawaiian language for example. Once upon a time, it was made illegal for native Hawaiians to use the Hawaiian language. Eventually, once it was socially and legally driven to near extinction then it was left alone. But to this day Hawaiians are struggling to revive the language due to the decades of stigma that was forced upon the remaining people that have knowledge of the language. The same thing has happened to hundreds of indigenous languages just within the US alone. The author would probably describe those languages as dying a natural death now, since its not outright illegal to use them anymore. But they were most certainly killed intentionally. If someone was beaten within an inch of their life and then left to die, the person who beat them would still be charged with murder if they did. Its not a reasonable excuse to say “well he only beat them almost to death, so really he died from natural causes”
