We Can’t Stem the Tide of Language Death
22nd October 2017
And why should we? Every article ever written on the prospect of languages dying out proceeds from the unspoken assumption that That Is A Bad Thing. I don’t buy it.
A language is a tool. Tools that no longer serve a purpose are abandoned. The sole criterion for whether a tool serves a purpose is whether it is used. Abandoned tools may have some historical interest, but that hardly justifies a massive effort to make sure that the tool is retained in use.
Consider the hitching weight. A hitching weight was a lump of metal or stone carried in a horse-drawn vehicle that, when the vehicle was stopped, was attached to the horse’s reins to keep the horse from moving. How much use is there for a hitching weight nowadays? So close to none as to be negligible. Ought we to have a crash program (complete with taxpayer funding) to ‘preserve the hitching weight’? The question answers itself.
Yes, languages are valuable indicators of how the groups that use them thought about the world.
Yes, languages ought to be fully documented, if possible, before they die out, just as examples of other abandoned tools ought to be stored in museums.
But neither case justifies going to extremes of effort or expense to do that. I personally feel that all this hoo-hah is just a tempest in a teapot ginned up by people who have an obscure hobby to get other people (like you and me) to pay them to pursue it.
We see a lot of that these days.