Today I was working on a project for my linguistics course, and it had to do with whether or not we thought it was important to save endangered languages. I thought it would be appropriate to blog about it because it fits nicely with the culture aspect of our program. Saving a language was something I’d never really thought about before, nor had I even really considered the idea of languages “dying,” but interestingly enough right now we have around 6,000 languages in the world, and its anticipated that in about a hundred years that number will be at around 600. I thought this number was really striking and to me it seems like it would be a tragedy to lose so many languages.
Through doing more research on this I was able to find many arguments for and against the preservation of endangered languages. Some said it would be a great cultural loss if we were to lose a language, while others said that the language itself has very little to do with culture, and that the loss of a language doesn’t make the cultural aspects of any group any less real. Other arguments outlined how by losing a language we lose knowledge and insight about human cognition and the creation of language. Some also believe that if a language is dying out it means there simply is no need for it anymore, and there is no reason to try and save it.
I found all of this really interesting, and was able to see both sides of the argument, but all I kept thinking was that by losing languages we are losing the diversity that makes the world so interesting. I believe that language plays a huge part in what makes different cultures so fascinating, and in addition is what makes multicultural places like Canada so great. And I believe that letting languages die out without any attempt at preservation would be a tragedy.