On the Decline and Fall of Languages

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11304255

This is an issue of particular interest to me as a one-time student of Linguistics. One of the classes I took was about revitalizing dying languages and the attitude of the professor and of the class was very much one which assumed that the death of a language is a Bad Thing. And to a certain degree, I agree with them that the linguistic imperialism we have been seeing for the past age--either as an accident of the building of empires or as a result of post-war globalisation--is detrimental. With the death of any language comes the death of a unique expression of culture, for no translation can ever fully grasp the nuances and delicacies of any given language. This is an issue with which anyone who has ever needed to translate any work is familiar and which we all bemoan.

That said, there is the flip side that I usually see where not only is language death a Bad Thing, it is a Bad Thing To Be Prevented At All Costs. This leads to a tone of discussion where we should be saving the language despite its speakers. It is a kind of denial of the life, evolution, and death of languages, calling people to rage, rage against the dying of the light. But is it really in the interests of the speakers that we say this, that we insist upon their preservation of their grandparents' language? I suspect that it is more a dragonish desire to hoard linguistic gold that drives it. For many of these people, they just do not see the relevance of the old language, for good or for ill, and so they stick to the majority language.

What I think is more useful is an emphasis upon developing grammars of dying languages--a kind of linguistic headstone, as it were. Where people wish to bring their language back (think Welsh or Hebrew, for example, as remarkable success stories), give them the opportunity. But where people simply do not care, perhaps it is better to let the language die in dignity. Write a grammar of it, so that the world may know what was there, and let it settle into its old age and pass into the shadows of graduate studies.