Language: The language barrier
Published online 21 May 2008 | Nature 453, – (2008) | doi:10.1038/453446a

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Please answer my question: Why do you think that the survival of languages is under the same law that governs the survival of species?

I’m off to my exam.

You are right, languages are constantly changing. But they change just like tools, species, and ethnicities change. They are subject to the same forces and laws that dictate if we find a certain tool useful or if a particular species provides some additive benefit to the ecology of an environment. Nothing has been static throughout time, but each snapshot of time has proven to be useful to understand how humans got here, who humans were and who we are now. To passively and ignorantly erase entire volumes of the human experience does not help.

Reducing a dead or dying language to an unused tool is extremely flawed… especially speaking to a group of anthropologists. So what if it is an unused tool? It still has a lot of information packed in it and as thorough researchers of the human experience we need to extract as much as we can before it is lost for good. Try telling an archaeologist who studies Oldowan era stone flakes and cores that his or her research is based upon ‘unused, dead’ effectively useless tools. I’m more than positive you’ll get a nice, humbling lecture telling you how important it is to study ‘dead’ tools.

Kambiz

Furthermore, communities generally abandon ancestral languages not for strictly utilitarian reasons (e.g. education), but due to a broader rejection of indigenous or minority identity, which is in turn motivated by the racism these communities face from the dominant society in which they participate.

Since I have not read de Swaan’s piece, it is not clear to me to what degree he, or his supporters in this thread, have considered these two points. But taken together, I think they undermine the position as expressed in the abstract.

There are many reasons for why languages “die.” Sure, this will lead to information loss, as dr. Harrison points out, that’s why language needs to be studied. But there’s a misguided ideology behind some language conservation efforts, and that’s that de Swaan is trying to expose.

I’m going to bed, I have an other exam to do tomorrow. Interestingly enough it’s a language exam: English…

Good night! I hope to see some more contributions tomorrow.