A Loss for Words: Can a Dying Language Be Saved?

As someone who speaks both English and a tad of Chinese, I am aware of instances where there are words in either language that can't be easily said in the other.

You'd think with a good enough command of English and logic you could necessarily translate any word of any other language in the universe.

However, I suspect it is not that simple. Some words invoke particular neuronal activity that encodes a particular thought which may be hard to replicate through the usage of a clumsy translation. Thus a difference in language may also be a reflection of a difference in culture and way of thinking.

Since people around the world care about different things, they will use different words more frequently, attach different connotations to them, and even invent new words whose usage you'd find to be isolated to particular geographical regions. So, the selection of a common language is almost like the selection of a particular way of thinking. The notion of cultural uniformity/superiority can rub people the wrong way.

So if there is to be a common language, it would be more considerate if it incorporated features from different languages, rather than be entirely from one language (English), and it should probably be engineered to be somewhat culturally agnostic.

This argument can easily be extended to the other national languages: Preserving a national language like Italian or French is all very well, but English is the language of international communication, science, and technology, and expending a child's language-acquisitive resources on a language which won't connect them to the rest of contemporary humanity seems like too high of a price.

The reason some languages are "dying" is because colonial powers attempted to exterminate those people and their community, through a variety of uses of power. In the article, the colonists exterminated more than 90% of the population and sent the survivors to a concentration camp. Just horrible. There's no reason to pretend that this community's precarious cultural position occurred through ethically neutral events.

Diglossia is very, very common worldwide, and many languages have a different functional distribution. In Morocco, kids may speak Berber at home, Arabic on the street, French in school. In other places, you may learn math and science in an international language and literature in a mother tongue.

Bilingualism is very common worldwide; people being bilingual isn't actually a big problem that you need to use state resources (schools and education policy) to stamp out mother tongues.

And as Joshua Fishman points out, if society isn't supporting minority mother tongues, then it is opposing them.

More than 90% of their community was slaughtered in the Selk’nam Genocide, and the survivors were resettled in a mission camp. This is like saying that Yiddish in Germany in the 20th century was an "experiment that didn't pan out."

There is no need to pretend that what happened to these communities was ethically neutral.