Language Deaths

With only one language under my belt, I've often tried and failed to learn other languages but somethings just aren't meant be. This article is good weekend reading about the death of languages and the overall cost/benefit to society about the extinction of languages.

From World Affairs...

The going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.

That death did mean, to be sure, that no one will again use the word demexch, which refers to a soft spot in the ice where it is good to fish. Never again will we hear the word 'ał for an evergreen branch, a word whose final sound is a whistling past the sides of the tongue that sounds like wind passing through just such a branch. And behind this small death is a larger context. Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

Many scholars hope that we can turn back the tide with programs to revive indigenous languages, but the sad fact is that this will almost never be very effective. Learning small indigenous languages tends to be a tough business for people raised in European languages. I saw what this meant when I was assigned to teach some Native Americans their ancestral language. Filled with sounds it’s hard to make unless you were born to them, it seemed almost designed to frustrate someone who grew up with English.

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic.