Why language diversity matters - further ammunition
Lots of languages in the world will fall out of use within the next decades and century. There are between 6 - 9,000 languages in the world, and the language reference catalogue Glottolog (v5.3) estimates that over 4,000 languages are in a threatened or worse status*. There are many reasons why this is a bad situation. One aspect that is often mentioned is that when languages disappear , we lose an important facet of what it means to be human. All languages are different from each other, they represent different records of our history and capacity . When one falls out of use, especially when there is no documentation of it, we as humankind loose information about what we are capable of, what it means to be human - how far we can reach, what unites us and what varies. This was for example argued very well by Dr Levinson in a talk I had the pleasure of attending in Berlin last week (poster ⇨) It also forms part of the discussion between Cooperrider and Dr B...