Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die. (You might want to watch the interview with David Harrison posted to the front page of the Ning.)
As we’ve discussed in class, language influences how a speaker thinks and processes life, so if a language were to die out so would a unique way of filtering the world. The article seems to apply a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality to the survival or domination of any given language. It cites English, Spanish, and Mandarin as ‘winners’ in the global competition for lingual dominance because all three of these languages have a large body of speakers and, more importantly, these languages are supported by a system that can guarantee its proliferation. These types of socially supportive systems, such as school, are what ensure the existence of one language while simultaneously driving languages deemed as insignificant to the brink of extinction, as seen in the case of Siletz-Dee-ni. Although having serval major languages simplifies international communication, increasing the size of the speaking population at the cost of a minor language seems counterintuitive to globalization and diversification.
There seems to a difference between language preservation and language revival. The article mentions how some try to save a language through documentation and translation into a widely used language, and it also brings up the revivalist approach which entails increasing the number of people who can actually speak and manipulate the language. I think increasing the number of speakers to a sustainable level is more important than just documenting its existence. If the language were to die out completely, with just recordings and dictionaries but no native speaker, there would be no way to restore the language to what it once was. The nuance of the language and the understanding of its cultural context would most likely would be gone.
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