Is Language Endangerment A Problem?
Generally the accelerated pace of language endangerment is considered to be a problem by linguists and by the speakers. However some linguists, such as the late phonetician Peter Ladefoged, have argued that language death is a natural part of the process of human cultural development, and that languages die because communities stop speaking them for their own reasons. Ladefoged argued that linguists should simply document and describe languages scientifically, but not seek to interfere with the processes of language loss. A majority of linguists do consider that language loss is an ethical problem as they consider that most communities would prefer to maintain their languages if given a real choice, as well as a scientific problem, because language loss on the scale currently taking place will mean that future linguists will only have access to a fraction of the world's linguistic diversity, and will therefore have a skewed picture of what human language is and can be.
Some linguists consider linguistic diversity to be analogous to biological diversity, and compare language endangerment to wildlife endangerment.
Read more about this topic: Endangered Language, Effects
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)