The_Linguist_LL

The_Linguist_LL t1_j9se1j3 wrote

Reply to comment by ALR3000 in TIL that there are more than 160 endangered languages in the United States alone. In addition to many Native American languages, Cajun French, Eastern Yiddish, and Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, and Plains Sign Language are all endangered. by afeeney

Language loss isn't just a factor of connection, it's economic disparity, political, cultural, and linguistic discrimination and oppression, lack of institutional support, and ethnolinguistic genocide. People aren't just tossing their cultures to the side because they have neighbors.

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The_Linguist_LL t1_j9s8sqj wrote

Reply to comment by samuelgato in TIL that there are more than 160 endangered languages in the United States alone. In addition to many Native American languages, Cajun French, Eastern Yiddish, and Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, and Plains Sign Language are all endangered. by afeeney

I'm not claiming language loss is the sole cause of cultural homogenization.

First of all, language is part of culture. The mass eradication of human minority cultures including languages is what's horrifying.

These languages are not being lost because their speakers are throwing them away, they're being lost because economic inequality between cultures, political, demographical, and sociolinguistic discrimination and repression, lack of institutional support, and ethnolinguistic genocide are preventing speakers of these languages from maintaining their ability to choose whether their cultures survive into the next generation. The survival of a culture should always be an option for its members, yet it isn't in many cases.

Not to mention, every language represents a breadth of culturally specific knowledge, information, and stories, that die with it.

Not to mention that understanding human language in general, which is extremely important, requires research on the breadth of human languages.

There are thousands of reasons to protect linguistic diversity, and the only reason to want to decrease it is support of ethnolinguistic genocide.

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The_Linguist_LL t1_j9rx1r9 wrote

Reply to comment by Thin-Solution-1659 in TIL that there are more than 160 endangered languages in the United States alone. In addition to many Native American languages, Cajun French, Eastern Yiddish, and Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, and Plains Sign Language are all endangered. by afeeney

Martha's Vineyard Sign Language is the language referenced here, not sure why that was left off. It's pretty cool, apparently influenced the development of ASL, though I don't know much on the topic.

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