I still want to say sombrero and hey you are one cold hombre.

Reasons for preserving languages:
(a) Cultural heritage and traditions: much cultural practice is bound up in linguistic knowledge. Ceremonial traditions, oral history, myths, views of the world, geographic and botanical classifications. This is obviously important to the community whose language it is, but also has scientific value in anthropology and potentially in other fields, such as biology.
(b) Preservation of communities, ethnic and cultural pride: the language one speaks is (often) an important part of cultural and ethnic identity.
(c) Preservation of linguistic diversity. Much like some of the arguments for protecting endangered animals, anyone who has any interest in the range of beautiful and surprising things that are found in the natural world should recognize that linguistic diversity has its own value. Both animal species and languages have always been dying out and being replaced. However, the rate at which both species and languages are disappearing has increased dramatically in recent years. We can’t stop it, but some efforts at preservation may well be worthwhile.

Finally, the reason for at a minimum thorough documentation of endangered languages (though not necessarily preservation): Science. Linguistic diversity is crucial to scientific understanding of the human capacity for language. What is a possible language? What is not? How are linguistic structures products of (a) the human brain and (b) the functions of language as a communication system?

And documentation by itself might not be sufficient to answer some of the more interesting questions linguists pose about the structure of a language, such as: What does a speaker actually have to know about his/her language in order to produce only the grammatical structures of the language, to be able to make uniform grammaticality judgements about sentences s/he has never heard before, etc.?

i know that one world language could help us a lot, but i think that language is a part of culture. that's the main reason why protecting this diversity.

but i also think that history will follow its course, and this global community is going to that direction: the vanishing of languages.

it's scary to think that in the future there will be no more spanish, portuguese, korean and so on, but just one world language. but if that is the tendency, nothing's gonna stop it

I, too, am going to play the devil's advocate.

I agree that language is an element of culture. Is it not that culture's responsibility to preserve the language, if they choose? Every community and person decides to what extent their cultural preservation is important to them, and languages/traditions will reflect the choices of those people.

Interesting, also, in the study of language, is the convergence of languages, no? Languages borrow and lend so many words from each other, and if some die out, they will still be present in other languages. I would argue that this is an inevitable product of a global society, and an interesting scientific study in and of itself.

To the first post: I seriously doubt Spanish is in any danger of dying out, so I will also continue to say sombrero, and greet my friends with a saucy 'hola.'

I think that the possible extintion of "minor" languages is due to growth, in use of the "major" languages

Certainly the promulgation of English as the world's "lingua franca" is unethical and linguistically undemocratic. I add that I am a native English speaker!

Unethical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. English is now used, at an international level, in this way.

Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.

An interesting video can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

Somewhat on a tangent here, and admitting that I am *completely* biased as I say this, but English is absolutely the pits for an international language. BTW, it's not my mother tongue.

It has too many quirks and irregularities in it. To speak English, one always has to keep up with the "vocabulary du jour", or what the jokes and cultural commentaries are. For instance: I remember when "germane this" or "german that" was very much in fashion. Or take "401K". Unless you watch US news every night, it's just an incomprehensible term.

An international language should not be tarnished so much by specific cultural contexts, but should be a space where a plurality of influxes from many contexts are created. This will never happen with English (or any other natural language - I'll get to that).

Furthermore, even for a person accustomed to English, it's a very hard language to comprehend. Now, I'm perfectly fluent - to the point where I blend in perfectly (I don't have an accent). However, I always have difficulty with English accents and pronunciation - this is because there are simply to many semi-vowel sounds in English - depending on the speaker's origin or even articulation. Not all languages are like this - take Italian or Japanese, for example, are much, much easier in vowel and semi-vowel phoneme detection.

The other aspect is that a foreigner is always in an inferior, non-expert position when talking to a native English-speaking person - he/she being the expert.

That all being said, I am currently hoping that Esperanto will come out as a true international language - at least for written material on the Web (such as the Wikipedia). Although it's an artificially created language (an "auxiliary language" we like to call it), unbeknownst to many, languages by "dictat", as it were, are not without successful precendents. The examples are many: Norwegian (created via a consesus), modern spoken Hebrew (ressucitated by a linguist), and the many ortographic reforms in Portuguese. The point is that "pushing" a "working language" is an agenda that has worked before. Esperanto has many desirable features, and currently it has more speakers than some natural languages, such as Welsh. But let's leave it here, as this is getting much too long...

I'll just say that, at least for the European Union legal documents, it would be a rational choice, English being unacceptable, for political and cultural reasons.

Dear Professor

I would like to hear what you would say it was your mother language that was threatened with extinction. Language is inextricably linked with cultural heritage, literature, identity, and with many other essential elements of human existance.

Your article is so fundamentally ethnocentric and revels such a spectacular ignorance of cultural diversity, that it deserves no further comment.

Thank you for providing a perfect example that will allow many of us to illustrate perfectly the worst of American cluelessness, cultural isolation and navel gazing.

Caput tui ubi sol non lucet est.

Have you ever had difficulty expressing a thought or idea in another language not because you lacked the vocabulary, but because the very language didn't have an identical, exact translation?

The language you know dictates what and how you can think and express yourself. Therefore, the death of language is also a purging of ideas and thoughts that are incapable of being expressed in an alternate language.

Interesting.. True. On the Same hand I will go on and argue we will be much better off having One or 2 religions, One or two nationalities, because ignoring the "frenzied imagination" there is nothing that is different that what makes people belong to a group in them too.

Then the obvious question is, Who gets to choose? Which survives and which dies?

This is, in fact, the same as Endangered species. Survival of the fittest is the pattern applicable to every power struggle. People do some last minute time buying on the hope the species will survive somehow, even if it has lost all relevancy and competitiveness for survival for whatever reasons..

On the same now, I will add English, Chinese (Mandarin) and Hindi.
Now lets get japanese ,German and the French to agree to this. Good luck on that one dude!

Not to be hard, But it is pretty obvious a language is for communication only and apart from the cultural and historical value and the "my language - I protect" mind set, there isnt really anything much to it..

1. Losing languages could mean a narrowing of worldviews, thought patterns, and interpretations of information:

Does anyone know of hard experiments done on how language might be linked to cultural thought patterns? i.e. the idea that if your native language does not have a phrase for something, or emphasizes several words for an idea, it is related to how you view the world - possibly as a causal relationship. I remember an example from a textbook of a bilingual speaker explaining how their actual thought and behavioral patterns differ depending on what language they are speaking. If language has a direct influence on how we structure our thoughts, then a loss of linguistic diversity would decrease our ability to produce various interpretations of how the world works.

2. Losing a language may not be inherently alarming, but if it is a symptom of social injustice, then it is a harmful phenomenon.

If a language dies, I feel it is important to evaluate why it is no longer in use. Arguments for efficiency in communication (the most usefully structured languages survive) are inaccurate when considering English's irregularities and simultaneous popularity. Likewise, it is simplistic to speak of cultures "choosing" to keep a language alive or not, since this simplifies the forces at work and makes it seem like this was completely within a minority group's control.

Instead, why not consider how imperialistic, dominating relationships interplay between cultures and how this affects what languages "live" and "die." Most of today's "world" languages are widespread due to conquest and expansion of some variety (economic, physical, political). There is much to be said about the social justice issues involved in the characterization of "native" peoples, their "native" tongues, and the more "useful" world languages that have only become useful through, historically, aggressive and domineering force. (English - the British Empire, Spanish - colonialism in South America, etc.) Instead of arguing about whether the death itself is good or bad, it might be more beneficial for society to examine why these languages are dying, and what that means about the global interactions occurring between cultures.

I have been confronted by the ways different languages develop different thinking patterns. While someone who lives in Florida could care less that the Inuit have 10s if not 100s words that differentiate snow, it would be helpful for people who experience snow to have the ability to differentiate without an endless series of adjectives. I have been informed, that songs written in English and translated to Spanish may overall present the same sense of message, they communicate it very differently, sometimes in such a way that the weight of the thought in English doesn't translate in Spanish at all, and vice versa.

As much as language and culture frame our ways of thinking, language is a tool. Just like a tool, there are times when a job can be done using one tool, another tool might be better and more efficient.

The singular advantage of English is that it encourages new words, versus languages like French which tries to use new combinations of old words to express new things or thoughts. The advantage of a language like Esperanto is that it is a manufactured language, thus add vocabulary shouldn't be too hard, and hopefully (though I don't know), it has rules that people can rely on to always work, versus English (especially the American variety) which is unreliable in that regard.

I suppose, that is another thing to add to this. What about regional dialects? Canada, the USA, Australia, the UK all have significant differences is their speech. I don't see those disappearing. Maybe, one day, we will all officially speak the same language, but we'll have a huge variety of dialects.